The Battle of Orgreave - Monday 18 June, 1984
Created | Updated Feb 14, 2007
The Miners' Strike of 1984-5 was a confrontation that changed Britain. The dispute lasted for almost a full year, but the events around the Orgreave coke plant on the strike's hundredth day effectively presaged its outcome. Much else was decided at Orgreave too, because two heavyweights from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher, had each put their public reputation on the line. The supporters of the first were defending livelihoods and communities, while the followers of the second wanted a national economy free from the yoke of dysfunctional labour relations. Neither of these protagonists had it in their character to accept compromise. Casualties were inevitable.
Setting the Scene
It was a lovely midsummer morning, with the sun climbing into a near-cloudless sky, and Highfield Lane was already milling with men. They stepped down from coaches, they clambered from vans, and all of the vehicles were unmarked, and none of them stayed a minute longer than necessary. This was an illicit army, its soldiers kitted out in jeans and T-shirts. Today it would be thousands strong. Today would be make or break for the Miners.
Away down the slope, their enemy was arriving too. Sleeker coaches, their progression more orderly, but the men who alighted were just as determined to be anonymous. Nobody in this other army would be fighting for his livelihood. Everybody knew he had a job to do, but only the mercenaries from far afield relished the prospect.
The Police had van-loads of shields and body-armour, and they had horse-boxes, and it was soon clear that there would also be thousands in these lines. Any forlorn expectation on the Miners' part that they would prevail by numbers was dispelled. Today, the success or failure of the strike hung in the balance. Only it was more than that, much more than that. Today, the future of a nation would take shape.
Dave worked at Silverwood Colliery. Gary served with the Derbyshire Constabulary. Phil drove for CLS Haulage. Stan lived in the Lane. Lesley sold her photographs to the press. They were all there that day1. The story unfolded before their eyes.
By 1984, Orgreave had become an urban village, engulfed by the eastern extremities of Sheffield and four miles south of the municipality of Rotherham, of which it formed a part. A colliery-shaft was first sunk there in the 1820s, and in 1919 the pit and its neighbour at Treeton were acquired by the United Steel Company, who built a coke-making plant to supply their blast-furnaces. At the time of the strike, with South Yorkshire's ironworks long since replaced by arc furnaces for melting scrap, the Orgreave Coke Plant was serving a remote main customer. The coke made there was shipped 35 miles to the east, to British Steel's Scunthorpe Works.
First Arrivals
The time was about ten past seven as Dave came to the Topside field, and the ranks were already building. An hour before, the first arrivals had been in a friendlier mood, with dry banter between Pickets and Police, and some of the Pickets playing football. At that early stage, the Police on the scene were all local men, and none of them were wearing riot gear. Even so, the growing weight of numbers had its bearing on the atmosphere. Aggression crept into some of the shouting, and the two sides were soon assessing and adjusting their positions.
There was nothing coincidental about the location of the lines. Many on both sides were already veterans of these confrontations, and the arriving Pickets had expected the usual road-blocks and diversions. Instead, this would be the day that the Police tactics changed. There were no restrictions on the approach roads at all, and bemused Pickets found their vehicles escorted towards the plant. The growing crowd was then shepherded into a field on the 'topside' of the site.
The Protagonists
Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, was born in Worsborough, near Barnsley, in 1938. He made his reputation as a pugnacious champion of the Miners during an earlier coal strike in 1972, and one of his most significant contributions to that dispute was the orchestration of the picketing of another coke depot, at Saltley Gate in Birmingham. The Miners achieved an effective stranglehold on coal and coke shipment to power-stations, forcing the imposition of the Three-Day Week. So it was that the Miners brought down a Conservative government and its leader, Edward Heath.
Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Britain, had come to power five years before the Miners' Strike. She was already committed to general reform of industrial relations, seeing Trades Union militancy as an arbitrary hindrance to national economic success. An unashamed free-marketeer, Thatcher was moreover philosophically opposed to the state-ownership of industries. The NUM and the National Coal Board between them epitomised the decadence of the nationalised industry model - an intransigent and irresponsible union pitted against ineffectual and unaccountable management. Nor was coal any longer a material of over-riding strategic importance. The whole added up to an untenable burden on the tax-payer.
These two people were alike as well as different. Both were by nature belligerent and unyielding. Both had personalised their political convictions to a level of mission and morality. Both commanded immense loyalty and both claimed an unequivocal mandate.
Each one hated the other with a passion. It was going to be quite a fight.
Lines are Drawn
Gary glanced at his watch and it was a little before 8 am. The Police line in which he stood faced up the slope. Away to the left and the right there were loose lines of dog handlers and mounted officers, and straight in front was the melee of Pickets. Half a mile to the Miners' rear, the field fell away down a steep embankment, where the railway from Worksop ran through. Although the Miners occupied the higher ground, they were effectively surrounded.
For years afterwards, this unassuming Chesterfield lad would fret over the contradictory allegiances he felt that day. At this moment, he was realising that the ground before him had been very deliberately prepared. The Pickets could be effectively repelled if they attempted to march on the plant gate. If they chose to try something rougher than a march, then this field was the perfect place for the Police to reply in kind.
Minute by minute, the sun rose higher, and the temperature steadily climbed.
The Road to Conflict
After Margaret Thatcher won the general election of 1979, it was soon clear that the first Conservative Premier since Heath was not about to repeat the mistakes of her predecessor. During the Iron Lady's first term of office, three conspicuous events and a great deal of less visible planning prepared the ground for the eventual confrontation.
The first key event was a strike in another nationalised industry. British Steel shed about a third of its capacity and half of its workforce in less than four years, between 1979 and 1982. The steel strike occupied the first four months of 1980, demanding a cessation of closures and a 20% pay increase. The relative ease with which it was put down signalled that the Trades Union Congress as a collective would not lightly support an embattled sector. The Police refined their methods against flying Pickets. The strike failed utterly, and the closures were accelerated under a new British Steel chairman, Ian McGregor, who thereby marked himself as a candidate for a similar role in future.
Then came a phoney war in the coal industry itself. In the autumn of 1981, the government announced a modest number of pit closures, and were confronted by a spontaneous national walk-out. Thatcher backed down immediately, and the closure orders were rescinded. Over the next two years, however, some isolated single-pit closures took place, and the NUM executive failed each time to win ballot support for a strike. The rank and file membership, and key junior management groups such as the pit deputies, did not perceive sufficient threat to merit national industrial action.
The third event was the one that gave Margaret Thatcher her constituency. In April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falklands Islands, an action which must have been founded on an assumption that Britain would not risk a military response. As it turned out, the British public rediscovered its barely-sublimated appetite for war, and Thatcher was able to enter a general election campaign as an avenging champion. She was pitted against Labour's Michael Foot, and an emasculated brand of pacifism that only enhanced her image. The Iron Lady was returned for a second term with a 100-seat majority and an electorate positively expecting her to carry the fight.
The Police Ranks
Gary and his colleagues were under the command of Assistant Chief Constable Anthony Clement. Ordinarily, an operation as crucial as this would have been overseen by the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, but the incumbent of that office, Peter Wright, was absent and destined to retire shortly afterwards. Several aspects of the Battle of Orgreave leave a suspicion that experienced men who questioned political instructions were unceremoniously pushed aside.
Before Orgreave, the personal equipment used by the Police in the face of riot included a six-foot clear plastic shield. The Met Shield, as it was known, was very clearly a defensive implement, trading full body protection for the decreased mobility of the bearer. Following first-term experience of civil unrest in a number of English cities, however, the Home Office was ready to introduce more proactive methods to quell picket-line violence. Clement was thus given permission to deploy a type of cordon hitherto only used in Ulster : officers wearing crash helmets and carrying short shields would be allowed to operate as 'snatch squads', specifically to detain, disable or disperse targeted protagonists.
There was no clear-cut instruction to use these squads against the Orgreave Pickets. It would be left to Clement's judgement on the day. The authorities knew that such a tactic would blur the boundary between defensive and offensive action on the part of the Police, and so might yet prove too robust for public opinion.
The Miners Marginalised
As Thatcher's political standing rose, Arthur Scargill's public persona was heading in the opposite direction. Instead of seeking the sympathy of the entire country, he instinctively adopted an 'us and them' categorisation of working classes and others. Within his own natural community, he had done little to rebut accusations of desertion from the steelworkers, and he was increasingly seen by the TUC as a loose cannon. For the recently-routed Labour Party, he was now a downright liability. In spite of all this, Scargill still believed in the collective political strength of the miners with a certainty that bordered on arrogance, and a passion that bordered on aggression. In those traits, perhaps, lay the seeds of his defeat. Arrogance is an allowable defect among capitalists, but in a socialist it smacks of the corrupting influence of power. The aggression was even more misplaced. It allowed Margaret Thatcher, the player with the real agenda, to pretend innocence and to adopt the moral high-ground.
Behind the scenes, too, massive reserves of coal were being built up at power stations. A road-freight infrastructure based on non-union truck-fleets was appearing, with large industrial concerns given fiscal encouragement to develop and sustain it. In March 1983, McGregor was appointed Chairman of the NCB, and planning for a wholesale downsizing of the British coal industry began.
Opening Salvo
Phil was driving one of the trucks in the first convoy. They pulled into the plant at 8 o'clock, and their arrival caused an immediate escalation. PC Akers was hit in the face by a brick, and became the first hospitalised casualty of the battle. The Pickets surged at the long-shield line, but it held firm. The squeeze lasted for less than a minute, as contemporary video footage demonstrates.
Video and courtroom testimony also records what happened next. In order to regain the ground lost, ACC Clement ordered a group of mounted Police forward. The Miners retreated, apparently in some panic, as the horses moved through the line. This first advance was orderly, and no batons were used, but a hail of stones now began from the Pickets at the back of the field. A second advance soon followed, but the stoning continued. Clement took up a loudhailer and demanded that the Pickets should move back a hundred yards. As he did so, short-shield squads were moving into position behind the main Police line. A few moments later, a third mounted advance began, with the squads in support. Policing in Britain was about to change for ever.
The Beginnings of the Strike
The first wave of the strike was called in Yorkshire on 5 March, 1984, in response to an announcement of the planned closure of Cortonwood Colliery near Barnsley. Scargill sought wider support, claiming that the NCB intended to shed seventy thousand jobs. On 6 March, the coal board countered, declaring the actual figure in their plans to be twenty thousand, and that Cortonwood would be the first of twenty projected closures. The alacrity of this statement demonstrates McGregor's confidence in the management's preparations : a national strike was inevitable given the extent of the necessary cuts, and so there was no point in delaying the confrontation.
Until Thatcher came to power, a strike called with the authority of a recognised Trades Union was implicitly legal, and there were no laws to restrict the practice of secondary picketing. By the time of the strike, an individual picketing any establishment other than their place of employment was subject to arrest, and the calling of a strike without first undertaking and winning a secret ballot was against the law. On a split vote, the NUM executive rejected a ballot, ostensibly to show defiance of the Tories' anti-Trades Union legislation, but surely also because the level of dissent would have been significant. Many Miners knew the writing was on the wall. Much as they deplored the government's intentions, they also feared that a coal industry on its present scale was economically untenable. Under the circumstances, to go quietly with a redundancy pay-off must have been tempting, particularly when set against the privations of a protracted dispute.
A further attempt to debate a ballot was beaten off by Scargill late in April, but the refusal to take this course had a crucial consequence. It cost the NUM the unequivocal support of the officials union, NACODS. Without its deputies, safety considerations meant that no pit would be allowed to operate, but the continued supervision of these men meant that strike-breaking remained an effective possibility. When significant numbers of Nottinghamshire Miners chose to work on, the strikers countered with intimidation, further eroding public sympathy. Then, as the weeks went on, the deep irony of the Miners' position became apparent. Anything less than a total strike would fail, because the industry could shed a high proportion of its capacity without hurting its customers. This ludicrous economic position was a direct consequence of years of tenacity on the part of the Miners themselves.
Running the Gauntlet
Gary heard the short-shield senior officer instruct his squad quite clearly. 'You know what you’re doing. No heads, bodies only' were his exact words. Three units, and about sixty Policemen in total, followed the mounted contingent forward. The first arrests took place, as well as some truncheon-beatings, all captured on Police video and all subsequently shown in court. The number of Police who ignored the 'no heads' instruction was still small at this time, but the demonstration was by now sliding towards a pitched battle, and the first laden trucks were about to emerge from the plant.
Phil turned the key in the ignition at 9.25 am. He swung out into Highfield Lane amid a hail of missiles, turning north towards the motorway and away from the chaotic press in the Topside field. He turned up his radio to drown out the clamour and the baying. He wore sunglasses and balaclava, partly to avoid recognition, but also to protect his face should the windshield be put through. The air was thick with dust. As soon as the haulage company had renegotiated their British Steel contract under the strike terms, protective grilles were fitted across the cab-fronts. Phil and his mates were glad of those now, as the steel mesh rang under the impact of bricks and stones.
Earlier Confrontations
There were precursor stand-offs at Orgreave before the big one. During May, Arthur Scargill succeeded in getting himself arrested at one of these, but the lorries continued to roll out of the plant. At the other end of the A18, the steelmen showed no inclination to blockade them. Depleted from nineteen thousand to barely a third of that number, and with no dependence on mining in their own communities, many at Scunthorpe resented the Pickets. Steel was then beginning to recover from its own 'decimation' as Scargill liked to call it. The last thing that the remaining steelworkers wanted was their hard-won job security jeopardised by militant outsiders. It was becoming ever more apparent that the NUM had cultivated too many enemies.
Police intelligence was extremely effective throughout the strike, and it's now accepted that informers were at work. Power-station stocks were holding up, and their periodic replenishment was being achieved with demoralising audacity. The union decided to repeat the tactics of Saltley Gate, and close a major source of coke. The contingent of flying Pickets was enormous, at some 6 thousand, but the Police knew it in advance and matched the turnout. In the early morning of 18 June, at this incongruous village south of Rotherham, determined men just kept pouring in.
The First Skirmish Ends
It could have been much worse for the drivers. The Police line held once more, and the Miners were repelled before they could reach the plant perimeter or obstruct the trucks directly. Horses and short-shield units once again pushed the Pickets back, but by now there were faces streaming with blood on both sides. The day had just begun, but the tension and the stand-off were too precarious to continue like this.
This was the moment that Arthur Scargill chose to walk along the Police line, berating them for their behaviour. His attempt to bolster Miners' morale drew no visible response from Clement's men. The press were ready to record a repetition of his arrest, but the Police had learned some guile since the last time. Scargill eventually strode back to the Pickets' side, cutting a slightly ridiculous figure, and disappeared into the throng. He would not be so conspicuous again that day, though he would later claim to have been pushed down a bank and injured.
The uneasy stand-off resumed. Ten thousand men must have known that it couldn't last.
Twenty Years On
The sorry half-mile where it all happened looks very different today. The junction of Retford Road and Rotherham Road, where the last truncheon-blows were meted out, is little changed, but Asda has moved away up to the other end of Handsworth Hill, and the railway bridge has recently been replaced with a new one. Highfield Lane ends abruptly at a roundabout, more or less where the morning's stand-off took place. Irony of ironies, the coking plant itself has gone, swallowed up in 1990 by great opencast workings.
Even though coal is still processed at Orgreave, it isn't through mining as the pitmen knew it. Once there were hundreds of men on every shift, maintaining and operating the ancillary plant as well as toiling at the face itself. Today's activity is mechanised picking over the 12 million cubic metres of spoil heaps left over from those former times. Mining in the old, labour-intensive way, has gone for good.
Provocation and Privation
Half a mile to the south, Stan's wife was being kept busy at the Asda tobacco counter. A little after 10, a huge influx of Miners had begun. The next coke run was at least an hour away, and the supermarket provided a convenient source of refreshment on a sweltering day. A dark-haired young woman wanted change for the pay-phone. She was memorable partly because there were so few females around, and partly because of the ill-concealed long-lens camera that bulged under her safari jacket.
The relative mobility of the Pickets became an effective way to taunt the Police, whose lines were still full of men wearing hot and sticky uniforms. The Miners in the field were by now no more than a third of the Police numbers, because most of their colleagues had moved off into the village. Many of the remaining Pickets were making a provocative show of drink-cans, while others lounged on the grass, but no longer were stones being thrown.
Clement must have seen this lull as the ideal time to consolidate the Police position, and to force the Pickets out of range of the plant gates. The Police advance caught the Pickets off guard, and their hurried retreat choked the railway bridge on Highfield Lane, the only proper escape route. Dave was among the hundreds of Miners who scrambled down the embankment and across the railway line as the police pursued them. With the numbers involved, and the high density of bodies, it was fortunate that no train was due. The missiles were quickly flying once more.
After Orgreave, and as summer gave way to autumn, the position of the striking Miners began to worsen. Some were demoralised by the events of the day, and by other days like it. It wasn't so much the Police behaviour as the public vilification that shocked the strikers. To this day, Dave, like many ex-Miners, wonders in dismay at a population largely unsympathetic to the plight of whole communities deprived of their wherewithal.
The other factor, of course, was the financial hardship. Families once fed by the country's best-paid labour force were now relying on food parcels and on soup kitchens. In September, the NCB offered settlement terms including minor concessions in the pace of the closure program. The NUM rejected them, but by now a significant drift back to work was apparent. The picketing became still more confrontational, and the vicious circle ground on. Then the strike suffered a fatality, when a block of concrete was hurled through the windscreen of a taxi carrying a working Miner to a South Wales pit. The Press howled its contempt and hands were wrung at Westminster. The chances of preserving a way of life were subsiding into oblivion.
Beaten
It was at the railway bridge that Clement began to lose control of significant numbers of his men. The narrowing of the road made the new front-line barricade a concentrated target for the missile-throwers. There were undoubtedly Police casualties, and the provocation must have been severe, but the point remains that order broke down in the force that was there to uphold it. There is no denying the record of what followed, because there were numerous camera lenses deployed among the side now retreating into the village.
One of the most notorious incidents befell a young Miner called David Bell. He had already been injured in the leg, and took refuge beside an electricity sub-station close to the bridge. In full view of the cameras, he was set upon by five Policemen, one of whom stamped on Bell's leg, breaking it. This didn't stop the Police from forcing the victim to hop back to the Police line, where he was arrested.
An unhappy Christmas was the last straw for many, and the numbers returning to work began to mount. By now, there were those among the Union's leadership who acknowledged that the game was up. The strike would have to be called off, because otherwise it would soon collapse altogether. An NUM conference was convened, though Scargill tried hard to resist it. On 3 March, 1985, almost exactly a year after the strike had begun, Union delegates voted 98 to 91 to bring the dispute to an end.
Most pitmen went back to work on the anniversary, marching in with their bands and banners in a last show of defiance and pride. There was pride, all right, in the resilience and spirit they had shown, and they were entitled to remind a nation of the nobility of their cause, but this was no victory for the Miners. Thatcher had taken on the most powerful and militant Union in the land, and she had beaten them. Most of the country, moreover, rejoiced that she had beaten them. The closure program would continue apace, and the industry, as well as many of the communities it provided for, was doomed.
Clement Loses His Grip
The Battle of Orgreave might have ended just beyond the railway bridge on Highfield Lane, because the Pickets were now half a mile away from the gates of the coke works, but the Miners were in no mood to give up. A scrap yard beyond the bridge provided a new source of extremely dangerous projectiles. A car was wheeled out into the middle of the road and set alight.
ACC Clement was now faced with a problem of his own making. If he withdrew out of range, then increasingly-violent Pickets would follow and once again approach the plant. If he ordered further charges to disperse the combatants, he would be carrying the battle into a residential area, and there would clearly be problems in restraining his men. After a couple of limited forays that failed to perturb the scrap-throwers, Clement elected to order a general advance. The final and nastiest phase of the confrontation was about to begin.
The Police did themselves few favours in the way that the journalists were treated. Some pressmen were threatened, and at least one was man-handled. A lot of film and video was confiscated, but by no means all of it. When Pickets were subsequently brought to trial, crass attempts were made to edit the order of both press and Police footage, and so manipulate the apparent sequence of events. These misrepresentations were vehemently discredited. Senior Police officers, including Clement himself, found themselves criticised by the judiciary for exaggerated and in some cases mendacious accounts. None of the arrests at Orgreave led to a conviction, although several Miners spent months or even years of anxiety, fearing for their liberty. Few were ever advised that they would not be charged : the majority of the prosecutions were quietly dropped when the public relations began to go awry. On the other hand, none of the Miners' attempts to bring Police brutality charges got anywhere at all.
Hindsight
Stan still lives in one of the houses just north of the crossroads, close to where the final cordon-line was drawn. He pointed out the bedroom window where his mother knelt that Monday afternoon , clutching the curtain-hem, transfixed by fear and dismay. Here was the watershed, beyond which no Policeman was supposed to go. Gary claims that none of the local men did. In the streets beyond, there was only the mindless vengeance of the incomers, the uniformed savages who could thrash and trash a community in the certainty that they would never have to live among its victims.
Stan missed the whole thing. Until his retirement, he worked as a gas fitter, and he was out on the road that day. A neighbour who became a redundant Miner would later ask about retraining for the same job. 'Even if I can't get owt', he said, 'at least I should know how to kill me sen'.
One of the most bizarre twists of the Orgreave tale was the re-enactment of the Battle in 2001. It was staged and filmed by a grouping comprising EventPlan, Artangel Media and Channel 4, and the resultant footage was made into a conceptual artwork by Jeremy Deller, a subsequent winner of the Turner Prize.
The 'Comic Strip Presents' comedians also famously parodied the events of the Miners' Strike. That piece for Channel 4 was based on the incongruity of an American TV-style dramatisation, and its writers probably didn't intend humour at the expense of injured communities. Nonetheless, the broadcast still brought complaints of insensitivity from viewers in mining areas.
Dave, Gary, Phil and Stan - they are all united on one point. They resent the way that the general public seemed to despise all of the protagonists at Orgreave. Everyone who was there became a pariah, some sort of sub-human, a creature from another world. Millions of Britons didn't recognise Orgreave as their own country, and therein, perhaps, lies the greatest tragedy of all.
Across the Line
The mounted Police charge over the crossroads was instigated by Clement's orders, though the Assistant Chief Constable's later comments suggest that he was not in control of its conduct, and may even have been unaware of much of what happened. The intention was to take out targeted missile-throwers. In the event, the Miners scattered, and horsemen proceeded to chase down individuals on foot with the short-shield squads following up. Relatively few fleeing Pickets were actually caught, but all of those who were seem to have been subjected to excessively rough treatment, and some were severely beaten. Several such beatings took place in full view of members of the public view, notably and notoriously in the Asda car park. Another incident added to the catalogue of unwelcome film footage, when an unresisting Miner was pinned to a car bonnet by an assailant who later turned out to be a Police Inspector.
The most memorable photograph comes from the last of the clashes, just before Clement finally called his men back to the cordon-line. Mounted Police pursued a stone-thrower right into Rotherham Lane. Until that moment, this extremity of the village had seemed like safe territory. It was here that Lesley, her camera put aside for a moment, was tending to an injured Miner who was lying on the pavement.
For no explicable reason, the Policeman on the horse swung his baton at her as he charged past. The contact was slight, but another photographer caught the action at the height of the backswing, and the definitive image of an out-of-control Police force was captured.
There was an ice-cream van in the midst of it all. Many people remember it, and the photographic record authenticates their story. It said 'Rock on Tommy' across the front, and it continued to sell ices all day from its pitch close to the crossroads, at least until it was completely surrounded by the advancing Police. For something like an hour prior to that, as the action swept along the Lane towards it, this ridiculous vehicle had stoically held its position in the middle of a pitched battle. There were certainly no children in the vicinity by then, and the Pickets surely had neither the time nor the disposable income to buy too many ice-creams. Maybe the Police were even stingier, because their arrival coincided with the driver's seriously overdue decision to move off.
Given the weather and the crowds, though, he quite probably made more money on the day than usual, and he certainly had a story to tell afterwards.
By the middle of the afternoon, the last of the trucks were gone. There was no longer any reason to picket, and the Police pulled back to the bridge. Some last few idiots attempted to fashion petrol bombs, after discovering a diesel pump in the scrap yard. The devices wouldn’t burn properly, of course, but the intent was enough to further discredit the Miners in some of the following day's papers. A vicious contrivance was made out of scrap, with ugly spikes presumably intended to impale horses. It was left in the road, but it was only the most vindictive of the protesters who was fighting any more. The final irony of the Battle of Orgreave was that these most deserving targets of the snatch-squads were completely ignored as they attempted their pathetic and twisted reprisals. Everywhere else by now, those who were fit to do so were melting away.
Legacy
The final official count was 93 arrests, 72 Policemen given hospital treatment and 51 Pickets recorded as injured. The last total was surely far lower than the real figure, because medical treatment for a Picket was an effective guarantee of arrest. Over the next couple of days, there were a lot of visitors to casualty departments claiming to have suffered implausible domestic accidents. One man turned out to have a fractured skull. After an initial statement that he had tripped over his dog, it transpired that the patient had been on the picket-line at Orgreave.
Stan's wife looked out from the glass doors of the Asda supermarket, and decided to stay behind them. She didn't come out for a long time, not till after all the shouting had stopped and the crowds had dispersed. There were very few cars in the car park. In their place was litter and rubble and the sh*t of the horses, and it was hard to comprehend where it had all come from. The woman with the camera picked her way through this incredible landscape, but there was nobody else to be seen.
It was largely a matter of luck that there were no fatalities, but the Battle of Orgreave still claimed many victims in the longer term. These certainly include the pit communities of Britain. The clash also marked a precipitous decline in the influence of the national Trades Union movement. Some contend that the electability of the Conservative Party was seriously eroded that day, and others observe that the incident caused a loss of public trust and respect for the Police. Most significantly, perhaps, Orgreave polarised the people of the nation. Sharp divisions in perception and values do not serve democracies well. Such rifts take generations to heal.
The Miners' cause stands as one of the direst PR calamities in recent history. Beyond the working-class communities of the coalfield regions, sympathy was ultimately minimal. Scargill and the NUM proved all to easy to demonise. There was, moreover, a real economic problem to be solved, and the coal industry epitomised it. Thatcher had a mandate and the electorate had spoken. The Miners defied both, and in that respect they got their just deserts.
To open your mind to the plight of the Miners in 1984, therefore, you have to put yourself in their shoes. You have to sense the despair of communities robbed of their livelihoods. You have to imagine the bleakening prospects of your own children. It isn't enough to be a remote liberal intellectual, sneering at Thatcher while shunning the unwashed hordes that the Iron Lady did down.
Socialism is still a dirty word. Guilt is a powerful political weapon. If you rue the passing of a once-united Britain, then maybe it's time to face your own.
