The Storytellers (23 page)

C
HAPTER

T
HERE WAS a holiday atmosphere inside the bus bringing the men out of Durham. Buses from as far away as South Wales and Scotland converged on Orgreave. For once these were not stopped on the motorway, as was normal police practice, but allowed to disgorge their occupants near the village. Amidst much good-natured banter, the police then escorted the travellers to a field just short of the plant. Within the British Steel facility, lorries were being filled with coke, ready for their drivers to take out: drivers King Arthur intended his army of pickets to stop.

Harvey had been alerted by George Gilder the day before. He had not been the only one. The entire national press corps seemed to be milling around in heightened expectation.

“This is the big one, Mudd,” his editor had said. “The government intends to put a stop to the use of mass picketing – or mass intimidation as the Prime Minister regards it – once and for all.”

Yorkshire's rolling countryside was spread out around them like a patchwork. Corn fields were ripening under a summer sun blotted only intermittently that day by a quick succession of flighty clouds. In hedgerows the county's emblem bloomed, a white rose, symbol in
the struggle for England's crown between Yorkists and Lancastrians, whose own rose was red. After much strife between them, one family emerged with roots in both camps and almost by accident the Tudors set the nation on a path to maritime greatness. As a centre of coal and steel production during the Industrial Revolution, the county had flourished, and after the Second World War it became home to Bomber Command. Yorkshire men were Yorkshire men and London a distant place.

Struggling to be heard above the ribald chatter emanating from the wheat field, larks sang their hearts out high in the sky, but few below were in the mood to hear their call. The men, who came from far and wide, had answered a different summons. Although not many had any great notion what they were supposed to do, they did know that they were there to support their side as they did their football team nearly every weekend in the season. Dressed mostly in jeans and T-shirts, which a good few discarded as the morning wore on, they looked like what they were: a high-spirited bunch of lads, some 5,000 strong, let loose from the humdrum of everyday life.

Having taken lodgings the night before, Harvey had toured the site early. The coking plant was as ugly as most such plants and did not employ a large number of men, but its coke was needed to keep the blast furnaces at British Steel's Scunthorpe plant going. If these furnaces were allowed to go out, the production of steel would be halted for some time and the jobs of steel workers adversely affected. Harvey had learned that neither British Steel management nor its union were anxious for this to happen.

The police had set up their command centre next to the facility and had arrayed their men in lines several deep across the entrance to the plant well beyond the road the drivers needed to take if they were to escape with their cargo. On one side of the field, which the pickets had been ushered into, there was a steep bank down to a railway line with dog patrols stationed beyond it. On the other side there were
more dog patrols as well as a detachment of mounted police. Harvey estimated the number of officers to be around 6,000, drawn from forces across the country. Their unpreparedness at Brixton was not going to be repeated. A core of specially trained men, wearing helmets Darth Vader would have approved of, had been armed with either the new long shields or the short ones and all carried truncheons. The contrast between the two groups was stark. It was clear the pickets had been led into a trap. Short of breaking through the police lines, their only escape was back across a bridge to the village.

As Harvey took this in, he couldn't help thinking that any general who had allowed his men to be manoeuvred into such an abysmal position should have been shot. Worse still, and what he didn't find out until much later, there had even been some disagreement within the union about the merits of diverting pickets from the Nottinghamshire mines, which were crucial to the strike, up to Orgreave, which was not. But convinced he could repeat his Saltley Gate success, their president's wish that they do so had prevailed.

* * *

A murmur spread through the crowd. The first of the loaded trucks was leaving the depot. Miners coalesced into a loose phalanx and moved to test their opponents in the ritual trial of strength that accompanied meetings between mass pickets and police. Like sumo wrestlers, they pressed against each other for advantage. At one moment the pickets gained ground as men piled in from the back only to lose it again when extra police weighed in to strengthen the weakest point of their own line. Back and forth it went with shouts from the pickets escalating as each side's blood became charged.

Missiles were thrown, although the sky was hardly black with them as the police later claimed. But little provocation was needed for the officers to implement their battle plan. As the pickets pulled back after
one unsuccessful push, the long shields parted and horsemen rode through, scattering men in all directions. No sooner had the riders spread confusion than they turned back behind the protective screens. The assistant chief constable then ordered the men in his specially trained short-shield units to draw truncheons and attack. Dressed in their black riot gear, they spread out and fell upon any retreating picket who came their way. Once immobilized, captured individuals were dragged back behind police lines where they were roughed up some more if not adequately subdued and then incarcerated.

As the day wore on, the specials made repeated forays into the increasingly angry crowd like wolves, picking off stragglers or any protestor foolish enough to taunt them. In the manner of anguished wildebeest besieged by a predator, the bulk of the pickets just milled around together booing, throwing stones, shouting insults and attempting to sidestep capture as the police force gradually pushed them back up the hill. Perhaps it was the sight of their opponents in such disarray that enticed them, or perhaps an order was given, it hardly mattered, but hundreds of officers suddenly joined the specials, lashing out at anyone they encountered. This was their chance to teach the miners a lesson and they were not about to hold back.

Over to one side of the action, a shield caught the NUM President on the head, sending him to the ground. A young lad pulled him clear of the battle which was now raging as riot police pushed protestors back up the hill towards the village. Injuries and arrests multiplied. A rowdy teenager cornered against a building was stamped on and ended up in hospital with a fractured leg. Pickets attempting to escape tumbled down the steep embankment onto the railway lines. One miner, who had retired to the village for refreshments, came back carrying a can of shandy and some cream buns. He was caught in the crossfire and felled. Picking himself up, he reached down for the buns and had his hand smashed.

“You can leave those bastard things there!” he was told.

Another picket who had made it back to the village with the riot police on his heels finally gave up only to have his head cracked open with a truncheon. It was a rout. Arthur's army had been outmanoeuvred, out-classed and out-fought. Dazed pickets huddled around everywhere examining each other's injuries with the muted pride of the battle-scarred, uncertain what had happened to them.

* * *

Inside Rotherham's detention centre, ninety-five mostly bloodied picketers were charged with various public order offences, fifty-five of them with riot. The place looked more like a battlefield hospital than a police station. The human rights advocate, Gareth Pierce, who had come to help the arrested men, remarked that for once she wished she had been a doctor not a lawyer. Later she observed magistrates working through the night to process charges with scant regard to evidence and listened to them setting bail conditions which were clearly punitive.

One of the young men remanded in custody that night was only released after six days on bail conditions that required him to attend Rotherham police station, some two hours from his home, by 11.00 a.m. – every day. He was also prohibited from setting foot on British Steel property, National Coal Board property, the Central Electricity Generating Board's property, British Rail property or in any of the country's docks. In the weeks that followed, the Home Secretary was heard to say, on numerous occasions, that the crime of riot carried a life sentence.

It is sometimes said that although the wheels of British justice grind slow, they do, at least, grind fine. By 1987 most of the charges raised that night against individual pickets had been dropped and the few cases that made it to trial collapsed. South Yorkshire Police were eventually forced to pay thirty-nine pickets some £425,000 in
damages and another £100,000 in legal costs for unlawful arrest. Michael Mansfield QC later remarked that the judicial system had clearly been used that night for political ends. And, so it had. But the British public had grown tired of being held to ransom by the NUM in particular and the trades unions in general and probably regarded the compensation payments they as taxpayers had to pay out for ‘allowing' their government to misuse their justice system as money well spent. However, few sane people could really have been pleased that things had come to that. For the nation to have stopped a few runs short of a communist or fascist state was hardly much to brag about.

* * *

Like the rest of the media hurtling back to London on the train that evening, Harvey was in high spirits. They had been witness to a great event. Mob rule had been crushed. From the vantage of the police command centre, they had watched as the police withstood wave upon wave of attempts to break through their lines. They had observed as the unruly pickets had been pushed slowly away from the British Steel coking plant by a disciplined and well-orchestrated counterattack. Most of them had even cheered when the police broke ranks and pushed home their advantage. One wag was heard to remark that he didn't much like horses at the best of times, but greatly preferred observing their back ends in motion to their front ends, prompting another to jibe that he had obviously never worked in a stable.

On the television that night, the state's victory over the mob was amply displayed. Shots of stone-throwing youths and a sequence which had captured four uniformed officers attempting to restrain a bare-torsoed, tattoo-covered, beer-bellied bruiser shouting obscenities was shown over and over again. Arthur Wellesley's observation about
battles won and lost had been taken to heart by the programmers. This was a victory and the public's evening meal was not about to be sullied by any of its grim details.

Before retiring to bed, Harvey prepared to file his copy for the following day's issue. Under the banner
Our Victory at Orgreave
, he trumpeted the fact that thirty-four drivers had been able to deliver their precious cargo not once but twice during the day thanks to
brave and skilful police action
, which had enabled
industry to function, jobs to be protected and the nation to go about its lawful business
. With a whisky and water on the desk beside him, he thumped out his words.
What God-given right did the miners have to expect people to buy their coal when it could be purchased from elsewhere for less or not used at all? Wasn't gas now a cleaner, safer, cheaper alternative?

He looked up and wished Sylvia had been there to relish the triumph. But as he sat back sipping his drink in the warmth of his home in Buttesland Street, wondering how best to finish his piece, he heard his mother's voice.

‘Don't forget, Harve, these were people desperate to save their communities and livelihoods. The union sold them false promises, is how I see it.' So he concluded by urging
The Sentinel's
readers not to forget the men and women whose lives were being turned upside down by a changing world and whose predecessors had fuelled the nation's greatness and prosperity.

Our government certainly won an important battle at Orgreave yesterday
, he wrote,
but the war will not be won until mining communities have been put back on their feet – with or without the help of their union
.

* * *

George Gilder's secretary called the following morning to say that the great editor wanted to see him. He'd been hoping for a slow start after Orgreave, but wasn't that sorry to be summoned. The house felt
empty these days and he preferred to be out and about. Doubtless it would be a new assignment; perhaps some line fed to him by the paper's contact in MI5 which needed following up. And then an unsettling thought occurred to him: had his article fallen short in some way? If it had, it wouldn't have been the first time George had altered some aspects of what he had written, although that hadn't happened for a while now.

Slightly anxious, he purchased a copy of
The Sentinel
on the way to the Tube. His headline was intact, bold as brass, which was a relief. There was too much of a breeze for him to try reading the rest as he walked and too much of a crush underground to do more than squint at the front page. He couldn't see any changes and as George generally didn't bother with the continuation inside, he relaxed. That is until he entered
The Sentinel
offices.