The ‘Battle of Orgreave’ was the bloody last stand of British miners
The workers are still seeking justice
“What is a riot?” asked the prosecutor in his opening speech. “A riot is where three or more people gather together and they have in their minds a common purpose which they intend to achieve through force. These defendants committed the offense of riot.”
The year was 1985, and 95 coal workers were on trial for rioting in the town of Orgreave, South Yorkshire. At the time, rioting was punishable with life imprisonment.
The prosecution lost. But even after their mass acquittal, the miners felt deeply wronged.
“I was there,” said one. “Only people that rioted that day were police. They went berserk.”
“Anybody that happened to be in the vicinity was fair game to police,” said another, “whether you were hit by truncheons or trampled by a horse or bit by a dog. You were fair game.”
“These photographs here were taken of me on the day,” said defendant Eric Newbiggin on the courthouse steps after the acquittal. He was holding a pair of photos showing him surrounded by police, bleeding from his head.
“It shouldn’t have been me who got charged with riot,” Newbiggin inveighed, pointing to an officer in the photograph. “It should’ve been him.”
In 1984, Britain was caught in a bitter battle between Margaret Thatcher’s administration on the one hand and the National Union of Mineworkers on the other. Twelve years prior, miners had won a major victory: by refusing to work, they had produced a national energy shortage, and thus won a pay increase that lifted many of them out of poverty. The idea was to repeat that victory.
But Thatcher was having none of it. She and her administration had decided that the coal industry was not economically viable, and announced mass layoffs and pit closures — without a comprehensive plan in place to care for miners who would be put out of work.
One strategy that had helped the miners in 1972 was the use of “flying pickets,” or groups of traveling union men who would drive across the nation in fleets and assist in organizing strikes at individual plants and collieries. In anticipation of the flying pickets, Thatcher assembled ad-hoc mobile police units. Roadblocks and checkpoints appeared on British country roads, intended to stop the traveling miners.
The strikes began in March of 1984. Work stoppages happened in Yorkshire, Durham, Kent, Lancashire, and Nottinghamshire. Every picket line was met with a throng of police, and the confrontations often grew violent. Rocks flew and truncheons fell. The media made much of the violence of picketers, and downplayed the overreaction of police.
By June, after months of confrontations, flying pickets had come to expect police checkpoints. But when they headed to Orgreave, South Yorkshire, they didn’t encounter any. This was the first sign that something was amiss.
Orgreave was a sleepy small town, and not particularly radical. South Yorkshire had “a reputation for moderation rivaled only by North Yorkshire,” write Ruth and Jonathan Winterton in their book Coal, Crisis and Conflict. There was no reason to believe that the picketing at Orgreave would have been any more violent than anywhere else. The National Union of Mineworkers considered it a “token picket.”
But the Thatcher administration was fed up. It was time to crack the whip. Orgreave’s “terrain favoured the police,” write David Hencke and Francis Beckett in their book Marching to the Fault Line. “Orgreave is in open country. No intelligent general on the miners’ side would’ve chosen Orgreave for his battlefield.” But the police had chosen it — and chosen wisely.
With the full knowledge of the Thatcher administration, they planned the action for weeks in advance, and even intentionally drew picketers to Orgreave by cutting off access to more strategically important locations.
As lawyer Michael Mansfield put it, “They wanted to teach the miners a lesson — a big lesson, such that they wouldn’t come out in force again.”
When the flying pickets arrived on June 18, 1984, they were not only permitted to pass with ease — police actually escorted them to the plant. Before they knew it they had been funneled into an open field, where they were surrounded by hundreds of police, as well as dogs and horses.
Four hours, the miners stood together, uneasy. Some jostled with police at the front of the blue line, but many more lingered in the back, waiting — trapped. And then, without warning or provocation, the police rushed the crowd.
“The long riot shields parted,” remembers miner Bernard Jackson, “and out rode fourteen mounted police straight into the pickets. As they did, police in the line beat their riot shields with truncheons, creating a wall of noise which was meant to intimidate and frighten. It was more than simply a noise, it was a declaration that we were facing an army which had declared war on us.”
Jackson watched, frozen, while police knocked men to the ground and beat them unconscious. He remembers seeing felled miners with “bloody gashes” and “vicious wounds” all around him. When the police grabbed him and began to squeeze him by the throat and bash him in the face, he shouted, “Get bloody off, what’s wrong with thee?”
“Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll break your fucking neck,” was the reply.
Jackson remembers hearing the police hurling insults as they swung their clubs: “Bastard miner” and “Fucking Yorkie miner.” The Guardian reported that police clapped and cheered as a bloodied picketer was loaded into an ambulance.
Miners retaliated, according to witnesses. Some threw rocks and bricks. The national media made much of this retaliation, portraying Orgreave as a fight between enemies, between equals.
But the miners had no horses or dogs, no truncheons or shields. In the end, they were badly defeated, and 95 of them were arrested and thrown in jail to await trial on charges of riot.
“Orgreave knocked the stuffing out of mass picketing, and perhaps out of the whole dispute,” write Hencke and Beckett. “It gave the police a psychological advantage which lasted for the rest of the strike. Increasingly miners were only able to picket their own pits, and they were penned in and peremptorily ordered about by police.” As the picket lines dissolved one by one, the police “followed them, very much like a victorious army.”
Many pits and plants were shuttered, the coal industry declined and its vestiges were eventually privatized. The 95 miners at Orgreave, for their part, saw no true victory in their eventual acquittal. During the trial it had come to light that the police were engaged in a cover-up — their own statements had been dictated to them, witness statements had been falsified, and signatures were forged to produce a narrative of a picketer provocation that never occurred. The accused miners wanted not only to be cleared of wrongdoing themselves, but for the police to be held responsible for their conspiracy and their brutality.
Naturally, the Thatcher administration never even considered an inquiry into police misconduct at Orgreave. And while those affected and their families spoke for decades about the injustice they had endured, there seemed to be little hope that the government would ever formally investigate, much less apologize — that is, until recently.
In 2010, a commission was formed to look into police mishandling of the Hillsborough stadium disaster. It found that the police had treated the football fans who died in 1989 as a danger to be controlled rather than a group of innocents to be rescued, and had therefore exacerbated the fatal situation.
In a piece for The Guardian, Owen Jones argues that “In the 1980s, the police were politicised, transformed into blunt instruments as part of a wider concerted mission to neutralise the British labour movement…. South Yorkshire police were violent, ideologically driven and corrupt, but they were not stupid. They behaved as they did because they believed they had official sanction to do so. They then learned a lesson — quite reasonably — that they could act with impunity.”
Orgreave victims and families thought they might finally see an inquiry this year. But it wasn’t to be. Amber Rudd, the home secretary, announced on November 1st that the government would not proceed with an investigation because there were “no deaths or wrongful convictions.”
Barbara Jackson, the head of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, responded with sarcasm and dismay. “So it’s OK that you get beaten up and seriously injured,” she said, “but so long as you don’t die the police don’t have to be held accountable.”
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has promised to keep pushing for an inquiry. “Campaigns for justice,” he said, “never go away.”
