Another voice
A sense of community
Auberon Waugh
As the miners' strike rumbles slowly towards its inevitable collapse, we listen politely to every wiseacre in the kingdom telling us how essential it is that the miners should not feel humiliated by the failure of their attempt to hold the country to ransom, how it is the essence of chivalry and gentility and yes — oh my God! — old fashioned Toryism, to be magnanimous in victory, to heal wounds, to give the miners some indication that their struggle and sacrifices have not been in vain. Above all, we must pretend it has all been some jolly sort of football match, played according to the rules, which we, the rest of the country, just happen to have won. There is no ground for hard feelings. Now, if the coalminers will be kind enough just to pop down these little holes in the ground which have been made for them, we can all go on as before . . . .
So many people sincerely hold this view that there must be something to be said for it even if I cannot, at the moment, think what it is. My own inclination is to take the contrary view. Let us examine the contents of the Pandora's box which was opened, however briefly, by the miners' strike. To generalise about striking miners as if they were a single, homogeneous entity would obviously be as misleading as it would be offensive, so I will divide them into three main groups. In the first place, there are those who did not wish to go on strike, were never consulted, but allowed them- selves to be bullied into toeing the line. For the sake of brevity, but without any con- notations of moral disapproval, I will call them the cowards. In the second place, there are those whose lack of intelligence allowed them to be persuaded that justice was on their side in their demand that no uneconomic pits should be closed and that they had a reasonable chance of securing this aim by industrial action. Again for the sake of brevity, I will call them the fools. Finally there are those who for whatever motives demanded the strike and imposed it on their fellow-miners, using many of the criminal tactics of terrorist persuasion. I will call them the bullies.
Most people of reasonably generous or understanding nature will feel sorry for the cowards; only those of unusually vindictive disposition would wish to see them punished further when the strike is over. Few of us are heroic by inclination, and most of us, I dare say, would have played along with the bully-boys and the fools under the peculiar circumstances of life in a mining community. Many, too, would tend to sympathise with the fools, arguing that it is not their fault that they are stupid and no gentleman would wish to rub it in. Person- ally, I do not see that there is much to be gained by protecting the sensitivities of this group. But what we have been watching for the last ten months has been the triumph of the last group, the bully-boys, the wild men, louts, smash and grab artists who have been able to impose their will by a systematic reign of terror over their fellow members. These people are not a new phenomenon, but have always existed in every barrack-room, lower-deck or shop-floor where unintelligent people are thrown together; they exist also, of course, in every school and junior common-room — even in Senior Common Rooms, I dare say — but it is the constant endeavour of intelligent and civilised folk to keep the brutes in their place, the dogs in their kennels, the Calibans in their caves.
What we saw in the miners' strike was a microcosm of what the French saw in 1789, the Russians in 1917, the Germans in 1933: a minor eruption of everything that is most brutal, violent and hate-filled in our socie- ty. Perhaps there are greater eruptions ahead. I do not know, but there is nothing whatever to be gained, as I would main- tain, by trying to appease these elements in our society. They are not the product of any temporary crisis of capitalism but a permanent feature in all human society, the product of Original Sin.
Soft-hearted middle-class Britain has one final objection to a policy of defeating the miners: perhaps they were unreason- able in demanding that uneconomic pits be kept open by the cold calculations of profit and loss, but any other policy involves the destruction of their communities.
Any use of the word 'community' tends to have a quasi-religious connotation nowadays, and in the new theology pit communities command most of the rever- ence which once attached to God's holy church, the mystical body of Christ. Min- ing villages are by definition warm, vib- rant, caring, ecologically bio-efficient heritage material.
For my own part, I have never lived in a mining community and have no intention of doing so. But a book came out last week written by a former Ampleforth boy (Toff Down Pit by Kit Fraser, Quartet £8.95) who spent 18 months underground in Tyneside. Its interest does not lie, as the publishers suggest, in any claim by the author to be aristocratical. In fact the Fraser family (formerly Frisel or Frizzell) belongs to what might be described as the wilder fringe of the Highland landowning class. It produces fine women and sturdy men but I am not certain I could disting- uish a male Fraser from a Tyneside coal miner if both were stripped and scrubbed down. No doubt these northerners, like the Chinese, contrive to discriminate between each other in minute and far-fetched par- ticulars. Perhaps, indeed, the coalminers of South Shields were informed on the Trotskyist grapevine that young Fraser had some tenuous connection with the English aristocracy — an uncle of his married a first cousin of mine. But the important thing about young Fraser, as I say, is not that he is a toff. It is that he is intelligent, articulate, reasonably well-educated and recognisably human. So far as I know, nobody possessing all these qualities has ever worked down a British coalmine before. And the miners nearly murdered him.
Kit Fraser's motives in going down the mine were firstly to prove his manhood (oh dear!), then to discover whether the life was as tough and dangerous as popularlY supposed, whether miners really deserved their prodigious wages, whether there was communist infiltration in the mines or whether this was tabloid hysteria, and finally what it was really like in one of these sainted mining communities.
In gratitude for his intelligent interest in them, the miners threw stones at him, prodded him with their fingers and felt-tip pens and covered him with love-bites in the darkness of the cage, stole his snap (called 'bait') or doctored it with snuff, ripped off his buttons, set his pockets on fire, painted his face blue, flicked him with towels in the shower and humiliated him by dropping their trousers and underpants and squat- ting over their scuttles whenever he appeared. Never mind. This brave and persistent young man managed to establish to his own satisfaction that 'the average shift of a faceman could easily be done by a house- wife. . . The only miners on the face who need to deploy any effort are the two machine men. But even they require onlY the stamina of a man who mows his lawn . . . coalface work is a doddle . . . the work they are called on to do would hardly tax a debutante.'
So far so good. But it is the picture which emerges of the miners' community which is most striking. Obviously, there are some kindly and sensible people there; but the general picture is of a society in which the loudest, coarsest and most violent man is king. It is the glimpse of a world which most people would identify as hell on earth. Before the miners' strike there might have been a case for encouraging these poisonous little corners of human society to fester out of sight and out of mind. Since the strike, and the pictures of
brutal intimidation we all saw on the picket line, my own conclusion is that any de- velopment which has the incidental effect of dispersing these nasty little concentra- tions of everything that is most brutal and vile in human nature should be recom- mended on that account alone.
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