Two sorts of miner

Richard West

Mansfield, Notts

As the coal strike enters its 25th week, it comes increasingly to resemble a battle between the neighbouring counties of Yorkshire, the home and headquarters of Arthur Scargill, the strike leader, and Nottinghamshire, where all but a few of the miners have never stopped work. It is reported that the Scottish strikers have lost heart and. their leader Mike McGahey would like a settlement with the Coal Board. The South Wales miners have. had their funds, and therefore the cash to pay for pickets, sequestrated by law. The strik- ing miners of Kent are few, and remote from the central battlefield.

The Yorkshire miners know that they cannot possibly win the strike while Not- tinghamshire is at work. This county pro- duces not only 20 per cent of the nation's coal but more than 30 per cent of its electri- city. Here in Mansfield one has a constant reminder of both these facts as coal trucks rattle and crash from pit to power station, along the railway viaduct spanning the town centre. (The passenger service has long been closed, so that Mansfield is now the only town in Britain that has a major football ground and professional team, but no railway station — or so I was told by a leading authority: i.e. a Welshman I met at the Lamb. in Lamb's Conduit Street.) Because the strike can never succeed while Nottinghamshire continues to work, this county has been the target of ever more violent attacks from outsides pickets, especially from Yorkshire. Last week hun- dreds or thousands of pickets smashed cars and threw stones at people at Silverhill colliery and at Harworth, right on the border with Yorkshire and therefore espec- ially vulnerable.' Mansfield itself has not escaped the Yorkshire invaders. A local businessman, Terry Paling, whose office looks onto the main square told me that one demonstration 'was the most frighten- ing thing I have seen in my life, especially when the pubs shut and they were going around with bottles'. In fairness, however, the landlord of one of the pubs near this square said of the same demonstration: 'The crowds didn't cause any trouble. I think it was mostly got up by newspapers such as the Daily Express and the Daily Mail. The only trouble I had was some- body trying to break open the French letter machine.' (This unknown miner who wanted to make love, not war, must surely have come from the Nottinghamshire pit village of Eastwood, birthplace of D. H. Lawrence. When Lawrence went back to Eastwood during the strike of 1926, he was inspired to write a novel about the class struggle, which ended up, however, as Lady Chatterley's Lover.)

Why are the miners of Nottinghamshire so different from those of Yorkshire? Back in 1926, the Notts men broke away from the miners' strike, after the failure of the General Strike, and founded their own Spencer Union, named after a local Labour MP. Since rejoining the National Union of Miners, as it is now called, the Nottinghamshire miners have always been unwilling to strike, except when they thought it necessary, as in 1973. Progres- sive trendies in London, the Trotskyite Old Etonians and well-heeled sociologists, will tell you knowingly that 'Notts people have always been scabs', a piece of wisdom no doubt passed from father to son in the close-knit pit communities of Hampstead. Holland Park and Canonbury. In fact, the peculiar character of the Nottinghamshire miners goes back to the earliest history. even pre-history.

'The geology of an area pre-determines the natural history and man's use of the land,' reads an inscription in Mansfield's fascinating museum. 'Mansfield's situation on the junction of the Magnesian Limes- tone and Bunter Sandstone, with the underlying Coal Measures outcropping 3 few miles to the west, demonstrates this particularly well.' The surface coal to the east and in Derbyshire was quickly ex- hausted during the 19th century; deeper pits were sunk to the 'concealed' coalfield under the Permian Limestone; the mining communities 'crept eastward', to use the words of Mansfield Museum.

During the first decades of the 20th century, many new pits were opened in and around Mansfield, which therefore became

r the most lucrative and contented part the great coalfield underlying most 01 Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. In the 30 years from 1891, the,. population of Mansfield trebled, most the newcomers being from neighbouring counties. The newness of the mining com- munity helps to explain why it did not wisp to continue the doomed strike of 1926. The Notts men lacked the solidarity of the Yorkshire men; also their sense of grie- vance. When J. B. Priestley came to Nottinghamshire for his English JourneY_ he found it much more cheerful than lhe mining communities of, for instance, Lan- cashire and County Durham. After the second world war the Malls: field miners were not living too badly, the Museum. by some of the payslips shown in tn_. Museum. For example Arthur Richardson' of Sherwood colliery, during the Year

1947-48, received wages of £344.19.9, on which he paid income tax of £2.16.0. The weekly wage-slip of a Mansfield miner in 1948 shows a basic pay of £3.16.10, plus overtime payment of 7s 10d, plus cost of living allowance of 16s. After deductions for such things as rent (9s 4d), coal (5s 6d). the Club ( Is 7d) and the Union (Is), the miner took home £3.17.0. He paid no tax at all.

During the great pit closures of 1961-71, most of them during the first two Wilson governments, thousands of miners from the affected regions like County Durham and Northumberland came down to work in Nottinghamshire. More miners followed from five pits closed in Derbyshire during the third Wilson government. The Nottinghamshire pits also gave work to many of the Polish and Ukrainian exiles who settled in this county. A retired Polish miner at the Stag and Pheasant pub told me that youngsters in the community tend not to follow in this work — 'Who'd want to go down a pit?' — but do, however, continue to learn Polish, especially if both parents speak it. They are of course pas-. sionately anti-Communist, anti-'Rooshian' and unfriendly to Scargill, who has de- nounced Solidarity.

Political enmity between Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire goes right back to the seventh century when the two counties formed the border between, respectively, Mercia and Northumbria, later between English and Danish territory. I remember a TV documentary on this period in which the narrator compared the district south of Doncaster with the Demilitarised Zone in Vietnam. When King Harold, in 1066, was on his way to Hastings after defeating Harold Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, he stopped at Bawtry, which lies on the Yorkshire border with Nottinghamshire. Robin Hood was believed to have left the Sherwood Forest, surrounding Mansfield, to work as an outlaw or bandit in and around Barnsley, the home town of Arthur Scargill.

By the end of the Middle Ages, there had arisen a clear distinction between the North, starting at Yorkshire and Lan- cashire, and the South, starting at Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. The North was inclined to be Catholic, feudal and hostile to southern kings. In Henry VIII's time, the Pilgrimage of Grace, a rebellion in favour of keeping the Mass, began in Yorkshire. Elizabeth I made annual progressions all over southern England, as far as Bristol, Exeter, and Norwich, but never once went further north than Buxton, in Derbyshire — and then only to take the curative waters.

The industrial revolution was most spec- tacular in the North, which therefore be- came the hub of capitalism, and later socialism. Dour Gradgrinds and fiery trade union leaders agreed on one thing: that they were more down to earth than the pansy southerners. George Orwell was one of the first to note, in The Road to Wigan Pier, how guilty southerners would acquire a reverse snobbery, preferring Yorkshire, for instance, to the county of their origin. During the 1960s, thousands of trendy southerners went north to witness the proletarian marvels of Liverpool (and the Beatles), Newcastle and South Yorkshire, the site of several risible TV plays by Trotskyist southerners. Often during the last few years, I have heard southerners talk with eager anticipation of how the enraged workers will march on London to sweep away the hated Mrs Thatcher.

The Conservatives too are obsessed by the North, though in their case they fear rather than admire. The Macmillan gov- ernment in 1962 was so terrified by the class war noises of Tyneside socialists, like T. Dan Smith, that Lord Hailsham was made Minister for the North-East, and went up to Newcastle wearing a cloth cap. The Heath-Walker government was so frightened by Arthur Scargill's pickets that it threw in the sponge and called, and lost, an election. The present Conservatives, just like the socialists, appear to think that the Notts miners who stay at work some- how do not count, because they are not from the North and therefore not 'real'.

On several visits to Nottinghamshire during the present strike, I have found it, if not as 'real' as South Yorkshire. certainly much more pleasant. Mansfield is an ugly place but is not as dour as mining towns

over in Yorkshire. There is much less drunkenness and hooliganism. Supporters of Notts Forest, Notts County and Mans- field football teams do not go in for the institutionalised knife fights and similar forms of assault common to many clubs in South Yorkshire. The skaters Torvill and Dean come from Nottingham. There are few obvious louts. I was very surprised (as I would not have been surprised in York- shire) to see a young man wearing jeans and a black waistcoat whose arms were covered in tattoos, including the words: 'It Was A Woman That Drove Me To Drink But I Forgot To Write And Thank Her'. The local beer has a splendid advertise- ment on the sides of the buses, showing the blown up face of President Reagan over the words . . but he's never had a pint of Mansfield'.

The city of Nottingham has the inevit- able horrors of ring roads, shopping cen- tres and multi-storey car-parks, but some- where among that concrete mess I found a Chinese restaurant, the Pagoda, where there was not only excellent food but a staff that smiled and chatted with custom- ers. All round the cities and pits lies tranquil countryside including the exquisite small town of Southwell, with its Norman cathedral. (It also has a new wine bar and restaurant, Cromwell's, which surely will be in next year's Good Food Guide.) The commonest name in Southwell is Wheat- croft.

Nottinghamshire has suffered during this strike the insults and attacks of the York- shire pickets, the cost of thousands of extra police, and the bitterness of political differ- ences. The Labour Party is now in disarray and may have lost its hold on the county. But when the strike ends, Nottinghamshire will be bound to attract investment from British and foreign businesses who see it as one part of the country prepared to work and prepared to fight for the right to work. The people of Nottinghamshire have earned olir gratitude. They have done what our politicians had not the courage to do. And in this respect I disagree with Paul Johnson who blames the failure of this Government on its bad public relations. PR is pointless if it does not reflect the will and beliefs of the people who use it. I suspect that nobody in this Government (except possibly Norman Tebbit) really wants to stand up to Mr Scargill. They are most of them terrified of the North. They have funked using the full powers of the law against illegal and often dangerous pickets. They have left the fight to the miners and ordinary people of Nottinghamshire. Looking at this strike from Mansfield, the centre of the battlefield, one gets the impression that of the politicians onlY David Owen has got the point. As PereS- rine Worsthorne observed in the DadY Telegraph, Dr Owen has somehow changed from a trendy pseud into a states- man whose words carry more weight than anyone in the country. It is very be- wildering.