Podcast episode about the huge and successful strikes by miners in Britain in 1972 and 1974, in conversation with Dave Douglass.

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Continuing our intermittent series of podcast episodes about the great strike of UK miners from 1984-5, we tell the story of what came beforehand. In this episode, we look at the historical background, and learn about the national wildcat strike in 1969, as well as the nationwide official strikes of 1972 and 1974, which both defeated the Conservative government and eventually brought it down.

Episodes

  • E81: Miners strikes 1972-4

E81: Miners' strikes 1972-4 – Working Class History

  • E81.1: Bonus episode with more about Dave’s revolutionary politics, day-to-day work in the mines, and discussion of popular images of the 1970s in the UK today – Available exclusively for our patreon supporters

More information

Pickets at Ferrybridge Power Station, Yorkshire, 1972. Courtesy © NLA/reportdigital.co.uk
Dave Douglass at work at Hatfield Main colliery, 1967. Courtesy Dave Douglass
Dave Douglass with colleagues down the mines at Hatfield. Courtesy Dave Douglass
Dave Douglass fundraising with Didcott pickets during the 1972 strike. Courtesy Dave Douglass

Sources

Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.
  • Episode graphic: © NLA/reportdigital.co.uk.
  • Edited by Louise Barry
  • Theme tune courtesy of the Easington Colliery Brass Band.

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Transcript

Miners’ strikes in 1972 and 1974

In the late 1960s, the revolutionary spirit sweeping the world reached the coalmining communities of Britain. This resulted in a resurgence of militancy, and massive strikes in 1972 and 1974 which transformed miners’ lives, and twice defeated the Conservative government. This is Working Class History.

[Intro music]

Our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. For example, you can listen to an exclusive bonus episode with more of our interview with Dave, plus discussion of the three-day week and the 1970s. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory

As long-term listeners will know, we have been producing an intermittent series of episodes about the great miners strike in Britain of 1984-5, which was the most significant industrial dispute in recent UK history. Our episode 13 was about the role of women in the strike and our episodes 27-29 were about LGBT+ people in the dispute.

But before making an episode about the strike itself, we realised that it is important to tell the story of the strikes by miners which preceded it: crucially, the massively successful national strikes in 1972 and 1974.

These strikes had their origins in the 1960s.

Dave Douglass: We’d just come through the ‘60s and we were in the ‘70s and this was the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll revolution. Well, young miners wanted part of that as well. We didn’t want to be confined to some great corridors of the trade union movement. We wanted to be wild as well.

This is Dave Douglass, a former coalminer, activist, author, and member of the National Union of Mineworkers, the miners’ union.

I’m an eighth-generation coal miner from the North. I followed my dad and granddad into Wardley Colliery on Tyneside where I worked as a linesman until the Wilson closure programme when I was transferred down to Hatfield Main in Doncaster where I worked for the next 30 years as a tunneller and 42 years altogether in the coal industry, both as a working underground miner and as an official of the union.

Dave started working in the mines as a teenager in 1962. Harold Wilson, of the Labour Party, with prime minister between 1964 and 1970, during which time the government closed down 235 deep pit mines. This saw many miners redeployed to different pits, and the number of workers declined from over 500,000  down to just over 280,000 in 1972.

The work was dirty, and difficult. Dave talks more about his day-to-day work as a miner in the bonus episode to this episode, available for our patreon supporters.

Coalmining was also an exceedingly dangerous job, although safety had improved significantly since the industry was nationalised by the Labour government in 1947, and put under the control of the National Coal Board (NCB).

Following nationalisation, the safety standards rose considerably, mainly because the Coal Board, obviously being a government institution, was regulated and tightly controlled. It didn’t mean they were safe but they were considerably safer than the private mines and also we could hold them to account because we had a national union framework which we’d struggled really to build. It was frequently built and frequently destroyed or nearly destroyed.

Creating and maintaining a universal, national set of terms and conditions was a constant battle for mine workers in Britain since the defeat of the national miners’ strike in 1926. By 1962, miners had successfully gained the implementation of a National Power Loading Agreement, which established a national pay scale across the whole country.

The 1950s and early 1960s were a period of relative social peace in the UK, as numerous social democratic reforms were implemented after the end of World War II. Workers’ wages were relatively high, a free, National Health Service had been introduced, and a mass wave of squatting by ex-service members and their families had pushed the government into a massive programme of building good quality, affordable social housing.

Wages for miners were also pretty good. And so the union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) led by Joe Gormley, hadn’t undertaken any big national strikes over pay since it was founded in 1945. But there were smaller, local disputes, and areas where workers were more militant, and more likely to take action to defend themselves or fight for improvements.

It depended on where you were. I was in the Durham area to start with. The Durham area was considered a moderate area or at least, in the 20th century, it became a moderate area. It was known for its militancy in the 19th century and up until the 1926 strike. It had always been pretty constitutional but there had always been a battle between the rank-and-file and the full-time officials over constitutional and unconstitutional action. By the beginning of the ‘60s, wildcat action in the Durham and Northumberland coalfield was almost unheard of. It was considered almost an act of betrayal to follow union members for well-paid faceworkers, in particular, to take unofficial action.

Wildcat, or unofficial strikes, are strikes organised directly by workers themselves, and not authorised through official union channels.

 When I transferred down to the Doncaster coalfield, I was absolutely amazed [laughter] because they had rag-ups, as they called them, all the time which were face-to-face disputes, haulage workers’ disputes and surface workers’ disputes all of the time in the whole coalfield and Doncaster coalfield, in particular, but also statistically, you could see that in South Wales, Kent and Scotland, it was a similar picture. So there was a lot of localised militancy in that sense.

Another really important aspect of working life, and struggles over it, which is often ignored, is around workers’ control. Through mass struggles in the 19th and early 20th centuries, many workers in Britain, like workers in other parts of the world, in addition to fighting over pay and conditions, also fought to establish various degrees of control over their work. And in many areas, they succeeded in this. This is something which the neoliberal counteroffensive since the 1980s has unfortunately been very successful in clawing back, to the extent that issues of workers’ control don’t even really come on the agenda for many unions.

There were various levels of workers’ job control where miners had areas of the operation of the mine which they controlled and management didn’t control: one of those being manning. With the coming of the National Power Loading Agreement, which was supposed to make a standard day wage to level up all of the different county agreements and pay scales, localised control was supposed to have been abolished. While that was generally true in the rest of the country, in places like Doncaster and South Yorkshire it wasn’t. They operated a very keenly-protected priority system, as they called it, where the union decided who went in the team and where those teams went. In the Durham coalfield, there had been a lottery where, every three months, you cavilled, as they call it, for a different working place so that the blue-eyed boys didn’t get the decent places and the militants got the bad places. You had to swap around but at Doncaster, that didn’t happen but you had spare men who didn’t have a full-time job and they were on the priority. So when a new coalface developed, they were the first ones to go onto the regular job and the people who’d had the regular job then went on the market, as they called it. So there were arguments about disputes over what the people on the market should be paid. Now you got the National Power Loading Agreement on the coalface if you were available but on the market, that was sometimes not true. If there wasn’t any job availability, you didn’t get the top wages even if you were trained. So there were disputes over that and there were disputes over what craftsmen should get on the face. These stopped coalfields. They stopped the Doncaster coalfield or the South Yorkshire coalfield intermittently.

In addition to these local disputes, there was one major national issue, which was around working hours for one group of miners.

There were lots of different irons in the fire but the thing which was still the big bone of contention was the hours that were worked by the surfacemen. Now most of these carried the legacy of the defeat of 1926 and so while underground hours had reduced again to 7.25, surface hours were still 8.5 sometimes and, of course, they were the lowest-paid workers.

Surface workers were often older miners who could no longer work underground for health reasons. Now union members had pushed this issue to the annual conference of the NUM, who voted in 1968 to demand that surface workers’ hours be lowered to match everybody else’s. But as I’m sure any of our listeners who have ever attended a union national conference will be aware, a union passing a policy does not necessarily translate into any action in favour of that policy. So rank-and-file workers began to take the matter into their own hands.

In the end, there was a growing unofficial movement with different strands and different composites and I suppose the most important catalyst for these in Yorkshire was the unofficial miners’ panels. These were not part of the official structure of the NUM. These were unofficial alliances of all the branches in particular coalfield areas. In Yorkshire, there were four areas: South Yorkshire, Doncaster, Barnsley and North Yorkshire. Each one of these would have a panel of all of the branches in those areas and they, more or less, acted like semi-areas and could come to a policy decision themselves and often used to take action as a whole area. That was one particular catalyst and then there were miners’ forums led by various left-leaning people. Arthur Scargill’s miners’ forum at Barnsley attracted miners from all over Yorkshire and discussed questions of policy and action. The Yorkshire area was, at this time, also considered a very moderate, right-wing and also very constitutional area, despite the fact the men took no notice of the leaders and acted anyway. Officially, they condemned it and didn’t like that. There was a growing rank-and-file militancy around that. I edited a far-left miners’ paper called The Mineworker, an organ of the Mineworkers’ Internationale with our comrades in Belgium and various other places but there were other rank-and-file papers around at the time which were all pushing in the same direction.

The thing that brought it together really was the call for a national demonstration to the Coal Board in 1969 down in London called by the Derbyshire area. Tens of thousands of miners poured into London to demonstrate. The London commuters were completely shocked. They didn’t know there were any coal miners left in Britain. Actually, at that time, there were 320,000 of us but because they hadn’t heard anything about us as we were never in the national news or anything, people thought we didn’t exist. If the commuters were shocked, the National Coal Board was shocked because they thought they could do anything they wanted with us. We actually occupied the building. I remember these London clerks shouting, ‘They’re in! They’re in!’ as if the Martians had suddenly bloody landed. We walked into the negotiating room where the NUM and the NCB officials were discussing quietly the issues before them and were suddenly confronted by all these miners from all over the country. They were harangued by a miner from Scotland and they couldn’t understand a word that he was saying, except they got the general impression that he wasn’t very happy. To be honest, we didn’t know what he was saying either but we knew he was on our side [laughter]. That was in the days when there were still mines outside of Glasgow.

With the miners’ confidence high after the protest, on 11 October 1969, the area council of the Yorkshire NUM, including Arthur Scargill who later led the national union, kicked out their president, who attempted to block action, and voted overwhelmingly to strike.

So we took unofficial action and we went on strike to lower the hours of labour for the miners.

Over the next 2 days, all 70,000 miners in Yorkshire had joined the strike. Strikers set up flying pickets, to spread the strike to other pits, and walkouts began in Scotland, south Wales, and Kent. Yorkshire miners set up flying pickets in Nottinghamshire. While they were successful in picketing out five collieries, 21 remained open. Nottinghamshire NUM officials denounced “intimidation” by flying pickets, and discussed bringing in police protection with the NCB. The strike drastically reduced the amount of coal available for electricity generation, and caused factories to be shut down to save electricity.

After a couple of weeks, the NCB attempted to defuse the dispute by offering miners more pay, while leaving working hours to be discussed at a later date.

In order to buy us off, we got the biggest pay award we’d had, although that wasn’t the issue. We got the biggest award that we’d ever been given in recent times but we stayed on strike until they made this nod-and-a-wink agreement that local areas could come to their own arrangements with their own pits and their own workforce which really meant, if not in writing then in fact, that there was a reduction for surfacemen’s hours. That set the scene because the year after that, in 1970, with general discontent over wages, there was a change in mood towards the leadership.

Miners had also realised their potential industrial power. As most electricity generation in the UK relied on coal, they had the ability to essentially shutdown the whole country. This now-energised rank-and-file then began pushing up against the more conservative leadership of the NUM.

The leadership had been locked in this conciliatory, almost hypnotic trance with the National Coal Board basically since nationalisation with the idea that the national coal industry was ours and that no matter what they did and what government was there, you would still do what the National Coal Board said because we were all in it together. Of course, we weren’t and they had completely different priorities than us. This is why they got away with the mass closure programme in the ‘50s and ‘60s with little or no resistance and supported by the national and the area officials basically. There was no area-led or nationally-led resistance to pit closures anywhere.

There was major disgruntlement with that. It also has to be said that the older men were now starting to leave the industry and take early retirement. So there was a lot of that and the threat that the coal industry was an anachronism and that nobody wanted us, well, the weeks of strike in 1969 closed industries down lock, stock and barrel. It suddenly lit a spark that showed we were still a highly-strategic industry.

The following year, some miners walked out again for a further pay increase.

They’d gone there for a 10% rise I think it was in 1970 and we didn’t get that and so there was unofficial strike action again. Miners walked out all over the country. There was a smattering of discontent in the Durham and Northumberland coalfield where some coalfaces went on strike and one or two pits went on strike for a day. Now that had never been done, not in decades, and it showed that there was a new mood emerging all over the coalfields. We ended up getting some minor local improvements like rest days and things like that I believe but it set the scene for 1972.

In 1970, miners voted to reject their pay offer, but without a strong enough mandate for strike action due to union rules at the time. More on that in a bit.

In June 1970, there was a general election, in which Conservative candidate Edward Heath beat Labour’s Harold Wilson.

Heath assumed that the defeat of Wilson was an endorsement of him and his anti-trade union programme but it wasn’t. Heath didn’t get elected by any landslide vote. He was elected because of mass Labour abstentions – huge Labour abstentions – because Wilson hadn’t come through. People like my dad, who had been a lifelong, moderate Labour supporter, had given him time after the first election because he only had a handful of seats as a majority but when he got an 80 or 90-seat majority and had the door open before him to bring in the most left-wing, radical programme since the end of the war and he didn’t, it caused a lot of disillusionment. Now my dad would always vote Labour if it was an Alsation dog standing with a Labour sticker but he wouldn’t canvas for them anymore. Something went out of his generation’s idea about Labour as well at that time. Heath, not for the first time, misread the situation.

While Labour won 13.1 million votes in the 1966 election, they only got 12.2 million in 1970. Whereas the Tories went from 11.4 million up to 13.1 million.

The union had accepted miserly wage rises on the basis that the industry wasn’t needed, that nobody wanted coal anymore and also the threat that they’d close the pits. They’d closed hundreds of pits – [laughter] literally hundreds of pits and so that just didn’t frighten us anymore. We came to this resolution that if the pit was going to stay open for two days, we wanted paying for being in it. It didn’t matter. We weren’t talking about whether the pit stayed open or not. It was about how much money we were getting paid while we were working it. In a way, that was a very short-sighted analysis but that’s the way the mood was at the time and we caught them off guard. As one of the old Durham leaders said, ‘There were people asleep at their posts.’ We’d had a national ballot in 1970 for strike action on the wages offer but at that time, the union rules still said we required a two-thirds majority vote to win. Well, it was almost impossible to get a two-thirds majority. We’d have needed almost every miner, who wasn’t on the sick or whatever, to vote in favour. With the rise of the unofficial movement and the new leadership in the 1960s and early ‘70s, we changed the rule to a 55% majority. With a 55% majority, we easily won the strike ballot and launched the national strike.

With the new rule, in 1972, nearly 60% of miners voted for strike action, and the strike began on 9 January 1972. The government was determined to beat it, and believed that it could withstand a long strike, and ultimately emerge victorious, enabling it to impose successive years of smaller and smaller, sub- inflationary pay “rises”.

In this next clip, Dave mentions the NEC. This is the National Executive Committee, which is an important leadership body of the union, made up of lay members who were elected to it.

It was a very decentralised strike and it was still under the leadership of Joe Gormley. There were attempts to form a national coordinating committee for the strike, much against Joe Gormley’s opinion, made up of militant NEC members but really, areas did their own thing. By their own thing, I mean literally anything to stop the country. The Kent miners formed a fleet of motorboats to stop ships coming in the Thames if they were bringing in coal cargoes but we had absolute support from the National Union of Seamen who wouldn’t transport that.

What really made the strike so successful was the miners’ use of flying pickets, and solidarity action shown by other groups of workers.

We had massive support from workers in every industry. We had very, very little dissension. We went down to Keadby power station and you could stand there all day and no lorries would come and if a lorry did come, nobody would unload it inside the plant. So we were there really as a public relations exercise as the solidarity was so great.

With mining shut down, lorry drivers, rail workers and power station workers had all agreed not to handle scab coal.

It’s important to point out that this collective refusal was driven by rank-and-file union members, not union leaderships. For example, train drivers in the union ASLEF told their officials that after the strike began, they would not carry any coal, which was mostly stockpiled at power stations.

I was actually the picket coordinator for Didcot power station. It was a nuclear power station they were trying to bring onstream to break the blockade of coal and so it was an important job.

Despite the large amount of support, picketing is still potentially dangerous business. Dave mentions the IRA here: to clarify, he’s referring to the Irish Republican Army.

One of the men from my pit got killed on a picket line who was called Freddie Matthews. Down at that wharf at Keadby, a scab lorry had told the police that he was going to go through and if anybody got in the way, he’d run them over and he actually did kill one of my comrades, Freddie Matthews. It was a turning point of the strike in ’72 really because then people said, ‘Right, the gloves are off now,’ and we had a mass funeral which the BBC said was reminiscent of the mass IRA funerals in Ulster [laughter] and made that link for us because thousands and thousands of miners and their families followed the coffin. It changed the mood.

Freddie’s brother, Jimmy, blames the police for Freddie’s death, as it was the police who were facilitating scab vehicles crossing the picket lines.

Dave doesn’t believe there were serious consequences for the killer.

I think they charged the guy with dangerous driving and that was it. The thing was, of course, his lorry wouldn’t have been unloaded when he got through the gates anyway. He was just trying to make a point.

The biggest flashpoint of the strike was at the Saltley Gate coke depot in Birmingham. While the miners had shut down extraction of new coal, to win quickly they also needed to shut down the movement of coal from existing stockpiles, and imports. Dave compares Saltley Gate with the Orgreave coking plant, which we will talk in more detail about in our forthcoming episodes on the strike of 1984-5.

Saltley Gate was a big coal/coke terminal; a bit like Orgreave was in ’84. It was a dump for the coal breaking the British Seafarers’ embargo that was coming in through the docks at Heysham on the Irish Sea side of the country and up to Birmingham. I should say, by the way, that the IRA did us the service of blowing up some scab coal lorries heading for that port at the time but that’s another story [laughter]. Anyway, the lads from South Wales mainly went up to Saltley Gate and the police were determined that the depot wouldn’t close and it became a trial of strength.

The Midlands NUM didn’t have the ability to shut down the depot, so they called for assistance from other regions. So around 2000 miners came to join them from South Wales, and Yorkshire, including Arthur Scargill, to begin mass picketing on 7 February.

Now, Arthur decided, quite unofficially in his own flamboyant way, to take a huge group of miners from Yorkshire down there because he had a strong reputation.

Pickets managed to reduce the number of lorries being filled and sent out at Saltley from several hundred a day down to just 50 a day, but an army of 400 police was succeeding in keeping the gates open for the first three days of the mass picketing.

Arthur went a stage further and he addressed all of the engineering unions in Birmingham and in his inimitable way, he didn’t request them to support but demanded that they support the miners. Some people thought he went too far. So the following morning, as the police all marched there, there was a hush in the atmosphere and then 25,000 Birmingham engineers downed tools and went on strike. I mean it was the stuff of Eisenstein and 10,000 of them marched with their banners to Saltley Gate shouting, ‘Shut the gates! Shut the gates!’ When the police saw this force coming, they closed the gates and they put the padlock on it and said, ‘Right, that’s it.’

Sergei Eisenstein, mentioned here, was a Soviet filmmaker who directed epic films about working-class struggles like Strike and Battleship Potemkin.

Saltley Gate closing on 10 February was a more important symbolic victory than a practical one in actually winning the strike, as at most it only contained around 100,000 tons of coke, whereas the strike was depleting coal reserves by 1.6 million tonnes a week, and by early February the country only had two weeks’ supply remaining.

In terms of what happened at Saltley, it was very different to what happened 12 years later at Orgreave, where police used intense violence against pickets to keep the plant open.

This is an important point when you come to look at the 1984 dispute and Orgreave. The difference was the police had other priorities. Keeping a scab depot open was not their only priority. For the chief constable, it had to be seen in conjunction with everything else he had to do. It was not an overall instruction that whatever else happened, you would keep these gates open until every police officer in Britain was employed battering people off the streets to keep the gates open.

Back in 1972, with the exception of the left-wing tabloid, the Daily Mirror, almost the entire media establishment was vociferously opposed to the strike.

The state was trying to move against militants through the use of the media, of course, with non-stop propaganda. It wasn’t as bad as ’84 mind you because people just didn’t believe it. People had already started to reject it. We’d gone through the anti-Vietnam War movement and the mass movement against the Vietnam War and there was militancy in factories and everywhere. There was a high tide of working-class militancy and trade union militancy. There was a whole attitude of wanting to dispense with the entire system. That’s not fanciful. It was more or less the mainstream idea that we actually could change the system; not only should but could change the system and we had it there.

Also active in the strike were numerous left-wing organisations, and rank-and-file groups of miners, some of whom put out their own publications.

We had our Mineworker paper and there were other radical miners’ papers around at the time. Most of the far-left at that time at least had a foothold in industrial working-class communities; not a strong foothold. They were still mainly in colleges and places like that but the students themselves, of course, were a major political force. There was a big movement of students at the same time as the 1972 miners’ strike. There was a mass demonstration of students in London which marched and drew the bulk of the student demonstration unofficially away from Hyde Park to the Coal Board offices. They marched past the Coal Board and shouted, ‘The miners’ strike will win. Troops out of Ireland. Pickets out of jail.’ They were linking those struggles together. I was popular on the platform of the London School of Economics at that time [laughter].

Facing a crisis, the government declared a state of emergency and started restricting power usage to save energy. On 12 February they banned the use of electricity for heating businesses and offices. They then gradually introduced more restrictions, including permitting industrial uses to only use electricity for three days for a short period. Although this was not the infamous three-day week – we will discuss that later as that was during the 1974 strike.

Rolling blackouts of nine hours at a time began shortly after. And 1.6 million workers around the country were temporarily laid off.

The NUM leadership took steps to de-escalate the conflict. For example, they told members to scale down picketing of the Longannet power station in Scotland. But rank-and-file strikers didn’t comply. They increased numbers of pickets from 500 on Tuesday 8 February, to 1000 on Friday, and over 2000 the following Monday.

Authorities tried to make an example of pickets at Longannet. They directed 10% of all Scottish policing resources onto this one power station, and on 14 February they arrested 13 strikers, denying them bail and trumping up serious criminal charges of mobbing and rioting against them. But mass pickets continued, and outrage at the arrests eventually led to the workers being released on bail. They were all later acquitted by juries at trial.

As February progressed, the government realised the game was up.

Heath knew when he was beaten. He must have played cricket as a lad or something because he realised the game was up and didn’t press it. After the closure of Saltley, of course, that was it in terms of winning that particular pay rise. Everything was tied up. The railways were totally tied up. Steelworks and the docks were tied up with solidarity action.

On 19 February, the government made an improved offer which was accepted by the NEC of the NUM, who then called off picketing. On 25 February, miners voted to accept the new offer.

Well, we won virtually everything that we asked for for the first time.

The pay deal was worth a pay increase around 21% on average – well above the pay cap of 7 to 8% which the government was trying to impose, which was in line with inflation at the time. The government also agreed to extend adult pay rates, which were only paid to workers aged 20 and up, to 19-year-olds the following year and 18-year-olds in 1974. They also granted five additional days’ holiday.

In order to get out of the system of pay restraint the government had set up for themselves, they commissioned a hasty inquiry by Lord Wilberforce which recommended a pay increase well over inflation, but argued this could be acceptable if matched with increased productivity.

The government had set itself basically a wage freeze system where you couldn’t go to certain levels above inflation pay rises and productivity had to be matched with it. Well, our productivity had gone through the roof. We’d doubled, trebled and quadrupled production. The output per man shift had just risen astronomically. The number of pits had declined, the amount of productivity had gone up and we were producing more coal with fewer pits and far fewer men. So there wasn’t any argument on that front but what we were after exceeded the wage restraint models.They set up an inquiry or a judicial review type of thing which was always going to find in our favour and found that we were a special case because of the miners’ danger, the deaths, the injuries, the productivity, the location…

The 1972 strike was hugely successful. But the following year, the government again started trying to erode pay.

We got more or less everything but then within two years, our position in the wages’ league had started to decline rapidly again and we’d lost some of those important gains that we’d made in ’72. Now, the thing was that we had already set out the arguments and the enquiry had already decided in our favour and so when Heath came along two years later and said he wasn’t going to concede, even though all of the ground for his previous pay rise had been undermined so that the rationale of allowing us to win then really should have applied in ’74 but there were other forces at work as I say. He was badly misled by the state’s intelligence forces who said the miners wouldn’t strike again. To be honest, we did have a ballot the year before in 1973 and we didn’t achieve the 55% but instead of seeing the per cent we did get, which was one year after and was a high percentage and we only just failed to achieve the mark, they told Heath that we wouldn’t strike again, it was too soon and all the rest of it. I think they almost certainly knew that we would. In any case, it was rumoured afterwards that Lord Gormley, who was alleged to have been a state asset anyway – he wasn’t a Lord then – told Heath that we would and that he needed to settle otherwise we’d go on strike again.

So, failing to reach the 55% threshold to approve a strike ballot over the 1973 pay deal, the NUM basically accepted it. And over that year, miners’ pay slipped from the top of the industrial wages league, to 18th place in the league.

But towards the end of 1973, the government again tried to impose pay restraint. They wanted to limit pay increases to 7%, while inflation had risen to over 10%.

This time, the hand of the miners was greatly strengthened by the 1973 oil crisis.

In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in what is known as the Yom Kippur war. Arab countries in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) then retaliated against Western countries which supported Israel by increasing oil prices, reducing a global shortage and resulting in a fourfold increase in the costs of oil, provoking an energy crisis in the UK and elsewhere.

High oil prices abroad meant that domestic coal became a more valuable resource. The government did increase their pay offer to 16.5%, but this was rejected by the workers.

So, in November 1973, the NUM began an overtime ban, putting a squeeze on coal supplies and trying to reduce stockpiles of coal.

This action was extremely powerful, and so by 1 January 1974, the government declared a state of emergency and introduced the three-day week to save electricity. This is the three-day week which lives on in the public imagination, and which is frequently referenced today.

All non-essential businesses were limited to three consecutive days’ consumption, and television had to stop broadcasting at 10:30 PM. We talk more about this, and the media image of the 1970s in Britain, in the bonus episode to this episode, available for our patreon supporters.

On 9 February, the action escalated to an all-out strike. During the strikes in 1972 and 1974, miners had to get by without being paid for relatively short periods of time, often getting support from NUM hardship funds.

People managed. Families supported them and communities supported them but we didn’t have a big support network. Most of the financial support came from our own area hardship funds and the students. I was invited to various places either to sing, because I sing, and was paid astronomical sums of money [laughter] from student unions for my services singing which were really not that good but they were paid to get them over the hoops and boundaries of their own rules about what they could pay for what. They weren’t allowed to pay very much money for miners’ hardship funds but were allowed to pay quite a lot of money for entertainers. So I had a barnstorming concert at York University and a massive thing down at Sussex University.

Dave performed miners’ songs, about the industry, the work, and life in mining communities.

No, the coal industry has got a very rich tradition of song, poetry, stories, art and painting. Miners are extremely cultured people mostly all over the world really but we share a lot with Appalachia and that whole tradition of singing.

You can learn more about Appalachian miners’ struggles in our episodes 57-58, and back in the UK, you can check out episode 2 of our sister podcast, Working Class Literature, about Northumbrian poet and miner, Joseph Skipsey.

With the strike, the three-day week, and the state of emergency dragging on, Edward Heath responded by calling a snap election, believing that the public would support him in standing up against the unions.

Of course, what happened then was that he went to the country asking, ‘Who rules? The unions or the government?’

Now, Labour tried to get us to call the strike off for the duration of the General Election. This was a real mark of political maturity really. The officials of the miners’ union were deeply entrenched in the Labour Party and believed the Labour Party was their party and that we shouldn’t do anything to upset the Labour Party. We’d been told that we would spoil Labour’s chances unless we called the strike off. The rank-and-file said they didn’t care which government it was and whoever was in government was going to have to pay well or we were staying on strike.

While the union officials consented to the strike continuing, they made big efforts to try to avoid any kind of violence or confrontations.

in ’74, the officials were determined that, first of all, there would only be six pickets. They invented that. They had to be officials pickets and so you couldn’t have anybody rolling up just to support you. You had to have a special armband. They said there would be no mass picketing and there would be no more Saltleys and you’d rely on solidarity action. The quid pro quo was we had solidarity action but the experiences of being on the picket line and being with other workers were lost. They tried to depoliticise ’74, despite the fact that, in a way, it was more political in ’74.

So, the miners stayed on strike, and the general election took place, with Edward Heath asking the question: “who governs?”

The population said, ‘Well, not you anyway,’ and he went.

In the election, the Conservatives lost their majority, and Labour got the most seats and outright majority, so they formed a minority government. And the strike continued.

 So we stayed on strike during the General Election and after the General Election into the new Labour Government because we were none too sure that Labour was going to treat us any more kindly than bloody Heath had.

The Conservative government had set up a pay board during the strike to make recommendations on miners’ pay.  Labour took power, and the board recommended a big pay increase, equating to an increase of around 35%. Labour agreed to implement the increase, and on 6 March 1974 the strike was called off. The increase put miners back at the top of the industrial earnings league.

With the miners winning a good deal, the national union confederation, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) promised the government it would not support strikes by other workers to achieve similar pay increases, and it committed to union leaders using their influence to reduce workers’ pay demands.

The strike over, and oil prices high, the government was keen to expand the coal industry.

After the victory in ’74, the tide appeared to change and they started to recognise that coal was essential. They started to change their perspective of energy policy to invest in new mines, new machines, new long-term futures and to advertise for more apprentices. ‘There will always be jobs in mining’ was one of the slogans. We were constructing an experimental, clean-coal power station, clean-coal steelworks and clean-coal foundries. All of these irons were in the fire literally at the time which had they been allowed to develop would have taken away a lot of the rationale for the mass closure programme which Thatcher brought in in ’84. For a brief period, the NUM regained its throne.

Anxious to avoid a dispute the following year, in 1975 the government offered miners a pay increase of a further 35%.

But the Labour government continued in general to try to impose pay restraint amidst high inflation. This ultimately resulted in the winter of discontent, of 1978-9, which was a wave of mass wildcat strikes in protest at a sub-inflationary pay agreed between the government and the TUC. But that is a story for another day.

In the wake of the strikes, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party was elected, and they began devising a plan to defeat the miners, once and for all.

 [Outro music]

That brings us to the end of this episode about the 1972 and 1974 miners’ strikes in Britain. We have a bonus episode, where Dave talk more about his day-to-day work as a miner, and discusses his anarchist little views. My co-host, Matt, and I also discuss media images of the 1970s, the three-day week and so on. This is available exclusively to our patreon supporters. This podcast is only made possible because of support from you, our listeners on patreon. So if you can, please consider joining us for as little as two dollars a month at patreon.com/workingclasshistory. Supporters get great benefits like exclusive early access to episodes, as well as exclusive bonus episodes, free and discounted books and merch, and more.

If you can’t spare the cash, don’t worry about it, please just tell your friends about the podcast, share links to episodes on your social media and take a second to give us a five-star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify.

As always, we’ve got sources, links to more info, transcripts, and more on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes. We also have links there to some of Dave’s writings.

Thanks again to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.

Theme music for this episode is courtesy of the Easington Colliery Brass Band, links to them in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Louise Barry.

Finally, thanks to you for listening. Catch you next time.

Interview transcript by PODTRANSCRIBE.

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History isn't made by kings or politicians, it is made by us: billions of ordinary people.