Arthur Scargill, Pit Closure Rally, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
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While the Keele Students’ Union bars saga was the largest internal issue that subsisted for the first six months of our sabbatical year 1984/85…
…the 1984-85 miners’ strike was far and away the biggest UK political/news story of that time.
The dispute had been running for some six months before this day, in September 1984, when Arthur Scargill held a rally outside the pit in Silverdale, which might be described as “Keele’s local” in the matter of coal pits back then. Indeed I think it was that pit that did for my first Barnes flat, in M block, which needed to be demolished in late 1982:
But I digress.
Here is a transcript of my diary note from the day that Arthur Scargill came to town:
Saturday, 22 September 1984 – Got up early. Went to Shelton – Kathy [North Staffs Poly, President? I think], Cath [Coughlin], Andy [Crawford] and I went to Rumours and on to Scargill [Arthur Scargill rally at a closing colliery]. Shopped in afternoon – visited Kevin [“the Guinness”?], Helen [Ross] etc. Went to Union in evening.
Obviously it was a big rally…a very, very big rally – in contrast with the comparatively small rallies (by his own standards) that Donald Trump holds in the USA these days (2024). Joking apart, there were several hundred of us who attended that 1984 Potteries event.
I discover, though, by delving into The Evening Sentinel archive, that Arthur Scargill 1984 did share something in common with Trump 2024: death threats. Indeed, had I known what I now learn from the Evening Sentinel 40 years later, I might have been a little reluctant to attend:
Scargill Rally 22 September 1984 Sentinel 22 Sep 1984, Sat Evening Sentinel (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England) Newspapers.com
In truth I don’t remember a great deal about the rally. I wasn’t a political sabbatical, by which I mean that I wanted to focus on running the Union and my portfolio, Education and Welfare, rather than national or international events. But I do remember that sense of history and wanting to be there when the “show” came to our town.
Arthur Scargill was a charismatic speaker and certainly carried his crowd with him. Thatcher-bashing/Tory-bashing was low hanging fruit for speeches in places like the Potteries at that time. I do remember Scargill’s mantra:
There’s no such thing as an uneconomic pit…
…failing to pass my personal economics test at that time. It was clear to me even then that the coal industry was on its way out, for economic and environmental reasons. The issue, for me, was the way that the Tory Government was going about its industrial policy, like a bull in a China shop, for ideological reasons, rather than a measured, planned approach to industrial change, which might have been achieved with more net benefit and less resulting hardship.
But it wasn’t about me, it was about Arthur. Here’s a video of a similar speech to the one we would have heard at the end of our rally:
Mercifully there was no assassination attempt on Arthur Scargill at the event we attended nor, as far as I know, at any other event during those heady days in the mid 1980s.
But just a few year’s later, comedy writer and performer Brian Jordan …
…to whom I shall always be grateful for premiering my comedy material in Edinburgh, in his wonderfully-named show, Whoops Vicar Is that Your Dick…
…assassinated Arthur Scargill’s character in the following lyric which ran and ran in NewsRevue in the early 1990s, reproduced here with Brian’s kind permission. I especially like the couplet:
He may not be to everybody’s liking,
But as a union leader…he’s striking.
Anyway, the September 1984 rally was not to be the last of the Students’ Union’s involvement in the miners’ strike, as the issue found its way onto the UGM agenda several times during our year – on at least one occasion with quite incendiary results.
Ashley Fletcher will help me to pick up on that aspect of the story in the coming months, as he has been busy recently (2024) writing up his own memories of the miners’ strike.
I wish I’d been there.