Miners' Scotland 'melted away'

More than 14,000 miners were employed in Scotland when the strike began in 1984

On 6 March, 1984 Coal board chairman Ian MacGregor told the National Union of Mineworkers he planned to close 20 pits. The Scottish NUM immediately called a strike from 12 March.

BBC Scotland correspondent Colin Blane covered the 1984 - 1985 strike from beginning to end.

Everyone who lived through the miners' strike of 1984 seems to have powerful memories of what happened: the picket lines, the coal lorries speeding along the M8, police horses at Ravenscraig.

My strike began with a face-to-face encounter with Big Norman.

It happened in Edinburgh, a few days before the real hostilities started.

Men from Polmaise colliery near Stirling had gone on strike before anywhere else because their pit had been one of the first earmarked for closure.

The Polmaise strikers were having none of it and converged on a meeting of Scottish miners' leaders at Edinburgh's Royal Hotel in Princes Street to persuade them to bring the rest of the coalfield out too.

As the meeting dragged on, tempers frayed among the miners outside.

Journalists who'd been waiting for news retreated inside the hotel, away from the increasingly agitated strikers.

We'd taken sanctuary in the upstairs tea room when they charged into the hotel.

"You can walk out or get carried out!" came the cry.

A very large figure crashed through the tea room doors and paused for a moment before spotting my tape machine and its red recording light.

"He's got that bloody thing switched on," he said before seizing me by the lapels and throwing me down the stairs.

I felt I was entitled to record. Big Norman took a different view.

Months later, when the strike was nearly over we patched it up and drank tea together.

The miners' strike was a turning point in Scotland's industrial history.

Before the strike, the unions had real muscle; after it their power was broken.

At the beginning of 1984, Scotland had a dozen pits and more than 14,000 miners.

Ian MacGregor was dubbed the American butcher by Arthur Scargill

In the years which followed, mining went into steep decline and much of the rest of heavy industry with it. Today, there's not a single colliery left in Scotland.

By the start of 1984, everything was in place for a collision between the coal board and its new chairman, Ian MacGregor, and Arthur Scargill's NUM.

The miners had faced down governments in the past but this time, Ian MacGregor - picked for the job by Margaret Thatcher - was better prepared.

There were huge stockpiles of coal and details of the latest round of pit closures were only announced in March once winter was over.

Ian MacGregor had performed radical surgery on British Steel, shedding 70,000 jobs. Arthur Scargill called him the "American butcher" and said he was planning the same for the coal industry.

By early 1984, the Scottish coalfield was already in upheaval. There'd been an eight-week strike at Monktonhall colliery near Edinburgh in the autumn; in the spring there were local strikes in Ayrshire and Fife.

Then Polmaise went on strike and the men there - including Big Norman - demanded support.

First I had to sell the car, then there was an interview with the bank, then I had to sell the house because I had no money James Hogg Miner at Bilston Glen

Eventually, Scottish miners' leaders declared an area strike but half the pits were divided.

There was an angry meeting at Bilston Glen colliery outside Edinburgh where many of the men insisted they wanted to work. Their pit wasn't threatened with closure.

Ian MacGregor himself had told them they had a future and, although many at the pit-head meeting had called for it, they hadn't been allowed a ballot and as a result some miners felt forced into the strike.

That was an issue which opponents used to thump Arthur Scargill and bruise Neil Kinnock.

Bilston Glen was a fault line in the strike in Scotland. It was the biggest and most modern of the Scottish pits and many of its 1,800 men were "green labour" - relatively new to the industry.

Unlike the miners from Fife or Polmaise, the men from Bilston Glen weren't quite so tightly bound together.

On the first Monday of the strike, that was where the trouble was.

The early shift went in without serious incident but in the afternoon it was a different matter.

I saw strikers and their wives scream abuse at men who'd been friends and workmates before the weekend.

A man on the picket line had his foot run over

Watching the violence at the colliery gates, I had no idea how often I'd be back.

On and off, throughout the year, Bilston Glen was a flashpoint.

We learned to anticipate the picket-line choreography: the strikers' big push, a counter-surge from the police.

Some things you couldn't be ready for: a picket had his foot run over, stones flew out of the morning sun. Once a stray missile even clattered off my reel-to-reel tape machine.

I saw a working miner attacked in the car park, and strikers arrested and dragged away.

Very quickly after the strike started, opinions began to harden both inside the coal industry and in the country beyond.

James Hogg, then a young miner at Bilston Glen, told me how he hadn't given the strike much thought at the beginning, expecting it to be over in a matter of weeks. But as the days went on and the pressure built up it became the most important thing is his life.

He said: "First I had to sell the car, then there was an interview with the bank, then I had to sell the house because I had no money. I had no option.

"But you were that involved it was keeping you going. The coal board could say there were hundreds going back, but you'd say to yourself: they'll no' break me."

Pressure point

Twenty-five years on, the political landscape of Scotland has changed so much it's hard to imagine many workers showing such commitment to a trade union and its leaders, but in 1984 thousands of Scottish miners did.

Of course, as the first day at Bilston Glen showed, there was dissent against the NUM as well.

One strike-breaker took to carrying an iron bar because he was threatened so often. His windows were broken repeatedly.

There were acts of viciousness and spite on both sides of the strike. An NUM official in Fife, Bob Young, had his cat poisoned.

Ravenscraig workers said they had to accept coal from private contractors

If there was rancour between miners, there were serious differences between the NUM in Scotland and the unions whose support they'd called for.

The test of trade union solidarity was Ravenscraig, the steel plant at Motherwell, which was the symbol of Scotland's surviving heavy industry.

The 'Craig was a vital pressure point. If the miners' pickets could prevent coal and iron ore going in, they could bring steel production to a standstill.

Many of the steelworkers were sympathetic since that part of Lanarkshire had once been an active coalfield.

Tommy Brennan, the Ravenscraig shop steward, was himself from a mining family.

But Ravenscraig was known to be at risk of closure and the steelworkers insisted they had to accept coal to prevent permanent damage to their furnaces and ovens.

At the time, Clive Lewis, the steel union's Scottish organiser said he'd never faced such an awful dilemma.

Ravenscraig defied the miners and an army of pickets assembled at the gates.

In the days before mobile phones and satellite trucks, I had to broadcast from a phone box 50 yards away.

Some families were fed in soup kitchens as the strike continued

At one stage, caught in the crush against a fence, I had to crawl to safety from beneath a police horse.

The battle for Ravenscraig was a key moment in the strike.

It was bad enough for the miners that the steelworkers failed to support them but much worse was the way that coal was driven through picket lines by private contractors.

The convoys of Yuill and Dodds lorries bringing American coal up from the coast advertised defiance of the strike to everyone who saw them pass.

For those wrapped up in supporting the strike it was a year of doing without.

It was a time of soup kitchens and plastic sandals and second-hand clothes.

Many of the women who endured it said it was a year when friendships were tested to destruction. Those which survived have been unbreakable.

Difficult return

If the 1984 strike ultimately brought defeat for the miners, it may also have begun the erosion of a sense of community in towns and villages like Dalkeith, Whitburn, Fallin and Oakley which had been shaped by miners and their families.

Ask retired miners and they'll say much of what local people had in common is disappearing.

The strike was a battle of ideas. These were the early years of Margaret Thatcher but while she had a handsome majority across the UK, Scots were still voting against her and the big state-owned industries had yet to be privatised.

This was a Scotland before the age of council house sales and call centres and credit card debt.

Looking back it's astonishing to see how quickly the Scotland the miners were trying to preserve just melted away.

When the strike ended I went to Frances colliery in Fife to watch the men march back to work.

It was an emotional occasion made even more difficult for those returning because more than 200 miners across Scotland had been sacked during the strike.

After the strike, Polmaise, where Big Norman had worked, was one of the first to go.

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