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By Roger Hermiston
Today programme
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It is 25 years since the start of the year-long 1984 miners strike
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I took up my new job as reporter on the Wakefield Express - in "King" Arthur Scargill's heartland - just days after a national miners' strike was declared in March 1984.
I had arrived expecting to be on the crime beat, but quickly realised it was all hands to the pump for what was developing into one of the defining moments in modern British history.
Actually, I'd already encountered the massed ranks of the NUM, just days into my first job in journalism working for the Sheerness Times-Guardian in Kent.
The occasion was the first national steel strike for 50 years, and the object of the miners' ire was Sheerness Steel, a private manufacturer that had refused to down tools and join its state sector colleagues.
Some 1,000 or more flying pickets, steelworkers principally, but joined by pitmen from Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales, fought running battles with police who had been ferried down from London. It was a taste of things to come.
Scabs and scum
Wakefield in 1984 felt a very insulated, isolated place to work - we were at the centre of a major national story, but we didn't often lift our heads up to view the wider consequences.
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It became frustrating attempting to interview surly, non-committal miners gathered round braziers outside their little shed shelters at the gates of collieries.
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For a local paper serving the needs of the local community, we were instinctively sympathetic - if not slavishly so - towards the striking miners.
For some of my more ideologically committed colleagues, however, the view was that we stood shoulder to shoulder with the miners in their battle with the Coal Board and, by extension, the Thatcher government.
Others, myself included, felt Scargill, having ruled out a national ballot, was on a road to disaster.
So down at the perfectly titled Black Rock pub in Cross Street every lunchtime the assembled hacks would down a pint or two of bitter, ferret out information from contacts, and regale each other with heroic stories from that morning's work on the "frontline".
Many journalists were sympathetic to striking miners in their community
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Scabs (working miners), scum (police), Coal Not Dole, Women Against Pit Closures, Arthur (Scargill), Jack (Taylor, head of Yorkshire NUM), Mick (McGahey, Scargill's deputy), these were the names, phrases, the lexicon of our existence.
The Yorkshire coalfield was one of the most solid in support of the strike. In November 1984, 97.3% of the region's miners were on strike - on the day it ended in March 1985, 80% were still out.
After all, this was Scargill territory: he worked as a young man in Woolley Colliery on the West/South Yorkshire boundary, where he became a pony driver.
Civil war
For us journalists in West Yorkshire, the story became a little mundane after the initial excitement of the first few months.
After all, nothing was changing: the strike was solid, the finances of the miners' families were holding up and the political stalemate continued at a national level.
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KEY DATES IN THE STRIKE
5 March 1984 Yorkshire miners strike following announcement of Cortonwood pit closure
6 March 1984 Further announcement of wide ranging closures which would put 20,000 miners out of work
12 March 1984 Scottish miners join strike, half of Britain's 187,000 miners now striking
18 June 1984 Violence flares as flying pickets attempt to blockade Orgreave coking plant
3 March 1985 NUM delegates vote to call off the strike
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It became frustrating attempting to interview surly, non-committal miners gathered round braziers outside their little shed shelters at the gates of collieries.
Our attention turned to finding those brave - or treacherous, depending on your view - individuals who were listening to the blandishments of Silver Birch (the Nottingham strike-breaking organiser) and going back to work.
When we did find them, they were front page news.
I discovered one, Dennis Poole, a 39-year-old surface fitter at Stillingfleet Colliery in the Selby coalfield.
For him, retribution followed swiftly by way of a brick through the window and damage to his car.
"These people are what we call the 100-yard heroes, creeping out in the dead of night, doing a little bit here and a little bit there," he told me.
"But I tell you, it'll take a brave man to come round and attack my family: my son and I will be waiting for them."
Dennis believed Arthur Scargill was leading him into poverty, but the decision not to strike was far from easy.
"When it's all over, I'm going to have to walk down the street again," he told me bleakly at the end of our interview.
"My next-door-neighbour is talking to me, but most people in the town aren't".
Miners confronted police across the UK in an attempt to disrupt coal production
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I particularly remember one summer day in 1984, when I was sent to cover the Yorkshire Miners' Gala, held that year in Thorne's Park, Wakefield.
I crouched close to the stage, where there was a star-studded gathering of miners' leaders and politicians, including Scargill, McGahey, Dennis Skinner and Jack Taylor, president of the Yorkshire NUM.
Scargill was his usual brilliant self. Whatever else might be said about him, he was a superb orator, able to rouse an audience to a fever pitch.
But it was Taylor who caught the mood of the gathering that day.
"Two Yorkshire miners have died, men have been beaten, attacked by dogs and horses, handcuffed, tied to trees, jailed without trial, had their phones tapped and homes watched by police.
"This did not happen in South Africa or South America. It happened in Britain."
We were never close to a Third Civil War in 1984 - but at moments like that it sometimes felt like it.
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