Arthur Scargill was born in Worsbrough, near Barnsley, in 1938 and worked as a surface worker at Woolley Colliery before becoming a full-time union official. By the time he was elected President of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1982, the NUM had its headquarters in Sheffield, on Holly Street in the city centre. That building became the operational centre of the most significant industrial conflict in modern British history when the 1984-85 miners’ strike began in March 1984. Sheffield was, for a year, the capital of a war that the union was going to lose.
The South Yorkshire Coalfield
The pit villages of South Yorkshire – Maltby, Treeton, Dinnington, Thurcroft, Kiveton Park, Markham Main, Frickley, Grimethorpe – were not Sheffield, but they were Sheffield’s context. The city had grown as the commercial and service centre of a region whose heavy industry included both the steelworks of the Don Valley and the coal mines that ran in a belt through Barnsley, Rotherham, and Doncaster. The mineworkers and the steelworkers were different trades with different unions, but they were part of the same economic and social world. When the strike came, the solidarity between them was real.
Scargill argued, before and during the strike, that the National Coal Board’s plan to close twenty pits was the opening phase of a programme to close the entire industry. The subsequent history proved him correct. By the mid-1990s, virtually the entire South Yorkshire coalfield had closed. Maltby Colliery, the last pit in the area with any scale, closed in 2013. The communities built around these collieries – the housing estates, the welfare clubs, the institutes, the sports facilities that the miners’ welfare funds had built – lost the economic base that had created them. What followed was a long-running public health and social crisis that has never been fully resolved.
Orgreave
The coking plant at Orgreave, between Rotherham and Sheffield, was the site of the most violent confrontation of the strike, on 18 June 1984. Thousands of miners, attempting to prevent coke deliveries to the Scunthorpe steelworks, were met by thousands of police officers including mounted units. The mounted police charges into the crowd, the baton strikes, the pursuing of fleeing men into fields beyond the site, were captured on television film. South Yorkshire Police arrested 95 men on riot charges. All were eventually acquitted or had charges dropped after it emerged that police statements had been fabricated. The prosecution collapsed.
The demand for a public inquiry into Orgreave has been running since the 1980s. The Home Secretary declined to order one in 2016, a decision met with anger from the communities affected and from organisations including the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, which has continued pressing for official examination of what happened. The connection between South Yorkshire Police’s conduct at Orgreave in 1984 and their conduct at Hillsborough in 1989 – both involving fabricated statements, both involving the same force – has not been examined by any official body.
Sheffield After the Pits
Sheffield’s own heavy steel industry was collapsing in the same period as the coalfield. The two crises overlapped and reinforced each other. The regeneration of Sheffield’s lower Don Valley from the 1990s onward used the space left by closed steelworks for retail, leisure, and some light industrial development. The pit villages of the coalfield, outside the city boundary, had fewer resources and fewer visitors and have recovered more slowly, where they have recovered at all. The political culture that Scargill embodied – Sheffield as a centre of organised labour, of collective resistance, of suspicion toward central government – is still present in the city, though the industrial base that sustained it is gone.
Corrections
Spotted something wrong? Send a correction.
