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| Simon Pirani |
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| Polmaise miners at a march in London, April 1984. Photo: NLAC/reportdigital.co.uk |
From East Fife to South Wales, from Lancashire to Kent, men voted to down tools, and streamed out on to picket lines. By Friday 9 March, the great strike – that we commemorate at this year’s Durham Miners Gala – was underway.
But 260 miners at Polmaise colliery, in Fallin, Stirlingshire, had already been on strike for two weeks, since Tuesday 21 February 1984, against the threat of closure. They would not return to work until Tuesday 12 March 1985, a week after most other strikers.
For many months before the great strike, the Polmaise miners, and union stalwarts at other Scottish pits, had been resisting attempts by the National Coal Board to push through closures and changes in working practices. Managers responded with a campaign of intimidation that prefigured the Tories’ scorched-earth attack on mining communities in 1984.
The path to confrontation
Production started at Polmaise in 1905 and expanded after nationalisation in 1947. Men who left school in the 1960s and 70s were told they had a job for life underground. Fallin flourished, wages rose, and the miners’ welfare club was packed every weekend. After the national overtime ban in 1974, there was not a single day of strike action until 1981.
The shadow of Tory pit closures fell over the coalfield in 1982. The NUM resolved to oppose all closures, except where the coal was exhausted, and the policy was first tested in December that year, with threats to shut Kinneil colliery at Bo’ness, in Scotland, and Lewis Merthyr pit in south Wales. The Kinneil men staged an underground sit-in; Polmaise and other Scottish pits downed tools; but the union at Area level decided not to act. Kinneil closed.
In July 1983 the NCB sounded the death knell for Cardowan colliery near Glasgow. Battle was joined over the transfer of miners to other pits, opposed by the NUM because it undermined the defence of jobs. When managers tried to transfer Cardowan men to Polmaise, the union there put its foot down and said no.
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| On 7 July 1983, 41 years ago this week, the Polmaise miners went to Perth, where the national union conference was in session, to call for solidarity action in their fight against victimisation and sackings. Photo by Simon Pirani |
Albert Wheeler, the NCB Scottish area’s anti-union boss, was spoiling for a fight. He ordered: “Lock the gates.” The Polmaise miners were locked out for five weeks, until the Cardowan closure had been forced through. For a further 12 weeks, they were allowed down the pit but prevented from restarting production.
NCB managers now set out to crush union resistance to closures. With the NUM national overtime ban in place from October 1983, the Scottish coalfield became a battleground. Monktonhall colliery struck for seven weeks; union officials were victimised at Seafield and other pits; Bogside pit in Fife was sabotaged by managers who turned off pumps and allowed it to flood. In December, the closure of Polmaise was announced.
In February 1984, the Polmaise men called for a Scottish area strike, and other branches declared support. At Area level the union first hesitated, and, at a stormy meeting in Edinburgh on 20 February, decided against. On the 21st, the Polmaise miners went on strike alone.
That turned out to be one of the sparks that lit the fire across the UK coalfield two weeks later.
A year on strike
The strike was solid at Polmaise from the first day to the last. No pickets were needed at the gates. The Fallin miners’ welfare club came alive: women activists collected aid and served meals each day to striking miners and their families. Outside the village, the Polmaise flying pickets (nicknamed “the piranhas”) made a national impact.
A BBC Scotland documentary screened this year, Strike! The Village That Fought Back, reflected miners’ shock at the assaults by hundreds of riot police that they faced, at Hunterston docks, where imported coal was unloaded to supply the Ravenscraig steelworks, and at the works itself. Polmaise men were at the “battle of Orgreave”, too.
On the way to one demonstration, 300 Scottish miners were taken from coaches and arrested en masse. Robert Armitage, who had never been in trouble with the police before the strike, spoke in the film of how shocking the experience had been. “So, travelling the country wasn’t going to be allowed. That’s a police state”, he said. Miners had been “rubbished and vilified” for trying to save their jobs.
Polmaise, Scotland’s last village pit, was finally closed in July 1987. In the BBC film, those who had resisted reflected on its fight for survival.
Jim O’Hare, who was sacked for taking part in a four-day underground occupation of Polmaise, to prevent NCB managers from flooding the mine, said: “I would do it again. It kept guys in employment for another three years. I thought maybe it would be 33 years, but it was only three years.”
Margaret McColl of the Fallin Miners Welfare Womens Group said: “I can’t even really believe it went on for a whole year. And I look back now, with not one single regret.”
John Rennie, one of the flying pickets, said:
"It was worth it, 100%. I’d do it again, today, tomorrow, any day.” They wanted to shut Polmaise, the most militant pit, first, to make it easier to shut others, and “we stopped them. We got a reprieve.”
The more that time separates us from the great strike, the more clearly we can understand it. We can dismiss the outright lies, e.g. that pits were closed for the sake of decarbonisation and climate policy. We can see the context: deindustrialisation of the UK, as heavy industry was exported to the global south in pursuit of cheaper labour.
But the heart and soul of Tory policy was to vanquish mining communities who epitomised working-class solidarity, organisation and collectivism. That was what the Polmaise miners were up against, well before the national strike began.
Did the Tories succeed in crushing working-class spirits? Look around you on Gala day, and you’ll see the answer.
⏺ I was there at the time, and learned a lot. I covered the miners’ strike in Scotland as a journalist, and in the 1990s had spells editing NUM journals (the North East Miner and the national Miner). SP.
⏺ Strike! The Village That Fought Back, is available throughout the UK on BBC iPlayer. Strongly recommended.
⏺ Polmaise: the Fight for a Pit by the late John McCormack (Polmaise pit delegate)
⏺ Durham miners gala, as seen by the Guardian
⏺ Women standing up for mining communities, forty years on – People & Nature, April 2024
⏺ Coalfield paradoxes – People & Nature, July 2011
The more that time separates us from the great strike, the more clearly we can understand it. We can dismiss the outright lies, e.g. that pits were closed for the sake of decarbonisation and climate policy. We can see the context: deindustrialisation of the UK, as heavy industry was exported to the global south in pursuit of cheaper labour.
But the heart and soul of Tory policy was to vanquish mining communities who epitomised working-class solidarity, organisation and collectivism. That was what the Polmaise miners were up against, well before the national strike began.
Did the Tories succeed in crushing working-class spirits? Look around you on Gala day, and you’ll see the answer.
⏺ I was there at the time, and learned a lot. I covered the miners’ strike in Scotland as a journalist, and in the 1990s had spells editing NUM journals (the North East Miner and the national Miner). SP.
⏺ Strike! The Village That Fought Back, is available throughout the UK on BBC iPlayer. Strongly recommended.
⏺ Polmaise: the Fight for a Pit by the late John McCormack (Polmaise pit delegate)
⏺ Durham miners gala, as seen by the Guardian
⏺ Women standing up for mining communities, forty years on – People & Nature, April 2024
⏺ Coalfield paradoxes – People & Nature, July 2011
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