HILARY CAVE was at the heart of the National Union of Mineworkers administrative apparatus at its headquarters in Sheffield from 1983 to 1988.

As national education officer she ran training courses preparing union activists for what the union knew was coming — an all-out attack by the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher on the miners and their union.

Hilary Cave

Evidence of the government’s plans had been leaked years earlier. The Ridley report, which was produced in 1977, was a blueprint for the privatisation of Britain’s nationalised industries — automotive, steel, rail, electricity, the coalmining industry and others — and the destruction of their unions. 

The report was prompted in part by the 1974 miners’ strike which brought down prime minister Ted Heath’s Conservative government.

During the 1974 strike, which had seen power cuts and a three-day working week, Heath had called a general election and asked the public: “Who rules Britain?”

The voters had responded with a resounding: “Not you!”

Tory MP Sir Nicholas Ridley, whose family fortune had been made off the backs of coalminers before nationalisation in 1947, was a leading figure in the Selsdon Group, a neoliberal, free-market lobby within the Conservative Party.

His 1977 report had been prepared in anticipation of the election of a Conservative government. The report recognised that to achieve its goals of privatising Britain’s nationalised industries a Tory government would have to take on the unions in those industries, and that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) would be the biggest challenge.

Hilary Cave said: “The report did not necessarily concentrate on the mining industry but other industries too, like electricity. But it wanted to smash the unions. It was quite explicit.

“We knew that the coalmining industry was under threat. We knew that pits were already being shut and that the government was interested solely in the bottom line; that nationalised industries should make a profit and then be privatised.”

Ridley became a cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 government. By 1983 the government was already closing pits on the grounds that they were uneconomic, in some cases abandoning up to 200 years of coal reserves. NUM policy was that no pit should close on grounds other than exhaustion.

Cave said the National Coal Board was manipulating financial accounts to identify individual pits as loss-making.

“You can invest millions in a pit and on the face of it that pit is making a loss because of the investment,” she said.

There were other manipulations. The publicly owned Central Electricity Board (CEGB) and its power stations was the coal industry’s biggest customer.

“The price of electricity was raised by 8 per cent,” she said. “Coal prices went up by 4 per cent. Electricity seemed to be making a profit and coal was making a loss.”

The pit closures were causing huge concern in the coalfields.

“Miners were worried. Unemployment was high. Pits were shutting and jobs were disappearing,” said Cave. “That was the background and we began to prepare to save the coalmining industry.

“A special delegate conference was held in London. Delegates decided there would be an overtime ban. That was in October, 1983.”

An overtime ban in the coalmining industry causes huge problems. Essential maintenance was carried out using overtime on Saturdays when no coal was being turned. Without the maintenance work coal production was delayed when miners returned to work on Monday.

“It made a lot of hassle up and down the coalfields,” said Cave. “Different managers responded differently and there were sporadic bouts of strike action.”

A major aim of the overtime ban was to reduce coal stockpiles in preparation for the battle that the NUM knew was to come.

“Some people said we did not prepare for the strike, but we did — with the overtime ban,” said Cave.

As the overtime ban continued into 1984 tension in the coalfield mounted and miners at individual pits were responding with strike action.

“Sporadic action was already breaking out over closures,” said Cave. “Scotland, Durham, Yorkshire — all sorts of action going on. It was a very unsettled situation.”

The unrest came to a head when on March 6 1984, the National Coal Board announced the closure of Cortonwood colliery, near Rotherham in South Yorkshire, after more than 100 years of production.

“Cortonwood was a pit people had been moved to because it had a long future,” said Cave. “The announcement came as a shock.”

Cortonwood walked out and asked Yorkshire Area of the NUM for support. The NUM was made up of 16 semi-autonomous areas, mainly geographical, such as Yorkshire Area NUM, South Wales, Durham, Scotland, Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Kent.

Each was run by an NUM Area Council made up delegates from the pits in that area’s coalfield.

A week after Cortonwood came out, Yorkshire Area Council met and the vote to support Cortonwood with strike action across the coalfield was unanimous.

The Yorkshire coalfield was by far the biggest in Britain, with 54 pits and 56,000 miners, though pit numbers had already fallen because of closures. In 1978 there were 66 pits in Yorkshire, and 66,000 miners — evidence of the extent of the closures programme in the Yorkshire area.
Pickets from Yorkshire went into other coalfields.

A special delegate conference of the NUM was held in Sheffield on April 19. By then the strike was already widespread and the delegate conference was lobbied by thousands of miners who were already on strike calling for it to be made official.

The delegate conference did exactly that and called on all miners to support it. But the fact was that the strike had already started — from the bottom up.

Cave said: “It was clear that the popular will was for strike action to defend jobs and communities.”