25 years on, the wounds won't heal
Mar 2 2009 by Neil Mckay, The Journal
TWENTY five years ago, miners in the North East joined a national strike over pit closures in what became one of the bitterest industrial disputes of recent times.
Supporting the strike plunged many mining families into poverty and communities were divided between those who went on strike and those who continued to, or returned to, work.
When the dispute began, 170 collieries were open in Britain.
The strike ended in March 1985 and the National Union of Mineworkers’ president, Arthur Scargill, declared it a “tremendous achievement”. But, that year, 25 pits closed down and many more followed.
In the North East mining is now very much part of our industrial past. A recent Audit Commission report concluded that the pit closures had a more devastating impact on Easington in County Durham than anywhere else in the UK.
Barry Harper, a former miner and Newcastle United goalkeeper Steve Harper’s uncle, has vivid memories of the strike.
“When Maggie Thatcher dies there will be one helluva party in Easington Colliery,” he says.
The bitterness is still very much evident in Barry Harper’s voice, a quarter of a century after the miners’ strike. It seems out of character for such a friendly, open man. “Make no mistake about it, people here are still very bitter. That woman’s policies destroyed our community.”
Barry, 61, is now club steward at Easington Colliery Club and Institute. His wife Norma grew up in the house next door to where Billy Elliot “lived” in the film which put the place on the map all over again, years after police and pickets clashed on the same streets.
The Club, as it is known, is one of the few watering holes left open in the Colliery. (Easington Colliery is known as such, to distinguish it from Easington Village a mile up the road.) A competitive pricing policy – lager at £1.68 a pint, less than half what you would pay in Newcastle – may have something to do with its viability.
Barry, whose nephew is Steve Harper, the Newcastle United goalkeeper, left school at 15 to work in the pit and stayed there until he was made redundant when it closed in 1993, at the age of 45.
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