Suffolk and the Miners' Strike

The most famous 'battle' of the strike was at Orgreave coke depot

For Suffolk's police officers the 1984-5 Miners' Strike meant lengthy trips to the coalfields, but the additional pay was welcomed.

For left-wing activists it meant picketing East Anglian ports such as Wivenhoe, where coal was being imported and raising funds.

Retired police officers say they were just doing their job.

Miners' supporters say they were used by the government to crush the NUM and wider union movement.

The Miners' Strike began on 5 March 1984 in South Yorkshire following the announcement that around 20 pits would be closed.

A national strike followed on 12 March and it ended in defeat for Arthur Scargill's National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) a year later.

Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government had introduced a range of union laws including a ban on secondary picketing (aka flying pickets) - those who demonstrate at workplaces other than their own.

Police from across the UK were drafted into the coalfields to prevent secondary picketing and to make sure non-striking miners could get to work.

For serving officers in Suffolk, this meant weeks and months away from home, but also bigger pay packets.

Cricket on the battlefield

Bob Lawrence was a patrol inspector and in charge of Police Support Units (riot-trained squads) of around 20 men each which were sent from Suffolk.

Bob estimates that at least one was sent away each week and sometimes three.

PC Curtis and the Miners' Strike

They'd work 12 hour shifts and overtime would be paid at time-and-a-half.

"My first trip was up to Lincolnshire to be ready for the coal run of lorries from the docks to the power stations, but Orgreave near Sheffield was where we first saw action [29 May 1984]," said Bob.

"We were a convoy of nine vans from Suffolk and we arrived and were looking down at a mass of people - several thousand faced with five or six rows of police with linked arms.

"There were all sorts of pieces of wood and bottles being thrown over the front towards us at the back.

Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 and promised to limit union power

"[At other times] it was just a matter of preventing what was a criminal act of trying to takeover the mine.

"On some occasions there was a considerable amount of danger, but there was one week where we sat in two fields close to a motorway junction at a place called South Dronfield.

"We did absolutely nothing for a week. Nobody went up there against their will and it was all on overtime.

"I bought a set of 'Arthur Scargill' golf clubs and there were several 'Arthur Scargill' Cortinas driving around in Ipswich."

East Anglia's ports

The government had stock-piled coal so that power stations wouldn't run as low as they had in the early 1970s resulting in the three-day week.

Pro-NUM activist John Tipple said they were picketing coal deliveries at Wivenhoe, Brightlingsea and Colchester:

"They had to bring it in through little unorganised ports. Anywhere there was organised working class people - they couldn't get away with that.

"The hardest thing was to get other workers to take strike action because it had been outlawed by then - which today has not been repealed by the Labour government.

The thing you can't do in a global economy is blackmail government or employers into terms and conditions which make you uncompetitive John Gummer MP

"Those things were brought about to criminalise solidarity. The rich and powerful can stick together, but if you're working class and you do that, you're breaking the law."

The politics

The Miners' Strike was, if nothing else, certainly about how much relative power the unions and government had.

The miners' victories in 1972 and 1974 mean many see the 1984 dispute as an act of revenge by the Conservatives for the defeat of the Heath government in 1974.

John Tipple is also a member of the Socialist Workers Party: "Thatcher needed to take-on the most powerful union in the country if she was going to discipline the working class to accept privatisation, less wages and worse conditions.

Arthur Scargill saw the rival Union of Democratic Mineworkers formed in 1985

For Margaret Thatcher it was a different perspective according to John Gummer MP:

"What it actually was was the reality of a government that came in after the Winter of Discontent [1978-9] when we had bodies unburied and refuse in the streets and a feeling that no-one was in charge."

The Suffolk Coastal MP was a member of the Thatcher Cabinet in 1984/5 and had been an employment minister overseeing the new laws which limited union power:

"We came into power in circumstances in which the public said we must have a situation in which the government and democracy wins and the trade unions don't hold us to ransom.

Thatcher gave the police 28% wage increases just prior to unleashing them on the working class with their truncheons and violence John Tipple, SWP

"We saw ourselves as defending workers' rights.

"We had many workers unable to earn a living because of the power of particular trades unions who were refusing to accept that their actions were reducing the ability of Britain to compete and therefore the opportunities of jobs for other people.

"Even when it was privatised, the companies couldn't sell coal to any great extent.

"The fact was people weren't buying coal at a price we could produce it at.

UK COAL (TONNES) 1984 Total consumption: 77,309,000 UK production: 59,182,000 Imports: 6,601,000 2007 Total consumption: 62,886,000 UK production: 17,007,000 Imports: 42,844,000 Source: Dept. of Energy & Climate Change

"It's quite possible that in the future we could produce coal competitively if the price of energy makes it possible.

"But we should only use it if we have carbon-capture and storage."

Former Inspector Bob Lawrence said there was one occasion when he was made to feel the police were being used by the government.

It was at a management training course when they were addressed by a Conservative MP:

"He started off by congratulating us and he went over the top a little bit about there being 'enough coal in the power stations, we can go on forever'.

"I stopped him and said we'd just spent a week at Shirebrook where they're striking to keep their village and mine alive and if they lose that mine, they lose everything.

"We resented him a little bit coming down and telling us they had enough coal to crush the miners and that wasn't what it was about at all."

John Tipple has no sympathy with that claim:

"As far as I'm concerned the police were paid to scab on the miners. I've got no time for their sob-stories about how they got hurt.

Police and miners, 1984

"She knew exactly who she needed onside before she took on the miners.

"I can remember violence at Wivenhoe and armed police on the roundabouts at Colchester and then, of course, they called us violent when we showed up in our plimsoles.

"When they unleash violence it's 'just the police doing their job', when we respond it's 'mindless violence'.

"And it was backed up by a compliant media which wasn't prepared to say there was a military dressed-up in police uniforms and which constantly repeated the mantra that the strike wasn't democratic and Arthur Scargill was a communist.

"And that includes the Bosses' Broadcasting Corporation."