Five Leaves and the strike year

On Saturday I travelled up to Wakefield by train with more boxes than is sensible for a bookstall at With Banners Held High, a celebration of the end of the strike year, thirty years after the defeat of the National Union of Miners strike against pit closures. There were hundreds of people there - a thousand maybe over the day - packed into the old Co-op stores, now reinvented as the Unity + Works centre. As at all the other celebrations it was as if the NUM had won. I talked to and joshed with old comrades and friends - from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Committee, from the Notts minority who struck, to miners who'd written about their experience, to young people who were not even born when the strike took place, to women whose lives changed forever during the year...
Thatcher destroyed the mines but she did not defeat the spirit of those who stayed loyal to their union. The Cabinet documents released on the thirty year rule showed the NUM was right in saying that the Government always planned the massive pit closure programme.
The journey back was a lot easier - not least as the Durham miners cleaned us out of Dennis Skinner books and all our Pride DVDs were sold. In the past, could anyone have believed that a best seller at a miners' event would have been a lesbian and gay film?
Our involvement with the NUM has been one of the highlights of the last period for Five Leaves. With the anniversary coming we commissioned the rock journalist Harry Paterson to write a short book on Nottinghamshire and the miners' strike. Harry came from a mining family and his father-in-law was out the full year, his mother involved in a women's support group. There had been a handful of books about Notts in the strike, personal experience books, but nobody had told the full story of the minority who struck and the subsequent rise (and fall) of the UDM. We'd previously published David Bell's Dirty Thirty about the Leicestershire strikers, a tiny minority, but here we wanted to publish the definitive story, or as near to it as we could. The book was unashamedly pro-strike but interviewed everyone who would speak to Harry to create the narrative. The book grew and grew (and is still growing, the new e-book editon includes some additions) becoming Look Back in Anger - the miners' strike in Nottinghamshire, thirty years on. This was Harry's first book and, if not blows, we certainly traded a lot of emails. Harry is still scarred by my comment on his first draft that this was like a Mills and Books novel written by Lenin. We are proud of the result and became good friends over the duration which means I have to now support his football team, if that is what Alloa Athletic really is!
We did not have a book launch somehow, but Harry went on tour to union branches including Notts County UNISON, UNITE and even Ayrshire UNISON. The book was well reviewed and well received and was reprinted quickly.
If ever we had any doubt about the book it would have been dispelled at the Notts Retired and Ex-Miners celebration of the strike when Henry Richardson, former General Secretary of the Notts NUM, said to the 400 people at their event in Kirkby that  "This is your story. Every striking miner should have a copy of the book in their house to tell your children and grandchildren what you did." That, shall we say, helped sales on the night. It was a grand night anyway. Not least as the Notts NUM brought in a vegetarian alternative to their (meat) pie and pea supper, giving me a doggy bag of fifteen more veggie pies to freeze and bring back to other NUM events! We sold a lot of Coal Not Dole T-shirts on the night too - mostly XXL. As one miner said, we were all medium size once. The outside speaker was Owen Jones (who would later come to our own Bread and Roses weekend) who started by saying he looked like a minor rather than a miner. The most applause came when he mentioned the Government's then current advertising campaign against immigrants. This touched a chord with a 99% white audience and, like the Pride CD showed how much the militant minority in Notts know the word solidarity.
The Kirkby event was really for NUM members and their families, so Five Leaves took on organising a Nottingham city commemoration. Harry spoke, the Clarion Choir sang, Joyce Sheppard from Women Against Pit Closures, Bianca Todd from Left Unity, Keith Stanley from Notts NUM and the Guardian's Seamas Milne all spoke too. 150 people packed the Friends Meeting House. We sent a donation to the Doncaster Care Workers, then out on strike, who were at our evening. This was an important event for Five Leaves as we had only opened a few months beforehand and we wanted to see if we could pull off the sort of event we thought Nottingham should do to remember the strike. It was another great night.
As a result of the Nottingham event the Retired and Ex-Miners booked Seamas to speak at an event in Mansfield, which we supported, and at Christmas two of the staff were honoured to attend the NUM Christmas dinner with Dennis Skinner as the speaker. Another occasion when we ran out of books.
Over the summer two of the team also set up stall at the big event commemorating Orgreave, using our new gazebo (which did not survive its second outing, but that's another story) coming back again with big sales but also hearing lots of miners saying "got that one, read that one, I'm on the cover of that book, there's a picture of me in this one..."  We also did a bookstall for Derby People's History at which our local NUM colleagues Alan Spencer and Eric Eaton spoke, the Clarion choir sang... And recently we did a stall for the Notts and Derby Labour History Group with Huw Beynon speaking, Huw gave the clearest presentation on the Ridley Report and government preparations for the strike - a strike they provoked, yet (read Harry's book!) came so close to losing.
And throughout the year our miners section in the shop has been popular - especially Harry's book, Seamas's latest edition of The Enemy Within and the DVD Still the Enemy Within.
Thinks will be much quieter now - but in the coalfields people still organise. At Wakefield there was a big present from those who organise the "Big Meeting", the Durham Miners Gala - now bigger than ever, as the NUM remains committed to community organising and social change. This was instanced by the "Darlo Mums" NHS march when it passed through Mansfield to a tremendous welcome organised by the Retired and Ex- gang.
It's been a great year. My only regret is that so many involved in the strike are no longer with us. I've mentioned before four women who did so much to support the strike but who died, in some cases well before their time. The Nottingham meeting was dedicated to them: Ida Hackett from Mansfield, Liz Hollis and Pat Paris from Nottingham and Joan Witham whose book Hearts and Minds, sadly now unavailable, recorded the activities of the Nottinghamshire Women's Support Group.

"We were all medium size once"

Last night I ran a bookstall at the Nottinghamshire NUM 30th anniversary commemoration of the 1984/1985 miners' strike. The shop was particularly promoting Harry Paterson's book on the strike, published by Five Leaves. We sold a bucket load, particularly after Henry Richardson, former general secretary of the Nottinghamshire NUM (sacked by the working miners) said in his speech "This is your story. Every striking miner should have a copy of the book in their house to tell your children and grandchildren what you did."
I'd felt that the Nottinghamshire story had never previously been fully told. Keith Stanley from the NUM published a short memoir of the strike, Jonathan Symcox published his grandfather's diaries, Canary Press published some books at the time - all worth reading - but no book had looked at the background, the detail and the aftermath of the strike and explained why Nottinghamshire was so important to the Government, told the full story of the 1,800 men who stuck it out to the end out of 32,000 in the Notts coalfield, the secret dealings leading to the formation of the UDM and their ultimate downfall. That was the aim of the book, and I think we have mostly succeeded. I say mostly as since the book came out people who Harry interviewed, or others in casual conversation, have told us the most astonishing personal stories of the strike year. We're proud of the book, but will perhaps publish a later edition including more of these stories - of the picket line staffed, by agreement, one day only by women where the only men who turned up were police infiltrators who'd not heard it was going to be women only; of the Manton miner who was charged with attempted murder, sacked of course, only for the charges to be dropped later; of the local "major" picket set up by six people, and only for six people, to draw police away from Orgreave (which also proved that phones were tapped as the police turned up in droves thinking it was to be a major event)... I could go on. There were so many stories.
It was an honour to be there last night with the men and women of the strike year. All of us thirty years older, and some of us thirty years wider than before - XXL T-shirts ran out quickly (hence this posting's title). Most of those present were NUM or from women's support groups from the period, but we were joined by many from the Clarion Choir and friends from the Trades Council and UNISON. It was sometimes hard to hear the speakers or the choir as people had some catching up to do. There were a fair few Scottish notes in the bookstall takings as a number of ex-Notts people had travelled back for the occasion. Nobby Lawton came back from London and managed, the night before, to get a lifetime ban from his old Blidworth Miners' Welfare when he took over the mike to celebrate his fellow strikers! I think he might have been exaggerating to say he went down fighting, still clutching the mike and singing the Red Flag... but there is still ill-feeling in the coalfields between those who supported the Tory Government and those who supported their national union. In Harry's book he analyses the voting figures in Nottinghamshire, indicating just how many miners actually voted Conservative. Of course they were thrown on the scrapheap too.
Of those who spoke, I was pleased that Margaret Nesbit from the women's group in Ollerton spoke about Liz Hollis, who killed herself after the strike. So many people from the coalfields remember Liz with love and affection. Ian Lavery MP reminded us of the beatings people took at Orgreave, but demanded a wider inquiry into the state of siege that took place in Nottinghamshire. The very youthful looking Owen Jones provided the best crack of the evening, referring to himself as looking more like a minor than a miner. Owen was given a standing ovation and, interesting, given the ethnic make up of the coalfields, got most applause in his speech when he referred to the scapegoating of migrants and the National Front-style lorry touring immigrant areas telling people to go home.
The meeting opened with a minute's silence, for Davy Jones - killed on the picket line at Ollerton - and for other NUM members who did not make it through to the 30th, and supporters of the NUM like Bob Crow and Tony Benn.
At the time of the strike my main focus had been CND. I am proud that the day we held the biggest ever Nottingham Peace Festival we shared speakers and ran buses between our event and a major NUM rally elsewhere in the city. Our causes were one. Perhaps because of that most of those I knew personally from the strike days were women who'd been involved in the peace movement - Ida Hackett from Mansfield, Joan Witham from Newark, both now dead, and Pat Paris, now living abroad.
I think it was Henry Richardson who remarked that the NUM never lost, as the Big Meeting in Durham attracts more and more people every year to celebrate the NUM and the working class communities which it created and here, in Kirkby, in the heartland of the strike-breaking miners, it is the NUM that lives, not the UDM.
The evening was very ably organised by Eric Eaton and Alan Spencer from the Notts NUM Ex and Retired Miners Assocation.
Nottingham readers might want to attend the Five Leaves Bookshop commemoration on 25th April with speakers being Seamas Milne (Guardian associate editor), Harry Paterson, Keith Stanley (NUM), Bianca Todd (Left Unity) and Joyce Sheppard (Women Against Pit Closures). Full details on www.fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk/events).