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.

Allotment launch invite!

New allotment book from Five Leaves

New ebook from Five Leaves: David Jackson on the Bulger case

Another e-book only title from Five Leaves. Destroying the Baby in Themselves: why did the two boys killed James Bulger? by David Jackson. This is a reprint of one of the first titles published by Five Leaves in 1996 and is an examination of the actions of James Bulger's killers in the light of the culture which pressurises boys to be ever more agressively manly, harder, stronger, more commanding yet these two boys had chaotic backgrounds which led to the paralysing horror of the event.
Destroying the Baby in Themselves has been unavailable for many years but consistently in demand as a course book. It is available at 99p

from all e-book platforms.

New from Five Leaves: David Jackson on the killing of Stephen Lawrence

Now available as an e-book, as an ebook only to be precise. The Fear of Being Seen as White Losers: white working class masculinities and the killing of Stephen Lawrence, by David Jackson. 99p from all ebook platforms.

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This essay extends anti-racist debates by taking a close look at some of the possible reasons for the murder of Stephen Lawrence. His murder was a part of the rise of extremely violent racism in Britain (particularly in south-east London) and in Europe over the preceding decade. The neglected links between Stephen Lawrence’s murder and the wider issues of English national and young white working-class masculine identities are explored, to more clearly understand the complex reasons for the killing.

A message from Alan Gibbons about National Libraries Day

Four years after I called for a National Libraries Day, an event that is now an annual celebration, I fear for their future. On May 25th that year I said:

“We are delighted to launch National Libraries Day, a week of events in early February leading to a day of celebration of reading, libraries and librarians around the United Kingdom. A reading child is a successful child. A child who goes to the library is twice as likely to be a good reader and that child becomes a literate adult, a lifelong reader. There are 320 million visits a year to our libraries but we can make them even more popular,”
Four years on, the annual number of visits has fallen by forty million. The fall has been steepest in deprived communities, according to research by the House of Commons library commissioned by the Labour Party. The research follows the Cipfa figures in assessing that there were 282m visits to libraries in England in 2013-14, compared with 322m four years earlier.
In deprived areas, the percentage of people using libraries has dropped by more than a fifth from 46.2 per cent to 36.8 per cent.
A third of people aged 16 and 24 had visited a library in the last year, compared with nearly 40 per cent four years earlier.
There are now at least 330 fewer libraries open for 10 hours or more a week, a fall of eight per cent.
A few months ago William Sieghart, author of an independent report on libraries, warned the network was at a “critical moment.” Even the prestigious Birmingham of Library faces devastating service cuts.
Add the number of library closures to branches being handed over to an uncertain future in the hands of trusts and volunteers, book stock reductions and ever shorter opening hours and you have a recipe for possibly irreversible decline.
During my years of campaigning to save our libraries, I have debated with MPs, councillors and the Culture Secretary. I have yet to hear a single comment from any of these people to reassure me that the service is safe in their hands. So let’s celebrate National Libraries Day, but we will have to fight for them if it is to mean anything.

Alan Gibbons, Campaign for the Book

Is there a siffleur in the house?

If you were listening to the radio today and heard a new word - siffleur - referring to Ronnie Ronalde who has just died, you have not yet read the Five Leaves' book A Brief History of Whistling. Ronalde is of course covered in the book. A siffleur is a professional whistler. The female version is siffleuse, and our book was launched with a siffleuse, Sheila Harrod, who knew Ronalde, stealing the show. The book also retells John Gorman's story of Ronalde appearing on Sundays at a bar in Hackney, deserted during the week, but an upmarket bar with drag queens on Sundays. This was in the 1950s. Ronalde's whistling was popular in the 1940s and 50s, when he was regularly on the radio, had best-selling records and you could even by a Ronnie Ronalde whistling aid which looked like a polo mint but made of tin.
As far as we know, our book is the only book on the history of whistling!