The strike? It was worth it..up to a point

Ex-miner on the dispute that shocked the nation

- PAUL ROUTLEDGE

FORTY years ago, a Tory government lit the blue touch paper for the most explosive strike in modern times. Under political pressure to cut back on coal output, state industry bosses announced the immediate closure of Cortonwood colliery, near Barnsley.

This was seen, rightly, as a gauntlet thrown down to Arthur Scargill and his militant National Union of Mineworkers, whose strike in 1974 had scuppered Conservative rule.

Within days, Yorkshire was alight with protests and pit walkouts, and by the end of the week the biggest coalfield in the country was at a standstill.

In the county, 56,000 men heeded the strike call. One of them was 26-year-old Steve Tulley, a face worker at Frickley, a bighitter colliery in the village of South Elmsall producing a million tonnes of coal a year.

I talked to him in the early days of the conflict, when he was one of the notorious "flying pickets" who were trying to persuade working miners in Nottinghamshire to join the stoppage.

And I talked to him again this week, reliving the year that shook the nation. "We knew it was on the cards. We knew it was coming. When the time came, we decided to walk, and to this day I think we were making a valid argument and it was well worth fighting for.

"I was a union branch committee man, so I was heavily involved in the strike organisation. Everybody responded to the call to arms. We had hundreds volunteering to go picketing, and they went in busloads.

"We had some success in the first week, we didn't get stopped from going. That was when David Jones [a Wakefield miner] was killed on the picket line at Ollerton.

"But then the police began stopping us on the AI and we had to go through back roads, and eventually walk through potato fields to get to the working collieries.