Distant Voices

Distant Voices by John Pilger

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Authors: John Pilger
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bodies contorted, ‘titillating’ the roof to test for a fall and moving the hydraulic chocks, as heavy as cannons, which propped up the roof. They reminded me of men bringing up artillery under fire. Our lives depended upon on how they worked; and in every sense – the clipped commands of the deputy, the tense, planned assault on a stubborn adversary, the degradation of a filthy wet trench and the spirit of comradeship, of watching out for each other – this wasanother kind of front line. ‘Over there,’ shouted a voice behind me, ‘our last one was killed; Peart was his name. He was impaled by the machine. Just not quick enough, poor lad.’
    It was now twenty past eight in the morning. The walk back seemed eternal, the breathing of the men in time with their long steps metallic. Then, at last, the cage! Now the Coal Board had stopped paying. In the lamp room Harry Mason, the man whose hand was a claw, said, ‘This is where we keep the wounded.’ Silhouetted behind the wire mesh Nick Gowland walked in pain with his smashed hip. He is 22 and, because he was too young at the time, received no compensation.
    Now the young men sprinted for the baths, while the older men tried. Black faces and white bodies darted from lockers to showers, along aisles of steam, at the end of which were private showers ‘for the lads with a bit missing’. I was conscious of a background noise of wheezing and hacking. The lung disease, pneumoconiosis, known as ‘the Dust’, often doesn’t show up on X-ray for decades. ‘It’s been difficult to breathe for a long time,’ said Ron Sugden. ‘You know what the doctor said to me? He said I should keep out of ‘the Dust’! The laughter at Ron’s remark resounded in the baths, and when they laughed the hacking reached a crescendo.
    I returned to Murton in July 1984 with the great strike under way. All around pits had closed, the Consett steel works had been levelled and the shipyards were empty. The miners’ victory a decade earlier had led to seductive productivity deals, which provided their enemies with a new weapon of divisiveness. A spurious ‘social contract’ had seen a Labour government side squarely with capital. Now, with Thatcher in power, the miners’ union was the target. To be in a village like Murton then was to understand just how little the rest of the country knew about the state’s tactics during that strike. While the government and the media spoke virtually as one and incessantly highlighted the violence of miners,paramilitary police cut off the villages and assaulted almost anybody, including the old. As it was later revealed, most arrested miners had committed no offence and their arrests were illegal.
    â€˜You’re bringing bloody revolution to the streets of Britain,’ Robert Maxwell railed at Arthur Scargill in my presence. ‘You are doing nothing less than attacking the sovereignty of this nation’ – at which Scargill asked for a cup of tea.
    An insidious violence was directed at miners’ families through an increasingly politicised bureaucracy. The case of Patrick Warby’s daughter, Marie, was fairly typical. Marie, aged five, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. She was denied benefit by the Department of Social Security. After Patrick went to a tribunal I obtained records of the case showing that Marie had been turned down because her father was ‘affected by a Trade dispute’. 42
    Murton remained solid until the end when, said John Cummings, ‘The banks and finance companies turned the screws at once.’ The trade union establishment had hoisted the white flag long before that. In February 1985 I happened to be in the Murton Miners’ Institute when the television news showed the recently retired TUC leader Len Murray doffing his cap three times to Lord Hailsham, as ‘Lord Murray of Epping

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