We're Not Going Back: A Review

Forty Years On, Red Ladder Theatre Company Revisit The Mighty Struggle That Ripped Britain Apart

Coal Not Dole L-R Victoria Brazier (Olive) and Stacey Sampson (Mary). Photo credit: Lian Furness

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day,

Teach a man to fish and you get rid of him for the WHOLE WEEKEND!”

The older female characters in Red Ladder’s musical comedy set during the 1984/85 Miners Strike neither want nor expect a companionate marriage. Their menfolk are at once omnipresent and off-stage. Boff Whalley’s oddly entertaining script about the most harrowing UK industrial dispute of my lifetime is viewed entirely through the eyes of the women from South Yorkshire’s mining communities who fought like tigers to save the pits whilst still putting food on the table.

It is a story close to my heart. I was 16 when my family moved to Selby, and we did so because my father, a construction engineer, had been assigned by his company to the development of a new, hi-tech ‘superpit’ in the beautiful Vale of York. We arrived in 1979 — in the vanguard of many subsequent young families who descended on the medieval market town and its surrounding villages from the declining pit regions. They were there to take advantage of the new coal mining jobs available at Wistow, Stillingfleet, Riccall, North Selby and Whitemoor — a vast underground network of connecting tunnels that came to the surface at Gascoigne Wood.

My father worked at Wistow, the first of the pitheads to be developed. (The now-abandoned concrete shaft of Wistow mine is my father’s Sistine Chapel ceiling; it involved a continuous three-day pour in sub-zero temperatures.) In the late 1980s I worked a brief temporary job in the memorably fractious mine managers’ office at Stillingfleet, a building which my father had a hand in designing. Then in the 1990s, with a question mark already hanging over the future of the new colliery, I took advantage of a rare Open Day to put on a helmet, be instructed in the use of a miner’s lamp, and stoop, crawl and even slither on my belly along the working coalface of Whitemoor.

“Tha’s goin’ t’ hell,” a young miner told me when he saw I’d come up trumps in the coalface lottery, one of only a dozen or so members of public who were allowed that dubious privilege. “Hell” seemed a reasonable description when the coal-cutter roared past us like a monster, tons of glittering black coal from the seam collapsing onto the conveyor belt.

We were nearer death than we knew. A well-liked figure from my mother’s village was later killed in an accident involving just such a belt at the point where it tipped the coal into the trucks. There wasn’t, by all accounts, much left of his body for the coroner to inspect. Cause of death: being in hundreds of small pieces.

Not every ‘member of the public’ got out of that coalface without medical assistance. One lady collapsed and had to be stretchered to the surface. The miners who accompanied us were kindness itself, but so used to the diabolical working conditions that they didn’t realise what the impact would be on those who weren’t.

I made it out unaided, a source of pride given the exertion involved in burrowing beneath the chocks holding the roof up and crawling on my hands and knees for hundreds of metres over piles of spoil.

There can’t be many theatre critics out there who have successfully negotiated a working coal face almost 1,000m underground, and emerged with their dignity intact.

So. Miners. Not the most socially progressive of individuals — and even less so in 1985 when many were sceptical that Women Against Pit Closures groups had any formal role to play in their monumental struggle. Brechtian class warfare was more their thing.

I only became aware that something troubling was at work on the progressive left when one of my PhD-studying friends from London, who came to stay with me in Yorkshire during the very week when they announced the closure of the Selby pit, observed that he didn’t much like the town, that he found the atmosphere “dour”. He was infinitely more engaged — and enraged — by the fact that, writing about my visit to Palestine’s West Bank for a small Jewish publication that took issue with the IDF Occupation, I’d put quotation marks around the word “martyrs”.

It’s difficult to over-estimate the scars left on parts of the Northern psyche by the events of 1984-5. When, in 2011, Meryl Streep starred as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, her giant image was plastered on the sides of Yorkshire buses to advertise the film. Waiting at a bus stop, I witnessed one woman — probably a child during the Strike — physically recoil and snarled like a dog when she saw it. It’s visceral, you see. Encoded in our very bodies.

When Thatcher died in 2013, certain South Yorkshire ex-mining communities celebrated with bonfires. The London media seemed surprised. They’d forgotten those communities even existed.

The place where I lived — my mother still lives — during this period was not a pit village. Our rural settlement pre-dated the coming of the new pit. But it was a designated area to receive mining families, who took advantage of Coal Board subsidies to relocate to specially built housing estates. My mother’s Brownie Pack (she was a Brown Owl) filled up with miners’ children and my brother’s class at school contained kids who’d previously known each other in Wakefield. Neighbours there became neighbours again in Selby.

The strike began — raggedly, and without a formal ballot — in Spring 1984. A mining father came to my mother with a bundle of pound notes. “Tek it,” he said. “Tek it now f’t year. Pack holiday and all. I won’t have it in summer.”

Another mother told her: “We send one to Brownies this week, and one to Cubs the next.”

That was just the beginning of the hardship (my Tory mum discreetly waived the subs not wanting the children to miss out). No-one starved — this is Britain after all, and there were food and clothing parcels provided by supporters from around the world. But people have told me it took 10 years for their families to recover financially from the Strike. Some people’s never did.

And what was I doing during this momentous time? I was at Oxford University mostly, studying for my Finals. I was ill that year and only distant echoes of the conflict reached me through the black, exhausted mists of B12 deficiency and too much revision: One University friend’s father, a distinguished Queen’s Counsel, took on pro-bono work for miners charged with criminal offences, and found he was losing cases he should have won; another, a South Yorkshire headmaster, relucantly appeared on the News when striking miners’ children at his school apparently took to beating up the children of miners who had returned to work.

I went to a meeting at Oxford Town Hall and a chic Trade Union activist with a fashionable pixie haircut made an impassioned speech about workers rights which had her audience dropping their expensive watches into the donation bucket. Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, wasn’t there. But I’d heard him speak years before, when he came to Selby, and I’d thought then that he sounded like Hitler.

After my exams, I went home. To find a bad-tempered village where a brick had been thrown through a strike-breaker’s window (it was not even the right window) and where the ‘scab bus’ passed along the end of our road every day.

I have never forgotten the scab bus. Grey with dirt, and protected by business-like metal grills, it passed by rapidly with a police escort. Inside could just be seen the crouching figures of the three or four terrified-looking men. It was a grim and chilling sight. I hightailed it back to Oxford as soon as I could. Meanwhile, some kids at my brother’s school climbed on the roof to hold a demonstration.

Reflected back through the distorted lens of national media — not least that of the BBC — the simmering violence of the Miners’ Strike looked inexcusable. I was 20 years old and deeply conflicted. On the one hand, there was the ugliness of it all. On the other, I was economically literate enough with my shiny new PPE degree to understand exactly the issue that faced the strikers. It wasn’t low morals or any innate brutality that caused bricks through windows. It was Game Theory, the mathematics of collective action, and that inevitably goes hard on individual choice.

Boff Whalley’s upbeat script is a reliable enough account of certain episodes which took place during the strike but puts almost nothing of this agonising intra-community conflict directly on stage. Strike-breakers are mentioned but their motivations go unexplored. Differences of perspective — between an idealistic young South Yorkshire police officer, say, and his Women Against Pit Closures girlfriend — are wound up amicably with a song.

L-R Stacey Sampson (Mary), Victoria Brazier (Olive) and Claire O'Connor (Isabel). Photo credit: Lian Furness

Where the script gets it exactly right is in depicting the growing confidence and independence of the women themselves. With their menfolk on strike, a lot of wives did become the main breadwinner — a trend facilitated by the expansion of the retail and hospitality sectors during that decade, both of which in practice favoured female employment. Trips to Sheffield for political meetings, trips to London to demonstrate — we’re shown how the Strike expanded the horizons of women who’d scarcely set foot outside their own communities before. Their quickfire banter is often very funny, and the songs — though there aren’t enough of them — are gloriously catchy.

Victoria Brazier brings a core of steel to the socially conservative Olive, who hands in her clerical job at the National Coal Board offices so she can properly support her husband’s cause — simply because he is her husband — and then discovers a talent for political organisation. And special mention must be made of musical director Beccy Owen, who channels the spirit of the much-missed comedienne Victoria Wood from her station behind an electric organ at the side of the stage.

Portraying the notorious Battle Of Orgreave — a pitched battle between miners and police in which it is now generally agreed there were many wrongful arrests and false prosecutions — with a cast of five women and a limited budget was never going to be easy. Artist Jeremy Deller made a film about it — writer Boff Whalley has Olive recount the story as though she’d inadvertently got herself caught up in the middle of it.

The well-meaning British arts establishment hasn’t always dealt honestly with the Miners’ Strike, or with the catastrophic levels of de-industrialisation that characterised the Northern economy during the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps the sheer scale of the social tragedy is too painful to contemplate. It’s easier, and more crowd-pleasing to adopt a perspective of heartwarming comedy, personal triumph over difficult circumstance, instead of what’s really required to do it justice — a wailing and inconsolable Greek chorus.

It’s a feelgood trap from which Red Ladder’s We’re Not Going Back cannot hope to escape. Created to tour sports halls and community centres in former mining communities, it is nostalgic recreation of the music and haircuts of the era that predominate — and not the rage and helplessness of defeat. The night I saw it, in Goole, the audience consisted of people my own age — nicely dressed for a night out but, I noticed on the way out, mostly driving small cars.

There were no Zoomers in the audience. Not one.

I’m indebted to Barnsley writer and BBC Radio Three presenter Ian McMillan’s observation that for many years whenever he took constitutional walks through his home town there would always be some old codger who greeted him with the words, “Ee, Scargill were reet,” instead of “Good morning”.

Because the awful Scargill, in the worst way possible, was right about one important thing. Tight-knit communities are the capital of the poor and we have lost them. I have heard it argued that even without Mrs Thatcher and her inflation-fighting monetariest economic politicies, the jobs would have gone anyway, an inevitable consequence of technological progress and globalisation.

I don’t believe that. I think in the early 1980s good businesses as well as bad went to the wall in an orgy of sky-high interest rates and loads-a-money individualism. We’re living with the consequences even today.

And there is an interesting coda to The Battle Of Orgreave. The South Yorkshire force which oversaw that episode was the same force which five years later policed Hillsborough football stadium on the day in which 97 Liverpool fans died.

There are many in South Yorkshire who believe that the lesson some senior police officers learnt at Orgreave was that if you have a special understanding with the Prime Minister you can get away with anything. It is noticeable that the tragedy has never generated much animosity between the ground's Sheffield Wednesday fans and those of Liverpool FC. Both the people of Liverpool and the people of South Yorkshire know who the real enemy was.

We’re Not Going Back, a co-production between Leeds-based Red Ladder Theatre and Unite The Union, now travels to Sheffield Deli (tonight, returns only), Willows Social Club Hull (Mar 26), City Varieties Music Hall (Mar 27-29) and Ripon Arts Hub (Jul 6), £5-£15.