The last battle on British soil?

Jonathan Trigell, author of Under Country, recalls the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in Yorkshire during the miners’ strike of 1984. Though it’s described as a riot, he argues, was it, in fact, the last battle fought on British soil to this day?

18 June, 1984, might already appear to be quite recent as a suitable subject for a ‘historical’ novel, even if that date does pass the common literary convention of 30 years before the present day.

But for many in Britain’s former colliery towns and pit villages, the memories of that day remain even fresher. Places where former miners and their families still cross the road to avoid ‘scabs’. Where strike breakers often remain barred from the pubs and working men’s clubs.

Memories are long where employment is so scarce, even to the present day, and the date of 18 June, 1984, is seared into the collective consciousness.

That day was the 100th day of the miners’ strike and someone had clearly decided that it had gone on for long enough. The Prime Minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, had publicly called the strikers “enemies” and “extremists”; she had named them the “enemies of democracy” and “the enemy within”, as if they were fifth columnists or terrorists.

It might be argued that when a government names a group “the enemy”, they are tacitly green-lighting any action against them. Certainly, much of the police force of the time took it to mean that striking miners were outlaws; in the old sense, the common law sense – hors-la-loi – those to whom normal rights no longer apply.

Orgreave coking plant near Sheffield had become a focus of much of the picketing and normally the police did their best, with road blocks and arbitrary actions, to prevent miners from getting there. But on 18 June the police actually erected signposts pointing the way and flagged 60 or so coaches and a multitude of shared cars into a prepared car park and then politely escorted the picketers down to a field near the coking plant.

The miners were led across a narrow bridge, over the steep valley of a railway line cutting, to arrive in what could be described as a meadow, or a containment zone, or a trap.

In front of the picketers, between them and the coking plant, was a line of police ten deep and over 100 wide. A thousand men in one solid phalanx. A Roman legion of them, with full length Perspex shields making an impenetrable wall, like the Romans used to do.

Over in the field on the left were more police, with dogs. German shepherds, used for their wolfishness: there was something primal about the way their snarls tore the air; the way their lips curled back, their white fangs snapping as they barked, straining against quick release leashes. Their handlers let them bark, letting the miners know they were there.

In the field on the right were horses. Mounted police. Batons a yard long, sprung, to wrap around when they hit, like a steel whip. The horses snorted. The horses pawed at the dirt with muscled forelegs. The horses cavorted with barely reined-in force.

There were even more horsemen behind the massed ranks of riot police and there were more Alsatian handlers at the bottom of the railway cutting. The miners were completely surrounded. The only way out was the way they had been led in: across the bridge: a solitary, single-file escape route, for all of those gathered people.

Nonetheless, most of the miners initially seemed fairly unconcerned. It was a beautiful day, scorching hot for June. Many of the picketers played football, shirtless. There was a feel of holiday. A field, not of battle, but of play.

The police, however, were dressed for war. Black tunics and thick coveralls. Bobbies in big helmets to make them look taller, halfway to busbies. When they put their chinstraps on, it generally meant trouble. They all had their chinstraps on that day. And steel-capped boots, shin pads, cricket boxes, reinforced gloves, arm and body protection.

The riot squads were in armour, helmed and visored. Long shields and short shields, to repel and attack. The police were hot, the police were sweaty, the police were angry.

West Midlands Police equipped with long shield riot gear. Handsworth, Birmingham, 1985

Without warning, police horses came at the canter and then moved into charge. It felt like an earthquake, the ground was shaking. Miners could smell the horses, could feel them coming, the world changed, with charging wrath. The air was sliced by countless swung batons. Blood streamed. Hooves were all around. Men coiled foetal. Feared for their lives. Miners wet themselves.

Big men, hard men, had never felt a horror like that of a horse charging at them. They suddenly knew something of the terror of ancient peasants facing armed cavalry. Herdsmen against Mongol hordes.

The riders wheeled and rode back towards their own lines. Back through the crowd of pickets. Back through the bewildered and the injured. The police clapped and banged the riders home. Miners picked themselves up. Miners tried to lift maimed colleagues. Miners bunched T-shirts onto wounds.

The second time the horses charged, panic broke out. The picketers all knew what was coming by then. The young started running. The old tried their best to get out of the way. Wide eyed horses, staring through Perspex blinkers, reared and hoofed. Riders wielded night sticks, from one-ton animals, 19 hands high.

This time, short-shield snatch squads ran in behind the horses. Truncheoning into the carnage. Arresting at random. Arresting the floored and the broken. Wearing black boiler suits, no epaulets, no numbers, no way of identifying who had dealt violence, should a photographer catch them. Pairs of them dragged men back to behind the long shield phalanx. Where blue Leyland police vans sat waiting.

Long shields opened the line to let the arresting snatch squads back through. But only just enough to let them through. Arrested pickets were bounced off the shields. Arrested pickets ran a gauntlet of punches and truncheons, fists and sticks, before being slammed off vans and slung in.

A young lad, with a broken leg, was frogmarched across the field. Trying to hop. Crying in pain. Plenty of heads were smashed open. Generally, at the back, whilst running away, trying to get to safety.

Some miners did stand their ground then. After the second charge, miners started to throw stones, bottles, anything they could find, at the police lines. Miners threw missiles at that point, to try and stop the charges. But the charges came first.

More charges came and the miners were routed up the field. Men poured down the railway embankment. Cheese rolling down the steep hill. Tomahawking to the bottom. War-painted with blood. Men clutching their heads. Men clutching their stomachs. Men clutching their knees. Men were sobbing. Men were vomiting.

Dog handlers were waiting. Dogs barking. Dogs snarling. Dogs biting. Miners fled along the railway lines. More afraid of the canines than the trains.

But most of the picketers ran back across that narrow bridge, into the village.

The village was laid in crescents and miners’ houses were in the crescents. The police wanted to cut the men off from shelter. So they chased in vehicles. Sirens screamed. Police poured out of vans. Pickets were beaten under bay windows. Blood on the backyards. Blood on the patios. Men with split heads were marched up the street. Bundled into vans. Bounced off lampposts, bounced off bins. Miners hid in garden sheds. Miners hid in bedrooms and hedges.

Iron horseshoes clattered on the tarmac streets. Horses charged between parked cars. Miners were sick from the fear. From the running. From stitches. From the heat.

Short shields came after the horses. Chasing miners down sloping streets, swinging as they came, running over the fallen, leaving it to the bobbies behind to hand out a proper beating.

To be assaulted by the police is the position of ultimate helplessness and hopeless: because to fight back will only make it worse; yet who can come to rescue you; who can protect you, when you’re being beaten up by the protectors?

Annual Orgreave March and Rally commemorating the Miners’ Strike of 1984

South Yorkshire Serious Crime Squad were already on hand, behind the lines. The group, who would reach the pinnacle of their infamy with the Hillsborough disaster, was there, well-prepared, at Orgreave: dictating statements to other officers – officers who should have been perfectly capable of describing events themselves.

In the charging rooms, plain-clothes police from South Yorkshire fabricated statements, created stories that allowed for a scene of riot. They claimed there had been a violent attack on them, that they had no choice but to send in the cavalry to regain control.

It is no longer controversial to say that the South Yorkshire Serious Crime Squad was fond of doctoring statements, perverting the course of justice and collusion. Their statements of that day did not match logbooks, photos or videos.

South Yorkshire Police said that a stream of missiles came first, before the cavalry charges, while everyone present that day knew it was the other way around. But the BBC showed it the same way as the police had claimed, on the 10 o’clock news, that night of 18 June, 1984. The BBC switched the sequence. They must have buckled under governmental pressure. The BBC cut the film and changed reality. For many striking miners, that was the moment they knew they were finished: they expected bias from the majority of the printed press, but the BBC…

One policeman sitting in an ambulance nursing a cut ear was shown on the night-time news. While miners had been bleeding all over the streets and the fields. Miners had been curled motionless being cudgelled.

A young woman – Lesley Boulton – had been photographed in the instant of being batonned in the face by a mounted man. It was a terrifying image, but just one among so many that were taken; indeed, the entire day was filmed. Yet the evening news showed one policeman nursing a cut ear.

So, in former mining communities around the UK, the bitterness about the last battle on British soil might never heal. Because it was not a battle between equals. It was a paramilitary force against civilians.

The police were caught on camera, beating unarmed people on the ground. Yet not one policeman was prosecuted, no one was charged. No officer was even disciplined.

Not in Chile, not in El Salvador, not in South Africa, not even in Northern Ireland; in Yorkshire. In England. Because miners had been named the enemy within. Miners were called the enemies of democracy. Miners were the enemies of the people.

Under Country by Jonathan Trigell is published on 1 July, 2022. It’s his fifth novel and his second historical work after The Tongues of Men or Angels, which was about Saul of Tarsus and the birth of Christianity.

Jonathan has won several literary prizes and his novel Boy A was transformed into a Bafta-winning drama.