Scargill Caves In

‘Surrender,” announced the Daily Mail’s banner headline. The longest, bitterest, most violent, and most expensive strike ever endured in Britain had finally come to an end. After exactly a year, and with no settlement, the striking coal miners went back to work. The militants, including Arthur Scargill, the union president, would have preferred to continue the strike even then: but there was really no choice. The drift back to work had become unstoppable.

So, in order to keep a semblance of control, the union leadership decided on what was called “an organized return.” The strikers would march back with banners flying and brass bands playing. In the event, the return was thoroughly disorganized, as acrimonious and patchy as every other phase of the strike. Some areas refused to go back at once, because they wanted an amnesty for the seven hundred or so men who had been sacked, mostly for destruction of Coal Board property (the pits are all nationalized) or assaults on working miners. In Yorkshire Mr. Scargill, at the head of his banner-brandishing column, found the local mine picketed by miners from Kent, and, rather than sacrilegiously cross a picket line, marched his column away again.

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Anthony Lejeune

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‘Surrender,” announced the Daily Mail’s banner headline. The longest, bitterest, most violent, and most expensive strike ever endured in Britain had finally come to an end. After exactly a year, and with no settlement, the striking coal miners went back to work. The militants, including Arthur Scargill, the union president, would have preferred to continue the strike even then: but there was really no choice. The drift back to work had become unstoppable.

So, in order to keep a semblance of control, the union leadership decided on what was called “an organized return.” The strikers would march back with banners flying and brass bands playing. In the event, the return was thoroughly disorganized, as acrimonious and patchy as every other phase of the strike. Some areas refused to go back at once, because they wanted an amnesty for the seven hundred or so men who had been sacked, mostly for destruction of Coal Board property (the pits are all nationalized) or assaults on working miners. In Yorkshire Mr. Scargill, at the head of his banner-brandishing column, found the local mine picketed by miners from Kent, and, rather than sacrilegiously cross a picket line, marched his column away again.