Guest blogger Arabella Diedrich has written this moving and powerful description of the impact of the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike on the Hem Heath Colliery and community. Introduction is from former Hem Heath miner Dave Cliff. Thanks to Steve Baguley of the Trade Union Badge Collectors Society and editor of Symbols of Solidarity for drawing this to our attention. The latest edition of Symbols of Solidarity is a Miners’ Union Special.
This article came about as a result of a contact on a miners Facebook site. Karen Diedrich asked if anyone who worked at Hem Heath Colliery would help her daughter with a college assessed essay on the miners’ strike, numerous people responded and Karen then had a follow up question, “how long were you on strike” the answers varied from six to 10 months. When I told Karen I stayed out for the duration. She asked if I could do a zoom meeting with her daughter who is based in Texas, I was more than happy to do so, we then set up a time and Arabella called me on zoom. She was the daughter of the Diedrich mentioned in the article who was also on strike for the full twelve months. We had a few problems with zoom but finally got to speak for about 30 minutes, it was a very short time to get everything across that I wanted to, and Arabella had many questions. She submitted the article for assessment and got an A plus. I am very pleased with what she wrote but there is so much more to say.
Dave Cliff
The sound of rumbling and metal creaking permeated the air as the mine shaft cage emerged from the pit. Occasionally, it would be accompanied with chattering voices, but often the sense of exhaustion from an arduous eight-hour shift overcame the urge to speak. Functioning like an elevator, the cage consisted of four decks and was responsible for lifting coal filled mine cars and people out of the different pit levels. With each of the narrow and shallow decks holding 25 miners at a time, a small portion of the 300 who were on shift underground, men were packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Traveling at 25 feet per second, it was not uncommon for the cage to come up too quickly and bounce around like a yo-yo. The sour scent of body odor radiated from the inside of the cage, clashing with the crispness of the cool air of the surface. Black dust and coal particles clung to their sweat, making each face indistinguishable from the next.
Dale Diedrich’s height and lanky build, along with his piercing jade green eyes, set him apart from the crowd. The 24-year old’s dirt covered face blended into his black hair, giving his already slim face the illusion of hollowness. Even when he showered before coming home, black dust remained around his eyes and sometimes in his ears. His now-wife, Karen Preston, said you could always tell who a miner was because they looked like they were wearing eyeliner.
Like the rest of the miners, Diedrich carried a water bottle and an empty snapping can, which was essentially a lunch box, on his belt along with his headlight battery pack. He also carried a white helmet, yellow if you were a trainee, an oil lamp and a self-rescuer kit which equipped him with a mask in case of poisonous mine gasses like carbon monoxide and black damp. To combat the 100 degree heat of the pit, a majority of the miners wore tank tops and shorts, which oddly contrasted with their heavy steel-toe-cap boots.
As the men piled out of the cage, they returned a brass pendant with their check number to the manager’s office, indicating that they had safely returned from the pit. each man was given a number so they could be easily accounted for. Diedrich’s was 602.
After Diedrich was hired at Staffordshire’s Hem Heath Colliery in 1979 at just 19 years of age, he endured six months of training in a mock mine, learning mostly about safety and emergency procedures. Once instructed on how to use a self-rescuer respirator, he was shown the rescue team’s emergency kit, which included a hand-crank brace drill. With a U-shaped handle, one would put pressure on the head of the brace, rotate the handle and the auger bit would twist through whatever material was being drilled. In the case of coal mines, this tool was used for cranial drilling. If a miner was trapped in a pit collapse, the emergency team would use the brace drill to relieve pressure on the brain by creating small holes in the skull.
Coal miners rescue team at Porth, bringing an injured miner out of the pit, 1930s.
Getting caught in a collapse wasn’t the only safety concern for the miners. As mentioned, carbon monoxide was a common threat for them. The phrase “canary in the coal mine”, used when referring to early signs of danger, originated literally in the coal mines. While electronic toxic gas sensors were the main form of detection equipment used, the small yellow birds were the perfect candidates for indicating poisonous gases underground. Like many other birds, canaries have a higher need for oxygen than humans and their anatomy accounts for that. The avian respiratory system is made up of looped airways and air sacs that keep their lungs constantly filled with oxygen. If a canary was exposed to poisonous gas, it would kill them in a fraction of the time that it would take to kill a person.
Diedrich encountered poisonous gas once, and safely evacuated everyone, but he’d often heard about fellow miners losing fingers and extremities in equipment malfunctions or human error. There was no shortage of risk in the mines, no matter how invincible he claimed to feel. He was often tasked with driving roadways and crafting roof supports where machinery had carved out the pit tunnels. After assembling the frame for the supports, he and his crew were installing the archway when one of the beams gave out. As the ceiling began to cave in, a fellow miner grabbed Diedrich by the waist and pulled him out of the way.
Despite these physical dangers, the real danger that loomed was the threat of pit closures. For many of the miners, including Diedrich, employment opportunities were limited. He’d always dreamed of being a pilot. How did he end up in a diametrically opposite job, 40,000 feet beneath where he wanted to be?
Mining was often a generational job passed down from father to son. Although his stepfather had worked in a Scottish coal mine for over 40 years until a work-related back injury forced him out, he rarely talked about his pit history.
Diedrich’s family was working-class and aviation school, let alone college, was never an option, leaving him with little qualifications for anything but blue-collar work. In England, people graduated high school at 16 and were expected to support their families by immediately getting jobs. Mining was a good paying job, better than pretty much any other industry in the Staffordshire area. Including overtime, Diedrich worked a total of 48 hours a week earning 200 pounds before the strike, which is worth about £800 today. With little to no job options outside of mining for a majority of the workers, pit closures were the worst outcome, taking away their only dependable source of income. They needed the pit.
The same year that Diedrich started mining, Britain’s first female prime minister came into power. In order to combat unemployment and inflation that plagued the nation with economic recession, Thatcher wanted to privatize the nationalized coal mines, which were operated by the National Coal Board, and reduce the authority of trade unions, specifically the National Union of Mineworkers. While her political agenda was made clear from the beginning, many pit workers believed she had ulterior motives. They believed this was her revenge for the 1972 strikes, the first national ones since 1926, that brought down the Conservative government. Thatcher paused her plans for mass pit closures in 1981 following the threat of a strike, but that didn’t stop the NCB from putting over 40,000 mineworkers out of a job over a three-year period.
A mass picket at Saltley Gate coke plant near Birmingham during the 1972 miners’ strike.
Six months prior to the start of the strike and the union’s overtime ban, miners were encouraged to work as much as possible. Little did Diedrich realize that during all that overtime he was working to pay for his new house, Thatcher was stockpiling coal for the inevitable strike.
The government deemed the mining industry unprofitable, setting the stage for suspicion from the NUM that mass pit closure in 1984 was impending. Although there was no national ballot for the strike, meetings were held among the union and miners to decide if they were going to walkout. Diedrich felt as though a vote against a strike was a vote against another man’s job and life. A slogan emerged: “close a pit, kill a community.”
Apparently, about 140,000 other miners shared his sentiment and on March 12, as Diedrich sat eating his usual egg sandwich and drinking a cup of black tea, his tele announced that the NUM declared a national strike.
The following day, Diedrich and his Hem Heath comrades arrived for the morning picket line shift at 6 a.m. Fellow miner David Cliff, a 29 year old who happened to also serve on the union branch committee, was frequently late to the pit before the strike but not once was he late to the picket line. Whether it was a day, afternoon or night shift, he was there.
Outside the gates of mine, hundreds of strikers lined up on either side of the road. This time, their faces were distinguishable. With their expressions no longer hidden in black dust, one could easily make out the anger each man bore in his eyes.
For those who chose to return to work, they’d either take a bus or drive their own cars through the gates. As the bus passed by the picketers, the passengers avoided making eye contact. The air was thick with tension and disappointment. Despite their attempt to look away, the feeling of betrayal lingered. Men cursed at those they once considered brothers as they crossed the picket line, instantaneously becoming what the strikers called scabs.
With the expectation of violence, thousands of police officers were deployed to picket line scenes. Every so often, one of them would allow one or two picketers to approach a scab car or bus to try to persuade them not to break the strike. “Why would you cross the picket line? Just because your job is safe doesn’t mean everyone else’s is.”
While Diedrich’s interactions with returning workers were limited to these face-to-face persuasion attempts, Cliff, or Cliffy as he was referred to in the pit, had a more indirect approach to his scab protesting methods. Following a picketing shift at Littleton Colliery in August, Cliffy dropped a van of strikers off at a site where three empty scab buses were parked. The group got out and began torching the buses. Flames burst out of the side windows, climbing the metal frame of the bus as smoke and embers trickled up into the night sky.
Two of the men were caught and arrested as they crossed a nearby field. They soon admitted that they weren’t the only ones involved in the arson. Two days later, as he was heading off to London, Cliffy was also arrested. His headstrong character permitted him from giving the officers a statement and he demanded the presence of a solicitor. The NUM had always said, if you’re arrested, only give them your name, address, and your check number, which in Cliffy’s case was 1367. The next day, a solicitor arrived, but Cliffy had wanted an NUM one, not a general duty solicitor. He turned him away and later when the union solicitor finally arrived, he demanded to know what Cliffy had told the officers, if anything. Instead of telling him to give a statement, he told him only to say, “no comment on the instruction of my solicitor.”
When the trial finally got to court, there wasn’t much of a case. None of the other miners had given evidence against him and Cliffy was found not guilty, purely on the basis that he kept his mouth shut. Five of the lads involved were sent to prison for two years. Toward the end of their sentence, Cliffy took a bus full of miners to the prison. The entire drive they were banging on the side of the bus yelling “the miners united will never be defeated”, a slogan that rang true throughout the strike. Out of fear of a riot or prison storming, the guards moved the lads to the front of the exit queue. Once the group arrived back in Stoke-on-Trent, the town where Hem Heath was located, it was as if they’d never been apart. A feeling of unbreakable camaraderie flooded the room as they shared laughs and memories over drinks at the pit club.
This was just one of the many protest-related charges he would face over the course of the strike.
In addition to tensions between scabs and strikers, animosity arose between picketers and police. Sporting their bobbies, tall black coloured hats with large silver crown emblems and chin straps, a row of police stood parallel to the miners, each equipped with a truncheon. If it was a cold shift, the miners would light fires in steel drums in hopes of keeping warm. These usually didn’t burn long as it was not uncommon for a police sergeant to saunter up to the picketers and kick over the drums.
NUM leaflet – Coal not dole, 1985
On one occasion, a sergeant prevented Cliffy and his crew from bussing from a Mansfield rally to a picket line in Scotland. The confrontation got heated and the officer hit Cliffy on the head with his truncheon. So, in retaliation Cliffy smacked him in the mouth, breaking his nose. As officers hauled him off in a white police van, he was punched and kicked the whole drive to the station.
Not only did physical violence erupt with police, who the miners called “pigs”, but they verbally intimidated and teased them. Diedrich often heard them brag about expensive Spanish vacations, house remodels and new cars for their wives, which they could afford from all the overtime hours they were racking up by policing the picket lines. Those taunts struck a nerve for Diedrich. He went from earning 200 pounds a week to 2 pounds a day. His income, and whether or not he ate, was now dependent on donations. Once a week, he received food parcels that had been assembled by the community of supporters containing potatoes, vegetables and a bit of meat. The local nurses union was one of the miners’ most substantial allies, but they also received contributions from Russia, Poland and Libya. Still, it was not enough to keep the lights on. Diedrich’s mortgages had been frozen and he couldn’t afford heating. With temperatures that dropped as low as 30 degrees overnight, Diedrich had to rely on logs. He’d go outside, collect wood and burn them on a coal burning boiler, something that under normal circumstances should never be done. But he, like many other miners, was out of options. Returning to work was out of the question. If it meant freezing and starving, Diedrich was determined to fight the pit closures with whatever strength he could muster.
Poster for the International Women’s Day rally organised by the Women Against Pit Closures in Chesterfield during the miners’ strike.
Around Christmas time, more and more strikers began to break the picket line, returning to the pit. It had been a slow drift back to work before Ian MacGregor, who took over the National Coal Board under Thatcher, began offering 1,000 pounds to every man who would return. Having gone nine months without pay and thinking of their children waking up Christmas morning with no presents, many went back to work.
As months dragged on, the depression set in. Diedrich began to think they’d never win the strike, and a feeling of defeat once brought him close to considering, just for a second, that maybe he should cross the picket line. That feeling was quickly swept away by the overwhelming sense of brotherhood that was ever present among picketers. He felt proud for not crossing the picket line.
While the largest amount of support came from within the mining community, many strikers relied on financial and emotional fortification from their wives and girlfriends.
Preston, who was a 19-year-old model at the time of the strike, claimed she was no help financially, but what she lacked in money she made up for in support. When Diedrich was living off food parcels, her mother, already feeding ten people, would put together an extra plate for him. Regardless of how limited her understanding of the strike was and her boyfriend’s situation, she provided a shoulder to lean on and lent an ear to listen. She did her best not to put pressure on Diedrich, even when the pair had to brew their own beer because they couldn’t afford the pub. Sometimes the home-made beer was manageable and other times it filled the room with a pungent aroma of skunk. The toll of the strike on Diedrich’s mental health was just as pungent.
In a nearby household, Cliffy was financially relying on his wife who worked for the National Health Service. If it wasn’t for her, he said he would have starved. The 2 pounds a day and food parcels weren’t cutting it.
“Everybody was suffering.”
By February 1985, more than half of the miners were back at work. As the NUM’s funding and power dropped, the picket line began to thin out. The donations people had lived off of for nearly a year dwindled and so did morale for many. Of the thousands of Hem Heath miners that entered the yearlong resistance on March 6, around only 160 remained.
In a similar fashion to how he found out the strike was starting, Diedrich was eating lunch on a Sunday afternoon when the news came on his television set. Delegates at a union conference had voted to end the strike and on March 5, the striking miners returned to work.
“It was a sad day,” he said. “We’d lost the strike, and they (Thatcher’s government) could do basically what they wanted to. We had no power to stop them closing any of the coal mines.”
Their loss gave Thatcher exactly what she had wanted: the start of a privatized coal industry and the beginning of Great Britain’s deindustrialization.
Although he was making money again, working in the pit wasn’t the same as it had been one year ago. Tensions remained high between strikers and non-strikers, with managers dis-favouring strikers.
Diedrich, who had usually received the best jobs in the pit, was assigned to what he considered ridiculously prejudiced jobs. Along with fellow strikers, he was moved from the deepest level of the pit, which was 1,062 yards in depth, up to the 612 yard level. That Friday, he walked out of the coal mine in protest and on the following Monday, he was reprimanded.
When it was realized that workplace discrimination couldn’t be afforded amidst the rampant pit closures, Diedrich was promoted to chargehand, a role just beneath foreman. Regardless of his new work benefits, he could see the end coming for the mining industry. Like a canary, he sensed the imminence of disaster.
The miners faced redundancies. People were asked to leave shifts early or offered large sums of money to retire. Villages founded on coalfields turned into bleak ghost towns and just like the strike slogan stated, communities were killed. Areas that had once bustled with miners, saw lasting high rates of unemployment. Under Thatcher 115 coal mines would close, forcing thousands out of work and into poverty.
Cliffy said young lads used to go play football on Saturdays in the neighbouring Yorkshire pit village.
“Now there’s nothing there for them. Absolutely nothing.”
With towns crumbling around him, Diedrich felt his own mental health deteriorating. In the same pit where he’d once felt invincible, surrounded by brotherly laughs, a sense of claustrophobia now overwhelmed him. He was trapped in a doomed job that could be taken away from him at any minute. The anxiety and depression he developed during the strike left him feeling hopeless.
In 1989, after 10 long years of mining, his fears came true when he was removed from his chargehand role and put on a menial surface job. It became clear his time at the pit was coming to an end along with the industry, so instead of anxiously waiting for a notice of closure, he left.
For Cliffy, the first few years following the strike offered opportunity. In 1986, he received a guarantee from the coal board that they’d retain his job, allowing him to attend Ruskin College in Oxford for two years and University of Warwick ten months after that. One year after he earned his degree, he was doing a surface inspection for the colliery when he collapsed. He’d developed pleurisy, a condition where the tissue that lines the lungs becomes inflamed, causing chest pain. Under no circumstances could he go back underground. Doctor’s orders.
While Cliffy attributes this condition to the damp environment of the pit, his other lung diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema, most likely result from constant dust particle inhalation and exposure.
Because he could no longer work underground, he was offered a surface-level position. But Cliffy didn’t want it. He’d spent a year starving, in and out of court trials and jail cells, fighting for his and thousands of others’ mining jobs. So, like Diedrich, he left Hem Heath Colliery.
“I was a miner, or I was nothing.”
Forty years after the strike, the dust still hasn’t settled. Cliffy still hates Thatcher, working-class communities across the United Kingdom are still shattered and, according to Preston, Diedrich still hasn’t managed to wash all the dirt out of his ears.
Upon reflection, despite the emotional and physical trauma that resulted from the strike and years in the pit, neither miner regrets their pit work.
Cliffy walked away from his time as a miner not only missing his right pointer finger, which was essentially a rite of passage for a pit worker, but with the same appreciation he felt when he was hired in 1972.
“I just loved it, you know, I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else. It was all the lads. The camaraderie, the closeness, the laughs, the jokes. We had some fantastic fun, hard work.”
Each day Diedrich is reminded of his strength and commitment during the strike. Sitting on the maple wooden shelves in his office are framed photos of him and fellow miners smiling, covered in black dust wearing their helmets and headlamps. On another shelf, his oil lamp that had once lit up tunnel walls stands next to his fading black and white “I never scabbed” button. But what really cues feelings of sentiment is his NUM plaque that reads “This is to Certify that Dale Diedrich proved himself to be a loyal and true member of the NUM over the twelve months of the Great Pit Strike from March 1984 to March 1985 showing determination, pride, and loyalty.”
Every so often, these mementos make their way to the dining room as he shares stories with his daughter of missing fingers, picket line protests and jokes that only other miners would find funny.
Diedrich, still coping with his anxiety and depression, recognizes that being a miner and picketing in the strike rewarded him in ways no other job could.
“Well for starters, it’s been one of the best jobs I’ve ever had for the camaraderie and the friends, the friendships you developed with people who are always watching each other’s back to try and help and prevent injuries and accidents. So, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Although Hem Heath Colliery was abandoned and demolished in 1997, the miners united truly will never be defeated.
