Our July Discussion Meeting

                           JULY DISCUSSION MEETING

TOPIC :         FROM CAMPAIGN TO MANIFESTO :
                      What we can learn from the Orgreave Truth And Justice Campaign
                      about influencing national Labour Policy.

SPEAKER :  CHRIS PEACE.

TIME :          8pm to 9.15pm

DATE :         SUNDAY, 9th JULY

VENUE :      CONTACT CLUB, SNAPE HILL LANE, DRONFIELD S18 2GT

 

Chris is a Labour Councillor  on the Sheffield City Council for the Gleadless Valley Ward. She is also involved in the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign. A legal aid lawyer until recently, Chris also nationally campaigns for Youth Justice and better Access to Justice for all.

Clay Cross - 90 Continuous Years With Labour

 

It is a 90th Anniversary. Since 15 November 1922, Clay Cross has been represented in parliament by only Labour MPs. Since 1950, it has been part of the North East Derbyshire Constituency and the MPs (in turn) have been Henry White, Tom Swain, Ray Ellis, myself and currently Natascha Engel. Yet prior to the 1950 General Election, Clay Cross was part of the Constituency which bore its name. Below I give a synopsis of that Constituency's Labour Parliamentary History.

 The Clay Cross Parliamentary Constituency operated from 1918 until the time of the 1950 General Election. It covered much of what are currently the southern areas of both the North East Derbyshire and Bolsover Constituencies. In those days it was an area in which coal mining abounded.

Yet although the Constituency was dominated by the miners’ vote and the Derbyshire Miners' Association (DMA) was a powerful influence in the area, out of the six different Labour candidates it ran for parliament at various elections, only two of these were miners. The absence of miners as Labour candidates in parliamentary contests in 1922, 1923, 1924, 1929, 1931, 1933. 1935 and 1936 (when four different Labour candidates ran) showed an independence of mind amongst local miners from the pressures of the leadership of the DMA. This was aided by the influences of a socialist-inclined local Methodism and by left-wing activists in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in areas such as Bolsover. The ILP, however, went on to disaffiliate from the Labour Party in 1932. A further factor leading to the period in which miners' were not run as candidates, is that Clay Cross became one of the safest Labour seats in the country. It, therefore, attracted the interest of leading figures at national level in the Labour Party.

The first election in the Clay Cross Constituency in 1918 followed a conventional pattern for an area dominated by the DMA. . Fred Hall, the Labour candidate was a leading official of the DMA, who eventually served for 29 years on the national executive committee of its parent body, the Miners' Federation of Great Britain. He was, however, the only Labour candidate for the Clay Cross Constituency who ever failed to win the seat. He lost by 1,221 to a Liberal who had Conservative backing. For the Conservatives and Liberals who had been the larger elements of the 1915-18 War-time Coalition, had joined into a deal aimed at not running candidates against each other. 

When Fred Hall dropped out of standing for the seat just prior to the 1922 General Election, Charlie Duncan was selected in his place. He had helped to found the Workers’ Union who had been involved in the birth of the Labour Party and represented unskilled workers. He had been the Labour MP for Barrow-in-Furness from 1906 to 1918 and had spells as both Whip and Secretary for the Parliamentary Labour Party. He won the elections in Clay Cross in 1922, 1923, 1924, 1929 and 1931. His final success revealed how Labour had built up the seat. The 1931 election was held following the collapse of the minority Labour Government in the middle of a major financial crisis, with Ramsay MacDonald its leader defecting to run a National Government. Labour’s position at the subsequent General Election collapsed from 288 to 52 seats, yet Labour held Clay Cross by almost 10,000 votes. A massive Labour majority in the adverse circumstances of the time. 

When Charlie Duncan died in 1933, Clay Cross adopted Arthur Henderson as their candidate. Known as “Uncle Arthur” he was a huge figure in the early history of the Labour Party. He was leader of the Labour Party from 1908 to 1910 (with another spell at the start of the First World War). He served as Labour’s first Cabinet Minister in the First World War Coalition Government from 1915 to 1917, resigning when his idea for an international conference on the war was voted down by the rest of the cabinet. He helped shape the pre-Blairite structure of the Labour Party as its General Secretary, a post he held from 1912 to 1935. He was Home Secretary in the first Minority Labour Government of 1924 and Foreign Secretary from 1929-31. When MacDonald defected Henderson took over as Labour's temporary leader until 1932, but gave up the position because he had by then lost his parliamentary seat. Clay Cross provided his avenue back into Labour’s parliamentary politics. In the by-election one of his opponents was Harry Pollitt the General Secretary of the Communist Party who lost his deposit with 10.8% of the votes to Henderson’s 69.3%. So there was a total left-wing vote of over 80%. Whilst he was MP for Clay Cross, Henderson went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and was held in high regard, it being claimed that “no-one ever sought his help in vain"*. He died in 1935.

At the subsequent General election, Clay Cross ran the 35 year old Alfred Holland who was a local Methodist. But within 10 months he was stricken with spinal meningitis and died shortly afterwards.

A by-election in 1936 led to the Clay Cross Labour Party running its fourth candidate in five years. George Ridley had been on the Executive of the Railway Clerk’s Association since 1909. He was seen as “becoming the Labour Party’s leading pamphleteer*”. In 1944 he also died whilst still an MP.

After 26 years, Clay Cross once more adopted a Derbyshire Miners’ Candidate in Harold Neal the area’s Vice President, who went on to become Secretary of the Miners’ group of MPs in parliament. There was a war-time pact amongst Churchill’s Coalition partners at the time, which covered the Labour Party. This amounted to a deal not to run candidates against coalition partners in by-elections. So only two independent candidates stood against Neal. One ran as a “Workers Anti-Fascist” and the other as an “Independent Progressive”. Neal got 76.3% of the votes. When the war ended, he improved his position by taking 82.1% of the votes in opposition to a Conservative.

When the boundaries were redrawn and the Clay Cross seat was absorbed into other areas, Harold Neal became the Labour MP for Bolsover. He had a period as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Fuel and Power in 1951 and retired as MP in 1970 to be replaced by Dennis Skinner who was the Chair of NE Derbyshire Labour Party, President of the DMA and also an active member of the Clay Cross Labour Party.

A souvenir brochure published by the Clay Cross Divisional Labour Party in 1948 pointed out Labour’s dominance in the area, stating that there were “46 Local Government Seats (exclusive of Parish Councils) within the Constituency : of these 40 are held by Labour members. In addition, there are 16 Parish Councils : in the majority of cases we have 100 per cent representation”*. ( * = The two earlier quotations are also taken from this souvenir brochure.)

Those were the days.

"The Lessons Of History" by Bryan Robson

(Left) Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister during the Miners' Lock Out of 1926. (Right) Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister during the Miners' Strike of 1984-5.


The First Betrayal

The 1926 miners strike was caused by the Mine Owners' ultimatum that the length of a mineworkers' shift be increased and that their wages should be decreased. The response by the Miners Federation of Great Britain and its general secretary A J Cook was to call a national strike that began in May 1926. Cook's slogan for the strike was ‘not a penny off the pay not a minute on the day.’

What is not so well known is the fact that this strike should have begun in 1925 but for the intervention of the Conservative Government of Stanley Baldwin and his Chancellor Winston Churchill. The government paid a large financial subsidy to the Mine Owners as a delaying tactic to prepare for a confrontation at a later date of their choice. The response of the mineworkers was to claim a victory, and call it Red Friday; not knowing,of course, the devious intentions of the Tory Government to defeat them at a time of their choosing.

The first piece of legislation put through Parliament, in preparation, was the ‘Emergency Powers’ Act. Other preparations, included the setting up of the Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies; this organization was to be staffed with blackleg labour and volunteers. The volunteers being students. In the meantime, large stocks of coal were to be laid down for the possibility of a long dispute taking place. As a result of forward planning, the Mine Owners and the Government together inflicted a defeat on the miners and the MFGB. They returned to work defeated and demoralized, having to leave behind them black listed colleagues, and of course they had to accept the terms of the Mine Owners.

However, before we leave this important piece of history we must note a significant betrayal by the Nottinghamshire miners which at a later date was to play a major role in the 1984/85 miners strike. George Spencer the Labour MP for Broxtowe negotiated a separate agreement with the Nottinghamshire Mine Owners, and as a result led the Nottinghamshire Miners back to work leaving their fellow miners in other areas to struggle on to defeat. The result of this being that George Spencer was expelled from the Labour Party and became a Liberal MP. The sweetheart union created by George Spencer was called the Nottinghamshire Miners Industrial Union, but was better known in general as Spencer’s Union.


The Second Betrayal

Much has been said about the National Union of Mineworkers failure to hold a National Ballot regarding the 1984/5 strike, but it must be said that the NUM had run a ballot in 1982 regarding a National Coal Board proposal for a National Incentive Scheme, and although a majority of the members of the NUM had rejected this scheme, the Nottinghamshire miners ignored the result on the basis of the federal structure of the NUM, and at this point large stocks of coal started to be piled up in preparation of the forthcoming strike.

The closure programme for the coal mining industry, and therefore strike, was to be delayed in 1981 by the Tory Government. This was because of the Yorkshire Area’s large majority for strike action after the threatened closure of Cortenwood Colliery, which was followed by other areas with large majorities. Three years preparation by the Tory’s was put to good use, and this time instead of the likes of George Spencer’s sweetheart unionism I found that Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson were playing the same sweetheart role with the Nottinghamshire miners as Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill had done nearly 60 years earlier.

I believe there were strategic mistakes regarding picketing, however, I would like to concentrate on the relationship between the Thatcher government and the sweetheart union called the Union of Democratic Miners (Nottinghamshire's breakaway Union). Because politicians like to boast about their achievements after retirement, I acquired Margaret Thatcher’s book ‘The Downing Street years’, and Nigel Lawson’s book ‘The View from Number 11’ - both of which were very revealing.

In Nigel Lawson’s Book, he describes the importance of the Vale of Belvoir mining development as being vital for keeping the Nottinghamshire miners on side and detaching the more moderate area’s from the other more militant ones. In other words buy the Nottinghamshire miners with new jobs that would replace the old ones on closure. So were the Nottinghamshire Miners claiming that their right to work was based on a failure of the NUM to hold a national ballot or a selfish "I’m all right Jack" attitude? This book is worth reading for the duplicitous nature of ruling class Toryism, and it’s no holds barred use of the state and its institutions to remove by ANY means the opposition to its objectives. There is much more to read in this book regarding the miners strike.

In Margaret Thatcher’s book she describes the cosy relationship between the Nottinghamshire Miners leaders (UDM) and herself as follows; "I told my Private Office that when the strike was over I would have representatives of all the working miners to number 10 for a reception, and indeed I did." She also states that she kept in touch with Roy Lynk, the Nottinghamshire leader of the UDM, "who knew that he could speak to me, if and when he needed." Could they have been closer at this point in time?

When Michael Hesletine announced over thirty pit closures in about 1991, he also announced the closure of seven Nottinghamshire pits, to which Roy Lynk responded by going down Silverhill Colliery to do a sit-in. But before he went down the mine, he claimed the working miners of 1984/5 had been betrayed and stabbed in the back, so it seems to me there was more job promises than the Vale of Belvoir.

So it can be seen that the ruling class are not to be trusted, as the ‘divide and rule’ philosophy is not just about creating Empires, but can be usefully deployed over domestic policies. Finally I would remind the UDM miners that Thatcher said “greed is good,” but in this case it did not apply to them!

BRYAN ROBSON

Parliamentary Pitmen Politicians

James Haslam (above) was the first of eleven pitmen to become an MP in North Derbyshire, when he was elected to represent Chesterfield in 1906. It started a tradition which lasts to this day under Dennis Skinner, the MP for Bolsover. How did these pitmen politicians emerge and did they achieve what they set out to do? This is the topic which I will be covering at the following meeting.

NOTTS & DERBYSHIRE LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

Topic...........Parliamentary Pitmen Politicians of North Derbyshire

Speaker.......Harry Barnes (former MP for North East Derbyshire)

Date............Saturday 21st January 2012

Time...........2 pm (doors open at 1.30)

Venue.........Chesterfield Labour Club, Saltergate, Chesterfield


(See here for a related item.)

The Derbyshire Miners

The photograph was taken in 1983 and it shows a class from a Sheffield University Course for Derbyshire Miners' which was held at the Workers" Educational Association, Hurst House, Abercrombie Street, Chesterfield. Over three year's the students obtained 120 days paid release from work to study industrial relations, economics and politics. (See the final item below).

Ashes & Diamonds Exhibition

A tribute to the Mining Industry and those who fought to defend it by Darren Coffield at Hurst House, Abercrombie Street, Chesterfield

September 19th to 23rd : 10am to 4pm

Official Opening 12.30pm Monday 19 September by John Burrows,
(Leader Chesterfield Borough Council and ex NUM Official)

For examples of Coffield's work see - here and here.


September 20th at 7pm

Derbyshire NUM Day Release Reunion and Discussion with former lecturers Harry Barnes & Bob Heath

Identifying With Jack

This is a photo of the Labour Cabinet of 1945. The fourth person from the right in the back row is Jack Lawson (1881-1965). He differed from me in many ways, such as working in the pit where he went as a 12 year old , becoming a Government Minister and then a Peer. Yet there are many points on which I can identify with him. Although things often happened to us in a very different order and in a different context. For me, they were also at a much more shallower depth. But I can claim to share aspects of the points below - although unlike Jack I left the Methodist Chapel.

1. He was born in the north of England in a coastal mining community. 2. He grew up in a Durham County mining colliery. 3. He became a Methodist. 4. He joined the ILP. 5. He joined the Labour Party. 6. He joined the Co-op. 7. He was a bibliophile. 8. He made use of a bookseller in Newcastle in his early days. 9. His wife had links with Sunderland. 10. He had an involvement with adult education. 11. He studied at Ruskin College. 12 He served for two years in the forces. 13. He became a Labour MP. 14. He spent time at Easington Colliery.

I have finally got around to reading his 1932/1944 autobiography "A Man's Life" which I review here. However be warned, my review is a long one and I say nearly as much about myself as I do about Jack. But these are the entitlements of an old blatherer.

The 1984-85 Miners Strike - The Strikers Story

See You At The Crucible

A group of ten of us are booked in to see the play "The Enemies Within" at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield on 20 December. It is about the Miners' Strike. Nine of our group are from the Dronfield Labour Party, seven of whom attended our Discussion Meeting on the Miners' Strike on Sunday (see this thread).





"The Enemies Within

Remembering 25 years since the 1984 miners' strike, most of the original cast of David Thacker's groundbreaking 1985 production return to present The Enemies Within.

Using real-life accounts assembled from interviews with striking miners and their families, this pioneering work represents a unique period of the 20th century. Communities were changed forever and this piece tells the real stories behind a scar that has refused to heal.

'There are chilling scenes of faces bloodied, accounts of heads cracked open and impressions of an almost universally unsympathetic outside world of housewives, directors and television producers. The acting is reverberatively fine.' The Guardian, 27 July 1985."

Back on Sunday 20 December.
Tickets: £15.00 - £10.00.
Crucible Theatre, Sheffield.

For Booking details see here. Book in and look out for us.

We Are Women, We Are Strong

This was the logo of Women Against Pit Closures during the 1984-5 Miners Strike. It is in the colours of the Suffragettes.

To mark the 25th Anniversary of the Miners Strike, Barbara Jackson addressed a packed meeting of the Dronfield Labour Party Discussion Group on Sunday to outline both the nature of the strike and her and her colleagues' roles within it. Not only did she work with Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures, but she was also on strike herself with others who were members of the Unions' White Collar Section, COSA. They were employed at the NCBs Regional Administrative Office at Queen Street in Sheffield and picketed the site (see below).


The title of her talk was "We are Women, We are Strong" which was the anthem of Women Against Pit Closures. Here are the words -

We are women, we are strong
We are fighting for our lives,
side by side with the men
who work the nation's mines.
United by the struggle,
United by the past.. and it's
Here we go, here we go
For the women of the working class.


Don't need government approval
for everything we do,
We don't need their permission
to have a point of view.
Don't need anyone to tell us what to think
or what to say
We've strength enough and wisdom of our
own to go our own way.


They talk about statistics, about the
price of coal; the cost is the communities,
dying on the dole.
In fighting for our future, we find ways to organise;
Where women's liberation failed to move,
this strike has mobilised.

Ours is a unity that threats could never
breach; ours an education
that books could never teach.
We face the taunts and violence of Maggie's
thugs in blue;
When you're fighting for survival, you've got
nothing, nothing left to lose.

Barbara (left) pointed out that the NUM had to struggle against the full power of the State. The Thatcher Government prepared its ground by building up coal stocks, having already picked off the Print Unions and the Steelworkers in conditions of mass unemployment. Under what was known as the "Ridley Plan" it had introduced a set of anti-trade union laws, which it went on to use to the full against the Miners.

Whilst the NUM had imposed an overtime ban to counter the building up of coal stocks, during the strike 11 people were killed including 3 miners and numbers of young people mainly picking coal, 11,312 were arrested, 7,000 injured, 5,600 placed on trial, 200 imprisoned and 960 sacked.

The full power of the State was used against the Miners by a Conservative Government who resented the Miners Victory in the 1973 strike which led to the defeat of the Heath Government in the subsequent General Election. They turned Police Forces into a centrally controlled operation; whilst Power Stations were taken out of mothballs, Gas from the North Sea was squandered and Nuclear Power was used to the full.

The ability of the Miners to hold out for so long was a result of their own determination and their communal strength, supported by the international trade union movement in nations such as Australia, Russia and France.

This source explains something of Barbara's role in the strike, stating -
"She had a white collar job at the National Coal Board offices on Queen Street near Sheffield Cathedral. Although she had no family mining connections, Barbara felt so strongly about the Miners Strike that she was one of a handful of women who went on strike for the whole year. Nine people from her office picketed the National Coal Board building for the duration of the year-long strike, and Barbara quit work there within 24 hours of the strike ending in March 1985. Barbara had one teenage daughter at the time of the Strike. She is now retired and lives near Graves Park in Sheffield."

In Barbara's own words - "We welcomed all women and supported 30 support groups throughout South Yorkshire, we met weekly from May 84 to 87 when we closed the group at the point where we had our book published "We are Women , We are Strong" about our experiences during the strike. We raised hundreds of pounds through collections, jumble sales, benefit concerts, selling tee shirts, badges, Christmas cards, calendars. We talked to groups all over South Yorkshire, Belfast, Manchester and Germany. We picketed at the local pits with local women and tried to support other workers in dispute as well as the Greenham Common Women. We regarded ourselves as supporting the miners and their families but equally importantly making the political arguments and links about state power in all its forms. We were proud that South Yorkshire women and children were invited to the Soviet Union by the Soviet miners in the spring of 85 for a 5 week holiday in Moscow and the Black Sea coast."

Amongst the efforts Women Against Pit Closures undertook locally was the support they gave to Miners taken before the Sheffield Magistrates Court. When the strike was over, the Miners marched back to work behind their Colliery Bands and NUM Banners. But this wasn't an option at the Queen Street Office. Barbara decided not to return to work and was instead accepted as a Mature Student onto a Degree Course although she lacked the paper qualifications. As with many of the women who supported the strike her experiences were positive and life changing. A sentiment that came to be expressed by many Miners themselves.

More Mining Memories

Here is a notice of a significant meeting

Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Labour History Society

Miners at University

The Derbyshire Area NUM day-release course 1952-94

Saturday 21 November
Hurst House, Abercrombie Street, Chesterfield (see this map)
2 pm (Doors open 1.30)

John Halstead, one of the course tutors, will explain briefly
- How and why the course began
- Its main features
- Impact of the day-release programme

Then those present who attended the programme will be able to share their experiences.

All welcome

Please note that there is parking for disabled people only at Hurst House.
Long-stay parking is available nearby at Holywell Cross surface car park or the multi-storey car park.


From : NDLHS 22 Boythorpe Avenue Chesterfield

*************************************************************************************



This is a group of Derbyshire Miners who completed their three year Day Release Course in 1960. The photograph appeared in the Derbyshire Times on 7 May, 1960. They are presenting Miners' lamps to two of their tutors, who are the men wearing glasses. On the left is Noel Williams of the Workers Education Association who taught economics and on the right is the politics tutor Royden Harrison from Sheffield University Extramural Department who was a leading Labour Historian and whose final book was to be "The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb : 1858 to 1905 the Formative Years". From left to right the students on the course are (1) Les Ralley who became a leading figure on the Chesterfield Rural District Council, the North East Derbyshire District Council and the North Wingfield Parish Council, (2) a 27 year old Eric Varley who four years later was to embark upon his parliamentary career, (3) W. Whitaker, (4) E. Lawrence presenting the lamps, (5) E. Bradbury and (6) N. Wade. Further information about Whitaker, Bradbury, Lawrence and Wade would be welcome.

25 Years Ago

Here is a worthwhile follow up to our discussion meeting on 8 November as shown in our right hand column -

Get your tickets now – if you can’t attend, let others know – this will be the only other 25th anniversary event in Derbyshire !

BOLSOVER WOMEN’S ACTION GROUP

25 Anniversary of the Strike Celebration

Saturday 28 November 2009

Speakers -

NUM National President - Ian Lavery

Notts Area NUM Secretary - Keith Stanley

Dennis Skinner MP .

Venue .....
The Arkwright Community Centre
Hardwick Drive
Arkwright Town
Chesterfield
Derbyshire
S445BS

19.30 – to midnight

Tickets £5 (includes Pie and Pea Supper)

No ticket – no entry.

All proceeds from ticket sales and the raffle to

The National Justice for Mineworkers Campaign

and

the NSPCC.

For tickets, please contact Toni Bennett:

Toni’s contact details are:

E-mail: TBDB8@aol.com
Phone: 01246 826 032

SOLIDARITY IS STRENGTH

For directions etc, see: http://www.thearkwrightcentre.co.uk/default.aspx?tabid=786