102. Saturday October 6th, 1984.

The exhibition about the miners strike put together by Richie Whitfield and Phil Turner opened in the Old Town Hall, South Shields today and it is really excellent. As well as a lot of old photographs and written material, the ‘Coal Not Dole’ videos are running constantly. We sold 22 copies of Socialist Worker and collected over £25 for the soup kitchen, which is brilliant. Most people who came today gave favourable comments, though one man said it was too one sided because there were no photos of pickets beating up police. Astonishing!

Whilst I was at the exhibition I had the chance to talk with members of the Westoe Miners Wives Support Group and told them of our plans to reopen the soup kitchen. They wished us luck but said they were too busy dishing out food tokens to help. Fair enough. Hopefully we’ll have enough money to start by the end of the month, just in time to meet ‘General Winter’.

100. Tuesday October 2nd, 1984.

Kinnock’s speech today to the Labour Conference was a bloody disgrace!! Yet again he bleated on about his hatred of violence and said the law must be obeyed. He should have been at Westoe last week, or Easington so he can see where the violence is really coming from! The bastard is just trying to curry favour with the middle classes so Labour can get elected. If he is on the side of the working classes then I’m a Dutchman. Anyone who believes that a Labour Government under Kinnock and Hattersley will be vastly different from Thatcher’s Junta is living in cloud cuckoo land!

The NCB has threatened to close Wearmouth if men are not allowed in to do ‘vital safety work’. To their credit the union officials have refused unless the scabs are stopped. Let’s see who cracks first.

Also today I went to the Media Workshops in Newcastle where some lads from South Shields, Richie Whitfield and Phil Turner, are setting up an exhibition that links together a local miners strike in 1832, the General Strike of 1926, and the present dispute. They want to show how little has changed in the way the ruling class operate. It’s an interesting fact that in 1832 William Jobling, a striking miner, was the last person ever to be publicly gibbetted for allegedly murdering a local magistrate. It was a blatant attempt to break that strike organised by the newly formed union in the Durham coalfield, an attempt to scare men back to work. All that has changed today is that we can’t be hanged, yet, but Leon Brittan’s threat of ‘life sentences’ for miners amounts to the same thing. Like the men in 1832, we won’t be scared off.

56. Wednesday June 13th, 1984.

What a difference a day makes! I can hardly believe what has happened today and it has restored my faith in the strike and my fellow pickets. My phone  hardly stopped ringing this afternoon with my friends calling to tell me what happened, even though the Lodge Chairman had asked them not to because he wanted to ring me himself. He finally rang me at 5.15pm and I really enjoyed his discomfort as he informed me of the decision that had been made.

What happened was that Gary Marshall spoke to all the pickets in the new soup kitchen at Harton Miners Welfare when they returned from the morning picket. He told them that the food they were eating, and had been eating for weeks, had been paid for in part by money he and I had been collecting. He asked if anyone could cite a single case of dishonesty against me, and then went on to detail my personal committment to the strike. He told them about what the Lodge Committee had done to me and finished by urging everyone to get down to the union meeting in the Armstrong Hall to speak in my defence. He said I was being witch hunted for being a member of the SWP.

The pickets all got into their cars and left in convoy, stopping traffic, honking their horns and generally making a noise as they drove down Stanhope Road. They stormed into the Armstrong Hall and shocked the officials on the platform. When they found that the minutes had already been read they demanded they be read again. A vote was taken, won, and the minutes were re – read. When the minute concerning me was read out Gary jumped up and proposed that all charges against me be dropped and this was quickly seconded, but before a vote could be taken a heated debate developed with the end result being that the proposal to say that I wouldn’t have to appear in front of the Durham Executive but that I was still banned from collecting funds and given a warning as to my future conduct. This was passed almost unanimously and caused visible displeasure to the platform. The bastards were seething! They were even more mad when a proposal was passed to give £3,000 to the Women’s Support Group. The platform protested strongly but were easily defeated by the wishes of the majority. This was a great victory for the pickets because for the first time they could see that THEY made the decisions, the rank and file and not the so – called leaders on the platform.

I felt so elated about what had happened that I went along to our newly formed South Tyneside SWP held in the North Eastern pub in South Shields. We have split from Newcastle because that branch was becoming too big and and people were able to hide from being actively involved. We are very optimistic about the future, especially Phil Turner, who only a few months ago was the only member in town. Now there are five more members, all Westoe miners and hopefully more will join us in the future. The meeting was excellent because everyone was buzzing from the events of today, especially Gary, and we all feel a lot more confident that the ideas of the SWP really do work in practice.

Kath is pissed off again because I think she was hoping to see more of me.However, she is also relieved the charges against me have been dropped. A good day!

6. Thursday March 15th.

Did picket duty at the pit for a few hours but nothing happened, we all just chatted about the strike. I went round to visit a mate of mine and fellow miner, Dave Farham. He is an inspirational man who, despite suffering from MS, does as much as he can to support the strike. It was nice to sit in front of his coal fire and have a hot cup of coffee. I told him about yesterdays events but he already knew because he only lives a few hundred yards from the pit. Anyway, when I took a pause for breath he told me that he had been invited to speak to a student meeting at Newcastle Poly and he wanted me to go with him for moral support. I agreed because my daughters were in school and Kath was at work so I had the day to myself. We were going with one of his mates, Phil Turner, who is a student at the Poly, and he soon arrived and we caught a bus to Newcastle.

On the way Phil told me he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and that immediately put me on my guard because since Monday all kinds of political activists had begun to show up,SWP,WRP, Communist Party, and Militant. As a member of the Labour Party I tended to veer towards the latter and they had warned me that the SWP were extremists. I liked Phil straightaway and he made no secret of his beliefs as we talked. He told us that a General meeting of the Students Union had been called to discuss a motion that would give full support to the NUM and allow us to use their facilities. Phil asked if Dave and I would speak in support of the motion and we agreed, though he was worried that not enough people would turn up to constitute a quorem. Dave and me weren’t worried about that because at least we would get the chance to raise awareness of the strike.

The crowded room we saw when we arrived gave us both a panic attack and we were all for going straight back home but when we were led to a table of students we calmed down a bit. I stupidly thought that these were the students we were to talk to but that was soon corrected when Phil led us up onto the stage in front of about 500 noisy students and we sat down.My legs were shaking and so were Dave’s. I drew the short straw and had to speak first. I had nothing prepared so I told the meeting that they would have a better future if we could win the strike, and I also told them that we had been forced into taking a stand now and I explained exactly what we were on strike for, and why it was so important. I got a good round of applause. Dave came forward to speak but had to wait while a Tory student spoke against the motion, making lots of provocative remarks about the miners, and Scargill in particular.

Dave was brilliant! Not only did he answer the tory criticisms but he also attacked the Thatcher governments stated goal of smashing the unions. He warned the students that the Tories would force the students to pay for their own education if they beat us. He got a deserved standing ovation and everyone felt confident that we would carry the motion.

The last speaker was a fat posh Tory who was so right wing he made Thatcher seem like a communist! He tried to convince the meeting that miners were a highly paid group of workers and that it was only a small group of left wing agitators led by Scargill  who were against the closure of uneconomic pits. At the mention of wages Dave leapt to his feet and offered to show his last payslip for the princely sum of £67 for a 42 hour week! Predictably the tory refused to look at it, despite a noisy majority of students calling for him to read it out, and the rest of his speech went unheard under a chant of,’Read it out.Read it out!’

A vote was called for and the Tories made constant interruptions to try and prevent the vote being taken. The bastards even set off the fire alarm, but to the students great credit the vote was taken and the motion was passed. Phil gave us £23 from a collection and we both felt very humble that students, not the richest members of society, could be so generous. It was a very memorable day.

The media are generally speaking against the strike and are supporting the Notts miners who are refusing to come out, despite heavy picketing from Yorkshire. We need to go down there and join them.