More Hell Raisers Needed

Police sealed off Hatfield Main Colliery entrance and fought off attempts to stop scabs by a mass picket organised locally. Local NUM organiser, Dave Douglass was snatched by the police, but the pickets retaliated. Media coverage was nil.

Several members of the BLACK FLAG collective were eyewitnesses to the incident, had been invited to the picket and a social (the night before). At the social, a contingent of Nottingham miners were welcomed, as were ourselves (our group included several members of the Direct Action Movement and comrades from South London). A good time was had by all. A BBC crew filmed the evening’s entertainment for a slot on their ‘Real Lives’ series.[1] Behind a backdrop of a banner proclaiming ‘1926: TUC General Council Traitors. 1984: TUC General Council Traitors’, a motley of performers sang songs, told jokes, etc. Dave Douglass did a turn, Sandra Kerr from London sang the ‘Unwaged Maintenance Engineer’, ‘Which Side Are You On’ and others, a Labour man sang an anti-Labour Party song called ‘Just One More Chance’, the only low moments being when a couple of blokes did some anti-women and racist jokes but some good ones against the National Coal Board and scabs. It all ended with the usual ‘Here We go’.

The next morning we gathered early at the local Welfare Hall for a pre-march rally. A Channel 4 crew filmed the packed hall and several speeches were made., An ASLEF[2] delegate told those gathered that railway workers had blacked oil (although most of it is carried by truck and by direct pipeline). After a bit of a whine by a local Labour MP, Dave Douglass gave a rousing speech urging miners and support groups to organise to visit workplaces to widen industrial action. His final words were, ‘We don’t just want fundraisers any long[er] – much needed as they are – we want HELLRAISERS, and more guerrilla resistance’.

The 600 of so of us at the rally then marched out of the hall, past the gauntlet of trotskyist paper-sellers, and walked the mile or so to the pit entrance. We were followed by a convoy of police vans and riot vehicles. As those of us near the front of the march got to where the entrance was a wall of about 40 cops stood in our way. Immediately they grabbed Dave Douglass and three others and dragged them off behind police lines. We then went straight for the police lines. Cops were kicked, punched and stones were thrown. But within seconds the police convoy had sped up and pushed through the marchers, forcing a gap towards the cops on foot. We managed to drag a woman back who the cops had tried to nick, but then we realised that we would all get trapped between the foot cops on one side, the police convoy on another, and a house on a third side, so we regrouped and went for the tail end of the police convoy, which by then was being attacked from all sides. As the last van (a jeep) sped through a couple of miners managed to grab a petrol can and some police baggage and throw them at the windscreen. 

For the next 45 minutes we stood our ground while waiting for the scab bus to come by. But some outsiders had already begun to drift away and a contingent of Workers Revolutionary Party members made a dash for their coach before the trouble began. This left about 300-400 of us to face what was by now a similar number of cops who had their back-up of riot equipment in their vans as well as dogs. There were few missiles around to grab and the roads were all sealed off except for one which the cop vans could easily charge down. 

Suddenly the scab coach appeared, there was a big surge forward and stones went flying for the cops. A few hit their target and some vans got hit too. The police retreated to their vans for protection and we lobbed more stones. We then realised that this was only the lull before the storm: we were now few and a large reserve of cops were still waiting in their vans. All of us then began to drift back without getting set upon. For Hatfield the day’s events were just one of many such intrusions by the police on their liberty. 

Black Flag : Anarchist Fortnightly Vol.VII, No.125 28/01/1985 https://libcom.org/article/black-flag-vol-07-125-1985 

Notes

1, presumably https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/service_bbc_one_london/1985-02-06#at-21.25
2, Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen