The Iron Lady speaks to us from the past.
Eight men charge onto the stage, roaring, shouting, chanting; ‘Coal not dole’, ‘The miners united will never be defeated.’ Their physical presence is powerful and threatening; their fury palpable.
‘I will never negotiate with people who use coercion and violence.’
Welcome to the Eighties. It wasn’t all synth-pop and Star Wars.
The 1984/5 Miners’ Strike has been called the most bitter industrial dispute in British history.
Although no one who was around at that time will ever forget it, for most of us ‘history’ is what it has become. If we didn’t live in a mining area, the only way we learned about it was via the media. Violent scenes on the news every night, NUM President Arthur Scargill addressing his supporters. Many newspapers were against the strike, especially as the violence on the picket lines increased. Even the Communist Party had reservations.
But we went on living our lives. It was happening ‘up north’, or ‘in Wales’. Meanwhile, pit towns and villages, from Yorkshire to South Wales, Kent, Nottingham and Yorkshire, were being torn apart, with some miners striking and others still working. In Scotland, 63% of NUM members supported strike action in 1982 – at that time only Yorkshire had a higher percentage (66%).
The divisions caused by the strike destroyed friendships, split families, and caused anger and resentments that still linger today.
Now an exceptional play looks at the effects of the strike on a small East Lothian community.
In The Collie’s Shed we meet four ex-miners; Charlie (Stephen Corrall), Billy (Kevin Parr), Tommy (Alasdair Ferguson) and Glen (Paul Wilson.) Their stories are told partly in the present, and partly in flashbacks to the past – but we begin here and now, in the Collie’s Shed.
Glen has just retired and moved back after a long absence from the area. He’s taking over the running of the woodwork shed, an initiative set up to give unemployed men something to do.
Tommy’s pleased to see him; Billy refuses to shake his hand or even engage in conversation. We soon start to find out why.
Billy’s been visited by a local councillor, who’s told him there’s to be a review of policing during the strike (the picketing miners always felt that it was the police who’d incited, and used, violence against them; the police argued that such violence was a proportionate and unavoidable response to the miners’ own violent tactics.) Now miners who were convicted of violent crimes may be about to get a pardon.
The news divides the men. Glen thinks there’s no point in bothering; in his view both sides were as bad as one another;
‘The men were a f**g mob; the police had a right to be there…..We saw from the bus how you treated one another; it was people like them who broke it down, no one else.’
Billy disagrees:
‘Time doesn’t make what they (ie the police and the ‘scabs’) did any better.’
It soon becomes clear that both Charlie and Glen crossed the picket line and worked through the strike, while Billy and Tommy didn’t.
Playwright Shelley Middler creates real empathy between cast and audience by having the men chat about things other than strikes; Billy entertains us with his imitation of Charlie’s shuffle; Tommy tells us everything we need to know about his grief at his wife’s dementia simply by describing how he can’t fold socks the way she used to; Charlie may be old, but he still enjoys eyeing up the girl in the shop to get her to be more generous with his sweet ration. These are real men, not ciphers.
Each actor inhabits his character right from the start. Billy is still a firebrand, full of frustration and barely controlled anger. Parr’s taut physical demeanour conveys this just as much as his words. While the more laid-back Tommy and Glen move smoothly across the room, Billy’s every gesture is sharp and slightly aggressive; his miner’s strength is still there in buckets.
Charlie is now a victim of lung disease. For most of the play he doesn’t want to join in the arguments, but he eventually explodes into a rage that’s all the more effective for being held back:
‘You need to stop all of this! I’m damned if my life will be determined by what happened thirty years ago. There’s been too much darkness here.’
Each of the men has different view on the strike and its aftermath. Only Glen has had a successful career, and his standing with Billy certainly doesn’t improve when it’s revealed that that career was in the police. But his point is that he had no choice; he had a family to support, he realised how things were going, saw a recruitment advert and decided to seize the day.
After initially joining the strike, Charlie also crossed the picket line; like Glen he had mouths to feed. Billy isn’t quite as angry with him; we soon learn that Billy was, at least figuratively, one of those mouths – Charlie had promised Billy’s dying father that he’d look after Billy and his Mum, and it was a promise he kept.
‘Your father would have done the same (ie returned to work).’
‘No he wouldn’t.’
Billy looks up to Charlie as a father figure; he’s even furious when Glen asks Charlie about his wife, not knowing that she has died.
The scene then changes and we are back in the 1980s; Tommy (Dom Fraser) and Billy (Joey Locke, complete with ‘Burn the Witch’ emblazoned jacket) are discussing plans for a day of action. Glen (Rory Grant) is about to cross the line; he is resigned, but can’t understand why the unattached Tommy and Billy don’t just leave the area:
‘They don’t see us. They don’t hear us…while they get richer, we get poorer…while they line their pockets, we’re searching through ours. There’s never going to be a level playing field.’
Words that will resonate with many people today.
Tommy tries to keep the peace, saying that he respects Charlie’s decision, and that he and Billy should simply ignore the bus; they are fighting not only for themselves but for those who just can’t afford to.
When violence breaks out at the pit, it is Tommy who suffers most, and for longest. The play’s soundtrack effectively conveys the noise, the chaos, the desperation of the miners, and the struggles of the police as they try to protect the bus. Men on both sides, fuelled by adrenalin and fear; dynamite ready and waiting to be ignited.
As we return to the present, a sad event causes the men to argue once more about the rights and wrongs of it all, until a final revelation makes one character partly re-think his position. Nothing is black and white here, every man did the best he could. The last scene with Billy alone in the shed is deeply moving, but we are left feeling that some kind of resolution has been reached.
Margaret Thatcher famously said:
‘There is no such thing as society.’
This play proves her wrong. She may have destroyed power in the unions, but it is our community that ultimately gets us all through.
Shelley Middler, who comes from East Lothian, has written a compelling play, and one that will resonate not only with those local to the area but also with everyone who understands that life is complicated, hard decisions often have to be made, but in the end, and especially at times of crisis, we need each other.
The Collie’s Shed is at The Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Other Yin), Chambers Street at 1.15pm every day until 20 August.
