Arthur Scargill: Saltley Gate was the proudest moment of my life
Fifty years ago today thousands of Birmingham workers united behind striking miners at the Battle of Saltley Gate. ARTHUR SCARGILL, who was there, talked to Morning Star reporter Peter Lazenby
By Peter Lazenby
AMONG the events leading to the Battle of Saltley Gate was a telephone call from the London headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to the union’s Yorkshire area office in Barnsley.
The call was made on Saturday, February 5.
At the London end was an NUM staff member, researcher Jim Wheeler. At the Yorkshire end was a team of strike activists at the union’s Barnsley picket headquarters.
One of them was Arthur Scargill, then a 34-year-old mineworker at Woolley colliery who was spokesman for pickets in the union’s Barnsley area.
Today Scargill, 84, remembers every detail of what followed, leading to what he says was the turning point in the 1972 miners’ strike; an event which he believes is still a lesson for today’s trade union movement.
Since 1960 the miners’ pay had been falling behind other industries.
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The defining moment of the 1972 miner’s strike
GRANVILLE WILLIAMS reminisces about the momentous events of Saltley Gate 50 years ago which brought victory to the miners but lost him his light-coloured Crombie coat — a birthday present from his mum
GAS works have twice had a powerful impact on me. The first was a school visit in 1954 to the gas works at the east end of Eastbourne, Sussex (the site is now a Tesco supermarket).
It was a summer’s day but the experience of being enclosed inside the dark, cavernous coking plant is still fixed in my mind, as are the words of the Gas Board official who, as we toured the other facilities, extolled the scientific wonders of the distillation process which, apart from the coke, produced a multitude of by-products — coal tar, ammonia, dyes and much more.
Back then coal (or town) gas and its varied by-products sustained large sections of industrial activity, lit our streets, warmed our rooms and heated our food. Our society was still, as Orwell observed in his 1937 essay, Down The Mine, founded on coal.
Eighteen years later the extent to which the British economy was dependent on coal was put to the test when the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) went on strike at midnight on January 8 1972.
Continue reading at morningstaronline.co.uk
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