The Battle of Orgreave

If you are from Nottingham, then there is a good chance that a member of your family, your Dad or your Grandad maybe, was a coal miner. Gedling, Hucknall, Thoresby, Welbeck, Anesley and Newstead were pits in which local men worked in for well over a century. When the pits began to be wound down in the mid eighties - events came to a head in April 1984 in the South Yorkshire mining town of Orgreave.

Media footage at the time played up on the incredible visual similarities between modern-day mounted police 'valiantly defending themselves' against unruly trade union pickets and scenes from medieval battles, where picts and savages clashed with knights on horseback. This bloody skirmish became known as The Battle of Orgreave.

Ten years ago, artist Jeremy Deller created a series of posters for fictional talks and historical trips (see below). One of these advertised a re-enactment of the events in Orgreave. This poster was the origin of Deller's most high-profile project to date.

Jeremy Deller's work has led him to assume the roles of curator, mediator, producer and publisher. He frequently engages in collaborations that seem straightforward, but are actually complex and multi-layered, fusing seemingly disparate elements such as state of the art technology and old-fashioned industry, or contemporary culture and folk art.

Deller's idea of re-staging the original conflict was realised in a project produced by Artangel in 2001. The artist enlisted the help of The Sealed Knot, a group of military re-enactment enthusiasts, as well as ex-miners and members of the constabulary who had participated in the original incident. Deller maintained that his interest was less in the actual re-enactment than in bringing about a long-overdue dialogue about the original event. The only lasting document of the work was the documentary film The Battle of Orgreave, made by Mike Figgis in 2001. The film serves as a record of Deller's artwork, but also provides an alternative to the media portrayal of the event 17 years earlier.

I have seen this film many times before, with an assortment of audiences, many of whom barely understand the South Yorkshire or Midlands accents that make up a good part of the commentary of the piece. It was good to have a chance to see The Battle of Orgreave on a cinema screen, yet a privilege to see it accompanied by a Nottingham audience. The resonance that the subject matter had was evident in the laughter that trickled through the people watching when ex-miners made witty remarks about Mrs.T. There were also poignant silences when the film recalled how she wickedly labelled the striking miners as 'the enemy within'.

"We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty". Margaret Thatcher on the Miners' Strike.

At one point in the proceedings, the edit is cut to include a huddle of Yorkshire men, boiling over with two decades of hate and feelings of betrayal towards Nottingham miners who were seen, because of some individuals decision to return to work  as 'scabs'. I remember 'scab' being a playground taunt at primary school, actually around the time all of this was kicking off in the mid eighties. To a six year old it merely means 'snitch' or 'teacher's pet', but to these burley ex-miners, the term still had an altogether more sinister meaning.


In the seventies, Nottingham miners were, through the luck of geography, in a position to mine some of the finest, thick seamed and easy to hew coal. Because of this, and also as an indirect result of Spencer's breakaway Union in the 1926 General Strike, Nottingham miners by the time Thatcher was in power,  were earning wages much higher than their South Yorkshire counterparts. One guy in the film refers to people from Nottingham driving around in their new Range Rovers and living it up with their nouveux rich status. A Yorkshire miners' wife tearfully recalls the men from her region being viciously heckled by a group of Nottingham miners' wives for being troublemakers and mindless thugs.  When I first saw this film a few years ago, I was naïve enough to think that this was just sour grapes or regional rivalry - but there is some hash truth in what the film dredges up. Nottinghamshire miners were perceived by the Yorkshire men as letting the side down - or worse, most likely to abandon their picket. This is not to say that the miners in Nottingham did not care deeply at the loss of their industry, but some of the interviewees in the film imply less was at stake for Nottinghamians in terms of their historical culture and working class pride.

Maybe because of guilty feelings that still fester in the region, it is rare that people in Nottingham speak about what was done to the local coal industry. As a direct result of that, younger people here are not aware of this important slice of local history. Before seeing this film, I had no idea that the facts of the miners' struggle had been cynically massaged and manipulated at the time. Tony Benn, who in 1984 was MP for Chesterfield, recalled how the footage of a clod of earth (actually reported to be a brick) was hurled into the lines of policemen, thus provoking justified retaliation from the amalgam of local police, Met officers and army back up disguised as local bobbies. In reality, the footage had been edited. It was reversed to show the miners in a bad light. It was actually a policeman who had 'thrown the first stone'.

When the film had finished, and the credits had stopped rolling - the audience stayed still for what felt like about two minutes, which is a long time in the movies. The atmosphere that the documentary had created, I'm sure, posed many questions for the people watching. It was a stroke of genius to programme this film into the NOW festival - because as one of the miners said in the film - 'These issues continue to effect us - it will happen again.' Deller himself recognised the similarities between the current government and the Tories, highlighting the now common perception of innocent protestors as somehow 'up to no good.'

www.beherenow.org.uk