Battle of the Giants Wales in the Eighties

Wales changed out of all recognition in the '80s.

And it all began when Margaret Thatcher launched an attack

on the coal and steel industries

in what seemed like a fight to the death.

We realised that if you didn't move with the times,

we were going to die.

I mean, we were always under threat, as a steelworks.

We understood that if you close the mines, you close the community.

So we had never had any doubt that the cause was just.

My father would say, "When you come out of school, we're going to find a job." And it was a job for life.

But it was like, "Dad, that's not what I'm going to do."

This is the story of the struggle for jobs that defined the '80s,

dominated by a battle of the giants.

Coal and steel were by far our biggest

industries at the start of the '80s.

Fathers looked forward to their sons joining them in the workforce.

And they took comfort that the unions kept everyone's jobs

and wages secure.

Life had got better in these industries

since they had been nationalised after the war.

Branch secretary of the NUM in South Wales was Tyrone O'Sullivan.

All the jobs you needed in the industry were here, in South Wales.

It was a buoyant time.

Penrhiwceiber, Tower, Maerdy. We were all doing well -

linking up underground

so that we could get the coal to where we needed it.

It was the skills that we got from the nationalised industries

and the training programmes and apprenticeships that allowed

Wales to become a very skilful place.

You know, it was a good time to be in Wales.

The coal industry was a mass employer.

In South Wales alone, there were over 21,000 miners.

Here at Maerdy Colliery, at the top of the Rhondda Valley,

730 miners worked three shifts a day.

Bryn Davies was among them.

There was low seams in Maerdy - about one metre, probably,

so I was on my knees and my stomach for most of the time.

But it was a good atmosphere.

We'd all be having a good joke over each other and taking the mick,

"Where was you last night?"

But there was a bit of pride in your work as well,

cos of the dangers and...

You're looking after yourself and you were looking after other people as well.

They've got to do the same.

You're looking out for other people as well as yourself.

I think that was the comradeship between us all. We all got together.

If there was ever a problem, we'd help each other. It was all teamwork.

CHEERING

Steel was an even bigger employer.

The works at Ebbw Vale, Llanwern and Port Talbot

accounted for 22,000 jobs.

Tommy Fellows worked in the steelworks at Port Talbot.

I was C-rota and I had a marvellous shift.

And we worked together,

we ate together, we cried together.

So the team was always there. It was always a good team

and it was in an environment where it was dangerous.

So you sort of looked after each other.

Port Talbot was a very thriving town.

I mean, it always had plenty of employment.

Everybody tried to get into the steelworks.

Once you got in there, it was a job for life.

The big steelworks in North Wills was at Shotton.

It provided steady jobs for thousands of men living on Deeside

and along the coast.

But some of the younger generation wanted more out of life

and started to rebel.

-Like Mike Peters, from Rhyl.

-Suppression.

It was there in every measure of society.

When you were in school,

you were straitjacketed into the school uniform and then my father

would say, "When you come out of school, we're going to find a job."

And it was a job for life.

And it was just an instinctive feeling that that just sounded dull.

You know, at Shotton Steel Works, you were taken in as a young kid

by the careers officer and it was accepted that that's where you went.

However, over-manning had become a major issue in the steel industry.

Resistance by unions was compounded by management,

fearing the price of disputes.

British Steel was losing nearly £2 billion a year.

When Margaret Thatcher won the General Election of 1979,

she came with an agenda to shift power away from the trade unions -

in industry and politics.

As Mrs Thatcher arrived in Cardiff for a speech,

union demonstrators were in uproar.

JEERING

They were angry at her radical plans for the steel industry.

Ian MacGregor was appointed as head of British Steel.

His remit was to make the steel industry profitable.

His solution was to close plants and slash the workforce.

When they fetched MacGregor in, where he wanted to chop,

he went in and chopped straight away.

We weren't prepared take that route, where close, close, close.

We wanted something different.

1980 saw the first national steel strike for 70 years.

At a time of high inflation,

the steel unions demanded a 20% pay rise.

They were offered 6%, with tough conditions.

Port Talbot and the other steel communities were taken to the brink.

After 13 weeks, a settlement was agreed - a 16% pay rise,

but coupled to thousands of redundancies.

That strike, to me...

I was part of it and I was active during the strike.

To me, the only thing we came out of that strike with was self-respect.

We came out as a union.

Because when you consider the amount of men we lost, you know,

to me that was a huge, huge price to pay.

EXPLOSION

In March 1980, Shotton Steel Works closed, with a loss of 6,500 jobs.

Ebbw Vale went, with a loss of 4,000 jobs.

A further 10,000 were made redundant

at Llanwern and Port Talbot.

But the plants were saved.

If there was to be a future, though, there needed to be

investment in machinery.

The plant at Port Talbot was old

and inadequate, compared to foreign competitors.

We realised that if you didn't move with the time,

we were going to die.

I mean, we were always under threat, as a steelworks.

And I told MacGregor, "If you give us the kit,

"we can produce the goods. Without the kit, we can't do it."

Gradually, after we slimmed down,

and then we had the investment,

everybody breathed a sigh of relief that we were starting to compete.

# Port Talbot, Port Talbot, the city of steel

# Port Talbot, Port Talbot, I know how you feel

# There's fire in the blast and there's ships in the bay

# But a lot of the steel men are fading away... #

In the early '80s, there was a seismic shift in Welsh society.

The huge number of redundancies shattered the belief that

heavy industry would continue to provide employment

for whole communities.

# But progress is coming, it better be slow

# So a lot of the men will be out and below... #

Suddenly, for the new generation growing up, there were no

jobs for life to walk into. Unemployment in Wales was soaring.

Job security was becoming a thing of the past.

In Rhyl, Mike Peters decided his future lay with forming a band

with his friends.

They called themselves 17, before changing it to The Alarm.

We were entertaining enough, but I just thought,

"I've got all this energy, but I'm putting it into the wrong thing."

Let's write music and write a song that people will take home

with them. They'll take a lyric home that they'll want

to use in their life

as their soundtrack, to help them

get through that next day or make that next step.

Let's try and reinforce that through our music,

and so I wrote a song called Unsafe Building.

And it changed our lives.

# Declare yourself

# An unsafe building

# Suffer the indignation

# Of your world

# To climb the ladders

# You've got to suss out the snakes

# Remember your height, remember to never look down...

# Oh, now you've made your choice

# You've got to take a chance right away

# Act now... #

Many generations had mined the coal of South Wales.

Huge quantities still remained.

But the pits were losing money and a whole way of life was under threat.

# I have declared myself

# Unsafe... #

In May 1983, Margaret Thatcher was re-elected Prime Minister.

For her second term in power,

she wanted to tackle the huge losses in the coal industry.

By 1984, there were over 21,000 miners

working in 28 pits in South Wales.

Their solidarity was renowned.

As most pits were the prime employers in the valleys,

any closure would be devastating for the future of their communities.

But many believe that Margaret Thatcher's real aim was to

smash the political power of the miners.

From the very beginning, we understood as coal miners that this was a battle.

The battle had to be fought. We had no choice.

We understood that if you close the mines, you close the community.

So we had never had any doubt that the cause was just.

But there was caution when local NUM delegates met in early March.

Only a minority of pits in South Wales voted for strike action.

I found that incredible. I go home at night...

I think this can't happen. This is not going to happen.

So I phoned up the president, Emlyn Williams.

I said, "Emlyn, I'm not accepting this."

I said, "I'm going to picket in the morning."

Pickets from pro-strike collieries went from valley to valley.

Sian James lived with her young family in Caerbont, north of Swansea.

Her husband Martin worked at the nearby Abernant Colliery.

Martin's part of the coalfield had voted to remain in work, so he had

gone to work on the Monday morning

and by 11:30, he was back.

I thought, "Oh, that's a bit strange."

So he came up the garden path and I said...

Because I could see him coming past the window.

So I went to the back door and I opened the door and I said,

"Oh, why you back home?"

And he said, "Listen, Sian, I'll do anything for you.

"I'll do anything, but I'm not crossing a picket line."

And, hey, we understood that. You never cross a picket line.

CHANTING, CLAPPING

Within a week, flying pickets did their job

and all the pits were out on strike.

But feelings were strong as clashes with the police exposed

deep bitterness against the Tory Government.

-Everyone knew the stakes were high.

-What the bloody hell are you doing?

Is it a police state?

Are we going back to the bloody days of Germany,

with a bloody Gestapo regime?

Bloody Margaret Thatcher Regime, all right?

Which stabs you in the bloody back!

Half of you will be out of a bloody job shortly,

because you won't be bloody needed!

-Aye! Correct.

-Scabs! Scabs, you are.

ALL: Scabs!

Violence was common on both sides,

as thousands of picketing miners were arrested.

Community relations were strained to the limit.

We were picketing and picketing hard. Pushing and shoving.

And this policeman just came out of the crowd and smacked me

on my eye. I had a lovely black eye.

I ended up grabbing him down on the floor and I had him by the throat.

And I always remember this. The sergeant...

I won't tell you his name. He was from the same village.

Played on my soccer team. He said, "Tyrone, leave him go."

I said, "Listen. This is what he's done to me, for no reason."

"Tyrone, please," he said. "Leave him go."

And then I got up and stood up.

But that was incredible, you know, that there I was,

non-violent, grabbing a policeman by his throat

and the very man who saved me was another policeman.

Women were also in the thick of the action.

Miners' wives, sisters and daughters got stuck into organising

donations from local communities and further afield.

People have no money coming in at all.

Money was desperately needed to give miners

and their families something to live on. There was no strike pay.

Sian James was in a support group for 1,000 families.

I got involved with the fundraising to pay for the food.

So that was pretty important, but it meant that you went around in your

community, because it was important that we kept that money coming in.

It didn't matter how we kept it going,

we needed to keep it coming in.

Some people religiously gave you money every week.

Other people donated in kind.

They would give you food, they would give you tins.

Other people would give you jumble.

With so much at stake, many women give their all for the strike.

It ramps up into more direct action.

It ramps up into me being more physically involved.

Where we could organise ourselves as women, where we

could decide where we were going picketing and off we went.

-CHANTS:

-Maggie, Maggie, Maggie...

-All:

-Out, out, out!

One of the most contentious targets for the pickets was

the steelworks at Port Talbot.

Here, they appealed to lorry drivers not to make deliveries.

Have you got children? Can they eat food? Because my children can't.

That's what we are here for.

The NUM's strategy was to put pressure on the Government

by engineering a collapse of the economy.

This could only be achieved by stopping

the supply of stockpiled coal to power stations and steelworks.

But at Port Talbot, the men of steel feared if this happened,

they would be out of a job.

As miners leader Arthur Scargill and steelworkers boss Bill Sirs met,

feelings were running high in the heavy industries of Wales.

Miners and steelmen have failed to settle their differences.

The miners' strike was something that I think hurt every steelworker.

The miners are the salt of the earth.

I had friends who were miners. So I felt terrible for them.

But, I mean, it was something that you just couldn't let happen.

And our general secretary said it.

If we had had dispensation for us to have a certain amount

of coal to keep our furnaces safe, we would have been OK with that.

But no, their executive took the decision that they wanted to

close it, and we wouldn't let it happen.

At the end of the day, we had to safeguard our jobs.

As the months wore on,

it became a huge test of endurance for miners and their families.

Personal debts mounted as divisions grew within the pit communities.

A few were now desperate to get back to work.

But though many miners never lost the will to win the strike,

not everyone supported the leadership of the NUM's Arthur Scargill.

-CHANTING:

-Arthur Scargill, Arthur Scargill!

I thought we was going to win.

I didn't think there was any need to brag about the strike or what

he was calling to do to Margaret Thatcher.

He was going to pull her down. We didn't want that.

All we wanted was to get back to work, really.

Win the strike and get back to work as quickly as possible.

But it just dragged on and dragged on.

I think, in the end, we had all had enough.

We were hanging on and doing a damn good job of hanging on.

You know, with the support of our communities, but the

questions were rising then about what we were hanging on for.

Could we end up isolated?

I don't think I was prepared to see that at the time.

Everything was black and white to me, then. There was no grey area.

Looking back on it, there was an awful lot of grey, but I couldn't...

We couldn't see it at that time.

I don't think we could allow ourselves to see it.

The year-long strike ended on 3rd March, 1985.

In one of the most poignant moments in the history of Welsh mining,

the men of Maerdy Colliery marched back to work.

It was a scene repeated all over the South Wales coalfield.

The miners had lost the most bitter strike of the century.

A lot of people said they was proud to walk back to work.

I didn't think I was proud to walk back to work.

Because we were defeated, without a doubt.

A lot of people said no, we wasn't defeated. We was.

We lost the strike and we knew that.

CHEERING

But some believed it could have been a victory

if only they had stayed on strike a little longer.

First of all, I was very bitter. I was mad. I think it's crazy.

The feeling, the mood of the country is changing.

Let's hang on for another five or six weeks.

You will see the mood change in our favour.

Because I honestly felt that we could win.

I really did, otherwise I wouldn't have said it.

This wasn't about hanging about for the sake of it.

I don't regret one minute.

To stand up, to fight for what you believe in,

to fight for your next-door neighbour,

to fight for the people in your street, for their kids.

The consequences of the strike for South Wales were profound.

Damage to the pits was immense. 11 coal faces were beyond repair.

The coal board had lost more than £150 million.

After a year of struggle without pay,

there was no wage increase for miners at the end.

And pit closures now came thick and fast.

I defy these people! By burning the flag right in front of them!

This is all about what they have and should have.

Blaengarw closed in December 1985 -

only a few years after the community was told the pit had

a long and secure future.

CHANTING

The post-strike '80s was a time Bryn Davies,

seen here at Maerdy Colliery, remembers well.

For quite a couple of years, we was paying back mortgages. It was hard.

For the next 12 months, two years. And not just that.

After we paid back, it was knowing the pit was going to close.

We had a good idea that they would run the pits down.

The atmosphere in the pit wasn't the same.

The last day in the pit, when we came up, a lot of the boys,

we was just talking in the cage coming up, "What are we going to do?

"What do we think we're going to do?" We went into the bars, then.

I remember going in and just sitting down and thinking...

"What's next?"

Miners like Bryn Davies received redundancy pay,

based on the number of years they had worked in the pit, after it closed.

For the older men, this could be a large sum of money.

But with mining being all they knew,

some found the prospect of finding new work too much to bear.

A couple of my friends, they had the redundancy money and...

I think they just went out and drank and drank.

A couple of them just couldn't take it and they have never worked since.

A lot of the families broke up through it.

I think that's what hurts.

To see people like that, good, hard-working people.

Sad. It's really sad.

Without the pits,

many of the younger generation faced unemployment in the valleys.

But opportunities were now increasing in the new creative industries,

especially music.

Mike Peters achieved international success The Alarm with in the 1980s.

However, the band never forgot their roots

and were also hugely popular in Wales.

# I'm a man

# Torn in two... #

I did hear that word.

It was only by going away that I started to appreciate where

I had come from - when I came home.

Returning to his homeland was often the inspiration for his music.

To drive through Rhondda Valley in the late '80s and the aftermath

of the miners' strike, the futility of the miners' strike, to see

them broken and see the broken homes and broken communities...

It was sad to see such a great culture

and such a great set of people smashed.

And I thought, through this music, I can write about them.

# Throughout a lifetime, men have fought, men have given their lives

# To hear a congregation sing Cwm Rhondda, oh, My Lord

# Great, great change is the fair country

# The future lies with the sons and daughters

# South will meet with North

# Say...say a prayer for the fair country

# Great is the need for a new South Wales

# Oh, someone hear my prayer

# Oh, someone hear my prayer...

# Oh... #

During the '80s, there was

one big hope for the future in a new South Wales. The steel industry.

Losses at British Steel fell dramatically as it

competed in the world market, with a better quality of steel.

Port Talbot alone received over £500 million of Government

investment in machinery.

We had a strong workforce, highly motivated

and highly intelligent, And you had the kit.

So naturally, it was going to fly.

It always was about surviving, because it was in the global market.

I mean, you had the Japanese, you had the Germans,

you had the Koreans, you had the Russians.

You had everything,

and they all wanted to send all the cheap steel over here.

Well, that was doing us out of work.

Improved productivity was achieved with the company's

slimline programme, at a cost of many more jobs.

But with each round of redundancies,

the union struck a deal for more pay for the remaining steelworkers.

It was marvellous. I mean, the productivity went up.

We had done a deal and the bonus would be better.

Without doing what we had done in the '80s,

slimline after slimline, call it what you like,

we done what was necessary to keep the works there.

Without the works, we wouldn't have a Port Talbot.

We done what was necessary to survive.

Margaret Thatcher was elected for a third term in 1987.

The following year, British Steel was privatised.

But in the valleys, unemployment remained high.

A few miners tried to set up businesses

with their redundancy money.

It was a huge risk for men who only knew pit work.

But the age of mass employment from coal was over.

With his redundancy money, Bryn Davies

and his wife took on running a bar in Ferndale.

The first couple of weeks broke my heart.

Thinking have I done the right thing? Have I done the wrong thing?

And it took me, I think, really about three months to

get into it, because I was used to drinking the beer, not serving it.

We worked hard for over 18 months.

I didn't have a day off until we got on our feet.

And then it got a lot easier, then.

During the '80s, the once mighty industries of coal

and steel were changed forever by the politics of Margaret Thatcher.

But in the new Wales it created, there was still much to fight for.

And next time in Wales: The Eighties,

we see how women enjoyed a new-found independence and success.