Merseyside Miners Support Groups 1984/5

Celia Oakwood (formerly Jones) interviewed by Ritchie Hunter 08.02.05

The Dingle Miners Aid started on the Menzies Estate. The strike was only about two or three weeks old and I was watching the television news – the Miner’s Wives were setting up these communal eating places and I turned to Tony and said God we have got to do something this is a big one. My mother always said that the miners were the Storm troopers of the working class and I was brought up on that, even though she was very religious she had a very strong class feeling. Tony didn’t agree and then Tony Banda came to the house and it was him who suggested to me to knock on a neighbour’s house. He asked if there was anybody from the mining community and I said no, but Elsie Burns’ husband used to be a miner at Sutton Manor. So the next night I just knocked on Elsie’s door and asked and she said yeah OK, I didn’t expect her to.

So there was only just me and Elsie, and we were trying to write a leaflet and that’s when Tony (my husband then) typed one up and we had it printed at Toxteth Community Council. We were out on the Estate where we lived putting these through people’s doors and Bernie Smith came along and asked us what we were doing. He said “You soft pair of cows. You’ll never get anything now. You have to do it on Giro days” He said he would get a few more out with us. So there was a few of us putting leaflets through doors not knowing what to expect. We were all shocked; we were deluged. It was unbelievable. When we knocked back, if people didn’t have a bag of stuff to gives on the estate - and it was a very poor estate – they would come on a Saturday morning and drop a bag off. My house was like a warehouse; this happened within a week, it just took off. Word got around then. We arranged for MPAC bus to take the stuff up to Sutton Manor and when we were about to do this somehow word had got around the left and the day that the bus came all these people turned up on the doorstep with cheques. This was in the space of two weeks, that’s how quickly it took off; it just snowballed.

After about six weeks we realised we couldn’t just keep this to the estate, it was only a small estate where we lived and there was only so much people could give, so we decided to have a social. It was June 30th, we had done all this collecting in such a short time; the strike only started in March. I remember the date because it was our Tony’s birthday. We got St Finbars Hall for absolutely nothing. We went round all the shops and they donated prizes. Bernie Smith made a big pan of curry. We even had the paper cups and everything else donated. It cost us not a penny. Again people turned up with cheques. We had enough money by this time to bring 20 miners plus their partners in a bus, so that was 40 from the mining community. It was heaving, absolutely heaving. We made about £1,400 that night and we had another mountainful of aid; and don’t forget that was from a very small poor community.

It was at that time that Paul Humphreys rang me. He said, “We’ve heard what you’ve done. Can we go to this social tonight?” Paul has got quite a posh voice and I remember thinking, “who the bloody hell’s that” “Hello, Paul Humpheys here.” And that’s when I first met Paul. He came with Richie (Naylor) because they wanted to start one in Wavertree, which they did.

I didn’t know anybody in the Left in Liverpool, I hadn’t been involved at all in politics, but in the local community we were quite involved. Then I got a phone call of Bill Hunter. It must’ve been not long after this, and to be honest I was glad of this because, (it must’ve been about July), it was getting quite stressful on a couple of us; we couldn’t maintain momentum. You’re talking about ordinary women who have got like two jobs and are looking after all kinds. Most of the husbands were not working. So I was at a loss at how we could develop the support.

Bill told me about a meeting in the Unemployed Centre which was still being done up at that time, but there were certain rooms being used. So I went down there, and little Charlie Rainford and someone else who was running truckloads up to the miners was there. These were the other two who were doing it, to my knowledge, as early as us. I met them, Greg Coin and Winnie Potter. Bill and Ray Hunter were there as well, and that’s where the Liverpool 8 Miners Aid was formed from.

So then we did all the Holy Land and we spread out. We took a busload of stuff off our estate up to the Miner’s Gala in July. We took a whole load of kids up and they loved it. These kids were right little monkeys but they loved the whole thing. One thing I found when I was involved, some kids were very troublesome on the estate; they could be quite destructive, but they never ever disrupted us. They would say, “Oh Mrs Jones supports the miners.” It was that kind of feeling.

It was about the August/September time and we had a meeting in my kitchen. It was very difficult to organise at this time because the ordinary people off the estate, who were not activist, would come and go. If they saw you out collecting would say, “Hang on, I’ll come and give you a hand.” They would take a load of tote tickets and sell them. But that’s the level that their involvement was.

Anyway there was a discussion about what we should do next because there was only so much that you can do and we were trying to keep the support going. So we said we should go into Granby, we should go into the other half of Liverpool 8. Well there was a big uproar over this. You can’t do that: you can’t do that. It’s white man’s politics. I said what are you talking about white man’s politics? I used to have miners staying with me all the time, miners from Grimethorpe and Derbyshire, quite a lot of pits. At this time I had two Scottish miners staying with me. I said, come on, and I took them down to Granby. In those days in Granby there were lots of young men on the corners and they did eye you up and down if you weren’t part of that community. This was because they felt under siege. I just walked up to them and they said, “Who are you?” And I introduced us and said we had being doing all this miners stuff. I never said any more, they just took the miners off us. They were more than pleased. They said, “Yeah, we’ll help.” Then we had two or three meetings in that area with the black community and the miners on the way that the police were policing the miners strike and policing particularly the black areas or the Granby area of Liverpool and we had packed meetings.

What I always felt was that, people talked about it as being a water shed, which it was, but there was such a class feeling that I’d never experienced since I was a kid. It was so easy to get support for the miners, even going round the pubs as we did later on. There was such a class feeling there and I began to think this is going to get wasted, because all the Left groups were all over the place. Militant came in late into the support groups and then just ran their own support groups, and then you had the SWP who came in about the October. Previous to that they wouldn’t touch them because they said that they were just charities. All kinds of political people starting to mill around and they were following what was actually going on none of them were able to give a lead, which I felt was terrible, because there was such an opportunity there to unite the communities and the miners and at that time there was the council struggles as well.

Which is another thing we tried to do, Bill Hunter and I. I took some miners into where Tony [her son] worked, in the Parks and Gardens. Now they were giving a pound a week docked out of their money, but that’s the level of support it was kept at. There was no perspective of, “Here you have an attack on the communities and council services and here you have an attack on the miners, lets bring them both together.”

I remember at one point walking into the local Labour Club, that must’ve been in the June, when we had started the Miners Aid in the early April, and they wouldn’t even look at me. One of them said to me, “You shouldn’t be doing that. The main thing to do is to ensure that we get back into power in the council.” It was madness. I thought, “What’s going on.” This was a real ‘eye opener’. It’s awful that that was lost, not just the miners losing, but the whole time where people were coming together through need. Of course, by the end of the year the meetings got really big and everyone would be in on them organising their own support groups, all looking for a piece of the pie. Which was dreadful really. We fought on the perspective of uniting all the struggles up and all they could say was ‘General Strike’ or ‘Mass Pickets’. We would say, but mass pickets haven’t worked, the government’s learned by it. But they wouldn’t listen, so we just took miners into the council workers and tried to do what we could anyhow.

When the strike finished I was angry, not at the miners, at the Left. I remember they all went to bits, blaming the miners. The SWP came out with the line that there is no working class anymore; we’ve all become Petty Bourgeois. I felt this real anger. I remember flying at people over it. I flew at this one SWP guy saying that if there was no working class anymore then why are the government attacking all the benefits. They wouldn’t have to it if we didn’t exist. I was angry more than upset because I felt what we could’ve got out of it. There was no real thought, no enlightenment from the Left at what had really happened. They wouldn’t take any responsibility for anything. And that’s when I learned that most of them were actually following; they didn’t wish to give a lead. I used to call them the ‘Hokey Cokeys’; they jump in and out the movement whenever something was going on. What they were expecting was the miners or the movement to do the job for them and if it didn’t then they could blame them. That’s when I became very politically aware of what was needed. I didn’t blame the miners or the council workers. I saw that the people around the left, the people who should’ve been responsible for giving a leadership couldn’t; they were trapped in their own heads.

Of course there was the women, just working class women, both in our support group, at the beginning anyhow, and in the pit villages. Things had changed; lots of the old barriers within the mining communities had broken down. I think the film Billy Elliott shows that really well bye the way. The way the gender thing comes up, the whole question of fighting in a different way in the future, the different way that people are forced to think.

My name was given to various people as one of the people responsible for founding these miners support groups, so I had visits from people from the universities doing theses about the women. I got so angry with them because they would say, “Why do think they’ve gone back to the kitchen sink.” I couldn’t believe they were even asking the question. I said, “What choice have they got. Who’s going to look after the kids? They can’t go of and have careers. That’s the strength of working class women. They’re not motivated by what’s going on in themselves, but by what’s going on outside of themselves. That’s what makes them strong, cause it’s not only an individual question for them, it never has been.” These things used to really infuriate me, because they saw this as, “Oh yeah, all these women have been a struggle and they’ve become class conscious. Why don’t they carry it on?” It wasn’t like that. Those women were moving in defence of their communities and their families. Yeah, it changed their way of thinking, it politicised them. But the actual practicalities of life hadn’t changed. They still had to look after the kids; they still had to clean the houses. There might’ve been more men helping with the cleaning after the strike, but basically the social conditions hadn’t changed that much really. Though most of the women, if not all the women made a huge political leap in the way that they thought of things; which you would understand would happen.

I was treasurer. We had a fund to help with emergencies, electricity getting cut off, that sort of thing. We had people writing to us and we would send them money, so we helped individual families that way as well.
When it went from the Unemployed Centre, it was done differently. It was more under the control of them and the city council. But when we were collecting it went directly to the mineworkers or to the families themselves. I did have occasions when a miner’s wife turned up on the step, desperate, and you just had to make a judgement on your feet. There were times when you got a charlatan as well. For instance, I had a miner staying with me every weekend for a month before I learned that he was back at work. This was towards the end of the strike and here is a funny story about it. On a Thursday evening I used to buy this big sponge cake and we’d all have a piece. Elaine was about eleven at the time. We’d all had a piece, and there was a piece left. You know what kids are like, she was going mad, she wanted this piece. I said to her, “You’re not having it, it’s Stuarts. Elaine don’t be greedy you’ve had a piece.” You know how kids go, strutting around. And the first thing she said when we found out that he was a scab was, “And you let him have that piece of cake!” She must’ve been seething over it.

There were lots of funny stories. I remember the night before we had the first social on June 30th when our house got broken into. I had 200 and odd pound hidden in books. There was my rent money kept in a little cup in the bureau. And they had got in and taken this money put not the money for the miners. The next morning I had got the police in. So I had the police in the front room and all the miners, who were there for the social that night, in the kitchen at the back. It was like showdown at High Noon. There was an awful lot of policeman for such a small break-in and I told the miners not to move out of the kitchen. Afterwards, some kids in the area found out who had taken my money and they sorted them, but that was the loyalty around the area. It wasn’t to me, it was that they really believed what I was doing; it was absolutely brilliant, “That’s where they collect for the miners.” You know. I had a big poster in the bedroom window saying “Collection Point for the Miners”. And if I walked around the estate all the kids would want to know you. It sowed that, practically, at certain times, regardless of the social problems and the problems that young people have, how they could be overcome. These kids who were just little demons gave no trouble. With others they could be doing something like breaking wood off somebody’s fence and they would get a load of abuse. And yet with me I would get “Hello Mrs Jones, how’s the miners?” They always had a great respect for our family because of that, years afterwards.

Hardman Street had a collection point that started up later in the strike, about October/November maybe later than that. Cause I met Tommy Devany and Lesley Kenny when I was doing dingle and we are still friends to this day. I split up with Tony in the January (85) and I was more organising from Town. I didn’t have miners staying with me anymore because I wasn’t at home. I hated it (the set up in Hardman St) because it was all about everything having to go through their meetings. Everyone had to have a permit. You couldn’t collect without them permitting you. It was about control. It was a good idea to have a centre to organise things, but most of the support groups wouldn’t affiliate to Hardman St at all because they distrusted the opportunism. There was opportunism unfortunately, but this is the way things are. I didn’t like it as much as anyone else. Most groups, wisely, did organise independently if they could and took their stuff up to the mines themselves. But the problem was when we started to do collections of money, which was always done, now it was more difficult because you needed a permit from Hardman St., or you could be stopped. Some areas, such as Wavertree carried on regardless. They never put a penny through Hardman St., and I think they were right to do that because they wanted to keep that link from the community to the miners and they didn’t want anyone to take any glory for it. By the end of the miners strike there was a lot of different political differences on all kinds of things. Wavertree, for example, were all in the Labour Party, all of them. They organised within the Labour Party and outside, doing collections at supermarkets and places like that and then you had others, like me, who weren’t in any party, although I considered myself a Trotskyist though I wasn’t active. And then there was small, little groups like Mill View, ‘Harry the Hat’ the caretaker organised on a regular basis collections of money and food. That was like a little support group of its own that fed directly to the miners.

There was meetings where all the groups came together at Hardman St. It was a bit of a ‘bun fight’ really, because by this time you had the Militant, the SWP and other groups were all fighting for their corner. The perspective of the Militant and the SWP was ‘Mass Pickets’ that was the only thing that would end the dispute. Then you had others on the Left who were calling for a general strike. Which, bye the way, I agreed with, but what I disagreed with was, nobody was saying how you were going to get it; you don’t just get it by screaming for it. And then you had other people who were just in the Labour Party who just supported the miners. The there were others like Bill Hunter, myself and a few others who tried to develop the campaign into, not just mass pickets, but uniting with the councils and council workers themselves and developing committees in the communities in defence of the miners. But that really did piss me off. Because they all came in when the strike was seven or eight months old and none of them were fighting for what was best for the miners or the working class communities. They were all fighting to promote themselves first, and develop members, which a lot of them did by the way.