Lives in Cricket No 49 - Enid Bakewell

91 Chapter Sixteen Miners’ strike Newstead’s railway links had mostly closed already, but far more traumatic for Newstead, for Nottinghamshire, and indeed for the country than the railway closures was the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and its aftermath. In some parts of the country it may have passed into history (though miners’ support groups flourished in some surprising places), but absolutely not in Nottinghamshire. The strike was not supported in Nottinghamshire as it was in other areas, with the argument that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) should have held a full ballot being advanced. It was also true that self-interest suggested that the Nottinghamshire pits were modern and efficient and so apparently at no risk of closure. Enid’s father was a strong union man, a member of the Colliery Deputies and Shotfirers Union (NACODS). She had awful memories of the strike with the rival unions being very much at odds: ‘ I was not involved in any support groups… a friend of mine lived half way down the road to the Badger Box pub… Cantrills had a brick thrown through their window, and I knew them from the school where all my three children attended, but I did not ask about the incident.’ The full story of the strike has probably not been told even now, with papers redacted when they would normally have been released under the 30-year rule, and there is still a demand for an enquiry into what really happened at Orgreave with the ‘battle’ between striking miners and the police. But it has left scars and, as Enid says, ‘ the main problem was that the mines and the railways were the life of the village and both were closed down with nothing to give work to the young guys … I saw grown men trying to find pieces of coal from the fields where the supplies for the power stations had been stored .’