20 YEARS ON: LEGACY OF THE MINERS' STRIKE

Feb 1 2004

By Colin Wills

THE young bodies are discarded as casually as sweet papers. Crammed into wheelie bins or left in sheds, shop doorways and derelict houses.

These grim surroundings have become the last resting places of a lost generation. They should have grown up to be proud, productive men, following in their fathers’ footsteps, hacking coal from the ground. Instead at the Hope drop-in centre in Worksop – once the pulsing heart of the Nottinghamshire coalfield – the talk is only of funerals.

Twenty years after the the most bitter dispute of modern times, the 1984 miners’ strike, children and grandchildren of the defeated miners are dying. Virtually all the youngsters at Hope are victims of a drugs crisis of epidemic proportions.

Heroin addiction in Britain’s coalfields, where the pits were ruthlessly closed by Margaret Thatcher, is running at 27 per cent above the national average. In Wakefield heroin cases have soared by 3,361 per cent in four years. In South Wales drugs campaigners say the valleys are “awash with heroin.”

MP John Mann describes the situation in his Bassetlaw constituency in Nottinghamshire as “appalling.” Everyone here has lost at least one friend, their names recited quietly, the terror of their last moments recalled almost in whispers.

One was 29-year-old Kelvin Baker whose death shocked people who thought they had become unshockable.

“Kelvin? Oh yeah, they found him in a rubbish skip next to a block of flats,” says 19-year-old John Proctor, thin as a stick under his England football shirt. “He collapsed and died after shooting up. It was his mates who dumped him there. Desperation really.

“They didn’t want to phone the police ’cos a lot of drugs were being done in the house where he’d been staying and they were scared of being charged with something. Maybe manslaughter or attempted murder if they’d helped him inject.

“I heard they tried everything to bring him round. Ran a cold bath and threw him into it, burned him with a cigarette lighter to try and shock his system back to life. But it was no good. So they got him out of the house and that’s where he ended up.”

John Proctor knows all about death and funerals. “I went to Stuart Turner’s not long ago,” he says. “He was a good friend. I didn’t stay long as his mum wasn’t keen on having drug addicts hanging around. I went back later and left a bunch of flowers.”

Thirty-year-old Stuart’s death three months ago illustrates how heroin maintains its grip to the end. He was in hospital with pneumonia and kidney failure as his body finally gave up after years of heroin abuse. Yet a craving for heroin drove him to get out his hospital bed and discharge himself to get one last hit. Within 24 hours he was dead.

In the face of such events, no-one is under any illusions about the risks they run.

John Proctor is typical of many living in a community where the dream of a secure future has disappeared. The son of a miner who lost his job, John now lives with his mother, Dawn, 37, who is also a heroin addict.

They are trying to get off it together…so far unsuccessfully. Most days they survive on a prescribed heroin substitute, but they still need heroin to sleep at night. “It helps blot out the pain and makes you forget,” says Dawn.

There is much to forget in both their lives. Dawn, an attractive woman, worked in saunas and massage parlours to help finance her habit. John has been jailed three times for shoplifting and is banned from every shop in Worksop. They both need around £60 a day to feed their addictions.

Dawn has no doubt the personal disasters that have befallen so many here stem directly from the strike. “There were six pits around here,” she says. “After the strike they closed one after the other. There was no work, nothing at all. A lot of marriages broke up because of the strain of it all. Mine did. All we seemed to do was argue and fight.”

Worksop, outwardly a serene market town, is surrounded by pit villages, housing estates grouped around mine workings now landscaped and flattened. When the pits closed, a way of life that had sustained generations of families disappeared overnight

“When lads reached 16, an official from the National Coal Board would come to the school to sign them up,” said Mr Mann. “The following Monday they reported to the pit.”

And there was genuine pride in the work and a degree of togetherness unequalled in any other industry. Miners walked to the pit together, drank together, looked out for one another underground.

When the “Pit Closed” notices went up, all this evaporated. “Heroin filled the gap,” says Donna Marsh, whose son Gary, 22, is an addict.

She has paid £250 for Gary to have an implant which temporarily stops the craving. “It gives me six weeks of peace,” she says. “Six weeks of not having to worry where he is at 3am. The trouble is it wears off.” Donna, a helper at Hope, knows the real solution goes beyond implants. “The problem runs deep in a community,” she says. “When they shut the pits a whole way of life finished. These were one-industry villages and youngsters were left stranded. There was no work – and there were no role models for them either.

“When lads started down the pit they were taken out for a drink that night at the Miners’ Club by their workmates. You could call it an initiation. The older miners became their mentors. There was discipline, like being in the Army. That went when the pits closed.”

Family life was thrown into turmoil. Men who were used to being breadwinners rotted away at home. Women went out to work, often only getting the minimum wage packaging food. Couples split up and children drifted. Then the drug dealers moved in.

“We were targeted,” says Sandy Smith, who runs Hope. “No doubt about it. The dealers exploited the miners’ pain.” Heroin quickly became the drug of choice and at £5 a wrap even cheaper than cannabis or getting drunk on lager. And those who aren’t hooked came under increasing pressure every day.

“We’ve got an inner city problem without inner city resources,” says Mr Mann. In his constituency, there are 1,200 addicts in a population of 104,000. “But we are adamant we are not going to be beaten by it,” he says.

His initiatives include persuading GPs to start large-scale treatment programmes and employing two specialist nurses to visit primary schools and target “at risk” children – those with family members who are already addicts. “We may not see the benefits for some years, but in time it’s going to pay dividends,” he says.

But too many coalfields are in agony. Hope alone is dealing with 450 addicts and at least 10 have died in the last two years. “We’ve had bodies dumped everywhere you can imagine,” says Sandy. “Often their pockets have been gone through for drugs or money. Heroin is a terrible thing when it gets hold. Nothing else matters.”

Twice a week, addicts come to Hope to exchange their needles, taking away new ones in batches of 50. Some have exhausted all their veins and inject directly into their eyeballs. Those who inject into their crippled limbs risk permanent disability and even amputation

“Some of them end up in wheelchairs or on walking sticks,” says drugs campaigner Josie Potts. “You see them hobbling round town and you think, ‘This lad is either going to have his leg amputated or he will die’.”

Young Sean illustrates the desperation of a heroin addict, limping into Hope with a broken ankle after leaping from his bedroom window when his parents had locked him in. “Me mum and dad had locked me in to do my turkey – wean me off drugs, but I couldn’t cope. I was going crazy, so I opened the window and jumped out into the street.”

Sean’s dad was a miner and given the chance he would have followed in his footsteps. “My future would have been taken care of,” he says, “I wouldn’t be like I am, wasting my days.”

There are so many like Sean – not 24-hour club people, but youngsters turning to drugs to cope with what they see as a life devoid of meaning.

Another addict, Joanne, takes me to a disused house which she uses to inject. It is a terrible place, full of damp, old cushions, rotting food and litter. She came from a family of miners and can just remember a childhood which once seemed so safe, so secure.

Some schoolfriends even carried banners on marches during the strike. “Afterwards everything just seemed to collapse round here,” she says. “We were looking for any way out. Now... well, I’d sooner be dead than go on like this.”

She goes shoplifting every day to get the £50 to £80 she needs for her heroin. At 26, Joanne feels she is beyond redemption. “All I want to be is normal and to do what other people my age do,” she says. “Have a home, a nice man, a family. But, as it is, I might just as well wish for the moon.”

Every addict needs around £15,000-a-year to support their habit, which means they have to steal or shoplift £80,000 of goods which are then sold on for a fraction of their value.

The heroin-fuelled crimewave in Manton, a former pit village outside Worksop, has reached such epidemic proportions it is now known as The Bronx. One addict even stole her baby grand-daughter’s toys to get a fix.

To drive around its estates with Josie is to come face to face with a generation in pain. “See those two girls there,” she says, pointing at two youngsters crossing the road arm in arm. “Both addicts. Their children have been taken away from them. I’ve lost count of the cases where the courts have given custody to grandparents because the parents are addicts.”

Josie, 57, a miner’s wife, has seen things she will never forget working as a drug counsellor. “I went to a funeral the other day,” she says. “A lovely lad. His dad was a miner, I used to sit with him and his wife in the miners’ club. This lad...oh, it would break your heart. He was so thin, he never ate because of the drugs. Eventually his body gave up and he died of pneumonia.

“A week before he died he asked me to lend him £3.50. He said it was for his electric meter, but I knew he wanted it for heroin. ‘I’ll pay you back, Josie, I really will,’ he said, but I knew it would never happen. You might say I shouldn’t have given him the money, but I’ve seen kids on withdrawal and it’s the worst thing I’ve known. They call it ‘rattling’. It’s the right word because even their bones seem to shake.”

Yet it was so so different when the pits were bustling and families so close they went on holiday together. There were galas and festivals and street parties.

Josie has no doubt the aftermath of the 1984 strike is the cause of all this unhappiness. “It killed off a generation,” she says. “Maggie Thatcher didn’t know what a hell on earth she was creating when she shut the pits. Or maybe she did, and just didn’t care.

“I went down to Madam Tussaud’s in London a few years ago and stood in front of her dummy in all its finery.

“I know you, lady,’ I said to it. ‘And I’ll never stop hating you. You destroyed everything I loved’.”