In South Yorkshire, as in other mining communities of Britain, the miners’ strike of 1984–85 and its aftermath are still seared in collective memory. The bitterness and the anger still burn about what decent people endured and only through stubborn pride survived. It was one of the worst betrayals of working people in our nation’s history. We are still living with its consequences, including the rise of far right, demagogic, populist politicians with their simplistic slogans.
Historians now mark one particular episode of that clash between the Thatcher government and the National Union of Mineworkers – the so-called Battle of Orgreave, which took place on 18 June 2024, exactly 40 years ago – as not only a turning point in that particular dispute, and the crushing of trade union power in Britain, but also a crucial moment in the de-industrialisation of the North. On the direct instructions of government, armed police brutally and ruthlessly crushed the secondary pickets at Orgreave Coking Plant.
In the decades that followed, Britain effectively ceased to be a major manufacturing nation, but focused on service industries such as finance, banking and legal services, predominantly in the south-eastern corner of England. With little or no investment in the old industrial heartlands – a situation massively worsened by Brexit and the loss of the crucial EU Regional Development Fund – the poverty and destitution of so many former prosperous towns and cities in the North has become a national tragedy.
A voice for the North
So who is there to speak up for the North, for Yorkshire and the neglected mining communities in particular? One such voice now emerging is Mike Padgett, the son of a miner, who grew up in a mining community in South Yorkshire. Mike lived through, witnessed and shared the traumatic events, privations and suffering of the miners’ strike and its bitter aftermath, even after the last pithead wheel had been dismantled, slag heaps renatured with trees and old colliery railway branches turned into cycleways.
Mike’s powerful new novel SCRAP is set in the early 2000s, a decade after the closure of Brodworth (sic) pit. The book’s hero and narrator is a 50-year-old former miner, Phil Steele, whose house was repossessed when the mortgage repayments could not be met, and who is now living in a decaying terrace with his wife Deb and teenage son Gav. He is forced to retrain as a plumber. The course is itself a process of constant humiliation from arrogant and rapacious course managers.
The book’s title SCRAP both refers to the scrap metal that the trainees have to work with, but also symbolises a whole community thrust onto a collective scrap heap. Even his retraining course has to be paid for, and Phil has to constantly seek odd jobs and causal labour to survive, sometimes on the margins of legality. He suffers constant battles with a local corrupt developer-entrepreneur Jack Jagger who refuses to pay for a garden pool construction job Phil has done for him.
In post-Thatcher England law-breaking and criminality evade prosecution, and there is an ever-widening gap between the working poor and the rich and powerful who can evade the law and payment of taxes.
Out of the scrap heap comes something of value
Yet Phil has one dream to keep his sense of self respect and dignity – his BSA Golden Flash – a classic motor bike that he is painstakingly restoring from, yes, scrap parts he can scrounge and, with his new plumbing skills, some bits he can create by hand. A powerful element in the novel is Mike’s empathy with and understanding of male psychology, especially working-class men who may not have the words to express their feelings and creativity, but can do so with their hands, by recreating in Phil’s case an engineering marvel.
But this so easily merges into obsession to the detriment of his family. It is his wife Deb, working to set up her little cafe, who ultimately pulls Phil and their son Gav through their parallel crises. Deb, perhaps the most powerful character in the book, is herself an enduring symbol of the resilience and tenacity of the miners’ wives who pulled their menfolk through the enduring tragedies of the miners’ strike.
This a book of righteous anger at the way both individuals and whole communities have been treated, as relevant now in austerity England as it was in the decade after the wiping out of the mining industry, with a continuing lack of any Regional Industrial Strategy or national investment to replace it, apart from a few patronising Whitehall ‘Levelling-up’ handouts.
Continuing Northern literary traditions
Yet SCRAP also follows an important northern literary tradition – that of the working-class northern, mainly South and West Yorkshire novelists of the 1960s and 70s, names like John Braine, David Storey, Stan Barstow and, above all, Barry Hines. Hines’s 1968 novel Kestrel for a Knave is not only now regarded as one of the most important novels of the later 20th century, but inspired Ken Loach’s superb Kes, again recognised as one of the most significant British films of all time. In the USA the film had to have subtitles because of much of the not all-that-broad Yorkshire dialect was deemed too difficult for Americans – and maybe even some Southern English people – to understand.
By not entirely remarkable coincidence, Mike Padgett attended Longscar Secondary School in Barnsley where Barry Hines taught physical education and English, and Mike has already achieved a kind of immortality as one of the young lads in the soccer match refereed with comic brilliance by Sheffield actor Brian Glover.
So at last we have a writer of talent with the skill to write about working-class life in South Yorkshire a generation after Hines, exploring the tragedy of lives ruined, exploited by an uncaring state, and how individuals and the community are fighting back. The book ends on a positive note where, through sheer guts, determination and hard work, Phil and Debbie and their son Gavin triumph and escape their nightmare.
Support needed for publishing outside the mainstream
Yet the only way this book was published was because Mike, a retired gas engineer, financed its publication himself through a book production company. Publishing in the UK is predominantly London-centred, the big publishing houses working with book chains and ruthlessly efficient PR companies, using the literary festival circuits to promote and often overhype sometimes mediocre ego-polishing narratives and escapist romances of little real literary value apart from as a soporific beach read.
A tough, gritty book based on real life, with dialogue as sharp and witty as anything you will hear on any bus or in any pub in Barnsley or Doncaster, has no chance to get onto the literary circuit. The notable exception is the small not-for-profit Promoting Yorkshire Authors group who have helped Mike and other worthwhile Yorkshire writers with local book fairs.
How badly we need to see the revival of regional bodies such as Yorkshire Arts to promote the creative industries. Over the past few years these industries have suffered massive cuts in financial support, despite, as both Kestrel for a Nave and Kes proved, literature and film being massive worldwide money earners. Talents like that of Mike Padgett are shamefully neglected by our metropolitan-focused media.
![Mike Padgett](https://www.todaysauthormagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Mike-Padgett.jpg)
Discover for yourself. Mike Padgett’s SCRAP (Grosvenor House ISBN 978-1-80381-396-7) is available in local independent bookshops or via Amazon.
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