I was in an antique shop a
couple of weeks ago. It wasn't the kind of place where they were
selling stuff for thousands of pounds. Quite the opposite. It was a
two and three quid type of joint. The displayed wares were
essentially a couple of steps up from junk.
Interesting junk.
Carefully chosen junk. You know the kind of stuff.
My eyes were drawn to a
mug. It was oddly shaped and home to a sheen of long gathered dust. A
date reached out a me. 1984.
The wild time. Not the the
cold, vicious world of George Orwell. A much hotter time when Britain
teetered on the edge of complete mayhem. I was a year out of college
and living in damp terrace in the heart of Moss Side. The North felt
like an armed camp as the Miner's Strike raged through the summer and
into a dark, festering winter. Trying to get to Liverpool away matches meant endless games of cat and mouse to get round the road blocks.
Any car with young guys in it was deemed to be evidence of the 'Enemy Within'. Trying to claim you were on the way to the match was futile.
Hard faces on the other side of the car window saw you as one thing
and thing only: flying pickets.
Fully paid up members of
Arthur Scargill's army, hell bent on making it through the check points to
scream and howl at the gates of a Nottinghamshire pit.
At the time, lots of voices said the
great Miner's Strike was a turning point. The last chance to stop the
advance of untrammeled capitalism. And most of the time these voices were
mocked and derided and sneered at. Come on guys. Bit over the top,
don't you think?
Except the voices were
anything but over the top.
And with the defeat of the
Miners in 1985 came the long and slow decline to where we find
ourselves today.
The mug said 1984. Why?
Because it was a commemorative mug. 1834 to 1984. The 150th
anniversary of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Six farm labourers from Dorset
who swore a secret oath to a trade union. An enraged British State
threw the kitchen sink and sentenced them to penal transportation to
Australia. How Maggie must have yearned to do the exact same kind of
thing to Arthur Scargill and his merry men. Instead she had to
make do with beating them to a bloody pulp on the sun drenched fields
of Orgreave.
In 1984.
The mug made me smile. How
much? £3. Like I said, it was a £3 kind of place. I shelled out
knowing I had the perfect home for this particular relic.
John.
First Base's very own
Union warhorse who had been fighting the good fight for forty years
and more.
I got to know John ten
years ago. Councillor Archie Dryburgh called me to say a Union mate
of his had recently retired but still wanted to keep his hand in. He
passed me John's details and we met up. It turned out John had
represented the workers at Brown Brothers, a meat processing plant in
Kelloholm. I asked if he knew the bosses. He did, but a rueful smile
suggested the relationship had been less than cordial at times. So
how would he fancy getting in touch and trying to persuade them to
donate packets of sliced ham to the foodbank?
The very idea made him
chuckle. Sure. Why not? What was the worst that could happen?
Two weeks later he called me with appointment. We duly rolled into the boardroom and I asked the
directors if John had been a bit of a handful. Cue rueful grins and
shaking heads. A bit of a handful? A bloody nightmare more like!
But they accepted he had
been a completely fair and square bloody nightmare. He had their
absolute respect even though he had often make their lives a misery.
And of course they would be more than happy to provide packets of
sliced ham to the foodbank.
Seventy packets a week.
For ten years. 35,000 packets in all. Let's say £1.50 a packet.
£52,000 in total. All because the directors of the company held the union
warhorse in such high regard.
It was a glimpse of the
world as it had once upon a time been. Before Orgreave. Before
Thatcher.
Before 1984.
Over the next ten years
John did various bits and bats to help us out, not least making the
seventy mile round trip up and down the Nith Valley with our weekly
donation of sliced ham.
I couldn't have been less
surprised when my phone rang on day two of the lockdown. It was John.
Of course it was John.
Stepping up just like he
always stepped up. He told me he had already volunteered to help out at the
hospital. Was there anything he could do for us?
There was. I asked if he
would be happy to make deliveries of food parcels in and around his
home village of Thornhill. Of course he could, except he went
further. A country mile further. Within a few weeks he had set up a
whole new foodbank complete with premises, volunteers and collection
points. He mobilised the village via Facebook and the village bought
in with donations of homemade jam and cakes and cash. To start with
I delivered most of the food he needed to keep up with the growing
number of deliveries. Border News did a piece on the new set up and
the community upped its game to another level.
Soon my services were
barely required. My weekly deliveries were soon little more than a
few pies and packs of eggs. John shopped far and wide to get hold
of the best bargains. He made the lives of the local supermarket
managers a misery. He attracted a great team of volunteers.
Absolutely everything was build from the bottom up and soon the
Thornhill story was being talked about across the region.
Two weeks ago John was out
and about on one of his shopping runs when he was hit by an immense
wall of pain. Somehow he managed to drive himself to A&E, Lord
alone knows how. Soon he was in an ambulance speeding north to
hospital in Glasgow.
They operated and it
didn't go well.
And we lost him in the
early ours of Tuesday morning.
We lost one of the good
guys. One of the really good guys. John was as old school as old
school gets. He spent a whole life going out to bat for the little
guy. Not with high sounding words and half baked Marxist drivvle.
Instead he was forever practical. Hands on. Face to face. Ferocious
when required. Nice as nine pence when it was a good tactic to be
nice as nine pence. He got the job done. Saw things through.
He was living, breathing
proof that Maggie's thugs didn't prevail under the burning summer sun
of Orgreave.
And he leaves a hole. A
very large hole. The volunteers who rallied to his cause are
determined to make sure his last legacy lives on. As are all of us at First Base.
So farewell John. You
fought the good fight right the way to the very end.
I only wish I had been
able to give you the mug.
Here is the Border News piece.
