Battle of Orgreave: 'It was a peaceful picket but we walked into a set-up'

Experienced pickets, who were used to roadblocks when trying to picket in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, instead found themselves welcomed into Orgreave and advised where to park-up. Many were subsequently corralled into a field, with a huge police presence at the bottom end blocking access to the coking plant and mounted police and officers with dogs on either side.

The confined area was relatively easy to film when violence erupted and featured heavily on television news. Although footage did include images of police officers attacking miners, including baton-strikes over the head, the BBC attracted criticism for how it depicted mounted police charges apparently following missile throwing from pickets.

An Independent Police Complaints Commission report in 2015 included reference to the collapse of a trial of miners for riot and noted: “The prosecution… had to concede that much of the missile throwing followed, rather than preceded, the use of mounted officers. This was also evidenced from news camera footage which (as is well known) was initially broadcast in the reverse order by the BBC.”

David Nixon, a miner at Hatfield Main at the time, described the day as a “media event” filmed by cameras largely positioned behind police lines.

He said: “It was like ‘come on in’. It was like it was pre-planned, 100 per cent. Without doubt it was arranged. It was choreographed.

“The media was… filming from the police side. If they can show all these pickets are here, show them being unruly, they’re not here to protest in a dignified way but they’re here to create disturbance and trouble and the police are here to defend the law, then it looks good media-wise.”

For Johnny Wood, a Grimethorpe miner, the confrontation was stage-managed “without a shadow of a doubt. That was Margaret Thatcher’s glory day. I bet she was watching it with a big smile on her face.

“I think that was the strategy, that the government gave orders to the police to frighten us to death, arrest us, beat us up – and they did beat us up. We didn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance. We were put into a trap and we were surrounded. There were dogs there, there were horses, there were riot vans there and the mass amount of police that were there were unbelievable.”

Kevin Horne, a miner at Barnburgh pit at the time, said Orgreave set a precedent: “After Orgreave things changed altogether because they tried to get people back to work in Yorkshire and in South Wales and Scotland and then it became big pickets in little villages and police from all over the country came and abused people in their own villages.

“And that was all about Orgreave. They got away with it there and thought we can get away with it in other places and that’s what they did.”