Witnessing The Brutal Battle Of Orgreave
As a young radio journalist, Sky's David Bowden questioned using horses to charge striking miners and was berated by police.
Wednesday 4 May 2016 17:56, UK
It is 32 years since the so called Battle of Orgreave, the bloodiest single episode in the hard-fought miners鈥� strike of the mid-1980s.
No one who was there in the blazing sunshine of a South Yorkshire high summer’s day will ever forget what happened, be they miner, police officer or journalist.
I was a young radio reporter at the time and had a better vantage point than most on the day.
I arrived at the Orgreave coking plant, between Sheffield and Rotherham, in the early hours of 18 June - well before the thousands of picketers and police - and parked my car in the jaws of the coking works’ entrance.
Every truck that came into the plant and left had to drive past me. Every truck, bombarded by a volley of missiles by the miners who screamed "scab" at the drivers cowering behind metal grilles covering the lorry windows, hurtled past my microphone.
As the first trucks sped in, the pickets and police faced off in the narrow road in front of the plant.
Thousands of miners were hemmed in to the tarmac by the rows of riot-clad police officers from forces up and down the country.
As the lorries roared in, the strikers and the enforcers of the law pushed and shoved. Bricks, bottles and other objects rained down on the lines of police, who responded with truncheons drawn and shields up. And so it went on for much of the morning until the police changed their tactics.
Behind the ranks of officers on foot, a couple of dozen police on horseback formed up awaiting the order to charge. Once it came, the foot police parted to allow what was now a v-shaped phalanx of cantering heavy horses to force their way into the packed miners. Long nightstick truncheons were brought down on one side and then the other onto the pickets below.
It was a brutal turning point in the protest. I questioned live-on-air the safety of sending several tonnes of horse flesh into a penned-in crowd of people, something I would be berated for by a senior police officer later that day.
The horse charge scattered the protest and forced the pickets up the road away from the plant entrance and effectively brought to an end the morning’s proceedings at Orgreave.
What followed was a surreal hiatus when both sides retreated to have a picnic lunch in the fields surrounding the coke works.
Many of the miners had seen enough and dispersed, never before having faced such uncompromising police tactics.
For those who stayed, there was more to come.
Now isolated in the fields away from the coke works, the miners found themselves once again pursued by mounted police and their colleagues on foot. There were, throughout the day, scores of arrests, but a subsequent trial collapsed as police evidence was found wanting.
Now in the wake of the inquest into the deaths of 96 Liverpool supporters who died at Hillsborough in Sheffield in 1989 - which was highly critical of South Yorkshire Police - there are calls for a public inquiry into how the same police force and some of the same senior officers conducted themselves during and after the Battle of Orgreave.
There are allegations that to lay the blame for what happened on the striking miners.
The renewed push for a public enquiry comes as the interim Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, Dave Jones, made it clear he would be willing to listen to activists and the families of the 96 who died at Hillsborough.