The Battle of Orgreave was a violent confrontation on 18 June 1984 between pickets and officers of the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) and other police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, at a British Steel Corporation (BSC) coking plant at Orgreave, in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. It was a pivotal event in the 1984–1985 UK miners' strike, and one of the most violent clashes in British industrial history.
Seventy-one picketers were charged with riot and 24 with violent disorder. At the time, riot was punishable by life imprisonment. The trials collapsed when the evidence given by the police was deemed "unreliable". Gareth Peirce, who acted as solicitor for some of the pickets, said that the charge of riot had been used "to make a public example of people, as a device to assist in breaking the strike", while Michael Mansfield called it "the worst example of a mass frame-up in this country this century".
In June 1991, the SYP paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution. A new inquiry was set up in 2025 to investigate the event.
Background
Transport of coal and coke
The Orgreave Coking Works, where coal was turned into coke for use in steel production, was regarded by National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader Arthur Scargill as crucial. Early in the strike, British Steel plants had been receiving "dispensations", picket-permitted movements of coal to prevent damage to their furnaces. However, it was found that more than the permitted amount of coal had been delivered, so action was taken.
In the early days of the 1984–85 strike, the NUM made a decision to picket the integrated steel complexes. Scargill invoked the notion of the old Triple Alliance whereby the unions in coal, steel and rail were bound to support one another, and asked steelworkers not to handle deliveries of coal. Bill Sirs of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC) rejected such calls on the grounds that industrial action by steelworkers at the integrated complexes could incapacitate the rolling mills and billet forges, and cause job losses. Sirs stated, in defiance of Scargill, that his members would continue to handle any fuel that presented itself.
There was also some opposition within the NUM to the picketing of the steel plants, as closures in the steel industry could reduce demand for coal and lead to job losses in the coal industry. Mick McGahey, the deputy leader of the NUM, was particularly concerned about the picketing of the Ravenscraig steelworks in Scotland, which he had campaigned to keep open, and negotiated agreements to maintain supplies of coal to the plant.
Picketing was largely unsuccessful at the plants of Ravenscraig, Llanwern and Port Talbot, which were all close to deep-water ports and had a range of methods of receiving coal supplies. The plant at Scunthorpe was inland and thus more vulnerable to picketing. The cokeworks at Orgreave became a target of the NUM pickets in an attempt to deny supplies of coal and coke to Scunthorpe.
An agreement between the NUM and ISTC over deliveries of 15,700 tonnes of coal per week to Scunthorpe broke down after an explosion in the Queen Mary blast furnace at the plant on 21 May 1984. It took two hours to douse the flames and a further eight hours to stop the liquid iron bursting through the brickwork. This was considered a result of the poor quality of coal supplies. Attempts by the ISTC to persuade the NUM to deliver more coal did not bring immediate results, with the divisional official Roy Bishop writing on both the physical dangers to the workers by the Queen Mary and the possibility of irreversible damage to the furnace. As the NUM did not respond immediately, British Steel decided to act quickly to find alternative supplies. The company ordered a large consignment of coal from Poland to be delivered to Flixborough, Lincolnshire, and spoke to every haulage company it had ever used to arrange for non-unionised hauliers to transport the coal. In addition, an order was made for 5,000 tonnes of top-quality coke to be delivered from Orgreave to Scunthorpe.
A sympathetic steelworker informed the Barnsley NUM of the plans on 22 May. Although there had been some picketing at Orgreave since the start of the strike, 23 May is generally considered the beginning of the major struggle between NUM pickets and the police to stop deliveries of coke from the plant. 18 June, which is often known as the Battle of Orgreave, is generally considered the end of this period.
Changes in policing tactics
Mass picketing had proved successful at the Battle of Saltley Gate in Saltley, Birmingham, during the 1972 miners' strike. At Saltley Coke Works, 30,000 pickets and supporters led by Scargill had faced 800 police officers, and on 10 February 1972 Sir Derrick Capper, the chief constable of Birmingham City Police, ordered the coking plant to close its gates "in the interests of public safety". Closure of the Saltley works secured victory for the NUM and nine days later the Conservative government of Edward Heath agreed to meet the union's demands.
As a direct result of Saltley, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) established the National Reporting Centre (NRC) which would be "operationalised in times of industrial or political crisis [to provide] a coordinated national response to demands on policing". The NRC assumed the power – "endorsed by the Home Secretary" – to deploy police officers from any force in the country to areas of "high tension" and "across force boundaries without the knowledge or consent of local police authorities". Speaking in October 1984, John Alderson, the former deputy chief constable of Dorset Police, criticised the NRC as a "de facto national police". In addition, events in the early 1980s, such as the national steel strike of 1980 and the riots in inner-city areas such as Brixton and Toxteth, had led police forces to train officers to deal with mass protests differently. For example, officers during the 1981 riots had been left using dustbin lids to protect themselves from missiles, whereas the police at Orgreave had all been equipped with riot shields.
Riot at Maltby and death of Joe Green
The Battle of Orgreave came amidst events that caused tensions to escalate in the Yorkshire coalfield. In Maltby, roughly 6 miles (9.7 km) from Orgreave, a large group of young mineworkers besieged the town's police station on Saturday, 9 June. There was a heavy police response that left the town cordoned off for several days and created local resentment.
On Friday, 15 June, an underground worker from Kellingley Colliery, Joe Green was killed while picketing. As Green was trying to dissuade lorries from delivering fuel to Ferrybridge "A" Power Station, he was fatally struck by a trailer.
This came after the death of David Jones in controversial circumstances at Ollerton on 15 March 1984, and also a similar incident in the 1972 strike in which picketer Freddie Matthews was killed by a lorry that mounted the pavement to cross a picket line. Speaking at a well-attended rally in nearby Wakefield on Sunday 17 June, Scargill made an impassioned plea to close Orgreave with mass picketing.
Events
The NUM deployed 5,000 pickets from across the UK, who planned to use sheer numbers ("mass picketing") to prevent access to Orgreave by strike-breaking lorries that collected coke for use at Scunthorpe. The South Yorkshire Police (SYP) were determined not to see a repeat of 1972's Battle of Saltley Gate – where 30,000 pickets had overwhelmed 800 police officers – and deployed around 6,000 officers from eighteen different forces at Orgreave, equipped with riot gear and supported by police dogs and 42 mounted police officers.
Robert East et al, writing in the Journal of Law and Society in 1985, suggested that rather than maintaining order and upholding the law, "the police intended that Orgreave would be a 'battle' where, as a result of their preparation and organisation, they would 'defeat' the pickets". Michael Mansfield said: "They wanted to teach the miners a lesson – a big lesson, such that they wouldn't come out in force again." Civil liberties pressure group Liberty has said: "There was a riot. But it was a police riot."
Having corralled the pickets into a field overlooking the coke works, the SYP positioned officers equipped with long riot shields at the bottom of the field and mounted police and dogs to either side. A road along one side of the field allowed the mounted police to deploy rapidly, and a railway cutting at the top of the field made retreat by the pickets difficult and dangerous. When the pickets surged forward at the arrival of the first convoy of lorries, SYP Assistant Chief Constable Anthony Clement ordered a mounted charge against them. It was "a serious overreaction" and the miners responded by throwing stones and other missiles at the police lines. Clement ordered two further mounted advances, and the third advance was supported by "short shield" snatch squads who followed the mounted police, "delivering baton beatings to the unarmed miners". There followed a lull of several hours, during which many pickets left the scene. The coking plant had closed for the day and no more lorries were due to arrive. Those pickets that remained in the field were sunbathing or playing football and posed no threat to the police or the plant. By now "massively outnumbering" the pickets, the police advanced again and launched another mounted charge. Officers pursued the pickets out of the field and into Orgreave village, where Clement ordered a "mounted police canter" which Hunt describes as an "out-of-control police force [charging] pickets and onlookers alike on terraced, British streets".
Trials
Official reports state that during the confrontation 93 arrests were made, with 51 pickets and 72 policemen injured. 95 pickets were charged with riot, unlawful assembly and similar offences after the battle. A number of these men were put on trial in 1985, but the trials collapsed, all charges were dropped and a number of lawsuits were brought against the SYP for assault, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. The SYP later agreed to pay £425,000 compensation and £100,000 in legal costs to 39 pickets in an out of court settlement. However, no officer was disciplined for misconduct.
Writing for The Guardian in 1985, Gareth Peirce said that the events at Orgreave "revealed that in this country we now have a standing army available to be deployed against gatherings of civilians whose congregation is disliked by senior police officers. It is answerable to no one; it is trained in tactics which have been released to no one, but which include the deliberate maiming and injuring of innocent persons to disperse them, in complete violation of the law."
Calls for official inquiry
Mansfield described the evidence given by the SYP as "the biggest frame-up ever". He said that the force had a culture of fabricating evidence which was not corrected by the time of the Hillsborough disaster. After the 2012 report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, NUM leader Chris Kitchen called for the investigation into the force's practices to be widened to cover the Orgreave clashes. Also in 2012, the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) was formed to campaign for a public inquiry into the policing of the events of 18 June 1984, following the success of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. In October 2012, a BBC One regional news and current affairs programme, Inside Out, broadcast a 30-minute film about the events at Orgreave. The programme reexamined the evidence that the SYP had deliberately attempted to co-ordinate arrest statements in order to charge the miners with riot.
Following the programme, the SYP referred itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).
In June 2015, the IPCC announced that it would not launch a formal investigation into the events at Orgreave because too much time had passed. A Labour MP, Helen Jones, responded in the House of Commons by expressing her "deep concern", saying that the decision "calls into question whether the IPCC is fit for purpose".
Labour MS Mick Antoniw, who represented several Welsh miners charged with offences at Orgreave, said the miners were "surrounded on all sides by police horses and police dogs and then savagely attacked by charge after charge of baton-wielding police officers on horseback. Despite public calls at that time for an investigation, no inquiry ever took place. The tragedy of this failure is that not only have those miners who were arrested been denied the justice and vindication that would come from such an inquiry it meant that an early opportunity to investigate the culture and operation of the South Yorkshire Police never took place."