After The Miners’ Strike - A39 and Cornish Political Theatre Verses Thatcher’s Britain
Paul Farmer, Open Books, £23.99 

PRIOR to reading this book the term agitprop had never entered my lexis, and I am not a keen theatre goer. But I do love satire, and I know I attended one of A39 theatre group’s performances in the mid-1980s because Paul (the author) has the photo to prove it! It was an era of passionate solidarity in support of striking miners, and activities took place even as far south-west as the Land’s End peninsula. A period of revolutionary fervour and solidarity that sadly also turned out to be the pinnacle of organised working-class militancy in Britain. But we did not know that at the time and we were in it to win!
 
The book has a wry background wit which draws one in. It spans the period of the mid-1980s when the A39 Theatre Group was about as militant as it gets and as such was “overlooked” for any Arts Council funding which itself was a victim of Thatcher-era spending cuts, and so the troupe took to busking and street theatre — rather successfully. A very popular street satire was the Police-Morris dance; a Morris dance performed in police riot gear and truncheons! 

The crux of the story line begins in March 1984 with the announcement by the National Coal Board of the impending closure of what were termed “uneconomic pits.” But the author asserts that the planned closures was a deliberate provocation intended by the Thatcher government to precipitate a strike.

The author does not pull punches in his analysis of the events surrounding the strike, he describes the creation of a paramilitary national police force consisting of riot squads and cavalry, trained to steer pickets to convenient locations where they could be charged, attacked, dispersed, and isolated and occasionally arrested. The description of such events at the Orgreave coking works is powerfully conveyed. 

The book accurately describes the strike as a proxy war against the whole organised working class and the narrative doesn’t shy away from singling out Labour movement leaders such as Neil Kinnock (Labour leader) and Norman Willis (TUC general secretary) for their compliance in wilfully withholding support from striking miners — Willis even blaming miners for the violence on picket lines rather than paramilitary police armed with batons and riot shields. 

The book weaves a narrative of how living life on the economic margins as a struggling agitprop theatre troupe, while confronted with the real-life drama of the sudden appearance of a paramilitary police force on the streets of Britain, gave rise to the troupe’s growing creative awareness and connection with the historic hard-rock mining legacy of the Celtic nation they had come to call home — Cornwall, which would shortly face its own devastation and become another victim of Thatcher's demented rollout of the neoliberal project in Britain, echoing and taking her lead from her new mentor and would-be bestie US president Ronald Reagan.

The author does some mining of his own and unearths a rich seam of working-class industrial and cultural heritage in the indigenous population of Cornwall underpinned by centuries of mineral mining, mainly of tin, with haunting descriptions of Cornwall’s hard-rock mining landscapes.

There is a strong theme of class consciousness that underpins this entire take on Cornish life in the mid-’80s, which in chapter 4 erupts to the surface in quite a challenging way. One of the satirical performances described in the chapter humorously portrays the CND/Greens/Greenham Common movement of the day as the middle-class-at-play, the author states: “...we wanted to make things quite clear: we were not liberals; we were not interested in single-issue campaigns that inferred a wish to correct a particular blemish on the face of capitalist society.”

There are few, if any, books that take such a penetrating look at Cornish working-class culture and its history. 

A fitting note to end this review is the moving account of A39’s performance of their production One & All at the Geevor miners’ social club in Pendeen, near Land’s End, just as the mine was about to close for good. In the audience were the miners and their families, and the town Mayor Jack Hendy who proudly pronounced at the event that he was the only Marxist mayor in Britain! 

Available to read free online and to download free on www.openbookpublishers.com