Jeremy Deller’s the Battle of Orgreave

With the passing of Baroness Thatcher, the miners’ strikes of the early 1980s are likely to be on many people’s minds and lips. Considered a defining moment of her government’s monetarist policies, and the consolidation of the Conservative party’s power over the trade unions, the 1984 strike of the National Union of Mineworkers went on for over a year, with the miners failing to secure their demands in the face of government rationalisation. Upwards of 20,000 jobs were lost to the closures, predominantly in the north of England and Scotland.

Throughout the strike a media war raged between the unions and the government, with Thatcher defending her decision to close unprofitable mines and reduce government subsidisation of the industry on the one side, and workers defending their right to employment, the survival of their communities, and their way of life on the other.

For his 2001 film, the Battle of Orgreave, Turner-Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller staged a re-enactment of one of the most violent confrontations between workers and police, the picket line at the Orgreave cooking plant in North Yorkshire in the summer of 1984. Orchestrated by a leading historical re-enactment expert, and with the help of more than 800 participants, including former miners and former policemen who were at Orgreave – some even switching sides for the film – the restaging is intercut with images from the original protest, and testimonials from those who were involved. Despite the defiant chants of “We’re miners united, we’ll never be defeated,” after a day of meticulously staged re-enactment, the workers in the film are, true to life, eventually defeated and the picket line broken as they are chased through the town by police. As one interviewee reminisces, it was a “winner takes all competition, and we lost, and they took it all.”

See Jeremy Deller's archive here.

Text by Ananda Pellerin

Ananda Pellerin is a London-based writer and regular contributor to anothermag.com.