by Barry White
For former Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, his role during the year-long Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 was to try to counter the massive propaganda onslaught against the miners and National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) leader Arthur Scargill.
Steve’s confession came during a humorous and passionate contribution to a meeting marking the publication of former BBC industrial correspondent Nick Jone’s book about the very different perspective of the strike that came from the UK’s cartoonists.
Steve told the event in Leeds at the beginning of March that he actually did more than simply provide a pictorial interpretation of the dispute.
He told how, living in Brighton, he was driving past the nearest coal-fired power station, at the Sussex port of Shoreham-by-Sea, when they stopped to offer support to the NUM pickets. That, he continued, turned into providing accommodation for visiting pickets until the strike ended and the miners returned to work, generosity that also provided material for his If cartoon strip, then on the back page of The Guardian.
Steve was speaking as he had contributed a foreword to Nick Jones’s book – The Art of Class War: Newspaper Cartoonists and the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike.
Nick records how right-wing London-based national newspapers such as the Express, Mail, Sun and Star often portrayed pickets as violent thugs, arsonists or gullible fools, with political agendas that vilified Arthur Scargill and other NUM leaders.
Countering that, the book includes cartoons from left-of-centre publications and newspapers that supported the strike, including the Morning Star.
Nick’s analysis, based on his experience covering the strike for BBC radio, was, he says in the preface, “was the most momentous chapter in my career as a labour and industrial correspondent,” adding: “My critique seeks to explore, explain and assess the pressures they (the cartoonists) faced and what might have influenced the way they depicted an epic showdown between hard-line conservatism and ordinary workers.”
The Art of Class War is published by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (North) and costs £10. Contact: Granville Williams at cpbfnorth@outlook.com