Betteshanger colliery - a militant pit
‘Betteshanger’ literally means, a ‘steep wooded slope by a building’. It looks back to the Old English ‘hangra’, a ‘wood on a steep slope’, combined with ‘bytle’, a ‘house or building’. It is first recorded in 1176, as Betleshangre. “(Kent Place Names)
There is no wood now, no coal mined now, on the windy hilltop not far from the sea in East Kent.
The name Betteshanger sounds Saxon and old, yet it means most as a place of sharp, full pitched class struggles. From the 1930s, through the war, ‘stay down’ and national strikes, to the pit closure in 1989.
It is for those events that Betteshanger will be remembered; this book is part of that remembering.
The Coalfield Heritage Initiative Kent (CHIK) has, in its community archive at Dover Museum, constructed a history of some aspects of the Kent coalfield. However, the CHIK project in assembling the history of the Kent field:
“Made a conscious decision at the outset not to concentrate on the industrial disputes - feeling that this area had already been to some degree over emphasised." (CHIK, 2006)
Far from it, there is no complete history of the class struggle at the Kent pits, in particular there is no history of this the most militant of pits, Betteshanger.
As a recent commentator on the CHIK website remarks on the heritage.
“It is pleasing to see that there are some people out there who wish to remember the Coal Industry in Kent and the people who worked in it. I worked in Chislet, Tilmanstone and Betteshanger collieries and I find it hard to see how the industry has been removed form the map without any acknowledgement of heritage.” (Ex-miner writing on the CHIK web site, 26th September 2006)
It was in order to acknowledge and celebrate that heritage that Betteshanger Social Welfare Scheme (BSWS) sought and was awarded a small lottery grant and a further grant from Kent County Council, in 2006, to write this book.
Author’s interest
It was in 1972 that I first met Betteshanger miners on the picket line at Dover docks. This was during the national strike over wages and conditions. A number of students from Canterbury went to join the picket against the unloading of scab coal. There were pictures in the national press of a student friend being menaced with an iron bar.
After the strike was over, we went weekly to the Betteshanger pit. We stood by the bus stop selling the Socialist Worker, or delivering door to door in the Circle for the regulars. This is where I first met Peter Holden. Another of my roles was as driver for the students from Canterbury in the summer of 1972.
The miners clattered down off the bus or, dark eyed, trudged up towards us, after the shift, as we stood in nervous awe with our papers. Behind us, under the big office windows, was the canteen where large women in big aprons served chips, mushy peas and pies. Some times my small son came with me. He thought, ‘The Mines’ was a place where you were allowed to eat chips.
“They’d come in off the bus, get the check, get their chewing tobacco and go in the canteen for a pie. They was the best things they did in there, they was like bricks!
Then they’d go round the corner, go and get in their pit clothes, grease their boots to try to stop the wet getting in, they’d get their lamps and stand there outside having a last fag.” (John Moyle, 2006)
That was the beginning, in 1972, for Betteshanger and me; meeting Peter Holden John Moyle, Barney Wynn, Brian Foy, Jack Young and others and going to meetings in the Miners Welfare at Cowdray Square. By 1974 I lived in Oxford, went to the picket line at Didcot power station and later met Betteshanger miners when they came to courses at Ruskin College. We met again on the picket lines at Grunwick’s in North London, a bitter strike for union recognition.
Losing touch with the individuals in the 1980s, as a PhD student studying the social history of the Second World War, I went back to 1942 and wrote a chapter on wartime strikes. This included Betteshanger. It wouldn’t go away for me. It wouldn’t go away for me: Betteshanger; It was always there, brave, militant and heroic.
I became reacquainted with Betteshanger and its miners during the 1984/5 strike. Living in Hackney, I worked at the Greater London Council’s Women’s Support Unit and supported Women Against Pit Closures, marching with them on a long hot day in the summer of 1984. During that summer John Moyle, on strike duties in London, came to stay at our house in Hackney and had his tape recorder and brief case stolen from his car further down the street. In 1986 we visited him and his family in Deal, but managed to loose touch again.
In 2004, Betteshanger came to me again, in the twentieth year celebration of the start of the 1984 strike, where Arthur Scargill and John Moyle spoke.
It was after that meeting, during a time when I was engaged in work on equal opportunities in Kent, that we decided to apply for a grant and write this history.
Methods
This is a celebration of the lives and struggles of the Betteshanger miners and their families. A struggle which officialdom wishes to forget. So the main voices that need to be heard are the voices of the mining community itself. Across the generations right up to the age of 90, we interviewed 27 past miners, their wives, sons, daughters and friends. Those victimised, pushed down, battled and who overcame. It is these voices which hold centre stage in this account. I was also pleased to speak with Arthur Scargill on the subject.
The voices of miners and reports of their struggles are found in the newspaper reports of the day, the Deal, Walmer, Sandwich and East Kent Mercury. Their voices can be heard in the mid 1970’s oral history conducted by my friend Gina Harkell and in the records of Albert Newton (transcribed by his daughter Josephine Dempster). He had a hut storing bikes and selling cigarettes at Betteshanger in the late 1920s and early 30s.
Importantly, we studied the views and actions of the Betteshanger Branch of the Kent Mineworkers Association (KMWA) and examined the minute books of National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), still held in Magness House in Mill Hill. Furthermore, the area records of the union were studied; these were transferred to the Kent Archive at Whitfield Dover, they included minute books, correspondence, posters and collection sheets relating to various disputes. And finally, from the Public Records Office in Kew, the official records of the State were explored, including those of the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Mines and the Ministry of Fuel and Power.
We looked at the work of other historians including the official historian Page Arnot,Malcolm Pitt’s works, ‘The World on Our Backs 1972’ and ‘Once a miner’, (Snowdown, Kent) republished by CHIK,. Other resources used included the report on the Wilberforce Enquiry, plus a number of theses and works on the Kent pits, housed at the University of Kent, such those of Johnson and Goffee. A Deal History Society report, by Rutherford, on the coming of the miners to Kent was reviewed. And, both the CHIK Archives Project (voices and photos) and the Mass Observation Archive, at the University of Sussex, proved invaluable.
Throughout the project, I have benefited from constant dialogue with Betteshanger Social Welfare Scheme trustees and a number of ex-miners. I thank Sheila Shooter for providing tea and encouragement at Magness House. It should be noted that men from other Kent pits also contributed similarly to the efforts described here, men such as Jack Collins and others.
This book is dedicated to all the men who died in pit accidents, or through dust choked lungs, in the service of the ‘black stuff’ at Betteshanger. Dedicated too, to the lives ruined by closure and victimisation together with their families, who struggled alongside them.
As Mrs Grant, from one of those families, said:
“I am proud to be of mining stock.”
So should all those with a connection to Betteshanger, be deservedly proud, as I am to have met you.
Di Parkin 2007.
Di Parkin lives with her husband in South Devon; she works, battling injustice, as a consultant on Equal Opportunities. She has three children and four grandchildren.