Britain: Pit Stops

A miners' strike turns ugly

The first convoy of 35 trucks rumbled out of the plant gates last Tuesday morning carrying low-sulfur coal from the Orgreave coking works, near Sheffield, to a steel mill at Scunthorpe, 40 miles away. With that, Britain's angry, three-month-old miners' strike flared into open war. As the vehicles ran the gauntlet between Orgreave and Scunthorpe, 7,000 picketing miners pelted them with rocks, smoke bombs, ball bearings and nail-studded potatoes. Two thousand policemen charged repeatedly into the crowd on foot and on horseback. By the end of the...

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