cartoonists


home in Brighton. “It was a terrible defeat for the labour movement, which has never recovered.” Its symbolic importance to both left and right at a time


when daily newspapers had a combined circulation close to 15 million leads Jones to make a startling observation: “No British industrial dispute has equalled the pit strike for generating so many cartoons.” In quantity and reach, those cartoons were at the vanguard of a ferocious political battle. “Every cartoonist worth his salt had contributed to a


newspaper or a magazine during the strike,” says Jones. “When I give talks, people have come forward and said, ‘I remember those cartoons and they were a bit frightening. I didn’t like them.’ The cartoons of the right-wing newspapers had a tremendous impact.” He adds: “You only have to look, for example, towards the end of the book when the newspapers are reporting what they say is violence and the miners are increasingly being represented as thugs. They have baseball hats and hoods. The imagery becomes quite vicious, which is a transformation from the jollity of the cartoons in the opening months.” Cartoons would often come into their own on slow-news


days. Jones recalls spending tedious hours lurking outside meeting rooms in the hope of gleaning some titbit of information from the negotiating table. Turning those scant details into a scintillating radio report was next to impossible. The cartoonists, by contrast, had no such problem: they could make merry with the intransigence itself. Witness Les Gibbard in The Guardian portraying Scargill sitting opposite Ian MacGregor, the chairman of the National Coal Board, their view of each other blocked by an upturned table. Their cross-armed silence was the story. “You can do things in cartoons that you can’t do in text,”


says Bell. “And the power of the image is colossal.” To today’s reader – even one well versed in 1980s industrial


relations – the visual references can seem abstruse. Yes, you can get Keith Waite’s sight gag in which Scargill and Thatcher have near identical hair-dos, but why did Giles portray a football team running onto the pitch at Wembley and why, like figures in other cartoons, did they have plastic bags on their heads? “A cartoon gives you a very precise feeling of what it felt like to be alive at that time,” says Bell. “They always include layers of cultural references.” In this, Jones is an invaluable guide, contextualising the


jokes as he takes us through the stages of the dispute. Giles, for example, was thinking not only of the strike but also of an upcoming England international, while the unusual headwear was a reference to MacGregor arriving for talks in Edinburgh mysteriously hiding his face beneath a green carrier bag. “It’s the power of the noises off,” says Jones, recalling the jokes


prompted by a photographer spotting a can of hairspray in Scargill’s briefcase. “I needed to explain them but they are fun. They bring together, as well, the continuing propaganda effect – how these events help perpetuate the propaganda themes.” For Bell, the question is less about the skill of the cartoonists than about the purpose to which they are putting that skill: “Cartoons are an attacking medium. You’re always laying in to someone. But more often than not, cartoonists are laying into the wrong people. They’re laying into people they’re paid to lay into.”


The Art of Class War: Newspaper Cartoonists and the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike, Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (North), out now https:// tinyurl.com/2a4pkw5s


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