When art critic and novelist John Berger, perhaps best remembered for the ground-breaking Ways Of Seeing, won the 1972 Booker Prize, he had a go at the sponsors for exploitative practice on Caribbean sugar plantations at the ceremony and then donated half the cheque to the British Black Panthers. His Marxist humanist beliefs ran deep.
This collection of his work pertaining to mining is released to coincide with the anniversary of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, in particular the violent clash between pickets and police known as the Battle Of Orgreave. The police charged, the pickets were prosecuted and the BBC, according to Tom Overton and Matthew Harle’s introduction, “showed reversed footage, giving the false impression that the pickets attacked first”.
Berger, who was taken down a mine at the age of 16 by his father, subsidised his meagre writer’s earnings in the early 1960s by making programmes for Granada TV, including Before My Time, an interview with Joe Roberts, a miner born in 1890. Roberts’s plain-spoken descriptions of the work and conditions he endured, in the included transcription, are harrowing. “From what I’ve experienced, I wouldn’t like a dog of mine to go in.”
As part of an Open University course on the 19th-century novel, Berger made a later programme (with producer Nuala O’Faolain) discussing Émile Zola’s Germinal, a novel about a French coalminers’ strike. Set in the Derbyshire mining town of Creswell and rarely seen, it’s presented here as a photo essay. Berger’s line, “At pit bottom ... there’s no sense of the nature of the earth you’re in and under” is reflected in the eyes of the men in the grainy stills whose lot was this gruelling work. The “exploitation which Zola saw continues”.
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In 1968, he theorised that mass demonstrations “are an appeal to the democratic conscience of the state. But this presupposes a conscience which is very unlikely to exist.” After the 1980s strikes confirmed this, he declared “They are out to break you” and said the time of “justified vengeance” may have been at hand. In private, Berger said there were “few occasions when political assassination serves any purpose ... I think Thatcher supplies such an occasion.”
The press release describes this volume as “succinct” and it certainly is brief at 95-odd pages, almost half of which are taken up by the photo essay, but what’s here is, as always from Berger, worth chewing on.
