William "Bill" Muckle
William "Bill" Muckle, taken from a newspaper article
"I used to say we were slaves. We were getting starvation wages"
- William Muckle, interviewed by the BBC in 1969, describing the treatment of miners in 1920's Cramlington
In October 1981 William Muckle's book No Regrets was released. He was interviewed by the Evening Chronicle. Under the headline The Anger That Caused a Sensation, it was published on Tuesday, October 27, 1981. This article is based on that interview and has been updated to include further facts.
Born in 1900, William "Bill" Muckle was then 81 years old and adamant that the title of the slim volume in which he reminisces in his own pitmatic words about the derailment - and his life before and afterwards - was a testament to what happened on May 10, 1926, during the General Strike.
All of the eight imprisoned Cramlington strikers were in their 20s. Like Bill, he and his marras [workmates/friends] were the "flower of the proletariat": poverty-stricken young lives controlled by mine-owners of incredible meanness.
Bill's historical account gives an incredible background to the anger and frustration that welled over into the strike itself and the unintentional derailment of a passenger train carrying 281 passengers.
"When you went down the pit you had no helmets or protective clothing," said Bill. " When you first started....you had to buy all your own gear such as pick, handle or shaft, carbide lamp and tools. You even had to pay for your candles - you got nothing given.
"It cost about £3 in all. You weren't even earning £3 a week.
"Then you had to buy the powder for blasting down the rock or coal!
"I've come home from the pit wet to the skin some days and my clothes have not been dry next morning, abut I've still had to go on again for another shift.
"We were slaves without a word of a lie.
"With the money you got then you could not buy more clothes ... I used to stop in the house all day Sunday when I was 14 or 15 because I couldn't afford a suit.
“There was some hard up families then.”
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A young William "Bill" Muckle photographed on the front cover of his 1981 book.
Most boys in Cramlington and the surrounding pit villages were caught in an economic and social vice. When they left school the had two choices: work on the land as farm labourers or under it as pitmen. Most followed in their fathers' footsteps and became miners.
The miners' anger was born out of harsh working conditions and the small rewards they received for risking their lives underground, while making greedy coal owners incredibly wealthy.
The miners' homes, rented from the Coal Companies who owned them, were mostly slums - cheaply and badly built and liable to flood. They also developed considerably large cracks caused by the workings over which they had been built.
The focus of domestic life was the kitchen with its blackened fireplace.
Bill's mother would scrub her menfolk's backs as they bathed in a tub at the end of a shift and bake the bread they couldn't afford to buy in the shops.
The life of a working-class woman was hard with long hours, looking after their men folk (and children, and often elderly parents) throughout three shifts, meaning women had to be on call at any hour of the day and night.
Any change in domestic circumstances had a serious affect on the family finances.
Bill's father fought in the First World War (probably when conscription was introduced in 1916) and Bill, as a mere boy of 16, who started down the pit aged 13 in 1913, had been left to provide for his mother and three sisters.
If you couldn't look after yourself you were sent to the dreaded and hated workhouse where you worked just for your food, maybe porridge. There was a workhouse at North Shields and one at Morpeth.
It's easy to understand why miners and their families were politically motivated. As Bill said: "We just were socialists."
The Muckle family (highlighted) in the 1901 census. William was five months old.
(With thanks to Brian Ridley)
There was still a lot of bitterness about Black Friday in 1921 which led to the miners being locked out and deserted by leaders of other trade unions, meaning the miners had to fight alone for three months.
Bill explained how the pitmen felt humiliated at the memory of the soup kitchens and the weekly begging trips to Whitley Bay in 1921. "They'd get around the flash houses, from door to door and cadge. They used to come back with a canny bit of stuff," he recalled.
Sadly, the miners were defeated in 1921 - a battle lost in the ongoing class war. Anger was building.
Five years later, in May 1926, a General Strike was called. The working class responded magnificently.
At that time, miners in the Northumberland coalfield were being paid six shillings and nine and a half pence (34p) a shift but this was considered too much for the coal owners who imposed a 40 per cent cut in pay.
The Tory government had prepared for nine months to smash the trade union movement. Public schoolboys and students volunteered for Churchill's Organisation for Maintenance and Supplies (OMS) to do what they could to break the strike, including driving buses and helping out on scab trains. Troops would also be used to maintain essential services.
The "class war" that Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had envisaged, was now a reality as the miners said no to a 40 per cent wage reduction. First the miners, then the other trades and unions would be in the firing line of insidious greed and profit.
The rank-and-file pressure of the trade union movement forced the TUC leaders to reluctantly declare a General Strike at a minute to midnight on May 3, 1926.
Seven days in, at 11 am on Monday, May 10, Bill Golightly of the Northumberland miners' union executive spoke to a packed meeting of the Cramlington Lodge at the Miners' Institute where his famous words "stop everything on wheels" were uttered.
Following that meeting, Bill explained how he called for his marras to come back after dinner to "have a rail up to stop the blackleg coal trains going through".
"We went up the old wagon way towards the NE Railway," explained Bill. They walked half a mile up the disused colliery/mineral line (now a path in Alexandra Park).
“When we got there, there was a cabin where the platelayers kept their gear ... we broke in and got what tools [eg crow bars and levers] we wanted.”
On the railway line, the striking miners stoned some scab platelayers who "ran about 400 yards up the line". These blacklegs stopped an oncoming train at Cramlington Station, about half a mile away, and warned them that there was something likely to happen as they had been assailed by around 40 angry, young striking miners.
Bill explained: "The train came along and we were standing behind a bush. It was derailed and when I looked around I was standing by myself!"
Obviously, the miners never meant it to be a passenger train they stopped. To their astonishment, it was the Flying Scotsman that came along.
"Where the rail was up, it went about one hundred yards further, "said Bill. "I think the drivers jumped off. The engine flopped over and damaged the signal cabin.
“They could have stopped it...before it got that far. The drivers knew what was happening, but they didn't want to know.”
After the derailment Bill recalled how "there were policemen, there were civvies, detectives and such as that...they were standing at the street end and talking to the lads".
The pit village drew a veil of secrecy and despite miners being taken two at a time to the local police station for questioning nobody would say anything.
But finally, the ranks broke.
Crash! The famous Flying Scotsman passenger service derailed at Cramlington, Northumberland, on 10 May 1926.
(Image credit: The Northern Echo)
Bill explained: "It was four or five weeks after it happened that we eight were arrested. I remember that Saturday night I left home about four o'clock to meet a girl at Cullercoats. Three lads were standing against the pub and one said: "Have a good night for your last one."
“I thought somebody must have spilled the beans and I was right, we were arrested at 1.30 am, a Sunday morning. One of our mates had turned King's Evidence to save his own skin.”
Bill recalled sitting on a log at the end of the street with three of his marras when five policemen came. Bill's was the first name called for.
“I stood up and I felt the police get hold of my coat," he recalled. "I thought to myself "This is it!".”
As described extensively on this site, Bill was sentenced to four years of penal servitude, two others to six years and three to eight years.
After short stays at Durham, Leeds and Pentonville prisons the eight were eventually sent to Maidstone Prison - nearly 300 miles from their home. It was a vindictive punishment meted out by the Establishment to men (and their families) who had dared to challenge the capitalist system.
But thanks to solidarity support from throughout the labour movement the eight heroes never served their full time.
"A lot of people outside were fighting to get us out," said Bill.
“One of us ... took it [prison] very hard. He was a very nice fellow.”
Two of the eight died within six months of their release. He could have been referring to Billy Baker, LINK who, like Bill Muckle and Ollie Sanderson was sentenced to four years, and who died of a heart attack soon after his release on September 1, 1928, or James Ellison, sentenced to six years and released after serving three years. It is more likely James Ellison, who tragically died soon after his release in July 1929.
On internment, Bill explained: "Prison life was prison life in our days. Not a smoke even. Walking out you had to be five yards apart and no talking."
They actually wore uniforms with arrows stamped on them, albeit they were faded due to the age of the clothing.
"We were half starved in Durham but when we arrived at Maidstone we got as much bread as we wanted, it being a first offenders prison," said Bill.
"On a Sunday for dinner you would get a piece of corned beef about the size of the middle of your hand and three spuds, some with their coats on, with no gravy and a cup of cocoa - that was your whack.
"I was one of two cleaners in the print shop. The better job you had outside, the better job you had inside, Wey, I was a pitman, a dirty, claggy pitman and they gave me a job to suit.
"Horatio Bottomley, LINK well he was a [well connected, Liberal] member of Parliament...in for fraud [he was a reactionary shyster]...he had a grand time whilst he was in....they say money talks; money does talk!"
One of three "Wreckers" released after serving two years and three months of their four-year sentence, Bill and his two marras were greeted like heroes by a huge crowd at Newcastle.
"The station was packed and the streets lined up to the Haymarket," recalled Bill. "We had a meeting there with a flat lorry as a platform right in front of the Farmers Rest pub [now the site of Marks and Spencer].
“Will Lowther [national miners' leader] met us at the station and addressed the meeting.”
Bill continued: "Then we got on the bus to Dudley and we could hardly get off it for people. The policemen said: "If you don't make a way for these lads, I'll send them home."
"Then we got the bus home [to Cramlington] and the Co-operative hall was full, packed to the door. They got us on to the stage and I think it was the Women's Guild, they handed us 30s each.
“I thanked them all from the stage and I took bad. I went into the toilet. I spewed up. Oh dear me! I think it was the beer and not being used to it.”
Bill reserved his bile for the traitors who turned King's evidence until the day he died in 1984, aged 84. One of them offered to buy him a drink at Cramlington Club when he got out of prison. "I said, "If I had any poison in my pocket I would put it in your beer!" He turned around and went out crying."
When one of the turncoats died, Bill went to the man's local pub. "Soon as I went in, a fellow says to me: "You're a stranger in here". I says to him "I'm celebrating a man's death." Bill mentioned visiting the Burton House in High Pit Road.
While having no regrets, Bill was reflective of the actual derailment.
"The only thing I was sorry about was that the train we tipped was the Flying Scotsman with 281 people on board," he said. "But when you came to think of it again it was a general strike and they were blacklegs running the trains.
"I never did regret what I did and never will. We were fighting for our daily bread.
"They came for 40 per cent cut in our wages and that put our backs up.
“We were not violent men ... We only tried to stop blackleg coal getting through ... I still believe it [the Flying Scotsman] could have been stopped. The crew were given enough warning.”
During the 1972 miners' strike, Bill was interviewed, this time by The Journal (26/1/1972). Under the headline The Pit-Boot Saboteurs Derailed Crack Express.
It was the 19th day of the 1972 miners' strike and, again, hardship and unrest were sweeping through the North's pit villages and towns as Edward Heath's Tory government attacked miners' living standards. It was the first major battle between the Establishment and the miners since the 1926 strike [the miners won in 1972].
The Journal article was written to draw a link between the 1972 miners' strike and the 1926 General Strike, 46 years previous when another generation of miners toiled long hours for pitifully small wages and were also the victims.
Capitalist economic history has a habit of repeating itself, and always will until an alternative economic foundation is created: a socialist plan of production.
Bill, who was 71 and long retired, lived in the Aged Miners' Cottages at Cramlington when the 1972 miners' strike erupted. At that time, he had said little publicly about that historic day on May 10, 1926. Indeed, it was still another nine years (1981) until that his autobiography No Regrets was published
For The Journal article in 1972, Bill went back to the London to Edinburgh mainline - half a mile from his home - where he helped to rip up a 45-foot length of track.
The same bush, 20 yards from the line where he stood and watched the derailment, was still there.
Bill recalled: "We were being asked to take a 40 per cent reduction in money. All the miners were up against it. We were just living, you see. Starvation wages, you might say."
What happened after an angry union session in Cramlington Miners' Institute was still vividly clear to Bill - 46 years later.
"Stop the wheels turning" they had been told.
A crowd of pitmen went to the railway line and spotted a gang of blackleg platelayers on the track.
The platelayers ran off and the 30 or 40 young miners broke into a hut, grabbed tools and pulled up a section of the track.
"We expected to get a coal train," said Bill.
As we know, it was the Flying Scotsman, a passenger train, with 281 people on board. No one was killed and only one person was slightly injured.
"It was travelling [slowly] when it reached the gap in the track. I was standing by the bush, watching. We'd only just got the line up when we saw what was coming. I thought the express had made it - but then it waggled a bit and crashed.
“I was one of the ring-leaders but I was lucky. I only got four years.”
Bill added: "The fault with us was that we attacked the wrong people. We should have had a go at the mine owners."
Ten years after the 1972 article, The Journal (6/11/82) carried a follow-up piece with Bill headlined Sabotage of the Flying Scotsman.
Taking us back to the 1926 General Strike and that fateful day on May 10, 1926 (the seventh day of the strike), feelings were running high at the miners' institute meeting, especially about "blackleg trains" that were still carrying supplies of coal.
In reality, the amount of scab coal being transported in 1926 was minuscule but such blatant strike breaking riled young miners like Bill Muckle. There was a lot at stake in the dispute. In addition to immediate working and living conditions, as mentioned elsewhere, a General Strike is the prelude to a pre-revolutionary situation.
That morning, a meeting of the West Colliery branch of the NUM in Cramlington had listened to a report on the activities of the blacklegs from Bill Golightly head of the unions' Northumberland branch.
“They will have to be stopped," said Golightly, the grandfather of actor Robson Green. "If you can't stop them at the station then they have to be stopped between the stations.”
As the four remaining Train Wreckers told BBC's Yesterday's Witness, Golightly said: "Stop everything on wheels."
His call met receptive ears.
The day after the derailment newspaper front pages carried the story.
Worried but unrepentant, the miners awaited their fate.
Defiant to the last, Bill said: "We were thankful there was nobody killed, but it was a General Strike and they were blacklegs running the trains."