On the letters page of The Guardian, housewives have cried into their washing – up and ‘stereotypical’ Tory voters have fulminated. The Times and the Telegraph reported how Cheltenham took to the streets and the Gucci-heeled women of Kensington cheered the miners. Suddenly the ‘enemy within’ of 1984-5 are ‘our miners’. But someone forgot to inform the old lady in Kensington about this lightning rehabilitation; according to the Telegraph, she threw a bucket of water over marching miners from her first floor flat, shouting ‘animals!’
The press treatment of the pits crisis has unearthed more than pent-up frustration with the government’s incompetence. Nor can the crushing sentimentality of the right be explained simply as paternalist bingeing on their first ‘caring’ pub crawl after the long, dry years on the wagon with Thatcher. As Simon Jenkins worried in The Times, why this fuss over mining communities and not over the redundancies in, say, retailing or financial services?
Unasked, the miners have been assigned the burden of representing authenticity in an inauthentic Britain; real British men from real communities doing real work. Their labour-hard, masculine and productive- is an antidote to failed, frivolous and ‘feminine’ service industries. Heavy industry, once as unfashionable as Old Spice, is now the subject of a nostalgia that cuts across class, party and even gender lines.
‘A family gone to waste’ is the Mirror headline over a picture foregrounding a retired miner surrounded by his sons, their wives and children out of focus in the background. The reporter tells us that the sons were sent down the pit by their father: ‘It’s been dirty, dangerous work, ten hours at a time on hands and knees working at a four-foot high seam… But they loved it’. Thus we are invited to admire the manly embrace of dirt and danger in the last corner of Britain where men are men and women are wives.
This kind of fantasy is projected again and again onto the miners by all sections of the press. Just when Tony Parsons’ lament for the decline of working class decency was getting a head of steam, the media ‘discovers’ workers who have kept alive pre-consumer notions of masculinity based on duty, discipline and team-work. The miners, traditionally the vanguard of the proletariat, now find themselves portrayed as the rearguard of a vanished world.
Michaels Parkinson, in a Telegraph piece on football, eulogises and patronises miners as if pits were bottomless wells of virility. ‘The pits provided a certain kind of player. He was likely to be of medium height, of sturdy build and uncompromising tackle…they were undending in supply. All you had to do was peer down any pit-shaft and whistle and one came up, ready to go to work’.
The equation of the pits with a reservoir of men’s men, sporting and spunky, is also explained by the Star in a startling picture of the British rugby league team wearing their British Coal strip. They march grimly towards the camera shrouded in the smoke of battle with a war-torn Union Jack at their head. The headline barks, ‘Best of British, lads’ (the comma is clearly optional), while the copy pants about ‘fully grown, hard-bitten, genuine tough guys’.
The sporting motif ties in with the renaissance of one of the oldest male fantasies: the nation state. With Britain out of the ERM, Mastrich in doubt, and a trade war looming, old-fashioned manly virtues are required to make our nation strong again.
As John Major said, ‘it’s a cold, hard world outside the ERM’, and real men are needed, not ‘sensitive’ wimps like him. Major having shown weakness, his manhood questioned; either slyly, in The Times’ rumo urs of a crack-up, or bluntly, as with the Star’s description of him as a ‘wimp’. The same issue bellows to its readers: ‘You demand real men in power – not a bunch of failed wimps’. Even the Guardian cannot resist the gender slur: Simon Rae implies that Major is ‘Jane’ to Heseltine’s ‘Tarzan’. Everywhere our ineffectual and effete leaders are compared with the macho miners and found wanting.
Those tempted to consider any stick worth beating with, so long as it hurts, should consider the way the masculine mystification of the miners is used to point up the ‘unmanliness’ of left-wing intellectuals. The Telegraph report of the march contrasts ‘burly’ miners with ‘wispy peddlars of left-wing papers’ and ‘radical students…weedy with glasses’.
But it is a Star leader that makes explicit the reduction of ‘the workers’ to the ‘real men’. In a crude style not without resonance on the left, it jeers: ‘If Labour cannot do better for the miners, the founding fathers of the movement, it will prove conclusively that the party is now fit only for polytechnic lecturers, leftie lawyers and twittering women teachers – NOT the workers’.
The bitter irony is that media eulogies of the miners have only been possible because they are now so weak, and traditional masculinity so enervated. The Mirror offered a poster of an attractive, exhausted young miner slumped on a bench in a locker-room,posed in a sweaty singlet with a ghostly winding tower super-imposed, emerging from his leg as a kind of hazy memory of the phallus. In inviting pity, this male image also invites the gaze in a way that would have been impossible without the very changes in gender roles that it seems to lament.
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Mark Simpson
(From Male Impersonators, 1994, Originally published in New Statesman and Society, 30 October 1992).
Male Impersonators by Mark Simpson out now on Amazon Kindle
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