Easington Under Occupation

In late August 1984, police roadblocks sealed Easington. A police transit replaced the barricade at the colliery and remained there day and night. Officers from Gwent and Northampton marched through the village. Even the van carrying food to the strike kitchens was turned away.

Sociologist Huw Beynon was in Easington at the time. In his contemporary account, published in New Left Review (November 1984) he recorded a woman describing what had happened to her village: “We’re occupied. We’ve been occupied by the police.”

Keith Pattison’s series Easington: August 1984 has that word embedded in it: occupied. Not as a metaphor imposed decades later, but as an experience being described by people living through it. His photographs show what occupation looks like when it enters ordinary life.

Easington had been on strike since March. In August, after miner Paul Wilkinson announced his intention to return to work, the situation around the colliery escalated rapidly. Miners gathered, police reinforcements arrived, cars were overturned, windows smashed and riot police advanced with helmets, shields and staves.

However, Pattison's photography does not allow this violence to become the whole story.

Again and again, women, children and families occupy the same visual space as picket lines and police. Their presence is not a softer counterpoint to confrontation. It changes our understanding of it. A line of officers is also a line of officers outside somebody’s house. A riot helmet is seen against a domestic window. Children stand within sight of confrontations between police and people they know. A woman holds a baby above a street filled with uniformed men.

Photography can hold those things together in a way that a standard chronology of the strike cannot. Within a single frame, the public and private consequences of the dispute become inseparable. The political argument is no longer somewhere else, taking place between institutions, unions and government. It is happening outside a front door.

That is one of the particular capacities of documentary photography. It gives physical form to relationships that can otherwise become abstract: between power and place, violence and family life, national decisions and individual experience. Pattison’s photographs do not explain Easington from a distance. They keep returning us to the people through whom these events were being lived.

Easington colliery employed around 2,500 men and mining shaped much of the wider district. Five months into the strike, families were living with lost income, uncertainty about the future and a growing police presence in the village. The threat was not only to employment. It touched homes, clubs, shops, families and a whole network of life built around the industry. Pattison’s photographs keep those stakes visible without turning the people in them into mere illustrations of hardship.

Side exhibited and toured the photographs while the strike was still unfolding, and a booklet combining Pattison’s work with Beynon’s writing circulated in support of striking communities. And that contemporary circulation is part of their documentary story too. These images were not made simply to become historical evidence decades later. They were shown while people in Easington were still living through the strike. Photography carried an experience rooted in one place beyond it, while Beynon’s text brought the voices of people living there alongside the images.

Documentary photography cannot contain the whole truth of an event. A frame is always partial, and a photographer is always making choices about where to stand and what to include. But those choices can bring people back into histories that are easily reduced to headlines, statistics and confrontation.

Pattison’s photographs became part of that remembering while the strike was still unfolding. Shown and circulated at the time, they carried the experience of Easington beyond the village itself. Over forty years later, they still return us to the people inside that history: children watching, families waiting, women organising, people living with violence and defending the place they called home.

The woman who described Easington as occupied told Beynon she had never expected to see such scenes in her village. She ended with a promise: “We’ll never forget this–never. Not after this.”

Pattison’s photographs help make sure we don’t.