Convicted of a crime I did not commit
IT IS 32 years since John Shallow was arrested for the only time in his life. He was a young striking miner at the Polkemmet pit in West Lothian.
Shallow, pictured left, would go on to be convicted of assaulting a police officer and fined £250. At the end of the strike he was forced out of his job when the coal board made him redundant.
“It still irks me awful that I’ve got a conviction for police assault,” says the 58-year-old when he hears about the plea to Nicola Sturgeon to use her powers to look into the policing of the strike.
Now employed as a dairy worker, he has a vivid recollection of his arrest and encounter with the police on the picket line back in 1984. The account from Shallow about being arrested after a shove from the back on the picket line led to him falling over sounds like the kind of text-book case Lothian MSP Findlay is seeking to raise – of people allegedly caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. “I was stood on a bank at the side and a shove came from the back of the crowd,” says Shallow, who now lives in Shotts.
Shallow says he slid down a hill and when he got back up “a cop” pulled the hood of his parka coat over his head. “I said what’s that for, and he just came back at me and said ‘you’re done pal’.”
“They put me in the back of a police van and there were a lot of other lads in the van already. We then got taken to Kilmarnock police station, where we were kept for 12 hours. I was told that I was charged with a police assault, but I hadn’t touched him.
“He’d claimed I’d kicked and hit him, but how could I have done that if I was just getting up off the floor. There was no contact at all from me. We were released very late at night after about 13 or 14 of us had been held all that time in eight-by-six cells. It was horrendous and we were treated like animals.
“I ended up being fined £250 and although the coal board didn’t sack me, when Polkemmet closed after the strike I was made redundant and wasn’t offered a job at Bilston colliery like some miners. So I was effectively forced out of my job.”
Like the other miners convicted in Scotland during the strike, Shallow adds: “It still irks me awful that I’ve got a conviction for police assault. It’s like being put in jail for a robbery you didn’t do.”