They were two men on opposite sides of one of the bitterest industrial disputes of the 20th century. Golf balls, stones and sharpened coins had been flying, police horses were about to charge, and the leader of Britain's striking mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, had been arrested in that same field outside Orgreave cokeworks, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a few days earlier.
But for a brief moment one June day in 1984, there seemed to be a rapport between one of the solid line of officers in greatcoats and a miner who was joshing with them, wearing a toy police helmet, his whiskered chin thrust forward. As the Guardian's photographer Don McPhee pressed the button on his Nikon, the lips of both men started to curl; they seemed to have the promise of smiles not sneers.
It is a photograph that has been endlessly reprinted since - in books and magazines, on T-shirts and the programme cover of a play about the 1984-5 miners' strike. But the central relationship in the image has remained a mystery. Who were these two men and what was going through their minds?
McPhee, who died two years ago, never knew. He had to scamper to a safer part of the battlefield as 5,000 pickets tried to stop two convoys of lorries leaving to refuel Scunthorpe's steelworks. None of the writers of captions and articles accompanying the picture over the years ever found out, and friends of the miner who cut the original photo from the paper and stuck it on their welfare club noticeboard scarcely noticed when the tape lost its grip and the picture slid off and was swept up.
Then, towards the end of last year, Tony Parker, a senior BBC executive, was mulling over ideas for commemorating the strike's 25th anniversary when he came across the photograph online. Soon afterwards, he and some colleagues saw it again, hugely enlarged, at an exhibition of the work of the Guardian's Manchester-based photographers at the Lowry in Salford. Months later, after calling what seemed like every miner and police officer in Britain and trawling web clues all the way to Tennessee, Parker's colleague Lucy Smickersgill unearthed the story of George "Geordie" Brealey, the miner, and Paul Castle, the policeman.
"Geordie!" exclaims Graham Howells, the steward at Yorkshire Main welfare club where the photo once hung - alongside a smaller one, still there, of Brealey as the wicketkeeper of the pit's cricket team. Howells' face splits into a grin. "You can't but smile when you think about Geordie." Jim Cook, who stood beside Brealey at Orgreave, agrees: "If he could do you a favour, he'd do it. He always had a smile on his face."
Brealey, however, died in 1997, 12 years after the miners marched back to work at Yorkshire Main in March 1985, unbowed but comprehensively defeated after their disastrously botched last stand. He was only 53. He had transferred briefly to Maltby colliery when Yorkshire Main closed within the year, but he had lost heart. He suffered a series of strokes and finished up in
a wheelchair, unable to speak. Fatally, the paralysis spread to swallowing and he choked to death while eating an egg sandwich.
Brealey died in the house where he was born, a solid semi in Markham Square, a street in the Doncaster pit village of Edlington. His father had been a miner and his father-in-law went down Yorkshire Main at the age of 14. Mining was the community's whole life, not just a job, and it was this that the pickets at Orgreave were trying to sustain.
"We had a community culture in a mining village, self-policing, looking out for one another, and then all of a sudden we were thrown into Thatcher's class war," says Brealey's best friend Frank Arrowsmith, who left mining after the strike to train in psychiatric nursing and is now a mental health assessment officer.
"It was her war, not ours," he says over drinks at the welfare club with Jim Cook and other mates from Brealey's gang. "[Thatcher] determined it and we lost, but community spirit took us through 13 months. I was proud of what I did, so were my colleagues and my family. We still sit comfortable and sleep with our consciences clear."
Brealey's widow, Pat, has had a hard life since the strike, but she still giggles at McPhee's photograph, especially the toy helmet, which vanished in a spring clean. "He got it in Cleethorpes," she says. "We thought: we've got to get away with the kids for one day during this strike, so we all took off in the Morris Minor up the A631. George saw this hat in a shop and went straight in and bought it. 'What do you want that for?' I said. 'It's for the picket line,' he said, and that's how he started 'inspecting' the police."
Brealey had been a soldier before trying plumbing and then going down the pit, and he started play-acting once he'd got his helmet, using memories of infantry drill. "He was ever so brave," says Pat. "He had real bottle. I have another picture of him, from the Sheffield Star, 'inspecting' one of the mounted policemen at Orgreave."
Brealey's gang chuckle away as they remember the "inspecting". Jimmy Kelly says: "He was that kind of guy, very humorous. We thought he'd get snatched one day, but he didn't, he just got rounds of applause. George was able to raise a wee bit of humour for thousands of miners there fighting to save jobs against Thatcher's thugs - because that's what they were."
Even today, you won't hear a good word in Edlington for the Met from London or the Greater Manchester police. But there were other forces there such as Hampshire - who shared sandwiches on some picket lines - and Kent, to which Paul Castle belonged.
Castle is the grandson of a miner from the Kentish coalfield, which stayed out on strike longer than anywhere else, and his odyssey from Orgreave has been extraordinary. His CV includes spells in small armed units guarding Mrs Thatcher and the Queen, and he now lives in Tennessee, where he runs a personal protection advisory service. The indefatigable Smickersgill eventually found his company's website and with it, a burly guy in shades and fatigues carrying an assault rifle in front of a Hummer in the backwoods of America. A YouTube clip, "Paul Castle's combat course", suggests the gap between him and Brealey should have been too great to be overcome by a brief moment of good humour.
But on the phone from Nashville, Castle is not the mixture of John Wayne and Norman Tebbit you might imagine. Fighting cancer, one of his first reactions to the story of the photograph is to say how sorry he is to hear of Brealey's death. Castle didn't and still doesn't support the miners; he could not stomach their treatment of scabs. But he says: "The decent human people just got pulled into the middle of it all, like the first world war when you had German and English fighting men in trenches and the politicians and generals telling them to do this and do that. It was lions led by donkeys. Without having sympathy with what was going on in the big miners' strike, at the same time you had an awareness of what it might be like for those communities in Yorkshire. I'm not suggesting that you agreed with their line, but family background, as in my case, would give you human sympathy."
So was that meeting with Brealey a humane moment? Thinking back 25 years, and with a lifetime of police work since he took a £40 monthly cut from his butcher's wage to join the force, Castle won't pretend when he isn't sure. He says: "If I was a third party looking at the picture, I'd say it's a snapshot in time, it's getting folklore surrounding it and that's nice - it sums up the British sense of humour. But all I recall is being more interested in crowd safety than having a conversation with a miner, which we were told not to do. The photo doesn't catch the seriousness of the time."
Back in Yorkshire Main welfare, another of Brealey's friends, Gary Shephard, shares Castle's doubts. "I don't think there's rapport; George was just taking the piss out of them." "Yes," says Jim Cook, who was successfully defended by Michael Mansfield QC in court, "he was taking the P but they were decent enough to take it the way it was meant. Another force would have probably lifted him. He was lucky it wasn't the Met."
Both men are known at last, then, but one is dead and the other dubious about the meaning that so many people have read into McPhee's photograph. But there is one more piece of rediscovered evidence. McPhee had the original idea for the Lowry exhibition and was organising it right up to his death. After that, his long-standing friend and colleague Denis Thorpe took on the task, seeing the project through as a memorial.
Among the material he found was a line of negatives of the whole Orgreave sequence; not a solitary shot but four, taken within a couple of seconds. The second frame is the famous one: "Perfect geometry, Cartier Bresson's 'the moment', a picture which locks you in, wondering what's going to happen next," says Thorpe. But look at the last two on the strip of contact prints. In both, Castle's grin stands out from his poker-faced colleagues, while Brealey is clearly clowning on with his 'inspecting'.
What happened, in a grim situation with precious few other redeeming features, was a smile, not a sneer. Or, as Thorpe says, "A human moment, and that's what Don was always looking for."
The Miner and the Policeman will be on Inside Out, BBC1, 7.30pm tomorrow in the Yorkshire region. It will be shown nationwide at a later date. A Long Exposure: 100 years of Guardian photography is at the Lowry, Salford, until 22 March.