The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History 0198887698, 9780198887690

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The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization A Political and Cultural History JÖRG ARNOLD

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jörg Arnold 2024 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023942279 ISBN 978–0–19–888769–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For my father

Preface As I sat working on the draft manuscript in early March 2022, Paul Darlow, tireless custodian of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) archive, told me that it had been thirty-­seven years since he walked back through the gates of Woolley Colliery after having been on strike for an entire year. Looking back, Paul believed they were right ‘to try to stop the massacre of communities and jobs’.1 Two years and nine months after the end of the strike, Woolley had closed, and Paul was transferred to Houghton Main, 11 miles away. By the time this supposedly long-­life colliery was also closed in 1993, Paul had left the industry, still only 25 years of age. Looking back on the strike, Paul would do it all over again. For once, he felt, he had stepped onto the stage where history was being made. He would do it again—­except, that is, he’d make sure that the miners would win this time! Paul’s deeply felt memories may serve as a reminder that the distance between past and present cannot be measured solely in linear terms. For some, past events retain powerful purchase on the present, regardless of how long ago they took place. This is a book about time. It is about how ways of life and modes of production become labelled as ‘old’ or ‘new’, as obsolete, or full of promise; it is about how horizons of expectations shift, and how this shift reconfigures spaces of experience. More specifically, this book is about Britain’s coal miners: It is about the actual people who worked in the industry, but also, and perhaps even more so, about the ideas with which the figure of ‘the miner’ was invested by broader society in a period of rapid social and economic change. In a nutshell, this book argues that the British coal miners went through a cyclical movement—­from loser to winner and back again—­as Britain underwent a de-­industrial revolution in the final three decades of the twentieth century. The book reinserts the industry’s ‘new dawn’ of the 1970s into the story of coal. The industry’s reversal of fortunes, inscribed in Plan for Coal (1974), proved short-­lived. It was significant all the same. Its significance did not lie in affecting the long-­term decline of the coal industry. Rather, the ‘new dawn’ was important in raising the political and cultural stakes. The figure of the coal miner became invested with ‘special’ characteristics, and, collectively, the miners found themselves at the centre of sharply conflicting visions of the direction and nature of British society. The miners were no mere spectators in this process. They were agents, thought to be uniquely

1  Paul Darlow to author, email, 7 March 2022.

viii Preface power­ ful by their numerous opponents, and half-­ believing in this power themselves. This book is not about me. I do not come from a mining community. Nor did I grow up in Britain. The book offers an outsider’s perspective on watershed moments in contemporary British history, informed by reading, listening, and thinking, rather than by direct experience. It is hoped that British readers will not think I have trespassed on ‘their’ history. Yet, in a broader sense, the book also incorporates aspects of my own life. I grew up in an environment where, just as in the coalfields, relentless structural change laid bare the limits of vernacular agency; where hard manual labour served as a marker of (male) social status and esteem; and in which tensions between self-­images and broader societal perceptions (or ideas of those perceptions) became ever more pronounced as this way of life moved from the centre to the margins. At first sight, the lifeworlds of peasant farmers in rural Germany and of the miners in Britain’s coalfields may have been far apart. On closer inspection, both worlds had all too much in common. Thirty years on from the struggles recorded in this book, memories are (almost) all that remains of these worlds. This book has had a long, probably overlong, gestation period. Along the way I have accumulated many debts which it is my pleasure to acknowledge in this preface. I must start by thanking Professor Ulrich Herbert and all my former colleagues at the University of Freiburg, where the first sketches of a research project on the political and social history of de-­industrialization were drafted. Although little of this original project has found its way into the present book, I remain grateful for the many enlightening conversations I had with colleagues and students. A postdoctoral fellowship at the German Historical Institute in London in 2011/12 allowed me to undertake exploratory archival research and immerse myself in the literature on contemporary British history. I would like to thank the Institute for their hospitality and support. Work began in earnest after I had moved to the University of Nottingham in the autumn of 2013, and I have benefited enormously from talking to my colleagues and learning from students about modern Britain. A period of study leave in 2016 allowed me to reconceptualize the project and undertake extensive archival visits to London, Wales, Scotland, the North-­West, the Midlands, and Yorkshire. The bulk of the manuscript was written in 2019/20 during my time as a Senior Fellow and Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). I would like to thank all the members of staff at FRIAS and my co-­fellows for making my second time in Freiburg such a wonderful experience. Roland Muntschick deserves special mention for assisting so tirelessly with the research and the provision of reading materials. I would like to put on record my especial thanks to the Institute’s then director, Professor Bernd Kortmann, for allowing me to extend my fellowship when the Covid-­19 pandemic threw the world into turmoil in 2020/21.

Preface  ix Without the generosity and support of FRIAS, this book would almost certainly never have been completed. Over the years, I have visited many archives and special library collections. Throughout, my innumerable queries and requests have been met in a most helpful manner. I would like to thank sincerely all the members of staff at The National Archives, Kew; the South Wales Miners’ Library in Swansea; the National Coal Mining Museum for England; the National Mining Museum Scotland; the Bishopsgate Institute, London; the People’s History Museum in Manchester; the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick; Special Collections at the University of Sheffield; Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham. Paul Darlow and Paul Hardman have given me access to the invaluable collections held at the NUM offices in Barnsley. To them, as well as to NUM general secretary Chris Kitchen, caretaker Chris Kitchen Jr, Joanne (Jo) Batty, Emma Perry, Nicola Wakefield, and all the other staff at the miners’ offices, I owe a special debt of gratitude. The rich archival holdings have now been transferred, thanks to a generous grant by the Wellcome Trust, from their abode at Huddersfield Road to a new environment where they can be kept safe for posterity and made accessible for future scholars. I have presented aspects of my work at numerous research seminars, academic workshops, and conferences, both in Germany and the UK. I would like to thank all the organizers for their kind invitation and the discussants for their contributions and comments. On two occasions, at Nottingham in 2016 and the National Coal Mining Museum in 2017, I was fortunate in being able to co-­convene workshops myself, in collaboration with my colleagues Jim Phillips (Glasgow) and Natasha Vall (Teesside). Both were memorable occasions, which have helped me enormously in thinking about the place of the coal miners, as well as other industrial workers, in contemporary British history and beyond. The events were made possible by generous support from the National Coal Mining Museum for England, the Economic History Society, and the University of Nottingham. Oxford University Press have kindly agreed to publish the book. I am indebted to the Delegates of the Press for their approval of the project as well as to four an­onym­ous reviewers, who have provided detailed and incisive comments on the draft typescript. I owe a debt of gratitude to Commissioning Editor Matthew Cotton and Senior Assistant Commissioning Editor Cathryn Steele. I am equally grateful to production editor Mark O’Malley, project manager Saranya Ravi and copy editor Neil Morris. All have shown much enthusiasm for the project and overseen the commissioning and production process in a most congenial manner. My sincere thanks go out to them all. It’s been a great pleasure working with such a dedicated team. While institutions have made possible the conditions under which the research for this study was carried out, it was individuals who have made the difference. They have given generously of their time, have provided constructive criticism,

x Preface support, and encouragement. I would like to mention David Amos, Jim Phillips, and Marion Henry of the now sadly defunct Coal and Steel Miners’ Study Group; Janet E. Johnson and Carolin Duttlinger, co-­fellows at FRIAS who became dear friends; as well as all colleagues at the University of Nottingham. My colleagues and friends Spencer Mawby and Peter Darby have helped me in innumerable ways down the years, for which I am deeply grateful. Spencer Mawby has also offered incisive comments on the draft manuscript. Dean Blackburn has followed the genesis of this project more closely than perhaps anybody else. He has read and commented on innumerable drafts, and given generously of his time. I am deeply indebted to him. My former undergraduate student Harry Churchill, now a distinguished early career scholar himself, has kindly read the entire draft manu­script. Sonja Levsen has likewise carved out time to read large chunks of the text. Marion Henry and Janet E. Johnson have commented on individual chapters. I would like to thank all of them for their detailed comments and generous feedback. Thanks are also due to Franz-­Josef Brüggemeier, Peter Itzen, Vera Marstaller, and Jürgen Osterhammel for support and encouragement. Paul Darlow has provided invaluable assistance in locating sources from the archive and assisted the project in many ways. Very kindly, Paul has also read and commented on the manuscript. I am aware how deeply Paul feels about the miners’ history. I realize this book cannot do justice to his past, and I hope he will find the time to commit to paper his own record of events. Kerstin Bellemann, Jürgen Schmidt, Christian Schneider, Wioletta Frey, and Sebastian Schöttler have travelled with me for many years. I would like to thank them for their innumerable acts of kindness and friendship. My parents, Gerda and Helmut Arnold, as well as my brother and sister, Michael and Sandra, have been with me for even longer. My sincere thanks go out to them. During the final stages of this work, my father passed away, after many months of suffering following a grave medical misdiagnosis. His spirit will remain with me for the rest of my life. I remain indebted to Ilona. Our marriage didn’t last, but we managed to stay friends. Finally, I would like to mention my children, who keep reminding me of the richness of children’s experiences and perspectives. Emilia and Antonia, you are the light of my life!

Contents List of Illustrations List of Maps List of Tables List of Abbreviations

xiii xv xvii xix

Introduction: From Loser to Winner and Back Again

1

I .   F R OM L O SE R T O W I N N E R 1. 1967

23

2. 1972

66

3. 1977

94

4. 1981

130 I I .   .   .   .   A N D BAC K AG A I N

5. 1984

165

6. 1987

201

7. 1992

235

8. 1997

259

Conclusion: The British Miner in History

283

Appendix: Statistical Tables

293

Bibliography Index

301 319

List of Illustrations I.1. Kellingley Colliery, 1981 I.2. New workwear for Britain’s miners, 1979

18 19

3.1. NCB booklet (c.1975), front cover

105

3.2. NCB booklet (c.1975), back page

106

II.1. Mik Critchlow, North School Corner, 1979

162

II.2. Mik Critchlow, My Father On His Redundancy Day, 1988

162

5.1. Peter Price, communal soup kitchen, 1984

192

5.2. Peter Price, a girl being taunted, 1984

192

5.3. Peter Price, miners being chased, 1984

193

5.4. Peter Price, a strike-­breaker’s property being vandalized, 1984

193

List of Maps 0.1. The British coalfield in 1979 8.1. Comparison of British deep-­coal mines in operation in 1973 and 1998

xxiii 282

List of Tables 1a. Key indicators of the British coal industry, 1966/7–1981/2

293

1b. Key indicators of the British coal industry, 1983/4–1997

294

2. Recruitment and wastage by category, 1965/6–1968/9

294

3. Wastage by age groups, 1965/6–1968/9

295

4. Comparison of weekly earnings of manual men, 1950–1973

295

5. Recruitment and wastage during the 1970s

296

6a. Average weekly wages, men on colliery books, 1970/1–1977/8

297

6b. Average weekly wages, male manual workers by industry, 1970–81

298

7. Wage rates for mineworkers, 1 January 1981

299

8. Age distribution of men on colliery books, December 1983

299

List of Abbreviations BACM British Association of Colliery Management BBC British Broadcasting Corporation BC British Coal BFI British Film Institute CBH Contemporary British History CEHMB Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain CINCC Coal Industry National Consultative Council CISWO Coal Industry Social Welfare Organization COSA Colliery Officials and Staff Association CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain CPRS Central Policy Review Staff ESRC Economic and Social Research Council GWh Gigawatt hours HC House of Commons HL House of Lords HSIR Historical Studies in Industrial Relations HSR Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung ILWCH International Labour and Working-­Class History ITN Independent Television News JPAC Joint Policy Advisory Committee MISC Miscellaneous MP Member of Parliament MRC Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick NACODS National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers NCB National Coal Board NEC National Executive Committee NES New Earnings Survey NLR New Left Review NPLA National Power Loading Agreement NUM National Union of Mineworkers NUMSA National Union of Mineworkers (Scottish Area) OBE Officer of the Order of the British Empire ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OPEC Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries PM Prime Minister PREM Prime Minister’s Office RMPS Redundant Mineworkers’ Payment Scheme RMT National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers

xx  List of Abbreviations TCBH TNA TUC UDM WAPC

Twentieth Century British History The National Archives, Kew Trades Union Congress Union of Democratic Mineworkers Women Against Pit Closures

And tomorrow brings another train Another young brave steals away But you’re the one I remember From these valleys of green and the grey New Model Army, ‘Green and Grey’ (1989)

Map 0.1  The British coalfield in 1979, adapted from Spooner (1981).

 

Introduction From Loser to Winner and Back Again

In 2014, the feature film Pride was released in cinemas across the UK to critical acclaim.1 Set during the time of the 1984/5 miners’ strike, Pride tells the story of the encounter between a mining community in South Wales and a London-­based miners’ support group of gay and lesbian activists. Although based on real events, the screenplay self-­consciously makes use of poetic licence for dramatic effect.2 Throughout the film, the miners are ruralized:3 They are depicted as ‘locals’ who live in isolated occupational communities ‘deep in the valleys’, woefully ignorant of the liberalization in lifestyles that has emerged in the metropolitan centre.4 They are also cast as underdogs who are engaged in a battle against an opponent ‘so much bigger, so much stronger than yourself ’, as the trade unionist Dai puts it in a memorable scene.5 This opponent manifests itself in the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher but, ultimately, is none other than progress itself. The miners are firmly situated in an olden world: the miners’ traditions no less than their industry belong to a bygone era, illustrated just as much by the drab colours of their built environment as by the stiffness of their manners and attire. As the activists enter the village in their brightly coloured bus, they are shocked to observe a broken-­down vehicle abandoned in the street. Without the 1  Pride (2014), dir. by Matthew Warchus, screenplay by Steven Beresford. Peter Bradshaw, ‘Cannes 2014 Review: Pride’, The Guardian, 23 May 2014; Ella Alexander, ‘Pride film review’, The Independent, 1 July 2014; Beth Ashton, ‘Film Review: Pride’, 11 August 2014; Joe Utichi, ‘Unlikely alliance’, The Sunday Times, 24 August 2014; Kate Kellaway, ‘When Miners and Gay Rights Activists united on the Frontline’, The Observer, 30 August 2014; Charlotte O’Sullivan, ‘Pride – film review’, London Evening Standard, 12 September 2014; Alex Zane, ‘Pride & Glory’, The Sun, 12 September 2014; Robbie Collin, ‘Drama that earns its applause’, The Daily Telegraph, 12 September 2014; Brian Viner, ‘The Best of British Talent on the March’, Daily Mail, 12 September 2014; Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Pride, film review’, The Independent, 12 September 2014; Kate Muir, ‘Disco Dancing on the picket line’, The Times, 12 September 2014. For a rare critical review see: Nigel Andrews, ‘Pride – film review’, Financial Times, 11 September 2014. 2  Steven Beresford, ‘How we put Pride on the Big Screen’, The Times, 30 August 2014. For the historical context, Diarmaid Kelliher, ‘Solidarity and Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners 1984–­85’, History Workshop Journal 77 (2014), pp. 240–62; Diarmaid Kelliher, Making Cultures of Solidarity: London and the 1984–5 Miners’ Strike (London, 2021); Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-­war Britain: How the personal got political (Manchester, 2007), pp. 164–9. 3  Jörg Arnold, ‘ “That rather sinful city of London”: the coal miner, the city and the country in the British cultural imagination, c. 1969–2014’, Urban History 47/2 (2019), pp. 1–19, here pp. 3–5. 4  Citations from the introduction to the official launch trailer, available to watch on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsFY0wHpR5o, accessed 16 September 2021. 5  Official launch trailer, at 1:28–1:38.

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0001

2  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization pit, these villages are ‘nothing, they’re finished’, as veteran trade unionist Cliff informs the visitors.6 Yet it is the miners’ very conservatism, their preservation, amidst rapid socio-­economic change, of a communal consciousness, that make them admirable as well as pitiful. In the fusion of the miners’ social-­class-­based collectivism and the activists’ identity-­based individualism lies a way forward for the progressive Left in the early twenty-­first century, or so the film’s proto-­ Corbynite political message seemed to suggest.7 The British coal industry is no more. One year after the release of Pride, production ceased at Britain’s last commercial coal mine.8 The closure of Kellingley Colliery in December 2015 marked the end of an industry that George Orwell, writing in the 1930s, had memorably called the very foundation of ‘our civilisation’.9 Although the industry had long shed workers from its peak in the early twentieth century, even in decline coal remained of major economic and political importance to British society. It was only after the closures of the early 1990s that coal moved from the centre to the margins of British life. In 1966, the National Coal Board (NCB) employed 395,000 miners who produced 167 million tons (169.67 metric tonnes) of deep-­mined coal at 420 collieries.10 The industry furnished 58.7 per cent of Britain’s energy needs; 75.4 per cent of electricity was generated from coal-­ fired power stations.11 Thirty years later, the privatized industry employed no more than 10,000 miners at about twenty collieries, producing 20  million tonnes of deep-­mined coal.12 Yet, even as mining as an occupation disappeared, the figure of the coal miner lived on in the cultural imagination.13

6  Official launch trailer, at 1:10–1:15. 7  Matthew Warchus, ‘Picket in Pink’, The Guardian, 21 May 2014; Florence Sutcliffe-­Braithwaite, ‘‘Reopen the Coal Mines’? Deindustrialisation and the Labour Party’, The Political Quarterly 92/2 (April-­June 2021), pp. 246–54, here: p. 249. The release of Pride predated the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in September 2015. 8  Coal mining did not cease completely with the closure of Kellingley Colliery. At the time of going to press, there was one drift mine operating in South Wales, Aberpergwm Colliery, which produced small quantities of anthracite coal. On 7 December 2022, Government planning permission was granted for the sinking of a more substantial new mine in Cumbria, with output intended for use in the domestic and European steel industries. See ‘First UK coal mine in decades approved despite climate concerns’, BBC News, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-­politics-­63892381, accessed 16 January 2023. 9  George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London, 2001 (1st ed. 1937)), p. 18. On the closure see Jörg Arnold, ‘ “Like being on death row”: Britain and the end of coal, c. 1970 to the present, CBH 32/1 (2018), pp. 1–17. 10  The National Coal Board introduced the metric unit ‘tonne’ in April 1978. In this book, the unit of mass found in the primary source material will be converted when deemed necessary for comparative purposes. One imperial ton is the equivalent of 1.016 metric tonnes. See William Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 5: The Nationalised Industry (Oxford, 1986), p. xvii. 11  Ministry of Power, Fuel Policy (Cmnd. 3438) (London, 1967), pp. 1, 19, 31, 36. Compare also, with slightly different statistical parameters, the National Coal Board’s figures, reproduced in Tables 1a and 1b in the Appendix. 12  Making the Difference: A New Start for England’s Coalfield Communities, the Coalfield Task Force Report (June 1998), p. 8; Peter Pearson and Jim Watson, UK Energy Policy 1980–2010: A history and lessons to be learnt (London, 2012), p. 7 (fig. 2). 13  Arnold, ‘Sinful city’.

Introduction  3 Indeed, the very disappearance of working miners from British life gave new force to the figure of ‘the miner’ in the social imagination. From the mid-­1990s, two highly acclaimed feature films put coal miners at the centre of heartfelt tales of determined yet often futile resistance to relentless socio-­economic change.14 Meanwhile, heritage initiatives sought to preserve memories and remains of a fast-­fading way of life. Cultural representations and recorded memories alike drew attention to the human costs of the dramatic socio-­economic as well as political-­cultural changes that had swept British society since the 1970s. In the cultural imagination, the miners became an emotionally charged symbol of an imaginary ‘old England’.15 They served as a potent reminder of what was being lost as the nation was transformed in the final decades of the twentieth century. The miners’ hold on the cultural imagination continues into the present, as a string of recent publications and frequent references to ‘ex-­miners’ in political discourse testify.16 It is the relationship between broader ideas and self-­images that this study sets out to disentangle. It asks about the interaction between social imaginaries and miners’ subjectivities in a period of accelerated socio-­economic change. In doing so, it probes the significance of the figure of the coal miner for our understanding of contemporary British history. The book does not try to reveal the ‘real’ story of British miners behind the myths that circulated about them. Rather, it is an ex­plor­ation of the intersection between the broader societal meanings ascribed to coal miners and their collective and individual self-­images between c.1967 and 1997. The place of the miner in society was contested. Politicians, industrialists, experts, journalists, trade unionists, and individual mineworkers themselves were all engaged in shaping images and ideas of who the miners ‘really’ were, what motivated them, and what fears and hopes they held for the future. In examining these debates, the study opens up new ways of understanding contemporary British history. As we shall see, the value of the study of coal for our understanding of the recent past extends beyond a mere illustration of existing narrative arcs of ‘decline’, ‘de-­industrialization’, or ‘popular individualism’.17 In addition, a pol­it­ ical and cultural history of coal is also well placed to open up contemporary British history to theoretical approaches that have come to focus on historical

14  See Chapter 8, below. 15  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973). 16  Jeremy Paxman, Black Gold: The History of how Coal Made Britain (London, 2021); Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the end of Industrial Britain (London, 2021); Sherwood, series 1 (2022), BBC One, written by James Graham, dir. by Lewis Arnold and Ben A. Williams. 17  Jim Tomlinson, ‘De-­industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-­narrative for Post-­war British history’, TCBH 27/1 (2016), pp. 76–99; Jim Tomlinson, ‘De-­industrialisation: strengths and weaknesses as a key concept for understanding post-­war British history’, Urban History 47/2 (2020), pp. 199–219; Emily Robinson et al., ‘Telling Stories about Post-­war Britain: Popular Individualism and the “crisis” of the 1970s’, TCBH 28/2 (2017), pp. 268–304.

4  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization understandings of time, the articulation of emotions, and the semantic meanings inscribed into language itself.18 The study develops two overarching arguments. The first relates to tem­por­al­ ities and concerns the place of coal in our understanding of contemporary British history. The story of coal after the 1950s is often told in linear terms as the story of a ‘long death’, of the sad but inevitable decline of an industry that had no place in late twentieth-­century Britain.19 In his account of Britain’s ‘peacetime revolutions’, No Turning Back, the late Paul Addison firmly locates Britain’s miners on the wrong side of history. The coal industry is referred to as an example of a ‘Victorian industry’, which was ‘in decline’ from the late 1950s onwards and ‘in free fall’ by the 1960s.20 Here, as elsewhere, the decline of coal is linked to the demise of a productive regime that is referred to as ‘industrial Britain’.21 Coal is put at the centre of a historical metanarrative that conceives of the story of late twentieth-­ century Britain as a tale of a ‘de-­industrial revolution’.22 While Addison remains focused on the UK, other historians have extended the argument to the West in general. The late Tony Judt, in his celebrated history of post-­war Europe, sees impersonal forces at work during the 1970s and 1980s that were fundamentally transforming the very foundations on which post-­war Europe had been built. Significantly, Judt, too, uses the example of coal mining to illustrate his broader point about ‘incontrovertible’ tectonic shifts in the underlying socio-­economic structures of Western societies: ‘The [UK] mining workforce was to fall from 718,000 [in 1947] to 43,000 [in 1992]; most of those jobs were lost in the course of the decade of 1975–85.’23 Coal miners and their industry are also placed at the centre of the ­inter­dis­cip­lin­ary field of de-­industrialization studies. At its most basic level, de-­industrialization describes a process of economic change in which the dominance of the secondary sector—­in particular manufacturing—­gave way to the service sector, with at­tend­ ant consequences for employment, welfare and collective identities. To a greater or lesser degree, such a shift was experienced by all ‘developed’ nations in the

18 Much of this scholarship has been pioneered by continental European scholars: Fernando Esposito, Zeitenwandel: Transformationen geschichtlicher Zeitlichkeit nach dem Boom (Göttingen, 2017); Martina Steber, Die Hüter der Begriffe: politische Sprachen des Konservativen in Deutschland und Großbritannien, 1945–1980 (Berlin/Boston, 2017). 19  This narrative takes little cognizance of coal’s adverse impact on the environment. A history that links the demise of the British coal industry to an emerging awareness of global warming remains to be written, but see the remarks in Franz-­Josef Brüggemeier, Buried Treasure: The age of coal from 1750 to the present, translated by Ruth Martin (Oxford, in press), pp. 263f. 20  Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-­War Britain (Oxford, 2010), pp. 169, 288. 21  Beynon and Hudson, Shadow of the Mine; Francis Beckett and David Hencke, Marching to the Fault Line: The Miners’ Strike and the Battle for Industrial Britain (London, 2009). 22  Michael Kitson and Jonathan Michie, ‘The de-­Industrial Revolution: The Rise and Fall of UK manufacturing 1870–2010’, CEHMB, vol. II (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 302–29. 23  Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), p. 458f.

Introduction  5 second half of the twentieth century.24 As an analytical framework, de-­ industrialization is interested, above all, in the social and cultural fallout of this process. It is concerned with the people and places that were left behind when, in the words of Steven High, ‘mills and factories closed . . . leaving towns, regions and countries without an industrial base’.25 In the UK and elsewhere, the coal industry is regularly used as an example to illustrate the significance, and far-­reaching consequences, of this shift from an industrial to a service economy.26 While general histories use the story of coal for illustration’s sake, specialized histories tend to tell the story of coal through the prism of de-­industrialization.27 Just as miners occupied a prominent place in mid-­twentieth century studies on the impact of the social-­democratic settlement on the British working-­class, former miners and mining communities became of especial interest to scholars as ‘laboratories’ of de-­industrialization.28 These extant interpretations have much to commend them. They demonstrate that the coal industry’s significance extends beyond the subdisciplines of energy history, history of industrial relations, or history of labour. They put the story of coal where it belongs, at the centre of contemporary British history. Yet, while correctly identifying overall trends, these interpretations have much less explanatory power when the development of the coal industry is looked at from close range. In particular, they run into difficulties when we zoom in on the so-­called crisis decade of the 1970s, the very decade that the term ‘de-­industrialization’ re-­ entered public usage.29 Some interpretations impose a narrative of inexorable decline that hides from view the possibility of different outcomes. In other words, they ‘close down’ rather than ‘open up’ the study of the past. It is the central contention of this study that there are considerable benefits to be gained from conceiving of the trajectory of contemporary history in a more open-­ ended,

24  Charles Feinstein, ‘Structural Change in the Developed Countries in the Twentieth Century’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 15/4 (1999), pp. 35–55; Lutz Raphael, Jenseits von Kohle und Stahl: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte Westeuropas nach dem Boom (Berlin, 2019). 25 Steven High, ‘ “The Wounds of Class”: A Historiographical Reflection on the Study of Deindustrialization, 1973–2013’, History Compass 11/11 (2013), pp. 994–1007, here p. 994; Christopher Lawson: ‘Making sense of the ruins: The historiography of deindustrialisation and its continued relevance in neoliberal times’, History Compass 18 (2020), pp. 1–14. 26 Anselm Doering-­ Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970 (Göttingen, 2008), p. 35; Raphael, Jenseits von Kohle und Stahl, pp. 45–9; Tomlinson, ‘Strengths and Weaknesses’, pp. 214f. 27  Jim Phillips, ‘Deindustrialization and the Moral Economy of the British Coalfields, 1947 to 1991’, ILWCH 84 (Fall 2013), pp. 99–115; Ewan Gibbs, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland (London, 2021). 28  Tim Strangleman, ‘Mining a productive seam? The coal industry, community and sociology’, CBH 32/1 (2018), pp. 18–38, here pp. 24–7. 29  Jim Tomlinson, ‘Deindustrialisation and “Thatcherism”: moral economy and unintended consequences’, CBH 35/4 (2001), pp. 620–42, here 622–5; Jörg Arnold, Tobias Becker, and Otto Saumarez Smith, ‘The de-­industrializing city in the UK and Germany: conceptual approaches and empirical findings in comparative perspective’, Urban History 47/2 (2020), pp. 194–8, here p. 195. On the 1970s: Lawrence Black, Hugh Pemberton, and Pat Thane (eds.), Reassessing 1970s Britain (London, 2013).

6  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization conjunctural, and, indeed, cyclical manner. On closer examination, this study argues, the example of coal can serve as much to destabilize as to illustrate broader narrative arcs of socio-­economic transition and rupture from ‘smokestacks’ to ‘services’, of the inexorable advance of de-­industrialization and the rise of popular individualism.30 To begin with, if coal is looked at from the angle of energy rather than manufacturing, the cognitive link between coal and industrialism becomes much less compelling, and the inevitability of its demise less of a foregone conclusion. Despite the strong historical association between coal and the nineteenth-­century ‘staples’ of steel production, textiles, and shipbuilding, the coal industry did not depend for its survival on the perpetuation of a Fordist model of production. After all, the main market for coal from the 1960s onwards was electricity gen­er­ ation. Post-­industrial economies relied on a steady and secure supply of abundant and affordable electricity just as much as the ‘older’ industrial economies. By the end of the twentieth century, UK electricity generation stood at 350,000 GWh as compared to 230,000 GWh thirty years earlier.31 In principle, coal retained its value for society regardless of the broader macroeconomic shifts from the secondary to the tertiary sector. Indeed, as we shall see, throughout the later decades of the twentieth century experts and policymakers were careful to distinguish between the future of coal as an industry and coal miners as industrial workers. Even by the end of the 1980s, many would insist that the industry had a secure future, although the same might not be said for every worker in the industry. They would often argue that coal’s future depended on the ability of miners either to embrace change or, failing that, to leave the industry. Furthermore, there was an important anti-­cyclical element to the story of coal in the UK. Contrary to the claims by Judt, job losses in mining did not accelerate in the period 1975 to 1985. In some respects the opposite was the case: the financial year 1974/5 saw the first increase of employment in the industry in seventeen years, by 6,800 to 248,800 at the end of March.32 Average colliery manpower in 1975/6 stood at 247,100. Manpower trends did revert to the longer-­term pattern of decline after 1976, but at a relatively slow rate. As late as 1982/3, average colliery manpower figures remained at a level well above 200,000.33 In the financial year 1980/1, coal’s share of energy consumption overtook oil for the first time since 1970.34 Looking at the ‘long 1970s’ as a whole, the period is better characterized as a period of relative stability, sandwiched between the massive contraction that had taken place in the 1960s and the accelerated rundown that was to 30  Tomlinson, ‘De-­industrialization Not Decline’; Robinson et al., ‘Telling Stories’. 31  Pearson and Watson, Energy Policy, p. 22 (fig. 5). 32  National Coal Board (NCB), Report and Accounts 1974/1975 (London, 1975), p. 7. 33  William Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 5: The Nationalised Industry (Oxford, 1986), p. 680. 34 NCB, Report and Accounts 1980/81 (London, 1981), p. 9.

Introduction  7 follow after the conclusion of the miners’ strike in 1985. Indeed, the dramatic events of 1984/5 can only be understood against the backdrop of a ‘horizon of expectation’ among miners that the industry’s future would continue to hold promise.35 More broadly, the number of men on colliery books was an imperfect indicator of the health of the industry. It was even less indicative of the status and prospects of the people working in it. Here, the fortunes of the workers employed in the British coal industry seemed increasingly at odds with broader trends in society. At the very moment that the term ‘de-­industrialization’ entered popular usage and perceptions of ‘crisis’ were commonplace, the coal miner enjoyed an unprecedented moment of self-­ confidence, industrial bargaining power, and material wellbeing.36 In 1977/8, average weekly earnings in the industry for men aged 18 and over stood at £96.22 (inclusive of allowances in kind), making miners among the highest-­paid workers in industry.37 Comparative figures compiled by the Department of Employment’s statistical service gave a figure of £104.10 for the year 1978, as compared to £84.70 for all manufacturing industries, £91.20 for metal manufacture, £88.80 for vehicles, and £73.70 for textiles.38 A small but telling anecdote may serve to underline the broader point: at the opening of the National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) annual conference in 1974, a local councillor expressed a wish for his daughters to get married to miners. This was, of course, meant as a light-­hearted quip to open the proceedings. Yet, running counter to the well-­established trope that every mother wished for their sons not to follow their father down the mine, the comment was indicative of the miners’ renaissance of fortunes in the aftermath of the oil crisis and the two coal strikes of 1972 and 1974.39 In his 1976 presidential address, Joe Gormley argued that the tables had been turned. People outside mining who, back in the 1960s, had ‘enjoyed great prosperity and security’, were now living through ‘dark and depressing’ times. For the miners, by contrast, the seventies were a decade of opportunity and material advance.40 The miners’ elevated position did not come to an abrupt end with the election of a Conservative government in May 1979 either. It extended throughout the period of Margaret Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister from 1979 to 1983 and well into the second term. In some respects, the gap between miners and other

35  Pearson and Watson, Energy Policy, p. 6. 36 Tony Benn, Frances Morrell, and Francis Cripps, A Ten-­Year Industrial Strategy for Britain (London [1975]), p. 3; ‘Restraint is the right course’, The Times, 15 April 1975; Samuel Brittan, ‘The half-­truth of “de-­industrialisation”  ’, Financial Times, 24 April 1975. 37 NCB, Statistical Tables 1977/78 (London), p. 12 (table 14); Ashworth, History, pp. 374–7; Addison, No Turning Back, p. 324. Average weekly earnings in 1977/8 including juveniles stood at £90.12 (see Table 1, Appendix). 38  See Tables 6a and 6b, Appendix. 39 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Annual Report and Proceedings 1974 (London, 1974), p. 90. 40 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1976 (London, 1976), pp. 283–90, here p. 285.

8  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization industrial workers widened further at this time. Collectively, the miners wea­ thered the economic recession of the early 1980s comparatively well.41 As an edi­ tor­ial put it in the September/October 1980 issue of the union paper The Miner, ‘And while unemployment soars as the Tories destroy Britain’s manufacturing industry base, there are queues for jobs at the pits.’42 To be sure, 27,000 jobs were lost in the industry between 1978/9 and 1982/3. This compared to 95,000 jobs in the steel industry, where employment was more than halved between 1980 and 1983, from 166,000 down to 71,000.43 The point of the editorial was to forestall any false complacency on the part of the workforce; to close, on a cognitive level, the difference in outlook that had developed between miners and the mass of industrial workers. The subsequent events of the winter of 1980/1, when the National Coal Board, under pressure from the government, hastily withdrew a proposal for accelerated pit closures, demonstrated that, for the time being, the miners possessed the strength to shield themselves from the ravages happening all around them. At the very moment that de-­industrialization ‘reached a crescendo’ in the UK, with official unemployment figures reaching 2.13 million, the miners’ power—­or, more accurately, the perception of any such power—­stood at an all-­time high.44 Rather than being the archetypal victims of de-­industrialization, the miners ‘never had it so good’ as in the 1970s. To put this more abstractly, the 1970s were the time when the miners finally partook in the affluence that had reached other sections of the working class in the previous decade.45 It was the decade in which their status and public visibility was raised considerably. What the miners said and what they did mattered. At the same time, there persisted older assumptions about the undesirability of a miner’s life. These assumptions were rooted in the lived experience of arduous and hazardous working conditions, which, although much improved from previous decades, tended to set mining apart from other occupations. Even during the ‘good times’, work in the industry was considered a choice of last resort, an option on which to fall back when all other channels had been exhausted. The prospect of a working life spent underground was never considered an attractive proposition, as the National Coal Board, the unions and many observers of the industry were all too aware. Only in times of high un­employ­ment and low prospects did the mining industry find it easy to recruit 41 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes 1914–1991. The Short Twentieth Century (London, 1994), p. 304. 42  The Miner, September/October 1980. 43  Tomlinson, ‘Deindustrialisation and “Thatcherism” ’, p. 12. 44  Tomlinson, ‘De-­industrialization’, p. 87; Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke, 2nd ed., 1994), p. 110. For a contemporary analysis see John Grahl, ‘De-­industrialisation and the Tories’, Marxism Today, June 1980, pp. 5–11. 45  Brian Harrison, Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951–1970 (Oxford, 2009); Addison, No Turning Back. On the limits of affluence see Selina Todd, ‘Affluence, Class and Crown Street: Reinvestigating the Post-­War Working Class’, CBH 22/4 (2008), pp. 501–18.

Introduction  9 new employees, even from among mining communities. And among miners themselves workplace attachment was tempered by a desire to ‘get out’ before the difficult working conditions had wrought irreversible damage on their health and body, as the persistently high levels of voluntary wastage demonstrated.46 If the case of coal, then, is rather less suited to illustrate broader socio-­economic and socio-­cultural shifts than common metanarratives tend to assume, its study can help to restore complexity to these narratives. It helps to dislodge linear trajectories and inject contrarian elements into broader narrative arcs of con­tem­por­ ary British history. It is not so much that the story of coal in the period illustrates the persistence of ‘older’ modes of production, being, and consciousness among newer developments—­the simultaneous nature of non-­simultaneous developments (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen)—but more fundamentally that the very parameters of what constituted ‘the old’ and ‘the new’ could shift themselves.47 The trajectory of the coal industry between 1967 and 1997 showed that something ‘old’ could become ‘new’ again. Collectively, miners were turned from historical losers into winners—­only to revert to their former status as the decades wore on, as this study will show. The second overall argument relates to the tensions and overlaps between social imaginaries and subjectivities. Throughout the period, miners assumed different and often conflicting roles. The miners were cast, and cast themselves, as traditional proletarians and affluent workers, tragic heroes and dangerous villains; as a powerful vanguard of the labour movement and as victims of circumstances beyond their control.48 Demands were made of them: to embrace change; to become geographically and emotionally mobile; ultimately, to leave behind their occupational identity. The miners in turn made demands of others: of gratitude for services rendered in the past; of recognition for special status on account of hazardous working conditions and a ‘unique’ contribution to the nation’s wealth. There were considerable changes over time as, collectively, the miners turned from losers to winners and back again. Yet, despite the volatility of often conflicting ascriptions, a strong strand of continuity ran through the period as a whole: miners were deemed to be special. Just as miners were regarded as out of the ordinary, so was their workplace identity as ‘miners’ taken to override any other possible identity—­as son, father, husband, citizen.49 Indeed, the identity as a ‘miner’ seemed to defy even time itself: while it was possible to leave the industry, one would always be defined by the previous association with work

46  See also Tables 2 and 3, Appendix. 47  Stuart Hall, ‘Brave New World’, Marxism Today (October 1988), pp. 24–9, here p. 24; Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Zur historisch-­ politischen Semantik asymmetrischer Grundbegriffe’, in Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1989 [1st ed. 1979]), pp. 211–59, here p. 217. 48  ‘What kind of men are the miners?’, The Miner, March/April 1975. 49  Huw Beynon, Working for Ford (London, 1973), p. 90.

10  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization ‘down the pit’. Miners could turn into ex-­miners, but never leave behind their previous identity. In this very readiness, insistence even, of broader society to think of miners as special lies one of the major differences between the representations of miners as articulated by the miners’ union, politicians, scholars, and journalists, on one hand, and the subjective sense of self of (some of) the men working in the industry on the other. The special status ascribed to miners set them apart from ‘ordinariness’. As Mike Savage and others have demonstrated, the category of ordinariness was embraced by many working-­class Britons as a mode of self-­ characterization during the second half of the twentieth century.50 As this study shows, a substantial section of the workforce employed in the coal industry also aspired to nothing other than to lead an ‘ordinary’ life. A young miner from Bagworth Colliery in Leicestershire captured this aspiration, as well as the tension, well. As he declared in a documentary in 1977, ‘People think you’ve got to be something, I don’t know, superhuman or subhuman, you know, it’s just being an ordinary working chap you know.’51 The images and ideas circulating about miners were informed by, and intersected with, older historical understandings, transmitted via a multitude of channels and of variable reach, from highly localized community-­based understandings to broader national imaginaries. There were the canonized works of fiction and travelogues by interwar writers such as D.  H.  Lawrence, George Orwell, Richard Llewellyn, A. J. Cronin, B. L. Coombes, and (after World War II) Sid Chaplin;52 the documentary photography of Bill Brandt, and documentary film-­making from the interwar period to the 1950s. There was the ‘official’ union historiography;53 the collective aspirations inscribed into union banners;54 50 Mike Savage, ‘Working-­class Identities in the 1960s: Revisiting the Affluent Worker Study’, Sociology 39 (2005), pp. 929–46; Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me? The search for community in post-­war England (Oxford, 2019), p. 89; Florence Sutcliffe-­Braithwaite, Class, Politics and the decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000 (Oxford, 2018); Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010 (London, 2014); Arthur McIvor, Working Lives: Work in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke, 2013); Claire Langhamer, ‘‘Who the hell are ordinary people?’ Ordinariness as a category of historical analysis’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 28 (2018), pp. 175–95. 51  Miners (1976), dir. by Peter Pickering. 52  D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London, 1913); A. J. Cronin, The Stars Look Down (London, 1935); A. J. Cronin, The Citadel (London, 1937); George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London, 1937); Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley (London, 1939); B.  L.  Coombes, These Poor Hands. The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales (London, 1939); Sid Chaplin, The Thin Seam (London, 1950); Bill Brandt, The English at Home (London, 1936). See also Ben Clarke, ‘ “Noble bodies”: Orwell, Miners, and Masculinity’, English Studies 89/4 (2008), pp. 427–46. 53  R. Page Arnot, The Miners: A history of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain 1889–1910 (London, 1949); R. Page Arnot, The Miners: years of struggle. A history of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (from 1910 onwards) (London, 1953); R. Page Arnot, The miners in crisis and war. A history of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (from 1930 onwards) (London, 1961); R. Page Arnot, The Miners: One Union, One Industry. A history of the National Union of Mineworkers, 1939–1946 (London, 1979). 54  Jim Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2019), pp. 1–15; David Wray, ‘The Durham Miners’ Association through the Imagery of Lodge Banners’, in Granville Williams (ed.), The Flame Still Burns: The Creative Power of Coal (Pontefract, 2017), pp. 24–35.

Introduction  11 the ritualized performances during annual galas and mining festivals.55 Cultural memories were complemented by lived experience. In an industry whose workforce had contracted ever since the pre-­World War I employment peak, personal memories of the coalfields extended far beyond the social and geographical reach of the people and communities who were still actively involved in the getting of coal, to journalists, scholars, politicians, professionals, industrial workers, readers and cinemagoers. Just as the broader cultural representations with which they interacted, these personal memories were often drawn from the period extending from the 1920s through to the late 1950s. The various images and ideas were socially and temporally layered; they coexisted and competed with one another. There were strong affective dimensions to all of them. Indeed, it was a staple of any public debate about mining to make reference to the high degree of emotion that the subject evoked.56 It is, of course, easy to overestimate the interest that broader society took in coal miners. And indeed, there exists a long line of social commentary, from George Orwell in the 1930s to Tony Benn in the 1970s and beyond57 that points to the invisibility of the miner. This commentary laments the indifference that society showed towards the mineworker’s travails. Yet the question of how much attention any one group deserves in society is relational. In the case of the coal miners, the repeated claim about society’s indifference should perhaps be taken, not so much as an empirically verifiable description of their ‘invisibility’, but as an indicator of an expectation that broader society ought to take interest in them that was commensurate with their contribution to the nation’s wealth. The very perception of indifference could be a powerful mobilizing tool. It was harnessed by the mineworkers to articulate a shared sense of grievance, foster group cohesion, and press claims for special status. The figure of the coal miner stood at the core of a much broader web of assumptions and ideas about the nature and direction of British society. Throughout the period under consideration, miners and the industry in which they worked frequently seemed to represent broader developments: the in­ex­or­ able pace of technological change and the sad fate of the left-­behind; the descent of Britain into crisis and industrial anarchy; or, conversely, the humanization of work and the spread of affluence; the ‘forward march’ of labour and the advent of socialism. As maverick MP Enoch Powell expressed this sentiment in a speech at the height of the 1984/5 coal strike: ‘The miners who strike and the miners who

55 Gibbs, Coal Country, pp. 214–23. 56  For example, Hansard, House of Commons (HC) Sitting of 18/19 July 1967, cols 1859–2036; HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, cols 245–397; NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings for the year 1968 (London, 1968), pp. 212–17 (speech by W. Paynter). 57 Orwell, Wigan Pier, p. 30; Tony Benn, Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–1976 (London, 1989), entry of 28 Nov. 1975.

12  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization refuse to strike are acting out the emotional dilemma of the nation itself.’58 In view of this, it was no coincidence that in her memoirs Margaret Thatcher turned the British coal industry into a symbol of ‘everything’ that she claimed had gone wrong in Britain since World War II.59

Theoretical Framework In order to make sense of the multilayered meanings with which the figure of the coal miner was invested in the final decades of the twentieth century, we need a framework that is capable of identifying stable patterns as well as incoherent and ephemeral expressions. This study contends that the idea of ‘structures of feeling’ as developed by the British cultural Marxist Raymond Williams offers such a framework. Williams coined the term to have available a device that would be elastic enough to accommodate the messiness of everyday articulations yet be capable of identifying more durable structures.60 The emphasis on ‘feeling’ allows for ‘meanings and values’ to be recognized in their emotional and cognitive diversity, inconsistency, and open-­endedness. At the same time, the emphasis on ‘structures’ points towards more complex formations which were characterized by a degree of consistency and durability. As Williams put it, We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension.61

The idea of ‘structures of feeling’ can be usefully combined with Williams’s reflections on the links between culture, agency, and power. Drawing on the thought of Antonio Gramsci, Williams conceived of culture as a dynamic process in which ‘dominant’, ‘emergent’, and ‘residual’ values and ideas entered into conflictual relations with one another. The struggle for hegemony in the cultural sphere was not divorced from material conditions, as Williams well recognized. But neither was it a mere reflection of those conditions. Values and ideas can be located pol­it­ic­ al­ly, socially, and intellectually; the institutions and people who popularized them can be identified; and their social and temporal reach can be outlined. To do this 58  Enoch Powell, ‘Miners: symbol of a nation’s dilemma’, The Times, 22 September 1984. 59  Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), p. 340. 60  Stuart Middleton, ‘Raymond Williams’s “Structure of Feeling” and the problem of democratic values in Britain, 1938–1961’, Modern Intellectual History 17/4 (2020), pp. 1133–61. 61  Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), p. 132.

Introduction  13 in relation to the values and ideas surrounding the figure of the coal miner as they were articulated between circa 1967 and 1997 is the objective of this study. While Williams’s notion of competing ‘structures of feeling’ provides the overall framework, special emphasis will be placed on changing conceptions of time. Here, the reflections of German historian Reinhart Koselleck provide a conceptual underpinning.62 In a landmark article, Koselleck introduced the categories of ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ to structure historical time.63 The two categories are not opposites; they complement each other: ‘No ex­pect­ ation without experience, no experience without expectation.’64 Just as ex­pect­ ations are informed by past experience, be this lived experience or culturally transmitted experience, so expectations of the future shape the space of experience that we inhabit. For Koselleck, European modernity was characterized by a rupture in the connection between experience and expectation. Whereas in premodern times expectations were bounded by previous experience, with the advent of modernity the future broke open. The future became unknowable, yet with a clear direction of travel: humankind would progress towards a better future. History no longer moved in circles but in a succession of distinct, novel steps, towards an open horizon of ever greater perfectibility. The question of the miners’ future, and of what form it should take, was central to the debates surrounding the coal industry. It was on this terrain that some of the most bitter conflicts were played out. It was here that the outlooks and as­pir­ ations of people working in the industry came into collision with the understandings of other societal groups, including the miners’ own collective representative body, the NUM. Closely related to ideas about the future were competing understandings of the past. The importance that the past held for miners was often commented upon by contemporary observers. Indeed, it was a staple of public discourse that miners had ‘long memories’.65 But how was the past remembered, to what purpose, and by whom? Did the miners owe a debt to the generations that had come before them? And if so, how could this debt be repaid, if at all? These questions touched upon understandings of time itself. Sociological studies have often noted a distinct lack of faith in the future as a typical feature of working-­ class communities in mid-­ twentieth-­ century Britain. They have observed a reluctance to defer present gratification for the sake of a better

62 Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft; Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main, 2000). 63 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘ “Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories’, in Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. and with an introduction by Keith Tribe (Columbia, 2004 [1979]), pp. 255–76. 64  Koselleck, ‘Space of Experience’, p. 257. 65  ‘Coal and Dole’, New Statesman, 17 November 1967, p. 1; Beckett and Hencke, Marching to the Fault Line, p. 12; Beynon and Hudson, Shadow of the Mine, p. 3.

14  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization tomorrow.66 Among miners and their representatives, perhaps even more so than other groups of workers, future-­oriented, linear conceptions of time competed with cyclical understandings in which the future was understood as a repeat of the past. This book points to residual understandings of time in which the horizon of expectation continued to be bounded by spaces of experience, long after the rupture that Koselleck has identified for European high culture. The NUM’s socialist vision of a better future was articulated within a vernacular structure in which circular understandings of time retained powerful purchase. Scepticism towards the idea of a ‘better tomorrow’ was rooted in the individual work biography. ‘Ours must be one of the few Unions where a man can start at the bottom of the wage scale, work for about 40 years and finish at the bottom again,’ as a Nottinghamshire delegate remarked at the NUM’s annual conference in 1979.67 In doing so, he described a cyclical movement that defined a miner’s working life. Miners typically returned to the low wage levels on which they had started as they advanced in age.68 Circularity was also a feature that seemed to characterize the history of the coal industry throughout much of the twentieth century. There were two cyclical movements. The first stretched from the depression of the interwar years through the boom years of the 1950s to the coal crisis of the 1960s; the second from the contraction of the 1960s through the renaissance of the 1970s to the accelerated rundown of the later 1980s and 1990s. Confronted with volatility, influential voices among the mineworkers would argue that they had seen it all before. What was played out in front of their eyes represented neither a new beginning nor the end, but merely another turn of the wheel of fortune. Miners’ leader Will Paynter expressed the sentiment well in his autobiography. Looking back on the post-­war years from the perspective of 1972, he wrote, ‘In the mining industry after a decade of relative prosperity when coal was king in energy empire . . . the scene changed back again to one we were more accustomed to, a crisis of overproduction.’69 The two cycles roughly corresponded to the space of experience of two successive generations. Miners who were in their fifties in the 1970s, such as the NUM officials Joe Gormley (1917–93), general secretary Lawrence Daly (1924–2009), and vice-­president Michael [Mick] McGahey (1925–99), had experienced the nationalization of the industry in 1947 as young adults. Their lived experience 66  Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: aspects of working-­class life (London, 2017 [1957]); for circular plot constructions in prominent examples of working-­class fiction see Ronald Paul, ‘Fire in Our Hearts’. A Study of the Portrayal of Youth in Post-­War British Working-­Class Fiction (Gothenburg, 1982), pp. 30f; 184. 67 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1979 (London, 1979), p. 363. 68  Pay Board, Special Report: Relative Pay of Mineworkers (Cmnd. 5567) (London, 1974), p. 15. John Sewel, in his study of a South Wales mining community in the late 1960s, gives the example of a face worker who had to transfer to surface work, with a 20 per cent cut in wages, after contracting pneumoconiosis. John Sewel, Colliery Closure and Social Change: A Study of a South Wales Mining Valley (Cardiff, 1975), p. 62. 69 Will Paynter, My Generation (London, 1972), p. 133. Also quoted in Beynon and Hudson, Shadow of the Mine, p. 49.

Introduction  15 stretched back to the poverty of the interwar years. Gormley started work in the Lancashire industry in 1932, Daly and McGahey in the Scottish industry in 1939.70 By contrast, those who were in their thirties in the 1970s, such as Gormley’s successor Arthur Scargill (born 1938), had started their working lives under the very different conditions of the nationalized industry of the 1950s. Scargill started work underground at the age of 15 in 1953.71 The coal crisis of the 1960s hit them just as they had started building families of their own.72

Structure and Source Base To capture the rise and fall in the miners’ fortunes, this study is organized around eight flashpoint years: 1967, 1972, 1977, 1981, 1984, 1987, 1992, and 1997. Each year will be approached as a ‘freeze-­frame’ that cuts through the continuum of time, each with multiple possible futures and distinct understandings of the past.73 In adopting this approach, the stranglehold of ‘1984/5’ on the recent history of coal will be broken: the flashpoint years of the 1970s are no longer reduced to prehistories and the later 1980s and 1990s to codas. They acquire an im­port­ance of their own. Chapter 1 focuses on the year 1967 in which the Labour government under Harold Wilson published a controversial White Paper that projected an accelerated rundown of the industry in the decade ahead. Chapter  2 charts the reversal of fortunes for the miners in the wake of the two coal strikes of 1972 and 1974. Chapter 3 zooms in on the year 1977, the thirtieth anniversary of the coal industry’s nationalization and high point of projections for a bright future well into the twenty-­first century, as articulated in the policy document Plan 2000. Chapter 4 deals with the coal crisis of 1981 under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, when the miners’ ‘industrial muscle’ was widely feared and admired. Chapter 5 focuses on the 1984 coal strike, while Chapter 6 looks at the fortunes of the industry in its aftermath, c.1987. Chapters 7 and 8 revolve around the coal crisis of 1992 and the advent of a New Labour government in 1997, respectively. Together, these flashpoint years describe a cyclical movement: a story of there and back again. While the 1970s witnessed a remarkable reversal of fortunes in the standing of the miners, the 1980s saw the gains of the previous decade reversed and their status greatly reduced. Within the space of thirty years, miners were 70 Joe Gormley, Battered Cherub (London, 1982), p. 10; Lawrence Goldman, ‘Daly, Lawrence’, ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/101595; Robert Taylor, ‘McGahey, Michael’, ODNB, https:// doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/71995. 71  Paul Routledge, Scargill: The unauthorised biography (London, 1993), p. 12. 72  The generational argument is developed fully, with reference to the Scottish coalfield and different emphases, by Jim Phillips, ‘Economic Direction and Generational Change in Twentieth Century Britain: the case of the Scottish Coalfields’, English Historical Review 132 (2017), pp. 885–911; Gibbs, Coal Country, pp. 155–86. See also, with reference to British society in general, Selina Todd, Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth (London, 2021). 73  Philip Sarasin, 1977: Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart (Berlin, 2021), p. 36.

16  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization turned from losers into winners of history and back again. The study self-­ consciously takes the coal crisis of 1981, rather than the more common marker of 1984/5, as the decisive turning point. It was in the aftermath of the first Thatcher government’s withdrawal of the pit closure programme that the miners’ power reached its zenith. But it was also the tipping point. Finally, a word on sources. In his landmark study The Country and the City, Raymond Williams draws on works of fiction, and in particular lyrical poetry, to outline the structures of feeling that informed ideas of the urban and the rural in the English imagination between the eighteenth century and the late twentieth century.74 A historical, as opposed to a literary-­cultural, study will have to cast the net wider than works of fiction alone, yet will need to include fictional representations as well. As we shall see, it was often in works of fiction that broader societal ideas crystallized about who the miners ‘really’ were. Miners and their representatives, too, inhabited the world in which these representations circulated. They used them, sometimes self-­consciously, sometimes in more subtle ways, to fashion their own sense of self. For this study, the very abundance of scholarly, journalistic, and cultural reflections on the miners and their industry offers a historiographical asset rather than a liability. In addition to providing a wealth of scholarly insight, they constitute a rich body of primary source material. The source base of this study is extensive, yet far from comprehensive. It includes an examination of the files of the NUM at national and area level; in­tern­al government files as well as policy papers; debates on the industry in both Houses of Parliament as recorded in Hansard; select committee reports and evidence; the cover­age in the main NUM newspaper, The Miner, as well as the NCB publication Coal News; coverage in the daily broadsheets and in political weeklies such as New Statesman, The Spectator, and Marxism Today; contemporaneous sociological literature and think-­tank-­based pamphlet literature, amongst others. To capture how people working in the industry fashioned their own sense of self, the study draws on a range of ego documents, such as autobiographical essays written by miners on day-­release courses; submissions to the Arthur Markham Memorial Prize competition; interviews with sociologists and journalists conducted during the 1970s and 1980s; documentaries produced by the NCB’s film unit; letters to the editor to the NUM’s own publications as well as oral history evidence. None of these sources are without their problems. Yet, read critically and with an eye for genre conventions, they can afford insights into ‘ordinary’ miners’ subjectivities. In addition, in examining statistical evidence on recruitment to the industry, ‘voluntary’ wastage, and voting patterns in the NUM’s internal democratic processes, the study will also take cognizance of differences between what people said and what they did. Actions could, and did, speak louder than words.

74 Williams, The Country.

PART I

F ROM LO SE R TO W I NNE R 1967–1972–1977–1981

We are insignificant now.

J. Pratt, NUM Executive, 1968

When the miners were pushed back into darkness, their culture was not extinguished. E. P. Thompson, 1972 [The first mining festival] is billed as the social event of the year, with more fireworks on Guy Fawkes day than the Queen had for her jubilee celebrations. If events follow the precedent of recent years, it will be fireworks for the miners, and candles for the rest. Paul Routledge, industrial correspondent, The Times, 1977 [The miners’] threat had stopped the Government and particularly the Prime Minister in her tracks . . . the Iron Lady of the past was proved in reality to be nothing more than a Paper Doll. The Miners’ Parliamentary Group, 1981 The ‘long 1970s’ were the decade when the term de-industrialization (re-)entered political discourse.1 The basic process was not confined to the UK but extended to other Western European countries as well, albeit later and more gradually.2 The sharp shocks administered by the two global recessions of 1973–5 and 1980–2 made it difficult for contemporaries to disentangle conjunctural crises from structural shifts.3 The assumption that Britain was, and ought to remain, an industrial nation remained commonplace. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, the 1  Jim Tomlinson, ‘De-industrialization: strengths and weaknesses as a key concept for understanding post-war British history’, Urban History 47/2 (2020), pp. 199–219. Initially, the term was used to denote problems in industrial output and the impact on the balance of payments. 2  Lutz Raphael, Jenseits von Kohle und Stahl: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte Westeuropas nach dem Boom (Berlin, 2019), pp. 35–56. 3  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London, 1994), p. 403; Konrad Jarausch, Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2015), p. 620.

18  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization

Figure I.1  Kellingley Colliery, in Yorkshire, epitomized the modernity of Britain’s coal industry in the later twentieth century. Yet, when it started coaling in 1965, many observers believed that coal had no place in the new Britain that was being created by Harold Wilson’s Labour government. Fifteen years later, Kellingley became the first pit to turn more than 2 million tons of coal a year. Its eventual closure in 2015 brought the history of coal mining in Britain to an end.

tectonic shifts were discernible clearly enough. Although historical scholarship has traced the origins of de-industrialization back to the mid-1950s, the decrease of industrial employment accelerated between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Whereas in 1969, 10.472 million people had been employed across the industrial

FROM LOSER TO WINNER  19

Figure I.2  In 1978/9, the National Coal Board issued brightly coloured workwear for its 250,000 mineworkers. It came in a choice of two styles. The NCB was keen to showcase its role as a caring employer.

sectors of manufacturing, construction, mining and quarrying, and gas, elec­tri­ city and water, by 1983 this number had fallen to 6.945 million. Nearly 60 per cent of the overall job loss of 3.482 million occurred during the first term of the Thatcher government between 1979 and 1983.4 Within the British coal industry, 4  Jim Tomlinson, ‘Deindustrialisation and “Thatcherism”: moral economy and unintended consequences, Contemporary British History (2021), pp. 1–23, here p. 2.

20  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization average colliery manpower was reduced from 392,000 in 1967/8 to 229,000 in 1980/1. Much of the reduction in manpower and collieries was concentrated in the late 1960s and early 1970s.5 By the later 1970s, the industry’s central market was electricity generation, with a share of 68 per cent of coal consumption. This was followed by the steel industry with 12 per cent of consumption.6 Longer-term shifts in the geography of the British coal industry continued. By 1976/7, more than half the saleable output of 107 million tons was mined in the central coalfields of Yorkshire and the East Midlands.7 Politically, the years 1967–81 were characterized by a high degree of volatility. Both Conservative and Labour governments failed to renew their mandates at general elections. The Wilson government, in office since 1964, lost the general election to Edward Heath’s Conservative Party in 1970. Two elections in 1974 led to the establishment of a Labour government, albeit without an overall majority. Harold Wilson returned as Prime Minister but was succeeded by James Callaghan in 1976. The Labour Party lost the 1979 election and was replaced by a Conservative government, now under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher.8 If volatility was a feature of the broader political landscape, this was even more pronounced with regard to ministerial oversight of the coal industry. Here, ministers of power and secretaries of state changed in quick succession. Over the period, eleven ministers held responsibility for the industry, among them Richard Marsh (1966–8), Roy Mason (1968–9), John Davies (1970–2), Peter Walker (1972–4), Eric Varley (1974–5), Tony Benn (1975–9), and David Howell (1979–81). Repeated reorganization of the machinery of government was another feature of the period. The Ministry of Power, established back in 1942 (as the Ministry of Fuel and Power), was integrated into the Ministry of Technology in 1969, which in turn became the Department of Trade and Industry in 1970. In 1974 a separate ministry was re-established, now named the Department of Energy.9 In comparison to the quick succession of ministers, the change at the highest levels of the National Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers was concentrated in the early years of the period. Alfred Robens, chairman since 1961, was succeeded by Derek Ezra in 1971. At the NUM, Lawrence Daly had succeeded Will Paynter as general secretary in 1968, while Joe Gormley followed Sidney Ford as

5  William Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 5: The Nationalised Industry (Oxford, 1986), pp. 674f, 679f. 6 D.  J.  Spooner, ‘The Geography of Coal’s Second Coming’, Geography 66/1 (January 1981), pp. 29–44, here p. 35. 7  Ibid., p. 34 (fig. 3). 8 Pat Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain: 1900 to the Present (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 262–361. 9 Ashworth, History, pp. 687f.

FROM LOSER TO WINNER  21 president in 1971. The changes at the leadership of the NUM, and to a lesser extent at the NCB, carried the hallmark of generational change. Whereas Paynter’s (1903–84) and Ford’s (1909–83) outlook had been shaped by the interwar period, Gormley’s (1917–93) and Daly’s (1924–2009) formative years were the 1940s.10

10 Ewan Gibbs, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Scotland (London, 2021), pp. 156f. (with reference to generational change at the NUMSA leadership level).

1 1967 Introduction: ‘Down with the Mine!’ On 28 October 1967, twenty years after Britain’s coal industry was taken into public ownership, the well-­known ‘screen doctor’ and Liberal MP for Cheadle Michael Winstanley published a piece in The Guardian that was provocatively called ‘Down with the mine!’1 Winstanley drew on his lived experience among mineworkers, his professional experience as a physician, and his political experience as an MP to make a scathing attack on the coal industry. The antipathy was based on social as much as economic considerations: ‘As a doctor, I regard it as a social disgrace that people should still be burrowing about underground for coal in the appalling conditions which the British geology demands.’2 To Winstanley, the arduous nature of the working conditions and the health hazards of coal mining made it imperative to shut down the coal industry as fast as possible. After all, there existed ‘little real attachment to the pit’ among mineworkers themselves. Regardless of what miners’ leaders and even some miners themselves might say, as a practising physician he had encountered ‘deep-­seated though sometimes subconscious, resentment and fear of their work’, as evidenced by high rates of absenteeism as well as ‘a general tendency to hypochondria and an exaggerated stoicism in the face of more specific dangers’. Against this backdrop, the increasing availability to the British economy of alternative sources of energy, such as nuclear power, should be regarded not so much as a problem for the nation but as an opportunity to shut down, once and for all, an outdated Victorian industry. If such an objective could be acknowledged openly, the state would be able to focus on the urgent task of providing alternative employment for coal miners and the communities in which they lived. This chapter charts perceptions about miners and the coal industry around the time that ‘Down with the mine!’ was published. Although the industry had been reduced in size since nationalization, coal was still of major importance to the British economy. In 1967, coal supplied 58.7 per cent of the UK’s primary fuel consumption; 73.7 per cent of the nation’s electricity was generated from coal.

1  Michael Winstanley, ‘Down with the mine!’, The Guardian, 28 October 1967; Robert Ingham, ‘Winstanley, Michael Platt, Baron Winstanley’, ODNB, https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-­9780198614128-­e-­53451, accessed 10 October 2021. 2  Winstanley, ‘Down with the mine!’.

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0002

24  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization There were 395,000 men on the colliery books, producing 165 million tons of coal from 420 pits.3 These figures notwithstanding, many observers and policymakers, while not necessarily sharing Winstanley’s drastic vision, operated within a structure of feeling that viewed the industry as a relic from the past. The industry was regarded as a remnant from the nineteenth century that sat uneasily in the techno­logic­al age of high modernity. Within this structure, competing visions for the future of the industry and assessments of its past were developed. This chapter falls into three sections. Section I looks at the debate surrounding the publication of the Labour government’s White Paper on fuel policy in November 1967. Whereas policymakers regarded the industry as a liability in­herit­ed from a dark past, the National Coal Board (NCB) sought to project a contrasting image of a forward-­looking, future-­ oriented industry. Section II focuses on the miners’ official voice, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). It details the union’s position on the future of the industry and demonstrates the impact of generational change on perspectives about the past among mining trade unionists. Section III shifts attention from the industry to the people working in it. Miners were praised as ‘model workers’ across the political spectrum—­as hard-­working, adaptable, and productive. Social scientists and artists, by contrast, developed a rather different image of coal miners, depicting them as ‘proletarian traditionalists’ who embodied the very antithesis of the modern ‘affluent worker’. Testimony from ‘ordinary’ miners, meanwhile, suggests that the people working in the industry were keenly aware of the predicament facing it, and were eager to resolve the crisis in a way that would do least harm to themselves and their families.

I The fortunes and prospects of the British coal industry were a recurrent feature of political debate in the second half of the 1960s. The Labour government under Harold Wilson, in office since 1964, was seen as a natural ally of the miners. Yet the optimism with which the advent of a government committed to a ‘national plan’ for state-­led modernization was greeted quickly dissipated.4 Short-­term crisis management took the place of grand visions for a meritocratic future.5 In the field of energy, recent changes, together with the industry’s loss of market share, 3  Ministry of Power, Fuel Policy (Cmnd. 3438) (London, 1967), pp. 1, 15, 31 (figures for the end of 1966). See also Table 1a in the Appendix, below, taking tax years as the basis for calculation. 4  Jim Tomlinson, The Labour Governments 1964–1970, Vol. 3: Economic policy (Manchester, 2004), pp. 68–93. 5  Dean Blackburn, Penguin Books and political change: Britain’s meritocratic moment, 1937–1988 (Manchester, 2020), pp. 133–81.

1967  25 were too dramatic to be ignored by either policymakers or political commentators. With the availability of imported oil, Britain had moved from a coal-­powered economy to a two-­fuel economy within the space of little more than a decade. With the coming of age of nuclear power and the discovery of natural gas in the North Sea, the nation was projected to move to a four-­fuel economy.6 The rate of manpower reduction and colliery closures in the second half of the 1960s was dramatic indeed. Between 1964 and the autumn of 1967, manpower had fallen by 95,500, reducing the number of men from 490,500 to 395,000. In the same period, 137 collieries were closed. Total output had fallen by 23 million tons.7 For all the differences of emphasis on policy, there existed a widely shared sentiment, sometimes openly acknowledged, sometimes introduced as an undercurrent only, that located the coal industry, and by implication also the people working in the industry, in a bygone era. The coal industry was considered ‘old’ not in the sense of boasting a long history but in the sense of being a remnant of a dark past that sat uneasily in the technological age that the Labour government sought to harness to its vision of a ‘new’ Britain.8 In his address to the Labour Party conference in Scarborough in October 1967, Wilson contrasted the legacies of an ‘industrial age of brass and iron, muck and money’ with the ‘immeasurable possibilities [of] science and technology’ that socialism would harness to a better future. To drive home his point about the legacies of a dark past, Wilson referred to a speech by D. Davies about the situation in the South Wales coalfield.9 While in opposition, the Labour Party had intimated to the NUM that a Labour government would aim for a coal production of 200 million tons annually. The actual election manifesto of 1964, however, contained no such commitment. What was more, the only time that party leader Harold Wilson mentioned coal miners in a series of speeches in early 1964 was when speaking of the moral obligation to provide support for ‘paraplegic ex-­miners’, along with the war-­ disabled.10 There was little room for the miners, it seemed, in the ‘new Britain’ that Wilson had in mind. Within this framework, any government intervention towards stabilizing the coal industry could be interpreted as a turning back on Labour’s modernizing vision. As a leader’s comment in The Times put it in September 1967, after a government announcement to delay temporarily the clos­ure of collieries on social grounds,

6  Fuel Policy (1967), pp. 1f.; David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a twentieth-­ century history (London, 2018), pp. 291–8. 7  Fuel Policy (1967), pp. 29–31. 8  Harold Wilson, The New Britain: Labour’s plan. Selected speeches (Harmondsworth, 1964). 9  Labour Party, Report of 66th Annual Conference, Scarborough 1967 (London, 1967), pp. 213–22, here p. 216f. 10 Wilson, New Britain, pp. 20, 128.

26  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization If the Government follows through and orders a more permanent slackening of the colliery closure programme . . . it will be turning its back on the technological age into which the Harold Wilson of Scarborough was going to lead us.11

Within the context of the debate about the future of coal within a coordinated fuel policy, Winstanley, referred to above, expounded a minority view. Of the major political parties, only the Liberals subscribed to it.12 In particular, Winstanley was exceptional in demanding that contraction be accelerated on the grounds of the inhumane working conditions prevalent in the industry. More common was the view that coal should be phased out for economic reasons. Coal was deemed more expensive than rival fuels in the field of electricity generation, which had become coal’s main market by the mid-­1960s. In a Young Fabian pamph­let on energy policy, Bruce Lloyd, for example, argued that the ‘aim of a socialist policy’ should be ‘to allocate efficiently and humanely the nation’s resources for the benefit of the nation as a whole’.13 It was the coal industry that presented the major obstacle to achieving ‘a cheap energy policy’ that Lloyd con­ sidered essential ‘to Britain’s future industrial development’. He therefore recommended that ‘first priority be given to providing for the accelerated decline of the coal industry’. While acknowledging the social problems of the rundown of an industry that employed close to 400,000 workers, Lloyd’s conclusion was un­equivo­cal: ‘When all the relevant factors are considered cheaper alternative energy sources are available to replace most of the market now supplied by coal.’14 The Labour government shied away from the conclusions drawn by Lloyd, although they shared much of the underlying analysis. From a different political perspective, Colin Robinson, Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey, questioned the need for state intervention in the energy sector altogether. In a pamphlet published as an occasional paper by the Institute of Economic Affairs, Robinson argued for a ‘free market’ solution to the energy sector’s problems. If the state were to withdraw from the energy market, industry and consumers would benefit from increased competition and lower prices. Robinson was, however, prepared to make an exception for the coal industry, where he conceded that ‘a reasonable argument can be made on social grounds for some kind of assistance’, either as a direct subsidy to the National Coal Board or, better still, as direct payment to the individuals and regions affected by the industry’s decline.15

11  ‘A Fuel Policy Up in Flames?’, The Times, 2 September 1967. 12  For an exposition of Liberal policy towards the coal industry see Hansard HC Sitting of 18–19 July 1967, cols 1940–6 (Lubbock); 28 November 1967, cols 311–20. 13  Bruce Lloyd, energy policy (Young Fabian pamphlet 16) (London, 1968), p. 31. 14 Lloyd, energy policy, p. 31. 15  Colin Robinson, A Policy for Fuel? (Occasional Paper, Institute of Economic Affairs) (London, 1969), p. 33f.

1967  27 In October 1965, the Prime Minister approved a programme for an accelerated rundown agreed by the Economic Development Committee that planned for the closure of 210 pits within the next five years, with the loss of 124,000 jobs in the industry.16 Just like previous administrations, the Wilson government was in thrall to ‘an extraordinarily powerful futurism’ that invested different sources of energy with specific temporal valences: the future lay with nuclear power and natural gas, while coal was of the past.17 In their underlying assumptions, British policymakers differed little from their counterparts in other European countries. In France, for example, the embrace of nuclear power was, if anything, even more emphatic than in the UK.18 The official Labour government view, as explicated in the 1965 and 1967 White Papers, was that the coal industry would continue to decline for the foreseeable future.19 Contraction was both inevitable and, indeed, desirable from the point of view of the national interest. The 1967 White Paper expressed this view succinctly: ‘The Government have concluded that the modernization of the coal industry and its concentration on the most economic coalfields and collieries must go forward. Only in this way can the coal industry remain viable.’20 The incremental replacement of coal by other sources of energy would contribute to cheaper overall fuel costs and thus strengthen the competitive position of British industry. The pruning of the labour force would also be a potential ‘model exercise in the redeployment of our resources from uneconomic into economic fields without causing hardship and suffering’, as George Brown, Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, put it in a note to the Prime Minister.21 While the Labour government accepted the contraction of the coal industry throughout the next decade and beyond, it proclaimed that there would remain a sizeable coal industry for the foreseeable future.22 ‘Coal will remain of great importance for as far ahead as we can see and it is vital to increase productivity in the industry so it can produce at a lower real cost. We want as much coal as can be economically produced,’ as the Minister of Power, Richard Marsh, expressed it in a statement to the House of Commons on 18 July 1967.23 Such professions of faith notwithstanding, it did not go unnoticed that the government seemed to grow ever more doubtful about coal’s long-­term prospects. Whereas the 1965 White Paper had gestured towards a future in which a reconstructed industry would be 16  TNA PREM 13/923, George Brown to Prime Minister (PM), ‘Colliery Closures’, 18 October 1965. 17 Edgerton, Rise and Fall, p. 292f.; Andrew Taylor, The NUM and British Politics, vol. 1: 1944–1968 (Aldershot, 2003), p. 239f. 18  Martin Chick, Electricity and Energy Policy in Britain, France and the United States since 1945 (Cheltenham, 2007), p. 29. 19  Ministry of Power, White Paper on Fuel Policy (Cmnd. 2798) (London, 1965); Fuel Policy (1967). 20  Fuel Policy (1967), p. 44; see also p. 54. 21  TNA PREM 13/923, Brown to PM, ‘Colliery Closures’, 18 October 1965. A similar point was made by Lord Nugent of Guildford in Hansard HL Sitting of 12 December 1967, col. 1041. 22 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1967 (London, 1967), pp. 356–3 (address by R. Marsh M.P., Minister of Power). 23  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1869.

28  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization able to retain, and even expand upon, its market share, the 1967 paper held out no such consolation.24 The goal of an economically competitive coal industry was shared by the Conservative Party in opposition.25 The 1967 White Paper estimated that the total inland demand for coal in 1975 would not exceed 120 million tons, down from 165 million tons in 1967/8. Even without any further decline in demand for coal, productivity rises alone would reduce the labour force by 105,000 within the same period.26 The government refused to be drawn into predictions about the likely size of the industry beyond the year 1975. In a statement to the House of Commons on 17 July 1967, Marsh insisted that the figure of 80 million tons output by 1980, which had been leaked to the press, was a ‘working paper figure’ only.27 While emphasizing that the size and, indeed, survival of the industry would ultimately be decided in the marketplace and crucially depended on the ability to raise productivity, the government accepted that the industry needed to be cushioned against the full impact of market forces for a transitional period. The industry would be accorded a ‘breathing space’ in which to complete the process of rationalization and mechanization that had begun in the early 1960s.28 The government also accepted the principle that the decline of the industry needed to be ‘managed’ socially, with the provision of alternative industrial employment in contracting coalfields, inter-­colliery transferral schemes, and additional financial assistance, for a period of up to three years, for redundant miners over the age of 55.29 Further contraction was ‘necessary’ and ‘inescapable’, but the government’s aim was to effect this process ‘with the least possible waste and hardship’, as the White Paper expressed it.30 The government operated on the assumption, proffered by the NCB, that an annual rundown of 35,000 men would be manageable.31 In the words of Reginald Freeson, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Power, summing up the government’s position in the Commons debate of 18 July 1967, ‘It is the Government’s ­policy . . . to control the run-­down, so that it is properly phased down, not letting the market trends just carry the industry in an uncontrollable fashion down to a low level of production and sales.’32

24 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1968 (London, 1968), ‘Fuel Policy – White Paper’, p. 45f. 25  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1876: ‘All we can say is that we on this side, as with hon. Members on the Government side, want the largest coal industry in this country that is competitive.’ 26  Fuel Policy (1967), p. 31. 27  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1875. See also Sitting of 28 November 1967, col. 253 (Marsh): ‘No one knows what the position will be in 1980.’ 28  Hansard HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, col. 246 (Marsh). 29  Fuel Policy (1967), pp. 49–52. 30  Ibid., p. 39. 31  Ibid., p. 47. 32  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 2028 (Freeson); see also col. 2033: ‘The essential point is to give assistance during a holding operation in order to assist the transition in the industry and thereby to assist morale and to make it clear that we see a future for the coal industry – a properly shaped and modern industry – playing an important part in the economy. This to us is the best way of keeping up morale in the industry.’

1967  29 It was against the backdrop of a pervasive structure of feeling that located coal in the past that both the National Coal Board and the mineworkers’ unions operated in the late 1960s. In their defence of the coal industry, the Board and the NUM entered an uneasy and partial coalition of interests which, on the national level, lasted until the breakdown of industrial relations in 1972–4, but was revived thereafter and not finally abandoned until the early 1980s.33 Indeed, there existed considerable common ground between the Coal Board and the NUM in the late 1960s. Both agreed that, as a major fuel industry, coal possessed a future as well as a past. They argued that the coal industry had the potential to compete successfully with other fuels for a share of the energy market on purely economic terms. For this to happen, two conditions had to be met: first, the industry must be allowed a ‘breathing space’ in which to complete the process of modernization that had been set in train some years previously. During this period the state must protect coal’s share of the market. On this point, agreement between Board and NUM was such that they could be mentioned in the same breath, as in a Commons speech by Robert Woof MP on 18 July 1967: ‘Lord Robens and the National Union of Mineworkers have pleaded for time to enable the industry to complete its modernisation programme.’34 The argument that the industry’s modernization had not yet run its course acknowledged that the industry’s history represented a liability rather than an asset in the modern world. In a way, what both the Coal Board and the Union demanded of the government was to help the coal industry to shed the past and to be allowed to take its place in the modern world. The chairman of the NCB, Lord Robens, expressed this view succinctly in a speech at the Union’s annual conference in July 1967: ‘I said in those early days that the process of shedding the past and fitting the coal industry for a place in the second half of the twentieth century would not be achieved overnight.’35 Second, the state must ensure that the economic playing field was equal. In particular, the ‘real’ costs of the different sources of energy had to be taken into account in any policy decision on the future of the energy market.36 These ‘lateral’ costs included, for example, the social costs that would accumulate in any rundown of the coal industry as well as the defence expenditure needed to protect the supply routes of imported fuels such as oil.37 As the NUM emphasized in

33  Jim Phillips, ‘Deindustrialization and the Moral Economy of the Scottish Coalfields, 1947 to 1991’, ILWCH (2013), pp. 99–115; Jim Phillips and Andrew Perchard, ‘Transgressing the Moral Economy: Wheelerism and Management of the Nationalised Coal Industry in Scotland’, CBH 25/3 (2011), pp. 387–405. 34  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1928. 35 NUM, Annual Report 1967, ‘Address by Lord Robens’, pp. 215–25, here p. 217. 36  Lord Robens, ‘Electricity Costs and Coal’, The Times, 18 August 1967; Patrick McNair-­Wilson, ‘Cost of Electricity’, The Times, 29 August 1967. 37  ‘No Jobs in the Pits’, The Times, 31 August 1967.

30  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization written evidence to a parliamentary select committee on the nationalized industries, ‘The Government should assume the total social costs of concentration.’38 The NCB, NUM, and miners’ MPs in the House of Commons all harboured the suspicion that the Labour government, while paying lip service to the industry, was, in truth, prejudiced against coal.39 They suspected that the responsible ministers regarded the industry as a ‘residual legatee among primary fuels’ only. This suspicion was aptly expressed by Michael McGuire in a parliamentary debate following the publication of the 1967 White Paper. As the NUM-­sponsored MP declared on 28 November 1967, But [Richard Marsh] has swallowed hook, line and sinker the forecast given to him by people who have a record of inconsistency second to none. . . . There was an attempt – and the metaphor is apt – to blacken the coal costs as much as possible, to depress them and to make people feel that it was ruled out, that Old King Coal was dead, and at the same time, nuclear costs were so described that people were fired with enthusiasm.40

Against this backdrop, the pending government decision on the nature of a new power station at Seaton Carew in County Durham took on symbolic meaning. It came to be considered a test case of the sincerity of the Labour government’s attitude to the coal industry.41 As Gerald Nabarro, Conservative MP for South Worcestershire, put it in a Commons debate, ‘the greatest psychological blunder the right hon. Gentleman could make would be to build a nuclear power station on a major British coal field’.42 When, after lengthy deliberations, the Ministry of Power finally announced that the power station would be nuclear rather than coal-­fired, Union and Board felt their worst suspicions confirmed. McGuire described the decision as the ‘Waterloo for the Coal Board’.43 In his memoirs, published in 1972, Lord Robens castigated the decision as ‘perhaps the biggest single blow to the future of the industry’.44 The shock was all the greater because the ministry was led by the former miner and NUM-­sponsored MP Roy Mason. Here too, then, both the Board and the unions argued in essence that anachronistic 38 House of Commons Report from the Select Committee on Nationalised Industries (session 1968–69), National Coal Board, Vol. II: Minutes of Evidence (London, 20 October 1969), ‘Evidence of the National Union of Mineworkers’, 21 April, pp. 571–84, here p. 583 (181). 39  TNA COAL 31/131, ‘White Paper on Fuel Policy’, 13 October 1967. 40  Hansard HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, cols 347–57, here 351; 354. 41 See Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1993 (McGuire); 5 December 1967, col. 1228 (Nabarro); 5 December 1967, col. 1340 (McGuire); 5 December, col. 1350 (T. W. Urwin); HL Sitting of 12 December 1967, cols 1055–61 (Lord Blyton). See also Labour Party, Report of the 67th Annual Conference of the Labour Party 1968 (London, 1968), p. 119 (Seaton Carew Power Station emergency resolution). 42  Hansard HC Sitting of 5 December 1967, col. 1228. 43  Ibid, col. 1340. See also HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1993. 44  Lord Robens, Ten Year Stint (London, 1972), p. 172.

1967  31 assumptions about the nature of coal were allowed to prejudice decisions regarding its future.45 Above and beyond the economic argument, there was the ‘real price of coal’ which the miners’ union and NUM-­sponsored MPs felt was not taken into account in the callously rationalist debate about the future of the energy market. ‘We cannot measure the cost of coal simply in terms of pounds, shillings and pence or of 0.001d., whether in decimal currency or anything else . . . The cost of coal has been and still is calculated in terms of blood, toil and tears, in broken limbs and sudden death,’ as Eric Ogden MP reminded the House on 18 July 1967.46 The emphasis on the suffering that the miners endured in pursuit of their labour could easily be used as an argument for abandoning coal as quickly as possible. And indeed, in the article quoted in the introduction to this chapter, Michael Winstanley made precisely this point: The medical facts were highlighted with macabre irony in a recent debate in the House of Commons. Member after member rose to speak for a mining constituency and harrowed us with descriptions of miners in their thousands killed or crippled in pit accidents, coughing out their lives with pneumoconiosis, hobbling with ‘beat knee’, blinded with nystagmus, and twisted by years working underground. Then followed an impassioned plea for this great industry to be allowed to continue its work unimpeded.47

On the whole, however, the argument about ‘blood on the coal’ was mobilized to serve a very different purpose: the miners’ sacrifice underlined the moral obligation to pay back the debt that the nation had accumulated towards the miners in the past. If this historical debt was owed by the nation at large, it applied even more so to a Labour government. The miners, after all, were the backbone of the organized labour movement, and their loyalty to the party and the broader movement was legendary. ‘Mining communities have been an impregnable bastion of support for Labour over the centuries,’ as NUM general secretary Bill Paynter declared at the NUM’s annual conference in 1967.48 Did they not have the right to ask for some reciprocity? The NUM as well as critics of government policy inside the Labour Party held up the spectre of terminal decline instead of stabilization in an undetermined future. They extrapolated from the ‘working paper’ projection of 80 million tons of output in 1980 that no more than 65,000 jobs would remain in thirteen years’

45  See also Taylor, NUM, vol. 1, pp. 239–44. 46  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 2012f. 47  Winstanley, ‘Down with the mine!’, p. 8. 48 NUM, Annual Report 1967, p. 231. See also Labour Party, 66th Annual Conference, pp. 201–10 (Fuel and Power debate).

32  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization time, representing a drop of over 320,000 men.49 What was more, a rundown of such proportions would in effect bring coal mining to an end, or reduce it to a residue, in most mining areas except for the central coalfields. But even in Yorkshire and the East Midlands, employment opportunities would be reduced substantially, from 93,000 down to 18,500 and from 72,000 to 14,500, respectively.50 They argued that there existed a close link between the ‘death’ of coal as an industry and the ‘death’ of coal communities collectively, as well as the deg­rad­ ation of miners individually. As Paynter put it in a front-­page contribution to the South Wales Area paper, The Miner, in winter 1967, The stark reality is that the induced decay of coalmining means social death to many mining communities. I wonder if those who decide policies to precipitate the contraction of the coal industry have any idea as to what a pit closure means to the community built around it. It is the death of a creation that gave the community life and sustained that life no matter how deprived and anguished it might have sometimes been. It made possible their only happiness, too. Closure thus represents a disaster as poignant and harrowing as a death in the family.51

Drawing on lived experience of the interwar period and, to a lesser extent, contemporary sociological research, they pointed to the ‘soul-­destroying’ and emasculating nature of unemployment.52 ‘I was unemployed for most of the 1930s myself in the Rhondda,’ as the NUM’s general secretary declared at a protest in Edinburgh on 9 December 1967. Do they appreciate what it means to be unemployed, whether it is 55 or 35? It is soul destroying. I saw it in the 1930’s. Men, respectable men and families, upstanding men unemployed and twice a week going down to the Labour Exchange to sign on. Men that you would see in the morning washed and cleaned before they came to the front door. Men who had regard to their appearance but after 6 months, 12 months of unemployment you saw the deterioration in their behaviour and physical appearance, loss of self-­ respect, loss of dignity . . . .53

Or, as Robert Woof, the MP for Blaydon, put it in a debate on colliery closures on 14 March 1969, ‘There is nothing more devastating to the human soul than to

49 Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick (MRC), MSS.302 (Lawrence Daly Papers), ‘Statement at Protest Rally in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on Saturday’, 9 December 1967. 50  Lawrence Daly, The Miners and the Nation (Edinburgh, n.d. [1968]), p. 5. 51  Will Paynter, ‘We can’t let a vital industry be strangled’, The Miner: Journal of the South Wales Area National Union of Mineworkers, no 12 (Nov/Dec. 1967). 52  MRC, MSS.302, ‘Statement by W. Paynter’, 9 December 1967. 53 Ibid.

1967  33 find that one is not wanted when one is healthy, strong and anxious to gain an honest livelihood.’54 Yet, for all the common ground between the Coal Board and the NUM in defence of the industry, there existed a fundamental conflict of interest. Despite the care that the Coal Board showed towards its employees as a ‘responsible and responsive employer’, ultimately the Board was concerned with producing coal at such a cost that would enable it to compete with other fuels in the marketplace.55 As the 1961 White Paper on ‘the financial and economic obligations of the nationalized industries’ stated unequivocally, ‘Although the industries have obligations of a national and non-­commercial kind, they are not, and ought not, to be regarded as social services absolved from economic and commercial justification.’56 With the transition of Britain from a one-­fuel to a multiple-­fuel economy in the late 1950s, the overall goal, as laid down in the Coal Industry Nationalization Act of 1946, of ‘securing the efficient development of the coal-­ mining industry [and of ] making supplies of coal available, of such qualities and sizes, in such quantities and at such prices, as may seem . . . calculated to further the public interest in all respects’,57 was interpreted as an injunction to raise prod­ uct­iv­ity in the industry to the point of making coal price-­competitive with other fuels. Next to the introduction of mechanized coal getting and of powered roof supports, the closing down of ‘uneconomic’ collieries was a central plank of this strategy. The Coal Board envisioned a future in which mining was not only mechanized but also done by remote control, turning the collier into a ‘highly skilled technician’.58 In the late 1960s, it was the NCB rather than the NUM that was most out­ spoken in making the public case for coal. In particular, the Board’s boisterous and self-­confident chairman, the former Labour minister Alfred Robens, never shied away from public brawls over coal’s future share of the energy market with a succession of Ministers of Power and the respective chairmen of other sectors of the nationalized energy industry, most of all the chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). In the words of a contemporary newspaper report, Robens ‘is always ready to blurt out his thoughts for all to hear and to joust in public . . . He built up a picture of a vigorous, purposeful public industry

54  Hansard HC Sitting of 14 March 1969, col. 1723. 55  Jim Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2019), p. 20. 56 Chancellor of the Exchequer, The Financial and Economic Obligations of the Nationalised Industries (Cmnd. 1337) (London, 1961); Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nationalised Industries: A Review of Economic and Financial Objectives (Cmnd. 3437) (London, 1967); see also Michael Barratt-­ Brown, What Really Happened to the Coal Industry? Institute of Workers’ Control, pamphlet 31 (Nottingham [1972]). 57  For a transcript of the Act see http://legislation.data.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/9-­10/59/enacted/data. htm?wrap=true, accessed 21 July 2022. 58  Fuel Policy (1967), p. 29.

34  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization striding confidently into a new age.’59 Indeed, it was the NCB chairman’s frequent interventions in the public debate, rather than the protestations by the NUM, that caused the government concern. In December 1967, the Minister of Power felt compelled to write to Robens on a strictly confidential basis and ask for an assurance that he stop criticizing government policy. By way of reply, Robens refused to give such an assurance.60 More broadly, both in their recruitment material and the public relations material aimed at the general public, the Coal Board made considerable efforts to project an image of a ‘new’ industry fit for the modern age—­an attractive place to work offering specialized skills training, generous rewards, and attractive career prospects for its employees, producing a valuable and versatile raw material at competitive prices for its customers. At what was, in all likelihood, a deliberate rhetorical strategy (but which also amounted to an underhand acknowledgement of the considerable challenges facing the industry), the recruitment material from as far back as the late 1950s challenged openly what it considered to be the ‘general public’s conception’ of mining. These preconceptions were contrasted with what were presented as the social realities of working in the industry in the second half of the twentieth century. As a recruitment manual for managerial staff from circa 1958 put it, ‘Even in the late 1950’s the general public’s conception of mining has often something sinister about it—a picture composed mainly of darkness and dust.’61 In reality, there was little that distinguished the running of a coal mine from the running of a modern factory—­ except for the better opportunities at promotion in the coal industry, or so the pamphlet claimed: Little is fundamentally different between the factory manager, the steel engineer and the colliery manager – little, that is, except the colour of their hair. The factory manager was probably long since grey before they promoted him to his present position; the chief engineer has been qualified for thirty years, and is practically bald. But the colliery manager visits the barber every week or so; for he is still only 35.62

Not only was mining aligned with manufacturing industry. It was presented as a more ‘youthful’ alternative. A similar strategy was employed ten years later in a Central Youth Employment Executive-­issued pamphlet, simply called Coalmining.63 Here too the pamphlet opened by disparaging the received image of working conditions in the industry before outlining, rather more matter-­of-­factly than the Board’s own publications, 59  ‘The Robens way gave mining a new life’, The Times, 4 August 1967. 60  TNA PREM 13/2659, Marsh to Robens, 5 December 1967; Robens to Marsh, 8 December 1967. 61 NCB, The Many careers in coal: the basic industry with modern ideas (London, c.1958), p. 14. 62  Ibid., p. 22. 63  Central Youth Employment Executive, Coalmining (London, 2nd ed. 1970).

1967  35 the range of jobs available: ‘Mention “coalmining”, and many people will think only of a miner, covered in coal dust and cutting coal with a pick by the dim light of a flame lamp, under a low roof supported by wooden props.’64 The emphasis was on the extraordinary range of opportunities that the industry had to offer, ‘ranging from those who leave school without any educational certificate at all to the university graduate’. Above all, the pamphlet underlined the different apprenticeship schemes that were offered by the industry, mining apprenticeships, mechanical and electrical craftsmen schemes, and mining engineers as the most significant among them. Mining, then, was skilled work offering opportunities for everyone, the underlying message went. It was a truly meritocratic place of work, unencumbered by the privilege and class prejudice that was still encountered in all too many other walks of British life in the 1960s. In a deliberate attempt to counter the negative assumptions about the coal industry that were circulating in society at large, the Coal Board launched an ambitious and costly advertising campaign in the national broadsheets in the autumn of 1967. Coming in the wake of the devaluation of sterling by the Wilson government, the advertisements stressed coal’s value as an indigenous source of energy and the positive effects on the nation’s balance of payments, as well as the security of supply afforded by coal.65 The overall theme, however, was that the British coal industry was a ‘new’ industry—­highly mechanized, efficient, and productive. As one headline asked rhetorically, ‘So what is new about Britain’s coal industry?’ The confident answer was, ‘Almost everything’, from ‘advanced techniques in push button mining [to] remote control for faster safer production [to] the most up-­to-­date power-­loading equipment [to] computers [helping] to get the right fuel at the right price’.66 Indeed, the advertisements went so far as to claim that the coal industry could serve as an example to British industry overall. If only all British manufacturing would show the productivity gains seen in the coal industry, the country would be rid of its economic problems.67 The sentiment was echoed in the House of Commons by Labour MPs such as Eric Varley, who averred, ‘if other industries had the same productivity record we should not be experiencing the economic troubles that face the nation today’.68 Whatever the merits of such claims, the advertisements sat oddly with regular reports of ‘doomed pits’, ‘dying coalfields’, and ‘funeral dirges’ for the industry. As the Labour MP Eddie Milne commented sarcastically in the Commons in March 1969, ‘Advertising is doing better out of the coal industry at the moment than those working at the pit face.’69 64  Ibid., Foreword. 65  NCB, ‘Every ton of coal we use help our balance of payments’, The Times, 5 December 1967. 66  NCB, ‘So what’s new about Britain’s coal industry?’, The Times, 2 February 1968. 67  NCB, ‘Every ton’, The Times, 5 December 1967. 68  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1951 (Eric Varley). 69  Hansard HC Sitting of 14 March 1969, col. 1738 (Eddie Milne).

36  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization How deadly the legacy of the past could be was brought home to coalmining communities and the wider public on 21 October 1966. At 9.15 that morning, spoil heap number seven of Merthyr Vale Colliery in South Wales, which had been deposited on the slopes of Merthyr Mountain, started moving. Thousands of tons of colliery waste swept down the mountain, creating an avalanche that buried two farmsteads and destroyed a primary school and eighteen houses in the nearby village of Aberfan. One hundred and forty-­four residents were killed in the incident, among them 116 children, most of them of junior-­school age.70 Aberfan was one of the worst disasters in post-­1945 British history. The Secretary of State for Wales launched an inquiry into the causes that sat for seventy-­six days under the chairmanship of Lord Justice Edmund Davies. The resultant report was ordered to be printed on 19 July 1967 and its findings debated in the House of Commons on 26 October 1967, the very time that the Coal Board strenuously sought to project an image of a modern, forward-­ looking industry.71 The report left no doubt that what had happened at Aberfan was not a natural disaster. The catastrophe was man-­made, and the National Coal Board was responsible.72 True, the Board had inherited the practice of disposing of colliery waste by dumping it on sites above ground—­a ‘beastly and unscientific tradition’ that had resulted in the creation of thousands of ‘man-­made monsters of rubbish’ blighting the landscape, as Welsh MPs bemoaned in the Commons debate.73 Yet, rather than improving upon past practice, the Coal Board’s record on tip selection and safety appeared to have been just as neglectful as, if not more neglectful than, in the pre-­nationalization days. Tip seven was started as recently as 1958, and by 1963, when a first slide occurred, it should have become clear that the spoil heap was unstable. Yet tipping continued regardless. The report spoke of ‘ignorance . . . bungling ineptitude . . . and failure’ at all levels of the organization.74 Matters were made worse by the Coal Board’s, and Lord Robens’s, attitude during the tribunal. They sought to deflect responsibility by holding an unforeseeable confluence of geological factors responsible for the disaster, until it became clear during cross-­examination that not only was there nothing unusual about the geology of the mountain but there had also been warnings aplenty. The simple truth was that, without drainage, the presence of water on the mountain made the ground wholly unsuitable for tipping.75

70  Report of the Tribunal appointed to inquire into the Disaster at Aberfan on October 21st, 1966 (London, 17 July 1967), p. 26. 71  Hansard HC Sitting of 26 October 1967, ABERFAN DISASTER, cols 1909–2013. 72  Report of the Aberfan Tribunal, p. 147. 73  Hansard HC Sitting of 26 October 1967, col. 1927 (Davies); col. 1951 (Pearson). 74  Report of the Aberfan Tribunal, p. 13. 75  Ibid., p. 21f.

1967  37 The Coal Board’s reputation emerged badly damaged from the findings of the tribunal.76 ‘Aberfan’ underlined, once again, the dreadful costs of coal mining in human terms. It brought home the industry’s utter disregard for the wellbeing of the communities that lived in the shadow of the mines. The disaster gave the lie to the NCB’s protestation that coal was a ‘modern’ industry whose association with danger and calamity was a relic from a dark past with no relevance to the present. Another disturbing finding indicated that representatives of the local community may have turned a blind eye to the dangers of waste disposal on an unsuitable site due to concerns over the colliery’s future.77

II In the late 1960s, the NUM adopted a lower profile than the NCB in the debate about the future of the industry. It appeared to be standing ‘on the sideline awaiting the outcome of the struggle [between the government and the Coal Board] without any chance of directing the course of that battle’, as Labour MP Adam Hunter observed critically in the House of Commons.78 While sharing with the Coal Board the concern for a viable coal industry, the Union was concerned, in the first instance, ‘to advance and protect the interests of . . . workers employed in or connected with the coal mining industry of Great Britain’.79 The rule book defined these interests in material terms, relating ‘to questions of wages, hours, holidays, conditions of employment, safety, compensation, and all other questions arising out of and/or in connection with the members’ employment or occupation’. In practice, the Union’s remit extended beyond the immediate workplace, as detailed in the rule book, to two additional spheres. The NUM con­ sidered itself the guardian of the communities of which their members were such an integral part. In addition, as an affiliated member of the Trades Union Congress, the Union also saw itself as part of the broader labour movement, sharing in the goals and ambitions of that movement. Paragraph 3(s) explicitly listed as an object of the Union ‘to join in with other organizations for the purpose of and with the view to the complete abolition of Capitalism’.80 The overlapping allegiances were not as easily reconciled as it may seem. What if the interests of the broader labour movement, as defined, for example, by a Labour government, came into conflict with the immediate interests of the people working in the industry? And equally, were the interests of the (coal) communities in all instances

76  Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the end of industrial Britain (London/New York, 2021), p. 7; HC Sitting of 26 October 1967, passim. 77  Report of the Aberfan Tribunal, p. 34f. 78  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1999 (Adam Hunter). 79  National Union of Mineworkers, Rules (London, 1962), p. 3. 80  Ibid., p. 5.

38  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization best served by promoting the interests of the men still active in the industry? Even more problematically, were the interests of the men working in the industry themselves necessarily best served by keeping them in employment down the mine when there was abundant evidence of a lack of a secure future? The NUM’s National Executive Committee, led by Sir Sidney Ford, the president, and Will Paynter, the general secretary, sought to exert pressure on the Labour government via the channels open to them on account of their structural position inside the labour movement: through the Miners’ Group of Labour MPs; Trades Union Congress and Labour Party conference resolutions; and meetings with Labour ministers and the Prime Minister.81 Although the NUM leaders clearly recognized the importance of public opinion for the future of the industry, they hesitated to engage with it directly. They were even more reluctant to mo­bil­ ize their own members in direct action against the government’s policies. This was partly because the NUM lacked the resources available to the Coal Board to engage in extensive publicity campaigns. Until the late 1960s, the Union did not even have a national paper to keep in regular contact with its members (although there were area editions). When The Miner was finally launched in January 1969 as a monthly paper, all the Union thought it could afford was a part-­time editor.82 Indeed, the lack of resources available to the NUM considerably weakened the persuasive force of the arguments they put forward in defence of the industry, undermining the negotiating position in their dealings with ministry officials and the government.83 A confidential note following upon a meeting between an NUM delegation and the Prime Minister expressed the condescension of the government well: ‘The Prime Minister invited them [i.e. the NUM] to produce statistical evidence for the thesis [of a possible coal shortage] but privately doubts whether they are organized or competent enough to produce it.’84 On this understanding, the government knew better than the NUM what was in the miners’ best interests: ‘To accede to their [i.e. the NUM’s] request to reduce the closure programme would impair the industry’s long term competitive ability . . . In the long term such action would be harmful to the miners themselves.’85 But restraint was also necessary because the national NUM agreed with the government that state assistance to the industry could be a temporary expedient only. ‘To survive, the industry must be price competitive,’ the NUM’s strategy

81 Taylor, NUM, Vol. 1, pp. 213–29. 82  The Miner: Voice of the National Union of Mine Workers, No. 1, January 1969 (free first issue). 83  See also Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, National Coal Board, Vol. II: Minutes of  Evidence, Examination of Witnesses: Mr Lawrence Daly and Mr Richard Hillier, 29 April 1969, p. 588 (186). 84  TNA PREM 13/2659, Confidential Note by P. Le Cheminant, 12 March 1968. 85  TNA PREM 13/2659, ‘Prospects in the Coal Industry. A note by officials in collaboration with the National Coal Board’, 22 March 1968.

1967  39 paper ‘The Future for Coal’ argued in early 1967.86 From the acquiescence in the primacy of market forces followed an ‘acceptance of the inevitability and de­sir­ abil­ity of a concentrated industry’, as the paper underlined. To try to halt or even reverse what was regarded as an inevitable process would not just be futile but counterproductive, the paper insisted. It would neither be in the interests of the industry nor be in the interests of the Union’s members: In these circumstances, the only solution is for the industry to concentrate as quickly as possible upon the most efficient and profitable pits and to adjust total capacity to potential demand levels. To fight for the survival of grossly uneconomic pits . . . is to place upon the industry a burden that ultimately will make necessary an even greater degree of contraction than is necessary. It is not in the best interests of our members that the high costs of these collieries should continue to be borne by the rest of the industry when it results in further losses of markets.87

The Union’s stance was informed by a belief that the government’s position was basically in tune with the main currents of public opinion. As Ford observed at the NUM’s annual conference in 1968, ‘Let there be no misunderstanding about this; the government’s attitude towards coal is basically a fair reflection of public opinion.’88 More broadly, there was an acute awareness among the leadership of the NUM that public sympathy with the miners hardly ever translated into prac­ tical steps to install coal-­fired appliances. In fact, quite often the opposite appeared to be the case: miners were considered with such sympathy precisely because many people appeared to assume that, for better or worse, their way of life was doomed. As Sidney Ford lamented at the annual conference the following year: But still, after years of discussion and argument, we have failed to overcome what is . . . a very widely-­held view that coal is on its way out. In this connection we have to understand that whilst we can command considerable sympathy, and indeed, widespread support, for our claim for still more dynamic action in resolving the problems of those men who are made redundant and whose future livelihood depends on finding alternative employment, often, it is the very ­people who rally to our cause in seeking to mitigate the burden of the social consequences of change, who accept the contraction of the coalmining industry

86 NUM, Annual Report 1967, ‘The Future for Coal’, Economic Sub-­Committee, Minutes of Meeting held on 8 February 1967, appendix II, pp. 36–40. 87 In a parliamentary debate on 28 November 1967, future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made the same point: ‘The trend in debates has been that the continuance of the uneconomic pits tends to threaten the future of coal as a fuel, looking at it as a whole.’ Hansard HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, col. 266. 88 NUM, Annual Report 1968, p. 278.

40  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization as inevitable; who accept the fall in the consumption of solid fuel as a quite nat­ ural consequence of a changing pattern of energy consumption which they regard as progress in the field of fuel technology and utilisation.89

Official union policy during the late 1960s, then, did not dispute the government’s consumer-­centred and market-­oriented fuel policy framework. It was concerned to slow down the speed of contraction to a level that was considered ‘manageable’ and to extend the transitional period in which the industry would be given a degree of protection from market forces. ‘It is essential that the fullest possible use should be made of the country’s limited natural resources, and to enable this to be done, Conference urges the government to further assist the coalmining industry in order to provide an adequate transitional period in which to realize its full potential,’ as the resolution adopted at a special conference on the situation in the industry on 15 March 1968 put it.90 In addition, the Union was concerned that the government shoulder the social consequences of contraction by providing generous redundancy terms and more importantly, suitable alternative industrial employment for the men who would leave the industry.91 As the crisis in the industry deepened, the NUM’s position hardened but, nationally, stopped short of an open break with the Labour government. The NUM opposed the government’s White Paper on fuel policy on the grounds that the forecasts about the ever-­diminishing role of coal in the energy market were likely to turn into ‘self-­ fulfilling’ prophecies, making it impossible to retain a degree of confidence in the industry’s future for investment and potential recruits alike. More broadly, government fuel policy seemed to respond to existing market trends, without due consideration of the social costs of closures, rather than make efforts to shape them in the national interest. What was needed was to stabilize the industry at present output levels and give preference to indigenous fuels.92 Even so, moving a resolution on energy policy at the Labour Party conference in 1967, Ford conceded the need for a ‘virile, streamlined coal industry to meet the demands of the present age’.93 At the NUM annual conference the following summer, a resolution to oppose all pit closures except on the grounds of exhaustion was rejected as contravening long-­standing Union policy to examine each case on its merits.94 The Union’s tactics were not ineffectual. It was due to NUM pressure, for ex­ample, that the Wilson government agreed in the late summer of 1967 to defer, on a temporary basis, the closure of sixteen collieries.95 As Richard Crossman, 89 NUM, Annual Report 1969, p. 216. 90 NUM, Annual Report 1968, p. 114. 91 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1966 (London, 1966), pp. 562–70. 92 NUM, Annual Report 1968, ‘Fuel Policy – The White Paper’, pp. 45–52; for the quotation p. 46; ibid., NEC meeting of 14 March 1968, pp. 57–60. 93  Labour Party, 66th Annual Conference, pp. 201–3, here p. 202. See Gibbs, Coal Country, pp. 180ff. for developments in the Scottish coalfield. 94 NUM, Annual Report 1968, pp. 431–4. 95 Taylor, NUM, Vol. 1, pp. 222ff.

1967  41 leader of the House of Commons, noted in his diary on 31 July 1967, ‘Jim Callaghan and Harold came back from the Durham Miners’ Gala so shaken that they proposed . . . that we should postpone the pit closures this winter in order to cut the number of unemployed by about 15,000.’96 The White Paper itself was withdrawn on 23 November after the NUM had mo­bil­ized the opposition of approximately eighty Labour MPs.97 Yet, as was realized at the time, government concessions to NUM pressure were cosmetic at best. The reprieved collieries of 1967 closed in early 1968, bringing the total number of closures in that year to an unprecedented figure of seventy collieries, with a net loss of 57,257 jobs.98 The White Paper may have been withdrawn, but its stipu­la­tions continued to inform government policy all the same.99 Indeed, the ready access of mining trade unionists to decision ­makers inside the government, and their representation in the House of Commons, seemed to blunt, rather than strengthen, the miners’ power. As the Yorkshire ­delegate Jock Kane commented sarcastically at the annual conference in 1968, For eight years we have been running round in circles, knocking on doors, and the doors have always opened. Oh yes, they always open, you are always welcomed in and you are sat down and there is a cup of tea provided . . . and in the end of the road we are in the same position now as we were eight years ago, faced with an absolute absence of any steps being taken to prevent the destruction of our industry.100

It was therefore no surprise that, as the contraction of the industry continued unabated, the leadership of the NUM itself came under increasing pressure from sections of its membership. Indeed, the perception that the leadership of the NUM and their allies in Parliament were not doing enough to save the industry from destruction was shared by more disinterested observers from inside the Labour government. Crossman, wrote in his diary that the all-­night debate of 17/18 July 1967 was a cosy occasion but pathetic because it was clear that provided they could make their protest these miners felt that they were bound to support the Government

96  Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Vol. 2: Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons 1966–68 (London, 1976), p. 451; Taylor, NUM, Vol. 1, p. 225. 97 NUM, Annual Report 1967, pp. 603ff.; NUM, Annual Report 1968, report by Will Paynter at Special Delegate Conference, pp. 76–92. 98  Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, National Coal Board, vol. II: Minutes of Evidence, Evidence of the National Union of Mineworkers, Tuesday 29 April 1969, pp. 571–84, here 575f. (137f.). See also Tables 2 and 3, Appendix, for figures on wastage during the later 1960s. 99  Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, National Coal Board, Vol. II, Memorandum by the Ministry of Power, ‘Current Fuel Policy as it affects the Coal Industry’, February 1969, pp. 806–9 (404–7). 100 NUM, Annual Report 1968, p. 98.

42  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization in an action which really meant the destruction of the mining industry. What these miners’ M.P.s showed was a not very edifying loyalty, because people should not be as loyal as that to a Government which is causing the total ruin of their industry. As the night went on I was pleased that they were so pleased to have met there but I was also shocked at their pathetic lack of fight.101

These pressures made it difficult for the union leaders to maintain both the methods of backchannel diplomacy and the overall stance of critical support of the Labour government. They took two forms. The first type of pressure developed from inside the Union itself. It was carried by trade union officials at branch and area level who pooled resources to mount a fierce intellectual critique of the Labour government’s fuel policy and the NUM’s complicity in the ‘dismemberment’ of the coal industry. The story of the Left’s rise inside the NUM, and the capture of once ‘moderate’ coalfields such as Yorkshire by the Left, has often been told. Indeed, it was the rise of the Left inside an organization that was considered a bulwark of labourism that turned the NUM into an object of fascination for left-­wing intellectuals. The origins of a broad left coalition in the NUM are typ­ic­ al­ly traced back to an unofficial meeting at a hotel in Sheffield on 5 August 1967, where delegates from different coalfields agreed on the need to put forward a left unity candidate in the upcoming coalfield elections for the post of NUM general secretary.102 The unofficial strikes of 1969 and 1970, fought over the conditions of surface workers and wages, demonstrated the potential of a strategy that would combine activist pressure ‘from below’ and decisive leadership ‘from above’.103 Among the most influential expressions of this left challenge to official NUM policy was the pamphlet The Miners and the Nation, written by Lawrence Daly, general secretary of the Scottish Miners, and disseminated widely in the British coalfields. Daly’s central argument was that the miners must ‘break out’ of the economistic logic and press their demands for social justice, by industrial action if necessary. Despite the industry’s contraction, the miners were in a strong structural position, and it was time to remind the government that ‘the miners’ loyalty is not something to be coldly taken for granted.’104 In calling for ‘radical pol­icies . . . designed to take Britain in the direction of a Socialist society’, the pamphlet located the fortunes of the miners in a much broader critique of the post-­war settlement, which was portrayed as a betrayal of the aspirations and principles of the ‘spirit of 1945’. The charge that the ‘true’ 101 Crossman, Diaries, Vol. 2, pp. 431–2 (entry of 18 July 1967). See also the entries for 22 July 1967 (p. 437), 18 October 1967 (pp. 523ff.), 14 November 1967 (pp. 571ff.), 21 November 1967 (pp. 583ff.), 22 November 1967 (p. 586). 102  Andrew Taylor, The NUM & British Politics, Vol. 2: 1969–1995 (Ashgate, 2005), p. 26; V. L. Allen, The Militancy of British Miners (Shipley, 1981), pp. 118–35; Frank Watters, ‘Being Frank’: The Memoirs of Frank Watters (Doncaster, 1992), pp. 13–22. 103  Andrew Taylor, The Politics of the Yorkshire Miners (London, 1984), pp. 191–211. 104 Daly, Miners and the Nation, p. 17.

1967  43 interests of the rank and file were stifled by a Union ‘machine’ that was controlled by an unaccountable leadership was a standard argument in the New Left’s critique of the perceived failures of the labour movement, and critics such as Ken Coates viewed the pol­icies of the NUM as a perfect illustration of this wider malaise.105 The dissenters looked to ‘militant’ workers in other industries for in­spir­ation.106 As Daly reminded his readers in The Miners and the Nation, ‘Other trade unionists—­from railwaymen and dockers to busmen and bank clerks—­have shown some boldness in pursuit of their demands, and have achieved varying degrees of success.’107 They also looked to the Union’s interwar past for in­spir­ ation. Indeed, there was a distinct generational dimension to the left-­wing challenge to the moderate NUM leadership. As lived experience gave way to cultural memory, the meaning of the past began to change. To a generation of miners who had been socialized in the nationalized industry of the 1950s and 1960s, the past began to appear in a new light.108 The ‘bad old days’ of the interwar years were noted not so much for their suffering but for a rather different set of qualities—­a heroic time of struggle and sacrifice. By contrast, the redeeming triumph of the older narrative arc, the nationalization of 1947, was judged against the relative, as compared to other groups of industrial workers, and absolute, as measured in terms of size and employment, decline in the coal industry since the late 1950s.109 As a Scottish delegate expressed this re-­evaluation at the NUM’s Special Delegate Conference in March 1968, Over the years we have been selling copies of the histories of the respective ­miners . . . . All these histories have been interspersed with glorious examples of the struggles of the respective miners . . . in the fight for wages and conditions, for nationalisation, the 7-­hours day and other conditions, but when the present history comes to be written for this present period . . . it will be seen and

105 Ken Coates (ed.), A Future for British Socialism (Nottingham, 1968), p. 7f. See also E. P. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, in Carl Winslow (ed.), E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: essays and polemics (New York and London, 2014), pp. 119–34. 106  See, for context, John McIlroy, Nina Fishman, and Alan Campbell (eds.), British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964–79 (Ashgate, 1999); for a contemporary analysis, Robin Blackburn and Alexander Cockburn (eds.), The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus (Harmondsworth, 1967). 107 Daly, Miners and the Nation, p. 17. For historical context, Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010 (London, 2014), pp. 275–98. 108  See Jim Phillips, ‘Economic Direction and Generational Change in Twentieth-­Century Britain: The Case of the Scottish Coalfields’, The English Historical Review 132/557 (2017), pp. 885–911; Jörg Arnold, ‘Receding Futures, Shifting Pasts: The British Coal Industry, generational change and the pol­ it­ics of temporality, ca. 1967–1987’, in Lars Bluma, Michael Farrenkopf, and Torsten Meyer (eds.), Boom—­Crisis—­Heritage. King Coal and the energy revolutions after 1945 (Berlin, 2021), pp. 179–91. 109  See Table 4 in the Appendix on the relative decline of miners’ wages vis-­à-­vis other groups of industrial workers.

44  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization remembered as the period when this great Union had a part in the systematic dismemberment of this great industry.110

They demanded that the Union ‘stand up and fight’ for what they took to be the members’ interests and resort to industrial action if necessary to secure for the coal industry as large a share of the energy market as was necessary to maintain the industry at its present size. The heroic interpretation of the interwar years reflected in no small part the way in which the labour movement had monumentalized the past in order to draw inspiration for the present: the past was a time of great suffering, but also of dramatic events, exemplary instances of collective solidarity, community spirit, endurance, and bravery. By contrast, the present seemed humdrum, apathetic, and alienated. If the past was a time of masculine bravery, the present was a time of emasculated acquiescence, or so it seemed to activists of a younger generation. The second pressure, less conspicuous but considered much more of an immediate threat to the survival of the industry, was exerted by the thousands of m ­ iners who, on the basis of a consideration of their individual prospects, decided to leave the industry of their own accord. ‘Voluntary wastage’ in excessive numbers was considered dangerous by both the Coal Board and the Union because it threatened to turn a process of controlled contraction into an uncontrollable manpower collapse. The danger was all the greater as the pull factors of alternative employment were strongest in the areas of the central coalfields of Yorkshire and the Midlands where the most productive pits were located and where the future of the industry would be decided.111 In order to stand any chance of creating the streamlined, but profitable, industry that both Board and Union envisaged, it was essential that the industry retain their most skilled workers and put them to work at the most productive seams, especially so in the central coalfields. Union and Board framed the problem in terms of a potential loss of ‘morale’, precipitating wholesale collapse of the coal industry. The choice of phrase was significant here. Typically used in military contexts, ‘morale’ acknowledged that, just as with making a soldier out of a citizen, there was a degree of coercion necessary in making a coal miner out of a man. The pressure could come in the form of tradition; it could also come in the form of a lack of alternative life chances and employment opportunities. By the late 1960s, both elements were usually at play. By that time, recruitment had acquired a strong hereditary pattern. According to evidence produced by the Coal Board, it was rare for the industry to recruit young men from outside mining families and the traditional coalfields.112 But even here, there was 110 NUM, Annual Report 1968, p. 93. 111  Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, National Coal Board, Vol. II: Minutes of Evidence, Examination of Witnesses: Lord Robens, D. J. Ezra, D. M. Clement, 20 March 1969, pp. 479–99, here p. 484 (82). 112  Ibid., pp. 487 (85), 498 (96).

1967  45 evidence that working miners and their spouses actively discouraged their sons from continuing with the family tradition and following their fathers down the pit. Likewise, there were reports of local labour exchanges counselling against employment in the coal industry on account of the uncertain future and the arduous working conditions.113 Equally worrying from the Board’s point of view, highly qualified miners were starting to ‘disappear quite quickly’ as soon as a colliery was declared a candidate for potential closure, leaving behind the old and the less qualified.114 The Coal Board’s own data underlined the scale of the problem. Of the 260,500 men and adolescents who left the industry in the period 1965/6 to 1968/9, more than 50 per cent were classified as ‘voluntary wastage’. In the youngest age groups, comprising the below-­20-­year-­olds, ‘total wastage’ in 1965/6 and 1966/7, including both voluntary and involuntary exits, amounted to more than 35 per cent of the overall manpower.115 The NUM regarded the drift from the industry as a grave problem and threat to the very survival of the coal industry, to which the existence of the Union, by its rule book, was inextricably linked. They saw ‘voluntary wastage’ as an indication of the damage that government policy was doing to the industry and of the grave psychological impact on the workforce of the general atmosphere of uncertainty hovering over the industry’s future. Accordingly, they used the spectre of an imminent collapse of ‘morale’ as an argument in their attempts to influence government fuel policy, to slow down the closure programme, and to restore confidence in the industry. The concern was shared, no doubt in part for party pol­it­ ical reasons, by the Conservatives, but also a host of Labour MPs from mining areas and beyond.116 Initially at least, the government dismissed the argument as scaremongering. Serious overproduction in the industry was considered a much more immediate threat than the prospect of labour shortages. As the Minister of

113 NUM, Annual Report 1967, p. 5 (Item 23—Manpower). See also Hansard HC Sitting of 17 July 1967, col. 1996: ‘Young boys are reluctant to enter the industry.’ (Alec Jones (Rhondda, West)). 114  Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, National Coal Board, Vol. II: Minutes of Evidence, Examination of Witnesses: Lord Robens, D. J. Ezra, D. M. Clement, 20 March 1969, p. 485 (83). 115  See Table 3, Appendix. 116  See, for example, Hansard HC Sitting of 17 July 1967, cols 1876–83, here 1878f: ‘Having paid all those tributes, I would like to warn the Minister and the House of danger signals which now seem to be in sight. First the maintenance of morale in an industry declining in market and size is a very delicate operation indeed. . . . I understand that there are empty Coal Board houses beside profitable pits. I understand that profitable pits tend to be in areas where there is a choice of jobs, and that in these areas young men are hard to recruit, and school leavers particularly hard to get. I understand that in the East Midlands, the pride of the Board, hardly any school leavers can be obtained. On top of unbalanced wastage, the problem of absenteeism makes life particularly difficult for a coal industry which is  seeking to be efficient’ (Keith  Joseph). Ibid., col. 1948: ‘morale is all-­important’ (John Cronin); col. 2003: ‘We have got to restore confidence to the men who still work in the pits’ (Leslie Huckfield); col. 2008: ‘If the fall or collapse in the morale of the industry persists, the Government will not even be able to get their target of 155 million tons.’ (Michael Foot); col. 2018: ‘Uncertainty is the sapper of morale’ (Christopher Rowland); Hansard HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, col. 304: ‘As I said, the morale of the men in the coal-­mining industry has been severely shaken, if not completely shattered, by recent events’ (G. Elfed Davies).

46  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Power, Roy Mason, replied for the government in the Commons debate on colliery closures on 14 March 1969, ‘Despite the alarm caused by the high rate of rundown last summer, I do not know of any objective evidence that morale in the industry was damaged.’117 Mason’s protestations notwithstanding, the government was aware of the underlying point that controlled contraction must not be allowed to turn into uncontrollable collapse. The 1967 White Paper had noted with concern that ‘difficulty in manpower in competition with other industries, particularly in the profitable Midlands coalfields, led to many collieries being undermanned in 1966 and contributed to the failure in that year to make any significant increase in productivity’.118 Union policy operated on the premise that it served its members best by fighting for the future of a sizeable coal industry and by improving the wages and conditions of the people who worked in the industry. The Union also ac­know­ ledged a duty towards retired miners and their dependents despite repeated complaints that this policy area was woefully neglected. The assumption then was that miners should remain miners until they retired. The question as to whether the union also owed a responsibility towards members desirous to leave the industry altogether and whether it should assist them in their endeavours was more contentious. The NUM habitually demanded that closures be phased, with the provision of suitable alternative employment for redundant miners. But in a resolution tabled at the 1968 annual conference, the Nottingham area went one step further by demanding that men affected by closures should be given ‘the opportunity to take up work outside an unstable and uncertain mining industry’, regardless of whether they were offered alternative employment at another colliery. Under present circumstances, refusal to take up the offer of alternative employment in the industry would lead to forfeiting the redundancy pay. It was significant that in introducing the resolution to conference, Nottingham Area executive and member of the National Executive Len Clarke used the term ‘workmen’ rather than ‘miners’ to refer to people who preferred to leave the industry rather than be transferred to another colliery.119 As Clarke put it, I believe that when a pit closes any workmen who want to leave this contracting industry should be permitted to do so . . . . Young men at collieries closing down should be given the option of leaving the industry altogether while they are young enough to acquire the skills to obtain comparable employment in other industries.120

117  Hansard HC Sitting of 14 March 1969, col. 1792 (Roy Mason). 118  Fuel Policy (1967), p. 29; ‘When Miners walk away from the pits’, The Times, 5 December 1968. 119 NUM, Annual Report 1968, p. 200. For a similar point see also Hansard HC Sitting of 14 March 1969, col. 1751 (Will Owen). 120  See also Hansard HC Sitting of 14 March 1969, cols 1756ff. (Edwin Wainwright).

1967  47

III Who then were the people working in the coal industry in the late 1960s? How were they discursively constructed, and by whom? How did these broader societal types intersect with the self-­images of the people actually working in the coal industry? In the period, several partly complementary but also conflicting imaginaries of ‘the coal miner’ circulated in the public sphere, some of them reinforced by images drawn from earlier periods, others of more recent origin. Social scientists, writers and film-­makers, trade unionists, businessmen, and politicians all played a part in shaping these images. They ascribed certain characteristics to the figure of the miner, typified him, and invested him with moral qualities and af­f ect­ive dimensions. Portrait of a Miner was a half-­hour documentary produced by the National Coal Board’s Film Unit and directed by Richard Mason.121 It represented the Coal Board’s representation of a miner as a ‘man of today’.122 Filmed at Thoresby Colliery in Nottinghamshire, the documentary follows a day in the life of Pat Leigh, a coalface charge man. Pat is a family man, devoted to his wife and children; he is also deeply invested in the community and the industry—­he studies at Nottingham University one day a week and harbours the ambition to be elected secretary of the union branch. His views align with Coal Board thinking about the need to raise the industry’s productivity by reducing its size while maintaining existing levels of production. Leigh, then, is the modern miner as envisioned by the Coal Board: dismissive of tradition and future-­oriented; family-­centred yet committed to his place of work. While not everybody was convinced of the documentary’s alignment of the modern miner with the jet age—­the documentary was bookended by the sound of a modern aeroplane flying overhead—­there existed broad agreement among policymakers that the miners of the late 1960s were ‘no Luddites’. The term derived from the early Industrial Revolution and referred to workers who would smash machines in order to protect their livelihoods. It was commonly used to denote groups of people who were engaged in a doomed attempt to hold up the very currents of technological change itself.123 As Eric Varley, NUM-­sponsored MP for Chesterfield, put it in the House of Commons on 18 July 1967, When one looks at the transition that has taken place in the industry, with men who were brought up and trained only to use their hand tools at the coal face

121  Portrait of a Miner(1966), dir. by Richard Mason. 122  Ros Cranston, ‘Portrait of a Miner’, in BFI, National Coal Board Collection, Vol. 1: Portrait of a Miner, booklet (London [2008]), p. 35. 123 ‘Luddite’, OED (online edition).

48  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization now using modern, sophisticated machinery, there can be no possible reason for suggesting they are Luddite in their attitude.124

Lawrence Daly concurred. Writing in the New left pamphlet A Future for British Socialism?, he proclaimed, ‘We’re no modern Luddites, pleading for the retention of a ramshackle old-­fashioned industry.’125 Futile as the machine-­smashing of the historical Luddites may have been, there was a semantic strand in the concept that acknowledged, admired even, the oppositional character of what they had done. According to an early nineteenth-­ century report, Ned Ludd, the leader of the machine smashers, had in fact been a collier.126 The acknowledgement that miners were ‘no Luddites’ thus entailed a recognition that the miners of the late 1960s could no longer be stirred up into collective action, wrong-­headed or otherwise. The image of the ‘militant miner’ had taken on a distinctly residual character in the period, a distant shadow from a half-­mythical past without any bearing on the present. At the same time, there remained residual knowledge of the potential power at the miners’ disposal—‘if only they can agree upon the ends to which it should be used’, as Ken Coates mused in the introduction to a booklet recording the contributions of a socialist ‘teach-­in’ on the eve of the Labour Party Conference in 1968.127 Despite this, with hindsight it seems astonishing how little concern there was among either policymakers or the Coal Board that miners could collectively resist the policies that had been devised to ‘modernize’ the industry. In part, this was because in the 1960s the problems bedevilling the industry could still be accommodated into a narrative of delayed modernization that placed the blame for present difficulties at the doors of the pre-­1947 coal owners and the ‘thirteen wasted years’ of Tory rule. Quite the opposite was the case. The miners received widespread praise from politicians and the Board for their cooperative spirit and acceptance of changes that were considered both necessary and inevitable. Miners were lauded for their industrial relations record; they were held up as ‘model workers’. As Harold Finch, Labour MP for Bedwellty, put it in the House on 18 July 1967, The miners are facing the changing position with the same fortitude, patience and courage as they displayed years before, when coal was in high demand. When the history of our times comes to be written, men and women will marvel

124  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1951. See also Hansard HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, col. 248 (Richard Marsh), extending the praise from the workforce to the union: ‘The National Union of Mineworkers is one of the most realistic unions with which I have ever dealt. It has seen the industry contracting for a decade without a trace of the Luddite mentality which sometimes exists elsewhere.’ See also Hansard HL Sitting of 12 December 1967, col. 1048 (Lord Taylor of Mansfield). 125 Coates, Future, p. 59. 126 ‘Luddites’, OED (online edition). 127 Coates, Future, p. 8.

1967  49 at the attitude of the miners. . . . During all the years I have been a Member [of the House], not once has a Minister of Labour reported on a national stoppage or threatened stoppage, or, indeed, a stoppage of any great extent [in the mining industry].128

The mines were no hotbed of militancy. Indeed, if only all manufacturing industry showed an industrial relations record as cooperative as coal mining, there would be no need for trade union reform, the argument went. As Eric Ogden expressed it, ‘The industrial relations inside the industry are probably the envy of many other parts of industry, public and private; and would that such good relations existed in the motor car industry, or in the docks and the electrical engineering industry.’129 Neither the report by the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, chaired by Lord Donovan, nor the subsequent White Paper, In Place of Strife, both motivated by a concern over a crisis in industrial relations, regarded the coal industry as problematic.130 Indeed, as evidence reproduced as an appendix in the White Paper showed, the number of stoppages in mining had fallen by 70 per cent since the mid-­1960s, whereas they had increased by 30 per cent in the rest of industry.131 Both domestically and in comparison to the coal industries of other Western nations, the miners received the highest praise for the cooperative attitude as late as 1968. The assessment, if not the praise, was shared even by those who opposed what they considered to be the ‘defeatist’ attitude of the NUM. As a Scottish delegate at the union’s special conference in 1968 put it, ‘There is an apathy amongst the miners.’132 To him and others like him, ‘apathy’ was a state of mind that had been produced by a lack of leadership and direction from above.133 But the very ‘disenchantment’ between the rank and file and the leadership which had ensued had also planted the seeds for a ‘rekindling of the traditional spirit of the miners’, he insisted.134 Other delegates at the same conference begged to differ. They insisted that it was too late to stand up and resist what was, in any case, inevitable: ‘If ever

128  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1936 (Harold Finch). 129  Hansard HC Sitting of 14 March 1969, col. 1761 (Eric Ogden). 130  Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations 1965–1968, Report (Donovan report) (Cmnd. 3623) (London, 1968); First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, In Place of Strife: A Policy for Industrial Relations (Cmnd. 3888) (London, 1969). See Richard Tyler, ‘ “Victims of our History”? Barbara Castle and In Place of Strife’, in Glen O’Hara and Helen Parr, The Wilson Governments 1964–1970 Reconsidered (London and New York, 2006), pp. 155–70. 131  In Place of Strife, p. 39. 132 NUM, Annual Report 1968, p. 93. 133  Cf. Coates, Future, p. 11: ‘Apathy, fortified as a position of principle, and accompanied here and there by bitter, but sub-­political political upheavals, will extend itself at a geometric rate of progression. To meet and overcome this apathy is to engage all the forces of the left over the whole field of battle, at every level.’ 134 NUM, Annual Report 1968, p. 93.

50  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization there was a case or a classic example of the door being bolted after the horse has gone, this surely must be it,’ as a delegate from the Midlands put it.135 Or, as J. Pratt, member of the National Executive, expressed the same sentiment, ‘We are insignificant now.’136 In the estimation of another NEC member, the link between the past and the present had been ruptured by the corrosive impact of material wellbeing and the corresponding de-­legitimation of old-­fashioned working-­class values such as modesty and thrift:137 It is 42 years ago since we had industrial action, and the type of man you’re dealing with today is totally different from the type of man you dealt with at that particular time. . . . I will just mention one reason why. At that particular time of the day – and let us face it – the man who could walk down the street and say ‘I owe not any man a penny’, he was the great fellow of the village. . . . Today our lads have set on things like £800 cars, £3000 bungalows, all that kind of thing and it all has its effect.138

While miners were held up as ‘model workers’ for their adaptability and acceptance of change, there was an affective depth to their characterization that was rarely found amongst other types of industrial workers or, indeed, other groups in society more generally, with the possible exception of soldiers. Indeed, miners were habitually likened to soldiers, as in the following reminiscences by David Crouch, Conservative MP for Canterbury in the parliamentary debate on 17 July 1967. They are worth quoting at length for their acknowledgement of the emotional depth surrounding the subject matter of the coal industry and their in­tim­ ation of an unbroken line of continuity between past and present, directly contradicting the verdict expressed by some trade unionists themselves, as discussed above. The extract is all the more remarkable for coming from a Conservative MP. I, too, have had close association with miners. During the war, I had the honour to serve in a Scottish regiment of Fifeshire miners and go abroad with them and I never found a greater set of men in my whole experience until I paid my first visit down my own pit in Canterbury. There I found no sign of any feeling of Luddite-­ism. Instead I found a re­mark­ able spirit among working men in conditions which, although I have worked in factories, I know simply cannot be compared with working on the surface . . . .

135  Ibid., p. 104. 136  Ibid., p. 95. 137  On affluence as a moral concept, see Stuart Middleton, ‘ “Affluence” and the Left in Britain, c.1958–1974’, The English Historical Review 129/536 (2014), pp. 107–38. 138 NUM, Annual Report 1968, p. 102.

1967  51 These men have a wonderful spirit, the sort of spirit we talk of in the House when we talk of this country being in some danger economically. I do not wish to draw on the emotions of the House by saying so, but I came from my own pit inspired and encouraged by the people I met. It is because this is a human problem, because men want to know where they stand, because they give of themselves in hard work and sweat, that they want to know where they stand for their wives and children in the future. They are making a great contribution to the nation’s economy and they deserve from the Minister the same great care that he has given to the economic aspect of his vast problems. They deserve a very big and special care for their future.139

Miners, then, were special men, possessed of a ‘wonderful spirit’ and deserving of admiration on account of the hard, dangerous, and important work that they performed, ‘giv[ing] of themselves in hard work and sweat’. But they were also eminently vulnerable in the modern world, deserving of ‘very big and special care’ by everyone in a position of authority.140 On account of all the sacrifices they had made in the past and were still making on a daily basis, miners possessed a moral right to demand of society to reciprocate as best as possible. Miners, the characterization went, were heroes rendered vulnerable by broader patterns of change over which they had no control.141 To some, there was an additional poignancy in the miners’ position. Collectively, they were experiencing what, ultimately, lay in store for many other groups of industrial workers. ‘Today it is mining and mining communities; tomorrow it will be other industries and other communities,’ as Raymond Fletcher MP observed on 14 March 1969.142 If this was a characterization that, although not unchallenged,143 could command respect across the pol­it­ ical spectrum, for the labour movement there was the additional consideration that miners and mining communities had made an exceptional contribution to the movement as a whole. To abandon them in their hour of need was tantamount

139  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, cols 1934–6 (David Crouch). See also Hansard HL Sitting of 12 December 1967, col. 1063f: ‘I live in a mining community and have no desire to live elsewhere. As a class of workers their good qualities are predominant. They are noted for their native wit, their great courage and their superior intelligence. . . . The nature of the miners’ work has much to do with this . . . I love these people.’ (Lord Maelor). 140  Hansard HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1935 (David Crouch). 141  Hansard HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, col. 261: ‘These measures are not the charitable dispensation of a benevolent Parliament, but are designed to assist men who find, through no fault of their own, their industry and social environment changing with terrifying speed’ (Richard Marsh). 142  Hansard HC Sitting of 14 March 1969, col. 1777f. (Raymond Fletcher). 143 Compare, for example, the critical comments by Spence Summers and Nicholas Ridley in Second Reading of the Coal Industry Bill, Hansard HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, column 302: ‘Is only the mining industry to have this artificial diversion of real efficient cost values?’ (Spencer Summers); col. 383: ‘If a lorry driver, or a textile worker, is redundant, it is pretty galling to him to see special and very good arrangements being made for redundant coal miners, when he is left without help’ (Nicholas Ridley); 5 December 1967, col. 1351: ‘Why single out miners for redundancy terms better than those in other industries?’ (J. H. Osborn).

52  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization to, in the somewhat unfortunate analogy of a Labour MP, a son casting out his mother into the cold.144 There was also broad consensus in the public debate of the late 1960s about what miners desired. They needed assurances about security of employment in the coal industry. Failing that, they needed the provision of alternative employment. As Minister of Power Richard Marsh put it in a committee debate on the Coal Industry Bill on 5 December 1967, ‘What miners need, whatever their age, is work; they do not want benefits of any particular type.’145 But it wasn’t just any type of work that miners demanded: ‘We do not want the dolls’ eyes and plastic flower factories; we do not want cottage industries,’ as Michael McGuire, miners’ MP, stressed in the same debate.146 What they were desirous of was to be provided with ‘men’s work’, as, for example, in the automotive industry. Only manufacturing employment of a certain type would put miners in a position to ‘to sell [their] labour with dignity’, as McGuire underlined a few weeks earlier during the second reading of the Coal Bill.147 While there was widespread praise for the miners for their cooperative stance and ‘modern’ attitudes from both policymakers and industrialists—­sometimes mixed with incomprehension at their, or at least their representatives’, participation in what seemed like their own destruction—­the social sciences set out to construct a very different image of ‘the coal miner’. In contrast to the Coal Board, who depicted miners as modern ‘affluent workers’, skilled, acquisitive, and productive, sociologists cast them as the very opposite. In the estimation of David Lockwood and colleagues, miners, alongside dockers and steelworkers, were ‘proletarian traditionalists’ who held a dichotomous world view that sharply differentiated between ‘them’ and ‘us’, who lived in closely knit occupational communities, and for whom their work was inextricably bound up with a whole ‘way of life’.148 ‘Proletarian’ class consciousness they may have shown, but most of all they were ‘traditionalists’ because they were to be found ‘in industries and communities which, to an ever-­increasing extent, are backwaters of national industrial and urban development’, as Lockwood explained.149 Significantly, sociologists

144  Hansard HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, col. 363 (William Hamilton); HC Sitting of 18 July 1967, col. 1955 (Eric Varley). See also Report of 67th Labour Party Conference, p. 268: ‘I could give a formidable list of years and years of support by the miners for this great party of ours, but you know, there is no need to do so’ (H. Smith, Sedgefield C.L.P.). 145  Hansard HC Sitting of 5 December 1967, col. 1356. 146  Ibid., col. 1341. 147  Hansard HC Sitting of 28 November 1967, col. 348. 148  Tim Strangleman, ‘Mining a productive seam? The coal industry, community and sociology’, Contemporary British History 32/1 (2018), pp. 18–38. 149  David Lockwood, ‘Sources of Variation in Working-­Class Images of Society’ (1966), reprinted in Martin Bulmer (ed.), Working-­Class Images of Society (London, 1975), pp. 16–31, here p. 20. On Lockwood see David Rose, ‘Lockwood, David (1929-­2014)’, ODNB, https://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-­9780198614128-­e-­108612, accessed 10 October 2021; Jon Lawrence, ‘Inventing the ‘Traditional Working Class’: A re-­analysis of interview notes from Young and Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London’, Historical Journal 59/2 (2016), pp. 567–93.

1967  53 such as Lockwood were primarily occupied with disproving the embourgeoisement thesis then current in industrial sociology. In their Weberian typologies, miners served as a foil to accentuate what they considered to be the defining characteristics of ‘affluent workers’, the epitome of whom was considered to be the automotive worker.150 In his account of shop stewards at Ford Motor Company’s Halewood plant, published in 1973 but based on fieldwork that was begun in 1967, Huw Beynon made the contrast between miners and car workers explicit. With miners, their occupation infused their sense of self; with car workers, their job was a means to an end, nothing more.151 Accordingly, the image of the coal miner as a traditional proletarian was not tested against the evidence of empirical fieldwork conducted during the 1960s itself. Rather, it drew for the evidential basis, shallow as it was, on the findings of community studies that had been conducted ten years previously and, in particular, on the famous study of the Yorkshire mining town of Featherstone, Coal is Our Life (1956), fictionalized as ‘Ashton’ in the study.152 To a considerable extent, then, modern sociology, although ostensibly concerned with social change in the working class, showed itself oblivious to social change (and geographical diversity) among miners. The ‘scientification’ of the coal miner led to the freezing in time of an image of miners that had its geographical foundation in the Yorkshire coalfield and temporal grounding in the first decade after nationalization.153 Meanwhile, social geographers embarked on a series of empirical case studies that sought to understand how miners responded to the contraction of their industry and what became of them after they had left the industry.154 This work was carried out either at the behest of or in close cooperation with various government ministries and the National Coal Board. It was premised on the assumption that the scientific study of miners’ responses to colliery closures would be valuable for testing and refining the official machinery that had been put in place for managing the ‘modernization’ and contraction of the industry. Moreover, there was an assumption that mining to some extent represented a test case. The findings on miners’ responses and attitudes would therefore be of value when ‘dealing with large redundancies in other industries’, as the introduction to one

150  Strangleman, ‘Mining a productive seam’, p. 20. 151  Huw Beynon, Working for Ford (London, 1973), p. 90: ‘Often it is quite inappropriate to talk of “car workers” in the same way as one would talk of “miners”, for many of them do not consider themselves to be “car workers” in that sense. They see themselves more as workers who happen to work in a car plant. They don’t want to grow old on the line. They work in the car plant because of the money.’ 152  Lockwood, ‘Sources of Variation’, n. 5. 153 R. E. Pahl, Divisions of Labour (Oxford, 1984), p. 5. 154  J. W. House and E. M. Knight, Pit closure and the community (Papers in Migration and Mobility, no. 5) (Newcastle, 1967); E. M. Knight, Men Leaving Mining: West Cumberland 1966–67 (Papers on Migration and Mobility in Northern England, no. 6) (Newcastle, 1968); Ryhope: A pit closes. A Study in Redeployment (London, 1970). See also John W. House, Industrial Britain: The North East (Newton Abbot, 1969).

54  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization study put it.155 There were four studies altogether. Two of them were prepared for the Ministry of Labour by social geographers at the University of Newcastle. They focused on the northern coalfields of West Cumberland and Durham over a period of ten years between 1957 and 1967. The third study was prepared by in-­ house research officers of the Ministry of Power and the NCB. It focused on the closure of a single pit, Ryhope Colliery in the Durham coalfield. The final study was funded by the Welsh Office and carried out by a member of staff at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at University College, Swansea. This study was concerned with the impact of the closure of Cefn Coed Colliery in April 1968 on the community of the Dulais valley in South Wales. Its findings were not published in monograph form until the mid-­1970s, but the fieldwork was carried out between 1967 and 1969.156 The studies were highly localized in character, self-­consciously focusing on the contracting coalfields of the North and Wales because, as the introduction to the Ryhope study put it, ‘the impact of the closure programme would be particularly heavy there’.157 The studies highlighted the problems of the contracting coalfields rather than those of the receiving coalfields of Yorkshire and the Midlands. More generally, they gave precedence to the decline of the industry over other aspects of the Coal Board’s strategy of modernization. Even for the Durham coalfield, however, the coverage was far from comprehensive. The study by J. W. House and E. M. Knight focused on four pits around the town of Houghton-­le-­Spring, while the Ministry study took as its subject matter the closure of a single pit. Taken together, the studies painted a more differentiated picture of miners’ attitudes to closures than the metaphorical usage of ‘community death’ that was drawn upon by the defenders of the coal industry appeared to suggest. While not negating the various frictions and stresses associated with colliery closures, the studies concluded that, overall, the rundown had been cushioned relatively successfully by the redeployment policies of the Board. Where actual redundancies did occur, it was the old and the infirm who struggled the most. Of the 180 men (out of a total workforce of 804) who were made redundant by the closure of Ryhope Colliery, 76 per cent were over the age of 55, and 79 per cent were disabled.158 Moreover, the men made redundant had difficulty finding alternative employment. Around Houghton-­le-­Spring, only 20 per cent of the minority of miners who had been made redundant in the years 1963 to 1966 managed to find new work.159 More generally, the studies indicated that among the men working in the Durham and West Cumberland coalfields the attachment to place was more significant than the attachment to the industry itself. At Ryhope, only twenty-­seven

155  Ryhope, p. 3. 156 John Sewel, Colliery Closure and Social Change: A Study of a South Wales Mining Valley (Cardiff, 1975). 157  Ryhope, p. 4. 158  Ryhope, pp. 27, 89. 159 House, Industrial Britain, p. 112.

1967  55 miners or 3.4 per cent of the total could be induced to move to another coalfield, although 624 had been officially invited to consider such a move and 114 had taken the step to go on a transfer visit. As the study’s conclusion put it, ‘It is clear that for the Ryhope men the principal barrier to mobility was deeply-­rooted attachment, both to the locality and its associated network of relationships. They “didn’t want to leave Durham” .’160 As the study by E. M. Knight underlined, the number of miners who left the industry of their own accord was much greater than those who left involuntarily: between 1957 and 1967, the Coal Board lost 411,169 men (60.1 per cent) due to ‘voluntary’ wastage, while 245,000 left ‘involuntarily’ due to ill health or retirement, and 25,764 or 3.8 per cent were declared redundant. For the nine pits in operation in West Cumberland in 1957, the rate of voluntary wastage was similar, with 65 per cent of all wastage, although here the rate of redundancy was considerably higher than nationally, reaching 10 per cent. The study found that of the 729 men who left the industry of their own accord between January 1966 and July 1967, 489 (67.1 per cent) were under 35 years of age. Out of a sample of 296 ex-­miners contacted during the research, more than half gave insecurity over the future of the industry or disinclination to transfer out of Cumberland as the main reasons for deciding to leave the industry.161 Although only a minority had benefited from leaving the industry either financially or with regard to the length of the working day (and one-­fifth found themselves unemployed at the time of the survey), more than two-­thirds of those in employment claimed to be more content in their new work than in their previous employment.162 The study appeared to indicate that, firstly, young miners in particular were looking for individual escape routes out of a declining industry and, secondly, attitudes to work down the pit were more instrumental than was suggested by the sociological literature. Mining may have been a way of life for some, but for others it was, in the first instance, a means to an end. In his study of social change in a mining community in South Wales, John Sewel echoed many of the findings of the research carried out in the north of England. The study was indebted to an ethnographic approach as much as to social geography. The author had spent a year living among the miners of the Dulais valley during a period of accelerated change.163 In doing so, he was able to track local responses to the closure of Cefn Coed Colliery, the last operating shaft mine in the valley, from the initial announcement in July 1967 to the union-­led campaign to stop the closure; from the temporary reprieve during the winter of 1967/8 to the eventual cessation of production in April 1968.164 As in Durham and Cumberland, the study found that, in the Dulais valley, the attachment to place was greater than attachment to the industry.165 The miners who were interviewed accepted the economic rationale for closure. Few opposed the rundown of 160  Ryhope, p. 92. 161 Knight, Men Leaving Mining, p. 18. 163 Sewel, Colliery Closure, p. 1. 164  Ibid., pp. 11–27.

162  Ibid., p. 30. 165  Ibid., p. 56.

56  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization coal mining as a matter of principle. What they were opposed to was a rundown within the specific circumstances of a depressed local economy. Ambivalence to coal mining was the dominant sentiment that Sewel recorded in his encounters with mineworkers. As much as the local union lodge sought to stop the closure of Cefn Coed Colliery, many expressed a desire to leave the industry. Indeed, the wish to preserve mining in the valley and simultaneously to see the back of the industry could be expressed by the same person.166 Social bonds among mineworkers were regarded as unique to coal mining; yet the existence of such bonds was considered as of little importance to a miner’s decision to accept redundancy or transfer to another colliery. Comradeship was viewed as a ‘compensating factor’ for the arduous and dangerous working conditions characteristic of coal mining.167 Sewel found that age was important. Whereas the young were most willing to leave, often after having completed an apprenticeship, those aged 55 and above were determined to stick it out until reaching retirement age or being made redundant, which would entitle them to the receipt of 90 per cent of their wages for a period of three years.168 Miners between the age of 35 and 55 were in the most difficult position. They had to weigh up certain short-­term costs of leaving, both in social and material terms, against the possibility of longer-­term benefits. Although it was rare for redundant miners to find equally well-­paid employment elsewhere, few expressed a desire to return to the pits.169 Just as with the social sciences, the literature and fiction of the time drew a picture of miners and of life in mining communities that sharply contrasted with the forward-­looking image projected by the Coal Board.170 Coming at the tail end of a ‘golden decade’ of working-­class fiction, a string of popular novels and plays depicted the prospect of a working life down the mine as wholly unpalatable. Mining villages, for their part, were places from which to escape. The most popular of these fictional renditions were the short novel A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines, adapted for the cinema as Kes, and the play Close the Coalhouse Door, both published in 1968.171 Billy Casper, the adolescent boy at the centre of Hines’s plot, grows up in an environment in which work in the coal industry carries the stigma of failure. When young Billy, distracted by more pressing issues, fails to engage at an interview for school-­ leavers at his secondary modern school, the youth employment officer sitting across the desk suggests that he think about getting a job in mining. After all, ‘conditions have improved tremendously’.172 Yet, as much as Billy seems to lack any ambition to advance in life, he burns with a fierce

166  Ibid., pp. 22ff. 167  Ibid., p. 36. 168  Ibid., pp. 9, 42f. 169  Ibid., p. 64. 170  For a valuable overview of miners’ fiction and the place of this body of work within working-­ class fiction more generally, see Ian Haywood, Working-­Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting (Plymouth, 1997), pp. 20–2 (on D.  H.  Lawrence), 58–72 (on interwar fiction), 117–19 (on Sid Chaplin), 132–6 (on Barry Hines). 171  Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave (Harmondsworth, 1968); Kes (1969), dir. by Ken Loach. 172 Hines, Kestrel, p. 139.

1967  57 c­ onviction that he will never work down the pit. To become a miner is to become like Billy’s older brother Jud, the strutting bully of the estate whose horizons do not extend beyond drinking, betting, and fantasies of sexual gratification. Indeed, in A Kestrel for a Knave, Jud the miner personifies the meanness of the world in which Billy is entrapped. This is an environment in which any genuine attempt at self-­expression is cruelly stifled by people who casually resort to bullying and ­violence, in part out of sheer spite and in part as a coping mechanism for their own repressed desires.173 It is no coincidence that it is Jud who kills the kestrel that Billy has trained, for no other reason than to punish Billy for his failure to place a bet on his behalf. In killing the bird, Jud also kills Billy’s hopes of escape from the stifling environment that entraps him.174 In the adaptation for the ­cinema, directed by Ken Loach and produced by Tony Garnett, the link between the industry and oppression is made even more explicit. It is a miner’s cage that serves as a metaphor for the meanness of the life that awaits Billy.175 Close the Coalhouse Door was a musical by Alan Plater.176 It was loosely based on short stories by Sid Chaplin and featured songs by Alex Glasgow. The play premiered at the Newcastle Playhouse on 8 April 1968. After running for nine weeks to local acclaim, the production transferred to Nottingham and, eventually, London. Combining elements of tragedy and comedy, the musical sent out an ambivalent message about the miners. Although ostensibly intended as an ‘unqualified hymn of praise’, the play very much cast the men working in the industry as proletarian traditionalists. Thomas Milburn, a 68-­year-­old retired miner and his wife, Mary Anne, live in the mining village of Brokenback. They are having a party to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. The occasion serves to bring together a cast of stock characters—­the vicar, the mate, the union man, the Geordie—­their two grandsons John and Frank, and Ruth, Frank’s partner. The setting functions as a ‘springboard into reminiscence and reflection about the past’.177 The outlook on life is shaped by collective memories of oppression, punctuated by acts of desperate resistance, stretching all the way back to the horrendous working conditions of the mid-­nineteenth century.178 Indeed, on this view, the contemporary closures and abandonment are but the latest iteration in a long series of injustices. ‘Are they always like this?’ Ruth, the outsider, asks. ‘Like what, Pet?’ Mary Anne asks back. ‘Living in the past?’ Ruth retorts.

173  For a more optimistic reading that emphasizes Billy’s resilience see Ronald Paul, ‘Fire in Our Hearts’. A Study of the Portrayal of Youth in Post-­War British Working-­Class Fiction (Gothenburg, 1982), pp. 152–85. 174 William Stephenson, ‘Kes and the Press’, Cinema Journal 12/2 (spring 1973), pp. 48–55, here p. 48. 175  Paul Barker, ‘Boy in a Cage’, New Society, 20 November 1969, p. 823. 176  Alan Plater, Close the Coalhouse Door (A Methuen Playscript) (London, 1969, repr. 1971, 1974, and 1976). 177  Ibid., p. 6. 178  Ibid., p. 7.

58  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization The occasion also provides the setting for a reunion between estranged brothers Frank, ‘who escaped, via education’, and John, who stayed behind.179 John works in a nearby pit, thus following in the footsteps of their grandfather and their father, who was killed down the mine when John was 5 years old.180 Although a skilled maintenance man, John’s interests are narrow indeed: ‘food, beer, women, gambling and not too many questions’.181 When John comes out on top in a fight with Frank, Ruth observes that it is John ‘who is flat on his back’, pointing out that Brokenback, whose local colliery has long closed, is not a pit village. ‘It is a ghost village. No call for pitmen anymore.’182 Yet, despite John’s traditionalism, his privileging of physical toughness, and his patriarchal ideas about gender—­or because of them—Ruth feels a strong physical and intellectual pull. Forgetting about her bookish boyfriend, she throws herself into a sexual adventure with John. But John tells her to reunite with his brother, because she ‘doesn’t need a pitman . . . and Frank needs you . . . look after his black eyes . . .’.183 In Close the Coalhouse Door, no less than in Kes, the miners are out of step with the present; they are imprisoned in a set of backward-­looking allegiances to a world and way of life that is fast becoming an anachronism. Yet, in Close the Coalhouse Door, it is also the miners’ very traditionalism that turns them into an object of fascination. ‘Ordinary’ miners had to negotiate their sense of self within the broader web of conflicting significations outlined above. To recover the subjectivities of mineworkers in the late 1960s is not easy. The recording of individual miners’ voices as part of ‘history from below’ projects did not get under way until the confrontations of the 1970s and 1980s had rekindled scholarly interest in the figure of the coal miner. Autobiographical writing from the period, other than a small selection of union leaders’ autobiographies, rarely appears to have found its way into the archives.184 Rather than give rounded portrayals of individual miners’ outlooks, all the historian can hope to achieve is outline a number of themes that appear to have played an important role for ordinary miners’ sense of self. Two types of sources, although not without their problems, are of particular value to this task. The first consists of a body of letters to the editor that were published in the Union’s official journal, The Miner. The second body of source material comprises fictional and autobiographical texts that were submitted as entries for the Arthur Markham Memorial Prize. The competition was set up in 1927 by Dr Violet Markham in memory of her deceased brother, a Liberal MP and coal owner. It was open to working miners and disabled miners. Half a dozen

179  Ibid., p. 9. 180  Ibid., p. 5. 181  Ibid., p. 9. 182  Ibid., p. 59. 183  Ibid., p. 77. 184  Arthur Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (London, 1960); Abe Moffat, My Life with the Miners (London, 1965); Will Paynter, My Generation (London, 1972); Keith Gildart, ‘Mining memories: reading coalfield autobiographies’, Labor History 50/2 (May 2009), pp. 139–61.

1967  59 submissions from the later 1960s have been preserved by the University of Sheffield, which administered the competition until 1993. Selected essays were published in 1994 under the title Pitmen Born & Bred.185 The journal, The Miner, was relaunched in January 1969; it reached a print run of 60,000 copies during its early years. One of the journal’s official goals was to function as a forum for a wide range of views on matters concerning the coal industry as expressed by ordinary members. And indeed, letters to the editor could take up as much as two pages out of eight pages of content. In that respect, then, the readers’ letters, while not representative in any strict sense, provide insights into a wide range of views and opinions as circulating among miners at the time. For the most part, they were written by men (and also some women) who took an active interest in the politics of coal and the affairs of the NUM. This very interest probably set them apart from the mass of ordinary miners.186 An analysis of dozens of letters published in the years 1969 and 1970 reveals widely divergent views on the efficacy, or otherwise, of a more aggressive stance of the Union towards the government’s fuel policy and, indeed, the prospects of the coal industry. Prevalent was a sharply critical tone towards union bureaucracy and the labour movement. They were ‘out of contact with the rank and file’, as J. Stones of Doncaster alleged.187 The National Executive of the NUM, Eric Lawrence, branch treasurer at Gedling Colliery in Nottinghamshire averred, ‘have found it necessary to control the membership as opposed to leading’.188 Other correspondents took a different view. ‘Remember—­it’s OUR Government,’ N. Nichols cautioned in the March 1969 edition.189 To have a space to articulate critical ideas was seen as important in itself.190 Some used the opportunity to draw attention to the problems of sections of the workforce who did not work at the coalface: craftsmen employed at the industry’s workshops; canteen workers; haulage drivers; surface workers.191 Others were concerned about health and safety and other workplace issues. The health risks of dust in modern mining played an important role; so did the prevalence and significance of high rates of absenteeism.192 Attention was also drawn to the position

185 The University of Sheffield, Special Collections, MS268, Arthur Markham Memorial Prize Essays, https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/library/special/markham, accessed 10 January 2023; Mike Kirkup (ed.), Pitmen Born & Bred (Newbiggin by the Sea, 1994). 186  That union politics was the preserve of the ‘active few’ is a staple of the historical literature on coal mining. 187  J. Stones, ‘What good’s a pay rise that’s eaten up before you get it?’, The Miner, February 1969. 188  Eric Lawrence, ‘United we stand – but who’s kidding who?’, The Miner, March 1970. 189 See also: Dennis Weighell, ‘Change the rule book, but don’t split the union’, The Miner, December 1969. 190  William Gibb, ‘Falling down, politically’, The Miner, March 1969. 191  T. H. Goulding, ‘Is it really absenteeism?’, The Miner, March 1969; ‘Opinions etc.’, The Miner, April 1969; Dai Price, ‘The pick and shovel days are over’, The Miner, June 1969; Albert Hughes, ‘Are craftsmen really an inferior race’, The Miner, June 1969. 192  Howard Wadsworth, ‘Dust is still the big killer’, The Miner, January 1970.

60  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization of miners vis-­à-­vis other groups of manual workers, both in material terms and symbolically. Occasionally, ex-­miners and miners’ wives also contributed to the discussion. In a notable intervention, Mrs L. P. Owen explained that she and her husband had recently moved from Nottinghamshire to Knottingley in Yorkshire ‘with the intention of bettering ourselves’. They had found their hopes of material advancement disappointed because her husband, a fully trained face worker, had been required to make do with haulage work.193 Just like Mrs Owen, many cor­ res­pond­ents argued on the basis of tangible lived experience—­the size of the wage packet; the concessionary coal allowance; the effect of long years of hard labour on their health.194 By and large, the controversies played out on the pages of The Miner found their equivalent in the more formal debates, as conducted at NUM annual and special conferences at both national and area level. Whereas the letters to the editor give an insight into the day-­to-­day concerns of workers in the industry, the contributions to the Arthur Markham Memorial competition reveal different aspects of miners’ subjectivities. While fictional, many pieces drew on lived experience. The contributions from the 1960s that have found their way into the edited collection, Pitmen Born & Bred, situate their characters in an environment where rugged individualism coexists with communal impulses. Miners assert their individuality, but they are also constrained by structures of mutual solidarity. In ‘None but the blind’, entered for the 1967 competition, pitman John Harris is characterized as ‘powerful’ and ‘hard’ yet also ‘dull’ and ‘obdurate’. In an underground conversation with the ‘wry’ and ‘book-­ learned’ Dai, Harris asserts his individualism by exclaiming, ‘I do what I want to do . . . You nor nobody else can stop me when I’m going to do something.’ To prove his courage, Harris enters into a bet with his workmates that he can find his way back from the underground workings to the pit bottom all by himself in complete darkness. Harris goes through with the bet and quickly loses his way, bringing him close to despair: The pitiless darkness almost compelled him to sit down and await the incoming shift. Yet this thought frightened him more than his present circumstance. The loss of face, the pulling down of an arrogant image, he dare not sustain. From his very soul came the anguished cry: ‘Show me a light, whoever you be.’195

Eventually Harris’s workmates come to the rescue, showing loyalty despite his protestations that they are ‘bloody fools’ and that he was getting on just fine without their help. John Farrimond’s contribution offered a different perspective on the relationship between the individual and the community. In ‘The Anniversary’, 193  Mrs L. P. Owen, ‘No room at the face’, The Miner, May 1970. 194  On the category of ‘experience’: E. P. Thompson, Education and Experience (Leeds, 1968). 195  A. F. Jones, ‘None but the blind’, in Kirkup, Pitmen, pp. 13–16, here p. 16.

1967  61 entered for the 1964 competition, a coal picker trips on a spoil heap and slides into a lake. The unnamed character, who has been ‘only half a man’ since he lost his legs in an accident twenty years previously, angrily refuses to reach for the outstretched hands proffered by fellow coal pickers. ‘ “Get back!” he shouted, and the words were somehow a battle-­cry, a roar of defiance. “Get back, I c’n manage.” ’ In persisting in ‘going it alone’, he will redeem his manhood, even if he gets killed trying to reach the shore. Many stories were set in the past, with World War II and the interwar years featuring prominently. They reveal a historical consciousness, an awareness of a time that was moving out of reach of lived experience into the sphere of communicative and cultural memory. In the process the interwar years started to take on a mythological quality. The bad old days were also the heroic days—­a period in which the harshness of the working environment and of everyday life had not yet been softened by the welfare state and nationalization. This was a time of danger and hardship, raw passion and stand-­offs, which brought out the best, and worst, in men. ‘I am a miner and can work,’ cries the first-­person narrator of Tom McKinstery’s story ‘The Dusthole of England’ (1968), about a Scottish miner who has travelled to the notorious Snowdown pit in the Kent coalfield in search of work during the Great Depression. Only the toughest and most resourceful survive in that notorious ‘dusthole’. When the narrator finds himself set upon by a spiteful deputy, he declares fiercely, Let me warn you and whoever else may be interested especially that red moustached bully; anyone who tries more of the kind of thing I got today will get a pick point stuck in his rotten heart by accident when no-­one is looking.196

Not all entries from the late 1960s, however, harked back to the interwar years. Some engaged more directly with the present. ‘Just a trick of the mind’, submitted for the 1969 competition by G. A. Ashley, took as its subject matter the closure of Hucknall Main Colliery on 29 March the previous year.197 Recounting the final underground inspection by a group of deputies, the story fused documentary and dreamlike sequences. As the main protagonist embarks on his tour, the narration offers a thick description of the underground environment: the well-­lit pit bottom, ‘like a large factory built on the same lines as an army nissen hut or an aircraft hangar’, the undermanager’s hut, the broad roadways, the turnout, and the workings.198 Factual observations on the value of the equipment that will soon be lost are interspersed with more wistful reflections on the fleetingness of human

196  Tom McKinstery, ‘The Dusthole of England’ (1968), in Kirkup, Pitmen. 197  University of Sheffield, Special Collections, MS 268, G. A. Ashley, ‘Just a trick of the Mind’, 11 January 1969. 198  Ibid., p. 3.

62  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization endeavour and achievement. As the protagonist gets lost in reveries about fellow miners he had known, he suddenly realizes that he has missed the allotted meeting place. His daydreams are swept aside by a nightmarish fear of getting left behind in the abandoned pit, trapped below ground and condemned to await the flooding of the workings. In the end, however, the Kafkaesque sequences prove just ‘a trick of the mind’. The protagonist is reunited with his workmates and together they ascend from the pit bottom for the very last time. Stepping out into the morning sunlight, the colliery and even the refuse tip seem beautiful and ‘majestic’, while the green fields beyond and the laughter of children indicate that life will go on even without the pit. By comparison, ‘The Derby Winner’, entered for the 1966 round of the competition, is set in a world seemingly untouched by the fear of closure.199 Bill Thomas, a chargehand at a modern colliery called Sutfield, in many ways resembles Pat Leigh, the coalface chargeman at the centre of the NCB documentary Portrait of a Miner, discussed above. Like Leigh, Thomas is a devoted family man, but also a good workmate. Work in the industry has brought the family modest material comfort: Thomas drives to work in his own car; the family own a semi-­detached house; and they holiday in Blackpool, where their daughter has just opened a boarding house. Thomas’s passion is gambling, but of a responsible rather than a reckless kind. He puts bets on horses for the thrill and as a social pastime as much as for hoped-­for material gain. Thomas is described as physically strong and masculine, but also as gentle and kind. He loves Mary, his religious wife, and his children dearly. Just occasionally, he likes to put his foot down and remind them that he is the main breadwinner. The plot unfolds as a psychological game between husband and wife in which Mary’s intuition helps Thomas to secure a big win. But what matters more to the husband than the money is his wife’s happiness. He decides to hand over the entire prize money and to let her spend it any way she likes. Taken together, the stories from the Markham Memorial Prize competition give insights into the range and complexity of miners’ perceptions in the later 1960s. They describe the modernity of the contemporary coal industry but also confront the challenge of pit closures. They reveal a deep historical consciousness, with a particular emphasis on the interwar period, but also illuminate the extent of social and cultural change that has taken place. More than thirty years seem to separate the comfortable world depicted in ‘The Derby Winner’ or the well-­lit underground workings of ‘Just a trick of the mind’ from the grim working en­vir­ on­ ment of ‘The Dusthole of England’ or the material deprivation in John Farrimond’s story about coal picking. The authors drew on a shared oral tradition as well as lived experience. At the same time, the stories were also moulded by the

199  University of Sheffield, Special Collections, MS 268, Fred Bennett, ‘The Derby Winner’, 1966.

1967  63 genre conventions of working-­class fiction. Echoes could be found in the submissions to the competition of the figure of the working-­class hero as popularized by Alan Sillitoe in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), former miner Sid Chaplin in The Day of the Sardine (1961), and Bill Naughton in Alfie (1966), amongst others. The working-­class hero of the late 1950s and 1960s was often portrayed in a Teddy-­boy mould: young and fashion-­conscious; irreverent and individualist; masculine and sexist.200 Whatever the precise emphasis of the fictionalized stories, there is considerable evidence to suggest that, around the time of the government’s publication of the 1967 White Paper on fuel policy, a substantial number of men on colliery books decided that it was in their best interest, and in the best interests of their dependants, to pre-­empt the closure of their workplace by leaving the industry of their own accord. According to Coal Board data, 27,800 men left the industry voluntarily in 1968/9, representing 8.3 per cent of the industrial workforce. Ninety-­two per cent of them were under the age of 50, and 53 per cent under the age of 30. By comparison, 20,000 men were made redundant, of whom nearly 70 per cent were aged 55 or over.201 While there had always been a high wastage rate in the industry, especially in times of economic boom, the Board judged that the unusually high rate for the year 1968/9 was a direct consequence of the heavy closure programme.202 Voluntary wastage was particularly pronounced in the areas where the closures had fallen most heavily, in Scotland, Northumberland, and Durham.203 The more marketable the skills that men had acquired in the industry, the higher they deemed their chances to make a new start away from the pits. As Lawrence Daly detailed in the NUM’s oral evidence before a parliamentary select committee, it was not uncommon for young men to complete a craft apprenticeship with the Coal Board, only ‘to be snapped up immediately by an outside employer’.204 According to Daly, the feeling was widespread ‘that one should get out of the industry as soon as one can in the interests of oneself and one’s family’.205 Speaking before the same panel, the NCB’s chairman concurred. It was trained craftsmen in their twenties and early thirties who were most likely to leave the industry, especially in the central coalfields where alternative job opportunities were good:

200 Paul, ‘Fire in Our Hearts’, pp. 51–5, 187. 201  Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, National Coal Board, vol. II: Minutes of Evidence, Examination of Witnesses: D. J. Ezra, G. C. Shephard, J. G. C. Milligan, M. W. Hudson, 22 April 1969, p. 555 (p. 153); Annex 3: Voluntary Wastage by Age Groups, p. 863. See also Table 3, Appendix. 202  Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, National Coal Board, vol. II: Minutes of Evidence, Appendix 19: Evidence by the National Coal Board of 22 April 1969, p. 857. 203  Ibid., p. 857f. 204  Ibid., Examination of Witnesses: L. Daly, R. Hillier, 29 April 1969, p. 599 (p. 197). 205  Ibid., p. 603 (p. 201).

64  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization The morale problem is that the youngsters leave us. We pay a lot of money to pay technicians. By the time they are 22 they are looking to see what life holds in store for them. Because they feel there is no long-­term future in coal . . . they make the simple calculation: ‘If I can get a better job now in a growth industry, I had better go whilst I am young and have the opportunity.’206

Left behind were those who were no longer young but not old enough to qualify for the government’s supplementary income scheme. Also left behind were those whose skills were applicable to mining only. As a consequence, the average age in the industry had risen substantially since the late 1950s, from 40.5 years in 1958 to 43.5 years in 1968. In the same period, the percentage of men under 40 had gone down from more than 50 per cent to 35 per cent.207 The statistical evidence suggests that miners, rather than demonstrating automatic attachment to their workplace as a ‘way of life’, took a hard look at the options before them. They carefully weighed up those options and decided what they judged to be in the best interests of themselves and their families. Older miners opted for redundancy, knowing full well that they would never work again; skilled craftsmen judged that they would be better off in a different line of work; others agreed to transfer to ‘long-­life’ collieries, sometimes remaining in continuous employment, sometimes as re-­ entrants who had benefited from redundancy pay before applying to be re-­employed by the National Coal Board.

Conclusion In 1969, the sociologists Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques, and Clifford Slaughter republished as a social science paperback their classic study of a Yorkshire mining community, Coal is Our Life. In the introduction to the new edition, they looked back from their current vantage point to futures past. Expectations of a better future had been bitterly disappointed. The ‘promise of security, prosperity and a new life flowing from nationalization and the welfare state was a lie’. The miners themselves had suspected this as early as the 1950s and they had been amply confirmed in their suspicions, Dennis et al. reflected wistfully. Looking ahead, the sociologists anticipated a bleak future for miners and mining communities. ‘The mining industry, or certainly a large part of it, has been condemned to death,’ they declared categorically. With the pits, the communities would die also, Dennis et al. were convinced: ‘Without the mine and mineworkers [this community] is in danger of becoming merely an aggregate of 206  Ibid., Examination of Witnesses: Lord Robens, D. J. Ezra, D. M. Clement, 20 March 1969, p. 483 (p. 81). 207  Ibid., Appendix 20: Average Age of Labour Force of the National Coal Board, p. 864 (p. 462).

1967  65 socially isolated and culturally condemned human beings.’ Yet, they averred, alternative futures were still possible. They required the mineworker to transcend the confines of the pit and the community: ‘Paradoxically, the miner’s fate as a mineworker and as a member of a mining community has made it necessary for him, if he is to survive, to look beyond the prospects to which the planners would like to confine him.’ To the authors, as to other academic observers, the miners’ future lay in adopting a more confrontational stance towards the expertise of ‘the planners’ on the basis of class-­based demands for social justice. The future, in other words, lay in rediscovering the militancy of bygone times.208 By the late 1960s, miners and their trade union representatives were operating within a structure of feeling that regarded the industry as a leftover from a bygone era. While the National Coal Board made strenuous efforts to project an image of the industry as modern and forward-­looking, policymakers remained sceptical. They were convinced the industry would continue to lose markets and shed manpower, although few were prepared to contemplate the phasing out of coal al­together. Projections of a reduction in the industry’s manpower needs of up to 80 per cent by 1980 sat side by side with nebulous assurances that the industry would remain a substantial employer ‘as far ahead as the eye can see’. The figure of the miner was cast as a classic loser of history. Their plight was recognized and looked upon with sympathy. While efforts were made to manage the decline of the industry in socially acceptable ways, trade unionists’ ominous warnings about the ‘death of mining communities’ were dismissed as the apocalyptic rhetoric of desperate functionaries. While the NUM, at national level, maintained their loyalty to the Labour government and shared in the Coal Board’s forward-­looking vision of a modern efficient industry employing ‘skilled technicians’, branch level and area activists began to look to the interwar past for guidance on how to develop a more confrontational stance. Those were evil days, but they were also days of heroism and courage when the miners stood up for social justice rather than acquiesce in the destruction of their livelihoods. Meanwhile, a considerable number of ordinary miners judged that their life chances, and the chances of their families, might be improved if they left behind their previous workplace identity and started a new working life elsewhere. Whereas 1967 marked the point when the miners’ way of life seemed doomed, within five years the miners’ horizons of expectation had been transformed substantially, as the next chapter will show.

208  Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques, and Clifford Slaughter, Coal is Our Life: An analysis of a Yorkshire mining community (London, 2nd ed. 1969 [1956]), pp. 8–10.

2

1972 Introduction On 24 February 1972, the prominent social historian E. P. Thompson published a piece called ‘A Special Case’ in the weekly journal New Society.1 The intervention appeared as the national coal strike, the first in the NUM’s history, reached its climax. The industrial action had been called in pursuit of an annual conference resolution which had demanded a substantial increase in miners’ wages. The strike had commenced on 9 January 1972 following an individual ballot in which 58.8 per cent of miners had voted for industrial action.2 On 11 February the ­government under Edward Heath was forced to declare a state of emergency. A week later, a hastily convened court of inquiry under Lord Wilberforce recom­ mended that the miners’ demands be met on the grounds that ‘the mineworkers at this particular moment in time have a just case for special treatment’.3 After extracting further concessions from the government, the NUM’s NEC finally agreed to recommend a return to work to the members.4 Thompson’s interven­ tion can be read on two levels. As a sharp polemic, the piece touched upon central themes of the debate about the identity of the miners in the early 1970s. In doing so, he developed further ideas about the significance of the miners for a radical politics that he had penned in a letter to Lawrence Daly, the NUM’s general ­secretary, some five years earlier.5 At the same time, ‘A Special Case’ was itself indicative of the extent to which the miners, or, to be more precise, a subsection within the political culture of mining trade unionism, became an object of fas­cin­ ation to intellectuals of the Left. It was through engagement with the miners that  New Left intellectuals like Thompson sought to ground their political ­project in the lived experience of the industrial working class.6 In the symbiosis

1  E. P. Thompson, ‘A Special Case’, New Society, 24 February 1972, pp. 401–4. 2  On a turnout of 86 per cent, 58.8 per cent of members had voted for industrial action. NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1972 (London, 1972), p. 183. 3  Report of Court of Inquiry into a dispute between The National Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers under the Chairmanship of The Rt. Hon. Lord Wilberforce (Cmnd. 4903) (London, 18 February 1972), p. 9. 4 NUM, Annual Report 1972, pp. 183–7; Andrew Taylor, The NUM and British Politics, vol. 2: 1969–1995 (Ashgate, 2005), pp. 49–72. 5  MRC, MSS.302 (L. Daly Papers), Thompson to Daly, 11 November [1967]. 6 Madeleine Davis, ‘ “Among the Ordinary People”: New Left Involvement in Working-­Class Political Mobilization 1956–68’, History Workshop Journal 86 (2018), pp. 133–59; Stuart Middleton,

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0003

1972  67 of  intellectual work ‘with dust from the pit’, they projected a road for socialist advance in the 1970s.7 Temporality was a central theme running through Thompson’s piece. The ­miners had plunged the nation into darkness through their effective blockade of coal stocks and other supplies to power stations. In the process, they themselves had become visible again. By emerging from the darkness of the mines, they had stepped out of the past back into the present, defying both political economists and commentators who had sounded the death knell for the industry only a few years previously. New Left intellectuals, Thompson averred, had likewise looked upon the miners as relics from the past, ‘splendid historical fossils of the “old left” ’.8 To Thompson, the miners’ action demonstrated that what was traditional was not necessarily obsolete. Residues from the past could yet become tokens of things to come: When the miners were pushed back into darkness [at some time in the 1950s], their culture was not extinguished. It was simply compressed into a fiercer ­solidarity. From that compression they have sprung back again . . . They came, at first, as ambassadors of a past culture, reminding us of whom we once were. They remained to challenge us as to whom we might yet become.

It was above all in the figure of Lawrence Daly that Thompson found personified the qualities that characterized the political culture of coal-­mining communities. The ‘patient, open, rational manner of political argument’ that was conducted in the very places where people lived and worked—­the home, the pithead, the work­ ing men’s club—­was nothing less than an ‘alternative to the official culture’. This ‘open democratic process’ was diametrically opposed to the ‘grooming’ and ‘selection by appointment’ so constitutive of modern-­day politics. To Thompson, the miners were indeed ‘special’, but only insofar as they embodied, in com­ pressed form, the traditional qualities of the British working class: ‘The “special case” turns out, after all, to be the general case of the working nation.’9 This chapter charts fundamental changes in coal’s position in the early 1970s. These changes can be conceptualized in temporal terms, from old to new. In the late 1960s, the National Coal Board had sought to convince a sceptical public that the coal industry was a ‘modern’ industry rather than a remnant from the nine­ teenth century—­often to limited avail. By the early 1970s, terminal decline of this nineteenth-­century industry was no longer a foregone conclusion. On the con­ trary, a new dawn seemed imminent. Policymakers articulated the view that the industry’s prospects had changed significantly as Britain entered the 1970s. As we ‘ “Affluence” and the Left in Britain, c.1958–1974’, English Historical Review 129/536 (Feb. 2014), pp. 107–38. 7  Thompson, ‘Special Case’, p. 404. 8  Ibid., p. 402. 9  Ibid., p. 404.

68  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization shall see, this shift occurred under the Conservative government of Edward Heath, well before the miners embarked upon their second national coal strike in early 1974. The reversal would, however, find its most salient expression in the policy document Plan for Coal, which was agreed upon by the National Coal Board, the government, and the NUM after Labour’s return to power in February 1974. At the same time, the idea of a bright future for coal did not command universal acceptance. What was more, the underlying reasons for the apparent reversal of fortunes remained controversial. Was the ‘new dawn’ a consequence of the miners’ own agency in wielding collective power? Or were the new op­por­tun­ ities for the industry a consequence of shifts in the international energy scene, the consequence of a looming world energy crisis that had occurred independently of domestic industrial relations? As the miners asserted collective agency in the two coal strikes of 1972 and 1974, the structures of feeling within which they operated were transformed. Expressions of sympathy gave way to feelings of awe. Whereas the miners used to be pitied for their sad fate, they came to be feared for the power they were pre­ pared to wield. Alongside this transformation in the image of the miner went a greater visibility of the miners’ collective trade union voice. In the late 1960s, the debate on the future of the coal industry had been dominated by the National Coal Board and its boisterous chairman, Lord Robens. In the early 1970s, the National Union of Mineworkers took on a much more active role. The conflicts in the industry were seen as a stand-­off between the NUM and the government, rather than a conflict between management and men or management and the state. The NUM adopted the rhetoric about the ‘modernity’ of coal mining that the public relations department of the NCB had promulgated since the 1960s. Unlike the NCB, however, they did not try to erase the past. They mobilized memories of coal to political advantage in the present. In 1972, the NUM tapped into the reservoirs of public sympathy to make a case for redistributive justice. In doing so, they came to be seen, and to see themselves, as agents who had the power to play an active role in shaping the future not just of the coal industry but of British society. Yet, as Section I will show, the miners’ reconceptualization from loser to vanguard led to fissures between miners and the mass of industrial work­ ers. Could the miners be both ‘special’ and ‘ordinary’? As Section II will show, these fissures deepened in the confrontation of 1974 as the government sought to capitalize on them for political advantage. ‘Special’ could easily be taken to mean ‘privileged’. Rather than a vanguard in the fight for redistributive justice for all, the miners could be conceptualized as a formidable pressure group who were pre­ pared to brush aside the weak in a ruthless pursuit of material self-­interest. Meanwhile, as Section III will argue, the ‘new dawn’ for coal which found expres­ sion in official government policy was conditioned as much by an ap­pre­ci­ation of the miners’ bargaining power as by a reappraisal of coal’s prospects in the energy markets of the future.

1972  69

I On 9 January 1972, the National Union of Mineworkers embarked upon the first national stoppage since 1926 within a structure of feeling that framed the miners as figures deserving of especial sympathy by the public. Across the national print media, editorials depicted the miners as proud men who were driven to desperate action by inevitable circumstances. ‘The miners’ strike, whether they know it or not, is the rage against the dying of the light’, as Bernard Levin wrote in The Times.10 Their action elicited expressions of melancholia and sadness more than anxiety or alarm. ‘The first national coal stoppage since the General Strike in 1926 is a sad affair, sad for the country but even sadder for the miners themselves,’ as The Observer editorialized.11 Invoking the title of Richard Llewellyn’s interwar novel, the Daily Mail asked rhetorically, ‘How bleak is their valley now’? The paper came down firmly on the side of the strikers, emphasizing that there was sympathy for the miners among the public, ‘and rightly so’.12 Sympathy was a complex term. It derived from late Latin sympathia and expressed a ‘conformity of feelings . . . which makes persons agreeable to one another’. While sympathy could mean no more than ‘a favourable attitude of mind towards a party or cause’, crucially, this attitude was based on a feeling of ‘compassion or commiseration’. Sympathy was elicited by ‘the quality or state of being thus affected by the suffer­ ing or sorrow of another’. While emphasizing the common bonds between fellow human beings, sympathy thus indicated an imbalance of power between the sym­ pathizer and the sympathized. Overt expressions of sympathy could even contain a degree of condescension. In any case, the recipients of sympathy enjoy little agency: they must be helped because they are not in a position to help them­ selves.13 In the intervention referenced above, Thompson captured the ambiguity in the public attitude to the miners in early January 1972. As he put it, ‘Since the strike hurt no one, the nation could afford to savour historical sentiment and to be generous.’14 Just as in the print media, in the House of Commons, too, sympathy towards the miners prevailed. ‘All speakers . . . paid tribute to miners,’ as the Heath govern­ ment’s internal strike report observed tersely with reference to the Commons debate of 18 January 1972.15 Indeed, of the twenty-­one Members of Parliament who took part in the debate on the coal dispute, no fewer than fourteen explicitly used the term ‘sympathy’ when speaking about the miners.16 Without exception, MPs of both major parties, front- and backbenchers alike, emphasized the high 10  Bernard Levin, ‘Don’t put your son down the mine Mr Worthington’, The Times, 11 January 1972. 11  ‘The miners’ decline’, The Observer, 9 January 1972. 12  ‘How bleak is their valley now’, Daily Mail, 7 January 1972. 13  Entry ‘sympathy, n.’, OED (online edition). 14  Thompson, ‘Special Case’, p. 403. 15  TNA PREM 15/984, Coal Strike Report for 19 January (PRCS/7), 19 January 1972. 16  Hansard, HC Sitting of 18 January 1972, COAL INDUSTRY (DISPUTE), cols 228–348.

70  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization esteem in which they held Britain’s mineworkers. They praised the miners’ contri­ bution to the general good. As David Crouch, Conservative MP for Canterbury, summed up the sentiment, ‘I hope that they [i.e. the government] will also be helped by the sense of sympathy which has been shown from honourable mem­ bers in all parts of the House.’17 The miners embodied the very qualities that stood at the centre of common self-­perceptions of Britishness: they were hard-­ working, loyal, and decent, slowly stirred to anger but determined to seek justice when wronged. The miners, Harold Lever, Opposition spokesman for Energy, exclaimed, were ‘among the most loyal and determined men we have’. In a telling analogy, he likened them to ‘the yeomen of England, Scotland and Wales’.18 While Labour MPs might be expected to speak up on behalf of the minework­ ers, who after all sponsored dozens of MPs, Conservative backbench MPs like­ wise heaped praise on them. Just like their colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party, they would often refer to lived experience to give added weight to their observations. Geoffrey Stewart-­Smith, Conservative MP for Belper in Derbyshire, for example, declared, ‘I have profound sympathy for the miners in this situation. I believe that they have a strong case and that they have suffered an injustice. They are the finest group of men it has been my privilege to be associated with.’19 Patrick Cormack, representing Cannock in Staffordshire, likewise freely ac­know­ ledged his admiration: Anyone, therefore, with even a smattering of knowledge of a mining community is bound to feel sympathetic to the miners at present. I do not disguise my sym­ pathy. I hope the House will accept it as being real sympathy. But it is a sympathy mixed with very deep sadness that the strike is on.20

Lived experience as mediated by cultural memory introduced strong affective dimensions to the Commons debates on the coal strike in early 1972. Miners’ MPs drew on their own lived experience in the coal industry to reinforce the moral authority of their observations. ‘My interest in the coal mining industry stems from the fact that I was born, bred and worked in it,’ as Robert Woof, the Labour MP for Blaydon in the Durham coalfield, emphasized in his contribution to the Opposition censure motion on 8 February 1972.21 Bob Brown, the MP for Newcastle upon Tyne West, likewise stressed that he was born among miners. He went on to recall childhood memories of a pit disaster in 1925: One of my earliest and most vivid recollections is of watching, as a very small boy of three years of age, a wall of water pouring down a bankside from the Low 17  Ibid., col. 294. 18  Ibid., col. 251. 19  Ibid., col. 261f. 20  Ibid., col. 274. 21  Hansard, HC Sitting of 8 February 1972, COAL INDUSTRY (DISPUTE), cols 1143–298, here col. 1170.

1972  71 Montagu Colliery, which was close to where I live. The date was 30 March 1925, when 38 men and boys were drowned like rats in that colliery by an inrush of water from an old mine-­working.

The miners of 1972 stood in a direct line of succession from earlier generations of mineworkers. Understandings of their working conditions were informed just as much by personal and cultural memories of a bygone age as by knowledge of working conditions in the mechanized industry of the early 1970s. As David Wilson noted in The Observer on 9 January 1972, While the strike lasts, the miners can be sure of a surge of sympathy from the public. Winning coal is still a lousy job, arduous, dirty and dangerous, and the self-­ enclosed communities of the miners have changed little in the public im­agin­ation from the days of D. H. Lawrence.22

The ‘spaces of experience’ stretched back half a century. Three temporal layers were of particular significance in the mobilization of the past: the 1920s; the post-­ war period; and the 1960s. They served as markers around which distinct sets of memories crystallized. In the Commons debate of 8 February 1972, Alfred Evans, the miners’ MP for Caerphilly, cast his mind back half a century to the strike of 1921.23 More commonly, MPs would evoke memories of the 1926 General Strike. While some MPs recalled the post-­war years when coal was in high demand, more frequently they would dwell on the miners’ experience in the 1960s. Together, the emphasis on these three distinct time periods prescribed a cyclical experience in which miners had gone from the destitution of the interwar years to a more elevated status and job security in the immediate post-­war years back to a depressed status in the 1960s. On this view, the miners had been ill-­rewarded for the restraint that they had shown in the 1950s and likewise for their co­oper­ ation in the rationalization of the 1960s: ‘But the miners’ reward has been a mouthful of stones’, as Richard Kelley, the MP for Don Valley, put it in his contri­ bution on 8 February 1972.24 While this interpretation of the recent past was pro­ moted most forcefully by Labour Party MPs, government ministers and Conservative backbenchers likewise acknowledged the validity of such a view. As Robert Carr, Secretary of State for Employment, acknowledged in his defence of the government’s policies, They [the miners] believe that they have acted responsibly in accepting new methods of working, new pay structures and the closure of pits. When they look at all that and compare the movement of their pay relative to other pay they 22  David Wilson, ‘Why the miners are digging up the past’, The Observer, 9 January 1972. 23  Hansard, HC Sitting of 8 February 1972, col. 1247. 24  Ibid., col. 1244.

72  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization believe that reward for what they – and the country – believe to be a responsible attitude has been a poor one.25

If speakers across the political spectrum concurred that the nation owed the ­miners a debt due to services rendered in the past, there was less consensus on what, precisely, the debt consisted of and how to repay it, if at all. While the Opposition condemned the government for the failure to intervene directly in the dispute to help resolve it,26 MPs from the governing party tended to stress that the miners’ industrial action threatened to undermine the very future of the industry on whose viability the livelihoods of the miners depended. In a speech that was highly critical of his own front bench, Geoffrey Stewart-­Smith praised the miners as ‘men of special breed’ whose discipline he likened to an ‘infantry battalion’. At the same time, he expressed a sense of bafflement at the miners’ ‘curious death wish’, which he saw exemplified in the refusal to allow maintenance work to be carried out at the collieries.27 Government MPs also emphasized the adverse macroeconomic consequences of the industrial action. In doing so, they echoed the arguments put forward by the National Coal Board and sections of the print media.28 But MPs’ criticism of the NUM remained muted. Above all, they qualified their critique of the industrial action by expressing admiration for the miners as a social group. It was within this structure of sympathy that the miners operated during the 1972 strike. The NUM framed the demand for a substantial wage rise as a case for ‘social justice’. As Lawrence Daly put it in oral evidence to the Wilberforce court of inquiry, ‘We can tell the court in one word what the miners ask for—­justice.’29 ‘Justice’ was a complex term which had entered the English language via French and Latin. In classical philosophy and Christian theology, ‘justice’ was considered one of the four cardinal virtues of mind and character. In the miners’ usage, ‘jus­ tice’ was a concept that spoke to a sense of ‘fair rewards’ or ‘correct returns’ for their labour. For decades, miners had made an enormous contribution to the nation’s wellbeing. They had shown exemplary self-­restraint in the process. It was only fair to demand that some of this debt be repaid now. Thus, the miners deployed ‘moral economy’ arguments that E. P. Thompson, in an influential art­ icle, had famously identified with the English crowd of the eighteenth century.30 Government advisers were scornful of the miners’ mobilization of the concept of 25  Ibid., col. 1158f. 26  TNA PREM 15/985, Opposition Motion, Tuesday 8 February 1972. 27  Hansard, HC Sitting of 8 February 1972, cols 1240–4. 28  Maurice Corina, ‘Strike is likely to accelerate pit closures’, The Times, 7 January 1972; Alan Hamilton, ‘Coal Board says NUM claim would seriously harm industry’s future’, The Times, 17 February 1972. 29  Michael Edwards, ‘Our claim in one word is – justice’, Daily Mail, 16 February 1972. 30  E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present 50 (1971), pp. 76–136; Jim Phillips, ‘Deindustrialization and the Moral Economy of the Scottish Coalfields, 1947 to 1991’, ILWCH 84 (2013), pp. 99–115.

1972  73 ‘justice’ within the context of a modern market economy. As adviser Brian Reading put it in a memorandum on 17 February 1972, ‘My economic training taught me nothing about the relevance of “justice” to the operation of an economy.’31 Reading went on to suggest that the miners faced a choice between a substantial, low-­pay industry and a much smaller, more highly remunerated industry. ‘How do they want their justice—short and fat, or long and thin?’ he asked in mocking terms. ‘Justice’ may have been a concept alien to the government’s economic advisers, but it had purchase with the media and the public. Public opinion, the govern­ ment noted with concern, had swung behind the miners.32 In pursuit of their claim, the NUM mobilized the past to make a case for redress in the present. As much as the NUM emphasized the skilled and technical nature of work in the industry,33 they marshalled oral testimony of working conditions that bore resemblance to the ‘pick and shovel’ days of interwar Britain. The testimony of Jack Collins, a 42-­year-­old ripper from Snowdown Colliery in Kent, was a case in point. In evidence to the Wilberforce Inquiry, Collins related that he worked in conditions so hot and humid that he had to strip naked to endure the shift: Indeed, the men at the pit where I now work wear no clothes at all when work­ ing. This was unusual to me when I went there because I was used to working in short trousers, but eight out of ten men in the headings work with absolutely no clothes on because of the heat and, because of the amount of sweating they do, they have to drink a lot of water.34

The primitive working conditions at Snowdown Colliery impressed the court of inquiry so much that they were mentioned in the final report.35 According to the retrospective account of the 1972 strike by Malcolm Pitt, published in 1979, it was the testimony of Collins that had made a particular impression on the public imagination.36 While Collins had been introduced to the court of inquiry as an ordinary working miner, Pitt underlined his credentials as a militant trade union­ ist, communist, and member of the National Executive Committee of the NUM. The NUM presented the mineworkers as a special case. This claim to difference rested on the nature of the miners’ work and the character of the social relations 31  TNA, PREM 15/985, Reading to Armstrong, ‘Justice’, 17 February 1972. 32  TNA, PREM 15/984, G. Holland, Note for the Record, 20 January 1972. 33  TNA PREM 15/984, Note for Record: Meeting of Secretary of State for Energy with Messrs Gormley, Schofield, Daly and two officials of the NUM, 21 January 1972. 34  John Hughes and Roy Moore (eds.), A Special Case? Social Justice and the Miners (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 75. 35  Report of Inquiry Wilberforce, p. 6. 36  Malcolm Pitt, The World on our Backs: The Kent Miners and the 1972 Miners’ Strike (London, 1979), pp. 192–4; Tony Rocca, ‘My life, by miner Jack’, Daily Mail, 19 February 1972; Roderick Gilchrist, ‘The Wilberforce offer an insult says miner Jack’, Daily Mail, 21 February 1972.

74  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization that characterized coalfield communities. For the NUM, it went without saying that the mining of coal was a uniquely valuable type of work, performed under especially arduous and dangerous conditions that required great physical strength and stamina. It was also skilled work requiring great technical acumen and knowledge. The unique challenges and dangers of coalmining had given rise to a ‘powerful egalitarian tradition’ that was characterized by a readiness to submerge individual self-­interest under the common good.37 According to the NUM, it was exactly this tendency of mineworkers to prioritize the common good over narrow self-­interest that had served them ill in the past. The nation had taken the mine­ workers’ sacrifice for granted, and in the process betrayed the promise embodied in the industry’s nationalization in 1947. The nation had prospered on the back of the miners’ hard labour by plentiful coal supplied below market value. The miner, by contrast, had witnessed the decimation of his industry and a loss in status. It was this historical injustice for which the miners were seeking redress. In the pre­ sent strike action, the miner demonstrated the same unity of purpose, commit­ ment, determination, and willingness to sacrifice that also marked his work. If he enjoyed the support of the public and organized trade unionists, then this under­ lined the justice of his case and the decency of the British people. If the mineworkers were special, the NUM took great care to turn them into representatives of Everyman. To this end, the NUM at the court of inquiry called expert witnesses on the system of industrial relations and, more pertinently, on the plight of the low-­paid worker who relied on benefits to make ends meet despite holding a full-­time job. If the miner was special, then he was special only insofar as he embodied, in condensed form, the predicament and qualities of Britain’s industrial working class: the exploitation of wage labour; the lack of ad­equate material remuneration and social rewards; the decency, common sense, and egalitarian self-­ help traditions of working-­ class communities. As John Hughes, the Director of the Trade Union Research Unit at Ruskin College, who had supported the NUM in the preparation of their evidence, put it in his after­ word to the miners’ submission to the Wilberforce Inquiry, which was published as a Penguin Education paperback in 1972, [The miners’ situation] was exceptional not by being different. It was exceptional in bringing together so many of the critical and unresolved elements in modern British industrial affairs . . . The miner’s working environment may be unfamiliar. But when we analyse his grievances and problems they are all too familiar.38

The emphasis on the miners’ egalitarianism disguised a powerful impulse for dif­ ferentiation. Publicly available data showed that the miner’s wages had declined

37  Hughes and Moore, A Special Case?, p. 114.

38  Ibid., pp. 163f.

1972  75 significantly relative to other industrial workers, from an advantage of 1.25 to 1 in the mid-­1950s to below parity in the late 1960s.39 Central to the miners’ pay claim was the goal of redressing this decline. Supporters of the miners’ cause would fre­ quently illustrate the intolerability of the situation by pointing out that dustmen and factory workers were paid higher wages than miners. Central to this argu­ ment was the assumption, sometimes expressed explicitly, more often left un­spoken, that the work of dustmen and factory workers was less valuable than the getting of coal. As Eric Varley, the miners’ MP representing Chesterfield, informed the House of Commons on 18 January, ‘One striking miner told me last week that lavatory cleaners at British Leyland get as much as the top rate in the pits.’40 There was also a gendered dimension to this argument. ‘There are thou­ sands of shorthand typists in London and other parts of the country with a bigger take-­home wage packet than many miners who work a full week underground,’ as Elfed Davies, representing Rhondda East, pointed out in the same debate.41 If the adult mineworker earned less than his typist daughter, then the gendered hier­ archy of coalfield communities had been thrown into disarray. The government monitored developments in the coal industry closely. As long ago as the autumn of 1970, the Cabinet had been warned about the potentially serious consequences of a coal strike on electricity supply and the steel industry.42 Yet, by October 1971 the Department of Trade and Energy believed that a miners’ strike could be withstood for four to six weeks ‘with difficulty but without major disruption of the economy’. Accordingly, the NCB was instructed not to agree to pay rises above 7.5 per cent in their negotiations with the NUM, the union’s con­ ference resolution of July 1971 notwithstanding.43 When they rejected the pay offer as ‘derisory’ and secured a mandate from the membership for pressing the claim through industrial action,44 the government decided ‘to stand firm’ in the interests of their wider anti-­inflationary policy. They were aware of the risks of such a strategy but judged that ‘however serious the risks the stakes are so high that they are worth taking’.45 One week into the strike, the Department of Trade and Industry started producing daily strike reports; an Official Committee on Emergencies and the Ministerial Committee was to keep developments under regular review.46 Acknowledging the sympathy that the miners enjoyed among the public, internal reports emphasized how well ordinary miners were 39  See Table 4, Appendix. 40  Hansard, HC Sitting of 18 January 1972, col. 328. 41  Ibid., col. 278. 42 TNA PREM 15/984, Memorandum by Ministry of Technology, ‘Threatened Coal Strike’, 13 October 1970. 43 TNA PREM 15/984, Ministry of Industry to Prime Minister, ‘National Coal Board Pay Negotiations’, 6 October 1971. 44 TNA PREM 15/984, Minister for Industry to Prime Minister, ‘National Coal Board: Pay Negotiations’, 13 October 1971. 45 TNA PREM 15/984, Secretary of State for Employment to Prime Minister, ‘Coalmining’, 6 January 1972. 46  TNA PREM 15/984, Industrial Affairs, 10 January 1972.

76  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization presenting their case to the media. ‘Probably the greatest popular impact was made by the earnest and passionate speeches of the miners themselves,’ the Coal Strike Report of 31 January 1972 acknowledged, with reference to a group of Rhondda miners who had appeared on David Frost’s The Frost Programme. They had presented ‘an excellent image of intelligent, estimable, self-­respecting citi­ zens, parents of teachers and other professional people’, as the report noted with thinly disguised admiration.47 Faced with ever more numerous calls in the national papers to treat the miners as a ‘special case’, the government pondered the possibility of launching a publicity campaign that would work on the seman­ tic ambiguity of this notion.48 Special could also mean ‘privileged’, and this was a line that the government should now press, G. Holland counselled in a note to the Prime Minister on 7 February 1972.49 The government was overtaken by events before it could develop this line. On 9 February 1972, the Chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) warned that the electricity supply situation had become ‘extremely seri­ ous’. Even with the introduction of restrictions, electricity generation would be down to 25 per cent of normal capacity by the end of the month.50 A state of emergency was declared the same day. When a belated attempt by the Department of Energy to bring about a resolution to the conflict suffered a ‘complete break­ down’ on 10 February, the government appointed a court of inquiry. The Wilberforce court of inquiry, after sitting for three days only, followed the NUM’s argument. The final report stressed the exceptional contribution that the miners had made to Britain’s prosperity in the post-­war years, as well as the arduous working conditions and the collaborative spirit with which the miners had accepted rapid change in the industry. ‘Other occupations have their dangers and inconveniences, but we know of none in which there is such a combination of danger, health hazard, discomfort in working conditions, social inconvenience and community isolation,’ as the conclusion put it.51 The report recommended that the miners’ pay be raised by an adjustment factor in addition to the regular increase. The judgement of Wilberforce that the miners were indeed ‘special’ offered the government the opportunity to mitigate the impact of the miners’ demands on their broader anti-­inflationary policy. All the same, the settlement was recognized by the government, and seen by the public, as a ‘serious political defeat’.52 The outcome was made worse by the NUM’s initial refusal to accept the

47  TNA PREM 15/984, Coal Strike Report for 29/30 January 1972 (PRCS/16). 48 TNA PREM 15/984, Coal Strike Reports for 31 January (PRCS/17), 1 February (PRCS/18), 2 February 1972 (PRCS/19). 49  TNA PREM 15/985, DH to Prime Minister, ‘The Coal Strike’, 7 February 1972. 50  TNA PREM 15/985, Minister of Industry to Home Secretary, 9 February 1972. 51  Report of Inquiry Wilberforce, p. 8. 52  TNA PREM 15/985, ‘Miners’ Strike action when court of inquiry reports’, 17 February 1972.

1972  77 court of inquiry’s recommendation.53 A final settlement was only reached after the Prime Minister had conceded further demands in direct negotiations that lasted into the early hours of 19 February 1972.

II For the miners, the victory of 1972 settled accumulated injustices, both of the recent past and the more distant past of the interwar years. ‘1972’ was immedi­ ately mythologized. At the NUM’s annual conference in July 1972, Lawrence Daly quoted from Shakespeare’s Richard III to mark what he called a ‘historic victory’: ‘Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths; our bruised arms hung up for monuments; our stern alarums changed to merry meetings; our dreadful marches to delightful measure.’ But he also added a note of caution. After all, Richard III had ended up on Bosworth Field, vainly trying to trade in his kingdom for a horse.54 While ‘1972’ had righted past injustices, it had also pushed open the door to a better future. Miners would come to enjoy the status and material rewards that they thought they deserved. At the same time, the strike settlement intensi­ fied political divisions inside the NUM.55 The internal rifts were about means rather than ends. All factions agreed on making the miner the best-­paid indus­ trial worker in Britain. They also agreed on strengthening the miners’ collective agency. Yet fundamental disagreements emerged over the use of the strike weapon in furthering these goals. For the militants, the stoppage of 1972 was but the beginning ‘on the road back to dignity’, as the pamphlet ‘Miners the Way Forward in 1972’ put it. ‘What does this mean?’ the authors asked. ‘It means continuing the struggle—­not just for higher wages but for a greater share of the national income; not just for shorter hours but for greater leisure; not just for better working condi­ tions but for control over our work situation.’56 Although the membership had declined since the 1950s, the miners’ leverage had increased. ‘Our power is greater than when we had a million members. The point is that we are now conscious of our strength and are determined to use it’, as the pamphlet put it. In a similar vein, Scottish miners’ leader Mick McGahey declared at the Scottish Area annual con­ ference in 1972: We meet this year in an atmosphere of confidence and pride; a newborn confi­ dence in the power and strength of the Labour and Trade Union Movement to 53  TNA CAB 128/150, Industrial Affairs: Coalminers’ Strike, 18 February 1972; Churchill Archive Centre, Hailsham MSS (1/1/4), entry of 18 February 1972, available at The Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111112, accessed 17 May 2022. 54 NUM, Annual Report 1972, p. 378. 55 Taylor, NUM and British politics, vol. 2, pp. 79f. 56  Modern Records Centre (MRC), University of Warwick, MSS.302 (L. Daly Papers), ‘Miners the Way Forward in 1972’ [draft version].

78  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization win advances for the workers and defeat reactionary policies . . . So I say no more inhibitions on the part of this Union to proceed audaciously with the legitimate demands of our members.

McGahey, like other representatives of the Left, entered a caveat. The victory of 1972 had opened up opportunities. But in order to win a better future, these opportunities must be exploited and not thrown away. Their politics was informed by a sense of urgency. ‘I wish to warn’, as McGahey declared in the same speech, ‘that this victory . . . can be lost unless we grasp the new opportunities to press for­ ward with our demands.’57 The moderates, for their part, were concerned lest strike action be normal­ ized. Ultimately, industrial action would undermine the very conditions on which the future of the industry depended. They cautioned that the strike weapon must remain a means of last resort. ‘But in talking about unity, for God’s sake don’t let us give the impression to the public and to our customers that we believe as a Union, that the only way to solve our problems is by the use of the strike weapon,’ as Joe Gormley put it at the annual conference of the NUM in 1972.58 The national president went on to warn fellow trade unionists that the miners still faced ‘a lot of opponents’. Sympathy was not the same as confidence in coal’s future: Without customers for coal there is no need for a Coal Industry, and we must never forget . . . we still have a lot of opponents around . . . a lot of the people of Britain who are responsible for making decisions about fuel uses, and also of the general public, who although they supported us during our strike, nevertheless are not buying coal, which is the important thing.59

When the NUM entered into a new confrontation with the Coal Board in the winter of 1973/4, in pursuit of a conference resolution demanding a wage increase of 35 per cent across the industry, the miners’ categorization as ‘special’ became increasingly contentious.60 As in 1972, the Coal Board’s negotiating hand was tied by the government’s insistence that any settlement must not breach the limits of their anti-­inflationary policy. The NUM, for their part, argued that the gains of the 1972 settlement had been eroded by high rates of inflation.61 Furthermore, 57 National Union of Mineworkers (Scottish Area), Annual Conference 1972 (Edinburgh), President’s Address 1972, pp. 4f. 58 NUM, Annual Report 1972, p. 246; see also NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1973 (London), pp. 374–5. 59 NUM, Annual Report 1972, p. 249. 60 NUM, Annual Report 1973, p. 373. The resolution called for weekly rates of £35 for surface work­ ers, £40 for underground workers, and £45 for coalface workers. For context: Taylor, NUM and British politics, vol. 2, pp. 84–102. 61 NUM, Annual Report 1973, pp. 373f.

1972  79 wage differentials vis-­à-­vis other industrial workers must be raised to the level enjoyed in the 1950s, in order to attract manpower into the industry at a time of falling unemployment and a worsening energy situation. The union introduced an overtime ban from 1 November, which coincided with the escalating oil crisis after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had decided, on 16 October, to raise the price of oil by 70 per cent. In an effort to learn from the mistakes of 1972, the government sought to pre-­empt an energy short­ age by introducing restrictions on the electricity supply and, on 1 January, intro­ duced a three-­day week across British industry.62 With negotiations stalled, the NUM executive called an individual pithead ballot, which returned an over­ whelming majority of 81 per cent for the support of strike action on 4 February 1974.63 The government, in an effort to break the deadlock, dissolved Parliament on 7 February, two days before the coal strike was due to commence, and called a general election for 28 February. Despite disquiet among moderate members of the NEC, the strike went ahead, albeit in a more restrained fashion than in 1972. It lasted until 10 March, when the dispute was settled by the incoming Labour government after the Conservative general election defeat. Although in 1974, as in 1972, the NUM emphasized that the miners’ case for improved wages rested, in part, on the miners’ uniquely hazardous working con­ ditions, the Union became increasingly wary of the emphasis on difference from the mass of industrial workers.64 Indeed, ever since the Wilberforce settlement of 1972, voices inside the NUM had started to reject the miners’ categorization as ‘special’. ‘We want a decent living wage. We are not a Special Case. We are workers like millions of others who want a right to a fair share of the nation’s wealth,’ the pamphlet Miners the Way Forward in 1972 emphasized.65 Echoing this sentiment, Lawrence Daly declared in February 1974: Don’t use the phrase ‘special case’. Miners are not begging to be treated as a spe­ cial case. I told [the TUC General Council, JA] I was not prepared to put for­ ward that kind of argument on behalf of the miners at the expense of the lower-­paid workers like dustmen, nurses and agricultural workers.66

The admonition came in response to an intervention by the Trades Union Congress that there was ‘a distinctive and exceptional situation in the mining industry’. Rather than relying on a claim to difference, the union argued that bet­ ter wages were needed to retain sufficient manpower in the industry. ‘Coal is our life . . . it is no longer a prison,’ as an NUM-­sponsored advertisement put it. More 62 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1974 (London), pp. 226–7. 63 NUM, Annual Report 1974, Copy of Ballot Controller’s Report, 4 February 1974, p. 28. 64 NUM, Annual Report 1974, p. 54. 65  MRC, MSS.302, ‘Miners the Way Forward in 1972’ [draft version]. 66  ‘Miners not begging to be treated as a special case, Mr Daly says’, The Times, 27 February 1974.

80  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization than 600 men were leaving the industry every week, and substantial wage increases were needed to retain the manpower that was needed to mine Britain’s coal in times of a world energy crisis.67 In early 1974, the Heath government sought to impress upon the public a point that had been hinted at in 1972, but not pursued with any vigour: that the miners were ‘special’ not on account of their arduous working conditions, past suffering, and egalitarian spirit, but because of the ruthless way in which they now deployed their industrial muscle. On this reading, the miners were self-­interested rather than communitarian, elbowing aside other industrial workers and the many needy and disadvantaged in British society. In a letter to the Prime Minister, the Chairman of the Conservative Party, Lord Carrington, raised this very point. Conservative Central Office had invited non-­government social welfare organizations such as Child Poverty Action Group, Shelter, and Age Concern to listen to their concerns over the energy restrictions that the government had introduced in response to the miners’ overtime ban. As Carrington summed up his conclusions, The most overwhelming impression to which I attach great importance, was the striking evidence of the opportunity there exists for the Government to create a major psychological impact out of all proportion to what needs to be done. The central point being the vulnerable sectors, old, very young, and low incomes, finding themselves innocent casualties of the crisis with little apparent concern for their welfare shown by Officials.68

In a draft public statement circulated among officials a few weeks earlier, the Prime Minister had juxtaposed the miners directly with the general public: ‘They [the NUM] consider that the miners ought to be a special case . . . But their action is already inflicting hardship in homes, loss of output, jobs and earnings in indus­ try, and damage to the economy; and these effects are bound to get progressively more serious.’69 In his television broadcast of 7 February 1974, announcing the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of a general election for 28 February, Heath extended the point by framing the dispute as a conflict about the sover­ eignty of Parliament, in addition to redistributive justice. As he declared, The issue before you is a simple one: . . . Do you want Parliament and the elected Government to continue to fight strenuously against inflation? Or do you want

67 MRC, MSS 302/2/7, NUM 1969–1974, ‘600 more men have left the pits this week’; NUM Election Manifesto, ‘The Miner’s Case: The Rate for the Job’, 1974. 68  TNA PREM 15/2174, Lord Carrington to Prime Minister, 21 January 1974. 69 TNA PREM 15/2174, R.  T.  Armstrong to R.  A.  Custis, Proposal for Public Statement, 11 January 1974.

1972  81 them to abandon the struggle against rising prices under pressure from one par­ ticular, powerful group of workers?70

The argument was pressed further in the Conservative Party election manifesto of February 1974, ‘Firm Action for a Fair Britain’.71 Under the heading ‘The Danger from Within’, the manifesto spoke of the government’s efforts to prevent ‘one group of workers using its industrial strength to steal a march over those working in other industries’. Further down in the same section, the manifesto directly ref­ erenced the role of the NUM in the present dispute: The special position of the mineworkers has been recognised by an offer . . . of a size which few other groups of workers can hope to achieve. It is a tragedy that miners’ leaders should have turned down this offer. The action taken by the National Union of Mineworkers has already caused great damage and threatens even greater damage for the future.

For the government to give in, the manifesto further claimed, would mean ‘accepting the abuse of industrial power to gain a privileged position’, at the expense of other trade unionists and ‘the even greater number of people who have no union to stand up for them and who rely on the elected government to look after their interests’. While the election manifesto tempered the strategy of scapegoating the NUM with the concern to be seen as a voice of moderation, members of the govern­ ment and backbench MPs, as well as sections of the press, showed less restraint. As early as March 1972, Margaret Thatcher, MP for Finchley and Friern Barnet, had claimed with reference to the coal industry dispute in a speech to her con­ stituency association, ‘Strikes of this kind are not against the government. The reality is that they are strikes against the people.’72 Two years later, Thatcher would defend government policy by asserting that ‘No Government could surrender to a group with the capacity to hold the nation to ransom’. It was successive govern­ ments that had shown loyalty to the miners, not the other way round.73 In a report on the NUM’s annual conference following the 1972 strike, Paul Routledge, The Times’s industrial correspondent, summed up the semantic shifts in the ‘spe­ cial case’, pleading rather sarcastically, ‘Special is one thing; extra special quite another.’74 A more aggressive response was entertained in a column by Lucy Abelson, who asked her readers in the Sunday Express, 70  Quoted in Conservative Research Department, The General Election of 1974 (Notes on Current Politics, no 4) (London, 1974), p. 55. 71  February 1974 Conservative Party General Election Manifesto, ‘Firm Action for a Fair Britain’ (London, 1974), online at: http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1974/Feb/february-­1974-­conservative-­ manifesto.shtml, accessed 5 November 2021. 72  ‘The people must pay’, Finchley Times, 10 March 1972. 73  ‘No surrender. Public are behind us, says Thatcher’, Finchley Times, 1 February 1974. 74  Paul Routledge, ‘Miners reach militancy crossroads’, The Times, 3 July 1972.

82  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Are you so infuriated by the trade union leaders that you feel almost violent towards them? Could you be one of those television viewers who would like to throw something at Ray Buckton or Joe Gormley as they step slowly out of Number 10 Downing Street on the Nine o’Clock News?75

The degree to which the discourse surrounding the figure of the coal miner had changed from the time of the 1972 stoppage can also be illustrated by the new tone in the House of Commons. To be sure, there was still praise and admiration for the miners, and not just from Labour MPs but also from Conservative parlia­ mentarians. For example, the veteran MP for Manchester Withington, Sir Robert Cary, declared in the House on 6 February 1974, ‘Perhaps there is no community more valuable in our society than the mining community . . . the miners have a vital, almost superior, place in society’.76 And yet, a change in perspective was unmistakable. ‘There is a point where sentiment begins to run out, where sym­ pathy turns to hardness and where hardness turns to hostility,’ as Derek Coombs, Conservative MP for Birmingham Yardley put it.77 Most importantly of all, how­ ever, the figure of the miner came to be associated, by government and Opposition MPs alike, with power. Daniel Awdry, Conservative MP for Chippenham, spoke of ‘the immense power which is today in the hands of the miner’. If this power were to be used irresponsibly, Awdry averred, it would put into jeopardy the very foundation of ‘tolerance, good will, sense of fair play, a sense of humour . . . an acceptance by the minority of whatever decision the majority takes’ on which the British parliamentary system rested.78 From a different political perspective, the point was brought home most forcefully by John Cronin, Labour MP for Loughborough, who declared, ‘The Government should face the facts of political power. The miners have control of the industry of this country; there is no escap­ ing from that.’79 The claim underlined the extent to which even the miners’ allies in the labour movement started referring to the miner in exalted terms. In his address to the NUM national conference in July 1974, Eric Varley, himself an NUM-­sponsored MP, addressed his audience as the ‘aristocracy of British labour’. Varley had been appointed as Secretary of State for Energy when the Conservative Party narrowly lost the general election in February and a minority Labour gov­ ernment was returned to power. Although the term ‘aristocracy of British labour’ was of long standing, it implicitly acknowledged that the miners’ special status was not based on their commonality with other workers, but on difference. As an aristocracy, they were set apart, commanding (and demanding) special respect 75  NUM Archives, Barnsley, Lucy Abelson, ‘I wouldn’t be in Mrs. Gormley’s shoes for all the coal in Newcastle . . .’, uncatalogued material. 76 Hansard, HC Sitting of 6 February 1974, GOVERNMENT POLICY (PRIME MINISTER’S SPEECH), col. 1264. 77 Hansard, HC Sitting of 19 December 1973, ECONOMIC AND ENERGY SITUATION, cols 1423–5. 78  Ibid., cols 1391–7. 79  Ibid., col. 1414.

1972  83 and enjoying a lifestyle beyond the reach of common labourers. Through the two successful stoppages of 1972 and 1974, the miners had asserted their agency and regained a belief in their own strength. Whereas the miners used to operate within a structure of feeling that oscillated between admiration and pity, they now came to be situated in a structure of awe and fear. They were regarded as special because they held special bargaining power, no longer because they inspired especial pity. The NUM’s 1974 annual conference was held at the Welsh seaside resort of Llandudno from 1 to 4 July. The annual conference had long been a central fix­ ture in the mining trade unionism’s calendar. It was an indicator of the changed status of the British miner that this particular event, following in the wake of the ‘Who governs Britain?’ election, would attract media coverage that was exceptional even by the standards of the 1970s. Opening proceedings, Gormley remarked ironically, ‘Funnily enough, I do not know why it has come about but all at once the Miners’ Conference has become important. The eyes of the world are upon us.’80 As was customary, the local mayor also addressed the delegates with a few words of welcome. In 1974, Councillor Charles Rigby Payne opened proceedings by suggesting that, following the outcome of the recent national strike, he very much hoped that his daughters ‘will find one of your miners and get married to one of them’.81 While, clearly, this suggestion was intended as a light-­hearted quip tailored to a male audience, it underlined how far the miners had come in the few short years since the publication of the Wilson govern­ ment’s White Paper on fuel policy. But if the status of the mineworkers had been transformed, what about the prospects of the industry in which they spent their working lives?

III ‘The King is dead, long live the King,’ exclaimed Eric Varley, at that time still Opposition spokesman on energy, during the second reading of the Coal Industry Bill in the House of Commons on 21 December 1972.82 His parliamentary col­ league Albert Roberts, MP for Normanton in West Yorkshire, took up the ana­ logy. This was ‘the day of reckoning’ after years of denigration for the industry. King Coal had been forced to abdicate, but ‘we’re now inviting him to be king once more’.83 Through their interventions, the Opposition Labour MPs indicated their support for the Heath government’s Coal Industry Bill. While a new approach to the coal industry is often associated with the policy document Plan

80  NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1974 (London, 1974), p. 298. 81  Ibid., p. 303. 82  Hansard, HC Sitting of 21 December 1972, COAL INDUSTRY BILL, col. 1613. 83  Ibid., col. 1661.

84  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization for Coal, and thus with the Labour government of Harold Wilson, closer inspec­ tion makes clear that a re-­evaluation of the coal industry for Britain’s energy needs had started to take place under the Conservative government of Edward Heath. This re-­evaluation preceded the oil-­price shock of the autumn of 1973 and the miners’ strike of February 1974. The context was the widely shared perception that the world was headed towards an energy crisis in which demand for fossil fuels would soon outstrip supplies. While the depletion of the world’s resources of crude oil was projected to be one generation away, the prospect of ever diminish­ ing supplies would intensify competition between the nations of the developed world. Scarcity of energy would also allow the oil-­producing countries to use oil as a political weapon. The main outline of government policy on the industry was laid before Parliament in a statement by Peter Walker, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, on 11 December 1972.84 Walker emphasized that domestic fuel policy must be seen within the context of global demand for energy. For economic as well as social reasons, the government was not prepared to leave the industry to the mercy of short-­term fluctuations in market forces. It proposed to support the Coal Board and the unions in their joint endeavour ‘to put its house in order’, thereby offering the industry ‘the opportunity to re-­establish itself as a supplier of a com­ petitive fuel without being a permanent burden on the taxpayer’.85 Government policy comprised three main elements. First, while not ruling out redundancies, the government offered financial support to the Coal Board in preserving jobs in areas of high unemployment for social reasons. Second, the government commit­ ted to paying social grants to the industry to finance the stockpiling of surplus coal and to cover losses in special arrangements with the electricity supply industry for extra coal burn. Finally, the government proposed to write off the NCB’s accumu­ lated deficit, an estimated £475 million.86 Government policy was influenced by a study by the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) on the future of the industry, whose proofs were made available to the government in January 1972. ‘A Coal Strategy for the United Kingdom’ calculated that, without government support, demand for coal would fall from 140 million tons in 1972 to 83 million tons in  1980, leading to a reduction in employment from 281,000 to 124,000. They concluded that a level of output ‘dictated only by market considerations’ would be ‘undesirable from the national standpoint’ and proposed to stabilize the industry at 120 million tons of output, offering employment to 170,000 men in 1980. The CPRS’s case for slowing down the rundown of the industry rested on three considerations: some miners made redundant would become permanently unemployed; as a domestic fuel, coal had no adverse impact on the balance of payments; and volatility in energy markets and the difficulty in forecasting demand 84  Hansard, HC Sitting of 11 December 1972, COAL INDUSTRY, cols 31–9. 85  Ibid., col. 31. 86  Ibid., cols 31–9.

1972  85 made it  advisable to maintain coal production above the level of short-­ term ­commercial viability.87 The government emphasized that the policy had been drafted in a spirit of cooperation with management and men in the industry.88 The corporatist approach was also mirrored in the cross-­party support for the Coal Industry Bill. Speaking for the Opposition, Eric Varley remarked, ‘we ought to call this Coal Industry Bill the Consensus Bill’.89 In the House of Commons, opposition to the proposed legislation was confined to maverick MPs such as Enoch Powell, who denounced the social provisions in the bill as a ‘deliberate waste of human effort’. Powell took issue, above all, with the government’s justification for keeping in operation collieries that were operating at a loss.90 The government argued that productive capacity of the industry must be retained in view of prospective future developments. While (some) coal might at present be unable to compete eco­ nomically with other sources of energy, it might well become competitive in the future. In arguing thus, the government echoed the judgement of the NUM, as put forward in a document called National Energy Policy, which will be discussed more fully below.91 If the Heath government’s Coal Industry Bill was welcomed by the Opposition as well as the NUM, the underlying causes for the government’s supportive atti­ tude to the coal industry seemed less clear-­cut. While the government insisted that the policy flowed from a careful balancing of economic and social con­sid­er­ ations, there were some who claimed that it was, in fact, the industrial muscle of the NUM that had forced the government’s hand. This point of view was articu­ lated in the House of Commons by miners’ MP Dennis Skinner. In response to the statement by Walker, discussed above, the MP for Bolsover exclaimed: Will he also remember that one of the reasons – perhaps the main reason – why we are discussing this statement in this way today is not the effect of any co-­ operation that has existed during the past 12 months but the effect of what hap­ pened 12 months before, when the miners threw cooperation aside and decided to start to tackle the problems with which they were confronted? Perhaps he will remember that if any future government attempt to roll back the carpet, we shall have to go through the same process again.

Walker replied tersely that Skinner’s remarks were ‘as always . . . totally unhelpful’.92

87  TNA PREM 15/984, Central Policy Review Staff, ‘A Coal Strategy for the United Kingdom’, January 1972. 88  Hansard, HC Sitting of 11 December 1972, col. 31f. 89  Hansard, HC Sitting of 21 December 1972, col. 1613. 90  Ibid., cols 1654–9. 91  National Union of Mineworkers, National Energy Policy (London, October 1972), p. 17. 92  Hansard, HC Sitting of 11 December 1972, col. 39f.

86  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization In contending that the miners’ strike had reversed the state’s thinking about the coal industry, the MP for Bolsover articulated a point of view that was shared by some, but not all, trade unionists in the NUM. There was broad consensus that ‘the tide [had] turned’ for the industry, as Joe Gormley put it in his presidential address in 1973.93 History had proved the miners right and coal’s critics wrong. Indeed, in Gormley’s view, history had come full circle: ‘I believe that we are get­ ting back to the position in those years immediately after the war when energy was in such short supply and every ounce of coal was needed.’ Even the Conservative government, Gormley emphasized, had ‘realise[d] the facts of life’ and initiated policies that were designed ‘to halt the decline in the coal industry’. Yet he cautioned that the policy shift should not be taken as a sign for an any new-­found affection for the miners’ union or, indeed, the industry. In Gormley’s view, the miners and the Conservative Party remained natural enemies, despite the recent evidence of cooperation. More controversially, Gormley and other ‘moderates’ in the NUM also hesitated to assign too much significance to the coal strike of 1972 for the new dawn of the industry. While he rejected the argument that higher wages for miners would inevitably lead to a loss of jobs,94 he cau­ tioned against the belief that industrial disputes could solve the industry’s struc­ tural problems.95 Looking back on the 1972 strike from the perspective of the early 1980s, Gormley struck an even more ambivalent note: Even so, looking back at it all, I’m not sure whether that strike performed a good service or a bad. It was good in that it united the lads, and showed them the strength which that unity could bring. On the other hand, its success led to an attitude of mind, prevalent today, where people, the moment they don’t get what they want, think and talk immediately of strike action.96

The Left took a different view. For them, the strike of 1972 marked a ‘turning point’ in the history of the industry as well as the NUM. It was the moment when, in the retrospective assessment of Malcolm Pitt of the Kent Area, ‘a long period of retreat by the miners had come to an end, and when they were once again, as in the General strike of 1926, in the forefront of the trade union struggle in Britain.’97 Looking back on the 1972 strike in an interview with New Left Review in 1975, Yorkshire Area leader Arthur Scargill declared, ‘You see, we took the view that we were in a class war . . . We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies because we

93 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1973 (London, 1973), p. 86. 94 NUM, Annual Report 1972, Presidential Address, p. 70; see also S. Schofield, General Secretary’s Report for 1971, Monday 27 March 1972. 95 NUM, Annual Report 1972, Presidential Address, p. 68. 96  Joe Gormley, Battered Cherub (London, 1982), p. 118. 97 Pitt, World on our Backs, p. 7.

1972  87 were fighting a government.’98 Whereas the moderates sought to keep the wages struggle of 1972 and the future of the industry separate, the Left argued that the strike action had changed fuel policy. The stoppage had mattered more than the energy crisis in determining the industry’s future. In his address to the Scottish Area conference in 1972, Mick McGahey spoke of the ‘confidence’ and ‘pride’ that the strike had instilled in the membership. To him, the strike’s main lesson was that with ‘unity and determined leadership . . . Government policies [can be] changed’.99 McGahey rejected the view that mining was a declining industry, arguing that, from a global perspective, ‘we are operating in the most rapidly expanding market in the world—the energy market’.100 In his view, the energy crisis had strengthened the miners’ bargaining power, and rather than worry about the coal industry’s competitive position within the energy market, it was the task of the union to make sure that the power was used to advance members’ ‘legitimate demands’.101 The NUM’s official policy statement on the industry’s future, National Energy Policy, made only a passing reference to the strike.102 Rather than emphasize the miners’ industrial bargaining power, the document, published in October 1972, took care to embed the case for a stable coal industry within a consideration of world energy trends and Britain’s overall energy needs. It urged upon pol­icy­ makers the need to learn from the past to avoid serious consequences for the future. ‘The hasty rundown of the coalmining industry has led to coal shortages in the Common Market and inadequate supplies of coking coal throughout the world. Other factors are now pointing to the development of a shortage of all fuels,’ the document emphasized.103 It was to avoid ‘a fuel shortage in the 1980s’ that decisions must be taken now, the document urged. What was at stake was no less than the question of ‘Britain’s economic survival’.104 A revived coal industry, the argument went, was in the interests of the nation just as much as in the inter­ ests of the people working in the industry. It made sense from a geopolitical per­ spective, from a balance of trade perspective, and, in the medium term, also from an economic perspective. If it proved difficult to disentangle the impact of industrial action from govern­ ment policy in 1972, the task became even harder after the stoppage of 1974. The Conservative government had called a general election to strengthen their bar­ gaining hand with the miners. They had failed to secure a new mandate and the Labour Party was put back in government, albeit with a majority over the

98  Arthur Scargill, ‘The New Unionism’, NLR 92 (1975), pp. 3–33, here p. 13. 99  National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA), Annual Conference 1972 (Edinburgh, 1972), Presidential Address, p. 4. 100  Ibid., pp. 4f. 101  Ibid., p. 6. 102 NUM, National Energy Policy, p. 1. 103  Ibid., p. 1. 104  Ibid., p. 25.

88  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Conservatives of only four seats and no overall majority.105 At the NUM’s annual conference in the summer of 1974, Joe Gormley railed against the ‘completely false image’ that the union had called the strike in order to bring down a ­government.106 Yet, as much as he claimed that ‘there was never any necessity for an election because Ted Heath had a sufficient majority to rule the country’, the fact remained that the miners’ strike had resulted in a change of government, even if this was an unintended outcome. Moreover, the NUM, much more so than in 1972, had conjoined the issue of pay to the future of the industry. A substantial wage rise was needed, the NUM argued, to stop the drift of labour away from the industry.107 The case had been put forcefully by Mick McGahey at the Scottish Area’s annual conference in 1973: I note the optimistic declarations of the Chairman of the N.C.B., Derek Ezra, in speaking on the long-­term prospects for the Mining Industry, but he must remember that in order to get coal we require manpower, and mining man­ power, as I have said before, must in my opinion have the best wages and condi­ tions of any section of British industry.108

In their manifesto for the February election, the Labour Party had promised a wide-­ranging review of the coal industry in close cooperation with the unions and the Coal Board. Not only would a Labour government settle the industrial dispute quickly; it would also give the coal industry ‘a new status, perspective and security’.109 The manifesto made explicit reference to the NUM’s proposals for an integrated energy policy. After the election, the new government under Harold Wilson moved quickly to resolve the dispute on the NUM’s terms. They set up a tripartite Coal Industry Examination that was designed to provide reassurances about the industry’s long-­ term future. At its centre stood the government’s endorsement of the NCB’s Plan for Coal, which envisaged major new investment in the industry. The plan set out a two-­stepped roadmap of stabilizing and then expanding deep-­mined output by providing 42 million tons of extra capacity over the course of the next decade.110 Yet, as much as government policy sought to provide security through the adoption of a long-­ term planning approach,

105  On the election see David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of February 1974 (London and Basingstoke, 1974). 106 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1974 (London, 1974), Presidential Address, p. 92. 107  NUM Archives, Barnsley, ‘The Miners and the energy crisis’, uncatalogued material [c.1974]. 108 NUMSA, Annual Conference 1973 (Edinburgh, 1973), Presidential Address, p. 471. 109  The Labour Party, Let us work together: Labour’s way out of the crisis (London, February 1974), http://www.labour-­party.org.uk/manifestos/1974/feb/1974-­feb-­labour-­manifesto.shtml, accessed 18 May 2022. 110 NCB, Plan for Coal (London, 1974); William Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 5: The Nationalised Industry (Oxford, 1986), pp. 355–66; Taylor, NUM and British Politics, vol. 2, pp. 112–18.

1972  89 policymaking was very much concerned with short-­term exigency.111 In the sum­ mer of 1974, the fledgling Labour government was intensely concerned about the in­tern­al politics of the National Union of Mineworkers, as confidential docu­ ments make clear. Inside the Wilson administration, there was an awareness that the government’s room for manoeuvre on energy was limited; that the miners’ industrial muscle had forced the policymakers’ hand. The Coal Industry Examination was as much a political exercise as an energy policy statement. In a memorandum to fellow ministers dated 3 April 1974, the Secretary of State for Energy, Eric Varley, outlined the purpose of the review in the following terms: ‘The examination will of course be a delicate and highly political operation, but our aim must be to get from it results that make economic sense.’112 In keeping with this balancing act, Varley was very concerned that an intermediate report be published in time for the NUM’s annual conference in July 1974. As he made clear in a letter to the Prime Minister on 10 May, the interim report must show to the miners that the government was committed to fulfilling the pledges of the election manifesto ‘to give the industry a new status, perspective and security, as we believe is in the national interest’. Varley attempted to secure the Prime Minister’s support for the idea of an output guarantee of 120 million tons min­ imum for the decade up to 1985. Such a guarantee, he argued, would serve mul­ tiple goals, which were concerned as much with the internal politics of the NUM as with broader energy needs: In doing this we need to aim for three things: to strengthen the hands of the moderates against the adoption of the more extreme wage resolutions which are before the Conference, demonstrate to the industry that it has a secure future, but at the same time ensure that the supplies of coal we require will be obtained at reasonable cost.113

In fact, as the government soon learned, it proved difficult to guarantee a secure future if the future itself was unknowable. Just like previous administrations, the Wilson government maintained that the coal industry must be economically vi­able, if not necessarily in the short term, then at least in the medium term. If the policies were ‘to make economic sense’, then the promise of long-­term security could ever only be conditional. It was an ‘opportunity’ for a new dawn rather than the dawn itself. As revisions to early drafts of the policy document ‘The Energy Outlook and the Place of Coal’ showed, the government was concerned to remove ‘the note of euphoria’ lest the miners be encouraged to exploit their bargaining

111  Derek Ezra, ‘Long term planning for coal’, Long Range Planning 7/6 (1974), pp. 21–3. 112  TNA PREM 16/220, R. A. Custis to R. T. Armstrong, 3 April 1974. 113  PREM 16/220, E. Varley to Prime Minister, ‘Coal Industry Examination’, 10 May 1974.

90  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization power to the full.114 In the end, the Labour government adopted a dual approach to the industry that distinguished between firm commitments, on the one hand, and public declarations of ‘faith in the industry’ on the other. The two Coal Industry Examination reports made the industry’s future dependent on meeting certain conditions, in particular a rise of productivity of 4 per cent per year per man-­hour. The public declarations, by comparison, stressed the opportunities that lay ahead. In announcing the publication of the interim report in the House of Commons on 18 June 1974, Varley spoke of the ‘bright future’ for the coal industry which was ‘secure and indeed prosperous’, although he introduced the caveat that this future was dependent on the industry’s ability to ‘retain its new­ found competitive position’. Speaking at the NUM’s annual conference in July, the Secretary of State for Energy struck a similar note: ‘Coal has a great chance – and that means a great chance for the men, the wives and the families who live their lives through coal. That opportunity is within our grasp.’ Somewhat more am­biva­ lent­ly, he added, ‘I am confident this Union will be determined not to throw that chance away.’115 The National Coal Board sounded more exuberant. In the pref­ ace to the pamphlet Plan for Coal, which summarized the Board’s proposals for a broader audience, Derek Ezra hailed the proposals as ‘the most ambitious for­ ward strategy every prepared by the mining industry’. Coal was to play a ‘major role’ in an ‘entirely changed energy situation’, resulting in additional recruitment and long-­term job security for coal miners. While the short-­term goal was to sta­ bilize deep-­mined output at 120 million tons per year, the pamphlet indicated that an enlarged industry with an annual output of 150 million tons in the mid-­1980s was possible. The life of existing collieries would be extended, and new mines be opened, all underwritten by a massive investment programme totalling some £1,400 million over a ten-­year period.116 For all the professions of a new faith in coal, the two Coal Industry Examination reports stayed silent on three key issues affecting the industry’s future. There was, first of all, the uncertainty over the future development of world oil prices. The projections of an economically competitive coal industry rested crucially on the assumption that the exceptional hike in oil prices which had resulted from OPEC’s response to the Yom Kippur War would not be reversed substantially in the years to come. The assumption was maintained despite an intervention by the Central Policy Review Staff that emphasized the risks of such a view. As a note from Lord Rothschild to the Prime Minister’s private secretary put it, ‘I feel it would be wrong for the Steering Committee to underemphasize the possibility of a fall in oil prices and I do not think this point is sufficiently emphasised . . . .’117 114  TNA PREM 16/220, Handwritten note to R. T. Armstrong, 8 April 1974. 115 NUM, Annual Report 1974, p. 432. 116 NCB, Plan for Coal, p. 1. See also Derek Ezra, Address to the Annual Conference of the National Union of Mineworkers, 4 July 1973 (London, 1974): ‘The British coal mining industry faces better prospects and greater opportunities than at any time in the last 15 years.’ 117  TNA PREM 16/220, Rothschild to R. T. Armstrong, 24 April 1974.

1972  91 Second, while the government was concerned to hold out the prospect of a secure future, analysis by the Department of Energy made clear that this security could be forecast with a degree of probability for the next ten years only—­that is, the mere period between a young man of 16 entering the industry and this same man having started a family with young children at the age of 26. As a paper called ‘The Potential Market for Coal and Coal Supply’ emphasized, ‘After 1985 nuclear generation will have expanded to the point where the consumption of fossil fuel for electricity generation will have to contract.’118 Ominously, the paper added, ‘The level of coal sales will then depend increasingly on the coal industry’s ability to compete in alternative markets.’ Third, and arguably most importantly, the Department of Energy blurred the line between the future of coal as an industry and the future of the miners them­ selves. The Department did so for tactical reasons in order not to jeopardize the goodwill of the NUM. According to the Department’s own calculations, stable to moderately increased output coupled with annual productivity rises of 4 per cent would result in the reduction of the industry’s manpower needs by over 100,000 miners in the decade up to the mid-­1980s, a reduction of 40 per cent. As Varley wrote in a note to the Prime Minister, ‘Do you believe that this moment, before the NUM conference and consideration of a new pay claim with all its economic and political implications, is the right time to confront the NUM with informa­ tion of this kind?’119 In a personal minute dated 3 June 1974, Harold Wilson ­echoed a sentiment that had been voiced by one of Edward Heath’s advisers dur­ ing the height of the 1972 strike, namely that the NUM faced the choice between ‘a smaller more highly paid industry and a larger less well paid one’. He felt that the report had been ‘unnecessarily reticent’ on this point.120 Varley replied that it was best to pass over difficult questions such as this in the current atmosphere. As he made clear, The report has been put together with extreme care, to create a balance between unblinkered realism with the creation of as propitious as possible an atmosphere for next month’s NUM conference. This approach has already won a most help­ ful response from the NUM, which I am concerned not to jeopardise.121

The Labour government’s endorsement of Plan for Coal enjoyed cross-­party political support.122 Yet professions of faith in the future of the industry masked doubts about the long-­term sustainability of coal’s renaissance. There was no way of knowing if coal’s competitive advantage would be permanent or if it was merely 118  TNA PREM 16/220, Coal Industry Examination, ‘The Potential Market for Coal and the Coal Supply’, n.d. [April 1974]. 119  TNA PREM 16/220, E. Varley to Prime Minister, 26 April 1974. 120  TNA PREM 16/221, Prime Minister to Secretary of State for Energy, 3 June 1974. 121  TNA PREM 16/221, E. Varley to Prime Minister, 4 June 1974. 122  Hansard, HC Sitting of 18 June 1974, cols 226–36.

92  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization a transitory phenomenon. Colin Robinson, Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey, thought it erroneous to believe that ‘the days of cheap energy are gone forever’. In a pamphlet published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, he thought it probable that oil prices would decline again in the 1980s.123 The government chose not to dwell on either the economic imponderables or the consequences of productivity gains on mining manpower. This was because perceptions of the miners’ bargaining power did have an impact on the formulation—­and above all the presentation—­of policy. To many miners who had left the industry, the promise of a new dawn seemed sufficiently credible to reconsider their previous decision. Within seven weeks of the end of the 1974 strike, the Coal Board received 20,000 job applications, of which 5,200 were accepted, many of them by re-­entrants to the industry.124 Indeed, the extent of the recruitment was such that the NUM voiced concerns about the influx of ‘ “fair weather” friends who would leave . . . again the moment the climate elsewhere in industry brightened up’.125

Conclusion Throughout the two coal strikes of 1972 and 1974, British Gallup tracked public opinion, asking respondents if their ‘sympathies’ were with the miners or the employers. Over the months of January and February 1972, 55 per cent and 57 per cent favoured the miners, while support for the employers did not exceed 19 per cent. Two years later, support for the miners had declined but remained substantial. In December 1973 and January 1974, 41 percent and 44 percent favoured the miners. By February, this figure, at 52 per cent, had reached the levels of the 1972 dispute. Support for the employers, however, was more substantial this time, reaching 30 percent in January 1974 before falling to 24 per cent by February 1974. Although the public expressed favourable attitudes to the miners, the conduct of the strike received less support. In January 1972, 59 per cent of respondents thought that the miners had used ‘irresponsible methods’. Two years later, this figure stood at 63 per cent. In the same poll, more than half of the respondents thought that the miners ought to be treated as a ‘special case’.126 While Gallup opinion polling indicated a degree of consistency in public atti­ tudes, this chapter has shown how the figure of the miner was remade in the early 1970s. ‘Sympathies with’ was not the same as ‘sympathy for’: Whereas miners used to elicit pity, they came to inspire awe. Where policymakers and observers 123  Colin Robinson, The Energy ‘Crisis’ and British Coal (Hobart Papers 59) (London, 1974), p. 40. 124 NUM, Annual Report 1974, Coal Industry National Consultative Council, Minutes of 159th meeting, p. 157. 125 Ibid. 126  George H. Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain 1937–1975, vol. 2 (New York [1975]), pp. 1165f., 1171, 1289, 1293, 1296.

1972  93 had deplored the miners’ sad fate, they came to marvel at—­and to fear—­the ­miners’ power. In the early 1970s, miners were no longer associated with the past as readily as had been the case in the late 1960s. Tradition itself need not indicate obsolescence, as the coal disputes of 1972 and 1974 had demonstrated. The NUM recognized the potential, as well as the pitfalls, of this reconfiguration of the miner as exceptional rather than ordinary. While the Left inside the NUM argued the time had come to capitalize on this new-­found strength, the moderates cau­ tioned that assertiveness would isolate the miners from the mass of industrial workers, and contribute to the undoing of the gains of recent years. The miners’ new image became inseparable from the debates about the future of the industry. Political considerations, as well as shifts in Britain’s energy needs, drove a policy that would find expression in Plan for Coal, the blueprint for a prosperous indus­ try well into the twenty-­first century. Thus, for the miners, the horizons of ex­pect­ ation widened at the very moment that Britain entered a period of protracted instability and crisis.

3 1977 Introduction ‘On collision course now as the miners plunge the pay policy into darkness’; this  was the headline of a piece published in The Times on 2 November 1977. Written by the paper’s labour editor, Paul Routledge, the report detailed recent developments in the coal industry. In a pithead ballot, Britain’s 242,000 colliery workers had rejected by 55 to 44 per cent the recommendation of the National Executive Committee to accept a scheme that would link pay rises to performance at colliery level. In doing so, they had thwarted the national leadership’s attempts to negotiate substantial wage rises without breaching the norms laid down by the Callaghan Labour government’s ‘Social Contract’.1 A new confrontation loomed in the very year that the industry marked the thirtieth anniversary of na­tion­al­iza­ tion. Routledge juxtaposed the possibility of a miners’ strike with the pre­par­ations for a Mining Festival, to be held at the seaside resort of Blackpool. The festival, he wrote, ‘is billed as the social event of the year, with more fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day than the Queen had for her jubilee celebrations.’ Yet, ‘If events follow the precedent of recent years, it will be fireworks for the miners, and candles for the rest.’2 As a Yorkshireman who had grown up in the coalfields, Routledge was not unsympathetic to the miners. His contrast between ‘fireworks for the miners’ and ‘candles for the rest’ may serve to illustrate a central feature of the structure of feeling that characterized the discourse on the miners around the year 1977: their awe-­inspiring power. The miners were now special because they were powerful.3 The later 1970s were a time when the Labour Party was in government but hardly in command. While historical scholarship has gone some way in reassess­ ing the Wilson and Callaghan years, and the 1970s more generally, there remains a recognition that the government faced serious structural and conjunctural ­challenges.4 Although some degree of economic stability was reached by 1977/8, 1  On the Wilson and Callaghan governments see Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson (eds.), New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974–79 (London and New York, 2004). 2  Paul Routledge, ‘On collision course now as the miners plunge the pay policy into darkness’, The Times, 2 November 1977. 3  See also the editorial, ‘The Miners’ No’, The Times, 2 November 1977. 4  Kenneth  O.  Morgan, ‘Was Britain dying?’, in: Seldon and Hickson, New Labour, Old Labour, pp. 303–7; James Vernon, Modern Britain: 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 431–516; Pat Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 301–45, here pp. 320–6; Philipp Sarasin, 1977: Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main, 2021).

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0004

1977  95 visions of a better future had long since dissipated.5 Historian Eric Hobsbawm argued in Marxism Today that ‘the forward march of labour’ had ground to a halt.6 ‘There’s no future in England’s dreaming,’ bellowed the Sex Pistols on their 1977 release ‘God Save the Queen’, while Victor Burgin inscribed the photograph of a drab suburban landscape with the slogan ‘Today is the tomorrow that you were promised yesterday’.7 One indicator of this loss of confidence in the future was the return of the term ‘de-­industrialization’ into political discourse. Indicating a regressive development, the term was used to describe what seemed like a worry­ing trend in the performance of British manufacturing industry. ‘We must reverse the process of deindustrialisation – of a steady loss of jobs and factory capacity year after year,’ as Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey warned in in his budget statement in April 1975. If the trend were allowed to continue, Britain would be turned into a ‘tourist attraction and a provider of banking and financial services’, with grave consequences for the nation’s standard of living, Healey warned.8 It was against the backdrop of a broader perception of ever con­ tracting horizons that the coal industry’s seemingly secure future must be understood. This chapter charts the perceptions of the miners and their industry around the year 1977, the thirtieth anniversary of the industry’s nationalization. It con­ siders social imaginaries in the political arena alongside miners’ self-­images as they were articulated by trade unionists and ordinary miners. It links these ar­ticu­la­tions to competing visions of the past and the future and, indeed, the miner’s place in society. The chapter proceeds in three stages. Section I focuses on the political arena. It shows that politicians of both major parties shared in the perception that the miners wielded ‘unrivalled firepower’.9 Although there existed broad consensus that the miners’ power was real, the conclusions that followed from this shared understanding started to diverge. Was the miners’ power to be accommodated or must it be confronted? While there remained official cross-­ party consensus that the future of the coal industry was assured, policy advisers inside the Conservative Party came to identify the miners as an obstacle to, rather

5  Glen O’Hara, ‘Temporal Governance. Time, Exhortation and Planning in British Government, c. 1959–c.1979’, Journal for Modern European History 13/3 (2015), pp. 338–54, here p. 349. 6 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, Marxism Today, September 1978, pp. 279–86. 7  The Sex Pistols, ‘God Save the Queen’, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977); Keith Gildart, ‘ “The Antithesis of Humankind”: Exploring Responses to the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy Tour 1976’, Cultural & Social History 10/1 (2013), pp. 129–49; David Mellor, No such thing as society: photography in Britain 1967–87 (London, 2007), pp. 81–106, here p. 92. 8  Hansard HC Sitting of 15 April 1975, col. 288. See also Sitting of 21 April 1975, col. 1092 (Nigel Lawson); Tony Benn, Frances Morrell, and Francis Cripps, A Ten-­Year Industrial Strategy for Britain (IWC pamphlet, no. 49) (Nottingham [1975]), p. 3; Jim Tomlinson, ‘De-­ industrialization and “Thatcherism”: moral economy and unintended consequences’, Contemporary British History 35/7 (2021), pp. 620–42. 9  Paul Routledge, ‘A new miners’ battle is looming’, The Times, 3 July 1978.

96  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization than a conduit for, the realization of the industry’s potential and the renewal of Britain. Section II focuses on discussions inside the NUM. Here, the period wit­ nessed the escalation of pre-­existing tensions between moderates and militants over the question of how to use the miners’ power. Were the miners’ interests best served by constraining or by unleashing it? As the section demonstrates, the issue of power was bound up with divergent understandings of the miners’ identity. Whereas the moderates conceived of the modern miner as an ‘affluent worker’ whose attachment to the industry was instrumental, the militants drew on the interwar past to espouse a conception that privileged workplace solidarity. Finally, Section III looks at the self-­images of ‘ordinary’ miners as recorded by social sci­ entists, autobiographical accounts, and documentaries. It demonstrates just how disparate miners’ ideas about themselves could be.

I On 2 March 1977, the Secretary of State for Energy, Tony Benn, opened the debate on the second reading of the Coal Industry Bill in the House of Commons.10 The bill provided the legal framework for the Labour government’s continued support of an industry that had produced 106 million tons of deep-­ mined coal in 1976/7.11 Among its major provisions were a substantial expansion of the NCB’s borrowing powers in order to enable the investment programme that had been agreed under Plan for Coal; government grants for the sale and stockpiling of coal in order to cover fluctuations in demand, as well as social grants to cushion the social and human costs of restructuring.12 According to Benn, the bill before the House differed in two crucial respects from earlier legis­ lation: first, rather than ‘cushion the decline of the industry’, the present legisla­ tion was ‘to stimulate the extended investment of the board’.13 Second, the bill gave legislative support to running the industry on tripartite lines as a col­lab­or­ ation between government, management, and unions. To Benn, tripartism was the foundation of the industry’s recovery, providing a framework for dealing with ongoing problems, most prominent among them the difficulty of forecasting future energy demand and the disappointing productivity record of recent years. Moreover, tripartism could also serve as a model for worker participation and industrial democracy in British industry more broadly. ‘In tripartism we are

10  Hansard HC Sitting of 2 March 1977, Coal Industry Bill, second reading, cols 440–563. 11  National Coal Board, Report and Accounts 1976/7 (London, 1977), pp. 4–8. Compare also Table 1, Appendix. Figures vary slightly due to different statistical parameters. 12  Hansard HC Sitting of 2 March 1977, col. 441. 13  Ibid., col. 441.

1977  97 moving towards the conception [of industrial democracy]’ that had been envis­ aged as long ago as 1919, the Secretary of State declared.14 The bill was based on Coal for the Future, the third report of the coal industry’s tripartite group, which had followed on from the two Coal Industry Examination reports of 1974. Issued by the Department of Energy as a Green Paper, Coal for the Future was a hybrid document.15 It looked back to what had been achieved since 1974, but also looked forward beyond the ten-­year temporal framework envisaged by Plan for Coal. Just as its predecessors, Coal for the Future was as much a political document as an economic appraisal of coal’s prospects. Even more so than the previous examination reports, it sought to project confidence in the industry’s long-­term future while tacitly acknowledging that this future was, in fact, unknowable. Part 1 confidently showcased the financial support that had been made available to the industry by the Labour government in order to allow for investment in new mining capacity. The document committed to buffering ‘fluctuations in demand resulting from short-­term vari­ations in the prices of competing fuels’.16 It highlighted the introduction of a compensation scheme for the sufferers from the industrial disease of pneumoconiosis. It also underlined financial assistance in research and development projects of coal utilization. Part  2 took the perspective of the Coal Board. While ac­know­ledg­ing that the investment programme had turned out to be more complicated, time-­consuming, and expensive than anticipated, the NCB reaffirmed the validity of the objectives behind Plan for Coal: ‘The overall aim of the Plan for Coal investment programme remains the same now as in 1974 – to reverse the decline of the industry and to equip it for the vitally important job of meeting a major part of our total demand for energy in the 1980s and beyond efficiently and competitively.’17 In essence, the Coal Board explained disappointing short-­term results—­falling output and stag­ nant productivity—­by pointing to the ‘long-­term benefits’ of the investment pro­ gramme.18 Finally, in order to underline that short-­ term expenditures were necessary in order to secure the industry’s long-­term future, part 3 extended the time frame beyond the original cut-­off date of 1985 to the year 2000. While con­ ceding that total demand by the end of the millennium might remain at the levels envisaged for 1985, that is at 135 million tons, it offered up the possibility that total demand for coal ‘could’ be as large as 200 million tons. In the concluding section, the report noted rather more cautiously that the industry had ‘the poten­ tial for a significant expansion’.19

14  Ibid., col. 447. 15  Department of Energy, Coal for the Future: Progress with ‘Plan for Coal’ and prospects to the year 2000 (London [1977]). 16  Ibid., p. 7. 17  Ibid., p. 11. 18 Ibid. 19  Ibid., p. 23.

98  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Coal for the Future held out the prospect of an assured place for the coal industry well into the new millennium, but also introduced, albeit subtly, some caveats. There was, for a start, the future total demand for energy, which the NCB thought ‘likely’ to double by the year 2000. Secondly, as the report acknowledged, coal’s share of elec­ tricity generation depended on the price of oil. Only ‘providing that [coal] continues to be cheaper than oil [could] coal meet an increasing share’ of the market.20 Third, the NCB based the projections of the industry’s future on the ability ‘to secure a major advance in its productivity’.21 As with the two previous reports, Coal for the Future was as significant for its omissions as for its emphases. Above all, just like its predecessors, the report stayed silent on the size of the workforce required to cut the coal in the highly mechanized ‘super pits’ that the NCB envisaged. Writing with the benefit of hindsight, historians of the coal industry have been rather scathing about Coal for the Future. The industry’s official historian, William Ashworth, has called the report ‘less rational’ than the original Plan for Coal.22 In offering up such an assessment, Ashworth echoed concerns raised by con­ temporary academics over the validity of the assumptions underpinning the Coal Board’s investment and expansion programme. Gerald Manners, Reader in Geography at University College London, published an art­icle in November 1976 in which he argued that Plan for Coal was based on a misreading of the oil crisis of 1973/4. Rather than the first sign of a long-­term energy shortage, it was a short-­ term crisis caused by conjunctural factors. Plan for Coal sought to cater to a pro­ jected market demand for coal that was unlikely to materialize. ‘But who will consume the coal? What industries? In what places?’ he asked.23 To Manners, demand for British coal could only be guaranteed by a policy of energy self-­ sufficiency within the context of the European Economic Community, rather than by competition in the marketplace. ‘It is clearly a sadly deficient political mechanism that finances the expansion of a major industry without making appropriate provision for the sale of its output,’ he concluded.24 In a follow-­up paper published in the spring of 1978, Manners was even more scathing about the future market demand for coal informing government policy, calling the fig­ ures ‘more a reflection of wishful thinking and political cowardice than . . . of sound market analysis’.25 A.  R.  Griffin, economic historian at the University of Nottingham, struck a similarly pessimistic tone. In a wide-­ ranging history from  medieval times to the 1970s, he posed the question, ‘Is the resurgence in 20  Ibid., p. 16. 21  Ibid., p. 21. 22  William Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 5: The Nationalised Industry (Oxford, 1986), p. 431. Ashworth makes reference to the Coal Board’s Plan 2000 that informed the Green Paper. 23  G.  Manners, ‘The Changing Energy Situation in Britain’, Geography 61/4 (November 1976), pp. 221–31, here p. 223. 24  Ibid., p. 230. 25  G.  Manners, ‘Alternative Strategies for the British Coal Industry’, Geographical Journal 144/2 (July 1978), pp. 224–34, here p. 226.

1977  99 the coalmining industry’s fortunes since 1970 permanent, or will it be seen in the future to have been no more than a temporary amelioration of the long-­term ten­ dency to decline?’26 From a social geographer’s perspective, John North and Derek Spooner from the University of Hull drew attention to a continuing, and indeed growing, regional divergence. As they argued in several academic publica­ tions, production and investment would become ever more focused on the cen­ tral coalfields of Yorkshire and the Midlands.27 Their analysis suggested that it might be more appropriate to speak of futures in the plural rather than one future. Whereas the industry as a whole was set on a path of expansion, prospects looked much less promising from the perspective of ‘peripheral’ coalfields such as South Wales or Durham.28 The cavils of academics notwithstanding, political support for the coal indus­ try remained strong. Among politicians, there was little disagreement with Coal for the Future’s underlying assumption of a long-­term role for the British coal industry. Indeed, there existed a remarkable degree of cross-­party consensus, as an analysis of the second reading debate of the Coal Industry Bill in March 1977 demonstrates. While, internally, the Conservative Party may have been reassess­ ing its attitude to the nationalized industries as part of a major policy review, the official line of Her Majesty’s Opposition was broadly supportive of Labour gov­ ernment policy. Responding for the Opposition to the Secretary of State for Energy’s opening of the debate, Tom King, the shadow secretary, emphasized the degree of cross-­party consensus on the principles informing the legislation. Despite pinpointing shortcomings in the actual implementation of Plan for Coal, he went so far as to claim ownership of the coal policy when he declared, ‘ “Plan for Coal”, from which this Bill is developed, was drawn up in 1973, at the time of the Conservative government. It was endorsed in 1974. There is, therefore, a con­ siderable element of bipartisanship in the belief in the future importance of the industry.’29 John Hannam, Conservative MP for Exeter, concurred when he declared, ‘There has been great concord between the two sides about the future of this important industry.’30 Summing up the debate in which twenty-­two speakers had spoken for the Opposition, Hamish Gray, MP for Ross and Cromarty, stated unequivocally, ‘There is no doubt if most of the government’s legislation was as uncontroversial as this there would be little cause for long debates.’31 He went on to contrast coal’s assured future with a difficult past: ‘Gone are the sad days of the 26 A. R. Griffin, The British Coalmining Industry: retrospect and prospect (Hartington, 1977), p. 185. 27  John North and Derek Spooner, ‘The Great U.K. Coal Rush: A Progress Report to the End of 1976’, Area 9/1 (1977), pp. 15–27; John North and Derek Spooner, ‘The Geography of the Coal Industry in the United Kingdom in the 1970s: Changing Directions’, GeoJournal 2/3 (1978), pp. 255–72; here p. 271. 28  See also Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain (London, 2021), pp. 79–83. 29  Hansard HC Sitting of 2 March 1977, col. 455. 30  Ibid., col. 505. 31  Ibid., col. 547.

100  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization mid and late 1960s, when the Coal Industry Act 1965 set out provisions for the closing of many areas of coal mining.’32 It was indicative of the extent of the cross-­ party consensus on the future of the industry in the late 1970s that the most ser­ ious disagreement was introduced into the debate by two Labour backbench MPs, both of whom were sponsored members of the National Union of Mineworkers. The issue at stake was the National Coal Board’s proposal to introduce a colliery-­ level incentive scheme as a means to improving the industry’s stagnating prod­uct­ iv­ity record. Reflecting divisions amongst miners, which will be discussed in more detail below, Dennis Skinner, MP for Bolsover, vehemently opposed the proposed scheme, whereas fellow miners’ MP Michael McGuire, representing Ince, passionately argued the opposite case.33 Although there was broad political support for the idea that the coal industry had a future, the consensus was not total. Doubts were expressed from two cor­ ners: Opposition backbench MPs representing constituencies earmarked for the development of new coalfields drew on academic analysis in order to call into question the projections that underpinned the Coal Board’s case for expansion of the industry. From a rather different angle, rank-­and-­file activists on the Left of the NUM denounced the Plan for Coal as a ‘shallow trick’ that served as a fig leaf for management’s plans to rationalize the workforce out of existence. Plan for Coal, they argued, may hold a future for the industry, but this was an industry with little need for coal miners. Michael Latham, the young MP representing the Leicestershire constituency of Melton, in his contribution to the Commons debate of 2 March 1977, cast into doubt two central assumptions informing the government’s policy on the coal industry. He did so by drawing on the work of Manners, discussed above, in order to question the need for developing a new coalfield in the Vale of Belvoir, which lay in his constituency. According to Latham, the conditions that had existed in 1974 no longer applied. The price advantage that coal had enjoyed over oil in the wake of the Yom Kippur War had proven to be a temporary phenomenon, and total energy needs in 1976 were much lower than forecast in 1974. If market demand for coal was sluggish in the present, then there were even fewer grounds for assuming that there would be an expanded market for coal in the region of 135 million to 200 million tons by the year 2000. According to Latham, the underlying assumption of a looming ‘energy gap’ had little empirical evidence to support it. In any case, the MP for Melton cautioned, forecasting demand over a period of twenty-­five years was well-­nigh impossible.34 While Latham queried the rationale behind Plan for Coal in order to voice scepticism about the wisdom of developing a new coalfield in his constituency, miners coalescing around the magazine The Collier attacked coal policy from a 32  Ibid., col. 548. 33  Ibid., cols 475–80 (Skinner); 545f. (McGuire). 34  Hansard HC Sitting of 2 March 1977, cols 493–7.

1977  101 different angle. The grass-­roots activists focused in particular on the Coal Board’s forward projection of Plan for Coal into the twenty-­first century, which had been submitted to the tripartite group under the name Plan 2000 in October 1976.35 The plan was no more than a ‘shallow trick’ designed to coax the miners into accepting production incentive schemes that would undermine the union’s indus­ trial strength, The Collier argued. It was ‘science fiction gone mad’, with the Coal Board’s optimistic forecasts about expanding markets for coal in electricity gen­ eration, coking coal, industry, and domestic usage no more than ‘pie in the sky’.36 The magazine conceded that there may well develop an energy gap by the turn of the century, but, it asked rhetorically, ‘who is to guarantee that it will be filled by coal?’ In any case, a distinction must be drawn between a future for the industry and a future for the miners. As the paper put it, ‘If the NCB gets its way there will be a future for the industry, but not for miners.’37 Plan 2000, the magazine argued, was designed ‘to con the rank and file of the NUM into believing that there is a future for human beings among all these statistics but that the future depends on acceptance of the miners of a productivity deal.’38 Rather than collaborate with the employer (and the leadership of the NUM), the magazine urged the miners to take the future into their own hands by mobilizing their industrial strength. ‘Our future depends on our ability and determination to fight for it,’ The Collier declared.39

II In the later 1970s, Plan for Coal continued to enjoy broad political support. The voices that questioned the economic rationale for expanding the industry remained in a minority and, for the time being, without consequence. Despite the challenge mounted by the activists coalescing around The Collier, there was also widespread consensus that what was good for the industry must be good for the miners. Meanwhile, the idea of the miner as a figure deserving of public sym­ pathy had become residual to a structure of feeling that conceptualized the miner as an awe-­inspiring figure who wielded extraordinary power. The precise nature of this power was contested, as was the question of how to respond. Yet there was little doubt among policymakers, mining trade unionists, and public observers that the miners’ power was real. As this section will show, belief in the miners’

35 Ashworth, History, pp. 363ff. For a contemporary government appraisal see Secretary of State for Energy, Energy Policy: A Consultative Document (Cmnd. 7101) (London, 1978), pp. 27–31. 36  ‘Plan 2000 – Science Fiction Gone Mad’, The Collier, 4 December 1976. 37  ‘Is there no other way?’, The Collier, 4 December 1976. 38  ‘Science Fiction Gone Mad’, The Collier. 39  ‘Science Fiction Gone Mad’, The Collier. See also ‘No to the Productivity Deal: A Great Future for Mining – Without Miners’; ‘The Great Productivity con trick’, The Collier, October 1977.

102  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization power served to deepen pre-­existing divisions inside the NUM. Success had brought in its wake heightened expectations; self-­confidence had extended the bounds of the possible. At no other time in the Union’s post-­war history were the warring factions inside it so preoccupied with fighting each other. At no other time were their divisions so deeply entrenched, yet the balance of forces so pre­ cariously balanced, as in the later 1970s. While the miners were busy fighting each other, strategists inside the Conservative Party came to conceptualize the miners’ power as one of the major obstacles to their policy proposals for a major reform of the British post-­war state.40 With a shared perception of the miners’ power went sharply diverging views on the exercise of this power and the respon­ sibilities of the powerful. More broadly, ideas about the past and the future, and the miners’ true identity and aspirations, were all reformulated in the light of this shared perception of the miner as an awe-­inspiring figure. There were two major factions facing each other inside the NUM. On one side stood the moderates, who were represented by the NUM’s national president, Joe  Gormley. They possessed a structural majority on the National Executive Committee, but time and again were also able to legitimize their actions by get­ ting majority support from the members in pithead ballots.41 The moderates believed that the miners’ power should be exercised in such a way as to stabilize the Labour government. They also believed in cooperating with the management of the Coal Board as a means to the end of carving out a future in which the mineworker would partake of the material comforts of industrial modernity. Theirs was a future in which the mineworker enjoyed job security, social status, and material comfort. The moderates preferred to work through the established institutions of the labour and trade union movement. They also believed in strik­ ing deals with the Coal Board and the government. In many respects, their vision of the future found expression in the Mining Festival of Britain, which was held in Blackpool over two days in November 1977.42 The moderates were opposed by the militants, who were made up of a coalition of area coalfield leaders and ‘rank-­and-­file’ activists. The militants’ power base rested in the coalfields of Scotland, South Wales, Kent, and Yorkshire, as well as in branch-­level activism. They also enjoyed considerable support among university academics and intellectuals. The militants were suspicious of the tripartite arrangements that had characterized the industry since 1974. They considered that institutionalized cooperation was diluting the fundamental antagonism between employer and worker that was a structural feature of industrial

40  Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (London, 2nd ed., 1994), pp. 88–104. 41 Taylor, NUM and British Politics, Vol. 2, p. 111. 42  For a discussion of the Festival, see pp. 105–8 below.

1977  103 capitalism.43 The militants were equally suspicious of the system of high-­level ne­go­ti­ations and compromise deals, preferring to employ direct action methods. They campaigned for the unrestricted use of the miners’ power through indus­ trial action to secure material rewards, galvanize the broader labour movement, and usher in a socialist future whose precise contours remained vague. Rather than indulge in festivals that were sponsored by the National Coal Board, they sought to align themselves with labour struggles outside the mining industry, such as the famous dispute over trade union recognition at the Grunwick film-­ processing plant, and also with social movement causes such as anti-­racism and environmentalism.44 While the militants claimed to represent the true interests of the miners, their patchy record in pithead ballots did not bear out this confident claim. During the later 1970s, it was the issue of incentives, rather than the size of the industry or pay, that took centre stage. The controversy deepened internal division; it exposed the deep fissures inside the union that the appeal to a shared identity found it ever harder to conceal. At the centre of the moderates’ outlook stood an individualistic conception of the modern mineworker. The miner, the moderates believed, was in the industry in order to earn good money. Remuneration should be of a level to allow him to provide for his family and to partake of the material comforts of industrial modernity. In that respect there was nothing special about the miner. Just like any factory worker, he wanted to see effort rewarded in a tangible way, and believed that the more effort you put in, the higher the reward should be. The modern miner believed in collective representation and working-­class solidarity, but in an instrumentalist way as a means to an end, as a lever for the good life, rather than as a means to achieve broader social change, let alone a fundamental trans­form­ ation of society. In some respects, the moderates’ conception of the modern miner resembled the sociological type of ‘the affluent worker’ that had been described by industrial sociologists in their famous study of Luton factory workers.45 The moderates’ idea of the miners’ identity was far removed from the ‘proletarian traditionalist’ under which David Lockwood had subsumed miners alongside other ‘traditional’ workers such as dockers and steelworkers.46

43  Arthur Scargill and Peggy Kahn, The Myth of Workers’ Control (Leeds and Nottingham, 1980); Arthur Scargill and Peggy Kahn, ‘The Case for Conflict’, New Society, 7 January 1982, p. 9f. 44  See Jörg Arnold, ‘ “Gladiators for Women”? The British Miners, Muscular Masculinity and the Struggle for Workplace Rights, 1977 to 1984/85’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3 (2021), pp. 510–34. 45  John H. Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt, The Affluent Worker, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1968–9); Mike Savage, ‘Working-­class identities in the 1960s: Revisiting the Affluent Worker Study’, Sociology 39/929 (2005), pp. 929–46; Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me? The search for community in post-­war England (Oxford, 2019). 46  David Lockwood, ‘Sources of Variation in Working-­Class Images of Society’, Sociological Review, 14/3 (1966), pp. 16–13; Martin Bulmer (ed.), Working-­class Images of Society (Aldershot, 1974).

104  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Gormley expressed the conception of the miner as an affluent worker suc­ cinctly in his presidential address at the NUM’s annual conference in 1977: ‘It is a straight, brutal fact of life that a lad goes to work in a coal mine as he does in a factory anywhere else in order to earn wages which will create a good standard of living for himself and his wife and family.’47 At an area conference, Gormley had fleshed out this conception more colourfully: What is wrong with the leader of a union wanting a nice house for his members to live in? What is wrong with wanting a good standard of living for his wife and family, a good education for the children, a Jaguar at the front door to take him to work, and a Mini at the side to take the wife shopping?48

This was a socially conservative vision; a vision that believed in maintaining social and gender hierarchies, but aspired to make sure that the mineworker was put where he belonged, at the top of the industrial wages league and the apex of the patriarchal family. At the same time, the vision allowed for social mobility, especially in an intergenerational sense. Remuneration from work in the industry must be high enough to enable the children to have ‘a good education’, which, presumably, would allow them to pursue careers other than in the mining indus­ try. In gender terms, the vision tolerated, and to some extent encouraged, women to undertake paid employment, for as long as their contribution to the family income did not displace the man from his position as the main breadwinner. In the later 1970s, there were considerable overlaps between the moderates’ vision and the Coal Board’s conceptualization of the ‘modern miner’. Indeed, both were perceived by their opponents inside the NUM as indistinguishable and part of the same problem. (Policy advisers of the first Thatcher government would later share this perception.) An analysis of the industry’s recruitment material during the period may serve to illustrate this point. In their promotional litera­ ture, the Board emphasized the material rewards of the job, but supplemented this with an emphasis on the communitarian aspects of the miner’s work experi­ ence. In a string of promotional booklets designed by the Yorkshire-­based adver­ tising agency Colbear Advertising, the NCB used a colourful comic-­strip aesthetic to promise ‘good money, good mates and a great future’ to potential recruits to the industry.49 (See Figures 3.1 and 3.2). The use of bright colours was more than an aesthetic device. It served to underline the central contention that there was nothing ‘drab’ about modern mining. The past was present as heritage and trad­ ition, but had no bearing on the working conditions in a modern mine where the miner operated in a highly mechanized environment not unlike a factory. Modern 47 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings for the year 1977 (London, 1977), p. 339. 48  Joe Gormley, Battered Cherub (London, 1982), p. 186. 49 NCB, Get it all together as a skilled miner (London: Colbear Advertising in conjunction with NCB Public Relations [c.1975]).

1977  105

Figure 3.1  The front cover of an NCB booklet, c.1975. In the mid-­1970s, the National Coal Board’s public relations department employed a brightly coloured comic-­strip aesthetic to recruit young men into the industry, promising a well-­paid and highly esteemed job for life.

mining was a colourful job that was ideally suited to satisfy conflicting aspirations of late twentieth-­century modernity, or so the recruitment material suggested: offering job security and the prospects of a career; combining technical skills with bodily exertion; facilitating the pursuance of individualized leisure activities while offering a sense of community among like-­minded ‘mates’—a term connot­ ing habitual companionship, fellowship, and comradeship all at the same time.50 If the promotional material was designed to attract recruits to the industry by painting an image of the mineworker as a carefree, affluent worker, the Mining Festival of 5–6 November 1977 was intended to showcase the quality of life in the coalfields. Organized jointly by the Coal Board, the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation (CISWO), and the trade unions, the festival was billed as a ‘fun’

50  ‘Mate, n.2’, OED, 2nd ed. 1989 (online version).

106  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization

Figure 3.2  The back cover of ‘Get it all together as a skilled miner!’

event for miners and their families from across Britain. It was held at the resort of Blackpool to underline the miners’ social status and capacity to enjoy themselves; their pride in the past and confidence in the future. Ostensibly, the festival was held to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the industry’s nationalization in 1947. As if to emphasize the close identification of the miners with the nation, the date coincided with Guy Fawkes Night, one of the UK’s most popular annual rituals. The festival brought together, over two days, contests and competitions that were usually spread out across the year, chief among them the Coal Queen of Britain beauty pageant and a brass band competition. With its emphasis on carefree hedonism, the festival offered a contrast to the ritualized politics of the miners’ galas. It was designed to showcase the success of corporatism just as much as the miners’ elevated status in contemporary Britain. In Coal News, the NCB’s chair­ man, Derek Ezra, hailed the festival as ‘the biggest and most memorable mining festival ever held anywhere in the world’.51 51  ‘What they said about the Festival’, Coal News, December 1977.

1977  107 The extensive coverage in Coal News—­there were no less than eight pages of reports in the December edition—­placed great emphasis on the lavish nature of the festival’s entertainment programme. The Coal Queen of Britain beauty pa­geant, with which the festival opened, was a case in point: it was held in Blackpool’s 3000-­seat Winter Gardens, with TV personality Stuart Hall acting as compère and a well-­known comedian and a ventriloquist topping the bill.52 While the TV personalities added a touch of glamour to the evening, the real stars were the miners’ own daughters and wives. The sixteen finalists were between 18 and 26 years of age; they were drawn from across Britain’s coalfields. Although linked to the mining industry by virtue of family ties, the contestants did not conform to traditional gender expectations of stay-­at-­home daughters and wives. Fourteen listed an occupation on their CV, ranging from scientific technician to secretary, from bank clerk and shop assistant to receptionist.53 However much the very idea of female beauty contests came to be criticized by metropolitan feminists—­the contestants were, after all, ‘on parade’ in bathing suits—­for many contemporaries they served as a powerful symbol of the quality of life in the coalfields.54 It was right at the heart of the coalfields that affluence and beauty dwelled instead of the squalor and drabness of the interwar years that had been immortalized in numer­ ous works of social reportage and fiction.55 The significance of the contest was underlined by the official sponsors and the lavish prize money. The perry makers Babycham lent their name to the contest, while the winner was awarded a cash prize of £2,250, with £800 for the runner-­up and £300 for third place. In addition, British Airways sponsored a ‘star-­prize’ of a two-­week ‘dream holiday’ on the Seychelles, a ‘happy, lazy 14 days . . . tropical paradise holiday’, as Coal News mused.56 While the festival was focused on a bright present and a promising future, the past featured as heritage. At the finale in the Opera House on 6 November, a fifty-­ man strong choir from Parkside Colliery in Lancashire, supported by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, performed traditional songs. Meanwhile, folksinger and former miner Johnny Handle sang of the miners’ struggles in times gone by. Yet in some respects the evocation of a dark past served to underline rupture as much as continuity. ‘Coal already provides 40 per cent of Britain’s energy needs— and this share could increase in the future thanks to new techniques designed to replace oil-­based products with alternatives from coal “refineries” ,’ Derek Ezra told the 3,000 guests in the Opera House.57 The festival celebrated the modernity 52  ‘What a swell party it was’, Coal News, December 1977. 53  ‘On parade’, Coal News, November 1977. 54  See Thane, Divided Kingdom, pp. 328f.; also Georgia Paige Welch, ‘ “Up Against the Wall Miss America”: Women’s Liberation and Miss Black America in Atlantic City, 1968’, Feminist Formations 27/2 (Summer 2015), pp. 70–97. 55  On the history of the beauty contests see Anne Bradley and Rebecca Hudson, Memories of the Coal Queens (National Coal Mining for England Publications 11) (Overton, 2010). 56  ‘Girls, girls, girls . . . they line up in a most delightful way’, Coal News, November 1977. 57  ‘Festival Special from Britain’s first Mining Festival’, Coal News, December 1977.

108  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization of life in the coalfields. It climaxed in a big fireworks display, ‘a riot of colour and sound’ that cost some £5,000 and was broadcast on the BBC—­a ‘30-­minute extravaganza, the biggest display ever staged at the resort’, as Coal News proudly proclaimed.58

The Miners’ New Charter Whereas the moderates aligned with the Coal Board to propagate an individualis­ tic conception of the miner as an affluent worker concerned with earning good wages for his family, the militants embraced a collectivist vision in which ‘the new miner’ would use his industrial strength to elevate the social and material status of miners as a social class. In 1975, the Scottish area published a document called The Miners’ New Charter, which offered perhaps the clearest exposition of the militants’ conception of the miner’s identity.59 Like the moderates, the militants aimed at ‘raising substantially the working and living conditions of British ­miners’.60 Yet this goal was not to be achieved through cooperation with the Coal Board and the Labour government, as in the moderates’ vision, but through wielding collective strength. Theirs was a collectivist vision that prioritized work­ place solidarity over the domestic sphere, loyalty to the trade union over the indi­ vidual’s concern for the nuclear family. On this view, the past played a crucial role in legitimizing an uncompromising attitude towards all government, whatever its party-­political complexion. The his­ tory of the twentieth century was characterized by broken promises towards the miners, stretching all the way from the Sankey Commission’s recommendation for nationalization in 1919 to the assurances of a secure future in the 1950s and 1960s.61 Miners had taken these promises at face value and had received little in return.62 But this was the past. After the events of 1972 and 1974 the miners were in a new situation. Successful strike action had freed them ‘from the prison of despair and of resignation’.63 They had learned their lesson. As the Charter put it in capitalized words, ‘WEAKNESS HAS NO REWARDS UNDER CAPITALISM’.64 Whereas the moderates emphasized that, in the final analysis, mining was a job like any other, the militants posited a shared identity that derived from common work experience and bonds of solidarity: ‘We are proud to be miners,’ the Charter proclaimed.65 This sense of self-­worth derived from a belief in the social value of the work of coal-­getting. Even more so, it derived from a shared belief in the 58  ‘Ron’s riot of colour and sound’, Coal News, December 1977. 59 NUMSA, Annual Conference, 18–20 June 1975 (Edinburgh, 1975), p. 625. 60  NUM (Scottish Area), The Miners’ New Charter (Glasgow [1975]), p. 11. For a draft version see MRC, MS 302 (Daly Papers). 61  NUM (Scottish Area), The Miners’ New Charter (Glasgow [1975]), p. 6. 62  Ibid., pp. 5ff. 63  Ibid., p. 3. 64  Ibid., p. 7. 65  Ibid., p. 4.

1977  109 possibility of collective achievement through organized struggle. The militants’ vision was a self-­confident view of the miners’ ability to transform the social con­ ditions in which they lived. Through their own actions they would attain their rightful place in society. The Charter’s demands extended beyond the fields of wages and working hours towards hygiene, health, and general working condi­ tions. Next to an introduction of a four-­day working week and an annual income of £5,000 for the highest-­skilled miners, the provision of canteens and sanitary facilities underground featured prominently in the list of demands.66 The miners’ power did not rely on public validation. The ambivalent attitude to the structure of feeling that had prevailed in the early 1970s was expressed well in the following passage. Referring to the events of 1972 and 1974, the document proclaimed, ‘We have had much public sympathy . . . and in our struggles we have welcomed it. But we do not intend to live by it. We intend to change the conditions which have given rise to the truths and half-­truths about mining.’67 The Charter expressed, above all, a belief in the miners’ collective agency. The time to exert this agency was now: ‘MINERS HAVE THE POWER AND THE WILL. USE THEM TO MAKE THIS CHARTER A REALITY’, as the capitalized slogan at the end of the text proclaimed.68 While the Scottish area, alongside South Wales and Kent, had a long tradition of radicalism, the most prominent exponent of militancy in the later 1970s was the young president of the Yorkshire area, Arthur Scargill. Born in 1938 and an active trade unionist since the late 1950s, Scargill had risen to national prom­in­ ence in the strike of 1972. He was widely believed to harbour ambitions to suc­ ceed Gormley as national president.69 In an editorial to an interview in New Left Review in 1975, Scargill was described as representing ‘an intransigent pursuit of proletarian class interests that has not been seen for many decades’.70 In the inter­ view Scargill reiterated, in a strident form, the core tenets expressed in The Miners’ New Charter: the belief in the miners’ agency and the need for exerting power irrespective of any consideration for the incumbent government. ‘The one thing that annoys me about the trade-­union movement is that we’ve got one set of standards when we’ve got a Tory Government and a completely different set of standards when we’ve got a Labour Government. If you’re starving under a Tory Government it’s worse than if you’re starving under a Labour Government. How daft can you be?’ he asked rhetorically.71 After all, it was under the Wilson gov­ ernment of the 1960s that the miners had seen their pits close, communities destroyed, and living standards eroded.72 To Scargill, the collaborationist stance

66  Ibid., p. 7. 67  Ibid., p. 4. 68  Ibid., p. 12. 69  Michael Crick, Scargill and the Miners (Harmondsworth, 1985); Paul Routledge, Scargill: The unauthorized biography (London, 1993). 70  Arthur Scargill, ‘The New Unionism’, New Left Review 92 (July–­August 1975), pp. 1–33, here p. 1. 71  Ibid., p. 23. 72  Ibid., p. 24.

110  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization of the moderates only served to blur the clear antagonisms that structured indus­ trial capitalism; it served to blunt the miners’ strength: The issue is a very simple one: it is them and it is us. I will never accept that it is anything else because it is a class battle, it is a class war. While it is them and us, my position is perfectly clear: I want to take from them for us, in other words I want to take into common ownership everything in Britain.73

Yet, despite the strongly contrasting views on the use of the miners’ industrial power, industrial relations were not the most divisive issue in the later 1970s. Nor was it wages or colliery closures. Rather, the matter that sharply brought into focus different conceptions of the relationship between the miner and the society around him, of contrasting understandings of solidarity and loyalty, was the ques­ tion of bonus incentive schemes. This issue strained to breaking point tensions inside the National Executive Committee, between different areas of the NUM, and among ordinary miners. It was on the issue of bonus schemes that the differ­ ing factions hardened into two antagonistic camps. The debate became morally charged to an extent that the two sides started labelling each other ‘traitors’ and ‘wreckers’; in order to prevail, both sides were prepared to cast aside the rules and customs by which the Union had traditionally conducted its affairs.74 As we shall see, the visceral nature of the debate cannot be understood without appreciating the powerful hold that memories of a dark past exerted upon mineworkers’ sense of self. Eventually, the issue would be settled in the moderates’ favour, with incen­ tive schemes being introduced at area level throughout 1978. But the moderates’ victory came at a heavy price: The means by which they had secured their goal did severe damage both to their moral standing and to the authority of received rules and customs. The moderates advocated the introduction of bonus incentive schemes for two reasons: First, in order to safeguard Plan for Coal; second, to square their statu­ tory commitment to advancing the living standards of their members with loyalty to the struggling Labour government. Ever since 1974, the moderates had wor­ ried that the miners were falling short in fulfilling their side of the bargain that had been struck between the government, the Coal Board, and the NUM. Despite the government’s support and the Coal Board’s ongoing investment programme, productivity in the industry had remained stagnant. Deep-­mined output had fallen. Gormley summed up the problem in his presidential address at the NUM’s annual conference in 1977 in the following terms:

73  Ibid., p. 26. 74  Arthur Scargill, ‘The Betrayal’, Yorkshire Miner, December 1977; Dave Batley, ‘The Sell-­Out: A  Tragic Farce in 6 Treacherous Acts’, The Collier, March/April 1978; Gormley, Battered Cherub, pp. 146–72.

1977  111 The sky is the limit we are told in the production of coal because we are in a field  where the world is crying out for energy . . . The Government have for their  part accepted the plan and the money will be available. The Coal Board have  ­fulfilled their part of the plan by doing all the planning and the boring necessary . . . Unfortunately, last year we on our part failed, I am afraid. We did not meet the output objectives set forward for the industry.75

On this view, an incentive bonus was necessary in order to raise production. Equally important, the bonus offered an opportunity to make available to the members pay increases without coming into conflict with the Labour govern­ ment’s social contract. Miners’ leaders noted with concern that the living stand­ ards that had been secured by the wage settlements of 1972 and 1974 were being eroded by high rates of inflation. For the miners to benefit from the new future that had been promised for the industry, they needed to see material rewards in addition to heightened job security and elevated social status. Yet an open break with the Labour government (and fellow trade unionists) over pay would weaken the government and pave the way for a return to power of the Conservative Party. The moderates believed that the unity of the labour movement must be main­ tained in order for the miners, and the nation, to prosper. Abiding by the social contract was thus a question of loyalty to the labour movement. Gormley summed up this view well in his concluding remarks: ‘Only we can render our industry great. Only if the British T.U.C. is united and in harmony can the country once again be great to the advantage of everyone and not just a few.’76 At the 1977 annual conference, the South Derbyshire Area, seconded by the North Western Area, moved a resolution that took up the main arguments of Gormley’s address. It called for ‘the immediate implementation of a meaningful Incentive Scheme to improve both coal production and wage levels’.77 Meanwhile, another resolution, moved by the South Wales Area and seconded by Yorkshire, demanded exactly the opposite.78 It recalled the pithead ballot back in November 1974 that had rejected a productivity incentive scheme by a margin of 63 per cent to 37 per cent, contending that the introduction of bonus pay would undermine the very bonds of solidarity that had made the successful strikes of the early 1970s possible. More broadly, the militants opposed the scheme for two reasons. They argued that the introduction of an incentive bonus would take the miners back to the ‘bad old days’ of the ‘piece-­rate system’, which had operated in the industry until it was gradually phased out in the post-­war years by a day-­wage structure. The so-­called National Power Loading Agreement (NPLA), which was completed

75 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1977 (London, 1977), Presidential Address, pp. 336–45, here p. 338f. 76 NUM, Annual Report 1977, p. 344. 77  Ibid., pp. 414–22, here p. 414. 78  Ibid., p. 416.

112  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization as recently as 1966, was seen as conducive to fostering solidarity across different coalfields.79 The agreement was regarded as one of the foundations that had made the industrial victories of 1972 and 1974 possible. An incentive scheme was a regressive step, they contended, that would bring back the accident and fatality rates that had bedevilled the industry for so long; it would mean, in an emotive phrase popularized by the play Close the Coalhouse Door, more ‘blood on the coal’. The militants also believed that introducing wage differentials for the same type of work would undermine the NUM’s ability to mobilize the miners for future industrial action. Moving the resolution, Des Dutfield framed opposition to the incentive schemes in terms of an obligation to generations past: We do not want to allow anybody to shatter this unity that we have got now. If we allow ourselves to retrogress back to our divided directions, then it will be a crime against all those old miners who fought over the years to get what we have got now.80

M. Sykes, seconding for the Yorkshire area, framed the issue in a political, rather than economic context: ‘I will tell you what this productivity scheme is all about—­ carrot and stick, simply put. It does not only mean carrot and stick. It means divide and conquer.’81 The militants did not recognize any special obligation to the Labour government.82 They believed that the real purpose of the scheme was to weaken the miners’ power. From this perspective, the moderates were naïve stooges or, worse still, ‘parasites’ and ‘traitors’ who put their own personal wellbeing—­the ‘new-­found prosperity and comfort’ of their union jobs—­ahead of the miners’ common interests, as The Collier remarked acerbically.83 After an acrimonious debate, the South Derbyshire reso­lution was defeated on  a card vote, by 137,000 to 134,000 votes. The South Wales resolution was ­carried by the same margin.84 The conference decision notwithstanding, the National Executive Committee decided on 13 October 1977 to hold a pithead bal­ lot over a draft incentive scheme that had been negotiated with the NCB, recom­ mending acceptance by thirteen to eleven votes.85 The ­ manoeuvre enraged the  Yorkshire Area, who, alongside with other militant areas, declared their ‘total opposition’ and launched an intense campaign against the NEC’s ­recommendation.86 The Kent Area went a step further. It challenged in court 79  Beynon and Hudson, Shadow of the Mine, p. 55. 80  Ibid., p. 416. 81  Ibid., p. 418. 82  See also ‘Social Contract? Social Justice?’, The Collier, June 1974. 83 ‘Rank and File Organisation is the key to defeating Gormley’s Prod Deal’, The Collier, November 1976. 84 NUM, Annual Report 1977, p. 422. 85  NUM (Yorks. Area), Signed Original Copies and Minutes 1977, ‘Ballot: Proposed New National Incentive Scheme’, p. 677. 86 N.U.M.  (Yorks. Area), Signed Original Copies 1977, ‘Special Council Meeting’, Barnsley, 18 October 1977.

1977  113 the  Executive Committee’s right to call a ballot, unsuccessfully seeking a legal injunction to stop the ballot on the grounds that the NEC had acted in contraven­ tion of the union’s rule book.87 The ballot went ahead, but the proposal was defeated by a margin of 55 per cent to 44 per cent. A closer look at the area level results reveals just how divided the miners were over this issue. Whereas the ­militant coalfields of Yorkshire, South Wales, Scotland, and Kent had rejected the incentive bonus scheme with 76 per cent, 83 per cent, 83 per cent, and 71per  cent, respectively, the moderate coalfields produced substantial majorities in favour—66 per cent in Nottinghamshire, 63 per cent in Durham, and 71 per cent in South Derbyshire.88 The big regional disparities provided the NEC with a pre­ text to allow individual areas to go their own way. This ushered in a domino effect in which the moderate areas introduced schemes and the militant areas followed reluctantly in order to keep up.89 In the controversy over incentive bonus schemes both sides used tactics that did serious damage to the authority of the rules and customs by which the miners governed themselves, hardening pre-­existing divisions between the rivalling fac­ tions into bitter hostility. A dangerous precedent had been set which would come to haunt the union in the confrontation of 1984/5. In many respects, it was not so much the incentive scheme itself that led to division, as some historians, follow­ ing the arguments of the militants, have claimed, but the tactics that were used to push it through.90 In the wider political arena, the spectacle of acrimonious infighting also offered an opportunity for the political opponents of the govern­ ment to cast the miners as a ‘greedy pressure group’ to which the Labour govern­ ment was unable to stand up.91 As Paul Routledge put it in an article for The Times, ‘To a degree that saddens their friends and brings quiet satisfaction to their enemies, the miners have turned their unrivalled fire-­power on themselves.’92

Crisis of governance While the NUM was locked into bitter internal dispute, the very foundations of Plan for Coal—­a nationalized coal industry in which the NUM was recognized as the legitimate voice of Britain’s mineworkers—­came under attack. As yet, the challenge was not mounted publicly but developed as part of a policy review in the Conservative Party. Following the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader on 87  Ibid.; ‘N.U.M. Kent Area: Application to restrain ballot on national incentive scheme’; ‘Notes of a judgement given by the vice-­chancellor on 19 October 1977’. 88  N.U.M. (Yorks. Area), Signed Original Copies 1977, p. 754. 89  Paul Routledge, ‘Miners’ leaders set to accept output deal’, The Times, 7 December 1977. 90  See, for example, Harry Paterson, Look Back in Anger: The Miners’ Strike in Nottinghamshire 30 Years On (Nottingham, 2014), pp. 47–50. 91  Michael Hatfield, ‘Liberals react sharply to NUM wages decision’, The Times, 6 July 1977. 92  Paul Routledge, ‘A new miners’ battle is looming’, The Times, 3 July 1978.

114  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization 11 February 1975, proponents of a sharp break with the legacy of the Heath ­government came to single out the coal miners as a major obstacle to their reform agenda.93 The party’s grass roots as well as Thatcher personally had long been suspicious of the British trade union movement. By the mid-­1970s this suspicion had hardened into the widely held belief that organized labour was largely responsible for Britain’s economic woes. Within this demonology, the miners occupied a special place. They were ‘the old enemy’—the ‘archetypal overmighty subject’, as the historian E.  H.  H.  Green has put it.94 The Conservatives shared with the Labour government a view of the miners’ power, but believed that this power needed to be constrained, rather than accommodated, for Conservative policies to stand a chance of success. To them, the miners embodied the failures of the post-­war settlement as such: they operated a monopoly in a state-­owned industry and wielded power that crippled the workings of elected govern­ ment itself. Over the summer and autumn of 1977, three policy reports were circulated among members of the shadow Cabinet that dealt either explicitly or implicitly with the miners and their union: the report of the Authority of Government Group, chaired by Lord Carrington; the final report of the Nationalised Industries Policy Group under the ­chairmanship of Nicholas Ridley MP; the ‘Stepping Stones’ report produced by the advisers John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss.95 While the reports by Ridley and Hoskyns/Strauss have long been recognized as key policy statements of the incipient ‘Thatcher revolution’, it is im­port­ant to note that, as of 1977, the find­ ings and proposals were met with a mixed response in the shadow Cabinet’s steering committee.96 Whatever the differences between the three papers, all operated on the assumption that the trade unions were a powerful agent on the political stage. To John Hoskyns and his col­lab­or­ator, the trade unions were the ‘major obstacle’ to initiating the ‘sea change in Britain’s political economy’ that they considered necessary to halt, let alone reverse, national decline. In an uncanny echo of the militants’ rhetoric, ‘Stepping Stones’ distinguished sharply between union leaders and ‘rank-­and-­file’ members.97 In an annex to the report, they singled out ‘the union problem’ as a question of ‘union power’, emphasizing

93  Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (London, 1995), pp. 218, 232f. 94 E. H. H. Green, Thatcher (London, 2006), pp. 102–26. 95 Conservative Research Department, Authority of Government Group Report, 2 June 1977, available at The Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111394; Final Report of the Nationalised Industries Policy Group, 8 July 1977, https://www.margaretthatcher. org/document/110795; John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, ‘Stepping Stones’, 14 November 1977, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111771. 96  Peter Dorey, ‘The Stepping Stones Programme: The Conservative Party’s Struggle to Develop a Trade-­Union Policy, 1975–79’, HSIR 35 (2014), pp. 89–116, here pp. 104–8. Compare the mixed recep­ tion of the ‘Stepping Stones’ paper among the members of the steering committee. Leader’s Steering Committee, 51st meeting, 30 January 1978, extended minutes, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/109832, accessed 20 May 2022. 97  Dorey, ‘Stepping Stones’, p. 99.

1977  115 the ‘fear’ that the unions elicited among the general public.98 The unions’ strength was perceived to be such that even radical reformers inside the Conservative Party advised on moving cautiously: ‘There seems no alternative in the short run to paying the price of having state monopoly industrial unions. Since they have the nation by the jugular vein, the only feasible option is to pay up,’ as the Final Report of the Nationalised Industries Policy Group under Nicholas Ridley MP advised. The ‘Ridley Report’ has received much attention in historical scholarship.99 The confidential annex on ‘countering the political threat’, which singled out the coal industry as the most likely field of confrontation between a future Conservative government and the trade unions, has sometimes been read as a blueprint for the government’s tactics in 1984/5.100 Yet, at the time of circulation in the summer of 1977, the great miners’ strike was still a long way in the future—­just one possible future among several others, over which the Conservative Party did not have monopoly control.101 Rather than read the Ridley Report in the light of future events, as a manual for how the might of the state would be harnessed to crush a ‘hopeless’ cause,102 it is more productive to situate it in the time of its circulation, the later 1970s.103 Viewed as a document written during the coal industry’s jubi­ lee year, the report reveals just how entrenched the nationalized industries appeared to be in the nation’s life, and what a powerful force the miners were in the eyes of the Conservative Party. The Ridley Report made a case for the economic and political benefits of de­nation­al­iz­ing the nationalized industries. Part II opened by underlining how much the mixed economy had become an accepted aspect of the UK’s socio-­ economic fabric: The process of returning nationalised industries to the private sector is more difficult than ever. Not only are the industries firmly institutionalised as part of our way of economic life, but there is a very large union and political lobby wanting to keep them so. A frontal attack upon this situation is not recom­ mended. Instead the group suggest a policy of preparing the industries for the partial return to the private sector more or less by stealth.104 98  Hoskyns and Strauss, ‘Stepping Stones’, A1–17. In a dialectical twist, Hoskyns and Strauss added that the trade unions, while eliciting fear among the public, were in truth fearful themselves. 99  Beynon and Hudson, Shadow of the Mine, pp. 83–5; Jim Phillips, ‘Containing, Isolating, and Defeating the Miners: The UK Cabinet Ministerial Group on Coal and the Three Phases of the 1984–85 Strike’, HSIR 35 (2014), pp. 117–41, here p. 122. 100  Peter Dorey, ‘Conciliation or Confrontation with the Trade Unions? The Conservative Party’s “Authority of Government Group”, 1975–1978’, HSIR 27/28 (spring/autumn 2009), pp. 135–51, here p. 136; 149–50. 101  Dorey, ‘Stepping Stones’, p. 112. 102  Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2010), p. 542. 103  Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era (London, 2010), p. 156. 104  Final Report of the Nationalised Industries Policy Group, p. 15.

116  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Proceeding ‘by stealth’ was recommended out of a sense of weakness, not strength. The route to privatization lay in the process of fragmentation, of breaking up the national industries into smaller competing units. For the Ridley group, fragmen­ tation offered distinct economic and political benefits. It would increase efficiency by introducing market mechanisms and erode the unions’ power. Within this context, the policy group embraced, and endorsed, the NCB and Labour govern­ ment’s introduction of bonus incentive schemes into the coal industry. As the report put it, The real opportunity lies in Group A [comprising the coal, shipbuilding, and motor industries, amongst others]. All of these industries could be broken down into the basic industrial unit . . . As a first step we could try to have bonus schemes based upon productivity at each unit – leading perhaps to a demand for greater independence.105

By recommending the introduction of an incentive scheme, the Ridley Report seemed to confirm the militants’ suspicion about the NCB’s bonus scheme. Yet it needs emphasizing that the NCB sought to strengthen the economic position of the industry in line with Plan for Coal, whereas the report advocated a fundamen­ tal break with the principles underpinning the settlement of 1974. If the Nationalised Industries Policy Group considered the NUM an obstacle to  economic recovery, the Authority of Government Group under Lord Carrington framed the challenge of the miners’ power in even more fundamental terms. To them, the miners posed a threat to the authority of elected government itself.106 While the terms of reference were couched in general terms, it was clear from the deliberations that the group had been set up in order to learn from the events of 1972/4. As the final report explained, ‘In our discussions and in this report we have concentrated on challenges to the authority of Government by organized groups of workers, since this was the form which the challenge took in this country in 1973/4 and since it poses the main credibility problem which will face the Conservative Party at the next General Election.’107 As the minutes indi­ cated, the group very much had the miners in mind when reflecting on the les­ sons that could be drawn from the past. In contrast to the confrontational tone of the Ridley Report, there was a sense of world-­weary resignation permeating the deliberations. As Lord Carrington, who had been Secretary of State for Energy during the tumultuous months of early 1974, put it to Lord Armstrong, then

105  Ibid., p. 17. 106  Dorey, ‘Conciliation or Confrontation’. 107  Conservative Research Department, Authority of Government Report, p. 4. See also Peter Hennessy, ‘Mrs Thatcher warned in secret report of defeat in confrontation with unions’, The Times, 18 April 1978.

1977  117 Cabinet Secretary, ‘[They] felt that there were certain lessons that could be learnt from past experience. The first rule was probably that the government should not take on somebody whom they can’t beat.’108 Sir Campbell Adamson, giving evi­ dence on behalf of the Confederation of British Industry, concurred. In response to a question by Carrington about the miners’ strength, he averred that ‘it would always be very dangerous to tangle with the miners’.109 In an earlier meeting, George Younger had pointed out that the problem was as much a question of psychology as of authority: ‘The task was to persuade first ourselves and then the public that faced with a confrontation, we could win.’110 The Final Report, circulated in June 1977, tried to steer a middle course between conciliation and confrontation. Peter Dorey, in his analysis of the report, has called the recommendations ‘rather anodyne’ and ‘timid’.111 It restricted itself to making some general recommendations on strengthening the machinery of government and on placing greater emphasis on the management of public opinion in the case of an industrial relations conflict.112 At the same time, the report cautioned that the miners’ power was largely impervious to pub­ lic opinion as it rested on bonds of solidarity between the mineworkers them­ selves. This assessment was informed by a belief that there was something distinct about ‘the history, traditions and pattern of life of the group concerned’.113 In a curious way, the Conservative Party’s conceptualization of mineworkers as special was more in line with the militants’ view than the moderates’ conception of affluent workers who were concerned with the wellbeing of their family. The Conservatives’ views of the miners as a social group were informed by memories of the recent industrial disputes and the broader imaginaries circulating in British society. Little attempt was made to establish empirically what, if anything, distinguished the miners’ outlook in the late 1970s from those of other, ‘ordinary’ workers.

III At about the same time that the Conservative Party came to identify the miners as a major obstacle to their reform agenda, public interest in who the miners ‘really’ were appreciated markedly. Sociologists, historians, and film-­makers engaged in fieldwork that aimed to capture everyday life and perceptions among ‘ordinary’ 108  Authority of Government Group, Minutes of 12th Meeting, 21 July 1976, https://www.marga­ retthatcher.org/document/111390, accessed 20 May 2022. 109  Authority of Government Group, Minutes of 15th Meeting, 26 January 1977, https://www. margaretthatcher.org/document/111393, accessed 20 May 2022. 110 Authority of Government Group, Minutes of Minutes of 1st Meeting, 10 September 1975, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111379, accessed 20 May 2022. 111  Dorey, ‘Authority of Government’, pp. 146, 148. 112  Conservative Research Department, Authority of Government Report, pp. 8–10. 113  Ibid., p. 11.

118  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization miners. In 1977, film-­maker Ken Loach directed The Price of Coal, which was set in the Yorkshire coalfield and based on a screenplay by Barry Hines, the author of Kes.114 The documentary film unit of the NCB produced the half-­hour documen­ tary, Miners, set in Nottinghamshire.115 Jim MacFarlane published a collection of autobiographical essays that were written by coal workers from Yorkshire on day-­ release adult education courses. A team of young scholars and political activists had gone to County Durham to record voices from a traditional coalfield. Their research was published as But the World Goes on the Same under the authorship of ‘Durham Strong Words Collective’.116 In historical perspective, the late 1970s saw the publication of Independent Collier: The Coal Miner as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered as well as the publication of miners’ testimony as ex­ amples of ‘history from below’.117 Among sociologists, Martin Bulmer’s em­phasis on the communitarian dimension of the miners’ lives, on the ‘gemeinschaftlich ties of kinship, residence and friendship’, rather than the workplace itself, first published in 1975, generated considerable interest.118 This body of work followed the artistic and disciplinary conventions of its time. As such, it can tell us as much about trends in scholarly research and documen­ tary film-­making as about the lives of the people which it sought to record. Within a broader perspective, scholarly fascination with the miners came at the tail end of a ‘golden age’ of interest in Britain’s industrial working class. Back in the 1950s, concerns over the corrosive impact of ‘affluence’ on traditional working-­class communities had given rise to such landmark studies as Family and Kinship in East London (1957) and The Uses of Literacy (1957). In the field of artistic produc­ tion, the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and the play A Taste of Honey (1958) were but the most prominent examples of the genre of working-­ class fiction.119 The industrial unrest of the later 1960s and early 1970s had led to a distinct, albeit temporary, re­affirm­ation of the centrality of social class in understanding contemporary British society, as was attested by Huw Beynon’s Working for Ford (1973) and the class-­centred analysis of youth (sub)cultures at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, most notably Resistance through

114  The Price of Coal. Part 1. Meet the People (1977), dir. by Ken Loach; The Price of Coal. Part 2: Back to Reality (1977), dir. by Ken Loach; Barry Hines, The Price of Coal (London, 1979). 115  National Coal Board Film Unit, Miners (1976), dir. by Peter Pickering. 116 Durham Strong Words Collective, But the World Goes on the Same: Changing times in Durham pit villages (Rochdale, 1979). 117 Royden Harrison (ed.), Independent Collier: The Coal Miner as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered (Hassocks, 1978). 118  M.  I.  A.  Bulmer, ‘Sociological Models of the Mining Community’, Sociological Review 23/1 (1975), pp. 61–92. See Tim Strangleman, ‘Mining a productive seam? The coal industry, community and sociology’, CBH 32/1 (2018), pp. 18–38. 119  Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London, 1957); Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957); Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (London, 1958); Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey (London, 1959). See also John Kirk, The British Working Class in the Twentieth Century: film, literature, television (Cardiff, 2009), pp. 32–77.

1977  119 Rituals (1975) and Learning to Labour (1977).120 An interest in ‘from below’ approaches in history and sociology had led to a flowering of history workshops and community publishing projects, with the launch of History Workshop Journal (1976) and the creation of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (1976) as notable manifestations of this trend.121 The sociological fieldwork of the Strong Words Collective was situated within this context.122 The scholars adopted a theoretical framework that constructed the miner as a ‘traditional proletarian’ who operated in a declining industry. In adopting such a perspective, their study, But the World Goes on the Same, was indebted to an earlier generation of work, in particular the famous study from the 1950s Coal is Our Life, as well as Lockwood’s typology and Bulmer’s ‘occupational communities’ model.123 The privileging of what was over what is showed in the set-­up of the study: the interviews were conducted in the western, that is old, part of the Durham coalfield; retired and ex-­miners took precedence over working miners. At the same time, the politics of the researchers was reflected in the over-­ representation of politically engaged miners. Of the fourteen life stories in the collection, six were from men who were active in the trade union movement.124 The collective also included the voices of three women, one of them an arrival from India. The stories from the Durham coalfield echoed sentiments expressed by Roy Mason MP in a Commons debate in December 1973, where he had declared, ‘Working underground in a coal mine is not a life for any man. It is not fair on his wife. It is not fair on his family.’125 Indeed, the extent of revulsion towards the industry expressed by some of the interviewees was striking. As George Alsop, born in 1911, emphasized, starting work in a colliery was not a free choice, but dictated by custom and necessity. ‘I didn’t want to go down the pit, I really didn’t, but I hadn’t any other option.’ Alsop went further and decried as ‘stupid’ the senti­ ment that the comradeship amongst miners somehow offered compensation for bad working conditions. ‘And this is the fallacy in what some lads say; “Wey, what made me stop in the pit was comradeship” . . . That’s bloody nonsense to me. It was just necessity.’ Alsop left the industry in 1967 at the age of 56, after the closure of

120  Huw Beynon, Working for Ford (London, 1973); Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals: youth subcultures in post-­war Britain (London, 1976); Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (London, 1977). 121 Editorial Collective, ‘Editorials: History Workshop Journal’, History Workshop Journal 1/1 (1976), pp. 1–3; Tom Woodin, ‘Building culture from the bottom up: the educational origins of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers’, History of Education 34/4 (2005), pp. 345–63. 122  Ibid., p. 354, n. 46. 123  Strong Words, But the World. 124  In addition to the life stories, the collection included extracts from tape-­recorded conversations with local youths and the reflections of two shop stewards who had been involved in the campaign against the closure of a local worsted-­spinning factory. 125  Hansard HC Sitting of 19 December 1973, cols 1381–91, here 1391.

120  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization his local colliery and an industrial accident at his new pit.126 Maurice Ridley, also born in 1911, concurred with Alsop in the condemnation of the coal industry. ‘Let’s face it, I’m very clear in my own mind that coal mining is one of the occupa­ tions that (if one could organise or run one’s life without it) should not be on. You’re living like a mole and working under conditions that human beings should never have to work under.’ For Ridley, the lockout of 1926 provided the first ‘lib­ eration’ from work in the industry. When he returned in 1929 after a long spell of unemployment, this only strengthened his determination to find an escape route. ‘The only thing that the second introduction to mining did for me was to increase my determination to get out of the pits!’127 Like Mason in the House of Commons in 1973, the interviewees for The World Goes on the Same spoke of an industry and conditions as they had existed one generation ago. On the state of the industry in the late 1970s, and conditions in coalfields other than County Durham, they had little to say, except to recognize a difference in status between the present and the past. They also pondered the influence of affluence on the miners’ collective bargaining power. As Alsop remarked, ‘And the miner himself is considerably better off now than he was in the days of the dark period. It’s still a terrible job, but the wages are much better today . . . They’re looking at life in a different way now. Whilst they might remem­ ber what things were like, they are not prepared to argue in the same way now.’128 Alsop’s observation was underpinned by a general rise in living standards since the interwar years just as much as by the mineworker’s position vis-­à-­vis other industrial workers.129 In 1978, the Department of Employment’s New Earnings Survey put average weekly wages in the industry at 20 per cent above the average in manufacturing as a whole.130 Face workers came second in a league table of the most highly paid workers, while surface workers came sixth.131 By that time, car ownership, central heating, a telephone, television, and a washing machine had come within reach for between half and three-­quarters of all British households.132 Like Mason, the interviewees, recalling childhood memories of the interwar period, also reflected on the patriarchal structures in mining communities, the strict division of spheres, and the subordinate role of women. ‘Being married to a miner was a full-­time job for a woman, especially if she had sons who worked in

126  Strong Words, But the World, pp. 20–33, for the quotations pp. 24, 25. 127  Ibid., pp. 58, 62. 128  Ibid., p. 30. 129  A. B. Atkinson, ‘Distribution of Income and Wealth’, in A. H. Halsey with Josephine Web (eds.), Twentieth-­Century British Social Trends (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 348–81, here p. 349. 130  See Table 6b, Appendix. 131  Cited in Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-­War Britain (Oxford, 2010), p. 324. 132 Addison, No Turning Back, p. 319; on foreign holidays, Sina Fabian, ‘Flight to the Sun: Package tours and the Europeanisation of British holiday culture in the 1970s and 1980s’, CBH 35/3 (2021), pp. 417–38.

1977  121 the pit too,’ as Alsop observed.133 Ridley concurred. Casting his mind back to the unemployment following the 1926 lockout, he observed pointedly, ‘The real ­people who suffered were not the unemployed members [sic] like my dad and myself. The real sufferers, without a doubt, were the women folk.’134 Expressions of regret for the subordinate role of women were themselves indicative of societal changes in gender norms during the interviewees’ lifetime. The perspective was shared by the female interviewees, but with greater emphasis on the contrast between the past and the present. As Vera Alsop, born in 1915 into a small min­ ing community outside Chopwell, commented, In those old days, the days we’ve been talking about, the man was the boss. He was the boss of the house. And if he wasn’t the boss of the house, he wasn’t con­ sidered to be a man . . . Men used to come in from the pub – big bullies of men – and they’d beat their wives if things weren’t as they should be, or if the woman complained. They thought that was the proper thing to do. . . . The woman was supposed to sit there with a little black shawl on and wait for him coming in. And that’s what most women did.

Alsop was adamant that gender relations were different now, and paid tribute to the women’s liberation movement in bringing about change for the better. ‘This is what women’s lib is all about you see. I don’t go as far as they go perhaps but it’s nice to know you have some rights. Because in those days you had no rights at all.’135 Alsop acknowledged the role of political activism in changing entrenched gen­ der inequalities. Other female interviewees emphasized the diversification of the local economy, and in particular the arrival of manufacturing industry following in the wake of colliery closures, as the crucial factor in changing gender relations in the coalfields. Mary Samuels, a shop assistant, observed: Until the dress making factory came there wasn’t work in the town for women. If you didn’t work in a shop, there was no work for women. The biggest majority of women are working now though. Even women with families are working: nine till three. They can still get their children to and from school.

There were echoes in Samuels’s account of the aspirational and family-­centred conceptualizations of the miner that the Coal Board and the moderates in the NUM espoused: People want the car, the washing machine, they want the holidays, and they get them, mainly because the women go out to work.136 133  Strong Words, But the World, p. 21. 135  Ibid., pp. 70–6; for the quotations p. 71f.

134  Ibid., p. 61. 136  Ibid., p. 76f.; for the quotation p. 71.

122  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization At the same time, Samuels’s account made clear that the taking up of paid employ­ ment did not necessarily mean that domestic roles and childcare responsibilities changed as well. Even some of the former miners agreed that the diversification of the local economy had been a good thing. As Ron Rooney, who had started work in the mines in 1937, remarked, ‘So in a way the closures were one of the best things that’s ever happened to the miners. They’ve got jobs in other industries; jobs which they never thought about getting, and they have realized that the condi­ tions are a lot better—a hundred per cent better.’ Rooney, who had left the indus­ try in the 1960s after having been transferred twice, was adamant that he would never return to the collieries, whatever the incentives: ‘In my opinion we were slaves, we were definitely slaves. I would never go back. Even if they paid double what the miners have been asking for they would never get me back in the pits again.’137 The problem, however, was that the new future that had been promised by the arrival of manufacturing industry proved short-­lived, as the concluding interview with two shop stewards at Courtaulds in Spennymoor underlined. The worsted-­spinning factory had opened in the late 1960s with promises of ‘a good wage and a job for life’.138 Yet, a decade later, the Spennymoor plant had closed, with the loss of 1,500 jobs. Whereas The World Goes on the Same collected the voices of former minework­ ers and other people living in a peripheral coalfield, Essays from the Yorkshire Coalfield brought together autobiographical accounts from working miners in one of Britain’s central coalfields.139 The essays had not been written for publica­ tion but were produced as an assignment on a three-­year day-­release programme at the Department of Extramural Studies at the University of Sheffield. They were published by Jim MacFarlane to mark the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the scheme. MacFarlane was a former underground worker who had attended a day-­release course in the late 1950s. He had gone on to become the Director of Studies for the  programme. Although this was not a subject that was dwelled upon in the collection, MacFarlane’s own biography pointed towards the possibility of social change. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the essays were written in the later 1970s. With one exception, the authors were born between the mid-­1920s and the mid-­1940s, so must have been in their thirties and forties when attending the day-­release course. Twelve out of a total of twenty-­five were employed as coalface workers. Of the others, four worked underground as fitters, one as a development worker, and one as a haulage man. One was a winder, three were surface fitters, and one a lorry driver. Two were active in the NUM as branch president and as secretary, respectively.

137  Ibid., pp. 36–41; for the quotations pp. 38, 36. 138  Ibid., p. 91. 139  Jim MacFarlane (ed.). Essays from the Yorkshire Coalfield (Sheffield, 1979).

1977  123 Collectively, the essays demonstrated the historical depth of the authors’ sense of self. These were men in the prime of their working lives working in a central coalfield at a time when both the NUM and the NCB hailed the enhanced status and good prospects for coal miners. Yet the experiential space that they inhabited was populated by memories of growing up in a time of insecurity, deprivation, and poverty. The ‘bloody awful days’ of the 1920s and 1930s featured prominently even in the account of coalface worker Kevin Hughes, who was several years younger than the other day-­release man.140 In Hughes’s case, the dark view of the interwar period derived from an intergenerational oral tradition rather than per­ sonal experience. Other accounts related childhood memories of large families and hard times, characterized by material want, job insecurity, and also, in some instances, horrific incidents of domestic violence.141 They recalled the gendered division of duties in the family and emphasized the important role that their mother played in instilling values of respectability and a sense of social hierarchy. In his ‘Childhood memories of a Yorkshire miner’, Dennis Stevens, born in 1926, recalled, My mother was the domineering type, obsessed with the idea of ‘bettering ­ourselves’, ‘getting on in life’. She worked endlessly in the home to ensure that we weren’t ‘raggy-­arsed’, hadn’t nits in our hair and never needed free boots and cod liver from the ‘Welfare’, ‘like them buggers on the dole’.142

Attitudes towards the industry were described in more ambivalent terms than by the interviewees from County Durham. ‘Love–­hate relationship’ was the term by which several authors sought to balance strong self-­identification as miners with an emphasis on arduous and ultimately health-­destroying working conditions. Most authors emphasized the all-­consuming nature of work in the industry, the way it shaped social relations and modes of sociability beyond the workplace. A voice like Peter Hill’s, who was a lorry driver, was comparatively rare in express­ ing neither strong affection nor disaffection: ‘I cannot honestly say that I liked my job a lot, not the way I liked farming anyway, but the wages were a lot better and I did have a lot more free time and the extra money was a big help to mother.’143 Some emphasized that they had joined the industry because it was a family trad­ ition: ‘I am a miner, my father was a miner and his father was a miner before him,’ as Alec Wilkinson, born in 1945, opened his account.144 Other life stories, how­ ever, made clear that they had found their way into the industry only after a long itinerary. Michael Moore, for example, had worked as an agricultural labourer, in a steelworks, and in construction before getting a job at a Yorkshire pit. Born in County Mayo in the Republic of Ireland, Moore had lived in Peterborough, 140 MacFarlane, Essays, p. 86. 141  Ibid., pp. 33–6. 142  Ibid., p. 12. 143  Ibid., p. 49. 144  Ibid., p. 63.

124  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Scunthorpe, London, and County Kerry, Ireland, before settling down with his wife in the Doncaster area.145 While identification with the industry was strong in the sample, this was an affiliation by custom or by necessity rather than by choice. Most accounts acknowledged that the present was better than the past. In the memory of coalface worker Henry Kieno, the miners used to stand at the very bottom of society, below farm labourers, dustbin men, and casual workers: they were ‘zero rated’, the ‘dregs of society’.146 Yet few accounts exuded the sense of contentment expressed by Fred Bielby, NUM branch president at Dearne Valley Colliery. Looking back on his working life, he mused, ‘I am happy and content and, in my opinion, if a man is this, it is better than all the money in the world.’147 More common was an ambivalence, a sense that higher living standards and bet­ ter working conditions had been paid for by an erosion of community values. Such nostalgia could be found most strongly among the cohort of younger m ­ iners born in the 1930s and 1940s. Face worker Wilkinson, mentioned above, was a case in point. His account, ‘Dying Communities’, contrasted happy childhood memories characterized by a sense of mutual support and close community cohe­ sion with an individualistic present in which everybody was out for their own gain. Wilkinson did not attribute this transformation to changes in the workplace, but to the slum clearance and rehousing projects of the local council: Then, as if in a flash, the life style to which I had become accustomed came to an end. As the houses were rated as slums the local council decided to pull them down and build new modern houses, at the ‘top of the hill’. The families were moved, two or three at a time, and scattered about their new community like scaff [?] is scattered by the wind. Low valley was dead. The togetherness had gone and our mining community had gone with it. The new environment bred new desires, desires to be better than your new neighbour. The age of the rat race had come to the miners of Darfield. Now it is every miner’s ambition to ensure that his own son does not go to work in the pit, and now that I have a son of my own, I will do my utmost to see that he does not follow in my own footsteps.148

Frank Pearson (born 1935), a coalface worker at North Gawber Colliery, made a similar point, but took a more analytical perspective. To him it was the very pov­ erty that had thrown people into misery which also brought out the best qualities in the community. ‘Let me explain here that the bitterness I feel about the whole system which degraded our forefathers had its positive side. The system produced something very unique and wonderful in human terms, a humour, a warmth, a comradeship, a special relationship, in fact a community.’ In Pearson’s estimation,

145  Ibid., pp. 57–9.

146  Ibid., p. 15.

147  Ibid., p. 76.

148  Ibid., p. 64.

1977  125 too, it was the rehousing projects rather than changes to the industry that posed the real danger. As he explained, For here lies a real danger, lest the community feeling that was born of common hardship be eroded and whittled away by bureaucrats and slick advertisers eager to sell us their version of the new society. Consume and possess, buy such a product and make yourself the envy of the street: one of our cars would be sure to turn the neighbours’ heads. Self, self, self. These ideas are alien to the mining community I have grown up in and loved as ice cubes in a hot oven.149

In expressing concern over the cost of modernization, Wilkinson and Pearson did not stand outside broader trends. They partook of a societal discourse that bemoaned the loss of community values in a materialistic and individualistic age. Their very emphasis on the special values and bonds of close-­knit mining com­ munities demonstrated how much they were aware of broader concerns about the ambiguities of social and economic change. In 1976, American journalist Tom Wolfe had published his influential essay ‘The “Me” Decade’.150 This critique was not of recent origin either. As Raymond Williams has shown, a wistful look on what was being lost in the maelstrom of progress can be traced back to the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century.151 By the 1950s, the allegedly corrosive impact of modernity on community cohesion was a cen­ tral feature running through community studies such as Young and Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London or Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, both pub­ lished in 1957. As we have seen, the NUM also mobilized the trope of ‘community death’ in their protest against the pit closures of the 1960s.152 Importantly, Wilkinson and Pearson linked these broader concerns to their own lived experience. The same perspective was adopted by other writers who situated their memories within broader historical events such as the Great Depression and World War II but took care to prioritize their lived experience. Only when and insofar as historical events impacted on their lives did they receive attention. This owed something to the genre of autobiographical writing to which they had been asked to conform, but was also a reflection of an approach that adult education teachers identified as typical of industrial workers: it was lived experience against which the value or otherwise of abstract concepts and big events was measured.153 Alongside big historical events, the authors used turning 149  Ibid., p. 52. 150  Tom Wolfe, ‘The “Me” Decade and the Third Awakening’, New York magazine, 23 August 1976. 151  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973). 152  See Chapter 1, above. 153  See E. P. Thompson, Education and Experience (Leeds, 1968); Jörg Arnold, ‘ “Once the thirst for knowledge begins to grow, it knows no bounds”: The National Union of Mineworkers, the Campaign for Coal and the politics of education, c. 1979–1984’, in Sara-­Marie Demiriz, Jan Kellershohn, and Anne Otto (eds.), Transformationsversprechen. Zur Geschichte von Bildung und Wissen in Montanregionen (Essen, 2021), pp. 143–63.

126  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization points in their own lives to structure their accounts: moving house, the death of a family member, the first day at work, accidents and disasters. Such a perspective can help to explain a curious absence in all accounts but one—­the nationalization of the coal industry in 1947. Most accounts passed over this event because it did not make much of a difference to their everyday experience, despite the essays being written around the time of the thirtieth anniversary of this event. The strikes of 1972 and 1974 also received less attention than might be expected. Yet where they were covered, as in Robert Roberts’s account, they were regarded as a life-­changing event. Roberts remembered the seven weeks of strike action in 1972 as a consciousness-­changing event. The strike had served to resurrect communal qualities that had become residual: When I am an old man and my grandchildren ask me what are my most vivid recollections of my life, the answer will be ‘The Big Strike’ . . . Before the strike I was an ordinary working miner content with my materialistic existence . . . The strike, and the events and experiences during and after the strike were the spark that kindled a fire in my mind (or soul, as some people would call it) that will never go out. I became aware; I was conscious of my place in society and the position in the social structure of my close family and workmates. It was like being reborn.154

Whereas the collections from Durham and Yorkshire reflected the relevance of the past for conceptions of the self, the documentary Miners (1976) was con­ structed around a different set of oppositions.155 It underlined the tensions between societal conceptions of miners, on the one hand, and self-­images on the other. It also contrasted the sphere of work with the domestic sphere. Produced by the National Coal Board’s film unit and directed by Peter Pickering, the docu­ mentary followed a group of underground workers at Bagworth Colliery in Leicestershire through their day shift: arrival at the colliery; getting changed in the dressing room; descending down the pit; cutting coal; enjoying snap time; ascending from the pit; communal showering; end of shift. There was no narrator. Instead, the unnamed miners themselves reflected on their identity against the backdrop of moving images of their work routine. The male voices were supple­ mented with the voices of their female partners. The women were filmed in a domestic setting, reclining in armchairs, looking after the children, or doing household chores. The women were portrayed in a supportive role, reflecting more on their husbands’ lives than their own. One interviewee indicated that she was in paid employment as well, but this aspect of her life remained unexplored. The documentary thus operated with a strict dichotomy between a masculine

154 MacFarlane, Essays, p. 4.

155  Miners (1976), dir. by Peter Pickering.

1977  127 sphere of work, characterized by dirt, skilled labour, and male sociability, and a feminine sphere of the home, clean, comfortable, but also socially isolating. It painted a socially conservative picture, with the miner as a family-­oriented bread­ winner whose wages allowed for a degree of security and domestic comfort. The second emphasis was on the tension between societal conceptions and miners’ own sense of self. Broader societal images, the miners suggested, were characterized by ignorance about modern mining. They were still very much rooted in a bygone past, picturing miners as ‘underground savages’ who rely on raw muscle power to hew the coal with a pick and shovel; miners as living in iso­ lated villages where all social interaction is dominated by the pit. Modern mining, the interviewees contended, was very different: it required knowledge, training, and skill to operate sophisticated machinery. It was ‘a skilled job nowadays’, as one miner emphasized. And while the miners maintained that the sense of comrade­ ship made the job distinct and egalitarian—‘everybody is the same, down the pit’—they were just as aspirational and family-­centred as other industrial work­ ers, wanting to live in their own home rather than rented accommodation; want­ ing to enjoy domestic comfort and provide for their family. They also no longer lived in isolated occupational communities, but were integrated into society, ‘scattered, here, there and everywhere’, as a miner’s wife put it. In some respects, then, according to the documentary, the modern miner of the 1970s had become distinctly ordinary, although some people had not noticed. As one miner described it, ‘People think you’ve got to be something, I don’t know, superhuman or sub­human, you know, it’s just being an ordinary working chap you know.’ The sense of self articulated in the documentary very much aligned with the NCB’s conception of miners as ‘affluent workers’, invested in the job, in the first instance, as a means to providing for their family. Patrick Russell, senior curator of the British Film Institute’s national archive, has called the documentary a ‘rebranding’ exercise, rather than ‘objective reportage’.156 Russell’s critique not­ withstanding, the documentary offered a window into a sense of identity that the social scientists of the period, firmly locating miners in the category of ‘proletar­ ian traditionalists’, all too frequently overlooked. Rather than privileging one set of identities over the other, historical understanding might be better served by acknowledging the coexistence, and conflicting political valences, of both sets of ideas in late-­1970s Britain. If the NCB’s documentary presented the modern miner as an affluent worker whose work life was sharply demarcated from his domestic life, the two-­part tele­ vi­sion play The Price of Coal depicted a more traditional image. Here, the work experience carried over into the home life. The patriarchal family was situated at the heart of a rich web of community relations. Written by Barry Hines, directed 156  Patrick Russell, ‘Miners’, National Coal Board Collection, Vol. 1: Portrait of a Miner (booklet) (London: n.d.), p. 47.

128  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization by Ken Loach, and produced by Tony Garnett, the two-­part comedy drama was set in the South Yorkshire coalfield. It was broadcast on the BBC over two nights on 29 March and 5 April 1977 to good reviews.157 This was politically engaged film-­making that cast a critical light on Britain’s class structure in the year of the Queen’s silver jubilee. The television drama drew attention to a culture of defer­ ence that helped to sustain persistent social inequalities. Part 1, Meet the People, chronicles the efforts by the local management to prepare the colliery for an offi­ cial visit by the Prince of Wales, which mainly consist of applying generous help­ ings of white paint to the overground facilities. The efforts are met with a mixture of indifference and cynicism by the miners, providing a rich source for slapstick comedy. Character Sid Storey offers a politically informed critique of the waste of colliery resources. In one scene, he confronts the compliant NUM branch official about the union’s collaboration in the charade. In another, he condones his son’s wish to boycott the visit and go fishing instead. Sid’s critique is given added poignancy by the second part, Back to Reality, which sees a shift in tone from comedy to drama. It depicts the horrific conse­ quences of an underground disaster at the colliery in which Sid, alongside six fel­ low miners, is killed. While underground accidents had long been a staple of coal-­mining fiction, this particular incident was modelled on an underground explosion at Houghton Main Colliery in June 1975, in which five miners were killed.158 The official inquiry found that the accident had been caused by firedamp in a development heading, which had been allowed to accumulate due to lack of ventilation and had been ignited by frictional sparking.159 By contrast, the film suggests that part of the explanation lies in the prioritizing of productivity over safety regulations. In so doing, the film-­makers intervened in the contemporary debate on productivity incentive schemes explored above, effectively taking sides with the militants, who argued that the drive for higher production inevitably meant more ‘blood on the coal’. As if to underline the political dimension, the slogan ‘Scargill rules o.k.’ appears on a wall on the colliery premises on the day of the royal visit. On an intertextual level, Price of Coal engaged with the film-­ makers’ previous collaboration, the acclaimed feature film Kes (1969). In contrast to this bleak drama of alienation and blunted ambition, Price of Coal offered a more sympathetic depiction of social relations in a mining community. While chronicling the horrors of a pit disaster in realist style, the film also finds comfort in the mutual help and social cohesion that show themselves especially in times of adversity. 157  Michael Church, ‘Mining a rich seam’, The Times, 30 March 1977; W.  Stephen Gilbert, ‘The Week in View’, The Observer, 27 March 1977, 3 April 1977. 158  On the trope of ‘blood on the coal’, Jörg Arnold, ‘ “The Death of Sympathy”. Coal Mining, Workplace Hazards, and the Politics of Risk in Britain, ca. 1970–1990’, HSR 41/1 (2016), pp. 91–110. 159  Health and Safety Executive, Report on Explosion at Houghton Main Colliery Yorkshire (London, 1976), p. 22.

1977  129

Conclusion The Mining Festival of Britain was designed to celebrate the quality of life in the coalfields and showcase the modernity of the industry thirty years after na­tion­al­ iza­tion. A secure and prosperous future had opened up before the miners, under­ pinned by planning and cooperation. The dark past, meanwhile, had been left behind; it had no bearing on the present, except as heritage. While the Coal Board and the moderate wing of the NUM were busy projecting an image of the miner as a ‘modern’ worker not unlike any factory operative, the militant areas harked back to a historical reference point to keep alive a different tradition. On 22 May 1976, the Yorkshire and Derbyshire Areas of the NUM marked the fiftieth ­anniversary of the 1926 General Strike with a rally and meeting at City Hall in Sheffield. Michael Foot MP and former general secretary Will Paynter delivered the speeches, while Arthur Scargill acted as chairman and Peter Heathfield, the Derbyshire general secretary, proposed the vote of thanks. As the programme booklet explained, 1926 was a moment of trauma, betrayal, and tragedy for the miners. But lessons had been learnt from the past; the victories of 1972 and 1974 had avenged the earlier defeat. Struggle, rather than acquiescence or col­lab­or­ ation, was the key to a prosperous future, or so the booklet suggested. Around the year 1977 the coal industry’s future seemed assured. At the very time that de-­industrialization entered the vocabulary of political debate, coal’s prospects looked better than had seemed possible only a decade before. Gone also were the days when miners had been pitied for their sad fate; instead, the miners’ collective industrial muscle inspired awe and fear. The miners’ exalted position expanded their horizons of expectations. For some, the door had been opened towards a future in which the miner would enjoy high status, material comfort, and contented domesticity. For others, the miner had been propelled into a van­ guard position from which he would be able to transform the very structures of the post-­war order. Meanwhile, beneath an official cross-­party commitment to Plan for Coal, policymakers inside the Conservative Party came to identify the coal industry, and single out the coal miner, as a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with Britain since the war. It was during Margaret Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister that these multiple tensions could no longer be contained, as the next chapter will demonstrate.

4

1981 Introduction At the NUM annual conference in July 1981 Joe Gormley used his final address as national president to reflect on the past as well as look towards the future. Reviewing developments over the past ten years, he declared: I must admit that we have lifted the status of the miners in a fantastic way during that period. Ten years ago nobody wanted to know us. Now everybody seems to want to be related to a miner.1

There was a self-­aggrandizing dimension to Gormley’s casting of recent history as a success story. His critics in the NUM, for one, would claim that any advance that had been achieved in the 1970s was despite Gormley rather than because of him. Others would argue that the renaissance in the fortunes of coal was due to the confluence of global political and economic factors rather than to domestic pressures. Yet, while there was room for disagreement over causation, few would have called into question Gormley’s underlying point that in 1981 the British miner enjoyed higher status, material wellbeing, and political influence than he had ten years previously. According to figures by the Department of Employment, miners earned 30 per cent more than workers in other industries.2 What was more, their collective clout appeared to shield them from the worst consequences of a deep economic recession that, in the estimation of Eric Hobsbawm, amounted to nothing less than an ‘industrial holocaust’ for British manufacturing industry.3 ‘And while unemployment soars as the Tories destroy Britain’s manufacturing industry base, there are queues for jobs at the pits,’ as an editorial in The Miner put it.4 In February 1981, even the Thatcher government ‘bowed before the miners’, as the sociologist Vic Allen put it in a piece suggestively titled ‘The Miners on

1 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1981 (London, 1981), p. 318. 2  TNA PREM 19/540, ‘Coal Industry: Background brief ’, 6 July 1981. See also Table 6b, Appendix. These figures are aggregated averages. For internal wage differentiation among men on colliery books, see Table 7. 3  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London, 1994), p. 304. 4  The Miner, August 1980.

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0005

1981  131 the Move’.5 Faced with the threat of strike action, the government performed a hasty U-­turn and withdrew a radical restructuring programme for the industry. Intertwined with a perception of the miners’ strength was a sense of crisis that extended far beyond the coal industry.6 Both sides in the political debate judged that the miners were a crucial force in deciding the outcome of the critical juncture that Britain found itself in in the early 1980s. As the New Left economist Michael Barratt Brown wrote in a personal letter to Arthur Scargill, who was campaigning to succeed Gormley as president: I guess that we have 18 months before the crunch comes and we have either a nuclear war or fascism, or a right-­wing coalition. There is only one chance of avoiding all these terrifying alternatives and that is for the Labour Movement in Britain . . . to establish its credibility as the leading force in the nation. If you don’t start us off in this direction, Arthur, I don’t know anyone who can.7

Meanwhile, inside the first Thatcher government fear of the miners was such that John Hoskyns, head of the Policy Unit, asked in a policy paper, ‘To what extent has NUM power effectively outflanked all the measures we can take to reduce it?’8 This chapter proceeds in four stages. First, it situates the February 1981 stand-­ off between the miners and the government in the context of the political debate on the future of the coal industry. Second, it investigates the nature of the miners’ power as it was understood by contemporaries. What were its foundations? What was its significance? How should it be exercised? It looks, third, at competing understandings of the past that informed different perceptions of the miners’ position in society. Finally, the chapter considers how ordinary miners responded to the broader crisis. It inquires about the futures they charted for themselves in this highly volatile climate.

I  The Future of Coal The first Thatcher Cabinet of 1979–81 was adamant that the coal industry was essential to the future of the UK. In his opening statement to the second reading of the Coal Industry Bill on 17 June 1980, Secretary State for Energy David Howell declared that ‘coal’s prospects have never been better’. The bill, he emphasized, was an ‘expression of the Government’s confidence in the future of coal and 5  Vic Allen, ‘The Miners on the Move’, Marxism Today (February 1982), pp. 17–21, here p. 17. 6  Andy Beckett, Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980–82 made modern Britain (London, 2015); Jim Tomlinson, ‘Deindustrialisation and “Thatcherism”: moral economy and unintended consequences’, CBH 35/4 (2021), pp. 620–42. 7  NUM Archives, Barnsley, Northern College, part II, Barratt Brown to Scargill, 12 August 1980. 8  TNA PREM 19/540, Policy Unit, ‘The NCB/NUM problem’, 22 May 1981.

132  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization in those, both management and men, who work in the coal industry’.9 Coal, Howell went on to underline, was central to government energy policy, alongside conservation and nuclear energy. The government stood behind Plan for Coal.10 The Secretary of State contrasted coal’s bright future with a dark past: It must be recognised that in the past there was undoubtedly a feeling that the coal industry was no more than a survival, doomed to irreversible decline and early extinction. This view is utter rubbish.

It was precisely because the coal industry was central to the future energy demands of the UK, and because the investment programme under Plan for Coal was starting to show results, that the government had decided to phase out public support progressively over a period of four years. Public investment would continue, but operational grants would cease from 1983/4 onwards, the Coal Industry Bill laid down.11 David Owen, the Labour Party’s shadow secretary, welcomed aspects of the Coal Industry Bill but condemned the prioritization of short-­term financial ­viability over the long-­term strategic goal of self-­sufficiency in energy. The Opposition’s central charge was that the broader economic context had worsened since the financial targets were agreed the previous year.12 Opposition speakers also noted that the bill represented a fundamental shift in the framework that politics had set for the industry. Whereas Plan for Coal had emphasized output targets, the new bill prioritized financial targets.13 In voicing concern over the provisions of the bill, Labour Party MPs were joined by speakers from the Liberal Party and, indeed, several Conservative backbench MPs.14 Across the political divide, the coal industry was presented as a success story; its fortunes contrasted favourably with much of British manufacturing industry—‘The industry is the one incontrovertible basis for optimism about the country’s future,’ as Sir Anthony Meyer, the Conservative MP for West Flintshire put it.15 Responding to the debate for the government, the Undersecretary of State, John Moore, contrasted what he considered the Opposition’s ‘timidity’ with the government’s vision of a bright future: There is no will, no imagination and no faith on the Opposition Benches when it comes to recognising the potential of our great coal industry. In the Bill the

9  Hansard HC Sitting of 17 June 1980, cols 1377–87, here col. 1377. 10  Conservative Research Department, Politics Today, Vol. 12: Energy (London, 1980), pp. 206–8. 11  Hansard HC Sitting of 17 June 1980, cols 1377–87. 12  Ibid., col. 1387f. 13  Ibid., col. 1451. 14  See the speech by Patrick McNair-­Wilson (New Forest) as one notable example. Hansard HC Sitting of 17 June 1980, cols 1393–7. 15  Hansard HC Sitting of 17 June 1980, col. 1436.

1981  133 Government see a different future. They see a new industry, with great assets, great opportunities, expanding markets and . . . the security that success for coal will give to our miners and to our country.16

The Coal Board, too, considered the financial targets difficult to meet, but welcomed the government’s continued commitment to Plan for Coal.17 The NUM did not oppose the principle of financial viability embodied in the Coal Industry Bill but was suspicious of the government’s motives in imposing a timetable. In a meeting with the National Coal Board on 18 June 1980, the NEC expressed the view that the government’s ostentatious support for Plan for Coal served to mask the ambition to push through a ‘programme of entrenchment similar to that of the 1960s’. In particular, the financial constraints imposed on the industry would result in the Coal Board ‘seeking the union’s help to secure the closure of a great many pits’.18 In a meeting with the Secretary of State for Energy on 27 June, the NEC repeated their concerns about the timetable, which they deemed to endanger the long-­term future of the industry for the sake of short-­term benefits.19 The annual conference report of the same year offered a balanced appraisal. While the report welcomed the continuation of the investment programme, it reiterated opposition to the timing for the phasing out of operational grants, rather than the principle. The report approved of the extension of social grants, but voiced concern that the provisions might be used to facilitate ‘the premature closure of un­eco­nom­ic collieries’.20 In his presidential address, Gormley described the bill’s financial target as ‘physically impossible’ and urged the delegates to situate the coal industry within the broader picture of government economic policy and its effects.21 Indeed, it was less government policy on coal that was causing alarm to the NUM and the NCB but more the impact of the government’s broader economic policy, which was believed to deepen the global recession of the early 1980s.22 In some respects the British coal industry in the early 1980s was a victim of its own success. At the very moment that the investment provided for under Plan for Coal was starting to pay off, when productivity in the industry surged and output targets were superseded, markets were falling away. The economic recession of 1979–81 had hit manufacturing industry particularly hard, depressing demand 16  Ibid., col. 1472. 17 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1980 (London, 1980), Report of Coal Industry Tripartite Meeting, 23 April 1980, pp. 129ff. 18  Ibid., Minutes of Special Meeting of the N.E.C. with representatives of the NCB, 18 June 1980, pp. 165–80. 19  Ibid., Minutes of Meeting with Secretary of State for Energy, 27 June 1980, pp. 181–4. 20 NUM, Annual Report 1981, p. 236f. 21  Ibid., p. 346. 22 Modern scholarship tends to agree with this reading of events. See Jim Tomlinson, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Macroeconomic Adventurism, 1979–1981, and its Political Consequences’, British Politics 2/1 (April, 2007), pp. 3–19.

134  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization for energy in the industrial market and in the electricity market. In the market for coking coal, the crisis had preceded the advent of the Conservative government and was particularly acute. With the near collapse of the UK steel industry, the second most important market for coal, and the most profitable one, had become severely depressed. The South Wales coalfield was hit particularly hard by the steel crisis. An additional problem was the surge in the value of sterling, which made coal imports cheaper and exports of British coal much more difficult to achieve. It was within the context of the economic recession that the government’s financial objectives for the coal industry turned into a major threat to the survival not just of individual collieries but of entire coalfields, in particular the peripheral coalfields of South Wales, Scotland, and Durham. Faced with government in­transi­gence to relax the financial targets, and unable to raise prices further for fear of loss of market share, the National Coal Board saw no other solution than to reduce overall output by accelerating the closure of ‘loss-­making’ collieries. For the government, this was very much the policy which they had wanted to see the Coal Board adopt all along.23 An economic analysis produced by the Labour Research Department highlighted the underlying problem between long-­term expansion and short-­term market contraction: The increased output, necessary if Britain is to achieve the targets set in Plan for Coal, cannot be matched with the reduced demand of recession-­hit Britain. Economic expansion is essential for the coal industry as for the rest of the economy.24

By the summer of 1980, the NUM had become convinced that the government’s professions of faith in the industry were not to be trusted, and that government policy posed a fundamental threat to the future of the industry and the people working in it. The NUM responded to this challenge by seeking an alliance with the industrial workers in the rail and steel industries. They also used the channels of the tripartite framework to close ranks with the management of the Coal Board to press upon the government the need for a change in policy. In the autumn of 1980, the NUM launched a major publicity campaign, both among miners and the broader labour movement, by issuing a special issue of The Miner and producing the pamphlet The Miners and the Battle for Britain.25 As the title of the booklet, of which more than 100,000 copies were produced, made clear, the NUM 23  TNA PREM 19/539, Secretary of State for Energy to PM, 27 January 1981: ‘I agree with the Board that substantial closures of uneconomic capacity are needed . . . It has taken the Board themselves some time to realise the need to accelerate closures, and the pressure of the financial strategy we set for them in 1979 has played a big part in bringing them to do so.’ 24  ‘Pit Prospects’, in Labour Research (June 1981), pp. 136ff. 25 NUM, The Miners and the Battle for Britain (London [1980]); see also NUM, Annual Report 1980, N.E.C.  meeting of 11 September 1980, minute 7, p. 590; N.E.C.  meeting of 9 October 1980, minute 18, p. 626; Economic sub-­committee, meeting of 5 November 1980, pp. 669ff.

1981  135 took care to situate the coal industry in the context of the government’s overall economic policy.26 For the duration of the campaign, the NUM managed to put aside factionalism and speak as one National Union of Mineworkers. The pub­li­ city campaign served a dual purpose: It sought to impress upon miners the ser­ ious­ness of the threat facing the industry by disowning the belief that miners were a ‘special case’. The coal industry may have escaped the worst consequences of the recession so far, but this was a temporary reprieve only, the NUM argued: ‘There are no “special cases” under these Tories.’ Second, they framed the conflict in national terms, positioning the miners as the guardians of the national interest against a Conservative group interest; common sense against narrow doctrine. A foreword signed jointly by the NUM’s president, vice-­president, and national secretary gave vivid expression to this belief of the miners to be legitimized to speak on behalf of the whole nation: The country’s miners . . . are in the frontline trenches of the British economy in good times and in bad  .  .  .  Therefore, we cannot remain silent while the Government of Tory extremists destroys the industrial fabric of our country. Naturally, we are arguing for the interest of our own industry and our own members – that’s our job. But we are firmly convinced that the interests of the miners and all the working people of Great Britain are one and the same. History – and especially recent history – is on our side in this.27

In doing so, the NUM identified government policy, rather than the Coal Board, as the real problem. At the same time they positioned miners as both special and ordinary: miners were special insofar as they were better organized and more powerful than other sections of the labour movement; they were ordinary because they were of the working class, just as any other worker in Britain. The situation came to a head in the winter of 1980/1. At a joint consultative meeting on 10 February, the NCB chairman Derek Ezra, under pressure from the NUM, the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS), and the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM), revealed that a four-­point action plan for the coal industry entailed the taking out of 10 million tonnes’ capacity per annum ‘for the foreseeable future’, resulting in the closure of twenty to fifty collieries ‘over a period of years’ in order to  bring supply into balance with demand.28 At that meeting, Ezra stayed

26  See also NUM, Annual Report 1980, N.E.C.  meeting 11 September 1980, minute 7: ‘That the Union mount an urgent campaign at all levels in order to inform the membership of the detrimental effects, results and harm of Government policies and in particular the attacks on nationalised industries.’ 27 NUM, Battle for Britain, foreword. 28 NUM, Annual Report 1981, Note of a Meeting between the NCB and the NECs of the NUM, NACODS and BACM, 10 February 1981, pp. 38–53.

136  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization silent on the employment implications of the Coal Board’s closure programme, despite the union’s insistence that it was jobs that they were concerned about.29 However, at a briefing of the Prime Minister at the end of January, the Coal Board’s chairman had spelled out the dimension of what was proposed: 40,000–50,000 jobs were at stake, while closures would be concentrated in Scotland, Wales, and the North-­East.30 The NUM, alongside the two other unions, objected strongly to the closure element of the plan. They were also unanimous in their judgement that the government, rather than the Coal Board, was to blame. As Gormley expressed it, ‘It was monstrous that the Board had been forced by government policy to put forward their plan, when British coal had the lowest production costs of any in Europe.’ At their meeting on 12 February, the NEC unanimously agreed to oppose the closures, to press for an urgent meeting with the government, and to prepare for a national ballot on industrial action.31 Meanwhile, the Left areas had agreed to work for an unofficial stoppage from 23 February. By Wednesday, 18 February, the Welsh, Scottish, and Kent coalfields were on strike, with the Yorkshire Area due to join by the end of the week.32 When the Secretary of State declared at the meeting on 18 February that the government were prepared to reconsider the financial framework for the coal industry, Ezra withdrew the closure plan.33 The following day, the NEC agreed to ‘accept the report of the meeting with the Minister of Energy as a victory for the N.U.M.  and common sense’. It was decided to call off the national ballot and instruct the striking miners to return to work.34 The sudden change of policy was seen by the media as a major defeat for the government and as a humiliation suffered at the hands of the miners.35 It came only a few months after the Prime Minister had famously declared, at the Conservative Party conference, that ‘the lady’s not for turning’.36 In their report to the NUM annual conference, the Miners’ Parliamentary Group noted gleefully, ‘this Government can never be quite the same again – the Iron Lady of the past was proved in reality no more than a Paper Doll’.37 Inside the government, too, the volte-­face was regarded as a major setback, with ramifications extending beyond the field of energy policy. In the view of Hoskyns, it exposed a lack of 29  Ibid., p. 40. 30  TNA PREM 19/539, T. P. Lankester to Julian West, Dept. of Energy, 29 January 1981. 31 NUM, Annual Report 1981, Minutes of Meeting of N.E.C., 12 February 1981, pp. 33ff. 32 NUM Archives, Barnsley, Pit Closures 1981, A.  Scargill, ‘Pit closures – National Dispute – February 1981 – Record of Events’, 14 April 1981. 33 NUM, Annual Report 1981, Coal Industry Tripartite Group, minutes of meeting held on 18 February 1981, pp. 71–3. 34 NUM, Annual Report 1981, N.E.C. minutes, 19 February 1981, p. 70. 35  TNA PREM 19/539, B. Ingham, ‘Lobby this morning – Coal’, 19 Feb. 1981; B. Ingham to PM, 17 February 1981. 36  Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Party Conference’, 10 October 1980, https://www. margaretthatcher.org/document/119958. 37 NUM, Annual Report 1981, p. 303.

1981  137 strategic thinking at the heart of government. As he put it in a memorandum to the Prime Minister on ‘lessons of the NUM strike threat’, 1. It was clear last July that our financial strategy for coal had to be abandoned; modified; or pushed through against NUM resistance. We argued then that we had to devise a strategy to achieve our objectives. D/Energy seem to have left this to the NCB. 2. Even before the Election, it was clear to anyone that the NUM posed a serious threat to this Government: we always needed a strategy to cope with them . . . 3. Meanwhile the NUM militants clearly did have a strategy. They have now won a major battle to relax financial discipline, weaken the Government’s authority, assert their power and limit future competition from imports.38

As the confidential Prime Minister’s Office files make clear, the government had changed course abruptly on 13 February 1981. While the Department of Energy was presenting the unfolding crisis in terms that the Prime Minister’s private secretary described as ‘relaxed’, press secretary Bernard Ingham raised the alarm: in a memorandum headlined ‘Miners’, he warned that there was a tendency in government ‘to underplay the seriousness of the threat’. He also pointed out that in resisting closures the miners were fighting for a cause that had the potential to enlist the support of the general public: Defending one’s livelihood has a certain appeal not merely to those directly concerned but also to the public; it proves excellent cover for those like Scargill who have ulterior motives – in his case, the smashing, among other things, of the Employment Act’s picketing provisions.39

Thatcher was impressed with Ingham’s intervention, noting in a handwritten comment that she ‘rather agreed with Bernard’s point’ and wanted to see the situation defused as quickly as possible.40 The minutes of a meeting between the Prime Minister, the Secretaries of State for Energy and for Employment, and other senior officials recorded that ‘it was essential to avert a national coal strike’.41 In further discussions on 20 February, Thatcher noted that ‘the Government, and the NCB would have to go along, to a large extent, with whatever Mr. Gormley proposed in order to ensure that the militants did not regain their ascendancy’.42

38  TNA PREM 19/540, John Hoskyns to Prime Minister, ‘Lessons of the NUM strike threat’, 27 March 1981. 39  TNA PREM 19/539, B. Ingham, ‘Miners’, 13 February 1981. See also Bernard Ingham, Kill the Messenger (London, 1991), p. 233. 40  TNA PREM 19/539, Coal Industry Review, 13 February 1981. 41  Ibid., Tim Lankester to Dept. of Energy, 18 February 1981. 42  TNA PREM 19/539, 20 February 1981.

138  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Clearly, the government were convinced that they could not win a national stoppage in the coal industry at this point, so decided to give in to the miners in order salvage their overall economic strategy, and the survival of the government itself. At the same time, they redoubled their efforts to search for ways and means to prevent a repeat of the events of February 1981. The NUM success also gave rise to the suspicion, nurtured by the civil service, that the National Coal Board had deliberately engineered the crisis to be released from a policy which they had adopted reluctantly only after intense government pressure. As the senior civil servant Peter Le Cheminant wrote in an unusual minute, ‘Indeed if – which I don’t believe for a moment – the whole thing had been stage-­managed by the NCB, Machiavelli would have been proud of them!’43 In the NUM, unity between the warring factions proved temporary only. It was lost the moment that the government withdrew the closure threat. The official minutes for the NEC meeting of 19 February merely noted ‘very lengthy and detailed discussion . . . where some reservations were expressed’.44 The vote to suspend the strike action was taken by a majority of fifteen to eight. The Left areas, however, had agreed at an informal meeting on 11 February to work for an un­offi­ cial strike from 23 February regardless of the NEC’s decision. ‘We felt it imperative that unofficial action be taken in this way in order to circumvent any attempted manoeuvre by the right wing and Gormley,’ as Scargill commented in a retrospective note for the record.45 Although the unofficial action failed to develop momentum, the episode underlined the level of mutual distrust at the top of the NUM. While the official voice of the NUM, The Miner, declared the withdrawal of the closure list a major victory, the Left argued that the NEC had called off the stoppage too early and thereby failed to press the miners’ advantage.46 In the formulation of Mick McGahey, the government had not been defeated but merely ‘side-­stepped that particular battle’.47 In the note for the record mentioned above, Scargill averred that the events of February 1981 represented a ‘qualified victory’ at best but might also turn out to be a ‘monumental “sell-­out” ’. He added, ‘I am absolutely convinced that, had the South Wales area not taken action when they did but waited until the following weekend, we would have had a national strike of enormous proportions, and possibly one that would have succeeded in getting rid of this Tory Government once and for all.’48 As the quote indicates, the events of February 1981 also exposed fissures inside the Left itself, in particular between the traditional militant coalfields of South Wales, Scotland, and Kent on the one side, and Yorkshire on the other. Scargill himself 43  Ibid., Le Cheminant, ‘Coal’. 44 NUM, Annual Report 1981, p. 70. 45  NUM Archives, Barnsley, Pit Closures 1981, Arthur Scargill, ‘Pit Closures – National Dispute – February 1981 – Record of Events’, 14 April 1981, p. 3. 46  ‘A Victory for Common Sense!’, The Miner, special issue, February 1981. 47 NUMSA, Minute of Annual Conference, 17–19 June 1981, pp. 623–8, here p. 624. 48  NUM Archives, Barnsley, Pit Closures 1981, Scargill, ‘Pit Closures’, p. 11.

1981  139 had come under pressure for hesitating to bring out the Yorkshire coalfield on strike immediately. If ‘February 1981’ represented a missed opportunity for the Left, the lessons that they drew was that the miners, if led decisively, were in­vin­ cible and that the most effective weapon in their armoury was the strike weapon. Whereas the moderates emphasized what had been achieved in high-­level tripartite talks, the Left stressed the crucial contribution of unsanctioned direct action to the miners’ ‘victory’. The differences notwithstanding, both factions were agreed that it was the miners’ power that had forced a change of policy on the government, rather than any new appreciation of underlying economic trends. It was the nature of this power that also came to preoccupy the government.

II  The Nature of the Miners’ Power On 31 July 1981, three weeks after Gormley had self-­confidently spoken about the miners’ ‘fantastic’ status, the Prime Minister received a report on ‘The NCB/NUM problem’.49 The report was part of a concerted effort to learn from the events of February 1981. It followed on from an observation by Hoskyns that the government’s inconsistent policy on the coal industry revealed a lack of problem comprehension.50 In order to remedy the situation, the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) was asked on 8 June to produce a paper that would define ‘the fundamental nature of the problem’, ‘to correct’ a perceived imbalance of power, and to study the implications for the government’s overall policy.51 Although ostensibly an exercise in strategic thinking, the CPRS study, which was completed by the end of July, operated on two key assumptions that were not, by themselves, subjected to any critical scrutiny. The first was that the miners’ power was real; the second that such power posed a threat to the government. Thus, the relationship between government and miners was conceptualized in adversarial terms. At no point did the study seriously contemplate harnessing the miners’ power to the common cause of a successful coal industry. For the Central Policy Review Staff, the NUM’s power was grounded in ma­ter­ ial as well as psychological conditions. On one level, it was rooted in the structure of the British economy and the role of coal in electricity generation. Coal-­fired power stations supplied 75 per cent of the nation’s electricity needs. Because of import restrictions, the NUM enjoyed ‘an effective monopoly of supply’ and hence the power of ‘slow strangulation of the economy’.52 Economic structures were a necessary, but not a sufficient, explanation for the miners’ power. Crucial were broader structures of feeling which created bonds of solidarity between 49  TNA PREM 19/541, CPRS Study of the NCB/NUM problem, 31 July 1981. 50  TNA PREM 19/541, Policy Unit, ‘Lessons of the NUM Strike Threat’, 27 March 1981. 51  TNA PREM 19/541, CPRS Study, p. 2. 52  Ibid., p. 3.

140  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization individual miners, the NUM, and other trade unions, and between mineworkers and the general public. The report noted ‘unique community solidarity’, a ‘particular claim on the solidarity of other trade unions’, and a ‘unique degree of public sympathy’.53 All of those bonds, the CPRS believed, had deep historical roots. In addition, it was the recent past, the successful use of power in 1972, 1974 and 1981, which had boosted the miners’ self-­confidence. If the CPRS identified a convergence of material and psychological factors as the root cause for the miners’ strength, they held that this power was used not in the national interest but to further narrow group interests: to obtain high wage settlements for the mineworkers and to sustain high levels of public funding for the industry. For the authors of the study, such use of power was not just detrimental to the coal industry but posed a threat to government policy and the very authority of elected government itself. Not only did the miners act as pacesetters for other groups of organized workers; ‘If joined to other forms of extra-­ parliamentary opposition, NUM power could be used to subvert government authority on a wider front,’ the study warned.54 While the authors assumed that the self-­confidence born out of the successful use of power made the miners especially dangerous—‘how to undermine the buoyant confidence of the NUM so that they stop feeling invincible’, as a despairing J. R. Ibbs asked on 18 May 1981— they considered that the very success might potentially be a constraining influence:55 ‘The miners’ high relative wage position and new-­found affluence now probably limit their aspiration.’56 In so doing, the CPRS shared in the assumption, also widely held on the Left, that material wellbeing acted as a constraint on ‘traditional’ solidarity. How then was the miners’ power to be reduced or, to use the term employed by the CPRS, ‘rebalanced’?57 The study distinguished between the short term and the medium term. It was pessimistic about the next few years. A covering note by Ibbs struck a note of resignation by conceding that ‘unfortunately we have been unable to find any radical new solution’.58 Yet paragraph 55 sketched a scenario for dealing with the problem in the long run. The key lay in delaying open confrontation until such time as the movement of underlying factors had substantially weakened the miners’ strength. As the study put it, We therefore consider it most unlikely that the Government can in the next few years rely on clearly ‘winning’ a confrontation with the miners. In those circumstances, the aim in 1981 and 1982 must be to influence the miners’ attitudes and demands . . . towards a moderate settlement. The cumulative effect of various

53  Ibid., p. 3. 54  Ibid., p. 4. 55  TNA PREM 19/540, Ibbs to Lankester, NCB Finances, 18 May 1981. 56  TNA PREM 19/541, CPRS Study, p. 3. 57  Ibid., p. 4. 58  TNA PREM 19/541, J. R. Ibbs to Prime Minister, ‘NCB/NUM Problem’, cover note, 31 July 1981.

1981  141 actions . . . should eventually bring some movement in the balance in the Government’s favour.59

In their consideration of short-­term policy options, the study distinguished two types: first, structural measures designed to diversify the supply of energy and hence to ‘break NUM monopoly power’, among them lifting the restrictions for coal imports and increasing the share of nuclear energy; second, psychological initiatives aimed at weakening the sense of unity amongst miners and undermining the sympathy they enjoyed among the general public. It was remarkable that the study drew on little empirical research to elucidate who the miners were and what their aspirations were. The authors’ understanding of mining communities operated with the traditional sociological model of the ‘isolated mass’,60 but acknowledged that the model might no longer be adequate to capture the social reality of the early 1980s: Part of the NUM’s strength in industrial dispute rests on the isolation of many members in small communities wholly dependent on the mining industry. The geographical distribution of the industry is changing, and it may be that over time this will reduce the sense of community. The increasing prosperity of the miners, and their exposure to communication, travel and other influences, should also help to weaken their isolation.61

Elsewhere the study acknowledged that ‘evidence on grass-­roots feeling is anecdotal’. It recommended that the government commission public opinion research to get a clearer picture of the miners’ aspirations. Judging by the pattern of pithead ballots, the study posited that miners’ main concerns were pay and job se­cur­ity, with little appetite to go on strike over ‘massive wage increases’. The study further suggested that the government work on public opinion to undermine the affection that many people felt towards the miners. As co-­author Hoskyns had acknowledged in an earlier memorandum, ‘The fact remains that miners are seen to be (and most people with any direct contact would say are) the “salt of the earth”.’62 The caveat in parenthesis was significant here, for it suggested two things: in the minds of senior government advisers, this was more than a question of skilful public relations. The miners were indeed a formidable op­pon­ ent; they were not just portrayed as such. Second, the parenthesis also indicated that government strategy was devised by advisers who possessed little direct 59  TNA PREM 19/541, CPRS Study, p. 16. 60  On the ‘isolated mass’ thesis, developed by Kerr and Siegel in the 1950s to explain the high propensity for strike action in mining, dock labour, and seafaring, see M. Bulmer, ‘Sociological Models of the Mining Community’, Sociological Review 23/1975, pp. 61–92, here pp. 67–72. 61  TNA PREM 19/541, CPRS Study, p. 10. 62  TNA PREM 19/540, Policy Unit, ‘The NCB/NUM problem’, p. 4.

142  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization knowledge of either the coal industry or the people working in it. Like Hoskyns, Ingham, whose ‘romantic’ view of miners was formed by memories of his maternal grandmother,63 expressed a sense of awe, of admiration mixed with fear. As he put it in his influential memorandum of 13 February 1981, discussed above, I am far from convinced that the miners are as corruptible as the next man and that better redundancy terms could do the trick. In some ways they are more resistant to blandishments because they are the most cohesive industrial force in Britain who are prepared to defend the basis of their livelihoods – i.e. pits.64

Looking further ahead, the study posed the question of whether running down the coal industry was a means to resolving the problem of NUM power. While acknowledging that coal was ‘a valuable national asset’, a ‘policy of retrenchment’, as it was called, was one option available to the government: ‘Aimed at reducing the cash burden and the power of the coal industry by progressively withdrawing support; but with the hope of creating conditions in which future expansion becomes economic.’ In the end, the study rejected such a strategy as ‘high-­risk’, as it was certain to meet with determined resistance by the NUM. In another concession to the miners’ power, the option of retrenchment was thus ruled out on political, rather than economic, grounds. Instead, the CPRS opted for the option of ‘continued modernisation including substantial investment conditional on active cooperation by miners’. Such a strategy carried less risk of confrontation but would ‘require skilful management’. It was only here, twenty-­three pages into the report, that the authors hinted at a less confrontational approach to the industry and its problems, but characteristically emphasized that this was to be achieved by a ‘credible chairman and management’. Earlier in the report the study had emphasized how much importance they placed on bringing in a new chairman. In focusing on the senior management structure, the authors revealed their underlying belief that it was the quality of management, rather than the workers themselves, which made all the difference. The study explicitly held up the ex­ample of Lord Robens in the 1960s as a model (while preferring an industrialist to a politician), thus offering a return to the past as a way to the future—­but this was a decade that the NUM were determined not to revisit. Just like the government, the NUM believed that the miners wielded real power. Yet, in contrast to the government, the Union’s leaders were uncertain and divided about the nature, purpose, and effect of this power. Ever since the successful strikes of 1972 and 1974, the moderates had warned against the excessive threat of strike action lest the NUM be seen as an agent that interfered with elected government. The miners’ industrial muscle must be used for industrial 63 Ingham, Kill the Messenger, pp. 93, 13. 64  TNA PREM 19/539, B. Ingham, ‘Miners’, 13 February 1981.

1981  143 ends only, not for syndicalist purposes. In his memoirs, published in early 1982, Gormley revisited the recent past of 1974 in order to, as he saw it, put the record straight. In 1974, the miners did not bring down the government of Edward Heath. Nor had that ever been the intention of the strike, which was an industrial, not a political, conflict.65 The strike, Gormley claimed, could have been avoided had it not been for the meddling of politicians—­and here Gormley singled out the leader of the Opposition, Harold Wilson, for special opprobrium—­in the back-­ door negotiations then going on between the NUM and the Prime Minister.66 The memoirs underlined a message that Gormley had been sending out with increasing urgency since the change of government in May 1979. If the miners were to wield their power for the political purpose of defeating the Conservative government in an industrial conflict, the backlash would be ter­ rible. Such a use of power, Gormley warned, far from ushering in an era of socialism, could result in the establishment of a fascist regime. It would, in any case, see the rights of trade unions severely curtailed.67 As Gormley put it in an interview with Brian James of the Daily Mail on 19 February 1981, This is the danger as I see it. That we start getting carried away with the idea we can use our industrial strength to change Governments. But what we’ll get changed is the constitution . . . and the role and place of our trade union movement.68

The Left, for their part, believed that the potential power of the miners was thwarted by the outdated constitution of the NUM, in which small areas were overrepresented on the NEC, and used their vote to frustrate the will of the majority. As Scargill, who had been made the Left’s unity candidate for the presidential elections in 1981, declared in his election pamphlet Miners in the 1980s, ‘That which has been achieved has come about because of massive pressure from the rank and file compelling the leadership to take positive decisions.’69 The ­miners’ power was to be actualized not through back-­door diplomacy but through industrial action and the mass mobilization of the wider trade union movement. The notion of the ‘rank and file’ was crucial in the Left’s conceptualization of the miners’ power. While ‘rank and file’ was sometimes used as a synonym for ‘or­din­ ary members’, they articulated their collective will not through the constitutional route of the pithead ballot but through direct action. In that respect, the ‘rank and file’ did not comprise all members of the National Union of Mineworkers, but their activist vanguard: those who attended branch meetings, were willing to put 65 Gormley, Battered Cherub, pp. 144, 196. 66  Ibid., pp. 134ff. 67  Ibid., p. 197. 68  Joe Gormley talks to Brian James, ‘The Miners and Maggie: Were they both being set up?’, Daily Mail, 19 February 1981. See also TNA PREM 19/540, Policy Unit, ‘Lessons of the NUM strike threat’, 27 March 1981, Annex A. 69  Arthur Scargill, Miners in the Eighties (Barnsley [1981]), p. 10.

144  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization themselves forward for election, and were prepared to wield the strike weapon irrespective of sanctions or instructions from the official leadership. As Scargill declared in a speech in February 1981, ‘Areas will not be constitutionalised out of action. And I give due warning from this platform, that, ballot or no ballot, if pits are closed we go on strike to defend our jobs.’70 The cause in the name of which the Left campaigned was the ‘defence of the industry’, which was interpreted to mean, in the first instance, a defence of ‘pits and jobs’. While there was broad consensus across both factions in the NUM that colliery closures should be resisted, the moderates advocated a case-­by-­case approach in which agreed review procedures were followed and ultimate authority rested with the men at the colliery concerned. As Gormley underlined in his final presidential address in 1981, ‘I must emphasise all the time the question whether men should work in conditions that would apply in collieries or could apply in the future is a decision which must remain with the men at the collieries. No way should we start using a big whip to say that men must work in certain conditions regardless of their feelings.’71 It was the Left who had turned the question of closures into a matter of principle. In his election manifesto, Scargill put forward two key demands: first, ‘a signed agreement from both the Government and the Coal Board guaranteeing that no pit shall close on the grounds of exhaustion’; second, the expansion of the Coal Industry to produce an output target of 200 million tonnes.72 Principled opposition to closures also curtailed the freedom of individual members to accept redundancy. As Scargill put it in the above-­ mentioned speech in February 1981, ‘No man has the right to prostitute his job for a few pounds. More important, no man has the right to sacrifice the job prospect of his son who has never had the opportunity to work.’73 The NUM situated developments in the coal industry within the context of a broader discourse of crisis. In that respect, the NUM shared in the perception of crisis that was such a hallmark of Thatcherite discourse.74 Yet they disagreed on the nature and causation of crisis: the crisis that the NUM had in mind was the crisis of de-­industrialization, understood as a politically willed process to destroy the manufacturing base of the UK as a means to disciplining the organized labour movement and, in particular, the trade unions. The NUM pointed to developments in the steel industry, which had seen its workforce reduced from 166,000 to 71,000 in the space of a few years.75 The miners, a special issue of The Miner argued in August 1980, may as yet not have been exposed to the full force of de-­ industrialization. But they must not delude themselves that the industry could be 70  NUM Archives, Barnsley, A. Scargill Speeches 1981–early 1982. 71 NUM, Annual Report 1981, p. 318. 72 Scargill, Miners in the Eighties, p. 5f. 73  NUM Archives, Barnsley, A. Scargill, Speeches 1981–early 1982. 74 Jim Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline: Understanding post-­ war Britain (London, 2000), pp. 48–64. 75  Tomlinson, ‘Deindustrialisation and “Thatcherism” ’, p. 631.

1981  145 shielded permanently from the surrounding crisis. The miners’ fight was Britain’s fight, as the pamphlet The Miners and the Battle for Britain argued. The NUM emphasized that there was no conflict of interest between the miners and the ‘working people’ of Britain. The miners were special only insofar as they possessed the strength to speak and act on behalf of all working people. The sense of crisis was shared across the Left and Right of the NUM. It was successfully mobilized in the autumn of 1980 as it became clear that the Coal Industry Act of 1980 would pressurize the NCB into a programme of accelerated closures of uneconomic pits in order to bring down costs. Yet it was the Left who placed especial emphasis on the crisis by arguing that the 1980s were worse even than the 1930s. Miners in the 1980s opened with the stark statement that ‘Britain is in a deeper crisis than at any other time in its industrial history. It is far worse than the 1930s, taking into account . . . the raised expectations of ordinary men and women.’76 While the government was identified as the main adversary, the NCB was seen as a mere agent of government policy. There was no conception that a common cause could be built between the NCB and the NUM. Whereas the government judged that the Coal Board was effectively in the hands of the miners, the Left could conceive of the relationship between management and union in no other than conflictual terms. ‘There is a fundamental incompatibility between the employers’ need to control the workforce . . . and the workers’ desire to secure the highest wages, best conditions, and resist control,’ as a pamphlet ­co-­authored by Scargill and the academic Peggy Kahn put it.77

III  Contested Pasts The debate about the nature of the current crisis was carried out against the backdrop of a contested past. Lived experience fused with social scientific accounts and personal memoirs to produce sharply diverging understandings. Three ex­peri­en­tial spaces were of particular significance: first, the industrial conflicts of the early 1970s; second, the experience of the 1960s; third, the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1980s, the most recent past witnessed a first wave of historicization. In part, this was a response to the rapid social change of the previous decades; in part, it was a consequence of the reaching of retirement age of key actors. In 1979, Kent miner Malcolm Pitt published an account of the 1972 miners’ strike, World on Our Backs.78 The following year, Hywel Francis and David Smith published their thoroughly researched The Fed: A History of the South Wales

76 Scargill, Miners in the Eighties, p. 3. 77 Arthur Scargill and Peggy Kahn, The Myth of Workers’ Control (Leeds and Nottingham, 1980), p. 21. 78  Malcolm Pitt, The World on Our Backs: The Kent Miners and the 1972 Miners’ Strike (London, 1979).

146  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Miners in the Twentieth Century.79 In 1981, sociologist Vic Allen’s study of the rise of the Left across Britain’s coalfields, The Militancy of British Miners, appeared.80 While these accounts privileged the perspective of the Left in the British coalfields, Joe Gormley’s bestselling autobiography, Battered Cherub, serialized in the Daily Mail and published in 1982, accorded an insight into the understanding of the recent past by a leading moderate.81 Aimed at a broader market was King Coal by the BBC radio current affairs producer Tony Hall, which also appeared in 1981.82 Peter James’s monograph The Future of Coal was published the following year and focused on coal as a source of energy.83 Among mining communities, cyclical understandings of history coexisted with linear conceptions: although many trade unionists espoused a narrative of progress ‘from darkness to light’, they also acknowledged that the past was ever ready to revisit the present. Bernard Donaghy, an unsuccessful contender for the NUM presidency in 1981, expressed this understanding well in his electoral statement: ‘In my 33 years in the coal industry I have seen the wheel turn full circle twice.’84 For the Left, the past that threatened to return, but must not be allowed to, was the 1960s. Whereas historical scholarship tends to emphasize the cooperative nature of the restructuring process under the chairmanship of Lord Robens,85 the Left in the early 1980s looked back on the 1960s as a dark period, a decade in which ‘the butcher of Woldingham, Robins [sic], slashed this industry to the bone.’ In the 1960s, collaboration with the Coal Board had resulted in devastation for the miners and their communities. ‘It is worth remembering that throughout the sixties a philosophy obtained in the NUM which meant the Union leadership . . . actively collaborated with both the Coal Board and the Government in the destruction of the industry,’ as Scargill put it in his electoral stump speech.86 The sixties offered an indictment not just of government policy but of union col­lab­or­ ation. While public statements conjured up the spectre of a return of the 1960s, in the semi-­public space of a meeting with the Coal Board, Scargill acknowledged that, in his view, the analogy was misplaced. As the minutes recorded, Finally, he [Scargill] did not agree with those who said that the present situation was no different to the ‘butchery’ of the industry carried out in the 1960’s. The difference was that the talk of closures now was linked with talk about the

79  Hywel Francis and David Smith, The Fed: a History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (London, 1980). 80 V. L. Allen, The Militancy of British Miners (Shipley, 1981). 81  Joe Gormley, ‘My Fighting Life’, Daily Mail, 16 March 1982; Gormley, Battered Cherub. 82  Tony Hall, King Coal: Miners, Coal and Britain’s Industrial Future (Harmondsworth, 1981). 83  Peter James, The Future of Coal (London, 1st ed. 1982; 2nd ed. 1984). 84  Bernard Donaghy, ‘Policy Statement’, The Miner, November/December 1981, p. 5. 85  Jim Phillips, ‘The Closure of Michael Colliery in 1967 and the Politics of Deindustrialization in Scotland’, TCBH 26/4 (2015), pp. 551–72. 86  NUM Archives, Barnsley, A. Scargill address, October 1981.

1981  147 industry’s golden future—­which had no counterpart when Lord Robens was at the helm 20 years ago. But the talk of golden future cut no ice with the miners now, for what it meant was a different kind of industry, with a few super-­pits and a small workforce.87

If the 1960s featured as a dark period in the collective memory of the Left, the strike of 1972, more so than the events of 1974, were held up as a glorious ex­ample. ‘1972’ was interpreted as a moment of triumph that had restored the confidence of the miners in their own agency and wiped out the bitter memories of the defeat in 1926. In his history of the Kent miners, Malcolm Pitt expressed the significance of ‘1972’ in the following terms: The 1972 Miners’ Strike was one of those explosions in history when decisions are not taken by politicians, civil servants and trade union officials above the everyday life of the mass of the people, but when those people step onto the stage themselves and impose their will on society.88

Similarly, Scargill, during his presidential campaign, emphasized the impact of the strike on the collective consciousness of the miners: I was asked at the conclusion of the 1972 miners’ strike what was the most important victory that you won? And I thought for a few minutes, was it the wages, was it the 12 additional conditions – none of them. One week after that strike, I walked into the centre of my home town, and a man in his 80s made his way across the traffic laden street to shake my hand, he was crying, he was choked, and he expressed a desire to thank me and the miners for wiping out the bitter memory of 1926. The greatest victory that we won was the restoration of the faith and dignity of the National Union of Mineworkers.89

If ‘1972’ was hailed as the greatest triumph in the miners’ long history of struggle, then the so-­called Battle of Saltley Gate, rather than the Wilberforce Inquiry, was regarded as its decisive event. An oil painting that was on display in the Yorkshire Area offices captures this reading of events well. It was painted by Pat O’Neill, a miner at Woolley Colliery, to commemorate the events of 1972. Against a black backcloth, portraits of key protagonists of the strike are depicted. Scargill is put centre stage, presiding over a group of men and women who form a loose line. The caption reads, ‘The Battle of Saltley Gate. Where the working class took

87 NUM, Annual Report 1981, ‘Notes of a Meeting between the NCB and the national executive committees of the NUM, NACODS and BACM, 10 February 1981’, p. 40. 88 Pitt, World on Our Backs, p. 8. 89  NUM Archives, Barnsley, A. Scargill. Speeches 1981–early 1982.

148  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization control and provided a turning point in the strike.’90 In an interview with New Left Review a few years earlier, Scargill had described vividly, as he saw it, the significance of the mass picketing at the coke depot for the strike and beyond: Here had been displayed all that’s good in the working-­class movement. Here had been displayed what for years had been on a banner but had never been transferred into reality. You know the words: ‘Unity is Strength’, ‘Workers of the World Unite’, ‘Man to Man Brother Be’. They’re big words. Sometimes they’d been ridiculed. Through all that ridicule, all that sneering, they survived. Here was the living proof that the working class had only to flex its muscles and it could bring governments, employers, society to a total standstill.91

By comparison, in the moderates’ understanding of the past, memories of ‘1972’ were more muted. Looking back on the strike, presidential candidate Trevor Bell emphasized the role he had played in preparing the evidence for the Wilberforce Inquiry. Pensively, Gormley reflected in his memoirs: Even so, looking back at it all, I’m not sure whether that strike performed a good service or bad. It was good in that it united the lads, and showed them the strength which that unity could bring. On the other hand, its success led to an attitude of mind, prevalent today, where people, the moment they don’t get what they want, think and talk immediately of strike action.92

If ‘1972’ was a moment of triumph for some miners, senior Conservative politicians remembered the events as a painful humiliation. In his memoir An End to Promises, Douglas Hurd, Heath’s political secretary, underscored the extent of the humiliation: ‘11 February: “The Government now wandering vainly over battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time”.’93 To many Conservative politicians in the early 1980s there was a personal dimension to this collective memory. Senior figures of the first Thatcher government were veterans of the Heath administration, not least the Prime Minister herself. The policy reversal of February 1981 was given added significance by memories of ‘1972’ and ‘1974’. In a note for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Hoskyns asked if ministers were too traumatized by memories of the early 1970s to be able to make a rational appraisal of the miners’ position in the early 1980s: ‘Are some [colleagues] so scarred by 1974 that they are not able to examine the problem

90  Pat O’Neill, The Miners’ Strike 1972 (oil painting), NUM Offices. I would like to thank Paul Darlow for making a copy of the image available to me. 91  Arthur Scargill, ‘The New Unionism’, New Left Review 92 (1975), pp. 3–33, here p. 19. 92 Gormley, Battered Cherub, p. 118. 93  Douglas Hurd, An End to Promises: Sketch of a Government 1970–74 (London, 1979), p. 103.

1981  149 rationally?’94 As the CPRS report on the ‘NCB/NUM problem’ put it, the miners’ confidence stemmed from ‘successful use of that power (or threat of it) three times in last decade’.95

IV  Ordinary Miners In their analysis of ‘The NBC/NUM problem’, the Central Policy Review Staff acknowledged that they possessed anecdotal evidence only of how ordinary miners positioned themselves in the unfolding power struggle between the ­ ­government and the NUM. In historical scholarship, the early years of the Conservative government have received relatively little attention. They are often treated as a prehistory to the strike of 1984/5. Historical interpretation of miners’ attitudes tends to follow the contemporary explanations by the Left: historians point to the allegedly divisive impact of production incentive schemes and the corrosive effect of affluence on group solidarity.96 More broadly, with an emphasis on Scotland, Jim Phillips has highlighted the abrogation of the ‘moral economy’ operating in the coalfields by senior management and the Conservative government.97 While such a perspective helps to illuminate broader patterns, it presents miners’ agency in defensive terms. It also has little to say about the relationship between trade union leaders, rank-­and-­file activists, and the general membership. One way to gauge miners’ attitudes in the early 1980s is to look at what they did rather than what they, or their elected representatives, said; to look at the attachment they demonstrated to the industry and how they voted in pithead ballots. Statistical evidence by the Coal Board suggests that workplace attachment in the coal industry was higher in the early 1980s than it had been in previous decades. In 1980/1, absenteeism fell to the lowest level since 1954. ‘Voluntary wastage’ fell by 50 per cent between the financial years 1979/80 and 1980/1, from 9,744 to 4,838.98 At the same time, older age cohorts were eager to avail themselves of the opportunity to take early retirement: 91 per cent of miners took early retirement the moment they became eligible, nearly all of them before reaching the age of 65.99 By May 1980, 23,000 miners above the age of 60 had retired

94  TNA PREM 19/540, J. H. to G. Howe, ‘The NCB/NUM problem’, 22 May 1981. 95  TNA PREM 19/541, ‘NCB/NUM problem’, p. 3. 96  Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the end of industrial Britain (London, 2021), pp. 81ff. 97  Jim Phillips, ‘Deindustrialization and the Moral Economy of the Scottish Coalfields, 1947 to 1991’, ILWH 84 (2013), pp. 99–115, here p. 109; Andrew Perchard and Jim Phillips, ‘Transgressing the moral economy: Wheelerism and management of the nationalised coal industry in Scotland’, CBH 25/3 (2011), pp. 387–405. 98 NUM, Annual Report 1980, Situation in the Coalmining Industry, p. 233. Compare also Table 5, Appendix. 99 NUM, Annual Report 1980, CINCC, 18 March 1980, p. 123.

150  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization e­ arly.100 As a consequence, the average age in the industry fell from 45 years in 1976 to 39 years by October 1980.101 While older workers left, the industry had no problem in attracting new labour, be they juveniles, adult re-­entrants, or new recruits.102 Neither the Union nor the Coal Board had any illusions that de-­industrialization was largely responsible for the upsurge in applications for work in the industry. The recession accelerated the process of job loss in manufacturing industry to a dramatic extent, in the process turning work in coal from an option of last resort into a valued refuge. Wherever manual workers looked in the early 1980s, they saw industrial jobs disappearing at an alarming rate. According to figures prepared by the Department of Energy, British Steel had suffered a loss of 39 per cent of its workforce between 1978 and 1981. At British Leyland, the workforce had been reduced by 24 per cent. By comparison, the coal industry seemed a haven of stability. Here, manpower rundown between 1977/8 and 1980/1 stood at 4.2 per cent. The industry offered well-­paid work and a degree of security rapidly dis­ appear­ing elsewhere.103 As The Miner described the situation in a special issue in September 1980, The rush to the pits is a familiar tale in times when unemployment stalks the land, but this time it is very different. Those seeking work in Britain’s coal industry are being told that they’ll be joining an industry whose future is secure, there’s big money to be earned. In other words, A GOOD PLACE TO HIDE from the social and economic storms that the Tories have created to batter British working men, women and their families.104

This is the background against which an apparent conundrum in the miners’ collective voting behaviour in the early 1980s needs to be understood—­their reluctance to authorize industrial action despite the overwhelming support they gave to a leadership contender who passionately believed in the power of the strike weapon. In December 1981, the miners elected Scargill to succeed Gormley as national president of the NUM. On a turnout of 80 per cent, 70 per cent of votes were cast as a first preference for the Yorkshire Area leader who was also the Left unity candidate. Only 17 per cent voted for the moderate candidate, Trevor Bell.105 The NUM did not publish a breakdown of the voting figures by area level, but Scargill’s majority was so big that he must have gained many votes in traditionally moderate 100  Ibid., CINCC, 20 May 1980, p. 191. 101  Ibid., CINCC, 7 October 1980, p. 688. 102  Ibid., CINCC, 18 March 1980, p. 123. 103  TNA PREM 19/540, Comparisons of Manpower Rundown, 6 July 1981. 104  ‘We must not kid ourselves – we are NOT immune to the havoc going on around us’, The Miner, September/October 1980. 105 NUM, Annual Report 1981, The Electoral Reform Society, Election of President, p. 729.

1981  151 areas in addition to his Yorkshire power base and the strongholds of the Left. Scargill had campaigned on a platform that extolled the virtues of direct action and confrontation over consultation and compromise. He had promised to defend the industry and extend the material wellbeing of miners by deploying the strike weapon, if necessary. Scargill’s election to the highest office tilted the precariously balanced power arithmetic of the NUM towards the Left. Yet, despite the vote for Scargill as president, the membership repeatedly frustrated the Left by rejecting the call for industrial action in a series of pithead ballots. In the vote of November 1979, the members by a majority of 51 per cent to 48 per cent rejected the NEC’s recommendation to take industrial action in order to press for the union’s wage claim.106 The following year, 56 per cent accepted a negotiated settlement that fell far short of the wage claim that had been passed at the annual conference in July.107 In January 1982, a few weeks after electing Scargill as president, the National Executive’s recommendation for industrial action was turned down by a majority of 55 per cent to 45 per cent.108 The NEC was defeated even more decisively in the pithead ballots of October 1982, which linked the wage claim to the question of pit closures, and of March 1983, which focused spe­cif­ic­ al­ly on colliery closures. On both occasions, 60 per cent of members decided to go against the NEC’s recommendation.109 How are we to account for the apparent contradiction between voting for a radical national president and rejecting strike action? This was a question that much exercised the contemporaries themselves. Scargill as national president located the root cause for the members’ reluctance to endorse strike action in the sphere of consciousness rather than lived experience. In a string of letters after the ballot of October 1982, Scargill maintained that he would never blame the miners ‘when we suffer a defeat at the hands of the establishment’. Just like Jesus Christ before him, he would never turn his back on those whom he had been ordained to lead. In essence, Scargill believed that the members had been duped by ‘the vile propaganda of Fleet Street, television and radio’. The mass media had inculcated in a majority of miners a mistaken belief that, whatever the prospects of other people and other colliers, their particular pit and place of work were safe. In addition, Scargill believed, there had been a failure of leadership, in particular at branch level, to mobilize the miners behind the recommendation of the National Executive Committee.110 At the NUM’s annual conference in the summer of 1983, contributions to a debate on an emergency resolution to launch a ‘Campaign for Coal’ revealed an awareness of the great obstacles that the NUM would have to overcome to close 106 NUM, Annual Report 1979, p. 749. 107 NUM, Annual Report 1980, p. 687. 108 NUM, Annual Report 1982, p. 28. 109  Ibid., p. 781; NUM, Annual Report 1983, p. 119. 110 NUM Archives, Barnsley, Admin including correspondence AS, 1982–3, Scargill to T.  Butheraitis, 15 November 1982; to W.  Piergies, 18 November 1982; to B.  D.  Barthorpe, 22 November 1982.

152  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization the ‘credibility gap’ between union policy and parts of the membership. ‘I believe it is going to be a hell of a fight . . . to get our lads out,’ as Midlands delegate Jim Colgan put it.111 After all, in the ballot of March 1983, only four out of the twenty-­ two constituent areas of the NUM had returned a majority vote for the NEC’s recommendation for industrial action. In the crucial central coalfields of the Midlands and Nottingham, fewer than one in five members had supported the proposed course of action.112 While all contributors to the debate expressed faith in the power of agitation to change the members’ minds, they also identified deep-­seated cultural and material divisions between the members. There were, first of all, distinct coalfield cultures shaping voting patterns. The ‘militant’ coalfields of Kent, South Wales, Scotland, and, to some extent, Yorkshire, were pitted against the ‘moderate’ coalfields of Nottingham, the Midlands, Leicester, North Wales, the white-­ collar ‘area’ of the Colliery Office Staff Organization, and the two Power Groups. Regional variations reinforced perceptions of differing degrees of loyalty to the NUM. These perceptions introduced an element of mutual suspicion into the union’s proceedings. In the debate at the 1983 annual conference, Ray Chadburn, president of the Nottinghamshire Area, felt obliged to defend his members against allegations that they were ‘jelly babies’, ‘blacklegs’, and ‘scabs’.113 He cautioned that the Nottinghamshire Area had taken in many transferees from the contracting coalfields of Durham, South Wales, Scotland, and Kent, each of which had experienced pit closures at first hand: There is no doubt about it our difficulty is not to convince the Nottinghamshire miners to support a campaign, but to convince those people who have worked in three, four, five pits and then in Nottinghamshire that they should support other people in coalfields where they come from that they should support strike action.114

In addition, as Peter Heathfield, general secretary of the Derbyshire Area, cautioned, among the current workforce across Britain there were many who had joined the industry as a ‘short-­term expedient because of the general economic situation’.115 Their loyalty to the NUM, he believed, could not be taken for granted. Secondly, the membership was divided along generational lines. In the intervention above, Colgan distinguished between three cohorts, each with distinct perceptions and outlooks: young adults in their twenties and thirties, middle-­ aged men in their forties, and men aged 50 and above.116 The younger age cohorts were thought to have incurred heavy financial obligations—‘up to their eyeballs in mortgages, expensive cars and all this business’, as Colgan put it. To older men, meanwhile, the National Coal Board’s enhanced redundancy terms offered a 111 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1983 (London, 1983), p. 493. 112  Ibid., p. 91. 113  Ibid., p. 499. 114  Ibid., p. 499. 115  Ibid., p. 498. 116  Ibid., p. 493.

1981  153 powerful incentive to take an individual exit route from the industry rather than resort to collective action. The prospect of redundancy was all the more attractive because long years in the industry undermined the prospect of living out old age in comfort and good health. As a delegate from the Derbyshire coalfield put it sarcastically, ‘For the men over 50 the Coal Board have offered redundancy. They have opened a new bank and they have called it the Redundancy Bank, and our members are making a run on that bank.’117 Members therefore might have strong material motives to avoid the certain short-­term loss of a stoppage over the potential, but uncertain, long-­term gains of successful strike action. According to internal Coal Board records from the summer of 1983, the category of men aged 50 or above comprised 44,455 miners, some 23 per cent of the total of 196,881.118 The popular press took up the interpretation that the miners’ reluctance to endorse strike action was a consequence of the material gains they had made since the early 1970s. Reporting for the Daily Mail from the Lancashire coalfield, journalist Ann Leslie visited the home of 22-­year-­old underground electrician Michael Gregson and his partner, Nadine Gregson, in January 1982. According to Leslie, Michael’s £8,500 per year wage packet, supplemented by Nadine’s part-­ time work, had made possible a comfortable lifestyle. In some respects, the Gregsons were living the life that Gormley had envisioned in the late 1970s: a three-­bedroom semi-­detached house, a car in the driveway, holidays abroad, a telephone, a hi-­fi stereo and videocassette recorder. The consumer electronics and the car were Japanese-­built, rather than British, as in Gormley’s original vision. Crucially, they had all been acquired on hire purchase or through a mortgage. In Leslie’s estimation, it was this glimpse of a comfortable life that had undermined traditional loyalties. As the journalist put it, ‘If [Nadine Gregson] feels any solidarity at all it is not with the tribal memories and loyalties of the coalfield: It’s to those Sonys, Panasonics and the Datsun in her life.’119 Whereas the Daily Mail offered up an interpretation that grounded the miners’ rejection of industrial action in the corrosive effects of an individualized, comfortable lifestyle, the BBC documentary Miners, aired on 25 November 1982, painted a more complex picture.120 The documentary followed four miners from Goldthorpe in the South Yorkshire coalfield for the duration of one weekend in 1982. In some respects the lives of Ron Yates, Steve Frost, George Bran, and Kevin Pickering bore resemblance to the patterns that had been delineated in the classic sociological account of the 1950s, Coal is Our Life. Everyday life was shaped by shift work at the Highgate Colliery, whose pithead overlooked the village. Men worked together, took communal showers after work, and went 117  Ibid., p. 500. 118  TNA COAL 31/135, Area Five Year Strategy, 29 July 1983. For a detailed breakdown of the membership by age cohorts see Table 8, Appendix. 119  Ann Leslie, ‘The lifestyle that beat Arthur Scargill’, Daily Mail, 22 January 1982. 120  Miners, BBC, 40 minutes, produced by Mike Mortimer (25 November 1982).

154  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization drinking together. They lived in a tightly knit occupational community where everybody seemed to know each other. Homosocial bonding at work and away from the pit was embedded in patriarchally structured families. On the Friday night, a group of young miners crams into the Buxton Arms Sports and Social Club minivan to visit the ‘Pussy Cat’ discotheque in nearby Wakefield. Meanwhile, other miners take their partners to a local dance or simply stay home watching TV. Others work night shifts. Yet, in other ways, the miners’ life contrasted sharply with received notions of traditional mining communities. Ron Yates, an underground bricklayer for twenty years, and Kevin Pickering, a coalface worker, both owned their own semi-­detached homes. Yates had bought the property five years ago when his partner had started to work part-­time at a bakery. Pickering was in the process of selling his property because he wanted to move into something bigger to accommodate his small family. Steve Frost, a wireman electrician, was divorced from his partner but committed to their son, who he enjoys spending time with on the weekend. George Bran, an older miner who can no longer work on the coalface due to suffering from arthritis and pneumoconiosis, likes his pint but does not find anything strange about his grandson Tony attending regular ballet classes. They even joke about Tony turning into Fred Astaire one day. The Yates family, meanwhile, delight in sharing video footage with friends and family of their recent holiday in Ibiza. At the same time, Ron Yates praises ‘King Arthur’ as ‘the finest bloke who ever wore a pair of shoes’. While the documentary opened with shots from the coalface, it closed with footage of an aeroplane with the Yates family on board departing for Palma de Mallorca. This was a world in which the past and present seemed to have fused seamlessly. It was a world in which miners were family-­centred as well as workplace-­ oriented, traditional as well as modern, special as well as ordinary. This was a world in which material comfort and (verbal) support of militancy were not seen as contradictions. While journalistic accounts give insight into how the modern miner was viewed by professional commentators, hundreds of private letters preserved at the NUM’s headquarters in Barnsley offer a glimpse of how miners were viewed by the general public. The letters were written in 1980/1, often by old-­ age pensioners. Many were addressed to then Area president Scargill personally. Deceptively labelled ‘fan mail’, many letters gave vent to a strong sense of anger at what the correspondents regarded as the miners’ extravagant demands for higher wages. The writers also made clear, both by referring to personal experience and to reports in the media, that the threat of job loss and un­employ­ment was a common experience in the context of the times. It did not qualify the miners to press their demands. As a woman from Bradford wrote imploringly,

1981  155 If you bring this and every other government down, who will there be left to buy the coal and who will be able to afford it. There is no job anymore for most ­people. They [i.e. the miners] do a dangerous job and deserve money, but what about the hospitals and old peoples’ homes closing down.

Just like many other correspondents, the woman went on to situate the domestic crisis within the context of the Cold War, talking about conditions in the Soviet Union and the need for Britain to maintain a nuclear deterrent. She concluded by beseeching the Yorkshire Area president to make it possible for her son to have a future: ‘I am a frightened person. I have a young son, he wants to be a policeman if [sic] he grows up, please help him to grow up.’121 More problematically, some authors held the miners responsible both for their personal plight and for the unemployment and deprivation that they described in vivid terms. John Coyle, who was unemployed with four children, wrote in faltering English: Mr Scargill, suppose your [sic] ready to burst your fucking lungs on September conference. Thanks to you shower [?] this country is in such a poxy state with your pay demands. Thanks to you & Sirs, Mullery and a few more we are out of fucking work. Communist Rat122

Margaret Rennison, an old-­age pensioner from Horsham in Sussex, expressed the same sentiment in more articulate terms, combining a critique of the miners’ pay claim with an appeal to national unity. Her letter was addressed to the miners as well as the miners’ leaders: Having heard of your recent announcement of 35% increase, I feel you are carrying this much too far. You are not serving the Miners [sic] interests, you are cutting their throats. Do you wish to see the Miners priced out of the Market? You are going the right way about it. Look at the other side of the coin. Two million unemployed, several million on lowly paid jobs, struggling to make ends meet and I do not know how many O.A.P.’s, & Widows of which I am one. The whole of the country is relying on you and you alone. . . .  This is not a time for back biting and cat calling, its time we all pulled together no matter what Government is in power and it is in our own hands, the working people of this country, whether we make or break this countries [sic] back. Go to 121 NUM Archives, Barnsley, Arthur Scargill, Fan Mail, Bernice Jowett to A.  Scargill, 4 September 1980. 122  Ibid., John Coyle to A. Scargill, undated.

156  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization it MINERS and set an example and we the working people will be behind you. GOD be with you.123

The past featured prominently in the correspondence, often to make a moral point about the present. The space of experience that was invoked was typically the interwar and war period. It was remembered as a time of material deprivation but behavioural and moral rectitude. Times had been hard, but people were hard-­ working, honest, and possessed of a sense of duty. The present, by contrast, was characterized by greed, selfishness, and lack of moral fibre. Ron Potter’s letter from Stroud in Gloucestershire gave eloquent expression to this sense of contrast between the past and the present: I left school when I was 14 in 1921 and worked hard including 6 years in the ranks during the last war: When I was demobbed on Sept. 12 1945 I started to prepare for my future, not smoking, and little drinking. I had married in 1932 and went through the real crisis, you present day youngsters just do not know when you are well off. You parade around wasting time instead of getting on with a decent days work, and the country has been ruined, and out-­priced by restrictive practices etc.124

Mrs Phyllis Bickerdike from Sandy in Bedfordshire contested the claim that there was anything exceptional about the miners’ memories of hard times. She went on to contrast past expectations of a nationalized coal industry with present realities: Dear Mr Scargill, Why do you always talk and think about the past so much? Do you think you were the only person to be born without the amenities we all take for granted today? . . . When I was at school, sixty years ago, everyone said, ‘When the mines – and railways – are nationalised there will be no more strikes. Nobody will strike against themselves.’ How wrong they were. How terribly sad the Labour Party and the Trades Unions have lost their souls. How dare you compare yourself to Keir Hardy.125

Another female correspondent combined a sense of difference between past and present with a cyclical view of history. She opened the letter by quoting from Ecclesiastes 9–10, a key reference passage for a cyclical understanding of the human experience: ‘What has happened will happen again, and what has been done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun.’ But if avarice and greed existed through time, agency had changed: the miners had been 123  Ibid., Margaret Rennison, 18 July 1980. 124  Ibid., Ron Potter to A. Scargill, 13 August 1980. 125  Ibid., Phyllis Bickerdale to A. Scargill, 7 January 1981.

1981  157 transformed from victims to victimizers—‘The new rich, powerful and greedy (the miners) has the same morality as the old rich powerful and greedy, a total indifference to the plight of the new poor, the unemployed, the poor, the old and the cold.’126 Only a fraction of the letters collected as ‘fan mail’ were written by miners or their close family. Some hailed Scargill as a great miners’ leader. As Mrs H. Clarke from Upton near Pontefract in Yorkshire wrote, ‘I have been brought up among the miners all my life I don’t know of any male member or relative not being a miner. As far as I am concerned and most people I speak to you are the greatest man the miners have ever had.’127 Others put pen to paper in order to caution against pressing the miners’ demands regardless of the consequences. As Mr Kitchen, a Yorkshire miner, cautioned, ‘It is not big rises we need today with ­people being laid off work and not the big demand for coal, with industry closing, it’s better pensions, more home fuels and better retirement payments and more holidays in other words better perks same as the big men.’ A more analytical approach was adopted by Norman Chaplin from Highgate Colliery in Goldthorpe. In a long letter he tried to chart a course of action that would secure the miners a good wage settlement without incurring the harm of an all-­out confrontation. He judged that the Conservative government were too strong for the miners to confront on their own. His first preference was therefore for coordinated strike action of the miners with power workers, transport workers, and dockers. If this proved impossible, then the miners must settle, he believed, even if it led to closure of collieries: Let them close whatever pits they like. One thing that they cannot do is give a man that has never worked in the pits a book, tell him to read it, and he becomes a miner. This is one life where that is not so. They will still need miners in 100 years time. . . . The first method I mention is definitely out, we cannot win. All we will get is a load of misery and back to work with our tail between our legs.128

In their reservations about industrial action, miners’ letters from the ‘fan mail’ collection differed from the letters that were published in The Miner in the early 1980s. Here, the voice of activists was over-­represented, although even in the letter pages of The Miner some authors emphasized that they were not prepared to go on strike to achieve their demands. Why then, if a majority of miners were unwilling to risk industrial action, either on wages or on pit closures, had they elected Scargill as president of the NUM? In a memorandum on the lessons to be drawn from the coal crisis of February 1981, government adviser Hoskyns spoke of the value of building up a 126  Ibid., Letter to A. Scargill, 17 October 1980. 127  Ibid., H. Clarke to A. Scargill, undated. 128  Ibid., Norman Chaplin to A. Scargill, 28 October 1980.

158  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization credible ‘deterrent’ against a miners’ strike.129 There is reason to believe that a majority of miners, too, saw the election of Arthur Scargill as a deterrent against the government’s policies—­a powerful voice that would put the case for the ­miners cogently and uncompromisingly, but a man who would ultimately be controlled by the members through the instrument of a pithead ballot in accordance with rule 43 of the union’s constitution. In a character portrait in The Observer on 6 December 1981, Robert Taylor suggested as much. Noting the Yorkshire Area leader’s status as a ‘folk hero’ among the Left, he also underlined the limits of Scargill’s appeal: ‘It is very doubtful whether Britain’s miners are going to become “extras” in a Scargill melodrama. They might admire his élan, the ferocity of his language in the fight for their interests, but his half-­baked Socialism has little appeal.’130 In the documentary Miners discussed above, underground bricklayer Ron Yates ventured that there was nobody on television who could ‘outtalk’ or ‘outsmart . . . King Arthur’.131 In the next scene, he and his family set off for a holiday to Palma de Mallorca. It was to safeguard this prosperity, rather than usher in a fundamental transformation of British society, that miners like Yates put their faith in Scargill as NUM president.

Conclusion In 1981, the Coal Board had considerably fewer men on colliery books than in 1967. The number of operating collieries had more than halved, from 438 to 211.132 Taken by themselves, these figures might suggest that the 1970s were marked by a trajectory of ongoing decline. Yet, as Part I of this study has argued, the years between 1967 and 1981 are better understood as a period of trans­form­ ation and reversal. Whereas in the late 1960s influential commentators had been prepared to write off the industry as a remnant from the first Industrial Revolution, by the early 1980s indigenous coal was considered a form of energy with a long-­term future. Margaret Thatcher’s embattled Conservative government was concerned to reduce the dependence of the industry on public funding. It had no intention of killing off coal. Even more remarkable than the industry’s changed prospects was the reversal in the miners’ fortune and social standing. Whereas Britain’s coal-­workers used to be pitied as doomed proletarians, they came to be revered as the aristocracy of British labour. Between the late 1960s and 129  TNA PREM 19/540, John Hoskyns to Chancellor of the Exchequer, 12 May 1981: ‘You do not have to decide now that the Government will take on the miners. That must depend on the circumstances. But if you continue to plan on the basis that you are willing to do so, that itself will have the right impact on their expectations. It will help to ensure a more moderate outcome. It is just like the nuclear deterrent: we cannot afford to look like unilateral disarmers.’ 130  Robert Taylor, ‘King Arthur courts success’, The Observer, 6 December 1981. 131  Miners, minute 33. 132 Ashworth, History, pp. 674ff. (figures for financial years 1966/7 and 1980/1, respectively).

1981  159 early 1980s, miners had improved their material conditions in absolute as well as relative terms. Inhabiting experiential spaces that stretched back to the dark but heroic days of the interwar years, the miners’ horizon of expectations now extended to material comforts such as home ownership and car ownership as well as to the excitement of holidays abroad. The miners’ good wages and job security stood in marked contrast to the experience of other groups of industrial workers. Rather than stand at the forefront of de-­industrialization in the recession of 1979–81, the miners were sheltered from its ravages by their strong bargaining position. The miners’ golden decade was the very crisis period whose memory as a ‘benighted decade’ would resonate well into the twenty-­first century.133 As horizons of expectations expanded, the miners became dangerously exposed. Many colliery workers may have aspired to nothing other than to share, in their own bounded ways, in prospects and comforts that other people had long taken for granted. Yet, however ordinary their aspirations for themselves and their loved ones, collectively the miners were regarded as special. Friends and detractors alike were exercised by questions of the miners’ power; by how to apply or to curtail it. Whereas the moderates in the NUM argued that power was best deployed discreetly, through veiled threats and in complex back-­door ne­go­ti­ ations, the Left believed that pristine principled positions and clear battle lines would allow the miners to deploy their power most effectively. Government advisers, for their part, professed to be at a loss as to how to restrain the miners’ power in the short term, but held out the prospect of structural solutions to ‘the problem’ in the medium term. While seeking to anticipate the future, all sides operated under the shadow of the recent past. Whereas some inside the NUM looked to the industrial conflicts of the early 1970s as an inspiration to be emulated, the Conservative government, aghast at the memories of humiliation, started to set in train measures that were designed, in the first instance, to stop the past from reoccurring. The miners had come a long way since 1967: in just over a decade they had been transformed from losers into winners of history. Yet, as Part II will show, what may have appeared like a stairway to a prosperous future turned out to be a temporary arrest in yet another turn of the wheel of fortune.

133  Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton, ‘Introduction. The benighted decade? Reassessing the 1970s’, in Lawrence Black, Hugh Pemberton, and Pat Thane, Reassessing 1970s Britain (Manchester and New York, 2013), pp. 1–24; more recently, Aled Davies, Ben Jackson, and Florence Sutcliffe-­ Braithwaite, The Neoliberal Age: Britain since the 1970s (London, 2021), p. 7.

PART II

. .  .  A N D BAC K AG A I N 1984–1987–1992–1997

There are enormous divisions appearing among the member­ ship . . . Believe me! these are not cracks, but running sores through which the life of this Union is running away. R. N. MacSporran, NUM Power Group delegate, 1984 Kites without wind, that’s what we are. Billy Barrymore, electrician, Horden, 1986 The coal miners, like farmers in France, seem to have gained a pecu­ liar hold on the British imagination: a muscular symbol of a lost era. The Economist, 1992 People who go to cinemas and weep when they watch the film Brassed Off should recall that a promise was made to Britain’s miners to rect­ ify the terrible wrong that had been wreaked upon Britain’s miners and Britain’s mining communities. Arthur Scargill, NUM president, 1998 De-industrialization continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in Britain as elsewhere across the Western world.1 Although the haemorrhaging of jobs was particularly acute during the recession of the early 1990s, periods of economic growth did little to reverse the underlying trend. In the UK, the longue durée of structural change was accelerated by government policy, albeit as an ‘unintended consequence’.2 Whereas in 1981 6.9 million people had been employed across the manufacturing and energy and water sectors, by 1997 this figure had fallen by a quarter to 5.15 million.3 ‘De-industrialization’ became a politically charged 1  Lutz Raphael, Jenseits von Kohle und Stahl: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte Westeuropas nach dem Boom (Berlin, 2019), pp. 35–56. 2  Jim Tomlinson, ‘Deindustrialisation and “Thatcherism”: moral economy and unintended conse­ quences’, CBH 35/4 (2021), pp. 620–42. 3  Duncan Gallie, ‘The Labour Force’, in A. H. Halsey and Josephine Webb (eds.), Twentieth-Century British Social Trends (London, 2000), pp. 281–323, here pp. 284ff.

162  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization

Figure II.1  Mik Critchlow, North School Corner, 1979.

Figure II.2  Mik Critchlow, My Father On His Redundancy Day, Hirst Progressive Social Club, 1988. In Mik Critchlow’s photographs of Ashington, Northumberland, the Coal Board’s promises of a bright future take on a distinctly monochrome quality. By the later 1980s, these promises are no more than a distant memory. They have been overtaken by the reality of closures and redundancies.

. . . And Back Again  163 concept. While critics on the Left used the term to draw attention to the socioeconomic fallout from the Conservative government’s reform agenda, the Right was suspicious of the concept as a veiled call for state intervention in the work­ ings of the market.4 Even so, positive advocacy of de-industrialization as a ‘good thing’ remained rare throughout the 1980s.5 Rather, in public debate manufactur­ ing came to lose its privileged position as the crucial sector underpinning Britain’s economic prosperity. By the end of the 1980s, the perception was taking hold that Britain had moved into ‘new times’. In that perspective, contemporary society became sharply demarcated from the industrial nation that had existed for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6 The coal miners, more so than any other group of workers, appeared to sym­ bolize what was being left behind in the embrace of the new. The reversal of for­ tunes in the industry was stark indeed. At the end of the financial year 1980/1 there were 224,000 men on colliery books, producing 110 million tonnes of coal at 211 collieries.7 For the first time since 1970, coal had overtaken oil as the most used primary fuel.8 Sixteen years later, only twenty-two deep mines remained, all but four located in the central coalfields of the East Midlands and Yorkshire.9 Closures and job losses were particularly pronounced in the two-year period fol­ lowing the conclusion of the miners’ strike and the years before the industry’s privatization in 1994. Output remained stable for longer but fell off precipitously in the 1990s. The substitution of indigenous coal with imports was another fea­ ture of the period, as was the expansion of open-cast mining at the expense of deep-mined output. Politically, the sixteen years between 1981 and 1997 were characterized by a higher degree of continuity than the preceding period 1967 to 1981. The social upheavals of the 1980s notwithstanding, the Conservatives were returned to power with substantial majorities at the general elections of 1983, 1987, and again in 1992. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was forced from office by her own parliamentary party in November 1990 and replaced by John Major. Even so, many scholars are agreed that neither the Major years nor the governments of Tony Blair, whose ‘New’ Labour Party had won the 1997 election by a landslide, marked a decisive break with the policy paradigm established in the 1980s.10 4  Tomlinson, ‘Deindustrialisation and Thatcherism’, p. 635. 5  Samuel Brittan, ‘De-industrialisation is good for the UK’, Financial Times, 3 July 1980. 6 ‘New Times’, Marxism Today, October 1988; Matthew Hilton, Chris Moore, and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘New Times revisited: Britain in the 1980s’, special issue, CBH 31/2 (2017). For a sharp critique of the paradigm see David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (London, 2018), pp. 496ff. 7 NCB, Reports and Accounts 1980/1 (London, 1981), pp. 32ff. The NCB’ s total workforce stood at 293,940 (ibid., p. 26). 8  Ibid., p. 3. 9 Derek Spooner, ‘Landscapes of Power: The Shaping of the UK’s New Energy Geography’, Geography 84/1 (1999), pp. 66–79, here p. 70. 10 Edgerton, Rise and Fall, p. 492.

164  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization At the Department of Energy, ministers changed frequently, even though not as rapidly as in the late 1960s: David Howell was succeeded in the reshuffle of September 1981 by Nigel Lawson, who was replaced by Peter Walker after the election victory of May 1983. After the election of 1987, the portfolio was held by Cecil Parkinson, followed by John Wakeham (1989–92). In 1992, the department was abolished, its functions integrated into the Department of Trade and Industry, which was held by Michael Heseltine (1992–5), Ian Lang (1995–7), and, after the return of a Labour government, Margaret Beckett (1997–8) and Peter Mandelson (1998). At the highest level of the NCB, changes were frequent. Between the early 1980s and the dismantling of the nationalized industry, the position of chairman was held by five different men: Derek Ezra (1971–82), Norman Siddall (1982/3), Ian MacGregor (1983–6), Robert Haslam (1986–90), and Neil Clarke (1990–3). By comparison, the national leadership of the NUM showed greater continuity. Arthur Scargill was re-elected as national president in 1987 and remained in post until 2002. General Secretary Lawrence Daly was succeeded in 1983 by Peter Heathfield, who retired in 1992. Vice President Mick McGahey retired in 1987.

5

1984 Introduction On 23 July 1984, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher replied to a personal note from the President of the United States.1 Ronald Reagan had told her that he fol­ lowed closely the events of the miners’ strike, confident in the belief that the gov­ ernment would ‘come out of this well’. In her personal reply, the Prime Minister assured the President that ‘a substantial portion of the industry is at work and producing coal’. The government had built up reserves to see the economy through for several months to come. Thatcher further expressed confidence that ‘in due course the focus of moderation and common sense’ would prevail. They were, after all, ‘Britain’s traditional sources of strength’. Although confident of victory, the Prime Minister stressed that the stakes were high, for ‘the issues underlying the miners’ strike are serious and important’. The letter concluded by expressing how grateful she was to be assured of the President’s empathy and support. By the time this remarkable exchange occurred, the great miners’ strike had entered its fifth month. Ostensibly an industrial dispute between the NUM and NCB over the latter’s plans for restructuring the industry, as detailed in the meeting of the consultative council on 6 March 1984, and triggered by branch level resistance to the sudden closure announcement of Cortonwood in the Yorkshire coalfield, the dispute quickly acquired a significance that went far beyond the immediate issues at stake.2 As the exchange above illustrates, contemporaries invested the conflict with political and symbolic meaning that, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, went ‘to the very heart of our society’.3 For the Thatcher government, the miners posed an extra-­parliamentary challenge not just to the present administration but to all elected governments and the principles under­ lying parliamentary democracy. As Richard Vinen has shown, the perception was shared by senior civil servants.4 Although ostensibly not a direct participant in

1  TNA PREM 19/1332, Message from Prime Minister to President of US, 23 July 1984; for the original message, 18 July 1984. 2  For the minutes, NUM, Annual Report and Procedures 1984 (London, 1984), pp. 164–8. 3 TNA PREM 19/1330, Transcript of Prime Minister’s Comments on Coal Dispute, Banbury, 30 May 1984. 4  Richard Vinen, ‘A War of Position? The Thatcher Government’s Preparation for the 1984 Miners’ Strike’, English Historical Review 134/566 (February 2019), pp. 121–50, here p. 132.

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0006

166  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization the dispute, the government was prepared to mobilize the full apparatus of state power to make sure that the NCB would prevail. Conflict in the industry had been anticipated; and ever since the humiliation of February 1981, preparations for the eventuality of strike action had been stepped up.5 The NUM had likewise anticipated industrial conflict and launched a campaign to rally the membership behind the Union’s policy of opposition to pit closures. Its leaders, too, invested the conflict with existential significance. ‘Ours is a supremely noble aim,’ as NUM president Arthur Scargill declared in his address at the extraordinary annual con­ ference in July 1984, ‘to defend pits, jobs, communities, and the right to work’.6 This was a battle for the ‘survival’ not just of the coal industry but of working-­ class communities and the labour movement. Yet, as became apparent right from the start, the miners’ strike was not only a conflict between capital and labour, or even between labour and the state. It was a conflict that set worker against worker, coalfield area against coalfield area, and miner against miner. As Power Group delegate MacSporran exclaimed in desper­ ation at the special delegate conference of 19 April 1984, convened to authorize the strike on an area-­by-­area basis according to rule 41 rather than through the conventional route of an individual pithead ballot according to rule 43, ‘Believe me! These are not cracks but running sores through which the life of this union is running away.’7 The ‘sores’ did not escape the notice of the government, and it was to exploit them, and to encourage their festering, which the government’s efforts remained focused on throughout the duration of the conflict.8 David Edgerton has recently challenged a declinist interpretation of the strike, which was popular in the historiography of the 2000s. This interpretation held that the miners’ case in 1984 was ‘hopeless from the beginning’ due to underlying tectonic shifts in Western economies. In this perspective, the coal strike was a desperate ‘last stand’ by backward-­looking proletarians.9 By contrast, emphasiz­ ing the modernity of Britain’s coal industry, Edgerton has argued that ‘the miners were not doomed they were defeated’.10 The interpretation advanced in this chap­ ter builds on Edgerton but puts greater emphasis on the miners’ own agency. While acknowledging the government’s determination to break the NUM, it argues that the miners’ lack of unity hastened their defeat. The chapter shows how

5  Vinen, ‘War of Position’, pp. 129, 131. 6 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 407. 7  Ibid., p. 117. 8 For government strategy and tactics, see Jim Phillips, ‘Containing, Isolating, Defeating the Miners: The UK Cabinet Ministerial Group on Coal and the Three Phases of the 1984–85 Strike’, HSIR 35 (2014), pp. 117–41. 9  Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005), p. 542; Avner Offer, ‘British Manual Workers: From Producers to Consumers, c. 1950–2000’, CBH 22/4 (2008), pp. 537–71, here p. 544; Graham Stewart, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s (London, 2013), p. 345. 10 Edgerton, Rise and Fall, p. 458.

1984  167 the failure to rally all miners behind the industrial action delivered into the hands of the government the tools, material as well as psychological, to ‘contain, isolate, and defeat’ the miners.11 We cannot know for certain if a united stance would have delivered a different outcome. But the evidence clearly suggests that, divided, the miners faced an uphill struggle from the very beginning. There had been warnings aplenty about the dangers of a lack of unity, but they were disregarded. In the process the very foundations on which the miners’ collective agency rested became undone, and the miners embarked on a trajectory in which they were turned from agents of history, inspiring fear and awe, into objects of contempt and pity. This chapter proceeds in four stages. Section I looks at temporalities. It situates agency in the dispute in competing temporal frames of reference. For both m ­ iners and the government, the past mattered, and both looked to past events as a resource to guide their actions in the present. But the past also mattered in another sense: the government and sympathetic supporters in the media invested considerable energy into demonstrating that miners themselves, or at least sections of them, were of the past, their struggle ‘a last stand’ in defence of a cause that was already lost. Just as the past mattered, so did the future. All sides operated with horizons of expectation of what the future would hold for the industry, as well as for miners collectively and individually. Yet, as this section argues, it was the present that acquired a special significance: the present was conceived of as an extraordinary time; it was the present that would be remembered as a crucial period in which history was made. Section II looks at identities. It was in 1984 that ideas of who the miners ‘really’ were were debated intensely and with sharply differing imaginaries. Questions of masculinity and loyalty were central to this debate. Crucially, competing imaginaries were no mere discourses; they were lived out in everyday practice. Indeed, identities were not decided by what people said but by what they did. As Section III demonstrates, the conflicts over temporalities and identities were closely linked to questions of agency and power. The strike laid bare the limits of the miners’ collective agency, with far-­reaching consequences for the future. The final section looks at how the voices of ‘ordinary’ miners were recorded during the strike by social scientists and investigative journalists. The picture that they drew of the conflict served to reinforce a perception that the events of 1984/5 marked a watershed in the history of modern Britain.

I All sides in the conflict drew on lived experience and cultural memory to make sense of the unfolding events. The past offered a storehouse of examples for what 11  The memorable trio is Jim Phillips’s.

168  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization to do and what to avoid. People were called upon to live up to the standards set by past generations, but were also exhorted to avoid the mistakes of the past. Among the miners, three temporal layers were especially significant. There was, first of all, the recent past of the 1970s, encompassing the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974 as well as the tripartite Plan for Coal (1974) and its successor, Coal for the Future (1977). Underneath that, there was the memory of the 1960s when, seem­ ingly, the Union had acquiesced in massive closures and displacement of miners. Underpinning both of those decades was a half-­mythical past beyond the lived experience of all except those reaching retirement age. This was the interwar period, with the 1926 General Strike as the defining moment. The government, by comparison, had a shorter memory, stretching back no further than the Heath administration of 1970–4, with occasional reference to the Wilson government of 1964–70. For many senior members of the Thatcher administration, as well as for senior civil servants, the 1970s represented a lived experience rather than a cul­ tural memory. This included the Prime Minister and her Secretary of State for Energy, Peter Walker, as well as other senior members of the government, such as the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Norman Tebbit, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Douglas Hurd, and the Leader of the House of Lords, William Whitelaw.12 The leaders of the NUM were likewise veterans from the 1970s. Among the wider NUM membership, however, 60 per cent of men work­ ing in the industry in the mid-­1980s had not taken part in the conflicts of the early 1970s.13 At the NUM special delegate conference on 19 April 1984, Peter Heathfield, who had recently succeeded the long-­ailing Lawrence Daly as general secre­ tary, was charged with opening the debate on behalf of the National Executive Committee.14 By the time of the conference the strike had been going for six weeks, at some collieries for eight weeks, but it had been a confused, messy affair, with traditionally moderate areas failing to follow the lead of their ­activist colleagues in militant coalfields. Indeed, even in South Wales, Scotland, and Yorkshire developments had been marked by a degree of confusion at the  way the strike had been spread by ‘picketing out’ reluctant collieries.15 Following the decision of the NEC on 8 March, reaffirmed on 12 April, the special delegate conference had been called in order to sanction the leadership’s strategy to declare official the strike action in accordance with rule 41, and

12  Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (London, 1995), pp. 194–239; Peter Walker, Staying Power: An Autobiography (London, 1991), pp. 120–44; Norman Tebbit, Upwardly Mobile (London, 1987), pp. 114–34; Douglas Hurd, An End to Promises: Sketch of a Government 1970–74 (London, 1979), pp. 84–110, 111–36; William Whitelaw, The Whitelaw Memoirs (London 1990), pp. 159–76. 13  Ned Smith, The 1984 Miners’ Strike: The Actual Account (Whitstable, 1997), p. 196. 14 NUM, Annual Report 1984, pp. 112–14. 15  David Howell, ‘Defiant dominoes: working miners and the 1984–5 strike’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012), p. 152f.

1984  169 extend it to the whole of the British coalfield, rather than to legitimize the strike by individual pithead ballot, as was customary in the NUM.16 In his wide-­ranging speech, Heathfield compared the dilemmas facing miners in the 1980s to the situation that had faced them in the two decades following the war. In the 1950s miners were promised ‘jam tomorrow’ in exchange for support­ ing management’s calls for rationalization and longer working hours, only to see the industry contract in the 1960s and miners turned into ‘industrial gypsies’. To forestall a repeat of the 1960s had been a central plank of Scargill’s, and the Left’s, presidential election campaign of 1981. Strike action now was required to stop history from repeating itself, as Heathfield argued: ‘Don’t rock the boat’ in 1956 resulted in a decade of loss of 300,000 jobs in our industry . . . We would be extremely foolish . . . if we did not recognise the com­ parisons between the problems the present generation of miners are facing.17

Yet, as much as the past offered an example of what to avoid, it could also provide false comfort, as Heathfield admonished. For whatever the claims of the NCB that redundancies would be on a strictly voluntary basis only, the real prospects facing redundant miners was no longer to be turned into ‘industrial gypsies’. Rather, the fate awaiting them was the ‘scrapheap’: We are no longer talking about transferring miners from one coalfield to another . . . We are talking about dramatically changing the role of the British coalmining industry within the British economy.18

If the memory of the 1960s served to illustrate the dramatic nature of the choice facing the miners in 1984, then the same held true for a second temporal frame of reference—­the interwar years. Just as in 1926, Heathfield contended, today’s ­miners represented the vanguard of the British labour movement. If they were defeated, present and future generations of miners would suffer, and all ‘the sacri­ fices that your fathers and our forefathers made will be completely nullified by our collective willingness to turn the other cheek’. The invocation of the interwar years served to underline the importance of a collective response to the chal­ lenges facing the miners in 1984. ‘We have got to stand shoulder to shoulder. We have got to fight together,’ Heathfield urged.19 Yet, problematically, the interwar period also conjured up a different set of memories. In the South Wales area, an official leaflet circulated in which Jack London’s definition of a strike-­breaker as a ‘scab’, a ‘traitor to his God, his country,

16  Howell, ‘Defiant dominoes’, pp. 148–64. 18  Ibid., p. 113. 19  Ibid., p. 114.

17 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 112.

170  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization his wife, his family and his class’, was revived.20 Reference to the 1920s seemed to offer a historical explanation for the refusal of a great many miners from the Nottinghamshire coalfield to fall in line with either bottom-­up pressure from rank-­and-­file activists or top-­down pressure from the national leadership, and indeed, the area leadership.21 Just as bosses never change, so the Nottinghamshire miners of 1984 were no different from their forefathers who, in the aftermath of the 1926 lockout, had formed a separate trade union under the leadership of George Spencer.22 South Wales delegate Terry Thomas expressed this point of view in his contribution to the debate: ‘Let me say – a lot has been said about Nottingham – I take my hat off to the people who are on strike in Nottingham, but there is one thing that must be said. The soul of George Spencer is still in the heart of Nottingham.’23 Jack Taylor of the Yorkshire Area put the challenge more directly. Referring to the moderate areas’ demand for a pithead ballot to unify the membership behind the industrial action, he exclaimed, ‘I will tell you what worries me about ballots . . . I will tell you what is up. We don’t really trust you. We don’t really trust you.’24 While memories of the interwar period were important, the NUM’s overall strategy owed much to a particular reading of the more recent past, in particular the 1972 strike and the 1981 coal crisis. From the 1972 strike the Left leadership had learned that mass picketing could be a decisive weapon in any industrial dispute. It turned strike action into an emotionally exhilarating collective experience, galvanizing not just the membership but also other sections of the organized working class into action.25 In an interview with New Left Review in 1975, Scargill had referred to ‘the Battle of Saltley Gate’ as the greatest moment in his life. He remembered the incident as a moment when the rhetoric of class struggle had come alive.26 Throughout 1984/5, the NUM leadership sought to rekindle the spirit of ‘Saltley Gate’ through sustained mass picketing, most notably at the Orgreave coke depot near Sheffield in May and June of 1984. Even retrospectively, Scargill believed that the tactic could have succeeded. As he declared in his first post-­ strike annual conference address in July 1985 with explicit reference to the Saltley and Orgreave coke depots, ‘It was not a failure of mass picketing, but a failure to mass picket that represented a weakness in many sections of our Union.’27 20  Copy in TNA PREM 19/1330, fol. 171. 21  For developments in Nottinghamshire see David Amos, The Nottinghamshire miners, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers and the 1984–85 miners’ strike: scabs or scapegoats? (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012); W. John Morgan and Ken Coates, The Nottinghamshire Coalfield and the British Miners’ Strike 1984–85 (Nottingham [1989]). 22  On the historical George Spencer see Tony Mason, ‘Spencer, Georg Alfred (1873?-1957)’, ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/47379. 23 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 124. 24  Ibid., p. 122. 25  Raphael Samuel, ‘Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism, Part Three’, New Left Review 1/165 (1987), pp. 52–91, here p. 89. 26  See also chapter 4 above. 27 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1985 (London, 1985), p. 493.

1984  171 From the events of February 1981, meanwhile, the leadership had learned that the talk of pithead ballots could be manipulated by the moderates to defuse the momentum that had been set in train by spontaneous, non-­official rank-­and-­file action. This reading of events had been reinforced further by the failure of the NUM, throughout 1982 and 1983, to win majority support for industrial action in pithead ballots.28 This time around, the miners would ‘not be constitutional­ ised out of action’, as Mick McGahey made clear in a television interview.29 As much as the NUM based its own strategy in 1984 on a particular understanding of the events of the 1970s and the early 1980s, they also rationalized government actions against the backdrop of the recent past. Of particular relevance was the Ridley Report, the policy document on nationalized industries drawn up during the Conservative Party’s time in opposition, which had been leaked in 1978. The Ridley Report now came to be understood as a blueprint that had guided govern­ ment policy towards the coal industry since at least 1979. Perhaps even more so than the NUM itself, the Labour Party and intellectuals of the Left highlighted the Ridley Report to support the contention that the strike had been deliberately engineered by the Thatcher government.30 Just like the NUM, the government looked to the past for direction in the pre­ sent. The memory of 1972/74 and the more recent events of 1981 were especially relevant. Both episodes were remembered as moments of painful public hu­mili­ ation not just for the Conservative Party but for the British state. In the estimation of leading Conservative politicians, the events had exposed the vulnerability of the sovereignty of Parliament and the rule of law to the collective power of the miners. While few government ministers would have been prepared to echo pub­ licly backbench MP William van Straubenzee’s declaration that he had ‘a personal account to settle’, throughout 1984/5 the government’s overriding objective was to prevent history from repeating itself.31 To avoid being drawn into the dispute in the same way as in the past, the government sharply distinguished between the internal assessment of the strike as a political challenge and the public insistence that this was an industrial dispute between the NCB and the NUM in which the

28  For a discussion see Jörg Arnold, ‘ “Once the thirst for knowledge begins to grow, it knows no bounds”. The National Union of Mineworkers, the Campaign for Coal and the politics of education, c. 1979–1984’, in Sara-­Marie Demiriz, Jan Kellershohn, and Anne Otto (eds.), Transformationsversprechen. Zur Geschichte von Bildung und Wissen in Montanregionen (Essen, 2021), pp. 143–63. 29  Roy Ottey, The Strike: An Insider’s Story (London, 1985), p. 64. 30 NUM, Annual Report 1984, Fraternal Address by S.  Orme MP to NUM Annual Conference, pp.  430–4, here p. 430; Labour Research Department, The Miners’ Case (London, 1984), p. 5; John Saville, ‘An Open Conspiracy: Conservative Politics and the Miners’ Strike 1984–1985’, Socialist Register 22 (1985), pp. 295–329. This view is supported by Phil Rawsthorne, ‘Implementing the Ridley Report: The Role of Thatcher’s Policy Unit during the Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985’, ILWCH 94 (Fall 2018), pp. 156–201. For a different perspective, see Vinen, ‘War of Position’, p. 125. 31  Hansard HC Sitting of 31 July 1984, Government Policy, col. 259. Straubenzee emphasized that this was with the miners’ leadership rather than the miners themselves.

172  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization government’s only role was to uphold the rule of law.32 In contrast to the Heath government, the Thatcher administration refused to be drawn into the role of mediator that would arbitrate in the name of a purported national interest. At the same time, the government worked assiduously behind the scenes to forestall any resolution of the dispute that could be interpreted as a victory, or even qualified success, for the NUM. As an internal memorandum made clear on 30 May 1984, there was ‘too much at stake’ for the government ‘to allow the NCB a completely free hand’ in the negotiations.33 For the strategy of keeping the dispute at arm’s length to work, it was essential that the miners’ strike remained a ‘spectacle’ played out on television screens, rather than a lived experience of power cuts, toothbrushing by candlelight, and three-­day working weeks. From the crisis of February 1981, the government had learned to build up power station ‘endurance’. If any immediate impact of the coal strike on the general public could be delayed, then the government would be in a strong position to win the ‘war of attrition’ against striking miners, on whom, they judged, going without pay for weeks and months on end would inflict an ever-­heavier material and emotional toll.34 Even so, internally, the government was convinced that the miners were a formidable opponent, a ‘special breed of men’ who were able to withstand hardship, and enforce cohesion on recalcitrant individuals, for much longer and much more effectively than any other group of workers.35 Considered against this assumption, even Margaret Thatcher’s notori­ ous comment about miners’ leaders as ‘the enemy within’ can be read, if not exactly as a backhanded compliment, at least as an acknowledgment of how much power and agency the government ascribed to the miners.36 Next to 1981, 1972/74 formed the central historical reference point in the gov­ ernment’s strategic thinking. As Thatcher would later put it in her memoirs, ‘For me, what happened at Saltley took on no less significance than it did for the Left.’37 The government judged, correctly, that the NUM leadership would seek to repeat the success of ‘Saltley Gate’ through the deployment of mobile pickets comprised of a core of rank-­and-­file activists. In the estimation of the Home Secretary, this group, which the industrial correspondent John Lloyd had christened Scargill’s ‘red guards’, comprised some 10,000 miners, or 5.4 per cent of the 32  TNA PREM 19/1330, Pascall to Turnbull, ‘The Coal Dispute’, 25 May 1984, p. 5. 33  TNA PREM 19/1330, Turnbull, ‘Coal Dispute’, 30 May 1984, fol. 12. See also Smith, Actual Account, p. 222 and passim. 34  TNA CAB 130/1268, MISC 101 (84), 9th Meeting, 11 April 1984: ‘The longer the current action continued the more likely it would be that financial pressures now more severe than those applying in 1972 and 1974, would be felt by miners and their families. There might then be a drift to work in a number of coalfields currently closed down, although such developments were unlikely in Yorkshire.’ 35  TNA PREM 19/1330, D. Pascall to Turnbull, ‘The Coal Dispute’, 25 May 1984, p. 4; compare also TNA PREM 19/539, Bernard Ingham to Prime Minister, ‘Miners’, 13 February 1981. 36  TNA PREM 19/1330, Pascall to Turnbull, ‘The Coal Dispute’, 25 May 1984, p. 4: ‘Miners’ endurance is notoriously long (26 weeks in 1926 without social security) and should not be under-­estimated.’ 37 Thatcher, Path to Power, p. 218.

1984  173 185,000 workers on colliery books.38 In the first week of the dispute, the Prime Minster had declared herself to be ‘most disturbed’ because ‘The events of Saltley cokeworks were being repeated’.39 To forestall history from repeating itself, the government mobilized the police to an unprecedented extent and instructed them to intercept travelling miners before they could even reach the collieries and other targets for picketing. Ostensibly, this was done to uphold the criminal law, although since 1984 questions have been raised about the conduct of the police, with evidence to suggest that the police themselves had become guilty of abusing the law.40 If the past mattered, then so did expectations of the future. The NUM pre­ sented the dispute as a defensive action. The members were called out on strike not so much to make real a desirable future but to prevent a dystopian future from being realized. ‘Ours is a supremely noble aim’, Scargill declared at the extraordinary annual conference on 11 July 1984, ‘to defend pits, jobs, communities and the right to work.’41 The NUM’s rationale was underpinned by the belief that the Coal Board’s plans for the restructuring of the industry, as revealed at the consultative meeting of 6 March 1984, represented, at best, a half-­truth; that the relatively modest proposal to reduce the workforce by 20,000 men in 1984/5 was just the beginning of a much more far-­reaching restructuring process. Referring to an NCB strategy paper of June 1983, the NUM judged that, in reality, plans were afoot to shut seventy pits and cut the workforce by 46 per cent, down from 185,000 men on colliery books to 100,000.42 The NUM were correct in suspecting that the NCB’s proposals did not reflect the full extent of the planned restructuring programme. The Board were agreed that 25 million tonnes of ‘high-­cost capacity’ needed to be taken out over a five-­year period for the industry to stand a chance of meeting the ‘break-­even’ financial objective set by the government.43 To that end, they had prepared two possible strategies: an ‘accelerated conventional case’ would spread closures evenly over a five-­year period, while a ‘new rapid case’ would aim to concentrate closures in the first two years.44 Even so, by July 1983 a considerable gap remained between 38  John Lloyd, ‘Why Scargill relies on his red guards’, Financial Times, 17 March 1984. 39  TNA PREM 19/1329, 14 March 1984. 40  Hansard, HC Sitting of 10 April 1984, Coal Industry Dispute (Police Operations); John McIlroy, ‘Police and Pickets: The Law against the Miners’, in Huw Beynon (ed.), Digging Deeper: Issues in the Miners’ Strike (London, 1985), pp. 101–22; Jim Coulter, Susan Miller, and Martin Walker, A State of Siege: Politics and Policing of the Coalfields: Miners’ Strike 1984 (London, 1984); Jim Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2019), p. 248. In June 2022, the Scottish Parliament agreed to pardon most Scottish miners accused of offences during the strike. See Jim Phillips, ‘Strategic Injustice and the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike in Scotland’, Industrial Law Journal (Advance Access Publication, 27 August 2022), pp. 1–29. 41 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 407. 42 NUM, Annual Report 1984, ‘Future for Coal’, pp. 211–13; p. 404 (Scargill speech). See also Terry Pattinson, ‘Shock plan for axed pits’, Daily Mirror, 6 June 1983; NUM, Annual Report 1983, p. 724. 43  Over the same period, 14 million tonnes of new capacity would be coming on stream. 44  TNA COAL 31/135, ‘Possible Strategies to 1987/88’, 18 April 1983.

174  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization central office and the areas. Whereas the headquarters calculated that seventy-­one colliery closures were required, with a rundown of 55,900 men, the area pro­posals added up to forty-­eight closures (and eleven mergers), with a more modest net reduction of 38,750 jobs.45 In September 1983, the Board’s new chairman, pos­ sibly echoing the ‘rapid case’ strategy, mentioned a figure of seventy-­five closures in a meeting with the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Energy.46 In secret ministerial correspondence early during the strike, forty to fifty closures were considered necessary for the NCB to become financially viable.47 Government advisers also expressed scepticism about how realistic the Coal Board’s projection of stabilizing production at 100 million tonnes per year really was. While the NUM predicted a rapid rundown of the colliery workforce by 70,000 men, they expected the British coalfields to be affected unequally. Closures would fall most heavily on the peripheral areas of Scotland, South Wales, Kent, and the North-­East, all but the Durham coalfield traditional strongholds of trade union militancy. The disconcerting projections notwithstanding, not even the NUM could picture a future in which the coal industry would disappear entirely. Rather, they accepted as veracious MacGregor’s claim of wanting to create a ‘high-­volume, low-­cost industry’, but judged that the social costs for miners and mining ­communities were unacceptable. The NUM was averse to contemplating that there could be a future for miners outside the industry; that it might be possible, desirable even, to assist miners in forging a new identity in a world without coal mining. Rather than welcoming generous redundancy terms, they considered them a bait to lure miners into betraying their own true interests as well as the general interest of coalfield communities past and present.48 Throughout the duration of the dispute, the NUM foregrounded the defensive nature of the industrial action. The official campaign slogan, ‘Coal not Dole’, encapsulated the prioritization of the status quo, however unsatisfactory, over the spectre of a bleak future. The slogan itself harked back to the late 1960s, where it was used locally to oppose the closures under the Wilson government.49 Yet the Union also developed more positive strike aims, both for miners and for the nation at large. ‘We must lift our eyes to the future,’ Scargill declared at the extraordinary annual delegate conference.50 In doing so, the NUM fell back on the platform that Scargill had developed for his campaign for the presidency in the early 1980s. In June 1984, the NUM put forward an alternative ‘Future for 45  Ibid., Area Five Year Strategies (Brief for Deputy Chairman), 29 July 1983. 46  TNA PREM 19/1329, Record of a Meeting Held at No 10 Downing Street, 15 September 1983, available at The Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/133121; Phillips, ‘Containing’, p. 117. 47  TNA PREM 19/1330, David Pascall to Turnbull, Coal Operating Costs, 11 May 1984. 48 Ottey, Strike, p. 62. 49  John Sewel, Colliery Closure and Social Change: A Study of a South Wales Mining Valley (Cardiff, 1975), p. 18. 50 NUM, Annual Report 1984.

1984  175 Coal’, which built on the original 1974 Plan for Coal to propose an expanding industry of 185 million tonnes of deep-­mined output by the end of the century, with substantially improved working conditions for miners. Among the demands were the introduction of a four-­day working week, better pay, and increased holi­ days; a rate-­protection scheme and the consolidation of the incentive bonus scheme; early retirement at 55 and higher pensions.51 More broadly, the NUM projected a future in which the strike would galvanize the labour movement and bring about, either directly or indirectly, a change of government. The NUM’s fight for miners’ jobs was also a fight for all working people of Britain, the NUM and supporters in the labour movement argued. As Scargill declared at the TUC’s annual conference on 3 September 1984, ‘[MacGregor’s] policy, which has been earmarked by the Government, is to defeat the trade union Movement. That is our fight and it is your fight.’52 Just like the NUM, the government foregrounded the defensive nature of their actions. They claimed to be concerned, in the first instance, with upholding the rule of law and, in particular, with safeguarding the rights of individuals to access their place of work without the threat of intimidation or violence.53 In doing so, they intimated that it was the government that was the bulwark against a dys­ topian future. While refusing to be drawn into a discussion on the precise nature of the NCB’s restructuring plan—­this was, after all, a question for management, not for the state—­they derided the NUM’s claim that the government was intent on running down the coal industry as nonsensical.54 Quite the opposite was true, or so the government claimed. They were committed to a prosperous and viable coal industry, as was demonstrated by continued high investment and state support. The government went further still, asserting that it was the Conservative government, rather than the NUM, who had the true interests of Britain’s mine­ workers at heart, both of those willing to leave the industry and of those wishing to remain. Indeed, the government claimed that it was militant trade unionism that blocked the way to a prosperous and secure future. More broadly, the NUM was cast as an obstacle to progress itself. Alfred Sherman, former head of the Centre for Policy Studies, pushed this claim further still. Writing in The Times on 21 August 1984, he invoked the Marxian philosophy of history to claim that the NUM represented ‘trammels’ on the dynamism of productive forces. In truth, the NUM were ‘reactionaries’ who used Marxian phraseology to keep their members locked in the past. In other words, the NUM did not just defend the past; they were of the past: 51  Ibid., ‘Future for Coal’, 13 June 1984, pp. 209–13; NUM Archives, Barnsley, 1984 Strike: Leaflets, ‘The Miners’ Strike: It’s time for a Four Day Week’ (n.p., n.d. [1984]). 52 TUC, Report of the Proceedings at the 116th Annual Trades Union Congress, Brighton (London, 1984), pp. 399–401, here p. 400. 53  TNA CAB 130/1268, MISC 101(84), 1st Meeting, 16 March 1984. 54  Hansard HC Sitting of 13 March 1984, Prime Minister’s Questions, cols 276–80.

176  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization I argue advisedly that social as well as economic change is resisted by the NUM. The working miner rarely benefits, but more often loses, from the NUM’s reactionary policy. Its effect is to keep him in the equivalent of what Marx called ‘rural idiocy’, in an isolated quasi-­tribal one-­class society.55

Yet, even more than the past and the future, it was the present that became invested with special significance by both sides in the conflict. From as early as March 1984 the NUM came to view the unfolding events as of historical signifi­ cance, as the long-­anticipated confrontation with the forces of reaction. Present actions would decide the future not just of the coal industry but of Britain for decades, if not generations, to come. The present moment was looked upon as a crucial test of character for the Union as an organization and for every individual miner. How people acted now would decide the way they would be remembered for the rest of their lives. The dispute offered a unique opportunity: It was a chance for the present generation of miners, not just to prove themselves worthy of the struggles of their forefathers, but to surpass them; to step out of the shadow of the past and create history in their own image. But the present was also a moment of judgement: the time of equivocation had passed; decision time had come. The dispute was a test that divided the ‘hypocrites’ from those who were prepared to back up their words with deeds. The NUM president summed up this conception in his concluding remarks at the delegate conference of 19 April 1984: Once more we find ourselves in the vanguard of the struggle. We find ourselves in a leadership position, and none of us should shirk away from that responsibility or obligation. We should recognise that 1984 marks the most crucial point in our history. . . . We can either accept the Board’s proposals and see our industry decimated and our people consigned to the scrapheap of unemployment, or we can stand up and fight.

Earlier in the same speech, Scargill acknowledged the high degree of emotion that had characterized the debate, lauding it as a distinctive feature of trade unionism: ‘The Union has been built on emotion, built on passion and commit­ ment, and faith and loyalty.’56 It was ‘commitment’, and the actions flowing from it, that constituted the Union’s greatest asset in the developing confrontation with the state.57 Within the context of the special delegate conference, the national president’s emphasis on the emotional nature of the debate—­and the actions inspired by passion and loyalty—­served to silence critics of the leadership’s course from among the disintegrating moderate wing of the NEC. It also served as a fig leaf for a broader debating climate in which delegates who argued in favour of an 55  Alfred Sherman, ‘How Scargill is betraying Marx’, The Times, 21 August 1984. 56 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 129. 57  Ibid., p. 131.

1984  177 individual pithead ballot were verbally abused and, some evidence suggests, also physically assaulted by protesters who had amassed outside the conference hall. Similar incidents had occurred in front of the NUM headquarters at the crucial NEC meeting of 12 April 1984.58 More broadly, Scargill paid tribute in his remarks to what was considered a distinctly working-­class culture of rough physicality. Just like the NUM, the government from very early on took the position that the dispute was a confrontation of historical significance—­a seminal test for this, and indeed any elected government. The resolution of the conflict could not be left to chance. A special Cabinet committee, the Ministerial Group on Coal (Miscellaneous 101) was formed to monitor developments and coordinate the government’s response across the various departments concerned.59 The first meeting was held on 16 March. It was chaired by the Prime Minister and com­ prised the Lord President of the Council (Whitelaw), Attorney General (Havers), Chancellor of the Exchequer (Lawson), and Secretaries of State for Defence (Heseltine), Energy (Walker), Employment (King), Home Office (Brittan), Trade and Industry (Tebbit), Transport (Ridley), and the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for the Sottish Office (Stewart).60 The committee met no fewer than fifty-­ one times throughout 1984, with a further nine meetings in 1985. In the weeks between the NCB’s announcement on 6 March and the NUM special delegate conference on 19 April, the Ministerial Group on Coal held eleven meetings. The frequency contrasted markedly with the NUM’s approach. Only two NEC meet­ ings were held in the first few weeks of the dispute, one on 8 March and another on 12 April. No liaison committee was established with either the TUC or the Labour Party. Whereas the Ministerial Group on Coal provided an institutional­ ized forum through which developments were monitored and policy responses were formulated, the NUM leadership chose a different approach. Largely bypass­ ing the NEC, they relied on the dynamism of on-­the-­ground activists to bring the coalfields to a complete standstill.61 In their presentational stance, but also in their proceedings, the government cultivated a position of careful ‘reasonableness’ which they contrasted with the purported irresponsibility of the picketing miners.62 The very surfeit of emotion that Scargill had characterized as the NUM’s greatest asset the government identified as the Union’s Achilles heel. They developed a presentational line that would focus on the physical actions of striking miners, with a particular emphasis on acts of violence, to discredit the NUM’s specific demands as irresponsible and unworthy of serious consideration.

58 Ottey, The Strike, pp. 92–117; TNA CAB 130/1268, MISC 101(84), 10th Meeting, 13 April 1984. 59  For an analysis, Phillips, ‘Containing’. 60  TNA CAB 130/1268, MISC 101(84), 1st Meeting, 16 March 1984. 61 Ottey, Strike, pp. 70–91. 62  Hansard HC Sitting of 31 July 1984, cols 241–52, here col. 249.

178  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization

II During the course of the dispute, the opposing sides developed sharply an­tag­on­is­tic imaginaries of who the miners really were. There was a distinctly normative dimension to these ascriptions. The debate was as much about who miners ought to be as who they were. While both sides operated with ideal types against which actual behaviour was judged, the miners’ identity was decided by what they did or did not do during the strike. The NUM as well as the government employed dualities that constructed sharply opposing imaginaries. As this section will show, the government made an effort to lay claim to those strands of identity that the NUM had disavowed. In the process they were able to appropriate notions of ordinariness that were, as we have seen, so important to many men working in the industry. For the leadership of the NUM, and representatives of the militant coalfields, the strike was the event that revealed the true character of a person; it was the moment when rhetoric was put to the test of reality. Only those miners willing to follow the call for strike action deserved to be called miners. These ideas were strongly gendered: By joining in the strike action, miners demonstrated that they were ‘real’ men, prepared to fight and, if need be, to sacrifice individual comfort and material wellbeing for the collective good. To an extent, the martial rhetoric was metaphorical, but only to an extent. The NUM extolled active engagement in the strike, the push and shove of picketing, over passive acquiescence. It was above all a cohort of young activists, prepared to put their bodies on the line, who were held up by the NUM as a shining example to others—­the real backbone of the strike and the Union’s future. In his contribution to the extraordinary annual conference, held in Sheffield on 11–12 July 1984, veteran miners’ leader McGahey praised this cohort as ‘my young wolves’ who were out there ‘barking’ and ‘fighting’. With men such as these, even the General Strike of 1926 could have been won. This was why, in McGahey’s estimation, 1984 was ‘the most wonderful strike’ he had ever been involved in.63 The ‘young wolves’ were brave, committed, with no time for procedural ni­ceties—‘he is not going back, and you can ballot until you are blue in the face’, as George Bolton, born in 1934, exclaimed with reference to his younger brother, who was one of the pickets, at the special conference on 19 April.64 The activists had no qualms about imposing their will on the undecided, by physical force if necessary. McGahey admitted as much when he added wryly, ‘I would hate to be a scab, and how a scab must hang his head in the face of those young wolves.’ In doing so, McGahey hinted at the opposite to the young activists. In this im­agin­ary, anyone who violated the sacred principle of trade unionism—­the refusal to cross 63 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 444; see also the comments by Smith, Actual Account, p. 191f. 64  Ibid., p. 126.

1984  179 an official picket line—­placed himself outside the community of miners: he was a traitor to the union, the community, and himself, unworthy to be called miner. This negative counterimage, too, was sharply gendered: ‘scabs’ were not men; they possessed no honour, guts, or spine. Kent miners’ leader Jack Collins expressed this duality in uncompromising terms. Speaking at the special delegate confer­ ence, he exclaimed, I am proud of those lads who have been on the picket line, proud of the ­comrades who have been sleeping in the buses . . . The rest of you, who have not got the guts to stand by men like that ought to hang your heads in shame. (Hear, hear) Hang your heads in shame. Don’t call yourselves colliers.65

There persists a belief in popular memory that the government, in 1984, indis­ criminately labelled all miners as the ‘enemy within’. In truth, the approach was more subtle. While, initially, the government, alongside the Coal Board, was taken by surprise by the extent of disarray amongst miners—­politicians and civil servants, too, had internalized an image of miners as an especially cohesive body of men—­they were quick to spot the potential of these divisions.66 Throughout the dispute, government strategy was to capitalize on the internal fissures and widen them into irreconcilable rifts. To this end, two differentiations were intro­ duced: first, between the leaders and the led; second, between miners on strike and those who were not. The latter were called ‘working miners’ rather than non-­ striking miners or strike-­breakers. The qualifier ‘working’ was significant, for in adding this appellation, the government associated them with a long discursive tradition that expressed admiration, tinged with a touch of establishment guilt, for the hard and arduous labour that miners performed—­a sense of guilt to which, as the government well knew, the British upper classes were curiously sus­ ceptible. Indeed, even in 1984, prominent Conservatives could be heard saluting miners as embodying the best of British values. The most prominent exponent was the former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who, in his maiden speech in the House of Lords on 13 November 1984, extolled miners as ‘the best men in the world’. Bemoaning the strike as ‘terrible’, Macmillan, ennobled as Lord Stockton, reminded the Lords of the enormous contribution that miners had made to British history. Memorably, he exclaimed, ‘They beat the Kaiser’s army and they beat Hitler’s army. They never gave in.’67 In an unsolicited draft speech for the Prime Minster, retired civil servant Philip de Zulueta likewise lauded the miners as ‘a breed of men who are some of the finest in this country’. The draft went so far

65  Ibid., p. 120. 66  Vinen, ‘War of Position’, pp. 133, 145; Smith, Actual Account, p. 15f. 67  Hansard HL Sitting of 13 November 1984, cols 234–41, here col. 240.

180  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization as to express grudging admiration for the endurance demonstrated by coalfield communities during the strike.68 In 1984, such indiscriminate praise of mineworkers was confined to the margins of Conservatism; it belonged largely to a generation of retired politicians and civil servants. Much more central to the government’s rhetoric was a distinction between the NUM leadership and ordinary members. The leadership, the argument went, did express neither the true views nor real interests of the great majority of Britain’s mineworkers. They were motivated by the political objective to bring down the elected government and change fundamentally the distribution of power in British society. In pursuance of aims that had nothing to do with the coal industry, the leaders had abused the Union’s rule book and pushed the membership into a self-­defeating political strike which was detrimental to the interests of the miners, the future of the coal industry, and the country. The foot soldiers of this politically motivated action, the government claimed, were the very activists that McGahey had hailed as ‘our wolves’ and which parts of the media had christened ‘Scargill’s army’. These people, far from embodying the core values of mining trade unionism, had become a violent ‘mob’.69 They were ‘men of violence’ contemptuous of the rule of law; ‘terror squads’ bent on intimidation, or so the government claimed.70 In identifying strike activists through their (alleged) behaviour on the picket line, rather than by occupation, the government con­ nected them rhetorically to the volunteers of the Provisional IRA who were, at the time, engaged in a violent campaign on the British mainland and, on 12 October 1984, had attempted to assassinate the Prime Minister herself. Whereas the government condemned the activist section of the NUM as a violent mob, the very people whom the NUM had cast out as ‘scum’ were hailed as the true torch­ bearers of democratic trade unionism.71 ‘ “Scabs” their former workmates call them. Scabs? They are lions!’ as the Prime Minister exclaimed at the Conservative Party conference in October 1984. They were ‘the best of British’.72 While driving a wedge between trade union officials and members, and exploiting the divisions between strike activists and non-­striking miners, it was a third group, the mass of inactive strikers, on whom the government and the Coal Board focused especial attention. By contacting them directly and offering them material incentives to return to work, the government and the Coal Board worked on their conflict of loyalties. ‘I would like you to consider carefully . . . whether this strike is really in your interest,’ as NCB chairman MacGregor put it in a letter that

68  TNA PREM 19/1332, Philip de Zulueta to Butler, 31 July 1984: ‘Their loyalty to the union leaders is, I accept, admirable in its way.’ 69  TNA PREM 19/1332, Transcript of Peter Walker’s remarks, 10 August 1984. 70  Ibid., article by Employment Secretary Tom King for News of the World, 12 August 1984. 71 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 609. 72  The Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Margaret Thatcher Speaking text, 12 October 1984, pp. 43, 46, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/136240, accessed 1 June 2022.

1984  181 was sent to all men on colliery books in June 1984.73 This group was torn between the demand to be a good trade unionist who refuses to cross a picket line irre­ spective of his personal views, on the one hand, and the demand to be a good provider whose priority is to look after his family and children on the other. It was among this group that the NCB sought to recruit converts for its various return-­to-­work campaigns. They were identified as ‘ordinary decent miners’ who, the government claimed, did not stay away from work because they supported the industrial action, but because they were intimidated into doing so.74 It was also this group that the NUM had identified as the weak link in the chain, and who they sought to entice into more active support for the strike. As General Secretary Heathfield declared at the special delegate conference on 10 August 1984, If some of our members think that they can defend the principles of trade unionism by looking through lace curtains as pickets go onto the picket line, if they can ignore their mates who are making the sacrifices and think that the principles of trade unionism can be maintained when they sit watching tele­vi­ sion at home, they are kidding themselves.75

Concern over the resilience of non-­active strikers was also the broader context in which the Women Against Pit Closures campaign was set. In the run-­up to the dispute, the NUM’s attention had been drawn to worries over the role of the miner’s immediate family in a future confrontation. Nell Myers, the NUM’s press officer, wrote a memo in August 1983 warning that miners’ wives and mothers may no longer be relied upon to support automatically the industrial action of their husbands and sons. Jean McCrindle, a lecturer at Northern College, had expressed similar concerns in a letter to the NUM president.76 Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) formed in Barnsley in early March 1984 in response to media coverage that focused on women who had voiced their opposition to the strike.77 Women’s support groups also sprang up in other areas. Demarcation disputes between individual union branches and local groups notwithstanding, WAPC was embraced emphatically by the national leadership of the NUM.78 In mobilizing women behind the strike effort, WAPC underlined that the strike was waged in defence of communities just as much as in defence of individual 73  NUM Archives, Barnsley, Ian MacGregor, ‘Your Future in Danger’, June 1984. 74  TNA PREM 19/1332, Transcript of Peter Walker’s speaking notes, 10 August 1984. 75 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 617. 76  Florence Sutcliffe-­Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, ‘National Women Against Pit Closures: gender, trade unionism and community activism in the miners’ strike 1984/85’, CBH 32/1 (March 2018), pp. 78–100, here pp. 80f; Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson, ‘ “Side by Side with Our Men?” Women’s Activism, Community, and Gender in the 1984–1985 British Miners’ Strike’, ILWCH 75 (spring 2009), pp. 68–84. 77  Sutcliffe-­Braithwaite and Thomlinson, ‘Women Against Pit Closures’, p. 81. 78  Ibid., pp. 84, 86.

182  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization livelihoods. As a leaflet by the Barnsley group declared in capital letters, ‘WE ARE ALL IN IT TOGETHER – HERE WE GO!’79

III For all their differences, both the NUM and the government believed that the miners possessed extraordinary power. In this estimation, the miners were spe­ cial because their ‘industrial muscle’ set them apart from other groups of workers in late twentieth-­century Britain. The biological metaphor was significant for two reasons: It suggested that the miners’ power rested, in the last analysis, on the application of physical strength rather than in practices regulated by law and cus­ tom. It also carried the connotation that the power had the potential to spill over from the sphere of industrial relations into the political arena. While both sides shared the view that the miners were powerful, their understandings of the com­ posite elements of this power differed considerably. To the leadership of the NUM, the miners had always been powerful. While sympathetic academic observers traced the roots of this power to the bonds of workplace solidarity forged—­in the words of Raphael Samuel—‘in a daily wager with death’, the miners’ leaders themselves were not concerned with first causes.80 To them, the miners’ unique contribution to the nation was self-­evident. Nor did the special nature of their work require elucidation. They were much more con­ cerned with answering the question why this power had been allowed to remain latent for most of the post-­war period, rather than used, as they saw it, to the miners’ collective advantage. The miners’ leaders of the 1980s offered two ex­plan­ ations, both of which focused on social consciousness rather than social being. The explanations were informed by a belief that the cultural superstructure, instead of being a mere reflection of material social conditions, had the power to shape people’s actions. First, the miners had been badly led. Rather than press the miners’ interests, for years the union leadership had colluded with management and the state—­in part for personal gain. In doing so, they had betrayed the rank and file. For the Left, the arch example of this type of ‘Judas’ leadership was Joe Gormley, Scargill’s predecessor as national president, a master in the art of back-­ door wheeling and dealing, and in manipulating the rule book to the detriment of the miners’ real interests.81 The second reason was that the miners had been

79  NUM Archives, Barnsley, 1984 Strike: Leaflets, Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures, ‘What we stand for and what we do’ (n.d. [1984]). 80  Raphael Samuel, ‘Introduction’, in Raphael Samuel, Barbara Bloomfield, and Guy Boanas (eds.), The Enemy Within: Pit Villages and the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5 (London, 1985), p. 8; The People of Thurcroft, Thurcroft: a village and the miners’ strike: an oral history (Nottingham, 1986), p. 34. See also B. L. Coombes, ‘The Miner’s Life in Wartime’, Picture Post 21/5, 30 October 1943, pp. 14–16. 81 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 465.

1984  183 insufficiently educated about their true interests. Here, too, past generations of miners’ leaders were largely to blame, the present leadership believed. By neglecting the educational sphere, miners’ leaders had allowed large parts of the member­ ship to fall prey to the misinformation of the capitalist media and, in particular, the tabloid press and the NCB publication Coal News. It was this false conscious­ ness, rather than independent reasoning, that had led a majority of miners to reject the NEC’s recommendations in the pithead ballots for industrial action in 1982 and 1983. It was to combat this that the NUM annual conference in 1983 had decided to launch a ‘campaign for coal’.82 With the work of political education stepped up and the national union led, for the first time in its history, by a troika of Left leaders, the major obstacles to ac­tual­iz­ing the miners’ power had been removed, or so the leadership believed at the outbreak of the dispute in March 1984. Under these conditions, victory in the coming battle with the government was assured. While the support of the wider trade union movement and the broader public was welcome, the miners were not dependent on either to emerge victorious from the struggle. The NUM leadership conceptualized the miners as a vanguard in relation to other industrial workers. They were an elite force; not equal but special. This was the reason why they had been singled out by the government for attack and this was why other workers must recognize that the miners’ fight was also their fight. Thus, the NUM saw no reason, until well into the summer, to follow custom and ask the TUC to co­ord­in­ ate the assistance of other unions;83 they felt that all industrial workers had a moral obligation to offer support, regardless of the short-­term impact of the strike on their wage packets or workplaces.84 Whereas the NUM operated on the understanding that the miners’ latent power only needed to be actualized for them to prevail in the confrontation with the state, the government conceptualized power in relational terms. In the after­ math of the 1981 coal crisis, the National Policy Review Staff had produced a study of the ‘NCB/NUM problem’.85 In the document, the authors had identified structural as well as psychological factors as contributing to the miners’ unique position. The miners were powerful because they occupied a central position in the British economy. They were also powerful because they, and others, believed in their power. While the memorandum had been pessimistic about the possibility of changing these factors, ever since the humiliation of 1981 the government had worked assiduously to forestall history from repeating itself. 82  See also Arnold, ‘Thirst for knowledge’. 83  MRC, MSS.292D/253.145/1, Heathfield to Murray, ‘National and Area Action’, 16 March 1984. See also ibid., Extract from F&GPC minute, 21 May 1984: ‘It was undoubtedly the case that the General Council supported the NUM and wanted to assist. But the General Council was being placed in a difficult position by the NUM’s attempts to organise support from other unions outside the framework of the TUC.’ 84 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 608. 85  See Chapter 4.

184  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization There was, first of all, the close relationship between the NUM and the National Coal Board. To the government, the Union and management had, to all effects and purposes, formed a producers’ cartel. NCB and NUM might assume different roles for presentational purposes, but they were united in the common goal of shielding the industry from the full exposure of market forces. The very co­oper­ ation between Union and management that the Left habitually denounced as a despicable ‘treason’ was viewed by the government as an important structural component of the miners’ strength. Theirs was an alliance that needed to be ­broken up. It was for this reason that in the aftermath of the 1981 coal crisis the government went to great lengths to appoint as successor to NCB chairman Derek Ezra (and interim chairman Norman Siddall) an industrialist from outside the industry. Ian MacGregor’s reputation as an American union-­buster (despite the fact that he was Scottish by origin) was just as important to the government as his actual proposals for the restructuring of the coal industry, which arguably dif­ fered in degree only from those of his immediate predecessor—­for it was this reputation that helped to break the link between the NUM and the NCB on which so much of the miners’ advances in the 1970s had depended.86 Ever since the appointment of MacGregor on 1 September 1983, the NUM considered the NCB as a mere arm of government, rather than a potential ally in putting forward shared demands for the future of the industry. In fact, the appointment of MacGregor as chairman had been greeted with ‘great dismay’ by the NCB’s man­ agement as well. Throughout the dispute, the NCB was riven by internal conflicts between senior managers with decades of experience in the industry, on one side, and the Chairman and his coterie of outside advisers on the other.87 Even so, the government remained wary of NCB management, including MacGregor, for the government was susceptible to the argument that the senior management oper­ ated in ‘a culture based on almost 40 years of NCB/NUM co-­existence and co-­determination’.88 The government were acutely aware that, whatever the financial position of the coal industry, Britain was reliant on the miners to supply the coal-­fired power stations that generated 75 per cent of the nation’s electricity needs.89 This, the most basic pillar of the miners’ strength, could be altered in the long term only by diversifying the fuel economy, encouraging imports, or investing in alternative forms of electricity generation. Most fundamentally, therefore, the miners were powerful because their labour was essential to keeping the British economy going. While this fundamental fact could not be changed, the government recognized that there were ways of delaying the impact of the miners’ withdrawal of their labour on the economy and, in particular, the electricity supply industry. As long 86  Smith, Actual Account, pp. 16–22. 87  Ibid., p. 16 and passim. 88  TNA PREM 19/1334, John Redwood, Interview with G. Whalen, 24 September 1984. 89  TNA PREM 19/541, CPRS Study of the NCB/NUM problem, 31 July 1981, p. 3.

1984  185 ago as 1977, the Ridley Report had recommended building up coal stocks to blunt the miners’ power. But it was only after the coal crisis of 1981 that the govern­ ment started to act on this recommendation in earnest. They engaged in building up ‘endurance’ capacity, that is coal stocks at pitheads and power stations, in add­ ition to providing for the ability to switch from coal-­based generation to oil burn.90 Viewed in those terms, industrial confrontation with the miners was a competition between different types of endurance—­a ‘war of attrition’.91 Government strategy rested on the ability to exhaust the miners’ material and psychological resilience before the interruption in coal production throttled the electricity supply industry. The Prime Minister expressed this calculation well. Summing up the discussion of the Ministerial Group on Coal’s meeting on 11 April 1984, she averred, ‘The longer the current action continued the more likely it would be that financial pressures now more severe than those applying in 1972 and 1974, would be felt by miners and their families.’ Even so, the government regarded the NUM as a formidable opponent. ‘Miners’ endurance is notoriously long (26 weeks in 1926 without social security) and should not be under-­estimated,’ adviser David Pascall cautioned on 25 May 1984.92 Throughout the dispute, the government closely monitored the level of coal stocks and based the forward planning on pro­ jections of how much longer it was able to withstand the strike. At the beginning of the strike, endurance was estimated to stand at twenty-­eight weeks;93 by the autumn, the government was confident it could maintain uninterrupted energy supply well into the summer of 1985. In their contingency planning, the govern­ ment was greatly helped by the failure of the NUM to unite all members behind strike action. According to the NUM’s own figures, nearly 40 million tonnes of coal were produced in the financial year 1984/5, 26 million tonnes of which were deep-­mined output, which translated into 30 per cent of regular production.94 As noted above, initially the government was taken by surprise by the extent of the divisions inside the NUM. Yet they were quick to spot the potential of dis­ unity for defeating the strike. After all, the miners’ internal cohesion was one of the fundamental pillars of their power. To exploit the internal rifts, the govern­ ment lauded non-­striking miners as defenders of democracy and the true repre­ sentatives of Britain’s coalfield cultures; worked on striking miners’ conflict of loyalties between their union and their families by offering material incentives for abandoning the strike; and clandestinely encouraged non-­striking miners to take their own Union to court. At Yorkshire Area level, in Derbyshire, as well as nationally, it was civil action initiated by non-­striking miners, rather than actions initiated by the NCB or a third party, that resulted in the High Court declaring 90  Vinen, ‘War of position’. 91  TNA PREM 19/1331, John Redwood, ‘Coal and Dock Strikes’, 13 July 1984. 92  TNA PREM 19/1330 ‘The Coal Dispute’, 25 May 1984. 93  TNA CAB 130/1268, MISC 101(84), 1st Meeting, 16 March 1984. 94 NUM, Annual Report 1985, p. 417.

186  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization the strike to be unlawful. The NEC’s rejection of this judgement and reaffirmation of the industrial action as official led to the imposition of a large fine, and ul­tim­ ate­ly to the sequestration of the Union’s assets, for ‘contempt of court’.95 In his judgement of 10 October 1984, Justice Nicholls echoed the government’s line that ‘a great and powerful trade union . . . has decided to regard itself as above the law, and to make this plain repeatedly, emphatically and publicly’.96 By comparison, the material incentives designed to lure striking miners into abandoning the strike produced disappointing returns only. They resulted in a gradual erosion of support of the strike rather than the precipitous collapse that the government and the Coal Board had hoped for. Not before the autumn of 1984 did the so-­called ‘return to work’ build up any momentum; it was not until February 1985 that the number of miners not on strike started to match the figure of striking miners. While the government worked to destabilize the NUM’s internal cohesion, they were also concerned to undermine the respect that miners had traditionally enjoyed among the general public. In their public relations effort, the government pursued a dual strategy. It imputed political motives to the NUM leadership, who were represented as extremists abusing the loyalties of their members to pursue insurrectionary goals that had very little to do with the future of the coal industry. In her address to the Conservative Party conference on 12 October 1984, the Prime Minister labelled strike activists as part of an ‘organized revolutionary minority who are prepared to exploit industrial disputes, but whose real aim is the breakdown of law and order and the destruction of democratic parliamentary democracy’.97 More broadly, the government capitalized on the miners’ special status to isolate them from the mass of ‘ordinary’ workers. Miners were special not because they worked harder than others, but because they lived off the work of others, or so it was imputed. In her conference speech, Thatcher played the coal industry off against the National Health Service, claiming that tax payers’ annual subsidy to the coal industry equalled the total sum of salaries paid to all doctors and dentists in the NHS.98 Backbench MP Eric Cockeram was even more strident in his denunciation. On 26 November 1984, he declared in the House of Commons, ‘It is time that the miners were told that they cannot expect endless subsidies from working people earning less than they earn.’99 Throughout the dispute, the government was concerned to monitor public opinion. While not commissioning polling themselves, the government analysed 95 NUM, Annual Report 1984, pp. 655, 675f; Howell, ‘Defiant dominoes’, pp. 157–9. For a transcript of the High Court judgements by Justice Nicholls of 28 September 1984 (Taylor & Ors. vs. NUM) and 10 October (Taylor & Foulstone vs NUM (Yorkshire Area) and NUM), see TNA PREM 19/1334, fols 114–52. Earlier in the year, similar court judgements had been reached regarding the Nottinghamshire Area, the North Wales Area, the North-­Western Area, and the Midlands Area. 96  TNA PREM 19/1334, Royal Courts of Justice, 10 October 1984. 97  The Margaret Thatcher Foundation, Margaret Thatcher speaking text, 12 October 1984, p. 51. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/136240, accessed 1 June 2022. 98  Ibid., p. 47. 99  Hansard HC Sitting of 26 November 1984, col. 743f.

1984  187 avidly the data that was made available to them. Opinion research carried out among the general public in May, June, and August revealed a dynamic situation but also a clear pattern. In May 1984, 44 per cent of the sample expressed a degree of sympathy with the striking miners, with the same percentage opposed and 11 per cent undecided. At the same time, a substantial majority of 78 per cent disap­ proved of the striking miners’ tactics of mass picketing, with only 22 per cent in support. While only 12 per cent thought the NUM would win the dispute, confi­ dence in the NCB’s ability to win was not much higher. Sixty per cent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that ‘nobody will win’ and that the longer the strike lasted, the more damage would be done.100 On the evidence of opinion research commissioned by the Evening Standard, by mid-­August, on the eve of the TUC annual congress, public opinion had hardened further, both among the general public and trade unionists: 70 per cent of those sampled disapproved of the NUM’s handling of the strike; 89 per cent believed the NUM should have held a pithead ballot. Among trade union members, 48 per cent expressed a degree of sympathy with striking miners, but only 29 per cent wanted the miners to win. Among the general public, support was even lower at 21 per cent. According to the research, half the general public thought that more direct support for the miners would harm the TUC and the Labour Party. While the government took the polling data as evidence that ‘Mr Scargill and the NUM have lost the support of the general public and the great majority of trade union members’, the 95 per cent approval rating for TUC-­sponsored initiatives to bring the strike to an end could also be read in a less one-­dimensional way.101 It seemed to indicate that what the general public desired, above all, was for the strike to end. Whatever the possible meanings of the data that the government used, there can be little doubt that this knowledge helped the government to bolster confidence that their over­ all strategy was working. History would not repeat itself, and 1984 would not turn into another 1972 or 1974. The NUM, for their part, neither commissioned nor obtained public opinion polls. In their analysis of the situation, people’s views were shaped by what they read in the mass media and saw on television.102 Crucially, published opinion on the strike was not neutral or objective, but systematically rigged in the govern­ ment’s favour. With very few exceptions, the media were not independent, but an arm of government propaganda—­ a ‘lie machine’ that either suppressed the Union’s point of view or used slander and distortion to discredit the Union’s

100  TNA PREM 19/1330, David Pascall, ‘The Coal Dispute’, 25 May 1984, Attachment: National Public Opinion Poll. 101  TNA PREM 19/1332, The Miners and the TUC Conference, 31 August; see also TNA PREM 19/1332, T.F.  Thompson, Chairman Opinion Research & Communication to Prime Minister, 29 August 1984. 102 NUM, Annual Report 1984, ‘Relations with the Media’, p. 395.

188  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization pos­ition.103 The way forward, therefore, was not to address any concerns about the conduct of the strike as raised in the media or public opinion polls, but to expose the media’s bias and create an alternative public sphere. In the NUM’s esti­ mation, mass publications such as the tabloids were powerful only because they ‘fill[ed] an empty space, the territory left vacant by organisations in the Labour Movement’.104 Despite their concerns about the systematic bias of the mainstream media, the NUM maintained a vigorous public relations effort throughout the strike. Indeed, government advisers were worried that the NUM displayed greater skill in handling the media than did the NCB.105 National officials regularly made themselves available for interviews, while the Union’s press office released a con­ tinuous stream of briefings. More importantly, the NUM worked to build up an alternative public sphere, by encouraging the growth of a grass-­roots network of women’s support and community groups both in the coalfields and beyond in which the miners’ case would find a sympathetic hearing.106 Although the NUM made no effort to monitor public opinion, hundreds of letters arrived at the National Union’s headquarters over the course of the strike. They were written by members of the general public as well as miners and other residents of Britain’s coalfields. The letters represented a random but broad sam­ ple of opinions on the coal dispute. They demonstrated the extent to which the issue was a matter of national concern, arousing strong emotions: they were full of concern and well-­meant advice; expressed hopes and fears, praise and invec­ tive. Some also contained threats to the national president’s and other officials’ wellbeing and life. While the letters were opened and possibly read by members of staff, there is no indication that the NUM made any attempt to analyse their contents systematically or make use of them in any way. If they had done so, they would have found qualitative evidence supporting the quantitative findings of the public opinion surveys. As an analysis of a sample of forty-­seven letters from the first weeks of the coal dispute indicates, a minority of letter writers expressed support for the strike action, occasionally coupled with strong admiration for Scargill personally.107 As Joe Henery, a retired miner from Kirkintilloch, Scotland, expressed it, ‘Your uncompromising stand on behalf of the miners . . . will be an inspiration not only to miners (but to the whole of the working class) to resist to the full the attacks of the government . . . on our standard of living and our liberties.’108 More common 103 NUM, Annual Report 1985, p. 479. 104 Ibid. 105  TNA PREM 19/1330, David Pascall, ‘The Coal Dispute’, 25 May 1984: ‘The Board are not nat­ ural communicators.’ 106 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 364; Annual Report 1985, p. 468f. 107  I would like to thank my former undergraduate student Aaron Ashley for making available a synopsis of the letters to me. See also Aaron Ashley, ‘ “How much more blood do you want on your hands?” An analysis of letters sent to Arthur Scargill at the beginning of the 1984/85 miners’ strike’, undergraduate dissertation, University of Nottingham, 2019. 108  NUM Archives, Barnsley, 89/1 Box 4, Joe Henery to A.S., 20 March 1984.

1984  189 than praise, however, were concerns over the divisions inside the NUM and the scenes of public disorder that were watched on television screens. ‘When I see groups of young miners shouting “Scab! Scab! Scab!” at fellow workers I feel very sad,’ a trade unionist from East Sussex confessed.109 Mrs Jones, a miner’s daughter and miner’s wife from Atherstone in Warwickshire was more strident. Sarcastically addressing the national president as ‘Dear King Arthur’, she exclaimed, ‘Never in all this time have I seen anything as ridiculous as is happening now. I hope you are satisfied putting man against man and pit against pit.’110 Another miner’s wife, meanwhile, expressed concern that the modest material comfort that miners had been able to accumulate over the years through hard work and sacrifice was being put in jeopardy by the strike action.111 Others went further still in their critique of the strike. They sided with the police against the striking miners and imputed political motives to the industrial action. R.  Krzymowsk from Kidsgrove in Staffordshire wrote on 17 March 1984, ‘You seem to see yourself as a sort of Messiah of Marxism or Moses leading men to promised land when in fact you are just a soap box speaker, with ne head for heights.’ Others claimed that the miners’ use of their industrial muscle was, once again, hurting the weak and the vul­ner­ able. As Reverend Cameron from Kirkwood, County Durham, expressed this sentiment, May I remind you, as someone who works alongside the many of those who are disadvantaged, that it is they and not the Government, Coal Board or big busi­ ness who will suffer the effects of this dispute.112

As the strike dragged on, the government became more ambitious in its strike aims.113 Although adviser David Pascall suggested as early as 30 March 1984 that the government was presented with a ‘unique opportunity to break the power of the militants in the NUM’, initially the government was concerned above all lest history repeat itself.114 Increasingly, however, they came to view the coal strike as an opportunity to break—­in the retrospective words of Norman Tebbit—‘the spell’ of the miners’ power.115 The miners must be defeated and seen to be defeated—­only then would the enormous material and political resources used by the British state have served a purpose. As Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson declared in the House of Commons on 31 July 1984, the public ex­pend­ iture costs of the dispute, ‘even in narrow financial terms . . . represent a worth­ while investment for the nation’.116 Accordingly, the government watched 109  Ibid., Heathfield to A.S., 20 March 1984. 110  Ibid., J. Jones to A.S., 17 March 1984. 111  Ibid., G. D. Rogers to A.S., 12 March 1984. 112  Ibid., Revd. Cameron to A.S., 30 March 1984. 113  TNA PREM 19/1330, David Pascall, ‘Coal Dispute’, 25 May 1984; Smith, Actual Account, p. 222. 114  TNA PREM 19/1329, David Pascall, ‘Coal’, 30 March 1984. 115 Tebbit, Upwardly Mobile, p. 238. 116  Hansard, HC Sitting of 31 July 1984, col. 307f.

190  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization anxiously, and sabotaged if necessary, third-­party attempts at mediation between the NUM and the NCB; and came to reject any resolution of the strike that would offer the NUM a face-­saving settlement.117 Indeed, from the summer of 1984, the government was just as concerned about an unsatisfactory compromise settle­ ment as they were about an NUM victory. Any settlement short of total victory was considered tantamount to a government defeat. As adviser John Redwood cautioned in a secret policy document on 13 July 1984, Any fudged formula over uneconomic pits which allows the pace of pit closures to be slowed and the level of subsidy to increase is defeat. It invites the question of why did we bother to soldier on for so long? I can think of no good answer.118

It has often been noted that the 1984/5 miners’ strike was an uneven contest, with the balance of forces tilted against the NUM from the very beginning. With the benefit of hindsight, it may well appear that the miners were ‘doomed’ from the beginning.119 Yet, throughout the dispute, the Thatcher government remained wary of the miners’ power. There were moments in the year-­long dispute when the government became intensely concerned that the miners might be getting the  upper hand.120 Apart from the early weeks when the strategy of picketing out reluctant coalfields nearly succeeded in bringing coal production to a com­ plete standstill, the solidarity action of the dockers’ union in July 1984, and the deputy union’s successful strike ballot in September 1984 marked such potential turning points. ‘If I were a miner, I would be delighted by the events of the last 2 weeks,’ Redwood remarked acerbically in the memorandum of 13 July with refer­ ence to the dockers’ strike.121 Both of these potential tipping points came about as a result of supportive action by other trade unions, rather than through the mo­bil­iza­tion of a grass-­roots rainbow coalition that has featured so prom­in­ent­ly in the popular memory of the strike. They failed to materialize because the gov­ ernment was prepared to ‘buy off ’ workers in other industries to keep the miners isolated.122 The NUM sensed, correctly, that the government was prepared to give ground in industrial relations disputes with other unions to keep the ­miners on the defensive. Yet they had little to offer to other workers, other than an appeal to their sense of honour and solidarity, to countervail these pressures.123

117 Smith, Actual Account, pp. 150–61; Phillips, ‘Containing’, pp. 134–6, 140. 118  TNA PREM 19/1331, John Redwood, ‘Coal and Dock Strikes’, 13 July 1984, p. 2. 119 Judt, Postwar, p. 542. 120 Edgerton, Rise and Fall, p. 458. 121  TNA PREM 19/1331, ‘Coal and Dock Strikes’. 122  Phillips, ‘Containing’, pp. 131–6; TNA PREM 19/1331, Redwood, ‘Coal and Dock Strikes’, 13 July 1984: ‘There is no alternative to seeing the miners’ dispute as central.’ 123 NUM, Annual Report 1984, p. 616 (G. Bolton).

1984  191 By November 1984, however, after NACODS had called off their threat of  industrial action and with the sequestration of NUM funds, the ‘war of ­attrition’ was inexorably turning against the miners. With the material and emotional toll of strike action steadily rising, the support base for the strike was slowly, but inexorably, eroded. The NUM sought to shore up support by stepping up campaigning in the coalfields and beyond.124 Delegates at special conferences argued that the hardship and suffering themselves were reasons to continue. They were compelled to hold out until ‘total victory’ was achieved.125 This was a time ‘to grit our teeth’;126 the stakes were too high to give in now. Perhaps ‘General Winter’ would come to the miners’ aid.127 Yet the NUM’s ­delegate conferences of the summer and autumn of 1984 could no longer claim to represent Britain’s miners in their entirety. Whole coalfield delegations were absent, and non-­striking miners had started to organize in a Working Miners’ Committee and other groups to articulate their interests.128 As a working miner from South Derbyshire challenged a striking delegate from the Midlands Area at a special delegate conference in February 1985, ‘Ninety percent of your men are at work. Who do you represent, brother?’129 Whatever the defiant rhet­oric emanating from rostrums week after week, the number of miners abandoning the strike increased: according to government data, by 26 November 1984 36 per cent of NUM members had returned to work. By the end of December, only twenty-­five out of 185 collieries had no NUM member back at work.130 Although the NUM disputed these figures, the trend was unmistakable.131 On  3 March 1985, a special delegate conference agreed narrowly to organize a  return to work ‘without any signed agreement’ to forestall the collapse of the  Union.132 On Tuesday, 5 March 1985, the great miners’ strike was over, although some miners in Scotland and Kent did not return to work until the following week.133

124  Ibid, Special Delegate Conference November 1984. 125  Ibid., p. 609. 126  Ibid., p. 699. 127  Ibid., p. 702. 128  Ibid., p. 604; Smith, Actual Account, p. 207; Morgan and Coates, Nottinghamshire Coalfield, pp. 17–19. 129 NUM, Annual Report 1985, p. 66. 130 TNA CAB 130/1268, MISC 101(84), 49th Meeting of 26 November; 51st Meeting of 18 December. 131  According to the Union’s own calculations, 60 percent of members were not at work as of 1 March 1985. The figures were not adjusted for sickness and other absences. There was wide regional variation. See NUM Archives, Barnsley, Strike Files, NUM National Office, Industrial Relations: Dispute Figures, Friday 1 March 1985. 132 NUM, Annual Report 1985, p. 105. 133  Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain (London, 2021), pp. 127–37.

Figure 5.1  A communal soup kitchen, by Peter Price. This series of ink drawings from Maltby in 1984 captures something of the complex impact of the 1984/5 strike on local communities. Scenes of communal self-­help are contrasted with instances of social ostracism; police brutality is highlighted, but vandalization of the property of strike-­breakers is also depicted.

Figure 5.2  Peter Price, a girl being taunted.

1984  193

Figure 5.3  Peter Price, miners being chased through a field by mounted police.

Figure 5.4  Peter Price, a strike-­breaker’s property being vandalized.

194  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization

IV All parties to the dispute took for granted its historical significance. The present would be looked upon in the future as a watershed moment in post-­war British history. Accordingly, day-­to-­day records were carefully filed away to serve as source material for future histories. Other records were created specifically with history in mind: the sizeable body of diaries, poems, songs that emerged from the strike attested to its cultural significance.134 Journalists, and drawings and tele­vi­sion teams would visit the coalfields to report back from the nerve centres of the action. Social scientists, too, took to documenting and analysing the unfolding events. Much social scientific research was self-­consciously sympathetic to the striking miners. It was launched during the second half 1984. It tended to be published either towards the end of the strike or in the years immediately following the organized return to work.135 Historians and sociologists such as Raphael Samuel, Huw Beynon, and Peter Gibbon were less interested in the high politics of the strike than in perspectives ‘from below’. Through interviews with strikers, participant observation and the collection of first-­hand testimony, they sought to document community mobilization in ‘typical’ coalfield communities in the North-­East, Yorkshire, and South Wales. The common theme running through this body of work was the rediscovery of ‘traditional’ working-­class values of self-­help and solidarity in the face of adver­ sity. Concerned to give a voice to perspectives ‘from below’, the social scientists took great care to involve miners and other members from the community in the production process. In their study of the mining town of Thurcroft in South Yorkshire, for example, Gibbon and David Steyne of Sheffield City Polytechnic went so far as to remove their own names from the title page. Instead, they cred­ ited ‘the people of Thurcroft’ with the publication. The story that was told in this and other studies was not that of individuals but of local communities, be it Thurcroft in South Yorkshire, Easington in County Durham, or Armthorpe in Doncaster. In practice, the social scientific research made little effort to capture the whole array of perspectives and practices. The authors privileged the voices of strike activists. As Gibbon and Steyne put it in their preface, ‘This is a book by the activists of Thurcroft . . . about the miners’ strike of 1984–5. It tells their story of the strike.’ Deliberately, the study aimed to be ‘positive’ as well as ‘truthful’: While not suppressing the bleaker aspects of what happened, we have tried to dwell most on what Thurcrofters saw as being worthwhile and heroic about their struggle. 134 Katy Shaw, See figures 5.1.–5.4. as an example of evocative drawings. Mining the Meaning: ­cultural representations of the 1984–5 UK miners’ strike (Newcastle, 2012). 135  On the early historiography of the strike see Chapter 6, below.

1984  195 Collectively, the social scientific research emphasized the resilience of working-­ class communities under attack by a state that disregarded their traditions, tres­ passed on their territory, and vilified them as enemies. Expressions of shock and outrage at the invasion of ‘our village’ and ‘our pit’ by outside forces featured prominently in the oral testimony that formed the backbone of these studies. As a young miner from Armthorpe reflected in December 1984, ‘There’s one law for one and one law for the other now. If you’re a miner, that’s it, you’re a criminal.’136 This miner explicitly included the local police force in his condemnation of heavy-­handed policing, extending the critique even to his own brother, who was a local policeman. The shock was psychological as well as physical: to be labelled an ‘enemy’ when miners represented the backbone of the nation cut just as deeply as being manhandled on the picket line or prevented from moving about freely in one’s own neighbourhood. The literature carefully balanced experiences of powerlessness with an em­phasis on the exhilarating aspects of the strike. As Gibbon and Steyne put it, For the activists . . . life revolved around supporting the strike. Their inner community developed quickly, and for those who were part of it, it involved a new way of life and new sets of feelings. . . . The most important part of the new way of life was the establishment of new, deeper and interconnecting friendships on the basis of a common sense of purpose and shared experience.137

Communities did not just prove resilient; they were reborn. In the face of adver­ sity, mining communities rediscovered resources of self-­help and solidarity which some observers thought had been eroded by the miners’ material gains during the previous decade. ‘The weeks and months of strike saw / slowly and concurrently emerge in shabby / river valleys in South Wales / – in Yorkshire too, and Durham / Kent and Ayreshire – villages no longer / aggregates of dwellings / privatised by television, but / communities again, the rented videos and tapes / back in the shop,’ as the Welsh poet Duncan Bush rendered this sentiment in a piece called ‘Summer 1984’.138 The same idea was expressed, in less poetic terms, by a miner’s wife and factory worker from Armthorpe: I’ve lived in Armthorpe all my life. My father was a miner and my grandfather. When we were children, this was a small, close-­knit village. As years passed – I suppose this has happened all over – people got a bit better off, bought their own houses and community spirit was disappearing. But this has brought it all back.

136  Samuel et al. (eds.), Enemy Within, p. 196. 137  Thurcroft, p. 105f. 138  Reprinted in Tony Curtis (ed.), Coal: an anthology of mining (Bridgend, 1997), p. 194f.

196  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization It’s like it was years ago. People banding together, helping one another, sharing and shopping.139

As the extract indicates, mining communities also became enabling spaces in which women were able to transcend the strictures of patriarchal social structures. ‘The strike has changed me, my life has changed a lot,’ as Irene Fretwell, a miner’s wife and mother of four children, put it.140 That the strike marked a cataclysmic moment for gender relations in the coal­ fields was also a recurring theme in feminist publications such as Spare Rib. The same argument would later be developed in Jean Stead’s popular history of wom­ en’s activism, Never the Same Again, published in 1987.141 Recent scholarship has done much to expose the partial nature of such liberationist accounts. As Florence Sutcliffe-­Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson have argued, gender relations in the coalfields had started changing well before the onset of the strike, in line with broader developments in British society.142 Evidence of any lasting impact of strike activism on gender relations was, moreover, often anecdotal. Key activists in the women’s support movement were, in fact, seasoned campaigners, fre­ quently with links to the Communist Party, rather than apolitical housewives.143 The heroic narrative was useful politically for the NUM. It also helped to dispel a feminist critique, powerfully articulated by Beatrix Campbell in the early 1980s, which had questioned the infatuation of the labour movement with the figure of the coal miner and had presented coalfield communities as repositories of deeply entrenched patriarchal practices.144 The social scientific research of the period did take cognizance of dissenting practices inside mining communities. But they presented the actions of working miners and those who abandoned the strike through the lens of striking miners. In doing so, striking miners were cast as the true representatives of the local com­ munity, whereas strike-­breakers were othered as people who had chosen to put themselves outside the framework of mutual trust and obligation. In the oral

139  Samuel et al. (eds.), Enemy Within, p. 167. 140  Ibid., p. 174. 141  Jean Stead, Never the Same Again (London, 1987); Sheila Rowbotham and Jean McCrindle, ‘More than just a memory: some political implications of women’s involvement in the miners’ strike, 1984–85’, Feminist Review 23 (June 1986), pp. 109–24. 142 Florence Sutcliffe-­ Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, ‘Vernacular Discourses of Gender Equality in the post-­war British working class’, Past & Present 254 (February 2022), pp. 277–313, here pp. 281, 292. 143  Sutcliffe-­Braithwaite and Thomlinson, ‘Women Against Pit Closures’, pp. 80–2. 144  Beatrix Campbell, Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties (London, 1984), pp. 97–115; Jörg Arnold, ‘ “Gladiators for Women”? The British Miners, Muscular Masculinity and the Struggle for Workplace Rights, 1977 to 1984/85’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3/2001, pp. 510–34, here pp. 529–32.

1984  197 testimony from Armthorpe, the views of striking miners were counterbalanced, to some extent, by the reflections of community members with no direct links to the coal industry. As a dress shop saleswoman commented, I think that the mining community has stuck together, rightly or wrongly – they’re closing ranks. But it’s causing a lot of trouble for the miners who want to work because I think a lot of them do now, because they are so hard up – they’ll never get the money back that they have lost.145

While the social scientific literature did not explicitly condone acts of verbal and physical violence against working miners, it tended to rationalize them as under­ standable responses to the abrogation of the principle of working-­class solidarity and as an expression of a working-­class culture of physicality. As a miner from Thurcroft relayed an incident at a strike-­breaking miner’s home, Then someone said there was another one living up on John Street, ‘We’d better go and do him now’. Everybody was mad, feelings were high and we all marched up there. Outside his house we were shouting abuse. Nowt happened, no reply or owt like that. Anyway, he had a car (which people said, he normally ferried the whole team to Bevercotes in) so the next minute the lads all got hold of it and turned it over. I admit it was wrong, but we did it.146

Practices and perceptions in mining communities where coal had been turned throughout the duration of the strike, such as Nottinghamshire, parts of Derbyshire, the Midlands, Lancashire, and North Wales, remained largely outside the purview of this early social scientific research, with consequences for popular understandings of the miners’ strike to the present day. The darker side of community cohesion was closely watched by the Home Office. In the daily briefings for the Prime Minister, the Home Office catalogued instances of ostracism, intimidation, damage to property, and physical assaults against miners who decided to return to work in strike-­bound communities. The Daily Coal Report of 11 October 1984, for example, noted that three striking miners had been charged with threatening to kill a faceworker at Manton Colliery.147 A working miner at Arthur Scargill’s old colliery, Woolley pit, was beaten up by masked men.148 The report for 26 October noted a ‘serious assault’ on a working miner waiting to be taken to work at Monkton Hall in Scotland.149

145  Samuel et al. (eds.), Enemy Within, p. 180. 146  Thurcroft, p. 111. 147  TNA PREM 19/1334, Daily Coal Report, 11 October 1984. 148  Ibid., 10 October 1984. 149  TNA PREM 19/1335, Daily Coal Report, 26 October 1984.

198  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization John David Roberts, a quality control inspector who was one of the plaintiffs in the legal action against the Derbyshire Area, testified in court that, following abuse of his 10-­year-­old son at school, he became so concerned that he decided to move out of his property, at least temporarily. Co-­plaintiff Albert Roland Taylor, a surface engineer at Shirebrook, spoke of threats against his wife and children and how his car windows had been sprayed with the word ‘scab’.150 Working miner’s wife Irene McGibbon, who had appeared at the Conservative Party conference in October 1984, had paint bombs thrown at her house and was subjected to verbal abuse by the local community.151 A rare insight into the inner turmoil of a striking miner who returned to work is offered by an anonymous letter that was sent to the Yorkshire Area in February 1985: Jack, I don’t write letters in fact I haven’t wrote [sic] one for 20 years but this one is vital its [sic] so important I’ve got to write even if I [sic] kills me, so read it and read it well and proper.152

Clearly, the author was not used to conveying his thoughts through the written word. But more difficult still was the information he was about to convey. The author had returned to work after eleven months on strike. He emphasized that he had broken the strike not because of his own volition but because he saw no other escape to save his marriage: It hurt me starting but I had to. I’ve 3 kids and my wife keeps threatening to leave me. I had to start I was destitute.

The writer pleaded with the Yorkshire area to organize a return to work lest the government and management succeed in their aim of breaking the NUM. He was aware that he would be ostracized for strike-­breaking, which he seemed to accept as an act of retributive justice. Still, he felt he ought to render a final ­service to the union by alerting them to the danger of allowing the drift back to work to continue. The letter concluded by imploring the Yorkshire Area presi­ dent thus: ‘Good luck Jack – but for Christ’s sake get the men back all to-­gether [sic], SAVE YOUR UNION.’ Pointedly, the writer no longer referred to the NUM as his Union also. Was this because he felt he no longer deserved to be called a miner?

150  TNA PREM 19/1334, High Court of Justice, Taylor & Ors. vs. NUM, 28 September 1984. 151  ‘Fine Print’, The Times, 19 October 1984. 152  NUM Archives, Barnsley, O. Briscoe files, 27 February 1985.

1984  199

Conclusion News of the miners’ return to work brought forth a welter of journalistic reflec­ tions on the significance and meaning of the year-­long conflict.153 Industrial cor­ respondents and editorialists concurred that this had been no ordinary industrial dispute. ‘This was conflict for the highest stakes,’ as The Guardian editorialized on 4 March 1985.154 Yet, as John Lloyd averred in the Financial Times, the strike had been ‘messy and contradictory . . . at once farcical and momentous, cruel and noble’.155 Just like the direct protagonists themselves, journalists invoked the past to place the dispute in perspective. The government had laid to rest the ghosts of ‘1974’, as Peter Riddell commented.156 Some correspondents reached back fur­ ther, referencing the General Strike of 1926. Just like his namesake Arthur James Cook before him, the NUM president had led the miners to disaster.157 While the past helped to understand the present, the dispute itself had upended the continu­ ity in time. In the judgement of many, the coal strike marked a rupture, with conse­ quences extending far beyond the coal industry. In the judgement of Patrick Wintour, the miners’ defeat symbolized the end of industrial Britain.158 Defending a way of life that was being swept away by de-­industrialization, they had embarked on a cavalry charge against tanks, just as futile as the Polish army against the Wehrmacht in 1939. As an ‘evocative symbol of the past’, the miners ‘pitted their notion of community against the new cult of the individual’, as Peter Jenkins observed in The Guardian.159 Other commentators were not so sure. The future was not a foregone conclusion. New alliances had been forged in the strike, between the industrial working class and the ‘rad­ical dispossessed’. Reaching for a different martial analogy, Lloyd observed that the miners had lost a battle, but the war was not over.160 Although there was broad agreement that the government had triumphed over the NUM, doubts were voiced about their ability to capitalize 153  The following is based on an analysis of the coverage in The Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Mirror in early March 1985. 154  ‘And the political accounting / Implications of the coal miners’ strike’, The Guardian, 4 March 1985. See also ‘The Miners’ Strike: A balance sheet’, Marxism Today, April 1985. 155  John Lloyd, ‘Lessons of the strike’, Financial Times, 4 March 1985. 156  Peter Riddell, ‘The Political Impact: Thatcher purges the traumas of the past’, Financial Times, 4 March 1985; see also Paul Johnson, ‘Why Scargill couldn’t win’, Daily Mail, 2 March 1985. 157  David Felton, ‘Scargill: the fighter who led from the front’, The Times, 6 March 1985; Lloyd, ‘Lessons’. 158 Keith Harper and Patrick Wintour, ‘The bitter battle that ended an era’, The Guardian, 5 March 1985. 159  Peter Jenkins, ‘The rift around the miners’ hearth / Aftermath of the coal miners’ strike’, The Guardian, 6 March 1985. 160  John Lloyd, ‘The class warriors’ battle is over, but the war goes on’, Financial Times, 8 March 1985. See also Richard West, ‘Yobbos and Loonies’, Daily Mail, 1 March 1985. For a scholarly perspec­ tive, Diarmaid Kelliher, Making Cultures of Solidarity: London and the 1984–5 Miners’ Strike (London, 2021); Maroula Joannou, ‘ “Fill a bag and feed a family”: the miners’ strike and its supporters’, in Jonathan Davis and Rohan McWilliam (eds.), Labour and the Left in the 1980s (Manchester, 2018), pp. 172–91.

200  the british miner in the age of de-industrialization on the success. ‘The challenge and menace of Scargillism has been crushed. We have seen the face of defeat. We await the responsibility of victory,’ The Times editorialized.161 As this survey of the press coverage suggests, structures of feeling prevalent in the late 1960s were starting to re-­emerge towards the end of the coal strike. The latest opinion polling seemed to suggest that striking miners were starting to be looked upon as suffering underdogs.162 In defeat, ‘stories of human dignity in suffering’ had displaced images of violence on the picket lines, Jenkins observed.163 Perhaps, rather than delivering a clear result, the dispute had left losers all round, as Geoffrey Goodman remarked wistfully.164 Yet, in the spring of 1985, this reconceptualization was, as yet, far from complete. As the leader writer of The Times insisted, non-­striking miners, rather than striking miners, deserved to be remembered as the true heroes of the conflict.165 As the next chapter will show, two years on from the end of the strike sharply conflicting imaginaries persisted. While the gulf between the NUM’s public stance and ordinary miners’ lived experience ­widened, the coal industry was embarked on a restructuring process more radical than anything thought possible before the onset of the conflict. More broadly, the 1984/5 strike would come to furnish a lens through which all the miners’ history in the second half of the twentieth century came to be viewed. As Goodman remarked presciently, ‘in legend’ the coal dispute would be ‘with us . . . for generations’ to come.166

161  ‘The Face of Defeat’, The Times, 4 March 1985; Geoffrey Smith, ‘Commentary’, The Times, 5 March 1985; ‘Building on Victory’, The Times, 7 March 1985. 162  Peter Riddell, ‘A warning for Mrs Thatcher’, Financial Times, 8 March 1985. 163  Jenkins, ‘Rift’. 164  Geoffrey Goodman, ‘Loser all – Strike over – now for reckoning’, Daily Mirror, 4 March 1985. 165  ‘The Face of Defeat’, The Times, 4 March 1985. 166  Geoffrey Goodman, ‘Bitter taste of victory’, Daily Mirror, 1 March 1985.

6

1987 Introduction When Don Concannon rose in the Commons on 25 November 1986 to make his farewell speech, he was barely able to stand.1 Having suffered a road accident in October 1985, the MP for Mansfield spoke of the ‘sorrow’ and ‘regret’ with which he addressed the House.2 Yet the sense of sadness that permeated the speech was not primarily caused by Concannon’s ill health but by the state of the industry to which he had devoted much of his working life. While the issue at stake in the debate was the industry’s future, the speech was mainly concerned with the shadow of the past. Representing the heart of the Nottinghamshire coalfield, Concannon spoke of continuing division, of ongoing resentment between miners on strike in the 1984/5 dispute and their colleagues who had continued working. As an NUM-­sponsored MP in whose constituency a majority of miners had joined the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM), set up in December 1985, Concannon felt he had no choice but to defy, for the first time in his career, a three-­line whip by the Labour Party.3 He voted in support of the government’s Coal Industry Bill, which promised, inter alia, to give the UDM rights of representation on the welfare institutions and pension funds of the coal industry. Concannon’s predicament illustrates the structures of feeling and layers of tem­ porality that informed the discourse about the miners in the years following the coal strike. By 1987, miners’ collective agency was much reduced. They were forced to make individual choices in the context of a rapidly changing situation over whose direction they exerted less collective control than at any time since the late 1960s. It was the Conservative government and their supporters who retained a residual belief in, and fear of, the miners’ power. Sympathizers on the Left, by contrast, came to depict the miners as deplorable victims of a political vendetta and, increasingly, of the very pace of de-­industrialization itself—­as victims who were deserving of sympathy but who also represented a lost cause. 1  On Don Concannon’s life and career see ‘Obituary: Don Concannon’, The Times, 18 December 2003; Tom Dalyell, ‘Don Concannon’, The Independent, 19 December 2003; Andrew Roth, ‘Don Concannon’, The Guardian, 18 December 2003. 2  Hansard HC Sitting of 25 November 1986, Coal Industry Bill, cols 165–7, here 165. 3 On the UDM see Steven Daniels, ‘The Thatcher and Major Governments and the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, c. 1985–1992’, HSIR 40 (2019), pp. 153–85; David Amos, ‘The Nottinghamshire Miners, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers and the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike: Scabs or Scapegoats?’, unpublished PhD dissertation (Nottingham, 2011).

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0007

202  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Two years after the end of the dispute, the coalitions that had operated during the strike retained some purchase: the government and the National Coal Board, rebranded as British Coal, on one side; the miners and their supporters in the labour movement and wider society on the other. Yet the years after the end of the dispute had also deepened, rather than closed, rifts inside the opposing camps: differences of opinion inside the government over the future of the industry; mutual suspicion between the government and the senior management of British Coal; divisions not just between the NUM and the nascent UDM, but inside the NUM itself. The debate was informed by different temporalities. Whereas the political Left invested considerable energy into shaping the memory of the coal strike, the Right was more interested in exploiting the opportunity that the defeat of the NUM had opened up for charting a radically different future for the industry. Indeed, Conservative politicians and commentators would frequently charge that Labour, and the Left more broadly, embodied ‘the past’.4 The claim was not extended to the industry itself, however. Despite a growing recognition of the magnitude of the shift in the nation’s economic structure away from manufacturing industries, Conservatives would claim that they had ‘revitalized’, rather than abandoned, what they called ‘traditional’ industries. The 1987 general election manifesto boasted that productivity in the coal industry had risen by 50 per cent since 1983.5 This chapter proceeds in four stages. It reconstructs, first, the identities that politicians, trade unionists, and scholars ascribed to miners in the aftermath of the strike. It shows how the very notion of who the miners were continued to be shaped by what they had done, or were perceived to have done, in 1984/5. Second, the chapter charts the debate on the future of the coal industry in the aftermath of the coal strike. It demonstrates how senior ministers and policy advisers inside the government were emboldened by the outcome of the dispute to put forward structural reforms to the coal industry that were far more radical than anything that had been proposed prior to 1984. In that vision for the future of coal, not just the NUM, but any type of collective workers’ representation, including the UDM, came increasingly to be viewed as an irritant of a bygone age. Inside the NUM, meanwhile, the leadership’s stance of principled opposition to the industry’s restructuring was criticized by erstwhile militant coalfields as a self-­destructive strategy that could only abet the demise of the industry and hasten the mar­gin­al­iza­tion of the Union. Third, the chapter investigates the nascent historicization of the coal strike as it emerged with the publication of influential but sharply c­ ontrasting historical accounts. Finally, the chapter will look at the choices and experiences of ordinary miners, as they were recorded in aggregate data and in oral history. 4  See, for example, a speech by Neil Hamilton (MP), Hansard HC Sitting of 25 November 1986, col. 210f., here 210: ‘I wish that Labour Members would not be so reactionary and backward-­looking in their speeches.’ 5  1987 Conservative Party General Election Manifesto: The Next Moves Forward, in Iain Dale (ed.), Conservative Party General Election Manifestos, 1900–1997 (Abingdon, 2000), pp. 311–52, here p. 329.

1987  203

I  Heroes and Villains In the aftermath of the coal strike, the figure of the miner continued to be invested with sharply contrasting imaginaries. The identity of miners was defined not so much by what they did in the present as by what they had done in the recent past. To the government and their supporters, the miners who had continued working during the coal dispute were the torchbearers of everything that was admirable about mining as an occupation and a way of life. ‘Working miners’ were cour­age­ ous, democratic, patriotic; they had withstood violence and intimidation to uphold the democratic traditions of trade unionism and, in doing so, upheld the rule of law against formidable odds.6 The Prime Minister personally showed great concern lest the contribution that the non-­striking miners had made to the defeat of the NUM be forgotten or cast aside in the restructuring of the coal industry. Repeatedly, Thatcher urged that reports of ongoing social ostracism and intimidation directed against working miners be taken seriously by the management of the Coal Board. In a strongly worded letter to the industry’s chairman on 13 June 1985, she emphasized, ‘It must never be said that this government or the Coal Board let down the people whose courage and determination took them through the worst strike in our history.’7 Likewise, her handwritten comment on a policy paper indicated that she wished every possible encouragement to be given to the nascent Union of Democratic Mineworkers.8 This was in part because the Prime Minister remained on guard against a possible resurgence of NUM militancy. More so than those around her, Thatcher feared a rerun of the miners’ strike. ‘The Prime Minister throughout emphasised the need to prepare for the worst case. The government could not afford to be complacent about the risks of another dispute,’ as a report on an interministerial meeting on the lessons of the miners’ strike noted on 20 December 1985.9 But the support shown towards the UDM also seems to have been informed by a genuine sense of gratitude towards the contribution that the non-­striking miners had made to the outcome of the dispute. Indeed, Thatcher kept supporting the UDM even after her policy advisers and the senior management of the coal industry started to voice doubts about the personal quality of the UDM’s leadership and the role of trade unionism more generally in the future for the industry.10 In a meeting with Sir Robert Haslam, 6  Hansard HC Sitting of 25 November 1986, Coal Industry Bill, Second Reading, cols 219–24 (David Hunt). 7  TNA PREM 19/1581, Prime Minister to Ian MacGregor, 13 June 1985. 8  TNA PREM 19/1865, John Wybrew, ‘Coal Industry Bill’, 30 May 1986, with PM’s handwritten comment, ‘Yes very much so’, in response to a recommendation to ‘rectify’ the UDM’s ‘disadvantaged position’. See also ibid., Secretary of State for Energy to Prime Minister, 30 May 1986, PREM 19/1865, with PM’s handwritten comment. 9  TNA PREM 19/1865, 10 Downing Street to Department of Energy, 20 December 1985. 10  TNA PREM 19/2352, John Wybrew, Energy Committee Report on Coal Industry, 6 March 1987: See also ibid., David Norgrove, 10 Downing Street to Geoff Dart, Department of Energy, ‘Union of Democratic Mineworkers’, 4 November 1986.

204  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization MacGregor’s successor at the Coal Board, on 18 September 1987 the Prime Minister again emphasized that ‘her first concern was that British Coal should keep onside with the UDM though this was not always easy’.11 By contrast, to the NUM and to miners who had struck, ‘working miners’ had forfeited the right to be called miners at all. They were ‘scabs’ who had betrayed the values of comradeship and solidarity underpinning the Union. In doing so, they had done immeasurable harm to their fellow workers and to the communities in which they had grown up. The strike had been a crucial test of character; working miners had failed this test. Such a conviction was articulated forcefully by the president of the NUM. In his address at the annual conference following the return to work in July 1985, Scargill declared, ‘In refusing to respond to a call from the vast majority of their colleagues already on strike and – more im­port­ant­ly – by refusing to accept picket lines, those who continued to work producing coal provided a lifeline to the Tory Government as it waged class war against the N.U.M.’12 In the formation of the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers in the autumn of 1985, the NUM’s president saw a case of history repeating itself. The UDM followed in the tradition of the ‘Spencer’ union that had been formed in the Nottinghamshire coalfield in the wake of the 1926 General Strike. While there was a case for reuniting all miners, Scargill warned against the dangers of ‘false unity’. As he declared in his presidential address in July 1986, We need unity in this industry – but we must never again commit the error of our forefathers, who accepted a false unity and reconciliation with Spencerism in 1937. There is a place for every miner inside the NUM but there can be no place or any reconciliation with a 1986 version of Spencerism in the form of a Tory-­backed ‘UDM’.13

In a direct challenge to Concannon and another Labour MP from Nottinghamshire, Scargill called on the Labour Party ‘to take action’ against MPs who continued to be associated with a ‘company outfit’ such as the UDM.14 Yet, as the events of 1984/5 receded, doubts grew about whether principled condemnation of working miners as ‘scabs’ really served the interests of the Union and the men working in the industry. After all, the NUM and sympathetic

11 Ibid., Note for the Record of meeting between PM, Peter Walker and Robert Haslam, 18 September 1987. 12 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1985 (London), Presidential Address, pp. 490–6, here p. 492. 13 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1986 (London), Presidential Address, p. 335. See also NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1987 (London), p. 391. 14 NUM, Annual Report 1986, p. 333.

1987  205 observers had long recognized that the distinction between ‘miners’ and ‘scabs’ did not reflect the reality of the ways in which the strike had developed. By the time the NUM special delegate conference decided to call off the strike on 3 March 1985, nearly half of the union’s members had returned to work. Did they all stand to be condemned? Were there different degrees of ‘scabbism’? Were there ‘scabs’ and ‘super scabs’? In order to reunite all miners in one trade union, the Scottish Area submitted a motion to the 1986 NUM annual conference that called ‘on those who have left the Union to return to the fold for their own benefit and for the well-­being of all miners and their families’.15 The Nottingham Area put forward an amendment which stipulated that all returnees must be acceptable under the terms of the Union’s new disciplinary code. The passionate debate that followed illustrated that miners’ leaders were aware of how much the existence of a rival union undermined the miners’ collective voice. But it also demonstrated that to many delegates there were also actions that were considered unforgivable. Such voices were strongest among delegates from coalfields which had fractured during the strike. As P. Beasley, a member of the Nottingham delegation, declared, ‘We must for the sake of unity attempt to forgive and forget. We must build bridges. Having said that, however, there are some people who will never be forgiven.’16 In essence, the NUM drew the line between ordinary miners in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere who, in the words of a Derbyshire delegate, ‘went out of line during the course of the strike’, on the one hand, and trade union officials and activists who had actively sought to break the strike, on the other. The first group were labelled as ‘casualties’—a term suggesting that miners had become victims of circumstances they could not control—­whereas the second group were regarded as ‘traitors’.17 As Mick McGahey, the much-­ respected Scottish miners’ leader and embodiment of the Union’s radical tradition, explained in his contribution, the strategy was to welcome the UDM members back into the NUM but destroy the structure of the rival union.18 In an interview with Marxism Today in July 1987, McGahey struck an even more con­ cili­ atory note: But, I have often said, and I will say again, if you have several thousand miners – and their wives and families – you can’t treat them as untouchables. They are my people. They are wrongly directed. . . . How do we bring them back? I don’t think we bring them back by just shouting scab, scab, scab . . . . . . Why can’t we stop talking about blacklegs, scabs and things like that and say, ‘Brother, our interests, your interests, my interests, need one union’.19 15  Ibid., p. 432. 16  Ibid., p. 435. 17  Ibid., pp. 435, 439. 18  Ibid, p. 438. 19  ‘Flexibility at the Coalface’, Marxism Today, July 1987, pp. 24–6, here p. 26. See also ‘Anger is not enough’, New Statesman, 3 April 1987, pp. 18ff.; Donald MacIntyre, ‘Close Up on Mick McGahey’, Marxism Today, September 1986, p. 60.

206  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization To the NUM and their supporters, the true heroes of the strike were the ‘victimized miners’—those members who had been dismissed by the Coal Board due to alleged offences against Coal Board property or acts of violence against non-­ striking miners and other workers. Close to 1,000 miners were dismissed during the dispute, while fifty had been sentenced to terms in prison. Three months after the end of the dispute, 671 remained out of work.20 By April 1987, 356 miners had still not been reinstated.21 The reinstatement of the dismissed miners ranked among the NUM’s highest priorities in the aftermath of the strike.22 The Union raised the issue with the Coal Board at the first post-­strike meeting of the Joint National Negotiating Committee on 11 April 1985,23 calling for a general amnesty for people who were described as ‘honest decent men whose only crime had been to stand up and fight for their jobs and communities’.24 To this end, the NUM submitted detailed evidence to the Employment Committee of the House of Commons and successfully carried a motion at the 1985 TUC annual congress and the Labour Party conference.25 Year after year, the president of the NUM sought to reassure the victimized miners that they had not been forgotten.26 Yet, in practice, the NUM’s efforts met with only limited success. While the numbers of dismissed miners gradually came down, the NUM failed to secure a majority vote among their members for a solidarity levy.27 To the government, by contrast, ‘victimized miners’ were criminals who had formed a ‘violent mob’ during the strike and who rightly were barred from re-­ entering the industry after the end of the dispute. Sharply contrasting perceptions of who deserved to be called a ‘miner’ were also infused with layers of temporality. While ‘working miners’ were cast by the government as defenders of democratic traditions of British trade unionism, they also embodied the future. They were considered a ‘progressive’ force whose attitudes could be made to realign with the government’s plans for the transformation of the industry. In a memorandum to the Prime Minister dated 5 September 1985, Nicholas Owen of the Policy Unit even held out the prospect that ‘Midlands miners’ might, in due course, themselves come to embrace and welcome the break-­up of the industry into competing units.28

20  House of Commons, Sixth Report from the Employment Committee, The Dismissal of National Coal Board Employees (London, 19 June 1985), p. iii. 21 NUM, Annual Report 1987, pp. 315f. 22 NUM, Annual Report 1985, ‘Report of Special Delegate Conference, 28 October 1985, subject: victimised miners’, pp. 835–50. 23 NUM, Annual Report 1985, Minutes of 212 Meeting of the Joint National Negotiating Committee, 11 April 1985, p. 261. 24  Ibid., p. 60. 25 NUM, Annual Report 1986, pp. 314–16, for a text of the respective motions; House of Commons, Sixth Report of Employment Committee, Minutes of Evidence, 22 May 1985, pp. 1–25. 26 NUM, Annual Report 1987, Presidential Address, p. 391. 27 NUM, Annual Report 1985, ‘Ballot on Special Levy: Notification of Result’, p. 119. The recommendation of a levy of 50p per week was lost by 54% to 46%. 28  TNA PREM 19/1581, Nicholas Owen, ‘Strategy for the Coal Industry’, 5 September 1985.

1987  207

II  The Future of Coal On 25 November 1986, the House of Commons debated on second reading the Conservative government’s Coal Industry Bill. Opening the debate, Peter Walker, Secretary of State for Energy, painted the picture of an industry that had made enormous strides since the end of the strike to improve performance. At the same time, he made clear that the strike marked a turning point: the closure of collieries and the contraction of the workforce were contrasted with high increases in productivity. Both were presented as two sides of an inevitable and long-­overdue process of ‘rationalization’. According to Walker, the bill embodied the government’s constructive and future-­oriented approach to the industry. To underline the break with the past, the National Coal Board was to be renamed ‘British Coal’. Walker reiterated that there would be no compulsory redundancies and emphasized the ‘incredibly generous’ redundancy provisions. The bill also provided for continued government support for the industry and, thirdly, introduced an elem­ ent of social justice by making sure that miners who were represented by the Union of Democratic Mineworkers would not be disadvantaged. Through the bill, Walker emphasized, the industry was given ‘good scope to improve per­form­ ance and prosperity for the future’.29 Speaking for Her Majesty’s Opposition, the shadow secretary of state, Stanley Orme, rejected the legislation as a ‘pit closure Bill’. He noted that since the end of the strike 55,000 jobs had disappeared and fifty-­nine pits had closed or were under notice of closure. The government approach would spell ‘doom’ for coalfield communities across Britain.30 Veteran mining MP Alex Eadie went a step further. In wrapping up the debate for the Labour Party, he spoke of a pit closure and ‘election Bill’ that promoted an unsustainable ‘best-­seams first’ approach to one of the nation’s most precious resources of indigenous energy. The legislation, he averred, was underpinned by a mistaken belief that the job losses in coal and across the manufacturing sector more broadly could be made good by an expansion of the service sector. As Eadie exclaimed sarcastically, ‘The Government state that the service industries will provide the jobs in the mining communities. Apparently, tourism, hotels, visits to our stately homes will provide increased jobs in the future. If only we all wore kilts and showed our bare knees that would attract more jobs.’31 Overall, twenty-­four members of the House took part in the debate. On the government’s side, backbench MPs representing constituencies in the Midlands played a prominent role. Among them was Patrick McLoughlin, a former working miner at Littleton Colliery and ex-­member of the NUM who had held the 29  Hansard HC Sitting of 25 November 1986, col.s151–6. 30  Ibid., cols 157–61. See also Table 1, Appendix. 31  Ibid., cols 214–19; for the quotations, cols 215, 219.

208  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization constituency of Derbyshire West for the Conservative Party in the by-­election of 8 May 1986.32 Throughout, Conservative backbench MPs sought to frame the argument in temporal terms. The coal industry was a ‘prisoner of history’, Phillip Oppenheim, the young MP for Amber Valley, declared in a wide-­ranging contribution. To him, the miners’ strike of 1984/5 was characterized by a ‘1930s ideal of industrial machismo’; it represented the ‘atavistic thrashing of the old way of doing things’.33 In this logic, the NUM and the Labour Party stood in the way of progress itself. As McLoughlin put it, ‘Great opportunities lie ahead for the coal industry and they exist in spite of the NUM, not because of it.’34 Miners could be turned into businessmen if they were liberated from the shackles of collectivism, David Ashby, the MP for Leicestershire North-­West, argued.35 Neil Hamilton, representing Tatton in Cheshire, expressed this view well when he claimed, ‘I wish that Labour members would not be so reactionary and backward-­looking in their speeches.’36 By contrast, Opposition MPs pointed to the exodus of miners as evidence of low morale throughout the industry. The root causes lay in the Coal Board’s vindictive attitude to striking miners and the government’s ideologically motivated vendetta against the NUM, they argued. Far from ushering in a period of sta­bil­ iza­tion, as some Conservative backbenchers would have it, the bill represented but another step on the road to further contraction, the break-­up of the industry, and piecemeal privatization. As Allen McKay, the MP for Barnsley West and Penistone, put it, ‘The Secretary of State and the Government want to haul down the blue flag and cover up the plaque. They want to prepare for the Tory dream – the privatization of the coal industry and the demise of the NUM. That is what they are really after.’37 The Opposition were correct in suspecting that the bill did not reflect the limits of the government’s ambitions. Ever since the conclusion of the strike, a chorus of influential opinion inside the government had argued that the strike had opened up an opportunity to go much further in the restructuring of the industry than had been deemed possible before the coal dispute. As early as 21 June 1985, adviser John Wybrew had emphasized in a note to the Prime Minister, ‘Hopefully the notion of a Plan for Coal – in the sense of a rigid supply-­related target, based on wishful thinking about energy markets – is dead.’38 On 2 September 1985, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, argued in a personal memorandum to the Prime Minister that the post-­strike environment offered up a unique window of opportunity for radical proposals on the future of the industry: 32  Philip Webster, ‘Ex-­miner used to fighting adversity’, The Times, 11 May 1986. 33  Hansard HC Sitting of 25 November 1986, cols 191–3. 34  Ibid., cols 185–7, here 187. 35  Ibid., cols 204–6. 36  Ibid., cols 209–11, here 209. 37  HC Sitting of 26 November 1986, cols 201–4, here 203. 38  TNA PREM 19/1581, John Wybrew to Prime Minister, ‘Lunch with NCB Executive, Monday 24 June’, 21 June 1985.

1987  209 Our stance in the coal strike won widespread support. People readily saw the sense in standing firm, at considerable cost, in the face of unreasonable demands pursued by means of violence and intimidation. It is now of prime political and economic importance to demonstrate that we make use of our hard-­won success in the strike to put the coal industry on to a sensible footing and stop the drain on the tax payer.39

The idea of a window of opportunity was premised on the belief that the miners’ power, although thrown into disarray by the strike, had not been stamped out. The opportunity must be exploited before the NUM had had the time to regroup.40 In an assessment of Lawson’s strategy paper, Nicholas Owen from the Policy Unit outlined what he considered to be the underlying problems of the industry: It is naïve to suppose that better management and room to manage by themselves will solve the industry’s problems. Which is fundamentally a structural one. . . . The solution is to marginalise the NUM by fragmenting the industry and making it compete with itself, and with others. Once miners become accustomed to negotiating with regional employers, and to drawing (in some cases) substantial productivity bonuses, they are less likely to be rallied by the NUM.41

As Lawson and the Policy Unit advisers argued, it was no longer sufficient for the industry to reduce its reliance on public funding; there should be a return on capital akin to the private sector. The entire notion of a Plan for Coal should be abandoned in favour of structural change: the industry must be broken up into competing units, opened to foreign competition, and privatized. The advantage, the proponents of the strategy claimed, were both economic and political: a privatized industry operating in a liberalized energy market would cut the ground from underneath the NUM; it would stop the drain on public resources and also benefit the customer in the form of lower energy prices. They were agreed that the industry needed to shed further productive capacity and manpower as a ‘first limit­ ed step’ before broader structural changes could be considered.42 They showed little concern over the possibility that ever new rounds of closures might in due course lead to the disappearance of the industry altogether; that ‘rationalization’ could easily turn into ‘retrenchment’ and ultimately extinction. The size of the industry was not the government’s responsibility, the argument went, but would be determined by the market. As Lawson made clear in the strategy paper mentioned above, 39  TNA PREM 19/1581, Nigel Lawson to PM, ‘Strategy for Coal’, 2 September 1985. 40 Ibid. 41  TNA PREM 19/1581, Nicholas Owen, ‘Strategy for the Coal Industry’, 5 September 1985. 42  Ibid., John Wybrew, 23 September 1985.

210  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization In principle, the industry should consist of a number of private sector com­pan­ies selling such coal as they can profitably produce in competition with each other and with coal producers in other countries. The size of such an industry would be set by: (a) the selling price set for coal in the international market (b) investors’ assessment of whether individual mines (or prospects) offered a sufficiently attractive return after taking account of the risks.43

Such grand visions were not shared by Peter Walker, the Secretary of State for Energy. Walker argued that the government and the Coal Board should concentrate on the immediate tasks ahead and leave structural change to a later date.44 Walker had fallen out with the NCB’s chairman, MacGregor, over the handling of the coal dispute. He maintained that MacGregor’s successor, Sir Robert Haslam, needed more time and the industry a period of stabilization before any radical steps could be considered. A period of stability was all the more urgent because the collapse in the price of oil in the winter of 1985/6 had thrown the coal industry into new financial turmoil. Walker also judged that the industry needed to be given a degree of protection for the sake of preserving the UK’s most abundant indigenous fossil fuel.45 Even after he had left the Department of Energy, Walker expressed irritation at his successor’s announcement, at the Conservative Party conference in October 1988, that ‘by the next parliament’ the government would be ‘ready for this, the ultimate privatisation’.46 In his memoirs, published in 1991, Walker did not dwell on these internal differences of opinion. But he emphasized that after the strike he had advised that ‘there must be no gloating’ because the miners were ‘decent, honourable people’.47 Nigel Lawson, meanwhile, also emphasized that ‘it gave me no pleasure to see ordinary decent miners suffer (on whichever side of the barricades) and be humiliated’. The industry’s dramatic decline in the half-­decade following the end of the strike he judged ‘unavoidable’.48 Whatever the differences between the two camps, they agreed that the NUM should play no role in deciding the future of the industry. There was less agreement on the UDM. Whereas, initially, the breakaway union was labelled a ‘progressive’ force, soon internal policy papers started to dismiss the UDM as ‘reactionary’ and to condemn their ‘outmoded’ attitudes. As John Wybrew wrote in a note to the Prime Minister on 6 March 1987, ‘Regrettably, the short-­sighted, defensive leadership of the UDM is showing no more inclination than the NUM to respond to

43  Ibid., Nigel Lawson, ‘Strategy for the Coal Industry’, 2 September 1985. 44  Ibid., Nicholas Owen, ‘Strategy for the Coal Industry’, 5 September 1985. 45  TNA PREM 19/2352, ‘British Coal: future of industry’, 24 July 1987. 46  PREM 19/3097, Paul Gray to Prime Minister, ‘Coal Privatisation’, 14 October 1988 (with transcript of Parkinson’s Party Conference speech). 47  Peter Walker, Staying Power: an autobiography (London, 1991), p. 181. 48  Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London, 1992), p. 162.

1987  211 bc’s encouragement in this direction.’49 Here, all kinds of collective workers’ ­representation had become an obstacle to the future that was being envisioned for the coal industry. Throughout the second half of the 1980s, the government remained concerned about a resurgence of the miners’ power. Indeed, the proposals for radical structural change were, in part, justified by reference to a small window of opportunity. Following the strike, the NUM was in disarray, but before too long they might regroup and mount a new challenge, the suspicion went. Yet, arguably, the real reduction in the miners’ power lay less in the diminished capacity to mobilize the members for industrial action than in the exclusion of the NUM from the decision-­making process on the future of the industry. From a powerful player in a cooperative process of policy formation the NUM was reduced to an impotent onlooker. The long-­established consultation and conciliation machinery that had played such an important role in the articulation of the miners’ interests was abrogated by the Coal Board in the aftermath of the strike.50 The Coal Industry National Consultative Council (CINCC) and the Joint Policy Advisory Committee (JPAC) were no longer used as forums for detailed information, discussion, and exchange, but as a platform for the promulgation of decisions taken elsewhere. It was at a CINCC meeting on 24 September 1985 that the Board ‘read out’ their ‘New Strategy for Coal’. On 6 December 1985, the Board informed the NUM that the established machinery be abolished and replaced with one national forum to meet on a quarterly basis.51 On the same day, the Board also notified the NUM that the Conciliation Scheme, under which wages and conditions had been negotiated since 1946, would be terminated from 31 May 1986.52 From as early as July 1985, the Board had entered into separate wage negotiations with the (then) Nottinghamshire Area and South Derbyshire Area. The state of the NUM’s marginalization at national level is well illustrated by the minutes of a meeting between the NUM’s negotiating team and representatives of the National Coal Board on 19 March 1987. On ‘conciliation / wages’, the minutes noted, ‘Following a full discussion, the Board stated that they would not negotiate on wages unless (a) the Union accepted the Board’s conciliation pro­ posals . . . .’ On ‘Industrial Strategy / Hours of Work’, the minutes noted tersely, ‘The Union asked if the Board were prepared to discuss, in the traditional way with the National Union on these matters. Sir Robert said he was prepared to hold a meeting to give a “presentation” . . . but he was not prepared to intervene or become involved in discussions relating to hours of work in those Areas where 49  TNA PREM 19/2352, John Wybrew to PM, ‘Energy Committee Report on the Coal Industry’, 6 March 1987. 50  On the background of the British model of consultation in a nationalized industry see Rebecca Zahn, ‘German Codetermination without Nationalization, and British Nationalization without Codetermination: Retelling the Story’, HSIR 36 (2015), pp. 1–27. 51 NUM, Annual Report 1986, pp. 25, 36–7. 52  Ibid., p. 37.

212  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization discussions are already taking place.’53 In his memoirs, published in 2003, Robert Haslam remarked laconically on the restructuring of the industry, ‘Any difficulties for our management in dealing with two unions were absolutely minimal compared with the advantages.’54 Excluded from the process of decision-­making, the NUM placed their hopes on a change of government at the 1987 general election. When the Conservatives were returned on 11 June with a substantial majority, the NUM’s room for manoeuvre was diminished further. Yet, even within the trade union and labour movements, voices emerged which argued that the economic conditions on which the policies of the 1970s had been based had changed irrevocably. In July 1986, the NUM submitted a policy document for discussion with the Labour Party. Its title, ‘Plan for Coal’, indicated that the NUM envisioned the future as a return to the status quo ante. They proposed to readopt, albeit in modi­fied form, the policies of the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments of the 1970s. While ostensibly concerned with the future, much space was taken up with reviewing the objectives of the original Plan for Coal. For the NUM, the pol­ icies adopted by the Coal Board since the end of the strike marked a sharp break with the recent past. Management’s New Strategy for Coal laid down criteria for a ‘severely contracted but immensely profitable coal industry’.55 It represented a first step towards the goal of breaking up the coal industry, ‘either piecemeal or [by] total privatisation’.56 If the NUM was concerned to return to the 1970s, they maintained that the NCB planned to take the industry back to an even earlier past. Far from opening up a path to the future, management’s New Strategy, the discussion paper argued, represented a throwback to ‘the folly of relying on short-­ term market considerations’ of the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, while using the language of economic necessity, the New Strategy was at heart an ideological, rather than economic, project: it aimed to privatize the industry and in doing so return to an even earlier past, the era of private coal owners.57 The costs of the Coal Board’s new strategy, the document argued, were immense, both to the miners and the nation. While throwing tens of thousands of miners out of work, the market-­oriented approach would serve to reduce ‘the life of the coal industry from 300 years . . . to as few as 50 years’. It represented a colossal squandering of one the nation’s greatest national resources. To the NUM, the challenges facing the coal industry, as well as the potential remedies available, were political rather than economic. Accordingly, the Union’s own policy document paid only cursory attention to economic factors. The collapse in the price of oil, for example, which the Department of Energy regarded as an additional 53 NUM, Annual Report 1987, Meeting of the Union Side Negotiating Team, 19 March 1987, p. 117. 54  Bob Haslam, An Industrial Cocktail (London, 2003), p. 122. 55  NUM Archives, Barnsley, ‘Plan for Coal: NUM Proposals for the Future of the Coal Industry’, July 1986, p. 21. 56  Ibid., p. 2. 57  Ibid., p. 21.

1987  213 severe challenge facing the industry, was acknowledged in passing only.58 Against this, the NUM recommended ‘A New Plan for Coal’ that would build on the production targets of the predecessor but extend planning from the production to the consumption of energy. It would privilege the coal industry over nuclear energy and be integrated into a ‘socialist energy policy’ based on increased overall energy demands due to an expansion in the economy. The 1987 Labour Party election manifesto, however, did not commit a future Labour government to a new Plan for Coal. It merely noted the copious reserves of indigenous coal and contained a vague promise that ‘Britain develops the full potential of its coal, oil and gas resources, whilst gradually diminishing Britain’s dependence upon nuclear energy’.59 While the NUM proposal looked towards a change of government as a solution, a paper prepared by Vic Allen, Professor of Industrial Sociology at the University of Leeds, suggested that the problems besetting the industry were structural rather than party-­political. While there had long existed a ‘special relationship between miners and the Labour Party’, in practice even Labour governments had faced the same challenges as Conservative governments. Accordingly, they had been forced to adopt similar policies. Because Plan for Coal had focused on production targets rather than regulating demand, a Labour government would have responded to the recession of the early 1980s in much the same way as the Conservative government, the NUM’s long-time ally claimed: There can be no doubt that if the Labour Party had been returned to power in 1979 it would have been forced to react to the depression after 1981 by contracting the industry in much the same way as the Conservative government, for it had no other options, except to pursue the politically unpopular course of providing unlimited subsidies. The embarrassment of the 1960s would have been repeated.60

Operating against the backdrop of a worldwide overproduction of coal—­ a ­consequence, just as Plan for Coal, of the energy crisis of the 1970s—­the NCB’s vision of the future, of a small efficient industry concentrated in the central coalfields, may be overly optimistic, Allen maintained. To him, the industry was headed towards extinction by the early twenty-­first century. Importantly, the outcome would not be different if a Labour government were returned at the next general election. As he wrote provocatively,

58  Ibid., p. 16. 59  1987 Labour Party Manifesto: Britain will win with Labour, http://www.labour-­party.org.uk/ manifestos/1987/1987-­labour-­manifesto.shtml, accessed 12 July 2022. 60  NUM Archives, Barnsley, V. L. Allen, ‘The Labour Party and the Survival of the Coal Industry’, n.d., p. 10.

214  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization This time, however, the position [of the coal industry] is critical. If left to the exigencies of a free market the industry could virtually disappear within less than two decades. If it is treated in the conventional Labour government manner its death will be just as inevitable but will be lingering.61

The TUC likewise was, if anything, even more sceptical of the feasibility of retaining Plan for Coal as the basis for a future of the coal industry. As a document ­prepared for the Finance and General Purpose Committee from 6 November 1985 put it, ‘The background against which Plan for Coal was drafted in the early 1970s has changed.’ In fact, the past ten years had seen a drop in the overall demand for energy rather than the substantial increase forecast by ‘Plan for Coal’.62 The report considered that the Coal Board’s revised target of holding deep-­ mined production at 90 million tonnes may be unduly optimistic, citing a recent estimate for demand as low as 76–81 million tonnes by 1988. It also noted acerbically that the strike had been waged, amongst other things, in opposition to a proposal to cut capacity by a mere 4 million tonnes. For the authors of the paper, the conclusion was clear: no realistic discussion of energy policy for the late 1980s was possible on the basis of the optimistic projections of the 1970s. The paper went further still, stressing that in order for the industry to be able to hold its market share, it must ‘eliminate high cost capacity’. The document foresaw two possible futures: the first was of ‘new pits and new technology’ capable of competing with nuclear power; the other was of further contraction, the breaking up of the industry, and ultimately of extinction. In order for the miners to resist, or even to shape, these developments, and for the TUC to be able to support them, the miners must overcome their internal divisions, the report urged: The French are closing their coal industry altogether. A UK government could do the same in the next century as alternative energy sources are tapped and coal is imported on a massive scale. A divided miners’ union pursuing different policies would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to resist these moves.63

The TUC’s position paper underlined the importance of unity for the miners to be able to exercise any agency over the future of their industry. The authors were concerned, above all, about the emergence of a rival trade union in the industry. Yet, in the half-­decade following the end of the miners’ strike, the split between the UDM was not the only division plaguing mining trade unionism. Under the impact of the strike’s fallout and the Coal Board’s adoption of the New Strategy, the Left coalition inside the NUM fractured into rival camps. In the process, the 61  Ibid., p. 2. 63  Ibid., p. 13.

62  MRC, MSS.292D/253.145, F & GPC 3 (S)/1, ‘Mining’, 6 November 1985.

1987  215 South Wales Area, supported by the Scottish Area, emerged as the most vocal critic of the policies of the National Union and its president. To some extent, the conflict was over Scargill’s personal style of leadership, which was increasingly perceived as secretive and authoritarian. This critique was articulated forcefully by Hywel Francis, son of the Welsh miners’ leader Dai Francis and labour his­tor­ ian. To Francis, Scargill ‘behaved like an imperial leader of the Yorkshire miners presiding over other coalfields as if they were colonies. Old fashioned values such as showing respect, tolerance and having the ability to listen rather than preaching have always been absent in his style of leadership.’64 To Francis, the NUM president’s style was not just an expression of his personality, but a reflection of the authoritarian culture of the Yorkshire coalfield in which he had been raised. At heart, Francis claimed, Scargill remained wedded to that tradition, ‘despite the left-­wing slogans’. He was none other than the ‘Geoff Boycott of the Yorkshire coalfield’, as Francis claimed in an article published in Wales on Sunday on 9 July 1989. The article earned an angry riposte from the NUM president. Personal acrimony aside, the exchange illustrated that the divisions ran deeper than disagreement over the NUM president’s personal style of leadership. They were about competing claims of ownership to the miners’ radical tradition, collective iden­ tities, and, above all, contrasting conceptions of the role and function of the NUM as the organized expression of the miners’ interests. The conflict was also about the relationship between the past and the present, and, in particular, the legacy of the miners’ strike and the lessons to be learned from that dispute. Throughout the second half of the 1980s, the NUM’s national president espoused an understanding of the Union’s role that was imbued with a particular reading of the miners’ strike. In 1984/5, the miners had not been defeated. Quite the contrary: their courage, resilience, and endurance had set a shining example to a demoralized labour movement in the UK and, indeed, to all oppressed ­peoples across the world. The fight was not over with the return to work in March 1985. It had merely entered a new phase. As Scargill declared in his address at the 1985 annual conference, ‘We meet not in the aftermath but still in the midst of a historic and heroic struggle waged by this Union and mining communities’, and in which the NUM had challenged ‘the very heart of the capitalist system’.65 According to Scargill, the miners must redouble their efforts and embark on yet more determined industrial action both to redeem the sacrifices made in 1984/5 and in order to win a prosperous future for themselves and their industry. ‘We must intensify the fight to save pits, jobs and communities, knowing that in the present climate only industrial action . . . can stop a pit closure programme which if allowed to proceed would slaughter our industry.’ In 1986, he repeated the message and urged that ‘for the sake of the entire nation, as well as our members and 64  Hywel Francis, ‘Having Arthur for breakfast’, Wales on Sunday, 9 July 1989. 65 NUM, Annual Report 1985, Presidential Address, p. 491.

216  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization their families, we must act sooner rather than later . . . to take organised and united action’. One year later, he enjoined upon the delegates that ‘this Union must regenerate the spirit built up in the historic miners’ strike’. According to Scargill, the miners were involved in an ongoing ‘class war’ in which arguments about the economic viability of the industry were no more than a smokescreen for a politically motivated attack on the National Union of Mineworkers as the vanguard of the organized working class. As he declared at the 1988 annual conference, We are not dealing with an economic argument; we are dealing with a deliberate attack by the Tory Government upon a nationalised industry and upon the N.U.M., which the Tories see as a major class enemy because we have resisted attacks upon jobs, living standards and communities.66

In this conflict, any accommodation or constructive engagement, with either the Coal Board or the breakaway UDM, represented an act of betrayal of the sacrifices of the past and, above all, of the hundreds of miners who had been dismissed by the Coal Board during the strike and not been reinstated. In the address’s rousing finale, Scargill likened the miners to the French Resistance in World War II and the Vietcong during the Vietnam War: Imagine that in the Second World War the French Resistance had decided that they should do nothing until such time as the occupying forces felt it was time for war to come to an end! Can you imagine what would have happened had the Vietnamese given up on their incredible 30-­year struggle against French and United States imperialism? When you face a class enemy intent on destroying you, you have a simple choice – either accept and submit – to the destruction of our jobs and industries, our health, education and welfare service, housing, public transport – or stand up and fight back.67

To his critics, the national president’s tone of high principle sounded increasingly like empty rhetoric divorced from the realities that the miners encountered in their daily lives. It amounted to an abrogation of a trade union’s first duty, to give expression to and defend the interests of their members in the here and now. They urged that the NUM develop a strategy that recognized the shift in the balance of power between the Coal Board and the Union and that sought to engage constructively with management in order to regain a degree of agency in shaping the 66 NUM, Annual Report 1988, Presidential Address, p. 392. Italics in the original. 67 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1988 (London), Presidential Address, p. 397.

1987  217 industry’s future. In a wide-­ranging debate on the NUM’s attitude to new practices of working that the Coal Board were implementing as part of the ‘Wheeler Plan’, George Rees of the South Wales Area declared at the annual conference in July 1987, This is the basic function of any trade union, to represent his members and to talk to the employer, whoever the employer is . . . We do not have the luxury of being able to say, ‘I will not prostitute my principles’ because there is not a lodge secretary or delegate or official in this Area here, in this conference, who has not at some time or another had to prostitute his principles in order to achieve for his member what his principles demand, because you are elected not for your own principles, but you are elected to carry out the principles of the membership you represent.68

Miners were not resistance fighters or a political vanguard, but industrial workers concerned, in the first instance, with earning a living for themselves and their families, as Des Dutfield, also from South Wales, emphasized in the South Wales Miner in 1988.69 Surprisingly, perhaps, it was to the figure of McGahey, the retiring vice-­ president, that left-­wing critics of Scargill looked to articulate their concerns. There were two issues in particular around which the conflict crystallized—­the relationship with the UDM and the introduction of a six-­day working week. On both issues, McGahey made statements that were widely believed to contain a critique of the NUM’s official position. In an interview in Marxism Today in July 1987, McGahey made comments which seemed to suggest that the NUM ought to modify its policy of non-­engagement with the UDM and also think afresh about their position on flexible working.70 Modern miners, after all, McGahey cautioned, were no longer the pick-­and-­shovel miners of McGahey’s youth, but ‘skilled engineers’.71 Perhaps the NUM would do well to try and discover how the miners felt about new work practices and shift patterns? Likewise, continuing division between miners organized in the NUM and miners organized in the UDM could only serve to weaken their collective voice. After all, as McGahey declared cryptically, ‘If you never move an inch, that is not a movement – that’s a monument.’72

68 NUM, Annual Report 1987, pp. 469–72, here p. 471. 69  Des Dutfield, ‘Areas Abandoned’, South Wales Miner 2/4 (1988), p. 1. 70  ‘Flexibility at the Coalface’, Marxism Today, July 1987, pp. 24–6. 71  Ibid., p. 24. See also Donald Macintyre, ‘Close up on Mick McGahey’, Marxism Today, September 1986, p. 60; John Lloyd and John Sweeney, ‘Anger is not enough’, New Statesman, 3 April 1987, pp. 18ff. 72  ‘Flexibility at the Coalface’, p. 25.

218  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization

III  The Miners’ Strike as History Memories of the strike played an important role in the debate about the future of the miners and their industry. Inside the government, fears of a resurgence of the miners’ power gave added impetus to proposals for radical structural change. Inside the NUM, meanwhile, contrasting understandings of the strike’s legacy became an important fault line for division. Whereas the union’s national leadership conceived of the present as a continuation of the events of 1984/5, dissenting voices from South Wales, Scotland, and elsewhere argued that in order for the NUM to remain relevant, they must draw a line under the past. Differences notwithstanding, mining trade unionists were agreed that the coal strike stood out from other industrial disputes. It underlined the miners’ special position in the labour movement and British society. The Annual Report for the 1985 conference declared proudly, ‘The miners’ strike was unique in several respects.’ Its special nature derived not only from the duration and intensity of the conflict but also from three defining elements: In the first instance it was unique because the Coal Board and not the Union were making the demands . . . Secondly, it was unique because it was the first strike by a British Trade Union against job losses. The strike embodied a recognition by the community that jobs impart a dignity which not only enhances an individual’s standing, but also connects him to his immediate social structure. Thirdly, it was unique because of the involvement of all sections of the community, in particular the Women’s Groups who organised to provide moral, financial and material support and without whose assistance it would have proved impossible to sustain the strike for so long.73

The period also witnessed a second wave of historicization of the miners’ strike.74 These works followed upon a first wave of publications that had been published during the conflict and its immediate aftermath.75 In late 1986 and early 1987, historical accounts and memoirs appeared that claimed to combine in-­depth research with a degree of methodological sophistication. They were widely reviewed in the national broadsheets and weekly political magazines.76 In 73 NUM, Annual Report 1985, pp. 53–60, here p. 59. 74  David Howell, ‘Goodbye to all that? A review of the literature on the 1984/5 miners’ strike’, Work, Employment & Society 1/3 (September 1987), pp. 388–404. 75  David Edgar, ‘Strike while the iron is hot’, New Statesman, 16 January 1987, p. 28. 76  W. E. J. McCarthy, ‘King Arthur and Sir Ian’, New Society, 3 October 1986, pp. 27f.; Michael Foot, ‘Enemies of Mac the knife’, The Guardian, 3 October 1986; James Campbell, ‘Victorian and other values’, The Times, 5 October 1986; Ian Jack, ‘MacGregor on the warpath’, The Observer, 12 October 1986; Paul Foot, ‘Spirit of revolt’, New Society, 6 February 1987, p. 27f.; Peter Paterson, ‘Not a merry old soul’, The Spectator, 18 October 1986, p. 31.; Mark Hollingsworth, ‘Too much made of Scargill’s strike role’, Tribune, 16 January 1987.

1987  219 October 1986, The Miners’ Strike: Loss Without Limit by journalists John Lloyd and Martin Adeney was published by Routledge & Kegan Paul. Two months later, the social historians Raphael Samuel, Barbara Bloomfield, and Guy Boanas published a collection of miners’ testimony, The Enemy Within: Pit villages and the miners’ strike of 1984–5. Books by Tony Parker, on Horden in County Durham, and Peter Gibbon and David Steyne, on Thurcroft in South Yorkshire, also offered a perspective ‘from below’.77 Ian MacGregor, chairman of the National Coal Board, published his account of the strike in late 1986 with the help of Rodney Tyler.78 Roy Ottey, a leading moderate on the NEC of the NUM, had published his account the previous year.79 Together, this body of work would shape the historiography and influence public understandings of the strike well into the early twenty-­first century.80 Common to them all was a belief that the miners’ strike had been no ordinary dispute. An understanding of the events of 1984/5 was essential to illuminate broader currents of recent British history. At the same time, this early historiography was conceived as a self-­conscious intervention in the debates of the present: It was as much an attempt to shape the memory of the strike as to historicize the events. With the exception of MacGregor’s memoirs, the early historiography was the preserve of writers from the Left, with a disproportionate representation of ­scholars who either still were or had been members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Raphael Samuel and John Lloyd had both been members of the CPGB, as were Beatrix Campbell, Hywel Francis, and Pete Carter, who had published influential assessments of the strike in its immediate aftermath.81 It was through debating the miners’ strike that they sought to shape the political course of the labour and trade union movements.82 By contrast, the coal strike generated far less retrospective controversy and interest on the Right of the political spectrum. For all the intense coverage in 1984 and 1985, and for all the sharp polemics directed against the NUM,83 no prominent Conservative journalist undertook to write a history of the strike. Nor were any attempts made to produce an account that would capture the actions and perceptions of the ‘working miners’ whom the Prime Minister herself had praised as ‘lions’ in 1984.84 In his 77  Tony Parker, Red Hill: A Mining Community (London, 1986); Thurcroft: A village and the miners’ strike (Spokesman, 1986). 78 Ian MacGregor with Rodney Tyler, The Enemies Within: The Story of the Miners’ Strike (London, 1986). 79  Roy Ottey, The Strike: An Insider’s Story (London, 1985). Ottey had resigned from the NEC in October 1984. 80  Arne Hordt, Von Scargill zu Blair? Der britische Bergarbeiterstreik 1984–85 als Problem einer europäischen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main, 2013). 81  See Chapter 5, above. 82  E.g. John Lloyd, Understanding the Miners’ Strike (London, 1985), pp. 35–43. 83 Martina Steber, ‘Fundamentals at Stake. The Conservatives, Industrial Relations and the Rhetorical Framing of the Miners’ Strike 1984/1985’, CBH 32/1 (2018), pp. 60–77. 84  Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Party Conference, 12 October 1984, https://www. margaretthatcher.org/document/105763, accessed 12 July 2022.

220  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization memoirs, published in 1988, Norman Tebbit noted with regret that the government had never received the credit for defeating the miners that he thought they so amply deserved.85 For Conservatives, there was little to be explored about the strike because its meaning was obvious. Columnist Bruce Anderson summed up the conventional wisdom well in a scathing review of Samuel’s edited collection: The miners’ strike was an attempt by some of the most reactionary elements in British society to unleash a brutish Stalinism, first upon their fellow miners and then upon the population at large. Throughout the dispute, the striking miners displayed an utter contempt for democracy and they were, regrettably, able to command the football hooligan loyalties of some of their members.86

Insofar as there was any controversy at all, it concerned the role of individuals in the strike. The government anticipated with some alarm the publication of  MacGregor’s memoirs. The book was serialized in The Sunday Times from 21  September 1986.87 The rather grandiloquent claim that the NCB’s chairman had single-­handedly faced down the miners was received with concern, as were the scathing attacks on the Secretary of State for Energy. In order to forestall nega­tive repercussions on the government’s reputation, the Prime Minister and Walker agreed to issue a short statement that would summarize the government’s understanding of the strike. The dispute had been ‘politically motivated’; the defeat of the NUM was attributable ‘to the willingness of some miners to continue to work, to the determined efforts of the police in upholding the rule of law, to the  contribution made by sensible trade unionists . . . and to a totally united Government which did not falter’.88 MacGregor was not mentioned by name. As it turned out, the government need not have worried. The memoir’s public reception was un­favour­able. Reviewing the book for New Society, W.  E.  J.  McCarthy dismissed it as ‘unreadable apologia’, while Peter Paterson, writing for The Spectator, spoke of ‘overtones of paranoia’ and the ‘unpleasant tone of much of this book’.89 By comparison, among the Left, the meaning of the strike was heavily ­contested. Journalists, social historians, and social scientists joined in the debate, trying to identify the forces that had been at work and to assess their broader significance. Common to them all was a shared belief that the strike was more than an ordinary industrial dispute; that it raised, in the words of a promotional leaflet for The Enemy Within, ‘in dramatic form major issues haunting 85  Norman Tebbit, Upwardly Mobile (London 1988), p. 238. 86  Bruce Anderson, ‘Dangerous Wives’, Sunday Telegraph, 18 November 1987. 87  See also Graham Turner, ‘How Ian MacGregor defeated the enemies within’, Sunday Times, 21 September 1986. 88  TNA PREM 19/2352, D. Norgrove to Geoff Dart, ‘The Enemy within’, 15 September 1986. 89  Peter Paterson, ‘Not a merry old soul’, The Spectator, 18 October 1986, p. 31.

1987  221 con­tem­por­ary British society . . . and offers a unique vantage point for inquiring into, and reflecting upon, the contradictory forces reshaping Britain today’.90 This early scholarship was self-­consciously political in the sense that the authors sought to intervene in debates about the future direction of the Left in Britain. ‘The meaning of the coal strike’, a call for first-­hand testimony by the History Workshop Centre proclaimed in February 1985, ‘will not be determined by the terms of the settlement . . . but by the way in which it is assimilated in popular memory, by the retrospective understanding both in the pit villages and in the country at large’.91 Among the most significant of these early controversies was the debate between Raphael Samuel, social historian at Ruskin College, Oxford, and John Lloyd, industrial and labour correspondent for the Financial Times and editor of the New Statesman. Indeed, Samuel’s edited collection of oral testimony, The Enemy Within, represented a deliberate attempt to offer an alternative understanding of the strike to Loss without Limit, the history that Lloyd had co-­written with Martin Adeney. Samuel had come across a typescript of Lloyd and Adeney’s book while writing the introduction to his edited collection. Samuel was concerned that by late 1986 the miners’ cause no longer commanded the sympathy that it had enjoyed during the final phase of the strike in the spring of 1985. As Samuel revealed in a letter to his publisher, The new feature that confronted us at page proof stage was the book by Adeney and John which you yourselves are publishing in October. It is a brilliant melodrama, extremely well written and very well researched. In the present climate of opinion it will carry all before it, and coming out two or three months before our book it will in my view prevent our testimonies being read except as a qualifying footnote. My foreword was intended to protect our book against this by taking Adeney and Lloyd head on.92

The Enemy Within was concerned to shift attention from top-­down histories that focused on the clash of personalities, negotiations at national level, and the dramatic incidents of violence to what Samuel called ‘the real nerve centres of the strike’, the miners’ welfare in the colliery villages, and the local networks of solidarity that had sustained the striking miners for so long. To that end, the collection brought together written and oral testimony from the Midlands, South Yorkshire, and South Wales. While professing to give expression to voices ‘from below’, Samuel in fact took great care to situate the testimony in a specific

90  Bishopsgate Institute, Raphael Samuel Ruskin Archive RS 4/250, ‘The Enemy Within’. 91  Ibid., RS 4/250, ‘ “The Enemy Within”. Pit villages during the strike of 1984–5’; ibid., RS 4/251, ‘Miners’ Strike: An appeal for local histories’. 92  Ibid., RS 4/250, Samuel to Jane Wilkinson, 26 August 1986.

222  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization interpretative framework that ‘ruralized’ the striking miners.93 Likening the strikers to nineteenth-­century village radicals, Samuel labelled them ‘radical conservatives’ who were concerned, in the first instance, with defending a received way of life. In doing so, he situated the strike in a temporal framework in which ­tradition, represented by the miners, was confronted by the forces of modernity, represented by the Coal Board and the government’s ‘modernizing’ agenda. The Enemy Within brought together inspiring stories of communal self-­help, resilience, and renewal in the face of overwhelming odds. As the call for testimony from February 1985 put it, There are two histories of the strike. One, which has been the focus of headlines and TV newsflashes, is that of high level negotiation. The other is that of the villages – the real heartland of the strike. The first has been full of disappointments, of help which failed to materialise, of the use of the courts, of the police and state trying to break the miners’ will. The other is inspiring, of the discovery of community, of the mobilisation of resources to make a defence of livelihood and work, of solidarity between the generations, of support groups and survival networks which have brought hidden resources into play.94

Samuel, Bloomfield, and Boanas’s bottom-­up approach shared some similarities with interventions from the Eurocommunist wing of the CPGB from the spring of 1985.95 These texts argued that the miners’ strike had given rise to a new kind of politics, akin to the popular front of the interwar period. The argument was developed most fully by the Labour historian and critic of Scargill, Hywel Francis,96 but also played an important role in the Communist Party’s post-­ mortem of the strike, written by the party’s industrial organizer, Pete Carter.97 In building up alliances between trade unions and the new social movements, the miners’ strike was pregnant with possibilities for a new kind of politics for the Left, they argued. Here, too, the interpretation was informed by a specific tem­ poral framework: while mass picketing and traditional trade union solidarity had been exposed as ineffectual, cross-­class alliances and new forms of social protest represented the future. Despite overlaps between Samuel’s interpretation and the popular front perspective, Samuel was sharply critical of interventions that 93  See Jörg Arnold, ‘ “That rather sinful city of London”: the coal miner, the city and the country in the British cultural imagination, c. 1969–2014’, Urban History 47/2 (2020), pp. 292–310. 94  Bishopsgate Institute, RS 4/250, ‘ “The Enemy Within” Pit villages during the strike of 1984–85’. 95  For a good discussion of CPGB internal party politics see Geoff Andrews, Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964–1991 (London, 2004); on the Eurocommunist reading of the strike, Peter Ackers, ‘Gramsci at the miners’ strike: remembering the 1984–1985 Eurocommunist alternative industrial relations strategy’, Labor History 55/2 (2014), pp. 151–72. 96  Hywel Francis, ‘Mining the Popular Front’, Marxism Today, February 1985, pp. 12–15. 97  Pete Carter, ‘Striking the Right Note’, Marxism Today, March 1985, pp. 28–31; PHM, Labour History Archive and Study Centre, CP/CENT/IND/07/02, Coal Pamphlet, 2nd draft, n.d. [1985].

1987  223 appeared to apportion blame to the national leadership of the NUM. In several sharp polemics, Samuel defended the NUM and, indeed, came close to arguing that the very debate itself represented a betrayal of the miners and their cause.98 In contrast to the perspective ‘from below’ of The Enemy Within, Adeney and Lloyd focused on the high politics of the strike and the socio-­political structures within which Britain’s nationalized coal industry operated. Their account was highly critical of the NUM leadership, in particular their refusal to hold a pithead ballot. The book emphasized the miners’ collective agency. The NUM, they argued, were not forced into the strike, but had actively sought to precipitate it. Moreover, rather than being confronted by overwhelming odds, there had remained the possibility of a settlement well into the autumn of 1984. Yet, as much as the miners were equal contestants in the power struggle, they operated within a broader socio-­economic framework that made the long-­term decline of the industry inevitable. However, it was the defeat of the NUM that had accelerated the pit closure programme and deprived the miners of a voice at a crucial phase in the industry’s history. The debate between Samuel and Lloyd was carried out in the pages of New Socialist, New Statesman, and Marxism Today. To coincide with the second anniversary of the return to work in March 1987, Routledge & Kegan Paul, the New Socialist, and New Statesman also hosted a public round-­ table discussion.99 Both books found a ready market and were widely reviewed in the press. Ian Jack praised Loss without Limit in a review for The Observer as an ‘admirable analysis’; W. E. J. McCarthy hailed it as a ‘first class job’.100 Michael Foot, writing in The Guardian, commended the book as ‘a document packed with facts and verdicts’, but Mark Hollingsworth deplored the authors’ ‘obsession’ with the figure of the NUM national president. By comparison, The Enemy Within’s immediate reception was more mixed, despite selling 2,000 copies. Paul Foot found it ‘difficult and rather unsatisfactory to read’. Together with other reviewers, he took issue with Samuel’s characterization of the strike as defensive and conservative.101 Tony Parker, by contrast, praised the collection as ‘the most human, and the best’ of the many books that had been written about the strike.102 Writing in Tribune, Caroline Rees predicted that the edited collection would still be read ‘long after most others have been forgotten’.103 Taken together, the books mapped out the 98  Raphael Samuel, ‘Doing Dirt on the Miners’, New Socialist; ‘Reopening old wounds’, Marxism Today, October 1986. 99  Bishopsgate Institute, RS 4/261, Press Release, Debate on ‘The Miners’ Strike 1984/85’ on 12 March 1987. 100  Ian Jack, ‘MacGregor on the warpath’, The Observer, 12 October 1986. 101  Paul Foot, ‘Spirit of Revolt’, New Society, 6 February 1987, p. 27; Edgar, ‘Strike while the iron is hot’, press cutting; Tom Roberts, ‘Within the ranks of Scargill’s army’, press cutting, 6 February 1987, in Bishopsgate Institute, RS 4/250. 102  Tony Parker, ‘Defending the job’, The Guardian, 23 January 1987. 103  Caroline Rees, ‘How it wasn’t Scargill’s strike’, Tribune, 30 January 1987.

224  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization contours of scholarly discourse in the later 1980s. In the longer term, both within popular culture and scholarly understanding, it was Samuel’s social historical approach ‘from below’ that proved more influential. In focusing on the everyday, The Enemy Within presented a sympathetic and endearing picture of the striking miners. It also locked them into a structure of feeling that turned them into objects of sympathy and pity. In doing so, Samuel’s collection helped to displace an alternative reading that had presented the miners as powerful agents employing morally complex means that aimed to transform, rather than preserve, the socio-­economic environment in which they led their lives.

IV  Dreams of Escape While historians and journalists debated the recent past, the men working in the industry had to adapt to a rapidly changing present. The speed and magnitude of this change was stark indeed. Between March 1985 and March 1987, forty-­two collieries closed and seventeen mergers took place, leaving 110 pro­du­cing ­collieries. In the same period, 61,435 men on colliery books left the industry, reducing the overall number to 109,944. Between September 1983 and March 1987, the workforce on colliery books fell by 43 per cent. In the same period, the total number of employees in the coal industry, including ‘other industrial staff ’ and ‘non-­industrial staff ’, declined from 246,835 to 143,207, a reduction of 42 per cent. While the workforce was nearly halved, deep-­mined output per year showed a slight reduction only, from 90.1 million tonnes in September 1983 to 86.9 million tonnes in March 1987, a decline of 3.5 per cent.104 Over the same period, productivity, measured by tonnes per man-­shift, increased by 35 per cent, from 2.43 to 3.29 tonnes per man-­shift.105 In a note to the Prime Minister on 23 July 1986, Peter Walker observed that ‘the rationalisation of the coal industry is proceeding at a pace faster than any of us could have anticipated’.106 The main instrument facilitating the policy of  contraction was the Redundant Mineworkers’ Payment Scheme (RMPS). Payments under the scheme, went beyond the statutory severance pay ­guaranteed under the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act of 1978.107 The level of benefits was dependent on age and length of service in the industry. While a lump sum of £1,000 per year was payable to redundant miners

104  Compare also Table 1, Appendix. 105  House of Commons Energy Committee, Session 1986–87, Memorandum: The Government’s response to the Committee’s first report of session 1986–87, on the coal industry, HC176 (London, 13 May 1987), p. 3. 106  PREM 19/1865, P. Walker to Prime Minister, 23 July 1986. 107 For the text of the act see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1978/44/contents/enacted, accessed 13 July 2022.

1987  225 between the ages of 21 and 49, miners aged 50 and above were entitled to weekly benefits in addition to a reduced lump sum. The maximum sum available to ­miners below the age of 50 was £36,500, roughly equivalent to four years’ annual gross wages. To those aged between 50 and 55, weekly benefits amounting to one half of pre-­redundancy earnings were payable on top of a reduced lump sum. Those aged 55 and above stood to receive roughly two-­thirds of their pre-­ redundancy earnings, in addition to a more modest lump sum.108 In response to questions raised by a parliamentary select committee report on what steps were taken to alleviate the hardship of pit closures, the Department of Energy drew attention to the voluntary nature of the process, the adherence to the established procedures of the Colliery Review Process, which made sure that closure was a protracted process lasting up to nine months. Above all, they pointed to the activities of the National Coal Board (Enterprise) subsidiary, which, they claimed, had helped to create 16,000 job opportunities between October 1984 and March 1987.109 How the miners responded to this highly dynamic situation was of con­sid­er­ able interest to contemporaries. Here, the parliamentary Select Committee on Energy played an important role. It solicited a wealth of oral and written evidence from a cross-­section of interested parties in order to scrutinize government policy on the coal industry. The fortunes of the industry and the men working in it remained politically charged: As the miners’ collective voice, the NUM, fragmented, other groups emerged to speak up on behalf of miners and defend their interests. Chief among them was the Coalfield Communities Campaign, a coalition of local authorities from mining areas which was set up in the latter half of the strike. Social scientists, too, intervened in order to detail the social consequences of the restructuring. Many of them had long-­standing connections to the labour movement. In the aftermath of the strike, they tended to base their arguments about the social and psychological effects of restructuring as much on historical analogies and the example of other industries as on fieldwork among miners themselves. In this respect, the late 1980s were different from the late 1960s: social scientific knowledge was anecdotal rather than empirical; it was framed by broader narratives that had been developed elsewhere. The evidence suggests that, confronted with a highly dynamic situation over which they exerted little collective leverage, many miners looked for individual escape routes from the industry. In oral testimony to the select committee on

108  MRC, MSS.292D/253.145/2, National Coal Board, ‘Briefing for Representatives of the TUC on the Mineworkers’ Dispute, 24 September 1984’, Section D: Redundancy and transfer benefits. 109  Energy Committee, Session 1986–87, Memorandum: The Government’s response. See also House of Commons Energy Committee, Session 1986–87, The Coal Industry, Minutes of Evidence (12 November 1986). For a sceptical assessment of this claim see Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain (London/New York, 2021), pp. 161–82.

226  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization 5  November 1986, Bob Haslam, the Coal Board’s new chairman, admitted that the rush to take redundancy had become almost unstoppable. As he declared, ‘I have been underground a lot in the last few weeks talking to miners. One of the consistent parts of the conversation is, “When can I get out?” ’110 To committee member Bill O’Brien, Labour MP for the Yorkshire constituency of Normanton, the rush to take redundancy was an indication of the ‘low morale’ in the industry following the strike. In a lively exchange with Haslam before the select committee, O’Brien elaborated on this point: The situation is that I live amongst the miners, I meet them every week . . . I sense a general attitude of demoralisation in the industry. I also find, from my brothers in the trade union movement, that there is no sense of cooperation at any level within the industry. If you’re telling me that this feeling that I have got and the attitude I have developed from meeting the men in the industry is wrong, then I would try to clear this up, because the people in my constituency and the people in the area where I live are saying that they are totally disenchanted with the industry.111

Similar points were made in written memoranda to the select committee by the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS) and the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM), the trade union representation of overmen and middle management, respectively:112 ‘BACM is critical however of the Board’s attitude to industrial relations since the end of the dispute. The style and manner in which it has conducted consultations on a number of issues has been less than frank, and has not reflected the spirit of Section 46(i) of the Nationalisation Act.’113 Even more forthright in his assessment was Peter McNestry, the president of NACODS: Relationships within the industry are now at an all-­time low. Discipline is always required in this industry of ours, but the discipline now being practised is dis­ cip­line by fear.

McNestry went on to elaborate that men were regularly threatened with dismissal for minor offences. He laid blame for this at the door of the NCB’s outgoing 110  HC Energy Committee, Session 1985–86, The Coal Industry, Minutes of Evidence (5 November 1986), p. 259 (para. 1024). 111  Ibid., p. 261 (para. 1033). 112  On BACM see Andrew Perchard and Keith Gildart, ‘ “Run with the fox and hunt with the hounds”: Managerial trade-­unionism and the British Association of Colliery Management’, HSIR 39 (2018), pp. 79–110; more broadly, Perchard and Gildart, ‘Managerial ideology and identity in the nationalised British coal industry, 1947–1994’, Economic and Industrial Democracy (2022), pp. 1–32. 113  HC Energy Committee, Session 1985–86, The Coal Industry: Memoranda, Vol. I (London, 26 January 1986), Memorandum 4, pp. 33–40, here p. 40.

1987  227 chairman, MacGregor, who had framed the industrial dispute in terms of ‘insubordination’ and ‘insurrection’. To McNestry, there was a direct link between low morale and ‘the ever-­increasing accident rate, both in fatal and major injury figures’.114 The stark characterization of a disintegrating industry was not accepted by the Coal Board and the Department of Energy. They pointed to the increase in prod­ uct­iv­ity since the end of the strike as evidence for high morale. ‘If you look at the fact that we have now broken our output per man-­shift record six times in the last seven weeks, that is hardly an indicator of lack of morale,’ as Haslam testified before the select committee in November 1986.115 BACM took a more differentiated view of the issues at stake. Productivity in a capital-­intensive industry such as modern coal mining was not a direct reflection of human effort, they cautioned in their written submission to the select committee. Investment and the utilization of mining machinery played their part, as did the closure of many of the industry’s high-­cost collieries. At the same time, they attributed the increase in productivity ‘in part [to] a desire by mineworkers to compensate for loss of earnings during the dispute’, but also saw this as an expression of a collective desire to move on from the strike.116 From a different angle, David Douglass from Hatfield Main explained that there could also be a political rationale behind the rise in productivity or, at the very least, that it was possible to rationalize such an effort as consistent with NUM policy. As he explained in a letter to Raphael Samuel, For me we hadn’t just fought a year to save other pits just to roll over and die when our own loomed close to the rocks. I had to fight to get the branch, and the membership at large to accept a strategy of trying to make the pit profitable, trying to turn coal, not for the Board’s sake, but so that the great cause of the miners’ union itself and our contribution to the rest of the working class wouldn’t be lost. Some of our best pickets got stuck into those coal faces with as much determination as they had done earlier on against the police lines.117

Whatever the precise relationship between ‘morale’ and productivity, the aggregate picture concealed as much as it revealed. Region and age were important variables in assessing the social consequences of the restructuring, as Gareth Rees of University College Cardiff made clear in his written evidence to the select committee.118 While closures affected all coalfields, they were unevenly distributed. Between February 1984 and October 1985, the overall decline in employment of 114  Ibid., Memorandum 5, pp. 41–5, here p. 44. 115  Energy Committee, Minutes of Evidence, 5 November 1986, p. 260 (para. 1032). 116  Energy Committee, Memoranda, Memorandum 4, pp. 33–40, here Q. 337. 117  Bishopsgate Institute, RS4/250, D. Douglass to R. Samuel, n.d. [March 1986]. 118  HC Energy Committee, The Coal Industry: Memoranda, Vol. II (London, 18 June 1986), Memorandum 62, pp. 326–33.

228  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization 17.7 per cent masked huge differences between a peripheral coalfield such as Scotland, where the workforce had been reduced by 34.3 per cent, and a central coalfield such as Nottingham, where the reduction was a modest 8.6 per cent. For the miners who had decided to leave the industry under the terms of the Redundant Mineworkers’ Payment Scheme, benefits and prospects were ­dependent on age. In Rees’s estimation, for the miners aged 50 and above, redundancy meant, in effect, early retirement. As he explained, For those older miners leaving the industry, the overwhelming probability is that they will not work again . . . For some – especially those who are nearer to retirement age – this offers a welcome respite from arduous, dangerous and unhealthy work. They do not seek alternative employment and, therefore, do not appear as unemployed. Others, whatever their wishes, are unable to look for another job by reason of ill-­health or disability; again, they are not recorded as unemployed. For the remainder, however, the likelihood is that they do seek new employment but are unsuccessful and thus add to the levels of unemployment.119

For younger miners, meanwhile, even the relatively generous lump sums available were insufficient to provide for security in the long term. Many, in fact, used the lump sum payment to pay off the debts they had incurred during the strike. Their employment prospects were not encouraging, as Rees argued with reference to social scientific studies done in the 1960s and to previous scholarship about unemployed steelworkers. Rees cautioned that in order to understand the situ­ ation fully, the discussion had to move beyond the mere financial aspects of job loss to encompass the social and psychological consequences. Drawing on a long tradition of social scientific work, he averred that the consequences of long-­term unemployment were well known: ‘There is now a substantial body of convincing evidence which clearly demonstrates that unemployment causes a significant deterioration in psychological health.’120 Furthermore, the effects of job loss were not confined to the individual. They rippled out across the social structure, with knock-­on effects on local communities and coalfield regions. The loss of well-­paid jobs represented a challenge to the local economy, with repercussions on the social fabric and urban environment. As submissions from local authorities and the Coalfield Communities Campaign emphasized, as recently as the early 1980s the coal industry had been of major importance to local economies, especially as they tended to be situated in areas with high unemployment. As the Local Authority Associations’ Joint Minerals and Reclamation Group described the problem in their memorandum to the Select Committee,

119  Ibid., p. 327.

120  Ibid., p. 331.

1987  229 In many villages in Northumberland, Durham, West and South Yorkshire, parts of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire and the valleys of South Wales between 60–70 per cent of male employment may be dependent on mining. The effect of colliery closure on employment in these communities can be devastating as in addition to the direct impact of the closures on employment the loss of local purchasing power has a negative secondary impact on employment in other linked industries and services such as rail freight, shipping, road transport and retailing.121

The debate about the social consequences of pit closures was underpinned by assumptions about the miners’ identity and agency. Local authorities and sympathetic scholars conceptualized the miners as emblematic of (male) industrial workers in a rapidly de-­industrializing world. The plight of the miners embodied, in condensed form, the plight of working-­class communities caught up in the throes of the de-­industrial revolution. Indeed, much of the evidence on the social consequences of the industry’s restructuring was drawn from work on other sectors of the industrial economy, in particular steelworkers. Miners were special insofar as they illustrated the fate of every industrial worker. As Rees stressed in his evidence to the select committee, the skill sets and social characteristics of miners were unlikely to secure them alternative employment in the highly competitive labour market of the mid-­1980s.122 Similarly, the challenges of colliery closures for coalmining communities made them equivalents of the ‘inner city’ and its problems, as Mid Glamorgan County Council argued in its submission. It was in the pit villages that the dereliction and social disintegration of the inner city could be studied in laboratory form.123 At the same time, there was a countervailing strand in this argument which posited that coalfield communities possessed unique traditions of self-­help and resilience; that they were, in the words of Rees, especially ‘efficient’ social units.124 In that respect, the closure of a colliery was not the same as the closure of a factory. As the Coalfields Community Campaign maintained: The social and cultural traditions of mining communities involve the collective self-­provision of welfare and community support facilities. The income loss involved in colliery closure destroys the financial base of many of these facilities in a situation when few alternatives exist. In contrast, factory closure rarely has this effect because factory production involves different social and cultural

121  Energy Committee, Memoranda, Vol. II, Memorandum 49, submitted by the Local Authority Association’s Joint Minerals and Reclamation Group, pp. 245–60, here p. 255. 122  Energy Committee, Memoranda, Vol. II, Memorandum 62, p. 327. 123  Ibid., Memorandum 50, submitted by Mid Glamorgan County Council, p. 260. 124  Ibid., Memorandum 62, p. 332.

230  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization traditions. Factory closure therefore does not normally involve such extensive social dislocation and community destruction.125

The unique qualities of coalfield communities made their disintegration especially painful, but their resilience could also provide a potential model for the regeneration of British society. In arguing thus, scholars harked back to arguments that had been developed in the early 1970s. The miners were a repository of traditions that may well point the way to a better future.126 From a different angle, the government also operated with the idea of the ­miners’ special nature. They kept insisting that the redundancy terms on offer to the miners were uniquely ‘generous’, unmatched by any other industry. Miners, even those facing redundancy, were special insofar as they were privileged. While the Government presented the terms on offer to the miners as an act of largesse, in truth they were motivated by residual concerns about the resurgence of the miners’ power. The public expenditure incurred by the RMPS was the price that the government was prepared to pay in order to keep this power in check, even in the later 1980s. In a curious way, a residual belief in—­and fear of—­the miners’ power, and thus their agency, remained stronger among the Conservative government than the support groups and sympathetic scholars who spoke up on behalf of miners in the half-­decade following the end of the strike. While the local authorities and social scientists offered a composite picture of the impact of restructuring, the journalist and oral historian Tony Parker took the pulse of one community. He visited Horden, a traditional mining town in County Durham in the north-­east of England, to record the voices from a cross-­section of the local community in the months following the return to work.127 Edited transcriptions of the interviews were published in 1986 as Red Hill: A Mining Community. The collection presented a broad cross-­section of local experience, with minimal intervention other than through the editing of the material: among the twenty-­five interviewees, sixteen were male and nine female; in age they ranged from 16 to 60. Next to striking miners the book also included two miners who had returned to work as well as the views of two members of area level management. There were skilled craftsmen, power loaders, a union official, dismissed miners, a chaplain, housewives, a schoolteacher, school-­leavers and a policeman among the interviewees. The testimony was collected at a time of uncertainty for the future of Horden Colliery: once considered the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the coal industry, and as recently as the early 1980s regarded as a colliery with a long-­term future, Horden was announced to be under threat of closure shortly after the end 125  Ibid., Memorandum 75, submitted by the Coalfields Community Campaign, p. 347. 126  See Chapter 2, above. 127  The identity of the village was revealed in a BBC Radio 4 documentary on Tony Parker, ‘The Great Listener’(May 20212), produced by Martin Williams, available online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b01hdp9g.

1987  231 of the strike. It closed on 28 February 1986, three months after the interviews were conducted.128 As Parker made clear in the acknowledgement, he had no personal background in mining, but as a conscientious objector in World War II had worked in a Lancashire coal mine for eighteen months. During that time, he imbibed a sense of the ‘mystique of coal mining to those involved in it’, their sense of ‘specialness and pride’. The interviews recorded individual perspectives and experiences, but there were also common themes: one of them was uncertainty. The view of Bernard Wilkinson, who said he looked forward to ‘a long and happy retirement’, was exceptional. More typical was the judgement by 36-­year-­old electrician Billy Barrymore, who told Parker during the second interview: It’s changed me you know the strike and all the uncertainty afterwards. It’s like you’re living in uncertainty, waiting to hear what’s going to happen to you, not being able to do anything that’ll have any influence. Kites without wind, that’s what we are.

To Barrymore, the feeling of uncertainty was compounded by a lack of a sense of agency: the future was not bright and open, but dark and threatening. With the defeat of the NUM in the strike, the collective agency which the miners had possessed had disintegrated. In the aftermath of the strike, the future had to be faced on an individual level or, at best, as a family unit. But uncertainty was ex­peri­ enced also as a collective phenomenon, threatening the whole community just as much as the individual. As Barrymore emphasized, I hate and fear the idea we might lose Red Hill. If they close the pit they’re closing down my life. And not just mine mind, but everyone’s else who works there, who lives in the village here round the pit.129

While some interviewees felt confident that their individual skills would secure them, if need be, employment outside the industry, dismissed miners could conceive of no future for themselves at all. As Garry Neil, 25, exclaimed, ‘If they don’t [give me my job back] I don’t see what I’m ever going to do with my life.’ Alan Whitfield, 42, dismissed by the Coal Board after more than twenty-­five years of service in the industry, commented with a tinge of sarcasm, ‘Perhaps I could take up a life of crime or something, that seems about the only future for me.’ The colliery had been the centre of the community for as long as any of the interviewees could remember. While work down the mine had rarely been a first 128  Huw Beynon, Ray Hudson, and David Sadler, A Tale of Two Industries: The Contraction of Coal and Steel in the North East of England (Milton Keynes/Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 35–83. 129  Ibid., p. 20.

232  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization choice—­indeed, for some, the very notion of choice was alien—­it was an option to fall back on. If all else failed, there would always be the pit. As Harry Hartley, who as a boy had dreamt about becoming a professional footballer, explained, I was thinking the other night about what I had been saying to you about once perhaps being a footballer. I remember my dad told me he didn’t think it was a very good idea because there was no future in football. But he’d never said to me there was no future in being a miner, that’s something he wouldn’t have said.130

As the quotation indicates, to Hartley the rupture between past and present was compounded by a loss of trust in the employer. Several interviewees commented about how, as recently as a few years ago, the Coal Board had held out the promise of a secure future for the colliery. Others pointed out that their distrust extended beyond the Coal Board to the police and the state as well. They felt that the strike had been provoked by the government for political reasons in order to break the power of the Union; and that, likewise, the closure of Horden had no economic rationale other than being a ‘punishment’ for solid support during the strike. Parker solicited reflections on the strike, but it is likely that even without such a prompt many interviewees would have raised the subject. While some expressed a desire to move on from the past, others commented that the past cast a large shadow over the present. Several interviewees concurred with the written evidence that NACODS and BACM had submitted to the select committee, that industrial relations had been permanently damaged. As Tom Doy, the recently retired manager of Horden, explained, ‘But that said, the other thing that now strikes me as equally wrong is that now when the strike is over, it’s so much a case of to the victor the spoils.’131 The strike was often remembered as a test, and sometimes a conflict of loyalties between the Union and ‘work mates’, on the one hand, and the core family, on the other. Alan Whitfield, 42, told Parker how the strike had put additional strain upon, and finally broke, an already fraught marriage: I’m divorced . . . I’d say definitely it was the strike caused the divorce. The wife wasn’t sympathetic to the miners and we were always rowing about it: she kept telling me I was a lazy bugger and ought to get back to work. I used to get out of the house to get away from her, and then one day I hit her once too often and she pissed off to her mother’s.132

130  Ibid., p. 47.

131  Ibid., p. 76.

132  Ibid., p. 86.

1987  233 Norman Lane had returned to work in February 1985 and now suffered ostracism from his former workmates. He told Parker that he had only returned to save his marriage: ‘In fact I didn’t want to go back, I’d have stopped out if I could. But things at home, you see, they were very bad.’133 Not all memories were negative. Among women who got involved in the support groups, the strike could be remembered as a cataclysmic experience and political awakening, which also strengthened the emotional ties between husband and wife. As Annie Brooks commented, When we were talking the other morning I was thinking after you’d gone like you said: about what ways the strike had made a difference to me as a person. And the biggest one of the lot, and I asked Joe if he thought the same and he did, was that it’s made me into a very political animal. . . . It did a lot for Joe and me’s marriage did the strike: everything it did was good.134

Underlying many reflections was a strong sense of grievance at the portrayal of miners as ‘enemies’, which had wounded their self-­respect. While some interviewees emphasized the sense of ‘camaraderie’ among miners, many insisted that, at heart, they thought of themselves as ‘ordinary’ with no aspiration other than provide for their loved ones. Barrymore expressed this in the following terms: I wasn’t a brain person, I was a hard manual worker, a physical worker, I’ve never been a shirker. I’d worked, and worked hard. All I’d wanted to do was to see the family got a few of the decent things in life everyone else has. Not a lot of lux­ur­ ies, just what nowadays is the basics of a standard of living better than it was in my father’s day. A house, a second-­hand car, television, a washing machine so the wife doesn’t have to labour like her mother did, a fridge, perhaps two weeks holiday in Spain where the sun is . . . And then the day came when she [Margaret Thatcher] said me and my mates were the enemy within. Within our own society, that it was our work that had created. Like somebody spitting in your face, eh? In all my lifetime, those words made more impression on me than anything anyone else’s ever said.135

Conclusion By 1987, the coal industry was embarked on a radical restructuring process. Within two years of the end of the strike, 60,000 miners had left the industry. The

133  Ibid., p. 54.

134  Ibid., pp. 108, 112f.

135  Ibid., p. 22f.

234  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization number of producing collieries had been reduced from 185 to 110, while output had shown a slight reduction only. Accelerated change was carried out under the shadow of the recent past. Miners continued to be defined by what they had done in 1984/85. The coal dispute furnished the backdrop against which the industry was understood. To the government, the outcome of the strike had opened up a window of opportunity to remodel the industry along commercial lines. The NUM, while concerned with continuing the struggle found themselves marginalized from the process of decision-­making. The significance of this reconfiguration extended beyond the field of energy. With the defeat of the NUM, the ‘spell’ of trade union power had been broken. Thatcherism stood triumphant over the old nemesis. Curiously, however, it was the Thatcher government that retained a residual belief in the miners’ agency across the watershed of 1984/5. By contrast, among the Left, the idea of a decisive rupture took hold. Seeking to cushion mining communities against the force of the industry’s contraction, community groups and scholars came to cast miners as victims of a vindictive government and, increasingly, of the pace of socio-­economic change itself. Mineworkers came to be viewed as repositories of principles and traditions that seemed increasingly out of step with the ‘new times’ of the later 1980s.136 As the next chapter will show, this process of reimagining the mineworker was made complete in the coal crisis of the early 1990s.

136  ‘New Times’, Marxism Today, October 1988.

7

1992 Introduction On 13 October 1992, the President of the Board of Trade, Michael Heseltine, announced that thirty-­one of Britain’s remaining fifty collieries would close within five months, reducing British Coal’s (BC) workforce from 53,000 to 23,000.1 Of the pits scheduled for closure, six would close immediately, a further thirteen by Christmas, and the remainder by March 1993. The closures would mark the end of deep-­coal mining in Lancashire, North Staffordshire, North Wales, and North Derbyshire. South Wales, Scotland, Warwickshire, and the North-­East would retain just one colliery each. Heseltine stressed how difficult the decision had been but maintained he ‘must not allow my heart to rule my head’. There was no economic alternative, Heseltine maintained. All that could be done was to ameli­or­ate the hardship that the closures and the redundancies would inevitably bring. The privatization of electricity generation in 1990 had given licence to the elec­tri­city generators to purchase their fossil fuel wherever they chose after a transitional period of three years. Despite protracted negotiations, all that was on offer for British Coal was a contract to supply 40 million tonnes in 1993/4, falling to 30 million tonnes in each of the following four years, a reduction of 25 million tonnes on the previous contract in the first year alone.2 The government was quite unprepared for the public outcry that met the announcement.3 In his memoirs John Major, who had succeeded Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in November 1990, remarked how the decision had ‘inflamed opinion more spontaneously than any other event’ during his prem­ ier­ship. He spoke of how ‘the prospect of whole mining communities being destroyed touched a raw nerve among the British people’.4 The protests against the closure decisions extended beyond the coalfields and the miners’ traditional supporters in the labour movement to the Conservative heartlands and Tory backbench MPs. Richard Alexander, Conservative MP for Newark, spoke in the

1  ‘Heseltine warns of worse to come’, The Times, 14 October 1992. On the background and origins of the crisis, Mike J. Parker, Thatcherism and the Fall of Coal (Oxford, 2000), pp. 103–13. 2  HC Trade and Industry Committee, First Report, British Energy Policy and the Market for Coal (HC 237) (London, 26 January 1993), p. 18. 3  Ralph Negrine, ‘The “Gravest Political Crisis Since Suez”: the Press, the Government and the Pit Closures Announcement of 1992’, Parliamentary Affairs 48/1 (1995), pp. 40–56. 4  John Major, The Autobiography (London, 1999), pp. 668ff.

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0008

236  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization House of ‘a wave of anger . . . as I have never known before’, while his colleague Paul Marland, MP for Gloucestershire West, exclaimed, ‘The letters of protest from my constituency have had to be weighed rather than counted, because there are so many.’5 Within less than a week of the announcement, the government was forced into a partial reversal that one commentator called the most embarrassing U-­turn in twenty years.6 As Heseltine announced in the Commons on 19 October 1992, the government would reprieve twenty-­one of the thirty-­one collieries and await the results of a wide-­ ranging review into the coal industry, by both the Select Committee of Trade and Industry and the Department of Trade and Industry.7 While the promise of a review succeeded in quelling the rebellion amongst Conservative MPs, it did little to halt further contraction of the coal industry. By the time the government had concluded the coal review in March 1993, almost 9,500 miners had agreed to take ‘voluntary’ redundancy.8 Four months later, in oral testimony before the House of Commons Employment Committee, the chairman of British Coal gave a figure of 22,000 who had left the industry, including clerical staff.9 By the end of the year, all but four of the thirty-­one collieries mentioned on the October list had closed.10 As this chapter argues, the significance of the coal crisis of 1992/3 did not lie in the field of energy policy but in the reconfiguration of the figure of the coal miner in the public imagination. The bifurcated image of the miner as hero and villain, which had dominated in the 1980s, gave way to a conceptualization of the miner as victim. From an awe-­inspiring figure who possessed agency the miner was transformed into an underdog deserving of public sympathy. Commentators from across the political spectrum came to agree that the miners had been misled and betrayed, but the exact nature of this betrayal and the forces behind it remained contested. The reconfiguration was not new. It drew on imaginaries that had been much in evidence in the late 1960s, but which had played a residual role only during the industry’s renaissance in the 1970s. These imaginations had ­re-­emerged in the latter stages of the 1984/5 strike, as one conceptualization amongst others. Within the wider context of concerns about the impact of economic recession on Britain’s manufacturing industry, the fate of Britain’s mineworkers 5 Hansard HC Sitting of 21 October 1992, cols 439–534, here col. 504 (Alexander); col. 509 (Marland). 6  ‘Heseltine retreats over pits in bid to buy off Tory rebels’, The Times, 20 October 1992; Peter Riddell, ‘The U-­turn that spells disaster’, The Times, 20 October 1992. 7  Hansard HC Sitting of 19 October 1992, ‘Statement on the Coal Industry’, cols 205–36. 8  Department of Trade and Industry, The Prospects for Coal: Conclusions of the Government’s Coal Review (Cm 2235) (London, March 1993), p. 28. 9  House of Commons Employment Committee, The Management of Redundancies, Minutes of Evidence (London, 26 July 1993), p. 190. 10  David Waddington and David Parry, ‘Coal policy in Britain’, in: Chas Critcher, Klaus Schubert, and David Waddington (eds.), Regeneration of the Coalfield Areas: Anglo-­German Perspectives (Pinter, 1995), pp. 5–33, here p. 7.

1992  237 acquired a broader significance. The miner was Everyman: he came to stand in for the plight of the male industrial worker in a de-­industrializing world. As a political symbol the miner retained special potency, but not as an agent of his own destiny. A retired teacher expressed this sentiment well in a letter to The Guardian on 26 October: The policies of the grocer’s daughter are still with us; and though ‘still living on coal and surrounded by fish’ (to say nothing of the oil), we can no longer afford decent education, health service, transport or old age pensioners. Nor is there money to build our own ships, invest in our industry or even dig our own coal. On the other hand, we can afford millionaires by the score, accountants and lawyers by the thousand.11

The reconceptualization of the figure of the miner had consequences for the understandings of the coal industry’s past and future. While the government insisted that the coal industry possessed ‘opportunities’ for a viable future, they came to present the history of coal mining in the twentieth century as a story of linear and inexorable decline.12 In this new iteration, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM) lost its function as heroic ‘lions’ who had saved both the nation and the coal industry in 1984/5. The NUM, meanwhile, but also the UDM itself, interpreted the coal crisis of 1992/3 as the culmination point of a politically motivated vendetta against mining trade unionism for their role in the industrial confrontations of the 1970s and 1980s.13 On this view, ‘1992/3’ took on the meaning of a ‘last stand’.14 In both reconfigurations, there was little place for the ‘new dawn’ of the 1970s, except as a temporary aberration or short ‘Indian summer’.15 This chapter proceeds in four steps. It examines, first, the emergence of a structure of feeling that conceptualized the miner as a noble but pitiful underdog who was caught up in a relentless process of inevitable structural change. It looks, second, at the attempts by the NUM and the UDM to reassert the miners’ collective agency in the context of the public outrage that met the closure announcement. Third, the chapter moves on to consider the responses of ordinary miners to the crisis, as they were conveyed by the media and social scientists. It argues that

11  Tom Green, ‘Profit and Loss’, Letters to the editor, The Guardian, 26 October 1992; Negrine, ‘Gravest Political Crisis’, p. 44. 12  Hansard HC Sitting of 29 March 1993, ‘Statement by President of Board of Trade’, col. 30; HC Sitting of 19 October 1992, cols 205–36, here cols 205, 221 (‘remorseless pressure of market decline for coal’), 224. 13 Hansard HC Sitting of 19 Oct 1992, col. 216, ‘It is a political act, long prepared by the Government, to rig the market, to close the pits and to punish the National Union of Mineworkers’ (T. Benn). 14  Quote attributed to Stephen Fothergill, in Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography (London, 2000), p. 437. 15  David Bowen et al., ‘Who killed King Coal?’, The Independent, 18 October 1992.

238  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization miners looked for individual resolutions to the crisis, by exiting the industry rather than collective action. Finally, the chapter considers the debate on the future of miners as ex-­miners. It shows how the miner came to embody the plight of the industrial worker in a de-­industrializing world.

I  Miners as Underdogs In his memoirs, Life in the Jungle, published in 2000, Michael Heseltine offered an extended account of the coal crisis of 1992/3.16 Looking back from the vantage point of the early twenty-­first century, he noted the ‘immediate and immense’ reaction to the announcement on 13 October 1992 that thirty-­one of Britain’s fifty deep-­coal mines would close by the end of the financial year.17 He observed how support for the miners extended beyond the labour movement to traditional Conservative voters, remarking that, indeed, outrage among Tories seemed bigger than among the miners themselves: ‘The middle classes marched with the miners. Indeed, the middle classes appeared to feel even more strongly than the miners themselves, although within the mining communities, which had long since sensed the writing on the wall, there was much resentment.’18 Heseltine’s retrospective observations may serve as a good starting point for an examination of the public image of the miner in 1992/3. It identifies two central emotions that characterized the structures of feeling that informed the debate about the future of the miners and their industry: sympathy, ‘a feeling of compassion or commiseration’, and resentment, ‘an indignant sense of injury or insult’.19 The observations are also revealing for their silences, for fear of the miners was conspicuously absent in the debate of 1992/3. Heseltine’s retrospective observations followed in the wake of many con­tem­ por­ary assessments by journalists, public figures, and politicians in both Houses of Parliament. To a remarkable degree, these observations were self-­conscious of the contrast between the then present and the mid-­1980s. Writing in The Times, Philip Howard observed how the miners had been ‘metamorphosed . . . from scapegoats to popular heroes’.20 Peter Riddell observed how the image of the miner had been transformed ‘from Marxist wreckers to heroic victims’.21 Speaking in the House of Commons, John Cummings, Labour MP for Easington, exclaimed, ‘In 1984 and 1985 the finger was pointed at miners and people said they were

16 Heseltine, Life, pp. 434–44. 17  Ibid., p. 439. 18  Ibid., p. 439. 19  ‘Sympathy’; ‘resentment’, OED (online edition). 20  Philip Howard, ‘The Miners are the latest beneficiaries of the British love of the underdog’, The Times, 22 October 1992. 21  Peter Riddell, ‘No poodle, this rottweiler’, The Times, 20 October 1992.

1992  239 the enemy within. I ask now who is the enemy within.’22 The observations also exhibited an awareness of the emotional texture of the debate. These tendencies were well illustrated in a report by New York Times cor­res­ pond­ent William E. Schmidt from Grimethorpe, ‘In village under the ax, British miners feel betrayed’. The miners of this small Yorkshire mining town had learned of the imminent closure at the very moment that its famous brass band won the British National Brass Band championship. The piece situated the perceptions of Yorkshire miners within the context of a broader shift in structures of feeling. Whereas in 1984/5 the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had ‘successfully portrayed the miners as militants . . . these days . . . there is a great deal of sympathy for the miners’. To Schmidt, the public support rested, in part, on ‘a nostalgic affection for the miners as the embodiment of Britain’s industrial mythology’. The miner stood for a rapidly disappearing world, representing the socio-­cultural costs of the recession of the early 1990s and of de-­industrialization in general. As Schmidt put it, The miners’ situation has also been more broadly viewed as a symbol of the nation’s larger economic plight, underscoring the peril of an economy in which as many as 8,000 people a week are now losing their jobs as Britain struggles with its longest economic recession since the 1930’s.23

Writing in The Independent, Neal Ascherson concurred, ‘They [i.e. the miners] were the last true industrial community, as all other ways of life grew fluid and indistinct. Now they are to be destroyed.’24 The Economist, in an attempt to explain what the journal regarded as an irrational defence of the mining industry, reached for a different comparison: ‘The coal miners, like farmers in France, seem to have gained a peculiar hold on the British imagination: a muscular symbol of a lost area.’25 Public compassion for the miners in 1992 was a consequence of their defeat in 1984/5. As The Guardian remarked in an editorial, the miners were seen as victims because they no longer possessed collective power: The reason why the miners received such public support was because they had been defeated in the mid-­1980s, along with the rest of the trade union movement. As a result, no one saw or sees miners as a threat but rather as helpless victims in need of charitable support.26 22  Hansard HC Sitting of 21 October 1992, col. 492. 23 William  E.  Schmidt, ‘In village under ax, British miners feel betrayed’, New York Times, 25 October 1992. 24 Neal Ascherson, ‘Maggie ruled like a despot – but at least she ruled’, The Independent, 18 October 1992. 25  ‘The economics of coal’, The Economist, 24 October 1992. 26  ‘Unions rise from the canvas’, The Observer, 26 October 1992.

240  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization If the miner was imagined as a helpless victim, he was also configured as a tragic hero, for after the strike those remaining in the industry had done everything that had been demanded of them by management and the government. They had foregone collective agency and had shown themselves to be flexible and adapt­able, earning lavish praise from government ministers and the senior management of British Coal for their achievements in raising productivity in the industry by 150 per cent since the end of the strike.27 Mr Mallin, a 45-­year-­old Grimethorpe miner, expressed this sentiment in the following terms in the New York Times article: ‘We always met the production targets and we worked to keep the costs low . . . We brought out more coal with fewer miners. And still they want to shut us down. It’s not right.’ This sense of injustice—­of betrayal despite the miners’ every effort at collaboration and adaptation to ‘new times’ – was especially pronounced among Nottinghamshire miners and the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. On 14 October 1992, UDM branch officials learned that nine collieries in the Nottingham section were on the closure list. Cotgrave and Silverhill were to cease production immediately, while the rest were to close by the end of March 1993. Delegates put on record their disgust at the ‘contemptuous treatment’ the Union had received at the hands of British Coal.28 In proposing to close UDM collieries, the distinction between good working miners and militant wreckers, which the government had introduced with such effect in the 1980s, became irrelevant. The collapse of the UDM’s cooperationist approach to industrial relations was symbolized by the reaction of Roy Lynk, the UDM president, to the announcement. Lynk staged a solitary sit-­in protest down Silverhill Colliery and threatened to return the OBE that he had been awarded in 1990 in recognition of his role in the miners’ strike. His loneliness seemed a poignant illustration of the way the UDM had been cast aside by the government as soon as they were no longer needed as a counterweight to the collective bargaining power of the NUM. In a Commons debate on 21 October 1992 following the closure announcement, several Conservative backbench MPs paid tribute to Lynk, emphasizing the extent to which their constituents felt that the miners, and the Nottinghamshire miners in particular, had been abandoned and betrayed. As Richard Alexander, the Conservative MP for Newark expressed it, Nottinghamshire miners brought common sense, sanity and moderation to the ugly situation that arose in 1984, and I join other right hon. and hon. Members in paying tribute to Roy Lynk of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers for his role in that. Nottinghamshire miners did so often at great personal and family 27 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1992 (Sheffield), SC-­19. See also Employment Committee, Management of Redundancies (26 July 1993), p. 188 (statement by Mr  J.  N.  Clarke, chairman of British Coal). 28  Union of Democratic Mineworkers, Nottingham Section, Minutes 1992 (Mansfield), Conference of Branch Officials and Committee members, 14 October 1992, pp. 262ff.

1992  241 cost, and that is still continuing. Now they ask for common sense, sanity and moderation – and we owe them that.29

Elizabeth Peacock, representing the Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen, confessed to her feelings of shock and shame upon hearing the announcement. Like the MP for Newark, Peacock paid tribute to Lynk and the Nottinghamshire miners but extended this to all the miners of Britain regardless of their trade union affiliation: I must say a few words about a lonely man at the bottom of a pit shaft. He must really feel that he has let his members down – and they feel that he has let them down. But he must also feel that the Government have let him down. That man helped to keep the lights on in 1984 and 1985 – perhaps against the advice of many people who talked to him. He took a band of men with him, and they kept this country afloat and alight. . . . I do not want to see our country held to ransom on energy policy in the future. I should like to think that in the years to come, when the history of this period is written, the Conservative Government will not be seen to have abandoned the miners and this country’s energy policy.30

The miners—­all miners—­were ‘ordinary decent people’, Lord Marsh, the former Labour Minister of Power declared in the House of Lords.31 Yet they were also extraordinary, as Lord Callaghan, Prime Minister from 1976 to 1979, reminded the House in the same debate. For the miners possessed a ‘tremendous sense of cohesion and . . . tremendous loyalty and patriotism’: They do not mention Britain 52 times in a speech or anything of that kind; but when the call comes, they go and fight for Britain. They did that in such numbers that they had to be stopped and brought back because we were going to be short of coal.32

There were those who cautioned against a surfeit of emotion in the debate. Phillip Oppenheim MP, representing the Derbyshire constituency of Amber Valley, conceded in the Commons that ‘the industry has a heroic quality that is rightly admired by many people’. Yet he was adamant lest ‘sentimentality’ obfuscate clear-­headed judgement.33 ‘Sentimentality’ carried connotations of overindulgence in superficial emotion, and this was precisely the meaning that Oppenheim ascribed to the term. In the Upper House, Lord Boardman warned of the ‘danger

29  Hansard HC Sitting of 21 October 1992, col. 507. 31  Hansard HL Sitting of 20 October 1992, col. 690. 33  Hansard HC Sitting of 29 March 1993, col. 71.

30  Ibid., col. 514. 32  Ibid., col. 683.

242  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization of being carried away on the great emotional wave that broke over this country’.34 Others found value and meaning precisely in this outpouring of public affection. As Roy Hattersley commented in The Guardian, ‘The colliers became the catalyst that liberated the best instincts of the British people.’ The plight of the miners facing redundancy represented the plight of the homeless, the old, and the frail in British society. ‘It is impossible to imagine the treatment of any other group of workers mobilising the conscience in the same way,’ the columnist observed. Were these feelings to be labelled ‘sentimental’? Maybe so, but ‘all the stories on which the sentiment is built are true’, as Hattersley insisted. It was the nature of the work itself that fostered ‘special qualities’ among the men who dug coal.35 In their public statements, the government were forced to fall back on the pos­ ition that ‘the market’ left no alternative but to close collieries regardless of the miners’ collective qualities or their contribution to the nation in days gone by. As British Coal’s major customers, the two electricity generating companies, PowerGen and National Power, were unwilling to enter into long-­term contracts that would absorb the output of Britain’s collieries; there was an unanswerable case for ‘a substantial reduction in capacity’, as the President of the Board of Trade expressed it in his statement to the House on 19 October 1992. The chairman of British Coal concurred. Challenged in front of the Employment Select Committee, he declared that the decision for closure was made ‘first of all, by the market’.36 Furthermore, the government situated the present round of closures in the longue durée of ‘remorseless changes in circumstances’. Regardless of the party-­political complexion of government, the history of coal in the twentieth century was a history of a loss of market share, colliery closures, and reduction in employment. The most that this, or any, government could do, Heseltine argued, was to ameli­ or­ate the social consequences of these inevitable changes. Helpfully to the government, this argument was developed most forcefully by Lord Marsh, Minister of Power during the Wilson Labour government in the late 1960s, in a widely noted speech in the House of Lords on 20 October 1992. Responding to an intervention by the Bishop of Sheffield that decried the in­human­ity of the closures in moving terms, Marsh cast his mind back to the 1960s. He admitted to a deep feeling of déjà vu. Regardless of the intentions of government, the coal industry had lost markets ever since the 1950s. There was no alternative then and there was no alternative now for this ‘sad industry’, he maintained. The real problem was not the history of continuous decline, Marsh

34  Hansard HL Sitting of 20 October 1992, col. 686. 35  Roy Hattersley, ‘A Rich Seam uncovered in Kensington’, The Guardian, 26 October 1992. 36 House of Commons Employment Committee, Second Report: Employment Consequences of British Coal’s Proposed Pit Closures, Vol. I: Report and Proceedings of the Committee (London, 13 January 1993), p. 20.

1992  243 cautioned, but the very promises of an assured future that had been given to the miners again and again. False promises led to false expectations, resulting in ever new rounds of emotional turmoil and social upheaval: My Lords, we completely misled ourselves and them [i.e. the miners]. It did not work then and it will not work now. Indeed I believe now, with the benefit of hindsight, that by the 1960s public ownership, and the succession of reconstructions, each one leading to accelerated closure programmes, provided the miners with a false belief, completely without foundation, that they would have long-­term job security if they went one more step. Every time they were betrayed, not by individuals, not by Ministers, but by the realities of the situation. . . . The time is long overdue for politicians and unions to stop pretending, to face up to the need to accept the inevitable and to concentrate all the available resources on minimising the pain of a process which on every shred of evidence is inevitable.37

When Heseltine reported back to Parliament on 29 March 1993, after the conclusion of two inquiries into the industry, he praised the speech by Lord Marsh as a contribution that everybody would do well to read. Yet Heseltine too, in line with all his predecessors, held out the promise of a long-­term future for a reconstructed British coal industry, albeit couched rather cautiously in the language of ‘opportunities’ that were open for British Coal to capture market share above and beyond the tonnage agreed with the two electricity generators over the next five years. The only way to a more stable future, Heseltine claimed, was the speedy privatization of the industry.38 In comparison, British Coal seemed less optimistic. In oral testimony to the Select Committee for Trade and Industry, chairman Neil Clarke put the remaining lifespan for deep-­coal mining in the UK in the range of twenty to forty years, adding that the earlier date was more realistic.39 In other words, Clarke expected commercial deep-­coal mining to come to an end between 2010 and 2030. Yet not even among Conservative MPs or right-­of-­centre quality broadsheets did the government’s argument about the primacy of ‘the market’ carry much conviction. An editorial in The Times, under the headline ‘A black day for coal’, noted wearily on 14 October 1992:

37  Hansard HL Sitting of 20 October 1992, cols 690–2. 38  Hansard HC Sitting of 25 March 1993, ‘Statement to the House on the Coal Industry’, col. 1238f. 39  House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee, British Energy Policy and the Market for Coal, Minutes of Evidence (London: 28 October 1992), p. 31f.

244  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization Government and public spent a year battling to break the hold of Arthur Scargill’s miners over the power industry. There were famous political gains from Margaret Thatcher’s victory. There were also some less heralded industrial benefits, the turning of British Coal into the most efficient and lowest-­cost in Europe. The political benefits seem dimmer now. The industrial gains, judged by the pit closures announced yesterday, have been allowed to vanish almost entirely. The probable elimination of up to half British Coal’s output, to be replaced by imports or by exportable gas, is not some sad but inevitable product of competitive market forces. It is a direct result of the botched privatisation of the elec­tri­ city industry.40

Likewise, the government’s claim that the closures of 1992/3 were just the latest round in a long history of contraction did not go uncontested. In the House of Lords, the former Cabinet minister Merlyn Rees pointed to significant differences. For one, the closures of the late 1960s had occurred within the context of conditions of near full employment as opposed to the mass unemployment of the present. The average age of the men working in the industry was much higher in the 1960s than three decades later. In the sixties, among Britain’s miners there had been many older men eager to retire early after a lifetime of work in the industry. Crucially, back then, the miners were powerful and ‘had great influence on the political development of this country’.41

II  The NUM and the Campaign to Save Our Pits The reconfiguration of the miner as heroic underdog led to a partial rehabilitation of the NUM. Referring back to a notorious comment by Eric Hammond during the time of the 1984/5 strike, The Independent observed, ‘Today, the donkeys having vanished or shed much of their donkey-­ness, we are left with the lions.’42 Retrospectively, the predictions from the time of the miners’ strike about the ‘butchery’ of the industry had been proved correct, so it seemed to a chorus of columnists. ‘Ten years ago Arthur Scargill told the truth about the coal industry,’ Hugo Young declared in The Guardian on 15 October 1992. Pensioner Christine Pagett, from Sheffield, was quoted in The Times as saying, ‘The government don’t

40  ‘A black day for coal’, The Times, 14 October 1992. 41  Hansard HL Sitting of 20 October 1992, cols 709–13. 42  Donald Macintyre, ‘Political Commentary: Time for Labour to talk tactics’, The Independent, 18 October 1992. Hammond’s jibe that striking miners were ‘lions led by donkeys’ drew on a popular critique of the poor tactics of British military commanders in World War I.

1992  245 realise that they’ve made Mr. Scargill into a Moses figure.’43 In a Labour-­initiated debate on the coal industry in the House of Commons, Tony Benn was adamant that the closures were a politically motivated act that could be traced back to the industrial confrontations of the 1970s and 1980s: ‘It is taking place because the previous Prime Minister regarded the National Union of Mineworkers as the enemy within.’44 Benn’s colleague Dennis Skinner MP, secretary of the parliamentary miners’ group, went a step further. Telling the House about his experiences during the NUM-­sponsored protest rally earlier in the day, he exclaimed, I have never seen so many people hanging out of windows, including those at Kensington Gardens hotel . . . The people were cheering us on ‘Good old Arthur’. It was the return of the prodigal son.45

Not everybody shared this perception. Conservative backbencher Richard Alexander retorted that ‘the spectre’ of mining militancy, as personified by the NUM president, would serve to reunite the Conservative Party and reconcile ­disaffected constituents.46 Others held the NUM responsible for the industry’s problems.47 As an editorial in The Independent put it early during the crisis, ‘Mr Scargill claims to have been fighting to defend his industry. In practice, he has been administering it grievous body blows.’48 Yet most observers agreed that the NUM president had been reborn as a ‘folk hero’.49 Indeed, even Conservative politicians asked how the government could have blundered so much as to turn the NUM president into an endearing figure. As Lord Brookes wondered aloud in the House of Lords, ‘I ponder what peculiarities and what extraordinary mental cocktail can concoct an event which reflates a deflated Mr. Scargill and destroys faith, and perhaps hope and future, for the Union of Democratic Mineworkers and Mr. Lynk who has done so much good for the nation at a time of great need.’50 The NUM were aware that the wave of public sympathy provided the miners with an unexpected opportunity to influence the future of the industry through reclaiming some of their collective agency. At the same time, mining trade unionists were also acutely conscious that expressions of sympathy were not the same as support. After all, the sentiment rested on the perception of the miners’ collective weakness. The miners’ feared ‘industrial muscle’ was a memory of a bygone era; 43  Bill Frost, Alice Thomson, and Kate Alderson, ‘From all over Britain and every walk of life they came to join pitmen’s pilgrimage to London’, The Times, 22 October 1992. 44  Hansard HC Sitting of 21 October 1992, col. 502. 45  Ibid., col. 507. 46  Ibid., col. 504. 47  Cecil Parkinson, ‘How Scargill killed King Coal’, The Times, 16 October 1992. See also contributions by Cranley Onslow, Winston Churchill, and Spencer Baptiste to the HC debate of 29 March 1993. 48  ‘Cause and effect in the pits’, The Independent, 15 October 1992. 49  Celia Weston, ‘NUM president has resurfaced as a folk hero’, The Guardian, 19 October 1992. 50  Hansard HL Sitting of 20 October 1992, col. 700.

246  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization miners were no longer capable of going it alone. As Derbyshire delegate J. Burrows made clear at the NUM’s special delegate conference on 15 October 1992, The most sickening feature of all this for me is the sight of the Tory tabloids, B.B.C.  and I.T.N.  newscasters and reports, Tory backbenchers and the scab U.D.M. leadership trotting out the diatribes of support. Our message to them is clear, crocodile tears. Too little too late. Where were you when the kitchen was at its hottest. Nonetheless, despite all that, despite our doubts, we have still got to make use of that support in this campaign. . . . Over the past few days, discussing this particular problem with literally hundreds of Derbyshire miners, one thing has become clear, and I know it is the same in every other Area, the British miner is demoralised. He has fought his fight. He has fought his fight with the pride and dignity of his working class background. On his own he can give no more. Never before . . . not even in 1984/85 did we need them, but we now need to cry out to the Labour and Trade Union movement for help.51

In a change of tactics that did not go unnoticed in the press, the NUM opted for a different strategy from the time of the miners’ strike.52 Instead of privileging industrial action they sought to build up a broad-­based campaign in support of the industry, reaching beyond the labour and trade union movements to involve the churches, reactivated support groups, and the broader public. Marches, lobbies, and leaflets were to take precedence over strike action. To an extent, the ‘Save Our Pits Campaign’ of 1992/3 followed the tactics that Eurocommunist critics had pointed out the NUM should have adopted in 1984/5. Their ‘practical dignity’ and ‘restraint’ also seemed to emulate the actions of the Women Against Pit Closures campaign in 1984/5. ‘The men of today have learnt from yesterday’s women,’ as Rosalind Miles observed in The Times.53 While the NUM felt that they had been proved right by history, they deliberately refrained from adopting a stance of ‘I told you so’. They also downplayed the political dimension of the closure decisions. Instead, the Union’s publicity foregrounded the economic case against pit closures. A Save Our Pits Campaign information pack focused on the ‘economic madness’ of the closures, as a draft protest letter put it.54 The pack comprised four ‘fact sheets’ and a window poster; it was for distribution to Labour Party constituencies, trade unions, churches, and other supports. The material emphasized the modernity and efficiency of Britain’s ‘world-­class’ coal industry; the great strides in productivity that had been made 51 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1992 (London), SC-­23. 52  Helen Hague, ‘Profile: Bloodied but unbowed: Arthur Scargill’, The Independent, 18 October 1992. 53  Rosalind Miles, ‘Mining the hidden resource’, The Times, 19 October 1992. 54  NUM Archives, Barnsley, Save our Pits Campaign information pack, area circular 11 January 1993. Draft Protest letter, ‘Pit Closures’.

1992  247 since the mid-­1980s; the economic costs of closures, drawing on the calculations of Dr Andrew Glyn of Oxford University; and the extent to which the market had been ‘rigged’ against the most efficient coal industry in Europe.55 Speaking in the House of Commons, the miners’ MP Jimmy Hood, representing Clydesdale, took the thrust of the argument to its conclusion by exclaiming, ‘May we have a little bit of Thatcherism? May we argue on a level playing field so that coal can stand its ground against nuclear and gas energy?’56 This emphasis on the modernity and the efficiency of the coal industry was a deliberate tactic to mobilize widespread support. It sat at odds with the widespread public perception that the miners themselves represented a bygone era, ‘a lost tribe in some ethnographic film’, as a feature in The Independent called them.57 Whatever the thrust of the publicity campaign, the NUM believed that, at bottom, the rundown of the industry was politically motivated, part and parcel of a ‘pathological hatred of the miners’ born out of social class antagonism and mining trade unionism’s role in challenging the Conservative governments in the 1970s and 1980s.58 Their response to the crisis was informed by two perceptions: first, that the crisis represented the miners’ last stand; second, that there existed widespread demoralization among the membership, in the sense that confidence in the power of collective action had been sapped by the relentless restructuring of the industry that had followed in the wake of the defeat in 1984/5. Against this backdrop, the coal crisis was also an opportunity to reassert collective agency in shaping the future of the industry, and, in doing so, to make the NUM relevant again to the day-­to-­day experience of the members. This was urgent because on its core function, the negotiation of wages and conditions for its members, the  NUM had been bypassed nationally by British Coal for the past seven years.59 In oral testimony to the Employment Select Committee on 18 November 1992, the NUM president revealed just how far the marginalization had gone. In response to a question about the ‘immense hostility’ between the leadership of the NUM and the senior management of British Coal, Scargill revealed that he had never met bc’s present chairman. To an incredulous follow-­up question, Scargill responded, ‘We have asked consistently since 1985 three different Chairman if they will meet with the National Union of Mineworkers and consult. What they have granted are two consultative meetings per year, but they only normally hold one.’60 Four months earlier, at the NUM annual conference, a Scottish delegate had spelt out the consequences of the NUM’s position in stark terms: 55 Ibid. 56  Hansard HC Sitting of 19 October 1992, col. 224. 57  Reggie Nadelson, ‘Coal that keeps the yuppie fires burning’, The Independent, 22 October 1992. 58 NUM, Annual Report 1993. 59 NUM, Annual Report 1992, Letter by K.  Hunt, employee relations director; ibid., ‘Industrial Relations Structure of Deep Coalmining. Labour Party Consultation’. 60  Employment Committee, Second Report, p. 87.

248  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization I think we have got to ask ourselves the question, what have we achieved over the last seven years? What progress have we made? What benefits have the membership gained due to our tactics? The answer, of course, is clear and simple, nothing; absolutely nothing at all. We should be presenting progressive pol­ icies and progressive strategies instead of continually looking back and living in the past.61

The NUM believed that it was their duty to stop the rundown of the industry, a task which they considered identical with protecting the interests of the miners. Indeed, they saw themselves as the guardian not just of the present generation of men working in the industry but also of generations past and future. They were convinced that by defending the coal industry they were also defending the very principle of trade unionism itself. By comparison, the NUM did not see it as their duty to facilitate the exit of men from the industry on the best conditions pos­sible. This sense of transhistorical stewardship gave the rhetoric of the delegates at the special delegate conference on 15 October 1992 a near eschatological quality. As Nottinghamshire delegate M. Newton, a faceworker at Thoresby Colliery, put it, Society is at a crossroads. We can either fight and make sure we retain our dignity, our jobs, and our communities, or we can lay down and give it all up. But I tell you, if we give the fight up now, there is no turning back, because we will never fight again.

Did the delegates truly think that they still possessed the power to shape the course of events? Several speakers expressed doubts that they retained enough authority over their members to stop them from opting for individual exit routes from the crisis. As A. Owen of the Power Group put it in his contribution to the debate, ‘I believe that there will be enough volunteers at Littleton colliery to fill every place on that redundancy list after Christmas . . . People are sick and fed up of working in an industry not knowing whether that pit will be shut or not. So the attitude is, let us get out with a bit of money while we can.’62 These concerns notwithstanding, many delegates felt that that they owed it to themselves and their history that they should make a stand. H. Richardson of the Nottinghamshire Area expressed the dilemma succinctly: ‘So it will be difficult, but I do not think we should flinch the fight. We should at least try, and at least let us go down fighting if nothing else.’63 At the core of this collective identity stood a deep sense of grievance. Britain’s miners had contributed so much to the British

61 NUM, Annual Report 1992, AC 71. 63  Ibid., Sc-­20.

62  Ibid., Sc-­29.

1992  249 nation, the labour movement, and the community; they had made so many sacrifices and exhibited qualities that were the envy of the nation. Yet they stood to be cast aside like a piece of scrap for no other reason than political vendetta. D. Murphy of the North-­East Area gave poignant expression to this sense of self: Oh yes, we know all about patriotism, but not the patriotism that has been twisted into some kind of Gung Ho jingoism, but true patriotism that is shown by the love of one’s people whatever their colour or creed, and the genuine love of one’s community. Mining communities are overflowing with examples. We built hospitals, schools and libraries long before the Welfare State. We built sports centres and welfares. We set up sickness and injury funds to look after the less well off in our communities, when those subscribing themselves are actually on the bread-­line, and called that building a labour of love. We have for generations also paid the ultimate sacrifice, as most mining villages will testify by the tomb memorials to our dead. From the Somme and Paschendale to Arnheim and Tobruk miners answered the call. From Hartley Colliery and West Stanley, Easington and Gresford, miners also paid a terrible peace time price. True patriotism . . . we have shown in abundance. So, in conclusion, I need not remind this Conference what is at stake. Our heritage, indeed our very way of life is summed up in the tragedy of a miner who achieves the near impossible every day producing top quality work in desperate conditions and then describing himself as unskilled at the dole office.

The emotional response to the closure programme was just as strong among UDM trade unionists. Whereas the NUM could take some comfort from the conviction that they had been vindicated, among the UDM wounded pride was compounded by a sense of betrayal, ‘a violation of trust or confidence, an abandonment of something committed to one’s charge’.64 In remarkable oral testimony before the Employment Select Committee, UDM president Roy Lynk exclaimed, I have spent eight days down a coal mine to tell the world I have been thoroughly 100 per cent betrayed. Promises made in the House towards the miners of Nottingham are not being kept and the miners in the country as a whole do not deserve the treatment they are getting. They have done everything anybody has asked of them.

Lynk resorted to a drastic image. Reflecting on the failure of the UDM’s cooperationist approach to industrial relations, he declared, ‘we have cut our own throat’.65 64 ‘betrayal’, OED, online edition. 65  Employment Committee, Second Report, 13 January 1993, p. 27.

250  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization

III  Resentment and Resignation The typical miner of the early 1990s was aged been 25 and 40. His wage supported not just himself but a broader social unit: typically he was married with school-­ age children; had a partner who either stayed at home or worked part-­time; and had substantial mortgage commitments.66 He therefore stood to lose much by the closures, especially because, according to evidence received by the Employment Select Committee, the prospects of finding adequately remunerated alternative work did not look encouraging.67 However much miners may have taken heart from the public response to the ‘Save Our Pits’ campaign,68 the evidence suggests that many were sceptical that words could be translated into meaningful action. More broadly, they seemed to have lost faith in the ability of miners collectively to shape their destiny. The NUM itself appeared to recognize the limits of what could be expected of their members. At the special delegate conference on 15 October 1992, many delegates expressed doubts about the ability of the NUM to carry the membership with them. An emergency resolution calling for strike action was passed on the understanding that the ballot vote would be deferred to a later date. When the ballot was eventually held in March 1993, following on from another special delegate conference on 4 February 1993, it was for a series of largely symbolic twenty-­four-­hour strikes. On a turnout of 79 per cent, a majority of six to four voted for strike action.69 More significant was the miners’ search for an individual exit route from the situation. In evidence to the select committee dated 1 December 1992, the Department of Employment spoke of the ‘resilience’ and ‘resourcefulness [of] the individuals concerned’. They pointed out that no fewer than 4,600 applications for voluntary redundancy had been received since the initial announcement on 13 October.70 By June 1993, the NUM wearily ac­know­ ledged a ‘dramatic exodus of men from the industry in the recent past’. The NUM held the ‘harassment, intimidation and blackmail tactics of British Coal’ re­spon­ sible for the decisions of miners to take advantage of the best redundancy terms available.71 Impotent fury was the dominant sentiment that parliamentarians and journalists picked up from the coalfields themselves. In their report on the employment consequences of the proposed closures, the parliamentary select committee reported on a visit to the threatened Silverdale and Trentham collieries in Staffordshire. The committee emphasized the ‘strong local feeling’ that they encountered and noted ‘an underlying sense of betrayal’. This was because ‘all the 66  Ibid., ‘Memorandum from the Coalfield Communities Campaign’, pp. 180–4, here p. 182. 67  Ibid., p. xvii. 68  Maggie O’Kane, ‘Golden offers at the pit gates’, The Guardian, 23 October 1992, p. 21. 69 NUM, Annual Report 1993, AR 37–8. 70  Employment Committee, Second Report, 13 January 1993, p. 202. 71 NUM, Annual Report 1993, p. 36.

1992  251 encouragement that British Coal had given the workforce to become more productive had had no effect in preserving jobs’.72 The sense of betrayal was echoed by miners in their conversations with newspaper journalists. In the days following the closure announcement, Maggie O’Kane of The Guardian spent a week in the North-­Eastern coalfield and spoke to miners from Easington Colliery, Vane Tempest, and Wearmouth. O’Kane found bitterness and resentment amongst the miners, but above all detected a mood of resignation. At Easington Miners’ Club she was challenged as to where all the sympathetic media coverage had been eight years earlier: ‘Where was your newspaper in 1984 when the media hated us? . . . We needed you in ’84 and now you’re all on our backs to get our opinion, but it’s too late,’ John Dobbs, 46, told her.73 Memories of 1984/5, and also of 1972 and 1974, were mobilized to explain why the miners would not resist the closures, regardless of what the NUM might say. ‘We’ve been through three strikes, there will not be another one,’ as a 51-­year-­old miner declared.74 Miners felt there was little they could do collectively to stop the closures. All that was left was to take the redundancy money and ‘be off ’. As Steven Owen, 27, put it, ‘Principles are fine, but they cost too much money.’75 A miner from Vane Tempest Colliery wearily described the limits of his ambition succinctly: ‘I just want to earn a wage and fetch up a family.’76 Limited as this aspiration was, the miners whom O’Kane interviewed saw little prospect of ever earning a good wage again. ‘Train us for what – sweeping the roads?’ one miner at a pub in Sunderland exploded angrily in response to Heseltine’s announcement of a package of regeneration measures for coalfield areas.77 Correspondents from The Times, meanwhile, visited Bilsthorpe and Silverhill in the Nottinghamshire coalfield. Here too, the miners tried to make sense of the present by casting their minds back to the past. While they did not regret working through the 1984/5 strike, the only way they could rationalize the closure decision was by suspecting a political motive of revenge for the strikes of the early 1970s.78 They had worked hard and thought that their industry had decades of life ahead of it. In Nottinghamshire, the journalists noted signs of ‘modest private prosperity’ among the mining community,79 and it was the attendant lifestyle of relative affluence that seemed most at risk, ‘the semi-­detached home . . . the satellite television, two-­litre car and next year’s holiday in Spain’.80 Equally at risk was the miners’ self-­esteem, ‘the sense of pride derived from extracting a great

72  Employment Committee, Second Report, 13 January 1993, p. xvi. 73  Maggie O’Kane, ‘Fatal Contraction’, The Guardian, 19 October 1992. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76  O’Kane, ‘Golden offers’. 77  Maggie O’Kane, ‘Tears and sneers’, The Guardian, 20 October 1992. 78  Robert Crampton, ‘What happens when the gas runs out’, The Times, 14 October 1992. 79 Ibid. 80  Ronald Faux, ‘Coal men peer into black hole of future’, The Times, 17 October 1992.

252  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization national resource under difficult conditions’, as The Times correspondent Robert Crampton put it.81

IV  Life after Coal? In their 1993 annual conference report, the NUM acknowledged the exceptional wave of public sympathy that had met the initial closure threat: ‘For the first time since the Tories came to power in 1979, the mass media appeared to be backing the N.U.M.  in its fight to save Britain’s nationalized coal industry.’ It was, the report went on to note, ‘a stunning example of the power of mass communications’. Yet, after the first week, the media attention soon subsided. More critically, the nature of the coverage changed as well: from an emphasis that conveyed the economic and environmental case for coal to a focus ‘on the industry and mining communities as “doomed” . . . admirable, noble even but doomed’.82 What the report bemoaned had been a standard feature of the NUM’s own communications strategy for a long time. Ever since the late 1960s, the NUM had resisted contraction of the industry by painting a drastic picture of the devastating impact of colliery closures on coalfield communities. The spectre of the ‘dying community’ was used to strengthen the case for a strong coal industry and the occupational identity of miners as miners. The problem with such a perspective was that it played into a temporal framework that conceptualized the future as a world without mining. There may be no life after mining, but mining itself had no future either. Besides, how could the industry be modern when the people working in the industry embodied the virtues of a bygone era? Much reporting on the coalfields during the crisis was, indeed, elegiac in tone. The piece ‘Coal Seams Stitched Up’ by Jeremy Seabrook and Trevor Blackwell, published in New Statesman and Society in July 1993, provided a case in point. In moving terms, the piece spoke of ‘a sense of bereavement, of trauma and grieve’ that permeated coalfield communities after the closures. The miners’ fate in the late twentieth century equalled the fate of the peasantry two centuries earlier: ‘the ruined farm on the hilltop, the ruined colliery below; two epochs fallen into decay. Country and industry, side by side, and the people trapped between them.’ Seabrook and Blackwell went further still. They not only ruralized the miners but exoticized them as well, comparing their fate to that of indigenous peoples elsewhere: When cultures are destroyed, it’s always the same. People lose their faith in the life that has sustained them. Some die of grief, others damage themselves,

81  Crampton, ‘What happens’.

82 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1993, AR 107.

1992  253 colluding with the power that has vanquished them. The Aborigines, the Indians of the Plains, the Yanomami, and the people of the desolated pit villages at the heart of our society: it’s only a difference of degree.83

In so doing, the authors turned the miners into a residual symbol of all the values that had been destroyed in contemporary Britain: What has happened here has been a colonisation by more powerful forces of a strong, rooted, apparently indestructible, culture of labour. It is unbearably poignant: solidarity, community, shared experience of work, a vigilant regard for one another – values destroyed in the cities, clung on to tenaciously in the pit village.

To some extent, Seabrook and Blackwell harked back to E. P. Thompson’s early 1970s depiction of the British miner as the embodiment of an indigenous trad­ ition of English radicalism.84 Yet, whereas Thompson’s miner was a powerful agent shaping the society in which he lived, Seabrook and Blackwell described the miner as a vanquished ‘refugee’ from a bygone age who was condemned to eke out a precarious existence. For what followed in the wake of this destruction, in the estimation of Seabrook and Blackwell, was not something ‘more humane’ but a vulgarized version of the ‘money-­driven individualism’ that had engulfed the present. ‘Technological change. It used to be called progress. Now we’re not so sure,’ the elegy ends. The NUM kept their distance from initiatives that focused on the regeneration of areas where the mines had closed. In a remarkable exchange with Oliver Heald MP before the Employment Select Committee on 18 November 1992, Scargill refused to be drawn on the question of the NUM’s potential role in mapping out a future for coal-­mining communities after mining. ‘The question only makes sense you see if you say to someone if they are about to be executed, “What should be done with the body?” I do not believe he should be executed and I do not believe the pits should be closed,’ the NUM president declared.85 He insisted that the union’s campaign to keep the mines open would meet with success. Hence it was futile to speculate about regeneration after coal. In a handwritten note nine years later, Scargill’s position had not changed. A formal request by the Coalfields Regeneration Trust on heritage was to be left unanswered because, ‘The NUM want to see pits kept open, closed pits reopen, not see money used for DMBC [Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council] project.’86 While the refusal of the 83  Jeremy Seabrook and Trevor Blackwell, ‘Coal seams stitched up’, New Statesman and Society, 9 July 1993, p. 18. 84  See Chapter 2. 85  Employment Committee, Second Report, 13 January 1993, p. 85. 86  NUM Archives, Barnsley, Coalfields Regeneration Trust to NUM, received 5 September 2001.

254  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization NUM to engage with regeneration did little to stop the contraction of the industry, it served to marginalize the miners in the debate about the future of the coalfields. The vacuum was filled by the Coalfield Communities Campaign, and to a lesser extent the TUC, but the price was a shift in emphasis from the miner to the ex-­miner, from social class to community, and from trade unionism to broad-­ based campaigning. More fundamentally, the miners no longer represented themselves but came to be represented by others, however well-­meaning. Just as the working miner had attracted the scholarly interest of industrial sociologists and New Left historians in the past, the redundant miner now became an object of study for social scientists interested in illuminating the socio-­cultural fallout of de-­industrialization.87 Much of this early academic research was self-­ consciously partial: it sought to provide an empirical basis for the campaigns of local authorities and associated bodies to put coalfield regeneration on the pol­it­ ical agenda and to secure public funding for regeneration initiatives. Some of this early work was commissioned directly by the Coalfield Communities Campaign.88 Other studies were funded by research grants from the Economic and Social Research Council and conducted by university-­based scholars.89 The research also functioned to disprove a different, more optimistic narrative that was being peddled by the government. The Department of Employment, in evidence to the Employment Select Committee, had argued that mining communities were re­sili­ ent and resourceful; miners themselves were adaptable and skilled and therefore in a good position to move into alternative employment. ‘British Coal’s workforce is mainly young and skilled with positive attitudes to teamwork, unsocial hours, and travel to work, giving strong potential for finding alternative jobs,’ as the government declared in the reply to the report by the Employment Select ­ Committee.90 During the coal debate in the House of Lords back in October 1992, Lord Boardman had made a similar point: ‘I believe that the miner, like the steel worker, is a marvellous worker who can adapt to change.’ Besides, Lord Boardman cautioned, miners were to be offered redundancy terms that were far superior to the many thousands of other industrial workers who also faced redundancy. Even in job loss, the miner remained privileged, or so the noble Lord seemed to suggest.91

87  Tim Strangleman, ‘Mining a productive seam? The coal industry, community and sociology’, CBH 32/1 (2018), pp. 18–38, here p. 27. 88 S. Witt, When the Pit Closes: the employment experiences of redundant miners, special report no 11, (Barnsley, n.d.). See also the surveys of redundant miners at Grimethorpe, Silverhill, Vane Tempest and Parkside by N. Guy, the Coalfield Communities Campaign research officer. 89 R.  L.  Turner, Regenerating the Coalfields. Politics and policies in the 1980s and early 1990s (Aldershot, 1993). 90  House of Commons Employment Committee, Third Special Report, Employment Consequences of British Coal’s Proposed Pit Closures, Government Reply (London, 31 March 1993), p. vii. 91  Hansard HL Sitting of 20 October 1992, col. 688f.

1992  255 By comparison, the Coalfield Communities Campaign painted a distinctly less encouraging picture of the employment prospects for redundant miners and of the future of coal-­mining communities. In evidence to the Employment Select Committee, they emphasized that the consequences of job loss in the coal industry extended far beyond the miners themselves, estimating that through various multiplier effects as many as 110,000 jobs were at risk.92 They situated the present round of closures in the context of the recession and of de-­industrialization. In doing so, they emphasized the difference between the early 1990s and the 1980s, not to speak of the 1960s.93 Whereas in previous decades miners had been able to find work elsewhere in the coal industry or in manufacturing, now there was nowhere left to go. The Coalfield Communities Campaign was also sceptical about the ability of former coalfield areas to attract outside investment: poor infrastructure, low levels of formal education, and a blighted environment combined to put obstacles in the way of economic renewal. As the memorandum summed up the task, These problems mean that coalfield areas are amongst the most difficult to secure genuine economic and social regeneration. Success tends to come only from adequately resourced initiatives pursued over a sustained period. In essence, the task is to completely restructure the economy and labour market in ­communities that, once the pit closes, loses the original reason for their existence.94

Their case was supported by the findings of social scientific research which had been conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a review of the available studies, Royce Turner and Martin Gregory emphasized the difficulties that redundant mineworkers faced in finding adequately remunerated alternative employment within the context of a de-­ industrializing economy.95 In their own longitudinal study of the employment prospects in the Doncaster coalfield, they found that over 60 per cent of former mineworkers were still out of work twelve months after the closure of Brodsworth and Markham Main collieries. Significantly, they found that less than half of those out of work were officially registered as unemployed. While a small fraction of ex-­miners was in further education or employment training, around 20 per cent of the interviewees had withdrawn from the labour market by registering as long-­term sick. This was in spite of the fact that the mean age of the interviewees from Markham Main was only 39 years, and 43 years from Brodsworth. Of those miners who had managed to find alternative employment, almost one third had returned to mining through 92 Employment Select Committee, Second Report, 13 January 1993, ‘Memorandum from the Coalfield Communities Campaign’, p. 180f. 93  Ibid., p. 181. 94  Ibid., p. 183. 95 Royce Turner and Martin Gregory, ‘Life after the Pit: The Post-­Redundancy Experiences of Mineworkers’, Local Economy 10/2 (1995), pp. 149–62.

256  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization employment with outside contractors that had been hired by British Coal to facilitate the final closure of the collieries. Alternative employment outside the coal industry was invariably less well paid than previous employment with British Coal. Turner and Gregory emphasized that their own longitudinal study cor­rob­ or­ated the findings of earlier ‘snapshot’ studies undertaken on behalf of the Coalfield Communities Campaign at Grimethorpe, Silverhill, Vane Tempest, Parkside, and two unnamed collieries in the Yorkshire coalfield: It is clear from these empirical data that once mining has disappeared from a particular locality, for many individuals there appears to be very little chance of a return to the kind of prosperity that the coal industry had provided.96

Whereas the study by Turner and Gregory was interested in the economic impact of colliery closures, a research project by Chas Critcher, Bella Dicks, and Dave Waddington from the Centre for Media and Community Studies at Sheffield Hallam University also looked at repercussions of job loss on identities and social relations. For two unidentified local communities in Yorkshire, closure and redundancy represented a dramatic break with the past. In the first community, where the pit had closed recently, the authors observed ‘a total disorientation of . . . established patterns of work, family and communal life’. In the second community, where the colliery had closed two years previously, they observed ‘if anything, a more vivid portrait of despair’.97 Although the researchers described mining communities as ‘resourceful’, a summary of preliminary findings published at the height of the coal crisis put emphasis on the grave challenges that job loss posed to the identity of the miner as a breadwinner in a patriarchally structured family unit. The ‘loss of status’ was just as difficult to bear as the economic impact of unemployment. As an unidentified miner was quoted as saying, It’s so bad now, when she says, ‘I’m keeping you’, it hurts. I stopped smoking for five years and I’ve started again. Worrying, whittling, you’re copper-­counting all the time. I get so uptight about being unemployed. Everybody says, ‘My dad’s grumpy’. I just go barmy with them all – if they don’t move a cup, or knife, or anything like that, I go absolutely crazy.98

The tearing asunder of traditional family hierarchies was experienced not as a liberation from outmoded structures and an opportunity for renewal along more egalitarian lines but as a catastrophic collapse that brought in its wake heightened

96  Turner and Gregory, ‘Life after the Pit’, p. 158. 97  Chas Critcher, Bella Dicks, and Dave Waddington, ‘Portrait of Despair’, New Statesman and Society, 23 October 1992, pp. 16ff. 98  Ibid., p. 17.

1992  257 tensions, hardship, and despair. The brunt of male job loss, the researchers pointed out, was borne by women: They have normally looked after shopping, cooking, organising the children and seeing that bills are paid. Now they have to manage this on a drastically reduced budget, and with the hourly presence of an often demoralised partner.

Conclusion In the crisis of 1992/3, coal’s future as a ‘low-­cost, high-­volume industry’ became undone. Exercising their ‘right to manage’, British Coal had restructured the industry relentlessly since the end of the coal strike. Yet ‘the market’, coming in the shape of a near duopoly of privatized electricity generating companies, would not recognize the principle of just rewards. Far from supplying a share of the nation’s energy needs well into the twenty-­first century, Britain’s deep-­mined coal industry was headed towards extinction, as the chairman of British Coal conceded in oral testimony to a House of Commons select committee. As the lie was called on assurances of a bright future, dystopian visions from the time of the miners’ strike appeared to be vindicated. In the process, the NUM, as the evan­gel­ ist of this dark future, was partially rehabilitated. The miners’ struggle against pit closures, denounced as dangerous extremism by many observers at the time, became ennobled as a principled stance against a politically motivated vendetta. Just as much, however, as the coal strike came retrospectively to be understood as a political confrontation between the miners and the Thatcher government, it came to be integrated into a temporal framework in which the possibility of a different future was foreclosed. Although driven by political vendetta, the government in 1984/5 had in truth been a handmaiden of impersonal forces of structural change. Coal had been doomed all along, and the new dawn of the 1970s was no more than a temporary aberration in a long story of decline, or so this new understanding of the coal industry’s trajectory seemed to suggest. As the total number of men working in Britain’s deep-­mined coal industry fell to a level equivalent to the number of employees at a twenty-­first-­century British university, the figure of the coal miner loomed large in the cultural imagination.99 The miner was turned into Everyman. His fate came to illustrate the fate of all (male) industrial workers, marooned in a post-­industrial world that had use neither for their skills nor for their values. But the potency of the symbol extended further still. Had not the nation, too, just like the miners, been ill-­rewarded for all 99  In 2010, the University of Nottingham employed 8,028 staff, including the China and Malaysia campuses. See John Beckett, Nottingham: A History of Britain’s Global University (Nottingham, 2016), p. 483. For a similar comparison see Edgerton, Rise and Fall, p. 499.

258  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization the years of conflict of the 1980s? Caught up in a recession just as deep as the ­crisis of the early 1980s, Thatcherism’s economic miracle was exposed as no less a mirage than the protestations about the coal industry’s assured future. It was this sense of injustice and betrayal that Tony Blair’s New Labour project was able to capitalize on. Meanwhile, any pretence that an incoming Labour government would seek to revive the coal industry was quietly abandoned, as the next chapter will show.

8

1997 Introduction In 1997, the poet and scholar Tony Curtis published Coal: an anthology of mining.1 The collection brought together four centuries of writing about coal miners, their communities, and their industry. It comprised canonical writers such as D.  H.  Lawrence, George Orwell, and Philip Larkin, as well as fictionalized autobiographical writing and anonymous folk songs. Curtis’s introduction emphasized the significance of the coal industry for the UK’s national identity. In elegiac language, he lamented not so much the demise of the industry as such as the recklessness with which the people who had dug the coal were cast aside by the rich and powerful: ‘And when a government closed mines, it strangled the life from the valleys and towns it had tolerated out of necessity. The communities that died government knew little of and cared nothing for.’2 The collection contained a foreword by veteran Labour MP Tony Benn. Just like Curtis, the former Secretary of State for Energy underlined that it was the people who mined the coal that mattered more than the mineral resource that they had dug up. ‘Mining communities have always been special,’ Benn declared. Praising the miners’ ‘tribal solidarity’, ‘loyalty’, and ‘trust’, he juxtaposed these qualities to the individualism and greed of ‘those in the City who earn their living by outsmarting their neighbours’. Benn looked back upon the 1984/5 strike as a turning point in the nation’s history and cast it as a ‘civil war’ between two cultures. Despite the defeat of the miners, he confidently proclaimed that one day they would regain their former strength, ‘for there are a thousand years reserves still underground and it is Britain’s greatest mineral resource’.3 The anthology may serve as a good starting point for an exploration of the structures of feeling within which the miners and their industry operated around the year 1997. The mid to late 1990s marked the moment when the past finally supplanted the present, when cultural imaginaries trading in selective memories of who the miners ‘really’ were displaced concern for the working lives of the 17,000 or so people still employed in deep-­coal mining. As the coal industry moved from the centre to the margins of public interest, two influential feature films etched into the national consciousness an image of miners as ‘decent 1  Tony Curtis (ed.), Coal: an anthology of mining. With a foreword by Tony Benn (Bridgend, 1997). 2  Ibid., pp. 12f. 3  Ibid., p. 9.

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0009

260  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization ordinary people’ whose communal values and aspirations were admirable but also hopelessly out of date. While the miners may have been beaten by Thatcherism, ultimately they were beaten by history itself. Tony Blair’s New Labour project reaped the electoral benefits of this sentimentalized depiction of the miners.4 At the same time New Labour subscribed, arguably even more strongly than the Conservatives, to the underlying conviction that the miners represented a bygone age—­worthy of concern and pity, but ‘completely out of touch with the modern world’, as Blair would later put it in his memoirs.5 Few attempts were made to stabilize the coal industry, let alone reverse the structural changes that had been introduced during the eighteen years of Conservative government. While the NUM was ignored, the attention of both policymakers and social scientific research shifted from the workplace to the community, from social class to gender, from the collective articulation of political demands to questions of coalfield culture and individual identity. In this emergent structure, coalfield communities represented a particularly intractable case of social exclusion; the coalfields were special insofar as they were especially difficult to regenerate. Worse still, the very qualities and values that had sustained them through the decades had, under the radically changed conditions of the ‘modern world’, turned into their ‘greatest weakness’, as the government-­initiated Coalfields Task Force Report expressed it memorably in 1998. This chapter proceeds in four stages. It sketches, first, the role that British cinema played in shaping popular images of the coal miner in the late 1990s. Whereas the once nationalized coal industry had been the stuff of intense pol­it­ical debate and extensive media coverage, the privatized industry of the late 1990s, although still operating twenty-­two collieries and employing some 17,000 men, had lost much of its former news value.6 Into this void entered two feature films, both centred on miners’ struggles in the recent past: more than any other event of the later 1990s, the release of Brassed Off in 1996 and of Billy Elliot in 2000, Section I argues, shaped popular understandings of the miner, casting them as noble defenders of a ‘lost cause’ whose aspirations were frustrated not just by overwhelming odds but also by the very traditionalist values that they espoused. The chapter goes on to consider the expectations of the future with which the NUM greeted the return of  a Labour government in May 1997. As the section shows, the government under Tony Blair was indifferent to the future of the coal industry, but was concerned to help the m ­ iners, and coalfield communities, to ‘help themselves’ to shed their ‘trad­ition­al­ist’ identities and leave behind the past, just like the character Billy Elliot in the feature film. As Section II argues, the

4  Brian Harrison, Finding a Role? The United Kingdom 1970–1990 (Oxford, 2010), p. 168. 5  Tony Blair, A Journey (London, 2010), p. 42. 6 Derek Spooner, ‘Landscapes of Power: The Shaping of the UK’s New Energy Geography’, Geography 84/1 (1999), pp. 66–79, here p. 68f.

1997  261 government considered (former) mining areas as prime sites of social exclusion that must be tackled with new approaches to regeneration. Third, the chapter shows how social scientific researchers also came to emphasize the social de­priv­ation to be found in coalfield communities, while mineworkers themselves were conceptualized as casualties of socio-­economic change. Oral testimony came to be collected with new urgency at the very moment that working coalminers disappeared from public view. The chapter concludes by reviewing this material, arguing in Section IV that what miners actually remembered did  not always sit comfortably with the usable pasts that were cultivated by regeneration projects.

I Back in the 1970s, NUM president Joe Gormley had articulated mineworkers’ aspirations in acquisitive terms: a ‘nice house’, ‘good education’ for the children, a Jaguar sports car for the miner, and a second car for his wife ‘to do the shopping’. Half a decade later, at the beginning of the 1980s, Lancashire Area president Sid Vincent had humorously referred to a union branch motion to extend the local car park in order to accommodate all the miners’ big Jaguars. This vision of a prosperous future of respectable, patriarchal domesticity had always been an aspiration rather than a lived experience. Yet miners’ living standards did improve noticeably during the 1970s and 1980s, allowing them to partake of the comforts of industrial modernity. Miners, too, were part of broader currents of social change. In April 1975, faceworkers were listed second in a league table of workers’ weekly wages, while surface workers came third. By the end of the decade, faceworkers had maintained their position while surface workers came sixth, ahead of policemen, car workers, toolmakers, and train drivers.7 In Brassed Off and Billy Elliot, the two feature films that shaped popular understandings of the figure of the coal miner in the 1990s and beyond, material comfort and domestic contentedness are nothing but a distant memory, eroded by the material deprivation suffered during the miners’ strike and also, so it seemed, an attachment to communal ways of sociability dominated by the workplace, the pub, the miners’ welfare and practice halls. In Brassed Off, set in the Yorkshire ‘pit village’ of Grimely—­a thinly disguised fictionalization of Grimethorpe—­at the time of the coal crisis in the autumn and winter of 1992, the five miners at the centre of the story drive to work in a battered Vauxhall Cavalier Mark II—­British-­built, to be sure, but a far cry from Gormley’s vision of a Jaguar

7  Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-­War Britain (Oxford, 2010), pp. 324f. See also the evidence in Tables 6a and 6b, Appendix.

262  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization for every miner.8 In one scene, they ‘squeeze in Jim’s car as they leave the pit, each face as glum as the next’, as the stage directions of Mark Herman’s screenplay put it.9 Gloria Mullins, by contrast, the miners’ granddaughter who left for London and returns in order to conduct a viability study as part of British Coal’s review of the closure decision, drives a brand-­new Volkswagen Beetle.10 In Billy Elliot, set in the Durham coalfield during the time of the 1984/5 strike, the Elliots at the centre of the plot do not own a car at all. Every vestige of domestic comfort, if ever there was any, has been eroded by the loss of the weekly wage packet. By Christmas, Billy’s father is driven to smashing up the family piano—­material remnant of a different, better time when the miners had work and Billy’s mother was still alive—­with a sledgehammer to heat the sitting room. Gormley had underlined the importance of a ‘nice house’ and alluded to a happy, albeit patriarchally structured, family life. The NCB documentary Miners (1976), discussed above, had also foregrounded how important domestic comfort was to the sense of self of miners. By comparison, in both films from the 1990s the idea of a comfortable home, providing material satisfaction and emotional support, was strikingly absent. In large measure, discomfort was depicted as a consequence of the strike and its aftermath. In Brassed Off, Phil, son of brass band conductor Danny Ormondroyd, is caught between the irreconcilable demands to be a ‘good’ son and trade unionist, on the one hand, and a ‘good’ husband and father, on the other. Phil tries to square these demands by taking on an additional job as Chuckles the Clown, demeaning himself in front of middle-­class audiences. Alas, to no avail: the loan sharks come round to denude the house of all furniture and appliances while Phil is away on a fundraising trip with the brass band. When his wife, Sandra, discovers a receipt for a new trombone of £300, she decides she has had enough and moves out with their four children. In a memorable scene, Phil is left all alone in an empty house, with a deflated football and a beer crate, functioning as a makeshift chair, as the only items still left in the otherwise barren living room. The phone has been cut off, and when he answers a knock at the door, he is informed by an agent of the local building society that the house is going to be repossessed.11 In trying to reconcile conflicting demands, Phil is driven to the brink of suicide. ‘I have lost everything else: wife . . .

8  I would like to thank Dean Blackburn for helping to identify the model. For an innovative cultural history of the importance of brass bands to the miners’ sense of community see Marion Henry, ‘ “Every village would have a band”: Building Community with Music. A Social and Cultural History of Brass Bands in British Coalfields, 1947–1984’, PhD thesis, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, University of Strathclyde, 2021. 9  Mark Herman, Brassed Off: A Film Script, ed. Herbert Geisen (Stuttgart, 2003), p. 41 (scene 31). 10  The screenplay introduces the car as an ‘old but well-­kept VW Beetle’, but the model used in the film seems brand new. Herman, Brassed Off: Film Script, p. 6 (scene 2E). 11  Ibid., p. 122 (scene 117).

1997  263 kids . . . house . . . job . . . self-­respect . . . hope,’ as he tells his father in casualty after the aborted suicide attempt.12 In Billy Elliot, too, although there is no indication that the Elliot family faces dispossession of their property, the signs of wear and tear on the furniture and appliances are unmistakable. Even more striking, however, than material want is the lack of emotional warmth in the domestic settings. The home is not, as envisioned by Gormley in line with a long tradition of working-­class idealization of domesticity, a place of relaxation and comfort, but the setting of bitter quarrels, emotional breakdowns, and violent confrontations.13 In Billy Elliot, the chilly emotional atmosphere is symbolized by the absence of the mother figure, the memory of whom serves as a reminder to Billy that things were different once. In Brassed Off, miner Harry and his wife Rita, active in Women Against Pit Closures, never meet inside any more. They just pass each other briefly on the driveway. Overtly, the physical and emotional deprivation are shown to be a consequence of the strike and its aftermath, which Brassed Off, even more so than Billy Elliot, presents as a politically motivated vendetta waged by Margaret Thatcher’s government against mining communities. Seven years after the end of the strike, Phil is still in debt because he suffered victimization by the Coal Board due to his activism during the strike. He even spent some time in Wakefield Prison. Phil represents one of the victimized miners whose reinstatement and moral rehabilitation the NUM had made their primary objective in the aftermath of the coal strike, as we have seen. In Phil’s case, they succeeded, but it took eighteen months before he was allowed to return to work.14 Poverty is a major factor in the breakdown of his marriage, too, although, in keeping with the conventions of the genre of comedy drama, the final scene suggests that the separation between Phil and his wife may be temporary only. In Billy Elliot, too, the state is shown as a partial force in the dispute: the police, rather than trying to uphold the law on all sides, are deployed in defence of strike-­breakers only; they are depicted as an alien occupation force that shows scant regard for the local community. Yet the chilly atmosphere inside the home, both plots suggest, is not just a consequence of the strains imposed by material deprivation. It also stems from ­miners’ traditionalist attitudes and, in particular, their unreconstructed masculinities. In Brassed Off, the five miners at the centre of the story prioritize communal over domestic spaces, enacting modes of sociability that would have been recognizable to any reader of the classic sociological account Coal is Our Life, from the 1950s. The communal shower after work is where they are at their happiest; they spend the time off work practising together, drinking in the pub, and policing each other’s behaviour. In one uncomfortable scene, the four take Andy to the pub and question him over his romantic liaison with Gloria, who they 12  Brassed Off (1996), dir. by Mark Herman, at 1:23:55–1:24:05. 13 See Brassed Off: Film Script, scenes 9A, 19, 20. 14  Ibid., pp. 39–9 (scene 30).

264  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization suspect, correctly, to work for British Coal. When Andy tries to stand up for himself and assert that he is old enough to make his own decisions, Jim retorts, ‘Oh aye, old enough to be a scab then.’15 The affection, mixed with deference, that they demonstrate towards Danny as the personification of local tradition contrasts with a peculiar lack of concern for Phil’s plight. Even his attempted suicide seems less important than Danny’s failing health. Danny, for his part, seems more preoccupied with keeping the brass band going than caring for the domestic troubles of his son.16 In Billy Elliot, Billy’s father, Jackie Elliot, and also his brother Tony, are wedded to traditionalist notions of what it means to be a man. ‘Lads’, Mr Elliot tells Billy with barely contained rage, ‘do football, or . . . boxing, or . . . wrestling. Not frigging ballet!’17 Not for Billy’s father the affection with which the Brans regarded their grandson’s aspiration to become Fred Astaire in the 1982 BBC documentary Miners, discussed above.18 Mr Elliot’s inability to express his feelings, punctured by outbursts of physical violence, is as much a problem for Billy as is the strike. Young Billy is held back by the same forces that held back Billy Caspar in Barry Hines’s bleak coming-­of-­age novel from the late 1960s, A Kestrel for a Knave. The community is a disabling force, exerting heavy conformist pressure and stifling individual self-­expression. It broke Billy Casper in the late 1960s; it does, however, no longer possess the cohesion to break Billy Elliot fifteen years later.19 To be sure, both films invite the audience to identify with the miners and their plight. They also suggest that there is something valuable, and worthy of preservation, in the tribal attachments and loyalties displayed by the miners. Both films emphatically reject the Conservatives’ slur, from the time of the strike, that the miners were motivated by political extremism. Instead, they depict them as ‘or­din­ary decent’ people driven to desperation by extraordinary circumstances, but also displaying remarkable qualities of resilience and mutual self-­help in the face of adversity. In keeping with the genre of social realist comedy, in both films the central characters are stretched to breaking point, but they remain unbroken. To some extent, they even manage to learn from their experiences and change themselves, rather than their environments. And yet, theirs is a dying world, and not just because of the strike but for more fundamental structural reasons: Danny suffers from miners’ lung, an occupational disease that forced him into early retirement and which is slowly suffocating him. Just as Danny is doomed, so is the coal industry. On a deep structural level, the plot of Brassed Off vindicates the very verdict against which it mobilizes a sense of moral outrage. ‘Coal is history, Miss Mullins’, as John Mackenzie, the suave representative of British Coal 15  Brassed Off: Film Script, p. 83 (scenes 63 and 64). 16  See also the perceptive comments by Herbert Geisen, Brassed Off: Film Script, p. 164. 17  Billy Elliot (2000), dir. by Stephen Daldry, at 25:55. 18  See Chapter 4. 19 Alan Sinfield, ‘Boys, Class and Gender: from Billy Casper to Billy Elliot’, History Workshop Journal 62 (2006), pp. 166–71, here p. 169.

1997  265 management, tells Gloria when she protests that her viability study of Grimley was nothing but a public relations exercise.20 While the miners invite sympathy, their way of life is also a prison, stifling individual aspiration and self-­expression. The miners, the narratives suggest, must extricate themselves from this olden world to find a place in the emerging modern world, either by escape (Billy) or by reinventing themselves and their communities (Grimley). The challenge that both films pose, but do not know how to resolve, is how to shed the old identity without shedding also what was valuable about the communitarian way of life. In their overall message, both films not only aligned with the ‘modernizing’ message of New Labour but also left unresolved the very tensions at the heart of the New Labour project.21

II The NUM were not oblivious to the cultural representations that circulated in broader society. The Union’s correspondence from the late 1990s contains several references to Brassed Off. In June 1997, a London socialist film co-­op wrote in to request an NUM speaker to take part in a screening of the film and discussions of its significance.22 In another letter, the national president wrote how much an autobiographical account of childhood memories of life in Barnsley during the 1940s reminded him of the film.23 Yet, as much as the NUM appreciated the empathic depiction of the miners’ struggles on the big screen, they were acutely aware that sympathy with the miners’ plight was not the same as political support for reversing the decline of the industry. Worse, they suspected that turning the miners into a symbol of the inexorable pace of socio-­economic change provided the newly elected Labour government with a convenient cover to renege on commitments that they had entered into while in opposition. In his address at the NUM’s annual conference in 1998, Scargill expressed the disjuncture between public sympathy and political support well. As he declared, People who go to cinemas and weep when they watch the film Brassed Off should recall that a promise was made to Britain’s miners to rectify the terrible

20  Brassed Off: Film Script, scene 99 (p. 108). 21  Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Nowhere Show’, Marxism Today, November/December 1998, pp. 9–14, here p. 10: ‘In practice it is difficult fervently to believe in “the politics of community” and at the same time to hold unshakably to the view that the task of government is “to help individuals to help themselves”, especially when the ways of implementing each so often point in diametrically opposed directions.’ See also Cora Kaplan, ‘The Death of the Working-­Class Hero’, New Formations 52 (spring 2004), pp. 94–110. 22  NUM Archives, Barnsley, A. Scargill to N. Seyd, Programme Organiser, London Socialist Film Co-­op, 17 July 1997. 23  Ibid., A. Scargill to D. Shiels, 21 October 1998.

266  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization wrong that had been wreaked upon Britain’s miners and Britain’s mining communities. I find it objectionable, I find it obscene, that one year on the Labour Government has not put right those wrongs of 1984 and 1993 and not kept the promises that they had the audacity to publish . . . in 1994.24

The NUM did not see the miners as supplicants but as active agents who possessed a moral right to demand from the new Labour government policies that would reverse, rather than merely halt, the changes brought about by the Conservatives: to take the industry back into public ownership; to reopen coal mines as part of an integrated ‘socialist’ energy policy; to restore the NUM—­and trade unions in general—­to their former positions of influence; to compensate the victimized miners for the financial loss incurred during the strike.25 In the Tory Party’s ideological onslaught against the labour movement, the NUM had not just survived against extraordinary odds but also kept the flame burning of time-­honoured ideals of the labour movement when so many others had com­prom­ised themselves.26 Survival under these conditions was by itself an achievement. For as long as the NUM was still there, it was possible to rebuild ‘from the ashes of destruction’ not just a new coal industry but also a new labour movement.27 In a letter to the chairman of British Coal, sent on the eve of the industry’s privatization on 31 December 1994, the NUM president made the same point: Despite the devastation and butchery of our industry, the National Union of Mineworkers has not been destroyed, and continues to fight for an industry within a national energy policy that benefits not just miners but the British ­people as a whole . . . Future generations will not forgive the Government, your predecessor, or you for the terrible destruction which you have caused. At least, the end of 1994 will see the last of you. Good riddance.28

It is doubtful the NUM truly believed that the government under Tony Blair would make good on the promises that the Labour Party had made in opposition. But in a way the very indifference of New Labour towards the miners’ future strengthened the NUM in their view of the world: Labour’s insouciance was yet another deceit in a long history of defections and betrayals. It was, in other words, just what was to be expected from the ‘modernizers’ around Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Uniquely among the organizations of the labour movement, the NUM had refused to sell out—­ and in doing so, had become a symbol of 24 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1998 (London, 1998), Presidential Address, AC-­3. 25 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1997 (London, 1997), Presidential Address, AC-­2–10. 26 NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1995 (London, 1995), Presidential Address, AC-­8. 27  Ibid., ‘Defend Clause IV Campaign’, AR-­88. 28 NUM, Annual Report 1995, A. Scargill to N. Clarke, chairman of BC, 31 December 1994, AR-­18.

1997  267 resistance to the dispossessed in the UK and abroad. The NUM’s place was ‘alongside all the “single issue” protest groups that have led the fight against motorway developments, nuclear power and for animal rights’, alongside ‘all those who represent the dispossessed including our fellow citizens who are literally without a home and without a hope’, as Scargill declared in 1996.29 In this estimation, the very marginalization of the NUM by government and employers alike—­most of the successor companies to British Coal refused even to let national NUM officials enter colliery grounds—­was a sign not of failure but of moral rectitude.30 Rather than a traditional trade union concerned, in the first instance, with the sectional interests of its members, the NUM had turned into an international beacon of hope in a dark world in which unfettered capitalism reigned tri­umph­ant, or so the loyalists wanted to believe.31 This message did resonate with some members of the public, as correspondence held at the NUM archives testifies. In a letter dated 21 October 1998, Miss R. E. Jones, of Tredegar in South Wales, lauded the NUM president as ‘our greatest, and perhaps our last, working-­class hero’.32 Retired dockworker Bob Boyd struck a similar chord. In a poem, he deplored that the Labour Party had become indistinguishable from the Conservatives and praised the NUM president as a man who had stayed true to his principles.33 The NUM’s conference report for 1994, meanwhile, made reference to an opinion survey among British youth in which the NUM president had been referred to as a living hero.34 It was a different question altogether, however, whether the NUM could still claim to speak on behalf of the people working in the coal industry in the later 1990s. According to the Union’s own records, 11,059 miners were organized by the NUM as of 31 December 1994, inclusive of honorary members.35 Yet, in the ballots for industrial action held in May 1995 and February 1996, fewer than 3,000 votes were cast.36 In December 1996, 2,666 miners took part in a pithead ballot.37 Branch delegates spoke of the confusion and derecognition of the union at their places of work.38 Indications are that, at national level at least, the NUM itself had lost track of who still qualified as a member in the confusing conglomerate of separate companies and outside contractors that mined Britain’s coal in the late 29 NUM, Annual Report 1996, Presidential Address, AC-­9. 30  David Waddington, Chas Critcher, Bella Dicks and David Parry, Out of the Ashes? The Social Impact of Industrial Contraction and Regeneration on Britain’s Mining Communities (London, 2001), p. 130. 31  See also NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings 1994, AR-­77, ‘So, even with the mass media aiding the war against what the Union stands for, the miners and their families inspire admiration and hope far beyond the embittered strongholds of the labour movement.’ 32  NUM Archives, Barnsley, R. E. Jones to A. Scargill, 21 October 1998. 33  Ibid., Bob Boyed to A. Scargill, ‘Pale Blue’, 3 April 1997. 34 NUM, Annual Report 1994, AR-­77. 35  Ibid., AR-­17. 36 NUM, Annual Report 1995, AR-­82; Waddington et al., Out of the Ashes?, p. 123. 37 NUM, Annual Report 1996, 16 December 1996. 38 NUM, Annual Report 1994, Report of Special Delegate Conference, 10 March 1994, SC-­8–32.

268  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization 1990s.39 In their study of the privatized industry, David Waddington et al. suggest that even at the places of work where the NUM was the dominant trade union, fewer than 50 per cent of the colliery workforce actually held Union membership.40 However deep the reservoir of loyalty on which the NUM was able to draw, there can be little doubt that the Union had lost any leverage in shaping the future of the coal industry. In his study of the privatization of the coal industry, Mike Parker, former Director of Economics at British Coal,41 mentions in passing that by the mid-­1990s the NUM had become ‘almost invisible’.42 In the words of Waddington and fellow researchers, their once formidable power had been ‘nullified’.43 Whereas the Coalfield Communities Campaign was seen as the ‘authentic voice of the coal interest within the Labour Party’,44 little note was taken of the NUM when, five years after the coal crisis of 1992, the English coalfields faced a new round of closure threats. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1997, RJB Mining, which had acquired 80 per cent of the UK’s deep-­mined output and almost all of the English deep-­coal mines upon privatization, struggled to renew supply contracts with electricity generating companies, which were due to expire in March 1998.45 To the extent that the national media took notice of the new crisis at all, they focused on RJB Mining’s colourful chief executive, Richard Budge. When the Minister for Science, Energy and Industry, John Battle, declared in October 1997 that the government had no intention of intervening in what it considered a matter between private businesses, disquiet stirred among representatives of ‘old’ Labour in the parliamentary Labour Party. As The Times reported, the issue threatened to turn into ‘the first showdown between new and old Labour’.46 On 26 November 1997, an early morning debate initiated by Paddy Tipping, MP for Sherwood, elicited an equivocal government statement on the future of the industry. As Battle declared, ‘I do not believe it is time to write off the coal industry. There is still a long-­term future for the deep-­mining industry in Britain.’47 While the statement was designed to strike an optimistic note, it also underlined that the government had no intention of introducing policies that would reverse the near collapse of the industry since the mid-­1980s.

39 NUM, Annual Report 1995, p. 349: ‘The total colliery manpower is very difficult to identify in 1994 [sic] because of the different coal companies which now exist, together with outside contract operations in the industry.’ 40  Waddington et al., Out of the Ashes?, p. 128. 41  Mike Parker, The Politics of Coal’s Decline: The Industry in Western Europe (London, 1994), p. ix. 42  Mike Parker, Thatcherism and the Fall of Coal (Oxford, 2000), p. 170. 43 Waddington et al., Out of the Ashes?, p. 130. 44 Parker, Thatcherism, p. 185. 45  For the background, ibid., pp. 165–202. 46  Christine Buckley, ‘Coal poised to spark showdown between new and old Labour’, The Times, 24 October 1997. 47  Hansard HC Sitting of 26 November 1997, col. 931.

1997  269 In the end the government did intervene, albeit half-­heartedly. On 3 December 1997 in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister declared that ‘we want to preserve as much of the deep-­mined coal industry as we possibly can’.48 To this end, a series of policies were announced, among them a moratorium on new gas-­fired power stations, the extension of the electricity-­supply contracts into June 1998, and the promise of yet another review on energy policy. In the ­estimation of Parker, these moves were ‘driven solely by the government’s wish to placate the coal lobby in its ranks’.49 While the policy reversal demonstrated the government’s wariness lest coal become an issue around which ‘old’ Labour galvanized op­pos­ition against New Labour’s reform agenda, the significance of the crisis should not be overestimated. By 1997, neither the miners nor their industry were considered of sufficient importance to merit sustained attention at the highest level of government. The Queen’s Speech of 1997 made no reference to coal. Whereas in her memoirs Margaret Thatcher had devoted an entire chapter to the coal strike of 1984/5, and both John Major and Michael Heseltine devoted several pages to the 1992 crisis in theirs, Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, made no reference to the crisis of 1997.50 The Labour government’s disinclination to reverse the structural changes of the previous decade and a half was in part because the government recognized the link between electricity generation from coal and global warming. At the Kyoto summit in October 1997, the Prime Minister committed the UK to what was then considered an ambitious target of reducing the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent by 2010.51 More fundamentally, New Labour positioned the political culture of mining no less than the fossil fuel itself firmly in the past. The coal industry was a classic example of where—­in the minds of New Labour—­ the reforms of the Thatcher era, although handled callously, had proved ‘necessary acts of modernisation’, as Tony Blair wrote in the pamphlet The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century.52 What was more, the ‘old industries’ had also propped up ‘the old politics of the Left’, neither of which had a place in the ‘new’ Britain that Blair and fellow modernizers envisaged. In a revealing passage, Blair castigated those who yearned for a return to a ‘nostalgic version of family life in the Fifties’, because this was as ‘unreal and misguided as calling for the return of the smokestack industries’.53 An opinion piece published in The Independent at

48  Hansard HC Sitting of 3 December 1997, The Prime Minister, col. 349. 49 Parker, Thatcherism, p. 184. 50 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), pp. 339–78; John Major, The Autobiography (London, 1999), pp. 668–71; Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle: my autobiography (London, 2000), pp. 434–44; Blair, Journey, passim. 51  Nicholas Schoon, ‘Environment: Blair sticks to pledge to curb carbon dioxide emissions’, The Independent, 1 October 1997. 52  Tony Blair, The Third Way: new politics for the new century (London: Fabian Society, 1998), p. 5. 53  Ibid., p. 14.

270  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization the height of the 1997 crisis summed up this position well. Under the headline ‘Kissing goodbye to the coal industry’, the unnamed author opined: But if the rundown of the coal industry can be achieved in a humane manner, then it will surely be worth the pain. It is not easy, particularly for a Labour government, to say goodbye to the working-­class culture and traditions of this once mighty industry. But in truth, these things belong now more to a museum than the modern world. The time has come to let go. There are better uses for Government money.54

III In the second half of the 1990s, the miners passed into history. While the people still employed in the industry moved out of public sight, the former coalfields became a laboratory for social engineering and social scientific research. To the Labour government, the way forward did not lie in reversing the policies of previous governments, but in ‘help[ing] old coal communities’ to move into the modern world. Coalfield communities represented a particularly intractable case of ‘social exclusion’ whose root cause was as much cultural as it was economic. The government was prepared to help, but only if the communities proved willing to help themselves. New Labour’s understanding of the problem was spelled out in the official report by the Coalfields Task Force, a unit that had been set up by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott following an announcement at the Durham Miners gala in July 1997.55 In the Task Force’s estimation, the very qualities that had given the coalfields their distinct sense of identity had become a formidable obstacle to moving into the future. ‘There is nowhere else like the coalfields,’ the report intoned, only to continue: Their long history as the engine of the nation’s industrialisation meant they developed a cohesion, a reliance on a single industry and an independent existence with few parallels. This was their greatest strength when the mines were producing and now it is their greatest weakness.56

The Task Force comprised representatives from the Coalfield Communities Campaign, English Partnership (the agency charged with the regeneration of dere­lict land), officials from various government departments, local authorities, and the Bishop of Sherwood. The mining unions were represented by Peter 54  ‘Outlook: Kissing goodbye to the coal industry’, The Independent, 27 November 1997. 55  Peter Hetherington, ‘Prescott mines old Labour seam’, The Observer, 13 July 1997. 56  The Coalfields Task Force Report, Making the Difference: A New Start for England’s Coalfield Communities. Published by Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (London, June 1998), p. 7.

1997  271 McNestry, the general secretary of NACODS. Neither the NUM nor the UDM had an institutional voice. Accordingly, the task force was less concerned with the fortunes of ex-­miners than with communities, regardless of whether the individuals had worked in the industry or not. ‘Coalfields’ were defined as wards in which a minimum of 10 per cent of the resident male population had worked in the energy and water sector in 1981. At the centre of the coalfields were located ‘pit villages’, which were defined as settlements in which at least 25 per cent of the male working population had been so employed.57 On this count, the English coalfields comprised 3.7 million people; and 1.4 million people lived in ‘pit villages’. The task force operated much like a parliamentary select committee. Between the autumn of 1997 and the summer of 1998, hearings were held in the Midlands, Yorkshire, the North-­West and Staffordshire, the North-­East, and Kent. It commissioned two case studies, in Barnsley and the Meden valley in Nottinghamshire, and solicited written submissions from more than 200 organizations and individuals with a stake in coalfield regeneration. In June 1998, the Task Force presented the report Making the Difference: A New Start for England’s Coalfield Communities to the government and other interested parties. The report’s findings were stark. It presented a picture of multiple deprivation in the English coalfields comparable to the inner cities: high levels of unemployment and economic inactivity intersected with statistical evidence of ill health and juvenile delinquency. Housing and infrastructure were poor; levels of academic attainment low. Indeed, drawing on research carried out by the Coalfield Communities Campaign, the report held that official unemployment figures severely underestimated the true extent of economic inactivity in coalfield communities because many ex-­miners had withdrawn from the labour market. When this ‘hidden unemployment’ was counted in, joblessness in the coalfields was on  average 6 per cent higher than in England as a whole, while in Durham, Northumberland, Lancashire, and Yorkshire ‘real unemployment’ stood in excess of 20 per cent.58 Another indicator of deprivation were the low levels of car ownership. In 1991, 37 per cent of coalfield households and 39 per cent of households in pit villages possessed no car, as compared to 32 per cent in England as a whole.59 In painting this picture, the report made little attempt to distinguish between the environmental and health problems that had been germane to the coal industry and the problems brought about by its decline. Indeed, it was the confluence of industrial and post-­industrial challenges that made the coalfields ‘special’ in the report’s estimation.60 The problems were exacerbated by the

57  Coalfields Task Force Making the Difference, p. 65. 58 Coalfields Taskforce, Making the Difference, p. 10; Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, ‘Labour Market Adjustments in Areas of Chronic Industrial Decline: The Case of the UK Coalfields’, Regional Studies 30/7 (1996), pp. 627–40. 59  Coalfields Taskforce, Making the Difference, p. 11. 60  Ibid., p. 55.

272  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization speed of the industry’s contraction.61 They were as much cultural as they were socio-­economic. Accordingly, at the heart of the ‘holistic’ and long-­term approach re­com­mend­ed by the task force stood the idea of cultural change: communities needed to be ‘empowered’ to help themselves. As the report described the challenge, Pit closures have dealt a sudden and irreversible shock to the culture of coalfield communities. Regeneration programmes must seek to build on the cohesion and strong work ethic that has traditionally characterised the coalfields. They must now focus on empowering communities and raising their aspirations so that they can take full advantage of new opportunities.62

The Task Force’s remit was such that it did not consider the role that a revived coal industry might play in the regeneration of coalfield communities.63 Mining had no place in their vision of the future, except as heritage. Accordingly, the report recommended that the National Mining Museum for England be placed on a permanent footing, as a magnet for tourism and identity marker for local communities.64 The recommendations of the Task Force were underpinned by, and in turn gave rise to, social scientific research into the socio-­cultural repercussions of economic change. By and large this research was carried out by scholars who were broadly sympathetic to the communities under investigation. Often, the initial research impetus could be traced back to the time of the miners’ strike and its immediate aftermath. Research efforts intensified in the wake of the 1992/3 coal crisis. Of special significance were two research clusters: a team of sociologists from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University, who secured funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a project on ‘the social impact of industrial contraction and re­gen­er­ ation on Britain’s mining communities’; and a collaborative project of social geographers and sociologists from the Universities of Cardiff and Durham, who were funded by the ESRC and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to conduct a ‘coalfields research programme’ into questions of ‘social exclusion or flexible adaptation . . . in a period of economic transformation’. By the beginning of the twenty-­first century, the findings of this wave of social scientific research came to be published in the form of working papers, research articles, book-­length multi-­authored studies, and essayistic reflections. Common to the two research clusters and other similar p ­ rojects was the tendency to view (ex-)mining communities as exemplary of broader currents of socio-­economic change. As the Coalfields Research Programme’s first ‘discussion paper’, co-­authored by Huw Beynon, Andrew Cox, and Ray Hudson, 61  Ibid., p. 23. 63  Ibid., p. 7.

62  Ibid., p. 34. 64  Ibid., p. 29.

1997  273 put the problem, ‘Nothing illustrates the changes in British society since 1945 as well as the history of the coal mining industry.’65 The coal industry served as a case study for the social and cultural fallout of de-­industrialization. If the miner had once been constructed as the archetypal proletarian, the ex-­miner now became the archetypal victim of de-­industrialization. This research was focused on contemporary developments, but it did have a historical dimension. The present situation was embedded in a long history of King Coal’s fall from grace, stretching all the way back to the late 1950s, if not earlier. From this perspective, the industry’s ‘new dawn’ in the 1970s became no more than a ‘short-­lived reprieve’ in a long story of decline; the 1974 tripartite Plan for Coal was a ‘blithely optimistic document . . . that was clearly going to end in tears’.66 In this iteration, the Thatcher government’s confrontational stance appeared as the executor of the spirit of historical change itself, ‘accelerating’ rather than initiating developments that had been in train for a long time. The researchers noted how, as long ago as the 1960s, the industry had operated within a discursive framework that situated the industry in a ‘bygone era’.67 In a subsequent discussion paper they observed that the promotional literature of the 1990s, too, projected an image of the industry and the people working in it as irredeemably ‘old-­fashioned’.68 Yet, despite the critical undertone, the Coalfields Research Programme’s own research framework corroborated, rather than queried, a structure that located coal firmly in the past. The social geographers and sociologists from Cardiff and Durham were interested in the discursive construction of place in the promotional literature produced and disseminated by development agencies and other stakeholders. They found that the literature projected two contrasting images, both of which were premised on an understanding of the coalfields as ‘special’ places: coalfields were especially ‘needy’ places or especially ‘attractive’ places, depending on whether the literature was aimed at acquiring government funding or at garnering inward investment. In the very emphasis on the ‘uniqueness’ of the place, however, there lay a homogenizing tendency. The stress on ‘uniqueness’ was a common marketing device that glossed over differences between the coalfield regions of the North-­East, Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, and South Wales, and within those regions themselves. In this discursive construction, coalfield ­culture played an important role. The dominance of coal mining had created people who could be presented in sharply contrasting ways: either as resilient, hardworking, and authentic; or alternatively, as dependent, poorly educated, and 65  Huw Beynon, Andrew Cox, and Ray Hudson, ‘The Coalfields Research Programme, Discussion Paper No. 1: The Decline of King Coal’ (1999), p. 1; see also Katy Bennett, Huw Beynon, and Ray Hudson, Coalfields Regeneration: Dealing with the consequences of industrial decline (Bristol, 2000), p. 43. 66  Beynon et al., ‘Discussion Paper No. 1’, pp. 2ff. 67  Ibid., p. 1. 68 Huw Beynon, Ray Hudson, and Tim Strangleman, ‘The Coalfields Research Programme: Discussion Paper No 5, Retraining the Workforce’ (1999), p. 7.

274  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization non-­entrepreneurial.69 Any appreciation that the miners had, only a few years ago, also been politically powerful actors—‘enemies’ of the state and shock troops of the labour movement—­went strikingly unacknowledged in this bifurcated imaginary. The same homogenizing tendency, the research found, extended to the concept of community. ‘Community’ was a complex term that could mean different things to different people. The authors differentiated between an official usage found in policy documents, on the one hand, and a vernacular usage, on the other. They noted that the language of ‘empowerment’ was often used to devolve responsibility for regeneration from the state to the very people at the receiving end of social change. ‘If places fail to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and turn themselves around, they have only themselves to blame.’70 By contrast, vernacular usages of the term would often refer to a world that was lost. In this conception, community was a nostalgic concept to evoke the memory of an imaginary place that was demarcated sharply from the present. It was also a concept through which generational antagonisms could be articulated: of a more prosperous, ­stable, and communitarian time when, allegedly, the young were socialized into a world of regular, dignified manual labour and still deferred to the superior judgement of the older generation.71 In the researchers’ estimation, then, the ubiquitous usage of the term community ‘obfuscates rather than clarifies’, because it obscured the reality of ‘divided places’.72 As they noted acerbically, What this points to is that the notion of community often masks issues of in­equal­ity and questions of power. In fact, some would argue that this has been one of the main functions of the term.73

The Coalfields Research Programme took cognizance of vernacular voices, noting how central the mining industry was to the construction of a collective memory that offered up a contrast to the insecurities and perceived marginalization of the present. Both in Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and the Rhondda in South Wales, the researchers were struck by a pervasive sense of loss: Many of the people we talked with felt trapped in these places, unable to look out and beyond them. Often they were overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness and despair . . . These memories of a past [when the pits were working] defined through a strong community identity are a crucial part of these places.74

69  Katy Bennett, Huw Beynon, and Ray Hudson, ‘The Coalfields Research Programme: Discussion Paper No. 2: Different Places: Representations’ (1999). 70  Bennett et al., Coalfields Regeneration, p. 44. 71  Ibid., p. 19. 72  Ibid., p. 45. 73  Ibid., p. 23. 74  Ibid., p. 19.

1997  275 Whereas the Coalfields Research Programme was based on fieldwork that had been carried out around the turn of the millennium, Out of the Ashes? the major output by the Sheffield-based sociologists, brought together evidence that had been collected over a longer period of time. As David Waddington, Chas Critcher, Bella Dicks, and David Parry made clear in the co-­authored introduction, the goal was to capture the ‘incremental nature of decline’ in mining communities.75 While the origins of the project reached back to the time of the miners’ strike, the present publication focused on the period since the early 1990s. The main body of the study was based on research carried out in four Doncaster mining communities at the time of the coal crisis of 1992/3. When the initial fieldwork was undertaken, two of the four pits (Brodsworth and Askern) had been closed for periods of eighteen months and six months, re­spect­ive­ly, whereas one, Hatfield, was considered under threat of closure. The fourth colliery, Rossington, was then considered to possess a long-­term future. The empirical basis for the analysis was made up of a questionnaire survey and in-­depth interviews of (ex-)miners, their female partners, and other non-­mining members from the local community, comprising 480 respondents in total. The original Doncaster case study was later supplemented by additional research on Thurcroft in Yorkshire and Warsop Vale in Nottinghamshire. The study situated the British experience within the context of the history of coal mining in Western Europe. It also looked at the working conditions in the privatized industry and discussed the efficacy of coalfield regeneration policies. In the introduction, Out of the Ashes? paid tribute to the classic study of a 1950s Yorkshire mining community, Coal is Our Life. Waddington et al. operated with Martin Bulmer’s ideal type of ‘occupational communities’ to chart the socio-­cultural impact of job losses and pit closures. To be sure, the researchers emphasized that the places under investigation had acquired ‘a far more cosmopolitan character’ than the ideal type would allow.76 Mining settlements had changed alongside the broader society in which they were situated. Indeed, some findings served to complicate the stereotypical image of the consequences of economic change as universally negative. Some mineworkers, for example, reported that they had greeted the announcement of closure with a sense of relief because this had put an end to a period of agonizing uncertainty. Others reported that they preferred their new jobs over their old work in the coal industry. Views of working conditions in the privatized industry also tended to be more favourable than of the conditions in the post-­1985 nationalized industry. By and large, however, the Doncaster study appeared to corroborate the findings of earlier research. Waddington et al. found ample evidence of the detrimental impact of closures not just on the miners themselves but also on their wives and the local community. For mineworkers, redundancy was frequently experienced as a ‘loss of occupational identity, ero-

75  Waddington et al., Out of the Ashes, p. 2.

76  Ibid., p. 72.

276  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization sion of meaningful structure and loss of purpose’.77 Much of the emotional strain, meanwhile, was carried by the miners’ female partners. Conflict was most acute when the unemployed miners tried to impose their authority on the domestic sphere, ‘monitoring and criticising their housework, whilst contributing little themselves’. The loss of a major source of relatively well-­paid employment rippled out to the wider community, aggravating pre-­existing social tensions and environmental problems. These would often manifest themselves in an increase in vandalism, drug abuse, and petty crime.78 The study found parallels between the fate of Doncaster mining communities in the 1990s and agricultural communities in the US in the 1980s: ‘As in the American farm crisis, it was the dismantling of established relationships, lost traditions and fractured daily routines which formed the root cause of current social difficulties.’79 Waddington and colleagues were scep­tic­al about the prospects of regeneration. They suspected that the Labour government was content to ‘let the industry slowly die’ for as long as any potential ‘political or economic fallout’ could be contained. They concluded by emphasizing that there was nothing special about ex-­miners except for the daunting obs­tacles that they faced: They are ordinary men and women who seek neither charity nor condescension, only the right to work and live in communities with some hope for the future. That is, surely, not too much to ask.80

While the emphasis of much social scientific research rested on rupture and loss, some projects uncovered fragments amidst the detritus of de-­industrialization that seemed to hold promise for the future. Of particular interest were instances where British Coal’s closure or mothballing of a mine had served as an op­por­tun­ ity for sections of the workforce to trial cooperative models of ownership. Workers’ control had long been a cherished goal of the radical Left.81 At several collieries earmarked for closure, men on colliery books, sometimes in co­oper­ ation with local management, had explored the possibility of a workers’ buyout, with the aim of keeping the mine in operation.82 Although the NUM at national level remained firmly opposed to any type of ‘workers’ control’, some local union branches, with the support of their areas, took out soundings. In this, they were guided by their members’ wish to retain a stable income and keep their identity as

77  Ibid., p. 212. 78  Ibid., p. 219. 79  Ibid., p. 94. 80  Ibid., p. 219. 81  See Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham, Records of the Institute of Workers’ Control, c.1962–c.1982. 82  Cases are documented for Monktonhall, Thurcroft, and Betws, in addition to Tower Hill. See David Waddington, David Parry, and Chas Critcher, ‘Keeping the Red Flag Flying? A comparative study of two worker takeovers in the British deep coalmining industry, 1992–1997’, Work, Employment & Society 12/2 (1998), pp. 317–49, here p. 325.

1997  277 miners. Most of these projects came to nothing or ended, as in the case of Monktonhall in Scotland, in the takeover by a private mining firm and subsequent liquidation.83 But there was one case in South Wales, at Tower Colliery, where a core of determined miners and their local union officials succeeded in taking over the colliery. In this, they enjoyed the strong support of the local community, ­including of the local Labour MP, Ann Clwyd. Tower Hill became a minor cause célèbre among the Left. Reopened as Goitre Tower Anthracite Limited on 2 January 1995, the colliery was run successfully as a workers’ co­opera­tive for another fourteen years, until reserves were exhausted. At its peak, Goitre Tower employed up to 325 people, 75 per cent of whom were shareholders.84 Waddington and colleagues chronicled the fate of worker takeovers in the coal industry in an article that contrasted the success at Tower Hill with the failure at Monktonhall. They situated the buyouts within the tradition of the worker co­opera­tive movement. They asked if the case of Tower Hill was able to serve as a model for other mining communities facing closure. They emphasized the distinct culture of the South Wales coalfield, the communitarian tradition and the history of political radicalism, as well as propitious economic circumstances. However, they also noted the willingness of the prospective worker-­shareholders to collaborate with institutions that until a few years previously would have been considered as the class enemy, most notably John Redwood, the Thatcherite Secretary of State for Wales under the Major government, and the accountants Price Waterhouse, who had overseen the sequestration of the NUM’s funds during the miners’ strike. In their cautiously optimistic conclusion, Waddington and colleagues suggested worker buyouts may prove a way forward. Provided that certain conditions were met, worker takeovers may yet hold a future for men on colliery books in their old identity as miners.85

IV Culturally driven regeneration provided one context for a surge in oral history projects in which ex-­miners were invited to reflect on their lived experience in the industry. These projects were not designed as a critical window on the past. Rather, the past was viewed as a resource out of which to reconstruct a shared sense of belonging in the present. The project ‘Discover Beighton’ illustrates the politics informing these initiatives well. It was concerned with ‘restoring a sense of community identity and pride’ to a small South Yorkshire mining town that

83  Waddington et al., ‘Keeping the Red Flag Flying’, pp. 325–31. 84  Ibid., p. 332. See also Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the end of industrial Britain (London, 2021), pp. 293–303. 85  Waddington et al., ‘Keeping the Red Flag Flying’, p. 346.

278  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization had been hit by the contraction of the coalfield, as the official project report described the aims and objectives. Eventus Ltd, a Sheffield-­based cultural development agency, had secured funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to ‘work with a team of Beighton residents to research and record the heritage of the village’ and to bring ‘together [people] of all ages to share memories’.86 In a similar vein, the Coalfields Heritage Initiative in Kent was set up to ‘celebrate and commemorate mining in Kent during the twentieth century’. To this end, over 200 hours of oral histories were recorded.87 While the funding regimes encouraged an approach in which the past was ‘celebrated’ rather than scrutinized, the life stories themselves did not necessarily conform to such an affirmative reading. Indeed, the content of the interviews was hardly ever analysed in the projects’ publicity material. It seemed as if the practice of collecting the stories was sufficient to foster a sense of local identity and pride, regardless of what was actually said and remembered by the interviewees. An analysis of a random sample drawn from the hundreds of interviews deposited with the National Coal Mining Museum for England reveals a wide range of memories.88 While some interviewees looked back wistfully on cohesive communities characterized by mutual trust and support, others admitted to deeply ambivalent feelings about life in the coalfields.89 While the earliest interviews in the museum’s collection date from the late 1980s, systematic collection started in the late 1990s.90 In an interview recorded in the year 2000, 75-­year-­old Jack Sunley of Wimblebury in Staffordshire remembered a childhood of hard times, extreme poverty, and thwarted ambition. His father died when he was 2 years old, leaving his mother to provide for Jack and his two elder brothers. Jack’s mother enforced harsh discipline on the three boys, ‘ruling with a rod of iron’, while often going hungry herself to keep the children fed. Poverty prevented Jack from cap­it­ al­iz­ing on his success in the eleven-­plus examination, while a short stint at Wolverhampton Wanderers FC came to an abrupt end when he physically assaulted another boy. Although Jack was able to look back on a life of social mobility inside the industry, he still remembered the ‘good hiding’ his mother administered when she learned that he had signed up at the local colliery aged 14 in 1939.91 Tom Bowers, of Sharlston Colliery near Wakefield, interviewed in 1999 when he was 87 years old, remembered how he left the industry ‘before it killed 86 ‘Discover Beighton’, https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/projects/discover-­ beighton, accessed 22 June 2022. 87 ‘Coalfields Heritage Initiative Kent’, https://www.communityarchives.org.uk/content/organisation/coalfields-­heritage-­initiative-­kent, accessed 22 June 2022. 88  National Coal Mining Museum for England (NCMME), Oral History Collection. 89  As an example of the former see NCMME, Oral History Collection, SR96.1&2. Interview with Lord Geoffrey Lofthouse, 7 January 2000. 90  Author’s correspondence with Anne Bradley, Curator NCMME, 16 November 2020. I would like to thank Ms Bradley for her help in making available summaries and transcripts of selected interviews. 91  NCMME, Oral History Collection, SR 117, Jack Sunley, summary of interview.

1997  279 me’. He made clear that he had not wanted his son to follow him down the mine. He joined the Royal Navy instead.92 Eighty-­two-­year-­old Lily Armitage, interviewed in 1999, remembered a childhood turned upside down when her mother died when she was 12 years old. Lily’s father, a miner at Crigglestone Colliery, made her leave school to run the household and look after the younger siblings: ‘The bottom went out of my world when my mum died. It was the beginning of hell for me’, as she remembered. To the day of the interview, Mrs Armitage regretted that her own life chances had been subordinated to the putative needs of the family.93 She was a bright pupil who ‘loved everything about school’ and had been awarded a scholarship to continue with her education, which she was forced to turn down. The emotional pain was aggravated by physical deprivation, especially after her father left the coal industry due to ill health and, after a spell as a general labourer, was made unemployed. ‘The more I look back and the more appalled I am that . . . I don’t know . . . I don’t know how we existed,’ she confided, seemingly as much to herself as to the interviewer.94 Fifty-­one-­year-­old Andrew Rochell, interviewed in 2000, also harboured bitter memories of an unhappy childhood, albeit of a different kind. His father was a distant figure and his mother was ‘always . . . stressed’; his parents’ marital relationship was full of tensions and quarrels. He remembered miners as ‘very aggressive people’, which he linked to the nature of their work, but also to a culture of masculinity: They didn’t show their feelings a lot . . . It’s a shame, isn’t it, that colliers think they have to be hard and tough. Mind you a lot of men think they have to be don’t they. Shame . . .

Rochell’s father suffered a heart attack shortly after he retired at the age of 60. Wearily, the son commented, ‘stupid life I’nt it. Right active before he retired and then what happened he never moved outta chair.’ Rochell struggled to remember good things about his childhood, but he expressed relief that he had avoided becoming a miner himself, despite leaving school at the age of 15 without qualifications. He described the reasons for choosing a different path from his father vividly: Well, I saw me Dad how tired he used to be when he got home, didn’t I, terrible. Sometimes he’d do double shifts. Had his fingers trapped, he once got hit on the

92  Ibid., SR 78, Tom Bowers. 93 For a similar life story see the interview with Irene Whitaker, NCMME, Oral History Collection, SR90. 94  Ibid., SR 81.1, Lily Armitage. Transcription of Recording.

280  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization ’ead., and he were out and it scared me. I were only little and he looked like a monster to me.95

Former miners of Agecroft Colliery in Lancashire, interviewed in the early 2010s, some twenty years after the pit’s closure in 1991, remembered their ‘working lives’ in more positive terms.96 Born between the late 1930s and mid-­1950s, they were of a different generation from most of the men and women discussed above. Their memories of childhood spoke less of grinding poverty than carefree hours spent playing in the street in a community in which people trusted each other. Trust was also a recurring motif in the stories they told about work at Agecroft Colliery. They emphasized a spirit of ‘camaraderie’, both among the men and between the colliery workforce and management—­at least until the divisions engendered by the strike of 1984/5. As John Beswick, born in 1938, remembered, You just felt so comfortable. I don’t know how to explain it. It was dangerous, filthy yet I loved it. The best thing about it was comradeship, friendship . . . I went up into Agecroft showers and had my wage packet in my pocket, left it on the bench to get a shower and would come back and no one would take it. I could leave it there for a month and nobody would take it. There was so much trust. The trust you had in other people despite not knowing their names or who they were.97

Of the five interviewees, only two came from mining families. Their actual employment history was more chequered than might be expected. Beswick was forcefully prevented by his father from signing up with the Coal Board, so tried his hand at a number of different jobs, including a spell in the army, before he started working in the industry as a coal delivery driver. Paul Jordan, born in 1954, first joined in 1972 at the age of 18, but left again shortly after to work as a storeman in Bolton. He rejoined after the 1974 strike because he wanted ‘to go where the money is’.98 The fabled wages for miners were also the incentive for Tony Carroll, born in 1942, to sign up with the Coal Board. Remarkably, in his case, it was not his father who tried to stop him joining the industry but Coal Board training officers. As he remembered in 2012,

95  Ibid., SR 80. Andrew Rochell, Transcription of Recording. 96 ‘Invisible Histories. Salford’s Working Lives’, https://invisiblehistoriesproject.wordpress.com, accessed 4 December 2020. For the background of the project see Neil Dymond-­Green, ‘Invisible Histories: Keeping the Memory Alive’, History Workshop Journal, 18 August 2013. 97  ‘Invisible Histories’, interview with John Beswick, minute 58:05. Quoted according to an unofficial transcript, which has been edited from the original recording for clarity. 98  ‘Invisible Histories’, interview with Paul Jordan.

1997  281 So I borrowed a map and a bicycle and I rode up to Lancashire Road to Cleworth Hall Colliery . . . and I said, ‘I want to be a miner’ and he [i.e. the area training officer] said, ‘What do you want to work in the pit for?’ So I said, ‘Because they get 40 pound a week’, so he said to me, ‘Anthony’, he said, ‘It’s dark it’s damp and it’s dangerous . . . I suggest you get on your bike and ride back to wherever you came from and get another job.’99

As much as some interviewees emphasized that they personally had wanted to leave their place of work, they regarded the demise of the industry as sad. Roy Pennington, sales manager at Agecroft in the late 1980s, told how, after the clos­ ure in 1991, all the mines he was transferred to shut within a short period of time.100 While some thought that the demise of the industry was premature, ­others accepted the closure of Agecroft as inevitable. Indeed, Tony Carroll suspected that the colliery was kept open longer than was warranted on commercial grounds as a ‘reward’ for the role the workforce had played during the 1984/5 strike.101

Conclusion The coal crisis of 1997 did not mark the end of deep-­mined coal in the UK. Coal would be mined on a commercial basis into the middle of the 2010s. Yet, in a more general sense, the late 1990s marked the moment when the miners passed into history. Of course, miners had long operated within a structure of potent cultural signifiers. Their individual sense of self as well as their collective room for manoeuvre had been informed by broader societal understandings of who the miners ‘really’ were. Yet it was around the year 1997 that these broader cultural representations rendered all but invisible the men actually working in the industry. The miners were cast in a sympathetic light; they were also positioned on a trajectory of inexorable decline. The Blair government, scholars, and artists found exemplified in the figure of the coal miner the plight of traditionalist industrial proletarians in a post-­industrial world. (Ex-)miners inspired pity and sympathy. They were special insofar as they were especially needy. It seemed increasingly inconceivable that, only fifteen years previously, miners had possessed futures as well as pasts.

99  Ibid., interview with Tony Carroll, at 5:25. 101  Ibid., Interview with Tony Carroll, at 38.28.

100  Ibid., Interview with Roy Pennington.

Map 8.1  Deep-­coal mining: mines in operation in 1973 and 1998, adapted from Spooner (1999).

 

Conclusion The British Miner in History

Even after the disappearance of commercial deep-­coal mining from the UK in 2015, the figure of the coal miner retained purchase. The fate of coalfields across England and Wales was referenced frequently when explanations were sought for Britain’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016 or for the redrawing of the electoral map in the general election of 2019.1 More broadly, coal miners remained important points of reference in public discourse about social class.2 In the sphere of cultural production, too, the coal miner remained relevant, as the critical acclaim and popular success of the BBC drama series Sherwood, set in an ex-­mining town in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, testified.3 Yet, as this study has shown, the relationship between contemporary images and the historical realities of the 1980s, let alone the 1970s, was complex. Twenty-­first-­century imaginaries were shaped by the cultural reworking of the coal miner in the aftermath of the 1984/5 strike, and in particular the reconceptualization as ‘underdog’ that followed the coal crisis of 1992/3. In this reworking, contemporary concerns fused with residual images from the late 1960s. Miners came to be depicted as archetypal victims of the Thatcher revolution, as well as of de-­industrialization more broadly. In the process, the ‘new dawn’ of the 1970s, which had seen rather different images dominate, was edited out or, at best, relegated to the status of a tem­por­ary diversion. These concluding remarks situate this study’s findings within the historiographical landscapes of British and broader European history. They fall into three parts. Section I reviews the most recent interventions in the field of British labour history and recapitulates some of this study’s major arguments. Section II extends 1  Florence Sutcliffe-­Braithwaite, ‘ “Reopen the Coal Mines”? Deindustrialisation and the Labour Party’, Political Quarterly 92/2 (April–­June 2021), pp. 246–54; Jörg Arnold, ‘The Missing Link: De-­ industrialisation, Memory and the Left Behind’, in Martina Steber (ed.), Historicizing Brexit. Britain and Europe in the Twentieth Century (Studies of the German Historical Institute London) (Oxford, in press). 2  Laura Schwartz, ‘Working-­Class Heroes?’, History Workshop Online (2021), https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/working-­class-­heroes, accessed 22 May 2022; see also, with reference to the RMT rail strike in the summer of 2022, Quentin Letts, ‘King Arthur is back where he belongs’, The Times, 22 June 2022; with reference to the 1984/5 miners’ strike, Daniel Finkelstein, ‘Rail strikes for years is better than caving in’, The Times, 8 February 2023. 3  Sherwood, BBC One, series 1, written by James Graham, dir. by Lewis Arnold and Ben A. Williams (June 2022).

The British Miner in the Age of De-­Industrialization: A Political and Cultural History. Jörg Arnold, Oxford University Press. © Jörg Arnold 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198887690.003.0010

284  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization the frame geographically by looking at developments in other coal-­producing countries. Drawing on a typology developed by the sociologist John Goldthorpe, it makes a case for locating the difference of the British case in the field of cultural politics, in addition to the political economy of coal. Section III offers some final reflections on the relevance of de-­industrialization, both as socio-­economic process and as analytical framework, for the story of the British miners between the late 1960s and late 1990s.

I Coal miners have remained of relevance not just to political discourse and popular culture but also to the telling of contemporary British history. In the most recent historiography, two tendencies can be discerned. There is, first, a body of research that seeks to ‘rescue’ the coal miner from the condescension of posterity. This scholarship offers a self-­consciously sympathetic perspective. It emphasizes the miners’ communitarian self-­help traditions as much as their capacity for endurance under adversity. Some of the foremost exponents of this work are veterans of the struggles they seek to historicize.4 The second tendency coexists uneasily with the first. A ‘new’ labour history is concerned with conceiving of the working class in twentieth-­century Britain in more diverse terms. Rather than build social history around a collective of (mostly) white men and the patriarchal communities that they inhabited, we need to write a more inclusive history of the British working class, the argument goes. We need to make visible previously marginalized groups: women working in the textiles industry; people of colour trying to find their feet in blighted inner-­city areas.5 We also need to expose the racist practices embedded in the social institutions and everyday interactions of the working class.6 The new labour history does not call directly for a decentring of Britain’s miners. Yet one implication is that people like the miners have been 4  Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine. Coal and the end of Industrial Britain (London and New York, 2021). The oral history research project by Robert Gildea on ‘Class, community and family: the 1984–1985 miners’ strike in history and memory’ emphasizes the miners’ capacity for renewal in addition to their resilience: https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/emeritus-­ fellowships/class-­ community-­and-­family-­1984%E2%80%931985-­miners%E2%80%99-­strike-­history-­and-­memory, accessed 21 July 2022. Now see also: Robert Gildea, Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984–85 (London, 2023). This body of work benefits much from empirically rich regional studies that were published in the 2000s and 2010s: Ben Curtis, The South Wales Miners 1964–1985 (Cardiff, 2013); Hywel Francis, History on Our Side: Wales and the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike (London, 2015); Keith Gildart, North Wales Miners: a fragile unity, 1945–1996 (Cardiff, 2001); Jim Phillips, Collieries, Communities and the Miners’ Strike in Scotland, 1984–85 (Manchester, 2017). 5  See the policy statement of the ‘Network: Writing Labour History in Brexit Britain’, convened by Laura Schwartz and Diarmaid Kelliher, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/people/staff_index/ lauraschwartz/labourhistorybrexitbritain/, accessed 18 July 2022. 6 Camilla Schofield, ‘In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men’s Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England’, TCBH (advance online publication, 2023).

Conclusion  285 eulogized for far too long.7 On such an understanding it becomes possible, for example, to write a history of de-­industrialization that bypasses the coal industry altogether.8 More common is a recontextualization of the miners’ struggles, away from industrial relations conflicts over the right to continue digging up coal to battles over identity and culture. In this iteration, the coal miners derive their historical significance from their role as allies of groups whose rights have been denied on account of gender or race.9 Both historiographical tendencies are rooted in longer traditions. While the sympathetic approach takes its cues from the scholarship of E. P. Thompson, the decentring approach finds antecedents in the critical journalism of Beatrix Campbell.10 They respond to debates about the nature and direction of British society in the second and third decade of the twenty-­first century, in which academics’ commitment to progressive advance comes up against the reality of Conservative electoral dominance. Beynon and Hudson, for example, conclude their account on ‘the end of industrial Britain’ by suggesting that the historical experience of coal communities may have an important role to play in ‘rebuilding’ the labour movement and forging a better, more sustainable future.11 ‘New’ Labour historians, for their part, also take the present as their point of departure. In their view, the populist Right has mobilized historical images of an ethnically homogeneous and patriarchally structured working class to serve their reactionary politics. ‘New’ Labour historians aim to push back by exposing the fictitious nature of these narratives and, in doing so, make a contribution to the renewal of the Left.12 The present study has benefited from this body of work. At the same time, it has tried to remain wary of the dangers of presentism. The search for usable pasts can easily lead up the dead-­end street of anachronism. To contemporaries of Joe Gormley, Mick McGahey, and Arthur Scargill, the centrality of the coal miner to 7  Julia Laite, Aditya Sarkar, Laura Schwartz, and George Stevenson, ‘Labour’s Identity and Labour’s Strategy. Roundtable: the politics of class, past and present’, Renewal 30/1 (2022), pp. 10–28, here p. 17: ‘At the same time as offering alternative histories, we also need to grapple with why the white, male industrial worker continues to have such purchase on the public and political imagination’ (Laura Schwartz). 8 Christopher Lawson, ‘Nothing Left but Smoke and Mirrors: Deindustrialisation and the Remaking of British Communities, 1957–1992’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (2020). 9  See the landmark article by Diarmaid Kelliher, ‘Solidarity and Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners 1984–85’, History Workshop Journal 77 (2014), pp. 240–62. See also the contribution by George Stevenson to the roundtable discussion on ‘Labour’s Identity’ in Renewal, pp. 15ff. For my own contribution to the debate, Jörg Arnold, ‘ “Gladiators for Women”? The British Miners, Muscular Masculinity and the Struggle for Workplace Rights, 1977 to 1984/85’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3 (2021), pp. 510–34. 10 E.  P.  Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 2013 [1st ed. 1963]); E. P. Thompson, ‘A Special Case’, New Society, 24 February 1972, pp. 401–4; Beatrix Campbell, Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties (London, 1984); Beatrix Campbell, ‘Politics Old and New’, New Statesman, 8 March 1985, pp. 22–5. 11  Beynon and Hudson, Shadow of the Mine, p. 341. 12  ‘Labour’s Identity’, Renewal, p. 10.

286  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization British society was self-­evident. During the 1970s, Britain’s miners did not stand in need of ‘rescuing’ by intellectuals. Nor were they likely to accept lightly any attempt at ‘decentring’ them, either industrially, politically, or discursively. The energy crises, deepened by the miners’ collective action in 1972 and 1974, had underlined the crucial importance of the miners’ labour to the functioning of industrial society, as well as the political impact of their collective agency. The NUM’s every policy move was watched anxiously in Whitehall and covered extensively by a network of industrial correspondents. It was the miners’ col­lect­ive trade union voice that dictated the terms of the debate, not the other way round. If one aim of this study has been to reinsert the miners’ resurgence of the 1970s back into the story of coal, this has been embedded within the broader endeavour to recreate temporal horizons and structures of feeling at different moments in time. In this, I have drawn on the theorizing of Reinhart Koselleck and Raymond Williams, both of whom were contemporaries of the 1970s. Historians approach the past with the benefit of hindsight. Historians of contemporary history, in particular, tend to look to the past in order to trace the prehistory of the constellations defining the present.13 Such an approach is, of course, not without merit. It offers an attractive shortcut to demonstrating the societal relevance of historical research, securing funding and public attention in the process. Yet it also has costs. Contemporaries did not have the privilege of hindsight. Nor did they conceive of problems in the same way as we do now. A temporal perspective can help to distance the recent past from our present, and in doing so free it from the terror of retrospective causality. It may well be that the most valuable contribution that historians can make to the broader debate is to recreate the otherness of the past, rather than treat it as an incomplete, and imperfect, version of the present. Britain’s miners conducted themselves as morally complex agents in a discursive structure in which signifiers of coal as an obsolescent industry competed with assurances of wide-­open futures. Throughout the 1970s, an emergent tendency within the miners’ collective trade-­union voice harnessed traditionalist images of the militant miner, borrowed from the cultural memory of the first half of the century, to press claims for enhanced social status and political influence.14 The miner of the future would retain the qualities of ‘the big hewer’ but enjoy the privileges of salaried professionals.15 Time-­honoured solidaristic values would guarantee a better tomorrow. Other factions in the NUM shared the overall goals 13  Lutz Raphael, Jenseits von Kohle und Stahl: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte Westeuropas nach dem Boom (Berlin, 2019), p. 13; also: Jörg Arnold, ‘ “De-­industrialization”: A Research Project on the societal history of economic change in Britain (1970–1990)’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London XXXIV/2 (2012), pp. 34–60. 14  See, for example, The Miners’ Next Step, issued by the Unofficial Reform Committee, first published 1912, reprinted with a new introduction by R.  Merfyn Jones (Shoreditch, 1973); Dick Geary, ‘The Myth of the Radical Miner’, in Stefan Berger, Andy Croll, and Norman LaPorte (eds.), Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 43–64. 15  David Douglass and Joel Krieger, A Miner’s Life (London, 1983).

Conclusion  287 but cautioned that collective action was a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. The ‘moderates’ worked from the assumption that, in the last analysis, ­miners were no different from other industrial workers: they were in the industry to make a living. Among the miners, linear conceptions of time had long coexisted with cyclical understandings. They were all too aware of how the future, and understandings of the past, could be reconfigured in the light of new developments. From the perspective of the mid-­1970s, the prospects for the people working in the industry looked very different from what they had done a few years previously. Mick McGahey’s address before an audience of young communists, delivered in the aftermath of the 1974 miners’ strike, may serve to illustrate this point.16 In reviewing the miners’ recent history, McGahey showed an acute awareness of how conceptions of what was old and what was new had changed. As recently as 1967, he remembered, coal had been dismissed as a remnant from a bygone age. ‘Coal was old, belonging to the first industrial revolution. The future lay with oil and nuclear energy,’ he recalled being told by the then Minister of Power, Richard Marsh. The miners’ insistence that old need not mean obsolete was dismissed as the wishful thinking of desperate functionaries. Yet the energy crisis had proved the experts wrong. Marsh had been swept aside by the currents of change, while the miners had seized the opportunity to carve out a new role for themselves. The miners’ future, combining good wages with high status and security, seemed more assured than it had been at any point since the late 1950s. Expanded horizons of ex­pect­ ation created a momentum of their own. They shaped events as much as they reflected them. The hopes that had been fostered in the 1970s were to be disappointed in the decade that followed, just as the hopes of the 1950s had been dashed in the 1960s. Yet expectations of a better tomorrow, together with fears of the return of a dark past, shaped the NUM’s stance in the industrial battles of the 1980s. ‘Coal not Dole’, the miners’ most popular slogan in 1984/5, was itself revived from the late 1960s. It emphasized the defensive nature of the strike. The slogan masked an underlying confidence in collective agency. Indeed, campaign posters typically framed ‘Coal not Dole’ by the headline ‘Coal, the Nation’s Energy Future: Save it with the NUM’.17 United, the miners would be able to force a change of policy and make history, just as they had done in 1972 and 1974. Unity, however, proved elusive. Insofar as the NUM failed in uniting all their members behind industrial action, the miners defeated themselves in 1984/5. The Thatcher government, for its part, shared in the perception of the miners’ formidable ‘industrial muscle’, and retained a lingering fear of the resurgence of 16  ‘Mick McGahey on the energy crisis’, London Broadcasting Company/Independent Radio News Audio Archive, 1974. 17  NUM Archives, Barnsley, 1984 Strike: Leaflets.

288  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization their power for years after the end of the strike. It was not until the early 1990s that the miner came to be pitied for his fate, rather than feared or admired. This reconceptualization drew on tropes that had circulated in the late 1960s. It displaced images of affluence that had circulated in the 1970s, alongside the 1980s’ appellation of miners as dangerous ‘enemies’. Yet, even as the industry shed workers and closed pits with ever escalating speed in the later 1980s, management and government ministers would emphasize the opportunities that lay ahead, rather than acknowledge the probability of terminal decline. The industry remained ‘on the brink of success’, to use a formulation by Robert Haslam, chairman of British Coal, almost until nothing much of the industry remained.18 While the qualities with which broader society invested the figure of the coal miner fluctuated widely—­between hero and villain, aristocrat of labour and dispossessed underdog—­there existed a powerful strand of continuity: miners were regarded as special. For the people actually working in coal, the challenge consisted in balancing the idea of difference—­which they themselves, to varying degrees, had also internalized—­with the desire to lead an ‘ordinary’ life; a life defined by modest levels of material comfort and a degree of personal autonomy. The miners’ elevated status was both a blessing and a curse: It secured them state support for the industry unmatched in other staples such as textiles or shipbuilding, as well as wage levels, allowances, and benefits that were superior to those available in other lines of manual labour. Yet their special status also made them dangerously exposed, putting them in the cross hairs of political strategists who came to hold the miners responsible for everything that, in their view, had gone wrong in post-­war Britain. Rising stakes made it increasingly difficult for or­din­ ary miners to reconcile the short term with the longer term, commitments to their immediate family with obligations to their union and social class. These tensions were most cruelly exposed in the 1984/5 strike.

II The length and bitterness of the 1984/5 strike found few parallels in continental Europe, at least not west of the River Elbe.19 Yet a preoccupation with this singular event can easily obscure underlying commonalities with developments elsewhere. Neither the overall course of the industry nor the tropes surrounding the figure of the coal miner were peculiar to the UK.20 Alexey Stakhanov, the prototype of the 18  British Coal, ‘On the brink of success’: Address by Sir Robert Haslam to the annual conference, Union of Democratic Mineworkers, June 13 1988 (London, 1988). Compare also, Bob Siddall, ‘Excellent springboard for the nineties’, in British Coal, North Yorkshire Group, Coal (Castleford, 1990), p. 3. 19  Arne Hordt, Kumpel, Kohle und Krawall: Miners’ Strike und Rheinhausen als Aufruhr in der Montanregion (Göttingen, 2018). 20  Franz-­Josef Brüggemeier, Buried Treasure: The age of coal from 1750 to the present, trans. Ruth Martin (Oxford, in press); Barbara Freese, Coal: a human history (London, 2006); Raphael, Jenseits von Kohle und Stahl.

Conclusion  289 worker’s hero, was a coal miner, so was his East German counterpart Adolf Hennecke.21 Heroic images were common across the socialist world; they circulated in Western European societies as well, although arguably with variable reach.22 In many respects, the history of the British coal industry shared more with other Western European industries than what set it apart. Globally, the mining of coal intensified in the second half of the twentieth century, but do­mes­tic­ al­ly mined coal became less important in other Western European countries, just as it did in the UK.23 In France, the industry was wound down in 2004, in Belgium in 1992, and in the Netherlands coal mining had ceased as long ago as 1974.24 In Germany, the two last coal mines, Prosper-­Haniel and Ibbenbüren, closed in December 2018, only three years after the last shift at Kellingley Colliery. Although the contraction of the German industry was managed more consensually than in Britain, especially during the 1980s, the overall result was the same.25 Indeed, from a business history perspective, the major difference was that in the UK a plausible argument could be made for running the industry on a commercial basis.26 In the Federal Republic of Germany, let alone France, Belgium, or the Netherlands, not even the defenders of the industry were convinced that do­mes­ tic­al­ly produced coal would be able compete on the global market. In some respects, then, the problem of the British coal industry was that it was too successful for state support to be considered natural, and yet not successful enough to operate without it. What set the British case apart was not so much the role and trajectory of the industry, but the peculiar nature of Britain’s class structure. The absence of a peasantry provided the socio-­cultural background for investing the figure of the miner, and by extension the working class, with two distinct, and in some ways contradictory, sets of meanings. As a ‘ruralized’ worker, the miner symbolized a connection to the land and an attachment to communitarian ways of living. As a ‘militant’, the miner stood for radical change. He was both proletarian revolutionary and communitarian traditionalist. Speaking in 1979, the sociologist John Goldthorpe sketched the broader intellectual context within which these imaginaries operated. Goldthorpe identified three traditions in intellectual understandings of the working class: a liberal or ‘social democratic’, an ‘organicist’, and a ‘left’, neo-­Marxist tradition.27 Liberals believed that the working class would, in due 21 Brüggemeier, Buried Treasure, p. 204; Beynon and Hudson, Shadow of the Mine, p. 43. 22  Olge Dommer, ‘Mehr als richtige Kerle. Zu Darstellungen der Bergarbeit in der bildenden Kunst’, in Dagmar Kift, Eckhard Schinkel, Stefan Berger, and Hanneliese Palm (eds.), Bergbaukulturen in interdisziplinärer Perspektive (Essen, 2018), pp. 59–77, here p. 77. 23  See World Energy and Climate Statistics, Yearbook 2022, ‘Coal & lignite production’, 1990 to 2021, https://yearbook.enerdata.net/coal-­lignite/coal-­production-­data.html, accessed 4 March 2023. 24 Brüggemeier, Buried Treasure. 25  For a perceptive discussion that also looks at the costs, environmental as well as social, of the German model, see Brüggemeier, Buried Treasure, pp. 263ff. 26 Brüggemeier, Buried Treasure, p. 243. 27  John Goldthorpe, Intellectuals and the Working Class in Modern Britain. The Fuller Bequest Lecture (University of Sussex, 1979).

290  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization course, become subsumed in broader middle-­class society. The liberal conception was influenced by American intellectuals such as Daniel Bell and S. M. Lipset; its most prominent domestic exponent was Labour revisionist Anthony Crosland. Organicists, for their part, harked back to the literary critic F.  R.  Leavis. They shared with the liberals a materialist analysis of social change. Yet they were concerned lest the advent of affluence and mass culture erode communitarian values. To them, working-­class communities were repositories of such threatened values. Left intellectuals, for their part, saw the working class as a potential agent of revolutionary change. They pondered the British working class’s obstinate refusal to act out the role that the Marxian philosophy of history had assigned to it. Goldthorpe did not mention the coal miners specifically, nor any other group of workers. But the discussion in this book has demonstrated that the figure of the miner could resonate powerfully with all three frameworks. While the Coal Board and the moderate wing of the NUM sought to promote an image of miners as affluent workers in the making, the radical faction in the NUM embraced a revolutionary conception of the role of miners, albeit infused with organicist elem­ ents. The miners’ opponents within the Conservative Party and beyond also feared the disruptive potential of the miners’ collective agency. Meanwhile, organicist understandings had taken hold in the social sciences, and been popularized by the arts, in ethnographic studies as Coal is Our Life and works of fiction such as Close the Coalhouse Door. It was this organicist conception—­the miners as surrogate peasants—­that proved most enduring. By the mid-­1990s, it had crowded out the alternative readings of miners as ‘dangerous’ revolutionaries and ‘affluent’ workers.

III The miners’ resurgence in the 1970s coincided with the rediscovery of ‘de-­ industrialization’ as a term denoting structural change in the economy and society. In the early 1980s, the miners themselves mobilized the language of de-­industrialization to situate their own struggle for the preservation, and extension, of coal mining within a broader political and economic context. They did not think of de-­industrialization as inevitable or predetermined, but as a political strategy that was open to challenge and reversal.28 While the NUM would hold onto this position well into the 1990s, the broader discursive context was grad­ ual­ly transformed: What had been considered politically willed came to be regarded as inevitable, especially so among proponents of New Labour. In the process, the coal miner came to be configured as the archetypal loser of history: a 28  See, for example, National Union of Mineworkers, The Miners and the Battle for Britain (London [1980]).

Conclusion  291 ‘doomed’ proletarian worthy of sympathy, eliciting the type of admiration that comes cheap to the people doing the admiring. Just like the miners in the early 1980s, recent scholarly work has also emphasized the ‘willed’ nature of the coal industry’s dismantling.29 The desire to restore agency can, however, easily grate against an analytical framework that emphasizes the structural longue durée. Agency then becomes located primarily with those who do the work of de-­industrializing, whereas those on the other side slip into the role of heroic defenders of a lost cause. As a concept predicated on loss, de-­ industrialization carries forward into the scholarship of the twenty-­first century the organicist tradition identified by Goldthorpe in 1979. In the scholarly debate, the distinction between the miners’ collective trade union voice and the coal industry has not always been drawn carefully. The Thatcher government certainly wanted to defeat the NUM.30 It is more doubtful that it purposefully set out to phase out coal. Throughout the 1980s, the government insisted that opportunities lay ahead for the industry, although not necessarily for every person working in coal. Arguably, the absence of any long-­term plan was what distinguished the Thatcher government’s policy from previous governments. The market would take care of the future size of the industry, just as it would take care of everything else.31 When the miners’ collective trade union voice was shattered, it became possible for policymakers of either political party to dismiss their concerns as of secondary importance. Pity and sympathy proved poor substitutes for awe and fear. * * * On a Saturday afternoon in 1968, the journalist Irma Kurtz visited the urban district of Dodworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Writing for the cosmopolitan women’s magazine Nova, the Ivy-­League educated journalist painted a sepia-­ tinted picture of a closely knit community. Struck by the conformity of the life experiences she encountered, Kurtz felt reminded of the world of Charles Dickens. Sunday in Dodworth was a ‘scheduled pleasure’. While all the men were in the pub drinking, the women were at home preparing identical dinners. Conformity of life chances fostered cohesion in a world that revolved around the local colliery. Yet rumour had it that Dodworth pit would close, putting in jeopardy a way of life that had existed for generations. Kurtz found a good deal of fatalism among the older miners—‘if it ’appens it ’appens’—while the young harboured dreams of escape. The young men, she recognized, although as tough as 29  Jim Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2019); Ewan Gibbs, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland (London, 2021). 30  See also Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 390ff. 31  ‘1992 Conservative Party General Election Manifesto: The Best Future for Britain’, in Iain Dale (ed.), Conservative Party General Election Manifestos, 1900–1997 (Oxon: Routledge, 2000), p. 369.

292  The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization their fathers, had bought into ‘the hopes and trappings of a century they share with the rest of us’. Yet, whatever the outlook of the people of Dodworth, Kurtz left her readers in no doubt that she had visited a dying world. ‘Red-­eyed, inbred and proud, the pit community of Dodworth is doomed,’ she concluded.32 While Kurtz was correct about the longer term, she was mistaken about the short term. Dodworth Colliery would stay open for another twenty years, before it was merged with nearby Woolley Colliery. Indeed, Dodworth outlasted Nova magazine itself, which folded in the crisis of the 1970s. In the West Riding of Yorkshire and elsewhere, the wheel of fortune would turn one more time, and the industry would go through another upswing, before it finally ground to a halt. A new generation of miners, lured by promises of big money, high status, and a secure future, were recruited into the industry. Between 1971 and 1981, more than 200,000 men joined the Coal Board’s payroll, 50,000 of whom were below the age of 18.33 Paul Darlow, mentioned in the Preface and a resident of Dodworth, was one of them. Born in 1965 into a family of miners, Paul was 9 years old when the combined impact of the energy crisis and the miners’ industrial action seemed to have transformed the fortunes of the industry. In July of 1974, the young boy accompanied his father, a Yorkshire delegate, to the NUM’s annual conference at the Winter Gardens in Llandudno, North Wales.34 Every delegate was handed a copy of Plan for Coal, the blueprint for a prosperous future.35 Eric Varley, the Labour government’s Secretary of State for Energy, addressed the delegates, hailing the miners as ‘the aristocracy of labour’.36 Paul started work aged 16 in 1981—the very year that concerted action had demonstrated yet again the NUM’s power. In forcing the Thatcher government into a humiliating U-­turn on pit closures, the miners had been shielded, for the time being, from the ravages of de-­industrialization, which had accelerated dramatically in the recent recession. But 1981 also marked a turning point, as we have seen. The problem for Paul, as well as for many others, was that the final circular movement of the British coal industry did not align with their life cycle. When the last pit shut in 2015, people like Paul had only just entered their fifties. Some moved on, many fell by the wayside, and a few made it their life’s work to preserve the history of Britain’s coal miners. If this book has succeeded in making a contribution to this endeavour, and in opening up the past in all its otherness, then it will have served a worthwhile purpose.

32  Irma Kurtz, ‘If it ’appens it ’appens’, Nova (1968), pp. 65–9. 33  See Table 5, Appendix. 34  Paul Darlow to author, emails, 12 and 13 January 2023. 35  Andrew Taylor, The NUM & British Politics, Vol. 2: 1969–1995 (Ashgate, 2005), p. 114. 36  See Chapter 2, above.

APPENDIX

Statistical Tables Table 1a  Key indicators of the British coal industry, selected years 1966/7–1981/21 Year

1966/7

1967/8

1971/2

1972/3

1976/7

1977/8

1980/1

1981/2

Number of NCB collieries Deep-­mined output (million tonnes) Total Inland consumption2 Of which power stations

438 167.3 172.6 67.4

376 165.4 168.1 69.9

289 111.0 128.4 68.8

281 129.1 130.2 70.0

238 108.5 124.6 78.9

231 106.3 121.6 78.9

211 110.3 120.3 87.7

200 108.9 117.0 85.3

Average colliery manpower, ’000 Recruitment Wastage Net change Average age, years Average weekly earnings (£)3

419.4 34.2 60.7 −26.5 43.5 21.5

391.9 19.3 62.3 −43.0 43.7 22.71

281.5 17.8 30.1 −12.4 43.7 33.01

268.0 18.1 28.5 −10.4 43.7 38.19

242.0 20.2 21.7 −1.6 42.8 81.23

240.5 28.7 31.4 −2.8 41.1 90.12

229.8 10.0 18.3 −8.3 39.4 150.08

218.5 7.4 19.4 −12.0 39.1 167.21

1 NCB,

Statistical Tables 1976/7 (London [1977]). pp. 4ff.; BCC, Report and Accounts 1987/8 (London [1988]), pp. 18ff. For a more comprehensive table for the period from 1947 up to 1982/3 see William Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 5 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 671–86. 2  Includes output from opencast mines, licensed mines, and imports, in millions of tonnes. 3  Including value of allowances in kind.

294 appendix Table 1b  Key indicators of the British coal industry, selected years 1983/4–19971 Year

1983/4 1984/5 1986/7 1987/8 1991/2 19972

Number of NCB/BCC collieries Deep-­mined output (million tonnes) Total inland consumption Of which power stations

170 90.1 111.7 82.3

169 27.6 66.8 42.8

110 88.0 112.4 82.4

94 82.4 115.5 86.2

50 71.0 105.0 80.5

22 31.8 67.13 …

Average colliery manpower, ’000 Recruitment Wastage Net change Average age Average weekly earnings (£)6

191.5 2.6 23.9 −21.3 37.9 171.5

175.4 2.3 12.0 −9.7 37.9 …

125.4 1.9 32.7 −30.8 34.7 231.6

104.4 1.6 20.3 −18.7 34 241.8

48.94 0.7 14.1 −13.5 … …

17.35 … … … … …

1 BCC,

Report and Accounts 1987/8, pp. 18ff.; Report and Accounts 1991/92 (London [1992]), p. 31; Derek Spooner, ‘Landscapes of Power: The shaping of the UK’s new energy geography’, Geography 84/362 (1999), pp. 66–79, here pp. 68ff. 2  Major deep mines. The industry was privatized in 1994. 3  Figure is for total inland production plus imports, minus exports. 4  Includes other industrial manpower. The figure for colliery industrial manpower is 43,800. BCC, Report 1991/92, p. 31. 5  Total employees. 6  Inclusive of allowances in kind.

Table 2  Recruitment and wastage by category, 1965/6–1968/91 Year Recruitment Newly employed boys under 18 New entrants Re-­entrants Total Recruitment Wastage Involuntary deaths Retirements Medical reasons Dismissals and redundancies Total Involuntary Total Voluntary Total Wastage Net change 1 NCB,

1965/6

1966/7

1967/8

1968/9

8,154 4,427 18,875 31,456

7,966 5,939 20,268 34,173

6,738 2,623 9,890 19,251

4,656 2,693 11,531 18,880

2,671 8,137 10,520 4,460 25,788 46,711 72,499 −41,043

2,300 7,681 9,114 6,337 25,432 35,255 60,687 −26,514

2,139 7,149 7,265 16,940 33,493 28,800 62,293 −43,042

1,796 5,569 5,915 23,943 37,223 27,803 65,026 −46,146

Report and Accounts 27th March 1966–25th March 1967. Vol. II: Accounts and Statistical Tables (London, 1967), p. 127 (table 35); Report and Accounts 26th March 1967–30th March 1968. Vol II: Accounts and Statistical Tables (London, 1968), p. 97 (table 18); Report and Accounts 31st March 1968–29th March1969. Vol. II: Accounts and Statistical Tables (London, 1969), p. 95 (table 18).

appendix  295 Table 3  Wastage by age groups, 1965/6–1968/91 Year

1965/6 1966/7 1967/8 1968/9 1965/6 1966/7 1967/8 1968/9 Voluntary

Under 18s 5,266 18 and under 20 4,695 20 and under 25 7,766 25 and under 30 6,992 30 and under 40 9,714 40 and under 50 8,504 50 and under 60 3,496 60 and under 65 270 65 and over 8 Total 46,711

3,894 3,396 5,990 5,300 7,653 6,193 2,558 266 5 35,255

3,750 2,374 5,233 4,403 6,211 4,889 1,640 296 4 28,800

Total 2,660 2,018 5,206 4,743 6,488 5,590 1,867 230 1 27,803

5,736 5,082 8,556 7,880 11,507 11,276 8,407 6,127 7,928 72,499

4,335 3,778 6,765 6,072 9,255 8,788 7,597 6,563 7,535 60,687

4,300 2,832 6,326 5,546 8,746 8,943 8,394 10,206 7,000 62,293

1 NCB,

3,039 2,419 6,297 9,324 10,403 10,403 10,719 12,508 5,450 65,026

Report 1966/67, Vol. II, p. 127 (table 37); Report 1967/68, Vol. II, p. 96 (table 17); Report 1968/9, Vol. II, p. 94 (table 17).

Table 4  Comparison of weekly earnings of manual men in coal mining and all manufacturing industries, 1950–19731 Year

Coalmining All manufacturing Coalmining as industries percentage of manufacturing

October 1950 1955 1960 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973

£

1 

9.48 14.27 16.28 21.21 22.16 22.92 24.12 25.10 28.01 31.65 38.21 42.43

£

7.83 11.55 15.16 20.16 20.78 21.89 23.62 25.54 28.91 31.37 36.20 41.52

Per cent 121.7 123.5 107.4 105.2 106.6 104.7 102.1 98.3 96.9 100.9 105.6 102.3

Pay Board, Special Report: Relative Pay of Mineworkers (Cmnd. 5567) (London, 1974), p. 31. The figures include overtime. The figures for coal mining also include allowances for holiday pay, rest pay, and sick pay. They exclude value of allowances in kind. No allowances for holiday pay, rest days, and sick pay are included in the figures for manufacturing.

Table 5  Recruitment and wastage during the 1970s1 Year

71/2

72/3

73/4

74/5

75/6

76/7

77/8

78/9

79/80

80/1

Recruitment Newly employed Boys under 18 New entrants Re-­entrants Total recruitment

6,348 3,421 8,014 17,783

4,597 3,701 9,761 18,059

1,889 4,046 9,744 15,679

5,948 8,442 16,413 30,803

5,268 3,842 7,874 16,984

5,219 7,231 7,709 20,159

6,425 12,811 9,428 28,664

5,478 8,044 6,567 20,089

6,229 12,012 7,583 25,825

4,392 2,497 3,136 10,025

Wastage: involuntary Death and retirement Medical reasons Dismissals and redundancies Total involuntary

4,820 3,456 8,148 16,424

4,859 3,006 9,310 22,034

4,314 2,407 9,489 16,210

4,435 2,596 7,024 14,055

4,199 2,031 8,589 14,819

3,898 3,196 6,479 13,573

2,159 2,761 6,462 11,382

  }7,0012 2,8983 11,382

  }6,301 1,333 7,634

  }5,298 2,850 8,148

… 13,722

… 11,284

… 20,558

… 10,495

… 7,297

… 8,166

9,2354 10,828

6,458 10,590

7,681 9,744

5,361 4,838

30,146 −12,363

28,459 −10,400

36,768 −21,089

24,550 +6,253

22,116 −5,132

21,739 −1,580

31,445 −2,781

26,974 −6,885

25,059 +765

18,347 −8,322

Wastage: Voluntary Early Retirement Other voluntary Total wastage Net change 1 NCB, Report

and Accounts 28 March 1971 to 25 March 1972, Vol. II: Accounts & Statistical Tables (London, 1972), p. 95 (table 16); Statistical Tables 1973/4, p. 7 (table 6); Statistical Tables 1974/5, p. 7 (table 6); Statistical Tables 1975/6, p. 7 (table 7); Statistical Tables 1976/7, p. 7 (table 7); Statistical Tables 1978/9, p. 7 (table 7); Report and Accounts 1980/1, p. 22. 2  In 1978/9, the report started using a new classification, distinguishing under the heading of ‘involuntary wastage’ between ‘redundancies’ and ‘other involuntary wastage’ only. Dismissals were included under the heading of ‘other involuntary wastage’. 3  Redundancies only. 4  In August 1977, a scheme was introduced that offered voluntary retirement to mineworkers at age 62, provided they had twenty years of underground service in the industry (or above ground if they had suffered an industrial accident or disease), providing for approximately two-thirds of gross weekly earnings and a tax-free lump sum of £500. The early retirement age fell to 61 in 1978 and 60 in 1979. For details: NCB, Report and Accounts 1976/7 (London, 1977), p. 14.

appendix  297 Table 6a  Average weekly wages, men on colliery books, 1970/1–1977/8, NCB figures (in £)1 Year

1970/1 1971/2 1972/3 1973/4 1974/5 1975/6 1976/7 1977/82

All underground Surface

28.35 22.64

All workers3 27.07 Value of allowances 1.88 in kind Total4 28.955 1 NCB, Report

31.96 27.10

36.56 32.32

38.46 34.02

58.65 53.18

75.86 66.81

82.18 73.51

85.83 77.15

30.93 2.08

35.67 2.52

37.53 2.56

57.52 3.01

74.00 4.30

80.42 5.42

84.10 6.02

33.96

38.196

40.83

60.98

79.05

86.66

96.22

and Accounts 1971–1972, p. 101 (table 23); NCB, Statistical Tables 1973/4 (London, 1974), p. 12 (table 12); NCB, Statistical Tables 1974/5, p. 12 (table 12); NCB, Statistical Tables 1975/6 (London, 1976), p. 12 (table 14); NCB, Statistical Tables 1976/7 (London, 1977), p. 12 (table 14); NCB, Statistical Tables 1977/8 (London, 1978), p. 12 (table 14). 2  In 1977/8, a new definition was introduced, resulting in a downward adjustment of figures for the previous year. 3  Including juveniles. 4  Adult workers only. 5  Author’s calculation, on the basis of all workers including juveniles. 6  Author’s calculation, on the basis of all workers including juveniles.

Table 6b  Average weekly wages, male manual workers by industry, 1970–81, according to Department of Employment’s New Earnings Survey (in £)1 Year

1970

1971

1972

1973

1974

1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

Coal mining All industries and services All manufacturing Metal Vehicles Textiles

26.1 26.8 28.5 29.8 31.5 24.8

29.6 29.4 31.1 31.3 34.9 27.4

34.4 32.8 34.5 35.1 38.9 30.8

39.7 38.1 39.9 40.9 44.2 35.2

50.2 43.6 45.1 46.2 48.1 40.9

70.9 55.7 56.6 60.6 59.4 49.4

77.7 65.1 67.4 72.9 71.4 60.9

81.9 71.5 74.2 80.8 77.3 67.1

104.1 80.7 84.7 91.2 88.8 73.7

121.8 93.0 97.9 103.3 102.8 85.5

146.5 111.7 115.2 119.4 119.0 98.4

158.0 121.9 124.7 130.7 126.4 107.4

1 

Full-time manual men, aged 21 and over. Department of Employment, New Earnings Survey 1970 (London, 1971), p. 60 (table 18); New Earnings Survey 1971, p. 60 (table 23); New Earnings Survey 1972, p. 64 (table 30); New Earnings Survey 1973, p. 39 (table 29); New Earnings Survey 1974, Part C: Analysis by Industry, C4 (table 54); New Earnings Survey 1975, C4 (table 54); New Earnings Survey 1976, C 4 (table 54); New Earnings Survey 1977, C4 (table 54); New Earnings Survey 1978, Part C (table 54); New Earnings Survey 1979, Part C (table 54); New Earnings Survey 1980, Part C (table 54); New Earnings Survey 1981, Part C (table 54).

appendix  299 Table 7  Wage rates for mineworkers, as of 1 January 19811 Grade

Underground U1 … U7 Face/Craft 1 2 3 Surface S1 … S6 Craftsmen 1 2 3 1 NUM,

Basic weekly rates

Inclusive of incentive rate of £30 for standard performance

Plus allowances value c.£10

111.95

141.95

151.95

90.20

120.20

130.20

111.95 98.00 94.80

141.95 128.00 124.80

151.95 138.00 134.80

95.30

125.30

135.30

80.85

120.85

130.85

94.10 87.15 84.00

124.10 117.15 114.00

134.10 127.15 124.00

Annual Report and Proceedings 1981 (London, 1981), pp. 257ff.

Table 8  Age distribution of men on colliery books on the eve of the miners’ strike, December 19831 Age

Underground Surface

Under 18 18 and under 20 20 and under 25 25 and under 30 30 and under 40 40 and under 50 50 and under 55 55 and under 60 60 and under 65 65 and over Total all ages Average age

1,590 6,514 23,505 20,536 33,606 38,144 16,499 10,490 813 0 151,697 37.4

1 

Total

1,080 2,670 1,322 7,836 3,220 26,725 3,450 23,986 8,042 41,648 8,183 46,327 4,826 21,325 3,746 14,236 1,004 1,817 2 34,875 186,572 40.0 37.9

Per cent 1.5 4.2 13.8 11.3 20.7 23.3 11.6 11.3 1.4 0.0 100.0

National Coal Board, Report and Accounts 1983/84 (London, 1984), p. 34.

Bibliography Archival Material Bishopsgate Institute, London Raphael Samuel Ruskin Archive (RS) 4/250, 4/251, 4/261.

Hansard HC Sittings of: 18–19 July 1967 26 October 1967 28 November 1967 5 December 1967 14 March 1969 18 January 1972 11 December 1972 21 December 1972 19 December 1973 6 February 1974 15 April 1975 21 April 1975 2 March 1977 17 June 1980 10 April 1984 31 July 1984 26 November 1984 25 November 1986 19 October 1992 21 October 1992 25 March 1993 29 March 1993 HL Sittings of: 12 December 1967 13 November 1984 20 October 1992

Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham Records of the Institute of Workers’ Control, c.1964–c.1982. Union of Democratic Mineworkers, Nottingham Section, Minutes.

Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick (MRC) MSS.292D/253.145/1-­20 (TUC, Industrial Disputes: Miners’ Strike). MSS.302 (Lawrence Daly Papers).

302 Bibliography National Coal Mining Museum for England (NCMME) Coal News: Newspaper of Britain’s Mining Industry. Oral History Collection (SR).

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National Union of Mineworkers Archives, Barnsley 1969 Strike Files. 1984 Strike: Leaflets. Admin including correspondence A Scargill, 1982–3. A. Scargill, Correspondence. A. Scargill, Fan Mail. A. Scargill, Speeches. J. Gormley Files. Northern College Files. NUM, Annual Report and Proceedings (green volumes) (London, 1966–1998). NUM, Kent Area. NUM, Nottingham Area, Minutes. NUM (Yorks Area), Signed Original Copies and Minutes (red volumes), (Barnsley, 1966–2000). O. Briscoe Files. O’Neill, Pat, Oil paintings. Pit Closures 1981. Price, Peter, Drawings from Maltby. Save Our Pits Campaign Information Pack (1992). The Collier: for rank and file control of the NUM. The Miner: Journal of the South Wales Area National Union of Mineworkers. The Miner: Voice of the National Union of Mine Workers. The Yorkshire Miner. Uncatalogued Material.

People’s History Museum, Labour History Archive and Study Centre CP/CENT/IND/01/03: Correspondence regarding CP’s Industrial Activities (1960s and 1970s). CP/CENT/IND/12/10: Coal Mining (1961–1966). CP/CENT/IND/07/07: Miners’ Strike (1984/85). CP/CENT/IND/07/04: Miners’ and Miners’ Advisory Committee (1987–1990). CP/CENT/IND/07/03: Documents on Mining (1990).

Special Collections, The University of Sheffield MS 268, Arthur Markham Memorial Prize Essays.

The Margaret Thatcher Foundation Conservative Research Department, Authority of Government Group, Final Report and Minutes (1976/7). Conservative Research Department, Economic Reconstruction Group (1977). Hailsham MSS. John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, ‘Stepping Stones’ (1977).

Bibliography  303 Leader’s Steering Committee. M. Thatcher Speeches.

The National Archives, Kew Cabinet Office (CAB) 128/150, 130/1173, 130/1174, 130/1260, 130/1268, 130/1285. Prime Minister’s Office (PREM) 13/923, 13/2659. 15/984, 15/985, 15/2174. 16/220, 16/221. 19/539, 19/540, 19/541, 19/1329, 19/1330, 19/1331, 19/1332, 19/1334, 19/1335, 19/1581, 19/1865, 19/2352, 19/3097. Records created or inherited by the National Coal Board (COAL) 31/131, 31/134, 31/135, 31/138, 31/139, 31/140, 31/142.

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Printed Primary Sources British Coal, ‘On the brink of success’: Address by Sir Robert Haslam to the annual conference, Union of Democratic Mineworkers, June 13 1988 (London: British Coal Corporation, 1988). British Coal, North Yorkshire Group, Coal (Castleford, 1990). British Coal Corporation, Reports and Accounts (1986/7–1991/2). Carver, J., Report on Explosion at Houghton Main Colliery Yorkshire, June 1975 (London: HMSO, 1976). Central Youth Employment Executive, Coalmining (London: HSMO, 2nd ed. 1970). Chancellor of the Exchequer, The Financial and Economic Obligations of the Nationalised Industries (Cmnd. 1337) (London: HSMO, 1961). Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nationalised Industries: A Review of Economic and Financial Objectives (Cmnd. 3437) (London: HMSO, 1967). Conservative Research Department, The General Election of 1974 (Notes on Current Politics, no. 4, 25 March 1975) (London: Conservative Central Office, 1974). Conservative Research Department, Politics Today, Vol. 12: Energy (London: Conservative Central Office, 1980). Dale, Iain (ed.), Conservative Party General Election Manifestos, 1900–1997 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000). Department of Employment, New Earnings Survey (1970–1997) (London: HSMO, 1971–97). Department of Energy, Coal for the Future: Progress with ‘Plan for Coal’ and prospects to the year 2000 (London: HMSO [1977]). Department of Trade and Industry, The Prospects for Coal: Conclusions of the Government’s Coal Review (Cm 2235) (London: HSMO, March 1993). First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, In Place of Strife: A Policy for Industrial Relations (Cmnd. 3888) (London: HMSO, 1969). Gallup, George  H. (ed.). The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain 1937–1975, Vol. 2 (New York: Random House [1975]).

304 Bibliography House of Commons, Sixth Report from the Employment Committee, The Dismissal of National Coal Board Employees (London: HSMO, 19 June 1985). House of Commons Employment Committee, Second Report: Employment Consequences of British Coal’s Proposed Pit Closures, Vol. I: Report and Proceedings of the Committee (London: HSMO, 13 January 1993). House of Commons Employment Committee, Third Special Report, Employment Consequences of British Coal’s Proposed Pit Closures, Government Reply (London: HSMO, 31 March 1993). House of Commons Employment Committee, The Management of Redundancies, Minutes of Evidence (London: HSMO, 26 July 1993). House of Commons Energy Committee, Session 1985–86, The Coal Industry: Memoranda, Vol. I (London: HSMO, 26 January 1986). House of Commons Energy Committee, Session 1985–86, Memorandum: The Government’s Response to the Committee’s First Report of Session 1986–7, on the Coal Industry, HC 176 (London: HSMO, 13 May 1987). House of Commons Energy Committee, Session 1985–86, The Coal Industry: Memoranda, Vol. II (London: HSMO, 18 June 1986). House of Commons Energy Committee, Session 1985–86, The Coal Industry, Minutes of Evidence (London: HSMO, 5 November 1986). House of Commons Energy Committee, Session 1986–87, The Coal Industry, Minutes of Evidence (London: HSMO, 12 November 1986). House of Commons Report from the Select Committee on Nationalised Industries (­session 1968–69), National Coal Board, Vol. II: Minutes of Evidence (London: HMSO, 20 October 1969). House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee, British Energy Policy and the Market for Coal, Minutes of Evidence (London: HSMO, 28 October 1992). House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee, First Report, British Energy Policy and the Market for Coal (HC 237), (London: HMSO, 26 January 1993). Hughes, John, and Roy Moore (eds.), A Special Case? Social Justice and the Miners (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Labour Research Department, The Miners’ Case (London: LRD, 1 October 1984). Making the Difference: A New Start for England’s Coalfield Communities. The Coalfield Task Force Report, published by Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (London: HSMO, June 1998). Ministry of Power, White Paper on Fuel Policy (Cmnd. 2798) (London: HSMO, 1965). Ministry of Power, Fuel Policy (Cmnd. 3438) (London: HMSO, 1967). National Coal Board, The Many careers in coal: the basic industry with modern ideas (London: NCB, c.1958). National Coal Board, Report and Accounts (London: NCB, 1964–86). National Coal Board, Plan for Coal (London: NCB, 1974). National Coal Board, Statistical Tables (London: NCB, 1974–9). National Coal Board, Get it all together as a skilled miner (London: Colbear Advertising in conjunction with NCB Public Relations [c.1975]). National Union of Mineworkers, Rules (London: NUM, 1962). National Union of Mineworkers, National Energy Policy (London: NUM, October 1972). National Union of Mineworkers, The Miners and the Battle for Britain (London: NUM [1980]). National Union of Mineworkers (Scottish Area), The Miners’ New Charter (Glasgow: NUMSA [1975]).

Bibliography  305 Pay Board, Special Report: Relative Pay of Mineworkers (Cmnd. 5567) (London: HMSO, 1974). Report of Court of Inquiry into a Dispute between the National Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers under the Chairmanship of The Rt. Hon. Lord Wilberforce (Cmnd. 4903) (London, 18 February 1972). Report of the Tribunal Appointed to Inquire into the Disaster at Aberfan on October 21st, 1966 (London: HMSO, 17 July 1967). Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations 1965–1968, Report (Donovan report) (Cmnd. 3623) (London: HMSO, 1968). Ryhope: A pit closes. A Study in Redeployment (London: HMSO, 1970). Secretary of State for Energy, Energy Policy: A Consultative Document (Cmnd. 7101) (London: HSMO: 1978). The Labour Party, Report of 66th Annual Conference, Scarborough 1967 (London: Labour Party, 1967). The Labour Party, Report of the 67th Annual Conference of the Labour Party 1968 (London: Labour Party, 1968). The Labour Party, Let us Work together: Labour’s way out of the crisis (London: Labour Party, February 1974). Trades Union Congress, Report of the Proceedings at the 116th Annual Trades Union Congress, Brighton (London: TUC, 1984). Wilson, Harold, The New Britain: Labour’s plan. Selected speeches (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).

Autobiographies and Diaries Benn, Tony, Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–1976 (London: Hutchinson, 1989). Blair, Tony, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010). Crossman, Richard, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Vol. 2: Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons 1966–68 (London: Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1976). Gormley, Joe, Battered Cherub (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982). Haslam, Bob, An Industrial Cocktail (London: Robert Hale, 2003). Heseltine, Michael, Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000). Horner, Arthur, Incorrigible Rebel (London: MacGibbon & Key, 1960). Hurd, Douglas, An End to Promises: Sketch of a Government 1970–74 (London: Collins, 1979). Ingham, Bernard, Kill the Messenger (London: HarperCollins, 1991). Lawson, Nigel, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam Press, 1992). Major, John, The Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1999). Moffat, Abe, My Life with the Miners (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965). Paynter, Will, My Generation (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972). Robens, Lord, Ten Year Stint (London: Cassell, 1972). Tebbit, Norman, Upwardly Mobile (London: Futura, 1987). Thatcher, Margaret, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993). Thatcher, Margaret, The Path to Power (London: HarperCollins, 1995). Walker, Peter, Staying Power: an autobiography (London: Bloomsbury, 1991).

306 Bibliography Watters, Frank, ‘Being Frank’: The Memoirs of Frank Watters (Doncaster: Askew Design & Print, 1992). Whitelaw, William, The Whitelaw Memoirs (London: Headline, 1990).

Fiction Chaplin, Sid, The Thin Seam (London: Phoenix House, 1950). Coombes, B. L., These Poor Hands. The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939). Cronin, A. J., The Stars Look Down (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935). Cronin, A. J., The Citadel (London: Bello, 2013 [1st ed. 1937]). Curtis, Tony (ed.), Coal: an anthology of mining (Bridgend: Seren, 1997). Delaney, Shelagh, A Taste of Honey (London: Methuen & Co., 1959). Herman, Mark, Brassed Off: A Film Script (Reclam Fremdsprachentexte), ed. Herbert Geisen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003). Hines, Barry, A Kestrel for a Knave (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Hines, Barry, The Price of Coal (London: Hutchinson, 1979). Kirkup, Mike (ed.), Pitmen Born & Bred (Newbiggin by the Sea: [M. Kirkup,] 1994). Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers (London: HarperCollins, 2010 [1st ed. 1913]). Llewellyn, Richard, How Green Was My Valley (London: Penguin, 2001 [1st ed. 1939]). Plater, Alan, Close the Coalhouse Door (A Methuen Playscript) (London: Methuen, 1969, repr. 1971, 1974, and 1976). Sillitoe, Alan, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (London: W. H. Allen, 1958).

Documentaries, Feature Films, Photography, and Audio Sources Billy Elliot, dir. by Stephen Daldry (2000). Brandt, Bill, The English at Home (London: B. T. Batsford, 1936). Brassed Off, dir. by Mark Herman (1996). Critchlow, Mik, Coal town (Liverpool: Bluecoat Press, 2019). Kes, dir. by Ken Loach (1969). ‘Mick McGahey on the energy crisis’, London Broadcasting Company/Independent Radio News Audio Archive, 1974. Miners, dir. by Peter Pickering (1976). Miners, BBC, 40 minutes, produced by Mike Mortimer (1982). Portrait of a Miner, dir. by Richard Mason (1966). Pride, dir. by Matthew Warchus, screenplay by Steven Beresford (2014). Sherwood, BBC One, series 1, written by James Graham, dir. by Lewis Arnold and Ben A. Williams (June 2022). The Great Listener, BBC Radio 4, produced by Martin Williams (May 2012), available online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hdp9g. The Price of Coal. Part 1. Meet the People, dir. by Ken Loach (1977). The Price of Coal. Part 2: Back to Reality, dir. by Ken Loach (1977).

Daily and Sunday Newspapers Daily Mail Daily Mirror

Bibliography  307 Financial Times Finchley Times London Evening Standard News of the World The Guardian The Independent The New York Times The Observer The Sunday Times The Times Wales on Sunday

Periodicals Coal News Marxism Today New Socialist New Society New Statesman The Economist The Spectator

Other Literature Published before 1997 Allen, V. L., The Militancy of British Miners (Shipley: Moor Press, 1981). Allen, Vic, ‘The Miners on the Move’, Marxism Today, February 1982, pp. 17–21. Arnot, R. Page, The Miners: A History of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain 1889–1910 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949). Arnot, R. Page, The Miners: Years of Struggle. A History of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (from 1910 onwards) (London: Allen & Unwin, 1953). Arnot, R. Page, The Miners in Crisis and War. A History of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (from 1930 onwards) (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961). Arnot, R. Page, The Miners: One Union, One Industry. A History of the National Union of Mineworkers, 1939–1946 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979). Ashworth, William, The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 5: The Nationalised Industry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Barratt-Brown, Michael, What Really Happened to the Coal Industry? Institute of Workers’ Control, pamphlet 31 (Nottingham: Institute for Workers’ Control, [1972]). Beatty, Christina, and Stephen Fothergill, ‘Labour Market Adjustments in Areas of Chronic Industrial Decline: The Case of the UK Coalfields’, Regional Studies 30/7 (1996), pp. 627–40. Benn, Tony, Frances Morrell, and Francis Cripps, A Ten-Year Industrial Strategy for Britain (Nottingham: Institute for Workers’ Control [1975]). Beynon, Huw, Working for Ford (London: Allen Lane, 1973). Beynon, Huw (ed.), Digging Deeper: Issues in the Miners’ Strike (London: Verso, 1985). Beynon, Huw, Ray Hudson, and David Sadler, A Tale of Two Industries: The Contraction of Coal and Steel in the North East of England (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991).

308 Bibliography Blackburn, Robin, and Alexander Cockburn (eds.), The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Bulmer Martin (ed.), Working-class Images of Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). Bulmer, M. I. A., ‘Sociological Models of the Mining Community’, Sociological Review 23/1 (1975), pp. 61–92. Butler, David, and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of February 1974 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974). Campbell, Beatrix, Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties (London: Virago, 1984). Campbell, Beatrix, ‘Politics Old and New’, New Statesman, 8 March 1985, pp. 22–5. Coates, Ken (eds.), A Future for British Socialism (Nottingham: Centre for Socialist Education, 1968). Coombes, B. L., ‘The Miner’s Life in Wartime’, Picture Post 21/5, 30 October 1943, pp. 14–16. Coulter, Jim, Susan Miller, and Martin Walker, A State of Siege: Politics and Policing of the Coalfields: Miners’ Strike 1984 (London: Canary Press, 1984). Crick, Michael, Scargill and the Miners (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Daly, Lawrence, The Miners and the Nation (Edinburgh, n.d. [1968]). Dennis, Norman, Fernando Henriques, and Clifford Slaughter, Coal is Our Life: An ana­ lysis of a Yorkshire mining community (London: Tavistock Publications, 2nd ed. 1969, 1979 [1st ed. 1956]). Douglass, David, and Joel Krieger, A Miner’s Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). Durham Strong Words Collective, But the World Goes on the Same (Whitley Bay: Erdesdun Publications, 1979). Editorial Collective, ‘Editorials: History Workshop Journal’, History Workshop Journal 1/1 (1976), pp. 1–3. Ezra, Derek, Address to the Annual Conference of the National Union of Mineworkers at Inverness, 4 July 1973 (London: NCB, 1973). Ezra, Derek, ‘Long term planning for coal’, Long Range Planning 7/6 (1974), pp. 21–3. Francis, Hywel, and David Smith, The Fed: a history of the South Wales miners in the twentieth century (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980). Gamble, Andrew, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1994). Glyn, Andrew, The Economic Case against Pit Closures (Sheffield: NUM, 1984). Goldthorpe, John, Intellectuals and the Working Class in Modern Britain. The Fuller Bequest Lecture (Brighton: University of Sussex, 1979). Goldthorpe, John H., David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt, The Affluent Worker, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968–9). Grahl, John, ‘De-industrialisation and the Tories’, Marxism Today, June 1980, pp. 5–11. Griffin, R., The British Coalmining Industry: retrospect and prospect (Hartington: Moorland Publishing, 1977). Hall, Stuart, ‘Brave New World’, Marxism Today, October 1988, pp. 24–9. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals: youth subcultures in postwar Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1976). Hall, Tony, King Coal: Miners, Coal and Britain’s Industrial Future (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). Harrison, Royden (ed.), Independent Collier: The Coal Miner as Archetypal Proletarian Reconsidered (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978). Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, Marxism Today, September 1978, pp. 279–86.

Bibliography  309 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes 1914–1991. The Short Twentieth Century (London: Abacus, 1994). Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy: aspects of working-class life (London: Penguin, 2017 [1st ed. 1957]). House, John W., Industrial Britain: The North East (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1969). House, J. W., and E. M. Knight, Pit Closure and the Community (Papers in Migration and Mobility, no. 5) (Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle University, 1967). Howell, David, ‘Goodbye to all that? A review of the literature on the 1984/5 miners’ strike’, Work, Employment & Society 1/3 (September 1987), pp. 388–404. Howell, David, The Politics of the NUM: A Lancashire View (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989). James, Peter, The Future of Coal (London: Macmillan Press, 1st ed. 1982; 2nd ed. 1984). Knight, E.  M., Men Leaving Mining: West Cumberland 1966–67 (Papers on Migration and Mobility in Northern England, no. 6) (Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle University, 1968). Koselleck, Reinhart, ‘Zur historisch-politischen Semantik asymmetrischer Grundbegriffe’, in Kosseleck, Vergangene Zukunft (1989), pp. 211–59. Koselleck, Reinhart, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989 [1st ed. 1979]). Kurtz, Irma, ‘If it ’appens it ’appens’, Nova (1968), pp. 65–9. Lloyd, Bruce, energy policy (Young Fabian pamphlet 16) (London: Fabian Society, 1968). Lloyd, John, Understanding the Miners’ Strike (London: Fabian Society, 1985). Lockwood, David, ‘Sources of Variation in Working-Class Images of Society’, Sociological Review 14/3 (1966), pp. 16–3; repr. in: Bulmer (ed.), Working-Class Images of Society (1975), pp. 16–31. MacFarlane, Jim (ed.), Essays from the Yorkshire Coalfield (Sheffield: VAVASOR, 1979). MacGregor, Ian, with Rodney Tyler, The Enemies Within: The Story of the Miners’ Strike (London: Collins, 1986). McIlroy, John, ‘Police and Pickets: The Law against the Miners’, in Beynon (ed.), Digging Deeper (1985), pp. 101–22. Manners, G., ‘The Changing Energy Situation in Britain’, Geography 61/4 (November 1976), pp. 221–31. Morgan, W. John, and Ken Coates, The Nottinghamshire Coalfield and the British Miners’ Strike 1984–85, Occasional Paper, Department of Education (Nottingham: University of Nottingham [1989]). Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 2001 [1st ed. 1937]). Ottey, Roy, The Strike: An Insider’s Story (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985). Pahl, R.E., Divisions of Labour (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Parker, Mike, The Politics of Coal’s Decline: The Industry in Western Europe (London: Earthscan Publications, 1994). Parker, Tony, Red Hill: A Mining Community (London: Heinemann, 1986). Paul, Ronald, ‘Fire in Our Hearts’. A Study of the Portrayal of Youth in Post-War British Working-Class Fiction (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1982). Pitt, Malcolm, The World on our Backs: The Kent Miners and the 1972 Miners’ Strike (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979). Robinson, Colin, A Policy for Fuel? (Occasional Paper, Institute of Economic Affairs) (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1969). Robinson, Colin, The Energy ‘Crisis’ and British Coal (Hobart Papers 59) (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1974). Routledge, Paul, Scargill: The unauthorised biography (London: HarperCollins, 1993).

310 Bibliography Rowbotham, Sheila, and Jean McCrindle, ‘More than just a memory: some political implications of women’s involvement in the miners’ strike, 1984–85’, Feminist Review 23 (June 1986), pp. 109–24. Samuel, Raphael, ‘Introduction’, in Samuel et al. (eds.), The Enemy Within (1985), pp. 1–39. Samuel, Raphael, ‘The Lost World of British Communism’, Parts 1–3, New Left Review 155 (1986), pp. 3–53; 156 (1986), pp. 63–113; 165 (1987), pp. 52–91. Samuel, Raphael, Barbara Bloomfield, and Guy Boanas (eds.), The Enemy Within: Pit Villages and the miners’ strike of 1984–5 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). Saville, John, ‘An Open Conspiracy: Conservative Politics and the Miners’ Strike 1984–1985’, Socialist Register 22 (1985), pp. 295–329. Scargill, Arthur, ‘The New Unionism’, New Left Review 92 (1975), pp. 3–33. Scargill, Arthur, Miners in the Eighties (Barnsley: NUM Yorkshire Area [1981]). Scargill, Arthur, and Peggy Kahn, The Myth of Workers’ Control (Leeds: University of Leeds and University of Nottingham, 1980). Sewel, John, Colliery Closure and Social Change: A Study of a South Wales Mining Valley (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975). Smith, Ned, The 1984 Miners’ Strike: The Actual Account (Whitstable: Oyster Press, 1997). Spooner, D. J., ‘The Geography of Coal’s Second Coming’, Geography 66/1 (January 1981), pp. 29–44. Spooner, Derek, and John North, ‘The Great U.K. Coal Rush: A Progress Report to the End of 1976’, Area 9/1 (1977), pp. 15–27. Spooner, Derek, and John North, ‘The Geography of the Coal Industry in the United Kingdom in the 1970s: Changing Directions’, GeoJournal 2/3 (1978), pp. 255–72. Stead, Jean, Never the Same Again (London: Women’s Press, 1987). Taylor, Andrew, The Politics of the Yorkshire Miners (London: Croom Helm, 1984). The Miners’ Next Step, issued by the Unofficial Reform Committee, first pub. 1912, repr. with a new introduction by R. Merfyn Jones (London: Pluto Press, 1973). The People of Thurcroft, Thurcroft: a village and the miners’ strike: an oral history (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1986). The Sex Pistols, ‘God Save the Queen’, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977). Thompson, E. P., ‘The Moral Economy and the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present 50 (1971), pp. 76–136. Thompson, E. P., ‘A Special Case’, New Society, 24 February 1972, pp. 401–4. Thompson, E.  P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 2013 [1st ed. 1963]). Thompson, E. P., ‘The New Left’, in Cal Winslow (ed.), E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: essays and polemics (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 2014), pp. 119–34. Turner, Royce, Coal Was Our Life: an essay on life in a Yorkshire pit town (Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University Press, 2000). Turner, Royce, and Martin Gregory, ‘Life after the Pit: The Post-Redundancy Experiences of Mineworkers’, Local Economy 10/2 (1995), pp. 149–62. Waddington, David, and David Parry, ‘Coal policy in Britain’, in Chas Critcher, Klaus Schubert, and David Waddington (eds.), Regeneration of the Coalfield Areas: AngloGerman Perspectives (London: Pinter, 1995), pp. 5–33. Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973). Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Willis, Paul, Learning to Labour (Aldershot: Gower, 1977).

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Aberfan 36–7 Adamson, Campbell  116–17 Adeney, Martin  218–19, 221, 223 Addison, Paul  4 Agecroft Colliery  280–1 Alexander, Richard  235–6, 240, 245 Alfie (novel)  62–3 Allen, Vic  130–1, 145–6, 213 Alsop, George  119–21 Alsop, Vera  120–1 Amber Valley  207–8, 241–2 Anderson, Bruce  219–20 Armitage, Lily  279 Armstrong, Lord  116–17 Armthorpe 194–7 Arthur Markham Memorial Prize  16, 58–60, 62–3 Ascherson, Neil  239 Ashby, David  207–8 Ashworth, William  98 Askern 275 Atherstone 188–9 Authority of Government Group  114–17 Awdry, Daniel  82–3 Bagworth Colliery  10–11, 126–7 Ballot See pithead ballot Barnsley  154, 181–2, 265, 270–1 Barnsley West and Peniston  208 Barratt Brown, Michael  131 Barrymore, Billy  161, 231, 233 Batley and Spen  241 Battered Cherub (autobiography)  145–6 Battle, John  268 Battle of Saltley Gate  147–8, 170, 172–3 Beasley, P.  204–5 Beckett, Margaret  163–4 Bedwellty 48 Bell, Daniel  289–90 Bell, Trevor  148, 150–1 Belper 70 Benn, Tony  11, 20–1, 96–7, 244–5, 259 Beswick, John  280

Beynon, Huw  52–3, 117–18, 194, 272–3, 285 Bielby, Fred  124 Billy Elliot (2000)  260–5 Bilsthorpe 251–2 Birmingham 82–3 Blackpool  62, 94, 102, 105–7 Blackwell, Trevor  252–3 Blair, Tony  163–4, 257–8, 260–1, 266–7, 269 Blair government  281 Blaydon  32–3, 70 ‘Blood on the coal’  31, 111–12, 128 Bloomfield, Barbara  218–19 Boanas, Guy  218–19 Boardman, Lord  241–2, 254 Bolsover  85–6, 99–100 Bolton 280 Bolton, George  178–9 Bowers, Tom  278–9 Boycott, Geoff  214–15 Bradford 154 Bran, George  154 Brandt, Bill  10–11 Brassed Off (feature film)  161, 260–6 British Association of Colliery Management (BACM)  135–6, 226–7, 232 British Coal  201–2, 207, 235–6, 242–4, 250–1, 255–7, 261–2, 266, 276–7 Brodsworth Colliery  255–6, 275 Brookes, Lord  245 Brooks, Annie  233 Brown, Bob  70 Brown, George  27–8 Buckton, Ray  82 Budge, Richard  268 Bulmer, Martin  117–19, 275–6 Burgin, Victor  94–5 Burrows, J.  245–6 Bush, Duncan  195 But the World Goes on the Same  117–20, 122 Caerphilly 71 Callaghan, James  20–1, 40–1, 94–5, 241 Callaghan government  94, 212

320 Index ‘Campaign for Coal’  151–2, 182–3 Campbell, Beatrix  196–7, 219–20, 285 Cannock 70 Canterbury  50, 69–70 Cardiff 227–8 Carr, Robert  71 Carroll, Tony  280–1 Carter, Pete  219–20, 222–3 Carrington, Lord  80, 114–17 Cary, Sir Robert  82–3 Casper, Billy  56–7 Cefn Coed Colliery  53–6 Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB)  33–4, 36 Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS)  84–5, 90–1 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies  117–18 Chadburn, Ray  152 Chaplin, Sid  10–11, 57, 62–3 Cheadle 23 Cheshire 207–8 Chesterfield  47, 74–5 Chippenham 82–3 Chopwell 120–1 Clarke, Len  46 Clarke, Neil  163–4, 243 Cleworth Hall Colliery  281 Close the Coalhouse Door (play)  56–8, 111–12 Clwyd, Ann  277 Clydesdale 246–7 Coal: an anthology of mining (book)  259 Coal Board see National Coal Board (NCB) Coal crisis  14–16, 236–7, 272–3, 275, 283 Coal fields Memories of  10–11 Coalfield Communities Campaign  225, 228–30, 253–6, 268, 270–1 Coal for the Future (Green Paper)  96–8, 167–8 Coal industry  2–3, 9 as ‘new’ or ‘modern’  33–5, 37, 65, 67–8, 132–3 as ‘old’  24–5 as success story  132–4 as Victorian  23 contraction of  41–5, 53–4, 208, 214, 236 decline of  26, 31–2, 43, 65, 67–8, 86–7, 97, 132, 237 defence of  29–30, 38 destruction of  41–2 expansion of  97, 100 extinction 214 future of  44–6, 67–8, 72, 89–92, 95–6, 99–100, 131–9, 147, 202, 207–24 modernization of  53–4

nationalization of  14–15, 43, 73–4, 94, 107, 125–6 new dawn of  67–8, 86, 89–92, 237 privatization of  208–13, 243 rationalization of  209, 224 rundown of  31–2, 84–5 stabilisation of  31–2, 40, 89–90 Coal Industry Act (1965)  100 Coal Industry Examination (1974)  88–91 Coal Industry National Consultative Council (CINCC) 211 Coal Industry Nationalisation Act (1946)  33 Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation (CISWO) 105–6 Coal is Our Life (sociological study)  52–3, 64–5, 119, 153–4, 263–4, 275–6 Coal News (paper)  16, 105–8, 182–3 Coal strike see miners’ strike Coal Miner, coal miners and Britishness  69–70 and ‘long memories’  13–14 and ‘Old England’  4–5 and ordinariness  10, 16, 24, 58–9, 65, 68, 75–6, 92–5, 117–18, 127, 131, 135, 149, 159, 167, 178, 202, 233, 241, 264–5, 276–7 and power  7–8, 40–1, 68, 77, 80–3, 86–7, 92–6, 101–3, 110, 112–14, 116–17, 131, 135, 138–9, 159, 171–2, 182, 189–90, 201–2, 209, 211, 218, 230 and weekly earnings  6–7 as affluent workers  9–10, 24, 52–3, 95–6, 103–6, 108, 127–8 as aristocracy of British labour  82–3, 158–9, 292 as awe-inspiring  101–2, 141–2 as ‘backbone’  31 as ‘best men in the world’  179–80 as criminal  195 as ‘doomed’  39, 158–9, 190, 252, 290–1 as ‘enemy within’  172, 179–80, 195, 233, 238–9, 244–5, 287–8 as Everyman  74, 236–7, 257–8 as ‘fossils’  67 as heroes  9–10, 51–2, 203–6, 236–40 as industrial workers  6 as losers  9–10, 15–16, 65, 68, 159, 290–1 as Luddites  47–8 as ‘man of today’  47 as model workers  24, 48, 50 as ‘modern’  47, 104–5, 129, 154 as ‘organised revolutionary minority’  186 as privileged  68, 75–6, 230, 254 as ‘real’ men  178

Index  321 as resistance fighters  217 as ‘salt of the earth’  141–2 as ‘savages’  127 as ‘scabs’  178–9, 188–9, 197–8, 204–5 as ‘skilled engineers’  217 as ‘skilled technicians’  33, 65 as special  9–10, 51–2, 67–8, 72–81, 92, 94, 103, 117, 134–5, 144–5, 154, 159, 172, 182, 186, 229–30, 241–2, 259, 281, 288 as traditional proletarians / proletarian traditionalists  9–10, 24, 52–3, 57, 103, 119, 127, 166–7, 272–3, 281, 289–90 as underdogs  1–2, 200, 236–45, 283 as vanguard  9–10, 68, 129, 143–4, 169, 183, 217 as victims  8–10, 201–2, 233–4, 236–40, 272–3 as village radicals  221–2 as villains  9–10, 203–6, 236–7 as violent mob  180, 206 as vulnerable  51–2 as winners  9–10, 15–16, 159 as workmen  46 as ‘wolves’  178–80 as yeomen  69–70 fear of  131 invisibility of  11 scientification of  52–3 ‘Coal Not Dole’  287 Coal Queen of Britain beauty pageant  105–7 Coal Strategy for the United Kingdom, A (CPRS report) 84–5 Coalfields Heritage Initiative (Kent)  277–8 Coalfields Regeneration Trust  253–4 Coalfields Research Programme  272–5 Coalfields Task Force  259–60, 270, 272–3 Coalmining (pamphlet)  34–5 Coates, Ken  42–3, 48 Cockeram, Eric  186 Colbear Advertising  104–5 Colgan, Jim  152–3 Collier See coal miner Collier, The (rank-and-file magazine)  100–1, 112 Colliery closure  24–6, 32–3, 40–1, 45–6, 53–4, 190, 215–16, 229, 235, 242 Colliery manpower  6, 17–20 Collins, Jack  73, 178–9 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)  196, 219–20, 222–3 Concannon, Don  201–2 Confederation of British Industry  116–17 Conservative Party  95–6, 99–102 Cook, Arthur James  199–200 Coombes, B.L.  10–11 Coombs, Derek  82–3

Cormack, Patrick  70 Cortonwood Colliery  165–6 Cotgrave 240 Country and the City, The (book)  16 County Kerry  123–4 County Mayo  123–4 Cox, Andrew  272–3 Crampton, Robert  251–2 Crigglestone Colliery  279 Critcher, Chas  256, 275 Cronin, A.J.  10–11 Cronin, John  82–3 Crossland, Anthony  289–90 Crossman, Richard  40–1 Crouch, David  50, 69–70 Cummings, John  238–9 Curtis, Tony  259 Daily Mail  69, 142–3, 145–6, 153–4 Daly, Lawrence  14–15, 20–1, 42–3, 48, 63, 66–7, 72–3, 77, 79, 163–4, 168–9 Darfield 124 Darlow, Paul  vii, ix–x, 292 Davies, Edmund  36 Davies, Elfed  74–5 Davies, John  20–1 Day of the Sardine (novel)  62–3 Dearne Valley Colliery  124 De-industrial revolution  229 De-industrialization as analytical concept / framework 3–5, 283–5, 291 as field of study 4–5 as process  4–9, 17–20, 144–5, 150, 161–3, 199–202, 239, 254–6, 272–3, 276–7, 283–4, 292 as term used by contemporaries  5–7, 17–20, 94–5, 129, 290–1 Dennis, Norman  64–5 Department of Employment  6–7, 130–1 Department of Energy  20–1, 76–7, 90–1, 163–4, 227 Department of Trade and Industry  20–1, 163–4, 236 Derbyshire  69–70, 129, 185–6, 197–8, 241–2 Derbyshire West  207–8 Dickens, Charles  291–2 Dicks, Bella  256, 275 ‘Discover Beighton’ (oral history project)  277–8 Dobbs, John  250–1 Dockers 190 Dodworth 291–2 Don Valley  71 Donaghy, Bernard  146

322 Index Doncaster  59, 123–4, 194, 255–6, 275 Dorey, Peter  117 Douglass, David  227 Doy, Tom  232 Dulais Valley  53–6 Durham  30–1, 53–6, 63, 98, 112–13, 119–20, 123–4, 126–7, 133–4, 152, 174, 188–9, 194, 218–19, 229–31, 261–2, 271–2 Durham Miners’ Gala  40–1, 270 ‘Durham Strong Words Collective’  117–19 Dutfield, Des  111–12, 217 Eadie, Alex  207 Easington  194, 238–9, 251–2 Economist, The  161, 239 Edgerton, David  166–7 Edinburgh 32 End to Promises, An, (memoir)  148–9 Enemy Within: Pit villages and the miners’ strike of 1984–5 (book)  218–24 ‘Energy Outlook and the Place of Coal, The’ (policy document)  89–90 Energy policy  26, 88–9 English Partnership  270–1 Essays from the Yorkshire Coalfield 122 Evans, Alfred  71 Evening Standard 186–7 Exeter 99–100 Ex-miners  9–10, 24–5, 59–60, 119, 237–8, 253–6, 270–1, 275–8, 281 Ezra, Derek  20–1, 88–90, 105–8, 135–6, 163–4, 184 Family and Kinship in East London (sociological study)  117–18, 125 Farrimond, John  60–3 Featherstone 52–3 Fed: A History of the South Wales Miners, The (book) 145–6 Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers 117–18 Fifeshire 50 Financial Times  199–200, 221 Finch, Harold  48 Finchley 81 ‘Firm Action for a Fair Britain’ (Conservative Party election manifesto)  81 Fletcher, Raymond  51–2 Foot, Michael  129, 223–4 Foot, Paul  223–4 Ford, Sidney  20–1, 38–40 Francis, Dai  214–15 Francis, Hywel  145–6, 214–15, 219–20, 222–3 Freeson, Reginald  28

Fretwell, Irene  196 Frost, David  75–6 Frost, Steve  154 Fuel Policy (NUM memorandum)  85 Future for British Socialism, A (pamphlet)  48 ‘Future for Coal, The’ (NUM strategy paper, 1967) 38–9 Gallup 92–3 Garnett, Tony  56–7, 127–8 Gedling Colliery  59 General Strike  69, 71, 86–7, 129, 167–8, 178–9, 199–200 Gibbon, Peter  194–5, 218–19 Glasgow, Alex  57 Gloucestershire 235–6 Glyn, Andrew  246–7 Goldthorpe  153–4, 157, 283–4, 289–91 Gormley, Joe  6–7, 14–15, 20–1, 78, 82–3, 86–8, 102, 104, 109–12, 130–1, 133, 135–8, 142–6, 148, 150–1, 153, 182–3, 261–3, 285–6 Gramsci, Antonio  12–13 Gray, Hamish  99–100 Gregory, Martin  255–6 Gregson, Michael & Nadine  153 Green, E.H.H.  113–14 Griffin, A.R.  98 Grimethorpe  239–40, 255–6, 261–2 Grimethorpe Colliery Band  107–8 Grunwick (dispute)  102–3 Guardian, The  23, 199–200, 236–7, 242, 244–5, 250–1 Hall, Tony  145–6 Hamilton, Neil  207–8 Hammond, Eric  244–5 Handle, Johnny  107–8 Hannam, John  99–100 Hartley, Harry  231–2 Haslam, Robert  163–4, 203–4, 210–12, 225–7, 287–8 Hatfield Main  227, 275 Hattersley, Roy  241–2 Heald, Oliver  253–4 Healey, Denis  94–5 Heath, Edward  20–1, 66–8, 80, 86–8, 91 Heath government  69–70, 80, 83–5, 113–14, 167–8, 171–2 Heathfield, Peter  129, 152, 168–9, 180–1 Hennecke, Adolf  288–9 Henriques, Fernando  64–5 Heritage Lottery Fund  277–8 Herman, Mark  261–2

Index  323 Heseltine, Michael  163–4, 177, 235–6, 238, 243 Highgate Colliery  153–4, 157 History Workshop Journal 117–18 Hoggart, Richard  125 Hollingsworth, Mark  223–4 Home Office  197–8 Hood, Jimmy  246–7 Horden  161, 218–19, 230–3 ‘Horizon of expectation’  13, 65, 92–3, 129, 158–9, 167 Horsham 155 Hoskyns, John  114–15, 131, 136–7, 141–2, 148–9, 157–8 Houghton Main Colliery  128 Houghton-le-Spring 54 House, J.W.  54 Howard, Philip  238–9 Howell, David  20–1, 131–2, 163–4 High, Steven  4–5 Hill, Peter  123–4 Hines, Barry  56–7, 117–18, 127–8, 263–4 Hobsbawm, Eric  94–5, 130–1 Hucknall Main Colliery  61–2 Hudson, Ray  272–3, 285 Hughes, John  74 Hughes, Kevin  123 Hunter, Adam  37–8 Hurd, Douglas  148–9, 167–8 Ibbs, J.R.  140 Ibiza 154 Incentive Scheme  100, 110–12, 116, 149 Independent, The  239, 244–7, 269–70 Ingham, Bernard  137 Institute of Economic Affairs  26, 91–2 Jack, Ian  223–4 James, Peter  145–6 Jenkins, Peter  199–200 Joint Policy Advisory Committee (JPAC)  211 Jordan, Paul  280 Journey, A (memoir)  269 Judt, Tony  4, 6–7 Justice Nicholls  146–7 Kahn, Peggy  145 Kane, Jock  40–1 Kelley, Richard  71 Kellingley Colliery  2–3, 18, 288–9 Kent  61, 73, 86–7, 102–3, 109–10, 112–13, 135–6, 152, 174, 178–9, 191, 270–1 Kes (feature film)  56–8, 117–18, 128 Kestrel for a Knave, A (novel)  56–7, 263–4 Kidsgrove 188–9

Kieno, Henry  124 King Coal  14, 30, 83–4, 273 King Coal (book)  145–6 King, Tom  99–100, 177 Kirkintilloch 188–9 Kirkwood 188–9 Knight, E.M.  54–5 Knottingley 59–60 Koselleck, Reinhart  13, 286 Kurtz, Irma  291–2 Kyoto 269–70 Labour movement  37–8, 42–4, 51–2 Labour Party  20–1, 24–5, 88–9, 94–5 conference 1967  24–5, 40 conference 1968  48 conference 1985  206, 218 Labour Research Department  133–4 Lancashire  14–15, 107–8, 153, 197, 230–1, 235, 261, 271–4, 280 Llandudno  83, 292 Lane, Norman  233 Lang, Ian  163–4 Larkin, Philip  259 Latham, Michael  100 Lawrence, D.H.  10–11, 71, 259 Lawson, Nigel  163–4, 177, 189–90, 208–9 Le Cheminant, Peter  137–8 Learning to Labour (study)  117–18 Leavis, F.R.  289–90 Leicester / Leicestershire  10, 126–7, 152, 207–8 Leigh, Pat  47, 62 Leslie, Ann  153 Lever, Harold  69–70 Life in the Jungle (autobiography)  238 Lipset, S.M.  289–90 Littleton Colliery  207–8, 248 Llewellyn, Richard  10–11, 69 Lloyd, Bruce  26 Lloyd, John  172–3, 199–200, 218–21, 223 Loach, Ken  56–7, 117–18, 127–8 Local Authority Joint Mineral and Reclamation Group 228 Lockwood, David  52–3, 103, 119 London  57, 123–4 London, Jack  169–70 Loughborough 82–3 Luton 103 Lynk, Roy  240–1, 245, 249 MacFarlane, Jim  117–18, 122 MacGregor, Ian  163–4, 174, 180–1, 184, 203–4, 210–11, 218–20, 226–7 Macmillan, Harold  179–80

324 Index MacSporran, R.N.  161, 166 Major, John  163, 235–6, 269 Making the Difference: A New Start (report)  270–3 Manchester 82–3 Mandelson, Peter  163–4 Manners, Gerald  98, 100 Mansfield  201, 274 Manton Colliery  197–8 Markham Main Colliery  255–6 Marland, Paul  235–6 Marsh, Richard  20–1, 27–8, 30, 52, 241–3, 287 Marxism Today  16, 94–5, 204–5, 217, 223 Mason, Richard  47 Mason, Roy  20–1, 30–1, 45–6, 119–21 McCarthy, W.E.J.  220, 223–4 McCrindle, Jean  181–2 McGahey, Mick  14–15, 77–8, 86–8, 138–9, 163–4, 171, 178–9, 204–5, 217, 285–7 McGibbon, Irene  197–8 McGuire, Michael  30, 52, 99–100 McKay, Allen  208 McLoughlin, Patrick  207–8 McNestry, Peter  226–7, 270–1 Meden Valley  270–1 Melton 100 Merthyr Vale Colliery  36 Meyer, Sir Anthony  132 Mid Glamorgan County Council  229 Midlands  17–20, 31–2, 44–6, 49–50, 98, 152, 191, 197, 207–8, 221–2, 271–2 Miles, Rosalind  246 Militancy of British Miner, The (book)  145–6 Milne, Eddie  35 Miner, Miners see coal miner, coal miners Miners (documentary, 1976)  117–18, 126–7, 262–3 Miners (BBC ‘40 minutes’ documentary, 1982)  153–4, 263–4 Miners and the Battle for Britain, The (booklet)  134–5, 144–5 Miners and the Nation (pamphlet)  42–3 Miners in the 1980s (election pamphlet)  143–5 Miners’ New Charter (pamphlet)  108–13 Miner, The (union journal)  7–8, 16, 31–2, 38, 58–60, 130–1, 134–5, 138–9, 150 Miners’ Parliamentary Group, The  17, 38, 136–7 Miners the Way forward in 1972 (pamphlet)  77, 79 Miners’ Strike 1969 42–3 1970 42–3 1972  6–7, 15–16, 66–70, 86, 91–2, 109–10 as life changing  125–6 as moment of triumph  147–9 as turning point  86–7

1974  6–7, 15–16, 67–8, 83–4, 92, 287 1984/85  6–7, 11–12, 15–16, 165–77, 190–8, 207–8, 236–7, 288–9 as history  218–33 as spectacle  172 as war of attrition  172, 185–6, 191 as watershed  167, 194 Miners’ Strike: Loss without Limit, The (book)  218–19, 221, 223–4, Mining community  1–2, 8–9, 120–1 Mining Festival of Britain  94, 102, 105–6, 129 Ministerial Group on Coal  177, 184–5 Ministry of Power  20–1 Ministry of Technology  20–1 Monktonhall 276–7 Moore, John  132 Moore, Michael  123–4 Moral economy  72–3, 149 Murphy, D.  248–9 Myers, Nell  181–2 Nabarro, Gerald  30–1 National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS)  135–6, 191, 226, 232, 270–1 National Coal Board (NCB)  2–3, 7–9, 20–1, 24, 28–31, 33–8, 44–5, 47, 53–4, 64–5, 67–8, 72, 75–6, 102, 108, 110, 112–13, 123, 133–4, 149–50, 158–9, 165–6, 173–5, 184, 227 National Coal Board (Enterprise)  224–5 film unit  16, 47, 117–18, 126–7 National Energy Policy (NUM policy document) 87 National Health Service (NHS)  186 National Mining Museum for England  272, 278–9 National Power (electricity generating company) 242 ‘NCB/NUM problem, The’ (CPRS report)  139–42, 148–9, 183 National Power Loading Agreement (NPLA) 111–12 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)  20–1, 24–5, 29–30, 33–4, 38–41, 43, 59, 65, 67–8, 72–3, 77–9, 113, 122–3, 133–5, 150–1, 165–6, 174, 182–3, 187–8, 202, 211, 244–5, 265, 270–1, 285–6 and 1992/93 coal crisis  237, 247, 257 Annual conference 1967  29–31, 37–8 Annual Conference 1968  39–40, 46 Annual Conference 1971  75–6 Annual Conference 1974  6–7, 82–3, 87–9, 91 Annual Conference 1977  104, 111–12

Index  325 Annual Conference 1979  14 Annual Conference 1981  130, 136–7 Annual Conference 1983  151–2 Annual Conference 1984 (Extraordinary conference)  165–6, 173, 178 Annual Conference 1985  170, 215–16 Annual Conference 1992  247–8 Annual Conference 1993  252 Annual Conference 1998  265 files of  16 Left, the (faction inside the NUM)  42–3, 78, 86–7, 92–3, 100, 136–40, 143–7, 149–51, 169–70, 172–3, 182–4, 214–15, 217 marginalization of 211–12 militants  48, 77, 95–6, 102–3, 108, 111–12, 128, 138–9 moderates  78, 86–7, 89, 92–3, 95–6, 102–3, 108–10, 121, 142–3, 159, 287 National Executive Committee (NEC)  38, 66–7, 73, 78–9, 94, 102, 110, 112–13, 133, 138–9, 143–4, 150–1, 166–7, 176–7 Special Delegate Conference 1968  43, 49–50 Special Delegate Conference April 1984  166, 168–9, 176 Special Delegate Conference August 1984  180–1 Special Delegate Conference February 1985  191 Special Delegate Conference March 1985  191, 204–5 Special Delegate Conference October 1992  245–6, 248 See also: coal miner, miners’ strike Nationalised Industries Policy Group  114–17 Naughton, Bill  62–3 Neil, Garry  231 Never the Same Again (book)  196 Newark 235–6 ‘New times’  233–4, 240 New York Times 239–40 New Earnings Survey 120 New Labour  15–16, 163–4, 264–5 New Left, The  42–3, 66–7, 131 New Left Review  86–7, 109–10, 147–8 New Socialist 223 New Society  66–7, 220 New Statesman  16, 221, 223, 252 ‘New Strategy for Coal’ (1985)  211–12 Newcastle  53–4, 57, 70 Newton, M.  248 Normanton  83–4, 225–6 North, John  98 North Gawber Colliery  124–5 North Wales  152, 197, 235 North Western Area  111–12

Northumberland  63, 229, 271–2 Nottingham  46–7, 57, 151–2, 227–8 Nottinghamshire  14, 47, 59–60, 112–13, 117–18, 152, 169–70, 197, 201, 211, 229, 240, 248–9, 273–6, 283 Nova (magazine)  291–2 Observer, The  69, 71, 157–8, 204, 223–4 O’Brien, Bill  225–6 Occupational community  275–6 Ogden, Eric  31, 49 O’Kane, Maggie  250–1 O’Neill, Pat  147–8 Oppenheim, Phillip  207–8, 241–2 Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)  78–9, 90–1 Orgreave 170 Orme, Stanley  207 Orwell, George  2–3, 10–11, 259 Ottey, Roy  218–19 Out of the Ashes? (study)  275–6 Owen, David  132 Owen, Nicholas  206, 209 Palma de Mallorca  154, 157–8 Parker, Mike  268–9 Parker, Tony  218–19, 223–4, 230–3 Parkinson, Cecil  163–4 Parkside Colliery  107–8, 255–6 Parry, David  275 Pascall, David  184–5, 189–90 Paterson, Peter  220 Paynter, Will  14, 20–1, 31–2, 38, 129 Peacock, Elizabeth  241 Pearson, Frank  124–5 Pennington, Roy  281 Peterborough 123–4 Phillips, Jim  149 Pickering, Kevin  154 Pickering, Peter  126–7 Pit closure see ‘colliery closure’ Pitmen Born & Bred (book)  58–60 Pithead ballot  78–9, 94, 102, 111–12, 141–2, 149–51, 157–8, 168–71, 176–7, 183, 186–7, 223, 267–8 Pitt, Malcolm  73, 86–7, 145–7 Plan 2000 (1976)  100–1 Plan for Coal (1974)  67–8, 83–4, 88–93, 96–8, 100–2, 110, 113–14, 129, 131–4, 167–8, 208–9, 212–14, 273, 292 ‘Plan for Coal’ (NUM discussion document, 1986) 212 Plater, Alan  57

326 Index Pontefract 157 Portrait of a Miner (documentary)  47, 62 Powell, Enoch  11–12, 85 PowerGen (electricity generating company)  242 Pratt, J.  17, 49–50 Prescott, John  270 Price of Coal, The (television play)  117–18, 127–8 Pride (feature film)  1–3 Red Hill: A Mining Community (book)  230–1 Reading, Brian  72–3 Reagan, Ronald  165 Redundant miners  28, 46 Redundant Mineworker’s Payment Scheme (RMPS)  224–5, 227–8, 230 Redwood, John  189–90, 277 Rees, Caroline  223–4 Rees, Gareth  227–9 Rees, George  216–17 Rees, Merlyn  244 Resistance through Rituals (study)  117–18 Rhondda  32, 74–6, 274 Richard III (play)  77 Richardson, H.  248–9 Riddell, Peter  199–200, 238–9 Ridley, Maurice  119–21 Ridley, Nicholas  114–15, 177 ‘Ridley Report’  115–16, 171, 184–5 RJB Mining  268 Roberts, John David  197–8 Robens, Alfred  20–1, 29–31, 33–4, 36, 68, 142, 146 Roberts, Alfred  83–4 Roberts, Robert  125–6 Robinson, Colin  26 91–2 Rochell, Andrew  279 Rooney, Ron  122 Ross and Cromarty  99–100 Rossington 275 Rothschild, Lord  90–1 Routledge, Paul  17, 81, 94 Ruskin College  74, 221 Russel, Patrick  127 Ryhope Colliery  53–5 Samuel, Raphael  182–3, 194, 218–23, 227 Samuels, Mary  121 Sandy 156 Sankey Commission  108–9 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (novel)  62–3, 117–18 Savage, Mike  10 ‘Save Our Pits Campaign’ (1992/93)  246–7, 250 Scarborough 24–5

Scargill, Arthur  14–15, 86–7, 109–10, 128–9, 131, 137, 143–4, 146–8, 150–1, 154, 157–8, 161, 163–4, 170, 182–3, 186–9, 197–8, 204, 214–16, 244–5, 247, 253–4, 265–7, 285–6 as ‘folk hero’  245 ‘Scargill’s army’  180 Schmidt, William E.  239 Scotland  63, 102–3, 112–13, 133–6, 149, 168–9, 174, 188–9, 191, 218, 228, 235 Scottish Area  77, 108–10, 214–15 Annual Conference 1972  77–8 Scunthorpe 123–4 Seabrook, Jeremy  252–3 Seaton Carew Power Station  30–1 Sewell, John  55–6 Sex Pistols, The  94–5 Seychelles 107 Sharlston Colliery  278–9 Sheffield  42–3, 58–9, 122, 129, 170, 194, 242–3 Sherman, Alfred  175 Sherwood 268 Sherwood (BBC drama)  283 Shirebrook 197–8 Siddall, Norman  163–4, 184 Sillitoe, Alan  62–3 Silverdale Colliery  250–1 Silverhill  240, 251–2, 255–6 Skinner, Dennis  85, 99–100, 244–5 Slaughter, Clifford  64–5 Smith, David  145–6 Snowdown Colliery  61, 73 South Derbyshire Area  111–13, 152, 191, 197, 211, 235 South Wales  1–2, 31–2, 36, 53–6, 98, 102–3, 109–13, 133–6, 152, 168–9, 174, 194, 214–15, 218, 221–2, 229, 235, 267–8, 273–4 South Wales Miner 217 South Worcestershire  30–1 ‘Space of Experience’  13–15, 71, 156 Spare Rib 196 Spectator, The  16, 220 Spencer, George  169–70 Spencerism 204 Spennymoor 122 Spooner, Derek  98 Staffordshire  70, 188–9, 235, 270–1, 278–9 Stakhanov, Alexey  288–9 State of Emergency  66–7, 76–7 Stead, Jean  196 ‘Stepping Stones’ (report)  114–15 Stevens, Dennis  123 Stewart-Smith, Geoffrey  70, 72

Index  327 Steyne, David  194–5, 218–19 Straubenzee, William van  171–2 Strauss, Norman  114–15 Stroud 156 ‘Structures of feeling’  12–13, 16, 23–4, 29–30, 65, 68–9, 82–3, 94, 101–2, 108–9, 139–40, 200–2, 223–4, 237–8, 259–60, 286 ‘Summer 1984’ (poem)  195 Sunday Express 81 Sunday Times, The 220 Sunley, Jack  278–9 Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence  196 Swansea 53–4 Sykes, M.  112 Taste of Honey, A 117–18 Tatton 207–8 Taylor, Albert Roland  197–8 Taylor, Jack  169–70 Taylor, Robert  157–8 Tebbit, Norman  167–8, 177, 189–90, 219–20 Thatcher government  15–20, 104–5, 130–1, 158–9, 165–6, 190, 263, 287 Thatcher, Margaret  1–2, 7–8, 11–12, 20–1, 81, 113–14, 129, 131–2, 137–8, 163–5, 186, 203–4, 235–6, 244, 269 Third Way: New Politics for the New Century, The (pamphlet)  269–70 Thomas, Terry  169–70 Thomlinson, Natalie  196 Thompson, E.P.  17, 66–7, 69–70, 72–3, 253, 285 Thoresby Colliery  47, 248 Thurcroft  194, 197, 218–19, 275 Times, The  17, 24–5, 69, 81, 94, 113, 175, 199–200, 238–9, 243–6, 268 Tipping, Paddy  268 Tower Colliery  276–7 Trades Union Congress (TUC)  111, 175, 186–7, 206, 253–4 Tredegar 267–8 Trentham Colliery  250–1 Tribune 223–4 Tripartism 96–7 TUC see Trades Union Congress Turner, Royce  255–6 Tyler, Rodney  218–19 Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM)  201–4, 210–11, 237, 240, 245, 249, 270–1 Uses of Literacy, The (study)  117–18, 125 Vane Tempest  250–1, 255–6 Varley, Eric  20–1, 35, 47, 74–5, 82–5, 89–91, 292

Victimized Miners  206 Vincent, Sid  261 Vinen, Richard  165–6 Waddington, Dave  256, 267–8, 275–7 Wakefield 278–9 Wakeham, John  163–4 Wales on Sunday 214–15 Walker, Peter  20–1, 84–5, 163–4, 167–8, 177, 207, 210–11, 220, 224–5 Warsop Vale  275 Warwickshire  188–9, 235 Wastage involuntary  44–5, 54–5 voluntary  16, 44–5, 54–5, 63, 149–50 Waterloo 30–1 Wearmouth 250–1 West Cumberland  53–5 West Flintshire  132 ‘Wheeler Plan’  216–17 White Paper, In place of strife 49 White Paper on financial and economic obligations of the nationalised industries (1961) 33 White Paper on fuel policy (1965)  27–8 White Paper on fuel policy (1967)  24, 27–8, 30, 40–1, 45–6, 63, 83 Whitelaw, William  167–8, 177 Whitfield, Alan  231–3 Wilberforce, Lord  66–7 Wilberforce court of inquiry / settlement  72–4, 76–7, 79, 147–8 Wilkinson, Alec  123–5 Wilkinson, Bernard  231 Williams, Raymond  12–13, 16, 125, 286 Wilson government  20–1, 24–5, 27–8, 35, 40–1, 83–4, 88–90, 109–10, 167–8, 212, 242–3 Wilson, Harold  15–16, 18, 20–1, 24–5, 40–1, 91, 94–5, 142–3 Wimblebury 278–9 Winstanley, Michael  23–4, 26, 31 Wintour, Patrick  199–200 Wolfe, Tom  125 Wolverhampton Wanderer FC  278–9 Women Against Pit Closures  181–2, 246, 263 Women’s Liberation Movement  121 Woof, Robert  29–30, 32–3, 70 Woolley Colliery  147–8, 197–8, 292 Working Miners  179–80 Working Miners’ Committee  191 Working for Ford 117–18 Working-Class communities  13–14 Working-class hero  62–3, 267–8

328 Index World on Our Backs, The (book)  145–6 Wybrew, John  208, 210–11 Yates, Ron  154 Yom Kippur War  90–1, 100 Yorkshire  17–20, 31–2, 42–5, 52–3, 59–60, 64–5, 83–4, 86–7, 98, 102–3, 109–13,

117–18, 123–4, 126–9, 150–2, 155, 165–6, 168–9, 185–6, 194, 198, 218–19, 221–2, 255–6, 270–1, 277–8 Younger, George  116–17 Young, Hugo  244–5 Zulueta, Philip de  179–80