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The industrial politics of disablement 163 5 THE INDUSTRIAL POLITICS OF DISABLEMENT In 1843, one year after Parliament had passed the landmark Mines and Collieries Act banning females and children under the age of 10 from working underground, Punch magazine printed a cartoon titled ‘Capital and Labour’ (Figure 4). Reflecting the magazine’s sympathy for the poor and downtrodden and the spirit of social justice that characterised its radical early years, the image contrasted the circumstances of those who grew rich from coalmining, the wealthy coal owners
This book sheds new light on the human cost of industrialisation by examining the lives and experiences of those disabled in an industry that was vital to Britain's economic growth. If disability has been largely absent from conventional histories of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution has assumed great significance in disability studies. The book examines the economic and welfare responses to disease, injury and impairment among coal workers. It discusses experiences of disability within the context of social relations and the industrial politics of coalfield communities. The book provides the context for those that follow by providing an overview of the conditions of work in British coalmining between 1780 and 1880. It turns its attention to the principal causes of disablement in the nineteenth-century coal industry and the medical responses to them. The book then extends the discussion of responses to disability by examining the welfare provisions for miners with long-term restrictive health conditions. It also examines how miners and their families negotiated a 'mixed economy' of welfare, comprising family and community support, the Poor Law, and voluntary self-help as well as employer paternalism. The book shifts attention away from medicine and welfare towards the ways in which disability affected social relations within coalfield communities. Finally, it explores the place of disability in industrial politics and how fluctuating industrial relations affected the experiences of disabled people in the coalfields.
Embodiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). 3 For key works in the comparative coalfield societies literature, see Stefan Berger, Andy Croll and Norman LaPorte (eds), Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); John McIlroy, Alan Campbell and Keith Gildart (eds), Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout: The Struggle for Dignity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004); Stefan Berger, ‘Working-Class Culture and the Labour Movement in the South Wales and Ruhr Coalfields, 1850–2000: A Comparison’, Llafur, 8
This book is a social history of northern soul. It examines the origins and development of this music scene, its clubs, publications and practices, by locating it in the shifting economic and social contexts of the English midlands and north in the 1970s. The popularity of northern soul emerged in a period when industrial working-class communities were beginning to be transformed by deindustrialisation and the rise of new political movements around the politics of race, gender and locality. The book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of youth culture, popular music and everyday life in post-war Britain. The authors draw on an expansive range of sources including magazines/fanzines, diaries, letters, and a comprehensive oral history project to produce a detailed, analytical and empathetic reading of an aspect of working-class culture that was created and consumed by thousands of young men and women in the 1970s. A range of voices appear throughout the book to highlight the complexity of the role of class, race and gender, locality and how such identities acted as forces for both unity and fragmentation on the dance floors of iconic clubs such as the Twisted Wheel (Manchester), the Torch (Stoke-on-Trent), the Catacombs (Wolverhampton) and the Casino (Wigan).
becoming ‘disabled’, there were others for whom bodily impairment did not necessarily mean an end to their working lives. How did industrial expansion contribute to the incidence of injury, disease and impairment? What happened to those ‘disabled’ through accidents or disease during Britain’s Industrial Revolution? How did people with impairments negotiate changing welfare and medical regimes of assistance, and what was the place of disability in industrial politics? Did industrial change lead to increasing marginalisation of ‘disabled’ people and how receptive was the
illustrated. Yet disabled miners were involved more proactively in industrial politics, sometimes independently of trade unions, which might not always sympathise with their cause. Breaking terms of employment to escape unhealthy or dangerous collieries, seeking to supply shortages of labour during strikes, challenging colliery doctors, or fighting for compensation in the courtroom were all means by which disabled miners asserted themselves politically during this period. While this book has opened up new perspectives on disability in Britain’s coalfields, it points to the
communities and, as such, became an important organising principle as trade unions and the broader labour movement fashioned industrial relations campaigns and political strategies to deal with the issues that arose. Similarly, in the working-class literature of the twentieth century, class, industrial politics and disability are represented as intimately related. Histories of coalfield societies have tended to focus on political and industrial radicalism, but, arguably, a more radical historiography can derive from work that looks at the confluence of forces and discourses
, objectivity, newsreels, audience response, film as social and cultural comment. Reading around the subject Once again this will depend on the particular focus of the work, but a general introduction to the subject could include reading up on trade unionism in Britain in the twentieth century. Useful work could include: Sources: John McIlroy, Nina Fishman and Alan Campbell, The High Tide of British Trade Unionism?: Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, 1964–79. Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism. Barber.indd 84 3/2/2015 4:14:33 PM FORMULATING RESEARCH
, street protests against the means test were not as common as elsewhere. Marching and demonstrating against the means test was more likely to occur where a tradition of collective action existed that could be called upon. This was especially true of the working class in south Wales, where from the 1910s until 1926 militant industrial politics characterised the coalfield. However, the case of south Wales also shows the importance of other factors in allowing for mass action against the means test; while the SWMF may have led the working class in their militant struggle
be posed. Given the very real limitations of administrative capacities in a pre-industrial political context, a state’s abilities to rule bureaucratically over a large territory and population depended on encouraging positive relations between centre and locale. No political centre could command the coercive resources to impose constantly its will on its subjects. To be successful, a state had instead to offer some persuasive vision of good rule and implement policies that at least some of the time came close to achieving stated intentions. Local welfare needs