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This is a major re-evaluation of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike, which was a central event in Britain's recent economic, industrial and political history, and the first book to show the pivotal and distinctive nature of the strike in Scotland. The book's particular strengths address the limits of current understanding of the meaning and character of the strike. It: • focuses on colliery-and community-level factors in shaping and sustaining the strike, which tends to be understood in overly narrow high political terms; • examines Scottish developments, which were central to the outbreak and longevity of the strike against closures; • demonstrates that the strike was a popular and socially-embedded phenomenon, with limited connection to the ‘Scargill versus Thatcher’ dispute of historical legend and much political literature; • explores the moral economy of the coalfields, and how this shaped attitudes to coal closures and the strike • provides immediate and highly engaging history from below perspectives on society and politics in the 1980s, using interviews with strike participants.
1 Collieries, communities and coalfield politics The National Coal Board operated sixteen collieries in Scotland in October 1982, employing between 16,000 and 17,000 miners. These are listed in Table 1.1. Four closed in the ten months that followed: Kinneil, Cardowan, Highhouse and Sorn. The twelve that remained were therefore mainly young. Seven – Seafield, Bogside, Castlehill, Solsgirth, Monktonhall, Bilston Glen and Killoch – had been established since the nationalisation of coal in 1947. Excepting Polkemmet, these were the seven largest employers in the
Midlothian strikers on Thursday 7 March, but the Longannet complex and Comrie strikers did not return until Monday 11 March. Miners at Polmaise stayed out for one more week.1 This chapter analyses this ending, and examines its immediate aftermath. The emphasis in this book on the primacy of community and colliery factors is restated: local contingencies, as Chapter 4 demonstrated, were important in extending the strike into 1985; and there were distinctive pit-level experiences after the strike, although there was a common tendency across the Scottish coalfields to greater
Disability and work in the coal economy 23 1 DISABILITY AND WORK IN THE COAL ECONOMY Thomas Burt’s early memories of mining were haunted by the sight of the mutilated bodies of his fellow workers. Remembering his work as a teenage pony putter in the 1850s, responsible for moving coal underground at Murton Colliery, County Durham, Burt recalled that ‘everywhere, below ground and above, dangers stood thick’. Compounded by the ‘rush and recklessness’ of workers there, these dangers meant accidents were common. ‘Never’, he wrote in his autobiography published
at night, so there was a tendency for fewer – and more shoddy – repairs, making travelling underground more dangerous and difficult. Consequently, breakdowns that limited output could become numerous. The older the colliery, the greater these problems often loomed. A local coroner, reporting on an inquest at the county hospital in March 1911, suggested that, among other threats to miners’ safety in the pit, the Agreement caused undesirable and potentially very dangerous haste among miners at the end of their shifts. As well as these problems, some sceptical lodge
, jobs, ‘the people’s coal’ – had been attacked. It is significant too that McGahey, from the beginning of the strike, was talking proudly about the central role of women. The strike was in defence of collieries, but it was also, as McGahey and many others emphasised repeatedly, about protecting the communities and all of the people – men, women and children – that relied on the industry. The relationship between community and industry in the Scottish coalfields was, however, far from straightforward. It had been loosened by the restructuring outlined in Chapter 1
should we do the same with the labour disabled people have performed.4 Rather than judging disabled people’s relationship with work in the past simply in terms of their ‘inclusion’ or ‘exclusion’, we need to pay attention to the meanings and value of their work within particular occupational or familial contexts. Accounts of seriously injured miners returning to work are appealing because they show the economic productivity of disabled people in the past. Yet this does not mean collieries, or pit villages, were free of prejudice, or that it 202 DISABILITY IN THE
their respective trade union, was far more mundane: to meet the lodge secretary, to discuss the particular circumstances of their case and for the lodge secretary to seek an adjustment to working conditions or some form of compensation from the manager at the particular colliery. These local, personal relationships with a lodge undersecretary are represented in a novel by Jack Lawson (who would become MP for Chesterle-Street from 1919 to 1949) in Under the Wheels (1934). Jabez Sill, the secretary, is a paternal, even quasi-religious figure (referred to as ‘the new
world’s first industrial suburb, with workers’ housing built in close proximity to the cotton mills of McConnel & Kennedy and the Murray Brothers, it was coal from Bradford Colliery, established in the early seventeenth century, which powered the machinery in those mills. The Ashton Canal, completed in 1797, and the Beswick and Ardwick branch railway lines which followed, ensured further industrialisation of the area: Beswick Goods Station, for example, meant that an ironworks established in the mid nineteenth century by Richard Johnson & Brother (later Richard