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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.
was a rare voice in calling for official intervention to improve the health and well-being of colliers in ways that tackled their propensity to chronic disease in addition to their susceptibility to accidents.56 However, if policymakers were unwilling to introduce medical surveillance of miners, at a local level colliers came into contact with medical services in a variety of ways. The remainder of this chapter examines relationships between doctors and coalminers within coalfield communities and asks what medical treatments were available to those who worked in the
-1947 restructuring to the reconfiguration of Scottish coalfield communities and industrial politics in the 1960s and the 1970s, which encompassed support from the miners for political devolution in Scotland. It then examines the manner in which Thatcherite analyses of political economy, trade unionism and the coal industry subsequently developed and exerted additional pressures on Scotland’s surviving collieries. Collieries, communities and coalfield politics 23 Industrial and social restructuring Longer historical explorations of coalfield industrial politics in
first chapter, they were also manifest in the two other important spheres of life: home and community. This study has regarded the home as a workplace (mainly of unpaid women servicing industrial workers), while coal historiography since the late 1990s has brought into focus the importance of home and community as spaces in the constitution of social relations in coalfield communities.5 The home, in particular, with its gendered divisions of labour and family roles, is a key location in which to address the intersection of male disability and gender. It is also the
industry posed the same variety or severity of risks to its workers or generated as large a number of disabled individuals on a daily basis. No other industry was required to organise itself to quite the same degree to respond to the lives and fates of people impaired in its ordinary functions. No other industry left such a legacy of ill-health, impairment and chronic sickness during the twentieth century. Former coalfield communities across Britain continue to suffer the legacy of nineteenth- and twentieth-century coal capitalism and continue to face high levels of
injured mineworkers reside and what type of assistance was given? What, moreover, were the expectations of welfare claimants and providers in coalfield communities? And how did these expectations shape the experiences of disabled miners? To answer these questions, this chapter examines mineworkers’ experiences of the different strands – domestic, public and voluntary – that constituted the patchwork of care and assistance available to them. While the chapter examines each of these dimensions of welfare in turn, it is important to recognise their interdependence
all to see in coal communities in the maimed bodies of survivors. While walking down a busy street in mid-century Merthyr Tydfil, the Morning Chronicle’s correspondent observed that there were ‘more men with wooden legs than are to be found in any town in the kingdom having four times its population’ – a consequence of the great ‘number of accidents in the works below and above ground resulting in amputation’.9 How were people with impairments viewed in coalfield communities; how did they regard themselves; and what social roles did they play? This chapter examines
This book examines the impact that nostalgia has had on the Labour Party’s political development since 1951. In contrast to existing studies that have emphasised the role played by modernity, it argues that nostalgia has defined Labour’s identity and determined the party’s trajectory over time. It outlines how Labour, at both an elite and a grassroots level, has been and remains heavily influenced by a nostalgic commitment to an era of heroic male industrial working-class struggle. This commitment has hindered policy discussion, determined the form that the modernisation process has taken and shaped internal conflict and cohesion. More broadly, Labour’s emotional attachment to the past has made it difficult for the party to adjust to the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in Britain. In short, nostalgia has frequently left the party out of touch with the modern world. In this way, this book offers an assessment of Labour’s failures to adapt to the changing nature and demands of post-war Britain.
were accepted as daily occurrences.10 We examine responses to and experiences of disability in a formative period of industrial expansion – the so-called ‘classical’ phase of the Industrial Revolution. These responses and experiences, as we will see, played out and were shaped in coalfield communities that celebrated social solidarity on the one hand and individual self-reliance on the other. Beginning in 1780, just before the expansion of the Great Northern Coalfield in north-east England, the book addresses the processes of industrialisation related to coalmining
-existent, given the tacit assumption that coalfield disability was an occupational issue, and women were legally banned from working in the pits from 1842. Yet the category of ‘work’ in the coalfields needs to be expanded to include the unpaid but no less arduous work generally done by women in the home, as well as the labour of care. Women’s labour was equally dangerous and exhausting, and disabling INTRO DU C TIO N 7 injuries were common among miners’ wives. Relatedly, congenital impairment has largely been ignored in coalfield communities and such disabilities, whether