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2019

Danger, disaster and the loss of life are emblematic features of Britain’s cultural memory of coal mining. Netflix’s hit series, The Crown, prominently reinforced these motifs through its recent portrayal of the 1966 Aberfan disaster in South Wales. Collective traumas arising from major mining disasters and efforts on the part of trade unionists, politicians, and industry officials to improve health and safety conditions have featured prominently in British coal mining’s extensive historiography. Less has been written about the experience of disabled miners and former miners, and their place in coalfield societies. Men disabled through coal mining were a concentrated and visible presence in the early years of the 20th century, when the coal industry reached its peak, employing around one in 10 occupied men. Their conditions were the subject of politicising efforts by trade unions and became enmeshed in both complex tripartite systems of compensation, as well as structures of authori...

2016

The contents of the statistical compendium derive from a variety of sources utilised in the course of the research, including official Parliamentary papers, published works, annual reports, Poor Law records, trade union materials, employers' associations' documents, and other sources. They are intended as a snapshot of disability and as illustrative examples of the various ways in which impairment was experienced, understood and responded to in different contexts in the period concerned. General 1.1 Coal production and employment, 1853 to 1952. 1.2 The Scale of Coalmining in the Mid-Victorian period. 1.3 Number of persons employed in and about coal mines, 1882-1948; United Kingdom and particular coalfields. 1.4 Annual production of coal (thousands of tons), 1882-1948, United Kingdom and particular coalfields. Accidents United Kingdom 2.1 Summary of returns made by Clerks of the Peace of Coroners Inquests concerning people who had met with 'untimely deaths in the Mines of England and Wales' since 1810 (1835). 2.2 Causes of Death January 1851 to December 1859 in coal-pits, derived from Mine Inspector Reports. 2.3 Number of Persons Killed and Injured and Number of Persons Employed at Mines under the Coal Mines Acts, in Great Britain and Ireland, during the years 1904 to 1908, 1910 to 1918 and 1920 to 1925, so far as particulars are available. 2.4 Fatal accidents reported under Coal Mines Regulation Acts, United Kingdom, 1875 to 1947.

The Scottish Historical Review, 2017

This article connects with and builds on recent research on workmen's compensation and disability focussing on the Scottish coalfields between the wars. It draws upon a range of primary sources including coal company accident books, court cases and trade union records to analyse efforts to define and redefine disability, examining the language deployed and the agency of workers and their advocates. It is argued here that the workmen's compensation system associated disability with restricted functionality relating to work tasks and work environments. Disability became more visible and more closely monitored and this was a notably contested and adversarial terrain in Scotland in the Depression, where employers, workers and their collective organisations increasingly deployed medical expertise to support their cases regarding working and disabled bodies. In Scotland, the miners' trade unions emerged as key advocates for the disabled.

Cultural and Social History, 2015

This article considers the effects of work in the south Wales coal industry either side of the turn of the twentieth century and, specifically, the ways in which work aged workers prematurely. It examines the consequences of working practices for miners' bodies, the expedients utilized by miners to try and cope with the effects of premature ageing, and the consequences for their living standards, experiences and status. It situates these phenomena in the contexts of industrial relations and welfare provision. In so doing, the article engages with historiographies of the life-cycle, the aged, and pensions provision in modern Britain.

Disability in industrial Britain, 2020

History, 2017

Labour / Le Travail, 1987

Press 1985). LES SOLDA TS DE L 'ABIME, a race apart, the purest proletarians: today one could write a large book on the images of coal miners in fiction, in journalism, and in historiography. Distinctive mining mythologies have developed in each country, yet on closer inspection they follow international patterns dictated by the fairly similar pattern of coal's rise and decline in most of the western capitalist economies. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early-to-mid twentieth century, coal miners and mining communities were thought to stand outside bourgeois conventions: one could look upon them with loathing and fear (as many middle-class interpreters did) or with profound admiration (as did many socialists, who saw in them the living fulfillment of Marx's concept of the revolutionary proletariat), or, not uncommonly, with a mixture of the two (as in Zola, who saw them as both heroically enduring and fatally brutalized by their unique working environment). Then, from the time of coal's gradual eclipse in the twentieth century by hydroelectricity, nuclear power, and oil, the coal miners suddenly seemed like people from the past, and their struggles, now so often against nationalized coal industries and public boards, could be presented as Luddite attempts to block technological progress or wanton attacks on "the general public." From being the central figures of national labour history, they were shunted into their own little ghetto: in France, in Canada, in the United States, and even (although here the rebellion against this 'shunting' has been vigorous indeed) in Britain. They have shrunk in numbers, and correspondingly in historical stature. We used to know exactly what it was about coal miners that gave them such prominence in labour history: it was their isolation as a "homogeneous" mass, which predisposed them to mount massive and sustained strug

It is a commonplace of labour history that a lengthy industrial dispute necessarily involved highly committed strikers. After all, long-running strikes, it is averred, invariably brought hardship and suffering in their wake. That strikers were willing to endure such assaults on their well-being, often for many months, has generally been interpreted as an indication of their fortitude. However, this accepted wisdom has been called into question by Steven Thompson in a thought-provoking study of the 1926 miners’ lockout in South Wales. The lockout lasted a full seven months and has long been accepted as a classic example of working-class tenacity in the face of immense suffering and hardship. Historians of the dispute have been content enough to rely on journalistic accounts of hungry, malnourished strikers and their dependants. But according to Thompson, the lockout, far from generating ill-health and premature death, should properly be understood as bringing about an improvement in the well-being of the population. The implications of Steven Thompson’s re-evaluation of the impact of the 1926 lockout on the health and well-being of the coalfield population extend far beyond the confines of that particular dispute. His argument could be read as a gentle yet telling criticism of exponents of the ‘new’ labour history project that flourished in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Others have taken labour historians to task for a perceived tendency to over-romanticize the objects of their study. Had they done the same with starving strikers? Thompson suggests that in the case of the 1926 dispute in Wales historians had accepted, too uncritically, tales of starvation deaths and suffering. But might they have been guilty of doing so in other disputes? How much faith should we have in claims that strikers ‘were starved – literally starved – back to work’? For if death rates fell in 1926 notwithstanding newspaper claims of widespread destitution, might they not have also fallen during other lengthy stoppages? Were there other ‘healthy strikes’? This paper ponders some of these more general questions through a consideration of the events that unfolded during another South Wales dispute – the great ‘Coal War’ of 1898.

Labor History, 2015

This article examines British coal owners' use of scientific knowledge of occupational lung diseases in the mining industry to resist regulatory changes between 1918 and 1946. It explores the strategies deployed by coal owners in response to debates over the hazard to workers' health presented by dust, and legislation to compensate miners for pneumoconiosis and silicosis contracted in the nation's collieries. It investigates coal owner deployment of the views of notable scientists, especially the eminent physiologist John Scott Haldane (1860-1936), who insisted on the harmlessness of coal dust, in order to avoid costly compensation payments, as well as capital investment in ameliorative measures to reduce miners' exposure to such hazards. The article provides new insights by illustrating how coal owners influenced mining education programmes, deploying the arguments of Haldane and others, with direct implications for health and safety in British mines. This contributed to the mounting public health disaster wrought by coal dust on Britain's mining communities. The process is viewed as part of the broader political activities of the coal owners-and their industry body, the Mining Association of Great Britain (MAGB)-in its attempts to influence the regulatory process in period of dramatic change in the political economy of coal.