The General Strike of 1926 and the long lockout in the coal industry that continued for the rest of that year cast a long shadow in twentieth-century British political and industrial history and have fascinated historians for a whole range of reasons ever since. But while the General Strike has received less attention in recent years, work on the lockout continues apace. A volume of essays edited by John McIlroy, Alan Campbell, and Keith Gildart on the mining lockout (Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout: The Struggle for Dignity [Cardiff, 2004]) and a recently published monograph on the gender and social history of the strike and lockout in south Wales by Sue Bruley (The Women and Men of 1926: A Gender and Social History of the General Strike and Miners’ Lockout in South Wales [Cardiff, 2010]) demonstrate the continued interest in the events of that year and their wider significance for labor historians. In fact, few industrial disputes have received nearly as much attention as the miners’ lockout of 1926.

To this historiography is now added a fine monograph by Hester Barron. Barron’s study is concerned with events of that year in the Durham coalfield and, as such, constitutes, with Bruley’s new study of south Wales, one of the few instances of a book-length study of a single coalfield during the lockout. Barron aims in this volume to assess the reasons for the solidarity evident in the Durham coalfield, despite the many countervailing pressures that would have worked to undermine such solidarity and divide the miners and their families from each other. She does so through the use of the idea of “community,” which, as she demonstrates, is a concept with a long pedigree in the study of miners, though one that has divided practitioners and presented certain conceptual problems. In a series of discrete chapters on class and region, political and union loyalties, the attitudes of women, religious identities, and the influence of education, Barron very skillfully explores the many forces that contributed to, and acted against, the creation of identities and consciousness in the coalfield and the ways in which these identities and consciousness informed or militated against solidarity, cohesion, and union discipline in the lockout. These substantive chapters are based on extensive primary research, are lucidly written, and make for absorbing reading.

Barron’s findings are nuanced and stimulating, and they offer a fascinating contribution to work on the extent of social cohesion in mining communities and its effects on the unity or fragmentation of the labor movement in those locations. She finds, for example, that Durham miners had a strong commitment to an occupational rather than any simple class identity, that local and regional identities were more powerful than national considerations, that the political loyalties of the Durham miners were varied and often conflictual, that their religious affiliations were strong and meaningful, and that experiences of the lockout and, interestingly, responses to blacklegs were gendered. Furthermore, in her chapters on religion and education, Barron addresses issues that have not received a great deal of attention, at least recently, in accounts of social cohesion and industrial militancy in coalfield communities nor indeed at all in histories of the lockout. And yet her analyses of their importance show that they deserve serious attention from historians of the miners and the broader labor movement. In the material on religious identities in the coalfield, for example, Barron engages with a number of older works on Methodism and the working class and religion in the Durham coalfield, and she offers a revisionist account that recognizes the importance and strength of religious identity but concludes that such identity did not dampen class consciousness or loyalty to the union and that Methodism adapted its tradition and culture to the pit villages in which it operated. Similarly, the chapter on education is perhaps unexpected in a study of 1926 but offers an interesting contribution to the field. Intended to explore the extent to which education created an alternative sense of community that might have been at odds to the occupational community created and fostered through other means, it is perhaps the least successful of the substantive arguments but nevertheless demonstrates that this is an important question to ask and for which to seek answers.

The main conclusion to derive from Barron’s exemplary study is that historians need to be wary of positing uncritical accounts of the solidarity and militancy of miners. A certain heterogeneity of experience and outlook needs to be recognized, and the divisions that separated the inhabitants of coalfield communities require attention, but, what is perhaps most interesting, such internal divisions and differences were nevertheless overshadowed by the strength of commitment to the miners’ union, the Durham Miners’ Association. Other identities or senses of community were evident in Durham in 1926, but these could not compete with the overwhelming power of an occupational community that dominated the social life of the pit villages and that sought expression and advancement through the union. As Barron comments, “Rather than the ideal type of mining community being one in which a homogenous occupational identity existed to the exclusion of all others, it seems that the essence of community lay in its ability to subsume and integrate other categories of identity” (271). As she shows, fewer men returned to work before the end of the lockout than in any other coalfield, and, while the South Wales and Scottish coalfields had a reputation for greater militancy, it was Durham, perhaps, that was characterized by the greater level of cohesion, partly as a result of the moderate nature of the Miners’ Association but also because of the power of a definition of community that was founded on specific local, regional, occupational, political, and gender identities and was able to transcend variations in such identities. The extent to which such cohesion and solidarity were dependent on the very specific circumstances of 1926 is unclear, and further studies might consider whether or not such solidarity existed at other times in the history of the Durham coalminers. Nevertheless, this is an insightful, fascinating study that deserves a wide readership.