Looking out over the steel-shuttered and graffiti-daubed abandoned houses in his colliery village in 1999, former miner and National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) official Alex Mills addressed the subject of the “plague”—of unemployment and drug addiction—infecting his streets. To end our interview, he raised himself up to deliver a passionate indictment of the “class struggle perpetrated by Thatcher, carried on by Major,” that visited desolation on erstwhile mining villages such as his own. “At present, we have a generation of zombies,” Mills declared. “These are Thatcher's children.”Footnote 1 In 2004, on the other side of the former Scottish coalfields, an interview with former miner and subsequent deputy mine manager Bill Marshall culminated in an equally bleak outlook regarding the state of former mining communities. Like Mills, Marshall felt a sense of bereavement at the contraction of the industry in Scotland that was palpable. After recounting his physical prowess as a young miner and reflecting on the intrinsic pit skills of mineworkers, he moved on to the effects of pit closures on the very communities in which he had grown up. These were captured in his poignant description of visiting the nearby mining town where he was raised: “I was in Cowdenbeath the other day, saw old miners I kent: Broken men … ye ken?”Footnote 2
The narratives of both of these respondents captured the differences in their geographical locations, political outlooks, personal life histories, and career paths. However, they also featured many similar and redolent themes, not least in relation to the legacy of decline in the coalfields. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the scale of economic and social depression in the Scottish coalfields as summarized in an evaluation of regeneration activities by EKOS, a private sector research consultancy, in 2004:
Despite the passage of time since the pit closures, and some recent signs of economic recovery in coalfield communities, the economic base in these areas remains narrow, fragile, and susceptible to the worst effects of the current recession. Deprivation in Scotland is still disproportionately concentrated in coalfield communities, with particular inequalities evident in relation to income, employment, and skills … The evidence strongly suggests that the demise of the coal industry stills casts a long shadow over many communities …Footnote 3
The general picture that emerges from the report, as well as other major Scottish social data compendia, is of communities that remain among the most deprived in Scotland. The Coalfields Regeneration Trust provided an equally dismal outlook in their most recent report. What is more, the situation appears to be further degenerating in areas that had previously appeared to have better sustained the fallout of deindustrialization like the Lothians. With a few exceptions, former coal-mining communities have experienced more than average outward migration since the early 1980s. In some areas, such as that in which Mills' resides, it has been more than double that of the Scottish national average. Deprivation levels, as measured through the Scottish multiple deprivation index, welfare claimant numbers, poor educational-attainment, and rates of unemployment, are also manifestly higher in former coalfield than in non-coalfield areas, with one-third of former coalfield communities amongst the twenty per cent most impoverished in Scotland. Figures for Ayrshire, and the former Central and Fife coalfields, are almost double those of non-coalfield areas. In particular, the EKOS report (completed twenty years after the closure of the bulk of the remaining deep coal mines in Scotland) identified the deep cultural, as well as socioeconomic, scars left by the contraction of the industry.Footnote 4 Epidemiologists and public health scholars exploring health inequalities between Scotland and other parts of the UK have also suggested that the profound “psychological and cultural scars” associated with the mine closures are an explanatory factor.Footnote 5
This article addresses Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott's challenge to move “beyond the body counts” by examining the cultural and social inheritance of the contraction and final demise of deep coal mining in Scotland.Footnote 6 As Marie Johoda, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel observed in their path-breaking 1938 study of unemployment in the Austrian textile town of Marienthal, “When we try to formulate more exactly the psychological effects of unemployment, we lose the full, poignant, emotional feeling that this word brings to people.”Footnote 7 This is specifically explored in relation to the interplay between personal testimonies and collective narratives. In particular, it draws on earlier work by oral historians Alistair Thomson and Penny Summerfield, who deployed the concept of the “cultural circuit”—which they defined as a symbiosis between the life histories of their respondents and collective narratives.Footnote 8 Central to the approach of this paper is the use of oral testimony from former miners and managers alongside exploration of national narratives. The importance of this approach is underlined by the prevailing psychological and deep cultural scars of deindustrialization, enabling a better understanding of cultural, social, and political change in modern Scotland, including the collapse of support for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, and greater ambivalence to the political-constitutional unity of Britain.
A few observations and incidents illustrate just how significant and contested as a live political issue the legacy of industrial closures continues to be. In the run-up to both the UK and Scottish Parliamentary elections in 2010 and 2011, respectively, both Conservative and Labour parties used the site of the former British Steel strip mill at Ravenscraig in Lanarkshire to launch their campaigns: the Conservatives mounting a political platform that promoted a new enterprise culture that they claimed had saved Scotland from state dependency, while Labour deployed the bogey figure of Margaret Thatcher to “remind” voters of the effects on Scotland of the last period of Conservative rule.Footnote 9 The Scots-born-and-bred Conservative Member of Parliament and UK government minister Michael Gove has observed of the collective narrative of industrial decline during the years of the Thatcher administration that
All this played to a particular part of the Scots psyche, what I call, but no one else does, the “Letter from America ideology,” where distant figures seek to impose an alien ideology—often a free market one—on Scotland. Whether this was the Hanoverian monarchs, the Highland Clearances, or “Lochaber no more,” there was a pre-existing narrative into which Mrs. Thatcher was unwittingly slotted.Footnote 10
Gove's comment is a rhetorical device designed to challenge anti-Thatcherite narratives (by suggesting that they were ill-founded) and to restate a New Right case for Scotland, but it is nevertheless correct in stating that deindustrialization occupies a prominent place in the Scottish national narrative.Footnote 11 Among the most prominent of these “sites of memory” are Scotland's mining communities.Footnote 12
This article acknowledges that the deindustrialization narrative has blurred temporal events but argues that the narrative does accurately capture the very real and bitter experiences of individuals and communities. If Thatcher herself was not anti-Scottish, as popular narratives sometimes suggest, her assaults on public sector employment were more acutely felt in a Scottish economy proportionately far more reliant on those jobs than England's, even at the managerial level. Her actions had a major impact on coal, publicly owned from 1947 until privatization in 1994.Footnote 13 One of her government's key policies was privatization of publicly owned industries and services. This was at odds with Scottish public opinion; a poll in 1983 revealed only twenty-five percent of Scots favored greater privatization, compared to British averages of forty-four percent. The effects of Thatcherism on the Scottish economy saw a further disavowal of privatization, with just twenty-one percent of Scots surveyed in 1989 supporting the privileging of “private interests and a free market economy,” while an overwhelming seventy-one percent of those polled declared their preference for “public interests and a more managed economy.”Footnote 14 In Scotland, at any rate, there was a majority rejection of the political economic agenda of Thatcherism. This underlined, and was articulated in, growing popular support for devolution, which was consolidated in the coalfields by the Thatcher government's approach in the strike of 1984–1985. This included vilifying communities and criminalizing miners engaged largely in peaceful picketing, which, in turn, inculcated a deep-seated hatred.Footnote 15 Thus, if these narratives appear visceral, it is because they reflect the emotions of those trying to come to terms with the legacies of these changes on themselves as individuals and on their communities. They also reflect the very real socioeconomic hardships visited upon individuals and entire segments of Scottish society in the form of long-term unemployment, deprivation, the loss of family and friends through migration, and even criminalization. Alongside these national narratives, then, is an exploration of life histories, chiefly in the form of oral histories, as a means of understanding how social actors make sense of change, and “compose” and “recompose” their life narratives in response to it. “The importance of oral history,” Alessandro Portelli observed,
… may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge. Therefore, there are no “false” oral sources. Once we have checked their factual credibility with all the established criteria of philological criticism and factual verification which are required of all types of sources anyway, the diversity of oral history consists in the fact that “wrong” statements are still psychologically “true,” and that this truth may be equally as important as factually reliable accounts.Footnote 16
Oral histories, therefore, “tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did.”Footnote 17 Aside from its interpretive value, oral history equates to “more history,” as Michael Frisch and Joanna Bornat have put it, offering insights to events that might otherwise not be captured, through “eye witness accounts and the memories of people who might otherwise be ignored or overlooked.”Footnote 18 As the chief proponents of oral history have intended it to be, it acts to “democratize” and open up history. It also offers an insight into the “sociological imagination,” helping us to understand both the individual and, through and alongside them, the history of a society.Footnote 19
The personal testimonies in this article capture a sense of loss, not just of employment, but of workplace networks, occupational culture, and status. While these narratives are distinctive to Scotland and to mining communities, they also cross national boundaries, evincing the cultural experience of deindustrialization globally. As Steven High and David Lewis observe of the death of a Michigan car plant, “The story unfolding outside the gate at Dodge Main has been repeated in towns and cities across North America; we live in a “post-industrial” age, or so we are told. Mill and factory work no longer defines North American society, and it is fast losing its saliency at the regional and local levels.”Footnote 20 Similarly, the “corrosion of character,” as Richard Sennett put it, arising from the degradation and loss of work and meaning, has been reflected in Scotland nationally. This was evoked by the Scottish political journalist and commentator Neal Ascherson in a personal account of his travels across the country campaigning for the “yes” camp in the run-up to the 1997 vote on devolution for Scotland. Reflecting back on 1980s Scotland, Ascherson wrote, “Scotland's industrial landscape also became archaeology … These ways of working had long ago become part of Scotland's self-definition. Now a third identity question was added to ‘When was Scotland?’ and ‘Who are we?’ It was ‘What do Scots do?’”Footnote 21
These personal narratives also capture a sense of both “critical” and “simple” nostalgia—on the one hand, exhibiting the familiar mining motifs of loss and struggle as well as celebrating occupational culture; while on the other, overlooking profound gender and religious divisions that could exist within the coalfields—and ambivalence that are familiar in many accounts of workplace closure.Footnote 22
The “Wealth of a Nation”: Assembling and Disassembling the Industrial Nation
At the beginning of the twentieth century, coal was at the heart of Scotland's industrial complex. By 1913, 147,500 (about ten percent of the total Scottish workforce and about thirteen percent more than the British average) worked in coal mining. Even given the sluggish recovery of Scotland from the economic depression of the interwar years, by 1939, ninety thousand coal miners were employed at Scottish collieries (still about ten percent of the workforce). Like shipbuilding and engineering, coal mining was highly significant culturally, as well as socially and economically.Footnote 23 The notion of Scotland as an “industrial nation,” and equally a male occupational culture as epitomized by the heavy industrial mainstays, was promoted by and captured in the commercial press, middle-brow literature, national events (in particular, the Empire Exhibition of 1938, held in Glasgow), and films. On the back of the 1938 Empire Exhibition (at the behest of the secretary of state for Scotland, Walter Elliot), Films of Scotland was set up to produce “optimistic” films to promote Scottish industry and society. The first of this collection of films, Wealth of a Nation (released in 1938) received 4,472 showings and was watched by some 22.5 million people across Britain. Notwithstanding Wealth of a Nation's modernist message of planned improvement and new industries, it placed the heavy industrial mainstays—particularly coal, iron, steel and shipbuilding—at the heart of the nation. Wealth of the Nation also made an explicit link between the occupational status of male workers in these industries and the household economy. Over the decades that followed, notably under the direction of left-wing filmmaker John Grierson, Films of Scotland produced more than 160 films, many of them on industry and work. Taken individually and collectively—both at home and abroad—these films served to further reinforce the economic, social, and cultural significance of heavy industry to Scotland. As John Foster has observed, Grierson was the filmmaker most responsible for selling Scottish industry and, consequently, the notion of Scotland as an “industrial nation.”Footnote 24 As such, the idea of the industrial male worker, including the miner, as a symbol of the Scottish nation was firmly embedded in the popular cultural consciousness, reinforcing an industrial DNA of sorts for Scotland.
The Contraction of “King Coal” in Scotland
When Britain's coal mines were nationalized in 1947, Scotland's coal industry employed around 81,000 workers at 206 collieries. A sense of optimism for the industry's future was espoused by Dr. William Reid, chairman of the Scottish Division of the National Coal Board (NCB), in 1953, when he observed, “Scotland's coal reserves are recognized to be second in importance only to those of Yorkshire and the East Midlands [original emphasis], and from this it may be confidently adduced that Scotland's place in the mining future of this country [by which Reid meant Britain] is an assured one.”Footnote 25 This optimism was to be short-lived. By the late 1960s, the industry had shed around 60,000 jobs. Some of the closures, particularly in the Lanarkshire coalfield, had been anticipated in the Scottish coalfields report of 1944. Others arose as a direct consequence of the failure of several large new developments and reconstructions, the changing energy mix, and concentration of production on fully mechanized faces (power-loading). While the move to fully mechanized faces did not wholly deskill miners—rather, it changed some skills and morphed others—concentration on power-loaded faces and the imposition of centrally devised targets (based on formulaic calculations that took no account of local geological conditions) both shrunk jobs in the industry and hastened the closure of some pits. Moreover, it reduced the agency and, to some extent, negated the skills and knowledge of local managers, as well as miners. It further fetishized their labor as a commodity and diminished their techne (their intellect and skill) in the process of technological transformation.Footnote 26 This was exacerbated by a political assault on the industry by politicians of both parties, signaling their preference for oil, and then nuclear power, over coal. This was enshrined with the publication of Fuel Policy, the UK's first energy white paper in 1967 by Harold Wilson's Labour government. The numerical peak of these closures was between the mid-1950s and 1964, when over one-third of the jobs were lost. A further 14,000 jobs were lost between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. What remained of the industry was subject to stringent and far-reaching cuts over the next twenty years, with Scotland's last deep coal mine closing in 2002. Scotland (like South Wales and Durham and Northumberland in the North East of England) had become, in the words of the NCB, an “export division,” transferring human capital (rather than coal) to other parts of the British coalfields.Footnote 27
The NCB sought to present this reorganization in optimistic terms, but the realities were very different. One example of the mismatch between NCB rhetoric and reality was seen in the contraction of the older Lanarkshire coalfield in the late 1940s and the refocusing of operations on newer coalfields. The NCB's 1949 Mining Review film Replanning a Coalfield focused on the negotiations to close sixteen collieries in Lanarkshire, dwelling in particular on collieries around Shotts, and the transfer of miners from those sites to collieries in Fife, such as Wellesley and the new Rothes, which were deemed to have a long-term future. The film depicts this process as being essentially democratic and a victory for planning (overcoming objections by working with the NUM), and the seamless advance to a land of plenty. Concurrently, a team of sociologists at the University of Edinburgh was studying the transfer schemes from this part of the Lanarkshire coalfield. Their findings, published in 1953, presented a very different picture. Many of those transferred returned, citing as their reasons a sense of dislocation from established workplace and wider social networks; different workplace skills and environment; and broader cultural differences between Fife and Lanarkshire. The report also noted the deleterious effect of these closures on the social life of the mining villages affected. Furthermore, the NCB's assurances about the economic sustainability of the jobs were to be glaringly exposed with the closure of the Rothes in 1962, and Wellesley in 1967. In particular, the closure of the Rothes, a new “superpit” designed to be part of the future for the industry in Scotland, delivered a significant blow to the remaining aspirations for the Scottish coalfields.Footnote 28 While later NCB Mining Reviews, such as A Story from South Wales (1963), treated the subject of closures and transfers with more care, they still largely overlooked the real resentment and resistance growing in the British coalfields (especially Durham, Cumberland, Scotland, South Wales, and Northumberland) to the closure programs and centrally devised production targets. One example of local protest was The Blackhill Campaign made by amateur filmmaker Jack Parsons between 1958 and 1964 about the NCB's closure of Blackhill colliery in Northumberland, England. The film captures the profound effect that closures have in terms of dislocation, severing of workplace networks, and loss of familiarity with spaces of labor, as well as the effects on local pit communities, taking it beyond concerns about alternative employment.Footnote 29 By the early 1960s, those working in the industry in Scotland, and the public at large, were increasingly aware of the precarious future of the industry. Films of Scotland's Central Scotland (1962), for example, in which coal was relegated to being akin to an industrial relic within the Scottish economy, implicitly promoted this message.Footnote 30 For mining engineer Jack Morrow, the signs were clear: “The writing was on the wall. I was 35 years old. There were too many friends and colleagues I knew losing their jobs.” When Morrow left to join the steel industry in the mid-1960s, he found it “full of ex-miners.”Footnote 31
Dissent and Resistance in the Scottish Coalfields
By the early 1960s resentment over colliery closures, the imposition of fully mechanized faces (power-loading) and the introduction of targets devised at NCB headquarters in London, was boiling over in the Scottish coalfields. Speaking at a meeting in the Ayrshire coalfield in 1966, NUM Scottish Area (NUMSA) official Michael McGahey declared, “What we are experiencing is not the normal process of life of closing down exhausted pits, but the deliberate, premeditated murder of an industry at the hands of government and other big interests in this country.”Footnote 32 Closures, combined with the centralized mechanization drives and production targets, increased tensions between local colliery managers and their superiors, as well as miners and management. In a number of cases, colliery managers who refused or could not meet targets were replaced while, in a few cases, managers actually joined the campaigns to block colliery closures. At Glenochil Mine (Alloa)—hailed by the NCB as a significant reconstruction—the realities of geological problems and looming closure saw young miners express their frustration in acts of “vandalism,” as the local manager and union officials called it.Footnote 33 What emerged from these struggles in the 1960s and 1970s was the confluence of various sources of grassroots anger—degradation of skills, anomie, and disenfranchisement from decisions—with wider concerns about central direction of the economy from Westminster in light of the problems being faced by Scottish industry.
This coincided with the rise in civic nationalism. Under the leadership of William Wolfe (first as vice chairman and then, from 1969, chairman), the Scottish National Party (SNP) saw a greater proletarianization of the party machinery.Footnote 34 More important, though, was the changing outlook of the leadership of NUMSA on the issue of home rule. At a national level in Scotland from the 1960s, as Jim Phillips has noted, NUMSA “shaped” the adoption by the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) “of home rule as a political goal, and this was certainly connected to the worries aroused by the diminution of employment in the coalfields, which accelerated under the Labour government in the 1960s.”Footnote 35 This was supported by a number of prominent and influential NUMSA officials, notably McGahey, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Lawrence Daly, an ex-Communist on the Left of the Labour Party. In an impassioned indictment of the deindustrialization taking place in the Scottish coalfields, citing the example of his native central Fife coalfield and particularly Cowdenbeath (Bill Marshall's hometown and the subject of his lament), Daly observed in the New Left Review that Scotland “had her industrial ‘coffin’ before England and is now suffocating from the stench of economic obsolescence.”Footnote 36 Drawing on the rhetoric of the 1930s unemployed worker movement, he urged: “Scotland draw your sword—for you've drawn the dole long enough!” Daly's article, though wide-ranging in outlook, was clearly inspired by his indignation at what was happening in the Scottish coalfields. He heaped scorn on the NCB transfer schemes—which increasingly meant Scottish miners relocating to the newer English coalfields of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, not just other pits within Scotland—placing them within a longer collective trajectory of the Highlands clearances. The answer Daly proposed lay in “a Scottish Parliament,” which “could not only revitalize Scotland's economic and cultural life … it might well set the pace for the progressive social transformation of the rest of Britain,” especially if populated by “a majority of Labour and radical members.”Footnote 37 In essence, Daly was capturing the discontent in the coalfields, placing these within a broader collective narrative couched in “core vs. periphery” and “internal colonialism” discourses, predating arguments that would later foment over the “democratic deficit” of the Thatcher-Major years.Footnote 38 If arguments about “internal colonialism” were overstated, then critics of centralized planning from Westminster could point out that the role of Chief Economic Adviser and Scottish Economic Planning Department were not constituted until 1972 and 1973, respectively. Even with the formation of the Scottish Development Department—and despite separate legal and education systems, and being a home nation within the Union—most decisions on Scotland's economy until the early 1970s were taken in Whitehall, albeit with advice from Board of Trade officials at branch offices.Footnote 39 These only served to add weight to the fact that job losses were seen as the failures and insensitivities of a distant administration. In the mining industry, this was compounded by the productivity edicts issuing from the NCB's London headquarters, Hobart House, with little recognition of local conditions, often overruling and alienating local managers and miners alike. Similarly, these tensions over distant control were manifest in former NUM members' narratives in relation to the leadership of Joe Gormley (NUM national president, 1971–1982), and to a lesser extent, his successor, Arthur Scargill.Footnote 40 Feelings were further inflamed when Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath referred to Scotland's economy—in less than glowing terms: “a soup kitchen economy in a soup kitchen country.”Footnote 41 In March 1974, four Scottish Labour MPs, two of whom—Jim Sillars (representing South Ayrshire) and Alex Eadie (representing Midlothian, and one-time NUM delegate)—represented mining constituencies, pronounced themselves in support of an assembly for Scotland. Significantly, Sillars and Eadie had previously been vocal opponents of devolution. While mining constituencies at Westminster parliamentary elections continued to return Labour Party MPs, a different picture was emerging in results at the district level. In mining constituencies in Stirlingshire, West and Mid Lothian, in the Scottish district elections in 1974 and 1977, the Labour vote fragmented, with the SNP taking a significant portion of the working-class vote and, in some cases, council seats. This was mirrored in Ayrshire, with the newly formed, if short-lived, prodevolution Scottish Labour Party (SLP) taking much of the vote (and many of the council seats).Footnote 42 Disaggregated data for the Devolution referenda of 1979 and 1997 are not so comprehensive. However, in 1979, the regions covering many of the coalfields were the only areas of Scotland returning “decisive” victories in support of home rule.Footnote 43 Deindustrialization in the coalfields was developing from a local to a national issue, given the scale of closures, and the “moral economy” arguments about access to work and the management of collective resources registered more widely, especially after the election of Thatcher's government in 1979.
Genealogies of Coal: “A Different Breed”
That there was no homogeneity in mining communities or substance to the “archetypal proletarian,” as represented by the collier, has been well catalogued. If coal mining shared similar characteristics with other sectors (for example, shipbuilding, railways, and steel) in terms of socialization to the job and the challenges presented by the erosion of craft and status, it was, and continues to be, distinguished by certain distinctive occupational characteristics and narratives. The representation of miners as “a race apart” is redolent in many mining narratives. In Scotland, this was grounded in miners' legal status as serfs before 1799, as well as the nature of and distinctive risks involved in their work. This representation was reinforced by coalfield conflict and a history of geographical isolation.Footnote 44
The human impact of deindustrialization can be measured in the loss of workplace and community networks, as well as occupational status and esteem, resulting in a profound “corrosion of character.” These losses were deepened by the early socialization to mining as an occupation. For former NUMSA vice president and Stirlingshire miner Tommy Coulter, mining was inextricably intertwined with his family narrative:
Ma maternal and paternal grandparents were mine workers. Ma mother worked on the surface … when she was a young girl. Then she went to a different job after that but she did work on the pit top … [I l]eft school on the Friday, started on Saturday, because ma dad worked in the pit, and the procedure then was, yir dad got you a job.Footnote 45
As Ian Roberts and Tim Strangleman show in their work on shipbuilding and the railways, respectively, this family initiation was not restricted to coal mining. Like that of the shipbuilders in Roberts' Craft and Control, Coulter's testimony illustrates that recruitment through families served the purpose both of selecting candidates for the industry who were socialized into it, but also of maintaining discipline among the younger workers:
That was a two-fold thing, ah better explain that because ah was that found out, ah was quite an unruly boy ah must admit. And then when you put a lot of boys together you get a lot of unruly boys. Right? And eh? The fact that yer dad got you a job that was helping to support the household plus the fact, if the manager couldnae hold, fire, sort you out, he told yer dad. And so the pressure came on him and ma dad said tae me, “Ye' so and so that ye' are, ah've worked so many years in this pit never had nae bother until you started.” Psychologically, the manager would tell him and gie him a bad time and because when he spoke tae us…Footnote 46
Coulter's comments share much in common with those of a NUM official in a northern English (Durham) coalfield interviewed by Strangleman, reflecting both on the mining family and occupational socialization.Footnote 47
While the use of families and socialization as a labor management strategy was common in many industries, the distinctive underground work environs served to reinforce both the form and metaphors within mining narratives.Footnote 48 As Michael McGahey put it in an interview in the 1980s:
Well, o' course, the point aboot it is one must recognize the na'ure of the industry … Because they know and recognize they're in a struggle wi' Mother Nature, and she does nae give her treasures verra kindly. And in the struggle wi' Mother Nature they're dependent on one another …Footnote 49
In part, this reflected specific skills involved in being an underground worker, as Bill Marshall explained,
Now to compromise safety, the guys, I was talking about, working on top of a conveyor, they werenae stupid. They knew the dangers and eliminated them with their skills. The skill of their eyes, their hands, and to watch what was going on around them…It was just a culture, a feeling you have.Footnote 50
As Joy Parr notes perceptively,
Our bodies are the instruments through which we become aware of the world beyond our skin, the archives in which we store that knowledge and the laboratories in which we retool our senses and practices to changing circumstances. Bodies, in these senses, are historically malleable and contextually specific.Footnote 51
So the workplace environment of the coal mine shaped understanding, bodies, and memory in unique ways.
This environment acted to underline the sense of distinctive occupational culture, as well as of masculinity, as Alex Mills noted: “I was a coal miner and proud of it. A man's man, a miner's man.”Footnote 52 As Fife and Lanarkshire miner Carl Martin put it, “Miners are a different breed.” He added, “If I had my life over again I'd still like to be a miner 'cause as I say, you'll get companionship amongst miners.”Footnote 53 Recollections of workplace environment and networks for some miners, such as Fife collier Robert Clelland, are similar to those of manufacturing workers, reflecting on the impact of closure to their social, as well as economic, lives: “Once ah wis in the pit ma social friendships or whatever you want tae call them just snowballed, you know. It was a big deal tae me.”Footnote 54
This bond among miners was often manifest in the metaphor of the military unit, as well as that of the family. As Tommy Coulter explained, “Ah think … because of the nature of work and the nature of lifestyle we could at least hold our own … because we're hardy buggers and we fought, ah dare say something like soldiers.”Footnote 55 Camaraderie and identity were also tightly bound up with locality, occupational status, and masculinity. The rules of the coalfields defined “outsiders” and “insiders” within the narrative. They also determined underground moral codes, as is vividly evoked in testimony from Bill Marshall:
As an under-manager myself, I always tried to be straight with men. I was a hands-on guy. If there was a bad roof or something, I wasnae feart of getting mucked aboot ‘cos I wouldnae ask anybody to do what I wouldnae do maesel’. That was ma' culture. So I put maesel' in harm's way a few times … You got guys who relied on different ways of doing it—they delegated. But when it got hot, I didnae delegate, I was there. That was my way, but I'm no the kind of guy that says, “No, I want you to go and do it. You use your judgment to do what you need to do and I'll stand back.” I know other under-managers, a couple, who really got money for doing nothing, nothing—they just sat back and let it happen. I couldnae do that. And there was one of them and he was reviled by the men. That would be horrendous for me. The man was reviled. He had an office underground and the men used to go up and piss on his door … he just didnae sparkle, he didn't get into the thing …Footnote 56
Mines surveyor Alistair Moore recounted an incident at Seafield Colliery, Fife, around the late 1960s, illustrating the harsh enforcement of moral codes:
On the job within an hour and a half after the backshift finished, to do what we wanted to do, working on the roadways. We came out a bit after, say about one o' clock in the morning, to go up the pit and down this heading and I said to this chap: “I smell smoke, cigarette smoke.” And as we got down to the bottom of this heading, there was an engine house there, there was a strong smell. And just as we came down the heading, there was two chaps come in and we said: “You been smoking?” They said: “No, somebody's been smoking.” We went into the engine house and there was this guy who had been smoking but had it out when he'd heard the voices. And we went away. As we went further away, we heard the shouts and squeals of this guy getting a hammering. That was the way. It may have been brutal, but pound to a pinch of snuff he didnae smoke again cos' he'd of got a hammering. He put everybody's life at risk. There was rules you obeyed as part of the family.Footnote 57
In his memoirs, pit deputy Ian Terris recounts a similar incident at Rothes Colliery, Fife, when he hit an underground smoker in the face; such stories possibly became amplified into folk tales, part of a moral code passed down. Terris records his consternation that contraband searches were necessary in Fife; he came there from Cardowan, Lanarkshire—one of the gassiest of pits in the Scottish coalfields, where three miners were killed and seven injured in an explosion in July 1960—where the necessities of “self-regulation” were more readily accepted and transgressions of the rules were resisted on a collective basis.Footnote 58
Given the appalling loss of life in collieries generally, and through explosions in particular, this response was unsurprising: Between 1957 and 1960 alone, major explosions at Kames (Ayrshire), Lindsay (Fife), and Cardowan collieries and a fire at Auchengeich colliery (Lanarkhire) claimed seventy-four lives.Footnote 59 In his discussion of reinforcing the codes of the “family” as a manager, Moore's statement resonates with a number of other mining testimonies seeking to articulate loss while navigating the tensions of industrial relations in the industry, especially in the aftermath of the Miners' Strike of 1984–1985. His testimony also powerfully evokes the “insider” and “outsider” narrative in relation to clashes with the Scottish area director of the coalfields during the 1980s, a hardliner who “transgressed the moral economy” of the coalfields.Footnote 60 Marshall's observations reassert his sense of authority through masculinity and skill—his interview was interspersed with descriptions of his physical prowess as a young miner—but it is also about status and loss. The full implications of the loss of status—especially after the industry enjoyed a brief respite in the 1970s with the OPEC crisis and was further bolstered by the miners' victories in the 1972 and 1974 strikes (particularly after bringing down the Heath government)—are evident in Coulter's reflections:
Once you were a producer, ah think it's maybe like something similar tae the animal kingdom, now the lion has tae get the grub first. Ah think once yi' wir a producer and handing in, contributing more tae the household, you got maybe a wee bit better treated than a younger brother or whatever, you know or a sister … We thought we were the best in the world. We were the elite. When you went tae work in the coal face yi', well we were strong lads, you had tae be.Footnote 61
For some, like Coulter, McGahey, and Mills, implicit in these military metaphors and sense of camaraderie, were their outlooks as union activists and, for two of the three, as members of the Communist Party, where discipline was paramount. Of course, in the depiction of camaraderie and solidarity, the narratives avoid divisions within mining communities, whether between union men and those miners who crossed picket lines—memories are long in such instances—or the very pointed religious sectarianism (endemic in some parts of the Scottish coalfields) and separate gender spheres. Some of the mining narratives are highly gendered, either explicitly (such as in Coulter and Marshall) or more implicitly as in Mills and McGahey. The strike of 1984–1985 permanently changed gender relations in coal-mining communities, as women both became prominent campaigners for the striking miners and, in many households, the primary breadwinners in the decades that followed. In addition to provoking tensions within families, clearly this change led some of the men to question their sense of masculinity. This, John Beynon has suggested, is tantamount to a “crisis” with the loss of work in traditionally male-dominated fields.Footnote 62 A redolent theme in all these mining narratives (irrespective of political perspective and occupational role) is the privileging of communality in an attempt to create some form of togetherness in memory. This, in itself, is an indication of the profound sense of loss within mining communities. For Alex Mills, the defeat of the miners in 1984–1985 signaled the abandonment of the nation-state and society's responsibility to the miners (represented for him by the demeaning and bullying health checks private companies demanded of miners with pneumoconiosis) and mining communities. It also represented the wider defeat of the labor movement and a loss of moral direction within society:
That reflects to me that the miner, although he was a leading light and other workers from other industries did look to miners in as far as advancing their own cause for wages and conditions, the miner has been sadly let down from 1984 onwards. They have been forgotten about by the trade unions in general and equally by the people in the country being disillusioned; they have no one to look up to support that cause due to the fact that Thatcher and her brigade destroyed the miners from 1984 onwards.Footnote 63
Mills' testimony reflects the anger felt by former mining communities at their social abandonment and isolation (both geographically and socially), exposing the scars that are the legacy of that last bitter conflict and the demise of the industry.
Testimony from Moore and other mine management professionals reflects the divergent opinions among managers in the Scottish coalfields. This was especially pointed in the aftermath of the 1984–1985 strike. It illustrates what Erik Olin Wright would describe as their “contradictory locations” and “multiple exploitations” (i.e., an individual's role, status, experiences, and residence within different social groupings) and shared interests, kinship, family networks, and generational differences (“mediated class” and “temporal locations”). Within Wright's reappraisal of the social relations of production, “Professionals and technical employees […] can be seen as capitalistically exploited but skills exploiters.” They thus constitute “contradictory locations within exploitation relations.”Footnote 64 The creation of a new “technocratic” breed of managers, within industries nationalized by Clement Attlee's Labour government between 1947 and 1951, was an explicit element of his home secretary Herbert Morrison's vision of socialized industries—the closest they had to a blueprint for these new state-owned concerns. Many of these managers were born and bred in mining communities (and had served the practical apprenticeship of the industry and often had brothers and fathers still working as miners), and the National Coal Board's training schemes and career ladders sought to reinforce—albeit with the addition of technical education—that career trajectory.Footnote 65 Many of the managers had a loyalty to the NCB. As it had with railway managers, the assault on the industry was experienced as an attack on their norms and values.Footnote 66 While the mine managers might clash with the NUM and rank-and-file miners, they shared with them an occupational culture and identity, which was increasingly under assault. This is poignantly captured in Marshall's observations of an occupational community, into which he had been born and bred, being agonizingly lost:
As for the management above me, well, I know one manager at Seafield, he described it—Seafield had big gates around it—as, “When I get here at night, it's like going to a penitentiary.” It was quite a stressful job for a manager […] And then, of course, Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and she said, “the pits have to go.” And they went […] They went within twenty years. We've got nothing left, just a handful in Britain. Twenty years, and that was government […] At the end of the day, in 1984, we lost the industry, ye ken?Footnote 67
For Frank Gibb, a former Superintendent of the Mines Rescue Service, his managerial grade meant that his narrative was couched in the body politic while also reflecting his “mediated class,” and “temporal locations.” While distancing himself from what he saw as “political” views, he expressed himself in strongly collectivist and statist terms:
To my mind, if you've got a nationalized industry, it's something which should be there for the benefit of the Nation and not used as a chopping-block for politicians… They decided that British Rail was not working, British Airways might not have been perfect, but they were both better than the privatized industries which took over transport since then. Politics is a different game.Footnote 68
While critical of what he perceived to be NUM national president Arthur Scargill's political agenda “to change the colour of the government by a strike,” Gibbs' criticism of the narrow understanding of the costs of coal in the new political economy and what he saw as the ulterior motives of the government in its prosecution of the miners' strike represented a thorough rejection of Thatcherism:
The Coal Board weren't paid a proper rate for each ton of coal mined… We were subsidizing a nation. The British coal-mining industry was subsidizing a nation…To my mind it was equally wrong to devastate an industry, to have a go not only at the National Union of Mineworkers, but Mrs Thatcher also felt, I believe, that if she could smash the National Union of Mineworkers, there's not another trade union in this country as strong as them, she could master the rest.Footnote 69
At the end of his interview, Gibb chose to ruefully contrast the level of agreement and understanding within Scotland with the implicitly inferred shortcomings of central control and extrapolate on what might have been: “I think Mick McGahey and the Scottish Division were able to sit down and discuss many things fairly and, whilst having disagreements, could resolve issues.” This aspiration for separate industrial devolution for nationalized industries was being proposed both in Scotland and Wales beginning in the 1970s and in some cases overlapped explicitly, as well as implicitly, with civic nationalist identities.Footnote 70
The general loss of status as a skilled worker, and of the occupational culture in the mines, was further compounded by the response of economic and employment agencies operating in the coalfields. As Tim Strangleman observed regarding the Durham and Nottinghamshire coalfields, the skills of those who worked in the industry are often not recognized. This was true of Scotland's miners, as well. While this has also been the case in other fields of endeavor, the distinctive character of coal mining, combined with the geographical isolation of some mining communities, has made it even more pronounced.Footnote 71
Conclusion
For those working in the coal-mining industry, decline was evident from the 1960s onward. In the last decades of the deep-mining industry in Scotland, abject despondency and resignation had set in. Moreover, given the early, “anticipatory,” socialization of those growing up in mining communities to this way of life, the loss of the mining industry was profoundly personal. Alongside isolation and lack of alternative opportunities, these psychological scars persist in casting a long shadow over mining communities.
Dissent and discord over the contraction of the mining industry flowed up from the coalfields to shape the politics of NUMSA and also translated into growing support in mining areas for devolution for Scotland (as it had in other areas affected by deindustrialization, such as the shipbuilding community of Govan, adjacent to Glasgow). As the eminent political historian of modern Scotland and subsequent SNP politician (who, like Sillars and Neil, was a former Labour Party stalwart), Christopher Harvie observed, discussing his hometown in the former industrial heartlands of central Scotland: “What is true for Motherwell applies to the other settlements of the Scottish central belt, from the colliery villages of Ayrshire to the textile towns of Strathmore … It is this unknown Scotland, not in the guidebooks, away from the motorway, seen fleetingly from the express that holds the key to the modern politics of the country.”Footnote 72 The campaign for greater democratization of governance arose directly from those coalfields that felt, early on, the effects of closures, culminating in NUMSA's effort to convince the wider Scottish labor movement of the benefits of home rule. It was the mobilization of this political constituency, rather than the “chattering classes” as the Conservative commentator, Andrew Neil contended, that changed the national conversation in Scotland.Footnote 73 Evidence of the conversion that took place is to be seen in the careers of national political figures, such as Jim Sillars and Alex Neil. Scotland's experience reflects other national narratives that developed in response to deindustrialization—for example, Canadian workers' evocation of national sentiment in the face of closures in the 1980s. Notwithstanding the swell in support for home rule, Scottish miners (and other sections of the workforce), within a “stateless nation,” were unable to harness the “nationalist claims as rhetorical weapons” to exact the same levels of protection afforded to Canadian workers in the early1980s. Conversely, Steven High's description of the differences across the forty-ninth parallel—with US workers “transformed into metaphorical gypsies” while Canadian workers were able to “wrap themselves in the Maple Leaf”—is, to some degree, analogous to what happened within the UK, where Scottish workers were likewise able to find some voice within revived narratives of nationhood.Footnote 74
The decline of industry in Scotland was palpable from the mid-1960s onward and was increasingly acknowledged in the wider public sphere. In Scotland, the loss of coal mining, shipbuilding, and steel (as well as other workplaces) has become profoundly embedded in the collective consciousness. Personal experiences of this loss has fed into Scottish national culture and public discourse, as evidenced, for example, in recent prize-winning novels like John Robertson's And the Land Lay Still and Ross Raisin's Waterline, as well as the music of bands like the Proclaimers, The Skids and Big Country (half the members of the latter two groups emerged from Fife's coal-mining communities). The isolation and sense of loss within mining communities, as well as the cultural distinctiveness of mining culture, is also poignantly captured in the poetry of former miner Rab Wilson and also in his filmic homage to his native Ayrshire coalfield, Finding the Seam.Footnote 75
Raymond Williams observed that, “the history of the idea of culture is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life.”Footnote 76 Notwithstanding the contestation of certain overly deterministic aspects of Williams' work in relation to working-class culture, his definition of culture as “the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intention which proceed from this,” have considerable currency in this case.Footnote 77 The narratives of the miners and managers captured here encapsulate in different ways the profound sense of bereavement and betrayal still felt in mining communities at the loss not simply of employment but of a civilization—one with its own culture and moral codes—that stood against the changing political economy of postwar Britain, especially as embodied by Thatcherism. If the narratives of miners and managers were equally characterized by the, at times, bitterly contested industrial politics of the Scottish coalfields and the inherent risks involved in coal mining, the loss of the industry and its legacy is often manifested in reappraised collective values and memories.
