The British Miner In the Age of De-Industrialization
A Political and Cultural History
By Jörg Arnold
Oxford University Press - £35.00
I must admit that we have lifted the status of the miners in a fantastic way during that period. Ten years ago nobody wanted to know us. Now everybody seems to want to be related to a miner.
(Joe Gormley, 1981).
And tomorrow brings another train
Another young brave steals away
But you're the one I remember
From these valleys of green and the grey
(New Model Army, 'Green and Grey,' 1989).
The coal miners, like farmers in France, seem to have gained a peculiar hold on the British imagination: a muscular symbol of a lost era.
(The Economist, 1992).
I always remember the vile Margaret Thatcher referring to Britain's miners as: ''the enemy within,'' an equally vile and totally unwarranted statement that has always stayed with me. This partially explains my (inadvertent) undercurrent of affection for the miners, who, lest we need reminding, were, in years gone by. the committed backbone of British society.
Not only did they undertake a difficult and highly dangerous occupation, they were also the very same men who fought and died in the trenches of Northern France – for King and Country and for what?
To be literally starved back to work during the unspeakably bitter and unfair strike of 1984/5.
It is as former NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) President, Arthur Scargill said in 1998: ''People who go to cinemas and weep when they watch the film Brassed Off should recall that a promise was made to Britain's miners to rectify the terrible wrong that had been wreaked upon Britain's miners and Britain's mining communities.''
Moreover, for an all round, clear-cut analyses and understanding of said strike, the miners themselves and the communities which they represented, might I suggest reading The British Miner In the Age of De-Industrialization - A Political and Cultural History.
A book which is altogether lucid, in-depth, fair and exceedingly thorough when it comes to the ultimate big picture – as is not only substantiated in the second part of the book's title, but the following: ''It is the relationship between broader ideas and self-images that this study sets out to disentangle. It asks about the interaction between social imaginaries and miners' subjectivities in a period of accelerated socio-economic change. In doing so, it probes the significance of the figure of the coal miner for our understanding of contemporary British history. The book does not try to reveal the 'real' story of British miners behind the myths that circulated about them. Rather, it is an exploration of the intersection between the broader societal meaning ascribed to coal miners and their collective and individual self-images between c.1967 and 1997. The place of the miners in society was contested. Politicians, industrialists, experts, journalists, trade unionists, and individual mineworkers themselves were all engaged in shaping images and ideas of who the miners 'really' were, what motivated them, and what fears and hopes they held for the future. In examining these debates, the study opens up new ways of understanding contemporary British history'' (Introduction).
Indeed these 292 pages (excluding Preface, List of Illustrations/Maps/Tables and Abbreviations, Appendix, Bibliography and Index), make for more than compelling reading; not only because it's about the miners and how equate with society at large, but because of the book's overall reasoned approach.
A fine example of which can be found in chapter eight's '1992,' where the author, Jörg Arnold, writes ''In the second half of the 1990s, the miners passed into history. While the people still employed in the industry moved out of public sight, the former coalfields became a laboratory for social engineering and social scientific research. To the Labour government, the way forward did not lie in reversing the policies of previous governments, but in 'help[ing] old coal communities' to move into the modern world. Coalfield communities represented a particularly intractable case of 'social exclusion' whose root cause was as much cultural as it was economic […] In the Task Force's estimation, the very qualities that had given the coalfields their distinct sense of identity had become a formidable obstacle to moving into the future. 'There is nowhere else like the coalfields,' the report intoned, only to continue: Their long history as the engine of the nation's industrialisation meant they developed a cohesion, a reliance on a single industry and an independent existence with few parallels. This was their greatest strength when the mines were producing and now it is their greatest weakness.''
Informed, knowledgable, cohesive and deeply embedded within a social framework, The British Miner In the Age of De-Industrialization really is a great shining light of a book.
That said, I'd like to leave the final words to Paul Darlow (himself a former miner and strike activist) who has described it as: ''A beacon of how history should be approached.''
David Marx
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