The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on the theorizing of Raymond Williams and Reinhart Koselleck, the study makes use of previously inaccessible records to offer a new account of the British miner in the age of de-industrialization. The book reinserts the industry’s ‘new dawn’ of the 1970s into the story of coal. It argues that Britain’s miners went through a cyclical movement—from loser to winner and back again—as Britain underwent a de-industrial revolution in the final decades of the twentieth century. The industry’s reversal of fortunes proved short-lived. It was significant all the same. Its significance, the book argues, did not lie in affecting the long-term trajectory of the industry. Rather, the ‘new dawn’ was important in raising the political and cultural stakes. The figure of the coal miner became invested with sharply contrasting characteristics: proletarian traditionalist and standard bearer of socialist advance, hero and villain, underdog and enemy. The miners were no mere spectators in this process. They were agents, thought to be uniquely powerful by their numerous opponents, and half-believing in this power themselves. The miners’ special nature, however, jarred with the aspiration to lead an ordinary life, producing tensions that were most cruelly exposed in the year-long strike of 1984/5. As the industry’s reconstruction intensified in the aftermath of the strike, mineworkers were transformed from awe-inspiring agents wielding collective power into admirable but pitiful symbols of the changes wrought by de-industrialization itself, as the study shows.