British Mining Industry Research Articles

Mobilizing Coal for War: The Rise and Decline of English Socialism

Far from being the wave of the future, European socialism was primarily a defensive strategy for workers in the basic industries of the early 20th century. This is especially obvious in the history of the British Labour party. Workers in British coal mines benefited from free trade before WWI and were profoundly threatened by it after the war. Labour socialism was a strategy to prevent the collapse of the British mining industry that succeeded from 1918 until the hollowed out sector was finally destroyed by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The miners were at the center of a coalition that included steel and rail workers. It's greatest threat to the British state was in 1926 and its greatest victory was in 1946 but by 1971 it was no longer politically viable.

Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914, by Catherine Mills

Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914, by Catherine Mills

Catherine Mills, Regulation Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. xxv + 284, £60.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6087-3.

Scholars seeking a pathway through the complexities of safety legislation in the British mining industries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been in debt to extraordinarily conscientious contemporary and near-contemporary chroniclers of that labyrinthine body of law, no less tortuously convoluted than that governing the railways. There has long been a need for a modern synthesis and interpretation and those have now been provided by Catherine Mills in a study that casts its net wide. Mills engages with the much-overlooked growth of government debate, inspectorates, the actions and inaction of the Home Office, the demographic specifics of occupational health and, by implication, the deep origins of a mid- and later twentieth-century risk society. She deftly simplifies the impenetrably complex or, where she needs to, creatively complicates a bewilderingly complex cache of parliamentary and administrative evidence. Mills locates her study in a now thriving interdisciplinary literature which has its deep origins in Oliver MacDonagh’s work on the growth of government and the early Victorian state, but which has been extended and deepened by political and socio–medical scholars concerned with the history of occupational health and the roles played by the philanthropists, parliamentarians, civil servants and civil scientists, employees and trade unions in the quest for reform. However, this is a clear-eyed, determinedly non-Whiggish, and at times downbeat account. The author touches on the ways in which nineteenth-century print media sensationalised major mining disasters in an effort to hasten reform. Some of these catastrophes are much less well known than others. Thus, in Northumberland and Durham between 1805 and 1819, no fewer than seven major flooding episodes led to the deaths of approximately two hundred and sixty colliers (p. xv). Only one of these accidents killed fewer than thirty men. Mills also gives due attention to collapsing roofs and faulty ladders, and shows how explosions attributable to coal dust and methane contributed to the dismal register of death. But the most compelling part of her argument revolves around ‘invisible’ occupational mortality, most of it attributable to long undifferentiated variants of lung disease. In the earlier nineteenth century, afflicted colliers and workers in the metalliferous sector had a life expectancy at birth comparable to slum-dwellers in Liverpool and Manchester. Half-a-century later, J.S. Haldane concluded that conditions in the Cornish mining industry had deteriorated rather than improved: approximately eight years’ exposure as a machinist in a still, in many respects, pre-industrial working environment would be likely to lead to a premature and horrifically painful death from lung disease (p. 205). Over time, and intensively so between the 1840s and the early 1870s, the public visibility of large-scale disaster and the ‘immorality’ of near-naked workers labouring deep in the bowels of the earth, increased public and parliamentary concern. Owners, radicals believed, must be held either compulsorily, or – classic Victorian legislative evasion – ‘permissively’, to account. In telling pages, Mills describes how helter-skelter mid-century developments – between 1852 and 1854 no fewer than four select committees pondered the operation of the seminal government-backed inspectorial act of 1850 – began to turn the tide in favour of more effective regulation (pp. 99–126). But the metalliferous sector, which employed approximately fifty thousand workers as compared to nearly a quarter-of-a-million labourers in coal mines, lagged badly behind. Small-scale non-ferrous enterprises remained geographically isolated and failed to expand their scale of production. During the final thirty years of the nineteenth century, the sector stagnated in the face of foreign competition, and clung to anciently embedded payment systems based on sub-contracting. A form of pre-industrial individualism and localism proved inimical to the introduction of tougher regulation. In one sense, Mills’s monograph comprises two studies in one (note the plural in the title). Coal mining in Yorkshire and tin mining in Cornwall had about as much in common as chalk and cheese. Nevertheless, the two were repeatedly yoked together in later nineteenth-century administrative discourse and parliamentary debate, and numerous select committees, many of them packed with owners and share-holders deeply opposed to any erosion of permissiveness, sought to extend regulations from one sector to another. Mills’s principal achievement is to have worked her way through a maze of technical, legal, legislative and administrative source material and bring order to chaos. Eschewing explanatory short-cuts, she has made sense of a forbiddingly complicated topic. Discussion of the now half-forgotten growth of government debate, and the role that MacDonagh ascribed – or failed to ascribe – to agency in his original schema becomes repetitious. Nevertheless, this is an impressive synthesis and it is likely to remain essential reading for specialists in the field for a long time to come. One final point: either there has been a printing error or the author deliberately opted to omit any kind of acknowledgement to fellow historians and scholarly labourers at the coalface.

Catherine Mills, Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914

A review of Regulating health and safety in the British mining industries, 1800–1914 by Catherine Mills

Regulating health and safety in the British mining industries, 1800-1914 - By Catherine Mills

The Economic History ReviewVolume 64, Issue 2 p. 684-685 Regulating health and safety in the British mining industries, 1800–1914 – By Catherine Mills JAMIE L. BRONSTEIN, JAMIE L. BRONSTEIN New Mexico State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author JAMIE L. BRONSTEIN, JAMIE L. BRONSTEIN New Mexico State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 April 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00578_13.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume64, Issue2May 2011Pages 684-685 RelatedInformation

<em>Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800––1914</em>, by Catherine Mills

Reviewed by: Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914 Marjorie Levine-Clark (bio) Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914, by Catherine Mills; pp. xxv + 284. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010, £70.00, $134.95. After the recent mining disasters in Chile and West Virginia, mine safety and the occupational health of miners are clearly issues of great urgency. Catherine Mills explores these issues in the context of nineteenth-century Britain, when industrial legislation was in its infancy. By comparing the development of legislative regulations concerning the mining of coal and of metals such as iron, lead, tin, and copper, Mills demonstrates very different trajectories regarding the histories of occupational protections in these industries. Mills relies on parliamentary papers and debates, mining inspectors’ reports, newspapers, and mining journals to chart the path of reform. She argues that the economic significance of coal mining to the British economy, the visibility of the dangers to coal miners, and the demands of colliers themselves drew reformers and [End Page 138] politicians to the cause of coal mine safety much more readily than did the more internal ailments and self-sufficiency rhetoric of metal miners. The “marked differences in visibility of hazard” put coal mining on the occupational safety agenda (38), while leaving metal mining behind. There is much that is valuable in this study. Mills carefully explores the ways in which changing technologies not only created greater industrial productivity but also increased the dangers for mine workers. The very success of coal mining, due to the rate of production demanded by industrialization, brought more laborers into mining, thus increasing the numbers of workers affected by dangerous conditions such as falling shafts and ventilation problems. It was the impact of explosions in coal mines and the numbers of colliers who died at one time, however, that created an active humanitarian interest calling for reform in coal. Even more importantly, coal miners organized themselves to demand change in the 1840s and forced government conversion to at least the principle of regulation. Colliers and inspectors continued to push for improvements in both safety provisions and their oversight. Increasing scientific knowledge concerning the dangers of mining over the course of the last quarter of the century also contributed to an environment in favor of more regulation. By examining both coal and metal mining, Mills deftly illustrates that attitudes toward state intervention among workers were diverse and contradictory. Paralleling the arguments of Jamie Bronstein on workers’ compensation in Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2008), Mills shows that while colliers saw a positive role for the state in protecting their health, metal miners stressed their independence and self-sufficiency to the point that they eschewed state assistance. Traditions of bargaining and control over labor practices by metal miners—particularly those in Cornwall—created a workforce that was actually hostile to reform and reluctant to organize formally. Indeed, metal miners accepted the dangers of their work as part of the job, for which their own skill was the best protection. Without workforce buy-in, regulation could not get very far. Additionally, metal mining by the second half of the century was generally suffering industrial decline, and less attention was paid to the health of metal miners. When the first act regulating the metalliferous mining industry came on the books in 1872, it was largely derivative of legislation protecting coal miners and failed to address the problems unique to mining metals, particularly the causes of miners’ pthisis. While safety regulations led to a decrease in mortality for colliers, this was not the case for metal miners, whose occupational mortality actually went up significantly at the end of the century. Unfortunately, these valuable observations are marred by a rather clunky theoretical framework, lack of chronological clarity, and editorial errors. As is the case with many studies of the development of Victorian state intervention, Mills aims to place herself within the historiographical debates regarding the nature of government growth. Yet instead of staking her own territory, Mills remains in constant conversation with Oliver MacDonagh’s model of government intervention, continually checking her evidence against MacDonagh’s framework...

Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914 (review)

Reviewed by: Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914 P. W. J. Bartrip Catherine Mills . Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010. xxv + 284 pp. Ill. $114.95 (978-0-7546-6087-3). The history of occupational health and safety, for years a neglected research area, has received much attention of late, especially in the United States and United Kingdom. Mills's book, based on a Ph.D. thesis and heralded by several journal articles since 2004, adds to the flow of recent work on Britain. The history of dust disease among coal miners, long overlooked despite its ubiquity, was addressed in Johnston and McIvor's "bottom-up" Miners' Lung, which appeared in Ashgate's "Studies in Labour History" series in 2007. Mills has little to say about the miner's experience. In fact, the first half of her book barely touches on miners' health as opposed to mines safety. Her first four chapters examine in detail the development of regulation in coal mining, with emphasis on the various acts of parliament (1842, 1850, 1855, and 1860), and the introduction and operation of mines inspectors. She makes some attempt to place these regulatory developments within the theoretical context of the "Macdonagh model" of government growth, first posited more than fifty years ago. The effort, however, is half-hearted. She ignores much of the voluminous literature on the "nineteenth-century revolution in government," along with the evolving state of debate on the issue. Miners' health looms somewhat larger in the second half of the book, where metalliferous mining is discussed, but this volume is mainly a history of safety rather than health. The first legislation covering metalliferous mines dates from 1872. But with industries in terminal decline and the relationship between dust [End Page 683] and disease badly misunderstood, the problem of respiratory disease was not addressed effectively. As the author acknowledges, she traverses some well-worn ground in addressing the history of health, safety, and welfare in coal mines. Many historians have explored the origins and passage of the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act in particular. Mills justifies her study partly in terms of her use of a wide range of rich source material, some of it previously underused, which allows her to provide a comprehensive account of legal developments. It is surprising, therefore, that she has relied almost entirely on printed sources and made no use of the National Archives. There are other omissions too. Notwithstanding that J. S. Haldane is described as an expert on mine gases and a key player in the reform process, Mills ignores Martin Goodman's biography of him: Suffer & Survive (2007). One of Mills's objectives is to explain why safety regulation for coal mines substantially predated the introduction of similar measures for metalliferous mines. She emphasizes visibility: "[C]ontemporaries looked to the most visible hazards, which were not necessarily the most frequent or dangerous" (p. 243). She draws an analogy with the strong public response to the Ladbroke Grove rail crash of 1999, in which thirty-one people died, and the relative lack of public concern about the thousands killed each year on the roads. This explanation is unconvincing, however, given that many mining accidents, whether arising from coal or metal extraction, occurred below ground and hence out of sight, while most transport accidents, whether involving trains or automobiles, occur in plain sight. The real lesson appears to be that large-scale disasters stimulate immediate public responses, whereas disaster "by installment" arouses much less interest. Regulating Health is not easy reading, for Mills is no literary stylist. Tautologies, oxymorons, and other solecisms abound. The book also carries far too many typographical errors. Among the more grievous: Lord Ashley, the central figure in early mines regulation, appears at various points as Lord Ashleigh or Lord Shaftsbury (not Shaftesbury), and the names of several authors, including that doyen of occupational medicine Ludwig Teleky, are misspelled. P. W. J. Bartrip University of Oxford Copyright © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press

THE EMERGENCE OF STATUTORY HYGIENE PRECAUTIONS IN THE BRITISH MINING INDUSTRIES, 1890–1914

ABSTRACTIt will be fifty years in 2008 since Oliver MacDonagh suggested that the adoption of new responsibilities by the state in the early nineteenth century was an inevitable response to the social consequences of the industrial revolution, and impervious to ideological and philosophical influences. This article revisits MacDonagh's model by examining the emergence of occupational health reform in the British mining industry in the early twentieth century. Until the introduction of statutory measures in 1905 to protect miners against developing silicosis and basic sanitation provisions to prevent cross-contamination of disease, state regulation of working conditions prioritized the prevention of accidental injuries. It is argued that this decisive shift in the scope and nature of government intervention can be understood as part of a process of institutional expansion of mining regulations that broadly parallels MacDonagh's model. Yet the precise details of when, and how, health reform emerged and the nature of these specific regulatory controls were influenced by a variety of factors, including visibility of risk, human agency, economic performance of the industry, and contemporary thinking in political economy.

Gresford: the anatomy of a disaster

The worst disaster of the North Wales coalfield – one of the worst in the history of the British mining industry – occurred in 1934, killing 256 men and devastating a small community. Stanley Williamson’s account draws on his own interviews with the bereaved and those involved in the rescue, as well as the reports of the subsequent inquiry and the records of the North Wales Miners’ Association. Williamson covers the inquiry, and the important issues it raised, in detail and charts the way in which Sir Stafford Cripps, representing the North Wales miners, launched an attack on the whole social and industrial system of which the industry was a part.

Development of the Thyssen tunnel machine : Grieves, M Proc S Wales Inst Engr, V91, Nov 1976, P21–25

Reference is made to the requirements for a full face tunnel machine for operational use in the British mining industry in connection with the need to drive arterial roadways in hard rock to open up new working districts, or inter-mine connections. Negotiations within the industry and appropriate government departments is described which led to the design and construction of a prototype machine whereby data could be obtained on the operational behaviour of disc cutter types and configurations, and on the characteristics of main and ancillary bearings and environmental control techniques. Designed on a modular basis so that no single piece exceeded 1.5 M by 1.5 M by 2.35 M, and with no single piece exceeding 6 tons in weight, the installation of the machine in dawdon colliery for operational trials is discussed. The results of the operational trials over A distance of more than 1000 M are presented and discussed. On the basis of performances achieved, the author suggests that it would seem that a tunnel of some 3000 M continuous length is needed to arrive at a break-even cost per metre when compared with conventional drivages. However, a rise in wages of some 30 per cent would reduce this figure by 700 M. This comparison is based on the assumption of an average weekly advance of 15 M using conventional mechanised methods, roadheaders or mechanical loading in strata containing less than 50 per cent coal. The author considers that future developments, based on the experiences gained from driving the 3.65 M diameter tunnel in dawdon colliery, and the benefits that arise due to the earlier completion of arterial roadway systems will improve the economic justification for the use of such machines. /TRRL/