The United Mine Workers of America staged a fourteen-month strike against the Rockefeller company. An assault on the striking coal miners was ordered on April 20th 1914. The Secret Plan of the New World Order
1939: This is how a young man entering coal mining would have seen the industry. The industry of three quarters of a million men. There are nearly two thousand mines. Fourteen thousand men in man-mine management. 40 Years On, National Coal Board 1978, part of presidential address to Institution of Mining Engineers, narrator W J W Bourne
Haulage relied on muscle power of the ubiquitous pony. There were still forty thousand of them after the war ended. ibid.
Many of the engines were built in the nineteenth century. ibid.
Boys fourteen to sixteen carried out repetitive jobs underground. ibid.
Identity within the community was strong. ibid.
The mining galas: in the Durham Big meeting above all. Out of the social revolution of the forties came nationalisation of the industry. After a war in which five thousand miners had been killed at work. ibid.
Underground was still the area of the hardest graft. ibid.
With fewer men and even more costlier machinery it becomes possible to establish coal faces we only dreamed about twenty years ago. ibid.
Coal mining has always been international. ibid.
After forty years the picture has changed: chump conveyors, automatically monitored manless points, bunkers, trains hauled by diesel or electric locomotives. Mine cars. Man-riding carriages. Skip winders and big cages. Movement and environment monitored, and sometimes controlled from the surface. ibid.
That we shall continue to win our essential energy from under the earth not just for the next forty years but for the next four hundred. ibid.
All through the summer, so he tells us, the Rt Hon Michael Heseltine PC MP ‘agonised’ about a problem. He could identify the problem in three monosyllables; too much coal. There was too much coal at the pitheads and too much coal at the power stations. It was beginning to encroach like a vile black plague into the delightful countryside of the type where Mrs Heseltine is inclined to hunt. Obviously this was wasteful and something should be done about it.
After a final few days climactic agonising Mr Heseltine came to his lonely decision. Coal mining should cease, preferably altogether. That, he calculated, was the only realistic way to stop the surplus coal menace ...
Let us test that argument against the facts about power supply. With one exception (Drax) every one of the coal fired power stations in Britain is producing less electricity than a year ago. Even Drax is producing at only 75 per cent capacity. Every electricity company is distributing less electricity than a year ago.
Are people turning to an alternative? No, they are not. Less gas is being distributed too. Are people saturated with heat and light? Are old people, for instance, sweating so much in their homes at the start of winter that they are turning off the heat? Are factories and offices going at such full blast that they are switching off the lights and the machinery? Exactly the opposite. At a time when there is a glut of power capacity, the need for heat and light has never been greater. Miners and power workers are sacked while the old and poor freeze in their homes and yearn for jobs which would drive the factories and light the offices.
There is a very simple solution to the problem which tortures Mr Heseltine so. Coal could be given away to the pensioners. Power prices could be brought down especially for the unemployed. Hey presto! Cold people would be warm again and the black threat to Mrs Heseltine’s hunting grounds would be removed in a trice!
But no. The market insists that before anyone can get hold of any of these surplus services they must pay the market price. That puts flight at once to the notion that the market matches production with need. For in a society like ours where there are a few rich people, many poor people and some others in the middle, the ‘symmetry’ of the market is twisted and corrupted into the opposite of symmetry. Things are made which are not needed; things that are needed are not made; and even when things are produced which are needed, like coal and power, they go to waste because by the laws of the market there are not enough people with enough money to whom those goods can be sold.
Thus the market system which pretends to balance what is produced with what is needed becomes just a mechanism to further extend the imbalances and inequalities which led to its corruption in the first place. Paul Foot, article November 1992, ‘Birth of Our Power’
This colliery has been chosen for an official visit. Ken Loach, The Price of Coal I, part of Meet The People: A Film For the Silver Jubilee, BBC 1977
What’s he doing down pit then if he knows Latin? ibid. miner to miner
Miner: My father says he’s never seen a poor bookie.
Miner #2: … You’ve got to work a system out. I’ve got a good system. Ken Loach, The Price of Coal II: Back to Reality
All I know, Cliff, is there’s been an explosion. ibid. rescuer in van
You just can’t keep ’em in the dark. ibid. miner to boss
There’s eight men missing. ibid. Boss
Get the production and bugger the safety, that’s what happens. ibid. miner in canteen
They said that the coal mines went on and on for miles and miles outside the town. In some places there were fires burning under the earth and sending smoke into the air – fires that had been burning continuously for a hundred years! Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger p55
I don’t believe that anybody in the trade union movement wins anything at all without being militant. You get as much as you are prepared to take. Arthur Scargill
Coal mining is the basic industry of Britain. The coal mines of the country employ 750,000 men ... The miner works in a cramped position. He has scarcely room to swing his pick. William Coldstream, John Grierson with music by Benjamin Britten, Coal Face documentary/film
On the 17th of January 1969 Barbara Castle published her vision for industrial harmony in Britain In Place of Strife. It promised pre-strike ballots and a cooling off period before strikes could start, and that settlement would be imposed on wild-cat strikes. Moderate by today’s standards; most of Wilson’s cabinet saw all of this as extreme and divisive. And the union leaders regarded In Place of Strife as an outright assault. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain e3: Paradise Lost, BBC 2007
But for Heath there was no escape. On the 9th January 1972 the National Union of Mineworkers demanded a pay increase of 45%. When this was rejected they began their first national strike since 1926. The miners began a mass picket of the largest coke distribution depot in the country at Saltley in Birmingham. ibid.
This battle she was determined to win. The confrontation when it came was ugly and very violent. Ancient, county and regional rivalries resurfaced. Yorkshire men against Lancashire men. South Wales against Nottinghamshire. Southern police against northern strikers. And it was also medieval ... The worst pitched battle was took place here Orgrave where seven thousand well prepared police took on five thousands strikers. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain e4: Revolution
The violence and intimidation we have seen should never happened. It is the work of extremists. It is the enemy within. Margaret Thatcher
Coal-fired power plants produce the most incredibly damaging waste we know that’s changing the nature of our atmosphere. Professor Tim Flannery, chairman Copenhagen Climate Council
In north-east India they are mining coal so fast that fires are burning out of control underground. 70% of India’s electricity comes from coal. Environmentalists including many in India say the country cannot develop on coal the way the West did. What the Green Movement Got Wrong, 2010
West Virginia, the heart of Appalachia. Where miners carve a hard living out of solid rock. The risks are high. But so are the rewards. Working in tunnels half their height these men chase a high-grade seam of coal. Sons. Fathers. Brothers. Coal miners. Coal s1e1, Discovery 2011
With an investment of four million US dollars Tom and Mike bought mining equipment and hired thirty-five local miners. They’ve got one month to turn a profit or go out of business. ibid.
The men are cutting into Westchester mountain. ibid.
The Continuous Miner’s ripper-head is spiked with tungsten-carbide teeth. ibid.
The coal seam was formed by compression which means it bends and twists. ibid.
Half a ton of slate barely missed them. ibid.
Running coal and lots of it is the only thing that’ll keep the company alive. ibid.
The day-shift has been pumping out coal all week though not enough to make up for the night-shift’s short-fall. ibid.
They will barely be able to pay the bills. ibid.
All mining is brought to a stop when a team of state inspectors arrives unannounced. ibid.