And it was local [Birmingham] traders who took the initiative. In 1769 they commissioned James Brindley to build a canal connecting the local coal mines to the canal. The price of coal halved, cutting costs in the metal workshops. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e6: Coining It
This is mining country: tin and copper are found in this area, and have been worked here for over four thousand years. The Cornish coast is full of holes, hacked out of the granite by miners desperate to find metal ore. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e8: Heavy Metal, Discovery 2005
By the 1860s there were three hundred and forty mines across Cornwall; fifty thousand people were working above and below the surface. ibid.
By the 1860s the Cornish mining boom was over. ibid.
Britain built the first steam locomotive to deliver coal from its mines. They would have stayed purely as industrial machines if it hadn’t been for Robert Stephenson. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations: The European Story s3e4: The Impossible Railway, Discovery 2005
You feel a confidence in your fellow workers. Coal miner, black and white film cited Night on Film: An A-Z of the Dark, BBC 2011
Everybody’s the same. ibid.
It’s a dirty job. ibid.
No toilets, anything like that. ibid.
1,600 Pits Are Yours ... But Coal Crisis Grips Industry. Pathé News
For fifty years Britain’s miners have demanded the nationalisation of the mining industry. ibid.
I was telling you I went down a coalmine the other day. We sank into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain, and we did about three-quarters of a mile with rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be straining around us and above us to crush us in.
You could see the pit-props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibres split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way, and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites: the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame. In the very next colliery to the one I descended just a few years ago three hundred people lost their lives in that way. And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: Here, you know, these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse? They scowl at us, and we say: Only a ha’penny, just a copper. They say: You thieves! And they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who at the risk of life create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand. Lloyd George, address Edinburgh Castle, Limehouse, London
The miners are not broken – they continue to fight; their destiny is in your hands. An embargo on blackleg coal and a levy on all workers must be adopted to save the miners from defeat.
And to the miners who are fighting I say: Every honest worker in the world admires your courage and loyalty in the fight which was forced upon you by the rapacious mine-owners, who have at their service the banks, the press and the resources of the press. A J Cook, foreword to The Miners Struggle and the Big Five Banks
You know as well as I do the terrible conditions in the coalfields, and the suffering of the women and children. I have been compelled to do the most unpleasant tasks of begging for food, money, boots, and cast-off clothing. Practically every day young men, stranded, call for food, clothing and shelter at my office. I have done my best for them. Every day the post brings letters to me and Mrs Cook begging for help, especially from expectant mothers, terrible epistles of agony and despair.
I have heard their cry for help, and have done all I can to give assistance. I have helped all I can, begged all I can, till I have been almost demented and in despair, because I hate charity and reliefs which make us all beggars ...
I now want remedies instead of relief. The more poverty increases, the more our people sink into despair and become the hopeless prey of all the most reactionary influences and movements. A J Cook, open letter to Arthur Horner
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 percent 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 1977, writer Barry Hines, part 1: Meet the People: A Film for the Silver Jubilee, meeting chair
What’s he doing down pit then if he knows Latin? ibid. miner to miner
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