The coal mining conundrum: why did the NUM fight so hard for its members’ right to suffer underground?

Anyone with a grasp of the history of Britain knows that its once considerable power, and much of its still considerable prosperity, was built on coal. The geological accident of these islands containing coal gave us the industrial revolution and the first railways, and consolidated British naval power. Implicit in that accident was the fact that a few landowners, under whose acres the coalfields spread, became astonishingly rich as a result — people such as the Butes, the Londonderrys and the Fitzwilliams, who lived self-indulgent lives in their stately homes while half a mile below semi-naked men crawled in coal dust five-and-a-half days a week to make them so wealthy.

These emotive comparisons are why mining became such a political activity, with the eventual formation of the once massively powerful National Union of Mineworkers and the nationalisation of the pits in 1947 by the Attlee government. They are also why it is easy to write colourful books on this otherwise black subject. Not only did mining appear to exploit working-class men and their families, who became the captive labour force for the industry, but it also exposed them to horrible injuries, diseases and death.

Jeremy Paxman’s thorough but rather unoriginal book (despite having interviewed some veterans of the mining industry, much of what he writes is well known, and his use of secondary sources is extensive) rightly makes much of the terrible ordeals that the men (and, until the 1840s, women and children) who worked underground had to endure. He also writes sourly of the riches their work bestowed on the coal owners.

Yet this is not a predictable leftist diatribe against the forces of capitalism — though in his account of the 1984 coal strike Paxman does emphasise the suffering at the hands of the police of a female protestor who stupidly walked to the front line of the Orgreave dispute and was clouted with a baton, while the killing of David Wilkie, a Welsh taxi driver who was taking two miners to work when strikers dropped a concrete post on his car, receives no such overt condemnation.

Paxman concedes (though not enough) that while many coal owners were obtuse, exploitative and unfeeling towards their workers, equally many were not.