08.09.2010

Class, blackened faces, and academic muddle

David Douglass reviews Hester Barron's 'The 1926 miners' lockout: meanings of community in the Durham coalfield' Oxford, 2009, pp314, £65

Hester Barron writes of the Durham Miners’ Gala and its banners: “Men and women absorb the heroic image even if they could not grasp the political or social significance, like the old man who came to Durham on gala day to get his ‘reets’ [rights]: ‘We dinnat knaa what they are, but we’ve come to get them’” (p249). Just why men and women of the coal communities are incapable of grasping the social and political significance of the characters, slogans and historic scenes displayed on our own union banners is perhaps something only an Oxford graduate can explain to us - except she does not.

Like much else in this book, the author misunderstands the story she is relating, and later the evidence she herself is presenting. The man who does not ‘knaa what his reets’ are but has come to get them is the subject of a self-directed joke told by the pitman himself. On another level it is questioning the tangibility of rights. Are they stored somewhere in a magic box, with a special key? Are they written on some ancient parchment? What are they, where are they, are they real and can they be collected or even depended upon? It is meant to be a joke, but one demonstrating more political and social understanding than Barron gives us credit for.

This is a revisionist history; an iconoclastic rampage through the sacred memories and certainties of what 1926 was all about. Much of which, Barron will explain, is “constructed”. Readers will not be surprised to learn that I take issue with her over her suggestion that the scabs both in 1926 and 84 were heroes. A claim repeated in the book more than once.

“To walk the gauntlet of booing crowds must actually have required great courage and a strong character; far more so in Durham, where strike-breaking was infrequent, than in some Midland counties, where it might be the strikers themselves who were in a minority” (p129). Or “It may be that the blacklegging was simply indicative of a stronger - and perhaps braver - concern with individualism that many within the coalfield shared” (p132).

Coalminers work in teams, in a tight dependency one upon another, relying on a collective consciousness and concern for each other’s and the team’s safety. Implicit trust comes to members of the team that each man will be where he is supposed to be and doing what he is supposed to do. This has to be taken for granted, taken as instinctive for the whole operation to work safely and everyone to come back alive. A concern for individualism in this context would be anti-social and downright dangerous.

This instinct and self-dependency carried through into collective strength and union organisation for joint objectives aims. However, a scab adopts an entirely alien persona, giving up membership of a community, turning his back on everything of value and worth. This is not something either admired or ‘shared’, as the figures clearly reveal over a century of mining struggles.

Barron’s own evidence reveals that only a minute section of the community scabbed in 1926, but she contends: “If the number of men who blacklegged in 1926 remained tiny, many more must have considered it in the smallest hours of the night ...” (p257). For the debunker of ‘myths’ this is the creation of an entirely new one, based upon nothing but the author’s speculation.

Searching for some novel perspective on this epoch period she tells us in the introduction: “... attention has been given to those previously omitted from a union-based account, such as women and (to a lesser extent) groups such as the passive union member, the non-unionist and the coal owner” (p9).

Quoting Tom Griffiths, who documented the religious, ethnic and occupational divisions that cut across the social world of miners, she comments: “In the light of such research it becomes harder to understand how collective action could happen at all ...” (p11). Nevertheless class-consciousness is ‘blamed’ for the miners’ response to the lockout.

Mining communities

Barron frequently challenges the very idea that the Durham coalfield was a community and that pit work engendered class solidarity and class-consciousness. That class was the unifying feature of coal communities in Durham, not gender, religion or ethnicity. For her the history so deeply embedded in working class folklore is myth based upon false consciousness and invented identities.

She writes: “... as one commentator has pointed out, ‘as well as the popular myth of the miner as the prototypical working class avant garde is another widespread image: that of the miners as repressed proletarian’”. Why this is myth we are not told. She continues: “In the national imagination, coalmining might summon up romantic images of blackened faces and masculine toil deep beneath the ground, but in Durham one man hated his work with a passion ...” (p15). But how, even if it is viewed as “romantic” by some, does the fact that some men hate the back-breaking and lowly paid toil they are engaged in contradict the designation of “prototypical working class”?

As for the blackened faces, “It could also be a source of shame, and when in 1926 the Samuel Report emphasised the desirability of pithead baths, one reason it gave was the loss of self respect to the miner who had to travel home in dirty clothes ...” (p17). But if mining was such a romantic calling, so socially esteemed, why would being black be a source of shame, rather than pride? Old Welsh colliers from the 20s and 30s talked about having paraded in their pit gear months before they had a job and while they were still at school. In fact as young pit lads we could not wait to get black, and much blacker than the work we were engaged in would actually make us. The blacker you were, the harder you had worked. My father came home coaly black until the early 1960s, as did all the miners at our pit. They never once expressed “shame” at the visible evidence of their occupation. This is not to say miners were universally valued - girls who aspired to something better than the village and being a miner’s wife might, for example, shun the attentions of a collier. While being called a “pit yakker” was insulting, we were not ashamed of being a miner or coming hyme black. There certainly was no “stigma” (p27).

The book is shot through with annoying misunderstanding, misinterpretation and ideological spin. For instance, “By mid-November one third of the national labour force was back at work” (p27). The resistance finished at the end of November 1926, so less than two weeks before over 700,000 miners - two thirds of the total workforce in the midst of the most bitter deprivation, poverty and hunger - were sticking it out and standing firm with their union. But it depends what facts you pluck from history.

Here is another misconception: “But the miners themselves also might be discouraged from identification with a wider community. In some collieries, for example, tight rules governed the employment of men arriving from elsewhere” (p55). In reality, local lodges rooted in the community exercised job control. The strength of the lodge rested on the village, so it was youngsters from that village the lodge sought to employ. Progression to face work remained under the control of the lodge in the shape of generational union men, who also tried to prevent management from flooding the pit with footloose, perhaps non-union, miners with no loyalty to community union values.

But the object of the exercise was not a one of parochialism. On the contrary, by maintaining tight local control within each lodge and community the area union and in turn the national union is strengthened. It is this locally based strength which is demonstrated in the overall resilience of the miners in 1921, 1926 and all the years up to 1993. It is one the private owners have sought to undo wholesale, with local miners debarred from employment at their own pits, while those from distant coalfields or even those abroad are taken on instead. The consequential weakening of job control results in lower membership and diminished union strength.

Somewhat contradictorily, Barron plays down the role of the pit community. In 1984-85, she says, the “community of the earlier period was imagined and consciously emulated” (p6). But the pit villages and coal communities of Britain were not “imagined”. They still existed. She gives the example of pit welfare committees funding facilities in more than one village owing to the workforce being “widely separated” (p53). Indeed, sometimes a pit will be based upon several villages, but is this a denial of the existence of a pit community? My own colliery, Hatfield Main, was based on a dual community of Dunscroft and Stainforth - two villages a quarter of a mile apart, separated by a small railway bridge. Sometimes bitter argument raged over community resources and welfare provision between the two villages, “t’old bridge” being designated the cause of perceived imbalances of allocation. With the closure of firstly Thorne pit in the 1950s and then Yorkshire Main in the 1980s, miners were transferred to Hatfield. But Hatfield remained a community, albeit geographically based on two villages.

The same is true of pits which welcomed countless travelling miners in Durham during the Wilson rundown of the coal industry (Wilson closed more mines than Thatcher, it should be recalled). The core pit village remained, whilst the communities based round the closed colliery would still house large numbers of miners travelling to distant mines. Their sense of community, though weakened, remained intact. It was the legacy and culture of the coal industry which laid the base of the community rather than a particular and specific location.

But nobody has ever suggested that all miners lived in such communities anyway. Some lived in cities, in big new council estates with mixed occupancy in the 50s and 60s. In the 80s young miners might live nearer the action in town or city centre bedsits, but the core village community is not negated by this.

Barron writes: “During the strike local differences were exacerbated owing to variations in degree of deprivation. Although the strike meant a universal cessation of labour, some colliery villages had already suffered during the 1920s ... Chopwell colliery had been on strike for nearly a year when the lockout began” (p54). What is the point of this observation? The whole industry had been through the punishing strike of 1921, just four years previously. It clearly had not inhibited the determined, united stand in 1926. Presumably Chopwell should have been more reluctant to join than the rest of the county, but it was not. It was men from Chopwell who derailed the scab Flying Scotsman, and who marched to the city hall where they hoisted the red flag. It was Chopwell which adopted on its banner the hammer and sickle, together with a portrait of Lenin and Marx, after the lockout was over.

Pit women

Another straw edifice concerns the legend of anti-strike, anti-collectivist women. Mining women are said to be isolated and non-political, concerned only with home and children, and hostile or apathetic to trade unionism. This ignores the fact of village life, and the colliery which resides in the very heart of the living room and haunts the bedroom with early rising - or, worse, the permanently empty bed. With the pit tip looming over the back garden and a coal-black man sitting in a bath in the living room, its rather hard to envisage a women so isolated from the concerns of the pit, miners’ income and hours and the politics of the union.

In fact the record shows that women have been wholly supportive of miners’ struggles. Indeed women in the coalfields have a long record of fighting their corner everywhere from kitchens to picket lines; we see this time after time, from the 1840s to the 1990s. Despite this Barron suggests: “It seems plausible to speculate that some women must have broken under the strain and urged their husbands to return to work” (p149). But this is not what she finds among the reams of oral evidence collected. Talking of the blacklegs, one woman is quoted as saying: “We were as bitter against their wives as we were against the men, and that is how the women felt.” Another states: “For the miners themselves ... a commitment to wife and family became a reason to support the position of the community rather than defy it” (p150).

Somewhat reluctantly Barron concludes from the evidence that for the women of the coalfields the operation of gender in politics and society was rooted in class. Talking of the “frequent indifference toward the early feminist movement” in the early part of the 20th century, she admits that “those who perceived their lives in terms of exploitation” saw themselves as being oppressed not by “men”, but by “employers, the rich, the middle class and the bosses ... in other words, women who were conscious of exploitation interpreted it in terms of class conflict” (p163).

None of the references to the “non-political trade union movement” come with any explanation of how an ideology of non-resistance and cooperation with the employer and capitalism can be considered “non-political”. Apparently it was in keeping with “the earlier tradition of the independent collier ... an age before the national politics of the [Miners’ Federation] came to disrupt those of Durham” (p71). But the Durham miners had been deeply engaged in union struggles throughout the 1700s and efforts to form a national union since the 1830s and 40s. And at no point did they associate themselves with notions of “non-political trade unionism”, being branch and root supporters of first Chartism, then social democracy and more revolutionary working class ideology.

Despite having told us how the spirit of the “non-political union” correlated to the early roots of the independent collier, Barron then goes on seven pages later to tell us that in fact it did not: “Even in the aftermath of 1926 the Northumberland and Durham Non-Political Trade Union was unable to make inroads and had not attracted many more than 4,000 members by the end of 1928” (p78). This contrasts with the 155,773 Durham men in the miners’ union in January 1926.

Barron makes the somewhat bizarre proposition that the 1926 lockout was essentially a regional miners’ dispute, and the rest of the country was brought into conflict essentially to back Durham up: “Rather than simply appealing for help, the Durham miners gave the impression that they were fighting for Durham very much on their own terms” (p78). To support this absurd suggestion she offers the fact that Durham miners were uniquely defending the six and three-quarter hours shift its hewers worked. But this had been a standard established through strong trade unionism and there was a granite conviction not to move from it. It was a benchmark for the whole industry, and even the official Sankey Commission had used it in promoting the idea of a seven-hour day nationwide for coalface workers.

Barron calls it “a privileged position”, which basically accepts the owners’ arguments that, rather than cut profits, rather than demand state subsidy, the workers should take up the slack, with those enjoying the best conditions paying the highest price. Apart from which she seems to overlook the fact that no coalfield was given an exemption from the cut in wages and lengthening of hours.

The “privileged” hewers were actually graduates of the whole mining process in Durham. Lads started at the pit and worked their way through various outbyes, through back-up services, eventually arriving at the rank of hewer. It was not exclusive at all: it was the expected destination of every lad who signed on at the pit. The hewers worked the hardest, and were exposed to the worst and most dangerous conditions; they had the shortest life expectancy and the highest propensity to serious injury, which is why their shifts were shorter. When hewers became too old for such work they might end up back on the surface. By far the majority of face workers were either destined to become or had been hewers, along with some surface men.

The book informs us that during the general strike the armed forces were “briefly responsible for maintaining the peace ...” (p73). With navy destroyers sailing up the Mersey, the Tyne and Clyde, marines dispersing strikers from Newcastle and Glasgow, and armoured cars and tanks on the streets of London, one can only wonder what “peace” it was maintaining, and on whose behalf.

Class memory

There is not space here to cover in detail the book’s novel and thorough investigation into the various religious denominational responses to the lockout, especially the responses of the lay member and the religious hierarchy. Suffice it to say that this chapter like the others is framed by yet another straw proposition: “The significant role played by religious bodies in the coalfield raises questions about the potential conflict between a confessional identity and a class one.”

But, of course, it need not, and the Durham coalfield in particular demonstrates the solid base of class identity and consciousness, on top of which can stand all sorts of other - religious and cultural - identities.

Barron quotes Robert Moore’s Pitmen, preachers and politics to the effect that a “specifically Methodist outlook” was “able to erode a class or occupational identity” (p182). But the evidence accumulated in her own book shows that this is not actually the case. The Methodists did not erode class identity: indeed many of them fused class and religion into a new brand of socialist perspective and rock-solid trade unionism (my dad included). The hellfire preachers of socialism and unionism strayed very little from the tracts they also employed in the chapel.

At length Barron comes to demolish all this herself: “While both religious and secular identities remained important within the coalfield, they never threatened to override a more fundamental loyalty to the strike or a wider occupational consciousness: rather they might be appropriated for such ends” (p198).

Religion is just one factor Barron uses to devalue class solidarity, including the class memory of past struggle, which for her are somehow invalid and untrustworthy. It is true old miners did confuse dates and events, particularly those of the 20s, which saw three periods of strikes and lockouts within a six-year period. One can see why, decades later, old miners and their wives telling the tale as they recall it with nothing more than their memories, could merge the whole period into one “long, bloody war”, as someone once called it. Does that make them “mythological events”?

Something about class identity and the history which framed it, especially in the mining context, clearly rattles Barron. It cannot be real, and if it is it is “romantic” and somehow distilled from a wider, more complex context which would deaden the radical conclusions and perspectives if included in the mix. She cannot, of course, suggest that the events described are not real and not deeply rooted in what is in reality a collective history and identity, particularly for those of us who experienced all of these things, together with our families. Yet somehow they must be taken with an historic pinch of salt. My daughter was 12 in 1984, but the events of the miners’ Great Strike were etched into her adolescent memory. However, individual memories of 1926 are implicitly rejected by Barron as implausible in some unspecified way.

When it comes to direct parallels between 1984-85 and 1926 it is Barron who is the author of mythology, suggesting that we had some form of pathological death wish to repeat the earlier defeat (pp228-29) - “the keystone to a militant, heroic, and tragic past”. Except it was the colossal victories of 1969, 1972 and 1974 to which we referred and were freshest in our memory (and the government’s). These victorious events were just a decade previous, so why on earth would we ‘collectively’ forget these events and jump back instead 60 years into the past to find a memory of historic defeat?

Also up for challenge in the mythical memory of 1926 was the hot summer: “... despite the meteorological record the weather remains important to a romanticised image of the strike”, says Barron (p232). Without exception miners and their families will recall that it was a blazing summer and the sun-starved coal communities enjoyed it in full measure. But Barron has checked it out and discovered that “June almost exactly matched the inter-war average; and only in July and August and September did temperatures exceed the usual for the inter-war years” (p231). So with the exception of June, which was normally warm, the summer was indeed exceptionally hot. Not much of a myth there then - plus the fact, of course, that for miners usually confined to the dark, cramped spaces of underground labour through all but two weeks of the summer, any sunny weather would have been exceptional. As it turns out, the records establish that this was another example of miners’ memories being in line with the facts. Still, not to be outdone, Hester goes on to show it was actually a colder winter!

Contradictory

Despite recent revisionist coalfield histories, described by the author as “more imaginative” than those of the past, she warns that “a romantic tradition still pervades historical studies of 1926”. She uses the word “romantic” throughout the work essentially to describe notions of class struggle and class-consciousness, but nothing in this work uproots or seriously challenges a class analysis of 1926 and the coal community’s responses to it.

Barron sets up a whole series of false propositions based upon crass perceptions of community, class and identity, then not very convincingly knocks them down again. The fact that no-one would ever perceive community as a single, homogeneous entity - class identity, for example, absorbs and overlaps with other ideological and cultural identities - escapes her. Class struggle does not presuppose total uniformity of identity or influence.

She concludes that in 1926 “ideologies could come together, however tenuously”, but “The mining settlements in which men and women lived and worked meant that an occupational consciousness was constructed within strict geographical boundaries, which tended to militate against the development of wider working class identity.”

The experience of 1926 suggests something a lot stronger than a ‘tenuous’ unity based on ‘occupation’ and ‘geography’. The most bitter part of the struggle of the miners was in rejecting district wage negotiation and wage rates, in defence of national structures and nationally negotiated wages. The great strike of 1912 and the earliest strikes of the 1840s had been fought around this very perception and principle. Likewise the mass growth of the Communist Party and other far-left, revolutionary working class politics among the mining communities demonstrates how inaccurate the above conclusions are.

We miners are guilty of having “constructed a usable past” and this “imagined community” was “so powerful both to insiders and outsiders because a memory of the past was also being formulated at a much more basic and unconscious level” (p270). However, the evidence of the book contradicts this conclusion: every chapter pays unwitting tribute to the richness of the Durham coal communities and veracity of their recalled tradition - nothing at all relies on some Marxist construction or “romantic” imagination. Not so much not seeing the wood for the trees as not seeing the trees either.

The author further concludes: “However, in the light of the conclusions of this study it is worth rethinking the concept of community itself. Rather than the ideal type of mining community being one in which a homogeneous occupational identity existed to the exclusion of all others, it seems that the essence of community lay in its ability to subsume and integrate other categories of identity. Multiple identities still existed in the Durham mining villages of the 1920s, but they complemented each other, and men and women rarely found themselves forced to choose between them. Rather than a homogeneous entity the mining communities of Durham therefore consisted of interlocking layers of identity, placed one on top of the other” (p270).

Well, hallelujah, but since this conclusion was drawn before the thesis was submitted and before the book was published, why was the whole work not looked at again in that light? Hester Barron, it seems, finally came to a concept of community, class and identity we all had in the first place. Her revisionist ‘pure model’ did not match up to the realities of the 1920s - or the present day, for that matter. The central role of class, class-consciousness and their impact on the Durham coal communities are left intact.

But for Barron the allegations, the cynicism, the revisionism stay in place, despite the fact that all the evidence of the book frankly contradicts this at every page; despite the fact that the final conclusion ends up disputing the proposition around which the author has based her whole thesis: communities and identities just do not operate in that way. Well, that thesis earned the author a doctorate from Oxford, and the publication of a book. What it informs the rest of us that we did not already know - other than how reactionary this form of anti-working class revisionism is - I am unsure.

She is right, though, on one of her conclusions: in the light of this ‘new’ discovery of how community and class work, perhaps she should consider rewriting the book.

An extended version of this article will be found on the miner’s website, www.minersadvice.co.uk, under the review section.