Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain, by Jeremy Paxman
KATE HUBBARD Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain By Jeremy Paxman William Collins £30
The story of coal, Jeremy Paxman says, is the story of Britain. It’s one he tells well, deftly combining the political and the social in a brisk and bracing narrative, with plenty of scope for Paxmanian indignation and scorn.
People have been digging for coal since the Middle Ages. But Paxman focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, taking in the industrial revolution, two world wars, the first Labour government, the birth of trade unionism, nationalisation, strikes, smog and pit accidents, with much odd and interesting detail along the way.
In the Second World War, miners were not exempted from conscription, which meant a shortage of labour. Bevin Boys (after Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour) were the solution: lay miners. After just four weeks of training, they were sent underground. Eric Morecambe and Jimmy Savile both became Bevin Boys.
Coal made Britain not just warm but powerful, firing manufacturing, steam, gas and electricity. This came at a cost: 85,000 miners died in accidents between 1873 and 1953, and John Evelyn had been complaining about the London smog back in the 17th century.
While the 19th century saw the industry boom, the 20th brought its decline. The writing was always on the wall – coal was a finite resource, inevitably to be superseded by other forms of energy.
But George Orwell understood, as trade-union leaders did not, that a great many miners had conservative hearts. When they came out on strike, as in 1984, they were striking not for better pay, but to preserve a way of life.
The brutish business of mining is already receding in our memories. Black Gold serves as a reminder. Men dug on their hands and knees, or lying down, often naked because of the heat. Scabs studding their vertebrae were known as ‘buttons down the back’.
Up until 1842, when an Act banned women and girls from working underground, girls as young as five did 12-hour shifts in the dark. They opened and closed trapdoors to control ventilation or hauled wagons of coal, with a belt around the waist and a chain between the legs.
Accidents were frequent and terrible. In 1862, at the Hartley Colliery, a huge iron girder crashed down the only shaft, trapping the men below. The nation was gripped; Queen Victoria sent a telegram; a Mr Hill of Bristol suggested boring a hole in the debris and pouring down soup. But there were no survivors; 204 men and boys died, crushed or asphyxiated. Every disaster was followed by an inquiry, which, says Paxman, generally failed those most in need.
The story of coal is one of greed and indifference, of lessons not learned and warnings not heeded. After nationalisation in 1947, landowners were paid nearly £81 million as compensation for coal left in the ground.
In the 2000s, the offer of compensation for miners with broken health became a bonanza for solicitors – one received £16.7 million in a single year. The average payment for a miner was £1,000.
There aren’t many heroes here, with politicians, proprietors, trade-union and Coal Board officials mostly getting it in the neck. The ‘weaselly-faced communist’ Arthur Scargill is ‘a creature of the media age’. When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, an ex-miner sent Scargill a text: ‘THATCHER DEAD’. ‘SCARGILL ALIVE!’ came the reply).
Yet coal was ‘midwife to genius’ and this is also a story of extraordinary ingenuity. Paxman reserves his admiration for the miners, engineers and inventors. One is William Armstrong, who specialised in hydraulics and made a fortune by using steam power to make artillery. His Newcastle mansion was the first domestic house to be lit by hydroelectricity and he had the foresight, in 1863, to predict the demise of coal.
The future, as Armstrong saw it, lay in renewable energy.