Dreaming of a black Xmas
King Coal created modern Britain, says JEREMY PAXMAN
Without coal, there would have been no Dickens novels We should never forget the filthy example we set the world
You’d better watch out, You’d better not cry, You’d better not pout, I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town.
Even those who can endure Michael Bublé murdering a beloved Christmas song appreciate that there’s no need to take it seriously.
Father Christmas might have decided you deserve to have only a measly lump of coal in your stocking, but we all know he’d be hard put to find one nowadays.
Even much of the free coal that retired miners are given each month as a reward for risking their lives underground has been imported from some place like Poland or Colombia. The sweating and the dying happens elsewhere now. The ‘black gold’ which made a few rich beyond imagination and sent many more coughing their way to an early grave is consigned to Britain’s past.
No-one knows who first discovered that if you could get this filthy rock alight, it might burn for hours. But there is a very strong case for saying that coal made modern Britain. Those who could extract it from the generous beds beneath Britain became very rich indeed and coalpowered steam fuelled the Royal Navy and helped build the Empire. It was midwife to genius and drove the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally transforming everything from locomotive manufacturing to the folding of envelopes. Its by-product, gas, lit the streets. Without coal, there would have been neither the energy to print Dickens novels, nor light to read them by.
The landowners were the most obvious beneficiaries. The poor people who tramped the country to toil in their pits often considered themselves blessed, too, despite the dreadful injuries and dangers they faced underground, for they knew that they had also become a sort of aristocracy. You didn’t mess with the million miners in 1913. Thirteen years later, the only General Strike in British history grew out of a mining dispute.
Out of sight (and usually out of mind), the miners discovered for themselves the best way to mine coal, and then organised themselves as the process became mechanised, with great roaring machines which filled the air with choking dust. Many had ‘coat buttons’ on the vertebrae down their backs – blue-black scars caused by the sharp rocks when working bent double. Hundreds more died – crushed, gassed, burned in infernos. Precisely how many perished? No-one knows.
DH Lawrence, who grew up in an ugly Nottinghamshire pit village, has left us an unforgettably brutish picture of the sort of men who toiled underground, but it is hard to believe they were much worse than any other group of manual labourers.
The life or death bonds of dependency gave the miners an edge when their churches and the labour movement sought leaders from their amassed ranks.
Among the clusters of gimcrack houses with no running water, the miners’ autodidacticism nourished brass bands, allotment societies, male-voice choirs, dogracing and giant vegetable competitions. Naturally they were, from a party political point of view, mainly Labour-voting communities although most tended to be social conservatives.
Nationalisation of the mines was first proposed by one of the founders of the Independent Labour Party, Keir Hardie, in 1893, and soon became the prime political objective of the miners’ trade union. The great post-war Labour government eventually delivered their dream in 1947. But it meant that, from then on, instead of squaring up to black-hearted pit-owners, the miners were fighting the state. They brought down Ted Heath’s Conservative government in 1974 but, thereafter, no government could contemplate bending the knee.
Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) 1982-2002 (‘Remember, you’re talking to the inventor of the flying picket,’ he would boast) met his match in Margaret Thatcher, Heath’s successor as Tory leader. When Scargill’s strike began in 1984, there were 170 working collieries in Britain. All are now closed.
Boris Johnson was talking what his friends would affectionately call ‘utter bollocks’ when he tried to claim Margaret Thatcher’s closure of the mines had something to do with environmental worries, for the woman had not an environmental bone in her body. She shut the pits because she wanted to break the industrial and political power of Scargill’s union. She won the battle and the union now has under a hundred members. The NUM’S sparkling headquarters were opened in 1988 and occupied for just four years before remaining empty for a further 25 years. Britain goes into the great climate-change dance competition with no coal industry to promise to close.
The last ‘great smog of London’, when you could hardly see the cinema screen on a night out, and police used canes to tap a way along their beat occurred in the 1950s, after which clean-air legislation was introduced. But King Coal was once almighty. We should never forget the filthy example we set the world.