The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain

by Huw Beynon, Ray Hudson

No one personified the age of industry more than the miners. The Shadow of the Mine tells the story of King Coal in its heyday and what happened to mining communities after the last pits closed. Coal was central to the British economy, powering its factories and railways. It carried political weight, too. In the eighties the miners risked everything in a year-long strike against Thatchers shutdowns. Defeat foretold the death of their industry. Tens of thousands were cast onto the labour market with a minimum amount of advice and support. Yet British politics all of a sudden revolves around the coalfield constituencies that lent their votes to Boris Johnsons Conservatives in 2019. Even in the Welsh Valleys, where the red wall still stands, support for the Labour Party has halved in a generation. Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson draw on decades of research to chronicle these momentous changes through the words of the people who lived through them.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

Published June 29, 2021

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two enormously experienced researchers take on the death of a major industry. Their focus on the workers and on state policy-making is illuminating and progresses beyond the existing studies of coal that sometimes seem to begin and end with Scargill. As The Shadow of the Mine eloquently demonstrates, there was so much more...

Recommended musical pairing with Public Service Broadcasting's 2017 album "Every Valley".

[Jerry Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the seminal moments of my early adulthood, when I was a wet behind the ears, callow youth just embarking on my university experience, was the year long miner's strike in the UK of 1984/5. I am ashamed to say that I was a Thatcherite asshole who was very anti-strike. As I have aged, my position has moved sharply and extremely left to the extent that I have recently been looking for books that provide a retrospective on this key moment in the country's industrial relations history. This has proven to be a difficult exercise and I was hoping to get more on the strike from this book, which I found in the US surprisingly.

This is not about the strike per se of course, and about two thirds of the book examines the aftermath when the industry was basically being closed down by the government or for the workings being exhausted. I knew, of course, about the import of mining and the pits to many of the communities where they were situated and this book focuses on the Durham and South Wales coalfields specifically. Many communities were decimated by pit closures and although the NUM strove valiantly to prevent these closures, knowing the impact that shuttering pits would have, the government was inexorable in ensuring that there is today no deep mining to speak of in the UK.

Now, as climate change has taken hold (a fact not covered in this book), there is not much question that coal's days as a prime source of power generation for example, are numbered and the pits may well have closed in any event. There is an example quoted here of miners actually purchasing their colliery and keeping production going for another decade plus after initial closure, although the workings were eventually exhausted anyway.

However the fact remains that successive governments did little, the Tories especially of course, to alleviate the suffering caused by the implosion of communities that were formally tied to mining. It is laid out here. The breakdown of social cohesion, closure of social clubs, businesses, shops, poverty, boredom, people moving away, property speculation, lack of training programs, no jobs etc. I recall Michael Heseltine taking something of a lap of honor for closing down what was undoubtedly a dirty and dangerous industry that had and has, long term detrimental health impacts on those tasked with digging coal from beneath the lands of the UK. However, as I realized, it is clear from this book that coal mining does have something of a unique place in the annals of the UK. Clearly pivotal to the establishment of Empire, dangerous and lethal for many, but nevertheless being more than a job. Being a miner was an identity and one that all in the community revered and respected and when it was gone, that community all too often fell apart.

I feel as though, from 40 years distance, I owe Arthur Scargill a personal apology. It is clear that the government was out to shut down the industry as he warned about, and which I failed to heed. Having said that, mining was already on the decline from the heady days of the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, and even then, the mines were killing hundreds of men and boys a year to the benefit of the industrialists. Pits were being closed well before the 80s and coal was clearly out of favor as a fuel and would likely have continued its decline even without the UK's most overrated and heartless Prime Minister at the helm. The real crime though, is the failure to recognize, or perhaps callously ignore, the impact that closing the main lifeblood of a community would do to said community, and the impact of that is laid out here.

Not without interest but I don't know why I found this rather turgid reading. I suspect this is because I was looking for something that this book didn't even purport to do. It's not the first time I've done that, and I did come away better informed on some of the details of a situation that I was already pretty aware of.

[Andy Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brilliant book by Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson is a must-read account of industrial decline and the best account of the economic, social and political backdrop to what has happened with the so-called red wall parliamentary constituencies in the UK. If you want to know how parts of the red wall went blue, how the Conservative governments destroyed communities in Wales and the north east, how Labour in local and national government fared little better and why Boris Johnson’s spurious levelling up ‘strategy’ is no more than the reheated failed policies of the past, then you need to read The Shadow of the Mine. It’s simply indispensable and full of lessons for today.

[Toby Crime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Relatively short, comprehensible history of UK coal- respected the decision not to focus on 84 much as so much written that short chapter wouldn't have given loads. Finally got a political economy for why there are so many scabs in Nottingham

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Beynon is a bureaucrat who wants one day to be a politician, and here is his populist stance.

[Michael Macdonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

sad decline from the classic sociologist, riddled with errors and panegyric to the Hard Left who destroyed the NUM. Very weak analysis from a man bypassed by hidtory.

[Liv Kiely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written, well argued and though I read it years ago, still mull over some of the points.
Absolutely worth a read.

[Julian Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sensitive, comprehensive examination of how the Thatcher government plotted with ruthless forethought to destroy the British labor movement by crushing the 1984 miners' strike, and how coal communities in South Wales and Durham have since languished at the hands of neoliberal capitalism. The book opens by discussing the history and sociology of mining communities in the UK and thr strike takes place at around the mid-point of the book; the remainder is dedicated to discussing the economic and social after-effects of the mine closures, and how the labor movement and civil society continue to be relevant in rebuilding the social fabric and fighting for ex-miners. Comprehensive with a sharp edge, without being polemic; it fully demonstrates how one government's wicked actions devastated entire communities for decades since.