I’ve lived most of my life on the periphery of coalfields. As a child, I could see the twin spoil-heaps of Swadlincote, in the South Derbyshire Coalfield, from my parents bedroom window. When my daughter was a child, she went to nursery school just down the road in Coalburn (there’s a clue in the name) in the Scottish South Lanarkshire Coalfield. When we left Coalburn we moved to just outside Abergavenny, on the edge of the South Wales Coalfield. For the last twenty-odd years, I’ve lived just a few miles from the site of the Polmaise Colliery in Stirlingshire.

The Polmaise miners were famously militant: they struck for ten months in 1938; after Mrs Thatcher broke the 1984-85 national strike, they were the last miners to return to work, a week after every other pit. There’s little sign of the mine today; it closed a year after the strike ended. Stirling Council now has a refuse disposal and recycling centre at Lower Polmaise. Coal had been mined around Coalburn since the 1840s, the last pit closed in 1968. In 1988, a huge opencast mine was opened, alleged to be the largest hole in Europe. It closed in 1997. Europe’s largest battery storage facility is currently being built there, to store excess power from Scotland’s wind farms. At its peak in the early 1920s, The South Wales Coalfield had employed 250,000 men; numbers shrank through the twentieth century and the last deep mine to operate was The Tower Colliery in the Cynon Valley. In 1994, 239 Tower miners pooled their redundancy money to buy the pit and run it as a workers’ co-operative, which they did successfully until their coal reserves were exhausted in 2008. The old Swadlincote spoil-heap in South Derbyshire is now a dry ski slope.

From my comfortable seat on the periphery, I’ve watched a whole industry vanish. But many of the mining villages are still there. Not all of them, some were just timber cabins, but by the mid-1950s miners and their families were living in decent houses, funded out of the public purse, and replacing the shoddy houses previously built by the mine-owners for their workforces. Those mining villages remain special places. Take Coalburn for example: the village’s Miners Welfare Institute remains the centre of village social life and is the only pub in the village; there’s an annual village gala; there are two marching bands – a pipe band, and a silver [brass] band; there’s a thriving horticultural society, with an annual show; an historical society; pigeon-racing is a popular sport. There is a strong sense of community that is almost certainly an inheritance from the workforce solidarity of the village’s industrial past.

I was reminded of the role and importance of workforce solidarity in the mining industry when I saw the news of the deaths of 82 Chinese miners at the Liushenyu coal mine on May 23rd this year. The deaths had been caused by a build-up of carbon monoxide, which can kill by asphyxiation or explosion. The mine had a previously been criticised for its poor safety record.

Of course, that Chinese tragedy is part of a wider story, an auld song. Scotland’s worst coalmining disaster was back in 1877, ‘The Blantyre Calamity’, when 207 miners lost their lives in an explosion and fire caused by a build-up of firedamp (methane). A subsequent inquiry uncovered a list of poor safety management practices: inadequate ventilation, inadequate safety lamps (not the standard locked Davy safety lamps), and shot-firing by untrained workers. The attitude of the mine-owners can be intuited by the eviction of 34 widows from their ‘tied’ cottages just six months after the explosion. Disasters such as these drew a response from the workforce: they were a stimulus to worker solidarity. One of the Blantyre miners who gave evidence to inquiry was Andrew McAnulty who went on to be President of the Lanarkshire Miners Union. In the course of his career as a miner he suffered a scorched right arm with shrivelled sinews, he lost the sight in one eye and had injuries to his feet.

In the UK, the miners’ federated union successfully urged Parliament to pass a law in 1911 to allow miners to choose their own safety inspectors with the right to go anywhere in the mine to ensure that safety regulations were enforced. A similar measure had already had an impact in the French mines, and the introduction of the Workmen Inspectors, as they became known, definitely had a big impact on UK mine safety, especially in guarding against gas build-ups and deaths from roof falls.

Likewise, political pressure by the mining unions and Members of Parliament for mining constituencies led the Government to ask the UK Medical Research Council to conduct chest X-ray screening of miners, research which led in turn to pneumoconiosis, caused by coal dust, to be recognised as an occupational disease, allowing the sufferers to seek compensation. The mine-owners had previously opposed pithead medical examinations.

Workforce inspectors are also found in the shipping industry, another industry with a spotty safety record. The International Transportworkers Federation, an international union, has ITF inspectors who conduct unannounced inspections on berthed ships to detect violations in international shipping regulations on health and safety.

The UK coalfields, that have been a sort of backcloth to my whole life, no longer yield up coal to burn in the living-room grate. There are no more UK coal-mining disasters, though other industrial safety failures continue to cost lives – witness the 167 deaths in the Piper Alpha North Sea oilrig explosion in 1988. But the Coalburn Silver Marching Band is still there as a small reminder that human solidarity is a great resource for the common good.

Michael Bloor