Look Back in Anger: Mining Communities, the Mining Novel and the Great Miners' Strike (original) (raw)

Abstract

As I write this twenty years after the great strike of 1984-85, the final nails are being driven into the coffin of the British coalmining industry. The privatized company UK Coal has announced closure of its mine at Selby, Yorkshire, the 'super-pit' of the 1980s. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), its power broken by the state, its 3,000 members a pitiful remnant of past splendours, is merging-a grandiloquent term for absorption-with the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union. Arthur Scargill, once world famous, the last in a lineage which stretched back to A. J. Cook and Herbert Smith and beyond to Alexander MacDonald and Tommy Hepburn, stepped down as NUM president in 2002 and survives only as a marginal public figure as boss of the tiny Socialist Labour Party, the fruit of defeat. Yet no matter how distant the past appears today, for historians it requires remembering, explaining and celebrating. In the case of the miners we are lucky enough to have a developed historical literature dealing with diverse aspects of coal capitalism. 1 It is still being expanded and there is also a rich vein of creative literature. In comparison with other groups of workers, the miners have been well served by their novelists.

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