Abstract
From the managed change of the 1960s, through the brutal closures of the 1980s and 1990s, and the eventual closure of the last deep mine at Kellingley in 2015, the decline of the coal industry has been part of a wider story of industrial and social change. This process tells us much about wider narratives of deindustrialisation at the moment of closure and in what is widely known as the ‘half-life of deindustrialisation’. The ‘half-life’ of the coal industry reveals much about the place and places of the former industry and the people who populate them. This chapter examines how sociologists, geographers and historians have made sense of this unfolding process over the last four decades or so. It looks at how industrial pasts, presents and futures have been imagined and reimagined in that period. As part of its purpose, it pays attention to notions of the ‘industrial structure of feeling’ and a wider sense of social loss which informs those caught up in the immediacy of closure and subsequent generations of young people trying to make sense of an industrial past they had no direct knowledge of.
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Notes
- 1.
Bryne and Doyle highlight the irony of this historical eradication when they note the lack of evidence of the mining industry and South Tyneside: “…there is actually more visible evidence of the Roman occupation, which ended in the fourth century AD and has no historical connection to any contemporary experience, than of an industry which at its peak in the 1920s directly employed more than 12,000 men as miners” (p. 166).
- 2.
The 2000 Penguin Classic reprinting of the book includes an afterword by Hines reflecting on the character of Billy Casper and his role in the book. Hines returned to the topic of mining and mining communities in his later book—The Price of Coal.
- 3.
Learning to Labour is something of a touchstone in terms of sociological/ cultural accounts of the working class and the transition of the economy from ‘Fordism’ to post-Fordism. See Dolby, N., Dimitriadis, G., & Willis, P. (Eds.). (2004). Learning to labor in new times. Routledge. For studies framed in relation to Willis’ book, see McDowell, L. (2003). Redundant masculinities: Employment change and white working-class youth. Blackwell; Ward, M. (2015). From labouring to learning: Working-class masculinities, education and de-industrialization. Palgrave Macmillan.
- 4.
See the prominent place Coal is Our Life is given in Frankenberg, R. (1965). Communities in Britain: Social life in town and country. Pelican. This sets Coal is Our Life as one of the foundational studies of British sociology. Coal is our Life was republished in 1969 in the wake of Frankenberg’s volume. Later Graham Crow devotes a chapter to the centrality of mining community literature, especially the impact of Coal is our Life, in Crow, G. (2002). Social solidarities: Theories, identities and social change. Open University Press.
- 5.
There was a political fear on the left that post-war prosperity was weakening ties between labour and the manual working class. The miners are important here and so the perceived decline or marginalisation of the industry takes on a new significance. See Abrams, M., and Rose, R. (1960). Must Labour Lose? Penguin. See also the Affluent Worker Studies which sought to examine the notion of embourgeoisement. Although the groups of workers studied did not include miners, they were part of the traditional foil against which the emerging affluent workers were contrasted. See Goldthorpe, J., Lockwood, D., Bechhofer, F., & Platt, J. (1969). The affluent worker in the class structure. Cambridge University Press.
- 6.
Comparing unemployment statistics between 1970 and 1984, we can see that seasonally adjusted unemployment was around 3% in 1970 but had peaked at 11.9% by 1984. By the time, the later film was made the rate had fallen back to nearer 5%. Office for National Statistics Unemployment rate (aged 16 and over, seasonally adjusted) 1971–2021.
- 7.
- 8.
See some of the other contributions to this volume.
- 9.
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Strangleman, T. (2022). Contextualising the Coalfields: Mapping the Socio-Economic and Cultural Loss of the Coal Industry. In: Simmons, R., Simpson, K. (eds) Education, Work and Social Change in Britain’s Former Coalfield Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10792-4_2
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