The Scottish miners experienced enormous changes during these sixty-five years. Enjoying a high degree of autonomy underground throughout the nineteenth century, their work situation was transformed in the twentieth as Scotland became the most intensively mechanised of the British coalfields. Grievances generated by this change led to strike rates in Scotland being up to ten and fifteen times higher than in the major English coalfields. Such militancy displayed considerable geographical variation however, and the translation of grievances into industrial conflict was mediated by variables rooted in the community as well as the pit. A central theme of this volume is to explore the differences between the four principal mining regions in Scotland through the detailed study of ten localities within them. This innovative, two-tiered comparison is used to analyse the competing loyalties of class, gender and ethnicity, to map the uneven terrain of popular protest and social disorder, and to challenge traditional stereotypes of ’a peaceable kingdom’. This historical sociology of the Scottish coalfields frames the analysis of trade unionism and politics which is developed in the companion volume to this book.

Examining working class welfare in the age of deindustrialisation through the experiences of the Scottish coal minerThroughout the twentieth century Scottish miners resisted deindustrialisation through collective action and by leading the campaign for Home Rule. This book argues that coal miners occupy a central position in Scotland's economic, social and political history, and highlights the role of miners in formulating labour movement demands for political-constitutional reforms that eventually resulted in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. The book also uses the struggle of the mineworkers to explore working class wellbeing more broadly during the prolonged and politicised period of deindustrialisation that saw jobs, workplaces and communities devastated. Key featuresExamines deindustrialisation as long-running, phased and politicised processUses generational analysis to explain economic and political changeRelates Scottish Home Rule to long-running debates about economic security and working class welfareAnalyses the longer history of Scottish coal miners in terms of changing industrial ownership, production techniques and workplace safetyRelates this economic and industrial history to changes in mining communities and gender relations

The miners' lockout of 1926 was a pivotal moment in British twentieth-century history. Investigating issues of collective identity and action, Hester Barron explores the way that the lockout was experienced by Durham's miners and their families, illuminating wider debates about solidarity and fragmentation within working-class communities.

Arthur McIvor and Ronald Johnston explore the experience of coal miners' lung diseases and the attempts at voluntary and legal control of dusty conditions in British mining from the late nineteenth century to the present. In this way, the book addresses the important issues of occupational health and safety within the mining industry; issues that have been severely neglected in studies of health and safety in general. The authors examine the prevalent diseases, notably pneumoconiosis, emphysema and bronchitis, and evaluate the roles of key players such as the doctors, management and employers, the state and the trade unions. Throughout the book, the integration of oral testimony helps to elucidate the attitudes of workers and victims of disease, their 'machismo' work culture and socialisation to very high levels of risk on the job, as well as how and why ideas and health mentalities changed over time. This research, taken together with extensive archive material, provides a unique perspective on the nature of work, industrial relations, the meaning of masculinity in the workplace and the wider social impact of industrial disease, disability and death. The effects of contracting dust disease are shown to result invariably in seriously prescribed lifestyles and encroaching isolation. The book will appeal to those working on the history of medicine, industrial relations, social history and business history as well as labour history.

This work offers a unique contribution to gender and Scottish history breaking new ground on several fronts: there is no history of inter-war women in Scotland, very little labour or popular political history and virtually nothing published on women, the home and family. This book is a history of women in the period which integrates class and gender history as well as linking the public and private spheres. Using a gendered approach to history it transforms and shifts our knowledge of the Scottish past, unearthing the previously unexplored role which women played in inter-war socialist politics, the General Strike and popular political protest. It re-evaluates these areas and demonstrates the ways in which gender shaped the experience of class and class struggle. Importantly, the book also explores the links between the public and private spheres and addresses the concept of masculinity as well as femininity and pays particular reference to domestic violence. The strength of the book is the ways in which it illuminates the complex interconnections of culture and economic and social structure. Although the research is based on Scottish evidence, it also uses material to address key debates in gender history and labour history which have wider relevance and will appeal to gender historians, labour historians and social and cultural historians as well as social scientists.

The Labour Party became a major political force during the 1920s. It unexpectedly entered office as a minority government in 1924; five years later as the largest party in the Commons it took office again. For many the party's enhanced status was associated closely with its leader, Ramsay MacDonald. The years of optimism were destroyed by rising unemployment; in August 1931, the second Labour Government faced pressures for public expenditure cuts in the midst of a financial crisis. The Government collapsed, and MacDonald led a new administration composed of erstwhile opponents and a few old colleagues. Labour went into opposition; an early election reduced it to a parliamentary rump. This study offers a uniquely detailed analysis of Labour in the 1920s based on a wide variety of unpublished sources. The emphasis is on the variety of identities available within the party, and demonstrates how disputes over identity made a crucial contribution to the 1931 crisis. Thorough scholarship and distinctive interpretation combine to provide an important examination of a major episode in twentieth-century history.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) license, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust. Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain’s most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book looks at British coal through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miners and their families. A diverse range of sources are used to examine the economic, social, political and cultural impact of disability in the coal industry, looking beyond formal coal company and union records to include autobiographies, novels and existing oral testimony. It argues that, far from being excluded entirely from British industry, disability and disabled people were central to its development. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability history, disability studies, social and cultural history and representations of disability in literature.

Based on extensive use of primary evidence, this is the first study of interwar British communism to set the communist experience within the framework of the life cycle. Communism offered a complete identity that could reach into virtually all aspects of life; the Party sought influence even over members' personal conduct, moral codes, health and diet, personal hygiene, and aesthetic judgements. The British Communist Party (CPGB) sought to address the communist experience through all of the principal phases of the life cycle, and its reach therefore extended to take in children, youth, and the various aspects of the adult experience, including marital and kinship relations. The book also considers the contention that the Communist Party functioned as a ‘political religion’ for some joiners who opted to enter the congregation of the communist devoted.

Recent studies of the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian Britain have emphasized the significance of the themes of change, continuity, resistance and accommodation in the creation of a rich and diverse migrant culture within which a variety of Irish identities co-existed and sometimes competed. In contributing to this burgeoning historiography, this book explores and analyses the complexities surrounding the self-identity of the Irish in Victorian Britain, which differed not only from place to place and from one generation to another but which were also variously shaped by issues of class and gender, and politics and religion. Moreover, and given the tendency for Irish ethnicity to mutate, through a comparative study of the Irish in Britain and the United States, the book suggests that in order to preserve their Irishness, the Irish often had to change it. Written by some of the foremost scholars in the field, these original essays not only shed new light on the history of the Irish in Britain but are also integral to the broader study of the Irish Diaspora and of immigrants and minorities in multicultural societies. This book was previously published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

Coal is a topic that has been, remains, and will continue to be of significant interest to those concerned with the causes, course and consequences of industrialization and de-industrialization. This six-volume, reset collection provides scholars with a wide variety of sources relating to the Victorian coal industry.