Resisting Closures and Winning Wages in the 1960s and 1970s

The 1984-85 miners’ strike in defence of collieries, jobs and communities was an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the change in economic direction driven in the UK by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments. The government was committed to removing workforce voice from the industry. Its struggle against the miners was a war against the working class more generally. Mining communities were grievously affected in economic terms by the strike and its aftermath, but in the longer run emerged with renewed solidarity. Gender relations, evolving from the 1960s as employment opportunities for women increased, changed in further progressive ways. This strengthened the longer-term cohesion of mining communities. The strike had a more general and lasting political impact in Scotland. The narrative of a distinct Scottish national commitment to social justice, attacked by a UK government without democratic mandate, drew decisive moral force from the anti-Thatcherite resistance of men and women in the coalfields. This renewed the campaign for a Scottish Parliament, which came to successful fruition in 1999.

Changing Communities and Collieries

Economic security in the coalfields was intimately connected with underground safety. Hazards were mediated by the effectiveness of trade union representation. Where employers attacked workplace trade unionism, the risks to workers of death, serious injury and illness were increased. This was the pattern in the 1920s and 1930s, when private owners excluded forceful union advocates. The reverse was observable in the 1950s and 1960s, when nationalisation facilitated stronger union voice. The rate of fatality was cut by one half as a result. On this most fundamental of all questions, life and death, nationalisation was an unambiguous success. Major fatal disasters from the 1950s to the early 1970s showed that dangers were diminished but not eradicated. Changes in production, with the application of power-loading in the 1960s, also brought new hazards. Miners were nevertheless empowered by union voice and public ownership to act with greater vigilance in pursuit of safety and were compensated when missing shifts because of injury or illness. This was unmistakable progress towards greater security in the coalfields.

Changing Ownership and Employment

Changes in communities and collieries reinforced economic security in the coalfields. Communities were subject to substantial divisions of class and gender but became more cohesive after nationalisation. Economic diversification helped, bringing a widening range of employment opportunities for coalfield women. Community security was weakened slightly by migration, encouraged by policy-makers, but strengthened by the major advances of new housing and local authority ownership. At workplace level there were continuities from private to public ownership, with security improved through union mobilisation and collective state action. Village Pits established before the First World War were redeveloped after nationalisation and remained important in the 1970s. New Mines in the 1920s and 1930s included enhanced welfare amenities secured by trade union pressure. Cosmopolitan Collieries from the late 1950s came at a cost, with local pit closures and miners travelling greater distances, but greater long-term security was promised. Moral economy expectations were satisfied: restructuring involved meaningful input from the miners and improved their economic and social standing.

Introduction: Scottish Coal Miners and Economic Security

Changes in coalfield employment and coal industry ownership illustrate the ways in which economic security was strengthened from the 1920s to the 1960s. Private ownership was an obstacle to communal security, with employers protecting their profits at the expense of employment and wage stability. Nationalisation in 1947 was an important victory. Progress was not straightforward, however, disturbed by pit closures and job losses from the late 1950s onwards. Policy-makers moved human and capital resources out of basic industry, including coal, and into higher value-added manufacturing. The new employer, the National Coal Board (NCB), was initially clumsy in its approach to restructuring. Nationalisation involved limited innovation in the sense of enhanced industrial democracy. But miners and their union representatives made the changes work in their favour. Policy-makers were persuaded to accommodate the needs of the coalfields as miners defined them. New factories were established in the coalfields through UK government regional policy, mainly in mechanical engineering and then electrical engineering, with jobs for women as well as men. A reconfigured pattern of social relations emerged gradually, with more opportunities for women and less gender inequality.

Generational Learning: from the 1920s to the 1950s

Scottish miners were heterogeneous in their politics and culture. A distinct Scottish mining identity accommodated social conservatives and religious sectarians with class-conscious trade unionists and international socialists. This identity developed through political campaigning from the 1950s to the 1980s and drew upon the claimed values of the Scottish Nation as well as solidarity with working class people across Britain and the world. It emphasised the value of gender equality, and gradually undermined coalfield male chauvinism. Mining leaders related security explicitly to questions of class and nation. Solidarities of class were pursued with trade unionists across Britain, but miners in Scotland tended to see deindustrialisation as an acute and even distinctly Scottish problem. The unreformed constitutional-political structures of the UK were criticised as an obstacle to coalfield security, with policy-makers remote from the communities affected by accelerating job loss. Scotland’s national right to self-determination was asserted, and the miners persuaded the Scottish Trades Union Congress to adopt Home Rule as official policy by the early 1970s.

Campaigning for Jobs and Communities in the 1980s

The 1984-85 miners’ strike in defence of collieries, jobs and communities was an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the change in economic direction driven in the UK by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments. The government was committed to removing workforce voice from the industry. Its struggle against the miners was a war against the working class more generally. Mining communities were grievously affected in economic terms by the strike and its aftermath, but in the longer run emerged with renewed solidarity. Gender relations, evolving from the 1960s as employment opportunities for women increased, changed in further progressive ways. This strengthened the longer-term cohesion of mining communities. The strike had a more general and lasting political impact in Scotland. The narrative of a distinct Scottish national commitment to social justice, attacked by a UK government without democratic mandate, drew decisive moral force from the anti-Thatcherite resistance of men and women in the coalfields. This renewed the campaign for a Scottish Parliament, which came to successful fruition in 1999.

Legacy and Conclusion

On 9 September 2017 a service of remembrance was held in East Wemyss for the nine miners killed in the disastrous fire at Michael, exactly 50 years previously. The service was organised by the Fife Mining Heritage Preservation Society (FMHPS), and held at the village memorial, a miniature replica of Michael’s No. 3 pit head-frame. The service was attended by a multi-generational assembly of about 450. It was introduced by Duncan Gilfillan and Elizabeth McGuire, Chair and Secretary of the FMHPS, and led by the Reverend Wilma Cairns of Buckhaven and East Wemyss Parish Church. The Reverend Cairns spoke warmly about the nine miners who were still mourned by the families who lost them: Hugh Gallacher, aged 61, Alexander Henderson, 41, James Mackay, 59, Henry Morrison, 36, Johnston Smith, 60, James Tait, 41, Andrew Taylor, 43, Andrew Thomson, 55, and Philip Thomson, 64. She remembered these men as skilled workers, loving husbands, fathers and sons, helpful colleagues, friendly drinking buddies and pals who went to the football. Family flowers were joined on the village memorial by tributes from the Scottish Mines Rescue Training Centre in Crossgates, Fife, which had assumed a leading role in the difficult recovery operation in 1967, and representatives of Fife Trades Union Council, present with their banner, along with Peter Grant, MP for Glenrothes, and David Torrance, MSP for Kirkcaldy....

Miners and the Scottish Nation: from the 1950s to the 1970s

Economic security in the coalfields was strengthened after the closure of Scotland’s largest colliery, Michael in East Fife, in 1967. The moral economy was enforced vigorously by the New Mine generation. Mobilisation averted a significant erosion of employment. Increased coal burn at new power stations was secured. As the creation of jobs in new industries slowed, so did the rate of employment loss in coal. Pits closed only where the interests of mining localities were carefully protected. Security was also pursued through industrial action for improved wages. The New Mine generation in Scotland was instrumental in shifting union politics to the left, and Scottish miners were prominent in major unofficial strikes in 1969 and 1970. Miners across Britain won significant pay increases in 1972 and 1974. These struggles reflected ambitions for more trenchant resistance to deindustrialisation, but the trend to unity across the coalfields was countered by the NCB’s introduction of area incentive schemes. The prominence of territorial divisions reinforced the Scottish labour movement’s argument that deindustrialisation and economic security were phenomena with distinct national features in Scotland.

Improving Safety

The Scottish miners’ central goal was economic security. An important generational element was involved in its pursuit. The Village Pit generation saw nationalisation as deliverance from the evils of private ownership. The New Mine generation was simultaneously more critical of nationalisation and willing to engage with its joint consultative features. Nationalisation was dynamic and the New Mine generation shaped it to fit the security needs of miners and their communities. Generational differences were highlighted during the Second World War. The Scottish coalfield politics of the Home Front were complex, involving Communism and the strategic interests of the Soviet Union. Whereas the Village Pit generation opposed unofficial strikes, these involved and were led by the New Mine generation, who saw them as evidence of powerful workplace and community anger that could be mobilised in pursuit of collective security. In the 1950s New Mine generation miners were more assertive in their defence of the coalfield moral economy. Their actions at workplace level placed significant limits on the managerial sovereignty of NCB officials.