Introduction:
those who walked in the darkest valleys

On Sunday 16 September 2018, several hundred people gathered by the Auchengeich Mining Disaster Memorial in the village of Moodiesburn, North Lanarkshire. They included retired miners, trade union representatives and local councillors alongside members of local football teams and a choir made up of schoolchildren. The annual memorial service is timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Auchengeich pit disaster in which forty-seven men lost their lives due to an underground fire on 18 September 1959.¹ Most of the people present had little direct experience of coal mining, and many participants in the service had come of age after Lanarkshire’s last colliery, Cardowan, closed in 1983. During the service, Reverend Mark Malcolm, from the Church of Scotland’s Chryston Parish, paid tribute to the fallen men by reading from Psalm 23, commemorating those that ‘walk through the darkest valley’.² The annual service powerfully evokes collective memories of industry which continue to shape consciousness and identities in the towns and villages of the Scottish coalfields after deep mining itself has ceased. A permanent physical reminder is embedded in the landscape: the memorial statue of a 1950s-era British coal miner complete with cap lamp, battery and pick-axe. In a technical sense, deindustrialization can be understood as the decreasing contribution of industrial activities to gross domestic product and employment. But deindustrialization’s impact was as keenly felt in cultural and political terms as it was economically. This volume traces the socioeconomic transformation brought to the coalfields by these developments. The closure of mines, steel mills and factories fundamentally altered livelihoods and associations by challenging a strongly held social order in towns and villages which had developed around coal mining. Colliery closures and the experience of labour market alterations have significantly contributed to the questioning of Scotland’s position within the Union and the realignment of the politics of class and nationhood since the mid twentieth century.

These changes were not sudden. They unravelled over several decades. Between 1965 and 1967, the workforce at Auchengeich and the adjacent Western Auchengeich collieries faced a different threat as the National Coal Board’s (NCB) closure programme intensified. Union representatives, with the support of junior managerial staff, attempted to convince the Board that the coal reserves in the area were a profitable proposition.³ From mid century onwards, coal faced intensifying competition from petroleum and nuclear fuels. Contraction was incremental and phased, as well as regionally varied. The Scottish coalfields were permanently reconfigured. Its settlements had principally grown during the previous 150 years under the impetus of industrialization.⁴ From the onset of coal’s nationalization in 1947, mining developed to match the shifting priorities of the NCB. The pace of investment and divestment was dictated by coal’s place within UK energy policies, especially as they related to electricity generation. Although Moodiesburn’s local pits had closed by the late 1960s, miners from the surrounding area continued to work in the dark valleys of Scotland’s collieries for decades after. They commuted increasing distances across the central belt before deep mining ceased entirely following flooding at the Longannet complex during 2002. Longannet was comprised of highly modern drift mines in Fife and Clackmannanshire. They were initially developed during the late 1960s to feed the large power station which shared its name. By the time of its closure, Longannet’s workforce was drawn from across the Scottish coalfields. Connections between small-scale territorial communities and workplaces were weakened, but a more intimate Scottish national coalfield community was also established in the process.⁵ This is symbolized by the presence of former miners from across the Scottish coalfield at the Auchengeich commemoration. At the sixtieth anniversary in 2019, banners from collieries in Fife and Midlothian were present on a procession to the Memorial along with the National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA) banner.⁶

Willie Doolan, who leads the memorial ceremony on behalf of the Moodiesburn Miners Memorial Committee, was among the last of the men employed in Scottish coal mining when Longannet closed. Willie remembers the Auchengeich disaster, which occurred when he was four years old. In the aftermath, he began school with classmates who had lost fathers at Auchengeich. His own father attended the disaster as a mines rescue worker. During an interview in 2019, Willie recalled that, in contrast to the highly advanced computerized form of coal-getting pioneered at Longannet, his father had worked ‘hand stripping’ coal faces with a pick and shovel. Under the ‘pillar and stoop’ system, colliers left ‘pillars’ of coal to support roofs, while mining from the chambers between them. When Willie began work in 1971, Cardowan operated under a longwall system of advancing face mining using more developed technology, but conditions remained adverse. Men worked in two feet-high seams using a coal cutter – known as a ‘plough’ – to extract increments from sections that were 600 feet long.⁷

Pat Egan, a colleague of Willie’s at the Longannet complex, also recalled difficult conditions in Lanarkshire. At Bedlay colliery during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pat and his workmates wore protective kneepads while ‘crawlin about on oor haunds and knees’. They cut coal by hand in damp seams of a similar size to those at Cardowan. Upon transfer to the Longannet complex’s Solsgirth mine, Pat remembered being surprised by the noise and shocked at the sight of mechanized coal shearers ‘the size of a single-decker bus’ which operated in seams seven feet high.⁸ The transition to an increasingly technologically developed production system, and complex division of labour, increased mutual workforce dependency. It also engendered a shared sense of precarity as coalfield reorganization led to the shrinkage of the workforce and pit closures. Nicky Wilson, like Willie, started work at Cardowan but later transferred to the Longannet complex. He recalled traditions of workgroup solidarity whereby younger and fitter men would ‘muck in’ so that older or injured miners could retain better-paid jobs underground.⁹ The creation of a more cosmopolitan Scottish mining workforce tended to encourage workforce unity across traditional parochial divisions. In the context of a British nationalized industry, deindustrialization stimulated a Scottish national consciousness around coal which grew in importance as the industry’s future became more strongly tied to electricity production.

Developments in the Scottish coalfields reveal that ‘deindustrialization does not just happen’.¹⁰ The incremental contraction of Scottish coal mining was not the natural outcome of either market forces or geological exhaustion. Instead, it was the human power relations between miners, employers and the state that dictated pit closures and the provision (or otherwise) of economic security for the workers and communities affected. These factors are once again to the fore in discussions about the future of energy production and increasingly urgent calls to abandon fossil fuels. The organization of a ‘just transition’ depends on achieving environmental and social justice through arranging meaningful alternative employment for the workforces affected.¹¹

When deindustrialization first became the subject of academic study during the immediate aftermath of final closures and strikes and lockouts in the 1980s and 1990s, scholarship often resembled a ‘body count’ of lost factories and jobs. The analysis in this study uses the vantage provided by distance from these events to look ‘beyond the ruins’ of industrial Scotland.¹² Emphasizing the protracted process of coalfield contraction challenges the dominance of the closures of the 1980s within prevailing historical accounts. This is apparent in both the ‘instant post-industrialization’ reading of Scottish economic development, and the predominant focus upon the pit closure programmes of the 1980s and early 1990s within British coalfield literature.¹³ Both centre on the ramifications of the 1984–5 miners’ strike and the economic policies of the Thatcher government, losing sight of longterm dynamics. These narratives overlook UK energy policy, which tended to favour alternatives to coal from the 1950s onwards, and the nationalized industry’s concentration on investment in ‘super pits’ within the most productive coalfields.¹⁴ The great strike for jobs was not the harbinger of deindustrialization. It began due to the breakdown of the comparatively consensual approach to closures which the NCB had developed in partnership with the NUM between the 1940s and the 1970s.¹⁵

As the memorial service at Auchengeich indicates, memories and associations formed through industry continue to reverberate in the Scottish coalfields. This annual event is an example of deindustrialization’s ‘half-life’: the lingering influence of industrial society’s ‘historically mediated structures, action and experiences’ upon the culture and politics of deindustrializing localities.¹⁶ In place of a neat series of economic eras, deindustrialization instead suggests a longer, contested and more painful transition. By examining the Scottish coalfields, rather than a single location or industry, this study follows the suggestion that scholars of deindustrialization ought to ‘shift our focus from industrial ruins to the wider processes of ruination’.¹⁷ An extended time-period – spanning the second half of the twentieth century and into the present – allows for the development of a longue durée analysis. It reveals the ‘submerged history’ of major alterations in basic economic functions and social routines which deindustrialization entails. In the case of coal mining, these relate to pivotal questions of how societies choose to obtain their heat and light.¹⁸ The rundown of colliery employment led to the wholesale reconstruction of labour markets in the areas affected by incremental closures over several decades.

Towns and villages within the Scottish coalfields developed in tandem with the coal mining industry, which often pivotally determined their social structure and associational culture. Yet this was never a monoculture: other sectors such as metals and heavy engineering also evolved alongside Scottish coal mining.¹⁹ As coal employment contracted, replacement activities in mass production industries were directed towards the coalfields through UK regional policy. These sectors developed through inward investment, especially by American multinationals. Assembly goods plants were popularly understood in terms of an exchange in forms of employment. Policymakers presented coalfield reconstruction and inward investment as substantial improvements which could sustain affluent lifestyles and safer working conditions.²⁰ A comprehensive study of deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields therefore requires analysis of the transition towards a diversified industrial structure between the 1940s and the 1960s.

During the late 1960s, the transition from the ‘solidaristic’ environment of traditional workplaces embedded in community structures to the ‘instrumental’ motivations behind labour on assembly lines was theorized in the Affluent Worker study.²¹ Recent studies of industrial relations in engineering sectors have contested ‘privatist’ understandings of class in mid and late twentieth-century Britain, pointing to retained occupational identities, recurring cultures of solidarity, and expressions of collective trade union ‘voice’.²² This book adds to these conclusions by exploring how exchanging employment in traditional industries for assembly factories and more advanced collieries shaped workers’ perspectives. In the Scottish coalfields, links between work and community were retained through extensive economic and social reconstruction, including slum clearances and significant public house building. New jobs were understood as having been paid for at the cost of older workplaces closing. As a result, employment in factories and new or redeveloped collieries were viewed as the property of communities. These factors shaped workplace relations and encouraged opposition to closures as deindustrialization intensified during the 1980s.

Since 1945, the UK’s landscape has been transformed by the protracted transition from an economy centrally configured around industrial production towards one dominated by services. Deindustrialization’s long-term effects have provided explanations for deepening political polarization during the 2010s, especially the 2016 Brexit referendum.²³ However, the distinctions between patterns of voting at the referendum, principally the fact that deindustrialized areas of Scotland voted to ‘remain’, should caution against simplistic conclusions about the relationship between deindustrialization and right-wing ‘populism’.²⁴ Scotland’s renegotiated relationship with the rest of the UK can also be explained by deindustrialization. This volume is not primarily concerned with explaining developments in terms of party politics, including the electoral success of the Scottish National Party since the establishment of the Scottish parliament in 1999. Instead, it underlines the importance of industrial developments to understanding the growing political significance of Scottish national identity during the closing decades of the twentieth century. The experience of both falling industrial employment and the growing importance of London-based policymaking to the Scottish economy were significant ingredients in popularizing demands for political autonomy. Support for devolution – then more commonly known as ‘home rule’ – coalesced around the assumption that Scotland was an ‘industrial nation,’ which was shared across class divides.²⁵ The failure of both Labour and Conservative governments to sustain this reality encouraged dislocations between Scottish and British national identities. Deindustrialization also removed direct connections between Scottish communities and the state, especially in the context of nationalized industries. Industrial closures further undermined links between different parts of the UK that had been furnished through occupational solidarities.

Approaches to deindustrialization

In recent years, a historical account of deindustrialization in Scotland has developed which underlines the rundown of coal mining employment from the late 1950s onwards.²⁶ Andrew Perchard and Jim Phillips pioneered moral economy perspectives on Scottish deindustrialization, emphasizing how manual workers’ understandings of economic justice shaped practices and assessments of colliery closures.²⁷ Moral economy analyses of deindustrialization are centrally concerned with ‘non-economic norms affecting commercial interactions’, principally community and workforce attitudes to the ownership of jobs and workplaces.²⁸ They are influenced by critiques of industrial capitalism that developed between the 1920s and 1970s, based on its moral or spiritual effects rather than material outcomes. Karl Polanyi and E. P. Thompson were two key theorists who rejected a naturalized view of liberalized market orders, insisting on their social contingency.²⁹ Polanyi’s theory of the double movement illuminates the conflict between market forces and protective social agents which shaped deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields. Thompson’s moral economy assists in conceptualizing the customs and expectations that determined workforce and community perceptions of legitimacy or illegitimacy during the closure of industrial workplaces.

Polanyi conceived of industrialization and capitalist production as history’s ‘great transformation … Instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system’. This transformation swept away traditional ‘safeguards’ provided by customs and legislation which ‘protect the prevailing economic organization of society from interference on the part of market practices’.³⁰ However, Polanyi contended that industrial capitalism was characterized by a ‘double movement’ that created renewed safeguards: episodes of economic liberalization are met by protective ‘countermovements’ which act to preserve social bonds from the erosive commodifying effects of market forces.³¹ Industrial capitalist economies are never fully ‘disembedded’ from societal mores but are subject to a continual renegotiation between market and social pressures. Liberalization strains national societies to the point of a protective restriction on ‘the market mechanism’. It is these tendencies towards the ‘integration’ of political and economic spheres – overcoming their socially disastrous formal separation and disintegration – which lie at the heart of the double movement.³² The living, breathing status of workers and the inherently political status of labour means that it can only be commoditized fictitiously, and destructively. State regulation and the activities of workers organized in trade unions and labour movement political parties serve ‘a wider interest than their own’ in struggles to protect labour from commodification. These are necessitated because ‘the organization of capitalist production itself has to be sheltered from the devastating effects of a self-regulating market’.³³

Coal mining provides an archetypal example of the double movement. The industry’s development included early and significant contributions from state regulators as well as organized labour in the recurring ‘clash of the organizing principles of economic liberalism and social protection’.³⁴ Dangers present in the industry combined with paternalistic Victorian social norms to encourage initial legislation such as the 1842 Mines Act, which regulated the labour market by prohibiting women and boys under the age of ten from working underground.³⁵ By the early twentieth century, this had passed into other areas including health and safety and the length of the working day. The state legislated for minimum conditions which were highly contested by the coal owners and trade unions.³⁶ Coal mining’s subsequent nationalization in 1947 can be understood as a key example of economic and political integration which restored social objectives over economic processes.³⁷ In Karl Polanyi’s terms, nationalization can be viewed as a partial attempt ‘to take labour out of the market’ by enhancing the role of the state and trade unions in determining production, wages and conditions.³⁸ The privately owned industry’s legacy of conflict and failure to provide employment stability moulded expectations of how contraction would be managed under state stewardship. Rather than a single event, the double movement should be viewed as a recurring conflict between capital accumulation and societal order. The operation of liberalized markets encouraged protective responses phrased in a moral language of social responsibility. This continued under nationalization. Financial and productionist pressures competed with commitments to workforce security and dialogue with trade unions in the industry’s governance.

Moral economy analysis of human agency in the coalfields has its origins in E. P. Thompson’s account of eighteenth-century riots against the liberalization of foodstuffs marketing in England. The ‘crowd’ of plebian consumers defended and enforced customary practices of open selling through disciplined direct action, including price setting. Their activities were shaped by a moral economy consciousness which ‘taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provision by profiteering upon the necessities of the people’.³⁹ The customs which informed Thompson’s food rioters are an example of a countermovement invoking safeguards to protect social structures from economic disruption.⁴⁰ Thompson later summarized his conception of the moral economy at a theoretical level. It centred on claims of ‘non-monetary rights’ to resources predicated on traditions of ‘community membership [which] supersedes price as a basis of entitlement’.⁴¹ The coalfield moral economy also had a basis in popular custom and expectation regarding the provision of economic resources but related to the provision of industrial employment rather than food consumption. Its contentions centred on an interpretation of the social responsibilities of elites, NCB officials and government policymakers, to provide security against economic instability. These agents were obligated to fulfil the nationalized industry’s promise of worker ‘voice’ through consultation with trade unions. Perchard and Phillips defined the coalfield moral economy’s contours as:

Like Thompson’s moral economy of plebeian consumers, the coalfield moral economy was instigated by communitarian claims to economic resources: collieries and the employment they sustained. It was discernible in the application of customary measures: the observation of procedure regarding the management of closure through discussion with trade union representatives; ensuring transfers for the workforce within travel distance; the provision of transfers to appropriate jobs, especially for high-earning faceworkers; the provision of either retirement or suitable positions for elderly and disabled workers. Those practices were rarely followed in full, and their application evolved over the nationalized period. Nevertheless, these expectations structured workforce attitudes during colliery closures. While it was largely practised through workforce and management dialogue between the 1940s and 1970s – before it was defended during the year-long strike that began in March 1984 – the moral economy was animated by the collective memory of class struggles, especially the crisis-ridden 1920s and 1930s. Reference points included the 1921 miners’ lockout and the 1926 general strike and lockout, as well as the blacklisting of workers and forced relocation of mining families which often followed. These moments of mobilization and recrimination were conjoined with other memories of social violence associated with the private industry, such as its poor health and safety record, and mass unemployment. The interwar years were remembered in families, passed on in communities and workplaces and institutionalized by the NUMSA.

Coal’s centrality to Britain’s industrial economy, and the government’s regulation of mining, contributed to the state’s central role in the moral economy. Polanyi understood that ‘modern nationalism is a protective reaction against the dangers inherent in an interdependent world’.⁴³ Deindustrialization’s territorial politics developed within these parameters. Localized objections to closure were given the standing of national crises where they reached a critical mass. Objections to closures in Scotland were voiced within the framework of the Union, but they also stimulated demands for increased autonomy. The countermovement’s national grounding built on earlier responses to economic crises, including when national and class prerogatives merged during the agitation against unemployment in the 1930s.⁴⁴ Consciousness that developed from community and workplace experiences served as ‘building blocks’ upon which broader occupational and class-based solidarities were sustained.⁴⁵ These dimensions were apparent in the fusion of occupation, class and nationhood which shaped the political perspectives of Scottish miners and their trade union. The countermovement to the dislocation of communitarian norms experienced in colliery closures and industry-wide contraction was substantially framed in terms of national identity. Moral economy sentiments came to rest on expectations of action from devolved, and therefore supposedly more sympathetic, Scottish authorities.

The practices which shaped class consciousness in the Scottish coalfields can be encompassed by the concept of ‘labourism’. As theorized by historians of Welsh coalfield politics, labourism is an actively constructed expression of working-class consciousness and practical politics, rather than an aberration from the development of an overtly socialist political culture.⁴⁶ This is contrary to the dominant accounts of labourism which have their origins in the ‘new left’ analysis of the 1960s, and its successors, which distanced itself from both orthodox Marxism and social democracy. Within the new left view, labourism has broadly been understood as the product of a deliberately moderated and reformist politics. Labourism is primarily a parliamentary effort to mobilize the existing apparatus of the British state to improve incrementally the well-being of an organized working-class constituency.⁴⁷

In the Scottish coalfields, a heterogeneous coalition of political forces maintained a Labourist culture, beyond these boundaries of moderation. Neighbourhood organization, workplace conflict and cooperation, trade unionism, and local government shaped a variegated manual working-class consciousness. The NUMSA was central to these experiences, and Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) activists played a prominent role. Communist orthodoxies predominated within Scottish mining trade unionism at least from the election of Abe Moffat as president of the National Union of Scottish Mineworkers in 1942. CPGB influence continued to grow after the union became the Scottish Area of the NUM in 1945. The office of NUMSA president was filled successively by CPGB members for over five decades until the post was abolished following George Bolton’s retirement in 1996, by which point the union had become a marginal presence as the industry shrank.⁴⁸ NUMSA policy accorded with the CPGB’s perspective of supporting Scottish cultural and political autonomy while developing class unity across the UK. Under CPGB stewardship, the NUMSA pioneered a deepening commitment to political devolution through a Scottish parliament that gained influence across the wider Scottish labour movement.

Figures such as Bolton and Moffat embodied Raphael Samuel’s perception of Scottish miners’ ‘own distinctive version of militancy – more “educated”, more Communist, more statesman-like’ than its English counterpart.⁴⁹ Their form of radical labourism, or on occasion respectable militancy, was the product of the Area’s autonomy and the Scottish coalfields’ institutional political environment. This enabled the NUMSA to exercise influence through the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) and to consciously develop cadres of successor generations from the ranks of young activists. The Scottish miners also had strong connections with the Labour party to which it was affiliated. To this extent, the NUMSA – and the CPGB activists who shaped its political positioning – broadly adhered to ‘shared labour movement ethics’.⁵⁰ Yet the NUMSA’s persistent and sometimes successful agitation on international as well as constitutional questions cannot be explained in this framework alone. The prolonged contraction of coal mining employment was central to shaping arguments for enhanced Scottish political autonomy. These sustained developments were influenced by the complex status of the NCB and the NUM as having unitary structures with significant devolved elements. Devolutionary sentiment was further magnified by the centrality of coal mining employment to the economic welfare and cultural identity of coalfield areas.

However, the political reach of the CPGB-aligned activists in the NUMSA was always limited in the coalfields. They faced opposing tendencies within the labour movement, including organized Catholic and Protestant factions which asserted sectarian identities as well as social conservatism. Complex and conflicting political forces shaped identifications and social relations in the Scottish coalfields across the twentieth century. But both more radical and moderate currents were broadly unified in support for a politically and industrially united labour movement. They shared a working-class consciousness embedded in manual occupational identities and public housing tenancies. Labourism was therefore politically fractured, acting as a container and manager of divisions, including religious sectarian ones, and differences over political alignment. But it also acted as a unifying force, providing a common cultural and organizational repertoire and reference points grounded in the coalfield moral economy. Samuel’s observations affirm the gendered status of the moral economy, indicating its origins in communities structured around male employment and industrial and political leadership. The moral economy was renegotiated as coalfield labour markets changed. Working-class affluence was often secured through married women’s wages, and the assembly factories which partially replaced colliery employment also provided work for women. These factors contributed to an extension of the coalfield moral economy in sectoral and gender terms.

Sources and structure

The analysis in this volume combines oral testimonies from coalfield respondents with archival research relating to energy policy, the management of colliery closures and regional policy. Depth is added to existing accounts of deindustrialization in Scotland through shifts in theoretical lenses, temporal and geographical focus and detailed attention to dimensions of policymaking and application at Scottish and UK levels. The source base incorporates extensive archival material from the nationalized coal industry, government and trade unions, spanning from between the 1940s and 1980s. These include the minutes of Colliery Consultative Committee (CCC) meetings which were held during closure procedures and featured input from trade union representatives, as well as correspondence and reports from Scottish and UK NCB headquarters related to forward planning. Scottish Office and the Board of Trade records reveal dimensions of regional policy application and inward investment. Records from the Ministry of Fuel and Power and its successors shed light on the priorities and conflicts that guided energy policy and power station investment. These reveal a politicized anti-coal bias within the Ministry. Officials and government ministers from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s frequently pursued the liberalizing impulse of the double movement. They supported uneconomic experimental nuclear power projects and championed replacing coal with oil as the UK advanced from a single- to a multi-fuel energy economy. These developments anticipated the assertion of financial prerogatives under the Thatcher governments. Minutes from the NUMSA’s executive committee and annual conferences give voice to both trade union officials and elected colliery delegates who contested these decisions. Further access to union perspectives is provided through STUC annual reports, including conference contributions made by NUMSA representatives which shed light on the countermovement’s national framing.

The archival findings are supplemented by testimonies from an oral history project. The testimonies provide distinctive perspectives which assist in recovering experiences of social change, but they also crucially reveal deliberations on the cumulative impact of deindustrialization. Interviews were conducted with over thirty men and women in a life-story format, in addition to two focus groups. The interviewees were recruited through a variety of methods. Most participants were located through ‘snowballing’ from existing contacts, but some were also found through press advertisements.⁵¹

Recruitment was conducted with the aim of collecting testimonies from a range of voices in gender and generational terms. Former trade union activists were over-represented. This was a product of the contact networks that snowballing was conducted through. The predominance of former trade unionists reflects the tendency of activists to have the strongest narratives and retain social and emotional connections with movements they took part in.⁵² However, narratives were also gathered from former miners who were not supporters of the NUMSA leadership’s communist-influenced politics. These include individuals with a history of being active within loyalist or Unionist organizations such as the Orange Order, as well as former NCB managers. Despite these differences, a fusion of class and national framings was present within the testimonies. This resonated with the development of the double movement and the protective countermovement’s basis in Scottish national consciousness. These tendencies were encouraged by contemporary politics through the consolidation of a centre-left understanding of ‘social justice’ associated with Scotland’s contemporary political self-image. Perceptions of Scotland’s comparatively egalitarian ethos have been reinforced since the establishment of a devolved parliament in 1999.⁵³

Dialogue developed around the interviewee’s life-story, with questions emphasizing meanings and understandings of community, connections to the mining industry, and experiences of closure. Women’s narratives highlighted changes in gender roles and family life connected with increasing female participation in the workforce and rising male unemployment. Generational distinctions were another crucial source of differentiation in experiences of labour market changes. The testimonies are deployed with an emphasis on the role familial influences and communal experiences have played in shaping perspectives on job losses and workplace closures. Critical nostalgia – a reflective attitude towards negative aspects of industrial experiences that nevertheless mourns the loss of collective bonds and economic resources – has framed recollections of class, occupation and community within former coalfield localities. The ‘radical imagination’ offers a valuable critique of the past through a lens that considers what has been lost and gained in complex socioeconomic changes.⁵⁴ Respondents identified injustices and conservatism in traditional coalfield communities, but also questioned deindustrialization’s historical inevitability and critiqued contemporary labour markets and societal inequalities

One focus group was conducted with a retired miners’ group in Moodiesburn, centring on experiences of industrial relations and pit closures. Another comprised of a mixed gender group in Shotts in eastern Lanarkshire, which focused on community and social changes. Both followed a semi-structured format, with dialogue largely evolving through participant interaction. The retired miners’ group, which continues to meet regularly, was recruited through a contact. The Shotts focus group was recruited through contacting a local history group which principally involved men and women from mining backgrounds. In Moodiesburn, the discussion revolved around workplace experiences, with an emphasis on patterns of colliery closures and memories of industrial relations and the history of dangers and disasters. The group in Shotts focused on community, emphasizing shared social activities. There was minimal crossover between the focus groups and testimonies, but one Shotts participant, Willie Hamilton, also took part in a separate interview along with his wife, Marian.

Both the life-story interviews and focus groups displayed elements of collective memory and evidenced the tendency for communal experiences to be retold through myths and legends consolidated by family, community and labour movement connections.⁵⁵ These forces shape the operation of a coalfield ‘cultural circuit’ which sets the terms through which life-experience is mediated. It was common for analogies to be drawn with the strife and dislocation of the private coal industry during the first half of the twentieth century.⁵⁶ In the focus groups, the collective construction of memories was evident. The dialogue was often fragmentary and revolved around shared elements of everyday social life in a community and workplace setting, or communal experiences of events such as gala days, pit closures or mining disasters. Participant interaction drove dialogue and encouraged the ‘generative’ connections through which the cultural circuit operates.⁵⁷

The geographical focus of the oral history project and the archival research into individual colliery closures and regional policy investment primarily related to the Lanarkshire coalfield. However, individuals who lived and worked in Scotland’s other major coalfield areas – Ayrshire, the Lothians, Clackmannanshire and Fife – were also interviewed. Lanarkshire affords an important vantage given its centrality to the processes that reshaped society and the economy in the Scottish coalfields. It was Scotland’s largest coalfield upon nationalization in 1947 but underwent extensive contraction during the late 1940s and 1950s as capital and manpower were shifted eastwards. Towns and villages which had either been born or developed around mining experienced profound alteration due to the closure of local collieries before comparable settlements did elsewhere in Scotland. The moral economy practice of offering transfers to miners within travel distance, and objections to migration upon colliery closures which came to prominence during the 1950s, were formed through this experience. These norms had origins in local experiences of deindustrialization, which took place while Scottish coal mining employment was still expanding. The focus on Lanarkshire also affords a study of inward investment and the diversification of industrial employment through analysis of documentation from the Board of Trade and Scottish Office departments responsible for applying regional policy and liaising with plant management. Additionally, several of the interviewees had worked in assembly goods factories or had relatives who had. Lanarkshire reveals the long-term consequences of deindustrialization, as well as the transmission of culture, occupational identities and senses of place invested in the industrial past across generations. The annual commemoration at Auchengeich exemplifies these processes.

The first two chapters of this volume comprise a detailed analysis of the processes that shaped deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields. They are primarily, but not exclusively, based on archival records. Chapter 1 is themed around industrial developments, providing a top-down perspective on changes in labour market structures. It traces coal’s changing position in the pecking order which determined power station investment and analyses the application of regional policy through a case study of the Lanarkshire coalfields. In the second chapter, the perspective is altered to a bottom-up analysis. It assesses how the practices of the coalfield moral economy developed between the 1940s and 1980s. Chapter 2 includes three geographical case studies of colliery closures in Lanarkshire. It emphasizes how the early experiences of community abandonment in the Shotts area of Eastern Lanarkshire during the late 1940s and early 1950s shaped more careful management practices in future closures. During the 1980s, NCB management abandoned moral economy obligations.

The following four chapters provide a reflective account of deindustrialization’s long-term social, cultural and political consequences. They heavily profile oral testimonies, which are supplemented by archival sources. Chapter 3 analyses the processes of community reconstruction associated with deindustrialization. It distinguishes between the public house-building and slum clearances which accompanied industrial diversification between the 1940s and 1970s with the private house-building that accompanied intensified deindustrialization in later years. During the earlier period, new industrial communities formed through shared manual working-class identities and public housing tenancies while older ones were sustained by them. These communities have become the subject of critical nostalgia as suburbanization and accelerated workplace closures disembedded locational connections to industrial production. The fourth chapter considers the dimensions which shaped perceptions of deindustrialization by analysing how gender conditioned men’s and women’s experiences of labour market restructuring. Male feelings of social redundancy through job loss are contrasted with the expansion of women’s labour market opportunities in assembly plants and public services. Women’s direct experience of industrial job loss are highlighted with reference to the moral economy status that work in the factories brought to Scotland between the 1940s and 1960s had attained by the 1980s.

Chapter 5 switches focus by examining how formative episodes moulded the outlooks of three discrete cohorts between nationalization during the 1940s and displacement during the closures of the 1980s and 1990s. The sixth chapter develops how national identity was reshaped by deindustrialization through investigating the construction of a Scottish coalfield ‘imagined community’, drawing heavily on the NUMSA’s records.⁵⁸ It reveals how the predominantly communist-leaning leadership of the union developed a distinctive political culture which merged aspirations for home rule on the one hand with support for a UK-wide nationalized industry on the other. Chapter 7 provides a synthesis, linking the fusion of class and Scottish national consciousness through the complex process of coalfield reconstruction and colliery closures. The conclusion reflects on how this study’s findings relate to the scholarship of deindustrialization, underlining the challenges and fruitfulness behind reconciling intensely personal, human experiences with deep structural transformation.

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¹ E. Gibbs and J. Phillips, ‘Remembering Auchengeich: the largest fatal accident in Scottish coal in the nationalised era’, Scottish Labour History, liv (2019), 47–57.

² Observation notes from Auchengeich colliery memorial service, 16 Sept. 2018; Psalm XXIII:4 (New International Version).

³ National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (NRS), Coal Board (CB) 207/14/3, L. Johnston, National Union of Mineworkers (Scottish Area) (NUMSA), Report on Wester Auchengeich coal reserves (1967).

⁴ R. Duncan, The Mineworkers (Edinburgh, 2005), p. 145.

⁵ J. Phillips, ‘The moral economy of deindustrialization in post-1945 Scotland’, in The Deindustrialized World: Ruination in Post-Industrial Places, ed. S. High, L. MacKinnnon and A. Perchard (Vancouver, 2017), pp. 313–30, at p. 314.

⁶ Observation notes from Auchengeich colliery memorial service, 15 Sept. 2019.

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