2. Moral economy: custom and social obligation during colliery closures

The nationalized coal industry was subject to its workforce’s expectation that industrial governance would involve dialogue with organized labour and the provision of employment security. Those assumptions were powerfully shaped by the collective memory of social dislocation in the coalfields during the first half of the twentieth century, especially interwar class conflict and mass unemployment. Nationalization was understood by miners and their families as an imposition of social order which would displace liberal market logic. Colliery closures were a moment that tested the nationalized industry’s distinctions from its privately owned predecessor. During the early years of the nationalized industry, customary measures developed during colliery closure processes to protect economic security: 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. Moral economy conditions were rarely met in full, but these customs formed the basis of how pit closures were managed between the 1940s and 1970s. The National Coal Board’s (NCB’s) repudiation of its moral economy responsibilities provoked the 1984–5 miners’ strike, while the conflict’s decisive outcome confirmed the demise of joint regulation and the exercise of a significant trade union ‘voice’ within the industry. This chapter begins by outlining memories of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, before providing an overview of the coalfield moral economy’s development over the nationalized period. It emphasizes the continually contested nature of moral economy practices and their evolution over time as the geographical focus of closures shifted.

Three area case studies from the Lanarkshire coalfields provide an overview of the moral economy’s evolution under nationalization. They draw on the records of consultative committee meetings held between management and trade union representatives during closure processes as well as oral testimonies from former miners who were affected by closures. The first case study analyses Lanarkshire’s ‘eastern periphery’, the area around Shotts that experienced major closures during the early nationalized period. These experiences took place while overall Scottish coal mining employment was still rising (see table 1.4) and were formative to the moral economy as it was later practised across the Scottish coalfields. Later closures were organized around the principle of offering work within travelling distance following the reluctance of Shotts miners to uproot their families by migrating eastwards to Fife or the Lothians. Lanarkshire’s ‘southern area’ included dedicated mining settlements which were somewhat distant from the more diversified industrial areas to the north. Closures between the mid 1950s and early 1970s were managed by offering transfers to increasingly distant workplaces. These practices stretched local community connections to workplaces but broadly upheld moral economy expectations.

In Lanarkshire’s heavily industrialized ‘northern core’, the closure of redeveloped collieries on economic grounds during the 1960s and early 1970s provoked objections from miners who had often experienced earlier rounds of rationalization and been ensured of employment security at their now threatened workplaces. These episodes contributed to the renegotiation of the moral economy through miners’ industrial action and energy market fluctuations in the early 1970s. Struggles for wages in 1972 and 1974 were framed as highly moral arguments for the recognition of miners’ centrality to Britain’s industrial economy. The northern core case study culminates in an analysis of the closure of Lanarkshire’s last collieries during the early 1980s. It contrasts the relatively consensual closure at Bedlay during 1982, with the highly contested closure of Cardowan, a year later. These closures exemplify the centrality of customary expectations to the moral economy, especially joint regulation and the provision of collective employment security. At Cardowan, the Board’s commitment to dialogue was undermined when management incentivized workers to accept redundancy packages without the NUM’s agreement. Events at Cardowan during 1983 were formative to the miners’ strike which began a year later. The NCB’s aggressive assertion of managerial prerogatives and financial objectives at the expense of industrially viable units during the 1980s closely resembled the liberalizing pressures of the double movement. Trade unionists’ insistence on moral economy customs formed a protective countermovement against the disruption of social order by corrosive market forces. But as the case studies demonstrate cumulatively, these factors were continually present in the nationalized industry, especially during the governance of pit closures.

The moral economy’s development was shaped by a sense of both the recent and the more distant past. Shifting practices under nationalization were epitomized by dialogue between the NCB’s chairman, Derek Ezra, and the NUM’s president, Joe Gormley during the summer of 1979. Ezra tried to reassure Gormley, who cited earlier periods of large-scale colliery closures. In the Board’s view the industry was in ‘a completely different situation now from the 1960s when it was contracting. Now, closures take place only when a pit has reached the end of its useful life’.¹ The oral testimonies recorded for this study include appeals to a longer sense of coalfield history. Historical experience is retold through a non-linear relationship between personal experience and public narratives. Recollection involves an ‘interactive construction’; testimonies entail an act of cultural production shaped by hegemonic and highly politicized versions of historical memory.²

A cultural circuit of coalfield memory counterpoised the obligations of the nationalized industry with the deprivations and injustices of private ownership which moulded the moral economy expectations placed on the NCB during colliery closures. The circuit’s ‘conceptual and definitional effects’ shaped memories. When recalling events which have remained politically contentious, interviewees’ ‘memories were entangled with the myth[s]’ which political and media representations have generated.³ Counter-hegemonic narratives can be sustained by appeals to the memory of ‘particular publics’.⁴ Coalfield communities and left-wing political activists have sustained distinct understandings of miners’ experiences. Particular generations of workers have obtained a war veteran-like association with key episodes of industrial conflict that embed narratives of community resolve against employer and state hostility.⁵ An influential example is the ‘folk memory’ of the 1926 miners’ lockout. This enabled striking miners to see ‘themselves as part of the collective story of both their own family and the community in which they lived’ during the 1984–5 strike and was a source of historical framing of their struggle and ultimate defeat afterwards.⁶ Before this, these experiences were formative to the workforce’s understanding of the social responsibilities held by NCB managers.

A cultural circuit of coalfield memory was visible in the repertoires of public events such as the annual Scottish miners’ gala, the rhetoric of union leaders, and historical literature. It was also transmitted at a more localized level. The circuit had a powerful basis in connecting family histories with communal remembrances of major events such as industrial disputes and mining disasters. Collective memories were developed with institutional support. The NUMSA projected a Scottish mining community defined through a representation of the traditions and histories of localized mining communities within a national and class political framing. Union leaders were keen to place themselves within a longer history of miners’ struggles against injustice despite the union having only been established in its current form during the 1940s. Robert Page Arnot, a communist activist and sometime NUM official, published A History of the Scottish Miners in 1955.⁷ Arnot foregrounded Scottish miners’ ‘record of suffering and of heroic struggle against the soulless mine-owner’, including their eighteenth-century campaigns to abolish serfdom, which eventually succeeded in 1799. He also detailed the conditions of the early industrial revolution, using quotations from the 1840 Children’s Employment Commission to illustrate the horrific conditions in which children as young as seven years old worked up to thirteen hours per day.⁸ Arnot’s analysis profiled the achievement of trade union consultation within the NCB’s social democratic infrastructure. He counterpoised nationalization with the employer hostility and divisions within mining trade unionism that had characterized the 1920s and 1930s. The wartime construction of a Scotland-wide, and then subsequently Britain-wide, miners’ union was both a key achievement of ‘men who were not prepared to be put off by the difficulties and obstacles that had baffled their predecessors’, and an accompaniment to nationalization.⁹

Personal, familial and community experiences were reinforced by an awareness of a longer mining history transmitted through the cultural circuit. Peter Downie was raised in a mining family in Greengairs, North Lanarkshire, before starting work at the local colliery, Glentore, during the 1950s. His father was involved in an accident at Bedlay colliery in 1938 and not provided with work to suit his condition. As a result, Peter’s family grew up in poverty and he was ‘raised on the parish’. In Peter’s view this was part of a broader history of economic insecurity suffered by miners:

Peter summed up his perspective in another discussion by stating that ‘up to 1947 the men were living in deprivation’.¹⁰ His reflections are given added significance in that he was not sympathetic to the communist orthodoxies that predominated within the NUMSA. Peter has a background of involvement in the Orange Order, a loyalist or Unionist organization which is suspicious of socialist politics, and he rose to become an overman official within the NCB. Nevertheless, Peter shares an investment in the moral economy that was shaped by the transmission of the cultural circuit. Another appeal to the cultural circuit took place in the same focus group of retired mineworkers in Moodiesburn, North Lanarkshire. Billy Maxwell articulated an understanding of coal’s centrality to industrial societies. He worked at Cardowan colliery between 1957 and 1979, having been brought up in a mining household in Muirhead, North Lanarkshire. Billy stated that, ‘miners for centuries, as I said to you before, were fuelling the industry ae Great Britain. They were the most important ingredient in the making of wealth’. Earlier in the focus group, Billy claimed that ‘deep mining in the industrial revolution financed the world we have today’, and underlined this was ‘at the cost ae a lot of miners’. An understanding of the true ‘price of coal’, juxtaposing arguments relating to financial costs to that of lost miners’ lives, was compounded by the view that miners did not abuse their power: ‘the miners could ae held the country to ransom at that time [during the 1950s] and didnae dae it cause they were too decent a people’.¹¹ Awareness of coal’s strategic importance was combined with an understanding of the dangers endured by the workforce. This anchored a moral economy perspective based on the obligation of the state to reciprocate the ‘decent’ conduct of miners.

Memories of 1920s and 1930s class conflicts were pivotal to framing nationalization. Jessie Clark grew up in a mining family in the coalfield village of Douglas Water, an isolated mining village in the far south of Lanarkshire, during the 1920s and 1930s. She recalled the Coltness Iron Company’s employment practices as punishing trade unionists and socialists such as her father and encouraging social divisions within the village:

Both Jessie, her father, and her husband, Alex, who was also a miner, were Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) members. Jessie worked in the pit canteen at Douglas Castle during the 1940s when coal was taken into public ownership. She understood nationalization as a social advance and a victory in class struggle terms. It entailed ‘getting rid of the coal owners and there was going to be a bit more democracy you know within the working area … At least there wasn’t some eh lazy so-and-so drawin the money from your, the interest from your labour’. Jessie’s articulation of nationalization entailing ‘a bit more democracy’, indicates the rootedness of the moral economy conception of collieries as communal resources.

The nationalized industry

The nationalization of British coal mining is an emblematic example of developed economies’ societal embedding after the Second World War: ‘social control was restored over the economy’ as the objectives of full employment and economic security underpinned an enhanced role for state intervention.¹³ Rather than a once and for all act, the double movement describes an ongoing process. Conflict between the priorities of narrowly financially defined performance objectives and trade union consultation and employment security was a continual feature within the contested management of closure. Nevertheless, nationalization was viewed as a major achievement in all the testimonies collected for this study. It granted miners independence from the coal owners and secured improvements in pay and conditions. These findings affirm Jones et al’s conclusion that enthusiasm for nationalization was not confined to a minority of trade union activists.¹⁴ Ina Zweingier-Bargielowska’s work revised earlier findings on nationalization’s significance by emphasizing the importance of regional and colliery-level distinctions to understanding the meaning of public ownership.¹⁵ The three territorial case studies detailed below are structured in this vein. They indicate that rather than doubt over the principles of nationalization, discontent with the operation of the publicly owned industry tended to follow the double movement’s logic whereby the Board’s pursuit of market ends was held to conflict with its responsibilities towards its workforce and coalfield communities. These conflicting perspectives shaped the development of closure practices within the nationalized industry. One important innovation was the commitment to ensuring the localized community’s integrity by offering transfers within travelling distance. This was strengthened following the experience of divestment in the eastern periphery early in the nationalized period.

In the official history of the nationalized industry, Ashworth claimed that the priorities miners accorded public ownership were ‘first and foremost a guarantee of a better working life’.¹⁶ This was verified by testimonies from those with direct memories of the changes associated with nationalization. Comments from a focus group in Shotts demonstrated a commonly held association between public ownership and improved remuneration and health and safety standards by men who did not identify as having been trade union activists or socialists:

Within these recollections, improvements in conditions and living standards were accompanied by employment practices which emphasized social priorities. In addition to material improvements, the NCB provided employment suitable for men with learning difficulties and those who had been injured and made disabled during industrial accidents. Pat Egan, who followed his father into coal mining employment by starting at Bedlay during the late 1970s, recalled:

However, such accommodation was not always forthcoming from the NCB. The moral economy was negotiated between the liberalizing and countermovement forces of the double movement and was consistently challenged by the NCB’s financial pressures. In 1959, during the closure of Douglas Castle colliery in South Lanarkshire, an NUM representative on the pit’s Colliery Consultative Committee (CCC) commented that the 139 redundancies at the colliery left him ‘astounded at the callous manner in which elderly and disabled workmen had been discarded after serving a life time in the industry and it would appear that human relationship had been ignored completely by the Board’. Notably, the meeting secured some moral economy concessions with up to nineteen ‘extreme hardship cases’ to be reinstated.¹⁹

Coordinated practices evolved to defuse tensions through the organization of transfer to specific positions. In 1966, the closure of the Garscube pit in Maryhill, Glasgow, which placed transferees in facework and power-loading jobs, was agreed through meetings with the NUM branches at Garscube and Cardowan, and the Cardowan colliery manager, John Frame. Mr Callaghan, an NUM representative on the Garscube CCC, stated that having been initially ‘suspicious’ about closure, he was now ‘quite happy’ to accept the transfers.²⁰ As will be discussed below, seventeen years later Frame was commended by union activists for his opposition to the closure of Cardowan, and the victimization he suffered as a result. Frame’s earlier actions cemented his reputation through the cultural circuit as a manager who operated within, and defended, the moral economy.

Confrontations between the NUM and NCB over Cardowan’s future from 1968 to 1972 epitomized the dynamics of the moral economy and its fusion with national concerns over Scottish industrial and political autonomy. Over this period, the NUMSA succeeded in pursuing appeals processes that saved the pit from closure. Discussions within the NCB drew attention to the strategic importance of Cardowan as a coking coal provider and the political ramifications of leaving Scottish steelworks reliant on imports from England during a period of high local unemployment.²¹ The NUMSA’s case for maintaining Cardowan was an example of the countermovement prevailing over the logic of market forces. During 1971, J. B. Burton, an NCB official, noted in a memorandum that the colliery’s ‘high losses’ could not justify its continuation, and therefore ‘the decision now as to its possible removal from jeopardy has to be taken therefore on grounds other than financial [ones]’.²²

Early closures and migration

The eastern periphery of the Lanarkshire coalfields, centred on Shotts, was designated for closure during the late 1940s and early 1950s. This case has strong overtones of the ‘community abandonment’ thesis of deindustrialization: the NCB oversaw strategic divestment as part of its policy of diverting resources to other coalfields within the context of manpower shortages.²³ Friction centred on the NCB’s plans for reorganization, which incorporated large-scale migration from the declining Lanarkshire coalfields to new and redeveloped collieries in central and eastern Scotland. These priorities were in tension with expectations of community stability that contributed to pressure for industrial investment to replace lost coal employment. The Shotts experience was a formative period for the moral economy which conditioned the more sensitive management of redundancy and transfer in future closures.

Tension between the NCB’s economic priorities and community cohesion was summed up by the NUMSA president, Abe Moffat, in 1950. When responding to the proposed closure of Baton colliery he stated: ‘the Board should realise that they were not discussing a mining engineer’s opinion but the social life of a mining village’.²⁴ This outlook solidified within the NUMSA during the eastern periphery’s contraction, with future closures negotiated with the objective of alternative employment being provided within commuting distance. The NCB’s strategy centred on encouraging labour mobility. This was signified when W. Drylie, the Area industrial relations officer, advised ‘local men, particularly young men’, to seek transfers within Scotland during the closure of Loganlea colliery in 1949.²⁵

Board officials were articulating the dominant understanding of employment policy in the terms of the wartime coalition government’s 1944 white paper that formed the cornerstone of subsequent practice: a state commitment to ‘high and stable’ employment underpinned by workforce mobility obligations.²⁶ However, the Board’s migration schemes were undermined by regional policy concerns, while reluctance to leave Shotts also deterred workers from relocating. H. S. Phillips, the Board of Trade’s researcher for Scotland, communicated a sense of policymaker social responsibility in August 1948, when he argued that ‘the transfer method is only an additional and short-term method of reducing male unemployment’. These conclusions related to social circumstances: ‘quite a high proportion of unemployed persons are not prepared, or able, to move more than a short distance’. Phillips argued that the situation in Shotts justified a ‘take work to the workers’ policy.²⁷ Two years later, a Board of Trade research team studied Shotts and concluded that nevertheless limited emigration was desirable. Some success had already been attained in attracting light industry and further developments were necessary ‘to preserve and balance the community on a smaller scale’.²⁸ These concerns had entered NCB and civil service practices in the management of closures by the late 1960s. Correspondence referred to ‘hard core’ pockets of unemployment in areas to be affected by closures in 1967 and 1968. Both NCB and Ministry of Power officials sought solutions to defuse politically sensitive situations in Lanarkshire through the provision of employment within travel distances of the homes of redundant miners rather than opt for encouraging migration as they had in earlier years.²⁹

Policymakers’ assumption of responsibility for providing communities with employment shaped the workings of the moral economy. Their actions were indicative of the double movement’s pressures, which were exemplified by Moffat’s juxtaposing community concerns with maximizing productivity. Steps to stabilize labour markets in contracting coalfields, and the provision of colliery transfers within travel distance, hampered the NCB’s restructuring. The Board’s system of trade union consultation, which included advance warning of closure by placing pits in ‘jeopardy’ status, created obstacles to inter-coalfield migration. This was compounded by tight labour market conditions and regional policy commitments that directed investment towards declining coalfields. Local employment opportunities encouraged young miners to leave the industry when threatened with jeopardy status. This was confirmed by two formal schemes that operated across the Welsh, Scottish and Northern English coalfields. Only 14,974 transfers of miners and former miners took place between 1962 and 1971. By comparison, 678,000 workers left the coal industry between 1957 and 1967, with the bulk concentrated in the transferring areas.³⁰

The policy of linked closures and migration to other coalfields was broadly a failure. Movement was even limited among younger men, with many refusing to transfer. There was a high rate of immobility at Shotts pits, while others cited family in gainful employment and unwillingness to leave the community. At Hillhouserigg in 1949, as at Baton the previous year, there was an anticipated low take-up of transfers. In the face of another 105 redundancies within Shotts, the NUM branch president and secretary argued that one third of workers were too old to transfer, while another third ‘will be unwilling to uproot family ties’ and leave the locality. They noted that 1,050 Shotts men had been made redundant through recent pit closures and raised concerns for the future of the area.³¹ This evidence concurs with Heughan’s research from Shotts in the late 1940s, which concluded that the ‘deep roots’ that most of the population had within a ‘self-sufficient, independent community’ stimulated reluctance to relocate.³²

Records from Shotts collieries reveal resistance to inter-coalfield transfers strongly correlated with community ties and an aversion to disruption. Following the closure of Baton in 1950, miners were offered transfers to the Ayrshire, Lothian and Fife coalfields, yet under a fifth of the 226 men judged eligible transferred to these areas. More men either refused offers for transfer (twenty-eight), or transferred and then subsequently returned (fifteen). This may have been conditioned by the lack of consultation at this stage, with managers instructed that at redundancy interviews, ‘the workman should be made a firm offer of employment and not asked if he is prepared to consider it’.³³ The low take-up rate came despite the NUMSA’s support for coalfield reconstruction. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the NUM was committed to trying to make the nationalized industry a success and accepted some closures. This was most straightforward in cases where geological rather than economic reasoning was put forward by the NCB. In 1949, James McKendrick, the NUM Area secretary and a long-standing CPGB activist, accepted that, ‘they [the trade unions] could not make out a case for the continuation of Chapel mine’, as it became apparent that much of its reserves were unworkable due to flooding.³⁴ At the Area’s annual conference in 1948, Abe Moffat referred to the gains that the union had made under nationalization, and stated that these were tied to industrial reorganization:

This indicates some parallel with John L. Lewis’s strategy in the United Mine Workers of America during the 1940s and 1950s. Under Lewis’s leadership, the union agreed contracts with large firms that accepted significant closures and major job losses within less productive regions in return for guarantees of security and better pay and conditions.³⁶ However, the major distinction was the context of nationalization which promised a greater social restraint on economic pressure in the construction of a more durable industrial order. For Moffat, joint regulation and consultation was fundamental. When these conditions were seen to have been violated, relations between the NUM and NCB soured. This was evident at Broomside, which closed during 1948, the same year as NUMSA leaders urged conference delegates to accept restructuring. Having provided seventy houses for transferees in Fife, the NCB began redundancies before closure was agreed. The NUMSA objected to this at Scottish Divisional level. Moffat argued these developments went against stipulation as closure had not yet been sanctioned by the trade unions.³⁷

There were parallels at Baton in 1950, when eighty-six workers were laid off upon closure. Due to the presence of redundancies before the beginning of consultation, the NUM refused to be party to the closure.³⁸ Baton’s closure saw grievances over the closure process combine with concerns over the availability of facework for transferees and the treatment of elderly and injured workers. During the consultation process, Moffat stated that it was ‘not sufficient to say that the workmen would receive twenty-six weeks’ redundancy pay and then be forgotten about’.³⁹ Unease over local responses to the rundown of mining in Shotts was apparent in the Scottish Division’s worry over ‘press reactions’ to the closure of Hillhouserigg during 1950.⁴⁰ The Board objected to accusations it was determined to shut Shotts pits. Economic priorities justified redundancies and maintained efficiency. Closures were due to financial losses and the greater productivity of manpower if it was transferred elsewhere. However, the NCB later appeared to be more accepting of social arguments. In 1954, when Kingshill 1 was reorganized, and manpower reduced, the Area production manager recognized that there were ‘very few jobs in the area’ due to the impact of ‘fairly heavy redundancies’.⁴¹

Moral economy concerns gained traction over time as the NCB demonstrated a greater willingness to meet the responsibilities expected of it by the NUM and within mining communities. In 1955, the chair of the Scottish Division, Ronald Parker, acknowledged ‘a community life in Shotts which the Board did not want to see disappear’.⁴² Kingshill 2 was gradually rundown during the early 1960s and extensive transfers were provided.⁴³ In attempts to reach profitability, Kingshill 3 was maintained through several loss-making years after 1970. Consultation procedures were abandoned in 1973 before final closure took place in 1974. A renewed, embedded, social democratization of the NCB was visible in the management of Kingshill 3’s eventual closure. Local transfers were provided for all miners under fifty-five years of age to relevant positions according to skill levels, while redundancy payments were made to elderly and disabled workers. Transfers were achieved in part through offers of early retirement for men aged sixty-two and above at the receiving pits, Cardowan and Bedlay, which avoided involuntary redundancy.⁴⁴

For the most part, migration was turned down in favour of extended travel-to-work distances, either to larger pits such as Cardowan and Bedlay or to employment in other industries. This was exemplified by the procedure adopted at Kingshill 3, which broadly maintained patterns of residency but enlarged the locale, stretching the moral economy understanding of local employment. Travel distances grew incrementally through waves of closures. Peter Downie’s employment trajectory epitomized these changes. He started working in his local village pit of Glentore in Greengairs, North Lanarkshire, during the 1950s, before transferring to the adjacent Gartshore 9/11, and then the somewhat longer commute of around nine miles to Bedlay. Following the closure of Bedlay in 1982, Peter transferred further afield, to Polkemmet in West Lothian, seventeen miles from Greengairs. Peter ended his working life at the Solsgirth mine, part of the Longannet complex in Clackmannanshire, which incurred a daily commute of nearly thirty miles across central Scotland, amounting to a round trip of almost sixty miles.⁴⁵ These developments corresponded to a broader Scottish pattern of increased travel-to-work distances and rising car ownership within traditional mining villages. Localized community connections and familial patterns at work and home were disrupted by the dispersal this created, as well as the rising time spent on journeys.⁴⁶ But the improved pay and security provided by the nationalized industry increased the value of colliery employment. Restructuring also encouraged workforce solidarities within cosmopolitan collieries, which were understood as valuable economic assets paid for at the cost of the closure of smaller older units.

The contested moral economy

The Scottish industrial modernization agenda was most visible in the Lanarkshire coalfield between the mid 1950s and the late 1960s. Coalfield contraction was accompanied by the expansion of assembly manufacturing sectors. In the southern area of the Lanarkshire coalfield, the rundown of mining employment was broadly managed within policymakers’ moral economy obligations. Economic closures were still objected to, and the NCB rarely met expectations entirely. As in Lanarkshire’s eastern periphery, travel-to-work journey extensions redefined conceptions of what was considered local employment. However, over this period, employment within travel distance was generally provided upon closure. This included the transfer of miners to pits in the Lanarkshire and Ayrshire coalfields, as well as expanding employment opportunities in alternative industries.

The southern area included relatively large population centres such as Lanark and Lesmahagow, as well as smaller pit villages such as Coalburn and Douglas Water, which were dedicated mining settlements. The rundown of employment was more gradual than in the eastern periphery. To some extent, this resulted from the more profitable status of the seams within this area, which was not at the forefront of the initial closures during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The southern extremity of this coalfield acted as a receiving area for miners in the late 1940s. Alex Clark, Jessie’s husband, transferred from Larkhall to Douglas Castle colliery in 1948 and was allocated a council house in Rigside.⁴⁷ However, the later maintenance of mining was also indicative of its relative geographical isolation. NCB employment was maintained due to the absence of alternatives.

A social commitment to the preservation of employment within areas which overwhelmingly depended on coal mining competed with financial imperatives in NCB decision making. Proposals for development at Douglas Castle colliery through investing just over £460,000 were put forward by the West Central Area in 1957. This would have enabled access to 3.9 million tonnes of proven reserves, and an estimated total of over 8 million, but the suggestion was rejected by Scottish Division officials. The area projected that the investment would increase output from 270 to 700 tonnes per day with 510 men employed at an output per manshift of 27.56 tonnes. Instead, a lower cost investment of around £90,000 was adopted which maintained employment levels at 392 men.⁴⁸ The pit’s maintenance was partly justified by concern over the fate of the villages around it. Recognizing moral economy imperatives, the Scottish Divisional Board’s deputy reconstruction director justified this investment in a loss-making pit by arguing that there was a ‘need to retain the colliery from the manpower and social aspect’.⁴⁹

In 1957, a Scottish Division official speculated ‘that closure of the [Douglas Castle] colliery would be something of a disaster for the local community at Douglas Village and Douglas West, and a considerable number of dependable miners would probably be lost to the mining industry’.⁵⁰ These reservations over closure centred on the nature of the village and the unwillingness to move to the Ayrshire coalfield which paralleled the earlier experience in Shotts. Douglas was described as, ‘a contented homogeneous community with strong local attachment and very unlikely to accept, without opposition, any move to close the colliery or any suggestion to move the bulk of the miners to Barony or Killoch’.⁵¹ Commuting to these collieries entailed a daily round trip of around fifty miles from Douglas. There were tensions within management surrounding responsibilities towards areas experiencing colliery job losses. In this case, a sense of moral economy obligation was embedded at the level of the Scottish Divisional Board. The Scottish Division was done away with in a centralizing reorganization ten years later, further empowering London headquarters, which was more socially distant from Scottish collieries.⁵²

Opposition to closure emerged in the form of the Douglas Defence Committee. The committee wrote to the Conservative minister of fuel and power, Percy Mills, before the colliery’s final closure in January 1959. Their letter described the body as having recently headed ‘a torch-lit demonstration through the streets of Douglas’, before a large meeting was held at the local Miners’ Welfare. Protests were bolstered by two key contingencies that shaped the moral economy: the area’s dependency upon coal mining, and perceptions the NCB had given a ‘clear understanding that the pit had a long life ahead’, which had stimulated local authority investment in housing and amenities.⁵³ Ultimately, 139 men were made redundant, only six of whom were over sixty-five.⁵⁴ Protests against the onset of mid twentieth-century closures in single-industry localities with distinct patterns of cultural life also took place elsewhere in Europe and in North America. Occitan mining communities in Decazville, western France, similarly formed local protest committees against the rundown of their collieries and transfer to the more productive coalfields in eastern France, underlining the threat closures posed to communal cultural bonds.⁵⁵ Miners in Appalachia formed motorcades that used car lights to create spectacles in darkness, with some parallel to the torch demonstration in Douglas. These protests were aimed at non-union coal companies that threatened the status of swiftly contracting unionized mines during the 1960s.⁵⁶

The NCB felt that contraction would release manpower for other industries. Officials reprised the 1944 white paper’s emphases on occupational as well as geographical labour mobility. An internal paper noted it was ‘likely that many of the miners would seek work outside the mining industry near to places where the younger members of their families work’. Glasgow, Hamilton and Motherwell were listed as possibilities.⁵⁷ The oral testimonies demonstrate that pit closures led to extended commuting distances. Gilbert Dobby served an engineering apprenticeship at Auchlochan 9 in Coalburn. He recalled that after it closed: ‘Well there wisnae, ah don’t think there was say an awful lot left the village, but they’d to go further for work the likes ae Ravenscraig [steelworks] and things like that’.⁵⁸ Workers from areas outwith travelling distance of Ayrshire pits experienced redundancies. Geographical remoteness meant that when Auchlochan 9 closed in 1968, NCB officials noted that ‘work within daily travelling distance can be offered only to a very few men but jobs will be available to men willing to move’. Only ten of the 340 workers were able to transfer initially.⁵⁹ Opposition was greatest in cases where closure took place on economic grounds and moral economy transfer expectations were not fulfilled. At Auldton in 1963, objections were raised to an economic closure without adequate plans for transfer. G. Stobbs, the NUM district secretary, argued that this contravened established customs: ‘as alternative employment could not be offered to the men, he felt that production should be continued in all places w[h]ere coal was available’. Workforce objections were heightened because the jobs that were available did not meet the expectation of a transfer to the same grade. Faceworkers, shotfirers and deputies were all affected.⁶⁰ Four months later, upon final closure, seventy-one of the mine’s relatively small workforce of seventy-four were transferred to other pits, but only at the expense of a very much enlarged travel distance for the vast majority (sixty-four), who went to Killoch.⁶¹

Extended travel distances stretched the moral economy’s conception of local employment and contributed towards mounting objections to the removal of industrial employment without a perceived adequate replacement. Similar demands to those in the Shotts area were raised in relation to the rundown of the pits in the Douglas Water area. These concerns gained some redress from policymakers. The Scottish Economic Planning Council attempted to link closures with vacancies at new sinkings in other coalfields, including transfers to England. However, the need for ‘major developments’ in advance factory provision in North Lanarkshire was also recognized.⁶² This partly reflected pressure emanating from local political organizations. The Douglas Water Cooperative Society responded to the continuation of the closure programme through proposals for industrial developments to take place locally given the likely closure of Auchlocan 9. In a 1965 letter to the Labour MP for Lanark, Judith Hart, Cooperative representatives asked, ‘why should the [Labour] government not make some effort to take steps to prepare our people in some other job or employment during the transitory period to the closing of the very doubtful life of the colliery?’ Referencing the example of East Kilbride, the letter proposed that a new town should be built on the A74 adjacent to Rigside or Lanark. If that could not be granted, ‘at least an industrial estate’ was judged necessary ‘to revitalize the upper ward of Lanarkshire’.⁶³ This effort was successful, at least indirectly, as Larkhall was later marked for development. Work at Cardowan and Bedlay, around thirty miles to the north, as well as opencast developments that were closer by, maintained employment in the area, albeit within a redefined and enlarged locale.

Concern over falling coal employment grew as the weight of closures and local opposition mounted through the political as well as industrial links of the Scottish coal lobby. Hart stood alongside the NUMSA and NUM’s general secretary, Lawrence Daly, and the NUMSA president, Michael McGahey, in opposing the NCB’s proposed closure of Kennox during proceedings over 1968 and 1969. Their terms underlined objection to pit closures on economic grounds as the future of the industry was called into question. Incremental divestment’s cumulative impact was evident in the union’s pronounced opposition to closures and reassertion of the moral economy. The NUM took the Kennox closure to a national appeal in London, which consolidated the sense that the NUMSA were defending national as well as local interests. McGahey argued in terms resonant with the double movement that ‘the Board had already upset the social structure of what had been a prolific mining area’ through many closures. Daly also emphasized the threat to community cohesion by calling for the pit to be ‘kept open until the Government had arranged to introduce measures to alleviate the serious social consequences which would arise from closure’.⁶⁴ The NCB conceded extending the colliery’s life to allow the installation of chain conveyors. Despite early fears that the improved performance was inadequate and that closure ‘appears inevitable’, the pit was later withdrawn from jeopardy status.⁶⁵ The final closure of Kennox in 1972 related to the erosion of the pit’s reserve. Trade unions accepted this without contesting formal jeopardy procedures. This demonstrates miners’ understanding of the Board’s obligation to secure employment through the continued mining of coal reserves.⁶⁶

The renegotiated moral economy

The moral economy was renegotiated through a series of confrontations between the NCB and the NUM over the late 1960s and early 1970s. Opposition to economic closures became more pronounced within the NUMSA following Michael McGahey’s election as area president in 1967. Industrial relations tensions developed in response to the impact of incremental closures, and in opposition to the diminution of miners’ pay and conditions. A shift in NCB policy took place during the early 1970s that reasserted the moral economy obligation towards maintaining employment. The analysis in the final sections of this chapter focuses on the management of closures in the northern core, which encompasses the established mining and industrial area of North Lanarkshire. Under nationalization, there had been significant investment in the area, including the redevelopment of Cardowan and Bedlay as well as major expenditure at Gartshore 9/11 and Wester Auchengeich.⁶⁷ The availability of transfers mitigated resistance, but there was evidence of grievances related to the coordinated rundown of pits in the area to provide manpower for Bedlay and Cardowan. This contributed to a sense of instability within the industry as perceptions grew that the NCB’s promises of economic security were being broken.

Closures in the northern core were predominantly justified on economic grounds. They were contested by NUM representatives who embodied the protective countermovement to the NCB’s market logic by asserting the Board’s obligation to preserve collieries which the Board had previously stated were economically viable units. The NUM was supported by local politicians. Margaret Herbison, the Labour MP for North Lanarkshire, wrote to Ronald Parker, opposing the closure of Auchengeich in 1965. Her concerns echoed those of the workforce regarding the NCB’s promises of economic security given that a colliery ranked as Grade A and considered to have a long-term future in 1962 was now being closed. A further grievance was that men faced a considerable loss of earnings through transfers. Herbison stated she was ‘willing to help in any way possible to try to keep this colliery’ and called for investment, referring favourably to the NUM’s suggestion to develop the main coal area.⁶⁸ Parker’s reply sought to placate these concerns by emphasizing that closure took place within moral economy parameters. Only nine men were to be made redundant and pieceworkers would be found suitable positions through transfer.⁶⁹

The NUM responded to the proposed closure of Wester Auchengeich in 1967 by compiling an extensive engineering report arguing for its redevelopment. This demonstrated concern over the mounting termination of what had been earlier understood to be economically viable units. Union engineers concluded that long-term possibilities depended on six months of development work to reach the Cadder area, which could be profitably mined. Their report detailed tension between moral economy obligations and cost control priorities within different levels of management: ‘some [unnamed] Board officials’ supported further investment, but the Scottish North Area production manager was opposed.⁷⁰ Developments at Wester Auchengeich had parallels with the experience of Michael colliery in Fife, which was closed in 1967 following a major fire but, as in Lanarkshire, NCB officials favouring continued operations was ruled out by superiors.⁷¹ These cases confirm the moral economy’s basis in localized communities. Support from colliery management were overruled by central investment priorities, displaying the declining autonomy afforded to Scottish NCB operations during the 1960s as the industry felt intensifying cost control pressures.

The connection between closures and industrial relations tension is vividly described in NCB correspondence and the minutes of CCC meetings. Mineworkers’ rising frustrations centred on objections relating to the legitimacy of consultation and perceptions that the NCB falsely promised employment stability to transferees. These factors were apparent at the closure of Gartshore 9/11 in 1968. Plans for the closure of the colliery and Wester Auchengeich were published in the NCB’s Coal News and the Glasgow Evening Times. In a letter to the Scottish North Area’s director, D. J. Skidmore, McGahey argued that this breached protocol and encouraged animosity between workers and management: ‘no information or statements should be issued publicly before the miners and other workmen at the pit are informed of the actual position’.⁷² The cumulative effect of closures was apparent in the mistrust towards the NCB which workforce representatives articulated at CCC meetings. At Gartshore 9/11, it was alleged that transfers to the colliery following the closure of Boglea in 1962 had contributed to overmanning the pit and depressed its financial performance.⁷³

Previous area management promises of ten and twenty years of economically productive life were mentioned during closure procedures at both Gartshore 9/11 and Wester Auchengeich, indicating that these pits were understood as having been secured through investment that accompanied earlier closures. Doubt had been cast upon the transfer policy by Gartshore men in 1966 with reference to the fact that forty-nine men had recently been moved to Wester Auchengeich, which an NUM representative, reflecting on his belief the pit would soon close, stated had ‘no future’. This was borne out when closure proceedings began the following year.⁷⁴ Discontent over Gartshore 9/11’s closures related to perceptions of the future of the industry in the area. Among sixty men who refused transfer, one miner, commenting on recent closures, stated that ‘the pits are finished’, while another simply said, ‘I’ve been through too many closures’. Others highlighted the fact that in five years four nearby pits, an NCB workshop, and Wester Auchengeich’s coking plant, had been closed.⁷⁵ These feelings were collectively articulated at a local level. Kilsyth town council wrote to the chair of the NCB, Alf Robens, to protest at Gartshore 9/11’s closure and alleged that the Board was ‘deliberately re-deploying large numbers of men into Bedlay to force a closure on economic grounds within three years’. They further protested, in concurrence with the transferees’ grievances over grading, that these miners were ‘not gainfully employed’.⁷⁶ It is notable that grievances were directed towards Robens and not Scottish NCB officials. This was another indication of the centralization associated with the 1967 reorganization, which enhanced the role of the NCB’s UK headquarters in scheduling pit closures.⁷⁷

Perceptions of distance between mining communities and the Coal Board’s senior management were accentuated by a clash of worldviews. The divide centred on the productionist priorities of the NCB and the moral economy expectations of mining communities, which limited the extent to which the generation of miners represented by McGahey and Daly viewed nationalization as a social advancement. Tommy Canavan, who was an NUM representative at Cardowan, recalled McGahey claiming that the NCB had continued with the priorities and personnel of the private industry, stating that ‘the management just changed their jerseys. They went fae the Bairds, Scottish Steel and aw these different private companies and became managers’. However, Canavan qualified this by claiming the NCB ‘worked two ways’, and that despite its economic priorities it demonstrated a social understanding and commitment to mining communities at a local level through its support for community activities at Miners’ Welfares.⁷⁸ Willie Doolan, who was an active communist and trade unionist at Cardowan, described the ‘hated … hierarchy’ of the NCB as ‘enemies of the working class’ who retained a privileged and distant position. Nonetheless, their activities were constrained by public ownership, which perhaps reflected some colliery managers’ commitment to moral economy obligations: ‘I’m not trying to paint the picture that all colliery managers were vicious towards the miners because that wasn’t the case. They were under instructions obviously, the National Coal Board 1947’.⁷⁹

There was a significant turning point in coalfield contraction during the late 1960s and early 1970s, which coincided with the diminishment of alternative employment opportunities. Awareness of economic insecurity was increased by the publication of the government’s Fuel Policy white paper in November 1967. This forecast that British coal usage would decline from around 175 million tonnes in 1966 to 120 million tonnes by 1975, and that employment in the industry would decline at an even faster rate. Job losses would be highest in ‘peripheral’ coalfields, including Scotland.⁸⁰ In Lanarkshire’s northern core, these projections correlated with local experience, where miners were asked to accept pit closures in return for transfers. The NCB gave assurances of security on each occasion, yet planning documents suggest an awareness of future closures. This extended to the possible closure of Bedlay and Cardowan soon after the remaining pits in the northern core had been closed.⁸¹ The fact these closures did not take place is indicative of both the strength of workforce and community opposition, but also reflects market changes which benefited these collieries’ positions.⁸² A more favourable position for coal in relation to power generation was provided by the quadrupling of oil prices over 1973–4, following the beginning of the Arab-Israeli war. This created political uncertainty over the viability of supplies.⁸³ Grievances over wages and closures, which culminated in the industrial action of the late 1960s and early 1970s, were underpinned by coal’s strengthened energy market position.

Rising tensions within the mining industry slowed contraction. Large unofficial strikes in 1969 and 1970 led to official action over wages during 1972 and 1974.⁸⁴ K. S. Jeffries, the NCB’s secretary in London, sent a letter to area officials in December 1971 specifying that ‘in view of the fluid industrial relations situation’, jeopardy meetings were to be suspended. The instruction applied to economic closures, with ‘exhaustion closures’ to be resolved through contact with headquarters.⁸⁵ Richard Hyman concluded in 1974 that ‘coal miners have been able to argue that their work is dangerous and unpleasant and also that it has a new and strategic importance in economic life, as justification for substantial improvement in the incomes hierarchy’.⁸⁶ A focus group of retired Lanarkshire miners found that this perspective resonated with them. In 2014, the participants remembered that five decades earlier they had compared their conditions to men who worked in the Rootes car factory at Linwood, which opened in 1963 and was subsequently taken over by Chrysler. Peter Downie recalled that thousands of workers left coal mining for such opportunities and that while following Rangers Football Club, he had often met men who had done so:

The relative decline of miners’ wages vis-à-vis those of other manual workers was a major component of the discontent which fuelled miners’ industrial action in the early 1970s. Linwood played a seminal role in this. Chrysler resolved a dispute in February 1972, while the miners were on strike, by granting a 14 per cent annual pay rise. This took basic weekly wages to thirty-seven pounds, which was nine pounds more than the NUM’s basic claim.⁸⁸ Reflecting on this disparity, the 1972 and 1974 strikes were recalled in terms of restoring economic justice, which accorded the miners their strategic industrial status and demanding physical labour deserved:

A settlement was reached in the 1974 dispute through the incoming Labour government’s Plan for Coal. It ‘held out the prospect of a stable environment’ by cementing a place for coal within a mixed energy policy, overturning the position of the 1967 white paper. This included a pledge to secure employment through a long-term commitment to new sinking extending into the 1980s.⁹⁰ Colliery closures resultantly slowed down. The experience of energy market fluctuations between the 1960s and 1970s, especially accelerated closures due to the displacement of coal by oil, had a long-term impact on the NUMSA’s perspective. It reinforced a rejection of liberalized market approaches and reinforced an understanding based on an energy policy approach that utilized national resources endowments to sustain workforce and community integrity. In 1979, McGahey moved a resolution at the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) conference that praised the work of the Labour government in committing to expanding coal production and employment and making moves towards a more planned energy policy. However, he also warned of the experience of the recent past, reflecting on how reliance on imported oil had dislocated the UK economy and contributed to inflation:

The moral economy under threat

Deep coal mining ceased in the northern core during the early 1980s. The striking differences in the responses to the closure of Bedlay in 1982 and Cardowan in 1983 were due to the broad adherence to the moral economy at Bedlay and a clear transgression of its customs by the NCB at Cardowan. Bedlay was the last moral economy closure in Scotland, with all those that followed being marked by managerial hostility to union consultation and workforce opposition. The colliery had traditions of collaboration between managers and anti-communist trade unionists. Cardowan contrasted with Bedlay. It was a large cosmopolitan colliery and was a stronghold of politicized left-wing trade unionism.⁹² Descriptions of these distinct ideological alignments were present in the oral history interviews. For instance, Pat Egan, an NUM youth delegate at Bedlay, recalled:

These distinctions were not the fundamental cause of the differing responses to closure. It was the difference in the treatment of closure by the NCB, through their relative adherence to the moral economy at Bedlay and clear breach of it at Cardowan, which was fundamental in determining the stance taken by the NUM and within the communities affected. In the case of Bedlay, the closure was less controversial as it took place on geological rather than economic grounds. Extensive consultation and discussions with all unions were spread over ‘several months,’ while a ‘joint examination of all possible areas of reserves’ took place with the involvement of the union’s mining engineers. Closure was agreed due to ‘insurmountable geological conditions’.⁹⁴

After consultation was complete, transfers were arranged to ‘neighbouring collieries’. This stretched the understanding of local employment further than previous Lanarkshire transfers. Receiving collieries included Polkemmet and extended across central Scotland to Fife pits. However, the 640 men from Bedlay were absorbed by 200 redundancies, 440 transfers and 100 redundancies within other collieries. Although the NCB undertook these costs, its accountants objected to a net loss of £3.3 million through redundancy, transfer and pension payments. They were most concerned by taking on 340 extra workers without increasing production and prescribed a solution of an additional 340 redundancies.⁹⁵ This attitude indicates that commitments to further development through the Plan for Coal, upon which the renegotiated moral economy rested, were increasingly being undermined by financial priorities. The accountants’ perspective was shaped by the Coal Industry Act 1980, introduced by the first Thatcher government, which projected an end to subsidy by 1984 and effectively scrapped the long-term investment framework of the Plan for Coal. The legislation was ‘drawn so as to make it almost impossible to operate the industry in the way it had been operating until then’.⁹⁶ These major changes to the political economy of energy policy disembedded coal employment from communitarian routines and asserted the primacy of financial priorities.

Cardowan’s closure originated in the assertion of market logic across the nationalized industries through British Steel’s use of coal imports to supply Ravenscraig.⁹⁷ Nicky Wilson was an electrician and acted as a Scottish Colliery, Enginemen, Boilermen and Tradesmen’s Association (SCEBTA) delegate at Cardowan. In 2014, he remained angry at the loss of the Ravenscraig market for the pit’s ‘high grade coking coal’. The NCB were then obliged to ‘mix it wi a lotta rubbish’ for lower value power station use.⁹⁸ Cardowan’s closure transgressed the moral economy’s expectations of consultation with trade union representatives, while financial compensation was retained in return for the acceptance of closure, transfer and redundancy. Albert Wheeler, the NCB’s Scottish Area director, made this clear at a meeting during 1983 when he stated that ‘he wanted the opinion of the 1,090 men employed at the colliery and not just the few who attended branch meetings’. In place of negotiation with trade union representatives, he made an ‘offer’ to individual workers. Wheeler enticed miners to eschew collectivist imperatives with redundancy payments that incorporated a lump sum payment of up to £20,000 and pensions of up to £100 a week for men over the age of fifty. Protected earnings and transfer allowances were promised to younger workers.⁹⁹

The NUM’s principal objections related to the NCB taking steps to close the pit before any intimation of closure procedure was made towards trade unions. By the time of the trade union’s appeal, which saw the NUM supported by the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers in opposing closure, 300 men had already left Cardowan. Both Michael McGahey and Arthur Scargill, the NUM’s president, argued this breached procedure. Transfers were used to undermine workforce solidarity and collective agreements across the Scottish coalfields, leading to far greater intra-workforce disputes than the tensions unearthed at previous transfers over access to coalface positions. Grievances centred on the undermining of joint regulation, with strikes following the entrance of unnegotiated transfers from Cardowan to Pokemmet in West Lothian and Frances and Bogside in Fife.¹⁰⁰ The most serious moral economy transgression took place at Polmaise in Stirlingshire. Cardowan men were transferred in June 1983, while the pit was undergoing reconstruction. This breached promises to local miners, who had been assured of first refusal on employment at the redeveloped pit, and led to the NUM branch pursuing a policy of non-cooperation with unnegotiated transferees. These developments contributed to a lockout at the pit.¹⁰¹

The tendency for collective memories of social conflict to involve a ‘cluster of tales, symbols, legends and imaginary reconstructions’ is evident in recollections of Cardowan’s closure where boundaries between singular events are porous.¹⁰² Willie Doolan recollected the closure as an anticipation of the divisive policies deployed by the NCB during the 1984–5 miners’ strike:

In August 1983, the workforce at Cardowan rejected industrial action against the closure. Just under 40 per cent voted to strike following several months of demoralization as the NCB disregarded consultation with the cooperation of a minority within the workforce who accepted transfers and redundancy.¹⁰⁴ Memories of the build-up to the final defeat of the NUM’s appeal the following month emphasized that Wheeler’s methods of management diverged from the nationalized industry’s traditions. Tommy Canavan recollected that when Wheeler visited Cardowan to explain the closure to the workforce he was met with physical violence. The confrontation centred on the workforce’s and community’s understanding of the colliery as a communal resource and source of employment as opposed to the property of senior management to be disposed of according to the logic of profitability:

Nicky Wilson described opposition to Wheeler’s visit in terms of a mobilization from across the settlements which depended upon employment at Cardowan: ‘you had men in fae various groups ae workforce, and aw the families from Cardowan and roond aboot came. And he couldnae get oot’. Wheeler was unable to leave using the main exit and was eventually escorted from the premises by police. The protestors physically blocking Wheeler’s exit symbolized a rejection of the NCB’s financial priorities in favour of a moral economy claim on the colliery and the employment it provided. Both testimonies were strongly shaped by the requirements of ‘composure’: the telling of a congruent life-story, which is filtered by contemporary social and political sensibilities.¹⁰⁶ Tommy Canavan, articulating himself through the coalfield cultural circuit’s emphasis on the legacy of struggle, underlined the militancy of the Cardowan workforce in their opposition to Wheeler. Nicky Wilson, perhaps reflecting his role as the NUM’s Scottish president, argued that opposition to Wheeler was more comical than violent: ‘Somebody stuck an ice cream on his head right enough, that’s aboot as much damage as he got!’ It was Wheeler’s intransigence and arrogance in lecturing the workforce and their families, and his insistence upon attempting to use the main exit, which was behind the incident.¹⁰⁷

The acrimony over Cardowan’s closure was focused on rising unemployment and accelerating deindustrialization. Pat Egan remembered that in the early 1980s there was a major rundown of industrial employment around his home in Twechar, North Lanarkshire: two foundries, a brickworks, Bedlay and Cardowan closed. There were also redundancies at the Burroughs electronics factory in Cumbernauld, which finally shut in 1987. By the mid 1980s, ‘that was basically it for big employers in the locality’.¹⁰⁸ The incremental growth of unemployment and the lack of opportunities for work in other industries increased opposition to closure. McGahey drew attention to the fact that Cardowan was the last colliery in Lanarkshire at the pit’s national appeal. Moral economy objections to closures were further bolstered by the rejection of the uneconomic status of the colliery: Cardowan was not a ‘clapped out pit’. Unlike Bedlay, Cardowan had large workable reserves with eight years of immediately accessible coal, and long-term development prospects for thirty-five years more work. J. Varley, a representative from the NUM’s white-collar federate, the Colliery Officials and Staff Association (COSA), starkly commented that it was ‘ludicrous that such large reserves should be sterilised for purely political reasons’.¹⁰⁹

The view that Cardowan’s closure was willed by the Conservative government and their agents within the NCB was strengthened by the treatment of the pit’s manager, John Frame. Social obligations were felt more keenly by the lower rungs of management who were often embedded with their workforce and communal life in coalfield settlements. This led to them being more conducive to moral economy customs. Cost control imperatives from officials at area and headquarters level became irreconcilable with commitments to the workforce in the context of the NCB’s abandonment of the moral economy. Market logic and aggressive anti-trade union policies were imposed by new figures, including Ian MacGregor and Albert Wheeler, while officials such as John Frame who adhered to moral economy principles were removed.¹¹⁰ In the view of SCEBTA’s president, Abe Moffat, the son of the NUM president with the same name, Frame was ‘virtually forced’ to retire, and ‘was leaving the industry because he disagreed with the closure and knew that the miners had a good case’.¹¹¹ During 2014, Willie Doolan recalled Frame, who he described as a ‘devout Christian[,] … telling the union privately, “fight for the retention ae your pit because you have millions of tonnes of reserves of coal there, you have a bright future, good coal”’.¹¹² In similar terms, Tommy Canavan stated, ‘Even the manager knew the pit shouldnae shut. But it was laid doon by the Coal Board, by Wheeler, MacGregor, the whole lot ae them’.¹¹³ In their determined pursuit of closure, the NCB ceased any pretence of adherence to moral economy responsibilities. Rather than consultation and a negotiated procedure of closure and subsequent transfer, under Wheeler, the Board’s Scottish management sought to divide the workforce and break community opposition.

The closure of Polkemmet in 1985 confirmed that the NCB was wilfully disposing of valuable assets and employment. Both Seumas Milne’s investigative journalism and oral testimonies from managers within the NCB’s Scottish Area have confirmed that Albert Wheeler was personally responsible for ordering that managerial staff desist from pumping and maintenance activities during the 1984–5 strike. This resulted in the pit flooding. Final closure followed shortly after the dispute finished. A crisis had been created by a return-to-work effort that involved the NCB collaborating with police in enrolling six of the pit’s workforce to cross picket lines. The NUM resultantly withdrew safety cover.¹¹⁴ Polkemmet’s workforce included transferees from Bedlay who commuted from Lanarkshire to West Lothian. These events were recollected as a clear transgression of the moral economy within several testimonies. Gilbert Dobby, who worked as an engineer at the pit, stated it ‘wis closed wi a lie. It wis supposed to be flooded durin the miners’ strike. Now, ah cannae say it wisnae flooded, because it wis flooded. But it wisnae flooded’. He explained that although on strike engineers continued to provide safety cover to maintain the pits intact but that:

Similar allegations of intentional damage were put forward by Peter Downie. He explained that an expensive development, including assets valued at an estimated £300 million, suddenly ended with no adequate explanation. The equipment was in his view intentionally left at the pit which was deliberately flooded by management:¹¹⁶

Peter Downie’s memories emphasized the growing involvement of private contractors within the nationalized industry which expanded markedly during the 1980s. Their profitmaking undermined the solidity of strike action and constituted a waste of resources by the NCB. His analysis of the closure rested on the broader process of deindustrialization, the decline of the steel industry’s demand for coking coal, as well as the greater assertion of market principles within it. As with Cardowan, Polkemmet had previously supplied Ravenscraig, and similarly its economic viability was hampered by the shift towards imported coal.¹¹⁸ The accelerated closures of modernized pits confirmed the NCB’s abandonment of the moral economy. During and after the miners’ strike, the competing dimensions of the double movement clashed over the governance of the industry. The NCB’s market logic overcame the NUM’s protective countermovement. A decisive victory for the Board resolved the contested ownership of collieries between the Board and coalfield communities: they were the property of NCB management to be dispensed with according to financial priorities.

The nationalized coal industry was subject to the double movement’s competing logics of financial performance and productionist pressures on the one hand and the workforce and coalfield community’s claims to colliery employment on the other. Moral economy customs evolved as methods by which closures could be legitimated through dialogue with trade union representatives and the provision of collective economic security, usually via job transfers. Closures in Lanarkshire’s eastern periphery during the late 1940s and early 1950s were formative to the moral economy’s customs. These experiences reinforced the importance attached to maintaining the integrity of small-scale territorial communities in the offer of job transfers at future closures. During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s miners affected by closures were generally not expected to uproot themselves and their families to retain colliery employment. But as demonstrated by the transfers that followed closure in the southern area, and later at Bedlay, this was only maintained through greatly extended commuting distances which loosened relationships between localities and workplaces. Moral economy expectations were not static, and the operation of colliery closures was continually contested and renegotiated. The incremental logic of closures in Lanarkshire’s northern core contributed to a growing sense of economic instability among miners, which stimulated industrial action during the early 1970s. Although nominally fought over wages, these disputes were attached to a broader agenda for dignified and secure employment that was partially realized through the Plan for Coal’s guarantee of investment and comparative employment stability. During the 1980s, the Board repudiated its moral economy obligations to pursue a pronounced assertion of managerial prerogative instead of dialogue and the logic of financial costs instead of industry planning. Objections to colliery closures in the lead up to the 1984–5 strike, and afterwards, coalesced around the radical restructuring of industry governance from dialogue with trade unions towards individualized ‘offers’ to workers affected by closures. Managerial transgression of moral economy sensibilities was heightened by the sense that the Board was wilfully disposing of valuable public assets which had been paid for at the cost of earlier closures.

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¹ The National Archives (TNA), Coal 31/138, Minutes of the meeting held on 12 July 1979 at Thames House South.

² Popular Memory Group, ‘Popular memory: theory, politics, methodology’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. R. Perks and A. Thomson (London, 2006), p. 44; L. Abrams, Oral History Theory (London, 2010), p. 18.

³ P. Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester, 1998), p. 14.

⁴ A. Thomson, ‘Anzac memories: putting popular memory theory into practice in Australia’, in Perks and Thomson, The Oral History Reader, pp. 300–10, at pp. 301–2.

⁵ D. Nettleingham, ‘Canonical generations and the British left: narrative construction of the British miners’ strike, 1984–85’, Sociology, li (2017), 850–64, at pp. 852–3.

⁶ D. Leeworthy, ‘The secret life of us: 1984, the miners’ strike and the place of biography in writing history “from below”’, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire, xix (2012), 825–46, at p. 828.

⁷ R. P. Arnot, A History of the Scottish Miners: from the Earliest Times (London, 1955).

⁸ Arnot, A History of the Scottish Miners, pp. 12–28.

⁹ Arnot, A History of the Scottish Miners, pp. 252–3.

¹⁰ Moodiesburn focus group, retired miners’ group, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 25 March 2014. ‘Weans’ is a Scots word meaning children.

¹¹ Moodiesburn focus group, retired miners’ group, 25 March 2014.

¹² Jessie Clark, interview with author, residence, Broddock, 22 March 2014.

¹³ K. Polanyi Levitt, From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization: on Karl Polanyi and other essays (London, 2013), p. 100.

¹⁴ B. Jones, B. Roberts and C. Williams, ‘“Going from darkness into light”: South Wales miners’ attitudes towards nationalisation’, Llafur, vii (1996), 96–110, at p. 102.

¹⁵ I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘South Wales miners’ attitudes towards nationalization: an essay in oral history’, Llafur, vi (1993), 70–84, at p. 78.

¹⁶ W. Ashworth, The History of the British Coal Industry, v: 1946–1982: the Nationalized Industry ( Oxford, 1986), p. 129.

¹⁷ Shotts focus group, Nithsdale Sheltered Housing Complex, Shotts, 4 March 2014.

¹⁸ Pat Egan, interview with author, Fife College, Glenrothes, 5 Feb. 2014.

¹⁹ National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (NRS), CB 280/30/1, Douglas Castle colliery: summary of manpower as at 6 Jan. 1959; CB 280/30/19, Notes of a meeting held in the manager’s office, Douglas Castle colliery, on 4 Feb. 1959.

²⁰ NRS, CB 298/6/1, Minutes of meeting held at Robertson Street, Glasgow, Wednesday 3 Aug. 1966.

²¹ TNA, Coal 89/103/2A, 986, Meeting of the Board, 1969.

²² TNA, Coal 89/103/28A, J. B. Burton to D. J. Nisbet, Memorandum: Cardowan, 9 March 1971.

²³ B. Bluestone and B. Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York, 1982), pp. 19– 20.

²⁴ NRS, CB 222/14/1/21A, Notes of proceedings between the Scottish Divisional Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA) regarding the proposed closure of Baton colliery held at 58 Palmerston Place, Edinburgh, Monday 8 May 1950.

²⁵ NRS, CB 295/14/1, Loganlea CCC: minutes of special meeting, 1 Feb. 1949.

²⁶ M. Roberts, ‘Annotated copy of Employment policy (1944)’, Margaret Thatcher Foundation <http://fc95d419f4478b3b6e5f3f71d0fe2b653c4f00f32175760e96e7.r87.cf1.rackcdn.com/2312B65342E04F2B8107131C635023BD.pdf> [accessed 22 Nov. 2019].

²⁷ NRS, SEP 4/762, H. S. Phillips, Research studies: geographical movement of labour, 9 Aug. 1948.

²⁸ NRS, SEP 4/762, Research Section Board of Trade (Scotland) note, Geographical movement of labour, 4 Aug. 1950.

²⁹ TNA, POWE 52/305, J. W. Anderson note, ‘Kennox colliery’, 28 Jan. 1968; Coal 31/130, R. B. Marshall, Departmental Secretary, note to the Ministry of Power, 5 July 1967.

³⁰ Ashworth, British Coal, pp. 260–2.

³¹ NRS, CB 321/14/1, W. Moore, secretary and J. N. Watson, president of no. 121 Baton Branch NUM, Central East Area, to the NCB, 26 Feb. 1949.

³² H. E. Heughan, Pit Closures at Shotts and the Migration of Miners (Edinburgh, 1953), pp. 12, 56.

³³ NRS, CB 222/14/1, Offers of employment to redundant workmen, 13 June 1950.

³⁴ NRS, CB 295/14/1/1F, Minutes of meeting of Chapel Mine Consultative Committee meeting held in Bothwell Office 2 Feb. 1949.

³⁵ National Mining Museum Scotland archives, Newtongrange, Midlothian (NMMS), NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 8 July 1946 to 11 June 1947, p. 499.

³⁶ G. Wilson, ‘“Our chronic and desperate situation”: anthracite communities and the emergence of redevelopment policy in Pennsylvania and the United States, 1945–1965’, in De-industrialization: Social, Cultural and Political Aspects, ed. Bert Altena and Marcel van der Linden (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 137–58, at pp. 140–1.

³⁷ NRS, CB 483/24/1/6A, Divisional Consultative Committee point 127, Broomside colliery, 1948.

³⁸ NRS, CB 222/14/1/47A, A. Moffatt, NUM, Edinburgh to L. E. Bourke, NCB, Edinburgh, 20 Oct. 1948.

³⁹ NRS, CB 222/14/1/29A, Note of proceedings between the Scottish Divisional Coal Board and the NUMSA regarding the proposed closure of Baton colliery held at 58 Palmerston Place, Edinburgh on Thursday 18 May 1950.

⁴⁰ NRS, CB 321/14/1/14a, Divisional Board, closure of Hillhouserigg colliery-item 153 (1949).

⁴¹ NRS, CB 334/19/2/2, Special meeting of the Consultative Committee held on 26 Jan. 1954.

⁴² NRS, CB 410/14/1/57A, Notes of proceedings between representatives of the board and representatives of the NUM at 58 Palmerston Place Edinburgh, Friday 21 Oct. 1955.

⁴³ NRS, CB 334/19/2, Transport arrangements for workmen transferring to Polkemmet (1963); Kingshill no. 2, 2nd Stage (1963).

⁴⁴ NRS, CB 334/19/3, Minutes of a special consultative committee meeting held at Allanton Welfare, 30 May 1974.

⁴⁵ Moodiesburn focus group.

⁴⁶ D. Wight, Workers Not Wasters: Masculine Respectability, Consumption and Unemployment in Central Scotland: a Community Study (Edinburgh, 1993), p. 25.

⁴⁷ A. Clark, ‘Personal experience from a lifetime in the communist and labour movements’, Scottish Labour History Review, x (1996–7), 9–11, at p. 11.

⁴⁸ NRS, CB 280/30/1, Douglas Castle colliery: Rankin and Wilson mines reorganisation (1957).

⁴⁹ NRS, CB 280/30/1/1A, Thomson, deputy reconstruction director, NCB, Edinburgh, to W. I. Finnie, deputy area production manager, NCB Lugar Works, Cumnock, 6 Dec. 1957.

⁵⁰ NRS, CB 280/30/1, Report on Douglas Castle colliery project, Scottish Division, 6 Dec. 1957.

⁵¹ NRS, CB 280/30/1, Report on Douglas Castle colliery project, Scottish Division, 6 Dec. 1957.

⁵² R. Halliday, The Disappearing Scottish Colliery: a Personal View of Some Aspects of Scotland’s Coal Industry since Nationalisation (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 107.

⁵³ TNA, POWE 37/481/26, J. McCartney and R. Scott, Douglas, to minister of fuel and power, London, ‘Douglas defence committee’, 4 Jan. 1959.

⁵⁴ NRS, CB 280/30/1, Douglas Castle colliery: summary of manpower as at 6/1/59.

⁵⁵ D. Reid, The Miners of Decazeville: a Genealogy of Deindustrialization (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 189–201.

⁵⁶ A. Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: an Oral History (Oxford, 2010), p. 273.

⁵⁷ NRS, CB 280/30/1, Report on Douglas Castle colliery project, Scottish Division, 6 Dec. 1957.

⁵⁸ Gilbert Dobby, interview with author, Coalburn Miners’ Welfare, 11 Feb. 2014.

⁵⁹ NRS, CB 210/14/3, NCB colliery closures: Scotland, 21 March 1968.

⁶⁰ NRS, CB 210/25/1/12A, Minutes of meeting held at Auldton Mine, 12 March 1963.

⁶¹ NRS, CB 210/25/1/7B, Notice of closure, concentration or reorganisation, 30 Sept. 1963.

⁶² NRS, SEP 4/17/56/20, Scottish Economic Planning Council note, Implications of pit closures for economic planning, Dec. 1965.

⁶³ NRS, SEP 4/17/56/20, Scottish Economic Planning Council note, Implications of pit closures for economic planning, Dec. 1965; SEP 4/17/56/23, Douglas Water Cooperative Society to J. Hart, 15 Dec. 1965.

⁶⁴ NRS, CB 327/14/1/37B, Note of meeting between representatives of the NCB and NUM held at 3.30pm on Wednesday 29 Jan. 1969, in the board Room, Hobart House.

⁶⁵ NRS, CB 327/14/1/52A, T. D. M. Scrimgeour, Scottish Southern Area NCB, to W. Kerr Fraser, Regional Development Division, St. Andrew’s House, Edinburgh, 1 May 1969; CB 207/14/5/52A, J. M. Trail, Scottish Southern Area NCB, to K. S. Jeffries, NCB, London, 30 Dec. 1970.

⁶⁶ NRS, CB 207/14/5/92A, Kennox colliery note, 22 May 1972.

⁶⁷ M. Oglethorpe, ‘The Scottish coal mining industry since 1945’, Scottish Business and Industrial History, xxvi (2011), 77–98, at p. 82.

⁶⁸ NRS, CB 207/24/1/30A, M. Herbison, House of Commons, London to R. Parker, NCB, Edinburgh, subject: proposed closure of Auchengeich Colliery, 6 March 1965.

⁶⁹ NRS, CB 207/24/1, R. Parker, NCB, Edinburgh to M. Herbison, House of Commons, London, 19 March 1965.

⁷⁰ NRS, CB 207/14/3, L. Johnston, Report on Wester Auchengeich coal reserves (1967).

⁷¹ J. Phillips, ‘Deindustrialization and the moral economy of the Scottish coalfields, 1947 to 1991’, International Labor and Working-Class, History, lxxxiv (2013), 99–115, at p. 106.

⁷² NRS, CB 300/14/2, M. McGahey, NUMSA, Edinburgh to D. J. Skidmore, NCB, Alloa, 9 Jan. 1968.

⁷³ NRS, CB 300/14/2, Minutes of special CCC Meeting held in Grayshill office at 1.30am, on Wednesday 25 Aug. 1966.

⁷⁴ NRS, CB 300/14/2, Minutes of special CCC Meeting, Wednesday 25 Aug. 1966; Wester Auchengeich CCC: Minutes of meeting held in manager’s office, Wednesday 27 Dec. 1967; CB 207/14/4, Minutes of special CCC at Wester Auchengeich colliery, 9 Jan. 1968.

⁷⁵ NRS, CB 300/14/1, Manpower branch, NCB, Glasgow to legal department, NCB, Edinburgh, memorandum: Background notes: what happened at Gartshore 9/11 closure? (1968).

⁷⁶ NRS, CB 300/14/1, Manpower branch, NCB, Glasgow to legal department, NCB, Edinburgh (1968).

⁷⁷ A. Robens, Ten Year Stint (London, 1972), pp. 117–23.

⁷⁸ Tommy Canavan, interview with author, residence, Kilsyth, 19 Feb. 2014.

⁷⁹ Willie Doolan, interview with author, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 12 March 2014.

⁸⁰ Phillips, ‘Deindustrialization’, pp. 107–8; Fuel Policy (Parl. Papers 1967 [Cmnd. 3438]), pp. 27–32.

⁸¹ NRS, CB 256/33/2, Cardowan colliery: extract from note of meeting between NCB and NUM in London, 13 Nov. 1969; W. Rowell, director NCB Scottish North Area, Alloa, to G. Teel, agent, NUM, Edinburgh, 10 June 1971.

⁸² NMMS, FC/3/2/3/2, National appeal meeting, Cardowan colliery, 16 Aug. 1983, Appendix 1: special extended CCC meeting held in the Parochial Hall, Stepps, Friday 13 May 1983, p. 9.

⁸³ C. R. Schenk, International Economic Relations Since 1945 (London, 2011), p. 56.

⁸⁴ A. Taylor, The NUM and British Politics, ii: 1969–1995 ( Aldershot, 2006), pp. 31–6.

⁸⁵ NRS, CB 207/14/5/67A, K. S. Jefferies, secretary, NCB, London to Area officials, Colliery closures, 22 Dec. 1971.

⁸⁶ R. Hyman, ‘Inequality, ideology and industrial relations’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, ii (1974), 171–91, at p. 189.

⁸⁷ Moodiesburn focus group.

⁸⁸ J. Phillips, The Industrial Politics of Devolution: Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s (Manchester, 2008), p. 123.

⁸⁹ Moodiesburn focus group.

⁹⁰ TNA, Coal 31/159, Department of Energy note, Energy policy framework and forecasts, July 1974.

⁹¹ STUC, Annual Report 1978–1979, lxxxii (1979), 500–2.

⁹² A. Perchard, The Mine Management Professions in the Twentieth-Century Scottish Coal Mining Industry (New York, 2007), p. 373; J. McIlroy and A. Campbell, ‘Beyond Betteshanger: Order 1305 in the Scottish coalfields during the Second World War part 2: the Cardowan story’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, xvi (2003), 39–80, at pp. 46, 66.

⁹³ Pat Egan, interview.

⁹⁴ NRS, CB 223/14/3, P. M. Moullin, NCB, London, to P. McPake, Bedlay, Glenboig, 30 Nov. 1981.

⁹⁵ NRS, CB 223/14/3, Area chief accountant to area director, memorandum: Closure of Bedlay, 4 Nov. 1981.

⁹⁶ Ashworth, British Coal, p. 352.

⁹⁷ Ashworth, British Coal, p. 401.

⁹⁸ Nicky Wilson, interview with author, John Macintyre Building, University of Glasgow, 10 Feb. 2014.

⁹⁹ NMMS, FC/3/2/3/2, National appeal meeting, Cardowan colliery, 16 Aug. 1983, Appendix 1: special extended CCC meeting held in the Parochial Hall, Stepps.

¹⁰⁰ NMMS, FC/3/2/3/2, Background brief for national appeal meeting on Cardowan colliery, 1983.

¹⁰¹ T. Brotherstone, ‘Energy workers against Thatcherite neoliberalism: Scottish coal miners and North Sea offshore workers: revisiting the class struggle in the UK in the 1980s’, International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflict, i (2013), 135–54, at p. 144.

¹⁰² A. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, N.Y., 1991), pp. 1–2.

¹⁰³ Willie Doolan, interview 2014.

¹⁰⁴ TNA, Coal 89/103, Bill Magee, press release: Cardowan ballot results, NCB press office, Edinburgh, 26 Aug. 1983.

¹⁰⁵ Tommy Canavan, interview. Kinneil colliery in West Lothian was closed in Dec. 1982. The closure was unsuccessfully opposed through a stay-down strike.

¹⁰⁶ P. Summerfield, ‘Culture and composure: creating narratives of the gendered self in oral history interviews’, Cultural and Social History, i (2004), 65–93, at pp. 74, 81.

¹⁰⁷ Nicky Wilson, interview.

¹⁰⁸ Pat Egan, interview.

¹⁰⁹ NRS, CB 256/14/1, memorandum: Cardowan colliery national appeal meeting minutes, 19 Sept. 1983.

¹¹⁰ NRS, CB 256/33/2, Cardowan colliery: extract from note of meeting between NCB and NUM in London, 13 Nov. 1969.

¹¹¹ TNA, Coal 89/103, M. Gostwick, ‘Miners win unanimous backing’, Morning Star, 26 May 1983.

¹¹² Willie Doolan, interview 2014.

¹¹³ Tommy Canavan, interview.

¹¹⁴ S. Milne, The Enemy Within: the Secret War against the Miners (London, 2004), pp. 319–21; A. Perchard and J. Phillips, ‘Transgressing the moral economy: Wheelerism and management of the nationalised coal industry in Scotland’, Contemporary British History, xxv (2011), 387–405, at p. 398.

¹¹⁵ Gilbert Dobby, interview.

¹¹⁶ J. Phillips, Collieries, Communities and the Miners’ Strike in Scotland, 1984–5 (Manchester, 2012), p. 153.

¹¹⁷ Moodiesburn focus group.

¹¹⁸ S. Fothergill, ‘The new alliance of mining areas’, in Restructuring the Local Economy, ed. M. Geddes and J. Benington (Exeter, 1992), pp. 51–77, at p. 57.