4. Gendered experiences

Experiences of job losses and workplace closures were strongly dictated by gender: dislocated male workers dominate collective memories of deindustrialization, especially in coalfield settings. This focus obscures a longer set of changes that developed across the second half of the twentieth century. Gender relations were altered by increasing women’s employment and major changes within the industrial workforce from the 1940s, before sustained contraction and intensified deindustrialization during the 1980s and 1990s. These developments were not just economically important, as the rising cultural status of women’s work challenged family and community hierarchies. Scottish coalfield areas remained distinguished by highly patriarchal patterns of employment into the mid twentieth century, but this was significantly altered by rising married women’s employment in the welfare state and a diversified economic structure (see table 1.2). The relative working-class prosperity experienced between the 1940s and 1970s was often secured through the paid employment of both parents in nuclear families. In the accelerated deindustrialization that followed, women’s new-found status and economic security was undermined alongside the occupational identities and social standing of their brothers, husbands and fathers.

This chapter begins by exploring the operation of gendered social boundaries within the Scottish coalfields. It locates their origins in women’s exclusion from underground colliery work during the first half of the nineteenth century and the reinforcement of the ‘breadwinner’ wage ideology, but emphasizes that these outlooks were always an idealized picture of a more complex reality. Boundaries between private and public spheres were always blurred and women participated in economic life out of necessity, especially in contexts of mass male unemployment and poverty earnings. The second and third sections compare how masculinity and femininity were reshaped by deindustrialization. Colliery closures and redundancy undermined the capacity of both older and younger men to meet their breadwinner obligations and challenged their traditional status as household and community leaders. Women gained opportunities through the extension of employment openings in industrial restructuring and then from service sector expansion. However, these gains were tempered by labour market precarity and shouldering both household and employment responsibilities in the context of renegotiated, but nevertheless, patriarchal, gender relations.

Scottish coalfield life was strongly characterized by gendered social boundaries, often marked by physical and geographical barriers. Broadly, they mapped onto the familiar feminine private domestic space and the masculine domination of the public realm. These were never absolute, always contested, and continually renegotiated. Nevertheless, distinct spheres were vital to forming an idealized understanding of gender roles which remained a powerful influence into the late twentieth century, even as its material foundations in gendered divisions of labour were eroded. Male claims to a household breadwinner status were at the centre of this understanding. Masculinity has been defined as ‘a configuration of practice within a system of gender relations’, which must be understood as ‘an aspect of a larger structure’.¹ Hegemonic conceptions of masculinity are shaped by other aspects of social relations and prevalent ideological assumptions. Distinct political standpoints were important in shaping competing conceptions of middle and working-class masculinity. In the case of the latter, trade union wage demands merged with paternalist family ideology to assert the male worker as producer and provider.²

Coal miners’ commitment to a breadwinner wage was legitimated through nineteenth-century public morality and concerns over the employment of women in dangerous and potentially character compromising underground work. The 1842 Mines Act banned women and boys under the age of ten from working below the colliery surface. It was the product of campaigning by miners and their representatives, but also the efforts of aristocratic politicians and state officials.³ Polanyi viewed such a heterogeneous ‘tangle of interests’ as typical of countermovement efforts to embed the operation of industrial capitalism into societal norms.⁴ From 1842 onwards, underground coal mining in Britain was therefore male only. Collieries were pivotal to the development of masculinities within localities which often overwhelmingly depended on coal mining for employment. Male domination of public spaces encouraged a highly gendered understanding of class identities. These were performed through intra as well as inter-class plurality of masculinities, especially through the presence of ‘rough’ as well as ‘respectable’ working-class masculinities. An upright self-image was constructed in part on the judgment of ‘failures’ often accorded to alcoholics and other men who did not live up to expectations of familial stability or suitable employment. This continued into the late twentieth century. During the 1984–5 strike, strikebreakers were condemned in highly gendered terms. Supporters of the strike portrayed them as ‘wasters’: poor workers and bad husbands who lacked the gumption to join the struggle for jobs.⁵

An association between mining identities and respectable masculinity was communicated in the oral testimonies. Gilbert Dobby followed his grandfather and father into the industry during 1961. He remembered feeling pride in preserving a family tradition and contributing to the household by handing over his pay packet to his parents after he started work as an apprentice electrician at Arlochan 9 colliery in Coalburn, South Lanarkshire:

Gilbert’s memories confirm that a pay packet was a ‘symbol of power,’ which underpinned his household responsibilities and allowed him to court young women. Colliery employment was embedded through familial obligation and community membership. The social status associated with being a contributor to the family was confirmed through the ‘respectable’ hallmark of Gilbert handing a sealed packet to his mother, who was responsible for the household budget, and being given ‘pocket money’ of ten shillings from his wage.⁷ Gilbert’s emphasis on the relative affluence afforded by his wages indicates the changing context of coal employment during the 1960s and 1970s. Gilbert left Coalburn for the prospect of higher earnings in Nottinghamshire when Auchlochan 9 closed during the late 1960s. Jimmy Hood made a similar journey, transferring from the same pit. As a young mining engineer, he perceived transferring as the chance to make ‘mega money’ at highly productive pits in the English Midlands.⁸ The development of earning maximization orientations towards coal employment concerned National Coal Board (NCB) industrial relations personnel. During 1973, a paper was circulated around Scottish officials which analysed changes in sources of social status. As the industry was concentrated in larger depersonalized ‘cosmopolitan’ collieries less embedded in localized communities, younger miners increasingly engaged in ‘conspicuous consumption’, while living more private family centred lifestyles.⁹ This represents another incarnation of the double movement, which combines gendered perspectives with social standing. Unlike during the 1840s, in the 1970s it was miners’ employers who were concerned that their workforce was pursuing a market orientation which undermined the norms upon which the industry depended. Their answer was to attempt to preserve the social incentives that mining had traditionally provided, including the ‘male status’ of colliery employment.¹⁰

The effects of increased material expectation should not be exaggerated in terms of the erosion of social structures and associated gendered divisions. During the late twentieth century, the Scottish coalfields contained ‘whole areas of life where only men congregated’.¹¹ Large heavy industrial workplaces and associated trade union activism as well as other key locations of social interaction such as social clubs, pubs and football matches were relatively gender exclusive. The maintenance of gendered spaces within the coalfields was evident from the testimonies of former miners, and not just in Scotland. Peter Mansell-Mullen recalled commencing his work in colliery management in Nottinghamshire during the early 1950s. His wife, who was also undertaking management training, was treated with suspicion by the male workforce. This was rooted in traditions and superstition over women’s presence underground:

Margaret Wegg recalled hostility towards women in paid work in Cardowan village to the east of Glasgow. Margaret was intermittently employed between leaving secondary school during the mid 1950s until Cardowan colliery closed during 1983, when she lost her job in the pit’s canteen. Her wages were necessary to maintain the household. Notably, however, Margaret also underlined that her own employment was organized around that of her husband Jerry, who worked at Cardowan, and her children. During the 1980s, Margaret’s status as a working mother and miner’s wife earned her the chagrin of a neighbour who felt that by working, she set a negative example for his own wife:

Margaret’s life story indicates that women’s wages were often vital to obtaining economic security despite breadwinner wage aspirations. This sits within a long historical continuity, but there were distinct regional and temporal variations within Scotland.¹⁴ The ‘metal working and mining towns and villages of Fife and Lanarkshire’ often lacked significant labour market opportunities for women until the mid twentieth century. These can be counterpoised with both textile areas where female work, often of a skilled nature, was widely available, and the ‘diversified female labour market’ of larger cities such as Glasgow.¹⁵ Jessie Clark recollected women’s employment in the textile factories of Lanark, South Lanarkshire, indicating a longer history of women’s industrial employment even in such areas, which is also recorded in table 1.2.¹⁶ Within the Shotts focus group, memories of women who worked on the surface of collieries sorting coal under the private industry were also present.¹⁷ However, Margaret’s memories of the expanded employment opportunities available after the Second World War, and the Wegg household’s pronounced dependency on her formal employment, also confirms the impact of significant labour market changes discussed in greater detail below.

Coal mining’s gender exclusivity continued to shape attitudes towards work and employment during the late 1980s. Billy Ferns recalled that during 1988, when he was in his early fifties, he unilaterally chose to take redundancy from the Solsgirth mine in the Longannet complex after being approached by Willie Doolan, who was a colliery union official. He had begun working at Solsgirth after being transferred following the closure of Cardowan in 1983. Billy justified not consulting his wife because she had never worked underground. In his view, she did not have the necessary experience to provide judgment on a decision which went on to shape both of their lives:

Billy achieved composure through an appeal to the breadwinner model. The insecurity of mining employment contributed to this situation. When faced with an offer that could be withdrawn, Billy saw it as his obligation alone to swiftly negotiate the scenario to a conclusion which offered his family economic security. With strong parallels to Walkerdine and Jimenez’s study of ‘Steeltown’ in the South Wales valleys, in the Scottish coalfields, ‘masculinity was produced out of a certain distance from femininity’ through the demarcation of places, spaces and social roles.¹⁹ Rhona Wilkinson recalled that gender distinctions contributed towards feeling removed from her family’s coal mining connections in Breich, West Lothian. She remembered collecting racing pigeons for her grandad when they returned from training flights and being ‘fascinated’ by the bird’s homing abilities, but ‘being a girl I wasn’t really allowed into the doocot [enclosure]’. Gendered exclusion extended more directly into coal mining itself, with Rhona unable to join her male relatives in trips to the colliery, and potentially in hearing details about her grandfather’s underground experiences:

Duncan Macleod’s testimony confirmed Rhona’s inclination that boys were more readily socialized into mining culture. Duncan’s father was trained as a colliery blacksmith in Lanarkshire, but later became a police officer in Derbyshire after an inter-colliery transfer. Nevertheless, as a young boy during the 1950s, Duncan was also introduced to the world of mining through pit baths:

Ian Hogarth provided another vantage on the highly gendered colliery environment. He explained the precautions that had to be taken before a Workers Educational Association study group took part in an underground visit at Cardowan, specifying in relation to the pit’s baths and lockers that ‘We were not going to let ladies loose in the baths cause the idea of proprietary among the boys just didn’t exist … You weren’t going to let thirty women loose. You might do it today, most certainly not in 1956’. This unusual instance of cross-gender contact underground proved formative for Ian, who led the visit as a young managerial employee. His future wife, Muriel, met him for the first time when she attended the tour.²² Sam Purdie’s testimony affirmed the gendered dynamics of Scottish heavy industry. He elaborated on his experience as a manager in Clydeside shipyards during the 1970s in terms that underlined the tough masculine attitudes he had learned in Ayrshire collieries during the previous two decades: ‘Ma background in the pits helped. If an academic had gone into that, or somebody who had worked as a personnel manager in a ladies’ hosiery factory had gone in and tried to do that, they wouldn’t have succeeded’.²³ Sam’s memories also revealed facets of a ‘hard man’ culture in relation to experiences of death and disaster. As a young colliery engineer, Sam discovered that loss of life in the industry was ‘regular’, and explained that masculine expectations led miners to internalize their grief and carry on with their jobs. Sam contrasted these routine deaths with the collective grief associated with the death of seventeen men in an underground explosion at Kames colliery on 19 November 1957. However, it was still characterized by the expectation of a normalized return to work:

Willie Doolan recollected that his father, who was a rescue worker at the Auchengeich disaster two years later, similarly never spoke about his experience. He generalized that ‘mining was a dangerous game, a dangerous industry to work in. Deaths were pretty commonplace within the industry. Fatalities were a common thing. But I think you could say it was a trait of the miners nationally that they never spoke about these things’.²⁵ These attitudes are perhaps indicative of the ‘silences’ oral historians have identified as common in instances of individual and collective trauma.²⁶ They also preserved a masculine sphere from which women and children were excluded, and secured an occupational identity anchored in masculinity. In their influential mid 1950s study of a West Yorkshire mining village, Coal is our Life, Dennis et al detailed that miners exhibited ‘a pride in the fact that they are real men who work hard for their living, and without whom nothing in society could function’.²⁷ Similar combinations of occupation, class, and nation and gender consciousness developed in the Scottish coalfields. Mick McGahey, who worked as a surface worker at Bilston Glen colliery in Midlothian during the 1970s and 1980s, explained the key role that miners had played in developing British industry and supporting the economy at major points of national distress. These feelings were intertwined with and embedded in kinship and family connections to the industry. In Mick’s case these included his father, Michael, who was the NUMSA president from 1967 to 1987 and grandfather, Jimmy, a blacklisted miner and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who was jailed for his involvement in the 1926 general strike and miners’ lockout. This lineage bolstered the moral economy status of colliery employment:

Within the Scottish experience of deindustrialization, these factors were crucial in the articulation of opposition to contraction and closures. They were not only economic threats. Closures and redundancy undermined strongly held collective identities and the self-image of male industrial workers. This was evident during the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in of 1971–2 when its public leader, Jimmy Reid, overtly associated shipbuilding with constructions of masculinity by stating, ‘We don’t only build ships on the Clyde, we build men’. Reid’s other infamous uttering from the dispute, that there would be ‘no bevvying’ at the work-in, demonstrates how industrial identities overlapped with notions of respectability.²⁹

The work-in was characterized by a rhetorical fusion of class, nation and masculinity which underlined the morality of the argument against closure. At a meeting of shop stewards from across Britain, Reid asserted that by occupying the yards, Clydeside shipbuilders had ‘reasserted the dignity of working men’. Their objective was to ‘establish that they’ve got rights, and they’ve got commitments and privileges and principles, and they are going to utilize their ability and capacity to resist these measures, to fight and to unite around them their brothers and sisters’.³⁰ The work-in was a struggle for dignity that implicated industrial employment into the heart of communal identities. In the terms of the double movement, it was a defence of the socially embedded industrial economy against liberalizing market imperatives. Reid titled his autobiography Reflections of a Clyde-Built Man, which indicates that the imagery of shipbuilders he espoused during the UCS dispute connected to a strongly held sense of self.³¹ This outlook received widespread support across Scotland during the work-in because it had a deep-seated basis within the experience of industrial communities and chimed with the imagery of a distinctive Scottish ‘industrial nation’.³²

Miners and their leaders also commonly presented themselves as self-sacrificing male workers. In 1957, Alex Moffat, the NUMSA’s vice-president, and future president, contributed to a discussion about industrial diversification and employment for disabled miners by underlining ‘the social responsibility of the government to ensure that the work was found for those [disabled] men so that they could become part of an active working community’. Moffat was speaking to a resolution submitted from Newton colliery. Michael McGahey had moved the resolution on behalf of his branch by arguing that continued employment and retraining was the ‘minimum responsibility accepted by the NCB towards these men who have sacrificed their health in the mining industry’.³³ The moral economy was reinforced by an obligation towards men who had put themselves at harm for the collective good.³⁴ This rhetoric stood miners in parallel with other occupational groups such as soldiers who are depicted as masculine heroes facing dangers in the national interest.

Stories of workplace strife and heroism have often been reprised in narratives of class struggle which depict cohorts of coal miners in a similar manner to generations of military combatants.³⁵ During the mid 1970s, the Scottish nationalist poet, T. S. Law, exhibited this trend. Law was the son of a Lanarkshire coal miner. In light of the significant victories achieved through industrial action in 1972 and 1974, he lauded the ‘men of a different temper’ who ‘began to impose their ideas of independence upon the structures of coercion, intimidation and violence’ following the expansion of coal mining during the nineteenth century and through the major industrial struggles of the twentieth.³⁶ Participant comments on the 1984–5 strike replicated Law’s frame of reference. Billy Ferns recollected that he was ‘sent’ to picket in Nottinghamshire along with four other Kirkintilloch miners with whom he shared a strong bond and comradeship. This collective strength saw them through the ‘terrible’ events of police violence at Hunterston ore terminal in Ayrshire and at Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire. In both cases, Billy and his comrades joined other Scottish miners on early morning journeys to attend mass pickets. A sense of occupational distinction was affirmed through Billy’s exclusion of non-combatants from violent elements of the strike. He recalled instructing a non-miner regular at Kirkintilloch Miners’ Welfare that ‘you cannae get involved in this’ after the man began to confront off-duty police officers who were goading Billy.³⁷ These memories indicate that while British coal strikes were not characterized by the same levels of violence as American miners’ disputes, they also instigated a sense of battle experience informed by masculine sensibilities.³⁸

Billy’s description of more routine activities during the 1972 and 1974 wages strikes allude to the continuation of a gendered division of labour. He described miners from Bishopbriggs in East Dunbartonshire searching for firewood and raiding a coal ree in Ayrshire to provide fuel for mining families and elderly people who relied on NCB supplies.³⁹ Billy’s memories parallel the earlier 1926 miners’ lockout when women ran soup kitchens and men risked arrest gathering fuel and rustling livestock.⁴⁰ Yet the enforcement of these spheres was never absolute. Women’s economic activities punctured the breadwinner ideal out of economic necessity, especially in times of industrial conflict or male mass unemployment. Young girls were ‘caught up in the survival practices’ of coalfield households from an early age.⁴¹ Jessie Clark explained that after her father was blacklisted following his involvement in the 1926 miners’ lockout, she used to help her mother pick coal from bings in Douglas Water, South Lanarkshire:

Jessie described a complex arrangement whereby the Coltness Iron Company would defer rent charges while miners were unemployed, but then impose double payments when they returned to work. These practices created a strong interdependency typical of paternalistic links between coal companies and communities.⁴³ Paternalism consolidated itself through bridging the gap of the double movement. The breadwinner model was protected by measures which constrictively embedded colliery employment into family and community routines, partly by creating bonds of obligation that extended outside the immediacy of hourly wage earnings. Over the second half of the twentieth century, sustained changes to the industrial structure of the Scottish coalfields led to significant alterations as married women’s employment increased and gained cultural recognition. However, the expectation that men would continue to act as the prime household provider continued and supported exclusionary practices which sustained a form of masculinity strongly characterized by male-only or male-dominated social spaces. As deindustrialization intensified, it posed a growing threat to male identities.

Male responses to deindustrialization

Deindustrialization posed a major challenge to masculine sensibilities within coalfield communities, especially as it eroded men’s occupational identities and breadwinner status. These effects accelerated in the environment of mass unemployment that developed as workplace closures and job losses intensified during the 1980s. Labour market trajectories separated generations of men, differentiating older men who withdrew from employment from younger men who left industries for service employment, or never found work in industrial workplaces as they had anticipated. In John Slaven’s case, entering the labour market as opportunities dried up entailed being sent on the Youth Training Scheme while claiming unemployment benefits before he eventually left Lanarkshire to work on the railway in London. John dubbed this ‘the most blatant attempt at manufacturing the unemployment figures that I’ve ever seen’.⁴⁴ For the older generation facing industrial contraction in the 1980s, it was the social democratic environment which had characterized the years between 1945 and the late 1970s that informed their perspective. These reference points added to the dislocation experienced upon redundancy, and the threat to their established social position. John Slaven summed this up by claiming that most male industrial workers in their fifties and sixties who were made redundant during the 1980s survived but felt deprived of their former status: ‘I think there was cultural social poverty but economically people kinda got by. Maybe on a slightly [lower] living standard, so there was a lot ae people that just didnae work again’.⁴⁵ John’s father was laid off in the mid 1980s after almost three decades of employment at the Caterpillar tractor factory in Tannochside, North Lanarkshire. He was officially retired due to an industrial injury, but this related to losing a hand in an industrial accident two decades previously. These experiences exemplified a broader trend which led to an older generation of men experiencing social redundancy:

Within their distinct generational contexts, John and his father were both incorporated into government attempts to mask the labour market impact of the contraction of industrial employment. John’s testimony accords with statistical analysis of labour market restructuring in UK coalfield areas. Official unemployment rates fell between 1985 and 1994, despite over 200,000 redundancies taking place within the coal industry, due to the operation of state incentives to withdraw from the labour market. The relaxation of incapacity benefit requirements, and their adjustment to be more financially rewarding than unemployment benefits, contributed to large-scale male labour market withdrawal, and older men taking early retirement.⁴⁷ John’s comments are also redolent of Daniel Wight’s observations from the coal and steel community of ‘Cauldmoss’ in central Scotland where he found men ‘relying on the masculinity of one’s work for one’s self-respect’. Male identities were preserved by unemployed men retaining strongly held kinship groups which gathered outside the feminine space of the home. Men who had been made redundant struggled to adapt to the changed environment and attempted to preserve a gendered division of labour. This led to the spectacle of the ‘carrier bag brigade’ disguising their activities when doing the family shopping which was understood as a woman’s activity.⁴⁸

However, these experiences were not universal. Jennifer McCarey recalled that when Ravenscraig steelworks closed, her family ‘were all really worried about how he [her father] would take it. He was up for work half past six every day. And even when he went to college, he did the studying even though he knew he would never use the qualification. They only did it to get a year’s money’. Jennifer’s father adapted more happily to his new status upon his retirement at the age of fifty-seven than John Slaven’s father. As well as contentedly becoming ‘a professional golfer’, ‘he became someone that looked after the grandweans and it was great’.⁴⁹ Male experiences of deindustrialization were varied, even in relative proximity. They often differed according to how far a man could reconstruct their identity in a way that preserved their community and family standing.

Strong feelings of a reduced social status were also visible in testimonies from men of younger generations. Scott McCallum recalled that he had grown up anticipating following his grandfather, father and brother into coal mining. The absence of this opportunity following the closure of Cardowan colliery in 1983, and the rundown of the Scottish coalfield after the miners’ strike, had cultural as well as economic costs:

Workers in their late thirties and younger had differentiated experiences of intensified deindustrialization from those in their forties and fifties who withdrew from the labour market. Younger men faced the difficulties of raising families while navigating the benefit system and less secure or well-remunerated employment. In the Durham coalfield, former miners attempted to maintain collective support mechanisms that held existing social routines together. These included getting up early to walk dogs together, and the ongoing presence of the Durham Miners’ Association.⁵¹ There were parallels in the retention of the retired miners’ group in Moodiesburn, North Lanarkshire, who have continued to meet monthly and who acted as a focus group.⁵² Displacement was most strongly experienced by men who no longer had a stable counterpoint to the domestic sphere, which was constructed as feminine. In response, associations were maintained and, in some cases, relocated to the street, which replaced the workplace as a site of male bonding. These routines are emblematic of the ‘crisis’ of masculinity that occurred when declining male workforce participation coincided with retained patriarchal expectations during the late twentieth century.⁵³ Rhona Wilkinson remembered that younger men made redundant from local collieries reprised their social bonds in public spaces within the West Lothian coalfield and removed themselves from domestic settings:

Alcohol abuse emerged as a response and coping strategy for social displacement across generations. This is confirmed by the memories of both Billy Ferns and Brendan Moohan. Billy remembered the disastrous impact that redundancy had on his work colleagues at Cardowan who were largely in their early fifties. He felt the removal of work contributed to excessive drinking and early deaths:

Brendan Moohan recollected the trauma of being dismissed towards the end of the miners’ strike in February 1985 after he was arrested picketing during the summer of 1984. As a young man of twenty, Brendan struggled to cope with losing employment despite winning a subsequent industrial tribunal:

Brendan also recalled that he was not alone in this experience, telling the story of a friend who eventually died after succumbing to alcoholism in the aftermath of the strike.⁵⁷

Michael McMahon remembered that at the Terex factory in Holytown in North Lanarkshire, workers struggled with the disembedding of industrial workplaces from established social routines. During the 1980s, the plant moved towards a ‘just-in-time’ production regime, which disrupted the workplace’s culture:

The social disembedding of industrial production through the assertion of market logic was visible in other testimonies in more extreme forms. Alan Blades worked at the short-lived Chunghwa factory in the Eurocentral industrial estate near Airdrie after accepting redundancy from the Longannet complex in 1997. Chungwha lacked the social connections evident in the recollection of earlier Lanarkshire assembly goods factories such as Caterpillar and Terex, which opened during the period of social democratic economic management and relative trade union strength. Alan described the non-union factory as having a prohibitive and even anti-social working atmosphere:

Alan recalled working twelve-hour shifts at weekends without an overtime rate, but mostly reserved his moral economy anger for the ‘white elephant’ status of the factory which received extensive public funding but failed to deliver the long-term employment the company promised.⁶⁰ It was the context of growing economic insecurity across the engineering sector that convinced Michael McMahon to leave Terex and pursue studies at Glasgow Caledonian University instead:

Michael, who had served as a workplace union representative and on the Scottish Trades Union Congress youth committee, had developed skills that assisted him in adapting to a labour market increasingly dominated by the service sector. This was true of several of the interviewees who had been relatively young men when they left or lost industrial employment. In some cases, it was not the experience they had gained in their jobs that furnished them with the necessary skills for future employment. Instead, it was the political culture of large workplaces, principally labour movement activism, which had helped some men develop competences they used in later life. Brendan Moohan, who had been politically active through the Trotskyist Militant tendency within the Labour party in East Lothian, also ‘reinvented’ himself, partly by deploying the skills he had learned as an activist. Brendan became involved in youth work and went on to study community education at Edinburgh University. He remembered feeling driven towards these steps by his experience of political involvement. Brendan noted that other ‘politicals’ among his former colleagues had been most likely to later study at university. They subsequently found jobs that utilized their skills as organizers, orators and representatives by becoming teachers, welfare rights officers and elected politicians.⁶²

Other former miners found work in the public sector via alternative routes. Mick McGahey was also victimized during the miners’ strike and lost his job as a surface worker at Bilston Glen, in Midlothian. He described himself as ‘a refugee fae the pits y’know. There was nowhere else fir me to go so I got a job here wi the NHS [as a porter]’. Mick recalled that several former miners had worked alongside him as porters and care assistants at both the Astley Ainslie Hospital in Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Royal, where he was then working and was the Unison convener.⁶³ To some extent, Mick was able to find solace and continuity in this story by an appeal to the history of ‘industrial gypsies’ like his grandfather and father who had similarly been blacklisted and had to relocate between collieries. Mick’s retained involvement in trade unionism also provided another important source of pride and continuity. However, the finality of his removal from colliery employment created a significant lacuna. Mick claimed he could trace back coal mining through eleven generations in his family tree but remarked three times in the interview that he was from ‘the last generation’ of Scottish or British coal miners.⁶⁴ This sense of removal from a trodden path illuminates how far deindustrialization represented a pivotal challenge to masculine identities in the Scottish coalfields.

‘A sense ae opportunity’: women’s experiences of labour market changes

Women shared the communal experience of deindustrialization with men, but gender dynamics significantly differentiated perspectives. Female workers were among the beneficiaries of growing labour market opportunities and an accompanying rise in social status during economic restructuring after the Second World War. Light manufacturers prioritized attentiveness and dexterity, qualities typically socially constructed as feminine, as opposed to the physical strength demanded in coal mining and steelmaking. Assembly plants also provided a cleaner and safer environment than heavy industries. Women’s industrial work developed a moral economy status due to rising family dependence upon female earnings, and the increasing prevalence of married women’s employment. This was accompanied by women placing increased value on paid work, which became strongly integrated into personal life-stories and attached to collective narratives of incremental social progress.

The Clyde Valley Regional Plan viewed women’s labour as a necessary and valuable contribution towards postwar industrial diversification.⁶⁵ Policymakers in the Scottish Office and the Board of Trade shared this outlook. They expressed significant worries over a shortage of female labour. In 1946, the Board of Trade warned that industrial reconstruction might be hampered by ‘indications that in certain areas the danger line was being approached in regard to shortage of women’.⁶⁶ This was followed by a warning in 1948 that regions were guilty of ‘the overselling of female labour’ reserves in order to attract new industrial development.⁶⁷ These concerns grew during the 1960s, as regional policy shifted from diversification to economic growth aims following the publication of the Toothill report. This involved a growing reliance on the assembly goods manufacturing sectors that demanded large female workforces.⁶⁸

Women workers’ rising importance in policymaking agendas was combined with the retention of highly gendered attitudes and priorities. Forward planning projections continued to classify industries or occupations as ‘male’ or ‘female’.⁶⁹ When presenting figures for unemployment in the west of Scotland in 1949, Ministry of Labour officials referred to a ‘hard core of unemployment’ that contained around 20,000 people. As was customary, the figures were divided by gender and categorized as either ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’ labour. The latter incorporated those judged to be on the periphery of labour market involvement. Around two thirds of the 20,000 unemployed workers in question were married women classified as secondary, and officials noted that managers were ‘not keen to employ them owing to possible absenteeism’.⁷⁰ Despite the promise of expanding married women’s employment, civil servants accepted gendered attitudes towards the domestic division of labour to the extent of sharing employers’ assumptions that married women’s obligations as mothers and wives would prohibit them from making a full commitment to paid work. The retention of this perspective was confirmed in 1952 when Scotland had ‘a problem of finding an industry employing largely semi-skilled and unskilled men’. This was despite the growth in unemployment between 1951 and 1952 being entirely due to an increase in women’s joblessness. Over half of the secondary unemployed labour category, which totalled 27,000, remained married women.⁷¹

There was a marked, if gradual, shift in policymakers’ attitudes, which was discernible by the early 1960s. The Scottish Physical Planning Committee forecast that to achieve satisfactory economic growth rates over 1961–2, women’s involvement in the workforce would have to increase, and that this would best be attained by encouragement through higher wages.⁷² During the 1970s, analysts viewed the employment of women within the electronics and instrument sectors positively. Inward investment provided employment opportunities in regions formerly dominated by heavy industry where female employment had often been limited. Both academic economists and the Scottish Council (Development and Industry) assessed these developments favourably.⁷³ The expansion of part-time employment contextualized growing agitation for women’s rights and legal changes including the 1970 Equal Pay Act and the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. Up to the 1970s, this was achieved with a significant concentration in manufacturing. Often such workers were married women, especially those with children, either re-entering employment after childbirth or maintaining paid work.⁷⁴ In 1979, East Kilbride Development Corporation underlined the importance of female industrial employment to working-class households. They ruled it ‘unacceptable’ to view the opportunities that the new town’s manufacturing industries provided for women, who commuted from across Lanarkshire, as less valuable than male jobs.⁷⁵

Both the oral testimonies and archival records underline that the social gains and labour market opportunities that women achieved during this period were within the restructuring, rather than elimination, of patriarchal relations and gendered norms and values. During the Shotts focus group, Betty Turnwood recollected that before the Second World War, ‘A woman’s job was really quite an important job and a heavy job in the house. Not like today when you can just put things in the washing machine’. The introduction of pithead baths, central heating and domestic appliances, alongside the availability of employment within the expanded welfare state, including local hospitals, were remembered as heralding significant improvements.⁷⁶ However, it is also apparent that there were severe limitations to the extent of liberation that these developments delivered for women. Marian Hamilton recollected the differences between Shotts and those visible within Windsor, to the west of London. She briefly lived there in the early 1960s so that her husband Willie could take up employment at Ford’s factory in Langley. The distinctions she felt centred on the absence of community she had been used to within Shotts but also related to differences in social habits and attitudes:

Marian’s comments are indicative of continuities in distinct patterns of social life within the UK. During the interwar years, a sharp differentiation was evidenced in the rise of working-class commuter households in the south-east of England which broke with the forms of ‘kinship’ networks that were preserved within industrial communities in Scotland after 1945. Affluent English suburbs developed ‘consumption communities’ marked by home ownership and increased female employment, including within assembly goods plants. Similar developments only arrived in Scotland after the Second World War and did not necessarily have the same immediate impact on social life.⁷⁸ Marian’s recollections have parallels with the ‘different notions of lifestyles and sexuality’, specifically in relation to gender roles, unearthed in the ‘discovery’ of poverty in Harlan County, Kentucky, by metropolitan American political elites during the 1960s. While Marian’s comments are not as drastic a contrast as Mildred Shackleford’s recollection that ‘we [residents of Harlan] were more like the people in Vietnam than the people in the rest of the country’, they share a commonality in experiencing the co-existence of distinct social and cultural temporalities.⁷⁹ Marian’s memories question the extent to which privatist lifestyles transformed the Scottish coalfields. Into the late twentieth century, traditional social structures remained in place, including the strongly gendered demarcation of public space and socializing.

The qualification of women’s relative advancement was compounded by the retention of chauvinistic attitudes. Jennifer McCarey elaborated on this, reflecting on her own experiences within the trade union movement during the 1980s. When interviewed in 2014, Jennifer referenced a recent speech by the TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, about the exclusion of women who felt a strong connection to the trade union movement to illuminate her own experience. Jennifer underlined her links to the labour movement, including her father’s role as an APEX shop steward at Ravenscraig, which she felt was often ignored by male activists:

Margaret Wegg’s and Jessie Clark’s enjoyment of work in pit canteens underlines the need to appraise women’s self-valuation of their working lives. Despite patriarchal assumptions, women not only worked to earn additional income for their families but also gained a sense of identity and validation from their occupations.⁸¹ Unlike her mother, when Margaret married, she continued working to support the household. She commuted to Glasgow city centre from Cardowan village on the city’s outskirts and was trained in shorthand typing. Margaret felt her late daughter had advanced further than herself by receiving college education and entering management training with British Telecom. Within her memories, aspects of growing working-class affluence and rising social expectations are also apparent. Margaret’s wages afforded ‘luxuries’ for the household and allowed her own children to remain in education for longer, which developed their capacity for social mobility.⁸² These comments indicate a sense of incremental improvement in working-class families’ living standards which was partially secured by women’s paid work, but also a more specific sense of women’s social advancement. Margaret’s narrative is illustrative of Catriona MacDonald’s conclusion that Scottish women’s history ‘has generally styled the lineage in a surprisingly Whiggish manner, presuming unrelenting progress and improvement in each generation’.⁸³ While Margaret’s recollection reflects a liberal feminist influence by depicting a series of progressive generational advances in terms of social esteem and labour market roles, Jennifer McCarey’s perspective qualifies narratives of women’s relative advancement.

A key element in narratives of women’s advancement was the improved status given to women’s employment, especially married women’s work. Marian Macleod grew up in Law, South Lanarkshire. Her grandfather had worked as a miner in the area when it lost its last local collieries in the early phase of nationalization. Marian commuted to work in administration roles for engineering firms, first for Honeywell at Newhouse, North Lanarkshire, and later at Motherwell Bridge. She cited both as providing ‘jobs for life’ for women workers such as herself and a friend and colleague, Wendy:

It is evident from Marian’s testimony that economic security was extended to some women as well as men between the 1940s and 1970s. Just as male respondents were shocked by the announcements of redundancies at their workplaces, Marian felt shaken when Motherwell Bridge began to lay workers off. Redundancies undermined the certainty that she had previously felt when working there. However, these developments took place within the context of the highly gendered dimensions of employment practices discussed above. A Scotsman article from 1967 covering employment in the expanding electronics industry illuminated the outlook of factory managers, detailing that ‘dexterity and intelligence tests’ were utilized by US multinationals in their recruitment of women workers. The feminine qualities of ‘highly flexible’ intricacy and ‘careful control’ were prized, while clean production processes and relatively high wages incentivized labour.⁸⁵ Before the late 1960s, comments from subsidiary management to government officials indicate there was a positive relationship between management and women workers. C. J. A. Whitehouse, of the Board of Trade, noted in 1960 that Sunbeam’s ‘female labour in East Kilbride could not be bettered’.⁸⁶ Whitehouse commented again in 1965 that despite experiencing difficulties with male workers, whose occupational traditions were threatened by mass production practices, women workers ‘are good’. The quality of female labour justified the subsidiary negotiating male grievances and endeavouring to recruit skilled toolmakers.⁸⁷

Honeywell publicly commended its women workforce. The director of their Newhouse plant was quoted in the Herald during 1960 as having said ‘that their quickness in picking up detail of the work was about the best he had found in his career’.⁸⁸ In later years, when assembly plants experienced industrial relations turbulence, it was male workgroup rivalries which were at the centre of conflict. For instance, during 1978, an unofficial strike by the plant’s thirteen toolmakers led to over 500 assembly line workers being laid off. The dispute was instigated by the toolmakers to maintain their pay differentials over male maintenance engineers who had recently been granted parity.⁸⁹ Male ‘craft sensibilities’ were pivotal to explaining industrial disputes within multinational subsidiaries, but also often limited the scope of trade union activism to sectionalist interests.⁹⁰

These dynamics were not fully pervasive and tended to weaken as women workers became more assertive. By the late 1960s, women’s work in engineering had developed norms and expectations which awarded it a comparable moral economy status to male industrial employment. This shift in attitude from ‘gratitude’ to employers towards workgroup ‘possession’ of workplaces and employment mirrored the process that Cowie uncovered among the RCA workforce in Bloomington, Indiana.⁹¹ In Scotland, women also made up a large proportion of the workforce in electronics plants. Their experience of factory production shifted attitudes from a feeling of commitment to the company towards conceiving of the factory in terms of the firm’s obligation towards the community which both sustained and depended upon the plant. Moral economy sentiments were emboldened by the understanding that assembly goods factories were brought to Scotland with the assistance of public money through regional policy. These feelings were especially marked in communities that had exchanged employment in heavy industries for assembly factories. Subsidiary plants became strongly embedded within the settlements that depended on them for employment. Women workers expected that they would be provided with secure and well-paid labour. Management’s imposition of market logic was resisted by countermovements that asserted communitarian norms against the balance sheets of distant multinationals.

When employment stability and comparatively high wages were not offered, there were instances of industrial action. For instance, at Berg, manufacturers of air brakes in Cumbernauld, the failure to provide consistent employment triggered a strike which became a struggle for union recognition in June 1970. The dispute was sparked following the temporary layoff ‘at short notice’ of ten women due to delays in machinery deliveries. They were joined by other sections of the workforce. The ‘internal works committee’ that had traditionally overseen dialogue between workers and management in the non-union factory broke down. An ad hoc strike committee was established and evolved into a branch of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.⁹² During 1969, over 1,000 workers at the largely female engineering workforce of Birmingham Sound Reproducers (BSR) plant in East Kilbride struck for union recognition. Their struggle for ‘dignity and justice’ through the exercise of collective union ‘voice’ reached militant proportions. As in major coal disputes, strikebreakers were the subject of crowd actions, and picket lines were virulent. Union recognition was achieved in November, after one and a half months of action. It only came about after government intervention, which was stimulated by BSR’s status as a significant generator of export income.⁹³

BSR’s strategic importance bolstered the workforce’s moral economy sensibilities: policymaker promises of a secure industrial future working to produce competitive goods contributed to expectations that the plant would be embedded through the exercise of collective trade union voice. Following the strike, the East Kilbride Development Corporation registered it as a major event but also sought to present the outcome as leading to a future of peace. In February 1970 it stated that, ‘until recently industrial relations have not been a major problem’, but pointed to the ‘labour difficulties of last autumn’ as having changed this. The eventual granting of union recognition led to a hope that ‘harmonious’ relations could be re-established.⁹⁴ Events at BSR and other plants had a political and cultural influence which is evident in John McGrath’s 1980 play, Blood Red Roses. The play is set in East Kilbride. Its main character, Bessie McGuigan, is a communist shop steward in a multinational-owned engineering plant. She struggles against a combination of class and patriarchal oppression within her workplace but also in her efforts to raise a family as a single mother and against the forms of male chauvinism within the labour movement described by Jennifer McCarey.⁹⁵

Promises associated with factories brought to Scotland via regional policy, which was popularly understood as an exchange for employment within heavy industry, influenced demands for better pay and conditions by encouraging the development of an ‘ownership’ consciousness.⁹⁶ John Slaven recollected that within Tannochside, the Caterpillar factory’s status as a stable and long-term employer was widely acknowledged:

This encompassed a form of industrial citizenship which. As in the NCB, employment security was extended to incorporate career opportunities. In the case of Caterpillar women were included as well as men, with John’s mother joining his father in the factory in 1970:

John described how his mother became a shop steward at the plant and played a role within the 1987 occupation of the factory against closure. Caterpillar epitomizes the role of ownership consciousness upon divestment, which was confirmed in the workers taking physical control of the factory between January and April 1987 before ultimately accepting closure upon better redundancy terms:

At Caterpillar, the strength of community embeddedness John described the factory as having, and the value of the employment opportunities it provided, were communicated in the four-month occupation. Opposition to closure was bolstered by the fact the company had received extensive public support, including a high-profile £62 million grant to retool the factory the previous year which was prominently welcomed by the secretary of state for Scotland, Sir Malcolm Rifkind. This was emphasized during the occupation in a banner hung on the front of the factory which stated ‘Caterpillar and Rifkind say “Yes” to £62 million now CLOSURE! WHY?’¹⁰⁰ Although the occupation was led by male stewards, the fact that it was John’s mother who was active at Caterpillar, after his father had been made redundant earlier in the decade, is also indicative of changing patterns of wage-earning. The ‘end of an era’ feeling, and the sense that a vital community resource was being removed, had also been visible during the final closure of Burroughs’ large computer plant in Cumbernauld the previous year. It further confirms the effects that intensified deindustrialization had upon women employed in assembly plants. Unlike at Caterpillar, the chief public spokesperson for the workforce was a woman. Veronica Cameron served as the engineering union convenor at the plant. She concluded that management had deliberately ‘set up’ the closure through denying the factory scheduled production of the A5 mainframe computer. Cameron asserted the workforce’s moral economy claim to the plant and the employment it provided by stating that Cumbernauld had been ‘built around the Burroughs factory’. She articulated a sense that Burroughs, as a beneficiary of regional policy, and through its use of Cumbernauld labour over three decades, had incurred social obligations towards the town.¹⁰¹

Women workers who had sustained households through industrial employment were displaced by deindustrialization and exercised agency to contest and physically oppose closures. In their opposition to closure, women trade unionists mobilized identities invested in their workplace and community. This was visible in the occupation of Lovable Lingerie in Cumbernauld in 1981, as well as at Plessey’s factory in Bathgate, West Lothian, in 1982.¹⁰² These factors were also apparent in two major disputes which won support across the Scottish and British labour movement; the 1981 occupation of Lee Jeans in Greenock and the 1993 Timex strike in Dundee in which largely female workforces opposed closure in the first instance, and the radical restructuring of remuneration before eventual divestment in the latter.¹⁰³

Another example of women’s activism in response to industrial closures was Margaret Wegg’s involvement in the 1984–5 miners’ strike. The existing literature on the strike has appraised women’s involvement, emphasizing the leadership role women played at local level in community struggles to preserve employment. This was distinct from the more pronounced gendered division of labour in the 1926 lockout, when men dominated political leadership. During 1984–5, Women Against Pit Closures had a prominent role in building support for the strike as well as taking on more traditional tasks such as running soup kitchens.¹⁰⁴ A similar story is told in Maggie Wright’s documentary film Here We Go: Women Living the Strike, which is largely narrated through the voices of Scottish women who were involved in supporting the strike. Many of them were miners’ wives who had little prior political experience, but others were experienced trade unionists and political activists.¹⁰⁵ Margaret’s story broadly fits within this narrative of empowerment and activism. She explained that, ‘Once they started up the kitchen then, as I say, got roped in to goin giving the wimmin’s point of view of what was happening during the strike. That was, you know, I says, you began to take an interest in the political side’.¹⁰⁶ It was the first time Margaret had been actively involved in the labour movement. Her memories centred on unexpectedly addressing a crowd in Clydebank, to the west of Glasgow, during 1984:

Margaret recalled her activism stimulated a confrontation with patriarchal attitudes, as she had to justify her activities against her neighbour who had previously objected to her working. He now felt threatened by her newfound confidence and involvement in public life. But Margaret also defined her own activities against those of a younger generation of women who she felt had already taken on a more liberated role:

There is a clear distinction between Margaret’s role and that of many of the women profiled in research on the miners’ strike in that she had worked in the industry. Margaret was made redundant from the pit canteen upon the final closure of Cardowan colliery in October 1983. She was not alone in this position within the Scottish coalfields. Canteen workers played a leading role in organizing women’s involvement in the miners’ strike in Midlothian and Ayrshire. Liz Marshall, who worked at the canteen in Killoch colliery in Ayrshire, clearly articulated her own activities as motivated by a struggle to maintain her own employment and not simply as support for the men: ‘as a canteen worker … I would get no big redundancy. So, I needed a job, and for me, it was always about a job’.¹⁰⁹ The 1984–5 miners’ strike was a direct struggle for jobs for a small number of women, or, as in Margaret’s case, their activism was influenced by a history of employment within the industry as well as by family and community connections.

Margaret’s involvement in trade union activism continued after the strike when she attended conferences as a representative of miners’ wives along with NUMSA officials. Her activism was not the case of women who ‘broke away from domestic bondage’ detailed in some ‘heroic’ accounts of the strike.¹¹⁰ Previous experience of employment was important to shaping Margaret’s perspective, but her strike activism was a major life-changing set of events for someone who had not been involved in labour movement activism before the strike. This separates Margaret from the experienced activists who instigated the Women Against Pit Closures movement across the UK and within Scotland.¹¹¹ Margaret’s memories of being supported by progressive union members is also indicative of the politics that prevailed within the NUMSA. The Scottish Area proposed admitting miners’ wives as union members following the end of the strike in 1985, but were defeated by opposition from other parts of Britain.¹¹²

Although sharing the collective trauma of deindustrialization, as workers and community members, the gendered dimensions of women’s narratives contain a clear distinction from those of their male counterparts. Margaret’s memories of the miners’ strike are prefaced by comments about how a younger generation of women had rejected a role which centred their life and sense of self on domestic roles. As discussed above, her daughter, who had taken on further educational studies and management training before her death in the mid 1980s, personified this perceived change. Among male respondents, the shift towards female employment was not universally viewed positively. Peter Downie’s comments within the all-male Moodiesburn focus group, which consisted of a retired miners’ group, indicated unease with both the decline of male employment and the rise of women’s work:

These comments demonstrate the retention of patriarchal attitudes in relation to the appropriate division of labour within areas where the economy was formerly strongly characterized by male industrial labour. In some cases, younger male workers have continued aspiration to gain employment in manual jobs which were perceived as maintaining a higher income and more respectable status than service jobs. Scott McCallum reflected that his profession, joinery ‘wisnae ma planned option obviously but it’s a trade’. While it was not employment in coal mining and removed him from his family’s tradition, Scott also gladly reflected that joinery had given him work in a local factory in Stepps for fifteen years before he began employment with Dundee Council.¹¹⁴ George Greenshields is a Labour councillor for Clydesdale South who comes from a mining background and had previously worked in local opencast mines. His account of economic changes in the area emphasized the expansion of the service sector and the feminization of the workforce. George noted increasing employment in social care in particular: ‘I think most ae the women became employed through all these kindae care in the community like Auchlochan [Retirement Village], y’know that kindae type thing. You see aw the girls goin aboot in their South Lanarkshire uniforms and so on goin round aboot in the care in the community’.¹¹⁵

Yet alongside the positives associated with expanded employment opportunities, it is notable the jobs emphasized, particularly retail work and social care, are typical of feminized sectors in their insecurity and low wages. This tends to support Arthur McIvor’s conclusion that as the west of Scotland continued its transition from an economy marked by significant industrial sectors towards one increasingly dependent on services, it tended to be characterized by poorly paid women’s employment.¹¹⁶ Jennifer McCarey, who works as an organizer for the public sector union, Unison, articulated her own concerns about women’s contemporary position within a deindustrializing economic environment. She argued that labour movement decline had been a significant step backwards in disempowering a strong base of feminism:

In Jennifer’s testimony, this fed into contemporary concerns over trade union activism, including frustration that Unison had not taken a more confrontational stance on equal pay claims. She extended this to concerns over the organizing of women who work within social care in casualized conditions and the role of her union in mobilizing them and winning more secure employment conditions. The loss of secure industrial employment and weakened trade unions have had a strong but distinct effect on women. Women’s employment opportunities have expanded in an economic environment marked by the contraction of traditional male employment in heavy industries and the expansion of predominantly female service jobs. A generation of women workers has faced the challenges of insecurity and the growing likelihood of being the sole or dominant earner in households as a result. This contrasts with their parents’ experience of comparative labour market prosperity for three decades after the Second World War.

Gender relations in the Scottish coalfields were highly integrated with the industrial labour market. Over the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, a demarcation of domestic and public spheres developed through women’s exclusion from underground work. These distinctions were consistently transgressed, but nevertheless they were significant in sustaining a patriarchal culture. The long process of deindustrialization disrupted the economic basis of the gendered division of labour through colliery closures and industrial diversification, as well as the expansion of service employment. Nevertheless, the male attachment to masculine occupational identities and breadwinner status retained salience into the late twentieth century, even as its material reality was eroded. Working-class affluence was often obtained through women’s engagement in paid work, which secured a moral economy status for employment in assembly goods plants. Women’s industrial employment was embedded into the social life of coalfield areas, which was signified by the growing confidence of female trade union activists and the support they received from male counterparts. But women continued to negotiate patriarchal power structures and expectations in the workplace, at home and in public life. These persisted, even as men faced mass unemployment and the complete disintegration of the conditions in which their occupational cultures originated. The disembedding of the economy from the regulation of communitarian routines during the last two decades of the twentieth century was experienced as a profound challenge to both male and female workers. However, gender dynamics have strongly distinguished how it was remembered. Men’s narratives emphasize social redundancy whereas women’s testimonies were more likely to discuss new employment opportunities, highlighting both their liberatory potential and the losses incurred through the transition to increasingly precarious service sector work.

__________

¹ R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 67, 83.

² M. Roper and J. Tosh, ‘Historians and the politics of masculinity’, in Men and Masculinities: Critical Concepts in Sociology, i: Politics and Power, ed. S. M. Whitehead (Oxford, 2006), pp. 79–99, at p. 88.

³ C. Mills, Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914 (Farnham, 2010), pp. 56–66.

⁴ K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, Mass., 2001), p. 101.

⁵ D. Morgan, ‘Class and masculinity’, in Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, ed. M. S. Kimmel, J. Hearn and R. W. Connell (London, 2005), pp. 165–77, at pp. 168–72; J. Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2019), p. 254.

⁶ Gilbert Dobby, interview with author, Coalburn Miners’ Welfare, 11 Feb. 2014.

⁷ R. Johnston and A. McIvor, ‘Dangerous work, hard men and broken bodies: masculinity in the Clydeside heavy industries, c. 1930–1970s’, Labour History Review, lxix (2004), 135–51, at pp. 142–3.

⁸ Jimmy Hood, interview with author, South Lanarkshire Council offices, Lanark, 4 Apr. 2014.

⁹ TNA, Coal 101/488, J. C. H. Mellanby Lee, Operational Research Executive (Scotland), ‘A paper for consideration by the Scottish Area Monday and Friday Absence committee’, 8 Aug. 1973.

¹⁰ J. Arnold ‘“That rather sinful city of London”: the coal miner, the city and the country in the British cultural imagination, c. 1969–2014’, Urban History, xlvii (2019), 292–310.

¹¹ R. Horrocks, Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies and Realities (Basingstoke, 1994), p. 167.

¹² Peter Mansell-Mullen, interview with author, residence, Strathaven, 3 Oct. 2014.

¹³ Margaret Wegg, interview with author, residence, Stepps, 17 Nov. 2014.

¹⁴ A. Hughes, Gender and Political Identities in Scotland, 1919–1939 (Edinburgh, 2010), p. 19.

¹⁵ A. McIvor, ‘Women and work in twentieth century Scotland’, in People and Society in Scotland, iii: 1914–1990, ed. T. Dickson and J. H. Treble (Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 138–73, at p. 144.

¹⁶ Jessie Clark, interview with author, residence, Broddock, 22 March 2014.

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

¹⁸ Billy Ferns, interview with author, residence, Bishopbriggs, 17 March 2014.

¹⁹ V. Walkerdine and L. Jimenez, Gender, Work and Community after De-Industrialization: a Psychosocial Approach to Affect (Basingstoke, 2012), p. 174.

²⁰ Rhona Wilkinson, interview with author, residence, Fauldhouse, 7 Nov. 2014.

²¹ Duncan and Marian Macleod, interview with author, residence, Carluke, 1 March 2014.

²² Ian Hogarth, interview with author, National Mining Museum, Newtongrange, 28 Aug. 2014.

²³ Sam Purdie, interview with author, UWS Hamilton campus, 3 May 2018.

²⁴ Sam Purdie, interview.

²⁵ Willie Doolan, interview with author, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 14 June 2019.

²⁶ L. Passerini, ‘Work ideology and consensus under Italian fascism’, History Workshop, viii (1979), 82–108, at p. 91.

²⁷ N. Dennis, F. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is Our Life: an Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Community (London, 1956), p. 33.

²⁸ Mick McGahey, interview with author, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, Edinburgh, 31 March 2014.

²⁹ Johnston and McIvor, ‘Dangerous work’, pp. 138–43.

³⁰ J. Foster and C. Woolfson, ‘How workers on the Clyde gained the capacity for class struggle: the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in, 1971–2’, in British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, ii: the High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964–1979, ed. J. McIlroy, N. Fishman and A. Campbell ( Aldershot, 1999), pp. 297–325, at p. 306.

³¹ J. Reid, Reflections of a Clyde-Built Man (London, 1976).

³² J. Foster and C. Woolfson, The Politics of the UCS Work-In: Class Alliances and the Right to Work (London, 1986), pp. 322–5.

³³ National Mining Museum Scotland archives, Newtongrange, Midlothian (NMMS), National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA), Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 18 June 1956 to 5 to 7 June 1957, pp. 725, 814.

³⁴ A. McIvor and R. Johnston, Miners’ Lung: a History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining (Aldershot, 2006), p. 63.

³⁵ D. Nettleingham, ‘Canonical generations and the British left: narrative construction of the British miners’ strike, 1984–85’, Sociology, li (2017), 850–64, at p. 852.

³⁶ T. S. Law, ‘A Wilson memorial’, New Edinburgh Review, xxxii (1976), 22–8, at p. 25.

³⁷ Billy Ferns, interview.

³⁸ S. N. Horwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), p. 115.

³⁹ Billy Ferns, interview. Ree is a Scots word for a store.

⁴⁰ S. Bruley, ‘The politics of food: gender, family, community and collective feeding in South Wales in the general strike and miners’ lockout of 1926’, Twentieth Century British History, xviii (2007), 54–77, at pp. 66–7.

⁴¹ H. Barron, ‘Women of the Durham coalfield and their reaction to the 1926 miners’ lockout’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, xxii (2006), 53–83, at p. 73.

⁴² Jessie Clark, interview. Bing is a Scots term for slagheap.

⁴³ P. Ackers, ‘On paternalism: seven observations on the uses and abuses of the concept in industrial relations, past and present’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, v (1998), 173–93, at p. 178.

⁴⁴ John Slaven, interview with author, STUC Building Woodlands, Glasgow, 5 June 2014.

⁴⁵ John Slaven, interview.

⁴⁶ John Slaven, interview.

⁴⁷ C. Beatty and S. Fothergill, ‘Labour market adjustment in areas of chronic industrial decline: the case of the UK coalfields’, Regional Studies, xxx (1996), 627–40, at pp. 631–5, 644.

⁴⁸ D. Wight, Workers Not Wasters: Masculine Respectability, Consumption and Unemployment in Central Scotland: a Community Study (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 37–47.

⁴⁹ Jennifer McCarey, interview with author, iCafé, Woodlands, Glasgow, 9 Oct. 2014.

⁵⁰ Scott McCallum, interview with author, The Counting House, Dundee, 22 Feb. 2014.

⁵¹ T. Strangleman, ‘Networks, place and identities in post-industrial communities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, xxv (2001), 253–66, at pp. 253–7.

⁵² Moodiesburn focus group, retired miners’ group, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 25 March 2014.

⁵³ C. Haywood and M. Mac An Ghaill, Men and Masculinities: Theory, Research and Practice (Buckingham, 2003), pp. 22–3.

⁵⁴ Rhona Wilkinson, interview.

⁵⁵ Billy Ferns, interview.

⁵⁶ Brendan Moohan, interview with author, residence, Livingston, 5 Feb. 2015.

⁵⁷ Brendan Moohan, interview notes.

⁵⁸ Michael McMahon, interview with author, constituency office, Bellshill, 21 Feb. 2014.

⁵⁹ Alan Blades, interview with author, resident, Airdrie, 26 Feb. 2014.

⁶⁰ Alan Blades, interview.

⁶¹ Michael McMahon, interview.

⁶² Brendan Moohan, interview and interview notes.

⁶³ Mick McGahey, interview.

⁶⁴ Mick McGahey, interview.

⁶⁵ P. Abercrombie and R. H. Matthew, The Clyde Valley Regional Plan, 1946 (Edinburgh, 1949), p. 77.

⁶⁶ National Records of Scotland (NRS), Scottish Economic Planning (SEP), 4/690/48, Minutes of the nineteenth meeting of the research committee, Board of Trade, Glasgow, 6 June 1946.

⁶⁷ NRS, SEP 4/784, Progressive statement no. 4, 1948.

⁶⁸ NRS, SEP 4/781, Scottish Physical Planning Committee: Population Working Party comparison of estimated labour requirements and estimated population in Scotland for the year 1961–62, 1961.

⁶⁹ NRS, SEP/4/784, Progressive Statement no. 4, 1948.

⁷⁰ NRS, SEP 4/1199, West of Scotland District unemployment figures, 10 Oct. 1949, p. 9.

⁷¹ NRS, SEP 4/1199, Unemployment in Scotland: Dec 1951–Feb 1952.

⁷² NRS, SEP 4/781, Scottish Physical Planning Committee: Population Working Party comparison of estimated labour requirements and estimated population in Scotland for the year 1961–62, 1961.

⁷³ N. Hood and S. Young, ‘US investment in Scotland: aspects of the branch factory syndrome’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, xxiv (1976), 279–94, at pp. 281–2; Scottish Council Research Institute, US Investment in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1974), pp. 4–5.

⁷⁴ C. Wrigley, ‘Women in the labour market and the unions’, in British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, ii: the High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964–1979, ed. J. McIlroy, N. Fishman and A. Campbell (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 43–69, at pp. 55–7; S. Connolly, ‘Women and work since 1970’, in Work and Pay in 20th century Britain, ed. N. Crafts, I. Gazeley and A. Newell (Oxford, 2007), pp. 142–75, at p. 153.

⁷⁵ NRS, SEP 15/437, G. C. Cameron, J. D. McCallum and J. G. L. Adams, The contribution of East Kilbride to local and regional economic development: an economic study conducted for the East Kilbride Development Corporation, East Kilbride, June 1979.

⁷⁶ Shotts focus group.

⁷⁷ Marian and Willie Hamilton, interview, residence, Shotts, 14 March 2014.

⁷⁸ P. Scott, ‘The household economy since 1870’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, ii: 1870 to the Present, ed. R. Floud, J. Humphries and P. Johnson (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 382–86, at pp. 372–3.

⁷⁹ A. Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: an Oral History (Oxford, 2010), pp. 283–5.

⁸⁰ Jennifer McCarey, interview.

⁸¹ J. D. Stephenson and C. G. Brown, ‘The view from the workplace: women’s memories of work in Stirling, c. 1910–c. 1950’, in The World is Ill Divided: Women’s Work in Scotland in the Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century, ed. E. Gordon and E. Breitenbach (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 7–28, at p. 24.

⁸² J. Benson, Affluence and Authority: a Social History of Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2005), p. 31.

⁸³ C. M. MacDonald, ‘Gender and nationhood in modern Scottish historiography’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History, ed. T. M. Devine and J. Wormald (Oxford, 2012), pp. 602–19, at p. 603; Margaret Wegg, interview.

⁸⁴ Duncan and Marian Macleod, interview.

⁸⁵ NRS, SEP 4/2337 press cutting folder, ‘Dexterity and intelligence tests for women workers’, Scotsman, 21 Feb. 1967.

⁸⁶ NRS, SEP 3/567/18, C. J. A. Whitehouse, Board of Trade, to Mr Macbeth, Board of Trade, subject: Sunbeam Electric Ltd, 12 Dec. 1960.

⁸⁷ NRS, SEP 4/567/54, C. J. A. Whitehouse, Sunbeam Electric Limited, 3 May 1965.

⁸⁸ NRS, SEP 4/1629, Herald, 4 Oct. 1960.

⁸⁹ ‘Future of Sunbeam plant in jeopardy’, Herald, 15 Sept. 1978, p. 3.

⁹⁰ W. Knox and A. McKinlay, ‘American multinationals and British trade unions, c. 1945– 1974’, Labor History, li (2010), 211–29, at p. 225.

⁹¹ J. Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labour (New York, 2001), p. 4.

⁹² NRS, SEP 4/4251/23, S. Palmer, File note: Berg Manufacturing (UK) Ltd Cumbernauld, 6 Nov. 1970.

⁹³ J. Boyle, B. Knox and A. McKinlay, ‘“A sort of fear and run place”: unionising BSR, East Kilbride, 1969’, Scottish Labour History, liv (2019), 103–25, at pp. 111–12.

⁹⁴ NRS, SEP 4/568/16, East Kilbride Development Corporation corporate dinner, 2 Feb. 1970, 30 Jan. 1970.

⁹⁵ J. McGrath, Six-Pack: Plays for Scotland (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 201–76.

⁹⁶ J. Phillips, ‘The “retreat” to Scotland: the Tay Road Bridge and Dundee’s post-1945 development’, in Jute No More: Transforming Dundee, ed. J. Tomlinson and C. A. Whatley (Dundee, 2011), pp. 246–65, at pp. 252–3; E. Gibbs and J. Phillips, ‘Who owns a factory? Caterpillar tractors in Uddingston, 1956–1987’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, xxxviii (2018), 111–37, at p. 111.

⁹⁷ John Slaven, interview.

⁹⁸ John Slaven, interview.

⁹⁹ John Slaven, interview.

¹⁰⁰ C. Woolfson and J. Foster, Track Record: the Story of the Caterpillar Occupation (London, 1988), p. 41.

¹⁰¹ NRS, SEP 4/4070/14, Herald, 8 Jan. 1986; SEP 4/4070/25, Glasgow Herald, 14 Feb. 1986.

¹⁰² P. Findlay, ‘Resistance, restructuring and gender: the Plessey occupation’, in The Politics of Industrial Closure, ed. T. Dickson and D. Judge (Basingstoke, 1986), pp. 70–1.

¹⁰³ A. Clark, ‘Stealing our identity and taking it over to Ireland: deindustrialization, resistance and gender in Scotland’, in The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places, ed. S. High, L. MacKinnnon and A. Perchard (Vancouver, 2017), pp. 331–47, at p. 335; B. Knox and A. McKinlay, ‘The union makes us strong? Work and trade unionism in Timex, 1948–1983’, in Tomlinson and Whatley, Jute No More, pp. 286–7.

¹⁰⁴ J. Spence and C. Stephenson, ‘“Side by side with our men?” Women’s activism, community, and gender in the 1984–1985 British miners’ strike’, International Labor and Working-Class History, lxxv (2009), 68–84, at pp. 74–9.

¹⁰⁵ Here We Go: Women Living the Strike, TV2day, M. Wright, 2009.

¹⁰⁶ Margaret Wegg, interview.

¹⁰⁷ Margaret Wegg, interview.

¹⁰⁸ Margaret Wegg, interview.

¹⁰⁹ G. Hutton, Coal Not Dole: Memories of the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike (Glasgow, 2005), pp. 6, 35, 54.

¹¹⁰ V. Allen, ‘The year-long miners’ strike, March 1984–March 1985: a memoir’, Industrial Relations Journal, xl (2009), 278–91, at p. 284.

¹¹¹ F. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and N. Thomlinson, ‘National Women Against Pit Closures: gender, trade unionism and community activism in the miners’ strike, 1984–5’, Contemporary British History, xxxii (2018), 78–100, at pp. 80–9.

¹¹² Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners, p. 257.

¹¹³ Moodiesburn focus group.

¹¹⁴ Walkerdine and Jimenez, Gender, p. 118; Scott McCallum, interview.

¹¹⁵ George Greenshields, interview with author, Coalburn Miners’ Welfare, 11 Feb. 2014.

¹¹⁶ A. McIvor, ‘Gender apartheid? Women in Scottish society in the twentieth century’, in Scotland in the Twentieth Century, ed. T. M. Devine and R. J. Finlay (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 188–209, at p. 206.

¹¹⁷ Jennifer McCarey, interview.