7. Synthesis. ‘The full burden of national conscience’: class, nation and deindustrialization

Deindustrialization in postwar Scotland developed over several decades from the 1940s. Extensive colliery closures were initially experienced on a localized basis as older, less productive pits were closed in eastern Lanarkshire under the nationalized industry’s rationalization. The experience of labour market restructuring had a sustained impact in redrawing connections between residency and employment and disrupting communal bonds that had developed over a century of industrial production. Deindustrialization’s lasting impact has formatively altered life courses, political consciousness and senses of place within the coalfields. These developments were the product of long-term policy decisions related to energy generation. During 1967, Ministry of Power officials gathered to discuss coal production plans over the next four years in the context of increased fuel competition and cost pressures on the industry. They wished to maximize opencast mining, which was the most profitable and labour-saving method. But they were constrained by opposition to coal job losses. The minute-taker bitterly noted that ‘the industry cannot hope to become competitive if it is forced to carry the full burden of national conscience’.¹ National conscience can be understood in Polanyi’s terms as the protective countermovement to financial and productionist logic: the nationalized industry owed social obligations towards its workforce and the communities which sustained Britain’s economy.

While it may have appeared straightforward to diagnose national conscience from London, colliery closures altered territorial politics in Scotland. National and class consciousness were conjoined through the experience of administration under the National Coal Board’s (NCB’s) centralized structures and disappointment with UK energy policy. As localized experiences of closure accumulated, and the future of coal mining was called into question, pit closures increasingly became a matter for national discussion. This chapter presents a synthesis of this book’s major themes. It begins by discussing the importance of national and generational contingencies in shaping memories of deindustrialization. The second section analyses the fusion of working-class and Scottish national consciousness over the latter half of the twentieth century. Both the spectre of southwards migration to the more profitable coalfield in the English Midlands and memories of the interwar depression loomed large in objections to accelerating deindustrialization and rising support for political autonomy. However, protest was never an entirely straightforward process in class or constitutional terms. Although moral economy claims on colliery employment were voiced most consistently by trade unionists, they were episodically supported by Scottish Unionist or Conservative representatives when they affected their constituents. In the final section, narratives of deindustrialization are analysed by contrasting politicized collective memories with life-story accounts from the oral testimonies which demonstrate the need for a nuanced appraisal. Critical nostalgia provides a valuable means to assess memories of deindustrialization: the transition to a services-dominated economy offered some former industrial workers and their children opportunities for social mobility, but the diminution of community cohesion, workplace stability and trade union power were nevertheless experienced as major and lasting losses.

Deindustrialization is an unsettling process. The closure of collieries, steel mills and factories reshaped the complex connections between work and residency that powerfully moulded social life within the Scottish coalfields. It also disrupted the imagined communities sustained through class consciousness and nationhood that strongly conditioned political outlooks. In their formative contribution to the historical study of deindustrialization, the American scholars, Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, posited that it is ‘more disorienting than overtly political’. Unlike episodes of industrialization, the experience of incremental job losses and disrupted social routines are ‘more elusive than tangible’, and do not afford the same collective responses as early experiences of proletarianization.² Disorientation was engendered by the erosion of collectivism’s historic sources of strength in workplace solidarity and connections to communities, which in the Scottish context often had high public housing densities.³ More recent accounts of deindustrialization underline ‘rust belt’ rebellions in spurring far-right or ‘populist’ politics within both North America and western Europe.⁴

However, deindustrialization’s political consequences should not be read as an automatic conveyor belt stemming inevitably from workplace closures. Huw Beynon et al’s more optimistic account of enduring trade union membership rates in Wales emphasizes the legacy of industrial ‘working-class visions of society’, and the lasting memory of colliery employment.⁵ Differences between national and regional experiences are illustrative of how heterogeneous social and political forces contest experiences of deindustrialization. They further indicate the need to understand long-term processes of economic change through detailed analyses of industrial relations, institutions, policymaking and ideology.⁶ Wholesale economic reorientation profoundly changes social relations and culture. Deindustrialization incorporates a significant renegotiation of workplace relations as well as citizenship and conceptions of national belonging. These longue durée dimensions are revealed by the Scottish coalfields’ experience of industrial contraction.

The temporalities of deindustrialization were strongly moulded and punctuated by changes in government policy towards managing labour markets, regional policy which attempted to attract inward investment and energy policies that oversaw the transition from a coal to multi-fuel energy economy. In his revisionist account of Britain’s twentieth century, David Edgerton suggested that British nationhood reached its zenith during the mid twentieth-century experience of economic modernization under government direction. Edgerton emphasized the pursuit of technological advances, highlighting nuclear power stations and the NCB’s ‘super pits’, as well as the development of mass production industries. These were the product of an activist or ‘militant’ project for national development in which the state was the prime mover.⁷ The pursuit of financial liberalization during the late twentieth century undid a more pronounced sense of economic citizenship and shared objectives. This included government toleration, or even encouragement, of manufacturing job losses and regional inequalities, which continued after Thatcherism under New Labour.⁸ In a more polemical style, David Marquand argues that a ‘solidaristic’ moral economy of Labourist social democrats and third way Conservatives structured British political economy before the triumph of ‘market fundamentalism’ ushered in an age of ‘unreflective utilitarianism’.⁹

These perspectives on British history and economic change chime with the archival research and oral testimonies collected for this volume. Policymakers pursued a commitment to modernization and productivity increases through a comparatively careful moral economy management of colliery closures between 1947 and 1979. Those earlier experiences conditioned objections that were framed in social contract terms when moral economy norms were abandoned in favour of market logic. Edgerton’s and Marquand’s accounts also accord with explorations of deindustrialization in Scottish popular culture. Irvine Welsh’s 2012 prequel to Trainspotting, Skagboys, features a dialogue where Davie Renton, the shipyard worker father of the main character, Mark, reconsiders his Unionist constitutional affiliations. Davie finds himself arguing with a retired police officer about events unfolding during the 1984–5 miners’ strike in a pub adjacent to the site of his recently closed former workplace, the Henry Robb shipyard in Leith. Welsh portrays Davie’s despair that the social fabric of industrial society was ‘slowly but irrevocably coming apart’.¹⁰ Scott McCallum relayed a similar perspective in an interview during 2014. Scott reflected on the contentious closure of Cardowan colliery, to the east of Glasgow, during 1983, where his father and brother worked, as well as on his schoolboy experience of the miners’ strike. He explained deindustrialization through wilful social violence:

Nicky Wilson, who was an electrician and trade union representative at Cardowan, also rationalized accelerated deindustrialization in terms of cultural values. Nicky singled out Albert Wheeler, the NCB’s Scottish Area Director, as having betrayed moral economy obligations by relentlessly pursuing the strategy of a government hostile to the industry: ‘He probably suited the government at that time. He’d no social conscience or that. He

didnae care what happened tae mining communities despite coming fae that originally. Just a ruthless, ruthless, person who had ambition’.¹² A sense of betrayal was encouraged by the nationalized industry’s earlier promises of collective economic security. Pat Egan clearly voiced the coalfield moral economy’s key tenets. As a young miner, Pat had experienced the NUM’s consent to the closure of Bedlay colliery in Lanarkshire during 1982, which led him to relocate to Fife and take up employment at the Longannet complex’s drift mines. Pat was prepared to accept that less productive or geologically exhausted pits would close in return for the provision of employment elsewhere:

The Coal Board’s pursuit of market ends dislocated the social life of coalfield communities and the mining workforce’s practices. These developments began long before the pronounced industrial conflict of the 1980s, which has subsequently dominated the public understanding of coalfield deindustrialization.¹⁴ Earlier closures created severe tensions and led to questioning of nationalization’s achievements. This was indicated by the response to the closure of Gartshore 9/11 colliery in North Lanarkshire during 1968. Both Board officials and the NUM were ‘absolutely flabbergasted’ by the decision of sixty miners to refuse transfer and instead pursue a legal appeal for redundancy payments. An NCB report described the ‘resistance group’ as primarily middle-aged miners who were motivated by the loss of up to a fifth of their earnings through transfer from piecework rates to day wage work.¹⁵ The Board decried this action as ‘a mass protest … directed not only at the NCB but at the National Policy of the NUM’. This choice of ‘exit’ strategy was influenced by perceptions of economic insecurity, with one man resignedly commenting that ‘all I know is pit work – but for the sake of my family I’ve got to get out now’.¹⁶

These actions were given a collective nature by the number of men involved, some of whom were union branch officials. Their grievances indicated discontent with the insensitivity of a centrally organized closure programme, which disembedded the workplace from its traditional social order, including the rationing of piecework positions. The mass legal challenge of pit transfers anticipated the subsequent renegotiation of the moral economy through unofficial and official strike action between 1969 and 1974. These struggles produced significant increases in miners’ remuneration and a commitment to the industry’s future through the Plan for Coal, which shaped Pat Egan’s understanding of the sector’s future during the early 1980s.

Most of the men pursuing redundancy payments at Gartshore rejected NUM representation in favour of a local lawyer ‘of mining stock’. He was viewed as a reliable community voice and more combative than the full-time union officials who had agreed unacceptable closure terms. The Board and NUM both felt Gartshore 9/11 was ‘the best organized closure ever carried out in their experience’.¹⁷ Divergences between workers at the point of production and union and NCB staff are indicative of the class tensions inherent in experiences of deindustrialization. From their technocratic perspective, the Board’s officials had acted to both increase rates of productivity and improve financial performance while protecting employment security. Yet a significant portion of workers felt aggrieved by their experiences of repeated closure, remote administration and a more general view that their industry did not have an optimistic future. Industrial relations in the NCB were typified by ‘fluid struggle for control between administrators and administered’.¹⁸ Deindustrialization increased these tensions through adding to the sense of a persistent threat to livelihoods and social status that was far more existential than routine trade union concerns over wage and conditions, or even episodic unemployment.

Unlike narratives from younger men such as Scott McCallum, older respondents displayed a stronger awareness of the longer history of colliery closures. Alex Clark left his job at Douglas Castle colliery in South Lanarkshire during the early 1950s to become a full-time Communist party organizer. Four decades later, Alex recalled that when he left there was already a sense that the industry was contracting in the area. Local miners had already transferred to Fife, the Lothians and Clackmannanshire, where Alex would later assist party activities among miners.¹⁹ Alex’s widow, Jessie Clark, narrated coal closures in Scotland as a drawn-out process when she was interviewed in 2014:

Jessie’s narrative was strongly imbued with moral economy sentiments shaped by class and national dimensions. She juxtaposed the long-term commitment miners made to the industry with the short-term financial priorities which in her view motivated closure decisions. Burying large reserves of coal in the ground, at the cost of jobs and production, stimulated grievances. Jessie’s perspective was amplified by the national context because the Scottish coalfields contracted at a faster rate than the industry across the UK. Opencast mining exemplified the distinctions between ‘a quick buck’ and long-term investment. It became a source of ire when coal mining experienced its most pronounced employment rundown during the 1960s. Opencast operations were more profitable than deep mining, partially due to their short-term nature and the small number of miners employed, which encouraged opposition on moral economy grounds. Coal Board officials reported to the Scottish Coal Committee in early 1961 ‘that serious labour trouble would arise if it expanded opencast working while it shut down pits’.²¹

NCB officials recognized they operated between commitments to pursue the most profitable production and obligations towards their workforce and coalfield communities. Ministry of Power officials, who were persistent advocates of liberalized energy markets, continued to pressurize the Board towards opencast production and eschewing social responsibilities during the late 1960s. In preparing the 1967 Fuel Policy white paper, a Ministry steering group concluded that ‘as other coal producing countries have shown, there can be no question that the right course commercially is to maximize the production of low-cost opencast coal’. These comments anticipated the officials bemoaning the moral economy in the form of ‘national conscience’, which is detailed above.²² In November 1969, Michael McGahey contrastingly summarized the NUMSA’s role in the countermovement to market liberalization. He underlined that the union would only accept the development of three opencast sites in Scotland on the condition that ‘closures in future must of necessity affect opencast workings before deep mine workings’.²³ McGahey reasserted this position in a tripartite discussion during 1977 when he again stated that the price of the NUM accepting opencast development was a guarantee these developments were ‘not to supplant deep-mined coal’.²⁴

A conviction that ‘national conscience’ presented a barrier to the necessary reordering of British industry has provided an enduring narrative of deindustrialization and economic ‘decline’.²⁵ Advocates of Thatcherite counter-reforms, such as Corelli Barnett, were influential champions of this assessment. Barnett accused post-Second World War policymakers of operating free from any ‘sense of financial limits, but also from any sense of limits on material resources’.²⁶ However, these characterizations appear poorly evidenced when contrasted with the coal industry’s experience under nationalization: the urgent pursuit of production during the first decade of nationalization in the context of coal shortage was followed by a swift pace of colliery closures and a consistent rationalization towards the newest most productive collieries.

Barnett misrecognizes the economic challenges of managing coal’s contraction in the context of competition between fuel sources. In 1967, NCB officials in the chairman’s office starkly summarized ‘a serious conflict of objectives’ between the government’s pursuit of rapidly converting electricity generating capacity to oil and nuclear, and ‘potential damage to the industry and the consequences for the country, both economic and social, of reducing their manpower suddenly at a time of unemployment’.²⁷ Contradictions between these policy ends were further augmented by the fact that closures were concentrated in the ‘peripheral’ coalfields, which were already experiencing high rates of unemployment.²⁸ A year later, Jimmy Hood left the contracting Scottish coalfields for Nottinghamshire after Auchlochan 9 near Coalburn in South Lanarkshire closed. In 2014, when the Labour MP for Lanark and Hamilton East, Jimmy vividly recalled coal closures during this period in terms that were highly critical of energy policies pursued by Labour governments:

Jimmy’s perspective was clearly shaped by a sense of composure that connected his occupational identity and experience with macro developments in energy markets and political economy. His views were partly informed by his decision to oppose another Labour premier, Tony Blair, by voting against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.³⁰ Three decades earlier, the ‘oil shock’ of 1973–4 had given credence to the NUM’s position on the importance of maintaining domestic production to avoid dependency on imported fuels.³¹ These events provided renewed impetus for a moral economy viewpoint centred on government obligation to invest in collieries, maintain or expand employment and make use of national resource endowments

Jimmy’s reflections demonstrate that deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields was a long-term process. It was entangled with fundamental changes in the structures of the economy and meeting basic human needs, including the provision of domestic heat and lighting as well as power for commercial and industrial activities. Coal industry restructuring and moves towards final closure over the second half of the twentieth century were not the unmediated outcome of market forces or technological changes. In the context of Britain’s nationalized coal industry and the development of policies that aimed to promote a multi-fuel energy economy, colliery closures were a consciously willed process. The logic of pursuing financial performance alone was resisted in a countermovement that emanated from colliery workforces and communities. Trade union representatives articulated a moral economy stance which insisted that closures were negotiated through the nationalized industry’s consultation machinery, and that the Board and government undertake responsibility by providing alternative employment for those affected. These measures were at least partially implemented through the provision of transfers for miners upon closure and the direction of manufacturing inward investment towards contracting coalfields.

The moral economy had long roots into the nineteenth century. It was shaped by opposition to unbridled employer power, and the effects that economic fluctuations had in communities often overwhelmingly dependent upon coal mining. Collective memories of the private industry were maintained in families and passed on within coal mining settlements. They were also given institutionalized expression by the labour movement. This historical consciousness underlined the nationalized industry’s duty to provide employment by exploiting coal, a valuable national asset over which it had stewardship. Older respondents recalled a long-running conflict between government pursuit of financial and energy diversification objectives on the one hand, and the interests of the coal mining workforce and the regions which strongly depended on it on the other. In Scotland, deindustrialization was therefore not ‘disorientating’ and depoliticizing, which questions the universality of American scholars’ conclusions.³² Other European examples add to this contention, such as Asturias where the Spanish government recently agreed a ‘just transition’ programme with mining trade unionists who had previously mounted militant strike action against colliery closures.³³ The drawn-out experience of Scotland’s postwar deindustrialization proved to be a highly politicizing context. Coalfield contraction informed alternative, class-based, national interests at UK level but also a distinct Scottish identity. The oral testimonies collected for this study also indicate the challenge experienced by historians of deindustrialization. Understanding deindustrialization’s temporalities requires discriminating between the trend towards contracting employment in Scottish heavy industries since the early 1920s and individual and collective perceptions often conditioned by comparatively episodic reference points.³⁴ The sense of betrayal associated with the abandonment of the 1974 Plan for Coal exemplifies how generational outlooks coalesce around discrete formative experiences. Differing conceptions of the fusion between class and Scottish national interests also strongly conditioned narratives of economic change.

Class and nation

The mass refusal of transfers at Gartshore 9/11 illustrates the economic substance which shaped collective perceptions of deindustrialization. Willie Doolan recalled that during the twelve years that he was employed at Cardowan colliery, there were persistent rumours of closure: ‘there was always that threat hanging over us’.³⁵ Even earlier than this, coal mining was understood as an ageing and passing activity. For instance, in introducing her poem, ‘The newly wed miner’, at a reading during 2007, Liz Lochhead explained that she was inspired to write it by a 1950s childhood memory of seeing an elderly opencast worker cycling to and from the housing scheme in Craigneuk, North Lanarkshire, where she grew up. To the young Lochhead, the man embodied a passing way of life within ‘a former mining village turned dormitory’ in an area strongly affected by colliery closures during the early years of nationalization. Lochhead’s poem recasts the miner as a young married man, before he became a representative of the past.³⁶

Perceptions of deindustrialization were strongly shaped by localized circumstances. However, these were also mapped on to the Scottish national context. From the late 1950s onwards, a sense of prolonged contractions is visible in commentary on the coal industry. Accounts of mining’s past and future often included hostility towards the NCB, which was portrayed as following the dictates of a distant London-based central management, or towards British governments that were uninterested in exploiting viable coal reserves. These were not exclusively drawn from the labour movement or the political left. In February 1959, a businessman, David Murray, wrote a column in the Scotsman, entitled ‘I want to buy a coal pit’ that outlined his frustrations that the NCB held a monopoly on large-scale extraction. Murray objected to the closure of Douglas Castle colliery in South Lanarkshire. He argued it was the product of ‘group psychology’ within the nationalized industry which secured adherence to central direction from London. Public ownership had resultantly fatally undermined the Scottish coal industry: ‘If the iron and steel companies got back the pits that were taken away from them, they could soon show the NCB how to get coal out at much less than its idea of cost’.³⁷ Murray’s criticisms chime with those made by other Scottish authors who have sympathies for the private industry. Halliday’s account of his experiences in Scottish divisional management is highly disapproving of the major investment projects undertaken during the 1950s and 1960s. The division was ‘chasing its own tail’ to meet production targets and achieve extensive reconstruction or new sinkings deep into Limestone coal reserves which would simply have been unfeasible within the remit or localized managerial knowhow of privatized coal companies. However, Halliday was also more complimentary about the ‘remarkable’ success in concentrating colliery investment towards Upper Hirst coals through the development of the Longannet complex.³⁸ Such an undertaking was similarly unimaginable without the resources made possible by public ownership.

The class basis of these perspectives should not be understated. However, actors who were otherwise socially and ideologically opposed converged on fundamental details. In 1976, George Montgomery, the NUM’s mechanical and electrical safety inspector, referred to the ‘wastelands’ of ‘the old Lanarkshire coalfield’ where he had grown up. Montgomery lamented the concentration of colliery closures in Scotland, underlining that ‘the present-day miner has been the victim of continual closure and redundancy’. These injustices were blamed on ‘the blunders and bungling of the planner’.³⁹ Montgomery was writing in the pages of New Edinburgh Review, and further conferred the distinctive Scottish context by objecting to coal’s absence from contemporary energy discussions, which he saw as unduly concentrated on North Sea oil.⁴⁰ In the same publication, the Scottish nationalist poet, T. S. Law, stated that ‘my father and my grandfather saw the heart of Lanarkshire cleared out’.⁴¹ Law’s narrative at this point departs far from Murray and Montgomery’s in other respects. He underlined the history of miners’ struggles for social justice. Law was scathing in comments on 1970s coal strikes, underlining the revulsion he held towards middle-class opponents of the NUM’s mobilization for improved living standards. They left him ‘indignant and quite appalled at the utter impertinence of the continuing strictures against the miners by people who have not only never done a day’s hard manual work in their lives, but are incapable of sustained work of any kind at all’.⁴² Unlike Montgomery, Law drew more explicit attention to a fusion of class and national interests at stake in these confrontations, underlining the role of British government and capital in appropriating Scottish natural resources, which he saw as continuing in the North Sea.⁴³

Through these readings, a shared feeling of hostility towards centralization within the nationalized industry are apparent alongside a view that British government policy had negative consequences in the Scottish coalfields. In each case, elements of Scottish national identity and class interest merge and shape a countermovement framed around a protective role for Scottish nationhood against the threats of market forces and remote administration. The remedies put forward were incompatible: free enterprise was promoted by opponents of nationalization; the NUM sought a government commitment to coordinated energy policymaking and for political devolution to ensure decentralization within a Unionist framework; and Scottish nationalists advocated for independence and sovereignty over natural resources.⁴⁴ These stances stemmed from markedly different political positions and were roughly approximate to the three major ideological traditions that held sway, to varying degrees, within the Scottish coalfields during this period. While viable alternatives to Labour party dominance of Scottish coalfield politics were marginalized by the late 1930s, Conservative or Unionist representation remained significant for at least two further decades.⁴⁵ Jimmy Hood’s early political memories included the victory of his predecessor, Labour’s Judith Hart, in the Lanark constituency at the 1959 general election: ‘I remember ma mother swinging me round the room because it was just announced that Judith Hart had won the ’59 election. Labour lost the election, but we beat Patrick Maitland, and Judith Hart was elected after years of Tories being MPs’.⁴⁶

Maitland’s politics exemplified how dimensions of Unionist–Nationalism shaped perceptions of deindustrialization. Although his appeal rested on an accentuated Britishness, he also affirmed a politics of distinct local and Scottish national interest. Maitland’s responses to colliery closures included calling on the NCB to ‘make available for purchase by private enterprise any collieries which the Board finds uneconomic to keep open’.⁴⁷ He made this argument from the floor of the House of Commons during the same month that David Murray outlined a similar position in the press considered above. Maitland also made a representation to Lord Mills, the minister of power, over the closure of Douglas Castle, a major employer in an isolated part of his constituency. His letter was sent on the same day as the Coal Board met NUM representatives and expressed concern over the impact on the area’s long-term prospects. Maitland employed distinctly moral economy terms, discussing the wrongs of what he considered viable reserves ‘being flooded and left to waste’ by the Board while local consumers struggled to find coal.⁴⁸

Maitland’s ultimately doomed representations parallel the struggle to save Blackhill colliery in Northumbria around the same time. In each case, trade union representatives and community campaigners were joined by Tory grandees in campaigning against closure but faced with indifference by the government and the NCB’s centralized bureaucratic hierarchy. These forces broadly fit with Polanyi’s conception of the coalitions that often make up countermovements to the imposition of market forces, combining worker interests with those of local social elites also troubled by threats to communal institutions.⁴⁹ Jack Parsons captured the events just south of the Anglo-Scottish border in The Blackhill Campaign.⁵⁰ His film profiles the struggles of a small-scale community in the context of mounting critiques of organized capitalism signified by C. Wright Mills’ power elite thesis.⁵¹ New left academics and activists influenced by similar perspectives have been formative to the study of deindustrialization, most influentially in the United States. As a result, the literature has often privileged instances of local activists struggling against ‘global’ conglomerates.⁵²

Although the shared dimensions of the ‘community versus capital’ thesis has been central to readings of deindustrialization across international contexts, the influence of larger ‘imagined’ communities and political relationships should not be understated.⁵³ In the Scottish coalfields, these dimensions were given further significance by the presence of a nationalized coal industry and the role of both British and Scottish national identities in shaping the experience and framing of workplace closures. Maitland’s Unionist–Nationalist view of the nationalized industry’s obligations to Scottish communities was to some extent shared by Labour politicians, including sharp opponents of political devolution or ‘home rule’. These tendencies were strongly present during the third reading of the Electricity (Borrowing Powers) (Scotland) Bill in December 1962. Opposition members used this opportunity to advocate in favour of extending government funding to fulfil the recently published report of the Scottish Coal Committee, which had met to discuss the industry’s future following the onset of contraction during the late 1950s. It recommended investigating the possibility of expanding coal-fired power generation in Scotland.⁵⁴

These developments demonstrate the importance of national contexts: the case for further investment was propelled by a sense of obligation towards the Scottish coalfield and sustained by an argument that the UK government was failing to adhere to the social and political partnership that Union entailed. Margaret Herbison led the charge in condemning government inaction. She was the MP for North Lanarkshire and the daughter of a miner who was killed in a colliery accident.⁵⁵ Herbison asserted that ‘more and more Scottish pits’ faced closure without power station investment. She rhetorically asked: ‘can we take it that the Secretary of State has resigned himself to the fact that Scotland must always have a high rate of unemployment?’.⁵⁶ Herbison’s comments were echoed by Willie Ross, the shadow secretary of state for Scotland and MP for Kilmarnock who numbered Ayrshire miners among his constituents. Ross labelled the government’s bill ‘a confession of failure’, arguing that only further investment in coal-fired capacity could ‘bring hope’ to the coal industry.⁵⁷

Power stations became a politically contentious issue as they came to dictate employment in the surrounding coalfields during episodes of mounting colliery closures. These dynamics implicated both devolved agencies such as the South of Scotland Electricity Board, but also centrally administered organizations, including the NCB as well as UK government. Colliery closures were pivotal in anticipating the more extensive discussion of the constitution and Scottish nationhood which would follow over the proceeding decades. Key actors included – but were far from limited to – entrepreneurs, civil servants, Coal Board and Electricity Board officials as well as elected politicians and trade unionists. All were responding in a variegated manner to pressure from below, which was marked by expectations of workforce consultation and the provision of economic security. These priorities were shaped by collective memories of the first half of the twentieth century and earlier time periods, but also by a fusion of class and national consciousness which was informed by more recent industrial experiences. The pursuit of increasingly centrally directed closures eroded faith in the nationalized industry’s capacity to deliver secure employment and stimulated support for Scottish political autonomy, especially within the NUMSA, but also across the wider labour movement. Serving distinct Scottish interests was not, however, exclusively a Scottish nationalist aim and was often contextualized within a Unionist–Nationalist framework that underlined the economic obligations which political partnership entailed.

These developments lend weight to Hobsbawm’s view that expressions of nationalism incorporate ‘the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist’.⁵⁸ Hobsbawm was reflecting on the nineteenth-century experience of European industrialization, but episodes of deindustrialization also lend themselves to the reshaping of territorial politics and solidaristic affiliations through capitalism’s uneven development. These were embodied in the debate over power stations by emotive appeals to Scotland’s past and the perceived wanton neglect of its future. Parliamentary advocates of further investment in a coal-fired generation gave voice to less technical arguments than they did ones regarding economic welfare and obligations towards coalfield communities, which were given national rather than merely local importance.

Economic emigration became a spectre which haunted these discussions. The power of this trope partly came from the memory of interwar economic distress when large numbers of Scots emigrated overseas and to a lesser extent southwards, including through schemes such as the Stewart and Lloyds steelworks investment at Corby in the English Midlands.⁵⁹ After the Second Wold War, migratory trends continued and objections to southwards emigration were given more prominence as it exceptionally outstripped overseas departures during the 1960s.⁶⁰ This was partly due to incentives provided by the NCB. Scottish miners were granted the opportunity to take up well-paid industrial employment in England, while Scotland experienced higher rates of closures and divestment. Thomas Fraser, the Labour MP for Hamilton, explained during the 1962 debate that ‘All we are saying to the government is that it would be better to export electricity from the North than to export people. And that is the choice which has to be made’.⁶¹ Fraser’s juxtaposition between people and goods is illustrative of the countermovement to market logic and opposition to economic upheaval. The form of objection raised by Fraser inserts a crucial national content to these deliberations. Localized objections to closure were given the standing of national crises where they reached a critical mass. In the complex Scottish situation, objections to closures were voiced within the framework of the Union and stimulated demands for increased political autonomy.

Margaret Herbison portrayed the policies of Sir Alex Douglas-Holme’s Conservative government as driving an exodus of miners from Scotland. She underlined that this far from voluntary movement was to the detriment of Scotland, and the workers affected:

In his best-selling history of modern Scotland, Tom Devine argues that deindustrialization in the late twentieth century brought about ‘a deep crisis of national identity’ that stemmed from ‘a collective psyche’ invested in heavy industries.⁶³ The extent of socioeconomic transformation which took place over the second half of the twentieth century is indisputably the greatest since the first industrial revolution. It was a longer process than Devine allows for though. Rather than the sudden outcome of Thatcherite policymaking, deindustrialization in the coalfields can be traced back to the reorganization of coal mining that began under nationalization in 1947. A narrative based around threats to the Scottish nation was already being mobilized by the NUMSA and the broader labour movement during the early 1960s. Objections to colliery closures were given national significance in Scotland due to their swift pace, fears of increasing unemployment and the prominent role of state policy in determining the coal industry’s future, especially through power station investment. Discontent was magnified by the growth of emigration, which both triggered fears of a return to the interwar depression and appeared to signify Scotland’s inequitable treatment vis-à-vis the rest of the UK. Moral economy expectations of just procedure during colliery closures had origins in earlier experiences of dislocation within localized coalfield communities. But the presence of a nationalized industry and the contours of government policymaking, as well as the establishment of a relatively centralized Scottish miners’ union, all encouraged a national expression of miners’ discontents. Political forces broadly described as Unionist, sometimes with a capital U, were part of these expressions. Objections to closures, including those mounted by explicit Scottish Nationalists, were also often characterized by critiquing NCB policy in terms of a Unionist partnership framework.⁶⁴

Narratives of deindustrialization

Personal accounts of deindustrialization are shaped by a complex range of factors besides predominant political narratives. Oral history provides an important corrective by giving voice to individual as well as collective memories. Life stories are inevitably ‘deeply personal’ and shaped by contemporary contexts as well as the imperative of constructing a ‘composed’ version of events.⁶⁵ Interviewees spelt out their current political position in dialogue with composed memories of past injustices. The pain associated with workplace closure and community fragmentation was a widespread feature in the oral testimonies collected for this study. Other common inclusions were tensions between personal narratives of comparative success and economic comfort with collective stories of job loss. In further cases, there was contravention from dominant accounts. Although Coal Board transfer programmes were condemned by Labour parliamentarians from Scottish coalfield constituencies, and viewed with suspicion by union leaders, they were far from universally deplored by miners.⁶⁶

During 1968, both the NUMSA and the secretary of state for Scotland, Willie Ross, heavily lobbied the NCB to reconsider the decision to close Auchlochan 9 colliery in South Lanarkshire.⁶⁷ The colliery’s remote status was also alluded to by Scottish Office officials. W. K. Fraser of the regional development department informed Ministry of Power officials in London that they should not falsely assume that miners could easily find other jobs:

The agglomeration of voices arguing for the retention of Scottish coal employment indicates the forces behind the slowing of colliery closures which followed. However, the perspective they relay also jarred with the memories of two interviewees who saw the closure that followed – and the Coal Board’s subsequent offer of a transfer to Nottingham – as an opportunity. Gilbert Dobby was a recently qualified twenty-two-year-old engineer who recalled that the offer of an NCB subsidized house was a significant incentive:

Jimmy Hood similarly recalled the closure of Auchlochan 9 and the offer of transfer in starkly more optimistic terms than the official coalfield representatives tasked with opposing it:

Both Jimmy and Gilbert described a markedly different, more diverse environment in Nottinghamshire than they had left behind in Lanarkshire. Jimmy recalled a ‘cosmopolitan’ environment characterized by miners who had migrated from across the UK including large contingents from the north-east of England, Wales and other parts of England.⁷¹ Gilbert remembered a multicultural workforce including colleagues from the Soviet Union, Poland and Biafra.⁷² Jimmy only returned to Scotland after being a leader of the striking minority within the Nottinghamshire coalfield in the 1984–5 dispute.⁷³ Gilbert returned to Scotland earlier, to work at Killoch colliery in Ayrshire and then Bedlay and Polkemmet collieries in Lanarkshire and West Lothian respectively. He cited distance from family as leading him to ultimately give up the higher earnings he obtained in Nottinghamshire. When Gilbert returned to Scotland, he not only brought his young family into proximity with grandparents, but also worked alongside his father at Bedlay.⁷⁴ Willie Hamilton also left the Lanarkshire collieries. He went on to work at Cummins engine factory in Shotts and later moved to Ford’s plant at Langley, to the west of London. Like Gilbert, he explained that his wife’s inability to settle and being far from family led him to return to Shotts and the NCB during the early 1960s. Willie’s life-story narrative emphasized he became a miner because ‘there was nowhere else to go’ in Shotts as a fifteen-year-old school leaver in 1951. His decision to return to mining, as well as his description of a social infrastructure and sense of belonging provided by collieries, perhaps suggests a greater sense of attachment.⁷⁵

Despite Gilbert Dobby’s view of the opportunities provided at Auchlocan 9’s closure, his testimony also exemplifies Steven High’s understanding that deindustrialization incorporates ‘wilful acts of violence perpetrated against working people’.⁷⁶ Gilbert described the loyalty he felt the NCB had shown him and that he had reciprocated as an employee for over twenty years. He also discussed the mutual respect which characterized the nationalized industry. This was demonstrated by his father insisting that colliery management referred to him as ‘Mr Dobby’ when partaking in meetings as a union representative, which summarized the hard-fought-for status miners were granted under public ownership. The social violence of deindustrialization was epitomized by the closure of Polkemmet at the behest of the Coal Board following the pit’s pumps being switched off during the 1984–5 strike.⁷⁷ After Polkemmet closed, despite his years of service, Gilbert was made redundant and spent a year unemployed. The incremental logic of deindustrialization was summarized when he subsequently became a driving instructor. After the Ravenscraig steelworks closed in 1992, a flood of new entrants into the sector led Gilbert to change occupations once more by becoming a school caretaker.⁷⁸ Polkemmet’s closure was recalled by other respondents such as Peter Downie who worked as an overman at the pit alongside his three sons. Peter emphasized the cost in terms of public resources, the personal economic cost of lost jobs and the social damage of dispersed social bonds.⁷⁹

A sense of injustice and enforced removal from anticipated life courses and communal expectations was reiterated in several interviews, with many respondents exclaiming they would still be working in collieries if they had not closed. Mick McGahey, who lost his job at Bilston Glen colliery following his arrest while picketing during 1984, stated that:

The collective and individual costs of deindustrialization were mentioned in several testimonies, with parallels to Mick’s story of displacement. Opportunities created through economic change were also discussed, which created a lacuna in some narratives. Bill McCabe, who was a participant in the Caterpillar factory occupation during 1987, explained that ‘I’d have been quite happy on the truck tul I was sixty-five y’know!’ The factory was a homely environment for Bill where he was tutored by older shop stewards and worked alongside members of his immediate and extended family. Following the factory’s closure, and subsequently working in the North Sea oil industry, Bill took up white-collar employment in insurance. He reflected that Caterpillar’s closure ‘made me look at having tae dae a lot of different things in life, which is good in some ways and bad in others’.⁸¹ Factories and collieries were sites of collective social interaction and identity formation. Bill McCabe’s recollections suggest the importance of reckoning with social mobility in narratives of deindustrialization while maintaining an awareness of the capacity for critical nostalgia in comprehending the losses associated with economic restructuring. The breakup of community and weakening of trade union power were not fully compensated for by unevenly distributed access to alternative employment or financial gains. Workplace democracy and collectivity were the most significant and enduring losses.

Coal’s status as a nationalized industry, and the centrality of the sector’s fortunes to modern British history, strongly prefigures the collective memory of deindustrialization. Mining, especially under the NCB, had the character of ‘a civilization’, with distinct norms and values and a culture of internal governance.⁸² In 1976, George Montgomery celebrated this by commenting that ‘with few exceptions all positions of authority are held by people who have spent a life time in the industry’.⁸³ The nationalized industry’s social democratic infrastructure gave form to a distinctive occupational standing. Gatherings such as the Scottish miners’ gala epitomized these national connections, as well as elements of competition or rivalry. In 1967 John Hamilton was an apprentice blacksmith at Ponfeigh colliery in South Lanarkshire. During an interview in 2016, John emphasized the paternal role played by the men he worked alongside, some of whom took him to watch Scotland play international football matches at Hampden in Glasgow. Almost half a century later, John enthusiastically recalled himself playing for Scotland in the form of a select miners’ team in a football competition against a Derbyshire side at that year’s gala:

As a member of the winning team, John was presented with an engraved Ronsonol lighter. The importance of these events and similar competitions was also recalled by former management employees. Even during the early 1980s, under Albert Wheeler’s austere anti-trade union direction, the NCB’s Scottish Area continued to enthusiastically support participation in UK-wide health and safety competitions.⁸⁵ Ian Hogarth, who worked at the Board’s Scottish headquarters at Green Park in Edinburgh, recalled they were viewed as a means to bring prestige to ‘satellite’ coalfields such as Scotland. As a result, Wheeler personally ensured participants were given generous subsidies to attend events in other parts of the UK.⁸⁶

While civilization narratives powerfully shape coal mining discourses, they also compete with emphases on class struggle. Especially when viewed in relation to the long-term impact of deindustrialization, the events of 1984–5 and the sudden acceleration of colliery closures under the Thatcher government loom large in predominant public and personal memories.⁸⁷ However, the conflict at Gartshore 9/11 and Gilbert Dobby’s memory of his father’s assertion of equitable status between management and miners are important reminders that class tensions persisted across the nationalized industry’s lifespan. This was bluntly expressed by J. Wormald, a National Association of Colliery Overmen Deputies and Shotfirers agent, at a meeting with Coal Board officials in 1974, when he ‘commented that absence from a pit to go to Doncaster races was recorded, but absence from the office to go to Ascot was not’.⁸⁸ Within the oral testimonies, there was a strong tendency for narratives to blend dimensions of class and Scottish nationhood. In part this reflected the influence of contemporary politics, especially as most testimonies were collected shortly before the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. The testimonies reflected the tendency for reflections on major social changes to present ‘myriad narratives’, spanning past and present in dialogue with a range of perspectives drawn from varied ideological sources.⁸⁹ Tommy Canavan, who had formerly been an NUM representative at Cardowan colliery, exemplified such trends when he discussed the approaching referendum through analogies with the interwar coal industry:

Earlier in the same interview, Tommy had made another comment which appeared to counteract his inclination towards Scottish independence in class terms: ‘Mining politics are the same in Kilsyth as they are in Croy as they are in Yorkshire as it in Nottingham as it in Kent as it in Lanarkshire, Lancashire, same politics’.⁹¹ Tommy’s remarks indicate the tension between Scottish national responses to deindustrialization and inclinations towards class-based UK-wide solidarity. Both trends persisted within the NUMSA between the 1940s and 1980s, and they are now marked in historical narratives of deindustrialization. These collective memories rest on the fusion of class and national consciousness which were marked in responses to colliery closures from the late 1950s. The closure of coal mines, steelworks and factories was an imposition of class power and social violence that created a sense of crisis, removal and social redundancy. Moral economy perspectives persist decades after the last major closures, demonstrating the strength of an outlook deeply embedded in Scotland’s industrial fabric. The retention of moral economy outlooks reinforces the overwhelming significance of deindustrialization as a societal transformation whose substance is central to contemporary politics and culture.

__________

¹ The National Archives (TNA), Coal 31/154, Steering Committee on Fuel Policy, opencast coal production: 1967/71, 1967.

² J. Cowie and J. Heathcott, ‘Introduction: the meanings of deindustrialization’, in Beyond the Ruins: the Meanings of Deindustrialization, ed. J. Cowie and J. Heathcott (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), pp. 1–15, at p. 4.

³ S. Condratto and E. Gibbs, ‘After industrial citizenship: adapting to precarious employment in the Lanarkshire coalfield, Scotland and Sudbury hardrock mining, Canada’, Labour/Le Travail, lxxxi (2018), 213–39.

⁴ N. Isenberg, White Trash: the 400-year Untold History of Class in America (New York, 2016), p. xxi; G. Thereborne, ‘Twilight of Swedish social democracy’, New Left Review, cxiii (2018), 5–26, at p. 10; J. Tomlinson, Managing the Economy, Managing the People: Narratives of Economic Life in Britain from Beveridge to Brexit (Oxford, 2017), p. 107.

⁵ H. Beynon, R. Davies and S. Davies, ‘Sources of variation in trade union membership across the UK: the case of Wales’, Industrial Relations Journal, xliii (2012), 200–21, at pp. 200–1.

⁶ G. Hospers, ‘Restructuring Europe’s rustbelt: the case of the German Ruhrgebiet’, Intereconomics, xxxix (2004), 147–56, at p. 147.

⁷ D. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth Century History (London, 2018), pp. 309–38.

⁸ Edgerton, Rise and Fall, p. 498.

⁹ D. Marquand, Mammon’s Kingdom: an Essay on Britain Now (London, 2014), pp. 1–3.

¹⁰ I. Welsh, Skagboys (London, 2012), pp. 288–90.

¹¹ Scott McCallum, interview with author, The Counting House, Dundee, 22 Feb. 2014.

¹² Nicky Wilson, interview with author, John Macintyre Building University of Glasgow, 10 Feb. 2014.

¹³ Pat Egan, interview with author, Fife College, Glenrothes, 5 Feb. 2014.

¹⁴ J. Arnold, ‘“Like being on death row”: Britain and the end of coal c.1970 to the present’, Contemporary British History, xxxii (2018), 1–32, at pp. 4–5.

¹⁵ National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (NRS), Coal Board (CB) 300/14/1, Manpower branch, NCB, Glasgow to Legal Department, NCB, Edinburgh, memorandum: ‘Background notes: what happened at Gartshore 9/11 closure?’ (1968).

¹⁶ 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); T. B. Lawrence and S. L. Robinson, ‘Ain’t misbehavin: workplace deviance as organizational resistance’, Journal of Management, xxxiii (2007), 378–94, at pp. 382–3.

¹⁷ 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).

¹⁸ J. Krieger, Undermining Capitalism: State Ownership and the Dialectic of Control in the British Coal Industry (Princeton, N.J., 1983), p. 26.

¹⁹ 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; A. Clark, ‘Personal experience from a lifetime in the communist and labour movements (part 2)’, Scottish Labour History Review, xi (1997–8), 14–16, at p. 14.

²⁰ Jessie Clark, interview with author, residence, Broddock, 22 March 2014.

²¹ TNA, Coal 31/96, W. E. Fitzsimmons and E. Wright, Scottish Coal Committee Report, 11 Oct. 1961, p. 39.

²² TNA, Coal 31/154, Steering Committee on Fuel Policy, Opencast coal production: 1967/71, 1967.

²³ TNA, Coal 89/103, Copy of letter from Mr McGahey, NUMSA, to Mr Glass, NCB, 27 Nov. 1969.

²⁴ TNA, Coal 31/166, Coal industry tripartite discussions meeting held at 2.30pm, Wednesday 31 Jan., Thames House South.

²⁵ J. Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post-War Britain (London, 2000), p. 16.

²⁶ C. Barnett, The Audit of War: the Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London, 1986), p. 49.

²⁷ TNA, Coal 31/131, Notes on draft of Fuel policy section D: electricity, nuclear power and power station fuel use, F13, 1967.

²⁸ Fuel Policy (Parl. Papers 1967 [Cmnd. 3438]), p. 30.

²⁹ Jimmy Hood, interview with author, South Lanarkshire Council offices, Lanark, 4 Apr. 2014.

³⁰ ‘Obituary: Jimmy Hood’, Times, 7 Dec. 2017 <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/obituary-jimmy-hood-rfgl6sml3> [accessed 22 Dec. 2019].

³¹ National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), National Energy Policy (London, 1972), pp. 1–8; J. North and D. Spooner, ‘The great UK coal rush: a progress report to the end of 1976’, Area, ix (1977), 15–27, at p. 15.

³² Cowie and Heathcott, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.

³³ R. Popp, ‘A just transition of European coal regions: assessing the stakeholder positions towards transitions away from coal’, E3G Briefing Paper (2019) <https://www.e3g.org/showcase/just-transition/> [accessed 20 Nov. 2019].

³⁴ P. Payne, Growth and Contraction: Scottish Industry, c.1860–1990 (Glasgow, 1992), p. 19.

³⁵ Willie Doolan, interview with author, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 12 March 2014, notes.

³⁶ L. Lochhead, ‘The newly wed miner’ (2007), Seamus Heaney Centre Digital Archive <http://digitalcollections.qub.ac.uk/poetry/recordings/details/108096> [accessed 22 Dec. 2019]; L. Lochhead, The Colour of Black and White (Edinburgh, 2003), p. 12.

³⁷ TNA, POWE/14/857/47, D. Murray, ‘I want to buy a coal pit’, Scotsman, 3 Feb. 1959.

³⁸ R. Halliday, The Disappearing Scottish Colliery: a Personal View of Some Aspects of Scotland’s Coal Industry since Nationalisation (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 41–8.

³⁹ G. Montgomery, ‘Introduction’, New Edinburgh Review, xxxii (1976), 1–3, at p. 1.

⁴⁰ Montgomery, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

⁴¹ T. S. Law, ‘A Wilson memorial’, New Edinburgh Review, xxxii (1976), 22–8, at p. 24.

⁴² Law, ‘A Wilson memorial’, p. 24.

⁴³ Law, ‘A Wilson memorial’, p. 24.

⁴⁴ S. Maxwell, The Case for Left-Wing Nationalism (Edinburgh, 1981).

⁴⁵ A. Campbell, The Scottish Miners, 1874–1939, ii: Trade Unions and Politics (Aldershot, 2000), p. 1.

⁴⁶ Jimmy Hood, interview.

⁴⁷ TNA, POWE 14/587, Hansard column 103, Friday 20 Feb. 1959.

⁴⁸ TNA, POWE 14/587, Letter from P. Maitland to Lord Mills, 26 Feb. 1959.

⁴⁹ K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, Mass., 2001), p. 101.

⁵⁰ The Blackhill Campaign, J. Parsons, 1963, 50 mins <https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-blackhill-campaign-1963-online> [accessed 22 Dec. 2019].

⁵¹ C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956).

⁵² S. High and D. Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: the Legacy and Memory of Deindustrialization (New York, 2009), pp. 65–85.

⁵³ Cowie and Heathcott, ‘Introduction’, p. 13.

⁵⁴ Electricity in Scotland: Report of the Committee on the Generation and Distribution of Electricity in Scotland (Parl. Papers 1962 [Cmnd. 1859]).

⁵⁵ T. Dalyell, ‘Margaret Herbison’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/64016> [accessed 20 Oct. 2011].

⁵⁶ TNA, POWE 14/1495, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, dclxix, no. 32, Wednesday 12 Dec. 1962: third reading of Electricity (Borrowing Powers) (Scotland) Bill.

⁵⁷ TNA, POWE 14/1495, Hansard, dclxix, no. 32, Wednesday 12 Dec. 1962: third reading of Electricity (Borrowing Powers) (Scotland) Bill.

⁵⁸ E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990), p. 10, also quoted in J. Phillips, The Industrial Politics of Devolution (Manchester, 2008), p. 9.

⁵⁹ A. Mycock, ‘Invisible and inaudible? England’s Scottish diaspora and the politics of the Union’, in The Modern Scottish Diaspora: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives, ed. M. Leith and D. Sim (Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 99–117, at p. 105.

⁶⁰ T. M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Diaspora, 1750–2010 (London, 2011), p. 270.

⁶¹ TNA, POWE 14/1495, Hansard, dclxix, no. 32, Wednesday 12 Dec. 1962: third reading of Electricity (Borrowing Powers) (Scotland) Bill.

⁶² TNA, POWE 14/1495, Hansard, dclxix, no. 32, Wednesday 12 Dec. 1962: third reading of Electricity (Borrowing Powers) (Scotland) Bill.

⁶³ T. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1707–2007 (London, 2007), p. 643.

⁶⁴ TNA, Coal 31/96, B. Woolfe, SNP, to A. Robens, NCB, London, 1963.

⁶⁵ A. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Maddison, Wis., 1997), pp. 57–8.

⁶⁶ L. Daily, ‘Scotland on the Dole’, New Left Review, xvii (1962), 17.

⁶⁷ TNA, POWE 52/85, Note for the record: secretary of state’s meeting with the Scottish Area NUM on Friday 19 Jan. 1968; W. Ross, Scottish Office, to R. Marsh, Ministry of Power, 9 Feb. 1968.

⁶⁸ TNA, POWE 52/85, W. K. Fraser, Regional Development Department, St Andrews House, Edinburgh to J. R. Jenkins, Ministry of Power, London, 1968.

⁶⁹ Gilbert Dobby, interview with author, Coalburn Miners’ Welfare, 11 Feb. 2014.

⁷⁰ Jimmy Hood, interview.

⁷¹ Jimmy Hood, interview.

⁷² Gilbert Dobby, interview.

⁷³ Jimmy Hood, interview.

⁷⁴ Gilbert Dobby, interview.

⁷⁵ Marian and Willie Hamilton, interview, residence, Shotts, 14 March 2014.

⁷⁶ S. High, ‘Beyond aesthetics: visibility and invisibility in the aftermath of deindustrialization’, International Labor and Working-Class History, lxxxiv (2013), 140–53, at p. 141.

⁷⁷ High, ‘Beyond aesthetics’, p. 141.

⁷⁸ Gilbert Dobby, interview.

⁷⁹ Moodiesburn focus group, retired miners’ group, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 25 March 2014.

⁸⁰ Mick McGahey, interview with author, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, 31 March 2014.

⁸¹ Bill McCabe, interview with author, Tannochside Miners’ Welfare, Tannochside, 20 Jan. 2017.

⁸² A. Perchard, ‘“Broken men” and “Thatcher’s children”: memory and legacy in Scotland’s coalfields’, International Labor and Working-Class History, lxxxiv (2013), 78–98, at p. 94.

⁸³ Montgomery, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.

⁸⁴ John Hamilton, interview with author, South Lanarkshire Integrated Children’s Services office, Larkhall, 26 Apr. 2016.

⁸⁵ John Hamilton, interview.

⁸⁶ Ian Hogarth, interview with author, National Mining Museum, Newtongrange, 28 Aug. 2014.

⁸⁷ Arnold, ‘“Like being on death row”’, p. 9.

⁸⁸ TNA, Coal 31/168, Coal Industry Examination: Demand and Supply Working Group 2nd meeting, Thames House South, 22 May 1974.

⁸⁹ J. Kirk, Class, Culture and Social Change: on the Trail of the Working Class (London, 2007), p. 7.

⁹⁰ Tommy Canavan, interview with author, residence, Kilsyth, 19 Feb. 2014.

⁹¹ Tommy Canavan, interview.