3. Communities: ‘it was pretty good’ in restructured locales
Community is a central feature within cultural representations of British coal mining and deindustrialization. Prominent cinematic examples of this include the depiction in Billy Elliot of the hardship caused by the 1984–5 miners’ strike in a Durham pit village and the story of a Yorkshire colliery band’s struggles through the last major wave of pit closures during the early 1990s dramatized in Brassed Off.1 Twentieth-century scholarship similarly emphasized how occupational identities were consolidated through the strong homogeneity of mining settlements. The 1956 Coal is Our Life study of ‘Ashton’ (Featherstone) in West Yorkshire detailed the close link between work and social life in a village which continued to serve a nineteenth-century colliery.2 Stuart MacIntyre’s later historical account of interwar radicalism in West Fife and the Rhondda Valley similarly focused on single-industry localities.3 Despite the character of these depictions, the Scottish coalfields experienced extensive reconstruction during the second half of the twentieth century that significantly reshaped relationships between work and residence. Localized communities were reconstructed through the building of public housing to replace miners’ rows, which were demolished in slum clearance efforts. The concentration of production in larger ‘super pits’ and increasing commuting distances discussed in the last chapter loosened traditional ties between mining settlements and collieries.
This chapter utilizes oral testimonies, primarily drawn from the Lanarkshire coalfield, to understand the meanings attached to the long experience of coalfield reconstruction. It emphasizes that the phase of reconstruction between the 1940s and 1960s involved the loss of older bonds but also included significant material improvements and the making of new industrial communities. Accelerated deindustrialization and private housebuilding from the 1980s was more dislocating. It disrupted working-class consciousness constructed around shared investments in occupational identities and public housing tenures. The testimonies are appraised through the lens of critical nostalgia. They demonstrate criticisms of the social conservatism that often characterized coalfield communities during the mid and late twentieth century, while also noting the tangible and intangible cost of deindustrialization. Brendan Moohan summarized this by explaining that ‘it was pretty good’ growing up within the associational life of the mining industry, and that its social infrastructure provided fulfilment for himself and his family in the Lothians between the 1960s and early 1980s.4 Finally, the chapter investigates religious sectarianism, demonstrating both the reconstructive value and reflective nature of oral history. The testimonies reveal that ethno-religious identities remained a diminished but nevertheless present source of political and social division between the 1940s and 1990s.
Scottish coalfield communities developed around towns and villages with a historical basis in the mining industry. Community structures strongly intersected with class solidarities which were founded on a shared attachment to male manual industrial employment and public housing tenancies which typically characterized Scottish coalfield settlements between the 1940s and 1980s.5 Multiple identities have evolved and endured in the coalfields through complex interactions. Different elements of identity relating to locale, class and ethno-religious allegiances, have been emphasized in different contexts and in response to varying social and economic pressures. Institutions, leisure activities and labour movement political affiliations were instrumental in shaping the cultural ‘mediation’ of social relations and the formation of working-class consciousness in the coalfields.6 Expressions of class-consciousness developed in spaces that furnished active associational lives: the workplace, public space and social institutions such as Miners’ Welfares. Deindustrialization was not only a threat to industrial workers’ employment, it also undermined identities invested in occupation and place. These experiences also shaped national allegiances. Alan Little’s broadcast ahead of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence empathetically described growing support for devolution and then independence within formerly industrial areas of Scotland. He recalled that four decades earlier, ‘the British state dug coal. It milled steel. It built ships’. British identities had dissipated through privatization and the long-term effects of workplace closures.7 Links to both Scottish and British national identities were embedded by connections to nationalized industries as well as through the labour and trade union movement. These included the distinct Scottish identity of the NUMSA but also its integration with unitary British structures.
The oral testimonies indicate a strong symbiosis between class and community. Dialogue was structured around questioning what it meant to be part of a mining community. Connections formed around workplaces, neighbourhoods, and collective social activities were highlighted. Examples of both the closeness of community bonds constructed on this basis, and their exclusivity through barriers to inclusion, were vividly discussed by the interviewees decades later. Michael McMahon was raised in Newarthill, North Lanarkshire, where he worked alongside his uncle and father in the American-owned Terex heavy vehicle-manufacturing factory. Both of Michael’s grandfathers had been miners. His response to being asked the character of Newarthill was to emphasize its homogeneity and comment that ‘They were very working class’.8 The association between class and community is confirmed in a negative sense by Mary Spence’s experience. Mary’s narrative confirms that social boundaries limited community involvement despite geographical proximity and familial connections. She returned to Bantyre, South Lanarkshire, in 1959, aged twelve, with her father, who was from a mining background but had entered the civil service and risen to a relatively senior rank. Mary described the gulf which this created between her father and his family, who lived in impoverished conditions owing to her grandmother having to care for both her grandfather and uncle, who had been disabled by work in coal mining:
The people, my grandparents and aunt, they were so side-lined. They were like people on an island. They were away from the centre of things. They were no longer part of a community to the same extent with immediate neighbours, you could feel the isolation … We lived from ’61 onwards in Blantyre, round the corner from them, round the corner, round another corner, about a couple of hundred yards away. My grandmother was able-bodied. Never visited us. She was never nasty to us. But my father thought he was going to move back into bosom with his family. He was wrong. It didn’t happen. There was a barrier … They were in absolute poverty. Very unfair. And we had a very nice house. They were still living in their council house. And my grandmother was very proud. And she thought, well this is just me speculating: I’ve done my job I’ve brought up my children now they must get on with it. She belonged in her world, and she was in that world, and we were in ours.9
Mary’s comments underline the major social distinction between middle-class owner-occupiers and working-class public housing tenants. They also emphasize the growing isolation felt in some mining communities during the 1960s through the impact of mounting colliery closures. Mary’s later relocation to the new town of East Kilbride clearly maps social mobility onto the geographies of economic development in mid twentieth-century Scotland. Jessie Clark also recalled the retention of sharp class divisions into the period of the nationalized industry, as well as the often painful process of community breakup inherent within social reconstruction. Her memories highlight the importance of the connection between workplaces and community life, which continued under the public ownership. Jessie commented that nationalization ‘wasn’t just plain sailing, you still had that manager you know’. Despite the promise of ‘more democracy’ within the National Coal Board’s (NCB’s) collieries, there were evident elements of continuity in employer power. A member of colliery management, who had continued in his post from the private industry, ‘prevented us getting a house for a wee while’. She speculated this was the result of her husband’s reputation as a ‘troublemaker’ given his communist and trade union affiliations. The NCB hierarchy, or at least this individual, used the Board’s control of Scottish Special Housing Association (SSHA) houses at Rigside, in South Lanarkshire, to exercise power over the workforce in a manner reminiscent of paternalist private employers who acted as landlords.10
Jessie’s memories exemplify Little’s reflections on the British state’s direct presence in the coalfields. Her reflections on the eventual move to new housing combined happy memories of a major material improvement with mourning for the community life in the demolished miners’ rows:
It was a big change for me because I’d been living in a room in somebody’s house when I got married at first, you know. And to go tae a house where I had three bedrooms and a bathroom and running water. Fantastic, you know! It was good to have a bath, because that was the one thing about living in the miners’ rows. You didn’t have a bath and unlike the people in cities we didn’t have the baths that we could go to, you know, next door to the steamie … But I must say, when it came to friendship, comradeship, the village, the old village, was a hundred per cent. Second to none. And even the move up to a mile way to these new houses, it was different. It was different. It was really, it wasn’t as close a community you know. Literally close I mean, miners’ rows, when you think about it.11
These comments on proximity emphasize the degree to which public and private spheres overlapped in coalfield communities. The community formed a restricted public with membership defined on class, occupational and within the pit itself, gender terms. However, the nominally private family sphere had traditionally been inhibited by physical closeness and shared amenities and social lives. Jessie’s interview underlined the self-organized nature of community activities through Douglas Water’s Miners’ Welfare: tennis courts, bowling greens, a pipe and silver band as well as dances. At a focus group in Shotts, similar recollections to Jessie’s about the neighbourly closeness of miners’ rows were also accompanied by references to leisure activities. During the interwar period this had also included illegal gambling syndicates organized around ‘safe houses’ in the dense miners’ rows, as well as more formal public events. Bill Paris, who grew up within a Shotts mining family and worked in local collieries, recalled that:
It was actually quite a busy town and there was many local amenities for everyone. Well, the Miners’ Welfare existed at that time and I can remember there was swimming baths and a library and various others. I would say, y’know, associations, clubs built round aboot it. There was tennis courts, bowling green. Snooker, there was a billiards club and also there was the junior football clubs. Football was a strong very strong thing in the area because there were junior clubs, amateur clubs, juvenile clubs and they were they say probably quite a lot at least half a dozen, maybe even more. And all sorts ae other pastimes associated. You had the dog track as well, doon there.12
As in Jessie Clark’s narrative, the focus group in Shotts recalled that the community was disrupted by pit closures and the growth of commuting to work:
Ella Muir: Would it be fair to say if you’ve got these people changing under the umbrella if you moved onto different things would it do anything to the community the feeling in the community?
Bobby Flemming: It certainly fragmented. In the mining there was a common strand running through everything, whereas going to all different industries it certainly fragmented
Betty Turnwood: The more people went out to different jobs the less people were all the same.
Willie Hamilton: The community as you say fragmented, they werenae so close as what they were.13
Memories of community fragmentation associated with intertwined residency and employment shifts emphasize the growth of privacy. Socially and geographically mobile individuals entered new routines that led their employment and social lives to be less connected with their neighbours and work colleagues. Yet alongside these developments it is quite clear that there were elements of continuity. Willie Hamilton played for Shotts Vics junior football team, which had a historic connection with both local miners and steelworkers. He mentioned there had been an ongoing presence of amateur teams in Shotts which had only declined in recent years. Willie also recalled that these activities formed connections within Southfield pit where men from Fauldhouse in West Lothian and Carluke in South Lanarkshire bonded with miners from Shotts by playing sports together.14
The remaking of coalfield communities was positively affected by housing developments. Housing schemes constructed after the Second World War retained close forms of workplace and neighbourhood connections, forming the basis of new communities. Margaret Wegg’s family moved into an SSHA house in Cardowan village during 1948, when she was seven years old. Her father worked at Cardowan colliery and had previously travelled from Feriegair near Hamilton, but was offered a house in the village through a friend, a ‘union man’. Reconstruction was marked by the continuation of coal industry involvement in housing and the extension of joint regulation within the nationalized industry beyond the workplace. Margaret fondly recalled social life in the village which revolved around connections to the colliery. She referred to miners as ‘the salt of the earth’, reflecting on the generosity on display in regular collections being held at Cardowan colliery, which supported a range of initiatives including a pensioners’ club that she is presently a member of. Margaret’s testimonies also underlined the importance of neighbourly connections with ‘mining families’ several times, which were characterized by friendliness and shared social activities:
When the snow was on the ground, we used to sledge down the street and straight into the field, you know. You had to duck under the wire, but we used to you know or we used to go into the field and play. I mean, we used to play out in the street and our parents used to. Well, ma mum and Gladys stayed across the road. It was all mining families. And my mum and them used to go out in the street and play rounders. We’d play tennis, you know. They played with the kids. No the first time the knock had come to the door, ‘is your mum coming out to play?’15
Billy Ferns recollected that social life in Bishopbriggs also linked the workplace and residence. Billy worked alongside his father at Cardowan colliery and moved to the area during the mid 1960s. He estimated there were up to forty mining families who lived in NCB houses nearby. The men and their families socialized, indicating the establishment of a new coal community: ‘We used to go oot to the miners’ club on a Saturday up in Kirkintilloch they were aw there wi their wives. I used tae go tae sometimes Twechar or Kilsyth and you’d meet all the boys there Saturday night with their wives. I knew them all well’.16
There is a clear distinction between these descriptions of earlier social reconstruction and the period of private house building and intensified deindustrialization up to major final closures during the 1980s and 1990s. These developments contributed to the rise of commuter towns and the decline of relatively autonomous industrial settlements with interlinked residency, work and social life patterns. Intensified deindustrialization disembedded the economy from communities, defamiliarizing towns and villages and weakening historic attachments to associations at a national level. Siobhan McMahon, Michael’s daughter, remembered growing up in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, during the 1980s where an ‘industrial community’ was marked by a crossover of family and neighbourhood connections. Siobhan’s conception of an industrial community confirmed a view of the working class being defined by a common culture and sense of social standing. She felt that families of miners, steelworkers, engineers and welders, including her father and both her grandfathers, had a stake in the ‘shared struggle the community had gone through’. This was juxtaposed with the more private, middle-class and white-collar character of the ‘fancy new houses’ where lawyers and accountants reside. Siobhan emphasized the impact that the town’s increasing reliance on commuting and relatively low-paid service sector jobs has had in disrupting traditional community patterns and the essence of what she saw as having defined life in Bellshill:
We’ve changed in that the jobs aren’t coming to the area anymore. And when they do come, it’s what I would, it’s not, it’s not the same types of jobs, not the skilled jobs that you required to keep people. We’ve got lots o big retail jobs. Tesco coming’s great, and it is great. But our town centre’s decimated because it’s charity shops, it’s bookies, it’s pubs. What does that say to young people, y’know? What job do you get there? And when you’re trying to better yourself at uni then you don’t come back to Bellshill. You’re not going to get a job in Bellshill. You go somewhere else. So, people aren’t remaining in Bellshill. They’re seeing it as a town to build nice new houses in, absolutely, because it’s half way between Glasgow and Edinburgh so it gets you along the motorway. That was never what it was supposed to be about. That was never what Bellshill was.17
Siobhan McMahon’s comment ‘that was never what it was supposed to be about’, indicates a clear mental synonymy between Bellshill and an ‘industrial community’. Bellshill’s transformation into a suburban commuter town is a challenge to its very essence and has disrupted a strongly felt sense of belonging.
Duncan Macleod’s father and both his grandfathers were Lanarkshire miners before his father migrated to Derbyshire during the late 1940s after colliery closures in in Carluke, South Lanarkshire. This migration experience exemplifies the unitary nature of the nationalized industry which connected miners across the British coalfields. Duncan’s perspective on Carluke’s shift towards becoming a dormitory town paralleled Siobhan’s appraisal of Bellshill. The population has increased in size while signs of the area’s mining legacy have been removed:
Carluke’s gone from say about eight thousand population to about fourteen thousand. They’ve built about two thousand new houses in the last thirty, forty, years. These’ll be the oldest of the new ones if you like. These are about forty years old. I work in my grandson’s primary school, and if you talk to the people, let’s call them incomers for want of a better word, they’re not aware of the mining history of this area. And yet, if you come up even twenty years ago, which was thirty years after the pit closed, you couldn’t fail to be aware that it was a mining area simply cause of the bings everywhere. And if you come in from Airdrie, from the Airdrie direction coming along the A73, you could see it from as far as the land was flat. It was almost like an artificial mountain.18
Duncan emphasized the demise of regular community events such as the annual miners’ gala day, which had continued after the local pits had closed. The interlinked changes in housing tenure and occupational structure disrupted the conceptions of class and community that had pervaded for four decades. In 1981, Motherwell, Wishaw, Bellshill and Coatbridge in North Lanarkshire all had council house tenancy rates of over eighty per cent.19 This was reflected in the overwhelming majority of the oral history respondents who took part in this study having lived in public-sector housing. Jennifer McCarrey grew up in Mossend – to the east of Bellshill – during the 1970s and 1980s. Her parents were both active trade unionists. Jennifer’s father was the convenor for non-manual workers at the Ravenscraig steelworks, where her grandfather had also worked. She recollected that the economic restructuring of the 1980s was interpreted through a linked community and class consciousness. This reinforced identification with the Labour party, and affirmed the social division based on housing tenancies which Mary Spence referred to:
You’ve got to remember our existence was very different. Like I had never even been in a bought house tul I was like a teenager. Nobody I knew even lived in a bought house! Everybody lived in a scheme, in a council house. I was saying the other day I never met a Tory tul I was fourteen. One of them was leafleting up in a scheme in Bellshill. I remember looking at him as if to say you look just like us. It was that uniformity of the political identity in my community. It was the safest Labour seat in Scotland, North Lanarkshire.20
These comments resonate with Hassan’s and Shaw’s view of post-1945 ‘Labour Scotland’ as having been strengthened by the ‘institutional pillars’ of public housing, local government and trade unionism. Jennifer’s parents’ trade unionism and her involvement as a young Labour party activist are indicative of those connections. These networks sustained a ‘Labour state which extended far into the lives of communities in a way unimaginable now’, linking the workplace, housing and political representation at local, Scottish and UK levels.21 Jennifer’s recollections also affirm that working-class identity was associated with the growing electoral divergence between Scotland and UK, which accompanied the British state’s withdrawal from industry and the abandonment of moral economy obligations. During the last four decades of the twentieth century, electoral support for Labour in Scotland was generally higher than its UK-wide performance, while Conservative governments were secured through English parliamentary representation. Growing divergences stimulated demands for devolution, which became especially pronounced as deindustrialization intensified during the 1980s and 1990s.22
Nostalgia and critical nostalgia: ‘it was pretty good’
In former industrial localities, nostalgia parallels ‘a mourning process’. It is characterized by grieving for lost social connections, cultural activities and occupational identities.23 A latent critique of present circumstances is implicated within nostalgia.24 These sentiments are communicated in the form of ‘broad brushed contrasts’ between a past defined by community and a present whose main feature is its erosion.25 Feelings of loss within deindustrialized areas are often characterized by a ‘smokestack nostalgia’, which emphasizes sensual experiences of industrial activities.26 Marian Hamilton, whose grandfather and husband were miners while her father had been an iron moulder, fondly recalled that in Shotts, ‘You used to get up and suddenly you heard the boots in the morning the tramp, tramp, tramp. And that was folk going to the pits and going tae the ironworks cause it was a big works as well’.27 Jennifer McCarrey remembered that the sound of both the Lanarkshire and Ravenscraig steelworks were defining features of life in adjacent Mossend. She found their absence displacing upon moving to Birmingham in the mid 1980s where she worked as a paid trade union organizer:
I didn’t sleep very well. And I realized it’s because I couldn’t hear the clanging of the steel at night. Because that was constant through ma whole life, you would hear the clanging of the steel at night at Clydesdale and wherever. You always heard it. And I noticed it wasn’t here anymore! It was bizarre it was like, what is that? Only when I went home I realized it was the steel! It sounds ridiculous now, but it was absolutely true.28
Affinity with industrial activities was entrenched by the infrastructure of community life built around them. Mick McGahey, the son of Michael McGahey, the NUMSA president, referred to coal mining as providing the basis for a ‘social fabric’ of cultural activities and social connections.29 Annual gala days were mentioned in several testimonies aside from Duncan Macleod’s considered above. They played a key role in several respondents’ recollections of community life. Rhona Wilkinson’s grandfather worked at Woodmuir and then Polkemmet colliery. She had fond childhood memories of the annual celebration in Breich, West Lothian:
Everybody all went to the miners’ gala day. We always had our gala day, all that sort of stuff. It was a big day, even although Breich couldnae afford shows or anythin. I think one year we got a coconut shy. That would be aboot it! But it was just like races over the park and a cauld mince pie. Fauldhouse always seemed grand cause they had a Tunnock’s box at their gala day. But we just get a cauld pie and a German biscuit or something like that. That’d be it!30
Rhona’s emphasis on material deprivation alongside social cohesion concurs with the assessment of community apparent in memories of interwar miners’ rows. A similar view of social connections spurred by impoverishment was given by Barbara Goldie, who was from a mining family in Cambuslang, and went on to marry a steelworker. She stated that mining families ‘had nothing then, we were aw in the same boat’.31 Sam Purdie recalled the objections to the depopulation of Glenbuck, a village of traditional miners’ houses in East Ayrshire. In 1954, Glenbuck’s population were rehoused in modern council housing in the larger adjacent settlement of Muirkirk:
It was a tremendous place. No gas, no electricity, no water in most of the houses. There was a communal water pump at the end of the street where you went to fill your pails. When you entered Glenbuck at first, here’s a row of miners’ houses, twenty-six, one pump at the end. So, the housewives had to go to the end, get the pail and carry it for anything they needed to do. No cooking facilities except the fire, the open range. That was Glenbuck. I’ll guarantee that Burns would not have seen much difference in the place. Sewage didn’t exist. Open middens. The toilets were just a hole in a board ... Oh, Glenbuck people were desperate to stay. We had the impression that you could have built the houses in Glenbuck.32
Sam’s insistence on the maintenance of a Glenbuck identity over half a century later is matched by his work with other former residents to develop heritage activities and memorials on the former site of the village. The most prominent commemoration has been for the highly successful Glenbuck Cherrypickers football club, which produced a multitude of high-achieving professional players, including Bill Shankly. Shankly went on to manage Liverpool but retained an iconoclastic socialist philosophy which he attributed to his experience of growing up in Glenbuck and working in local collieries. In 2019, Sam was involved in unveiling a memorial in Shankly’s partially restored house. It was attended by Liverpool fans involved in the ‘Spirit of Shankly’ supporters’ union.33 Similar activities are also visible in lost Lanarkshire mining villages. While trade unions were broadly accepting of pit closures during the late 1950s, concerns were raised about Hamilton Palace shutting in 1959 due to ‘the grave social consequence this closure will have on the village of Bothwellhaugh’.34 The village was subsequently demolished in 1965, yet thirteen years later an annual commemoration, ‘Palais Day’ was inaugurated and it subsequently became an annual event headed by a committee of former residents. The committee continues to maintain memorials and are archiving memories of the village and colliery.35
Within the oral testimonies, the dialogue was shaped by a strong sense of passing on memories for posterity as the industrial era receded from human memory.36 Respondents identified me as somebody who had grown up following the end of large-scale industrial employment in Scotland. I was known to the interviewees as a University of Glasgow student or University of the West of Scotland lecturer originally from Edinburgh, which contributed to perceptions of both geographical and social distance. This perhaps heightened contrasts between past and present. In the case of Alan Blades, it also emboldened claims of the solidarity engendered through neighbourhood connections in the mining village of Greengairs, North Lanarkshire, through a contrast with my own background: ‘You’re a tight-knit community, y’know what I mean? It’s not like growin up in Leith!’ He later specified that he felt the ‘village mentality’ of Greengairs was particular to small-scale settlements, arguing that differing social attitudes, especially a tendency towards suspicion and to treat others as strangers, were visible in the comparatively large town of Airdrie where he now resides.37
Assessments of industrial nostalgia require a ‘generous critical cultural reading’ of working-class memories.38 Recollections of social life in industrial settlements are not limited to crude longing for the past, but instead demonstrate forms of critical nostalgia. Nostalgia can facilitate recognition of improvements as well as regression associated with deindustrialization and connected social changes. Critical nostalgia’s ‘radical imagination’ is a productive means to articulate criticisms of the past as well as the present.39 Oral history interview participants voiced critiques of hierarchical industrial communities but also reflected on the losses associated with workplace closure and community fragmentation. Generational distinctions encouraged critical considerations of the changes associated with deindustrialization. Alan Blades, perhaps influenced by my presence as a representative of a generation which had matured after most major industrial closures had taken place, and my status as a university researcher, argued that economic changes had presented opportunities for some young men as well as social dislocation for others:
Boys and then obviously their sons arenae getting in the local pit, so you’ve got the young ones aw comin through that were expected tae work in the pits they’d to go elsewhere and look for the jobs. Y’know what I mean? … It’d maybe be good for some ae them cause some ae them would probably say ‘I’ll need to be good I’ll need to start gettin into ma education’, y’know. And go to uni and college and aw that.40
A critical outlook was visible towards the culture within mining communities in some testimonies. Brendan Moohan grew up in Musselburgh, East Lothian. His grandfather was a communist who was blacklisted out of Lanarkshire collieries during the interwar period. Brendan’s grandfather subsequently found employment in the Midlothian coalfield where Brendan and his father also later worked. Brendan’s comments indicated his feelings of ambiguity towards the organized associational life that characterized mining communities:
There was something about that mining lifestyle that mining communities had that was a little bit conservative with a small c, and if you were adventurous it could be quite restrictive. And there was a clear hierarchy to it as well. You know, you had the guys who were on the committee, and the guys from the union. There was a very definite kind of structure to it.41
However, indicating the facets of critical nostalgia, Brendan’s criticisms were qualified by reflections on the loss of ‘social cohesion’ and the ‘form of socialism’ that associational life encouraged. He highlighted the occupational identity and activities of Miners’ Welfares, which anchored a pride and consciousness that has been eroded through deindustrialization. Brendan stated there had been a transition from an active community with a unique social life that celebrated its role in the mining industry to one increasingly based on passive receivership of media:
But the miners’ clubs again, the other kind of socialistic element to it was in your community. You’re gonnae celebrate your community, and we’re gonna have this gala day every year. The high point of the year in the summer. And we’ll have all these kinda sporting activities, all that kind of stuff. It would all centre round the club, but it would be something whereby the community celebrated itself. I have to say in a very hierarchical way, with a ‘gala queen’ and all the rest of it. But it was something that was for working-class people, accessible for working-class people and being bold enough to celebrate who they are and in their own community. I think that was a good thing. And you know, nowadays if people are more recipient of things to celebrate, i.e. they’ll watch the World Cup, they’ll celebrate whoever wins, the Olympics, something that’s put on their TV screen. Whereas in those events you had all ages having their races, their singing competitions, their boxing competitions, the garden competition was often judged then. So, there was a variety of things and it was celebrating no further than the boundaries of the village. It was pretty good.42
Brendan’s sentiment that growing up in a mining community ‘was pretty good’ contains definitive elements of critical nostalgia in noting the past’s detractions but nevertheless asserting positive comparisons with present circumstances. His narrative articulated criticisms of social conservatism. Nevertheless, in contrasting mining communities’ social life with less mobilizing and politically conscious contemporary routines he felt they had developed a culture imbued with activities and sensibilities of social and political value. Brendan’s perspective is redolent of Mark Fisher’s critique of the transition from ‘engagement to spectatorship’ which has taken place under Britain’s neoliberal political and economic transformation. Fisher singled out the politicized assault on mining communities during and after the 1984–5 miners’ strike as a significant moment in consolidating the perspective that there was no alternative to an individualistic and consumption-orientated society.43
Memories of mining accidents exemplified the tension between recollections of hardship and collectivity which characterize coalfield memories. Scott McCallum remembered the 1982 gas explosion at Cardowan colliery where his father and brother worked. To Scott, who was only eight years old at the time, the explosion imbued an awareness of the dangers associated with the industry. Yet he also recalled that the sense of community in Cardowan village, where his family lived, was strengthened by its stance in the face of adversity. The explosion fortunately led to no deaths but did have a casualty toll of twenty-five, with seven men having to be stretchered to hospital with burns:44
That brought everybody quite close, there was lots of services it was broadcast all over the world. We had family all over the world, Australia and Canada, saying they’d seen it on the news and checking everybody was okay. And then for years after it you still seen people that was affected. One man, just mentally disturbed in his head, he could remember bits of it. It was a close-knit community. Everybody knew everybody.45
Margaret Wegg worked in the pit’s canteen at the time. The accident served as both a memory of the danger miners endured but also as a pertinent example of solidarity, symbolized by the efforts of the workers who were off shift, to assist with the rescue:
That was a bad one, that was, you know. But even then, that’s when you knew there was a community. I mean, people ma dad’s age was retired, but the minute the word went out that that had happened all the old miners were right down to the pit to see what they could do, you know. Could they go down to see, help with the rescue … We just got ready and that was it. We were down, the canteen staff were all there working you know. It didn’t matter whether you were off duty or on duty or that you were down, you know. Oh, there was a bad. That was when John O’Rourke got brain damage. As I say, that was when we knew there was a community.46
Willie Doolan, who was the NUM’s workmen’s inspector at Cardowan, recalled the incident in harrowing terms. Having seen colleagues leave for hospital on stretchers with their burned skin peeling off their bodies, he was tasked with completing an inspection of the site with Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Mines: ‘the minute you walked in you could smell burning flesh. It was horrible. Horrible … It was a thing that will stay with me for the rest of ma life’.47 Willie’s memories demonstrate the important links between government and local communities through the nationalized industry. These were especially present during mining accidents. He recalled undertaking similar social responsibilities during the twilight years of deep coal mining in Scotland. When he was an NUM delegate at Castlebridge colliery during the 1990s, Willie collaborated with the pit management during an unsuccessful attempt to rescue a man who was trapped underground. Willie was responsible for informing the man’s wife of his death. The woman was comforted by her father who had also worked in the industry.48 These memories indicate the strong demarcation of gender roles within coalfield communities. Male pit managers and union representatives took responsibility for managing operations while mines rescue volunteers led underground efforts. Women acted as auxiliaries above ground and, along with children, anxiously awaited news from an alien underground environment.
These themes were apparent in reflection on other major incidents of injury and death within collieries, especially the Auchengeich disaster of 1959 in which forty-seven men died following an underground fire that resulted from mechanical failures in a large fan.49 This event’s significance transmitted through the cultural circuit of coalfield memory. During 2014, Siobhan McMahon recollected her maternal grandmother, a miner’s wife, recently telling her about the experience of the disaster and the role that women played in coal mining families. Siobhan retold her grandmother’s memories of the emotions felt by miners’ wives and mothers. These included a sense of terror at the incident and the combination of relief and guilt, with thought for other families who had not been so fortunate, when they learned that their sons and husbands had survived:
She said, ‘it had been on the news and one of the other wives had come up and said “y’know there’s a disaster at Auchengeich?”’ So, all the females got their children and waited at Bellshill Cross waiting on the bus coming back to see if their partner would get off the bus. How harrowing that must have been. To wait and to see if your partner was coming off a bus, because they had no other means of communication, you know, at that time. And she said, y’know obviously that was a worried time for her and the support. It was the female. Just the image of that, standing for hours at a bus stop waiting on that and holding each other together. I mean how strong those women must have been.50
These experiences parallel developments in South Wales, where ‘blood on the coal … generated a moral claim on the local mine’.51 Disasters served as pivotal events in framing conceptions of what it meant to be from a mining community, emphasizing collective solidarity in the face of industrial dangers. This embedded moral economy arguments within the sense that a community that had sacrificed for the industry had a right to economic security. Striking miners constructed a memorial for the Auchengeich disaster during the 1984–5 strike. It was erected by men affiliated to the Cardowan colliery strike centre that organized strikers from the recently closed pit. The main feature was the Cardowan colliery winding wheel which was ‘unofficially’ donated by pit management. An annual commemoration for the Auchengeich disaster began during the strike and now acts as source of community continuity. Willie Doolan was only aged four at the time of the disaster, but his father was present as a mines rescue volunteer. He remembers the event and its impact on his schoolmates who had lost fathers and brothers. Willie was involved in the establishment of the memorial as well as its subsequent expansion, including the erection of a bronze statue designed by Kevin McKenna, for which the Auchengeich Miners’ Memorial Committee raised £35,000.52 The attendees at the commemoration extend beyond the immediate areas of Lanarkshire which served Auchengeich colliery:
I don’t know whether I said to you about it before or not Ewan, but we have every year we have an annual memorial service to commemorate the miners that lost their lives in the Auchengeich pit disaster. I mean the fiftieth anniversary was in 2009, and we could command three thousand people at that memorial service. But it wasn’t only the families of ex-miners from this community. We had people from as far as the Lothians coming through. We had people from down south coming up tae share with this community once again the sorrow and the sadness that we had undergot due to that disaster that happened in oor pit.53
Figure 3.1. Auchengeich Mining Disaster Memorial, Moodiesburn, ©John O’Hara (2019).
Willie’s presentation of the annual commemoration indicates the connections and tensions between occupation, community, class and nation. The reconstruction of the coal industry in Scotland encouraged the construction of a national coalfield community, embodied by the presence of former miners from other coalfields at the annual commemorations. Donations from Longannet miners assisted the memorial’s expansion after the return to work in 1985, underlining the links between miners across Scotland.54 These connections developed through pit transfers and deindustrialization. They were encouraged by the political culture within the Scottish coalfields, especially the activities of Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) members and their allies within the NUMSA. There is an extent of critical nostalgia in the annual memorial service, especially through memories of miners’ successive struggles for improved safety conditions. The Auchengeich disaster took place within the context of significant long-term health and safety improvements. Death rates in the Scottish coal industry approximately halved between their nadir in the interwar years and the early years of nationalization. But there was a slight rise over the late 1950s and early 1960s. More complex mechanical systems, including mechanized ventilation and haulage systems, contributed to renewed dangers. These were augmented by pressures in the context of accelerating colliery closures and competition with oil and nuclear fuels.55
Nicky Wilson addressed the 2019 memorial service in his capacity as the NUM Scotland president. He commemorated the lives lost at Auchengeich with reference to his union’s long fight for improved health and safety conditions, including the campaign for the issuing of the self-rescuer breathing masks to miners. This was ultimately achieved following another disaster at the Michael colliery in Fife when nine men perished following an underground fire in 1967. Michael was Scotland’s penultimate mining disaster.56 After the death of five men following a roof collapse at Seafield colliery in 1973 there were no further accidents with multiple fatalities in the Scottish coalfields.57 Mick Hogg summarized his conception of Auchengeich’s place in the long history of the Scottish coalfield during his contribution to the 2018 memorial service. He addressed the rally as a fraternal delegate from the Rail and Maritime Transport union, for whom Hogg works as a paid organizer, and as a Midlothian miner who was victimized following his arrest during the 1984–5 strike. Hogg referred to this conflict as part of the long struggle of miners for safety and dignity which originated in resisting ‘feudal bondage’ during the eighteenth century.58 However, the outlooks of Willie Doolan, Nicky Wilson, Mick Hogg and their comrades were not universal. Identities and affiliations were complex and renegotiated through evolving historical circumstances.
Sectarian divisions
The history of the Scottish coalfields intersects industrial conflict with religious sectarian and anti-trade union employment practices. These were pivotal in shaping personal identities, communal affiliations and the social and territorial borders of communities. Struggles over the distribution of resources, especially industrial employment, are central to understanding the continued significance of sectarianism during the latter half of the twentieth century. Kelly defined sectarianism as ‘a social setting in which systematic discrimination affects the life chances of a religious group, and within which religious affiliation stands for much more than theological belief ’.59 This is an appropriate basis on which to construct an analysis in the context of the Scottish coalfields. Sectarian trends were especially concentrated in Lanarkshire where different Irish ethnic backgrounds, Catholic and Ulster–Protestant, intersected with residence, work patterns, and political affiliations.
Sectarian practices figure significantly within the oral testimonies collected for this study, especially as they relate to the private industry. Jessie Clark recalled that in the South Lanarkshire mining village of Douglas Water, her father, a blacklisted trade unionist, felt ‘the members of the Masonic Lodge were the ones that always got the work, you know. And that was a fact of life in the village that I lived in’. Jessie’s father had rejected such a path, breaking with his father’s affiliation in favour of socialist politics through the Independent Labour party and later the CPGB.60 But sectarian connections retained some bearing on colliery employment into the nationalized period. Pat Egan’s memories of the influential role played by a Catholic fraternity, the Knights of St. Columba, at Bedlay colliery, are demonstrative of the pit’s social embedding through strong links between workers and management.61 These practices were informed by a defensive and divisive mentality, which protected access to premium employment and promotion for those of a particular ethnic background and religious–political affiliation.
Pat’s contentions about Bedlay are corroborated by the memories of John Hamilton who was originally from Lesmehagow in South Lanarkshire. John had worked alongside his father at Ponfiegh colliery, adjacent to Lesmehagow, but took up employment at Bedlay during the early 1980s. His recollections also confirm that sectarian affiliations were embedded in other collieries. Before Bedlay closed, John transferred to Polkemmet in West Lothian. In contrast to Bedlay, it had a Protestant loyalist character:
I’m of the Protestant religion. I worked at the Bedlay and it was, the majority was Catholic religion. Big time. So you couldnae even talk aboot Glasgow Rangers when you were doon the pit. You’d just to watch what you were saying when you were saying it! *laughs* So, when that closed, I got transferred to Polkemmet. And in Polkemmet they’ve got pictures o the Queen in every corner you can think ae … But you were accepted nae matter where you came fae, didnae matter to who you were working wi. No. That was okay, as long as you were daein your job and aw that. There was never any trouble.62
John’s eagerness to stress that sectarianism did not contribute towards serious divisions in the workforce is indicative of elements of composure, especially the influence of the coalfield cultural circuit’s emphasis on workforce and community togetherness. Mick McGahey recollected that both Catholic and Protestant factions were active within mining communities and had a presence within the NUMSA: ‘You had the Communist party, you had the Labour party, you’d have the Catholic Action, the Masonic Lodge you know. You’d these major factions that were competing with one another’.63 In an interview recorded during the late 1990s, Mick’s father recalled growing up amid the divide between Catholics and Protestants in Cambuslang, South Lanarkshire, and claimed to have been rejected by both sides as a communist. However, the former NUMSA president also underlined the distinction between weekends characterized by the Old Firm football rivalry and the return to work on Monday when miners were reunited.64 This was indicative of both the NUM’s universal presence within the nationalized industry and shared investment in the moral economy. In Pat Egan’s view, sectarianism was historically stimulated by employers who used religious differences to divide the workforce. But like John Hamilton and Mick McGahey, he underlined that these had declined during the second half of the twentieth century:
I know Twechar, was a mining village, and the next village up is Croy, which I think is predominantly, in fact it wis aw Catholic. It wis one hundred per cent Catholic. And they used to play baith villages cause it was the same mine-owner. It wis Bairds who used to play them aff each other – ‘they’re producing much more than yous are’ – that kinda stuff and he just played them aff each other. I think it was a big part in the twenties, thirties, forties, even fifties, ah would say.65
The private industry’s legacy of fostering social control through sectarian division has been noted in recent research. In Coatbridge, the journalist Peter Geoghegan was informed by Jim MacDonald, a former steelworker and an Orange Lodge veteran of fifty years standing, that Bairds had given land to construct both Catholic and Protestant churches as well as an Orange Hall.66 MacDonald’s interpretation of local history is consistent with Alan Campbell’s account. He notes that, ‘to very varying degrees, the Scottish mining communities were fractured by ethnicity and religion’, emphasizing this was prominent within Lanarkshire. These divisions were maintained by the activities of secret organizations including the Knights of St. Columba and the Orange Order, which had a ‘mass membership’ among Protestants from Ulster backgrounds. Into the interwar period there were regular major clashes at parades and other events such as local football matches. Orange organizations were utilized by employers to pursue policies of ‘class collaboration’, often clashing with communists who were understood as threats to a Protestant-led social order and allies of Irish republicans.67
However, the Catholic Church itself also possessed a powerful anti-communist influence. Pat Egan’s description of Catholic organization at Bedlay colliery was part of a wider prolonged effort to retain a basis within working-class communities, and to undermine the CPGB. This involved the mobilization of groups working under the banner of ‘Catholic Action’ within the labour movement and led to clashes over emotive subjects such as birth control, divorce, and support for the Soviet Union and the secularist Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.68 Jennifer McCarey’s awareness of family and community history in Newarthill, North Lanarkshire, exemplified this religious and political divide, and the power of the Catholic hierarchy:
My grandpa had been in the Communist Party. We were brought up with that, it was a real identity in that you know. There was some families that had that identity and they were ashamed of it. And they hid it because they had been victimized by the Catholic Church in the community. Some of them, their fathers, had been thrown out the parish, the whole of the family. And they were embarrassed and ashamed aboot that, so they didn’t really talk about it. It was only later on when I asked about some of the characters, who the people were, that I kind of realized that there were others that weren’t proud of it.69
Jennifer’s recollections accord with other memories from the testimonies in noting the sustained presence of Catholic-infused anti-Communism in the Scottish coalfields after the Second World War. Sam Purdie recalled the NUM delegate at Cairnhill mine in Ayrshire during the early 1960s was Ed Donagher, a prominent local Catholic Action activist who opposed Abe and Alex Moffat and the communist orthodoxies that prevailed within the NUMSA under their presidencies.70 John Brannan’s father had been a coal miner but he took up employment at the Caterpillar tractor factory in Tannochside during the mid 1960s and went on to become the engineering union convenor at the plant, eventually leading the 103-day occupation against its closure during 1987. Brannan remembered that the previous generation of shop steward leaders at the plant had included Tom Dougan, who was also the chair of the local Catholic Action group. Dougan approached Brannan to act as an informant. Brannan’s refusal was to the chagrin of his father, but he saw this as the only consistent way to act as an anti-sectarian trade unionist:
The boy came to me and he says, ‘how are you doing John?’ I said ‘not bad’, he said, ‘my name’s Tom Dougan’. I said ‘how are you doing Tam?’ ‘I’m the chairman of the Catholic Action group.’ I said, ‘very good. What do you want?’ ‘I’m a bit concerned about the Communist infiltration in the Caterpillar. If you dae know who they are could you tell me their names.’ I said ‘No problem, what are you wanting?’ He said ‘members of the Communist Party, fellow travellers,’ as they called them at that time. ‘Anybody at aw’. ‘Have you got a pen?’ ‘Oh aye’ I says, ‘John Brannan’. He says, ‘I think I’ve made a mistake’. I says, ‘who telt you to come to me?’ ‘Oh I couldane tell you that’. So, two weeks later I’m over at my mother’s hoose, and my father says to me ‘you embarrassed me’. He said, ‘did Tom Dougan talk to you?’ I says, ‘did you tell Tom Dougan to talk to me?’ He said, ‘well I did say talk to oor John’. I said, ‘well you made a mistake n aw dad’. About a year or so later there was a job going. Tom Dougan should have got the job and he didnae get it. The next time I goes up to Tom and I says ‘why are you not challenging that job?’ He says, ‘I don’t expect to get it. I need to go to you anyway to take the case up’. I said, ‘I already took it up because you deserve to get the job’. I says, ‘don’t think because you did that makes a difference to your union membership’. I says, ‘Tom, that was in the days of your Catholic Men’s Society’. And I did the same thing with the Masons one time. I did exactly the same thing. Obviously, somebody thought for some reason I wasn’t a Catholic for lack of a better world.71
John’s memories confirm the continuity of a sectarian influence in Scottish labour movement politics, including within assembly plants operated by multinationals’ subsidiaries. Yet they also indicate sectarian practices had considerably diminished when contrasted with earlier in the century, especially where trade union representatives were committed to opposing them. Jennifer McCarey’s memories also indicated a continuation not only in the Catholic Church’s political power but also in historical geographical distinctions between Catholic and Protestant communities of the sort Pat Egan recalled within North Lanarkshire. However, these were also complicated by ethnic distinctions within Catholic communities between Lithuanians, Italians and those of Irish backgrounds:
If you get in a taxi the first thing they’ll ask you if you’re going to Mossend they’ll ask you ‘are you Lithie, an Italian or a Tim?’ Cause that was the only three options, so that was the standard joke, you had to be one of those three. There was Protestants that lived there. Mr and Mrs Scott were Protestants that lived next door to us. Some of the other people on the street were Protestants. There was a Catholic identity in Mossend, that’s true, but I mean there was a Protestant primary school right in the middle of it. But much more of a Catholic community than compared to Bellshill.72
Michael McMahon similarly recollected this area was marked by the form of sectarian ‘micro-geography’ that Campbell identified as dividing communities within bordering locales in the Lanarkshire coalfields:73
You ask anyone now and they’ll tell you Mossend is still seen as a Catholic place, Carfin is still the Catholic village, New Stevenson is the Protestant village, Holytown is a Protestant village. That still exists, no doubt about that. If you actually check now, you’ll see that the make-up of those villages is much different from what it would have been in the days when the pits were there. I mean there was also the fact that Terex in Newhouse was seen as the Protestant factory and Caterpillar was seen as the Catholic factory.74
Michael’s narrative indicates that manufacturing inward investment involved an extension of the geographies that characterized the Lanarkshire coalfield during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Continuities in the presence of sectarian affiliations within the nationalized coal industry, of a diminished form, also demonstrate that local autonomy facilitated persistence in industrial relations practices from the private era. Broadly, the pattern of community and industrial relations fits Knox’s characterization of sectarianism being increasingly marginalized by the demise of major Scottish Protestant employers and paternalistic apprenticeship systems as well as the consolidation of trade union strength. Retention was visible though in secluded ‘close-knit industrial communities’ where sectarian norms remained more powerfully inchoated into social life, including the workplace.75 As at Bedlay and Polkemmet, industrial relations were the product of core management expectations being filtered through local traditions. Michael McMahon’s memories of workplace organization at the Terex factory reveal how plant management were able to employ sectarian industrial relations practices despite the intent of American owners:76
Terex opened up in the early 1950s, and I was told this by one of the American bosses because I was a shop steward in the place … He’d come across and he was talking to management and the foremen and all the rest of it, and it struck him how open they were in their pride in the fact the factory was predominantly Protestant. And so, he asked the management to check what the make-up of the factory was and then he asked them to check what the make-up of the local community was. And it didn’t match up. So, he insisted that the management do something about that. And the company was expanding, the reason why he was over was cause the company was expanding. They built an extension onto the factory and the manager insisted that there had to be a higher proportion of Catholics hired to make the balance of the workshop reflect better the local community.
All the new recruits were all hired ontae one shift. What you ended up with was a shift that was predominantly Catholic and a shift that was predominantly Protestant … When it came to the end of oor apprenticeship we were told tae well, we were invited to ask what shift did we want to go ontae. And it was made pretty clear to us that we would be expected to go onto the shift that suited the religion best y’know. And most of the Catholic apprenticeships went onto one shift and most of the Protestant apprentices went onto another shift. And that was in the late 1970s, early 1980s, that kind of stuff was still going on. And there was one shop steward who ran an election campaign on the basis that he thought there was too many Catholic shop stewards and he wanted to get elected to redress the balance and make sure there was less Catholics.
When the company closed down in 1984, what they decided to do was close the company down and then rehire those that would make the company efficient, i.e. those that were trained in more than one skill. As apprentices, we were quite high up on the list of desirables because we could work all the machines because we were trained on them all. Whereas a lot of guys had come in and only worked on one machine. Thirty years and every day only working on one machine. So, when we were getting hired back most of the apprentices were getting hired back but the guy who was hiring them back was a very senior individual in the Orange Order and he was making sure he was selecting the ones he didn’t want to come back as well. And it was noticed a lot of the people that weren’t getting re-recruited, re-hired, were the Catholics and it just reverted to the way it had been. And there was a lot of religious tension built up around that time.77
Within a subsidiary where senior management made commitments to opposing sectarianism, divisive practices were fostered by local level managers and trade union representatives. These accommodated senior management directives but ensured the workforce remained demarked by religious denomination into the 1980s. Sectarian distinctions were to some extent embedded within at least part of the inward investment assembly goods sector. Upon closure, as industrial employment became a scarcer resource, sectarian affiliations were strengthened through their deployment as a mechanism to lay claim to and ration well-paid engineering jobs.
Associations formed through shared ethno-religious affiliations also continued within Lanarkshire coal mining into the 1980s. Alan Blades grew up in the village of Greengairs, adjacent to Airdrie, which is a characteristic example of the small settlements Knox identified with the continuity of sectarianism. Orange connections provided a common link between workers and managers. Alan emphasized, however, that the closure of local collieries meant there were also strong links between Catholic and Protestant miners. His testimony corresponds to the requirements of composure, as well as the dialogical nature of oral history interviews, by emphasizing that sectarianism was limited to ‘banter’ and comparing it to the Edinburgh football rivalry he assumed I was familiar with:
I grew up wi ma gaffer. I was in the Orange bands wi ma gaffer, y’know what I mean. We were a wee Orange village, so I was in the bands wi aw the boys I worked wi y’know … But see, the difference is, a lot ae folk think that because yer in the Orange bands you hated the Catholics. Some ae ma best mates are Catholics. Oh aye, I grew up wi some guys, but they accepted it cause they grew up knowin that we were aw in the bands and oor Dads were aw in the bands, y’know. Ye have yer bit ae banter y’know. Ye Orange bee y’Fenian bee, y’ effin bee and aw that. We aw liked each other, y’know. It was a bit of banter. They went tae Celtic games on a Saturday and we went tae Rangers games, know what I’m saying? A lot ae Catholics worked in the pits wi us as well, especially as you moved out ae Moodiesburn and Croy and that. They’re big Catholic villages. Still get on great wi aw they boys. Banter, that’s aw it is, a wee bit ae banterin, y’know. Celtic Ranger, y’know how it goes. You have Hearts and Hibs. *laughs*
These recollections chime with Wight’s study of ‘Cauldmoss’, an anonymized coal and steel town also located within Central Scotland. Wight detailed the importance attached to an annual Orange march during the mid 1980s. Although only attended by a small minority of dedicated members of the local Lodge, the march was greeted by a few hundred spectators, who flew Union flags, brandished Rangers Football Club scarves, and cheered as the band played while the march passed the town’s Catholic church.78
Yet the nationalized coal industry and the operation of moral economy prerogatives in the management of pit closures minimized divisions which markedly declined from their scale and legitimated status within the private industry. While trade union organization and Labour party politics created semblances of unity, they also facilitated the management of division. This is visible in the continuation of residential divides under public housing and in workplace practices.79 These were relative rather than absolute and diminished during the second half of the twentieth century. Willie Hamilton recollected the existence of prohibitive religious divisions in the Shotts area within new public housing developments that prevented one of his friends from marrying his partner. Reflecting the more open attitudes of his generational cohort who matured during the mid twentieth century, Willie felt these distinctions had dissipated over time:
People from different areas had moved in y’know it took quite a while to integrate and then you had the religious problem … My mate courted quite seriously, but they never got married cause he was a Protestant and she was Catholic. It was their parents. It was quite restrictive for a lot of young couples.80
Sectarianism was a fading but present source of division in the Scottish coalfields into the 1980s. Although not marked by the same extent of employer-instigated fractiousness or street violence of earlier in the century, after 1945, ethnic and religious ties continued to forge important bonds of identity and difference. The example of Terex shows that when industrial employment again became scarce in the 1980s it was contested on sectarian lines in some instances. The continued strength of sectarian identities was also confirmed in the 1994 Monklands East by-election. As at Terex ten years before, it was the distribution of economic resources, in this case local authority spending and employment, which was disputed. The election was marred by accusations that the Labour-led Monklands District Council heavily favoured the largely Catholic town of Coatbridge over predominantly Protestant Airdrie. In her victory speech, the Labour candidate, Helen Liddell, accused the Scottish National Party (SNP) of playing the ‘Orange card’ after her party’s majority fell from over 15,000 to 1,660.81 The rise in support for the SNP was also indicative of prolonged disillusionment with the British state in communities where its industrial presence had diminished through major coal and steel closures and privatization during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Recollections of sectarianism demonstrate the critical lens with which coalfield communities are remembered and the value of oral testimonies in reconstructing otherwise unrecorded events. Memories of the industrial past are filtered through a critical nostalgia which located the positive dimensions of associational life and links between workplaces and neighbourhoods that were lost through deindustrialization. This was a long and complex process. The new communities constructed through public house-building along with the nationalized industry’s concentration on super pits and inward investment were fondly remembered: ‘it was pretty good’ in restructured locales that offered improved material conditions and the appearance of stability. However, a potent ambivalence towards mining’s occupational dangers is visible in recollections of disasters as well as the patriarchal social conservatism and sectarianism that were embedded in community identities and rivalries. Localized coalfield communities were founded on the collectivism engendered by shared experiences of adversity. But links to a Scottish national coalfield community were reinforced by both the extension of travel to work distances under nationalization and collective struggles for improved conditions. Deindustrialization has not entirely ended associations between coal mining experiences and localities in the Scottish coalfield. The commemorations of the Auchengeich disaster and the depopulated pit villages of Bothwellhaugh and Glenbuck demonstrates that industrial culture’s influence extends beyond the industrial era.
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1 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. 8–9.
2 N. Dennis, F. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is Our Life: an Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Community (London, 1956).
3 S. Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Inter-War Britain (London, 1980).
4 Brendan Moohan, interview with author, residence, Livingston, 5 Feb. 2015.
5 J. Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2019), p. 62.
6 R. Williams, Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London, 2005), pp. 32–4.
7 A. Little, A. ‘Scotland’s decision’, BBC News, 4 Sept. 2014 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_8699/> [accessed 1 Dec. 2019]. [accessed 1 Dec. 2019].
8 Michael McMahon, interview with author, constituency office, Bellshill, 21 Feb. 2014.
9 Mary Spence, interview with author, The Terraces café, Olympia shopping centre, East Kilbride, 11 Aug. 2014.
10 Jessie Clark, interview with author, residence, Broddock, 22 March 2014.
11 Jessie Clark, interview.
12 Shotts focus group, Nithsdale Sheltered Housing Complex, Shotts, 4 March 2014.
13 Shotts focus group.
14 Marian and Willie Hamilton, interview, residence, Shotts, 14 March 2014.
15 Margaret Wegg, interview with author, residence, Stepps, 17 Nov. 2014.
16 Billy Ferns, interview with author, residence, Bishopbriggs, 17 March 2014.
17 Siobhan McMahon, interview with author, Central Scotland Regional List MSPs Office, Coatbridge, 28 March 2014.
18 Duncan and Marian Macleod, interview with author, residence, Carluke, 1 March 2014. Bing is a Scots term for slagheap.
19 W. W. Knox, Industrial Nation: Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800–present (Edinburgh, 1999), p. 262.
20 Jennifer McCarey, interview with author, iCafé, Woodlands, Glasgow, 9 Oct. 2014.
21 G. Hassan and E. Shaw, The Strange Death of Labour Scotland (Edinburgh, 2012), pp. 5–7.
22 J. Phillips, V. Wright and J. Tomlinson, ‘Deindustrialization, the Linwood car plant and Scotland’s political divergence from England in the 1960s and 1970s’, Twentieth Century British History, xxx (2019), 399–423.
23 T. Strangleman, ‘“Smokestack nostalgia,” “ruin porn” or working-class obituary: the role and meaning of deindustrial representation’, International Labor and Working-Class History, lxxxiv (2013), 23–37, at p. 28.
24 B. Jones, The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth Century England (Manchester, 2012), pp. 187–8.
25 R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London, 2012), p. 6.
26 S. High, Industrial Sunset: the Making of North America’s Rustbelt (Toronto, 2003), p. 50.
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28 Jennifer McCarey, interview.
29 Mick McGahey, interview with author, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, Edinburgh, 31 March 2014.
30 Rhona Wilkinson, interview with author, residence, Fauldhouse, 7 Nov. 2014. A German biscuit is a variety of sweet biscuit popular in Scotland. It is more commonly known as an Empire biscuit.
31 Barbara Goldie and Margaret Keena, interview with author, Whitehall Bowling Club, Cambuslang, 8 Dec. 2014.
32 Sam Purdie, interview with author, UWS Hamilton campus, 3 May 2018.
33 D. Kay, ‘Liverpool legend Bill Shankly’s spirit rekindled in village he first kicked a ball’, Liverpool Echo, 3 Sept. 2019 <https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/liverpool-most-important-date-history-16843384> [accessed 2 Dec. 2019].
34 National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (NRS), Coal Board (CB) 313/14/1/16A, D. Kelly, Scottish Colliery, Enginemen, Boilermen and Tradesmen’s Association (SCEBTA), to R. W. Parker, NCB, Edinburgh, 20 March 1959.
35 S. Swarbrick, ‘Breathing fresh life into the story of forgotten Lanarkshire mining village Bothwellhaugh’, Herald, 11 Feb. 2017 <http://www.heraldscotland.com/life_style/pictures/15084711.display/> [accessed 2 Dec. 2019]; ‘Bothwellhaugh Ex-Residents Committee’, Bothwellhaugh <http://www.bothwellhaugh.com/> [accessed 2 Dec. 2019].
36 A. Portelli, ‘What makes oral history different’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. R. Perks and A. Thomson (Oxford, 2006), pp. 32–42, at p. 40.
37 Alan Blades, interview with author, resident, Airdrie, 26 Feb. 2014.
38 Strangleman, ‘“Smokestack”’, pp. 25–28.
39 A. Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York, 2010), pp. 1–3.
40 Alan Blades, interview.
41 Brendan Moohan, interview.
42 Brendan Moohan, interview.
43 M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism: is There No Alternative? (Winchester, 2009), p. 5.
44 Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, xvi, cc889–91 (27 Jan. 1982), Cardowan Colliery (Accident) <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1982/jan/27/cardowan-colliery-accident> [accessed 2 Dec. 2019].
45 Scott McCallum, interview with author, The Counting House, Dundee, 22 Feb. 2014.
46 Margaret Wegg, interview.
47 Willie Doolan, interview with author, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 14 June 2019.
48 Willie Doolan, interview, 2019.
49 E. Gibbs and J. Phillips, ‘Remembering Auchengeich: the largest fatal accident in Scottish coal in the nationalised era’, Scottish Labour History, liv (2019), 47–57, at p. 49.
50 Siobhan McMahon, interview.
51 A. J. Richards, Miners on Strike: Class Solidarity and Division in Britain (Oxford, 1996), p. 22.
52 Willie Doolan, interview, 2019; Phillips and Gibbs, ‘Auchengeich’, p. 52.
53 Willie Doolan, interview with author, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 12 March 2014.
54 Willie Doolan, interview, 2019.
55 Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners, pp. 88–117.
56 Observervation notes from Auchengeich colliery memorial service, 15 Sept. 2019.
57 Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners, p. 98.
58 Observeration notes from Auchengeich colliery memorial service, 16 Sept. 2018.
59 E. Kelly, ‘Review essay: sectarianism, bigotry and ethnicity – the gulf in understanding’, Scottish Affairs, i (2005), 106–17, at pp. 109–10.
60 Jessie Clark, interview.
61 Pat Egan, interview with author, Fife College, Glenrothes, 5 Feb. 2014.
62 John Hamilton, interview with author, South Lanarkshire Integrated Children’s Services office, Larkhall, 26 Apr. 2016.
63 Mick McGahey, interview.
64 Busby, Stein and Shankly: the football men’ Arena, episode one, H. McIlvanney, BBC, UK, originally broadcast on 28 Mar. 1997, 55 mins.
65 Pat Egan, interview.
66 P. Geoghegan, The People’s Referendum: Why Scotland will Never be the Same Again (Glasgow, 2015), pp. 39–40.
67 A. Campbell, The Scottish Miners, 1874–1939, i: Industry, Work and Community (Aldershot, 2000) pp. 317–27, 342–6.
68 G. Walker, ‘The Orange Order in Scotland between the wars’, International Review of Social History, xxxvii (1992), 177–206, at p. 199.
69 Jennifer McCarey, interview.
70 Sam Purdie, interview.
71 John Brannan, interview with author, UWS Hamilton campus, 21 Feb. 2017.
72 Jennifer McCarey, interview.
73 A. Campbell, ‘Exploring miners’ militancy, 1889–1966’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, vii (1999), 147–64, at p. 158.
74 Michael McMahon, interview.
75 Knox, Industrial Nation, p. 269.
76 I. R. Paterson, ‘The pulpit and the ballot box: Catholic assimilation and the decline of church influence’, in Scotland’s Shame?: Bigotry and Sectarianism in Modern Scotland, ed. T. M. Devine (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 219–30, at p. 220.
77 Michael McMahon, interview.
78 D. Wight, Workers Not Wasters: Masculine Respectability, Consumption and Unemployment in Central Scotland: a Community Study (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 54–6.
79 G. Walker, ‘Sectarian tensions in Scotland: social and cultural dynamics and the politics of perception’, in Devine, Scotland’s Shame?, pp. 125–34, at pp. 127–31.
80 Marian and Willie Hamilton, interview.
81 Paterson, ‘Pulpit’, p. 224; J. Aldridge, ‘Labour to act over Monklands scandal’, Independent, 2 July 1994 <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/labour-to-act-over-monklands-council-scandal-mp-to-heal-wounds-caused-by-allegations-against-local-authority-john-arlidge-reports-1410968.html> [accessed 2 Dec. 2019].