5. Generational perspectives

Successive generations have negotiated the cultural, political and economic changes associated with deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields since the mid twentieth century. There are important differences between the meanings that they attributed to the closure of coal mines, steelworks and factories. This chapter analyses the perspectives of three distinct generations in the Scottish coalfields. The ‘interwar veterans’ were at the helm of the newly formed National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA) when coal mining was nationalized in 1947, after experiencing class conflict and mass unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s. During the 1960s, the interwar veterans were succeeded in workplace and community leadership by the maturing ‘industrial citizen’ generation, whose formative experiences took place under social democratic economic management. Finally, a generation of ‘flexible workers’ faced intensified deindustrialization during the 1980s and 1990s and adapted to less secure labour markets. The examination of these generational distinctions proceeds through an analysis of the transitions between the interwar veterans and industrial citizens, and then between the industrial citizens and flexible workers. A final section assesses the complex interplay of inheritance and conflict between generations. Each generation learned from its predecessor, but with a critical view of their failures as well as their successes. Cultural changes engendered by shifts in political economy also differentiated ambitions and values. Nevertheless, a strong sense of connection to family, community and occupational historical experience as well as commitments to maintaining workplace and trade union traditions shaped coalfield generations, even as coal mining employment itself was marginalized.

As collieries closed, the history of their distinctive role in shaping identities within former coal mining settlements and in shaping moral economy approaches towards industrial employment remained formative to consciousness in the coalfields. Experiences of the transition to a diversified industrial structure, and thereafter towards a service sector-dominated economy through intensified deindustrialization, were received through the lens of earlier experiences. Existing Scottish coalfield scholarship demonstrates the value of generational analyses. Alan Campbell has developed a method of studying coalfield generations by linking them with forms of workplace organization, associated industrial relations, and political outlooks.¹ His research on the Scottish miners concludes in 1939. Jim Phillips’s recent contributions insightfully trace generations of miners’ socio-political attitudes through industrial reorganization under nationalization.² These approaches are extended in this chapter by incorporating perspectives from workers in other sectors. It includes a focus on the assembly goods plants that to some extent replaced coal employment between the 1940s and 1970s as well as to the career trajectories of miners after the last major colliery closures during the 1980s and 1990s.

Generational consciousness is the product of age cohorts becoming aware of themselves as a distinct entity defined against others based on collective experience.³ Karl Mannheim’s foundational theory emphasizes the role of major life experiences that generally take place before groups mature to their thirties, and which formatively shape political and social outlooks. These events are experienced within ‘interior time’, defined as ‘the time-interval separating generations’.⁴ Distinct phases in economic restructuring were fundamental to generational consciousness within the Scottish coalfields through establishing perspectives shaped by the conditioning of interior time. The extension of state economic management during the 1940s, which incorporated both a commitment to full employment and the nationalization of coal, and the later abandonment of this regime in favour of the operation of liberalized markets from the late 1970s, were central to experiences and perceptions of deindustrialization. In both phases, differentiated age groups had distinct vantages on the same events. They were formative for a younger generation and interpreted through longer life-histories by an older cohort.

Episodes of generational succession are pivotal to understanding the evolving politics of Scottish mining trade unionism over the second half of the twentieth century, especially shifting attitudes towards the nationalized coal industry. Labour and political historians have often emphasized the dynamics of conflict which can be associated with generational differences. During the ‘long Italian 1968’ an ‘old left’ and ‘new left’ clashed over their regard for constitutional democracy.⁵ Not dissimilarly, in early 1970s America, a young cohort of industrial workers rebelled against the system of highly bureaucratized trade unionism that an older cohort regarded as its major achievement.⁶ These conflicts were fought over objections to alienation in the workplace as much as the more piecemeal objectives of wages and conditions usually associated with trade unionism. They were highly influenced by large-scale societal changes that acted to mould expectations of economic wellbeing and democratic engagement as well as perceptions of social justice.

There were parallels in the Scottish coalfields. The succession of Michael McGahey to the NUMSA’s presidency in 1967 represented the ascension of a generation that had matured under nationalization. This transition ushered in a harder stance against colliery closures, and expectations of pay and conditions which were determined by comparing miners to other industrial workers in the context of rising ‘affluence’.⁷ This change did not take place without conflict, during which the older generation, like their Italian and American counterparts, defended the integrity of the social democratic structures which they had built. However, cohorts within the twentieth-century Scottish coalfield were also strongly moulded by the intergenerational transmission of historical consciousness. Family and workplace socialization bound the moral economy and facilitated major collective mobilizations in national coal strikes during the 1970s and 1980s.

Transition I: interwar veterans to industrial citizens

Table 5.1 denotes an ideal anatomy of the transformation in the Scottish coalfield’s economic structure, workforce and the shifting political priorities under which economic changes were managed. These variables were central in shaping differing generational experiences and perspectives. The interwar generation held trade union leadership from the beginning of nationalization up to 1967. Its chief interior time experiences were the miners’ lockouts of 1921 and 1926, and the economic and social dislocation associated with mass unemployment and the victimization of trade unionists during the 1920s and 1930s. Interwar veterans saw the operation of joint regulation within the nationalized industry as a key achievement which granted employment stability. The ascendance of the industrial citizen generation was institutionally confirmed by Michael McGahey succeeding Alex Moffat as NUMSA president in 1967. Their consciousness was formed in the context of rising working-class affluence during the decades following the Second World War. Industrial citizens had a more ambivalent perspective on nationalization than interwar veterans and exhibited a less quiescent attitude towards the National Coal Board (NCB). This generation was characterized by both mounting opposition to closures and participation in industrial action during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Table 5.1. Generation, temporality and employment structure in the Scottish coalfields

The distinction between these two generations’ experiences is exemplified by a comparison of memories from the oral testimonies collected for this study. Willie Allison, who was born in 1933, elaborated positively upon the stability and social justice of nationalization in comparison to the struggles miners faced in the private industry, emphasizing the social control wielded by employers. Illuminating the distinction between the interior time experiences of interwar veterans and industrial citizens, Willie compared the victimization and unemployment his father, who was also a miner, faced in his working life. Willie noted that despite major pit closures, he was never unemployed after starting work with the NCB in 1948:

Willie’s emphasis on the social change associated with nationalization was shared in all testimonies. His comments highlight that the price of resistance to employers’ power was felt by whole families during the interwar period. Women also directly experienced these aspects of class relations in employment settings. Jessie Clark recalled her experiences of domestic service aged fourteen as exploitative but also marked by differences accorded to age distinctions:

Jessie left domestic service to work in the Douglas Castle pit canteen because she ‘just didn’t want to be somebody’s skivvy’. She reflected upon how the generation of interwar veteran women who preceded her had their opportunities limited through both class and gender oppression. Women were taught domestic science instead of complex maths at school, and few mining families could afford to send their children to grammar school if they passed entrance exams. The post-Second World War expansion of the welfare state provided Jessie with enhanced opportunities however, and she was able to find employment in social work.¹⁰ Jessie’s employment trajectory is indicative of the improved material and ideological conditions following the Second World War when manual workers and their families benefited from a ‘redistribution of social esteem’.¹¹

Abe Moffat’s autobiography conforms to a narrative of progressive political and industrial reform during the 1940s. Moffat’s outlook was pivotally shaped by his earlier formative experiences which followed his demobilization at the end of the First World War. He recollected maturing in the context of the major struggles in the Fife coalfield between 1919 and 1926.¹² These formative experiences were followed by division between miners’ unions, mass unemployment and the blacklisting of communists, including both Abe and his brother, Alex. The Moffats’ subsequent support for a unified miners’ union and respect for its official structure under nationalization was pivotally shaped by these earlier episodes of personal and collective disruption. For Moffat and other interwar veterans, the 1940s experience of state intervention within coal mining, and its collaborative rather than hostile relation with organized labour, was coloured by the stark contrast with the previous two decades. Moffat viewed the conversion of the luxurious Gleneagles hotel in Perthshire to a miners’ convalescence home as evidence that ‘During the [Second World] War Scottish miners were for once treated as human beings’.¹³

Maintaining the benefits of relative employment stability within the nationalized industry’s structures of joint administration was the chief concern of interwar veterans from 1947. The conservative dimensions of these trends were anticipated in Moffat’s role as an advocate of productionism during the Second World War. From the summer of 1941, in the context of the fascist threat to the Soviet Union, Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) members were integral to minimizing industrial conflict in the Scottish coalfield. During the autumn of 1943, Moffat arranged to meet with miners imprisoned in Barlinnie. Their arrest followed an unofficial stoppage at Cardowan colliery that had led to over thirty miners being detained and fined under Order 1305, which made striking illegal due to emergency wartime conditions. The refusal of around half of the arrested strikers to pay escalated the dispute and led to further walkouts across the Lanarkshire coalfield. In collaboration with another Fife miner, the later under-secretary of state for Scotland, Joseph Westwood, Moffat acted to defuse the situation and ensured an orderly return to work.¹⁴ Moffat retained a pronounced hostility to unofficial strike action, which contributed to later generational conflicts within the NUMSA.

Expectations of dialogue and the maintenance of procedure stimulated as well as muted interwar veteran criticisms of the nationalized industry. This was exemplified by the NUMSA general secretary, Bill Pearson, when he condemned the NCB’s ‘mysterious ways of working’ during the closure of Baton colliery in 1949. Pearson expressed disappointed that the Board’s Labour Department had not involved the union in organizing transfers.¹⁵ NUMSA representatives had similar misgivings ten years later when they criticized the NCB’s refusal to meet representatives to discuss the announcement of twenty pit closures in Scotland, although more profitable opencast mining would expand.¹⁶ Thomas Fraser, the MP for Hamilton, was among those who communicated grievances. Fraser won the seat with strong support from the Scottish miners’ union after standing as a Labour candidate at a 1943 by-election.¹⁷ He clearly articulated the interwar veteran understanding of nationalization as a measure of economic security, emphasizing that he expected guarantees provided to miners who had relocated to Scottish Special Housing Association homes on promises of forty years of secure employment would be maintained in work. Fraser’s contentions were articulated in moral economy terms which juxtaposed the forces of the double movement, the pressure for financial gain versus integrity and social well-being: ‘The National Coal Board’s moral obligation to the mineworkers should be stronger than any opencast contract’.¹⁸

While Abe Moffat and Bill Pearson collaborated with state and industry authorities to end the unofficial strike during 1943, younger men who shared their political affiliations were standing on picket lines. They included Michael McGahey and other young communists. McGahey was sacked from Gateside colliery for his involvement in the industrial action. Generational markers were stronger than party political allegiances in explaining attitudes towards social partnership. Younger trade union activists across Labour, communist and Trotskyist divides struck because they did not carry a worldview formed by the ‘initial adult experiences’ of defeat and division that shaped interwar veterans.¹⁹ The experience of wartime and post-war full employment, and rising living standards, raised material expectations among industrial citizens. Scottish miners of this cohort were strongly motivated to act on matters of health and safety, as well as miners’ pay.²⁰ Mick McGahey, who was born in 1955, emphasized that his father had campaigned for health and safety improvements and oversaw cooperation between the NUM and the NCB during the 1960s and 1970s. This advanced beyond the earlier cooperation associated with the nationalized industry and came about due to both growing concern within the NUM and the development of the Board’s expertise.²¹ Nationalization’s provision of improved material conditions and its mechanisms of joint regulation facilitated the demands for further improved conditions:

The demand for all miners to be equipped with self-rescuers rose to prominence following the fire at Michael colliery in 1967 which killed nine miners. The NUMSA successfully pressed for a public inquiry and the NCB made provisions for self-rescuers afterwards.²³ Willie Doolan, a former miner from Moodiesburn, reflected ruefully in 2019 that if self-rescuers had been available, they could have saved some of the forty-seven lives lost in the Auchengeich colliery fire which took place not far from his home in 1959. The achievement of major health and safety improvements under nationalization was in part the product of generational learning. During the late 1950s, major disasters replaced fatalities from smaller accidents as the dominant cause of deaths in Scottish mining. Maturing through these years stimulated this cohort’s campaigning on health and safety issues.²⁴

Industrial citizens’ expectations were galvanized by the improved conditions and full employment delivered by the social embedding of the economy after 1945. In Polanyi’s terms this incorporated the efforts to have labour standards ‘determined outside the market’ through the intervention of ‘public bodies’ including empowered trade unions, the NCB, and legislation.²⁵ Commitments to social partnerships were also strongly evident in managerial testimonies. Ian Hogarth was part of the industrial citizen cohort. He was born in 1928 and grew up in Springboig, to the east of Glasgow. Ian’s father worked as an accountant for Bairds and Scottish Steel, which gave him some acquaintance with mining. He recalled the ‘hungry thirties, I remember when I was at the primary school. I would say more than half my schoolmates’ fathers were unemployed’.²⁶ Ian subsequently graduated with a metallurgy diploma from Strathclyde Technical College in 1951. He later joined the NCB and went on to become a management trainee at Lady Victoria colliery in Midlothian before transferring west to work at Cardowan in Lanarkshire. Ian became the first Area ventilation engineer for the Central West Area before transferring to the Lothians in 1959 and remained at the Board’s Scottish headquarters at Green Park in Edinburgh until retiring in 1987. Although he had vague memories of the interwar depression, it was the new nationalized industry that shaped Ian’s approach to management. Ian’s outlook was moulded by the mutual respect he found between coal miners and managers. Jimmy Henderson, the Cardowan undermanager, arranged to have older miners employed in suitable work, including one man who suffered from pneumoconiosis and another who had lost a leg in the First World War. Ian remembered both these men as industrious and loyal workers.²⁷ This sense of social responsibility foregrounded later efforts to develop more comprehensive compensation and health and safety measures. Ian elaborated on the commitment he felt towards those who worked under him by relaying that he rebuked men working under him for describing themselves as ‘only miners’, imploring ‘you’re highly skilled men’.²⁸

Other managers remembered a similar sense of societal obligation. Peter Mansell-Mullen began his managerial training in Nottinghamshire during the 1950s after graduating from politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford. Peter explained that he joined the Board because he ‘had a fairly privileged existence and I wanted to put something back’. Peter combined these inclinations with an interest in nationalization, which there was ‘a great feeling’ of sympathy for at the time. He went on to become the NCB’s director of manpower, but, like Ian, described working to bring down barriers between himself and other employees, including other managers who were ‘largely people who’d come up inside the ranks’ of the industry.²⁹

The introduction of formalized managerial structures under nationalization offered far greater opportunities to entrants of the industrial citizen generation than those which had been available to interwar veterans. These developments contributed to a stronger sense of occupational identity among mine managers. Under public ownership, managers were no longer tied to the private industry’s often relatively small-scale and paternalistic firms. Their new-found prestige encouraged managers to be ‘protective of the nationalized industry’.³⁰ These inclinations were further cemented by managers’ connections to mining communities affected by closure programmes. Ian Hogarth noted his concern about the fate of miners who experienced mass unemployment: ‘the pride these people had pride in their job, don’t take it away from them’.³¹

Sam Purdie’s recollection of being informed by his superiors during the mid 1960s that he would not be promoted to a colliery chief mining engineer in the Scottish coalfield due to the rate of closures further confirms the impact of deindustrialization across the coal industry workforce. Closures disrupted the expectations of labour market stability and career advancement that the industrial citizen generation had anticipated in the nationalized coal industry. Sam indicated that he took the moral economy sentiments, as well as industrial hard-headedness, from the coal industry into the Marathon oil rig construction yard at Clydebank where he later worked. Although he explained efforts at simplifying craft pay scales left him with ‘scars’, Sam also recalled having a strong working relationship with Jimmy Reid who was the engineering union representative at the yard. This partnership extended to lobbying Tony Benn as secretary state for energy during the late 1970s.³²

As Mick McGahey’s comments indicate above, there was a trend towards convergence between workers and management through a generational commitment to work towards improved conditions. Ian Hogarth felt health and safety was taken ‘very much more seriously because nationalization stopped this problem of the coal owners ignoring things that were involved with safety’. He gave the example of methane monitoring, which was given recognition through the Board appointing him among its first cadre of Area ventilation officers. Hogarth further emphasized that under nationalization, legislation on methane levels was strictly followed whereas it had been flouted due to profitmaking imperatives under private ownership, and through the intimidation of underground officials by coal owners.³³ Ian Terris began work at Cardowan colliery in 1952. Like other industrial citizens, he was attracted by the offer of secure employment and advancement in the industry. Terris attained this through training as a shotfirer and later transferred to Rothes colliery in Fife during 1959. His autobiography confirms that the industrial citizen generation placed demands on the nationalized industry, and underlined expectations associated with health and safety. These were directed at management as well as fellow workers. At Rothes, Terris became a ‘marked rebel’ for demanding oilskin overalls to work in damp conditions, but he also recalled a physical altercation with a tunneller after Ian found him smoking underground.³⁴ Terris’s journey of social mobility saw him ultimately leave the mining industry. He used his technical training as a basis to study engineering at Stow College in Glasgow before starting a new career as a maintenance service officer.³⁵

Transition II: industrial citizens to flexible workers

The intensification of deindustrialization from the late 1970s drew sharp dividing lines between industrial citizens and flexible worker generations, which can be demonstrated by comparing trajectories. Willie Hamilton, who was born in Shotts during 1936, had a career that was characteristic of the industrial citizen miner’s capacity for advancement in the coal industry and outside it. Willie followed his father, uncles and brother into the industry, starting at Kingshill 3 colliery in Shotts after leaving school aged fifteen during 1951. He recalled the NCB was perceived as providing a ‘job for life’. Willie became an NCB official at Kingshill 3 and then Polkemmet in West Lothian, progressing from a shotfirer to a deputy and later an overman.³⁶ However, there were significant qualifiers to this advancement in terms of self-presentation. Willie was keen to emphasize that he retained strong connections with the men who worked under him, which was underpinned by a strong sense of class solidarity and shared investment in the moral economy. He underlined this through reference to the 1972 miners’ strike. Along with other officials, he engaged in ‘giein the pickets a lift doon the road’ to Kingshill 3 from Shotts.³⁷

Willie recalled that unlike in other pits, there was little animosity between miners and colliery officials during the strike. Officials such as himself attended for work but then did not cross picket lines, allowing more senior staff to act as safety cover. Like Ian Terris, Wille exemplified the industrial citizen generation’s capacity for occupational and social mobility when he left the shrinking coal industry for utilities management. However, he retained a coal mining identity which was perhaps shaped by both the needs of telling a composed life story and the effects of historical hindsight. Willie remembered arguing with a Ravenscraig steelworker in a Shotts pub over the impending coal strike during the early 1980s. He warned the Ravenscraig man: ‘“You cannae see beyond the end of yer nose” [The man replied] “how?” I says, “If the pits shut how much steel does the pits use in a year? Million ton?” “aw they use a lot” “there’s gonna be one more steelworks no needed if there’s a million ton no used it’ll be the Craig that shuts”, and so it was’.³⁸

Intensified deindustrialization during the last two decades of the twentieth century eroded opportunities for the ascendant generation. Flexible workers entered a labour market characterized by falling rates of industrial employment. Willie Hamilton remembered that among his peers, many men had opted to work in assembly plants including the Cummins engineering factory in Shotts where Willie himself worked for a short spell in 1959. Other large plants within travelling distance included the Organon and Honeywell at the Newhouse industrial estate as well as Caterpillar in Tannochside. Willie noted that the Cummins and Caterpillar plants had now closed, while both Organon and Honeywell have both severely reduced their employment levels.³⁹ The contraction of coal mining further contributed to the demise of opportunities for industrial careers. Alan Blades, who was born in 1962, a generation apart from Willie, described how at Bedlay, the NCB had provided opportunities to obtain skilled jobs through apprenticeships. His father was able to gain promotion by undertaking night school courses in shotfiring. Alan’s advancement in the industry was thwarted by closures and privatization. Between 1979 and 1997, he worked at Bedlay, Polkemmet and then at the Longannet complex. In contrast to his older brother, Alan was unable to attain the rank of faceworker.⁴⁰ Scott McCallum had a more pronounced experience of exclusion from coal mining opportunities. He was ten years old when Cardowan colliery closed during 1983. The pit was within walking distance of the family home and employed his father and brother at the time. Subsequently, the 1984–5 miners’ strike became a formative experience for Scott, as well as explanation for his own inability to follow his grandfather, father and brother into coal mining:

The miners’ strike was a formative experience within other flexible worker testimonies. Brendan Moohan was a nineteen-year-old underground worker at Monktonhall colliery in Midlothian when the strike began. Brendan was dismissed for gross misconduct in February 1985 following his arrest while picketing the previous June. His narrative underlines the strike as a transformational experience: ‘as a young guy, I didn’t have any views on it [pit closures]. Until 1984 I didn’t have strong opinions about really anything’.⁴² Brendan’s testimony was characteristic of ‘activist’ accounts of the strike.⁴³ He emphasized that the broad coalition of strike supporters had a significant change in his own consciousness as a young man who had previously been comparatively apathetic and lived in a secluded and socially conservative community.

Revisionist scholarship questions the extent of changes in social relations within the coalfield associated with miners’ strike activism,⁴⁴ and relates it to longer-term alterations in economic structure.⁴⁵ Emphasis on long-run and slow-moving developments does not negate the subjective significance that men who were young miners at the time have ascribed to experiences of the strike over three decades later in terms of its impact on their perspective and in moulding a sustained worldview.⁴⁶ Connections made through these experiences have often played an important role in shaping their subsequent life course in other respects. Brendan first met his future wife, Angela, through her engagement in solidarity action with the strike and both have retained a sustained involvement with the labour movement since.⁴⁷ Resistance to workplace closure had a similar effect on other workers. Bob Burrows recalled the difficult decisions he faced when sitting on the hardship committee during the occupation against the closure of the Caterpillar tractor factory in Tannochside, North Lanarkshire, during 1987:

Bob explained that the skills he learned on the hardship committee served as an apprenticeship for his later career as a local authority personal debt counsellor. He underlined the shock that the transition entailed. Bob went from a well-paid job at Caterpillar to starting work at a local authority homeless shelter. In this role he was exposed to the impact of intensified deindustrialization through the growing poverty which affected service users, but also in the form of his diminished pay and conditions. Bob found his wages almost halved despite working longer hours, and he was reliant on Family Income Support to make ends meet.⁴⁹

While he detailed major changes in circumstances, Bob insisted on the retention of a moral economy perspective which was reinforced by the experience of opposing accelerated deindustrialization in the factory occupation. A sense of major transition across the periods between the interwar private industrial economy, the postwar managed economy and the liberal market economy of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries was apparent in several other testimonies. Margaret Keena and Barbara Goldie were both born in 1931 and grew up in mining families in Cambuslang, South Lanarkshire. They vividly contrasted interwar conditions with those which followed the relative economic affluence and stability in the decades after the Second World War that they benefited from as members of the industrial citizen generation. Margaret recalled her cousin returning home from working in the pits in the Cambuslang area in his dirty work clothes, and underlined the relatively backward conditions that prevailed in the workplace and the home:

These comments were made within a wider discussion profiling how interwar experiences entered interior time and framed generational understandings. Barbara remembered her mother suffered from tuberculosis before she declared that ‘miners are heroes’ for experiencing harsh conditions underground. The dialogue then moved to considering the injustices and dangers within the mines. Several local deaths were mentioned, while Margaret recalled an uncle who was blinded in an accident underground during the 1930s and received minimal compensation.⁵¹ Margaret’s sister and Barbara’s brothers and sister worked at the local Hoover factory after the Second World War. The experience of Cambuslang’s transition from a coal and steel town to a diversified industrial structure, and then to a deindustrialized economy, was succinctly summarized in a discussion of the contribution the factory made to the town between the 1940s and 2005, when it closed:

Hoover’s factory was associated with both safer and cleaner work and higher wages than had been provided in the private coal mining industry. It was embedded in the community, providing employment for families, with jobs for women as well as men. The exit of ‘the Hoover’, after a prolonged rundown, ended significant industrial production in Cambuslang and contributed to rising unemployment in the area. John Slaven, who grew up in Birkenshaw in North Lanarkshire, had similar memories, but from the perspective of a representative of the flexible worker generation that entered the labour market during the intensified deindustrialization of the 1980s. John was born in 1965, after his parents relocated from Glasgow so that his father could take up work in the adjacent Caterpillar factory at Tannochside. His mother later also took up administrative employment at the plant. John summed up his feelings on the factory as representative of social improvements and economic modernization in comparison to the coal mining employment which had previously dominated the area:

Lanarkshire’s evolution under the diversified industrial economy was accompanied by social advancement. John felt that Birkenshaw and the surrounding area of North Lanarkshire was ‘a sorta prosperous working-class place,’ with recently constructed ‘good quality houses’. Tannochside was at the heart of investment brought by regional policy with both Ranco, another American engineering firm, and the nationalized British Steel Corporation steelworks at Ravenscraig, in close proximity. A strong sense of belonging was built around residing in the area and working within these factories, which indicates that the social democratic order of industrial citizenship extended beyond the publicly owned mining and steel industries. John referred to the Caterpillar factory as having built a ‘sense of identity’ characterized by a strong trade union and a ‘paternalistic’ management that supported social clubs, family days out involving workers’ children, and sporting activities.⁵⁴ As with Hoover’s rundown and final closure in Cambuslang, John remembered the closure of Caterpillar and the broader and sudden decline of industrial employment during the 1980s as a dislocating process that established his generational status by creating a significant distance from his parents’ experience. Employment at Tannochside peaked during the 1970s, before Caterpillar was badly affected by the global economic downturn of the early 1980s. The company sustained substantial losses between 1982 and 1984.⁵⁵ John’s testimony indicates the trauma associated with the series of local closures and job losses which ensued over the 1980s. The rundown of industrial employment in Lanarkshire altered his own life course through the absence of opportunities for someone who had left secondary school without many qualifications. Following long-term unemployment, John chose to leave for a job on the railways in London during 1985:

John’s sentiment that ‘there was absolutely nothing there’ for young workers, and a sense that he ‘had’ to leave for London provides a dramatic comparison with his earlier description of the relative affluence and stable industrial employment that had made Tannochside attractive to incomers. These reflections echo with Alessandro Portelli’s explorations of the ‘the short and violent life of the Industrial Revolution’. In Italy’s steelmaking centres, the industrial era was contained within a single lifetime, and even in American ‘heartlands’ easily traceable through a single family’s memory.⁵⁷ Scotland’s coalfields experienced major industrial development during the nineteenth century. However, the period between its zenith in production and employment terms during the 1910s and early 1920s and the cessation of deep coal mining in 2002 correlates with life-expectancy. The diversified industrial economy endured even more briefly, with its political and economic foundations fatally undermined by the late 1970s. Deindustrialization reveals the volatile patterns of resource extraction, investment and divestment that prevail within capitalist economies. These relations expose the ‘aura of permanence’ associated with the physicality of industrial activities’ presence in the built environment, as well as their centrality to communal experiences.⁵⁸ Large-scale industrial employment and the social routines and cultural identities constructed around it shaped the expectations of successive cohorts. Scotland’s status as an ‘industrial nation’ remained ‘common sense’ among policymakers as well as a dominant public perception into the late twentieth century.⁵⁹ This anchored moral economy outlooks within the coalfields. In the early 1980s, communal expectation remained that industrial employment would continue to sustain communities.

Inheritance and conflict

Generational successions are marked by cultural inheritances that are tempered by changes in the socioeconomic environment. Successive cohorts’ interior time experiences stoke modifications to or the rejection of parental expectations, but elements of tradition passed through coalfield generations. Paternal family bonds were an important part of coal mining identities. Scott McCallum recollected that within his family in Cardowan village there was an understanding that aged sixteen ‘[you] go there [to the pit], that was what ma father did, what ma grandfather did. It was just what you did’.⁶⁰ Antony Rooney recalled that within the Bellshill area this was secured through custom: ‘at that time the miners had an agreement, y’know, the oldest son in a family had to be more or less guaranteed a job’.⁶¹ Brendan Moohan described the NCB as having a policy of providing miners’ sons with employment during the early 1980s. However, he entered the mining industry to escape labour market adversity rather than through active choice:

Yet miners often wished for their sons to enter alternative industries. Anthony Rooney’s father rejected miners’ customary generational succession: ‘ma father wouldnae let any of us go anywhere near the pits’. Both Anthony and his brother found jobs in assembly engineering, with Anthony going on to become a shop steward at Caterpillar. Anthony displayed an ambivalence to coal mining. He summed up his attitude to underground work by stating that mining ‘was a dangerous dirty job’, and went on to reflect on the social injustices suffered by his father who died of lung disease: ‘All ma father got out of it was I carried him down the stair in a box, sixty years old’. Just four years earlier, Anthony’s father had been forced to retire early after the closure of Bardykes colliery in Cambuslang. But Anthony also proudly presented a picture of his father in his work clothes and indicated he felt a strong family connection to the industry: ‘I’ve never forgot my upbringing, y’know. I’ve definitely got an affinity with the miners and that. As I say, my whole family was on both sides, my mother’s side coal mining and my father’s’.⁶³ Anthony inherited a connection to trade unionism and Labour party politics, but in the context of the enhanced opportunities the diversified industrial economy provided to the industrial citizen generation. Scott McCallum’s memories were also coloured by his father suffering death from an occupational illness. A sense of injustice was further consolidated by the denial of compensation because Scott’s father was a smoker, despite clear evidence that mining had contributed to his condition:

In Scott’s case, his father’s experience consolidated a sense of dislocation associated with the absence of the opportunity to enter the mining industry after intensified closures. However, other respondents portrayed an attitude that more resembled Anthony Rooney’s father’s ambitions. Willie Hamilton recalled:

Willie’s case was characteristic of the expanded expectations held by the industrial citizen cohort. He passed on his ambitions for alternative work opportunities to his sons. None of them worked in coal mining or heavy industry, but one quite closely followed Willie’s own ambitions by becoming an electronic engineer.⁶⁶ Pat Egan recalled that his father, who like Willie was a miner of the industrial citizen generation, expressed disappointment at his decision to join the NCB, going as far as trying to actively prevent him from working at Bedlay colliery:

Pat remembered that many of his friends from the Lanarkshire village of Twechar had opted to work for the NCB upon leaving school: ‘a lot o them did go, it wis fun’.⁶⁸ Pat’s refusal of educational opportunities as a young man in favour of taking up colliery employment, and his father’s misgivings, conform to something of an established coal mining trope. The most influential Scottish example is in William McIlvanney’s novel, Docherty. McIlvanney’s book centres on the struggle of an Ayrshire mining family to maintain dignity in the face of abject poverty and the dangers of coal mining under the privately owned industry of the early twentieth century. Themes of generational succession and conflict loom large. Tam Docherty agonizes over having to allow the youngest of his three sons, Conn, to join him in the local pit. Conn himself is keen to leave a school where he feels shunned for his class status and is eager to attain the mantle of manhood and respectability that come with being a miner and household provider. His ultimate entry to coal mining is presented as a significant moral and cultural defeat for Tam. Conn joining him underground is both a concession to material impoverishment but also the crushing reproduction of class society.⁶⁹ Dick Gaughan’s song, ‘Why old men cry’, released in 1998, similarly reflects on his father’s encouragement to look beyond the coal mines where he was employed, but is highly qualified in light of the pit closures that affected Midlothian during the 1980s and 1990s:

I walked from Leith to Newtongrange

At the turning of the year

Through desolate communities

And faces gaunt with fear

Past bleak, abandoned pitheads

Where rich seams of coal still lie

And at last I understood

Why old men cry

My father helped to win the coal

That lay neath Lothian’s soil

A life of bitter hardship

The reward for years of toil

But he tried to teach his children

There was more to life than this

Working all your life

To make some fat cat rich⁷⁰

Gaughan’s lyrics are indicative of the improved status that coal mining employment had obtained by the late twentieth century. When Pat defied his father’s wishes and began working at Bedlay in 1977, at the age of seventeen, two years after Docherty was published, mining was no longer a poverty wage payer. However, parallel dynamics are apparent: a father urging his son to look up towards formal education rather than down colliery shafts, and young men drawn towards the local social status and collectivism of coal mining. McIlvanney also introduces the major theme of a larger, politicized, generational conflict. These revolve around the aspirations of the generation succeeding Tam. Both of his older sons demonstrate their dissatisfaction with poverty. Angus betrays Tam’s trade union values by becoming a contractor. Meanwhile Mick, having been injured on the western front, becomes a communist and an advocate of relentless class warfare which chafes with Tam’s socialist humanism.⁷¹ McIlvanney presented Docherty as ‘a book that would create a kind of literary genealogy for the people I came from’.⁷² At the time he was writing it, renewed generational tensions were shaping the coalfields. The forms of conflict over lifestyle, aspiration and morality that McIlvanney located in Edwardian Ayrshire manifested themselves within the NUMSA in an organized form and through more amorphous cultural attitudes towards employment.

The industrial citizen generation’s discontents, which were expressed in a collective form during the wage strikes of 1972 and 1974, were analysed by an NCB researcher, J. C. H. Mellanby Lee, in a paper published during 1973. Lee was considerably influenced by contemporary industrial sociology.⁷³ He accepted the core foundations of Alan Fox’s pluralism by acknowledging the distinct legitimate interests within workplaces, and understood ‘constructive’ or ‘organized’ conflict as a necessity in coal mining.⁷⁴ Lee’s chief concerns lay in the potential damage caused by ‘unorganized’ conflict, especially by miners’ use of absenteeism as a ‘weapon’ with which to express dissatisfaction. These were highly connected to demographic changes in the workforce which had shifted expectations of coal mining’s economic and social rewards. Reprising the language of the Affluent Worker study of Luton car workers published five years earlier, the Board’s research noted the increasingly ‘instrumental’ orientation of miners to work in mechanized and bureaucratized cosmopolitan collieries.⁷⁵ These attitudes were juxtaposed to those of miners ‘a generation ago’, in ‘small mining villages’ where social status had counted for more than financial compensation.⁷⁶

Comparisons between coal and the automotive manufacturing sector were also made by miners and their representatives. At a meeting between ministers and trade union leaders in 1961, the NUM general secretary, Will Paynter, juxtaposed the exodus of workers from coal with car workers’ commitment to their sector. Despite a cyclical sectoral downturn, vehicle builders ‘had faith in the industry’s future and wished to stay in it’.⁷⁷ These sentiments developed over the decade but were most strongly communicated by workers younger than Paynter. A focus group of retired miners in Moodiesburn, North Lanarkshire, held during 2014, made explicit reference to miners’ pay and conditions relative to car workers in their memories of the 1972 and 1974 wages strikes. Those present were members of the industrial citizen generation: men born during the 1930s and 1940s who entered the nationalized industry with expectations of economic rewards and employment stability.⁷⁸

Peter Downie contributed to the discussion by recalling that his wages nearly doubled as a result of the award that followed the 1974 strike, which took place while he was hospitalized following an industrial accident: ‘In 1974 ma wages at that time was 35 pound, and I went in tae the hospital and when I came oot the hospital and started walking again, my wages were 65 pound’.⁷⁹ His memories of hospitalization reinforce the NUM’s ‘special case’ for extensive wage rises in the early 1970s, which underlined the dangers and physical effort miners’ endured to produce Britain’s chief indigenous fuel. The NUM’s arguments rested on explicit reference to miners’ deteriorating wage position relative to other male industrial workers.⁸⁰ Michael McGahey summed up the industrial citizen generation’s assertive position at the 1972 NUMSA annual conference which was held shortly after the strike ended. With an element of implicit criticism directed at leaders of the interwar veteran generation, he asserted that ‘for too long in the past our members were conditioned to believe that the contraction of the mining industry was an inevitability and that pit closures and the stockpiling of coal had weakened the bargaining power of the miners’. Furthermore, McGahey emphasized the NUMSA’s objective of achieving further improvements in pensions, decreases in working hours and a lower retirement age.⁸¹

The roots of those sentiments lay in the experience of closures during the late 1950s and early 1960s. These episodes contributed to the frustrations of the industrial citizen generation and to conflict within the NUMSA which was presided over by interwar veterans until 1967. A key flashpoint took place in 1959 when the Board announced the closure of Devon colliery in Clackmannanshire. Over fifty men endured a stay-down strike between Tuesday 23 June and Thursday 25 June.⁸² They were supported by over 15,000 miners from across the Scottish coalfield, including all of Alloa’s sixteen collieries, as well as pits in Lanarkshire, West Lothian and Fife.⁸³ Press coverage profiled the strikers’ youthfulness. The Scotsman described the youngest participant, seventeen-year-old James McGuigan, as ‘quite a determined young man’. Other participants noted in the press included James Craig junior, the twenty-five-year-old son of the Devon NUM branch secretary.⁸⁴ Phillip Stein reported another instance of intergenerational cooperation in the CPGB-affiliated Daily Worker. Fifty-two-year-old Guy Bolton brought food and encouragement to his twenty-four-year-old son George, a CPGB member and the NUMSA’s future president. Guy affirmed the determination of the young men underground: ‘the mood of the lads is such they will have to be dragged on to the cast’.⁸⁵ Stein detailed that the strikers had deployed ‘flying squads’ that brought out other collieries. Over 1,000 miners had marched on the NCB’s Alloa Area headquarters in Whins, demonstrating in both a carnivalesque and subversive manner: ‘Leader of the demonstration, William McDougall, turned round to the men and shouted “Well lads, we are democratic – which way are we going?” There was an ear-splitting “In there” and the policemen were swept aside’.⁸⁶

The unofficial action of 1959 anticipated the grievances articulated over the 1960s and the 1970s as the industrial citizen generation ascended within coalfield politics. Strikers rejected the industry’s managed contraction and challenged the authority of the NCB, as well as union leaders of the interwar veteran generation who broadly accepted both. Abe Moffat recalled six years later that he was in London when he heard about the events at Devon and began discussions with officials from the NCB’s Scottish division. Moffat confirmed that as at Barlinnie sixteen years before, his role was as an arbitrator who sought to defuse tension through ensuring dialogue between the union and employers. This was the only method by which he could ‘persuade the men to come up the pit’.⁸⁷ The limitations of Moffat’s achievement, and of his generation’s conception of a moral economy centred on procedure, were confirmed by the NCB’s disquiet over his claim that ‘the Scottish Divisional Coal Board was prepared to negotiate with the Union on the closure’. Moffat had to rescind this claim at the NCB’s insistence. An exchange of letters between Board officials confirmed ‘all that the Scottish Coal Board have agreed’ was ‘to listen to what the men have to say after work has been resumed’.⁸⁸ Reports of the meeting, which took place upon the return to work, detail that an NUM deputation led by Moffat specified disquiet over the movement of families by men who had left Lanarkshire to work in Alloa.⁸⁹

The Devon strike communicated a general pattern of discontent that was especially focused among younger men who had been promised secure employment at modernized collieries in central Scotland. On the morning of 13 November 1961, nine Scottish collieries were affected by strike action against the announcement of further pit closures.⁹⁰ Unlike in 1959, during December 1961 and January 1962, Scottish delegate conferences voted for a day of official strike action against the industry’s contraction.⁹¹ The strike was to be timed alongside a lobby of parliament in March, but was eventually rescinded by the NUMSA’s executive committee in favour of building inter-industry unity against wage restraint. However, this exposed tensions within the NUMSA: 3,000 miners in the Clackmannanshire area joined an unofficial walkout. A group of Fishcross strikers reportedly met NUMSA leaders with chants of ‘throw them in the pond’.⁹² Events between March and June 1967 subsequently confirmed the differentiation in outlook between the interwar veteran generation of miners represented by the Moffats and the younger cohort who coalesced around McGahey. In March 1967, an NUMSA delegate conference voted overwhelmingly, by sixty-two votes to twelve, in favour of a resolution from the NUM Economic Sub-Committee, which stated:

Delegates saw closures as an unfortunate necessity. E. Tannahill from Kingshill 3 commented that in the last two decades Lanarkshire had lost forty collieries and now only eight remained, ‘despite all the campaigns, all the mass meetings and all the demonstrations’. Alex Moffat bluntly stated that ‘whether we liked it or not, the mining industry was going to contract’, and securing production on a financially profitable basis was the only option for survival.⁹⁴ Just three months later, in June 1967, the NUMSA annual conference voted unanimously to overturn this position. In the absence of the ill Alex Moffat, Michael McGahey delivered the customary Area conference presidential address, anticipating his election to the post upon Moffat’s retirement, which followed soon after. The Ministry of Power had intimated that objectives of capital investment towards a 200-million-ton annual capacity target for 1970 had been reduced to 140 million. By 1980 this would be reduced further to only 80 million across all holdings in England, Wales and Scotland.⁹⁵

McGahey stated that opposition entailed ‘refusing to cooperate in the total rundown of the industry’. His stance was based on moral economy arguments which counterpoised financial measurements to social needs: ‘I reject the present approach taken in many quarters which would make the cost of coal the sole criterion for determining the future size of the mining industry’. In terms redolent of the double movement, McGahey contrasted financial measurements with the ‘disruption of mining communities’ that would be caused by closures and redundancies. McGahey portrayed the government’s attitudes towards coal as wanton neglect of Britain’s prime domestic source of fuel. The NUMSA’s objective was to secure mining employment through an energy policy that would serve to ‘guarantee coal its proper share in the energy market, and to protect the long-term interests of the people we represent’.⁹⁶ Despite the ultimately unanimous vote, some delegates raised objections relating to the failures of previous attempts to oppose closures. However, the overwhelming sentiment was that the latest direction of closure and policies was a threat to the industry that had to be resisted. R. Baird from Cardowan claimed the industry was haemorrhaging workers because there was ‘no security’ in coal mining employment. T. Cullen, the delegate for Gartshore 9/11, reaffirmed this, stating that the ‘executive should oppose all closures including partial closures’.⁹⁷ Tannahill, the delegate from Kingshill 3 who had spoken in support of Alex Moffat four months previously, argued that the revised target was tantamount to the government reneging on promises of a stable future for the industry: a 200-million-tonne output would have limited the impact of closure through the expansion of capacity elsewhere. As a result, he voted in favour of the change of position.⁹⁸

During the 1980s, industrial citizen generation leaders still sought more generous redundancy and retirement terms to help rebalance the workforce in the context of closure threats and high rates of youth unemployment.⁹⁹ These suggestions were popular with activists who argued for statutory rights to retirement as an alternative to the government’s selective usage of redundancy payments and early retirement offers. John Mitchell of Frances colliery in Fife moved a composite motion at the 1983 NUMSA conference that argued for retirement at fifty-five for underground workers and sixty for surface workers at a rate that allowed former miners to ‘live in dignity’.¹⁰⁰ These efforts accord with Gildart’s view that over the second half of the twentieth century, for some miners ‘the mine became a place they longed to escape from’.¹⁰¹ The alienation that was visible in the industrial sabotage and absenteeism which so concerned Board officials in the early 1970s was communicated more constructively in rising demands that the nationalized industry would provide improved and safer conditions as well as a longer retirement and shorter working life. However, these demands also indicate that the industrial citizen generation retained a moral economy conception of lifetime employment in coal mining. Brendan Moohan’s narrative, perhaps influenced by his father’s experience of working with the NCB before retiring due to ill health, emphasized a generational distinction in outlook and socioeconomic circumstances:

Brendan underlined elements of generational conflict as well as reciprocal relationships in reflecting on his experience of social life in mining communities and the form of social conservatism that prevailed within them. This centred on constructions of respectability and masculinity. Brendan recollected that he found the atmosphere of the Lothians coalfields stifling due to his style of dress and the music he listened to. To a young man who questioned authority, the highly formalized rules-based order of the mining industry and its associational life, including Miners’ Welfares, were an imposition to be resisted:

Involvement in the 1984–5 miners’ strike brought some reciprocation between Brendan and the enforcers of community customs. He recalled joining other union members in arranging to expel a strikebreaking miner from the Royal Musselburgh Golf Club, which was owned by a miners’ charity:

However, political and cultural generational tensions remained among activists. Later in his testimony, Brendan specified that the ‘old farts’ he had in mind were often Communist Party members. His narrative indicated the importance of the link between generational experiences and political standpoints, confirming the hostility between older ‘Stalinist’ NUM officials and younger ‘Trots’ like himself who were predominantly organized in the Militant Tendency within the Labour party. Brendan recalled Chris Herriot, the NUM Youth Delegate at Monktonhall, and Joe Owens, who was the pit delegate at Polkemmet during the 1984–5 strike as standout examples of younger Militant members who gave a greater heterogeneity to internal politics within the NUMSA during the 1980s. This included a marked presence at Monktonhall colliery where some young miners would ‘leave copies of the Militant [newspaper] lying about’ areas that men had their breaks underground.¹⁰⁵

Jessie Clark’s husband, Alex, perhaps epitomized the type of leader from the generations of industrial citizens that Brendan clashed with in his youth but came to respect in later life. Alex Clark worked in collieries in South Lanarkshire from the late 1930s until 1953 when he became a full-time CPGB organizer. He played a prominent role as a local young trade unionist and communist activist during the early period of nationalization. Jessie was keen to stress Alex’s intellectual and artistic involvement based on a working-class culture of self-education that defied the official expectations:

Alex was also a member of the Lesmahagow male voice choir. This laid the foundations of his career development as he became involved in Scottish performing arts and culture as a full-time official for the theatre union, Equity, and through the Scottish Trades Union Congress Arts and Entertainment Committee.¹⁰⁷ Brendan qualified his description of conflict by describing older and younger activists drinking in the same pubs and noting that he used to borrow books from more senior union members who encouraged younger men to read novels as well as political literature.¹⁰⁸ Bill McCabe described a similar culture at Caterpillar, recalling an older steward at the plant lending him his copy of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. Bill portrayed becoming a shop steward before he was twenty as ‘the natural progression’, following in the trajectory of his brother and father at the plant.¹⁰⁹ Brendan has in some senses also followed a similar course to an earlier generation of political and cultural leaders, having become a poet. He has published an anthology of poems about his experience of the 1984–5 strike. The final poem in that collection, ‘Vision’, opens by acknowledging the weight of past generations stating that ‘Others have gone before, and will follow me’. Brendan presents the strike is as a coming-of-age event, prefiguring ‘a flammable future’.¹¹⁰ Contrastingly, the Ayrshire poet, Jim Monaghan, narrated the strike and its aftermath with an emphasis on loss. Sharing Brendan’s later-found appreciation of the culture that sustained the men of the industrial citizen generation, as well as younger flexible workers such as his brother, who was an active picketer during the 1984–5 strike, he narrates the ‘United Colours of Cumnock’:

My town was once a red town,

another miner dead town,

a men who fought and bled town,

wae brave and stalwart wives.

That’s red that came from meeting rooms,

from folk that worked the pumps and looms,

when borough bands played different tunes,

and marched – for better lives.

But now my town’s a grey town,

a fifty mils a day town,

a watch life slip away town,

a tunnel wae nae light.

That’s grey that weeps from dying eyes,

bewildered parents, children’s cries,

wae skinny erms and stick like thighs,

and nae strength left – tae fight!¹¹¹

Like Brendan’s reappraisal, Monaghan’s perspective looks ‘beyond the ruins’ of industrial society. The emotional space provided by temporal distance from the 1984–5 strike and the major closures which followed it, have allowed for a form of generational reckoning that necessarily entails a broader appraisal of the industrial era and coalfield culture. A form of critical nostalgia is visible in both men’s accounts. Coal mining is remembered for its costs in human lives and industrial diseases, as well as the instilling of a socially conservative culture. Yet a strong sense of bereavement for lost cohesion and collective mobilization are also emphasized. Monaghan’s critique of the present is amplified through Cumnock’s dramatic departure from its coal mining past. This confirms that accelerated workplace closure and industrial job losses were interior time experiences for the flexible worker generation. Coal mining and its associational culture continue to inform perspectives within Scottish coalfield areas today. The socioeconomic structure marked by increased rates of economic inequality that has developed in the wake of deindustrialization is understood and criticized through outlooks with roots in the collective memory of colliery employment. The norms and values that powerfully shaped the moral economy therefore also have outlasted the industrial structure in which they developed.¹¹²

Deindustrialization’s effects are still being transmitted across generations within the Scottish coalfields. Collective memories from earlier periods are passed on within families and communities. Customs and expectations with origins in older eras shape appraisals of the contemporary labour market. Over the second half of the twentieth century, three distinct generational cohorts coalesced around distinct formative interior time experiences that were central to determining their distinct political outlooks and cultural attitudes. The moral economy of the nationalized period was formatively shaped by the interwar veteran generation who stewarded the NUMSA during the early period of nationalization and placed extensive value on custom and institutional stability. Industrial citizens who were socialized during the early years of colliery contraction were less reverential towards the nationalized industry. Their expectations included both employment security and that rewards for the hard and dangerous physical labour of coal mining would be at least equal to the economic rewards offered in assembly goods factories. A final generation of flexible workers matured during the growth of mass unemployment and the bitter final struggles against major industrial closures which characterized the 1980s. Representatives of this generation were resistant to the conservatism and rules-based order of coalfield communities. However, their reflections on the effects of intensified deindustrialization also demonstrate their shared investment in the moral economy that they mobilized to defended against the atomizing effects of liberalized market forces.

__________

¹ A. Campbell, ‘Traditions and generational change in Scots miners’ unions, 1874–1929’, in Generations in Labour History: Papers Presented to the Sixth British–Dutch Conference on Labour History, Oxford 1988, ed. A. Blok, D. Damsma, H. Diedriks and L. Heerma van Voss (Amsterdam, 1989), pp. 23–37, at pp. 27–34; A. Campbell, The Scottish Miners, 1874–1939, i: Industry, Work and Community (Aldershot, 2000) pp. 159–60.

² J. Phillips, ‘Economic direction and generational change in twentieth century Britain: the case of the Scottish coalfield’, English Historical Review, cxxxii (2017), 885–911; J. Phillips, Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2019).

³ S. Scherger, ‘Concepts of generation and their empirical application: from social formations to narratives – a critical appraisal and some suggestions’, CRESC Working Paper, cxvii (2012), pp. 3, 9.

⁴ K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1952), p. 282.

⁵ S. J. Hilwig, ‘“Are you calling me a fascist?” A contribution to the oral history of the 1968 Italian student rebellions’, Journal of Contemporary History, xxxi (2001), 581–97, at p. 590.

⁶ J. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York, 2010), pp. 24–5, 60–5.

⁷ Phillips, ‘Economic direction’, p. 902.

⁸ Moodiesburn focus group, retired miners’ group, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 25 March 2014.

⁹ Jessie Clark, interview with author, residence, Broddock, 22 March 2014.

¹⁰ Jessie Clark, interview.

¹¹ R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), p. 161.

¹² M. Ives, Reform, Revolution and Direct Action amongst British Miners: the Struggle for the Charter in 1919 (Chicago, Ill., 2016), pp. 83–111.

¹³ A. Moffat, My Life with the Miners (London, 1965), p. 74.

¹⁴ Moffat, My Life, p. 78.

¹⁵ National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (NRS), Coal Board (CB) 222/14/1/21A, Notes of proceedings between the Scottish Divisional Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA) regarding the proposed closure of Baton colliery, held at no. 58 Palmerston Place, Edinburgh on Monday 8 May 1950.

¹⁶ The National Archives (TNA), POWE 37/481, I. Horrobin, parliamentary secretary, Whitehall, to T. Fraser, Westminster, 5 March 1959.

¹⁷ Moffat, My Life, p. 73.

¹⁸ TNA, POWE 37/481, Notes of a meeting with a deputation from the Scottish Area of the National Union of Mineworkers held in the parliamentary secretary’s room, Thames South, Thursday 26 Feb. 1959, 5.15 pm.

¹⁹ Phillips, ‘Economic direction’, p. 897.

²⁰ A. Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: an Oral History (Oxford, 2010), p. 308.

²¹ A. McIvor and R. Johnston, Miners’ Lung: a History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 205–8.

²² Mick McGahey, interview with author, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, Edinburgh, 31 March 2014.

²³ J. Phillips, ‘The closure of Michael colliery in 1967 and the politics of deindustrialization in Scotland’, Twentieth Century British History, xxvi (2015), 551–72, at p. 552.

²⁴ 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 pp. 47–9.

²⁵ K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, Mass., 2001), p. 258.

²⁶ Ian Hogarth, interview with author, National Mining Museum, Newtongrange, 28 Aug. 2014.

²⁷ Ian Hogarth, interview.

²⁸ Ian Hogarth, interview.

²⁹ Peter Mansell-Mullen, interview with author, residence, Strathaven, 3 Oct. 2014.

³⁰ A. Perchard and K. Gildart, ‘“Run with the foxes and hunt with the hounds”: managerial trade-unionism and the British Association of Colliery Management, 1947–1994’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, xxxix (2018), 79–110, at p. 81.

³¹ Ian Hogarth, interview.

³² Sam Purdie, interview with author, UWS Hamilton campus, 3 May 2018.

³³ Sam Purdie, interview.

³⁴ I. Terris, Twenty Years Down the Mines (Ochiltree, 2001), pp. 60–74.

³⁵ Terris, Twenty Years, pp. 127–8.

³⁶ Marion and Willie Hamilton, interview with author, residence, Shotts, 19 March 2014.

³⁷ Marion and Willie Hamilton, interview.

³⁸ Marion and Willie Hamilton, interview.

³⁹ Marion and Willie Hamilton, interview.

⁴⁰ Alan Blades, interview with author, resident, Airdrie, 26 Feb. 2014.

⁴¹ Scott McCallum, interview with author, The Counting House, Dundee, 22 Feb. 2014.

⁴² Brendan Moohan, interview with author, residence, Livingston, 5 Feb. 2015.

⁴³ D. Kelliher, ‘Constructing a culture of solidarity: London and the British coalfields in the long 1970s’, Antipode, xlix (2017), 106–24, at pp. 106–9.

⁴⁴ F. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and N. Thomlinson, ‘National Women Against Pit Closures: gender, trade unionism and community activism in the miners’ strike, 1984–5’, Contemporary British History, xxxii (2018), 78–100, at pp. 79–80.

⁴⁵ J. Phillips, Collieries, Communities and the Miners’ Strike in Scotland, 1984–5 (Manchester, 2012), pp. 32–3.

⁴⁶ D. Featherstone and D. Kelliher, ‘There was just this Enormous Sense of Solidarity’: London and the 1984–5 Miners’ Strike (London, 2018).

⁴⁷ Angela Moohan, interview with author, residence, Livingston, 5 Feb. 2015.

⁴⁸ Bob Burrows, interview with author, Tannochside Miners’ Welfare, Tannochside, 20 Jan. 2017.

⁴⁹ Bob Burrows, interview.

⁵⁰ Barbara Goldie and Margaret Keena, interview with author, Cambuslang Bowling Club, Cambuslang, 8 Dec. 2014.

⁵¹ Barbara Goldie and Margaret Keena, interview.

⁵² Barbara Goldie and Margaret Keena, interview.

⁵³ John Slaven, interview with author, STUC Building Woodlands, Glasgow, 5 June 2014.

⁵⁴ John Slaven, interview.

⁵⁵ M. C. McDermott, Multinationals: Foreign Divestment and Disclosure (Maidenhead, 1989), pp. 101–2.

⁵⁶ John Slaven, interview.

⁵⁷ A. Portelli, ‘“This mill won’t run no more”: oral history and deindustrialization’, in New Working-Class Studies, ed. J. Russo and S. L. Linkon (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005), pp. 54–9, at pp. 54–5.

⁵⁸ 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. 6.

⁵⁹ J. Tomlinson and E. Gibbs, ‘Planning the new industrial nation: Scotland, 1931 to 1979’, Contemporary British History, xxx (2016), 584–606, at p. 598.

⁶⁰ Scott McCallum, interview.

⁶¹ Anthony Rooney, interview with author, Morrisons café, Bellshill, 24 Apr. 2014.

⁶² Brendan Moohan, interview.

⁶³ Antony Rooney, interview.

⁶⁴ Scott McCallum, interview.

⁶⁵ Marion and Willie Hamilton, interview.

⁶⁶ Marion and Willie Hamilton, interview.

⁶⁷ Pat Egan, interview with author, Fife College, Glenrothes, 5 Feb. 2014.

⁶⁸ Pat Egan, interview.

⁶⁹ W. McIlvanney, Docherty (London, 1975).

⁷⁰ D. Gaughan, ‘Why Old Men Cry’, on Redwood Cathedral (GreenTax, 1998).

⁷¹ McIlvanney, Docherty.

⁷² W. McIlvanney, Surviving the Shipwreck (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 217–18.

⁷³ TNA, Coal 101/488, J. C. H. Mellanby Lee, Operational Research Executive (Scotland), ‘A paper for consideration by the Scottish Area Monday and Friday Absence committee’, 8 Aug. 1973.

⁷⁴ A. Fox, Industrial Sociology and Industrial Relations (London, 1966), pp. 4–5.

⁷⁵ J. Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour (London, 1968), p. 39.

⁷⁶ TNA, Coal 101/488, J. C. H. Mellanby Lee, Operational Research Executive (Scotland), ‘A paper for consideration by the Scottish Area Monday and Friday Absence committee’, 8 Aug. 1973.

⁷⁷ TNA, POWE 14/857, Notes of a meeting on fuel policy at Admiralty House at 4.30 pm on 2 Feb. 1961.

⁷⁸ Moodiesburn focus group.

⁷⁹ Moodiesburn focus group.

⁸⁰ J. Arnold, ‘“The death of sympathy”: coal mining, workplace hazards, and the politics of risk in Britain, c. 1970–1990’, Historical Social Research, xli (2016), 91–110, at pp. 95–6.

⁸¹ National Mining Museum Scotland archives, Newtongrange, Midlothian (NMMS), NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 28 June 1971 to 14/16 June 1972, pp. 598–9.

⁸² TNA, POWE 37/481/90, ‘Back to work at Scottish pits to-day’, Herald, 26 June 1959.

⁸³ TNA, POWE 37/481, Percy, Ministry of Power, to J. S. McClay, 25 June 1959; 37/481/91, ‘Talks to-day on pit closure’, Scotsman, 29 June 1959.

⁸⁴ TNA, POWE 37/481/83, ‘60 miners stage stay-down strike’, Scotsman, 24 June 1959.

⁸⁵ TNA, POWE 37/481/82, P. Stein, ‘“Stay-Down” to Save Pit’, Daily Worker, 24 June 1959.

⁸⁶ TNA, POWE 37/481/82, Stein, ‘“Stay-Down” to Save Pit’, Daily Worker, 24 June 1959.

⁸⁷ Moffat, Life, p. 185.

⁸⁸ TNA, POWE 37/481, Letter to Mr Jarrat, 26 June 1959.

⁸⁹ TNA, POWE 37/481/88, M. R. Foster, ‘Miners to resume’, Scotsman, 26 June 1959.

⁹⁰ J. Phillips, ‘Deindustrialization and the moral economy of the Scottish coalfields, 1947 to 1991’, International Labor and Working-Class History, lxxxiv (2013), 99–115, at p. 102.

⁹¹ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special Conferences, 12 June 1961 to 6/8 June 1962, pp. 338, 353.

⁹² NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special Conferences, 12 June 1961 to 6/8 June 1962, pp. 502, 509.

⁹³ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 27 June 1966 to 14/16 June 1967, pp. 279–80, 323.

⁹⁴ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 27 June 1966 to 14/16 June 1967, pp. 319–20.

⁹⁵ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 27 June 1966 to 14/16 June 1967, pp. 396, 411.

⁹⁶ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 27 June 1966 to 14/16 June 1967, p. 411.

⁹⁷ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 27 June 1966 to 14/16 June 1967, p. 396.

⁹⁸ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 27 June 1966 to 14/16 June 1967, pp. 413–14.

⁹⁹ TNA, Coal 31/138, Meeting held at 11am on Wednesday 25 Feb. 1981, Thames House South, London.

¹⁰⁰ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, July 1982 to June 1983, p. 654.

¹⁰¹ K. Gildart, ‘Mining memories: reading coalfield autobiographies’, Labor History, i (2009), 139–61, at pp. 145–6.

¹⁰² Brendan Moohan, interview.

¹⁰³ Brendan Moohan, interview.

¹⁰⁴ Brendan Moohan, interview.

¹⁰⁵ Brendan Moohan, interview.

¹⁰⁶ Jessie Clark, interview.

¹⁰⁷ 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. 15.

¹⁰⁸ Brendan Moohan, interview.

¹⁰⁹ Bill McCabe, interview with author, Tannochside Miners’ Welfare, 20 Jan. 2017.

¹¹⁰ B. Moohan, The Enemy Within (Livingston, 2012).

¹¹¹ J. Monaghan, ‘United colours of Cumnock’, Concept, viii (2017) <http://concept.lib.ed.ac.uk/issue/view/216> [accessed 20 Dec. 2019].

¹¹² 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, at p. 239.