6. Coalfield politics and nationhood

Coalfield experiences were central to the politics of class and nation in twentieth-century Scotland. Both trade union membership and Labour party parliamentary representation were disproportionately concentrated in the coalfields. Miners often exercised political leadership, especially in villages and towns whose economies and social structure were overwhelmingly reliant on coal mining. This was often based on highly parochial associations. The struggle to unify miners across Scotland and Great Britain was long fought and always subject to geographical tensions. Nationalization and coalfield restructuring considerably altered coal’s political economy. Scottish nationhood figured significantly in responses to the administration of the industry by the National Coal Board (NCB), which was headquartered at Hobart House in London. The context of a single employer across the UK created both dangers and opportunities for the National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA). It facilitated the consolidation of a stronger Scottish miners’ union, and also encouraged the adoption of a national countermovement to the NCB’s pursuit of financial and technical priorities that threatened the future of Scottish coal mining. This chapter begins by analysing the confluence of locale, class and nation in the NUMSA’s political culture. Under nationalization, a stronger and more centralized union structure was constructed, and the Area was given a left-wing or militant identity by its predominantly Communist-affiliated leadership. Section two examines how Scottish national consciousness framed industrial politics under nationalization, underlining the NUMSA’s shift towards more pronounced support for home rule during the 1960s as the NCB centralized. However, this nationalist orientation was always qualified by a class politics grounded in ‘Unionist’ sensibilities regarding the integrity of the nationalized industry and UK energy policy, trade union unity and affiliation to the Labour party. The final section discusses the Scottish miners’ gala, which was a major innovative feature of postwar Scottish coalfield culture. By hosting a large-scale annual event which reprised local traditions on a national plain, the NUMSA was able to mould occupational and class consciousness onto Scottish nationhood. But it did so within the context of the social democratic infrastructure provided by the nationalized coal industry and British labour movement connections.

Collective memories rooted in small-scale locales were central to conceptions of community within the Scottish coalfields, but the bonds established within coal mining villages and towns also served as a basis for the mobilization of a less geographically restricted industrial identity. Under nationalization, experiences located in localized community and workplace settings were rearticulated through the institutions and consciousness of nationhood.¹ The protective countermovement which challenged the NCB’s pursuit of closure programmes that threatened the integrity of the Scottish coalfields was substantially framed in terms of national identity. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, moral economy sentiments came to rest on expectations of sympathetic action from devolved Scottish institutions which were assumed to be less socially and politically distant.

The NUMSA’s political culture built on community and workplace experiences to emphasize the broader class and international dimensions of events in the coalfields. These efforts entailed a struggle to overcome the long history of divisions between jealously guarded autonomous regional associations. An increasingly centralized Scottish miners’ union emerged under nationalization, centred on a strengthened executive apparatus. This was shaped by deliberation on interwar experiences. Defeat in the 1926 lockout exposed the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain’s weakness as a relatively loose amalgamation of county unions. Another lesson was drawn from the failure of the communist-led separatist ‘red union’, the United Mineworkers of Scotland (UMS).² Abe Moffat, who had been general secretary of the UMS, was elected president of the National Union of Scottish Mineworkers in 1942 after the UMS was wound up. Moffat’s election began a sustained Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) presence at the top of the union. His presidency was marked by a commitment to maintaining a unified organization for Scottish miners as part of the UK-wide NUM, incorporating continued support for the Labour party.³

Abe and his brother Alex, who succeeded him as president between 1961 and 1967, combined a social democratic approach on industry matters with a communist perspective on international affairs. In Alan Campbell and John McIlroy’s term, the Moffats’ ‘Stalinist–Labourism’ consolidated a commitment to ‘restraint and moderation’ in the context of partnership with the NCB’, including the acceptance of major closures and coalfield restructuring.⁴ Building a disciplined commitment to the NUMSA across the nation’s coalfields required a sustained effort from activists. The union was relatively successful in achieving this, in part through appealing to memories of the early twentieth century, which shaped understandings of subsequent struggles.

In common with other UK coalfields, the events of 1926 strongly entered historical consciousness and became especially important to framing understandings of the 1984–5 strike in Scotland.⁵ Mick McGahey was a third-generation communist miner. Like his father and grandfather before him, Mick faced repression in the form of arrest and job loss for his involvement in picketing at Bilston Glen colliery in Midlothian where he worked as a surface worker.⁶ His testimony included a strong recollection of familial connection to miners’ struggles:

However, this historical consciousness developed in advance of 1984. Mick’s father, the NUMSA president, Michael McGahey, welcomed G. Solovyev from the Central Committee of the Soviet Miners’ Union to NUMSA’s annual conference in 1972. McGahey stated that Scottish mineworkers had been ‘reminded time and time again by their fathers and grandfathers’ of the assistance Soviet miners gave to their British comrades during 1926.⁸ Other conference speeches also referred to these earlier events. For instance, Alex Day greeted the same conference as a representative of the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) general council with a reference to the labour movement having had ‘a forty-six-year-old debt to repay’ before the solidarity action which enabled NUM to win significant wage improvements in the industrial dispute earlier that year.⁹

The NUMSA was profiled by the Moffats’ allies as a significant innovation with political and cultural as well as industrial implications. In his 1955 history of the Scottish miners, Page Arnot lauded the Moffats’ achievements in building a unified Scottish miners’ union. He emphasized the political direction that their leadership gave to the NUMSA. Arnot also highlighted the role the union played in ‘encouraging the development of music, art and the theatre’ to address the ‘cultural needs’ of the mining community, including through the Scottish miners’ gala. The Scottish miners also obtained a wider resonance through their union’s support for the Edinburgh People’s Festival and the communist singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl’s theatre workshop, as well as Unity Theatre’s activities in Fife. In addition, the NUMSA organized a concert given by the American communist singer Paul Robeson at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh in May 1949. A large part of the audience was made up of miners from across the Scottish coalfields.¹⁰ Arnot’s emphasis on international connections and political campaigning was shared in the NUMSA’s youth activities. These incorporated the establishment of residential political schools aimed at young miners. Delegates enrolled on ‘an educational course not only on technical mining matters but on general social and political questions’. From 1954 this message was also spread in the pages of the Scottish Miner which was published monthly and represented the achievement of the long-held aim of a newspaper for mining trade unionists in Scotland.¹¹

Mick McGahey recalled the important role these activities played in shaping trade union activism:

These activities developed within Stalinist–Labourism’s parameters. Under the Moffats, the NUMSA displayed a protective or even suspicious approach to political pluralism. The Area rejected an invitation to courses from the Workers Educational Association at its 1950 conference where it was explained that the NUMSA ran its own residential political school in Dunoon that provided a ‘week’s intensive education not only in the policy of the organization but in the economy of the country generally’.¹³ Even NUMSA activists who declined to join the CPGB recognized the importance and distinctiveness of the outlook the Scottish Area’s leadership provided. For instance, Nicky Wilson, who became active in the Scottish Colliery, Enginemen, Boilermen and Tradesmen’s Association (SCEBTA) as a young electrician during the 1970s and is a longstanding member of the Labour party, referred to ‘the leadership we had in the union in the past in Scotland who believed in bringing on young people and that didnae happen in other areas’. Nicky posited that this formed a critical distinction between trade unionism in the Scottish coalfields and the NUM’s ‘moderate’ areas. He emphasized that the NUMSA’s commitment to political education of young members differentiated it from other Areas, including Yorkshire, which he described as historically having been a ‘right-wing area’ despite the later influence of Arthur Scargill. Nicky underlined that the Yorkshire Area, unlike the NUMSA, had ‘no political education hardly at all’.¹⁴

There are elements of composure in these recollections. In the aftermath of defeat in 1985, CPGB members and supporters within the Scottish and South Welsh Areas of the NUM articulated criticisms of ‘Scargillism’, which was seen as politically naïve and not attuned to the changed climate of the 1980s.¹⁵ This was given greatest prominence after George Bolton succeeded Michael McGahey as president in 1987. In 1985, shortly after the miners’ return to work, Bolton argued that Scargill, along with his prominent English supporters, including the Labour MPs Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner, were exponents of ‘a range of thinking in the movement that’s not caught up with the reality of Thatcher and Thatcherism, and the state of British politics’.¹⁶ The rift in the NUM’s internal politics perhaps consolidated the NUMSA’s support for devolution. These developments were concurrent with the formation of a cross-class civil society coalition in support of a devolved Scottish parliament. The strike’s outcome appeared to sever traditional class-based strategies, and the polarization of the 1987 general election furthered national contentions regarding the UK’s fragmenting politics.¹⁷ Despite these influences, Nicky’s recollections concur with the description of the NUM’s organized left put forward by Vic Allen, a vocal supporter of Arthur Scargill. Criticisms of the NUM’s right wing or ‘moderate’ leadership during the 1950s and 1960s initially came from Scotland, South Wales and Kent but the left was able to gain crucial footholds in Yorkshire, partly through the efforts of Scottish miners who had transferred southwards.¹⁸

Nicky Wilson was not isolated in his recollections. Tommy Canavan was another longstanding Labour party member and trade union activist at Cardowan who exemplified the reach that CPGB perspectives and history had within NUMSA. He was keen to emphasize the importance of the Scottish Miner. When interviewed, Tommy presented a copy of the paper from 1967 which had a historical article discussing Willie Gallacher’s role as a Communist MP for the coalfield constituency of West Fife, as well as a column making the case for the establishment of a Scottish parliament. In Tommy’s view, the publication played an important role in publicizing the union’s perspective.¹⁹

The NUMSA’s policies and support for international solidarity campaigns was highly influenced by the CPGB’s outlook. This included a high prominence given to opposing nuclear weapons under the presidencies of both Moffat brothers as well as McGahey. Under Communist leadership, the NUMSA also opposed British military involvement in Greece and the Korean War and supported anti-colonial struggles in Kenya and Malaya.²⁰

There was also a clear occupational dynamic to this internationalism. Scottish and Soviet miners renewed their longstanding connections through the exchange of delegations in 1967.²¹ A Soviet delegation returned in 1972, while the NUMSA arranged visits to the East German coalfields the same year.²² The Scottish miners also lent support to struggles in other coalfields, most prominently to the major communist-led French miners’ strike of 1947.²³

The NUMSA’s internationalism developed concurrently with the STUC’s politics, which were formatively shaped by miners and CPGB activists. In 1968, the STUC welcomed a delegation from Hungary that included Antal Simon, general secretary of the Hungarian Mineworkers’ Union. They visited East Kilbride among other locations across Scotland.²⁴ These fraternal links were also evident in STUC delegates making numerous trips to Comecon, including attendance at Budapest May Day in 1972 as well as visits to East Germany and Czechoslovakia during the early 1970s.²⁵ The Scottish miners further extended their connections with their Hungarian counterparts through an invitation for Scottish miners and their children to holiday in the country. Support was also granted to anti-colonial and national democratic struggles. The STUC’s sustained opposition to Apartheid South Africa included a relationship with Jon Gaetsewe of the South African Congress of Trade Unions in western Europe. Gaetswere recurrently appears in STUC annual reports as a point of contact who assisted in providing Scottish financial support to South African trade unions.²⁶ The NUMSA was at the forefront of arguing for expanding the STUC’s international activities. At the 1973 conference, Michael McGahey moved a resolution in support of the Spanish Workers’ Commission, a Communist-affiliated trade union federation, after the imprisonment of ten trade unionists by the Franco regime. McGahey’s intervention came after one of the Commission’s leaders, Carlos Elvira, addressed the conference.²⁷

In some cases, NUMSA interventions were key in shaping STUC policy. At the 1953 conference, Abe Moffat spoke in favour of a motion that concluded ‘congress wishes the people of Kenya and Tanganyika every success in their fight for land, liberty and happiness’.²⁸ Moffat argued this was within the best traditions of the British labour movement: ‘He always had understood it was the basic policy of the labour and trade union movement in Britain to fight against all colonial wars and exploitation and he hoped that was going to continue to be its policy’.²⁹ The STUC general council opposed the resolution. G. Hamilton of the Transport and General Workers’ Union articulated the mainstream position which echoed both the pressures of Cold War alignment and the legacy of sympathy for imperialism within the labour movement, as well as British belligerence in the conflict.³⁰ Hamilton stated that, ‘Before Kenya and Tanganyika could have self-government the British had much more to contribute towards the education of the African peoples’.³¹ The motion passed, which is perhaps surprising given the context of a live struggle in which British soldiers and settlers were engaged in armed conflict with the Kenya Land and Freedom Army.

Despite these successes, the records of both the NUMSA and STUC also contain elements of disquiet and opposition to the NUMSA leadership. At the 1957 NUMSA conference, anti-communist delegates moved resolutions in opposition to the NUMSA having a relationship with organizations proscribed by the Labour party, implicitly including the CPGB. Another motion was moved in opposition to the communist-led World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).³² P. McCann, a delegate for the Lanarkshire colliery, Gartshore 3/12, moved both resolutions. He alleged that the WFTU was ‘communist-dominated’ and that further, ‘the real intention’ of the cultural organizations and ties the NUMSA held with Comecon nations, was to aid regimes such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany which had all recently been responsible for violently suppressing democratic opposition.³³ Although both resolutions fell, their presence indicates that the CPGB’s hegemony within NUMSA was never complete. Oppositional forces won delegate elections in Scottish collieries. More pertinent anti-communist trends had been apparent ten years earlier when a leadership-supported conference resolution opposing British involvement in Greece and the Labour government’s growing ties with the United States fell.³⁴ This result perhaps reflected the conflict on this occasion between the CPGB and Labour party positions, undermining the broad unity between Communists and the Labour left that usually prevailed within the NUMSA. These developments took place in the context of a general build-up of Cold War tensions within the British labour movement. Labour party supporters of nuclear armaments and affiliation with the American-led western powers who went on to establish the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were opposed to CPGB supporters of the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc, which later formed the Warsaw Pact, and who backed unilateral disarmament.³⁵

Another setback was the NUMSA’s failure to overturn the STUC’s ban on the Scottish USSR Society in 1951.³⁶ There were other episodes of discord during the 1940s and 1950s, including an affirmation of the STUC’s opposition to the WFTU in 1958.³⁷ However, later exchanges of delegations with the Soviet Union indicate that the CPGB and its allies were able to overturn hostility to communist-led regimes as well as garner support for international causes. Significant successes included the STUC committing to opposition to American involvement in Vietnam.³⁸ The STUC was therefore an important avenue through which the NUMSA were able to overturn social democratic orthodoxies in relation to international alignment as well as industrial strategy and constitutional politics. These findings question definitions of labourism contingent on a broad support for British foreign policy.³⁹ Major sections of the post-1945 Scottish labour movement were in fact open to outlooks shaped by opposition to pro-NATO perspectives. The activities of communists within unions, most prominently and continuously at the helm of the NUMSA, encouraged the development of increasingly critical policy stances. They also passed at conferences due to the growing discontent with British social democracy’s failure to deliver social advances and economic security in the context of deindustrialization. This was most marked during the Wilson and Callaghan governments of the 1960s and 1970s when the STUC developed a devolutionary perspective and became increasingly opposed to the Labour party’s pro-NATO Cold War alignment.

Left-wing opposition to the international aspects of Stalinist–Labourism was also apparent. Lawrence Daly was a prominent critic of CPGB policy following his resignation from the party in 1956. Before he became the NUMSA general secretary in 1965, and the UK-wide NUM general secretary in 1968, Daly established the Fife Socialist League with support from other members of the ‘new left’ who had also rejected the CPGB’s slavish adherence to Soviet policy and the suppression of internal debate. He won over 5,000 votes in West Fife during the 1959 general election and came third, defeating the CPGB candidate in Willie Gallacher’s former constituency.⁴⁰ Daly’s political positions caused tensions within the NUMSA. On 15 April 1957, the executive committee noted that the Scottish Miner had refused to publish Daly’s article commenting on the Soviet invasion of Hungary on the grounds that it ‘dealt with internal differences of Communists’.⁴¹ At the Area’s annual conference two months later, Daly inquired as to why his article had not been published in the Scottish Miner, arguing that ‘the essential point at issue was the question of the democratic rights of members’. Daly was not a lone voice. Supportive delegates included a representative from Priory colliery in Blantyre. Abe Moffat responded rather perversely given the politicized character of the Miner’s coverage. The NUMSA president claimed that ‘the paper had not been established for the purpose of discussing the policy of the Communist or any other political party’. Moffat conflated two separate issues in order to present his stance as one for unity by arguing ‘the miners’ paper could not be used for the purpose of attacking anyone’s religious or political belief ’.⁴²

Despite the appearance of rigidity in Abe Moffat’s response to Daly, the invasion of Hungary shook old certainties. Abe’s brother, Alex Moffat, briefly left the Communist Party, but he rejoined before assuming presidency of the NUMSA in 1961.⁴³ In the years after 1956, a ‘broad left’ strategy displaced Stalinist–Labourism within the NUMSA’s political culture. These developments were part of a wider trend in the CPGB’s orientation, which was especially marked within trade unions. Communists showed a greater willingness to undertake activities in coalition with Labour supporters and other left-wing allies on industrial and political matters through holding a less sectarian or restrictive attitude over Cold War alignments and commitments to official labour movement structures.⁴⁴ The CPGB’s criticism of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 indicated a very different attitude to that which it had maintained over Hungary in 1956. While Abe Moffat had barracked Lawrence Daly for his opposition to the latter, Michael McGahey, who had succeeded Alex Moffat as NUMSA president in 1967, was among the members of the CPGB’s political committee that voted to oppose the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring. Jimmy Reid, who also voted for the resolution, recollected the episode as a major rupture which led to McGahey’s father, Jimmy, a founding member of the CPGB, shutting his house door in his son’s face after stating, ‘So you and Jimmy Reid condemned the Soviet Union’.⁴⁵

Michael McGahey’s less restrictive attitude was also visible in support for the liberation struggles in Vietnam and South Africa through which the CPGB aligned itself with anti-Stalinist political forces in broader solidarity campaigns. Willie Doolan felt that these positions entrenched the NUMSA’s support for devolution, which he remembered evolving through discussions held during meetings between Scottish CPGB trade union activists in Edinburgh during the 1970s. McGahey, ‘was very critical of Czechoslovakia. And he was critical of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan too. Mick believed that a country should have its own say. Mick was an ardent campaigner for a Scottish Parliament’.⁴⁶ These shared commitments encouraged a closer relationship between McGahey and Daly, which partially overcame their differences about the CPGB. Daly was at the forefront of solidarity efforts with Vietnam. When Daly moved a resolution at the 1967 NUMSA conference calling on the British government to condemn America’s involvement in the war he referred to his recent visit to the North Vietnamese coalfield and seeing villages ‘which had literally been wiped out by systematic bombing attacks’. The resolution passed unanimously.⁴⁷ Under McGahey and Daly’s leadership, a shift within political culture took place with respect to both education efforts and public platforms the NUM provided at events such as the Scottish miners’ gala. Prominent representatives from across the British labour movement and political parties were welcomed by the Scottish miners.

This pluralistic development was indicative of the broad left turn within the CPGB’s industrial strategy during this period, but also had a basis in the 1930s Popular Front experience of broad political alliances. Through this change of strategy, the Communist International had abandoned an ultra-left ‘third period’ position which denigrated social democrats as ‘social fascists’ to seeking unity against fascism.⁴⁸ In Scotland, the CPGB, allied with the Independent Labour party and Scottish National Party (SNP), advanced a Popular Front at the 1935 election.⁴⁹ In West Fife, Willie Gallacher united left-wing political forces to defeat a Labour candidate who was on the right of the party and unseated a Conservative MP. Gallacher’s success was built on the dismay felt by local Labour supporters and Communists alike after the Tories won the seat with around a third of the vote in 1931, which was a smaller vote share than the combined total of their parties.⁵⁰ The Popular Front’s programme emphasized broad-based political support for home rule, a strategy that was reprised within the NUMSA under McGahey, in coordination with the STUC. John Kay, who was the CPGB’s Scottish industrial organizer between the mid 1960s and early 1990s, recollected that the Moffats had been ‘imposing hard nuts’. He counterpoised this approach with the one developed under McGahey, which saw NUMSA pursue a strategy based on building alliances across political divisions within the left and labour movement. Under McGahey, ‘the miners led the way’, by devising increasingly diverse platforms at both NUMSA education events and the annual Scottish miners’ gala. Speakers included left-wing trade unionists from across the UK and Liberal and SNP representatives who shared the NUMSA’s support for devolution and opposition to nuclear weapons and power stations.⁵¹

Deindustrialization and national consciousness

Local and regional distinctions proved a powerful and enduring feature of coalfield politics and trade unionism. The Marxist and Scottish nationalist labour historian, James D. Young, celebrated the miners in a 1976 special edition of New Edinburgh Review dedicated to mining culture. Young commended miners as ‘the most militant and class-conscious’ workers in Britain. He regarded their ‘parochialism’ as a key source of strength, which had given solace to secluded communities that possessed ‘a record of consistent resistance to capitalism and capitalist social values’.⁵² These sentiments accord with narratives about the militancy of single-industry mining settlements. Lumphinnans in West Fife, where the Moffats grew up, is among the examples of ‘Little Moscows’ detailed in Knotter’s account of ‘small place Communisms’.⁵³ Jessie Clark similarly described the South Lanarkshire mining village of Douglas Water as ‘a little Moscow’. This choice of terminology underlined the role of CPGB activists as trade union representatives and their central involvement in the community’s highly collectivized social and political life.⁵⁴ Despite the celebratory tone associated with memories of pit village radicalism, the strength of local attachments threatened the development of a coherent trade union that could sustain the strains of political and industrial conflict. A more profound national unity among miners was made practicable by the experience of coalfield restructuring and the building of larger cosmopolitan collieries, but these developments also potentially increased antagonisms and differences within the workforce.

The moral economy’s embedding of customary rights within local employment complicated the process of transfers and threatened the acceptance of incomers. Within receiving collieries, transferring miners represented threats to jobs and traditional arrangements in industrial relations. Coalfield restructuring therefore created tensions between locales in the rationing of industrial employment. Pat Egan recollected that divisions between sections of the workforce from different areas of Scotland were highly visible when he transferred to the Longannet complex following the closure of Bedlay in 1982:

Pat’s comments indicate the importance of a sense of belonging attached to pits within the settlements surrounding them. For Pat, who grew up in Twechar, a relatively isolated village in North Lanarkshire, Bedlay was a colliery invested with community and familial significance. Upon transfer to Longannet he was displaced into ‘the middle ae nowhere’.⁵⁵ Similar dynamics relating to coalfield restructuring and fear about the increasing scarcity of employment had also applied in North Lanarkshire during the 1960s. After the closure of Gartshore 9/11 colliery during the late 1960s, Peter Downie transferred to Bedlay. At Bedlay, he was met with pronounced antagonism from a local miner who saw the incomers as a threat to his economic security:

The NUMSA was fragmented by occupational as well as geographical distinctions. SCEBTA retained organizational independence as an affiliate to the union. As late as 1972, the SCEBTA general secretary Frank Gormill extended fraternal greetings to Michael McGahey and the NUMSA at the Area’s conference, underlining his union’s commitment to ‘cooperate to the fullest extent’ in the context of industrial action and strike mobilizations. However, Gormill reiterated his union’s opposition to amalgamation despite its membership shrinking as collieries closed over the 1960s.⁵⁷ Nicky Wilson worked as an electrician at Cardowan before he transferred to Longannet. Nicky recalled that solidarity between workgroups, and closer organizational links, developed incrementally through experiences of industrial action and by necessity as the industry contracted:

Nicky and Pat’s testimonies emphasized gradual progress towards unity through a restructuring process that brought Scottish miners into greater contact across regional and demarcation boundaries. Union activism asserted a common interest. The NUMSA’s sustained left-wing leadership and support for industrial action from SCEBTA tends towards supporting their conclusions. However, there are lacunae, most notably perhaps the faltering attempts to win backing for strikes against pit closures during the early 1980s. This was most marked in late 1982 when the NCB announced the closure of Kinneil colliery in West Lothian and twelve miners commenced a ‘stay-down’ strike at the pit. The strikers surfaced on Christmas Day following failure to gain support at other collieries. At a delegate conference three days later, Michael McGahey commended the ‘heroic’ action of the strikers and bemoaned the ‘lack of response from the Scottish coalfield’. David Hamilton, a delegate from Monktonhall pit in Midlothian, was more bluntly pessimistic, stating that ‘never at any time had he envisaged a situation developing where a large number of men at Monktonhall would pass a picket line’.⁵⁹ These divisions foreshadowed later tensions over closure threats, which surfaced across the UK fifteen months or so later when the miners’ strike began in March 1984.⁶⁰ Before this, the ‘highly precarious’ unity between NUM areas had already broken over attempts to garner support for industrial action.⁶¹

These distinctions were matched by internal differences within the NUMSA. John McCormack was the NUM delegate for Polmaise colliery in Stirlingshire, which was threatened by the intensification of closures. He criticized the executive committee for having ‘dragged their feet’ on initiating solidarity action.⁶² McCormack repeated these criticisms in a pamphlet published in 1989 where he claimed the NUMSA leadership was ‘working hand-in-hand with the Coal Board regarding the closure’ of Kinneil.⁶³ McCormack’s perspective reflected Polmaise’s relatively exceptional status within the Scottish coalfield. There was no CPGB connection at Polmaise and it was the last remaining traditional village pit in Scotland, with the workforce largely concentrated in nearby Fallin. During December 1982, the NUMSA’s leadership was undermined at pit level in larger cosmopolitan collieries such as Monktonhall. The refusal of miners across Scotland to support the stand at Kinneil precluded building up to a UK-wide strike. But the NUMSA continued its opposition to closures, including at Cardowan in 1983, where the workforce ultimately rejected strike action after months of targeted demoralizing campaigning by the NCB.⁶⁴ The comparatively solid response of the NUMSA to the 1984–5 strike, when only Bilston Glen colliery in Midlothian saw significant strikebreaking before the autumn of 1984, reaffirmed Scotland’s status as a ‘left’ or ‘militant’ coalfield.⁶⁵

Scottish miners’ collective self-image was shaped by a strong occupational identity and national allegiances. These sustained the NUMSA’s claim that the union held a leading position within the broader labour movement. In this respect, the NUMSA paralleled the NUM’s South Wales Area. The South Wales Area president, Emlyn Williams, attempted to build industrial action against pits closures during the 1980s through appeals to a history of militancy that extended back to the early twentieth century. He also drew attention to the threat intensified deindustrialization posed to the Welsh economy.⁶⁶ Michael McGahey similarly implored miners to provide leadership to the Scottish labour movement through rhetoric couched in class and national terms. At the 1983 NUMSA annual conference, he argued that ‘peripheral areas’ were being targeted to the detriment of ‘an abundance of coal reserves that will last the Scottish nation for one, two or three centuries’.⁶⁷ Furthermore, McGahey argued that ‘the defence of jobs in the mining industry is directly linked with other industries in Scotland’, emphasizing the need for ‘uniting our struggle’ with steel and railway workers.⁶⁸ The miners’ capacity for leadership was also observed by other trade unionists. Tom Dougan, a regional officer of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, addressed the conference from the general council of the STUC where he also expressed confidence that ‘the NUM would be in the forefront of the fightback’ against job losses. Dougan professed that the miners were at the core of ‘a true socialist belief within Scotland’, which he contrasted to the policies being pursued by the Thatcher government.⁶⁹ This framing was significant in shaping the historical memory of the 1980s, embedding national as well as industrial or class dynamics. Willie Doolan articulated this sense of the NUMSA’s vanguard role thirty-one years later, in 2014:

The conception of Scottish miners as standard-bearers of class struggle was actively mobilized by the NUMSA’s leadership across the life of the union as a federated Area of the NUM. These efforts included an active appeal to historical inspirations. For instance, the 1978 NUMSA annual conference included an obituary for Peter Kerrigan, a long-standing member of the CPGB and a Scottish volunteer who fought with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.⁷¹ The union also enjoyed a relationship with the Scottish Labour History Society who held exhibitions at the Scottish miners’ gala in 1967, which incorporated items relating to the coalfields.⁷² Miners’ history was similarly visible in the CPGB’s journal, Scottish Marxist. An edition from 1974 included a special section on Scottish miners that stretched back to an account of early attempts at labour organization in Ayrshire collieries by Christopher Whatley as well as extracts from Ian MacDougall’s oral history of struggles in the Fife coalfields during the twentieth century.⁷³ This anticipated MacDougall’s later publication of Militant Miners in 1981.⁷⁴ In the same edition, the NUMSA’s general secretary, Bill McLean, provided a report on the 1974 strike which profiled the union as a leading force in building the strike among miners across Britain. McLean explicitly connected these events with the earlier history recorded in the previous two articles.⁷⁵

Coalfield politics were a regular feature of Scottish Marxist. Two years earlier, Michael McGahey had written an article for the first edition of the journal. He critiqued the prevailing assumptions of energy policymakers with regards to the economics of coal following the NUM’s successful industrial action for miners’ wage increases. McGahey distilled a general lesson from these events, arguing that the arrest of thirteen pickets at Longannet power station, and their subsequent trial was ‘a classic example of an endeavour on the part of the ruling class to take retribution for the success of a workers’ struggle’.⁷⁶ Scottish communists also used Scottish Marxist to explore the connection between class politics and nationhood. Another article in the same edition cited the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in and recent miners’ strike as platforms to build the case for home rule.⁷⁷ George Montgomery, the NUM’s mechanical and electrical safety inspector, presented a similar sense of a ‘forward march’ in the introduction to the New Edinburgh Review coal special edition four years later when he described miners as ‘a once down trodden now organized section of the British working class’.⁷⁸

However, deindustrialization remained a fault line within the British labour movement. Responses to incremental pit closure programmes served to underline national distinctiveness. One significant expression was the NUMSA’s call for a public inquiry into the management of the Scottish coalfield during 1961. The STUC and the Scottish executive of the Labour party supported the demand as well as a significant number of local trades councils and Cooperative guilds.⁷⁹ The union attempted to claim ownership of a national as well as workforce interest by asserting that ‘a Public Inquiry would be a defence of Nationalization and [the NUMSA] believes that the Scottish people who have given such wide support for a Public Inquiry will continue to do so as part of the fight to defend Scotland’s Economy’.⁸⁰ A merger of concerns over industrial employment with local and national economic welfare was also apparent in the letters that the NUMSA’s supporters sent to the NCB’s Chairman, Alf Robens. For instance, Bothwell Constituency Labour Party in South Lanarkshire contacted Robens, stating that the party:

Similarly, J. S. Campbell, the district clerk of Forth District, which is also in South Lanarkshire, explained to Robens that the experience of closures in the district, as well as its retained dependency on coal mining employment, informed their opposition to further contraction. Campbell implicated local concern within a political commitment to the industry in a coalfield area. While it had lost most of its pits, Forth retained a cultural affiliation with coal:

These developments indicate that the dislocation that was felt in contracting coalfields was given an increasingly national expression during the 1960s. Closures and coal industry reorganization directed from London were understood as a threat to the Scottish industrial economy, not just localized communities. This related to the continuing cultural influence of mining in the coalfields, even after the industry had departed. Opposition to closures took the form of a protective countermovement. Not only were job losses or closures protested, the NUMSA also claimed the mantle of nationhood to assert social order over the dislocation caused by the imposition of market logic from outside of Scotland. Intensifying closures also contributed to the growth of fissures between the Scottish Area and the UK-wide union. In part, this related to the attitudes maintained by its communist leaders and activists, which clashed with the worldview of ‘moderate’ or mainstream social democratic officials. Friction between the Scottish Area and UK leadership was apparent at a delegate conference called in response to the announcement of a pit closure programme in November 1961. The minute taker noted that delegates removed two suspected plain-clothes police officers from the meeting, before the executive committee called for a campaign of demonstrations in a ‘fight to save Scotland’s economy’. Delegates bemoaned the UK leadership as presiding over ‘a fifth-rate union’ unprepared to take industrial action over wages or closures or to support the campaign for a public inquiry.⁸³

Responses to an NUMSA demonstration against pit closures in London during 1962 further exposed these differences. The NUM president, Sidney Ford, was reported to have described the procession as ‘a circus’.⁸⁴ Minutes of the NUMSA executive committee meeting held on 26 March note a pointed critique of Ford. References to Ford’s status as a career trade union official underline the class basis of the moral economy, and perhaps implicitly its national orientation too. Ford’s response to the demonstration was ‘Indicative of the fact that the President of the National Union had no working-class background and had never had to fight for wages or a job. In view of these circumstances, the Executive Committee felt that Mr Ford was more in need of their sympathy than their criticism’.⁸⁵ Ford was widely disliked on the NUM left due to his moderate stance. Rivalries between sections of the NUM amplified these political differences: Ford’s background lay in the Colliery Officials and Staff Association (COSA), the NUM’s white-collar affiliate. He defeated Alex Moffat in the 1960 union presidential election by a relatively narrow margin of under 10,000 votes. This made Ford’s status as an ‘office boy’ even more grating to left-wing miners and officials with underground experience.⁸⁶

Figure 6.1. Bob Starrett, ‘Phase 3’, Scottish Marxist, vi (1974) 24. Glasgow Caledonian University Archive Centre: Records of the Communist Party of Great Britain Scottish Committee/ © Bob Starrett

The NUMSA’s self-image as a harbinger of militancy increased through the role it played in stimulating national industrial action during the early 1970s, including through the prominence of Michael McGahey as a public face of industrial action. In 1974, Scottish Marxist published a cartoon that featured McGahey leading miners to dislodge the Heath government’s incomes policy, which is shown in the figure above.

Continuities in the sentiments of NUMSA activists were evident at the Area’s annual conference in 1978. Alex Timpany of Barony colliery moved a motion in opposition to the supposed quiescence of the NUM’s national executive committee on pensions and lump sums for retired miners. Timpany condemned the executive for its moderation, which he related to its distance from the industry by referring to ‘some of the fainthearted members of the NEC who purported to represent the interest of the members who toiled in the bowels of the earth’. Officials from the executive’s ‘right-wing majority’ were ‘so far removed from the rank and file’ that they were incapable of understanding the injustices experienced by miners who suffered occupational illnesses and financial deprivation despite their centrality to British industry.⁸⁷

NUMSA officials and activists also more explicitly cited the national as well as class or cultural distances raised by the conduct of industrial relations and the management of colliery closures on other occasions. During 1962, Alex Moffat made a presidential address to a delegate conference convened to discuss a possible one-day stoppage against closures in the Scottish coalfield. Moffat successfully argued in favour of focusing on a wages campaign with other industrial sectors in Scotland, partly through anticipating future dilemmas posed by the isolation experienced during fights against pit closures. However, Moffat was also keen to demonstrate his frustration with the UK leadership. In arguing with moderate members of the UK national executive over Scottish miners’ right to organize an official strike under the banner of the NUMSA Moffat had drawn attention to the significant disruption being experienced in the Scottish miners which far surpassed the costs of any industrial action: ‘The president had reminded the [UK] national executive, however, that the one day protest stoppage would not cost the miners in Scotland what it had been costing the men transferred from one pit to another over the years since 1958’.⁸⁸ A COSA representative summarized growing discontent at a consultative meeting between management and trade unions preceding the closure of Gartshore 9/11 in North Lanarkshire during 1968. He argued that the imposition of closures, via programmes drawn up in London, represented a threat to democratic procedure and local employment: ‘It used to be that the colliery manager had to plan out his own pit, then Area officials took control of this and now we find that the planning for the Pit is done 500 miles away. Handouts were all right, if unavoidable, but men wanted to work’.⁸⁹ These developments severely stretched the moral economy’s basis in the shared culture of mining communities, and the social as well as financial value placed on employment.

Significantly, these comments came only a year after the NCB’s major centralizing restructuring and indicate how the cumulative logic of deindustrialization encouraged a growing assertion of national as well as local and class-based discontent. Lawrence Daly had already begun arguing for strengthened industrial and political democracy in Scotland earlier in the decade. In a 1962 contribution to the New Left Review, Daly underlined the growing development of nationalist sentiment, which he accorded to ‘planning’ on a Britain-wide basis.⁹⁰ Anticipating analyses of ‘internal colonialism’ that gained influence over the following two decades, Daly agitated for an elected Scottish assembly to reverse the scenario whereby ‘Scotland, with a record of many centuries as an independent nation, becomes an economic and political backwater’.⁹¹ He singled out the coalfields as significant to a political solution, underlining that miners felt ‘betrayed’, not only the by NCB, but also through the NUM’s toleration of closure and encouragement of cross-border transfers. Foretelling the hardening of opposition to closures that would take place under his and McGahey’s stewardship of the NUMSA, Daly emphasized that ‘what is really surprising and impressive is the way in which the vast majority of the people refuse to be uprooted’.⁹² This rejection of market logic laid the ground for a class-conscious case for home rule and an agenda centred on averting deindustrialization by embedding the economy in communitarian expectations. The SNP also perceived the link between colliery closures and the growth of Scottish nationalism as analysed by Daly. The party’s leader, William Wolfe, wrote to Robens early the next year exclaiming discontent over the Board’s failure to commit to the restoration of Barony colliery in Ayrshire during 1963. Wolfe argued failure to reopen Barony would not only damage the local economy but also fly against Scottish public sentiment:

Wolfe’s party prospered over the following decade through advancing a perspective which chimed with frustration at Scotland’s perceived economic and political marginalization. These motifs accorded with miners’ experience of centralization and colliery closures. The SNP’s key electoral breakthrough took place in the Hamilton by-election of 1967. Winifred Ewing secured the Nationalist’s first parliamentary representation since the end of the Second World War with a victory in the historic heart of the Lanarkshire coalfield.⁹⁴ While economic planning policies had up to this point quite effectively maintained economic security, they had done so at the cost of local control. This stimulated mounting concern over Scotland’s industrial future, especially as the international economy faltered during the 1970s.

Following Ewing’s election, the SNP became a significant political force in Scottish coalfield areas. Ayrshire was also at the centre of the short-lived Scottish Labour party established through Jim Sillars’ break from the Labour party over the Wilson–Callaghan government’s failure to deliver devolution.⁹⁵ Sillars had earlier faced the growing fear of Nationalist advance in Labour circles during the 1970 South Ayrshire by-election when he was opposed by Sam Purdie. Purdie was a recent SNP convert. He had formerly been the SCEBTA delegate at Cairnhill mine as well as chair of the local trades council and had also been a union delegate to the South Ayrshire Constituency Labour party. In the latter capacity, Purdie had previously acted as the Labour party’s election agent in South Ayrshire.⁹⁶ His SNP election campaign included highlighting alleged dangers to the future of Killoch colliery and the 2,300 jobs it sustained. Purdie wrote to Tony Benn, the minister of technology, highlighting the loss of 7,000 mining jobs in Ayrshire over the previous decade. Sillars portrayed his opponent as ‘scaremongering’ and assisting ‘the anti-coal lobby’. Furthermore, Purdie’s change of allegiances, which Sillars himself would ultimately follow eleven years later, was presented as the act of a renegade:

McGahey supported Sillars by informing the Scotsman that there was ‘nothing to cause concern about the future of the pit’.⁹⁸ Although Sillars won the by-election and comfortably defeated Purdie again at the general election later in the year, he was left ‘haunted’ by the former mining engineer’s concession speech. Purdie challenged Sillars to justify Scotland being governed by a Conservative administration it had not voted for.⁹⁹ Sillars’s invocation of class loyalty against national allegiance reprised longstanding Scottish labour movement motifs. John Taylor, Labour MP for West Lothian, addressed the 1950 NUMSA conference on behalf of the Labour party’s Scottish Council. His contribution was highly critical of the recent Scottish Covenant campaign for a devolved Scottish parliament.¹⁰⁰ Despite the Covenant having been backed by the CPGB, the NUMSA and the STUC, Taylor mockingly noted the support of ‘such proletarians as the Duke of Montrose’. Furthermore, constitutional reform ‘was a diversion and a trap’. Taylor was dismissive of territorial politics, stating that to socialists it ‘did not matter much where we were governed from but by whom we were governed’.¹⁰¹ In contrast, the NUMSA’s longstanding commitment to home rule was grounded in an understanding of class that was sensitive to national dynamics and antagonistic to the effects of centralization.

Under McGahey’s presidency, the NUMSA more overtly embraced Scottish nationalism, but nevertheless stopped short of the demand for separation. During the 1968 STUC annual conference, at which McGahey moved a motion in favour of a Scottish parliament, he distinguished ‘healthy nationalism’ from chauvinistic ‘perverted nationalism’. The former was defined as ‘love of one’s own country, love of one’s own people and pride in their traditional militancy and progressiveness’. McGahey’s motion was remitted, which marked a pronounced shift in STUC policy towards devolution and paved the way for its later campaign in support of a Scottish assembly during the 1970s.¹⁰² McGahey’s STUC contribution readily acknowledged that his communist politics shaped his outlook. A strong continuity with the Popular Front is apparent in his pursuit of a broad alliance that appealed to ‘questions of democracy, nationalism, patriotism and history’.¹⁰³ But during the late 1960s, appeals to ‘subaltern’ culture were also stimulated by the influence of the Scottish folk revival and the influence of analysis which championed plebeian traditions as a valuable resource for the left.¹⁰⁴

Jimmy Reid redeployed McGahey’s motifs during a 1974 CPGB election address in Clydebank which similarly distinguished between ‘healthy nationalism’ and ‘jingoism’. Reid placed industrial job losses in a distinct national historical context by referring to twentieth-century ‘Lowland Clearances’. Echoing the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century experiences of forced removal in the Highlands, Reid stated these developments could be approaching ‘genocidal’ if a Scottish assembly was not established to implement ‘new policies in Scotland to reverse the trend and to preserve our culture and our nationhood’.¹⁰⁵ While McGahey’s rhetoric avoided this hyperbolic language, he similarly clearly conferred the sentiment that nationhood ought to be carried forward under a labour movement banner. During 1978, a referendum on a Scottish assembly was legislated for under the Scotland Act. This heavily divided the labour movement. In response, McGahey asserted the need for a class-conscious Scottish national identity at the NUMSA’s annual conference: ‘We must never allow the Nationalists to appear to be the banner of the Scottish nation. That honour truly belongs to the Labour and trade union movement’.¹⁰⁶ John Taylor’s logic from twenty-eight years previously remained influential within the Labour party. George Cunningham, a Scot and a Labour MP who sat for a London constituency, was an opponent of devolution who successfully moved a parliamentary amendment which established that a threshold of 40 per cent of eligible voters would have to vote in favour of the assembly for the referendum to mandate its establishment. The referendum, which took place in March 1979, ended in the debacle of a ‘Yes’ majority that failed to meet the threshold.¹⁰⁷

Occupational and class consciousness spurred the development of demands for autonomy, but also limited them. These dynamics were encouraged by the emphasis on unity within the nationalized industry, and the harsh lessons that miners took from interwar experiences of fragmentation. McGahey’s support for devolution at the STUC in 1968 was qualified with the reassurances that he ‘rejected outright the theory of separating Scotland from the United Kingdom’. Although the NUMSA was committed to ‘the decentralisation of power’, McGahey also maintained that ‘the miners’ union was a [British] national union’, that ‘operated in a nationalized industry, which miners would never allow to be destroyed’.¹⁰⁸ These sentiments continued to predominate as the likelihood of devolution increased. The NUMSA’s representatives at tripartite meetings that took place during Benn’s term at the Department of Energy continued to argue in favour of significant autonomy and planning in Scotland. However, this was within an overall commitment to the nationalized industry at a UK-wide level and sharp opposition to the ‘disintegration’ of unitary frameworks.¹⁰⁹

Scottish miners’ conceptions of class solidarities were shaped by the contradictory imperatives of resistance to centralization and support for the principle of a unified nationalized industry and trade union. NUMSA leaders and activists asserted a distinctive Scottish national identity while maintaining the Area as a bulwark of the left within the NUM and wider UK labour movement, and through its international connections. This was highly visible in the NUMSA’s major events, including its annual conference, but especially the Scottish miners’ gala which showcased coalfield culture through both Scottish and British national lenses.

The Scottish miners’ gala

The importance John Kay ascribed to the Scottish miners’ gala above chimes with the NUMSA’s records and other testimonies. Elements of an ‘invented tradition’ are evident from the gala’s inauguration in 1947. It aimed to consolidate conceptions of a unified Scottish mining community, the NUMSA’s centrality to the labour movement, and popularize its leadership’s political perspective. Eric Hobsbawm referred to invented traditions as practices and events ‘which appear to claim to be old but are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented’. His definition emphasized inventing traditions as necessarily tied to spreading conceptions of history and the contemporary politics through seeking a basis in the past:

Hobsbawm’s examples included the FA Cup final and royal radio and television broadcasts. Broadly, he referred to phenomena where elites attempt to preserve authority in periods of major economic and social upheaval through appeals to a ‘powerful ritual complex’, which attempted to establish continuity with a mythologized national past.¹¹¹ However, Hobsbawm did consider that subaltern forces could similarly deploy such sentiments. For example, he argued James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History was an example of an attempt to popularize ‘a people’s past’ that contested dominant interpretations and would inspire a socialist approach to national liberation.¹¹² The Scottish miners’ gala was a fuller deployment of ‘invented practices’ which linked the ideology of the NUMSA’s leaders with their aim of establishing a distinct and united Scottish mining community in congruence with the practices of localized coalfield communities. At the national gala, attendees were invited to spectate and participate in the same activities that took place at local gala days. These included running races, football and boxing, pipe and brass band competitions as well as a ‘Coal Queen’ competition, entrance to which was confined to miners’ daughters and partners.¹¹³

Figure 6.2. Miners’ Gala Day 1969. Historic Environment Scotland/ © The Scotsman Publications Ltd.

The Scottish gala involved the replication of village gala days on a larger basis. However, this reprisal of activities traditionally confined to a restricted locale communicated a different, national, purpose. Rather than taking place in a coalfield, the gala was always held in Edinburgh, shifting between Holyrood Park and Leith Links following a major procession through the city centre as demonstrated in figure 6.2. As well as holding the symbolism of Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh was also where both NUMSA and the NCB Scottish division were headquartered, which further conferred the gala as an event that affirmed a distinct Scottish mining identity. Through the combination of local, national and international networks coalescing around NUMSA, the Scottish miners’ gala paralleled the Durham miners’ gala, which Hew Beynon and Terry Austrin characterized as a ‘political project’.¹¹⁴ The Durham NUM Area general secretary, Sam Watson, used the gala to bring together a plurality of representatives from across the British coalfields, and the wider labour movement, including international speakers. In Watson’s case this was to illuminate ‘all elements in the new Labourist society’ constructed after the Second World War, which emphasized his moderate social democratic outlook and support for liberal freedoms.¹¹⁵ Watson was an internal political opponent of the NUMSA’s leadership and a stalwart of the NUM’s Labour mainstream wing. As a contracting coalfield, Durham was also potentially a rival to the needs and concerns of the Scottish Area. During 1961, Watson led the NUM national executive in voting down the NUMSA’s appeal for the union to adopt its demand for an inquiry into Scottish colliery closures.¹¹⁶

In the case of the Scottish gala, similar mechanisms were used to project a distinctly different form of communist-influenced politics, but these also shared the Durham miners’ gala’s emphasis on occupational and territorial identities. The gala served as both a symbol and a key institution of an emergent Scottish national coalfield community. The NUMSA placed itself at the centre of the event, and as in Durham, the gala brought together politically diverse elements under the banner of the Scottish miners. This is demonstrated in figure 6.3, which shows Joan Lester, a junior minister in the Wilson government with responsibility for nursery education, speaking on a platform alongside representatives from the North Vietnamese trade union movement at the 1969 gala.¹¹⁷ Brendan Moohan recalled the gala as a major annual event that showcased the size of the industry and the common purpose of mining communities across Scotland who marched alongside their union banners and bands. In the context of a shrinking coal mining workforce, the gala affirmed the continuing industrial and cultural importance of coal mining:

Figure 6.3. Gala Day 1969, featuring Joan Lester (Labour MP), Lawrence Daly, and Vietnamese Federation of Union representatives. Historic Environment Scotland/ © The Scotsman Publications Ltd.

International delegations also made an impression on young attendees. Jackie Kay’s poem, ‘Last room in operations’, which was written in tribute to Michael McGahey, profiles her memories of going to the gala with her adopted father John, whose memories of the gala are discussed above. Alongside links with the African National Congress (ANC)’s struggle against Apartheid, Kay remembers the NUMSA president introducing ‘Jock and Tam fray Vietnam’.¹¹⁹

An ‘imagined’ Scottish mining community developed through the gala, extending beyond the localized communities built around individual pits and villages.¹²⁰ With parallels to Anderson’s imagined communities of nationhood, the gala consolidated an imagined Scottish national coalfield community through an annual event in which collective participation and representation established connections between people above the expanse of a localized community. These occasions consolidated a sense of shared interest and emotional investment in the coal mining industry between individuals who by their very number and geographical proximity could not all be familiar to one another. A collective identity was maintained by the gala even as coalfield employment fell. The gala helped Antony Rooney to retain his familial connections to coal mining and linked it with his labour movement activities as a shop steward at the Caterpillar tractor factory in Tannochside, and as a Labour party activist in Bellshill:

Antony Rooney and John Kay’s memories indicate the involvement of key labour movement personalities in the gala, which affirmed its political importance. Tony Benn recalled in his diary that the 1977 event had a large attendance despite the weather, with Edinburgh ‘freezing and raining’ on the day.¹²² The gala articulated both a Scottish mining identity and the unity of the British labour movement. This combination of distinctive Scottishness within a wider British context can be understood as an example of ‘Unionist–Nationalism’. In Morton’s history of nineteenth-century urban governance, local civic institutions provided the basis for the articulation of a Scottish national identity within Unionist sensibilities.¹²³ At the gala, in contrast, it was the social democratic infrastructure of the nationalized coal industry which facilitated the expression of a Scottish cultural and political consciousness within a British framework. These relationships are indicative of the mid twentieth-century British context where ‘both national and transnational’ civil societies functioned; the gala exemplified this via the invocation of cross-Britain solidarity in a Scottish political setting, including the speeches of labour movement figures from England and Wales, especially British national leaders of the NUM.¹²⁴

However, the NUMSA’s support for home rule reveals another dimension to the gala. This was very much justified on the basis of asserting democratic control over economic decision making in Scotland, that is to say making ‘utilitarian’ rather than ‘existential’ appeals to national feeling.¹²⁵ But cultural aspects of national identity were nonetheless clearly mobilized at the gala. Elements of the tension between a Scottish and British identity framed within the context of the devolved structures of the nationalized industry were evident. Pipe bands and Highland dancing competitions coexisted with the characteristic British mining iconography of banners and brass bands. In terms used by Tom Nairn, latent ‘cultural “raw material” for nationalism’ served to embed a political agenda which was largely a response to the uneven economic development of British capitalism after the Second World War, rather than an articulation of romantic nationalist aspirations.¹²⁶

Figure 6.4. 1988 Gala poster. Historic Environment Scotland/ © James Hogg.

To some extent, the annual galas could be interpreted as an indication of the vitality of Nairn’s hope that the Scottish labour movement would ‘build up its own nationalism’ to oppose the SNP’s socio-economic moderation. However, Scottish nationalism’s containment within a Unionist structure also confirmed his disappointment with the role of Communist as well as Labour party politics.¹²⁷ The Scottish gala, like its counterpart in the South Wales coalfield, can be understood as an event in which the sensibilities of ‘left labourism’ predominated, but with an extended commitment to constitutional reform and an emphasis on internationalism.¹²⁸

The gala also highlighted the NUMSA’s transnational connections, especially through networks provided by the CPGB. In 1956, a delegation of miners from Poland was present at the rally.¹²⁹ Delegates from the (North) Vietnamese Federation of Trade Unions addressed the rally in 1969 as part of NUMSA’s international solidarity activities analysed above. Their presence was only achieved following a sustained political effort, which included drafting the services of Alex Eadie, the Labour MP for Midlothian, to secure visas for the representatives.¹³⁰ It also appears to have cemented links between NUMSA and Vietnam. A letter of thanks from the Federation was noted by NUMSA’s executive committee on September 8 1969:¹³¹

A further exchange of communications took place when NUMSA sent a note of condolences upon the death of North Vietnam’s president, Ho Chi Minh, later the same year. The Vietnamese Federation of Trade Unions warmly accepted NUMSA’s message replying that:

These exchanges were remembered over a decade later by the Vietnamese ambassador to Britain. Dang Nghiem Bai told a report from the Labour Herald that: ‘I will always remember that the first group of western workers to support us were the Scottish miners’.¹³⁴ The advertisement contained in figure 6.4, publicizing the 1988 gala, indicates the longevity of the event which had begun forty-one years previously. It also indicates a continuity of traditional mining community leisure activities such as pipe bands and sporting events alongside political speeches as well as sustained commitments to causes of the left associated with the CPGB. Both nuclear disarmament and Scottish devolution were heavily profiled through the inclusion of CND and STUC representatives. However, it was support for the struggle against Apartheid which was the lead item. A speaker from the ANC led the billing on the South African-themed poster.

The Scottish miners’ gala was a key institution in popularising and sustaining a distinct Scottish national coalfield community. It recast the emphasis of traditional gala days from a work and residence-centred locale to one based on a broader occupational attachment framed within the nationalized industry and the NUM’s British and Scottish facets. Speakers recruited through networks around the NUMSA and CPGB combined industry-level, national and international political dimensions. The gala straddled the politics of occupation, class and nationhood, which were formative to a distinctive Scottish national mining community that developed through the nationalized industry and coalfield restructuring. Both the international connections and links to the UK-wide labour movement and coal industry that the gala furnished were representative of the factors that shaped and qualified the NUMSA’s expressions of Scottish nationalism.

The Scottish miners’ gala ultimately came to an end during the 1990s, following the intensification of colliery closures and the draining of the NUM’s coffers as its membership fell.¹³⁵ A marginalized mining workforce struggled to claim the mantle of Scottish nationhood which it had articulated over the previous five decades. The first gala in 1947 exemplified the innovations in the NUMSA’s political culture which developed under public ownership. Nationalization facilitated the construction of a stronger, more centralized, Scottish miners’ union. Coalfield reconstruction undermined traditional parochial barriers. As the effects of centralization adversely impacted employment levels in the Scottish coalfield, the NUMSA became increasingly pronounced in its support for home rule, but its Scottish nationalism was always contextualized by its defence of the nationalized industry and the NUM’s unitary structures. Occupation, class and nationhood were fused in Scottish miners’ consciousness, including within the internal politics of the NUM where the Scottish Area usually adopted a left-wing or militant stance. This was sustained by reference to historical traditions. The NUMSA’s appeals to the past gave national coherence to localized experiences. These sensibilities were also apparent at the Scottish miners’ gala which reprised the routines of local village gala days on to a larger, national, stage in Edinburgh. Speakers were drawn from across the UK and from international networks that the NUMSA was linked to through the CPGB. Through its contributions to the STUC, the NUMSA achieved successes in advancing support for foreign policy positions and home rule which considerably went against the mainstream social democratic grain. The consistency with which the leadership of a major union articulated support for nuclear disarmament, an oppositional Cold War alignment and support for home rule indicates that labourist political culture was programmatically malleable. Deindustrialization was formative to coalfield politics over the second half of the twentieth century. However, responses to it were dictated by longer historical memories, which were mediated through economic and political forces that encouraged a fusion of class and national consciousness. These influences continue to exercise potent effects in contemporary Scotland.

__________

¹ J. Phillips, ‘The meanings of coal community in Britain since 1947’, Contemporary British History, xxxii (2018), 39–59, at pp. 42–3.

² S. Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Inter-War Britain (London, 1980), pp. 61–72.

³ A. Campbell and J. McIlroy, ‘Miner heroes: three communist trade union leaders’, in Party People, Community Lives: Explorations in Biography, ed. J. McIlroy, K. Morgan and A. Campbell (London, 2001), pp. 143–68, at 143, 158.

⁴ J. McIlroy and A. Campbell, ‘Coalfield leaders, trade unionism and communist politics: exploring Arthur Horner and Abe Moffat’, in Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies, ed. S. Berger, A. Croll and N. La Porte (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 267–83, at p. 276.

⁵ D. Nettleingham, ‘Canonical generations and the British left: narrative construction of the British miners’ strike, 1984–85’, Sociology, li (2017), 851.

⁶ A. Campbell, ‘Scotland’, in Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout: the Struggle for Dignity, ed. J. McIlroy, A. Campbell and K. Gildart (Cardiff, 2009), pp. 173–98, at pp. pp. 184–5.

⁷ Mick McGahey, interview with author, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, Edinburgh, 31 March 2014.

⁸ National Mining Museum Scotland archives, Newtongrange, Midlothian (NMMS), National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA), Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 28 June 1971 to 14/16 June 1972, p. 621.

⁹ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 28 June 1971 to 14/16 June 1972, p. 643.

¹⁰ R. P. Arnot, A History of the Scottish Miners: from the Earliest Times (London, 1955), p. 413.

¹¹ Arnot, Scottish Miners, p. 413.

¹² Mick McGahey, interview.

¹³ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 20 June 1949 to 2 June 1950, p. 631.

¹⁴ Nicky Wilson, interview with author, John Macintyre Building, University of Glasgow, 10 Feb. 2014.

¹⁵ P. Ackers, ‘Gramsci at the miners’ strike: remembering the 1984–1985 Eurocommunist alternative industrial strategy’, Labor History, lv (2014), 151–72, at pp. 153–4.

¹⁶ D. Priscott, ‘The miners’ strike assessed’, Marxism Today, Apr. 1985, pp. 21–7, at p. 24.

¹⁷ E. Gibbs, ‘Civic Scotland vs communities on Clydeside: poll tax non-payment c. 1987– 1990’, Scottish Labour History, xlix (2014), 86–106.

¹⁸ V. Allen, The Militancy of British Miners (Shipley, 1982), p. 139.

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

²⁰ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 23 June 1947 to 8 June 1948, pp. 462–3, 497; Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 20 June 1949 to 2 June 1950, p. 785; Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 18 June 1951 to 20 June 1952, pp. 664–5.

²¹ Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 27 June 1966 to 14/16 June 1967, pp. 429–30.

²² Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 28 June 1971 to 14/16 June 1972, p. 597.

²³ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 23 June 1947 to 8 June 1948, pp. 255–6.

²⁴ STUC, Annual Report 1967–1968, lxxi (1968), 191–2.

²⁵ STUC, Annual Report 1972–1973, lxxvi (1973), 233.

²⁶ STUC, Annual Report 1972–1973, lxxvi (1973), 193; 1978–1979, lxxxii (1980), 548.

²⁷ STUC, Annual Report 1972–1973, lxxvi (1973), 456.

²⁸ STUC, Annual Report 1952–1953, lvi (1953), 260.

²⁹ STUC, Annual Report 1952–1953, lvi (1953), 260.

³⁰ John McIlroy, ‘“Every factory our fortress”: Communist Party workplace branches in a time of militancy, 1956–79, part 1: history, politics, topography’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, x (2000), 99–139, at p. 113.

³¹ STUC, Annual Report 1952–1953, lvi (1953), 260–2.

³² STUC, Annual Report 1952–1953, lvi (1953), 769

³³ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 18 June 1956 to 5 to 7 June 1957, pp. 766–9.

³⁴ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special conferences, 8 July 1946 to 11 June 1947, pp. 38–9.

³⁵ R. Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (London, 2006), pp. 205–6; McIlroy, ‘“Every factory our fortress”’ (part 1)’, p. 113.

³⁶ STUC, Annual Report 1950–1951, liv (1951), 22–3

³⁷ STUC, Annual Report 1957–1958, lxi (1958), 297–305.

³⁸ STUC, Annual Report 1967–1968, lxxi (1968), 135, 192.

³⁹ J. Saville, ‘Labourism and the Labour government’, Socialist Register, iv (1967), 43–71; R. Miliband, Parlimanetary Socialism: a Study in the Politics of Labour (London, 1973).

⁴⁰ M. Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin (London, 1995), pp. 40–1.

⁴¹ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 18 June 1956 to 5 to 7 June 1957, p. 607.

⁴² NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 18 June 1956 to 5 to 7 June 1957, p. 714.

⁴³ N. C. Rafeek, Communist Women in Scotland: Red Clydeside from the Russian Revolution to the End of the Soviet Union (London, 2008), p. 141.

⁴⁴ R. V. Seifert and T. Sibley, Revolutionary Communist at Work: a Political Biography of Bert Ramelson (London, 2012), pp. 110–14.

⁴⁵ J. Reid, ‘Mick McGahey’, Herald, 2 Feb. 1999 <http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/aberdeen/mick-mcgahey-1.307647> [accessed 21 Dec. 2019].

⁴⁶ Willie Doolan, interview with author, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 12 March 2014.

⁴⁷ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 27 June 1966 to 14/16 June 1967, pp. 440–1.

⁴⁸ H. Graham and P. Preston, ‘The Popular Front and the struggle against fascism’, in The Popular Front in Europe, ed. H. Graham and P. Preston (Basingstoke, 1987), pp. 1–19, at pp. 3–4, 13–14.

⁴⁹ J. Foster, ‘The twentieth century’, in The New Penguin History of Scotland: from the Earliest Times to Present Day, ed. R. A. Housing and W. W. Knox (London, 2001), pp. 417–96, at p. 445.

⁵⁰ Foster, ‘The twentieth century’, p. 445.

⁵¹ John Kay, interview with author, residence, Bishopbriggs, 8 Aug. 2014.

⁵² J. D. Young, ‘The British miners, 1867–1976’, New Edinburgh Review, xxxii (1976), 5–9, at p. 5.

⁵³ A. S. Knotter, ‘“Little Moscows” in western Europe: the ecology of small-place Communisms’, International Review of Social History, lxi (2011), 475–510, at p. 478.

⁵⁴ Jessie Clark, interview with author, residence, Broddock, 22 March 2014.

⁵⁵ Pat Egan, interview with author, Fife College, Glenrothes, 5 Feb. 2014.

⁵⁶ Moodiesburn focus group, retired miners’ group, The Pivot Community Centre, Moodiesburn, 25 March 2014.

⁵⁷ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 28 June 1971 to 14/16 June 1972, p. 635.

⁵⁸ Nicky Wilson, interview.

⁵⁹ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, July 1982 to June 1983, pp. 319–27, 333, 337.

⁶⁰ J. Emery, ‘Belonging, memory and history in the North Nottinghamshire coalfield’, Journal of Historical Geography, lviii (2018), 77–89, at pp. 81–2.

⁶¹ H. Francis and G. Rees, ‘“No surrender in the valleys”: the 1984–85 miners’ strike in South Wales’, Llafur, v (1989), pp. 41–71, at p. 43; V. Allen, ‘The year-long miners’ strike, March 1984–March 1985: a memoir’, Industrial Relations Journal, xl (2009), 278–91, at p. 283.

⁶² NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, July 1982 to June 1983, p. 336.

⁶³ J. McCormack (with S. Pirani), Polmaise: the Fight For a Pit ( WordPress version, 2015) <https://polmaisebook.wordpress.com> [accessed 21 Dec. 2019], p. 10.

⁶⁴ TNA, Coal 89/103, Bill Magee, press release: Cardowan ballot results, NCB press office, Edinburgh, 26 Aug. 1983.

⁶⁵ J. Phillips, ‘Material and moral resources: the 1984–5 miners’ strike in Scotland’, Economic History Review lxv (2012), 256–76, at p. 264.

⁶⁶ B. Curtis, ‘A tradition of radicalism: the politics of the South Wales miners, 1964–1985’, Labour History Review, lxxvi (2011), 34–50, at pp. 35–7.

⁶⁷ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, July 1982 to June 1983, p. 635.

⁶⁸ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, July 1982 to June 1983, p. 633.

⁶⁹ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, July 1982 to June 1983, p. 678.

⁷⁰ Willie Doolan, interview 2014.

⁷¹ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, 27 June 1977 to 14–16 June 1978, p. 601.

⁷² NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 27 June 1966 to 14/16 June 1967, p. 104.

⁷³ C. Whatley, ‘Some historical pointers: miners in 18th century Ayrshire’, Scottish Marxist, vi (1974), 5–12; I. MacDougall, ‘Reminiscences of John MacArthur, Fife militant’, Scottish Marxist, vi (1974), 13–23.

⁷⁴ Militant Miners: Recollections of John McArthur, Buckhaven; and Letters, 1924–6, of David Proudfoot, Methil, to G. Allen Hunt, ed. I. MacDougall (Edinburgh, 1981).

⁷⁵ B. Mclean, ‘The 1974 struggle’, Scottish Marxist, vi (1974), 25–35.

⁷⁶ M. McGahey, ‘The coal industry and the miners’, Scottish Marxist, i (1972), 16–19, at p. 18.

⁷⁷ A. Murray and F. Hart, ‘The Scottish economy’, Scottish Marxist, i (1972), 23–35.

⁷⁸ G. Montgomery, ‘Introduction’, New Edinburgh Review, xxxii (1976), 1–3, at p. 3.

⁷⁹ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special conferences, 12 June 1961 to 6/8 June 1962, p. 267.

⁸⁰ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special conferences, 12 June 1961 to 6/8 June 1962, p. 238.

⁸¹ TNA, Coal 31/96, W. Drennan, Bellshill, to Alf Robens, NCB, London, 31 Jan. 1962.

⁸² TNA, Coal 31/96, J. S. Campbell, Forth District Council, Larkhall, to Alf Robens, NCB, London, 29 Dec. 1961.

⁸³ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special Conferences, 12 June 1961 to 6/8 June 1962, pp. 215–29.

⁸⁴ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special Conferences, 12 June 1961 to 6/8 June 1962, p. 523.

⁸⁵ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special Conferences, 12 June 1961 to 6/8 June 1962, p. 523.

⁸⁶ A. Taylor, The NUM and British Politics, ii: 1969–1995 (Aldershot, 2006), p. 25.

⁸⁷ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, 27 June 1977 to 14–16 June 1978, pp. 643–5.

⁸⁸ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special Conferences, 12 June 1961 to 6/8 June 1962, pp. 447–8.

⁸⁹ National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (NRS), Coal Board (CB) 300/14/1, Minutes of Special Consultative Committee Meeting of Gartshore 9/11 Colliery Consultative Committee (CCC) held in Grayshill Office on Thursday 18 Jan. 1968.

⁹⁰ L. Daly, ‘Scotland on the dole’, New Left Review, xvii (1962), 17–23, at p. 17.

⁹¹ Daly, ‘Scotland on the dole’, pp. 22–23; M. Hechter, Internal Colonialism: the Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London, 1975).

⁹² Daly, ‘Scotland on the dole’, pp. 19–22; R. S. Halliday, The Disappearing Scottish Colliery: a Personal View of some Aspects of Scotland’s Coal Industry since Nationalisation (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 7.

⁹³ The National Archives (TNA), Coal 31/96, W. C. Wolfe, SNP to A. Robens, NCB, London, 31 Jan. 1963.

⁹⁴ J. Mitchell, Hamilton 1967: the Byelection that Transformed Scotland (Gosport, 2017).

⁹⁵ A. Perchard, ‘“Broken men” and “Thatcher’s children”: memory and legacy in Scotland’s coalfields’, International Labor and Working-Class History, lxxxiv (2013), 78–98, at pp. 86–7.

⁹⁶ Sam Purdie, interview with author, UWS Hamilton campus, 3 May 2018.

⁹⁷ TNA, Coal 52/402/63, ‘SNP candidate accused of “pit-closure rumours”’, Scotsman, 27 Jan. 1970.

⁹⁸ TNA, Coal 52/402/63, ‘SNP Candidate Accused of “Pit-Closure Rumours”’, Scotsman, 27 Jan. 1970.

⁹⁹ J. Sillars, Scotland: the Case for Optimism (Edinburgh, 1986), p. 33.

¹⁰⁰ M. Keating and D. Beliman, Labour and Scottish Nationalism (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 144–5.

¹⁰¹ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 20 June 1949 to 2 June 1950, p. 642.

¹⁰² J. Phillips, The Industrial Politics of Devolution: Scotland in the 1960s and 1970s (Manchester, 2008), p. 38.

¹⁰³ J. Fyrth, ‘Introduction: in the Thirties’, in Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front, ed. J. Fyrth (London, 1985), pp. 9–29, at p. 14.

¹⁰⁴ N. Davidson, ‘Gramsci’s reception in Scotland’, Scottish Labour History, xxxviii (2010), 37–58, at p. 38.

¹⁰⁵ J. Reid, Reflections of a Clyde-Built Man (London, 1976), pp. 121–2.

¹⁰⁶ NMMS, NUMSA, Executive Committee Minutes, 27 June 1977 to 14–16 June 1978, pp. 609–10.

¹⁰⁷ J. Mitchell, Devolution in the United Kingdom (Manchester, 2009), p. 125.

¹⁰⁸ STUC, Annual Report 1967–1968, lxxi (1968), 400.

¹⁰⁹ TNA, Coal 31/166, Department of Energy paper 14: tripartite energy consultations, 20 Feb. 1976, London, 1976.

¹¹⁰ E. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: inventing traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 1–14, at pp. 1–2.

¹¹¹ Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.

¹¹² Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.

¹¹³ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences, 8 July 1946 to 11 June 1947, p. 8.

¹¹⁴ H. Beynon and T. Austrin, ‘The performance of power: Sam Watson, a miners’ leader on many stages’, Journal of Historical Sociology, xxviii (2015), 458–90, at p. 480.

¹¹⁵ Beynon and Austrin, ‘The performance of power’, pp. 480–2.

¹¹⁶ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive and Special Conferences, 12 June to 6/8 June 1962, p. 237.

¹¹⁷ NMMS, NUMSA Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 24 June 1968 to 18/20 June 1969, p. 92.

¹¹⁸ Brendan Moohan, interview with author, residence, Livingston, 5 Feb. 2015.

¹¹⁹ J. Kay, ‘Last room in operations’ (2014), unpublished poem used with permission of the author.

¹²⁰ B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 2009), p. 6.

¹²¹ Anthony Rooney, interview with author, Morrisons café, Bellshill, 24 Apr. 2014.

¹²² T. Benn, Conflicts of Interest: Diaries, 1977–80 (London, 1991), p. 177.

¹²³ G. Morton, Unionist–Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 (East Linton, 1999) pp. 7, 190–1.

¹²⁴ P. Ward, Unionism in the United Kingdom, 1918–1974 (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 6.

¹²⁵ D. Torrance, The Battle for Britain: Scotland and the Independence Referendum (London, 2013), p. 184.

¹²⁶ T. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London, 1977), p. 144.

¹²⁷ T. Nairn, ‘Three dreams of Scottish nationalism’, New Left Review, xlix (1968), 3–18, at p. 17.

¹²⁸ Curtis, ‘Tradition’, p. 48.

¹²⁹ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conferences from 18 June 1956 to 5 to 7 June 1957, p. 607.

¹³⁰ NMMS, National Union of Mineworkers (Scottish Area) Minutes of Executive Committee and Special Conference from 24th June 1968 to 18/20th June 1969, Entry for executive committee meeting, 12th May 1969.

¹³¹ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special conferences from 27 June to 14/16 June 1967, pp. 465–9.

¹³² NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special conferences, June 1969 to 15/16 June 1970, p. 55.

¹³³ NMMS, NUMSA, Minutes of Executive Committee and Special conferences, June 1969 to 15/16 June 1970, p. 166.

¹³⁴ ‘The struggle to build Vietnam’, Labour Herald, 29 Apr. 1983, pp. 6–7.

¹³⁵ ‘Last reminders of a dying breed’, Herald, 31 May 1994 <https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12694321.last-reminder-of-a-vanishing-breed> [accessed 21 Dec. 2019].