Systems of financial support for impaired miners and their families

Abstract

When a working miner met with an injury or contracted a disease, perhaps the most pressing concern was how to survive the financial consequences. Impairment often necessitated a period of time away from work, or possibly the end of working life altogether. The loss of a weekly wage meant that the miner needed to draw upon one or more among a range of different sources of assistance. This chapter examines the various, changing ways that financial welfare was available in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. It considers various providers of assistance many of which dated from before 1880, such as charities, friendly societies and the Poor Law, in addition to the major developments in statutory systems of welfare which affected miners after that date. Such statutory interventions started with the Employers’ Liability Act of 1880, continued with the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1897 (and several revisions in the decades after its introduction) and ended (as far as the scope of this volume is concerned) with the Industrial Injuries Act of 1946, which enshrined a generous system of benefits to injured workmen in the welfare state. The years from 1880 to 1948 were a crucial time in the development of welfare in Britain. There was a gradual move from staunch adherence to individualism and the free market to greater state intervention in the 1880s and 1890s, and then more significant Liberal government reforms in the Edwardian period that for the first time enshrined in law the right to provisions such as school meals, pensions and health insurance. The interwar hiatus in legislation was followed by the post-war welfare settlement, which brought universal healthcare and finally abolished the individualistic and stigmatising Poor Law. These key details have formed milestones in the extensive literature on British welfare, and this narrative of progression can also be seen in the shifting depiction of welfare in coalfields literature across the time period. Broadly speaking, in