Disability in Industrial Britain: A Cultural and Literary History of Impairment in the Coal Industry, 1880–1948

Abstract

Ten percent of male workers in the United Kingdom were employed in the coal industry in 1914. Coal's economic and employment prevalence came at immense human cost. No industry was more dangerous or injurious to the health of its workers. Major pit disasters arising from explosions and fires drew public attention, but more damaging were the everyday attrition effects of roof falls and the dust-ridden environment underground. Coalfield women shared the industry's physical toll. While barred from work underground in Britain after the 1840s, their experience of childbirth and domestic labor in extremely arduous conditions was debilitating. Their daily shift, called the darg in Scotland, involved cleaning and drying their menfolk's pit clothes, heating water for baths, and preparing meals. Where mining sons lived in the parental home and worked different shifts from their fathers, mothers’ dargs could last from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m.The authors of Disability in Britain examine the impact of such exhausting life and labor. Their first key insight, from disability studies, is profound. Impairment and disability are not synonymous: impairment is physical; disability is social. Miners acquired impairments through workplace accidents and diseases. They were then disabled by obstacles erected by employers and medical professionals along with welfare policy makers and administrators. The authors’ second key insight is that miners were a highly organized “patient” group that exerted agency on two broad fronts: campaigning for a safer working environment to minimize impairment; and resisting disability on the terms defined by employers and policy makers. Miners across the United Kingdom won two major legislative victories in 1946–47. Clement Attlee's reforming Labour government passed the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, which provided statutory and comprehensive compensation for workers denied employment owing to impairment, and nationalized coal, which led to safer employment through stronger union voice.Disability in Industrial Britain is a major outcome of the Leverhulme Trust–funded Disability and Industrial Society project, where twelve researchers from seven UK universities engaged in comparative cultural histories of the coalfields from 1780 to 1914. Kirsti Bohata is a professor of English at Swansea University, where Alexandra Jones undertook a PhD thesis and Mike Mantin worked as a research fellow. Steve Thompson is a senior lecturer in history and Welsh history at Aberystwyth University. The interdisciplinary strengths of this research team shaped the broad range of sources they analyzed in this book, focusing on the coalfield territories of South Wales, Durham, and Scotland. The team drew empirical evidence from records of welfare policy makers and administrators, employers, the courts where compensation claims were contested, and trade unions. These documents, alongside newspaper reports, are integrated with extensive readings from creative literature on mining, from middle-class authorial accounts in the nineteenth century that dwelt on tragedy and individual redemption, to assertive working-class writers who highlighted collective injustice in the twentieth century.Industrial changes from the late nineteenth century onward aggravated historical problems underground. Mechanization in a privately owned industry where firms competed for domestic and overseas markets led to accidents and illnesses. Coal industry employment was highly varied, however, and here was the social model of disability in action. When demand for mining labor was high, in periods of economic expansion, and in both the First and Second World War, impaired miners were redeployed. But when markets contracted, in the early 1920s and 1930s, these men were the first to be made redundant, employers often mobilizing bogus safety arguments against their retention. This is a highly significant finding, providing a historical parallel with the hidden unemployment of coalfield deindustrialization identified in the 1990s by Christina Beatty and Steve Fothergill. In this later period, redundant workers who would have remained economically active had coal jobs still been available were reclassified by doctors and welfare administrators as “permanently sick.”The theme of collective agency is showcased in the authors’ examination of the medical and welfare systems. Impaired miners resisted their “medicalization” and impoverishment. Organized labor was involved in the design of medical services and treatment. In the 1920s employers were compelled by mining unions to finance the Miners’ Welfare Fund, coordinated by the UK government, which provided pit baths and various rehabilitation and convalescence facilities. Compensation awards were meager and often contested. Impaired miners seeking compensation were subjected to medical inspection by company doctors who frequently disputed work-related causation and the extent of injury or illness. Determined union activism was required to demonstrate employer liability in local courts of law. The authors also examine the social relations of disability in households and communities. Isolation was a common experience for the impaired, with constraints on work and social interaction. The masculine breadwinner ideal was compromised, but impaired miners often found other roles, in jobs outside mining and in domestic caregiving and labor performance, confounding gender stereotypes, while union activism on compensation enabled their contribution to household income.The authors end their detailed analysis with an extended discussion of working-class coalfields literature, in which disability is shown to have been a core feature. Short-story writers, novelists, and poets demonstrated how people were disabled by mining under capitalist relations of production. Nonliterary scholars may query the value added in this stand-alone chapter. The material might usefully have been incorporated in the preceding discussions of work, medical treatment, compensation, social relations, and political activism. In explicitly focusing on working-class authors and the voices of the impaired, however, the authors emphatically reinforce this exceptional book's central contribution to our understanding of coalfield history. Disability was a social construct, and as such it was resisted by miners in South Wales, Durham, and Scotland from the 1880s to the 1940s.