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COAL CULTURES
 PHOTOGRAPHY, PLACE, ENVIRONMENT

Series Editors: Liz Wells

Photography, Place, Environment publishes original scholarship and critical
thinking exploring ways in which photography contributes to, or challenges,
narratives relating to geography, environment, landscape and place, historically
and now.
International in scope, and innovatory in placing imagery as both the object and
the method of enquiry, the series includes single-authored and edited volumes by
new scholars as well as established names in the field. By critiquing relationships
between land, aesthetics, culture and photography, the books in this series also
foster debates on photographic methodologies, theory and practices.

Coal Cultures: Picturing Mining Landscapes and Communities, Derrick Price

Renegotiating Landscapes: Art, Photography and Politics in
Postcolonial Documentary Practices, Nicola Brandt
Photography and Environmental Activism, Conohar Scott
COAL CULTURES
Picturing Mining Landscapes
and Communities

Derrick Price
 BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo

are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Derrick Price, 2019

Derrick Price has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

Cover design: Maria Rajka

Cover image: Naoya Hatakeyama, “Terrils #16015 (Dourges, Évin-Malmaison)” 2010.
© Naoya Hatakeyama / Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in
this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret
any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist,
but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Price, Derrick, author.

Title: Coal cultures : picturing mining landscapes and communities /
Derrick Price. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts,
an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018030857 | ISBN 9781350037830 (HB : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781350037847 (epub) | ISBN 9781350037854 (ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Coal mines and mining–Pictorial works. | Coal mines and
mining–Environmental aspects. | Mining camps–History–Sources. |
Community life. Classification: LCC TN801 .P75 2018 | DDC 622/.334–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030857

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3783-0

ePDF: 978-1-3500-3785-4
eBook: 978-1-3500-3784-7

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com.
Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and
the option to sign up for our newsletters.
CONTENTS

List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements xii

INTRODUCTION 1

Coal and photography 3

Commodities 5
Types of coal 8
Coal and politics 9
The culture of coal 10
Reading about coal 11
Manifesta explores coal mining 12
History and memory 13
The structure of this book 15

1 DEGRADATION AND REGENERATION 19

A famous coal tip 19

The Welsh mining valleys 20
Degraded landscapes 23
Picturing mining 25
The Bechers 29
Mining landscapes today 31
Aberfan 34
Memory and community 36
Landscape after Aberfan 37

2 IMAGES OF MINERS 41

Women in mining 42
The Munby archive 44
Women, mining and romance 46
 Masculine bonding 48
The miner as hero 50
Picturing workers 52
The FSA and the 1930s 53
Documenting three tenant families 57
Russell Lee 58
Lewis Hine 62
British 1930s documentary 65
The critique of documentary 68

3 MINING COMMUNITIES: COAL CAMPS AND MINING

VILLAGES 73
The cultural life of mining settlements 77
Disasters 78
Disasters on film 81
Moving and visiting 84
Artisanal mining 89
Bootleg mining 91
Free miners of the forest 92
Sea coal 93
The future of coal communities 97

4 FOG, SMOG AND POLLUTION 99

Fog in London 99
Coal gas 102
The dustmen of London 103
Fighting pollution 105
Smog and art 106
London and New York 108
Pollution 113

5 STRIKES AND CONFLICT 117

The British miners’ strike of 1984/1985 119

Women’s groups 126
Retrospective accounts 128
In Harlan County 131
Matewan 132
The Battle of Blair Mountain 134

vi CONTENTS
6 THE NEW LANDSCAPES OF COAL 139

Post-industrial landscapes and photography 141

The Valleys Project 142
Reconnaissance – Wales 145
Stripping the land 146
Mountain top removal 147
Mountains and the sublime 151
The sublime in art 152
The American technological sublime 153
The Anthropocene 155
Burtynsky 158

7 HERITAGE, MEMORY AND NOSTALGIA 161

Coal and the heritage industry 161

Industrial tourism 162
Heritage tourism and modernity 163
Tourism and photography 164
Nostalgia 167
Nostalgia for coal 168
Souvenirs 168
Memorabilia 171
Mining memorials 173
Ruins 174

CODA 179

References 181
Films 187
Index 188

CONTENTS vii
LIST OF FIGURES

1  his woodcut, which shows a mine-pumping device, appeared in

T
Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica libri xii in 1556. INTERFOTO /
Alamy Stock Photo. 2
2 Lewis Hine, Trapper Boy, 1908. Trapper boys waited in the
darkness of the mine to open and close doors as wagons passed
through. The socially concerned photographer Lewis Hine made
this portrait at the Turkey Knob Mine, Macdonald, West
Virginia, as part of a long project on child labour. Courtesy of
Library of Congress. 3
3 The town of Bargoed, with its famous coal tip, was
photographed as part of the Francis Frith photographic survey of
Britain c. 1955. © The Francis Frith Collection. 19
4 This engraving was made in 1815 from George Walker’s
watercolour of a miner and a steam train. © Album /
Art Resource, NY. 26
5 This stereograph is titled Slate Pickers, Anthracite Coal Mining,
Scranton, Pa., USA. The cheerful lad in the foreground frames
the room where back-breaking labour is taking place. Courtesy
of the New York Public Library Digital Collections. 29
6  he Becher’s typological study of Winding Towers in Germany,
T
France and Britain made in 1988. © 2018. Christie’s Images,
London/Scala, Florence. 31
7 John Davies’ study of the Terril at Haillicourt, France, 2013.
Courtesy of John Davies. 32
8 Mel Parry’s photograph taken at Aberfan was seen around
the world. Courtesy of Media Wales. 36
9 A drawing of the Rhymney River at Angel Lane from D. Alun
Evans’ exhibition, Black Wound, 2000. © D. Alun Evans. 38
10 This image from the Munby archive is captioned: Female
Collier from Rose Bridge Pits, 1869. Courtesy of the Munby
Archive. 44
11 A woman gets ready for work at a Pennsylvania mine.
The portrait is by Ted Wathen as part of his work for The
President’s Commission on Coal, 1979. The original is in colour.
© Ted Wathen. The President’s Commission on Coal. National
Archives USA. 47
12 Martin Senior and Tom Cook, Miners at Hay Royds Colliery,
Yorkshire, 2011, photographed by Ian Beesley and included
in his collection, The Drift, Café Royal Books, 2016. © Ian
Beesley. 49
13 Gustav Klutsis, Long Live the Stalinist Order of Heroes and
Stakhanovites, 1936. Original in colour. Heritage Image
Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo. 50
14  lexei Stakhanov, 1935, from the ITAR-Tass News Agency.
A
Original in colour. ITAR-TASS News Agency/Alamy Stock Photo. 51
15 Children of coal miners, Sunbeam Mines, Scott’s Run, West
Virginia, photographed by Ben Shahn as part of the FSA
project in 1935. © Ben Shahn. 54
16 Marion Post Wolcott, Coal Miner, His Wife and Two Children,
Berth Hill, West Virginia, September, 1938. The caption adds:
‘notice the child’s legs’. Courtesy of the New York Public Library
Digital Collections. 56
17 Russell Lee Milong Bond, Tipple Worker, Taking a Bath.
Even where bathing facilities existed they were often not
available for surface workers. Lee took this photograph as
part of the Medical Survey project in 1946. National Archives
photo no. 245-MS-1846L. 60
18 Lewis Hine, Breaker Boys, 1911 (123). Science History Images/
Alamy Stock Photo. 64
19 An unemployed coal miner in Wigan pictured in the late 1930s
by an unnamed photographer. Granger Historical Picture Archive/
Alamy Stock Photo. 66
20 A woman pegs out her washing in Stephen Spender’s
photograph taken in Yorkshire in 1936. Courtesy of Dave
Cooper. 67
21 Liu Zheng, Coal Miner, Arm Lost During Work, Datong, Shanxi
Province, 2002. © Liu Zheng, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery,
New York. 72
22 Walker Evans, Interior of a Miner’s Shack, Scott’s Run Outside
of Morgantown, West Virginia, 1935. Courtesy of the New York
Public Library Digital Collections. 73
23 Russell Lee, Coal Camp, 1946. One of many coal camp
images Lee made for the Medical Survey of the Bituminous
Coal Industry. National Archives photo no. 245-MS-37L. 75

LIST OF FIGURES ix
24 The Maypole Colliery Disaster of 1908 had a death toll of 76
people and took place at Abram near Wigan. It was
commemorated in this card. © John Hannavy. 79
25 A contemporary poster for Kameradschaft, 1931. Courtesy
of Nero Films A.G. and Gaumont-Franco Film-Aubert. 81
26 India, Jharkhand, Jharia, Children Collect Coal from an Artisan
Mine. Photographed by Joerg Boethling. Original in colour.
© Joerg Boethling / Alamy Stock Photo. 90
27 Sea Coal gatherers dig into the sea at Lynemouth in
Chris Killip’s 2011 collection, Seacoal. © Chris Killip, 2011. 94
28 People are led through the foggy streets by men and a boy
carrying lighted torches. The Illustrated London News,
Vol. 10, 1847. © Illustrated London News Ltd, Mary Evans. 99
29 John Thomson, The Temperance Sweep, from Street Life in
London. Hi-Story/Alamy Stock Photo. 104
30 Fred Stein’s photograph of a couple at a street corner in fog
bound Paris in 1934. dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo. 108
31 In 1956 smog masks were issued to London policemen.
Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo. 109
32 Walter Albertin captured this view of the Chrysler Building
in dense fog in 1953. Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy
Stock Photo. 111
33 One of John Sturrock’s many photographs of the strike.
This was taken at Orgreave in 1984. © John Sturrock/
reportdigital.co.uk. 123
34 John Harris’ celebrated shot of a mounted policeman attacking
Lesley Boulton from the Miners Women’s Support Group.
© John Harris/reportdigital.co.uk. 125
35 Roger Tiley, Glynis and Mary, Members of Maerdy Wives
Support Group, Maerdy, Rhondda Fach, 1985. Ffotogallery,
The Valleys Project Archive. 126
36 Danny Radnor, Played by Will Oldham, in a tense moment
from Matewan, 1987. Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock
Photo. 133
37 Machine gunners at the Battle of Blair Mountain, 1921.
FLHC 5/Alamy Stock Photo.  135
38 Miners handing in guns at the Battle of Blair Mountain, 1921.
FLHC 5/Alamy Stock Photo. 137
39 Mike Berry, Hauling Coal Back to the Village, 1985. Scrabbling
for coal in the miners’ strike. Ffotogallery, The Valleys Project
Archive. 143

x LIST OF FIGURES
40 Francesca Odell, Street Corner, Clydach Vale, Tonypandy,
July 1985. Ffotogallery, The Valleys Project Archive. 144
41 Garzweiler Strip Mine, Germany, Bildagentur Zoonar GmbH.
Original in colour. Shutterstock. 146
42 Mountain Top Removal at Oven Fork, Kentucky. The
photographer wishes to remain anonymous. The original
is in colour. © David Cooper. 148
43 A stock photograph showing the power of the Hoover Dam.
Shutterstock. 153
44 Peter Arkell, South Hetton Colliery County Durham Closed
Down June 1986 after End of the Miners Strike. © Peter
Arkell/reportdigital.co.uk. 160
45 Mining Souvenir, Hard Gannin (Hard Going) When it was
difficult for a pony to move the tubs themselves the miners had to
play a part. © Colliery Road. 169
46 Dean and Chapter Banner. Original in colour. Courtesy of the
Durham Mining Museum. 172
47 Universal Colliery, Monument to Coal, 1996. One of a series
of coal monuments by Paul Cabuts. Original in colour.
© Paul Cabuts. 174
48 Manfred Thürig, View of ruined buildings on Pyramiden, 2015.
Manfred Thürig/Alamy Stock Photo. 176
49 Gunkanjima, ‘Battleship Island’, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan.
Photographed by Kamal Parsi-Pour/Alamy Stock Photo. 178

LIST OF FIGURES xi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I
am indebted to Liz Wells for making this book possible. Her incisive reading of
the text and her critical responses to it were very valuable. More than this, I need
to thank her for the fact that our discussions and debates over the years have
helped to shape my view of photography and its place in contemporary culture.
The task of sourcing photographs was made pleasurable by working with Sophie
Tann of Bloomsbury Academic. She remained positive and constantly helpful even
when I was despondent and finding the whole thing a tedious chore. Paul Cabuts
was an insightful reader of the manuscript and I really appreciated and benefited
from both his encouragement and his criticisms. Richard Dyer very kindly gave
me notes he had made on mining in the context of the miners’ strike of 1985. Marc
Arkless of Ffotogallery patiently guided me through the archive of The Valleys
Project, and I am very grateful for his help. My greatest debt is, as always, to my
wife, Helen Taylor. Over the years she has driven me through the valleys of South
Wales, strapped on a hard hat to travel through heritage mines, and responded to
countless stories of the industrial past. Her support for this project was crucial to
me, as are the long conversations, jokes, rows and exchanges that are at the heart
of our life together.
Markov-Grinberg’s 1934 portrait of the ‘heroic’ miner Nikita Alexeevich Izotov.
© The Francis Frith Collection.
INTRODUCTION

In the sixteenth century the metallurgist Georgius Agricola described the

nature and processes of mineral mining in a celebrated and very comprehensive
treatise. Published as De Re Metallica, it became the standard work on mining
for hundreds of years. Much of the power of the work derived from the way
in which it was illustrated with wood engravings that helped to explain the
technical processes (Agricola 1556). From the first moment of the scientific
study of mining, then, visual imagery was central to the description and
communication of its nature and processes (Agricola 1556). The photographer
and critic Allan Sekula has argued that there is a clear line linking Agricola’s
famous work to subsequent prints, paintings and, later, photographic depictions
of mining (Sekula 1983).
Agricola’s study was a remarkable work, but coal mining was centuries old
by the time he produced it. Indeed, it is often said that, after agriculture, mining
was the earliest of human trades. The Chinese were digging coal out of shallow
drifts more than 3,000 years before the birth of Christ. The Aztecs burnt it,
and the Romans in Britain, as early as the second century AD, began a trade
that carried coal from Newcastle to London. The seventeenth century saw the
development of key technical innovations and a hundred years later deep coal
mines were established in a number of countries. Long before this, though,
coal was important to very early societies. Richard Martin asserts that one of
the reasons for China’s supremacy in the artistic and technological realms was
because their use of coal provided plentiful and cheap energy. He adds that ‘Many
of the achievements of the later Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD) – elaborate
lacquerware, exquisite bronze work, the perfection of the papermaking process,
and the development of the wind-powered bellows – were made possible by this
energy surplus’ (Martin 2015: 184).
But it is in the modern world that coal began to take centre stage, replacing
timber as the primary source of energy. Indeed, it might be claimed that the
mineral brought modernity about. In her influential book on coal, Barbara Freese
puts it this way:
FIGURE 1 This woodcut, which shows a mine-pumping device, appeared in Georgius
Agricola’s De re metallica libri xii in 1556.

The industrial age emerged literally in a haze of coal smoke, and in that smoke
we can read much of the history of the modern world. And because coal’s
impact is far from over, we can also catch a disturbing glimpse of our future.
(Freese 2003: 2)

The study of coal, then, is a way of exploring the past and predicting something
of the future. For coal is a global commodity, and there is no part of the world that
remains uninfluenced by it. Even if you could live in a country that neither mined
nor burnt coal, global warming and the deleterious atmospheric consequences of
burning coal would sooner or later affect you.
The centrality of coal to the making of industrial society means that it has
been studied by people in many different disciplines, but our sense that we know
something about mines, miners and mining communities comes largely from
visual material, especially from photographs.

2 COAL CULTURES
FIGURE 2 Lewis Hine, Trapper Boy, 1908. Trapper boys waited in the darkness of
the mine to open and close doors as wagons passed through. The socially concerned
photographer Lewis Hine made this portrait at the Turkey Knob Mine, Macdonald, West
Virginia, as part of a long project on child labour.

Coal and photography

This is a book about coal, but also about photography. From its inception
photography was concerned to reveal the hidden and dark places of the world.
Great cities were trawled for images of the lives of the poor and the dispossessed.
Indigenous peoples around the world were captured on camera, as were the
noble ruins of vanished civilizations and the minutiae of natural history. But, for

INTRODUCTION 3
early photographers, coal mines were a particular challenge. They were socially
and geographically remote from the centres of power, and it was difficult to
photograph the work itself, for that took place under the earth in dark caverns that
often contained dangerously flammable gases. Nevertheless, there are many early
pictures of coal mines, miners, coal communities, and underground working.
These were not the first images of mining, for from the eighteenth century there
were numerous paintings, engravings and drawings of mine buildings, although
they were often pictured from an aesthetic style that stressed their harmony with
the surrounding rural scene, rather than the rupture that they made with it.
Photography broke this sense that mining was an activity that might easily co-exist
with agriculture and rural pursuits.
Coal is a very particular commodity, but it shares many features with other kinds
of mineral mining. Gold, copper, nickel and zinc mining have all been extensively
recorded, described and photographed. Some fascinating photographic studies
have been made of these metals. The gold mines of South Africa are the subject
of David Goldblatt’s book On the Mines. In her introductory essay to this book
Nadine Gordimer observes:

The Witwatersrand created its own landscape out of waste and water brought
from the underground in the process of deep-mining, and created its own style
of living, inevitably following the social pattern of the colonial era of which it
was a phenomenon, but driven by imperatives even deeper than the historical
one. The social pattern was, literally and figuratively, on the surface; the human
imperative, like the economic one, came from what went on below ground.
(Goldblatt and Gordimer 1973: 19)

This connection between the materiality of mining and the underground sources,
in both a material and a psychic way, of its power and influence, could easily have
been written about coal. Goldblatt’s photographs show working miners, but also
the artefacts that surrounded them, as well as buildings such as cottages and shops.
He also includes a picture of the grand building that housed the company that
once financed the mines. If mines are hard to access and comprehend, the patterns
of ownership and finance that underpin them are equally opaque and often
difficult to understand. The chain of power and control between the mines and the
businesses that fund them is the central theme of photographer and critic Allan
Sekula’s Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes, in which he photographed the largest
nickel-mining town in the world – Sudbury in Canada. He directly linked these
to pictures of the headquarters of the Bank of Canada, whose capital financed the
mine (Sekula 1986).
Most books of mining photographs are collections of industrial locales and
machinery. Here there are innumerable pithead wheels, cages, trams full of coal,
washing plants, coke ovens and slag heaps. Photographs of miners themselves
are often of workers in an industrial setting. They have usually just come to the

4 COAL CULTURES
surface, so that they are still black with coal dust and wearing a helmet with a
cap lamp. Other scenes show massed men voting for a strike or celebrating some
notable event. These photographs are the stuff of academic history. They have
often been seen as evidential and can be used to support the veracity of a written
account. Forays from documentary photographers were undertaken in order to
get beneath the formal surface of things and bring to light the life of the pits and
the mining communities.
Miners were significant subjects of American, European and British
documentary photography in the 1920s and 1930s, both as proud, indispensable
workers and as exemplary figures of unemployment and economic depression.
There are countless images of them descending in cages, screening coal on the
surface of the pit, or emerging black faced and blinking in the light on their return
from the depth of the mine. Underground they are seen hacking at a coal seam
with a pick, leading horses or driving machinery. Mining communities were also
recorded. Here images of miners bathing in a tin tub before a glowing coal fire are
quite common, as are photos of women doing heavy domestic work or cooking
meals in a crowded room. Photojournalists were interested in news stories, so
tended to concentrate on disasters and strikes. Of course, most pit disasters take
place deep underground, so the photographs tend to be of people anxiously waiting
at the pithead for news. In addition, a number of major photographers have taken
portraits of miners. They are pictured, then, both as distinctive individuals and as
social types, so that even a sensitively made portrait may be titled simply, A Miner.
In the chapters that follow I shall consider various genres of photography and
the way in which they have been deployed in picturing these workers. The role of
women as miners and as miners’ wives, and in embodying the distinctive culture
of mining villages, will be an important theme of the book.

Commodities
Many of the products and services that we take for granted, from the food we eat
and the clothes we wear to the fuel that creates our power supply, are imported
from other countries and have been traded on global markets. Studying the history
of the production of these commodities often takes us to formerly colonized
nations whose economies have been shaped precisely in order to ensure a steady
supply of some vital product. In the service of this people have been enslaved,
indentured or exploited. Land has been appropriated and despoiled and particular
cultures created. The study of commodities, then, is not simply about economics;
it inevitably raises political, cultural and spatial issues. In recent years there has
been an upsurge of interest in the history of commodities. Research projects trace
the demand in the West for goods such as sugar, cotton, tobacco and tea to the
development of slavery and patterns of colonial domination. At the same time
there is great interest in popular histories of such things as, salt, potatoes, cod,
coffee and coal.

INTRODUCTION 5
 Replacing the burning of trees with an underground source of power was a
key moment in human history. It allowed the capitalists of the day to store energy
and to use it in different places at appropriate times. This crucial ability to have a
regular power supply made modern industrial life possible. In consequence, the
future of coal stocks was widely debated and, in the nineteenth century, there was
considerable disquiet over the possibility that coal supplies would run out, just as,
in Britain, timber had disappeared from the once extensive forests.
In 1866, at a time when Britain was the world’s leading producer of coal, Stanley
Jevons wrote what was to become a very influential book. In it he contemplated
a future when the supplies of coal declined. He made it clear that he was not
talking about the total loss of coal supplies in Britain, which he saw as ‘literally
inexhaustible’. Rather, he was concerned with the future cost of coal, as in order
to keep up supplies, pits had to be dug deeper and deeper. He was also worried
about the comparative advantage that Britain had over every other country being
eroded because:

It is impossible that we should long maintain so singular a position; not only

must we meet some limit within our own country, but we must witness the coal
produce of other countries approximating to our own and ultimately passing
it. (Jevons 1866: 2)

In response to this fear the British Geological Survey worked across the empire
to identify new supplies of coal. Indeed, one of the key drivers of imperial
expansion was the perceived need to find new sources of the mineral, and the
mining history of a number of nations can be understood only within the context
of their colonial past. The consequences of colonialism still affect present-day
societies. A report from War on Want in 2016 looked at the degree to which
British companies control key mineral resources in Africa. More than a hundred
companies listed on the stock exchange have mining operations in some thirty-
seven sub-Saharan African countries and control more than a trillion dollars’
worth of Africa’s resources. They conclude that ‘the UK government has used
its power and influence to ensure that British mining companies have access to
Africa’s raw materials. This was the case during the colonial period and is still the
case today’ (War on Want 2016).
Every book about coal stresses its importance in the making of the modern
world as it created the steam power that drove the Industrial Revolution. Jevons
was right when he said that Britain would eventually be overtaken as the world’s
largest producer of coal, and other societies would also see it as central to their
existence:

Coal made America great. Our nation was built on it – literally and figuratively
… For better or worse, the acquisition, transport and processing of coal shaped
the development of our cities and reshaped the appearance of the land. Coal

6 COAL CULTURES
 determined the location of towns. Coal dictated the routes of canals and
railroads. Coal influenced the evolution of society. In recognition of its value,
lumps of coal came to be called ‘black diamonds’. (Myers et al. 2017: 8)

The importance of coal is diminishing as many nations are pledged to stop

burning it in order to reduce carbon emissions. But, in many places in the world,
the memory of coal, the people who mined it, and the culture it created still resonate
in the collective memory. It is the coexistence of this homage to the memory of
coal, together with the material reality of existing and vibrant coal industries, that
makes mining a fascinating subject of study for the cultural historian.
Mining in Western Europe is entering the realm of history, and an aversion
to coal, and scientific awareness of its polluting properties, are now matters of
global concern. International agreements are in place designed to reduce carbon
emissions. However, despite great efforts to develop other forms of power, coal
remains a major source of energy. In 2017 it still produced about 40 per cent of
the world’s electricity. It constituted 29 per cent of global energy, making it second
only to oil which had a 31 per cent share. Far from declining, since the beginning
of the twenty-first century coal has been the fastest growing source of energy in
the world. China is a major producer of coal but also consumes half of the world’s
output. The key exporters are Indonesia, Australia, Russia, South Africa, Columbia
and the United States. As in previous centuries, then, it is still a major commodity
in the global economy, but its despoliation of the landscape and pollution of the
air raises powerful critical voices that want to see it abandoned. Not that this is a
peculiarly twenty-first-century problem. Writing in the Illustrated London News in
1893, the Rev. Harry Jones considered the prevailing state of coal:

Wise men of science are beating their brains in the search for something to
deliver us from the tyranny of coal. That fuel has warmed us and cooked our
food for ages – Newcastle was famous for it six hundred years ago. In these latter
days it has turned the wheels of our machines, and has given us light from gas.
It is difficult to realise what coal does in giving heat, illumination and driving
power; let alone the beautiful dyes which the chemist has drawn from the refuse
of gas-works. After having been a servant, coal has become our master, without
whose aid cities would be left in darkness, our meat would be raw, the railways
would be useless tracks of rusty iron, the industry of our factories would cease,
and our fleets would be no more able to carry merchandise or to fight an enemy
at sea. (Jones 1893: 646)

Musing on the tyranny of coal, and following this immediately with a list
of the benefits it delivers, is, in many ways, the contemporary position. Most
people and governments agree that carbon fuels must be phased out. Most
people and governments around the world still rely wholly or partly on coal for
their electricity supply, while people without electricity would happily welcome

INTRODUCTION 7
it whatever its source. Begin to unpick the nature of the industry and statistics
rain down from governments, coal companies, independent agencies, medical
groups and ecological warriors. Some are clarifying, some tendentious, almost
all need to be qualified, and treated with great care. Perhaps most significantly,
in predicting the future for coal, analysts are always looking to the past, and
comparing how things are now with the days when, as they like to put it, coal
was king.
This is a book about coal and about the ways in which photography has
contributed to our perceptions of miners and mining communities. Given the
long history of mining it is clear that it cannot be an account of the global story
of coal and its representation through images and literature. I have examined that
history for significant events, and I draw my examples and explore cultural works
connected with coal mining from all over the world in order to focus on some key
places and incidents that are typical of others.

Types of coal
It is important to know that there are various kinds of coal. In detailed studies of
mining the history of coalfields can be explored only in terms of the type of coal
that was found there. Different types of coal have diverse and often specialist uses
and vary considerably in terms of their economic value. Some are cleaner than
others, some burn more brightly and some can provide intense heat. Although
it is a mineral, coal comes from organic matter, from plants that have sunk into
the earth at various levels and for different periods of time. For centuries people
have described coal as a ‘living’ fuel and have claimed to find in burning it a
comforting sense of its origins in natural life. The type of vegetation from which
it was formed, together with the depth to which it sank and the temperatures
and pressures at those depths, helps to determine the kind of the coal that is
produced, as does the length of time it took to create. The youngest coal is a
compressed peat, a soft, brown, very dirty coal called lignite that is largely used
in power generation. Compress lignite and you produce sub-bituminous coal,
which is one of the cleanest. Even older is bituminous coal that is black, shiny
and constitutes about half of all coal. It is subdivided into ‘steam coal’ which was
very important when trains and ships were dependent on it, and is still widely
used in the generation of electricity and in a range of industrial processes. The
second is ‘coking coal’, an extremely hot fuel which was vital to the creation of
steel. Finally, about 1 per cent of all coal is anthracite, the most metamorphosed
it is a hard variety with a very high carbon content and few impurities. There
is, as a consequence of these different types of coal, no single coal economy.
For example, the vast reserves of steam coal in the Welsh valleys meant that
its prosperity depended on a buoyant shipping industry; so, in many ways, the
exigencies of world trade were more important to its economic condition than
the overall state of the British economy.

8 COAL CULTURES
Coal and politics
Today coal is largely used in power stations to create electricity. President Trump
vowed to ‘bring back coal’, but most experts predict that, despite this pledge, coal
will be less important within the power mix in the United States in the future as
natural gas becomes cheaper. The technique of fracking continues to lower the
price of gas, and in 2016, for the first time, more natural gas than coal was used
to generate electricity. About 30 per cent of America’s electricity is still produced
by coal-fired power stations, but many of these are old and the use of coal, there
as elsewhere, would seem to be in terminal decline. However, the position is
far from clear: in 2017 the output of coal increased in the United States, China
and India. President Trump’s aim is to make the United States an exporter of
coal, even as the domestic demand falls, an exporter that would rival Australia,
currently the world’s largest distributer of coal to the rest of the world. China
takes a different approach and, instead of exporting coal, it is establishing mines
in other countries, some of which have never been serious producers of coal.
The Shanghai Electric Group has said that it will build coal-based power plants
in Egypt, Pakistan and Iran, with a total output of more than 6,000 megawatts
(Tabuchi 2017). Yet everyone agrees that using coal carries serious negative
consequences. A leading writer on climate change, Tim Flannery, tells us that ‘the
burning of coal to generate electricity remains the world’s largest single source of
carbon pollution. According to the International Energy Agency things are going
to get worse’ (Flannery 2015: 90).
That coal is not good for human health is not news. For hundreds of years
coal and pollution have been linked together, and coal was understood to be the
cause of dense fogs, choking industrial atmospheres and air that was deleterious
to human health. The debates about the importance of the effects of carbon-based
fuels on the earth’s atmosphere date from the end of the nineteenth century and
have been the subject of serious scientific enquiry since the early 1960s. This
research took the idea of the human influence on climate change from the local to
the global, so that individual governments meeting in international committees
agreed that our dependence on coal and oil must end in the interest of the future
of the entire world.
This would all seem to be clear enough, but the present position is very
complex. On one hand we have political rhetoric and the signing of international
climate agreements. On the other an increasing worldwide demand for electricity,
a demand that in many countries can only currently be met by burning coal and,
in the case of poorer nations, will not be met for many years without oil and coal.
So, many countries have drawn up plans to extirpate coal in the coming decades.
Cyprus, Luxemburg, Belgium, Malta and the Baltic countries have all abandoned
the fuel. France will close all its coal-fired power plants by 2023, Britain by 2025,
the Netherlands by 2030, but, at the same time, a significant dependence on coal
continues. Germany is an excellent example of this. It has renounced nuclear

INTRODUCTION 9
energy and put in place plans to become entirely dependent on renewable energy,
but without naming a date for the end of coal-burning power stations. At the
moment it is still deeply dependent on coal and is home to the biggest mining
operation on earth. The Garzweiler strip mine wiped out a number of towns
in order to get at the earth beneath them. It stretches for 48 square kilometres
and will extract more than 1.3 billion tons of lignite coal before it is closed and
the ground flooded to create an enormous lake. Meanwhile, India continues to
develop its mining operations, as does Indonesia. Australia is still deeply in love
with coal, although its long-term use is problematic, while Turkey plans to build
seventy-five new coal-fired power plants in the coming decade. Coal India is the
largest coal-producing company in the world. Its vision is to ‘emerge as a global
player in the primary energy sector committed to provide energy security to the
country by attaining environmentally & socially sustainable growth through best
practices from mine to market’.

The culture of coal

While the whole world is involved in the coal trade, the culture brought about by
the mining of coal differs from one place to another. Looking at the importance of
miners in the British imagination, Barbara Freese writes:

Yet, the symbolic importance of British coal miners comes from more than
their once dominant numbers. It comes from the unique mixture of awe,
sympathy, guilt and fear that these workers have long inspired. It comes
from their work in that most mysterious and dangerous of places, the deep
underground, and from their distinctive and isolated tight-knit communities.
And it comes from a recognition, at least historically, that coal formed the
base of the industrial pyramid on which so much of Britain’s greatness rested.
(Freese 2003: 234)

The ‘symbolic importance’ was certainly strong in previous decades. At first

sight coal may be seen as lacking any kind of romantic qualities, but its very
mundane and grimy ordinariness gave it a kind of plebeian allure that contrasted
with the ostentatious commodities of other nations. This is well expressed in
John Masefield’s poem Cargoes that conjures up coastal steamers carrying coal,
and lends them a particular kind of homely romance. He compares an ancient
vessel, the quinquereme, that he declares is carrying apes, peacocks, ivory and
sandalwood, and a Spanish galleon laden with diamonds, emeralds, topazes
and cinnamon, with a battered and dirty British coaster hauling coal, firewood,
pig iron and cheap tin trays. For all its dullness the coaster is grounded in the
world of the everyday, rather than in a realm of luxury. We might also note
that transporting coal was central to determining the infrastructure and routes
of canals, trains, and steamers. For some people, though, coal is not a grimy

10 COAL CULTURES
product that might be symbolized by a battered coastal vessel, but a modern
product. It has often been argued that the introduction of mining to agricultural
societies brings with it advanced capitalist modes of production leading to an
increase in wages and to training for a workforce. Eventually, it would also lead
to greater urbanization and improve the transport infrastructure. At the same
time, it would precipitate a loss of agricultural land and result in the despoliation
of the rural landscape.

Reading about coal

The literature on coal mining is immense. It covers technical manuals, fiction,
memoirs, histories, ethnographic and anthropological studies, medical reports,
landscape studies, documentaries, community studies, political science,
business news, ecological campaigns, trade union history, working class action,
oral history, rhymes, poems, ballads and folk songs. There are also many novels
with coal mining as a major theme: from D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
to the story of mining communities in the Welsh valleys, Richard Llewellyn’s
1939 bestseller How Green Was My Valley or Upton Sinclair’s exploration of
life in an American coal camp, King Coal (Sinclair: 1919), to more recent
fictional works such as the 1992 novel Night Ride Home by Vicki Covington
or Martin Cruz Smith’s Rose which he published in 1996. I shall be drawing on
fiction throughout this book, but here I want to introduce just one novel which
is perhaps the most important fictional account of mining ever to have been
written, Émile Zola’s Germinal.
Published in 1885, it is the progenitor of all coalfield novels. It covers almost
every aspect of mining and much of it is still relevant today. Characteristically, Zola
had done a great deal of patient research, and Germinal touches on many of the
strands of coal mining that became important in later novels and documentaries.
The hero, Étienne Lantier, is a newcomer to mining and so has to be taken
through all the processes of the trade by one of the women hauliers. So the reader
goes with him from the surface, via the rudimentary descent, to the pit bottom
and the long trudge to the coalface. Through a graphic description of the back-
breaking labour involved, he describes the way in which coal is dug out and taken
to the surface – how it is screened, washed and transported to towns and cities.
We learn about human labour and the use of horses in the twenty-four-hour cycle
of a mine. ‘The mine never lay idle: night and day human insects were always
down there burrowing into the rock six hundred metres beneath the fields of beet’
(Zola 1885: 67). We also learn about the way miners work collectively, usually
at this time in family groups, and are relatively autonomous. Indeed, Lantier is
only reluctantly accepted because he might be depriving one of the girls in the
family of a job: ‘The policy of excluding women from working below the surface
was anathema to the miners, who were worried about their daughters finding a
job and didn’t much care about questions of hygiene or morality’ (Zola 1885: 31).

INTRODUCTION 11
Zola makes clear the semi-autonomy of the miner and explains the way in which
the ‘auctioning of contracts’ works, as miners bid for a particular stretch of the
coal face to work at a specific price. They functioned as little contractors, paid by
output, not by hourly wages. These key facts about mining remained important
for many years in the future and Zola unpicks the complex modes of supervision
and examines the disputes about the basis of pay which are always a feature of
mining life.
The book also tells us about the landscape in which the mine is set, as well
as family life, sexual relationships and community values. While we have
disasters and fêtes, the central theme of the book is the long running strike,
the political stance of the main protagonists and the hardship suffered by the
strikers.

Manifesta explores coal mining

Not only are there many books about mining, but the number of cultural works
inspired by or created about coal is enormous. At the beginning of the twentieth
century large quantities of coal were discovered in the little Belgian town of
Ghenk. By 1966 the coal was mined out and the town turned its attention to
other industries, leaving behind some colliery buildings. In 2012 a building
in the former coal mine of Waterschei was chosen as the site of Manifesta, the
travelling European biennial of contemporary art and culture. The theme was
mining under the title Manifesta 9: The Deep of the Modern, a Subcyclopaedia.
The organizers explained that they had chosen the site because it is an elegant
Art Deco complex set in a barren landscape and observed that ‘as a symbol
of the history of labour, it is a massive relic of twentieth century architecture,
constructed at the centre of what was once the most industrialized part of
Europe’ (Manifesta 2012: 13).
Inside this stylish industrial building was the work of hundreds of artists,
filmmakers and photographers. They brought together Richard Long’s Bolivian
Coal Line of 1982; Claire Fontaine’s 2012 piece called The House of Energetic Culture;
Maximilien Luce’s painting of a mine in Charleroi in 1858; Robert Smithson’s land
reclamation project, Nonsite, Site Uncertain; Janet Buckle’s undated but recent
painting, Hatfield: A Working Colliery; Henry Moore’s wartime drawings of miners
called At the Coal Face; Marge Monko’s Nora’s Sisters, a video piece that looked
at gender and class identity, 2009; Marcel Duchamp’s 1200 Coal Sacks, of 1938;
and many more. What linked contemporary and historical work from pieces
of embroidery, documentary films, postmodern video, technical drawings and
conceptual pieces was the fact that they were all about coal. From the mining of
it, to its uses, its effluence, its symbolic properties and its importance in shaping
whole cultures. Superbly researched and exhaustive as it seemed, there were plenty
of artists and movements for which, despite the enormous size of the building,
space could not be found.

12 COAL CULTURES
History and memory
In his celebrated study of archives in his essay ‘Photography Between Labour and
Capital’, Allan Sekula asks how photography can represent the voice of authority
while simultaneously claiming to be a token of exchange between equal partners.
How can it at once support the status quo and be oppositional and encourage
resistance to the existing state of things? Key to understanding this is to ask

How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and

obliterated by photographs? (Sekula 1983: 193)

This was one of the key questions asked by the curators of Manifesta 9 who linked
contemporary works with those produced in the past and critically examined the
history of mines and mining. In this book I also draw on the history of mining,
but a number of different types of history are present when making sense of the
past. In addition to history as an academic pursuit, we may also see a history that
is a study of all the ways in which different groups make sense of the past. Official
history is transmitted via a range of characteristic institutions from governments,
the media, museums and the academy. The story of everyday life recalled by
participants in some event: oral history, personal memory and collective memory
are all important to an understanding of mining life. The concept of ‘popular
memory’ is far from being a settled category, and there have been many social
and political struggles to define and determine the uses of popular memory.
What is clear is that stories from the past often have the power to resonate in
the present and help to define the future. Sometimes participants in events may
also be interviewed as part of an oral history project. Stories, of major events,
family crises, or ordinary existence are recorded and archived in libraries, galleries
and heritage sites. The cultural transmission of oral histories is, then, part of the
context through which events in the past may be understood and assessed. The
digitization of material has led to an increased availability of oral histories. One of
the early proponents of oral history, Paul Thompson describes the power of this
kind of history as being because:

The historian of working class politics can juxtapose the statements of the
government or the trade union headquarters with the voice of the rank and file
– both apathetic and militant. There can be no doubt that this should make for
a more realistic reconstruction of the past. (Thompson 1988)

This notion that oral accounts of the past might make for an even-handed history is
perhaps too optimistic. It is worth asking who is being interviewed and by whom.
Just because one is present at an event does not mean that one attended it with a
blank mind, ready to peel off an imprint of disinterested reality. The subject was
also influenced by the media, by friends and social contacts, and by the notions

INTRODUCTION 13
of common sense that were current at the time. Reacting to the often-held belief
that memory and history are in opposite camps as memory is spontaneous and
natural while history is the product of objective thought, the historian Raphael
Samuel says:

It is the argument of Theatres of Memory, as it is of a great deal of contemporary

ethnography, that memory, so far from being merely a passive receptacle or
storage system, an image bank of the past, is rather an active shaping force;
that it is dynamic – what it contrives symptomatically to forget is as important
as what it remembers – and that it is dialectically related to historical thought,
rather than being some kind of negative other to it. (Samuel 1994: ix)

This is particularly relevant in the many heritage sites that exist around the world
to commemorate a lost mining industry. Here the art of forgetting is as frequently
practised as that of commemorative remembering.
In the same spirit, Paul A. Cohen has celebrated the power of story, that is the
narratives we tell ourselves. He is less interested in providing a definitive account
of what happened at important moments in our history, than in what we believe
happened. The stories we tell ourselves of the past are not intended to make sure that
we have it right, but because we use these tales to deal with our present existence.
So things are written into our memory of the past that may not have happened
while correct events may be ignored (Cohen 2014). The construction of post-
industrial communities in mining areas draws on a selective version of the past to
deal with the dislocations and economic blight of the present. Stories about mining
are told in many voices and are validated by very different institutions and modes
of authority. There is, of course, a technical literature that describes developments
in the business of coal getting from the earliest times. This is a history of machines
and the harnessing of power to supplement human labour. But this inevitably
coincides to some extent with social history that looks at the way in which new
technologies, and the managerial forms through which they are introduced, change
the earning power and the way of life of coal miners. Because they live in small,
close-knit communities, collective memory is particularly powerful. Until the
end of coal mining in Britain the role of miners in the general strike of 1926 was
still a live and often-debated issue, as were the dark days of the 1930s. The past
was rehearsed through a number of exemplary stories that were familiar to most
people. Later these stories became the bedrock of oral history projects and were
recycled on television programmes and lodged in archives. In a study of photos
‘from the coal era’ in the Netherlands, Mariëtte Haveman observes the limitation of
photography to reproduce the reality of mining life. Having described the harshness
of the working conditions, the industrial injuries and illnesses it promoted, and the
family life of those who lived in the shadow of the mine, she concluded:

That reality remained largely out of the picture anyway. Photographs cannot
encompass that. But we simply have no better sources, except perhaps the

14 COAL CULTURES
 memories of direct witnesses, to convince us that this world once really did
exist. (Haveman 2002: 15)

Photographs are often accompanied by supportive texts, and witnesses to

the work of the past are represented in words and images. In 2016 the African-
American artist La Toya Ruby Frazier took up a residency in the historic Belgian
mining region of Grand-Hornu. The last pits had closed forty years earlier,
but memories of life in the collieries were still potent. Her book gives moving
testimony to the way in which the past shapes and influences the present and her
fine images give us a powerful sense of the nature of the place (Frazier 2017).
Photographs and personal testimony may give us evidence about the past,
but they both need to be treated with care. They have the immediate appearance
of authenticity, but, unsupported, both are unreliable. Personal narratives are
subject to the vagaries of time and the idiosyncrasies of the narrator, to the
partial viewpoint of the personal, or the pressure to conform to group mores and
beliefs. A photograph is notoriously mutable and unstable: its preferred meanings
having to be teased out through context, the purpose for which it was made
(intentionality), and the other texts and discourses with which it is surrounded.
It is for this reason that together with photographs and oral histories, I explore
the accounts of mines and mining given in novels, memoirs, official reports and
movies.

The structure of this book

While each chapter has a definitive theme I am conscious that each of these offers
a plethora of material, with examples that might be drawn from many places
around the world. This overabundance of material means that I have had to make
hard choices about the things I consider and critique. My concern has been to
link a discussion of the practice of mining and the physical and social effects of
burning coal with questions of representation and cultural formation. Especially
important was a consideration of the role of photography in picturing coal mining
communities and, over time, in establishing versions of these largely unknown
places in the public imagination.
Chapter 1 begins with a specific slag heap, that central signifier of the activity
of mining and of the degradation of the landscape that it brings about. It tracks
the progress of the land from the beauty of a pastoral society to the grimy world
of mining. It looks at the transitional images that were made as industry took
over from rural life. In order to have a vocabulary to discuss the aesthetic and
psychic importance of mountains I introduce Burke’s notions of the sublime and
the beautiful.
Of particular interest is the work of two of the people, John Davies and Naoya
Hatakeyama, who have photographed coal tips extensively as well as explored the
intrusion of industrial life into the rural and suburban.

INTRODUCTION 15
 Finally, the chapter looks at a coal tip that collapsed with terrible consequences
and at the way in which the tragedy of Aberfan was pictured and presented to the
public around the world.
Chapter 2 looks at the image of the miner as an archetypal proletarian,
then moves to examine the role of women in mining and their exclusion from
underground work in Britain after a government report that was primarily
intended to consider the position of children in mines. This leads to a consideration
of women who worked on the surface of coal mines and became quite famous
for their masculine dress and intrepid manner. The collection of photos of these
‘pit brow lasses’ assembled by Munby is very significant here. I then consider the
miner as hero. I look at the importance of Stakhanov in Russian history and at
the strategies employed by Soviet artists and photographers in order to picture
the proletariat. In the United States quite different methods were used, and I
explore these by focusing on the most famous archive of working people, the Farm
Security Administration Project of the 1930s, before examining documentary
work by more recent American and British photographers and filmmakers.
Chapter 3 is concerned with exploring what a coal community, so often
defined as ‘unique’, might be and how we might best classify them. Here I
also consider some of the cultural projects undertaken by miners, especially
the Welsh Miners’ Libraries. One of the features of coal communities is the
constant possibility of accident, as disasters at coal mines are fairly common
occurrences. Photography was important in communicating news of disasters,
and I look briefly at disaster postcards. I then turn to two films that were central
to accounts of disaster in mines – Kameradschaft, and The Stars Look Down,
together with a recent Indian novel, The Sound of Water. I examine how people
emigrated from or towards mining communities and explore the way in which
writers, photographers and intellectuals travelled to mining communities.
Perhaps the most famous, George Orwell, is discussed in terms of his well-
known book, published in 1937, The Road to Wigan Pier. The last section of this
chapter discusses mining that takes place in marginal sites that have no or little
connection with mining villages. I examine ‘artisanal’ mining, the Free Miners
of the Forest of Dean, ‘bootleg’ mining and Wang Bing’s film Coal Money about
coal trading in Inner Mongolia. Finally, photographer Chris Killip’s book
Seacoal is analysed in some detail.
In Chapter 4, I move away from miners and their communities to look at the
pollution caused by coal. Its long history is traced, through particular reference to
the smog in Manchester and the famous London fog of 1952 that blanked out the
city for five days and led to clean air legislation. I look at the way in which artists,
photographers, filmmakers and novelists treated fog from Victorian times. Here,
the conflation of atmospheric pollution and moral corruption is significant. Coal
gas brought about the lighting of cities and allowed them to function for pleasure
and commerce at night. At the same time, coal gas was itself a source of the smog
that plagued them.

16 COAL CULTURES
 Chapter 5 is about famous strikes conducted by miners. The British miners’
strike of 1984/85 still resonates in contemporary culture and this chapter explores
the ways in which it was photographed and filmed. Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment
of the ‘battle of Orgreave’, Ken Loach’s film Which Side Are You On? and Craig
Oldham’s In Loving Memory of Work are discussed, together with the documentary
photographs and photojournalism of the time. The second strike - perhaps the
most famous in U.S. mining history, The Battle of Blair Mountain – is examined in
some detail. We also look at Matewan, John Sales’ 1987 feature film that restored
the events of a mining struggle to a public that had long forgotten them.
Chapter 6 Explores post-industrial landscapes and looks at the work of the
Valleys Project in South Wales. It then considers strip mining in Appalachia and
moves on to examine mountain top removal. This leads to an account of the
American technological sublime. I then examine the concept of the Anthropocene
and consider photographers whose work delineates the malign influence of human
beings on the natural world. The primary figure here is Edward Burtynsky, but the
work of other artists is discussed, including that of Zhao Liang and his influential
film, Behemoth.
Chapter 7 This final chapter addresses the way in which coal mines are now
presented as objects of tourist attention in heritage sites. I discuss the ecomuseum
movement before considering some 1980s critiques of heritage that have been
of great significance. I then examine the role photography plays in supporting
heritage sites as well as the way in which a photography of record functions.
Heritage is tinged with nostalgia, an idea I discuss especially via its routes as a
diagnosed medical condition and its present status. This leads into a consideration
of the nostalgia for coal that some people detect in our time. This nostalgia is
commodified in mining souvenirs and given potent expression by the collection
of mining banners that were once symbols of collectivity and solidarity. Finally, I
look at the ruins of abandoned coalmines that have turned into sites of touristic
interest.

INTRODUCTION 17
1 DEGRADATION
AND REGENERATION

FIGURE 3 The town of Bargoed, with its famous coal tip, was photographed as part of
the Francis Frith photographic survey of Britain c. 1955.

A famous coal tip

When I was growing up in the Rhymney Valley, one of five mining valleys that
rise from Cardiff into the hills of South Wales, we were told that the slag heap (we
called it a tip) at Bargoed was the largest man-made hill in the world. This was a
source of considerable pride to us kids, even though plenty of people cast doubt
on the claim. Today an online colliery blog still debates its position in the world
league table of slag heaps, from which it emerges as the third largest in Europe –
probably. The colliery was opened in the early years of the twentieth century. The
Powell Duffryn Steam Coal Company sank the first shaft in 1897, and the first
coal was produced in 1901. Finally there were three shafts and so successful was
the venture that in 1909 it broke the world record for the production of coal in a
single shift, when more than 4,000 tons were mined. It became the largest coal
mine in the Rhymney Valley, and the coal tip grew until, at 400 feet, it could rival
the best in Europe. Of course, I am talking about the tip in its heyday, for since the
1970s it has been lowered, re-landscaped and, finally, flattened to make way for a
regeneration project and a road scheme. The colliery itself and all the surrounding
area have been converted into a country park. In its dark prime the tip loomed
over the village of Aberbargoed and the town on the opposite side. It was a huge
black mound that attracted attention not only from local people, but also from
visiting artists and photographers. Its sheer size gave it a certain grandeur, even
though it was nothing more than the dark detritus of the mine dumped over the
surrounding hills. All day long buckets on cables rolled overhead to throw more
and more waste on to the tip until it stretched away for hundreds of yards across
the mountain. It seemed like a natural feature that we all took for granted. Besides
it the colliery worked, as they all do, twenty-four hours a day, and the air was full
of the sounds of clanking coal trams, hooters and the shunting of trains carrying
coal to Cardiff and beyond.
When L. S. Lowry painted a view of Bargoed in 1965 he showed the town spread
out in the valley, with a road snaking through it and heavy clouds above. There,
on the horizon, is the great loaf-shaped mound of the coal tip. To many people
it was an eyesore, but others regarded it as a symbol of the economic success of
the town. All this was the culmination of a long history. Iron and coal had been
at the heart of the South Wales economy from the eighteenth century, but by the
middle of the nineteenth iron smelting was far less important than the mining
of coal. As well as having the largest deposits of high-quality steam coal in the
world, there were abundant supplies of anthracite and coking coal. It was also a
place where innovation and experimentation flourished, so that Wales became a
repository of technical skills in mining; skills that the miners took with them when
they emigrated to Commonwealth countries and the United States.

The Welsh mining valleys

Despite their importance in the global economy, largely from the production of
steam coal, the valleys of South Wales were more or less ignored by the outside
world. Many people lived all their lives in Cardiff, but never travelled for twenty or
thirty miles to visit them. Like many mining communities around the world, they
were hidden places that grew up entirely as a result of the demand for coal, and
their once-flourishing local economies have never recovered from the long, slow
demise of the extractive industries. Long before the coming of industry these valleys
were praised by travellers for their quiet loveliness. Low hills, clear streams, native
woodlands and acres of rough heath land made them into places of no economic

20 COAL CULTURES
importance, but of great beauty. All this was to disappear, at first slowly and then
very quickly as more and more coal was needed in the nineteenth century. A new,
brutal industrial landscape emerged, and South Wales became fixed in the popular
imagination as a place of dark mines, grime, polluted rivers, and, of course, of slag
heaps. Coal tips are particularly potent, and carry such symbolic weight, because
they are a kind of degraded mountain, and mountains were central to the romantic
imagination.
In a celebrated and highly influential treatise first published in 1757, Edmund
Burke set out his observations on the nature of the beautiful and the sublime. The
beautiful is smooth, delicate, well formed, and delights our aesthetic sense. The
sublime, though, is associated with pain, with danger and a certain kind of delicious
terror. These powerful emotions provoke in us feelings of awe and astonishment as
well as deep reverence and respect (Burke: 1757).
The picturesque was a British aesthetic movement that provided a set of rules
by which nature should be contemplated and depicted. Beauty in nature was
not to be found in formal structures and rigidly patterned gardens, but in the
production of ‘natural’ landscapes that prized wildness and irregularity. Houses,
gardens and estates were constructed according to the dictates of the picturesque,
and eighteenth-century tourism in Britain was deeply influenced by the search for
picturesque views and vistas. Many of the tourist postcards sold to this day conform
to its rules. The Picturesque Movement, which was initially formulated in terms
of the scenery of South Wales, mediated between the ideas of the sublime and the
beautiful. It provided a body of rules that allowed natural landscapes to be viewed
like a picture, but the term was applied both to landscapes and the depiction of
them, for as Anne Bermingham points out, ‘If the highest praise for nature was to
say that it resembled a painting, the highest praise for a painting was to say that it
resembled a painterly nature’ (Bermingham 1987: 57). Now hills were objects of
aesthetic contemplation and amateur painters descended on mountainous places
in search of scenes that could be viewed, appreciated and recorded according to the
rules of the picturesque.
Unlike natural hills, slagheaps were black, and nothing grew on them but
patches of anaemic, loosely rooted grass. Fissured by underground streams and
surface rain, their instability was apparent to walkers, for the ground slid away
underfoot as on a scree. On mountains one might climb higher and higher, look
down on the valley below, appreciate the sounds of solitude and contemplate the
glories of nature. But it is hard to ramble on a slag heap, and, when active they
are noisy, dirty, dangerous places that could be the site of only ironic or bitter
contemplation. Innumerable writers commented on the coal tip as a symbol of
the degradation of mining landscapes. George Orwell, on his tour of the North of
England, put it this way:

A slag heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless.

It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dustbin.

DEGRADATION AND REGENERATION 21

 On the outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your
horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot
is mud and ashes and overhead the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly
across miles of country. Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can
see the red rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving
blue flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of expiring and always
spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does ultimately, only an evil
brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface. (Orwell 1937: 95)

Coal tips are by no means as casual and unplanned as Orwell imagined, but long
before him writers had responded to the impact of industry on once-rural places.
In his novel Son of Judith, Joseph Keating described the relation of the valley to the
hills above it:

Above, on all sides rose the hills aglow with the flush of summer; the valley
stretched away north and south, fresh and delightful, while a summer haze
hung restfully over all the hills and the valley. In contrast with this, the black
smoke from the tall chimney stacks, the hideous black furnaces over the pit, the
black engine-houses, the black coal wagons, with the clash and clank of heavy
couplings and crash of shunting, and the shriek of steam whistles, marked the
plague spots of colliery enterprise which buried everything within its radius,
houses, river and valley, under black dust, and big tip-heaps of pit refuse.
(Keating 1900: 184)

This theme of the contrast between two landscapes is one he develops in his
autobiography. Keating was born in 1871 to Irish parents in ‘what at that time was
a charming, pastoral village in South Wales’ and, after working for many years in
London as a journalist, returned to the village of Mountain Ash in 1910.

The ancient streets were no longer pleasant and picturesque, but grimy with
coal dust … Hundreds of new streets, long and straight and ugly, and terrible
hills of pit refuse, filled the fields in which I had played. The Cynon river was
nothing but flowing mud. All semblance of its former silvery winding was gone.
(Keating 1916: 269)

In part this is simple reportage, for in the forty years of his absence the face of
the valleys did change in a most dramatic way. At that time there was a great
boom in coal production and a spectacular increase in population. Older ways
of life began to change in response to the new modes of production and the
development of capitalism. It would be too simple, though, to see Keating’s
contrast between the romantic and the sordid, the beautiful and the ugly,
as a straightforward, objective account. As always in response to mining
communities, he is expressing a profoundly emotional reaction, as well as
a simple description. But it is worth noticing that Keating does not see these

22 COAL CULTURES
eulogized fields as sites of harsh agricultural toil, but of innocent play. In fact
many farm labourers chose to work in the mines, despite the terrible conditions
they had to contend with, rather than stay on the land where the work was
also long and hard, and those who carried it out were often sunk in poverty
and privation. Keating continues the passage quoted above by observing that ‘in
many parts the mountains and farms themselves were being buried under pit
rubbish. Black industrialism would not stop until it had utterly destroyed the
old pastoral life’ (Keating 1916: 26). This contrast between the romance of the
natural hills and the squalid heaps of colliery waste recurs throughout literature.
In one of the most famous novels about coal mining, Richard Llewellyn’s How
Green Was My Valley, the landscape is used to carry the moral resonances of the
book, and the central signifier of dark evil is the coal tip. The spoil heap in the
book grows larger and larger over the years. It destroys the old, rural beauty;
scars the hills that are the site of romance and excitement; and, finally, presses
down on the protagonist’s house:

Here in this quiet house I sit thinking back to the structure of my life, building
again that which has fallen … The slag heap is moving again. I can hear it
whispering to itself and as it whispers the walls of this brave little house are
girding themselves to withstand the assault. For months, more than I ever
thought it would have the courage to withstand, that great mound has borne
down upon these walls, this roof. And for those months the great bully has
been beaten, for in my father’s day men built well for they were craftsmen. Stout
beams, honest blocks, good work, and love for the job, all that is in this house.
(Llewellyn 1939: 96)

The anthropomorphized coal tip will, sooner or later, overwhelm the personified
house. As industrial labour has replaced craft skill so the malign forces of industry
will defeat the ‘brave little house’. If the occupant stays much longer, he will be
crushed to death as, at the end of the book, his father is crushed ‘like a beetle’
underground while trying to save the colliery from the revolutionary fervour of a
mob (Price 1986).

Degraded landscapes
A slag heap is not a single, contained entity. It goes along with other features of a
degraded landscape. John Barr points out that:

Derelict land sours its surroundings. A spoil tip threatens a much larger area
than that on which it perches like some vile bird of prey. A series of heaps
or holes in an area kills the interstices as well. Dereliction depreciates – in all
senses – the value of the land in its vicinity. It helps to create what we have come
to call ‘twilight’ areas. (Barr 1969: 35)

DEGRADATION AND REGENERATION 23

 All over the world mining seriously despoiled the landscape within which it
took place. In his celebrated book on mining in Appalachia, Harry M. Caudill
observes that often tips were given a lively appearance by the fact that they were
burning steadily. Nineteenth-century travellers to Wales, too, sometimes found
this a lively sight as they came upon one on a gloomy evening. Caudill sees that on
the pit surface (known as ‘the tipple’ in the United States) mounds of waste were
very noticeable.

Near every tipple there grew up mountainous piles of discarded slate and
low-grade coal. As the years advanced these refuse heaps reached heights of
hundreds of feet and extended for hundreds of yards in length. As they grew
higher chemical processes deep within them caused a spontaneous combustion
which set fire to the coal. This fire spread, broke out in other places and burned
inexorably day and night. (Caudill 1962: 145)

This reminds us that there are many places where a landscape, once thought
picturesque, has been woefully damaged by the coal industry. Caudill uses a highly
charged language to describe the depredations of the industry:

Coal has always cursed the land in which it lies. When men begin to wrest
it from the earth it leaves a legacy of foul streams, hideous slag heaps and
polluted air. It peoples this transformed land with blind and crippled men and
with widows and orphans. It is an extractive industry which takes all away and
restores nothing. It mars but never beautifies. It corrupts but never purifies.
(Caudill 1962: x)

Even in a work as scientific as the US Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry,

1947, the effects of coal mining are described using adjectives such as ‘scented’,
‘sparkling’, ‘pristine’ and ‘green’ to describe the state of the old environment:

America’s coal deposits lie in some of the most beautiful parts of the country.
Nature’s handiwork, however, has been greatly modified by the enterprise of
heedless men. Many valleys, once clean and scented with pine, poplar, and
hickory are now filled with the belching of locomotives and a floating haze
of grime. Streams that once sparkled and hurried are now choked with silt
and sewage. Hillsides once pristine and covered with green, now are scarred
with gaping holes, waste dumps and raw gashes that serve as roads. (A Medical
Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, Supplement: 4)

For Caudill coal is a curse that blights the land, marring its purity and instilling
new forms of corruption. In mining country there is always a version of the ‘old
pastoral’ that is a yearned for space long after the work, the people and the values
that sustained it are recognized as being irrecoverable. Also, it is interesting that
accounts of the effects of mining from Britain, from the United States and from

24 COAL CULTURES
European countries all use the despoliation of natural landscapes as a metaphor
for the moral and psychic degradation of its inhabitants. In How Green Was My
Valley, what is also pressing against the old way of life, as well as the slag heap, is the
presence of ‘foreigners’ who are described as ‘half breed Welsh, Irish and English
… the dross of the collieries’. These people live in one district of the village and the
only character to be drawn from their number is a child molester and murderer.
Incomers to mining areas are often stigmatized, and all kinds of ‘foreigners’ have
been given a hard time. A steady supply of labour was sometimes hard to find and
people often worked without legal rights. Sometimes conditions close to slavery
existed, or immigrants were shunted off to the pits without much idea of what
they could expect. Recruits might come from a voluntary force fleeing political
persecution, or have simply moved from the land, lured by the relatively high wages
of mining. It is true that coal mining destroyed the old land wherever it took place,
but it also brought about new forms of social existence. People were no longer
bounded by place or limited by having to conform to settled ways of life. Freed
from the burden of life as a labourer on the land, and detached from a family group,
they could begin to negotiate the conditions under which they were prepared to
work; that is, they could move towards becoming proletarian wage earners.

Picturing mining
From early in their development, industrial sites, including mining scenes, were
quite widely recorded. Mining had long fascinated people, and almost the whole
three hundred years of British mineral mining is documented in drawings,
engravings, prints, paintings and photographs. During the eighteenth century
Wales was the place where a style and iconography for picturing industry were
established and numerous painters, including John Hassell, George Robertson
and George Samuel, recorded proto-industrial enterprises. Commenting on this
activity, Douglas Gray writes:

These artists … have bequeathed a major legacy of industrial paintings and

drawings that are unique in art history. Amongst them all, they managed
to depict almost all the processes contributing to the early growth of Welsh
enterprise. Their scenes of coal export, coal pits, copper and lead mines, iron
works, forges and tilt hammers, fulling mills, water wheels, industrial housing
and steam engines, established a kind of prototype for future depictions of the
industrial revolution. (Gray 1982: 14)

Several artists produced bodies of work that looked at the development of

science and industry alongside images of the countryside. In 1814 George Walker
painted a fascinating watercolour that showed a cheerful-looking strolling miner
with a pipe in his mouth, while behind him is a coal mine and alongside him a
primitive steam locomotive.

DEGRADATION AND REGENERATION 25

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
en Espagne, en maintenant d’ailleurs dans leur intégrité, ainsi que
sa majesté le gage indispensable, l’organisation de l’armée
d’Andalousie et des autres armées de l’Espagne. &c.

Observations faites par le roi d’Espagne sur la lettre du

major-général, de la 1ère Juin, 1811.
Le roi demande.
1º. Que messrs. les maréchaux commandant-en-chef les armées
de l’empereur, à l’armée du nord, du Portugal, de midi, et de
l’Arragon, ne puissent augmenter les impôts existant à ce jour, ni
lever aucune contribution extraordinaire sans l’autorization du roi, ou
de l’empereur.
2º. Le roi désire que le maréchal Jourdan remplace le maréchal
due d’Istrie dans le commandement de l’armée du nord.
3º. Que les maréchaux commandant les armées de l’empereur et
les intendans général ne puissent vendre aucune bien national ou
communal sans l’autorization du roi; qu’il en soit de même pour les
plombs et vif argent appartenant à l’état.
4º. Que les administrations Espagnoles dans l’arrondissement des
armées du nord, du midi, de l’Arragon, resteront telles qu’elles sont,
et que si des changemens paroissent utiles, ils seront demandés au
roi.
5º. Qu’il soit specifié que le quart des revenues des provinces
occupées par les armées de l’empereur, en Espagne, sera versé net
dans le trésor du roi à Madrid, et que les trois autre quartes seront
employés aux besoin de l’armée dans les dites provinces, et en
payement des traitemens des administrations Espagnoles.
6º. Le roi se trouvant avoir l’honneur du commandement près des
armées ou il se trouve, pense qu’il est dans les intentions de votre
majesté qu’il puisse voir et réunir les autorités Espagnoles comme
bon lui semblera pour leur parler dans l’intérêt des affaires
d’Espagne: ce que le roi trouve utile de faire dans les lieux où il
l’arrêtera pour se rendre à Madrid.
 7º. Il paroit entendu que le maréchal commandant l’armée de
Portugal rendra compte au roi des toutes les opérations, aussi que
doivent le faire les autres maréchaux.
8º. Le roi trouve utile pour les intérêts des affaires d’Espagne de
pouvoir s’attacher des officiers Espagnols ou autres qui se
trouveroient parmi les prisonniers, et qui par des motifs particuliers il
jugeroit convenable d’employer.
9º. Le roi de Westphalie qui ne peut pas recruter les régimens qu’il
a en Espagne est disposé à mettre le petit nombre d’hommes qui
restent aux drapeaux à la disposition du roi d’Espagne pour être à la
solde et à son service; le roi d’Espagne les placeroit utilement dans
la guarde.
10º. Le roi désire que le général Maurice Mathieu remplace le
général Lorge.
11º. Qu’il ne reste à Madrid que l’administration nécessaire pour
l’armée du centre, et que cette grande quantité d’administrateurs
appartenant à l’administration générale qui n’existe plus à Madrid
soit envoyée à Burgos ou en France.
12º. Que la solde des troupes françaises faisant partie de l’armée
du centre continue n’être payée par le trésor de France.
13º. Sa majesté conservera le général Belliard comme chef de
son état major.
14º. Le roi désire pouvoir prendre toutes les mesures politiques
qu’il jugera convenable, et faire toutes autres dispositions à l’égard
de cortez en se conformant aux vues contenues dans la lettre que
j’ai écrite d’après l’ordre de V. M. pour cet objet.
15º. Sur les 500,000 francs que V. M. met à la disposition du roi à
Madrid on en retient 100,000 francs pour l’arrière. Le roi demande
que cette somme soit pour le service courant.

Paris, le 17 Juin, 1811.

 Sire,—L’empereur m’ordonne de vous envoyer la copie de la
lettre que j’adresse au duc d’Istrie: j’écris à-peu-près dans les
mêmes termes aux autres commandants. Je n’ai pas encore vu le
maréchal Jourdan; je le verrai demain et immédiatement après il
partira pour Madrid, où l’empereur apprendra avec plaisir qu’il est
employé comme gouverneur.
Le duc de Raguse mande qu’il est en marche sur le Tage.
L’empereur désire que V. M. donne ses ordres pour qu’on lui procure
tous les secours dont il peut avoir besoin: il a avec lui vingt-huit mille
bayonnettes, trois mille hommes de cavalerie, et trent-six pièces de
canon. L’empereur désire que V. M. puisse l’appuyer avec dixhuit
cent chevaux, quinze à dixhuit pièces de canon et deux à trois mille
hommes d’infanterie: ce corps pourroit être placé à proximité afin de
pouvoir rejoindre et aider le duc de Raguse, s’il devoit donner
bataille aux Anglais. L’empereur verroit avec plaisir, Sire, qu’après
votre arrivée à Madrid vous vous rendissiez à l’armée de Portugal,
pour la passer en revue, l’animer, et prendre dans vôtre revue l’état
des emplois vacans.
J’écris au duc de Raguse que si l’on pouvoit retrancher Alcantara
et faire une tête de pont sur la rive droite, ce seroit une bonne
opération. Si l’armée de Portugal arrivoit à tems pour sécourir
l’armée du midi devant Badajoz, le petit corps de reserve dont je
viens de parler ci-dessus à votre majesté ne pourroit être que de la
plus grande utilité.
Le siège de Tarragone a déjà attiré une partie des bandes qui
étoient dans l’arrondissement de l’armée du centre. Deux divisions
de l’armée de reserve que forme l’empereur arriveront l’une à
Pampelune, l’autre à Vittoria vers le 14 Juillet: cela mettra à même
d’envoyer encore aux armées du midi et de Portugal environ douze
milles hommes qui sont en Navarre, et qui passeront par Madrid.
L’Empereur ne peut qu’engager votre majesté à envoyer à l’armée
du midi tout ce qui lui appartient, car c’est là que se portent les
grands coups et qu’ont lieu les opérations les plus importantes.
&c. &c.
Alexandre.
 To the duke of Istria.
Paris, Juin 1811.
J’ai prevénu, monsieur le maréchal, le général Monthion, les
généraux Caffarelli et Dorsenne directement les dispositions dont je
vais vous entretenir, et qui ont rapport aux intentions de l’empereur
rélativement au rétour de roi d’Espagne dans ses états.
Le roi commande en chef l’armée du centre, mais l’intention de
l’empereur est que vous correspondiez avec S. M. C. en lui faissant
le rapport de ce qui se passe afin de la mettre à même de connoître
l’ensemble des événemens en Espagne comme les autres généraux
en chef ont l’ordre d’en agir de même, le roi sera dans le cas de
pouvoir comme point central vous faire faire des communications qui
contribueront au succès des armes de l’empereur.
S. M. I. m’ordonne aussi de vous faire connaître, M. le duc, que
son intention est que pendant le voyage du roi dans son rétour à
Madrid, tous les honneurs lui soient rendus dans les gouvernemens
et dans l’arrondissement de l’armée du nord comme si S. M.
commandait cette armée. Le roi donnera l’ordre et recevra les
honneurs du commandement. Les gouverneurs l’accompagneront
dans leur gouvernement et lui feront fournir toutes les escortes qui
lui seront nécessaires. Il est à présumer que le roi séjournera
quelque tems à Vittoria et à Burgos, et qu’il profitera de son séjour
pour rassembler les notables du pays les éclairer sur la situation des
affaires, et améliorer l’esprit public. Vous seconderez, mons. le
maréchal, les mesures que le roi pourra prendre pour rendre les
villes et les villages responsibles des abus qui se commettent sur
leur territoire. Vous agirez de même si le roi accorde le pardon à
quelques bandes de guerillas qui se rendraient. Vous devez aider de
tous vos moyens les mesures que S. M. prendra pour le
rétablissement de l’ordre et de la tranquillité publique. Du reste les
troupes composant l’armée du nord doivent rester sous le
commandement respectif de leurs chefs et vos ordres doivent
continuer à être exécutés sans qu’aucun ordre de qui que ce soit
puisse les changer. Quant à l’administration du pays, elle doit
continuer à marcher dans la direction donnée par les instructions et
les ordres de l’empereur; les fonds doivent être destinées aux
besoins de l’armée, à l’entretien des hôpitaux, et vous devez
défendre et empêcher toute espèce d’abus. Le roi ayant plus
particulièrement encore que vous, les moyens de connaître les abus
qu’ont lieu, l’empereur ordonne que vous profiteriez des lumières
que le roi pourra vous donner à cet égard pour les réprimer. Il est
nécessaire, monsieur le duc, que vous me fassiez connaître le
budjet des ressources et des dépenses afin de savoir la partie des
revenues qui pourront être versés à Madrid, dans la caisse du
gouvernement pour le service du roi et pour l’armée du centre.
Je n’ai pas besoin de vous répéter que la justice doit se rendre au
nom du roi; cela a toujours dû avoir lieu; le droit de faire grace ne
vous appartient pas pour les individus condamnés par les tribunaux;
vous n’êtes autorisé qu’à suspendre l’exécution dans les cas que
vous jugerez graciables. Le droit de faire grace n’appartient qu’au
roi. Vous n’avez pas non plus le droit de nommer à aucune place du
clergé; le roi y nomme dans toutes les parties de son royaume.
Si le roi juge à-propos de tenir près de vous et des gouverneurs
un commissaire Espagnol pour connaître les recettes et les
dépenses, vous devez donner à ce commissaire les renseignemens
dont il aura besoin pour remplir sa mission. Vous aurez soin,
monsieur le maréchal, de me rendre compte journellement de ce qui
se sera fait pendant le séjour du roi afin que j’en informe l’empereur.
&c. &c.

Paris, le 24 Août, 1811.

Sire,—J’ai l’honneur d’informer votre majesté que d’après les
ordres de l’empereur, je viens de faire connaître à M. le maréchal
duc de Raguse que l’armée de Portugal doit prendre désormais sa
ligne de communication sur Madrid; je lui mande que c’est là que
doit être son centre de dépôt, et que toute opération que l’ennemi
ferait sur la Coa ne peut déranger cette ligne; que si l’ennemi veut
prendre l’offensive il ne peut la prendre que dans l’Andalousie
parceque de ce côté il a un objet à remplir, qui est de faire lever le
siège de Cadiz, tandis que ses efforts dans le nord s’avença-t-il
même jusqu’à Valladolid, n’aboutiraient à rien puisque les troupes
que nous avons dans ces provinces en se repliant lui opposeraient
une armée considérable et qu’alors l’armée de Portugal devrait faire
pour l’armée du nord ce qu’elle ferait pour l’armée du midi. Je le
préviens que l’objet important est que sa ligne d’opérations soit sur
Talavera et Madrid parceque son armée est spécialement destinée à
protéger celle du midi. Je lui fais observer que l’armée de Portugal
étant attaquée de front, son mouvement de retraite est encore sur
Madrid parceque dans tous les cas possibles ce doit être sa ligne
d’opérations, qu’il faut donc que tous les dépôts quelconques
appartinant à l’armée de Portugal soient dirigés sur Talavera et
Madrid. Je donne l’ordre impératif au général Dorsenne de faire
partir dans les 24 heures tous les dépôts et détachemens qu’il a
appartenant à l’armée de Portugal; tout ce qui est en état de servir
sera dirigé en gros détachemens par Avila sur Placentia, et quant
aux hommes qui ne sont pas pour le moment en état de servir, le
général Dorsenne les fera diriger sur Madrid, et aura soin d’en
informer à l’avance votre majesté, de manière qu’il ne lui restera plus
un seul homme appartenant à l’armée de Portugal, sauf la garnison
de Ciudad Rodrigo qu’il fera relever et rejoindre aussitôt après
l’arrivée des renforts qui vont se rendre à l’armée du nord.
&c. &c.

Boulogne, le 20 Sept. 1811.

Sire,—L’empereur m’a demandé si j’avois reponse à la lettre que
j’ai eu l’honneur d’adresser à V. M. en lui rendant compte de la
reddition de Figueras. L’empereur m’ordonne d’annoncer à V. M. que
son intention est d’étendre à toute la rive gauche de l’Ebre la mesure
qu’elle à jugé devoir adopter pour la Catalogne. L’empereur pense
que V. M. temoin de la resistance qui éprouvent les armées et des
sacrifices des toutes espèces que la France est obligé de faire, est
trop juste pour ne point apprécier les motifs de la conduite de
l’Empereur, et je suis autorisé à assurer V. M. des sentimens
d’intérêt et d’amitié qui continuent à animer l’empereur pour V. M.
mais il ne pouvent pas faire negliger à S. M. I. et R. ce qu’elle doit à
la sureté de son empire et à la gloire de son règne.
&c. &c.
 N o . I V.

section 1.

CONDUCT OF THE ENGLISH G O V E R N M E N T.

EXTRACT FROM MR. CANNING’S INSTRUCTIONS TO MR.

STUART AND MR. DUFF, 1808.

To Mr. Stuart.
“You are to enter into no political engagements.”

To James Duff, Esq.

“July 26, 1808.
“You will embark on board his majesty’s ship, Stately; on board of
that ship are embarked to the amount of one million of Spanish
dollars, three-fourths in dollars and one-fourth in bars, which sum is
consigned to your care and is destined by his majesty for the use of
the kingdom of Andalusia and the provinces of Spain connected with
them.”
“His majesty has no desire to annex any conditions to the
pecuniary assistance which he furnishes to Spain.”
“Military stores to a considerable amount are now actually shipping
for Cadiz, and the articles required for the clothing of the Andalusian
army will follow.”
“It was only by a direct but secret understanding with the
government of Spain, under the connivance of France, that any
considerable amount of dollars has been collected in England.”
 “Each province of Spain made its own application with reference to
the full amount of its own immediate necessities, and to the full
measure of its own intended exertions, but without taking into
consideration that similar necessities and similar exertions lead to
similar demands from other parts, and that though each separate
demand might in itself be reasonably supposed to come within the
limits of the means of Great Britain, yet that the whole together
occasion a call for specie, such as never before was made upon this
country at any period of its existence.”
“In the course of the present year it is publicly notorious that a
subsidy is paid by Great Britain to Sweden of one million two
hundred thousand pounds, the whole of which, or nearly the whole,
must be remitted in specie, amounting to at least seven million
dollars. One million of dollars has already been sent to Gihon,
another to Coruña in part of the respective demands of the
principality of Asturias and the kingdom of Gallicia, and the
remainder of these demands as already brought forward would
require not less than eight million dollars more to satisfy
them.”——“An application from Portugal has also been received for
an aid, which will amount to about twelve or thirteen hundred
thousand dollars, one million as has been stated goes in the ship
with you to Cadiz, and the remainder of the Andalusian demand
would require between three and four millions of dollars more. Here,
therefore, there are not less than three-and-twenty millions of dollars,
of which near sixteen millions for Spain and Portugal required to be
suddenly drawn from the British treasury.”
“In addition to this drain it is also to be considered that the British
armies are at the same moment sent forth in aid of the same cause,
and that every article of expence to be incurred by them on foreign
service in whatever country they may be employed, must be
defrayed by remittances in silver.”[1]——“You will be particularly
careful in entering upon the explanation with the junta of Seville, to
avoid any appearance of a desire to overrate the merit and value of
the exertions now making by Great Britain in favour of the Spanish
nation, or to lay the ground for restraining or limiting those exertions
within any other bounds than those which are prescribed by the
limits of the actual means of the country.”

FOOTNOTE:
[1] Note by Editor.—Nevertheless sir John Moore had only
£25,000 in his military chest, and sir David Baird only £8,000
which were given him by sir John Moore.
Admiral De Courcy to Mr. Stuart, October 21, 1808.
“Mr. Frere will have told you that the Semiramis has brought a
million of dollars in order to lie at his disposal, besides £50,000 in
dollars, which are to be presented to the army of the marquis of
Romana.”——“In the meantime the British troops remain in their
transports at Coruna, uncertain whether they shall be invited to
the war, and without a shilling to defray their expences.”

Mr. Canning to Mr. Stuart.

July 27, 1808.
“Already the deputy from Coruna has added to his original demand
for two millions of dollars, a further demand for three millions on
learning from the Asturian deputies that the demand from Asturias
had amounted to five millions in the first instance. Both profess in
conversation to include a provision for the interests of Leon and of
Old Castile in the demand. But this has not prevented a direct
application from Leon.”
“It is besides of no small disadvantage that the deputies from the
Asturias and Gallicia having left Spain at so early a period are really
not competent to furnish information or advice upon the more
advanced state of things in that country.”——“I have already stated
to you that in applications for succours, there is an under-ground
appearance of rivalry, which with every disposition to do every thing
that can be done for Spain, imposes a necessity of perpetual caution
with respect to the particular demands of each province. The
Asturians having been rebuked by their constituents for not having
applied for pecuniary aid as quickly as the Gallicians are bent upon
repairing this fault, and the Gallician having been commended for
promptitude, is ambitious of acquiring new credit by increasing the
amount of his demand. Whatever the ulterior demands, these
several provinces have to make, will be made with infinitely more
effect through you and Mr. Hunter respectively, as they will then
come accompanied with some detailed and intelligible exposition of
the grounds and objects of each particular application.”

Mr. Stuart’s despatches to Mr. Canning.

Coruna, July 22, 1808.
“Accounts of advantages in the quarters, which from the present
state of things can have little or no communication with this place,
appear to be numerous in proportion as the north of Spain is barren
of events agreeable to the existing government; and I am disposed
to consider unauthenticated reports of success in Catalonia,
Valencia, Murcia, and Andalusia, to be a mode of concealing or
palliating disasters in Leon, Castile, and the Montaña.”

July 24, 1808.

“One thousand men, under de Ponte, is the utmost force the
Asturias have yet organized or sent into the field, and the
contingents of Leon are very trifling.
“Thirty thousand men, of which twenty thousand are regular troops
under Blake, were united to ten thousand Castilian recruits under
Cuesta. They went to Rio Seco to march against Burgos, and cut off
Bessieres’ retreat to France, but they lost seven thousand men at
Rio Seco.
“The Estremadura army under Gallegos is at Almaraz, consisting
of twenty-four thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry, but the
battle of Rio Seco has cut the communication which had been before
kept up to Andalusia.”

Abstract of information sent to Mr. Canning by Mr. Stuart.

July 26, 1808.
“The 29th of May the inhabitants of Coruna appointed a
provisional junta of forty members taken from the notables of the
place, and this junta despatched circulars to the seven provinces of
St. Jago, Betanços, Coruna, Mondonedo, Orense, Lugo, and Tuy,
desiring that deputies from each should come to Coruña to form a
junta for Gallicia entire. Seven persons came and immediately
seized the government and dissolved the local junta; the troops
marched to the frontier, deputies went to England, and all seemed to
proceed well until contributions were demanded. Then the provinces
demurred saying, their deputies were empowered only to signify their
approbation of what had past, but not to seize the government, and
St. Jago insisted upon sending more deputies, and having additional
votes as being of more consequence. It was then arranged that two
deputies from each province should be sent to Coruña with more
power. The archbishop and a Mr. Friere came from St. Jago, and
others were arriving when the first deputation resolved not to submit,
and declared the second to be an ordinary junta, chosen for the
mere purpose of raising money, and subordinate to themselves. The
archbishop and the bishop of Orense refused to act in such a
capacity; but a letter from the latter painting the true state of things
being intercepted, he was arrested and confined in the citadel. A
body of troops was sent to St. Jago, it was uncertain whether to
seize the archbishop or to awe the people; but Mr. Stuart was
secretly assured it was for the former purpose. The archbishop
thought so also and came immediately to Coruña. This transaction
was studiously concealed from the English envoy but he penetrated
the secret. The people were discontented at this usurpation of the
junta of seven, but the lavish succours sent to them by Mr. Canning
and the presence of Mr. Stuart induced them to submit, as thinking
the junta were supported by England.
 “This junta of seven adopted no measures in common with any
neighbouring province, but willingly entered into close alliance with
the insurgents of Portugal as one independent state with another;
and they withheld any share of the English supplies for the armies of
Asturias and Leon.
“The archbishop was an intriguing dangerous man, and secretly
wrote to Blake to march with the army against the junta, his letter
being intercepted six voted to arrest him, but the seventh with the
assistance of Mr. Stuart persuaded them to avoid so violent a
measure as tending towards a civil commotion. Tumults however did
take place, and the English naval officers were requested and
consented to quell a riot, and it proved that they had more influence
over the people than the junta.
“In August the archbishop was commanded to leave Coruña, he
obeyed, and the bishop of Orense was after some resistance made
a member of the junta.”

Mr. Stuart to Mr. Canning.

“August 7.
“There is no common plan, and consequently no concert in their
proceedings. No province shares the succour granted by Great
Britain with its neighbour, although that advantage may not be useful
to themselves. No gun-boats have been sent from Ferrol to protect
St. Andero on the coast of Biscay, and the Asturians have in vain
asked for artillery from the depôts of Gallicia.
“The stores landed at Gihon, and not used by the Asturians have
remained in that port and in Oviedo, although they would have
afforded a reasonable relief to the army of Blake.
“The money brought by the Pluto for the province of Leon which
has not raised a man and was till this moment in the hands of the
French, remains unemployed in the port where it was landed.
Estremadura is said to have nine thousand cavalry, which are of little
service since the French quitted that province. Yet they have not sent
a man to Blake who cannot prudently stir from his present position
without cavalry. General Cuesta also has deprived him of six
hundred horse and his flying artillery with which he has actually
quitted Salamanca on his way to join the Estremadura army.”

Ditto to Ditto.

(Abstract.)
“August 12.
“The duke of Infantado reached Blake’s quarters, after escaping
from France. Blake gave him his confidence and sent him to Madrid
to form a council of war, and to persuade Cuesta to send two
thousand cavalry to the army of Gallicia. The junta did not approve of
this; they suspected Infantado as a double dealer and in the French
interest.
“After Baylen, the juntas of Seville and Murcia wished to establish
a despotism, differing in nothing from that of Charles III. and Charles
IV. save that Florida Blanca was to be the head of a regency. But in
the north they were all for liberty, and put forward the British
constitution as a model. The army spoke of Infantado as regent, but
the civilians disliked him. All the English guns sent out for Gallicia
went by mistake to the Asturias, the succours were absurdly
distributed and every thing was in confusion.”

Mr. Stuart to Mr. Canning.

“Coruna, August 9.
“I am placed at the very extremity of the kingdom where I cannot
possibly obtain any sort of information respecting other provinces,
and my presence has very materially contributed to cherish the
project of separation from the rest of the peninsula in the minds of
the Gallicians.
“Besides the constant communication of the navy with the junta, a
military mission is placed here consisting of several persons who
communicate regularly with the government and the admiralty, and
whose correspondence with England being a mere duplicate of my
own renders the one or the other perfectly useless.
“The packet instead of coming weekly only arrived every fortnight,
being sent to Gihon to carry home Mr. Hunter’s letters, who I
understand has no order to report to me!
“The admiral having no official notice of my situation here on the
part of government, cannot be expected to detach vessels for the
purpose of sending my despatches at a time when he is occupied in
sending his own accounts of the events taking place in Spain to the
admiralty.”

section 2.

L O R D W E L L E S L E Y ’ S I N S T R U C T I O N S T O M R . S T U A R T.

(Extracts.)

“January 5, 1810.
“In return for these liberal supplies, his majesty is entitled to claim
from the Portuguese government every assistance which can be
afforded to the British commander and troops, a faithful and judicious
application of the funds granted for the support of so large a portion
of the Portuguese force, which must otherwise be supplied from the
exclusive resources of Portugal.”
“I am commanded to signify to you the expectation that the
extraordinary efforts of his majesty’s government for the aid of
Portugal, and the consequent pressure upon the British resources,
will be met with corresponding exertions on the part of the regency,
and that all local and temporary prejudices will be submitted to the
urgent necessity of placing the finances of the kingdom in that state
which may render them available for its defence in the approaching
danger. You will direct your immediate and vigilant attention to this
most important object, nor will you refrain from offering, or even from
urging, your advice on any occasion which may open the prospect of
effecting any useful reduction in the civil charges, or augmentation in
the revenues or military resources of the country.”
“In addition to these arrangements his majesty will expect to
receive regular monthly accounts of the expenditure of the sums
applicable to the military charges of Portugal, under the orders
issued to lord Wellington, as well as accurate returns of the state and
condition of the several corps receiving British pay.”————“It is
also desirable that his majesty should be acquainted with the state
and condition of that part of the Portuguese force which is to be
maintained from the revenues of Portugal.”————“The crisis
demands the most unreserved confidence and communication
between his majesty’s ministers and the local government of the
prince regent. No jealousy or suspicion should be harboured under
such a pressure of common danger; the great sacrifices which we
have made for the interests of our ally must not be frustrated by any
consideration inferior to the main purpose of our mutual security, nor
must we now hesitate to take the lead in any measures necessary to
enable Portugal to contribute a just share of their own efforts and
resources for the accomplishment of their own safety.”
“The governing-power in Spain does not derive its authority from
the appointment of the sovereign, the disposition of some of its
leading members is at least equivocal, and its conduct has not
satisfied any expectations either of the Spanish nation or of the
allies.”————“In Spain, the assembly of the cortes is the only
remedy to which that country can resort for the purpose of investing
the government with a regular force or a national spirit, nor can any
hope be entertained of a sufficient exertion of the military resources
of Spain, until a governing power shall be so framed as to unite a
due representation of the crown with a just security for the interests
and welfare of all the estates of the realm.”————

section 3.

C O N D U C T O F T H E E N G L I S H G O V E R N M E N T.
 Lord Wellington to Mr. Stuart.
“Viseu, March 30, 1810.
“I don’t understand the arrangements which government have
made of the command of the troops there. I have hitherto considered
them as part of this army, and from the arrangements which I made
with the Spanish government they cost us nothing but their pay, and
all the money procured at Cadiz for bills was applicable to the
service in this country. Their instructions to general Graham alter this
entirely, and they have even gone so far as to desire him to take
measures to supply the Spaniards with provisions from the
Mediterranean, whereas I had insisted that they should feed our
troops. The first consequence of this arrangement will be, that we
shall have no more money from Cadiz. I had considered the troops
at Cadiz so much part of my army, that I had written to my brother to
desire to have his opinion whether, if the French withdrew from
Cadiz when they should attack Portugal, he thought I might bring into
Portugal at least the troops which I had sent there. But I consider this
now to be out of the question.”

General Graham to Mr. Stuart.

“Isla, May 22, 1810.
“I add this note merely as a postscript to my last, to tell you that
lord Liverpool has decided the doubt, by declaring this a part of lord
Wellington’s army, but saying it is the wish of government that
though I am second in command to him I should be left here for the
present. This is odd enough. I mean that it should not have been left
to his judgement to decide where I was to be employed; one would
think he could judge fully better according to circumstances than
people in England.”
 N o . V.

section 1.

MARMONT AND DORSENNE’S O P E R AT I O N S .

Intercepted letter from Foy to Girard, translated from the

cypher.
“Truxillo, 20 Août, 1811.
“Monsieur le général,—Wellington bloque Rodrigo avec
quarante mille hommes; son avant-garde occupe la Sierra de
Francia. On assure que l’artillerie du train arrive de Porto pour faire
le siège de cette place. C’est approvisionnée pour trois mois.
Marmont va se porter vers le nord pour se réunir avec l’armée
commandée par le général Dorsenne et attaquer l’ennemi. Ma
division partira le vingt six pour passer le Tage et suivre le
mouvement de Marmont. Huit mille hommes de l’armée du centre
nous remplaceront à Placentia et au Pont d’Almaraz.
“Monsieur le maréchal due de Raguse me charge de vous écrire
que c’est à vous à contenir quatre mille Espagnols qui sont en ce
moment réunis devant Truxillo.” &c. &c.
“Foy.”

Intercepted letter from general Wattier to the general commanding

at Ciudad Rodrigo.

(Extract.)
“Salamanca, Septembre 1, 1811.
“L’armée Espagnol de Galice, honteusement chassée de ses
positions de la Baneza et de Puente de Orvigo et poursuivie par
l’avant-garde au delà de Villa Franca, s’est retirée en grande hâte
sur la Coruñe. Le général-en-chef après avoir nettoyé ces parages,
vient ici sous six jours avec vingt-cinq mille hommes de la garde, et
nous irons tous ensemble voir s’il plait à ces illustres Anglais de
nous attendre, et de nous permettre de rompre quelques lances
avec eux. Le duc de Raguse à qui j’envoie de vos nouvelles est
autour de vous à Baños, Val de Fuentes, Placentia, &c., et nous
agirons de concert avec lui.”

Intercepted letter from Marmont to Girard.

“Placencia, 7embre, 1811.
“Général,—Je vous ai écrit pour vous prier de faire passer une
lettre que j’addressai au maréchal duc de Dalmatie. Les Anglais out
réuni toutes leurs forces auprès de Rodrigo, les corps Espagnols
même qui étoient sur la rive gauche du Tage passent en ce moment
cette rivière; vous n’avez presque personne devant vous. Il serait
extrêmement important que pendant que la presque totalité de
l’armée va se porter sur Rodrigo vous puissiez faire un mouvement
pour opérer une diversion utile et rapeller un portion de la force
ennemie de votre côté. J’ignore quelles sont vos instructions, mais je
ne doute pas que ce mouvement n’entre dans les intentions du duc
de Dalmatie.”

Du maréchal Marmont au général de division Foy.

“Talavera, Octobre 21, 1811.
“Général,—Je reçois seulement dans ce moment votre lettre du
18me avec la copie de celle du général d’Aultanne. Pour instruction
générale vous ne devez obéir à aucun ordre qui vous serait donné
au nom du roi lorsqu’elles sont contraires à mes intentions
particulières. Ne vous départez jamais de ces dispositions. L’armée
de Portugal ne doit point servir aux escortes, ni à la communication
de l’armée du midi,—nos troupes auront bien assez de courses à
faire pour assurer la rentré de nos approvisionnemens. Le roi a paru
désirer que je n’occupe point Illescas, à cause de son voisinage de
Madrid; par ce motif et plus encore en raison de l’éloignement et du
service pénible des troupes, je ne veux point l’occuper. Mon intention
était de ne point occuper Aranjuez; mais puisque les ministres du roi
out pris la mesure inconsiderée d’ordonner la vente des magazins,
ne perdez pas un seul instant pour envoyer un détachement occuper
Aranjuez, où le préfet de Toledo fera faire le plus de biscuit possible.
Prenez la même mesure pour tous les points où il y a des magazins.
—Emparez vous en,—et que personne n’y touche.—L’empereur a
indiqué la province de Toledo et non la préfecture; ainsi ce sont les
réssources de toute la province qui nous sont affectés.—Emparez
vous en,—et que le préfet administre tous le pays. Dites bien au
préfet qu’à quelque titre que ce soit aucun des réssources en blé,
argent de quelque source qu’elles préviennent ne doit être distraits
pour Madrid, et qu’elles doivent toutes être conservés pour l’armée
de Portugal. À la fin du mois la division de dragons arrivera dans les
environs de Tolede.—J’espère qu’elle éloignera les guerillas. Dans le
cas ou ils resteroient dans le voisinage on leur donnera la chasse.
Voyez à obtenir du préfet de Tolede qu’il fasse un effort
extraordinaire pour envoyer à Talavera le blé et l’orge qui lui out été
demandés, attendu que comme ici on est obligé de faire des
expéditions en avant, nous sommes dans un besoin très pressant.
Je désirerois rentrer dans la possession de tout le blé qui a été
vendu. On renverroit les acheteurs par devant le gouvernement
Espagnol pour être indemnisées,—s’il y a possibilité engagez le
préfet à prendre des mesures conservatoires en attendant que je
prenne un arrête à cet égard sur le rapport que vous me ferez. Je
me rends à Madrid où je passerai deux jours dans l’espérance
d’éclairer le roi sur la conduite que ses véritables intérêts lui
commandent de tenir envers l’armée française. De là je me rends à
Tolede. Je n’ai pas besoin de vous recommander, général, d’envoyer
à Aranjuez un officier sage et ferme, qui exécute ponctuellement les
ordres qui lui seroient donnés, qui se fasse obéir et qui mette le plus
grand soin à faire respecter l’habitation du roi.”

Intercepted letter in cypher from general Montbrun to the

governor of Ciudad Rodrigo.