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COAL CULTURES
PHOTOGRAPHY, PLACE, ENVIRONMENT
Derrick Price
BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
Derrick Price has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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.
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
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
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
vi CONTENTS
6 THE NEW LANDSCAPES OF COAL 139
CODA 179
References 181
Films 187
Index 188
CONTENTS vii
LIST OF FIGURES
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
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.
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:
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)
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’.
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)
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.
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.
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
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:
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)
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.
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:
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)
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)
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:
section 1.
To Mr. Stuart.
“You are to enter into no political engagements.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
section 1.
(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.”