Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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Such combinations of omitting important facts with a lack of rhetorical strategies that might cover for them weaken an intriguing and often convincing argument.

As someone who can't imagine anything worse than having to work underground in dark, hot, cramped spaces, the thought of this is unbearable. Boris Johnson’s sardonic reference to Margaret Thatcher’s “big early start” towards renewable energy has come at the perfect time for Jeremy Paxman’s Black Gold, a history of how Britain industrialised, modernised and thrived. Its history is one of humans and humanity, of a primeval struggle that encompasses enterprise, politics, religion, ingenuity, excitement and toil. The authors intend, I think, to trouble their readers, but some of the ways in which their book troubled me were to do with their approach.I don't suppose I learnt any think new as I pretty much know the story but it fills in the gaps and details. This did liven up the book although I did think some of his input was unnecessary, such as speculating whether the mining village of Aberfan had contributed to one of the most famous disasters by allowing the waste heap to stay in an unsafe position. In former mining areas, the young sometimes had little to do: in one Welsh village, the authors say, they could be found smoking dope and drinking cider while sitting on the ‘dole wall’ behind the bus station. By the middle of the nineteenth century, great numbers of British citizens were for the first time able to see what they were doing after sunset. Despite such a lack of broader knowledge of nineteenth-century history and her salting her pages with jargon, Miller has a great many interesting and informative things to say about the fiction she discusses.

In this brilliant social history, Jeremy Paxman tells the story of coal mining in England, Scotland and Wales from Roman times, through the birth of steam power to war, nationalisation, pea-souper smogs, industrial strife and the picket lines of the Miner’s Strike. Equally important, Britain’s main interest in Africa lay much farther north because it needed to protect Egypt and the Suez Canal, the lifeline to its richest colony, India. This power was of course the legacy of imperialism — the Persian imperialism that conquered South Asia before the British. It was a world of "allotment associations, pigeon and poultry clubs, brass bands, choirs, youth organisations, whippet racing and eagerly contested giant-vegetable competitions" .Apparently Miller remains unaware of the obvious fact that Tzarist and Communist Russia and Communist China, Nazi Germany, and various empires around the world, including the indigenous ones she discusses, all mined extensively.

Not only did coal free men and women from the cold of the seasons, it also freed them from darkness. Jeremy Paxman is equally good on the horrors of the work (the death toll was horrific, not just the disasters that killed hundreds in a single explosion, but the tens of thousands who died in smaller incidents), the immense wealth that came to those fortunate landowners who happened to find that they were sitting on mineral riches beyond their wildest dreams with barely any effort on their part, the technological innovation that coal powered steam stimulated, and the long-term mismanagement of the industry both before and after nationalisation in 1947. It did pick up again with the final couple of chapters with the confrontations with the Thatcher government. The second time, he correctly dates it to July 1984, but still repeats the anti-Thatcher propaganda line that she was referring to the miners in general. For example, at one point Miller dismisses India as a source of diamonds apparently unaware that before the discovery of diamonds at Kimberly Rajastan was the chief source of diamonds in the world.When my grandfather died his post mortem report stated that he had lungs consistent with heavy smoking. His account of this in The Road to Wigan Pier was vivid and heartfelt, as he struggled to describe the “heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space”. Perhaps because this book has been so long in the making, the authors do not make much use of the official documents that have been released in the last few years. The footnotes alone are worth reading and tell us, for example, that London’s remaining 1,300 gas lamps are tended by four lighters who travel on motorbikes.

It was something that we took for granted, delivered in great sackfuls every few weeks by the local coal merchant, who was so blackened by the dust that it was hard to believe that he could ever get it out of his skin, his hair and his clothes. Coal drove the Industrial Revolution and the primacy of the British Empire, but more than that, freed humans for the first time from the rhythm of nature.As Engels put it: 'there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as this one'. It was beyond the scope of this book but I am interested in, to what extent, the NUM contributed to the demise of mining in the UK by their strike in 1984. I found the writing style to be generally readable although the economic bits were a little dry and there were some odd figurative phrases.