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“Broken Men” and “Thatcher's Children”: Memory and Legacy in Scotland's Coalfields

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2014

Andrew Perchard
Andrew Perchard*
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde, UK
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Abstract

This article explores the legacy of the demise of the deep coal mining industry in Scotland. It places particular emphasis on the cultural scars of this process as witnessed through miners' and managers' memories, positioning these within the context of occupational socialization, conflict, and alienation. The piece explores the enduring importance of these cultural scars in shaping broader collective narratives of decline in Scotland, and how responses were manifest in shifting political outlooks and the emergence (at both a local and national level) of a resurgent nationalism from the early 1960s onward. Drawing on the notion of the “cultural circuit,” the article examines how and why personal experience of the loss of the coal industry informed and conformed to the politics of the miners' union in Scotland, the National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA). As the article makes clear, the program of closures in the industry has left profound psychological scars in coalfield communities—ones that, like the closure of other major industrial sites, shape a powerful national narrative.

Type
Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 84: Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory , Fall 2013 , pp. 78 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013 

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References

NOTES

1. Alex Mills, interview with author, Auchinleck, Ayrshire, September 13, 1999.

2. “Ken” is the present simple of “know” in the Scots language; “kent” is the past participle (i.e., knew): Bill Marshall, interview with author, Kirkcaldy, Fife, April 21, 2004.

3. EKOS, Evaluation of the Coalfields Regeneration Trust Activity in Scotland: Report for the Coalfields Regeneration Trust (Glasgow, 2009), 88–89.

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38. Coincidentally Lawrence Daly's article appeared in the same year that the Reid brothers, who spent their formative years in Fife and would go on to write Letter from America, were born. For a discussion of the sociology and cultural narratives of modern nationhood in Scotland, see McCrone, David, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Bell, Eleanor, Questioning Scotland: Literature, Nationalism, Postmodernism (Basingstoke, 2004)Google Scholar.

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41. Hansard, July 13, 1971, Vol. 821, Col.234.

42. Sillars formed the SLP in December 1975. Like Sillars, another product of the Ayrshire coalfield who left the Labour Party for the SNP was Alex Neil, MSP, the current Scottish Government Minister for Health, and the first general secretary of the SLP. Bochel, John M. and Denver, D. T., The Scottish Local Government Elections, 1974: Results and Statistics (Edinburgh, 1975)Google Scholar; Bochel and Denver, The Scottish District Elections: Results and Statistics (Dundee, 1977)Google Scholar; Harvie, Scotland & Nationalism, 188, 192.

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47. Strangleman, “Networks, Place and Post-Industrial Mining Communities,” 258–59.

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55. Tommy Coulter, interview; similar metaphors appear in interviews with George Bolton and David Carruthers conducted by Neil Rafeek and Hilary Young, January 12, 2005, SOHCA, 017/C23.

56. ‘Feart’ (Scots) meaning afraid, frightened: Bill Marshall, interview.

57. Alistair Moore, interview with the author, Bo'ness, West Lothian, March 12, 2004.

58. I. Terris, Twenty Years Down the Mines (Ochiltree, 2001), 55–56, 74.

59. Perchard, The Mine Management Professions, 334.

60. Perchard and Phillips, “Transgressing the Moral Economy.”

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69. Interview, Frank Gibb.

70. Phillips, The Industrial Politics of Devolution; NCB memorandum book, January 8, 1981–June 7, 1985, Phillip Weekes Papers 1/10, National Library of Wales.

71. Strangleman, “Networks, Place and Post-Industrial Mining Communities,” 260–63; EKOS, Evaluation of the Coalfields Regeneration Trust Activity in Scotland, passim.

72. Harvie, Scotland & Nationalism, 166; for the part played by NUMSA in leading arguments for home rule within the Scottish Trades Union Congress, see Phillips, The Industrial Politics of Devolution.

73. Ibid., 237.

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