I hate their ‘high pressure salesman’ society. (Hearing aid technician)
I feel that the Americans are rather too big for their boots. (Civil servant)
The Americans are obviously becoming the Master race, whether we like it or not, so let’s all begin to hero-worship them. (Designer)
Strikingly, even a commentator like Geoffrey Crowther, far from happy about the state of the British economy, had serious misgivings. ‘America is a country where to my mind they have too much competition,’ he told his Home Service listeners earlier in 1950. ‘It does indeed make them rich . . . But every time I go there I am struck again by how much personal instability and unhappiness comes with the heavy competition. It shows up, I think, in the greater incidence of things like suicides, of nervous breakdowns, of alcoholism; very few people there can feel economically secure.’ Accordingly, ‘I am not suggesting that we should go to the American extreme and imitate their degree of competition. They pay too high a price for their wealth.’
Ealing, its finger ever unfailingly on the national pulse, agreed. The Titfield Thunderbolt, premiered in March 1953, could not have made the case more explicitly against unsentimental, bottom-line materialism and modernisation. The film tells the humorous, heartwarming, defiantly emotive story of how the inhabitants of a village come together to save their branch line (the oldest in the world) from the attempt by both British Railways and the local bus company (Pearce & Crump) to have it closed down. ‘Don’t you realise you’re condemning your village to death?’ one of the campaigners, the local squire, asks passionately at a public meeting. ‘Open it up to buses and lorries and what’s it going to be like in five years’ time? Our lanes will be concrete roads, our houses will have numbers instead of names, there’ll be traffic lights and zebra crossings.’ The story’s ending is predictably happy – as it was in a remarkably similar film that Ealing Studios made later that year.9. This time the object to be saved was a small cargo boat pottering about the Clyde, with an American tycoon cast in the role of the bad guy in its struggle for survival. The message by the end was the simple and uplifting one that loyalty and obligations are more important than mere money. The film and the boat shared the same name: The Maggie.
9
Proper Bloody Products
Within the British mid-century economy, three industries were peculiarly emblematic. Each was important in itself, but each was also a symbol of something larger. Up to the 1970s, and even beyond, each possessed a resonance that made it the object of much attention, not always either accurate or flattering.
‘300,000 people were there,’ noted Hugh Gaitskell in July 1949, after speaking at the Durham Miners’ Gala in his capacity as Minister of Fuel and Power. ‘There were only 200 police controlling this vast mass and so far as I know there were no incidents. I only saw two people drunk and they were harmless enough.’ It was the red-letter day in the Durham miners’ calendar – the day that they and their families took over the city, with spectators packing each side of Old Elvet 15-deep for several hours in order to watch them march with their banners and bands through the centre on their way to the racecourse, where each year a handful of luminaries in the labour movement addressed them. In July 1951 it was the turn of Attlee and Morrison as well as Michael Foot and the General Secretary of the NUM, Arthur Horner. ‘The speeches were only incidental,’ reckoned one observer, the Labour MP for Huddersfield, J.P.W. (‘Curly’) Mallalieu. ‘They mixed with the sounds of the fair, of late-arriving bands, of sandwich papers and of popping corks.’ That afternoon, long after the speeches, there occurred in the narrow bottleneck of Old Elvet, as the processions made their slow and crowded way back, the day’s moment of epiphany:
Suddenly there was silence. The colours still danced, but everything else was still. For the banner we now saw was draped in black. It carried a flag sent by the miners of Yugoslavia. It carried also the name of Easington Colliery. In that colliery, 52 days earlier, 83 miners had lost their lives [as the result of an explosion]. Through the silence the Easington band began to play. It played ‘Gresford’, the tune which a miner himself had written in sorrow for the great Gresford disaster [of 1934 near Wrexham in North Wales, when an explosion had killed 266 miners]. When the tune came to an end there was again stillness and silence until Old Elvet gently relaxed his hold and there was space to move. With the first movement the great crowd set up a storm of cheering that could be heard in Paradise, dancers cavorted again and the sunshine wiped away all thought of tears.
‘Miners rub shoulders with death,’ concluded Mallalieu. ‘They know how to face death. Last Saturday I saw, too, that they will not let death spoil life.’1.
Gaitskell would have been moved, too, but his late 1940s diary gives overall a fairly unflattering account of an industry that was starting to settle down in the wake of its 1947 nationalisation. ‘I met the Divisional Coal Board and was not impressed,’ he noted after a visit to Lancashire in October 1948. ‘The problem of finding good men to occupy high managerial positions in coal is appalling. The industry just does not breed them. All you have is engineers without any conception of leadership or administration.’ The National Coal Board (NCB) itself was not much better. ‘The awkward thing is that I agree with most of his criticisms of the organisation,’ Gaitskell privately conceded earlier that year when one of its members, the distinguished if somewhat pig-headed mining engineer Sir Charles Reid, threatened to resign on the grounds that the NCB was over-centralised, too rigidly structured and did not allow its managers to manage. Gaitskell asked Sir Richard Burrows, the shrewd, commonsensical former chairman of Manchester Collieries, to investigate. Some seven months later, the minister recorded, ‘Burrows gave me some rather hair-raising accounts of the way the Board does its business. It is astonishing that nine apparently intelligent men should behave in the way that, according to him, they do.’
Almost certainly the most culpable figure was the chief of those nine, the NCB’s first chairman (until 1951), Lord Hyndley, who as John Hindley had entered the industry as an engineering apprentice back in 1901, having on leaving public school preferred the charms of Murton Colliery to those of Oxford University. ‘His successive promotions within British coalmining in the 1940s owed more to his seniority, and his familiarity in official and political circles, than to inherent suitability’ is his biographer’s telling verdict; she quotes the view of his counterpart in the electricity industry, the tough-minded former trade unionist Lord Citrine, that Hyndley was ‘a most likeable man, friendly, experienced and broadminded, but lacking in drive’. Although he was good with the miners’ leaders (Hugh Dalton called him ‘a human water softener’, presumably a compliment), and although the NCB did manage by the early 1950s a degree of decentralisation, the coal-mining industry needed an altogether bigger figure at its head.2.
Operating at a much lowlier level in the industry was Sid Chaplin, Durham’s miner-writer. The publication in 1946 of his first collection of stories, The Leaping Lad, had won him praise and a Rockefeller Award, enabling him to leave the pits and devote 20 months to writing But by the end of 1948 he was back at his old colliery, before getting a London-based job writing, from May 1950, a monthly feature (‘I Cover the Coalfields’) for the NCB’s magazine, Coal. In January 1949, while still a miner, he wrote a piece that looked ahead in highly positive terms:
There is a spirit of adventure and experimentation within the industry which will produce rich dividends. Every coalfield is searching for new untapped sources of coal. All wastage of manpower between coal-face and the shaft will have to be cut out, and we must think in terms of conveyor, diesel, skip-loading. The old cumbersome methods of screening will have to go, to be replaced by new techniques.
Above all there is a need for pit-level awareness of the problems and achievements of the industry. It is not enough that the Board itself, its administrators or technicians should be aware of them. Every rank-and-file miner should be conscious of the immensity of the task, and be prepared
to play his part.
At the beginning of the third year of public ownership the foundations are well and truly laid. Our task is now to build well upon them.
Given his deep emotional commitment to the nationalisation of an industry that ran in his blood, there is no reason to question Chaplin’s sincerity here or in subsequent articles, but if he could not yet become a full-time creative writer, it was surely a relief when he managed to escape from the pit.
In truth, the industry’s performance in its first five or six years of public ownership was less than sparkling. Overall output did rise but not by enough to meet demand fully, despite continued rationing. As for productivity, the verdict of the American economist William Warren Haynes was probably accurate. ‘When the expanding volume of investment under nationalisation is considered,’ he concluded in his major 1953 survey Nationalization in Practice, ‘the small rise in productivity is disappointing. Modernisation of the industry has barely kept pace with the deteriorating geological conditions and with the shorter work week. It is by no means clear that the miners are putting forth more effort.’ Capital expenditure and mechanisation (especially power-loading) were indeed increasing. But apart from the ‘effort’ factor – by definition difficult to quantify – there were two main productivity problems: the need, for short-term output reasons, to keep poor, inefficient, high-cost collieries going; and, despite overall progress on the manpower front, some shortages of skilled labour, especially in the more productive areas like Yorkshire and the Midlands. Accordingly, operating costs by the early 1950s were starting to rise quite steeply.
Even so, the long-term outlook for the industry seemed broadly optimistic. Plan for Coal was published by the NCB on 14 November 1950, and that evening its director-general of production, E. H. Browne, explained its main points on the Home Service. The assumption was that demand would continue to rise over the next ten to fifteen years, with production being expanded by about a fifth, while over those years there would be a capital investment of some £635 million. Browne explained how some 250 of the existing 900 collieries currently in production would have to be reconstructed – ‘many of them by major changes often amounting to complete remodelling’ – in order to become technologically fit for the task of producing about two-thirds of all the coal required. ‘There will also be a score of new large collieries,’ he added, as well as the closure by the early 1960s of some 350 to 400 pits. ‘It will not be possible to avoid a further decline in the central coalfield of Scotland, West Durham, Lancashire, the older parts of Cannock Chase, and the very small fields of the Forest of Dean and Somerset.’ After stressing again that the purpose of the plan was to expand output and control costs, Browne finished on a sober note: ‘Mere words on paper will not bring about the recovery of the industry. We have got to run fast in order to stand still.’3.
How would the traditionally vexed aspect of labour relations fit in? Chaplin in his January 1949 overview conceded that, since nationalisation, significantly less progress had been made here than in mechanisation, that indeed ‘as yet we have a great deal to learn about the human element in industry’. There was certainly no lack of commitment to making nationalisation a success on the part of what was a remarkably able and weighty generation of miners’ leaders – some of them Communists, like Arthur Horner or the Scottish and Welsh leaders Abe Moffat and Will Paynter. There was always on the NUM’s executive a solidly right-wing, pro-Labour government majority. Few areas were more politically moderate than the huge Yorkshire coalfield, with its 150,000 men in 130 mainly semi-rural pits. ‘The problem we had was that the entire NUM leadership in the coalfield was right-wing,’ recalled Bert Ramelson, a young and energetic Canadian lawyer appointed in 1950 as the CP’s district secretary in Yorkshire. ‘If I was going to do anything that was useful, of importance, it would be to change the character of the Yorkshire coalfield . . . The Yorkshire miners could change the character of the NUM, which in turn could change the composition of the labour movement as a whole.’ It would clearly be a long haul – by 1953 there were still fewer than a hundred party members in the South Yorkshire pits – but that was the gleam in Ramelson’s mind’s eye.
Nevertheless, for all the prevailing political moderation, industrial relations in the coal industry were if anything deteriorating in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not only did absenteeism rates (at around 12 per cent) fail to improve, but the frequency of strikes (almost all of them unofficial) was on an upward curve, quite sharply so after the already numerous 1,637 in 1951. Stanislas Wellisz, an industrial sociologist, examined the 640 stoppages between 1947 and 1950 in the North-Western Division, comprising some 65 pits in Lancashire and seven in North Wales. He was even-handed in his allocation of blame. ‘In most of the conflicts over authority,’ he reported, ‘management uses stern or arbitrary orders, or fails to ascertain the miners’ wishes, and the miners walk out in protest.’ On the other hand, the ‘clinging to inherent rights’, not all of them rational, was ‘at the root of the miners’ refusal to abandon output restrictive practices’, tending to push the managers into an unacceptably (from the miners’ point of view) authoritarian response. This was an even-handedness absent from most press coverage, which in coal-mining disputes almost invariably sided with the NCB.
The worker’s point of view was the subject of a report by the Acton Society Trust, based on a researcher’s experience in 1951 of living for three months in a miner’s home in a coalfield (given the fictitious name of Pollockfield). It was not an optimistic document. Miners were generally cynical about nationalisation, believing that as soon as their industry had been restored to health it would be sold back to its previous owners at the earliest opportunity. As for the NCB, a quarter of miners could name neither the chairman nor their own area general manager, while ‘the intensity of the hatred and scorn felt for the administration is perhaps conveyed by some of the nicknames freely given to them: Glamour Boys, Fantailed Peacocks, Little Caesars.’ Typically, there existed a widely held belief – such was the NCB’s congenital waste and inefficiency – that at head office in London there was at least one full-time car-cleaner who would clean any car parked anywhere near. Many wage disputes were ‘expressions of a feeling that the men’s services, and hence the men themselves, are undervalued’, while the miners’ resentment about the use of Poles and Italians in the pits stemmed from the implication that ‘only unemployed foreigners can be conscripted to do miners’ work’.
Above all, there was in the miners’ world view a gaping dichotomy that no amount of exhortations or information campaigns seemed likely to bridge. ‘Whatever falls within the miners’ experience – the wages system as it affects his actual pay, conditions in the pit, local issues such as housing and transport – was known in great detail,’ declared the report. But ‘the wider issues and underlying causes – the economic reasons for importing American coal, the probable forthcoming shortage of manpower, the character of the National Plan, the functions of the administrative and technical machine – were largely unknown’.4.
These were findings that made a cruel mockery of Chaplin’s hopes about rank-and-file consciousness of – and positive response to – the stern challenges faced by this most high-profile of nationalised industries.
The relentless primacy of the local was hardly surprising. ‘The life of the community is built around the pit,’ observed Pollockfield’s inquisitive guest, ‘and events touching the pit form the subject of practically all conversation.’ In Coal Is Our Life (1956), one of the classic community studies of the era, Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Clifford Slaughter analysed a Yorkshire mining community called ‘Ashton’, in fact Featherstone. Based on extensive fieldwork there, mainly in 1952/3, the study provided an unsentimental close-up of what was still a world of its own.
‘Ashton is predominantly a working-class town [population about 14,000] owing its development to the growth of its collieries,’ the three authors wrote. ‘The latter having drawn people and houses aroun
d them, the main pit is almost in the centre of the town. Most of the men in Ashton are miners.’ Crucially, they found that though much had changed in the miner’s life since the late 1930s – better conditions of work, rising wages, job security, nationalisation, enhanced status within the working class – his outlook was still in its fundamentals determined by the long preceding years of ‘hard toil and social conflict’. They told the story of a 63-year-old pitman who on two successive night shifts found himself being given pony-driving duties. At the end of the second shift, he stormed into the deputy’s cabin. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted. ‘I’m not signed on as a driver; I’m signed on as a collier, and that’s the kind of bloody job I should be doing, not a lad’s work.’ All this, noted Dennis et al, ‘was shouted loud enough for all the men near by, dressing to leave work, to hear’ – and the pitman ‘came away flushed and very pleased with himself, for he had, with this demonstration, removed, or so he thought, any reflection of inferiority cast upon him by his work of the last two shifts’.
In general, they found, the notion of co-operation with management, even after nationalisation, remained essentially suspect. ‘It’s a rotten scheme and you won’t catch me having anything to do with it’ was a 32-year-old collier’s view of the industry’s pension scheme. ‘Anything the management wants the men to do is bound to be to our detriment. That’s what I’ve always been taught.’ Indeed, there was an increasing tendency on the part of miners to treat their union officials as management, such being by now their relative closeness; the clear implication was that this was why stoppages and go-slows were assuming an increasingly unofficial nature. Crucially, the difficult and sometimes dangerous work that coal mining still was (involving a close mutual reliance between miners), combined with the single-industry character of the town, meant that there was no sign of any significant weakening in solidarity as ‘a very strongly developed characteristic of social relations in mining’. There was, as in other mining communities in West Yorkshire, a strong element of contra mundum in this solidarity:
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