Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (74 page)

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 around 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:

The mining villages, and Ashton is certainly a good example, are among the ugliest and most unattractive places to live; they are dirty, concentrated untidily around the colliery and its waste-heaps, and lack the social and cultural facilities of nearby towns. Passengers on buses going through Ashton will invariably comment on its drabness, and the place is often quoted as an example of the backwardness of the mining areas. In conversation with strangers, men and women of Ashton will defend their town almost before it comes under attack on such grounds . . .

In addition, the backwardness of welfare developments in the Ashton Colliery – there are no baths and only inadequate canteen facilities – is part of the reason for a general belief that Ashton is neglected and something of a backwater.

One historical event still had, for the older miners, a particular resonance. This was the great strike of 1893, when the troops were sent in and two miners were shot dead and 16 others were injured. It was the moment in the history of ‘Ashton’ that, these older miners proudly believed, would never be forgotten.

Ferdynand Zweig (who visited most British coalfields in the late 1940s) probably had it right about those who worked in the nation’s coal mines: ‘They all live in closely-knit communities where there is a strong projection of the group on the individual. Their life is firmly circumscribed by pit conditions. The pit and the village control their habits and rules of conduct . . .’ And again: ‘The miners, who often hate their jobs, have at the same time a deeply-felt affection for them, which is often expressed in the incessant talk about the pit.’ He added, tellingly, that ‘younger men often interrupt this talk with “Pit, pit, and pit again”’. Those younger miners included by 1953 the 15-year-old Arthur Scargill. Years later, he recalled his initiation into the industry at Woolley Colliery, just north of Barnsley:

Melson [Alf Melson, the one-eyed foreman] used to stalk up and down a sort of raised gantry in the screening plant. He was just like Captain Bligh glaring at his crew. We were picking bits of stone and rock out of the coal as it passed us on conveyer belts. The place was so full of dust you could barely see your hands, and so noisy you had to use sign language. When it came to snap time, your lips were coated in black dust. You had to wash them before you could eat your snap [in his case a bottle of water and jam sandwiches] . . .

There were two sorts of people in the section: us, and disabled rejects of society. I saw men with one arm and one leg, men crippled and mentally retarded. I saw people who should never have been working, having to work to live.

‘It probably sounds corny,’ this very atypical miner added, ‘but on that first day I promised myself I would try one day to get things changed.’
^5.

Five years earlier, in February 1948,
Picture Post
’s focus was on a different but not altogether dissimilar sector of the economy. Six individual dockers, each pictured with a confident, smiling face, were selected as representative of ‘The Men Who Can Do It’:

Walter Eagle
. Forty-six, he lives at Forest Gate with his wife and three children. He has been a docker for over 25 years.

Patsy Hollis
. Nicknamed ‘Flash-bomb’, says he’s about 45, from Poplar, and one of the ‘pitch-hands’, who load ‘cargoes from ships’ on to hand-barrows.

Wally May
. Thirty-four, he comes from Becontree. In his spare time is a chicken-fancier, but spends most of his time loading ships.

George Rutter
. Thirty-five, married, with two sons, he comes from Manor Park. When he has time, he likes escaping to Epping Forest with the boys.

Arthur May
. Thirty-nine, married, with two children, he comes from Manor Park. He works in the holds of the cargo ships.

George Moore
. Sixty-two, worked in dockland for 37 years. Travels from Canning Town. He has two sons who follow his footsteps.

A mainly historical piece about the dockers and their leaders, by the middle-class socialist (and man of parts) Raymond Postgate, accompanied the pictures and captions. It ended with Ernest Bevin, who had won national fame in 1920 as ‘the Dockers’ K.C.’ during a government inquiry. ‘Now he has international fame,’ wrote Postgate, ‘but he is still a docker. Study that stocky, sturdy figure – its faults and its virtues – its courage, its solidity, its short temper, its readiness to fight, its imagination, its patriotism, its loyalty – all these are typical of dockland.’

The same issue also included a photo-essay and more critical piece on London’s docks and dockers. ‘Men Who Are Vital Links in the Nation’s Import and Export Chain Work at the Port of London’s King George V Dock’ began one of the extended captions. ‘After generations of industrial struggle, they now have a guaranteed daily wage of £1 0s 6d for a 5½-day week. Casual labour, which was the curse of dockland, ended last year. It is on men such as these that the quicker turn-round of ships, which can so help industrial recovery, depends.’ The disturbing fact, however, was that turn-round time in British docks had, far from improving, ‘fallen off badly’. ‘Can we cut out this serious delay, which is costing us so much, and get back at least to pre-war turn-round figures?’ asked
Picture Post
, identifying restrictive practices as the crux:

The case can be quoted of six gangs on quay, all of which turned up one or two men short on a Saturday morning. These gangs would not manage to make five complete gangs, and they would not work shorthanded. So no work was done on the quay that morning, and the gangs on the ship could not work either. The dockers’ trade union leaders, responding to the Labour Government’s appeal, are now doing their best to end these restrictive practices, and the powerful Transport and General Workers’ Union has backed the Government’s export drive.

‘But the final answer,’ the piece concluded with no wild optimism, ‘is with the dockers.’
^6.

Much would turn on how the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS), building on Bevin’s wartime reforms of dock labour and coming into effect in July 1947, played out. In addition to decasualisation (aimed at ensuring a regular, well-organised supply of labour) and a guaranteed daily wage, it involved a disciplinary mechanism to be administered jointly by employers and unions. After so many years of chaotic, even vengeful industrial relations in the docks, there seemed a real chance that a new, more productive, more harmonious era might begin. Such hopes were quickly dashed. Not only were there major, high-profile strikes in 1948 and 1949 (in both cases centred on London and Liverpool), but between 1945 and 1951 as a whole, more than a fifth of the 14.3 million working days lost to strikes in all industries were attributable to industrial action in the docks – even though those docks employed only about 80,000 men out of a national workforce of some 20 million.
^7.

‘To some of us,’ a bishop living in Eastbourne wrote to
The Times
during the 1949 strike (ended only by the government’s resorting to no fewer than 15,000 servicemen to act as strike-breakers), ‘it is all so desperately puzzling.’ He went on:

We are told that the majority of dockers are decent men, yet their reasoning powers seem paralysed. How can it be right to sacrifice England, to attempt to starve her, and to upset our already over-difficult national recovery by any sectional action? Is there some deep cause we do not know, or is it just rather sheer stupidity or selfish sectionalism? We are told to admire the ‘solidarity’ of a section (even though England is victimised), but when employers were accused of a similar ‘common front’ we were told that it was a conspiracy to victimise the public. What is the difference?

Nor did the NDLS seem to make much difference in terms of restrictive practices. ‘They have the very finest machinery,’ the President of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce told the
Financial Times
about the new ships for handling ore cargoes on Clydeside, ‘but meantime the dockers insist that the same number of men should be employed as in the old-fashioned ships, which means that in a gang of eight to twelve men only two do the actual work.’ When a few weeks later a government-sponsored Working Party on Increased Mechanisation in British Ports published its report, it revealed that union representatives ‘have told us that they are not prepared, except in certain circumstances, to depart from the present arrangements which call for certain numbers of men to be employed on stated tasks’ – and that in those situations where dockers were paid for standing by watching the machine do the work, ‘we have been informed that this is the only method in which machinery can be used without causing disputes and stoppages’. Or, as a report at about the same time by the British Institute of Management on the London docks flatly summed up the situation, ‘The refusal of the workers to agree to alter long-established rules seems now so much to be taken for granted that many technical improvements are not even seriously considered by the employers.’