Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson have produced a very different kind of work on a subject that they have lived with for much of their lives. I thought this a fascinating telling of the business that was so needed at one point, has in all likelihood done irreversible damage (and is still doing around the world) to our planet and is closing down in the western world. Coal meant that ships became faster and better protected than they had been previously (the coal itself sometimes stopped projectiles), though one drawback was that they needed to put in at coaling stations, which meant that their movements were more predictable to enemy ships and also that their crews spent more time ashore. When a slag heap at Aberfan collapsed on top of the village primary school in 1966, at the inquest the coroner talked of ‘asphyxia and multiple injuries’, but one miner shouted that the words that he wanted on his child’s death certificate were ‘buried alive by the NCB’.

Such combinations of omitting important facts with a lack of rhetorical strategies that might cover for them weaken an intriguing and often convincing argument. Coal mining is rapidly being forgotten and there are no longer any operational deep mines in the UK- in a few years the only signs that we ever had a mining industry will be the odd mining museum and the "half" winding wheels that are in place in some former Yorkshire mining villages. 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. He is noted for a forthright and abrasive interviewing style, particularly when interrogating politicians.

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”.

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. When near the close of her book she clearly states her political views about the environment, I found that I agree with every one of them. Paxman explains the role that coal-fuelled ships played in establishing the hegemony of the Royal Navy. Yet Paxman’s book could hardly be more colourful, and I enjoyed every page enormously … A mining community, as Paxman points out, was not just a place of dirt and danger.Mines were horrible places and miners were, except during a brief period between the successful strikes of the early 1970s and the failed one of 1984–5, poorly paid.

What could be more reassuringly familiar than the dense, smoky fogs of Sherlock Holmes’s London or the fact that the detective keeps his cigars in the coal scuttle? It was a good book to this uninformed reader but perhaps experts would know if this was sensationalist or a fair account, because it felt on the popular side. He has also written many books including the best-selling The English, On Royalty and Friends in High Places. The narrative covers all this, as well as the push for nationalisation, then de-nationalisation when it was clear the industry was on its knees and the rise of mining Unions, in particular the NUM.For instance, unlike so many books emphasizing non-literary contexts, Extractive Technologies does not confine itself to the usual four or five canonical works. I don’t find that the absent or non-existent treasure in the “empty” pit in Treasure Island is “exhausted” or that it “explodes the fantasy of open-handed nature” (110), nor do I find convincing that Nostromo, a novel in which a supposedly exhausted mine turns out to be rich in silver, fits her scheme, in large part because of the book’s emphasis upon its protagonist and Decoud.

Factual, engaging and alas sad, insomuch that whilst we now know the cost to the climate of coal usage that the country was built on the work in harsh conditions for many families. Paxman was good at providing details of the Tyne's movement of coal to paint a complete picture, but moving on quickly when there were fewer developments. I don't suppose I learnt any think new as I pretty much know the story but it fills in the gaps and details.It was a “place where you slept and ate, visited the doctor, fell in love, had your children and entertained yourself” … One day soon, Paxman says, we may forget it was ever there.