Chapter CLXII: More than a Miner Inconvenience
Chapter CLXII: More than a Miner Inconvenience.
From a certain perspective the British coal industry in 1937 was doing tolerably well, the industry had coped with the disruption of the Abyssinian War and the Anglo-Irish Trade War, domestic production was holding up and industry-union relations were no worse than usual. Attractive as this view was, at least for those who were predisposed to let sleeping dogs lie, it missed out on a number of issues which had forced successive governments into action. There is a temptation to talk about coal at a grand scale and invoke the major trends that were involved; electrification and mechanisation, the rise of oil, the changing shape of the British economy and so on. All of these certainly played a part and we shall look at them in turn, but the reason that coal was such a political problem is far more simply explained; in the years since the Great War coal production had remained broadly flat but employment had fallen by 40%, over 350,000 net jobs being lost over the period.
The tale of the post-Great War British coal mining industry in a single chart. A subtle omission from this graph is the data for 1926, the year of the General Strike. While the General Strike itself may have lasted barely eight days, many of the coal miners had stayed out on strike until November severely disrupting production for most of the year. Many is not the same as all and certain mining regions had returned to work early, most notably the new mines on 'The Dukeries' coal fields of Nottinghamshire. The resulting fractures in the mining unions had still not healed over a decade later and would get worse when the independent Nottinghamshire and District Union abandoned merger talks with the national Miner's Federation and accepted the the TGWU enabled offer to affiliate itself with the Liberal Social Democrats. The growing splits in the union movement were of great concern to the TUC and the Labour party who were locked in argument about how to respond.
Bad as those figures were they actually under-stated the problem, a clue to the reason why can be seen in the use of the slightly clunky term 'net jobs'. If an older colliery that employed 2,000 men closed down and was replaced by a new mechanised operation that could produce the same amount of coal with only 1,000 employees, that was a net loss of only 1,000 jobs. However, if the new colliery was not in the same region as the closed site then the local employment impacts would be far worse than the net figure would indicate. This was the problem facing the government, the pits that had closed had been concentrated in the traditional coal mining heartlands of South Wales and the North East of England, while many of the new shafts that had been sunk had been located on the new Nottinghamshire and Kent coal fields. Consequently the overlap between the Special Areas and the traditional coal mining regions was considerable, only the struggles of the textile industry being comparable in scale and extent. From a political perspective therefore the key figures in the coal industry were not output, efficiency or even profitability but employment, specifically employment in the struggling Special Areas. For this reason the coal mining industry was not seen as a strategic or economic issue but as a social problem and policy was developed and judged accordingly. The chosen policy since 1930 by Labour and National governments had been cartelisation and quotas, the government fixing a 'tolerable' price for coal (i.e. one which kept the struggling pits just about afloat without causing too much damage to the wider economy, at least in theory) and dividing up the market in each region by setting quotas. The hope had been that this would be a temporary measure and that as the economy recovered from the depression and returned to growth so would the coal industry. The economy duly recovered and in terms of output so did coal, but by the politically important measure of employment the industry had at best stabilised and even that was only true at the national level. It is sometimes claimed that it was the only the political pressure to 'do something' about the Special Areas that prompted the government into action and doubtless that was a motivating factor, but the government focus on the coal industry should be seen as a part of a wider effort by Eden to re-focus the government on domestic priorities. Of course government attention is in no way a guarantee of a problem improving.
The pit village of Dowlais in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. The low rectangular white buildings at the rear left are the Dowlais foundry works, to the right is the demolished iron and steelworks and dominating the centre of the picture the massive tip that loomed over the town itself. The heavy job losses at the local coal mines during the 1920s had been a body blow to the region, the subsequent closure of the blast furnaces and steel works then all but killed off the local economy. The UK national unemployment rate had dropped below 10% by late 1937 and even South Wales had got the figure down to 30%, but in Dowlais unemployment was still at a shocking 75%. This was not an isolated problem, hundreds of coal towns and villages across South Wales and the North East of England were similarly affected.
As had become traditional for the coal industry nationalisation was briefly considered but then discounted, just as it had been in the many government and independent reviews since the Great War. The previous Conservative dominated National Government had engaged in a great many 're-organisations' of heavy industries hit by the Depression and Eden himself was supportive of state intervention, or at least the Tory One Nation version of it. Outright nationalisation however was a step too far for much of the wider party both inside and outside of Parliament. This was not just a matter of ideology however, aside from the considerable cost of such a move it was also unclear how the change in ownership would actually help the problems of the industry. The Coal Council was already centrally controlling price and production quotas, with the effect the failing pits were being subsidised by the successful pits (and coal consumers), a nationalised industry would just formalise the de facto centralised control. The more cynical would note that nationalisation would also mean the government would be more clearly responsible for the quotas and any consequences rather than being able to blame the Coal Council for any unpopular decisions. The other great claim of nationalisation was that it would vastly increase efficiency and productivity, even if this had been true such an outcome would make the political problem worse not better; increased efficiency allowed fewer miners to produce the same amount of coal, which raised the prospect of further job losses.
An obvious challenge to the analysis above is that it assumes a static market, that an increased supply of cheaper coal would not find new customers. This neatly brings up one of the main external challenges facing the coal industry; the squeeze on demand from advancing technology. This is often taken to mean changes such as the proliferation of diesel fuelled motor vessel replacing steam ships, the electrification of railways and the ongoing tussle between 'town gas' and electricity for new homes, all of which were indeed factors. One of the most serious impacts however was the growing efficiency of existing technology, as an example a pre-Great War steam boiler would be at best 15% efficient but by the mid-1930s it could be 35% or better. Similar, if less dramatic, efficiency gains could be found in everything from blast furnaces to turbines all of which enable far more useful energy to be extracted from the same amount of coal. This growing efficiency, along with the rising use of oil based fuels, had kept domestic coal demand flat even as energy used continued to rapidly rise. This did not stop a determined band in parliament and elsewhere trying to fight back, the demands for a return to a coal fired fleet or a more lavishly funded coal-to-oil programme were fundamentally aimed at increasing domestic demand for coal and so helping the struggling mines. As we have seen all these proposals were rejected by the government, almost always because they were incredibly expensive, massively impractical or both. Government planning would therefore proceed in line with the industry's own prognosis that domestic coal demand would be broadly flat at best.
Black coals over the white cliffs of Dover. The Tilmanstone aerial ropeway ran coal from the East Kent coalfield to a tunnel through the white cliffs and direct to Dover port for onward shipping. As was often the case government efforts to solve a previous problem were a cause of the current issue, in this case the development of the East Kent coalfield in the 1920s had been guaranteed by the Treasury as part of a wildly ambitious Labour plan to re-start the long dead Weald iron industry developed by the famed town planner Professor Abercrombie. The plan failed at anything beyond a few half laid out towns, but the coal mines proved profitable enough not to need the guarantee and, while never nationally significant, were large local employers. As crisis hit the wider industry more than a few politicians would come to wish the Kent mines had never been guaranteed and the jobs had stayed in the traditional mining regions.
Having decided what it would not do, or in some case could not do, the government was left with the question of what it would do. A twin track approach was decided upon, a somewhat convoluted plan to support the industry alongside an acceleration of existing schemes to re-train and re-locate former coal mine workers. To deal with the first point the planned Coal Act would nationalise ownership of coal mining rights which at the time sat with a wide range of owners, not always the same as those that owned the land above the mine. A new Coal Commission would be responsible for those rights, as well as continuing to 'encourage' mergers and acquisitions in the sector to reduce the number of coal mining companies and promote economies of scale. That nationalising the coal industry was a step too far but forcibly acquiring the mineral rights was in principle acceptable is an interesting insight into attitudes of the time, the distinction between government actively controlling an industry versus the entirely passive act of collecting royalties was considered a significant one. It should also be noted that the acquisition was not completely unprecedented, gold and silver mining rights had sat with the crown for centuries while the 1934 Petroleum Act had claimed for the state all 'unknown' oil and gas reserves. The Petroleum Act had been generally seen as a success, the legal certainty on rights and royalties had prompted a rash of exploration as we saw in Chapter CL, that there were no significant reserves to find was a fact of geology and not a failure of the system. Having a single rights owner for all coal would, it was hoped, allow mines to be planned and developed in the most efficient way without being constrained by a morass of agreements and leases; there were just over 1,800 producing coal mines in the UK but over 17,000 companies and individuals would register as owning coal rights. Of course this would mostly benefit new and expanding operations as already existing mines were committed to their current configuration, hence the second objective of the act, to substantially cut the rate of royalties. Such cuts would allow a reduction in the domestic price of coal without damaging the financial health of the mining firms and would increase the competitiveness of exports. As is often the case the 'ends' were popular but the 'means' by which they would be achieved were not, in this case it was the compensation being proposed that was the sticking point. The Greene Committee (named after it's chair the leading administrative judge Sir Wilfrid Greene as he was then) had assessed the value of all coal mining royalties as a shade over £4.4 million a year. Taking the standard 15 year valuation life of a mining royalty they decreed that £66.5 million was the fair value to acquire the rights, for comparison the entire RAF budget for 1937 was barely £55 million so this was a substantial sum. As the government could borrow for the long term at very low rates, around 3% for anything with a Treasury guarantee, the interest cost on such a sum would be only £2 million a year. Thus the new Coal Commission could substantially reduce the royalty rates paid by coal mine and be entirely self financing, a key requirement to get support from the Treasury and the more 'economically minded' backbench MPs. The controversial issue was that the Greene Committee had used the previous seven years of data to assess the annual income from royalties, a period which included the depths of the Depression and so, it was argued, significantly undervalued the royalties. Again it is interesting to note that the actual principle of the nationalisation scheme was not strongly objected to or even particularly commented on, it was concerns over the allegedly low price being offered that drove the opposition. That such opposition included the Church of England, who's Ecclesiastical Commissioners owned considerable coal rights in the North East of England due to their complex legal relationship with Durham over the centuries, lent those objecting to the act a certain moral sheen they perhaps did not deserve. In any event this alliance of large landowners and Lords Spiritual was unable to prevent the passing of the Act and it would duly come into force, an important detail for our current period was the extended implementation period. With over 17,000 claims to value the Act allowed five years to get them all valued, any appeals heard and the final totals reconciled and paid out. As a result the Coal Commission would not be able to start reducing royalties until 1942 at the earliest.
Snowdon Colliery on the East Kent Coalfield, in the background the partially built new town of Aylesham that had been built to house the miners. The deepest mine in Kent at over 3,000ft it was also somewhat damp, a combination which made it hot and humid; temperatures of 100ºF (38ºC) and 80% humidity were typical. The mine soon attracted the nickname 'Dante's Inferno' and was held to be one of the worst pits in Britain to work down. The workforce was almost entirely non-local, consisting of desperate miners from the Special Areas and those who had been blacklisted after the General Strike and could not get employed elsewhere. Unsurprisingly Aylesham was a fractious and divided place and only a quarter of it's housing was ever built, the idealised cohesive community the planners had hoped for entirely failing to materialise.
The other strand was what to do with the unemployed mining workforce or as some would have it the ex-workforce. As we saw in Chapter CXLI the government was keeping faith that the effects of the economic boom and the funding available from the new BIFID corporation would benefit the Special Areas and help the regional economies. However the Commissioners Reports were making clear that some of the former mining areas were not benefiting and probably never would; the remote pit villages of Northumberland and the mining valleys of South Wales were too small to have worthwhile local markets for local light industry and too far from decent transport links to attract any larger. The solution to this had been internal migration, from the 'Labour Exchange' system which advertised all the jobs available elsewhere through to schemes to encourage and financially support those re-locating. These had been a considerable success on their own terms, South Wales had experienced a net population decline of almost 300,000 people due to people moving out and there was a similar, if less dramatic, pattern in the North East. A minority had moved to the new mines in Kent and Nottingham but the majority had abandoned the traditional trades and started working in the new light industries of the Midlands and South East. Excluding the few who had relocated to the new coal fields the majority of those who had left were young and those with new families who were more prepared, often even happier, to work in a factory rather than down a mine. What was left was the older cohorts more attached to the mining identity and unwilling, sometime unable, to re-train and start a new profession at the bottom. The government's new approach therefore was to harness those skills to rejuvenate an old struggling policy, the Empire Settlement Act. Passed in the early 1920s it was a scheme to support emigration to the Dominions, which at the time were keen to increase their populations and were running land settlement schemes to set up new citizen farmers on empty land. The scheme was also popular in London as a way to build bonds of Imperial unity and as a way to deal with lingering post-Great War unemployment. Previous effort had been made to process miners through the scheme, several thousand being sent to Canada to work on the harvest and (in theory) stay on to start their own farms. This had ended badly with three quarters returning after the harvest, which was a depressingly typical outcome for the scheme, in the end however it was a combination of the Depression and advances in agricultural technology that all but killed the scheme. The key change in the new proposal was to stop trying to turn miners into farmers but let them carry on being miners, a seemingly obvious observation that had nevertheless taken Westminster, Whitehall and the Dominions 15 years to come up with. With the Empire in grips of a number of mining booms, primarily gold but also bauxite and a number of other key minerals, there was a strong demand for experienced miners and while coal mining is different from hard rock mining it is far less of a transition than agriculture. Another lesson from the earlier debacles was the need for proper co-ordination, a task which bounced around Whitehall until landing with the Imperial Trade Council and was the start of that bodies evolution beyond it's original more limited role. There was of course a price for such expansion, in this case the Council became the venue for the intense fight over the Imperial Labour Exchange proposals, a row we shall be looking at in due course. In the short term however the scheme was a moderate success, assisting tens of thousands of miners and their families to relocate to mining projects across the Empire.
The one area that we have not covered in detail is exports which had once been a pillar of the industry, prior to the Great War Britain had been formidable coal exporter with almost a third of all mined coal being destined for overseas markets. The Great War, more precisely the consequences of the war, had disrupted this setup considerably as old markets shrunk or disappeared entirely and new players entered the export trade. As a result far from looking to expand exports the main concern for industry and government was to preserve existing market share, as we shall see in the next chapter this was far from a straightforward endeavour.
---
Notes:
Coal! Graphs! Graphs about Coal! While writing this one it seemed longer, yet in the end it's about average Pip chapter length. I think this is in part because so much got cut out as being irrelevant. You were for instance saved the baffling history of British work camps/improvement centres, places where the soft and workshy unemployed would be made fit for work through the pedology of labour, a terrible idea and so unsurprisingly is the fault of the Fabians, one of Britains' most reliable sources of terrible ideas. There is also more coal to come as we look at the thrilling concept of international coal cartels! And hopefully more interestingly back stabbing politics, trade shenanigans and low ambition disguised as high strategy.
The Coal Act is OTL, as the chapter says I think the different views on nationalisation and state vs private industry are interesting, as is the fact this was an employment problem not an existential threat to the industry (that was postwar). The migration schemes did exist but had pretty much stopped by the early 30s, by coincidence the Empire Settlement Act was up for renewal in 1937 in OTL, so repuropsing that to ride the mining boom seemed a fairly possible change. It's not going to solve the problem, not every unemployed miner is going to want to leave their home, but it will help some and that is better than nothing. Unfortunately it probably makes things a bit nastier for those who remain, efforts are being made but if their position is that they will only work as a coal miner and only in a certain small area (which in many cases has no economic coal reserves in it) public sympathy is going to fast evaporate. The Nottinghamshire union did end up merging back into the national federation in 1937, here I thought it would be more interesting if they went and joined the LSD to give them a bit more union muscle and the left-wing credibility that miners bring to a socialist movement.
The Imperial Trade Council is a new Butterfly thing and like the Committee of Imperial Defence and a few other bodies it is going to become important. Nev and co. were not very Empire minded so that side of things atrophied in OTL and then just fell apart during the war, in Butterfly much more attention is being paid to it due to different personalities, Imperial Free Trade being a thing, the different threats (Japan no Germany), etc.
Last edited:
- 3
- 3
