Miners' Lung

A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining

Arthur McIvor, Ronald Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317095828
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Arthur McIvor and Ronald Johnston explore the experience of coal miners' lung diseases and the attempts at voluntary and legal control of dusty conditions in British mining from the late nineteenth century to the present. In this way, the book addresses the important issues of occupational health and safety within the mining industry; issues that have been severely neglected in studies of health and safety in general. The authors examine the prevalent diseases, notably pneumoconiosis, emphysema and bronchitis, and evaluate the roles of key players such as the doctors, management and employers, the state and the trade unions. Throughout the book, the integration of oral testimony helps to elucidate the attitudes of workers and victims of disease, their 'machismo' work culture and socialisation to very high levels of risk on the job, as well as how and why ideas and health mentalities changed over time. This research, taken together with extensive archive material, provides a unique perspective on the nature of work, industrial relations, the meaning of masculinity in the workplace and the wider social impact of industrial disease, disability and death. The effects of contracting dust disease are shown to result invariably in seriously prescribed lifestyles and encroaching isolation. The book will appeal to those working on the history of medicine, industrial relations, social history and business history as well as labour history.

PART I
Interpretations and Context

Chapter 1
Methodology and Historiography

Methodology: The Oral History Project

This study of miners’ lung disease in the UK combines archival research with oral history interviewing, a methodology similar to that used in our previous study which explored the causes, consequences and social impact of asbestos-related disease in Scotland.¹ A wide range of sources have been consulted in the research for this book, including the medical literature (especially for Part II), the papers of government agencies (such as the Mines Inspectors), and the records of the NCB and the trade unions (notably for Part III). However, we believe that the hidden history of the work process of coal mining, the culture of work and risk, and the impact of occupational disease are areas of experience that can only be fully understood when experiential testimony is utilised. The work environment in mining consisted of a wide variety of functional spaces within which – as one commentator has noted – bodies constituted the biological core of an ecological system.² Autobiographical accounts by miners sometimes provide an insightful window into this neglected area, though unfortunately they are not plentiful and tend to focus more on miners’ trade union and political activities, rather than health and the workplace – although one outstanding exception is Bert Coombes’ evocative These Poor Hands.³ The history of the body is not well covered in the extant literature, and consequently the importance – and timeliness – of gathering oral history evidence of work and health in coal mining is underscored. This, then, is the main rationale for our use of a comprehensive oral history project.

The discipline of oral history has developed significantly over recent years, largely under the influence of post-structuralist ideas, with practitioners now tending to be more sensitive towards the complexities of memory construction, the interrelationship between the present and the past, dominant discourses (narratives and ‘messages’) embedded within testimonies and the inter-subjective nature of the interview itself. Summerfield and Thomson have made vital contributions here in what one writer has described as a transition of oral history from a ‘reconstructive’ to an ‘interpretive’ mode.⁴ Oral history has been enriched by these new approaches, and exponents of oral history have enhanced our knowledge and understanding of a wide range of issues previously ‘hidden from history’, including women’s perceptions of work during both world wars, the nature of family life, gender identities, social protest and militancy, migrant communities, and the role of religion in people’s lives, to name just a few.⁵ Oral history has also deepened our understanding of the impact of several health-related agendas, including disability, the ageing process, the role of community pharmacies and district nurses, the impact of birth control, and the testimonies of HIV sufferers.⁶ In addition, medical researchers have begun to see the benefits of utilising such a methodology to explore doctor–patient relationships.⁷ However, there has been very little use of oral testimony in the field of occupational health history, and – related to our own subject of investigation – only Bloor has used a combination of oral/life history techniques and primary source analysis to highlight the conflict between lay and professional knowledge with respect to the medicalization of coal dust disease in the UK in the first half of the twentieth century.⁸ In Scotland, MacDougall has collected valuable oral history testimony of coal miners’ working lives, though unfortunately health and disease do not feature significantly in this material.⁹

From the outset of this study we were interested in getting under the skin of the coal dust problem in British coal mining, and this involved analysing the causation of the problem in the workplace and reconstructing how it felt to be disabled by lung disease caused by dust inhalation at work; how individuals, families and communities were affected by the blight of dust-induced respiratory disease, and how miners’ attitudes towards their work impacted upon their bodies. We were also interested in the construction of lay knowledge as much as professional medical expertise and wanted to explore workplace culture, including how working in one of the classic ‘heavy industries’ forged masculinity and in turn how manly identities impinged upon the body. Whilst aware of prevailing competitive pressures, the profit motive and power structures within the workplace, we wished to also probe the parameters of choice and individual agency. Oral testimony offered the potential to reconstruct something of the personal experience of disabled workers, as well as the mentalities and identities within the community on the dust that wrecked so many lives.

Therefore, to complement our primary source research at several archives throughout the UK, we undertook 45 interviews with 55 individuals, drawn from three geographical areas – South Wales, Scotland and Durham. The full list of our interviews is provided at the end of the book (see Appendix). We aimed to talk to a cross-section of mineworkers from several different coalfields which included representation of all the main occupational groups. We also targeted ex-miners who were impaired to some degree or other with dust-induced respiratory disease. In the event, our interview cohort did include a wide range of mining operations and different levels of employment, including coal face workers, haulage workers, surface workers, mine craftsmen, and different categories of supervisors (such as firemen and dust suppression officers) and lower/middle management. The oldest of our respondents was born in 1909, and the youngest in 1959. Their personal experience of working in coal mining thus stretched from the 1920s through to the 1990s. However, mine managers and the professions were not targeted, nor were company/NCB medical officers and top trade union officials, nor did we interview any Area or Central NCB personnel. We justified these choices on the grounds that there existed considerable documentary evidence for the policy makers through institutional records such as the NCB Reports and Archives, the papers of the National Joint Pneumoconiosis Committee and the archives of the NUM and its constituent regional branches (such as NUM South Wales). Coal mining is probably the most documented of all British industries in the twentieth century, but within this considerable body of evidence, the voices of ordinary miners are hard to come by. Our oral history project was explicitly designed to elucidate the experience and feelings of working miners and of the disabled mining community – to privilege the accounts and memories of those immediately and directly affected by respiratory disease. As the interviewing progressed, we expanded our cohort to include several of the wives and widows of pneumoconiotics, as well as three specialist ‘experts’ involved in respiratory disease litigation and occupational hygiene research. The latter group included Robin Howie, who worked for the Institute of Occupational Medicine in Edinburgh, and two lawyers, Roger Maddocks from Durham and Mick Antoniw from Cardiff.

The interviewees were told beforehand of our interest and the project’s aims, with a written ‘informed consent’ statement presented to each potential respondent. This is vital in any oral history project so that the potential respondent can make an informed decision about whether or not he or she agrees to being interviewed, and to the subsequent deposition of their testimony in an archive (in our case, the Scottish Oral History Centre Archive and the South Wales Miners’ Library). Several of the cohort of 55 wished to remain anonymous, whilst the others expressed the desire that their names be made known. Most completed a pre-interview questionnaire which told us something about their work experience and enabled us to go to the interview prepared. The respondents were recruited in a number of ways, though primarily through contacting the National Union of Mineworkers and the Coal Industry Social and Welfare Organization in Scotland, Durham and South Wales. These organisations did tireless work as advocates for the disabled in mining communities. Indeed, this welfare and pastoral service now remains the primary role of the mining trade unions in some areas, such as Scotland, where employment in deep mining has now completely ceased (the last Scottish deep mine, Longannet, closed in 2002). Some of our respondents had been or were involved in compensation litigation (either as claimants and/or as NUM ‘volunteers’ assisting other miners with claims), especially claims under the recently settled bronchitis/emphysema (or Chronic Obstructive Airways Disease) scheme. This undoubtedly had significant effects upon the discourses embedded in the narratives. We will return to this later.

Several people were involved in the interviewing process. The bulk of the interviews in Scotland and South Wales were conducted by the authors. The ones in Durham and several in Scotland were undertaken by a colleague, Neil Rafeek (Research Fellow in the Scottish Oral History Centre), assisted in Scotland by Hilary Young (then a history postgraduate at Strathclyde University).¹⁰ In the majority of cases, the interviews took place on a one-to-one basis in the homes of respondents (with Ronnie Johnston conducting most of these individual interviews, notably those in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire). However, there were six ‘group’ interviews where several miners shared their memories with us simultaneously, and on a number of occasions we (that is, Ronnie and Arthur) conducted interviews together, taking turns to ask questions (this was the predominant pattern in the interviews in South Wales and several in Scotland). In four interviews the wives or other relatives of respondents were also present, and in several in Scotland our contact in Ayrshire, an ex-miner Alec Mills, also sat in. Recently, oral historians have identified and elucidated the inter-subjective nature of the oral interview, and how the resultant testimony can be affected. Clearly, there were different dynamics operating in our ‘group’ interviews than the single ones. In the former, a ‘dominant’ individual could influence the testimony of the others. On the other hand, memories were ‘triggered’ and sometimes contradicted within the group interview, leading on occasions to more in-depth and insightful recollections.

Undoubtedly the interviewer also had an influence, however subtly, upon the process of recollection. Now an academic, Ronnie is an educated (mature student), working-class male Glaswegian aged in his late forties. He was born and brought up in a shipyard community (Govan, Glasgow), where his father was a joiner who worked in both the shipyards and in construction. Arthur’s background and age is similar (born in Coventry; father a docker from Liverpool, then car assembly line worker), and he has been a full-time academic for more than twenty years. Our age, background and gender may well have had further effects, in that respondents felt comfortable (rather than threatened) with their largely ‘traditional’ male identities and expressed this more openly than they otherwise might have. The dynamics of this relationship were indicated starkly in another recent oral history project on masculinity in Glasgow by Hilary Young, where several elderly male respondents ‘reconfigured’ their male identities because the interviewer was young (early twenties), female, educated, and perceived to be ‘feminist’, and to some extent were influenced by their interview situation, with different results, for example, when a spouse was present, and when the interview was conducted in the pub.¹¹ Our other interviewer, Neil Rafeek, was in his mid-thirties and was one of the most experienced oral historians in Scotland, having worked on a wide range of projects. Whilst his family background was middle-class (father a town planner; mother a teacher), Neil was brought up in a heavy industry community ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary of Medical Terms
• Introduction
• PART I: INTERPRETATIONS AND CONTEXT
• PART II: ADVANCING MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE ON DUST DISEASE
• PART III: THE INDUSTRIAL POLITICS OF MINERS’ LUNG
• PART IV: MINERS’ TESTIMONIES: DUST AND DISABILITY NARRATIVES
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The Oral History Project
• Bibliography
• Index