Staff Pick: Black Gold

Jeremy Paxman brings his whole arsenal of sneering, rabid, vicious, in your face chippiness to Black Gold – The History Of How Coal Made Britain. Until the 1950’s, everything was predicated on coal – without it there would have been no industrial revolution, no mass urbanisation, no modernisation, no slums, no total war, no Garden of Remembrance in Aberfan. And where there is a black or brown carbon rich combustible rock, there’s brass. Paxman trains his ire like a high muzzle velocity Howitzer on the brutish and greedy mine owners and the uncaring free market ideologues in Westminster.

Paxman writes that life down the mine was murderous and terrifying for the workers and quotes Friedrich Engels as saying, “in the whole British Empire there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as this one.” Coal miners were always in danger of immediate death from being crushed, gassed, drowned, burned and being boiled alive. But the remorseless conditions also caused the miners to suffer from night terrors, nystagmus, photophobia, miners’ phthisis and a panoply of other horrendous afflictions. 

The importance of coal gave the miners massive leverage in dealing with owners and governments but when the Conservative government deindustrialised Britain in the 1980’s and outsourced their coal requirements to places such as Communist Poland, whole swathes of towns and cities who depended on the pits for employment, became casualties of unemployment and impoverishment. The author perceives the coal miners as being betrayed and are today forgotten about – no one knows, and no one cares. 

A fascinating social history of the huge changes that the coal industry (and its collapse) brought to British society.  

Borrow the book at your local library.  Download the eBook from Borrowbox. 

Tom Burke, Librarian, Cabra Library