The 1926 Miners’ Lockout: Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield (review)

Should we call the labour action that convulsed Britain’s coalfields in 1926 a lockout or a strike? According to Hester Barron, even participants in that event disagreed on the terminology to use, and that divisiveness is foregrounded in her excellent study of community in the locked-out Durham coalfield. Although “community” itself is a vague and contested term, Barron subjects to scrutiny the Durham colliers’ community, using thematic chapters to illustrate many ways in which miners’ identities could divide as well as unite them.

Lest occupational solidarity seem obvious, Barron notes that miners were significantly divided on the basis of skill level and mining region. The term “miners” encompassed putters, mule drivers, labourers and topmen, as well as the most skilled hewers at the coal-face. Different levels of skill merited different levels of pay within the mine. Occupational pride may have predisposed some workers to support the strike more than others, but, as Barron shows, the Durham Miners’ Association locally helped to squelch dissent as much as class consciousness may have inspired cooperation. Moreover, occupational solidarity did not mean industry-wide solidarity: although owners contributed to charities benefiting miners’ children and refused to evict striking workers from tied housing during the strike, the striking miners resented the owners immensely.

The evidence is mixed about whether or not the isolation of mine communities built solidarity. Barron shows that strikebreakers were often new arrivals to a locale. Conversely, mining families moved often, which eroded relationships or prevented them from forming. Loyalties between miners and members of other occupational groups remained unpredictable. Shopkeepers who depended on mine families’ custom often supported the miners’ decision to stay out. In contrast, some non-mining manual workers who participated in the General Strike of 1926 resented the fact that miners were better paid than they were.

Family relationships could cut both ways in the coalfield. Boys often followed their fathers into the pits, and married miners’ daughters, which strengthened their loyalty to the cause. But during a strike, the masculinity of the solid union brother conflicted with the masculinity of the successful breadwinner. This explains why men would publicly refuse to blackleg, but would privately steal coal and food, even from each other. Women particularly suffered in times of male unemployment; rigidly gendered tasks like cooking and cleaning could not stop just because women now lacked the needed resources. Despite these hardships, women did not uniformly oppose the strike; some gleefully participated in demonstrations, smuggled labour newspapers to each other under their aprons, looted coal from coal cars, or threw potatoes at strikebreakers.

Political, religious, and educational affiliations were more likely to unite than to divide colliery communities. Barron shows that striking miners generally voted alike, supporting Labour without being attracted to communist principles. Similarly, while most colliers were more nominally Christian than professedly religious, strike leaders were more likely to emerge from Primitive Methodist chapels than from Anglican churches. Intriguingly, Barron notes that, for the sake of their long-term success in the field, clergymen remained publicly neutral on the strike even when pushed one way or another by their personal political inclinations. Schoolteachers, many of whom were the children of miners, were much more likely than were the clergy to support the strike outright. Schools became a centre for community, by providing free meals to strikers’ children; public libraries and workers’ institutes helped fill miners’ suddenly expansive leisure time with books and educational opportunities.

In her final chapter, Barron compares the collective memory of the 1926 strike, what actually happened, and the way in which the popular narrative of the strike helped to condition miners’ behaviour into the 1970s and 1980s. Individual narratives of the strike cover a wide spectrum, illustrating the variety of possible experiences. Some children and young male miners experienced the strike as a wonderful moment of leisure, in a year of winning local football clubs and impromptu dances. Other witnesses recounted the hardships of malnutrition and disease incurred while trying...