Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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I don't suppose I learnt any think new as I pretty much know the story but it fills in the gaps and details. Such combinations of omitting important facts with a lack of rhetorical strategies that might cover for them weaken an intriguing and often convincing argument. Alas her abhorrent politics continues to loom large in a Britain that is going the same way as coal has. Should anyone be tempted to live a simpler form of life, the miserable light offered after dark suggests some very long and boring winters before gas lighting and the advances enabled by coal were significant, as well as the prosperity enabled by such an impressive navy maintaining sea routes and trade.

She makes an interesting observation when she points to the fact that “the overlap between adventure and children’s literature is important because of adventure literature’s reliance on the epistemology of the constrained narrator; child narrators can easily inhabit such a role, as with Jim Hawkins, but even adult narrators of adventure literature are touched by the genre’s association with naivete” (123). As is quoted here, Heseltine opined that all he had done was shut down a dirty, dangerous industry and there is some truth to that I think. All the working people in this country were paying, through their taxes, to keep those remaining miners in the hard, dirty and dangerous labour to which they had become so accustomed. It is punctuated by accounts of those moments – usually a result of pit accidents or strikes – when miners attracted national attention. In Mike Leigh’s film High Hopes, the disappearance of coal is used as a metaphor for the rise of the rootless, yuppie society of the 1980s.

I was disappointed that there was virtually no mention of the technological advancements to clean up the coal burning industries - like electrostatic precipitators and scrubbers - and the effect they had. I was also fortunate enough, in my youth, to be able to descend into a copper mine in Zambia which was a fascinating experience - the descent in a cage, the heat, the noise etc.

Almost all traces of coal-mining have vanished from Britain, but with this brilliant history, Black Gold demonstrates just how much we owe to the black stuff. He talks candidly about the many diseaters that have befallen the coal industry and paints miners as heroes of the land. About three quarters of the way through Extractive Capitalism she does explain that “two of the major gains that drove the transition to fossil energy are its capacities for saving time and speeding transport across space” (144) — very general “capacities” that seem related only to business.He did give a good impression of how unpleasant working in the mines was, even at such a distance from the reality, as well as the importance of coal until the late 20th century. Written in the captivating style of his best-selling book The English, Paxman ranges widely across Britain to explore stories of engineers and inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists - but whilst coal inevitably helped the rich become richer, the story told by Black Gold is first and foremost a history of the working miners - the men, women and often children who toiled in appalling conditions down in the mines; the villages that were thrown up around the pit-head. The one criticism I will level at Paxman is that he's political views can sometimes become all too clear I think he should have taken a more neutral view at times. I would have liked a slightly more consistent or explicit tone towards the pit managers and workers, although he did treat the politicians fairly and acknowledged who had the power and influence.