“Once Coal Gets in the Blood…”: an Ethnography of Labour and Community in the Forest of Dean Coalfield
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“Once Coal Gets in the Blood…”: An Ethnography of Labour and Community in the Forest of Dean Coalfield Joe Morris 11247347 Thesis submitted for the degree of MSc in Sociology Comparative Organisation and Labour Studies University of Amsterdam Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Kobe De Keere Second Supervisor: Dr. Johan De Deken July 2017 *Image on cover, the Free Miners Brass. The symbol for the ancient traditions of the people of the Dean Forest (Nicholls, 1966). Abstract This thesis focuses on the experience of labour in a deprived area of West Gloucestershire, England. I carried out a historical analysis of labour formation, conducted an ethnography of labour and used an interview with a Free Miner. This thesis explores how customs and rights particular to the Forest of Dean affect the perception of class identity and how these identities have changed over time. In doing so, I take a fresh look at miners class conscious, challenging the idea of the coal miner as archetypal proletariat (Fisher, 2016). The historical research suggests there exists a stratified working class identity among Miners in the Forest of Dean, that influence productive and reproductive strategies, and narratives of labour that reshape the spaces of the coal mine and the community. In chapter three, I reconstruct the history of coal mining in the Forest of Dean. It shows that customs and rights alongside the development of industrial capitalism fragmented the coal miners into artisans - skilled coal miners and proletarians – unskilled wage workers. In chapter four, I conduct an ethnography of the coal mine. Here, I analyse the labour process under Free Mining. It shows how consciousness is formed at the ‘point of production’ (Burawoy, 1979) and through the commitment to custom and right. Using a Bourdieusian ‘second break’ (2000), I reincorporate the subjective truth of the Free Miner to analyse how the historical fragmentation is reproduced through the social relations of production. Chapter five reveals how Free Miners maintain and legitimate their productive relations in the community. The aristocratic ethos produced and reproduced through productive relations are legitimised through cultural consecration in the social field, despite periodical, creative destruction (Schumpeter, 2003) that has reshaped and fragmented working class mining identities. This ethnographic work refines and extends the hypothesis of late capitalism; of the social fragmentation of the working class and the social stability of an aristocracy of labour. Combining an analysis of the labour process with Bourdieusian field theory, the thesis shows the relative stability of an aristocratic miner within the Forest of Dean coalfield, despite an almost complete eradication of the coal industry. The thesis concludes with a discussion of whether late capitalism entails the dissolution of the working class and the consolidation of an aristocracy of labour under symbolic and cultural capital. It shows that the historical fragmentation of collective working class identities among miners exists today. It reveals, to what extent, and how it is maintained through the Free Miners Association. This is achieved through an analysis of shared mnemonic dispositions, linguistic capital, symbolic capital and the labour process under Free Mining. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Kobe de Keere for his invaluable intellectual contribution. Special thanks to my Mum and Dad for their support and for the political conversations that we have had. I am indebted to a number of persons who contributed to the making of this research. A number of people in the Forest of Dean have actively helped me during my stay. Ian Wright gave me contacts to Free Miners and local historians and shared with me his vast knowledge of working class history. The Dean Heritage Centre gave me access to resources on Free Mining, while Dave Tuffley shared with me his invaluable work in recording and documenting Free Mining casualties. A special thanks go to the Free Miners themselves, without their support, encouragement and welcoming presence, my fieldwork would not have happened. To them, I express all my gratitude and respect. Finally, I would like to give thanks to the people of the Forest of Dean; “Salted with humour, mellowed in the balm of long sunny days yet wearily weighed and assessed in the light of their hard and bitter history, unpalatable they may be to some, they carry with them the full flavour of their practical Forest origin” (Beddington, 1977, p. 7). Steve at Prosper Colliery: Free Miner and Chairman of the Free Miners Association (FMA). Contents Forward p. 1 Preface p. 3 Abbreviations p. 6 Glossary p. 7 List of Figures p. 9 List of Tables and Maps p. 11 ‘Arouse Ye Free Miners’ p. 12 ‘Poor Honest Neddy Rymer’ p. 13 Chapter 1: Introduction p. 14 1.1. First day on the job p. 18 1.2. The Place p. 19 Chapter 2: Methodology p. 23 2.1. Introduction p. 23 2.2. Negotiating Access p. 24 2.3. Methods in Practice p. 25 2.4. Historical Analysis p. 26 2.5. Participant Observation p. 26 2.6. In-depth Interview p. 28 2.7. Photographs p. 29 2.8. Ethics p. 29 2.9. Process of Analysis p. 31 2.10. Conclusion p. 32 Chapter 3: A Working Class History? [Production] p. 33 3.1 Introduction p. 33 3.2 Customs and Rights p. 35 3.3 Industrialisation of Forest Coal p. 38 3.4 The Butty System p. 40 3.5 Skill Sectarianism and the Formation of the FDMA p. 46 3.6 Conclusion p. 49 3.7 Economic Restructuring p. 51 Chapter 4: The Coalface [Reproduction] p. 53 4.1. Introduction p. 55 4.2. Prosper Colliery p. 57 4.3. Bixslade Free Mine p. 61 4.4. The Workforce p. 62 4.5. The Market p. 62 4.5.1. Primary p. 63 4.5.2. Secondary p. 64 4.6. Production Process and Machines p. 66 4.7. Distribution of Knowledge p. 72 4.8. The Value of Labour: “A Coal Mining Mentality” p. 75 4.9. Conclusion p. 77 Chapter 5: The Community [Legitimation] p. 79 5.1. Introduction p. 79 5.2. Class p. 81 5.3. Defining the Field; ‘Real Foresters’ p. 85 5.4. Linguistic capital p. 92 5.5. Murals and Statues p. 95 5.6. Didactic localism p. 99 5.7. Conclusion p. 104 Chapter 6: Conclusion p. 106 Addendum p. 109 Bibliography p. 110 Appendix 1. Profile of participants p. 118 2. Interview Guide p. 120 3. Interview Transcript p. 122 4. Codebook p. 144 5. Reflexivity p. 146 6. Future of Free Mining; Action Plan p. 150 7. A Counterfactual p. 151 Forward To understand capitalism; its content and processes, one should not start with analysis through narrowly defined political and social history. We should avoid top-down cultural analysis (Fisher, 2016, Dumenil & Levy, 2011). In stressing a move away from a purely structuralist account of labour history, Hobsbawm (1978) recounts, we must move away from structuralist tendencies in economic, political and social trends. Rather, we must focus on the social experience of labour, techniques of discipline, stratification and consent. In re- embedding the lived experience can we begin to understand the components necessary for collective subjectivity. Instead of viewing mining labour in the Forest of Dean as just one facet of defeat in the context of the labour movement as a whole. The restructuring of the economic sphere means the reconstitution of the working class as a class in itself. This does not mean a different mode of production in the orthodox Marxist sense, but a different kind of political economy and correspondingly, a different kind of working class experience. A transformation of the forces of production, including production techniques and instruments of production means that there is a transformation in workers relations and experience in capitalist production, and effectively, how labour is organised within the capitalist mode. However, the difference between Free Miners who unionised the Forest of Deans coal industry will be shown as retaining a strict similarity in production and therefore consciousness today. Craft style production in the large coal mines following the introduction of capital, to the craft style techniques still in use today in an era of flexible labour will be examined. This presents a view that capitalist development has not restructured work and entire communities. Rather, a new despotic capitalism has emerged based on flexible labour strategies, which remains congruent with small-scale subsistence mining, craft labour and informal market transactions. To understand capitalist transition and development we need to relate it to the British national context, second by industry and thirdly on an individual workplace basis; putting the experience of workers at the heart of analysis (Myers, 2017). Andre Gorz’s, ‘Farewell to the Working Class’ (1997), takes a broad structuralist account of the defeat of skilled industrial workers, without reference to empirically observable working class experiences. Rather, we should seek to understand the working class experience to understand the formation and resilience of capitalism and the contradictions of labour. One cannot understand capitalism outside its historical context (Myers, 2017). To historicize it means we must place the experience at the forefront of analysis. This applies to the current conjecture, the recomposition of the working class, consciousness, and subjectivity. In understanding the specificities of the Free Miners experience as a historical subject in the same manner and method, we understand the Free Miner today. As Hegel described, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (2008, p. 23). It is only at the end of a historical period that we come to a fuller understanding of it. By turning to an empirically 1 grounded knowledge of the lived experience of the Free Miner, can we begin to understand the nature of the modern system.