Pit for the unwary

Andrew Brown

Awriter in the Guardian recently sug- gested that the coal strike be solved radically: the unprofitable pits of England and Wales should be handed over free to the NUM, to run as it saw fit. The new holding company, 'Scargill Enterprises Ltd', would be financed with the miners' redundancy pay — this, Teddy Taylor reckons, would provide an immediate capital sum of £100 million, more, he claims, than even a company the size of ICI Could lay its hands on quickly. It is a large sum, though not very large compared with last year's losses of £875 million. Assume

for a moment that creative accountants could wipe off the debt burden of these Pits, so that they had only running losses to contend with. What snags remain in the Way of the plan? The first is that the miners would almost certainly,. and understandably, refuse to operate only the most unprofitable pits. The idea of solidarity within the coal industry demands that the more successful miners should subsidise the less successful ones; and since this idea is fundamental to trade unionism, it is a little unrealistic to

suppose that the miners would abandon it when it would so clearly be to their disadvantage to do so.

This snag could be overcome by handing over the whole of the industry to the miners, or at least enough profitable parts of it to allow them to run as they saw fit. There are some obvious disadvantages to this plan too — I foresee mass pickets

terrorising the garden gnomes of home- Owners who have the temerity to install

oil-fired central heating, for example. But More serious snags are suggested by the history of the idea. It is at least 140 years since the idea of a profitable, co- Operatively-owned pit was first suggested; it is 109 years since the suggestion was put

Into practice in Scargill country; and the story of the failure of this attempt is instructive.

By 1874 the South Yorkshire Miners' Under was established and prosperous. under the leadership of a powerful and able secretary, John Normansell, the union had won the respect of the employers, had set up an effective machinery of arbitration for most disputes, and had managed to sustain a level of wages in slumps rather

This than that of the surrounding areas. fhis feat was accomplished by moderation our - ins. booms, when the Yorkshire miners w, ere persuaded by Normansell to ask for less than they might have got, so as to turned bad. The union was also prosper- 'us. In 1874 the South Yorkshire miners' association had 20,000 members and

£40,000 invested. It was determined to invest £20-30,000 in a prosperous pit, in order to show what the industry could achieve if it were not troubled by the conflict between capital and labour. A subsidiary motive was to establish the 'true worth' of a miner's labour; an important figure, which the union considered that the employers were concealing.

The pit chosen was at Shirwell, near Alfreton in North Derbyshire, an area which was then, in union terms, a de- pendency of South Yorkshire. The miners' plan was extremely ambitious: they bought the pit itself, with 350 acres of coal, and 400 more to follow, 47 acres of freehold land, and a further 120 acres which the company farmed — and 62,000 bricks with which to build houses. Nearly 400 miners were employed at the colliery.

Trouble started almost immediately. To begin with, the timing of the deal was wrong. Those were the days of real booms and slumps; the decision to buy Shirwell was taken, and the price agreed, towards the end of a boom. By the time the union took possession — in July 1875 — a slump was well under way. The purchase of the colliery had been delayed for several months because the union's energies were taken up in a three-week strike, which cost it £20,000 and managed only to persuade the employers, who had wanted a 20 per cent reduction in wages, to accept a cut of 12.5 per cent.

The union had hardly started to operate the pit when the new managers discovered that all of the easily accessible coal had been removed under the previous regime.

If the pit was to be developed beneficially, large new investments would be needed. These proved impossible to raise. The union had already spent £31,5(X) on the colliery, and raised a further £47,000 from the public by selling debentures. The Yorkshire miners were extremely reluctant to pay any more money of their own, special collections raised negligible sums, while at the pit itself more trouble de- veloped, this time because most of the workforce was not unionised.

The miners at Shirwell had no loyalty to the management, or to the idea of a co-operative. They struck against wage reductions, saying that 'we have nothing to do with whether the colliery pays or not, we simply want our rights'. The union, hampered by a sense of responsibility, was unable to react to such talk with the vigour then customary among other employers; after six months one of the two shafts was closed down; after a year, the colliery was sold on the open market for £11,000. Of the £35,000 or so the union had sunk into the venture, only £250 was recovered. The immediate result was that the Yorkshire miners lost their enthusiasm for co- operatives as completely as they had earlier lost their money.

It is impossible to read the story of the Shirwell pit without regretting this. (You will find it in the NUM's history of the Yorkshire miners, by Frank Machin.) The union cannot reasonably be blamed for its failure to deal with an unco-operative workforce; and in the language of the union leaders one sees the extent to which trade unions did institutionalise and ex- press the more admirable Victorian values. Urging the purchase of Shirwell, one said: 'We want no revolution to secure this. All we want is the army of provident and thoughtful men.'

'When is a door nor a door! That's the riddle of the Sphinx?'