Mining Men
The story of the last generation of British miners: fathers and sons, brothers and comrades, big hitters and broken men, strikers and scabs.
Mining Men explores how these men felt when the pits were closed and what happened next, including former miners who became factory workers, detectives, driving instructors, counsellors, the local mayor and one who even ended up working on Fleet Street. Featuring accounts from Ayrshire to the South Wales Valleys, from the ‘People’s Republic of South Yorkshire’, to the ‘Sunshine Corner Coalfields’ of Kent, each chapter offers a different perspective of the industry.
Britain’s last deep coalmine closed in 2015, yet just fifty years ago the mining industry was a juggernaut, employing over 250,000 workers. Combining new personal interviews with extensive archival research, Emily P. Webber illuminates the extraordinary history of the industry once considered the backbone of Britain.
By situating the miners’ strike of 1984–85 in a longer history of the coalfields, we can understand why miners and their families fought so hard against pit closures, and what happened after the pit wheels stopped turning. Vivid, evocative and richly alive with minute detail, Mining Men uncovers what the mining industry once meant to its workers and their communities, and what Britain lost when it was gone.
Emily P Webber completed a PhD at the University of Reading and University of Exeter, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her research focused on masculinity and the British mining industry from nationalization in 1947 through to pit closures at the end of the twentieth century. Over the last few years, she has spoken to over a hundred miners, collecting their memories of the industry, and travelled across Britain’s former mining communities.
She was previously the Research Manager of the Imperial War Museum and contributed to several public-facing publications and acted as a curator for the award-winning Holocaust Exhibition. She is passionate about bringing history to wider audiences – and was recently selected as one of fifteen successful candidates for the Television Festival’s TV PhD Talent Scheme. She was also awarded the University of Reading’s PhD Researcher of the Year award for the Humanities. She has presented her research at conferences both in the UK and overseas, including at Northwestern University, the Institute of Historical Research, and the University of Birmingham, and she has published in History Workshop Journal, Contemporary British History and Twentieth Century History. She has also written for Time Out London.