Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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By not doing so, she unnecessarily makes Extraction Technologies seem a one-sided polemic instead of the scholarly critical text it is for the most part.

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).This means, in particular, that they lay a heavy emphasis on the report that Nicholas Ridley (later a minister in the Thatcher government) drew up in 1977 for tackling strikes in nationalised industries, extracts of which were leaked to the press. Whilst this was an interesting read, which aimed to provide a balanced view of the history of coal in Britain, I was left thinking that there were too few voices of the miners in the narrative.

Starting with the coal ships that brought thousands of tons of the stuff from Newcastle to 17th-century London, he describes how it drove the industrial revolution, how it fuelled locomotives and battleships, how lighting from coal-gas transformed streets and homes, and how collieries sprang up all over the country, employing at their peak more than a million men. 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. There is overall sympathy for the workers and the exploitative owners are shown in their true colours. Coal mining is rapidly being forgotten and there are no longer any operational deep mines in the UK- in a few years the only signs that we ever had a mining industry will be the odd mining museum and the "half" winding wheels that are in place in some former Yorkshire mining villages.Jeremy Paxman is equally good on the horrors of the work (the death toll was horrific, not just the disasters that killed hundreds in a single explosion, but the tens of thousands who died in smaller incidents), the immense wealth that came to those fortunate landowners who happened to find that they were sitting on mineral riches beyond their wildest dreams with barely any effort on their part, the technological innovation that coal powered steam stimulated, and the long-term mismanagement of the industry both before and after nationalisation in 1947. We're always happy to answer any questions or queries you might have, please get in touch using one of the methods below. I was surprised to read that these concerns began very early in the coal industry, even pre-dating the Industrial Revolution, but I suppose that like the international slave trade, it was too profitable for the people in power to let morality triumph over money-making.

I interpret literary form and genre as signals for habits of mind and ways of thinking about the world that have material causes as well as long-term effects” (2-3). I don't suppose I learnt any think new as I pretty much know the story but it fills in the gaps and details. I knew the names of most of the government ministers and NCB hierarchy but never appreciated the strained relationships in both political parties. Paxman gives a lucid account of the growing demands for better conditions, the counterarguments of the pit owners, the protests and strikes, and the eventual major legal changes: the shift to national ownership of coal underground in 1938, and the complete nationalisation of the industry in 1947. He is also quizmaster on University Challenge, has written and presented television series such as Empire, The Victorians, Great Britain's Great War, and is the author of numerous articles for many publications .This becomes a particular problem when they deal with what became, in many ways, the defining event for the NUM: the strike of 1984–5. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? Jeremy Paxman is quite an old man now and apparently has health problems but, in my opinion, it is still better to have the book read by him than anyone else.