The closure of Michael Colliery in 1967 and the politics of deindustrialization in Scotland

Michael Colliery in east Fife was the largest National Coal Board (NCB) unit in Scotland when it closed in 1967, following a disastrous fire which killed nine miners. The NCB, operating within the constraints of the Labour government’s policy framework, decided not to invest in Michael’s recovery, although this would have secured profitable production within five years and access to thirty-plus years of coal reserves. This outcome, which had major local economic implications, demonstrates that deindustrialization is a willed and highly politicized process. The Labour government ignored workforce entreaties to override the NCB’s decision and invest to bring the pit back into production, but made significant localized adjustments to regional policy that within a year attracted a major employer to the area, the Distillers Company Limited. The article relates the closure to moral economy arguments about deindustrialization. It shows that coal closures in the 1960s, while actually more extensive than those of the 1980s, were managed very differently, with attention to the interests of the workers and communities affected, and an emphasis on cultivating alternative industrial employment

Why Legal History Matters

This is the text of Professor Phillips' Salmond Lecture delivered at the Victoria University of Wellington Law Faculty on 24 June 2010.  In it Professor Phillips makes the case for why legal history matters both for lawyers and historians and argues for a continued contextual approach to the study of legal history

Economic direction and generational change in twentieth century Britain: the case of the Scottish coalfields

Changes in economic direction in Britain in the twentieth century were incremental, rarely permanent, and strongly contested, although trends to deindustrialisation, widened inequality and the ostracism of trade unions from policy-making were clear by the mid-1980s. This followed the defeat of the striking miners in 1984–5, a decisive movement in macro-economic direction. This case study of the Scottish coalfields uses generational analysis to illuminate the contested nature of these long-running economic changes. Three distinct trade union generations are identified, each of which was linked to successive ideal-types of economic unit. Each type represented an ever-larger economy of scale and qualitative changes in coalfield employment: ‘Village Pits’, ‘New Mines’, and ‘Cosmopolitan Collieries’. The evolving organisation of production, combined with other powerful experiences in early adulthood, gave rise to different political goals for each successive generation. The first, born in the 1890s, won the primary objective of nationalisation in 1947; the second, born in the 1920s, secured important changes to the manner in which the nationalised industry operated in the 1960s, gaining greater control for the workforce and enhanced economic security for the wider community; the third, born in the 1950s, attempted to defend the social democratic elements of the nationalised order in the 1980s against changing macro-economic strategy and micro-managerial operations which threatened pits, jobs and the voice of the worker in decision-making. Nationalisation, it is shown, was a success from the perspective of the workforce, but only because trade unions compelled the National Coal Board and the UK government to preserve economic security in the coalfields. These victories of the 1960s were overturned, however, by the Conservative government in the 1980s, at enormous cost to coalfield communities and workers

R. Bitterman & M.E. McCallum, Lady Landlords of Prince Edward -Island: Imperial Dreams and the Defence of Property

On 23 July 23 1767, some four years after its acquisition of Saint John\u27s Island [now Prince Edward Island] in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Britain held a one-day lottery through which it distributed almost the entire island in sixty-six lots [townships] of about 20,000 acres each.\u27 Many lots went to individuals, civil and military servants of the crown, including such notables as John Pownall, secretary to the Lords of Trade, and Admiral Augustus Keppel. Although none of the proprietors met the principal condition oftheir grant-that they settle the land within ten years with one Protestant settler for every 200 acres-the proprietorial system remained in place for over a century. Some large proprietors lost their lands when they were sold by the local government for failure to pay quit rents, while others sold because they were worried about such legal action, with the result that by the 1830s about one-fifth of Island land was in the hands of small farmer-owners. Yet the vast majority of the land continued to be owned by descendants of the original large proprietors, and mostly worked by tenant farmers. Most of the large proprietors were absentee landlords, residents of the United Kingdom

The meanings of coal community in Britain since 1947

This article offers an original contribution to the literature on coal communities and the history of the coal industry in Britain by examining changes and contested interests within Britain’s coal territories since nationalisation in 1947. The analysis is organised around three distinct but over-lapping meanings of coal community: economic locality, ideological communality and occupational group. As economic localities mining communities became stronger in the 1960s, even as the coal industry itself was shrinking, but then less viable as all forms of industrial employment dwindled in the 1980s. In ideological terms coal communities were divided by gender as well as class, but became more cohesive with social change and greater opportunities for women. A network of increasingly solid localities contributed—despite the divisions of 1984–1985 and subsequent job losses—to the strengthening of a national occupational community, partly because deindustrialisation was a common working class disaster that transcended regional boundaries

Remembering Auchengeich: the largest fatal accident in Scottish coal in the nationalised era

No abstract availabl