1926, 1984. .. And All That!
13 Steve Humphries, A Secret World of Sex: Forbidden Fruit: The British Experience, 1900–1950, London, 1991, p. 9. 14 Humphries, Secret World, p. 16. 15 Judy Giles, ‘ ‘‘Playing Hard to Get’’: Working-class Women, Sexuality and Respectability in Britain, 1918–40’, Women’s History Review 1: 2, 1992, p. 243. 16 As note 15. 17 Giles ‘‘Playing Hard to Get’’, 16, p. 250. 18 See Eustace Chesser, The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman, London, Hutchinson, 1956. Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character, London, 1955.
Class, Community, and Collective Action: Social Change in Two British Coalfields, 1850-1926
Part 1 Traditions of community. Part 2 Mining communities and collective action: Kerr and Kiegal - the isolated mass and collective action Olson - small groups and collective action Craig Calhoun - communal collective action mining towns and villages as communities. Part 3 South Wales: the valleys the structure of a local society local politics - the axis of change the decline of Mabonism the miners' next step - class action and local autonomy the reorganization of the union the lodge in its community the strikes of the 1920s the strange death of liberal Wales - a sociological revolution? Part 4 Ynysybwl: the role of the chapels the colliery company in the village the decline of the company's influence and the rise of the lodge labour leaders and community leaders the sociology of Ynysybwl strikes. Part 5 Nottinghamshire: socks and the squirearchy butties and sticky cherries religion and the miners the development of a regional society the political sociology of the coalfield Nottinghamshire in the lockouts the social origins of Spencerism? Part 6 Hucknall: before the mines the coming of the pits John Edward Ellis labour relations and working-class organization Hucknall into the 20th-century strikes and Hucknall. Part 7 Class, community and collective action.
Coal worldwide: the international context of the British miners' strike
While attention has naturally focused on the domestic causes and consequences of the miners' strike, the international setting of the dispute has played a significant role in the origins and development of the crisis. Moreover, the future prospects for the British coal industry cannot be evaluated without some understanding of the international context. While it is certainly true that the operating losses of the NCB during the past few years have been inflated by the Board's dubious accounting practices (Glyn, 1984), it is also the case that pricing policy has played a crucial part in the industry's financial crisis (Wright, 1984). Central to this pricing policy—which has rested on the principle of reducing the real price of coal—has been the belief that cheap foreign coal is readily available to replace British output (NCB, 1984, p. 5). Consequently, the NCB has been forced by fear of foreign competition to make contracts with the CEGB which link the price of a part of the coal purchased by the CEGB to the international price of coal for sale in Antwerp, Rotterdam and Amsterdam.1 It has been enough for some commen tators (e.g. Brittan, 1984) merely to note the cheapness of foreign coal and condemn the inefficiency of British coal mining, while failing to recognise the major crisis of over production which has arisen in the world coal market, dramatically affecting the relation ship between prices and costs of production and delivery and creating conditions analogous to the 'dumping' syndrome prevalent in the coal crisis of the 1920s and 1930s (Neumann, 1934, pp. 30-31). The first part of our paper will therefore examine the origins and development of the recent crisis in the world coal market. In describing the market's main characteristics, we shall pay particular attention to the role of the oil com panies, whose growing involvement in the coal business has so far received only limited attention (Kennedy, 1978; Tanzer, 1980; Wright and Rutledge, 1985). Oil company mining projects are now integrating wholly new coal mining areas into the world market. We conclude this section by examining one such project, at El Cerrejon in northern Colombia, where Exxon is developing what will probably become the biggest coal mine in the world.