I love a book that teaches me a lot of things I didn’t know. Any student of Western history feels like they know about British coal whether it’s because you study industrialization, military history, unionization, economics, trade, social history… you name it and coal (and usually the UK’s relationship and role in the industry) will come up in some way at some point. But by the end of every chapter of Black Gold I’d learned something new – whether it was the details about how coal mined in different areas of the country burns differently or the fact that the Endeavor, Captain Cook’s famous ship was the same type of ship that carried coal from Newcastle to London in the eighteenth century.
So, who is Paxman to teach readers the history of coal? Paxman is not a historian, but a journalist writing history which sometimes I take issue with in both writing and other forms like podcasting, but Black Gold is an example of the strengths this approach can have. Paxman’s thesis (which he clearly lays out in his introduction) is that Britain would be better off if society would reexamine the role of the coal industry in British history and culture rather than just leaving it behind. He doesn’t pretend this is an easy task and again and again he details emotional and painful moments in the history of coal.
Paxman takes on a chronological timeline telling the stories of those above and below right alongside each other, even as their existences couldn’t have been further apart. He describes the large houses funded by coal (like Cyfarthfa Castle and its seventy-two rooms and three hundred and sixty-five windows) right alongside the sounds and smells of the pits (where plenty of men worked naked because of the heat and came up so dirty no one wanted to sit next to them on the bus.)
Conflict is key to the history of coal. As Paxton tells it, mines were the center of communities for centuries, both for the wealthy and the poor, and the coal pulled from them powered the lives and industry of millions even if they had never been near a mine. But the industry was always so unstable and every mine so different in how it was run, what it produced, the way it was mined they were all their own universe. Even when they were all brought together under nationalization, the individual realities of each mine and community only became clearer. Of course, he covers the battle between police and strikers (and their supporters) at Orgreave in the 1984 but there are so many other stories I didn’t know about, like when the president of a local mineworkers’ association joined a push to protect the private gardens at the Wentworth estate from the damage of open-cast mining.
This pattern of how much conflict arose from something so important to the economy and daily life of Britain is a compelling argument to reassess how we think of coal in our current time. Anything that important and yet also that full of struggle can’t simply be left behind culturally even as we move on to new forms of energy technology.
Some academic history pulls too far away from emotion (how many times in my studies and reading have I read a paper or the first chapter of a book about a war or a famine and somehow been bored) and plenty of non-academic history writing prioritizes emotion and modern political goals at the expense of research and context (the fact that Bill O’Reilly’s books are even considered non-fiction will always drive me a bit mad.) But with this text, Paxman balances his argument with research and respect for his historical topic. By connecting the past so clearly to the present in his final chapter with his discussion of global warming and how our current society is still dealing with the effects of coal, Paxman’s ties history and modern-day journalism together quite effectively. And now, with the announcement in December of the first new coal mine in decades, the industry doesn’t seem to be as dead as we thought…[1]
lost in the dust jackets 