Blood is the Price of Coal: conference presenters and papers
Panel 1: Disasters, safety and commemoration
Chair: Dr Jörg Arnold, Universität Tübingen.
Oaks Colliery Disaster, 1866
Paul Darlow, National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and Paul Hardman, former NUM National Executive Officer
The disaster at the Oaks Colliery near Barnsley, which killed 361 people in explosions on 12-13 December 1866, remains the largest in English history. To mark the 150th anniversary of the disaster, community heritage group and registered charity, People and Mining, supported by a steering committee involving representatives of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), local volunteer organisations, local schools and the National Mining Museum, raised funds for a memorial to those who died in the disaster, whilst Heritage Lottery funding was used to develop educational resources to raise awareness of the disaster. This presentation discusses the disaster and its commemoration.
Paul Hardman, former NUM National Executive Officer, co-ordinated a range of activities to mark the 150th anniversary of the Oaks Colliery Disaster, supporting the ‘Remember the Oaks’ working party and research in the NUM’s archive. Paul Darlow, an ex-miner and teacher, worked as the Heritage Lottery Funded Oaks Colliery Disaster Project Officer, developing educational materials for local and national schools and writing the book ‘The Oaks Disaster 1866 – A living history’.
The Safety Men: the Colliery Deputies union in the British Coal Industry
Professor Peter Ackers, Loughborough University (Emeritus)
I shall sketch the historical development of the Colliery Deputies trade union: (1) the development of a sectional occupational identity, linked to changes in the labour process, with a growing emphasis on underground 'safety', prompted by legislation, such as the 1911 Coal Mines Act; (2) an emphasis on industrial moderation and co-operation, with an aspiration to become neutral 'civil servants'; (3) opposition to independent Deputies organization from both private employers and the 'industrial unionist' Miners' Federation of Great Britain / National Union of Mineworkers, the latter not fully resolved until 1973; and (4) the controversial position of Deputies, as 'Safety Men' in national strikes, like 1926 and 1984.
Peter AckersLink opens in a new window is Emeritus Professor in the History of Industrial Relations, Loughborough University. His PhD was on the pre-war Colliery Deputies leader, WT Miller (see Dictionary of Labour Biography IX and International Review of Social History 39 1994). Books include: Ackers & Reid (eds.), Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain, Palgrave, 2016; and Trade Unions & the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg, Routledge 2024.
Welcomed to Wrexham
Sarah Castagnetti, The National Archives
Speculative research at The National Archives evolved into a community projectLink opens in a new window reconnecting people in Wrexham with records of the 1934 Gresford Colliery disaster. Moving letters and petitions from bereaved families were uncovered, alongside inquiry records and evidence of falsified air quality data. Working with local partners, selected documents were brought from Kew and displayed in Wrexham alongside records from North East Wales Archives, to mark the 91st anniversary of the disaster. The event, prompted reflection, remembrance, and shared stories. The project shows how returning records to their communities can open new understanding and bring people together.
Sarah is a Visual Records Specialist at The National Archives, working with 19th‑ and 20th‑century photographic, design, art and film collections. She creates public content, runs student workshops, and supports researchers. Her interests include uncovering under‑represented voices and showing the relevance of archives today. Her recent work on the Gresford Colliery disaster focuses on reconnecting communities with their records.
The 1959 Auchengeich Disaster: class, community and commemoration in Scotland’s coalfields
Professor Jim Phillips and Dr Ewan Gibbs, University of Glasgow
The Auchengeich disaster was the largest fatal mining accident in Scotland during the era of public ownership (1947-1994). 47 miners were killed. It is commemorated annually in a community event in Moodiesburn, Lanarkshire, originated on the 25th anniversary by striking miners in 1984. Veterans from the former Scottish coalfields attend, with union banners, often joined by comrades from Yorkshire. Labour-movement representatives and sometimes labour historians are invited to speak. We analyse the commemoration, which invites reflections on linkages between community and class in coalfield history, and how the dangers of mining changed across the nationalised era.
Jim Phillips, presenting, is author of Coalfield Justice: the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike in ScotlandLink opens in a new window (2024) and Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth CenturyLink opens in a new window (2019). His evidence to the Scottish government and Scottish Parliament helped secure the Miners’ Strike (Scotland) (Pardons) Act of 2022.
Ewan Gibbs, co-researcher, is author of Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Post-war ScotlandLink opens in a new window (University of London Press, 2021), and An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working ClassLink opens in a new window (Verso, October 2026.)
Panel 2: Health
Chair: Professor Mathew Thomson, University of Warwick.
The Violent Realities and Multiple Temporalities of a Miner’s Life
Liv Robinson, Northumbria University
This paper examines the human cost of historical coal mining in North East England, foregrounding violence as a fundamental condition of miners' working lives - rather than a series of isolated events. Drawing on material from Northumberland Archives, it argues that violence was embedded within the labour process itself, shaping miners' bodies and life courses across multiple temporal scales. This violence is conceptualised as simultaneously exceptional and unexceptional: spectacular in moments of disaster, yet ordinary and culturally normalised through everyday exposure to risk, injury, and bodily degradation.
Liv is a third-year PhD researcher in Human Geography at Northumbria University. Her research examines the multiple forms of violence embedded within historical coal-mining in the Northumberland Coalfield, from major disasters to everyday injury, compensation, and solidarity. Drawing on archival material from Northumberland Archives, her work foregrounds the embodied and temporal dimensions of mining harm. Born and raised in County Durham, she has a deep interest in mining and its legacies.
‘A wonderful difference to the home life’: pithead baths, pitwomen, and disability in twentieth-century British coalmining communities
Lucy Jameson, Durham University
The introduction of pithead baths to coal mines marked an important juncture in the transformation of miners’ occupational welfare. Nonetheless, pithead baths were also a critical technology for pitwomen, yet the sluggish provision of such sites, and the refusal of some miners to use the pit bath facilities, expose the tensions between the gendered divisions of labour. Pitwomen’s domestic labour and caregiving helped to facilitate the coal economy, but at a great cost to their physical wellbeing and welfare. Approaching the pit bath debate from the perspective of disability history, I reinforce the importance of recognising unpaid domestic labour as a legitimate and critical form of work.
Lucy Jameson is a third-year PhD candidate at Durham University. She researches the history of science, technology and medicine at the intersection of disability history. Her doctoral thesis explores the ways in which technologies designed by and/or for disabled people in the British Post Office can recover lived experiences of disability from 1918-1964. Lucy has also researched the connection between experiences of pneumoconiosis and socio-economic status in County Durham coalmining communities.
Pneumoconiosis, Environment, and the Politics of Coal Miners' Health in Twentieth Century Britain
Dr Andrew Seaton, University of Manchester
This paper explores the shifting politics and science of coal workers' pneumoconiosis. It does so through the lens of the Institute of Occupational Medicine (IOM), a branch of the National Coal Board established in the late-1960s to continue pre-existing research into miners' health. The paper argues that pneumoconiosis should be recognised as an environmental question - tied to processes of resource extraction, the structure of the mine, and broader epidemiological factors. It also considers how, in a remarkable episode, the privatised coal industry legally challenged the earlier scientific research from its nationalised predecessor. As such, coal miners' health was always political.
Andrew SeatonLink opens in a new window is a historian of medicine, environment, politics, and society. He is currently a Hallsworth Research Fellow at the University of Manchester where he is writing a new environmental history titled The Ends of Coal. The project explores the multiple legacies and outcomes of coal - ranging from landscape harms, to the production of consumer goods like plastics, to health inequalities. Andrew's first book was Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best-Loved Institution (Yale, 2023).
A Special Case? Miners’ Health, Wage Relativities and the Fall of Heath’s Government
Robert Rayner, University of Birmingham
In February 1974, as Edward Heath asked the electorate ‘Who Governs Britain?’, a little-noticed pay inquiry was quietly considering a question of its own: what is the price of coal when measured not in pounds, but in terms of work hazard and compromised health? Behind the political confrontation of two national miners’ strikes and a general election lay an unrealised attempt to redefine ‘wage justice’ through occupational risk—a proposal that might have transformed incomes policy and industrial relations.
The grandson of a South Wales coal miner, Robert is a History PGR whose thesis is Coal: from Who Governs to What Governs? Reinterpreting the coal disputes of the Heath Government. He helped to organise a Birmingham Research in History & Cultures event Remembering Coal: Legacy, Memories, HeritageLink opens in a new window (UoB, June 2025).
Panel 3: Welfare
Chair: Dr Quentin Outram, Society for the Study of Labour History.
Quentin Outram is a historian of the British coal industry. He studied economics at Cambridge University and spent his career teaching economics and economic history at Leeds University. He has had a rich and varied research career covering all sorts of topics from profit-related pay through strikes and lockouts, the economics of famine and warfare in Eritrea and Liberia, the coalowners in the 1920s and the General Strike, the emotional history of the Featherstone massacre, and the moral economy of the rich. He is now the Secretary of the Society for the Study of Labour History (SSLH) and is the Book Review Editor of the Society’s journal, the Labour History Review.
“Feeding on the job?” Pit canteens in 1940s Britain
Dr Ariane Mak, Université Paris Cité & IUF
The provision of canteens was one of the most significant developments in mining welfare, yet it has received limited scholarly attention. The paper will begin by examining the challenges associated with setting up pit canteens and the numerous debates they sparked. Many experiments were conducted in the 1930s and 1940s, ranging from delivering hot meals to miners underground to establishing Central Food Depots that supplied dozens of collieries with sandwiches. The second part of the paper will focus on miners’ attitudes towards the newly built canteens, during wartime and in the early years of the nationalised industry.
Dr Ariane MakLink opens in a new window is a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Université Paris Cité. Her first monograph (En guerre et en grève) was published in 2025. The doctoral thesis on which it was based examined British coal miners’ strikes during the Second World War. It has been awarded the Mattei Dogan Social History Prize and the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris Prize. She is PI on the ANR research project A Social and Political History of Mining Canteens in European Coalfields.
The Warmth of Home: Concessionary Fuel and Domestic Energy in British Coalfield Communities, 1945-1995
Dr Kathy Davies, Northumbria University
Coal allowances have historically shaped domestic energy use and family welfare in mining and non-mining households in Britain. This presentation explores the relationship between fuel, labour, and care; the informal economy centred on the coal allowance; the domestic impact of industrial action; and the regional realities of the transition to North Sea Gas from the late 1960s. Centring on national archival research and insights from oral histories, the presentation demonstrates that concessionary coal was fundamental to adequate access to warmth across British coalfields in the twentieth century. Former mining regions are among the most fuel poor across Britain today.
Dr Kathy Davies is an historian of energy and environment and Research Fellow at Northumbria University, Newcastle working on the Wellcome funded project, Carbon Bodies: Warmth and Fuelling Health in Britain, 1918-1922. Kathy's research encompasses social, cultural, and political histories of energy, air quality, and environmental change. She was formerly Archives By-Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge and Visiting Fellow in Environment and Sustainability at the British Library in 2025.
Class, Culture and Democracy: the Miners Libraries of South Wales
John Pateman, University of Leicester
Sport and social provision as mining welfare was a common feature of many British coal mines. A unique and important aspect of this provision was the libraries that were set up within Mining Welfare Institutes. These libraries were wholly owned and operated by the miners themselves. As such they represented working class cultural democracy in action. Self-organisation and self-learning was a working class tradition and many workers could read long before compulsory public schooling was introduced. The miners' libraries represented ‘one of the greatest networks of cultural institutions created by working people anywhere in the world’.
John Pateman comes from a Romany Gypsy background and worked in public libraries for over 40 years, at all levels from Library Assistant to Chief Librarian. He was Head of Libraries in Hackney, Merton, Lincolnshire and Thunder Bay, Canada. He pioneered the development of community-led and needs-based libraries in the UK and Canada. He received the UK Libraries Change Lives Award, the Canada 150 Award and the Cuban National Culture Award for services to public libraries.
Deindustrialisation and the recreational provision of the nationalised British coalmining industry (1950s-1984)
Dr Marion Henry, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
From the late 1950s onwards, the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation's recreational programme had to adapt to the phased contraction of the British coalmining industry, which challenged the occupational homogeneity of mining communities. Drawing on underexplored sources from CISWO, this paper will explore the impact of deindustrialisation on the cultural policy led by the Board and trade-unions in the coalfields. It will highlight the industry’s sustained support to cultural activities in the coalfields until the early 1980s.
Marion HenryLink opens in a new window, PhD, Institut d’Etudes des Sciences Politiques de Paris and University of Strathclyde, 2021; in employment at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne since 2023. Current post: Lecturer in 20th century Cultural History. Her PhD thesis focused on the history of brass bands in British coalfields between 1947 and 1984. Her current research focuses on the feminisation of recreative activities in British coalfields in the 20th century.
Panel 4: Legacies
Chair: Professor Keith Gildart, University of Wolverhampton.
Now The Dust Has Settled
James O. Davies, Historic England
As a photographer for the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, English Heritage and Historic England I've been recording aspects of the coal industry for over 35 years. This talk will bring aspects of that work together for the first time, all of which is held in the Historic England Archive. The talk will discuss how those images were taken and look at the wide gamut of subject matter from lamprooms, miners safety, band practice, pit head bathing, free mining and seacoaling to opencast. It will also look at steelworks and power stations examining both the landscapes and structures associated with coal.
James O. Davies is Team Lead for photography at Historic England where he has been recording the built environment and their communities for the last 35 years. He is a passionate believer in the power of photography to document for perpetuity. He has exhibited and published widely on themes as broad as prisons, tin mining, mosques, farmsteads, shopping, post war architecture, stained glass and Stonehenge. He has won various awards and lectures on architectural photography.
'The Big K: The Pit that shaped a community': Its legacy, a decade after closure
Judi Alston, One to One Development Trust
Kellingley marked the final chapter of deep coal mining in the UK. Its closure was not only economic, but a psychological and cultural rupture for communities shaped by generations of mining heritage.
What does it mean to be the last?
This presentation screens extracts from The Big K filmLink opens in a new window, reflecting on its development through public engagement sessions. It explores “co-producing as you go” and how community discussion has shaped the evolving narrative and opened dialogue between lived experience and historical interpretation.
Judi Alston is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and XR Producer/Director. Her work spans broadcast, film and immersive media, focusing on working-class heritage, community memory and the effects of industrial change. She is the founder and CEO of arts and media charity One to One Development TrustLink opens in a new window and regularly presents her work at festivals and conferences in the UK and internationally.
Union Poorhouse to Union Leader - Herbert Smith, President of the Miners Federation of Great Britain 1922-1929
Kathryn Stainburn, Castleford Civic Society
The story of how a group of community researchers in the former mining town of Castleford, West Yorkshire, re-discovered this once great trade union leader. From personal experience Herbert Smith knew the heavy death toll that mining extracted from a community. Herbert's father died in a pit accident before he was born. A miner was killed in the same pit, in the first week where 10 year old Herbert had just started working. Into his sixties, he was still actively involved in mine rescue operations. Herbert Smith is buried in Castleford’s Victorian Cemetery amongst the graves of local pit disasters and individual miners who perished at work.
Kathryn Stainburn, Heritage Lead at Castleford Civic SocietyLink opens in a new window. Castleford Civic Society was first established in 1972 and is enjoying a new lease of life. Our mission statement is 'Valuing our past and encouraging pride in our future'. We are proud of our heritage and we always welcome opportunities to celebrate the hard-working characters and communities who contributed to our former industrial town. The Society are also involved in various community groups who are making a difference to Castleford.
The Afterlife of Coal in Barnsley: Youth, Community, and Intergenerational Legacies
Dr Kat Simpson, The University of Huddersfield
This paper uses social haunting to trace how intergenerational legacies of coal continue to shape young lads’ experiences of life growing up in Barnsley’s former coalfields. In partnership with the Youth Work Unit: Yorkshire and The Humber, it draws on co-created research with young lads, and narrative interviews with former miners, to examine how the temporality of the industrial past endures as ghostly presences and material traces that shape present–future experiences of community, education, and employment. This paper centres on community as a site of social haunting.
Kat SimpsonLink opens in a new window is a working-class academic and Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Huddersfield. Her research explores how industrial legacies continue to shape the lives of young people in former coalfield communities, examining how the industrial past and the deindustrialised present intertwine to shape the lived experiences of the present-future.
Displays and posters
On Behalf of the People: Work, Community and Class in the British Coal Industry 1947-1994
Professor Keith Gildart, University of Wolverhampton
Coal: a record of an industry
Gary Winter, Historic England
This digital display features photographs from the Historic England Archive'sLink opens in a new window Coal Industry Project. The project was undertaken in the early 1990s by one of the Archive's predecessor organisations, the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME). It was a response to the contraction of coalmining, and the impact it had on the buildings and structures associated with the industry, including headgear, pit-head baths, housing and memorials. The project also recorded people associated with the industry at a point in time, from seacoalers in Northumberland to free miners in Gloucestershire, and a selection of these evocative photographs are included in the display.
Gary Winter is the Archive Engagement and Content Officer for Historic England - the public body that champions England's historic environment. He has worked in various roles at Historic England and its predecessors - the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and English Heritage - for over 25 years. He has used the Archive’s extensive collections to produce public exhibitions, create online content, share images via social media and to undertake engagement activities.
Glamorgan’s Blood: Dark Arteries, Old Veins – Exploring the Coal Collections at Glamorgan Archives
Rhian Diggins, Glamorgan Archives
The exhibition explores aspects of the coal industry in south Wales, including the development of health and welfare facilities such as the pithead baths, and the social life of coalfield communities, including sport, bands and choirs, boys and girls’ clubs and the institutes. We also look at work in the colliery, accidents, industrial disease and mining disasters, pay and strikes.
Rhian Diggins is Senior Archivist at Glamorgan Archives, a role she has held since 2011. She holds responsibility for cataloguing and leads on access and community engagement. She managed the 3-year Wellcome Trust funded project, Glamorgan’s BloodLink opens in a new window, to catalogue Glamorgan Archives’ coal collections and undertake conservation and preservation work on the records.
Mining Disasters in the Village of Worsbrough
Maureen Gennard, Peter Fairham and David Bullock, Worsbrough Library Heritage Group
Whilst researching mining disasters in Worsbrough in 2025 group members noted the upcoming 150th anniversary, on 6th December, of the Swaithe Main disaster.
In November 2025 the group was instrumental in organising Swaithe’s 150th anniversary commemoration held at St Thomas’ Church, Worsbrough, where most casualties are buried. The group will provide a display sharing their research into the 144 men and boys who lost their lives underground in December, 1875. Commemorative plates produced to honour those who lost their lives in the disaster will feature in the display.
The Worsbrough Library Heritage Group was founded in 2010 by a group of individuals interested in exploring local history. In recent years, the group has focused not just on Worsbrough’s three main mining disasters but accidents in the intervening years. This research culminated in a database of almost 320 men and boys who perished in this small Yorkshire Village.
The group continues to preserve and honour Worsbrough’s rich heritage through research, publications and community engagement.
Mrs Sheila Truman
Daniella Law, Historic England
A poster that showcases a portrait of Mrs Sheila Truman, to champion the contributions of women in mining communities. Taken in 1993, the image of Mrs Truman working in her family's coal yard in Gloucestershire, embodies the sentiments of the “pit brow lasses,” who fought to remain working above ground following the Mines and Collieries Act 1842. The image posits a commentary on women’s involvement in mining, and will act as a starting point for viewers to discuss the complexities of gender and coal, community working, and the intergenerational effects of the mining industry. There will be a small paragraph underneath to provide context and information about the Archive.
Daniella Law works within the Archive Support Team at Historic England’s site in Swindon, helping to preserve the collections and create resources to engage with schools, museums, and researchers. She studied an MA in History at Oxford Brookes, following an undergraduate BA with Hons in Combined English and History at the University of Exeter. Using her experience, she is keen to get involved in research communities and showcase the archive’s valuable historical material.
When Coal was Clean: Soap and Smoke in Nineteenth Century Britain
Oliver Marshall
In Britain for much of the nineteenth century, frictions between ideas about cleanliness and health stood in the way of managing air pollution caused by coal. Until germ theory was widely accepted, disease was believed to be spread by miasmas - "bad air" from decomposing organic matter and bodies of water. Smoke-filled city air was believed to be healthier, or to even sanitise air from the countryside - a place outside of industrial hotspots and therefore considered unmanaged and dirty.
Coal tar soap was created in 1860 from by-products of coal distillation, and acts as a lens through which to examine coal's role in ideas of health and sanitation in the nineteenth century and today.
Oliver Marshall studied Environmental Science at the University of the West of England and wrote his final year dissertation in 2025 on the history of coal use in Britain and how coal represents the Anthropocene concept in visual art from 1770 to present. He currently works as a graduate trainee library assistant at Oxford University's Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library. He will begin studying for an MSc in the History and Philosophy of Science at UCL in September 2026.