14 - Myths and realities: strikes, solidarity and ‘militant miners’

Summary

Some of the conclusions reached in the preceding chapters indicate the need to revise a number of received views regarding coalmining strikes and miners' ‘militancy’. We readily acknowledge that strikes on a large scale, which extended across regions or the entire country have been an especially important feature of the British coal industry since the mid-nineteenth century. However, by concentrating upon these, often to the exclusion of other types of strike activity, historians have tended to obscure the study of the far more typical domestic and local strikes. We have described the distinguishing characteristics of these as limited in scale and of short duration; features which persisted both under private and public ownership. These ‘ordinary’ strikes, which comprised the majority by far, formed the primary focus for our analysis.

Our study reinforced the perception of well-established differences in regional strike propensities, underlining the enduringly conflictual nature of industrial relations in Scotland and South Wales and, in the 1890s though especially after the Second World War, in Yorkshire; in these regions strikes were typically both much more prevalent and of greater frequency. None the less, one of the most important conclusions, which applies to collieries in the most strike-prone regions as to others both before and after nationalization, is that a large proportion of domestic and local strikes occurred at a relatively small number of collieries and places. The typical British colliery was free from recorded domestic strikes in any given year before the 1950s.