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The 1926 Miners' Lockout: Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield,

by Hester Barron

Article in The English Historical Review · February 2012

DOI: 10.1093/ehr/cer339

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The English Historical Review Advance Access published November 30, 2011
English Historical Review
© Oxford University Press 2011. all rights reserved.

BOOK REVIEW
The 1926 Miners’ Lockout: Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield, by
Hester Barron (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2010; pp. xvi + 314. £65).

‘These are epic days’, proclaimed A.J. Cook, the miners’ leader during the 1926
miners’ lockout which precipitated the General Strike: ‘We of this generation
will be remembered in spite of ourselves’ (p. 253). Hester Barron’s admirable
monograph illustrates the prescience of Cook’s statement. She provides a
comprehensive and rigorously researched account of the lockout in the
Durham coalfield, doing justice to the epic nature of the struggle, while not
ignoring the complexities of community, identity and memory as experienced

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by the 170,000 miners, their families and other inhabitants of the area.
Barron is not concerned with the institutional history of the lockout but
with ‘the way in which miners and their families experienced, conceptualized,
and identified with a “mining community”’ (p. 1). She suggests that as
historians have moved away from understanding miners solely in terms of
class consciousness so they have overemphasised divisions within mining
villages, discounting the potential for an overarching sense of community.
Instead, according to Barron, identities among ‘those who lived their lives
under the shadow of the colliery wheels’ varied but ‘a sense of community
could still work’ (p. 11).
As befits a study of a single coalfield, Barron’s first chapter considers tensions
of class and region. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain was a conglomerate
of regional unions, of which the Durham Miners’ Association was but one.
Durham was not a profitable coalfield, with nearly all its coal cut at a loss. The
owners, therefore, wanted deeper pay cuts than elsewhere. This regional
difference acted to encourage the Durham miners to support national industrial
action. It also added regional impetus to class solidarity; a lower proportion of
miners scabbed in Durham than anywhere else in Britain. The miners’ leader,
Jack Lawson, remarked that the union ‘is an integral part of the life of the
Northern miner; in truth, it is in the texture of his thought even when he is not
conscious of it’ (p. 78). Barron draws out the ways in which the lockout and the
union were embedded in different parts of life in the area, as in her consideration
of the relationship of shopkeepers to the strike, which was shaped by material
interest and community outlook.
The second chapter continues this awareness of intricacy and Barron provides
a nuanced account of Durham political and union identities, exploring the
complexities of overwhelming support for Labour. Durham was a Labour
county, containing pockets of Communist strength such as that at Chopwell,
which was described as ‘A Miniature Russia’ (p. 112). Barron examines such left-
wing political loyalties but thinks too about those who supported or voted
Liberal and Conservative, and their attitudes to the lockout and its effect on
miners, their wives and children, and the wider community. She considers
mine owners’ refusal to back down on pay cuts alongside their continuing
paternalism, with contributions to children’s distress funds and continuing coal
allowances for striking miners. The cynical claimed, and Barron agrees, that the
 2 B O O K R EV I EW
mine owners recognised that they would need miners after the strike, and that
all-out war would be, literally, counter-productive. She considers violence in
Durham, which had more prosecutions and convictions during the General
Strike than elsewhere (with 183 cases of violence out of 583 nationally). For the
Durham miners, defeat would have been disastrous to pay and conditions—‘a
living death’, as Will Lawther called it (p. 88). Hours of work really constituted
a life and death issue. Seven miners died each day in British pits. An hour added
to the day would mean five more deaths each week, or 250 each year. Barron
returns again and again to the apparent contradictions within the coalfield:
‘The Durham mining communities included the striker who volunteered as a
special constable, the union official who returned to work, and the miner who
owned his house and despaired at the relief given to his fellow strikers [because
of the effect on his rates]’ (p. 134); but she concludes that ‘for the vast majority
of miners, some kind of attachment to their union underpinned all’ (p. 135).
Subsequent chapters explore different facets of the lockout. While all miners

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were men, Barron considers women’s lives in the coalfield. Women at the time,
as in subsequent disputes, have been represented as ‘anti-communitarian strike-
breakers, coalfield heroines, or simply innocent victims’ (p. 141). Barron
explores the gendered expression of involvement in the strike, remarking that
while men threw stones at blacklegs, women threw potatoes. Nonetheless, they
were intimately involved. A further chapter investigates religious identities. Of
eleven senior miners’ representatives, five played an active part in the chapel,
yet only 3.1 per cent of the Durham population were practising Nonconformists
by 1922. In a further display of the comprehensive scope of the volume, Barron
explores the influence of education on mining lives in 1926. She shows how
schools were absorbed into the culture shaped by the pit and lodge, and reveals
how their role in feeding miners’ children made them an integral part of the
lockout.
The final chapter on ‘Memory and Experience’ considers mining
communities’ collective view of their past(s) as founded in strikes and lockouts,
suffering and resilience. Barron again foregrounds contradictions. For some,
the strike was not an epic of class struggle but an opportunity for ‘long lies in
bed on a morning, of all the sunshine that we could get, and the green grasses
and all the lovely lasses that there were just to go about with’ (p. 238). For
others, it was a time of despair: there were seventy suicides in County Durham
in 1926 compared with the previous year’s forty-seven. But individual experience
was intertwined with social memory. Barron explains that there emerged a
coherent narrative of heroic, tragic struggle combined with fractured and
diverse individual memories (p. 241).
Overall, Barron provides a lucid and incisive explanation of the matrix of
identities in the Durham coalfield during the lockout. Community was a
combination of ethnic, local, regional and national identities of place, mixed with
identities associated with religion, age, and gender. But, she convincingly argues,
‘these alternative identities and concerns did not prevent a solidaristic response
amongst the vast majority of men and women as part of a common struggle’
(p. 254). This is a deeply impressive book. Thoroughly researched, clearly written,
and coping well with contradiction and complexity, as an exercise in labour
history it is a model for our identity-conscious age.
PAUL WARD
doi:10.1093/ehr/cer339 University of Huddersfield

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