Every story looks different from the end

Coal made Britain strong, shaped our psyche and set us on a journey towards global warming

Ian Jack
The Guardian, Saturday 5 September 2009
Next week on cinema screens in London and Sheffield the British Film Institute opens the first of three seasons devoted to British industry in the 20th century. The title for this ambitious project is This Working Life, and under its rubric steelmaking will be tackled in 2011 and shipbuilding in 2010. But the BFI's first subject is coal – King Coal as the programme has it, not without reason because it was Britain's numerous and easily exploited seams that made the industrial revolution possible, which in turn gave Britain its unexpected role as the world's supreme nation. The BFI programme has an epigraph from a now little-known American writer, William Jasper Nicolls: "With coal we have light, strength, power, and civilisation; without coal we have darkness, weakness, poverty and barbarism."
That was how it seemed in 1906, and not much had changed in British school classrooms in the 1950s. Coal had a benevolence that oil, which did the same job, never acquired. Partly this was because it was so solid and visible. Unlike oil, making its secret, liquid journey into buses and cars, there it lay sparking and glowing in the hearth having been brought in sacks by coalmen. Also, we knew the price of its extraction. Men had dug it out – hard and horrible work – and in most parts of Britain it would be hard to travel for an hour or two and not come across a colliery; at nationalisation in 1947 there were 958 of them employing 718,000 miners (60 years later only nine survived, with a workforce totalling 3,000) and their triangular spoil heaps and winding gear could loom up in the most surprising places, in the fields of Kent, the coast of north Wales and the lonely Scottish peninsula of Kintyre.
In these ways, unlike oil, it was ours. Orwell in a famous sentence wrote that "you and I and the Nancy poets and the archbishop of Canterbury … all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes." Oil couldn't provoke such moral fury – try substituting "BP engineers" or "Middle Eastern kingdoms" for Orwell's poor drudges. The moral feelings that coal aroused were, for the non-miner, part of its charm. Parents told their children of the brave men whose work down below had started the lump's journey to the grate. In novels and films, miners appeared as heroic, comradely, uncomplicated and above all essential. Their industry was patriotic. In a 1952 documentary, Plan for Coal, the narrator reminds us that in 1900 Britain supplied a quarter of the world's production and "to coal we must return again for all the strength that we will need in the years to come."
The film is one of about 1,000 documentaries commissioned by the National Coal Board during its 40-year existence and the BFI has made a fine anthology of them on a new DVD, Portrait of a Miner. Coalmining appealed to filmmakers. As the BFI curator Patrick Russell writes, its danger, light contrasts, social insularity and mythic position in national history made it "deeply cinematic". But to see these films is to understand social attitudes as much as what miners actually did, and to marvel that such attitudes existed within the lifetime of anyone much over 50.
Seriousness is one of them. In 1953, the coal board decided it wanted a training film that showed young miners how to shovel. The result, The Shovel, begins with a short history of shovels – beginning in pre-Roman times – before it moves on to modern shovelling techniques: "Stand with the leading shoulder well forward like a good batsman, though you don't have to be Len Hutton." In fact, it's a lovely little film, clear and direct, and at the end of its 17-minute instruction on perfecting "the Pioneer Throw" you know much more about the physical skill behind the back-breaking task on which the British economy then depended. With this earnest clarity, however, comes the condescension of the jolly spiffing commentary. In another film, designed to encourage miners from Lanarkshire's exhausted pits to migrate east to Fife, the voice says there will be other industries there too: "We do want miners to get the chance to mix with other folk" – words from a higher layer in the old geology of accent and social class.
I watched nearly two hours of these films and remembered my grandfather, who rather unwisely gave up a job as sewing machine salesman to go into the pit. Greyhounds, racing pigeons, chest x-rays, singing miners, dancing miners, miners on holiday at Filey: all these images came and went. The constant was coal: a black seam on diagrams, exploded by shot-blasting and sheared by machines, bouncing down conveyor belts and into tubs and eventually reaching the daylight it had last seen as plant life 350m years ago. The sight of so much extraction brought home a different point, which the makers of the films and the people in them could never have understood because they lived too early. Until the 1990s the history of the British coal industry could be seen in different ways – socially (greyhounds, comradeship), sentimentally (granddad), politically (struggle and strikes), geologically, economically, even aesthetically. But from a far higher elevation, perhaps that of eternity, all these interpretations will seem like whisperings in Lilliput. The coal industry's most enduring claim to fame, should history endure, is its vanguard position among the causes of global warming.
Some statistics. In the early 1800s, Britain dug about 15m tonnes of coal a year. By 1913, the peak year of production, the figure was 292m tonnes. No other country approached that rate of exploitation, which began to take off in the 18th century. Among historians, 1750 is the pivotal year, when twice as much Newcastle coal reached the market as 50 years earlier. What had been mainly a domestic fuel in the first half of the 18th century now smelted iron and heated the steam for thousands of mill and mine engines. In 1750, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere still stood at around 280 parts per million, now known as the "pre-industrial level". Today the level is estimated at 389 parts per million. The rise began slowly. Even when scientists in the late 19th century identified a firm link between CO2 and atmospheric temperatures, its relevance to the future seemed inconsequential. But in 1750, unknowable to the men who dug the coal and fed the fires, Britain had started the world on the journey.
According to Myles Allen, an Oxford physicist writing in the Guardian this week, dangerous climate change can be averted only if 50 to 80% of the carbon in known fossil fuel reserves is kept out of the atmosphere, which means leaving most of it in the ground. How strange that would have seemed to William Jasper Nicolls, who believed coal prevented barbarism. All stories look different from the end, when the moral and the mechanics of cause and effect become clearer. Nothing looks the same when viewed from the door of a terminal ward; victims of lung disease throw their minds back to their first cigarette. History gets turned on its head.
Ian Jack's The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain: Writings 1989-2009 was published by Jonathan Cape this week. To order a copy for £17.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846