Keith Gildart

Mining memories: reading coalfield autobiographies

This article examines unpublished coal miners’ autobiographies. The reading of the texts was complemented by ethnography, oral testimony and archival research. The narratives reveal continuities and ruptures in experiences of the workplace, the domestic sphere and industrial politics. Miners’ identity is explored through collective memory, language, song, humour, sexuality, and the body.

Buying brains and experts: British coal owners, regulatory capture and miners' health, 1918 - 1946

This article examines British coal owners’ use of medical and scientific knowledge of occupational lung diseases in the mining industry to resist regulatory changes between 1918 and 1946. It explores the strategies deployed by coal owners in response to scientific and lay debates over the hazard to workers’ health presented by dust, and legislation to compensate miners for pneumoconiosis and silicosis contracted in the nation’s collieries. In particular, it investigates coal owner deployment of the views of notable scientists, especially the eminent physiologist John Scott Haldane (1860–1936), who insisted on the harmlessness of coal dust, in order to avoid costly compensation payments, as well as capital investment in ameliorative measures to reduce miners’ exposure to such hazards. In so doing, the article provides new insights by illustrating how coal owners influenced mining education programmes, deploying the arguments of Haldane and others, with direct implications for health and safety in British mines. This contributed to the mounting public health disaster wrought by coal dust on Britain’s mining communities. This process is viewed as part of the broader political activities of the coal owners – and their industry body, the Mining Association of Great Britain – in its attempts to influence the regulatory process in a period of dramatic change in the political economy of coal.

Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of ‘Consensus’ in Post-War Britain

Modern British historians have rarely shown much interest in questions of youth, youth culture or popular music.1 Though it would be over-stating matters to suggest that young people have been writ...

Class, Youth, and Dirty Jobs: The Working-Class and Post-War Britain in Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia

This chapter examines Quadrophenia (1973) and the way in which it depicts continuity and change in the lives of the British working-class in the period that the album documents (1964/5), the political milieu in which it was written (1972/3), and the legacy of the concept that was later depicted on screen (1978/9). The album is explored as both a social history of an element of youth culture in the mid-1960s and a reflection on contemporary anxieties relating to youth, class, race, and national identity. It argues that Quadrophenia is a significant historical source for ‘reading’ these pivotal years providing a sense of how musicians were both reflecting and dramatizing a sense of ‘crisis’, ‘continuity’, and ‘change’ in working-class Britain.

Interview with Ethan Russell

Ethan Russell is a multiple Grammy-nominated photographer and director, who amongst other claims to fame, is the only photographer to have shot covers for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who. Some of his best work can be found in the stunning photography booklet that accompanies the original album Quadrophenia. In this interview, he talks about the process of making the booklet amongst other topics.

Introduction: Making a Difference by Making a Noise

Youth Culture and Social Change maps out new ways to historicise two overlapping political responses to economic and social change: public unrest and popular culture. Throughout the 1980s young people took to the streets, whether in formal marches organised by trade unions, political groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) or Reclaim the Night, or in spontaneous, collective outbursts of disorder. Wherever young people were present in forms of protest there, too, was music. The riots of the 1980s have their own soundtrack that has formed part of the collective memory of the decade. People rocked against racism, sexism, ‘the bomb’ and the fragmentation of working-class communities. The popular music charts recognised the voices of protest in singers like Pauline Black, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Morrissey and Paul Weller, whose songs of resistance gained both commercial and critical success.

Youth Culture and Social Change

This book brings together historians, sociologists and social scientists to examine aspects of youth culture. The book’s themes are riots, music and gangs, connecting spectacular expression of youthful disaffection with everyday practices. By so doing, Youth Culture and Social Change maps out new ways of historicizing responses to economic and social change: public unrest and popular culture.

Coal, Cotton and Rock ‘n’ Roll in North West England

This chapter examines the experiences of working-class youth in the northern industrial towns of Leigh and Wigan. It highlights the continuities and ruptures in popular culture and Clive Powell’s place within an industrial milieu in which rock ’n’ roll music played a particular role in both affirming and challenging working-class identities.1 Here is an image of England that still contained features of the Victorian economy and the social structure it created. Through an exploration of social spaces that were defined by particular soundscapes it explores the role that popular music played in complementing a ‘structure of feeling’ that connected young men and women to a sense of class, locality and the possibilities of change. The musical journey traversed by Powell and his peers in the coal and cotton industries of North West England sheds light on the complex relationship between class, youth and popular music in the 1950s.

Exploring London’s Soho and the Flamingo Club with Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames

This chapter examines Clive Powell’s geographical and musical trajectory through a period that has been popularly perceived as a crossroads for English popular music between 1959 and 1964.1 His journey took him from a working-class, industrial Northern England to a perceptibly more cosmopolitan England that by 1964 was shaking to the beats of West Indian ska music, rock ‘n’ roll and African American rhythm and blues. In this period, London provided social spaces where the boundaries and conventions of class and ethnicity could be temporarily traversed.2 Popular music played an essential role in this process through the way in which it became embedded in coffee bars, dance halls and clubs. It was in such places where a different England was being imagined on record, stage and dance floor. Powell’s engagement with various aspects of the city’s youth culture presents a particular image of England that remained rooted in class yet was open to particular incursions into, and transformations of, particular social and cultural milieus.

Darkness over England: Punk Rock and the Sex Pistols Anarchy Tour 1976

There is an expansive literature on the Sex Pistols and punk rock.1 Historians tend to place the group at the centre of a particular period of ‘crisis’ in British society (1976/77) or alternatively seek to underplay punk’s significance.2 This chapter weaves between the two positions by focusing on responses to the Sex Pistols Anarchy Tour of December 1976. It presents a particular image of England in which a sense of ‘crisis’ was articulated through a range of political/social organisations and media outlets.3 The Sex Pistols were symbolic of particular shifts within popular music and youth culture. Class identity, experience and rhetoric were core features of punk rock and its attempt to challenge existing political and social orthodoxies through sound, attitude and style.