And in the minds of those who did think about it, the suffering was more or less a necessary evil – because, as Orwell himself put it, “the machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal”.

I found the book very informative and it explained well the plight of the average miner and not only the working conditions they suffered under but the constant strife on wages and working hours particularly with mine owners. The second time, he correctly dates it to July 1984, but still repeats the anti-Thatcher propaganda line that she was referring to the miners in general. Indeed, the opening tells the story of one of the UK's worst pit disasters, and such tales are liberally dispersed through the narrative (Gresford, Aberfan and, of course Senghenydd where the Universal Colliery killed 439 miners in the blink of an eye) showing the human cost of coal mining. Although all her readings of individual novels are both interesting and point to aspects of the books in question that others may not have noticed, they do not always convince and too often appear to depend upon peripheral or minor points.I very much enjoyed how this was all put together, and it was interesting to follow how things progressed but as I say, I was particularly interested in the harsh lives of miners and the tough communities that are up solely around the pit heads. He opted to start with a mining disaster in the North-East, and it was clear that the author's own voice was to be included in the accounts, as a journalist at the scene 'duly became a pompous bore' when given a knighthood later in life for his Liberal party reporting. Having lived through a period encompassing coal’s still somewhat dominant position (though still a long way short of its pinnacle) through to its demise and demonisation, the latter third covering the postwar period was the most interesting, and also the period that probably plays most to the author’s strengths.

If you already know British history then some of the information won’t be new to you, but it gains new context here, demonstrating how coal, this dirty rock which caused so much human misery and polluted the environment, was a vitally important factor in the development of the country. a really comprehensive history of coal mining in Britian, albeit a little lacking when discussing the 1984/85 miners strike but that's likely down to my personal interest. Heat from coal offered freedom from the ravages of frost and cold, which amounted to freedom from the calendar. The NUM often seemed – like the French army after the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 – to be building its identity around the celebration of what had, in fact, been a crushing defeat. I would have liked a slightly more consistent or explicit tone towards the pit managers and workers, although he did treat the politicians fairly and acknowledged who had the power and influence.

I read in another book, discussing the Senghenydd disaster: "One woman said goodbye to her husband, three sons and two brothers on the morning of 14th October 1913. Men hunched over many miles down below, their back scraping against the rocky walls above in darkness. A Hovis television advertisement of 2008, celebrating the last hundred years of British history, featured miners, along with V-E Day parties and a Churchill speech, though, revealingly, it depicted a scene of a picket line in 1984 rather than of an actual working mine. Boris Johnson’s sardonic reference to Margaret Thatcher’s “big early start” towards renewable energy has come at the perfect time for Jeremy Paxman’s Black Gold, a history of how Britain industrialised, modernised and thrived.

Disjointed structure and surprisingly poor editing unfortunately damage what’s otherwise a very interesting and engaging popular history of coal mining and it’s impact on industry and empire in Britain. It was a “place where you slept and ate, visited the doctor, fell in love, had your children and entertained yourself” … One day soon, Paxman says, we may forget it was ever there. Written in the captivating style of his bestselling book The English, Paxman ranges widely across Britain to explore stories of engineers and inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists – but whilst coal inevitably helped the rich become richer, the story told by Black Gold is first and foremost a history of the working miners – the men, women and often children who toiled in appalling conditions down in the mines; the villages that were thrown up around the pit-head.How much has neglecting “mineral substrata” actually distorted our reading of, say, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now? Perhaps this is the legacy of his long years of service as the BBC’s Derisive Snorter in Chief; but it can seem glib and cheap on the page, whether dismissing the Victorian “toffs” who owned the mines or the “pinstriped young men from Rothschilds” who advised on the final privatisation. It was beyond the scope of this book but I am interested in, to what extent, the NUM contributed to the demise of mining in the UK by their strike in 1984. The horrors of the early days in the pits comes over vividly and the various catastrophes that the workers had to endure, and that the owners walked away from with the tiniest slap on the wrists, is described in such a way as to make the reader sad and angry. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages.

He had no time for landowners who got lucky from underground deposits, but his sympathies seemed divided between the capitalists who took risks and the miners, who were working and living in terrible conditions with awful health outcomes, but well-paid for manual workers despite being paid by piecework for most of the industry's existence. Although Miller’s Extraction Technologies is a work of literary criticism with a political agenda and Paxman’s Black Gold a work that moves from being a history of technology to one in its latter half chiefly about rise and fall of the miners’ political power, both mention and quote some of the same authors. Factual, engaging and alas sad, insomuch that whilst we now know the cost to the climate of coal usage that the country was built on the work in harsh conditions for many families.Both mention the development of steam engines, their bringing forth coal from the earth, and the society, economics, politics, and culture they produced. Written in the captivating style of his bestselling book The English, Paxman ranges widely across Britain to explore stories of engineers and inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists - but whilst coal inevitably helped the rich become richer, the story told by Black Gold is first and foremost a history of the working miners - the men, women and often children who toiled in appalling conditions down in the mines; the villages that were thrown up around the pit-head. One has to agree with her statement in the conclusion that “if capitalism fosters extractivism, it does not follow that getting rid of capitalism would, at this juncture, eliminate the need for extraction” (203).