How Britain’s black miners are reclaiming their place in history

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/24/black-miners-britain-nottingham

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One of the things that attracted Fitzalbert Taylor to becoming a coal miner was the warmth. “It was like I’d emigrated to a different country down there,” says the 88-year-old. “It was so warm. When I was in the building trade, I couldn’t feel my arms or my legs – donkey jacket, two pairs of trousers and you were still cold.”

Taylor moved to the UK from Jamaica in 1954 when he was 26, and spent 25 years working as a miner. Now he has joined about 20 men who are involved in a project that aims to record the experiences of black miners in the UK – Coal Miners of African Heritage: Narratives from Nottinghamshire.

The project will produce a collection of audio recordings and oral histories, along with a booklet to help preserve and share the miners’ stories. The initiative’s founder, historian Norma Gregory, says the role black miners played in the history of British mining industry has been badly neglected. “I’ve searched through so many books, films and archives, with the help of volunteers, and I’ve found very few mentions of miners of other nationalities,” she says.

Gregory is also working with the BBC to produce a programme about the history of black miners, due to be broadcast later this year.

Depictions of Britain’s industrial history tend to focus on white working-class communities, but Gregory’s research into Nottinghamshire’s mining industry has revealed communities of miners from Italy, Lithuania and Poland, as well as the Caribbean islands.

It’s important to recognise that “this country wasn’t built by one set of people”, says Gregory. There are no reliable records of how many non-white miners worked in British mines but Gregory estimates that between the early 50s and the late 80s there were nearly 1,000 men of African-Caribbean origin working in Nottinghamshire mines at any one time. Collieries did not keep records of workers’ ethnicity, and when pits started closing in the 1980s personnel documents were often destroyed, leaving researchers like Gregory to rely on former miners to suggest possible interviewees.

Garrey Mitchell started working at Gedling colliery in Nottingham in 1975, aged 17, and worked there until 1986, when he left to start his own business. He got the job because the manager had known his father, who was also a miner, and who had emigrated from Jamaica in the early 50s. “We were very united down there. You had to be,” says Mitchell. “You had to watch each others’ backs. Colour didn’t come into it. We were all on one level.”

Lincoln Cole, 83, father of the ex-England footballer Andy Cole, worked at Gedling from 1965-87, after he left Jamaica in 1957. “I enjoyed mining, because you got to make friends,” he says. “If a finger got crushed, there would be somebody there to come and give you a helping hand.”

“Once you came back on to the surface and had a shower, then the white folks would stick to themselves and the black folks would stick to themselves,” says Mitchell. “But when you were down there, you were automatically united, because you knew you were all in the same boat.”

Gedling colliery – where many of Gregory’s interview subjects worked – employed men from 15 countries and was described as the “pit of nations” in a 1967 Daily Mirror report. In the 60s, 10% of the pit’s 1,400-strong workforce was thought to have hailed from the Caribbean, and the colliery’s union banner showed a black miner alongside two white colleagues above the words “Brothers beneath the surface”.

The harmony depicted on the banner, however, did not represent race relations in Nottinghamshire. On 23 August 1958, the city saw a 1,000-person-strong race riot, a precursor to the violence that erupted in London’s Notting Hill a week later. Eight people were hospitalised and the Nottingham Evening Post wrote that Nottingham had become like “a slaughterhouse”.

Cole says his introduction to the city in the early 60s wasn’t particularly pleasant. “There were teddy boys with bicycle chains,” he says. “From six o’clock you couldn’t go out, because they would kick you left, right and centre.” While racial tension was simmering over on the streets, it does not feature much in the accounts from below ground. When a colleague used a racial slur against Cole, the colliery manager told the offender to apologise immediately and threatened to sack him. The men report that opportunities for promotion were limited because of their skin colour, and Mitchell says black miners generally brushed off racist comments by colleagues: “There was no use having friction, because it would give a bad atmosphere and [that was] the last thing you wanted.”

When the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike in 1972 and 1974, black miners in Nottingham joined their colleagues on the picket line. However, along with 73% of their fellow Nottinghamshire miners, most did not strike during the 1984-85 strike.

“I stood side by side with the miners who were on strike,” says Mitchell, who did strike in the 80s. “You had to stand with your colleagues, you couldn’t let them down.”

Taylor recalls being asked to stand at the front of the picket line during a strike in the 70s. “If the policemen had seen me at the front, [a black man], you can just imagine how they would have hit me,” he says. “I’d been in this country too long not to know what was going off.”

In an interview with Gregory, Taylor said that the experience persuaded him that industrial action was not for “us black men”. “After the 1972 strike, I said I was never going on a picket line again,” he said.

Many of the ex-miners now suffer from long-term health issues such as emphysema, pneumoconiosis, or “black lung” (coal dust in the lungs), and chronic bronchitis. “It was hard work, because you had to be on your hands and knees,” says Cole, who fractured his hip bone in an accident. “My body was knackered, but it was worth it, because it was secure [work].”

Taylor was forced to take seven months off work after an accident left him with a broken helmet, a “bust head” and a broken jaw. “I didn’t know how bad it was until I resumed work and one of the men said to me: ‘Albert, when you came up that day and I looked at you, I thought you were dead.’”

The project seeks to redress a historical oversight. “I went on the internet to find out about black miners in Britain and there was nothing at all. I was very surprised. We’ve just been left out,” says Mitchell. “I feel hurt by it all, because black people contributed a lot to the mining industry.”