Preface

Mining is a highly dangerous occupation, involving its workers spending many hours underground in ‘inhumane’ conditions, subject to falls of tunnels and to the invasion of gas or of water. It is work that free men rarely wanted to do and so the Pharaohs found slaves and convicts to go there. In later times, men were forced to do this, either for money or also because they had no land, no other job. Mining has virtually disappeared in Britain (and Europe) during my lifetime and the search for metals has been largely transferred to ‘developing’ countries, just as in the early days Europe was the continent to be plundered, and ‘developed’ in the process. This book, which is an account of that search, is humbly dedicated to these miners, who formed their own community, as the work of Clancy Segal and of Slaughter and Henriques has brought out. While my own trajectory led me to a different, and more comfortable, existence, my life has been much influenced by the Hunger Marches of the miners of my youth, by my serving in a regiment of Nottinghamshire miners in the war, by friends as ‘Bevin Boys’ on my return, by the work of the Tavistock Institute in the coalfields after the war, of the political activity of workers in the Fife coalfields, and by the attempts of Arthur Scargill and others to fight to keep the industry in this country.

This work was written because various scholars from abroad (including those at the Muslim College) had asked me to contribute a lecture for them and for CRASSH, the Centre for Arts and Humanities at Cambridge, so they could link their European studies with their homes in the east; but in the end I gave something different and got down to writing the book.