Jeremy Paxman is a well-known broadcaster who made his name by changing the way in which interviews were conducted with politicians. Prior to him these were largely subservient and polite but without being impolite Jeremy Paxman made it clear that he was representing the viewer. He since went on to develop his broadcasting career by making a series of highly successful historical presentations some of which were based on books he had written. In fact he as fine a historian as he is a broadcaster.

I have not read all his books but recently I read Black Gold - the History of How Coal Made Britain[i] and I think it must be one of his very best. The importance of coal in the development of Britain’s history cannot be overstated. Britain had as much energy in its coal deposits as Saudi Arabia has had in its oil deposits and over the course of the industrial revolution it was largely coal that made it happen both as a source of energy and as a source of profit for subsequent investments in new technologies.

That is very much the national story. Coal was the driver behind the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. The country's enormous appetite for this black gold came from the need for steam to drive new trains and for the Royal Navy to continue to Rule the Waves.

But these extraordinary developments came with a massive price and that is the human cost. Throughout the mining villages of South Wales, the Midlands, North East and Yorkshire from the early years of the 19th century the people who lived and worked in these places worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week. I was going to say they worked nearly all the hours of daylight but of course down the mines there was no daylight and so for most of their lives they rarely saw the sun. This was not just about working men but also their wives, their sons, and their daughters as well. In the book Paxman is not afraid to tell horrible stories about numerous catastrophes including the most tragic of all, Aberfan. Jeremy Paxman and I were born in the same year and so I am sure he has as I do clear memories of Aberfan where a mountain based on the refuse of the coal industry exploded and enveloped the whole village at the cost of many children’s lives. There was of course an extremely long inquiry into this disaster in the process of which many lawyers and others made themselves a fortune billing hours for investigating what for many people was a crime against humanity. Indeed in one inquest a young girl it was explained died of her injuries and her father exploded and said no she was murdered by the Coal Board.

Whilst the miners were suffering their employers were certainly not and Paxman sheds light on the extraordinary sums of money accrued by the landed aristocracy. They made so much money that they did not really know what to do with it and as a result insane projects were embarked on and money was outrageously wasted. For miners the answer to this completely unfair situation was for them to have proper representation and for the mines to be owned and run by the state. In 1947 the Attlee government granted what the miners always longed for in the spate of nationalisations by the post war Labour government. However this just brought a new set of challenges. Paxman shows that successive governments, whether Conservative or Labour, were unable to balance an efficient industry with a happy workforce.

One of the popular myths about the history of the coal industry is that it was the Thatcher government that closed the coal mines but this is not true. The previous Labour government under Harold Wilson closed several hundred as part of a deliberate strategy to somehow make this industry more efficient. More seriously in Wilson's so-called white heat revolution what he saw was that nuclear power would replace coal which eventually must run out. But there was nothing easy about building nuclear power stations and even though France seems to have managed quite well the UK has done very poorly in what was indeed a very promising idea. The coal industry had to go because it was a cruel industry and the Aberfan catastrophe brought this into clear view.

But what did not help the miners’ cause was the leadership of the union by Arthur Scargill and Paxman goes into great detail to tell the terrible story of the miners strike in 1984/85. At that time I was running a food business and although my head office was in Hove on the South Coast for historical reasons the factory was in Thurcroft, near Rotherham in Yorkshire. Most of the workforce in the factory were female and indeed the majority were wives of coal miners in the nearby pit. When the miners went on strike it had a terrible impact on the whole area and indeed rather oddly because it meant they were giving up their own pay my workers went on strike as well. The company was a subsidiary of Pillsbury which was strict in managing its cost and we had no room to give in to the trade union’s claims for that year's pay award. So while Margaret Thatcher and her team were dealing with the miners’ strike, I was dealing with a strike of my own. It was clear to me that we would not get them back without paying some price but I also adopted a different style of negotiation than the rather head-to-head style that Pillsbury had taken. Instead I met the unions informally, not sitting at one end of a table with them at the other end but rather sitting round a table.  I even took them to the pub. I went into discussions about not just money but other conditions from how we could improve the overall terms. It took me nine days to get them back much fewer than the miners’ strike. Their chief shop steward joined our management team and the following year the management played against the workforce at cricket on a pitch right next to the factory.

Paxman finishes by considering the complex question of Climate Change. It is clear that burning coal will obviously lead to significant carbon emissions. There will be those who are pleased to see hat we no longer do that and will criticise China where they are still building new coal fired power stations. However, the Chinese can point out that the British burned coal for over 200 years and so the cumulative effect of the carbon emissions we caused may well be greater. The British burnt more coal than any other nation in history.

Given the importance of this subject, both the contribution that Coal made to the development of the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire, and given the other parts of the story which is that it was a cruel and terrible experience for all of the workers over two centuries it seems strange that there were so few books that go into this detail.  I think Jeremy Paxman has performed a great service to the country by filling that gap with a very well researched story and with extensive coverage of tragedies like Aberfan and the miners’ strike. He tells it like it was.  I have explained that it was not just a Conservative policy to close mines but also clearly a Labour policy but in both cases what is absolutely clear is that hundreds of communities were dismantled, and their sense of betrayal by the political class lingers right up to this moment.

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