David M. Turner, Daniel Blackie. Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coal mining, 1780-1880. Disability History Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. 264 pp. $115.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5261-1815-8.
Reviewed by Pamela L. Dale (University of Exeter)
Published on H-Disability (October, 2018)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)
This is an interesting and ambitious book that should appeal to a wide range of readers. Nonspecialists will certainly appreciate the well-organized chapters and engaging narrative style. On one level, the book works perfectly well as an introductory text, yet there is also real sophistication here. The authors pose important questions about disability history and arrive at several surprisingly controversial conclusions. Alongside this analysis they offer a novel, and at times uncomfortable, reexamination of the British coal industry during an important phase of its development. The introduction clearly and convincingly sets out why the authors believe this time and place, and indeed industry, were so important. However, both the structure and content of the book encourage comparative analysis. Scholars with detailed knowledge of other industries in all parts of the world, from the first stirrings of industrialization to the present day, will find much with which to engage. I was certainly drawn back to a series of occupational health conferences I attended with my supervisor, Jo Melling, at the University of Exeter circa 2000-10, and was struck by the similarities and differences highlighted by contrasting this book with the range of case studies presented and explored in publications subsequent to the conferences. My personal research has concentrated on the period after 1880, but I studied the classic Industrial Revolution at school (General Certificate of Secondary Education [GCSE] level) and as an undergraduate. In both contexts, economic and social history provided the analytical framework. Social historians, in particular, tend to adopt a posture sympathetic to the working people, and the casualties of industrialization were and are very prominent in their accounts. However, issues relating to disabled people and the connection, or otherwise, between work and disability can easily be lost as other “victims” and “struggles” are highlighted. Indeed, a picture of almost universal suffering and exploitation can inadvertently marginalize the experiences of, and special difficulties faced by, disabled people. David M. Turner and Daniel Blackie make the important point that, despite the proliferation of academic studies examining aspects of the Industrial Revolution from a range of different perspectives, “disability history is absent from this intellectual endeavour.” They offer several convincing explanations about why this might be the case, but their most interesting conclusion is that “disability was central to the Industrial Revolution” (p. 2). In a comprehensive review of the literature, the authors use the introductory chapter to show how the neglect of disability issues impoverishes our understanding of the social and economic changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. They make the case for bold new approaches to better capture the experiences of disabled people. In doing so, they also challenge some of the ideas that underpin many leading disability studies publications. Scholars have previously noted the transformative nature of the Industrial Revolution but have tended to focus on the way technological change made disability more visible and more problematic for individuals and communities. Analysis then tends to concentrate on the exclusion of disabled people from lucrative types of employment and their increasing marginalization, stigmatization, and victimization. Poverty and ungenerous or inappropriate forms of economic support, including the mass, and in some cases forced, institutionalization of various groups of long-term sick and disabled people, become key narrative strands of research concentrating on the period circa 1848-1948. As activists have tried, and worryingly often failed, to make the British Welfare State more responsive to the rights, needs, and preferences of disabled people, both working and not, they have often deployed language that harked back to a pre-industrial golden age when disabled people were better treated. I share Turner and Blackie’s skepticism that this golden age ever existed, and appreciate their overall approach. This seeks to avoid generalizations and oversimplifications, and instead takes the lived experiences of disabled people, in and out of work, during a period of major industrial change as their starting point. The focus on the coal industry raised concerns that the study might unduly privilege the experiences of adult men. Male miners are certainly central to later nineteenth-century and twentieth-century discussions about, for instance, the disabling effects of silicosis, pneumoconiosis, and nystagmus. However, the study period embraces eras when women and children were also legally employed underground in coal mines. Turner and Blackie describe how campaigns to restrict and eventually end these practices shaped and reflected contemporary ideas about both disability and the “evils” of industrialization. The crucial 1842 Mines Act, which prohibited women and children under nine years of age from working underground, is rightly flagged, but the authors also usefully remind us that women and children continued to find employment in the coal mining industry after 1842. Some of these individuals were, or became, disabled. The authors suggest that “putting people with impairments at the heart of the story” changes our view of industrialization (p. 2). Disability history, compared to say the previously dominant occupational health history, helps develop new perspectives precisely because it extends analysis “beyond the worlds of work and medicine to include consideration of other important aspects of disabled people’s lives” (p. 13). I certainly welcome the development of a more holistic approach that offers assessments of family life and community roles as well as employment issues. It is a strategy that promotes inclusion and avoids the age and gender biases that might otherwise be inherent in a study of such a masculine industry. I was fully persuaded by the authors’ argument that a more rounded view of lives lived helps restore agency to the disabled people who appear in the study. The sick and injured miners suffered terribly, but rather than embrace victimhood they frequently asserted their rights, demands, needs, and preferences. Where the reader might expect passivity and dependency, Turner and Blackie highlight scope for complex negotiations with medical attendants, employers, co-workers, trade unions, friendly societies, and even the dreaded Poor Law officials. Even when completely unable to work, people are shown to have found ways to retain various cherished identities within part of the wider mining community. The authors obviously take human dignity very seriously. It is the value they place on both the work and the workers that makes their beautifully constructed vignettes come alive. These vignettes both illustrate and, in a sense, transcend the otherwise dense and depressing statistics that relate to the mighty and dangerous coal industry. From the perspective of today, when appalling mining accidents still blight the global industry, it is almost unbelievable that Turner and Blackie report: “In Benson’s estimation, during the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘a miner was killed every six hours, seriously injured every two hours, and injured badly enough to need a week off work every two or three minutes’ ” (p. 3). While major colliery disasters and mass fatalities understandably captured contemporary headlines and, in due course, the attention of historians, Blackie and Turner also usefully consider the devastating impact of far less noteworthy incidents that nonetheless had a terrible human cost. Implicit in this analysis is a concern with trauma, with psychological suffering given as much import as debilitating illnesses and injuries. The book does not dwell on psychiatric casualties and the formal diagnosis of mental illness, but gains much from wider study that embraces mental health in the coalfields from which discussion is drawn. One small omission is perhaps full consideration of fear as well as pain. The authors make very interesting use of several publications by Joanna Bourke, but at various points in the text I found myself pondering links to her uncited book, Fear: A Cultural History (2005). The introductory chapter includes a wealth of interesting detail as well as a guide to reading the rest of the book. A thematic approach helps address previously neglected topics as well as shedding new light on more familiar debates around medical care and welfare provision. Each chapter is important in its own right, although the full value of the book is only realized by reading it in its entirety. However, before considering the chapters in detail, it seems useful to discuss the way Turner and Blackie deal with three very problematic issues that appear at intervals throughout the text. A crucial problem is one of definitions. The language as well as experience of disability is very personal and it is easy to both unintentionally cause offence and be offended. Words, and the lived experiences they seek to capture, also vary significantly across time and place. Personally, I am comfortable to start from the position that anyone who self-identifies as disabled should be recognized as a disabled person, and other people, regardless of any impairment, who reject those labels, are entirely free to do so. However, we understand disability today not in its own terms but through a medico-legal language that evolved to restrict rights to compensation and determine access to health and welfare services. The authors usefully show how coal mining, as a key dangerous industry, was often at the forefront of these developments, and miners and their organizations were significant actors in campaigns around these issues. However, Turner and Blackie’s selection and discussion of cases nonetheless struggles at times to escape the artificial constructs of the contemporary medico-legal terminology deployed in the sources. This difficulty is compounded by the way the reader of today, willingly or not, views the evidence through the distorting lens of past and present medico-legal terminology. Understanding compensation schemes as we do, we can appreciate why the loss of say a finger was viewed as less serious than the loss of a hand. Yet, following Turner and Blackie, we also need to appreciate that the loss experienced by the individual would be highly personal to them, with a unique degree of physical and psychological pain experienced over the whole of the rest of their lives. I think Turner and Blackie have adopted the correct approach to the definition problem, but it never entirely goes away. This is especially problematic when contested definitions underpin disputed statistics deployed in contentious policy debates. The answers to superficially simple questions—such as how many or what proportion of miners were disabled—in their own assessment, that of their co-workers, their employers, or to some agreed definition, at any one moment in time, are elusive and ultimately unknowable. The difficulties only become worse if efforts are made to determine exactly what percentage of this “disability” among coal miners was directly workrelated. The second major problem is the question of how we should value the contribution, in and out of paid employment, of disabled people. My concern is that even thinking in these terms shows the insidious influence of the medico-legal terminology described above and its focus on the needs of a capitalist system of production. However, the question is inescapable in a book such as this and the authors handle it with sensitivity. Turner and Blackie draw on the work of feminist historians to underline the importance of viewing the labor of disabled people on its own terms. There are certainly benefits to this approach, but I would argue also some dangers. Many miners’ lives were ruined by work-related disability, and well-intentioned efforts to appreciate the way people coped as best they could after illness or injury must never be allowed to dissipate the anger necessary to challenge unsafe working practices and inadequate services for sick and disabled people. Turner and Blackie make frequent reference to these issues, and offer a particularly thoughtful discussion in the final chapter, but their conclusions provide as many questions as answers— which is presumably exactly what they intended. While the authors maintain a constant conversation in relation to the problems of definitions and valuing labor, they are perhaps less attuned to the difficulties for the general reader presented with other complex subject matter. The introductory chapter is detailed and informative, but in subsequent chapters the reader’s appreciation of the sources and analysis is dependent on a degree of prior knowledge about a whole range of topics. The thematic approach helps to make the material accessible, but it can weaken the chronological sense of developments. While it is important not to overstate the pace of change, this book does cover the whole period from 1780 to 1880. Testimony collected from and about eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century miners captures a rather different world from that of 1880. Specialists with knowledge of how technologies changed, industries developed, towns expanded, demographics shifted, medical knowledge advanced, welfare arrangements changed, and trade unions evolved will be better able to contextualize what this all meant for the sick and injured miners who rightly take center stage in this study. Students using this as an introductory text should read it in its entirety to fully appreciate how Turner and Blackie see the connections between issues discussed in different chapters. Even a history of British coal mining is complicated by the regional nature of employment practices and welfare systems. The authors usefully concentrate on a small number of geographical areas and, throughdetailed knowledge of these communities, provide the much-needed context mentioned above. Chapter 1 is titled “Disability and Work in the Coal Economy.” In a subsection, it discusses in some detail “the nature and conditions of mine work” (p. 23). The authors, drawing on earlier work by Blackie, strongly make the argument that it is necessary to rethink ideas about disability and the Industrial Revolution. The casualties of mining are extensively dealt with in the existing literature, but the continued participation of disabled mine workers has previously tended to be overlooked. Turner and Blackie assemble some very interesting case studies. Analysis of the pithead and coalfield community as well as the underground workers helps extend focus beyond adult men. Yet, even underground, different groups of miners were employed in a variety of tasks requiring different skill sets and attracting varying levels of reward. Such diversity could create a space for disabled mineworkers even if they were unable to return to their former roles. The authors discuss the apparent continuation of pre-industrial attitudes and practices but paint a realistic picture of the difficulties facing returning injured miners and the conditionality, requiring goodwill from workmates and others, of their acceptance. Turner and Blackie note the social as well as economic status that attached to different roles, with disabled miners risking losing more than pay as a result of illness or accident. Indeed, many miners had a working life that saw them initially advance to more valued work as they increased in skill and strength in early adulthood, but then, whether disabled or not, had to gradually retreat from these more challenging roles as they aged. This was not uncommon in other manual jobs throughout the study period and beyond, although white-collar workers could use continually gained experience to claim seniority and higher wages almost to the end of their working lives. This divergent career path introduced serious unfairness when calculating pension and benefit entitlements, a point that was finally, and imaginatively, dealt with by Barbara Castle and her officials in the 1970s.[1] In chapter 2, “Medicine and the Miner’s Body,” the authors start by confronting an interesting paradox where contemporary actors were struck by both the strength and vulnerability of the miners. A variety of actors promoted an image of a healthful industry and of workers whose courage and prowess marked them as an elite who were characterized by physical robustness. Such a narrative competed, and coexisted, with an alternative picture of the coal mine as a risky place where death lurked and the physical and, in some scenarios, moral health of miners was constantly under threat. As the authors show, these rival images shaped not only public perceptions of coal mining but also miners’ perspectives of themselves. The authors’ commitment to exploring experiences in mining communities as well as mines leads them to usefully explore the impact of reforms originating in public health and industrial health movements. The bodies and, increasingly, minds of miners and their wives and children then become an integral part of the narrative. My personal research in this field has concentrated on the 1930s and I was amazed by how pessimistic local and London-based officials were when discussing trends in mortality and morbidity in mining districts in this earlier period.[2] Turner and Blackie offer a more nuanced, though never rosy-colored, picture. A key theme highlighted by the authors is the expansion of medical knowledge that accompanied increasing state concern with, and surveillance over, all aspects of the coal industry. Consideration is given to the treatment and rehabilitation of accident victims and the links drawn between certain illnesses and working conditions. The brief discussion of women’s reproductive health is interesting, but the chapter really concentrates on the evolution of medical services, their organization and financing, and recent historiography on this and related subjects. The authors conclude that “the quality and effectiveness of the emergency treatment injured miners received from first responders, who were usually their workmates, was highly varied and largely a matter of luck” (p. 69). The patchy nature of medical care in other settings suggests this lottery continued throughout the treatment, recovery, and rehabilitation phases. Yet miners were far from apathetic about this. Collectively, they fought barriers to accessing decent care, and powerful doctors could find themselves under scrutiny when outcomes for patients proved disappointing. Turner and Blackie draw a very useful distinction between the growing confidence with which physical injuries were treated and the lack of certainty, and provision, in dealing with psychological trauma. In chapter 3, “Disability and Welfare,” the authors make excellent use of their extensive knowledge of the mixed economy of welfare. Attention to “the expectations of welfare claimants and providers” provides a particularly interesting perspective that revisits the tension between the rugged “independence” of the workers and the known risks of the industry (p. 94). A focus on the household as a locus of care and the support provided by family members offers a useful counterpoint to other accounts that have tended to focus on institutional solutions and welfare payments. The authors show how the wages of coalminers supported sick and disabled family members, making the loss of the main breadwinner all the more devastating. But older, or impaired, miners could also draw on familial networks of support. While many of the vignettes focus on families destabilized by illness and accidents, there is also discussion, expanded in chapter 4, of the way disabled people formed new partnerships and families. Opportunities for marriage clearly existed, although this theme is underdeveloped across all strands of the existing historiography. Yet the authors are not afraid to deal with difficult themes, including the deliberate exclusion of some disabled people from coalfield communities. In chapters 4 and 5, the authors repeatedly emphasize the conditionality of the acceptance of the disabled individual, with discretion, and discriminatory practices, exercised by kin, co-workers, and trade unionists as well as Poor Law officials. The authors have very interesting things to say about the regionality of the Poor Law and the importance of voluntary welfare schemes in the mining industry. Tension over the allocation of disaster funds is also usefully highlighted. The issues raised speak to twenty-first-century concerns over charitable initiatives that harness outpourings of public grief but struggle to maintain focus and accountability or demonstrate long-term effectiveness. The authors start chapter 4, “Disability, Family and Community,” by drawing a distinction between fatal and nonfatal accidents, again reminding the reader that, despite all the attention given to the former, the latter were the more common experience. In a particularly interesting narrative, they consider how risk in the industry influenced religious beliefs, social practices, and community relations. These themes are strong in the historiography exploring metal mining in Cornwall but can struggle to gain traction in accounts of the larger and more diverse coal industry. Important nineteenth-century changes in access to educational opportunities and changing leisure pursuits are shown to have positive and negative impacts on the image, as well as experiences, of miners. One troubling series of images links impairment with violence in a number of ways. While miners could all too easily fall victim to injuries from dangerous machinery and other pit hazards, they could also injure themselves and fellow workers. This could be through carelessness, even recklessness, at work, but also as a result of drunken brawls and less spontaneous violence associated with strikes. The authors use a number of prosecutions of men, who were both disabled and violent when drunk, to highlight the impaired miner’s continued participation in community activities and their alternative construction as dangerous outsiders or freakish figures of fun. Chapter 5, “The Industrial Politics of Disablement,” takes a rather different view of impairment, and the risks associated with mining, by discussing the industrial politics of disablement. Drawing on recent historiography of metal extraction as well as of coal mining, the book considers the many factors that pushed health and safety of mines up the political agenda. The authors explain the growth of trade unionism in terms of miners’ concerns about illness and injury. Yet collective action, and especially strikes, all too often led to employers putting pressure on disabled workers as a particularly vulnerable group who, the authors suggest, were often vindictively targeted. The disputes about “smart money” and its contested status as sick pay or gratuity are an important part of this story with the employers often painted as the villains. Yet, when funds were under pressure, miners’ organizations also showed a disturbing willingness to divert resources away from disabled members. Mutuality is shown to have had clear limits and an overt concern with “morality” too often served as a cloak for prejudice and discrimination. Interestingly the authors conclude that “unions … were not always useful, supportive or even sympathetic allies in the industrial politics of disability” (p. 172). It is this complexity, and highly nuanced analysis, that is the main strength of the book. I agree with the authors that more needs to be done to integrate both disabled people and a disability history perspective into the wider historiography of the Industrial Revolution. This can only add to the richness of our understanding of the lived experiences of different groups of workers. However, Turner and Blackie make the important point that the aim of this exercise is not to offer “inspirational” tales but to show the challenges that disabled workers faced and the impact of efforts made to ameliorate their difficulties (p. 206). The inadequacy of past arrangements not only debunks the myth of a golden age for the disabled but also acts as a necessary spur to future improvements.
Notes
[1]. Barbara Castle, Fighting All the Way (London: Macmillan, 1993), 466.
[2]. West Riding of Yorkshire Public Health Survey, 1933, MH 66/289, National Archives, London.
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