The Yorkshire Miners. A History, Vol. I, by Frank Machin

[p032] The Yorkshire Miners. A History, vol. i, by Frank Machin (National Union of Mineworkers, Yorkshire area, 25s.) Few industries can provide a clearer picture of unmitigated class warfare than the pre-1947 coal industry in this country. Here the employers had. early recognized the need for mutual co-operation against consumer and worker alike. The benefits obtained by combination among the coal-owners served only to reinforce their hostility to any similar action on the part of their employees. From:their often dominant position. on the standing joint committees and the Bench the coal-owners.as a class were further able'to manipulate the forces: of aw-against incipient militancy among the miners. But the Yorkshire miners too had a basis for class solidarity which transcended the place of work. The tradition of mutual self-help developed in response to common problems of poverty, insecurity and disaster, and provided a basis upon which the early trade unions were built. Machin’s first volume describes the growth of trade unionism from the handful of small, isolated but militant branches which existed in the early nineteenth century to the formation of the Yorkshire Federation in 1881, and from his narrative a picture of the class struggle clearly emerges. ose Emerges, since the author is not so much concerned to describe a period of working-class history as to trace the development of an_ institution—the Yorkshire Miners’ Federation (now the Yorkshire area of the National Union of Mineworkers), by which the book is sponsored. Yet its pages adequately catalogue the weapons of the employing class: from the lock-out and victimization, to company unionism and the 1865 version of ‘profit-sharing’. The Yorkshire Federation is formed in the last few pages of 61

[p033] LABOUR REVIEW the book by a merger of two previously existing associations covering south and west Yorkshire respectively, but already these latter organizations are to be found opposing the actions of local branches. Perhaps in his second volume Machin will show how the Barnsley bureaucracy first became alienated from the village communities upon whose militancy it was founded and was finally submerged in an even more unwieldy organiz- ation. If so, his work should certainly provide the source material for a living history of the Yorkshire miners. JOHN PEEL Bourgeois Democracy