Download or read book B L Coombes written by Bill Jones and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Miner s Day written by B. L. Coombes and published by . This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited with an introduction by Peter Wakelin. Part of the Modern Wales series. Originally published in 1945, Miner's Day tells of the coalmining life of the thirties in south Wales.

Download or read book B L Coombes written by BILL. WILLIAMS JONES (CHRIS.) and published by . This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of the life and work of Bertie Coombs, writer of fiction and non-fiction material, born in Herefordshire, who followed a career in coal mining, and who through his short stories and articles portrayed the hardship and comradeship of the South Wales mining community. New Edition. Originally Published in 1999.

Download or read book With Dust Still in His Throat written by Chris Williams and published by . This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The real history of the mines ought to be written by a man still at work underground. The dust should still be in his throat as he was writing-it seemed to me-then it would be authentic. Despite my searching, I knew of no man who answered this description.' At the end of a detailed, seemingly dispassionate, description of a shift underground, Bert Coombes felt compelled to tell his readers why he had become a writer. Expressed here in characteristic style, with direct prose and use of everyday language and imagery, his convictions and fundamental purpose in writing remained guiding principles throughout his life and literary career. His work received widespread praise from critics such as J. B. Priestley and Cyril Connolly for its accessibility, authenticity and humanity. This anthology represents four types of writing - all published here for the first time: autobiography; the short story; the novel; and the diary. His clear and unsentimental eye allowed Coombes to observe the regular pattern and rhythm of life and to appreciate the way in which on any day there would have to be a consideration of matters relating to work, to politics, to domestic and personal issues, to the weather and world of nature, and to enriching diversions such his beloved violin. His vision is essentially one of balance and normality and through it we begin to understand how this society survived, how its citizens were not the stage army of historians, but real men and women.

Download or read book Useful Toil written by Proffessor John Burnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Useful Toil engages freshly and directly with the `ordinary' people of the nineteenth century. John Burnett has assembled twenty seven telling extracts from the diaries and autobiographies of working people - wheelwrights and stone-masons, miners and munition workers, butlers and kitchen maids, navvies, carpenters, potters and ship assistants to list only a few. The men and women who speak in these pages concentrate on their working experiences, though they also write about their homes and their fears. They thus reveal, often unconsciously, the essence of their attitudes, values and beliefs. Burnett's broad and sympathetic introductions focus and contextualise the wealth of material. These stories provide the antithesis of `great name' history, yet they constantly touch on human experiences that are timeless and universal.

Download or read book Miners Lung written by Arthur McIvor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur McIvor and Ronald Johnston explore the experience of coal miners' lung diseases and the attempts at voluntary and legal control of dusty conditions in British mining from the late nineteenth century to the present. In this way, the book addresses the important issues of occupational health and safety within the mining industry; issues that have been severely neglected in studies of health and safety in general. The authors examine the prevalent diseases, notably pneumoconiosis, emphysema and bronchitis, and evaluate the roles of key players such as the doctors, management and employers, the state and the trade unions. Throughout the book, the integration of oral testimony helps to elucidate the attitudes of workers and victims of disease, their 'machismo' work culture and socialisation to very high levels of risk on the job, as well as how and why ideas and health mentalities changed over time. This research, taken together with extensive archive material, provides a unique perspective on the nature of work, industrial relations, the meaning of masculinity in the workplace and the wider social impact of industrial disease, disability and death. The effects of contracting dust disease are shown to result invariably in seriously prescribed lifestyles and encroaching isolation. The book will appeal to those working on the history of medicine, industrial relations, social history and business history as well as labour history.

Download or read book The common writer in modern history written by Martyn Lyons and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book underlines the importance of writing for the subordinate classes, and the variety of uses to which it was put. In eleven new studies by thirteen leading historians of scribal culture, it foregrounds the ‘common writer’ and contributes to a ‘New History from Below’. The book presents pauper letters, ego-documents, life-writing of various kinds, soldiers’ and emigrants’ correspondence, handwritten newspapers and graffiti in streets and prisons, analysing the major genres of ‘ordinary writings’. The studies draw on different disciplines, including cultural history, sociology and ethnography, folklore studies, palaeography and socio-historical linguistics. They range from the early modern Hispanic Empire to twentieth-century Australia, including studies of modern Britain, Iceland, Finland, Italy, Germany, South Africa and the USA. The book demonstrates the importance of studying manuscript culture to give a voice, a presence and dignity to the ordinary protagonists of history.

Download or read book The Women and Men of 1926 written by Sue Bruley and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work on the miners' Lock-Out of 1926 tends to focus on the perspective of the National Union of Mineworkers, while nothing has been written which attempts to examine, for example, how miner's wives coped for six months without pay. This book investigates the Lock-Out from the perspective of gender relations.

Download or read book Disability in industrial Britain written by Kirsti Bohata and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) license, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust. Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain’s most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book looks at British coal through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miners and their families. A diverse range of sources are used to examine the economic, social, political and cultural impact of disability in the coal industry, looking beyond formal coal company and union records to include autobiographies, novels and existing oral testimony. It argues that, far from being excluded entirely from British industry, disability and disabled people were central to its development. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability history, disability studies, social and cultural history and representations of disability in literature.

Download or read book Our Mothers Land written by Angela V John and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume marks the twentieth anniversary of the first publication of this groundbreaking book. It reflects the pioneering research of its contributors to the development of modern Welsh women’s history. The eight chapters range widely across time (1830-1939) and place, from exploring working class women’s community sanctions and the perils facing collier’s wife to the very different lifestyles of ironmasters’ wives. They also tackle the idealised images of respectable Welsh women in periodicals and the tragic reality of those who took their own lives as well as showing us the transgressive actions of suffrage rebels. They examine how women carved out space within movements such as temperance and track the fluctuating fortunes of women’s employment and domestic life from the Great War to the eve of the Second World War. This volume makes available once more a book that has become a classic in its field and a vital part of the historiography of modern Wales. This expanded edition also brings us up to date. It reveals the research and publications of the last two decades and comments upon the extent to which Wales has moved beyond being the familiar ‘land of our fathers’. Written in a lively and accessible style, it nevertheless draws upon a wealth of research and expertise and should appeal to both the academic community and to a much wider readership.

Download or read book Mastering Iron written by Anne Kelly Knowles and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry. In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, Knowles reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel. Richly illustrated with dozens of original maps and period art work, all in full color, Mastering Iron sheds new light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.

Download or read book The British Miner in the Age of De Industrialization written by Jörg Arnold and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British coal industry no longer exists and yet the figure of the coal miner lives on in the British cultural imagination. In feature films and documentaries, miners are typically portrayed as proletarian traditionalists working in a dying industry. Taking this perspective, the 1984/85 miners' strike seems a desperate last stand against forces much bigger than the miners themselves -- not just the Thatcher government but the tide of historical change itself. In this ground-breaking study, Jörg Arnold challenges a declinist reading of the people working in one of Britain's most important energy industries. The study makes extensive use of previously inaccessible records to offer a new account of the British miner in the age of de-industrialisation. The book situates the miners in broader structures of feeling, and reconstructs the miners' sense of the past and the future. Arnold argues that Britain's miners went through a cyclical movement -- from loser to winner and back again -- as Britain underwent a de-industrial revolution in the final decades of the twentieth century. The book reinserts the industry's 'new dawn' of the 1970s into the story of coal and shows that the miners wielded real power. The industry's reversal of fortunes, inscribed in Plan for Coal (1974), proved short-lived. It was significant all the same. Its significance, the book argues, did not lie in affecting the long-term trajectory of the coal industry. Rather, the 'new dawn' was important in raising the political and cultural stakes. The miners found themselves at the centre of sharply conflicting visions of the future at a critical juncture in Britain's history. The figure of the coal miner became invested with sharply contrasting characteristics: hero and villain, underdog and enemy, proletarian traditionalist and standard bearer of Socialist advance. The miners were no mere spectators in this process. They were agents, thought to be uniquely powerful by their numerous opponents, and half believing in this power themselves. The miners' special nature, however, jarred with the aspiration to lead an ordinary life, producing tensions that were most cruelly exposed in the year-long strike of 1984/1985.

Download or read book John Lehman written by A. T. Tolley and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1987-12-15 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the outstanding editors of this century, John Lehmann founded New Writing and London Magazine as well as other literary journals. He also wrote poems, two novels and a distinguished literary autobiography. All aspects of Lehmann's work are discussed in this book of recollections and essays of friends, critics and other writers.

Download or read book John Lehmann written by A. Trevor Tolley and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1987 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the outstanding editors of this century, John Lehmann founded New Writing and London Magazine as well as other literary journals. He also wrote poems, two novels and a distinguished literary autobiography. All aspects of Lehmann's work are discussed in this book of recollections and essays of friends, critics and other writers.

Download or read book To Exercise Our Talents written by Christopher Hilliard and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In twentieth-century Britain the literary landscape underwent a fundamental change. Aspiring authors--traditionally drawn from privileged social backgrounds--now included factory workers writing amid chaotic home lives and married women joining writers' clubs in search of creative outlets. In this brilliantly conceived book, Christopher Hilliard reveals the extraordinary history of "ordinary" voices. In capturing the creative lives of ordinary people--would-be fiction-writers and poets who until now have left scarcely a mark on written history--Hilliard sensitively reconstructs the literary culture of a democratic age.

Download or read book Orwell in Context written by B. Clarke and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-07-12 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold new reading of Orwell's work focuses upon his representation of communities and the myths that shape them. It analyzes his interpretations of class, gender and nationality within the context of the period. The book uses a range of texts to argue that Orwell attempted to integrate 'traditional' communal identities with socialist politics.

Download or read book Coal Cultures written by Derrick Price and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-19 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coal is the commodity that powered the technologies that made the modern world. It also brought about unique communities marked by a high degree of social solidarity and self-help. Mining was central to working class life, drawing rural populations into industrial labour, but it often took place in picturesque landscapes, so that its black spoil heaps became a central symbol of the degradation of pastoral life by the demands of an extractive industry. Throughout Europe and the USA photographers have pictured the characteristic landscapes of the industry, and continue to do so as strip mining devastates huge areas of land. Not only landscape photography but also documentary, portraiture, photojournalism and art photography have been used in order to portray mines and miners. This book presents three interlinked strands of investigation. The first is the way in which the production of coal created paradigmatic communities grounded in particular landscapes. The second concerns the role of photography in exploring, delineating and critiquing mining communities. This in turn involves an examination of the aesthetic and social characteristics of a number of genres of photography. Lastly, it considers the growth and decline of these sites, the geographic shift of the industry to other places, and the re-presentation of traditional localities through the lens of the heritage industry and industrial tourism.