Download or read book These Poor Hands written by Bill Jones and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2002-11-09 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These Poor Hands: The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales', was first published in June 1939. It was an instant bestseller, and its fame catapulted its author into the front rank of 'proletarian writers'. B. L. Coombes, an English-born migrant, had lived in the Vale of Neath since before the First World War, but only turned to writing in the 1930s as a way of communicating the plight of the miners and their communities to the wider world. "These Poor Hands" presents, in a documentary style, the working life of the miner as well as the author's experiences in the lock-outs of 1921 and 1926. It demonstrates Coombes' desire to offer an accurate account of the lives of miners and their families, and carries a sincere moral charge in its description of the waste of human potential that is industrial capitalism in decline. Long out of print, "These Poor Hands" has been recognised for over sixty years as the classic miner's autobiography.

Download or read book These Poor Hands the Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales 1939 written by Bert Lewis Coombes and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Download or read book These Poor Hands The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales written by B. L. Coombes and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coombes' title These Poor Hands first published in 1939, was an instant best-seller, catapulting the author to the forefront of proletarian writers. Coombes was born in England, but he lived for a large part of his in the Vale of Neath, South Wales, and as the economic problems of the 30s worsened, he turned to writing as a way to spread the news of the plight of miners and their communities to the wider world. He presented the daily life of miners in documentary fashion, with special attention to the damaging lockouts of 1921 and 1926, These Poor Hands retains the power to astonish readers with its description of the ways that unfettered capitalism can lay waste to pure human potential.

Download or read book These Poor Hands the Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales by B L Coombes written by B. L. Coombes and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Bibliography of Industrial Relations written by G. S. Bain and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1979-03-29 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reference book comprising a bibliography aiming to bring together secondary source interdisciplinary material on labour relations in the UK between the years 1880 and 1970 - covers employees attitudes, trade unions and employees associations, employers organizations, the labour market and working conditions, etc.

Download or read book B L Coombes written by William D. Jones and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive study of one of the most distinctive voices of the south Wales coalfield. Considered by Raymond Williams to be 'the most effective writing about mining life in South Wales', the work of B. L. Coombes portrays coal-mining and coalfield society in south Wales in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in England in 1893, Coombes began to work in the mines before the First World War, coming to prominence as a miner-writer in the late 1930s. His autobiography, These Poor Hands, was published in 1939 and was followed by two further books, Those Clouded Hills and Miners Day, as well as by hundreds of shorter pieces of fiction and non-fiction Drawing on new archival sources as well as on Coombes's published work, this volume examines the man, his writings and the society of which he was a part.

Download or read book The 1926 Miners Lockout written by Hester Barron and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The miners' lockout of 1926 was a pivotal moment in British twentieth-century history. Investigating issues of collective identity and action, Hester Barron explores the way that the lockout was experienced by Durham's miners and their families, illuminating wider debates about solidarity and fragmentation within working-class communities.

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 The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes written by Jonathan Rose and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark book traces the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. Using innovative research techniques and a vast range of unexpected sources such as workers' memoris, social surveys and library registers, Rose shows which books people read, how and why they educated themselves, and what they knew. In the process he shines a bold new light on working class politics, ideology, popular culture and the life of the mind. This book has won the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award 2001, the SHARP History Book Prize, the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History 2001 and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award. Book jacket.

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 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bert Coombes settled in south Wales in 1909, where he worked as a miner for more than forty years. He was motivated to write after witnessing the death of two work mates underground, and he determined to tell his truth about the lives of miners and their families. His first book These Poor Hands was acclaimed by critics such as J. B. Priestley and Cyril Connolly and is considered to be among the most authentically vivid accounts ever written about mining. It describes with moving simplicity the harsh conditions in which he and his comrades worked and lived and the bond which existed between them in the face of poverty, hunger, danger and death. These Poor Hands was followed by several other books, all consistent in their philosophy, style and integrity - there is no hint of sentimentality, just immense sympathy for the miners' lot, its hardship and its humour. As the Times Literary Supplement noted in 1974, 'he was one of the few proletarian writers of the 1930s who were impressive as writers rather than proletarians'. As a result of his success Coombes became a frequent broadcaster and his Plan for Britain was published in the Picture Post. This excellent introduction to the life and work of Bert Coombes is valuable not just for its penetrating assessment of Coombes, but for the light that it sheds on the social and industrial context in which he lived. His writing articulated the social and economic injustice of contemporary capitalism and has enduring value because of the way in which it gives imaginative expression to the belief that working people should have greater control over their well-being and destiny.

Download or read book Men and Menswear written by Laura Ugolini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite increasing academic interest in both the study of masculinity and the history of consumption, there are still few published studies that bring together both concerns. By investigating the changing nature of the retailing of menswear, this book illuminates wider aspects of masculine identity as well as patterns of male consumption between the years 1880 and 1939. While previous historical studies of masculinity have focused overwhelmingly on the moral, spiritual and physical characteristics associated with notions of 'manliness', this book considers the relationship between men and activities which were widely considered to be at least potentially 'unmanly' - selling, as well as buying clothes - thus shedding new light on men's lives and identities in this period.

Download or read book Writing the 1926 General Strike written by Charles Ferrall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the literary response to the 1926 General Strike and sheds light on the relationship between modernist politics and literature.

Download or read book The Absent minded Imperialists written by Bernard Porter and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British empire was a huge enterprise. To foreigners it more or less defined Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its repercussions in the wider world are still with us today. It also had a great impact on Britain herself: for example, on her economy, security, population, and eating habits. One might expect this to have been reflected in her society and culture. Indeed, this has now become the conventional wisdom: that Britain was steeped in imperialism domestically, which affected (or infected) almost everything Britons thought, felt, and did. This is the first book to examine this assumption critically against the broader background of contemporary British society. Bernard Porter, a leading imperial historian, argues that the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad. Many Britons could hardly have been aware of it for most of the nineteenth century and only a small number was in any way committed to it. Between these extremes opinions differed widely over what was even meant by the empire. This depended largely on class, and even when people were aware of the empire, it had no appreciable impact on their thinking about anything else. Indeed, the influence far more often went the other way, with perceptions of the empire being affected (or distorted) by more powerful domestic discourses. Although Britain was an imperial nation in this period, she was never a genuine imperial society. As well as showing how this was possible, Porter also discusses the implications of this attitude for Britain and her empire, and for the relationship between culture and imperialism more generally, bringing his study up to date by including the case of the present-day USA.

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 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 Bread Winner written by Emma Griffin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The overlooked story of how ordinary women and their husbands managed financially in the Victorian era – and why so many struggled despite increasing national prosperityNineteenth century Britain saw remarkable economic growth and a rise in real wages. But not everyone shared in the nation’s wealth. Unable to earn a sufficient income themselves, working-class women were reliant on the ‘breadwinner wage’ of their husbands. When income failed, or was denied or squandered by errant men, families could be plunged into desperate poverty from which there was no escape.Emma Griffin unlocks the homes of Victorian England to examine the lives – and finances – of the people who lived there. Drawing on over 600 working-class autobiographies, including more than 200 written by women, Bread Winner changes our understanding of daily life in Victorian Britain.

Download or read book People Places and Passions written by Russell Davies and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It takes a different view of the history of Wales, examining a panorama of different emotions and experiences – laughter, happiness, fear, anger, adventure, lust, loneliness, anxiety – to give an entertaining and exciting new history to Wales. a wide range of sources are used to present the ambitions and anxieties which drove and destroyed Welsh people The book’s literary style and the fact that it follows earlier successful studies by the author should ensure an audience.