Looking back to the days when coal was king

A new exhibition examining the history of mining in Fife reveals how the industry still has an impact on today's Scotland. James Robertson reports Bowhill, Valleyfield, Wellesley; Michael, Muiredge, Frances; Jenny Gray, Lady Helen, Lady Blanche; Muircockhall, Blairadam, Little Raith. There is something poetic in the way the names roll, evoking notions of pride in unremitting labour, unity in poverty, resilience in hard times. They are the names of Fife collieries and they map an identity which still goes bone-deep in entire communities, even though the people survive by other means these days, and only one deep mine - Longannet, the last not just in Fife but in the whole of Scotland - remains open.

A map of 1914, one of the items in a new exhibition, When Coal Was King, on the history of Fife mining which opened this weekend at Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery, marks around 60 functioning mines in the kingdom. Some names are for ever associated with disaster: Valleyfield, where 35 men died after an explosion in 1939; or Michael, where fire killed nine in 1967. At least 1750 miners were killed in Fife collieries from the mid-19th century to the 1990s, mostly in individual accidents but some in those bigger events which would have crowds gathered for hours in dreadful anticipation at the pithead. At the industry's peak, in the 1920s, some 27,500 people were employed by the coal companies - a quarter of the Fife workforce. Add to them the jobs which were ancillary to or dependent on mining, and you get some indication of the truth of the title of the exhibition: coal was king in Fife. Mining began 700 years ago and was dominant for two centuries. Its impact remains in the landscape, in the people and in their towns and villages.

Until 1799, Scottish miners were little more than serfs bound to the landowners for whom they toiled. Even after that date, the coal companies controlled their lives, deducting the price of house rent, doctor's fees, even fire-coal from their wages. Miners had to pay for their own tools and for their repair. Improvements in housing or working conditions came only slowly, and always had to be fought for. In 1946, just prior to nationalisation, only 14 out of Fife's 34 collieries had pithead baths; after nationalisation they all got them. Small wonder that politics was integral to the lives of mining communities, spilling over into what little time for leisure and education there was. The very first Miners' Gala in Scotland, in Kirkcaldy in 1871, was held to celebrate the securing of an eight- hour day.

Of course coal had other Scottish kingdoms, such as Ayrshire, Midlothian, Clackmannan and Lanarkshire. The country's economy was rooted in mining and even those who had no connection with the industry often felt a profound admiration and sympathy for those who laboured underground. One of the abiding images of the 1984-5 strike is Mick McGahey's solid, tight-lipped stance beside the flamboyant Arthur Scargill. Not everybody agreed with McGahey's gravel-voiced analysis of the capitalist system, but they respected the position he argued from, especially, perhaps, in Scotland. There was, ultimately, no way of separating the politics from everything else in a mining life. "Communists don't infiltrate unions, we are born into them," McGahey put it in 1974.

Often isolated geographically or socially, entrusting their lives to one another underground, miners learned the value of mutual support. The Randolph Wemyss Memorial Hospital was built in 1908 from funds raised partly by the miners themselves. It included a tunnel which ran from the Wellesley pit at Buckhaven to the hospital for the speedy transfer of accident victims. There was also the social role of Miners' Institutes, or the Goth pubs, such as the one which still exists at Cardenden, which were co-operatively owned and all profits from which were ploughed back into the community. Outside working hours, a whole range of activities developed. Athletics, cycling, boxing, football, pigeon and greyhound racing (doos and dugs) were enthusiastically pursued, as were drama and music (playwright Joe Corrie and accordionist Jimmy Shand were both miners).

If life revolved around the work of the men, women played crucial roles either at home or as surface workers, and they took on increasingly political roles, especially during the great strikes of 1912, 1926 and, of course, the 1980s. All this, along with a section on what coal is and how it affected the geology of Fife, is covered in the exhibition.

In fact, the main problem facing curators Gavin Grant and Emma Nicolson seems to have been the sheer volume of artefacts available to them. These include dozens of warning signs and work instructions, home-made placards from the 1984-5 strike, helmets of various shapes and designs, safety equipment, wage-slips, trade union banners, brass band instruments and colliery football strips. There are brooches, a jewellery box and even a chair beautifully carved out of "parrot coal" (so-called because of the noise it made when burning), paintings and cartoons by miners, and photographs covering every aspect of pit life from the 19th century to the present. One shows the Queen, in an immaculate white boiler-suit, opening the Seafield colliery in 1958; another shows Seafield's towers being demolished by explosives in 1988.

The irony is that vast reserves of high quality coal, particularly under the Forth, were effectively abandoned when the closures of the 1980s took place. In place of skills, knowledge and seams developed over generations came "cheap" imports of low-grade coal and the return to open-cast mining. The bitterness still felt about the strike comes from a heart-felt belief that the economic arguments used by Margaret Thatcher and Ian MacGregor were a front for the destruction of the strongest residual base of community socialism left in the UK. At a WEA-organised event in Cardenden last year, men and women delivered their own accounts of 1984-5 in a powerful, articulate and utterly natural Scots, lamenting that communities once so self-contained and inured to adversity were now struggling to cope with dissolution, drugs, vandalism and unemployment.

When Coal Was King, however, is very much an open-ended display, not a valediction. There is a resource room, where people can bring in artefacts and add their own memories to the archive. It would be too easy to see this as an exercise in nostalgia, a rose-tinted look back to days which were grim, dirty and dangerous. But the organisers are well aware that feelings about mining and the strike run as deep as the mines themselves, and are still very much alive.

Apart from fishing, it is hard to think of an industry which has shaped the characters of communities as powerfully as coal-mining. This exhibition, one of four which Fife Council Museums are mounting this year to explain the continuing legacy of coal to the region, demonstrates that admirably. Walking around it, you feel not just that you are revisiting the past, but that that past is indelibly imprinted on what Fife now is.

When Coal Was King is at Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery (01592 412860) until October 15 (Monday to Saturday, 10.30am to 5.00pm; Sunday 2.00 to 5.00pm. Admission is free)

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