This book sheds new light on the human cost of industrialisation by examining the lives and experiences of those disabled in an industry that was vital to Britain's economic growth. If disability has been largely absent from conventional histories of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution has assumed great significance in disability studies. The book examines the economic and welfare responses to disease, injury and impairment among coal workers. It discusses experiences of disability within the context of social relations and the industrial politics of coalfield communities. The book provides the context for those that follow by providing an overview of the conditions of work in British coalmining between 1780 and 1880. It turns its attention to the principal causes of disablement in the nineteenth-century coal industry and the medical responses to them. The book then extends the discussion of responses to disability by examining the welfare provisions for miners with long-term restrictive health conditions. It also examines how miners and their families negotiated a 'mixed economy' of welfare, comprising family and community support, the Poor Law, and voluntary self-help as well as employer paternalism. The book shifts attention away from medicine and welfare towards the ways in which disability affected social relations within coalfield communities. Finally, it explores the place of disability in industrial politics and how fluctuating industrial relations affected the experiences of disabled people in the coalfields.
the ‘unacceptable’, ‘unideal’ children, who lived with physical impairments and were understood to be incapable of ‘improving’ without charitable intervention. Later they were considered to be beyond help or, as Hendrick outlines, ‘threats’ to society. The failure of reformers to meet the needs of these youngsters meant they were subsequently constructed as ‘pathologically’ different from the norm. Two core issues sit at the heart of this chapter: firstly the nature of childhood in late nineteenth-century England, and, secondly, definitions and
antithesis of ideals of sober manliness.26 But at the same time, these stories show ways in which men whose livelihoods and status were threatened by impairment might fall back on the image of the tough, hard-drinking miner as a means of rejecting any associations between physical impairment and vulnerability or weakness. These were ‘disabled’ men determined to demonstrate their physical strength, whatever their impairment. They appear as not just getting into trouble, but positively inviting it, seeking opportunities to test their strength against able-bodied opponents
physical impairment is above all else a ‘problem’ that needs solving. Coalmining not only powered the Industrial Revolution, then, it also shaped emerging understandings and experiences of disability in nineteenth-century Britain that linger on, affecting the lives of disabled people in the present. Consequently, a disability history of British coalmining like this is long overdue. Approach and methodology While disability remains a neglected topic in histories of industrialisation, greater attention has been given to occupational diseases, working-class health and the
-related injuries and strain. The working life of this foot-soldier of capitalist imperialism leads ultimately to physical impairment; disability is presented as the result of his loyal service.37 It is not surprising that Lewis Jones and other politically aware writers responded to the commonplace impairments of the coalfields by creating emblematic disabled characters. The figure of the impaired, maimed or ‘stunted’ 38 wage-labourer within capitalism was a material and symbolic presence from Marx onwards. Marx not only lists disabled people among the ‘ragged’ paupers who, after
profitable ways. Nineteenth-century colliers proudly proclaimed their ‘independence’. However, the flexibility of working arrangements that allowed participation of men with a variety of physical impairments was gradually undermined as the period wore on.132 The rise of ‘industrial time’ and the increasing pace of life brought on by the Industrial Revolution is often regarded as a key factor in the ‘disabling’ of people with impairments.133 As pieceworkers, miners throughout the nineteenth century often worked more to task than time. In the 1840s, Benjamin Martin, a
violence.51 The industrial politics of disablement 173 Mineworkers with pre-existing physical impairments were not automatically insulated from workplace violence. In February 1832, collier David Edwards went to work in a coal pit attached to an ironworks at Blaina, south Wales. Many workers there were engaged in a dispute with their employer and were effectively on strike. Regarded as a blackleg, Edwards soon came to the attention of the notorious ‘Scotch Cattle’ – groups of Welsh miners who terrorised fellow workers that refused to take part in collective action
cross-institutional care provided models for managing other conditions, but new forms of working were again frustrated by the limitations woven into the fabric of the health services. Changing understandings of disease were related to shifting ideas of chronicity. During the 1940s, discussions of chronic patients generally referred to the large hospital populations deemed ‘incurable’ and admitted to old municipal and Poor Law institutions. 4 These patients were generally elderly and infirm, or diagnosed with long-term physical impairments and
Wilson, Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Farnham: Ashgate 2015); Lisa Sheppard and Aidan Byrne, ‘A Critical Minefield: The Haunting of the Welsh Working Class Novel’, in John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan (eds), A History of British Working Class Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), INTRO DU C TIO N 15 pp. 367–84; Laura Wainwright, New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing, 1930–1949 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018). 17 David M. Turner and Daniel Blackie, Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment
blurred the distinction between ‘disease’ and physical impairment.27 Early works on occupational health may have focused on the diseases associated with mineral mining, but, by the end of the eighteenth century, coalmining’s increasing economic importance meant that studies of miners’ diseases began to concentrate more fully on the health of colliers specifically.28 The first full-length study devoted to the injuries of colliers was Edward Kentish’s Essay on Burns (1797), which inquired into the best means of treating coalminers burnt in the mining explosions that were