There was a cruel irony in the collapse of what was left of the Scottish coal industry so soon after the funeral of the lady. It got high marks for timing.
I write here as a veteran of Mick McGahey’s daily press conferences during the ‘Who governs Britain?’ election. It feels like a different world. Correction: it was. The result was a goal-less draw – the electorate decided that neither side deserved to govern Britain in the half-light of February 1974 – but Edward Heath lost power and Mick claimed victory. Five years later Mrs Thatcher arrived with a mission to finish what Heath had started.
The remnant in Scotland employed fewer than 1,000 men in open-cast pits. Most of those jobs went last week with the arrival of the administrators at Scottish Coal Ltd, a company which will not be much mourned.
Its safety record was far from impeccable. At a pit near here, Pennyvenie, there have been three serious incidents since 2000. In the first, a miner was killed by a dumper; in the second, a miner died when he was trapped between two trucks. The third incident ended with the company in the dock of Ayr Sheriff Court over the deaths of two men whose Land Rover was crushed by a 100-tonne juggernaut. Scottish Coal allowed vehicles to operate at the pit with reduced visual fields and without a radar system or closed-circuit TV. It was fined £400,000 for breaches of health and safety regulations.
Only two months ago the company gave a breezy assurance that it had ‘a healthy future’ despite evidence to the contrary. The combination of rising production costs and the falling price of coal finally sank it. Six hundred workers, some of whom might even have bought the implausible ‘healthy future’ theory, are now out of a job in areas of the country – including Ayrshire and Lanarkshire – where unemployment is already high.
But it is not the demise of Scottish Coal Ltd which concerns me; nor is it the virtual disappearance of a notoriously dirty, dangerous industry. It is what happens to the communities which were built on coal and which have seen the reasons for their existence destroyed by the post-industrial revolution of the last 30 years.
Pennyvenie, the open-cast pit where four workers have lost their lives in recent years, is situated in the Ayrshire village of Dalmellington. On the face of it, there is not a lot to commend Dalmellington to the casual visitor. It has a melancholy air, and everywhere one looks there are physical reminders of its two dead industries, coal and iron. What is it there for, exactly?
One recent pilgrim was unable to find accommodation – a hotel or even a plain B&B – within a 20-mile radius. He ended up going for the day. Having inspected it, he came to the conclusion that the village should be demolished and that the people should be ‘re-settled’. He didn’t say where or how.
It does seem a logical solution. There is no need for Dalmellington any more. Pull it down, why don’t you? The same could be said of New Cumnock, which recently won the prestigious ‘Plook on the Plinth’ award, and of other downcast, no longer open cast, Ayrshire and Lanarkshire villages. No doubt there is a case for one or two new Brigadoons, along the lines of the model village being built by Prince Chairlie, where the refugees could be ‘re-settled’ and enjoy their state benefits in conditions of greater comfort.
But there could be a problem with the logical solution. There often is. Let me tell you a small story about Dalmellington by way of illustration.
There is a hill nearby, Mullwharchar, which is considered to be the finest of all Galloway summits. Dalmellington is quite possessive of it. Thirty years ago the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority realised that it had no strategy for disposing of the toxic waste produced by nuclear power. Its eye lit upon Mullwharchar and it resolved to do some drilling to assess the suitability of the hill as Britain’s first nuclear dump.
Dalmellington rose in anger at this monstrous idea. A splendid woman named Maryum Ali, the wife of the local GP, organised the resistance. A personal highlight for me (running the local radio station at the time) was when I was able to report that a reconnaissance vehicle from the UKAEA was stuck in the inhospitable hills. It had to be rescued by the Ayr polis and ended up spending the night in the pound in King Street. How we enjoyed heaping ridicule on an industry which invited our trust in the disposal of deadly waste but could not be trusted to get a vehicle to the site. They were laughed out of town, and Mullwharchar was eventually saved.
So – I come to the moral of the story – I believe the only thing standing in the way of demolishing Dalmellington is the will of the people who live there. They are down but they are far from out. They have shown that they are capable of being roused in their own defence. We need to think hard about how these villages – the former pit villages – are to be helped.
Some years ago, the man who dreamt up the idea of book towns decided that Dalmellington should be the book town of Scotland. His belief – an enlightened one – was that books could regenerate declining communities. A large antiquarian bookshop, and one or two smaller ones, did open in Dalmellington, but then Wigtown, in rather murky circumstances, set up a rival operation. There was no room for both. Wigtown went on to thrive while the original choice – the official book town – dwindled into insignificance.
Still, Dalmellington doesn’t lack potential. You could walk from here into hills so lovely that, as a friend once said, you want to stroke them; or you could take the little bus that leaves the village square on a summer morning and meanders its way through delightful countryside to Castle Douglas; or you could even see a future for the place as a centre of industrial archaeology.
All we need to revive forgotten Scotland is a little vision – a quality always in short supply.
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
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