4th October 2024 – Radical dissent: Mining, workers education, community.

The event focuses on the enduring impact of the miners’ strike at the fortieth anniversary and on the importance of the role of miner’s education. Professor Emeritus Linden West will present the outcome of his research on the Kent mining community, and Dr Sharon Clancy will give her perspectives on miner’s education in the North Notts/NE Derbyshire coalfields. We explore the ongoing tensions and bitterness, as well as spaces for healing, and themes such as cosmopolitanism and internationalism versus parochialism.

The event features two contributions:

• Linden West – Wilful remembering: the Kent Miners, workers’ education and creating a participative democracy, 1920-1985.
  Linden West’s talk embodied the constant struggle between forgetting and memory, in a context where the powerful have constructed miners as an ‘enemy within’, and industrial ‘Luddites’. The talk represented a kind of backward travelling, using oral history, to revisit the history of workers’ education in a mining community as part of our contemporary struggle to reinvigorate notions of the common good and popular education. The work culminated in an exhibition – Radical dissent, the Kent Miners and workers’ education – curated at the Betteshanger Miners’ Museum.
  
  What emerges is the complexity of working-class history, disparaged in neo-liberal condescension and over-simplified in progressive thought: a history of contention and struggle, yet rich, in the stories people tell, in experiment in dialogical, democratic, and co-operative learning.  We bear witness to an internationalist spirit and the opportunities to study locally as well as in residential university education, and internationally. It is a story questioning over-simplistic distinctions between technical and liberal education, or the meaningfulness, locally, of the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) and the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) conflict.
  
  The stories illuminate perpetual tension between conviction and a spirit of openness and doubt in learning: between commitment to an ideal – like Communism – and its questioning in the light of troubling experience. We encounter the role of liberation theology among some in the Coalfield and of non-conformist religious sensibilities in cultivating democratic learning. We note the importance attached to sustainability and how the position of some of the women of the Coalfield shifted profoundly during strikes.
  
  
• Sharon Clancy – Northeast Derbyshire miners – Training, the importance of vocationalism and the transition from collier to miner.
  Sharon Clancy’s talk examines, through oral history testimony, perspectives on miner’s education in the North Notts/NE Derbyshire coalfields.  Firstly, Sharon will explore the experience of her father, and his journey from miner to social worker, via day release provision offered by the National Union of Mineworkers, in conjunction with the University of Sheffield. The scheme enabled engaged and intelligent men to seek to further their education and was initiated in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire in 1953 by Bert Wynn, the Trade Unionist, Communist, and later Labour Party politician who was Secretary for the Derbyshire Area of the National Union of Mineworkers from the late-1940s up to his death in 1966. Sharon also talked about the importance of an adult educational approach in miner’s education underground and how this balanced both a vocational and a broader ‘lifewide’ non-vocational approach which respected the lives and experiences of the mining community, particularly when the transition took place from manual coal mining to machine mining.

The event concludes with an open discussion and reflection on the contributions, as well as future plans for the research circle in 2025.