‘The Black Jock Manager’? Mine management professionals in the Scottish coal industry, 1911-67

"The forces of capital and labour have arguably dominated the grand narrative of the nineteenth century British coal industry. However, by the twentieth century these forces were joined by increasingly distinctive groupings in the forms of mine management professionals and junior officials. With a few exceptions, histories of both the pre- and post-nationalised British coal industry have either tended to completely disregard managers and the associated mining professions as an entity, or to assume that they were entirely synonymous with private owners or the NCB – to be referred to under the category of ‘management’. By deploying the Scottish coal mining industry as a case study, this paper challenges the latter assumption, and highlights the importance of the study of managers within both structures and as social agents in this and other industries. It suggests that the generally received representation of managers in the historiography has been shaped by the dominant paradigm and coloured by rhetoric rather than detailed research and analysis of the relevant primary sources. Instead this paper shows how structure, process and agency all played a part in shaping the role, actions and composure of managers in the industry. It does so by comparing trends in the industry in its private and then nationalised formats. Prior to nationalisation in 1947, although the experience varied between companies, and even collieries, managers in the Scottish industry were generally afforded a lowly status and operated within limited confines. The Coal Mines Act of 1911 had some impact on the training of managers but most managers had little more than a basic education and received vocational training underground. For those mine management professionals who received formal technical education, this was often carefully controlled by mining companies whose financing of the main mining education providers in Scotland, the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College (later Royal Technical College, and after 1964, the University of Strathclyde) and Heriot Watt College (Heriot Watt University) in Edinburgh, enabled them to direct the curriculum, awards-systems and appointment of the staff to the institutions’ departments of mining. Moreover, many managers were little more than technical supervisors, with operational decisions generally taken by colliery agents or boards of directors. The pre-nationalised Scottish coal mining industry duly resembled Elbaum and Lazonick’s observations of ‘atomistic, nineteenth-century economic organisation’, with little evidence of the ‘visible hand’ of the professional manager. Yet there were more than stirrings of a conscious mine management profession by the 1930s and 1940s, vocal in its criticisms of the status of managers and the way in which the industry was being run, as well as of their status. Nationalisation greatly altered the status of this profession, with improved pay and conditions for managers, and professional development and career advancement opportunities not generally enjoyed under private control. It initiated also trade union representation and recognition (in the form of the British Association of Colliery Management). Yet the National Coal Board’s production goals and targets placed great strain on colliery managers. In Scotland, this became particularly pronounced after the mid-1950s, with the introduction of the Scottish power loading agreement (1955), with colliery closures at a peak (1958-63), and finally the implementation of the National Power Loading Agreement (1966). It was further exacerbated by periodically inconsistent political intervention at a national level, poorly judged initial planning at a Divisional level, and a reliance on some inexperienced and unsuitable appointees at tactical (and strategic) levels of management. In their recent survey of the historical development of British management, John Wilson and Andrew Thomson remarked that ‘management needs to be studied in practice as well as in theory’. Many studies of management history (located as they are within wider business literature) can be judged to be strong on the latter; few have eschewed the need for examining managers as conscious social actors within their widest setting. However, despite the importance attached to plant-level management by leading researchers in the field of industrial relations, few historians have devoted time to understanding the social behaviour of managers. At the same time, historical studies tend to assume that managers sit comfortably as members of the middle class. In contrast, colliery managers and associated mining professionals, like a good many managers in other industrial concerns, particularly at operational and tactical levels (as evidenced by a number of post-war sociological studies), were far more likely to have been promoted from the shop floor and have different social and cultural points of reference to their counterparts in commerce or the service industries. Thus this paper assumes a wider significance by highlighting the importance of detailed studies of managers in British industry in the twentieth-century within their social context."