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Callum Cant is the author of Riding for Deliveroo and coauthor of Feeding the Machine. He writes for the Guardianon strikes, the future of work and workers’ rights. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex and co-editor of Notes from Below, a journal of worker writing. Matthew Lee is a librarian and independent researcher and co-editor of Notes from Below. He is a contributing author to the upcoming book Higher Education’s Labor Upsurge.

For issue #187 of The Internationalist, Cant and Lee narrate how in early 20th-century Welsh coal mines, miners endured suffocating darkness, constant mortal peril, and brutal physical labor—yet it was precisely this hidden, subterranean world that forged unbreakable solidarity among workers and became a secret haven for revolutionary ideas.

In the Dark Recess of the Mine

Every detailed description of coal mining lingers on how dark the work was:

The darkness of the mine is indescribable. You push out your hand to feel it, and your hand goes through the solid blackness. There is no gleam of light or even relief of shadow. The darkness weighs on a man; it is as much as torture to the eyes as blinding light would be.

Coal was only distinguishable from the rock surrounding it because it reflected a little more lamplight. Those who worked the dayshift in the winter could go for almost a week at a time without seeing the sun. In this respect, at least, the nightshift could be an advantage. As miners climbed up to the pitheads the glow of the steelworks up and down the Valleys cast a red moonlight over their faces. The next morning, they emerged back into the light in scenes that could be blissful idylls or coated in coal dust, depending on the direction of the wind.

Geological variation meant that each seam could have a different kind of ‘top’ (clod, rock or cliff top) and require a different method of securing it against collapse. The gases encountered could be equally variable, from flammable fire- damp to choking whitedamp. The tools of work were mandrils, shovels, prising-bars, hatchets, explosives, boring tools and drills, all purchased at the miners’ own expense. Knowing when and how to use each was a matter of hard- won experience, and mistakes could be fatal. Lying on their side, miners would spend hours patiently digging out a groove under a foot or two of coal to undermine it. Eventually, the weight of the coal would do the rest, and a slab would detach itself from the top and crash to the ground. The key was to sense when this fall was coming and get out of the way in time. Each ‘heading’, or small tunnel, would be worked by a pair of miners. Often one would be senior and would teach the other as they went along. Once the coal had detached itself from the top, the junior miner would be tasked with shovelling the coal back up steep gradients towards the end of the heading, where it could be loaded into carts for transport to the surface.

There were dozens of ways to die in the mine: collapsing seams could bury men alive, rockfalls could crush them, loaded carts could smash limbs, explosives could detonate prematurely, gases could poison the unlucky and water could drown them. In the early 1920s, every twenty-four hours of operation of the coal industry would see three miners die and more than 540 be injured (with injuries only being recorded if they prevented the victim from work- ing for more than seven days).9 Survival relied on skill, experience and cooperation. A miner’s workmates were the men who would try to dig him out if the roof collapsed, or carry him to the surface if he was overcome by lack of oxygen. Under these conditions, miners formed immensely strong social bonds. Together, they spent their working lives trying to survive with as little injury as possible, but still bore the marks of the mine in their frayed nerves.10 Anyone who could avoid going down the mine, did. That’s why pits were managed from the surface: managers hesitated to follow miners down into the tunnels. For more than a cen- tury the miners had used this obscurity to guarantee for themselves a degree of both practical and political freedom. Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet The Rights of Man circulated widely underground in the 1790s. The subterranean world was a secretive one.

Shipping buyers at the Cardiff Coal Exchange were will- ing to pay a premium for particularly clean loads of coal, and this created another labour process on the surface. Women had been banned from working underground since 1842, but they had continued to do surface work at pits like Nantwen. High on the mountain to the east of the village, the ‘tip girls’ worked on the picking belts that brought coal up from the pit for cleaning. Ten women would stand either side of the belt and use their hands to pick out dirt and rocks from the stream of coal. All day long they kept their heads down, bent double, sorting through every last inch of the thousands of tonnes produced by the mine every week. However, as mechanical sifting and washing became more advanced, such tasks employed fewer and fewer women each year. Whereas there had been more than 1,600 women surface workers in the mines of South Wales in the 1870s, the number had dropped dramatically by the turn of the century.14 From that point onwards, women who needed to find work often ended up travelling to become the domestic servants of middle-class households in Cardiff and South West England.

Excerpted with permission from The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026 by Callum Cant and Matthew Lee and published by Verso Books, 2026.

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