Research Circle Event no. 3 - Oct 4 2024. Radical dissent: Mining, workers education, community

The final event in our latest series of research circle events. In 2024, in Backwards Travellers, Looking Forwards, we are reflecting on cultural, spiritual, political, working-class histories of education, with a view to learning from the past to inform our future.
Now, we mark the fortieth anniversary of The Miners’ Strike with Radical dissent: Mining, workers’ education and strengthening of democratic community.
About this event
The event will be in three parts. It combines two presentations and an open discussion.
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 will explore the ongoing tensions and bitterness, as well as spaces for healing, and themes such as cosmopolitanism and internationalism versus parochialism. We hope you can join us - and we can listen to your perspectives on the strike and its contemporary power.
Wilful remembering: the Kent Miners, workers’ education and creating a participative democracy, 1920-1985
Professor Emeritus Linden West
This talk embodies 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 represents 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 has 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.
Northeast Derbyshire miners - Training, the importance of vocationalism and the transition from collier to miner
Dr Sharon Clancy
This talk will examine, 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’s father’s ‘second chance’ came as a result of the scheme and he won a two-year scholarship to study at Ruskin College, Oxford, which gave him a deep grounding in sociology, psychology and history.
Secondly, she will also talk 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. This part of her talk will make reference to recordings of her father’s friend Bill Rodda, who talked to her in detail about the transition from collier to miner, and who died on 3rd April 2024.
Finally in an open discussion, with all who join us, we ask how the emerging themes, from the October event, may relate to this series and our engagement with cultural, spiritual, political, working class histories of education.
What has it meant to learn from the past to inform our future- and what are our plans for the research circle in 2025?