Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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The book is a grim read, with its details of horrific mining accidents, the working conditions, disputes, deadly smogs and exploitation. It also reinforces the usual way of business and profit being prioritised over welfare, safety and the environment. I was surprised to read that these concerns began very early in the coal industry, even pre-dating the Industrial Revolution, but I suppose that like the international slave trade, it was too profitable for the people in power to let morality triumph over money-making. I found the writing style to be generally readable although the economic bits were a little dry and there were some odd figurative phrases. Paxman's trademark acerbic observations, particularly of politicians, are in evidence. The book includes notes, illustrations and an index. At the heart of the book, inevitably, lies a political story. Paxman gives a lucid account of the growing demands for better conditions, the counterarguments of the pit owners, the protests and strikes, and the eventual major legal changes: the shift to national ownership of coal underground in 1938, and the complete nationalisation of the industry in 1947.

Of course, wealth and power frequently turns decent people into obnoxious monsters. Troublesome puppets were replaced with new ones, Britain got very rich, and the Arabs and Persians developed an intense hatred of Brits. In World War Two, Hitler launched his oil-powered blitzkrieg, made a beeline for oily Baku, and planned to grab the Persian Gulf. In this war, American oil once again came to the rescue. Beginning with a geologic- and chemical-related exploration of how -- over millions of years -- coal, oil, and natural gas has come to be, Albert Marrin provides a mind-blowing scientific, economic, sociological, environmental, and geopolitical history of the petroleum-based energy resources that are the core of our modern civilization and the core of our civilization's most intractable problems and conflicts. In the book, readers learn that nuclear reactors can generate lots of electricity, but they occasionally barf large amounts of radiation all over the place. Therefore, it’s very important to properly dispose of spent fuel because it’s extremely toxic. Great idea! How? William and Rosemary Alley discussed this issue in Too Hot to Touch. They note that today “there are some 440 nuclear power plants in 31 countries. More are on the way. Yet, no country on Earth has an operating high-level waste disposal facility.”

The town buzzed with excitement, and smelled to high heaven, thanks to all that oil. 'The whole place,' a visitor said, 'smelled like a corps of soldiers when they have diarrhea.'" Inspired by a true story, Marguerite Henry continues her literary tradition of showcasing a love of horse (and mule) flesh for young It is exciting to me that no matter how much machinery replaces the horse, the work it can do is still measured in horsepower ... even in the new age. And although a riding horse often weighs half a ton and a big drafter a full ton, either can be led about by a piece of string if he has been wisely trained. This to me is a constant source of wonder and challenge." This quote was from an article about Henry published in the Washington Post on November 28, 1997, in response to a query about her drive to write about horses. And then we come to the most dreadful woman in Britain's political history and her brutal vindictive and duplicitous behaviour is starkly brought into the light. Alas her abhorrent politics continues to loom large in a Britain that is going the same way as coal has. this story takes readers into the harsh world of professional horse racing, with its stark risks and grim realities.

Laura Obuobi’s empowering, whimsical text and London Ladd’s lustrous, captivating illustrations will inspire children to love themselves exactly as they are.

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from all the ‘players’ in a ‘Special’ story that started in the early 1970s and went through to the end of 1986 with Ayrton I don't even know where to begin with this. Maybe I should start with the fact that I wouldn't have read this had it not been a Battle of the Books book, and even then, it was one I was forced to read because no one else wanted to. I really wish that I could have turned around and said that this book wasn't as bad as every thought, but, sadly, that is not the case. Readers also learn that the U.S. has huge coal reserves, enough for 250 years at the current rate of consumption. To understand why this is a meaningless statement, watch one of the many versions of Albert Bartlett’s famous lecture, Arithmetic, Population, and Energy on YouTube. Every student and teacher should watch it. Lyrical, empowering, and inspiring. An affirmation of the miracle each individual is.” —Yamile Saied Méndez, author of Where Are You From? and What Will You Be?

A Bank Street College of Education’s Children’s Book Committee’s Best Children’s Books of the Year (2023) There is overall sympathy for the workers and the exploitative owners are shown in their true colours. The horrors of the early days in the pits comes over vividly and the various catastrophes that the workers had to endure, and that the owners walked away from with the tiniest slap on the wrists, is described in such a way as to make the reader sad and angry. In vivid detail it describes how Aboriginal people often figured significantly in the search for gold and documents the devastating social impact of gold mining on Victorian Aboriginal communities. It reveals the complexity of their involvement from passive presence, to active discovery, to shunning the goldfields. Mining in general, and coal mining in particular is one of those subjects that somehow fascinates me for reasons I don't clearly understand. I think it is something to do with the horror and wonder of the industry; the danger, the long term impacts, the communities that build up around mines, the vile impact of unfettered capitalism that made many fabulously rich whilst killing those tasked with digging this filthy commodity out of the ground. I was also fortunate enough, in my youth, to be able to descend into a copper mine in Zambia which was a fascinating experience - the descent in a cage, the heat, the noise etc. Mining therefore became one of a collection of subjects that both fascinates and repels me.

My favorite part of the book was the history of nations and wars over/with/because of oil. As a young child I remember the oil cruch in 1973, and in hearing about the Iran controversery with Ayatollah Khomeini coming into power, then the American hostages held for 444 days, their release shortly after Ronald Regean became president, and the Iran/Iraq War. At the time I was too young to understand much; but this book put it all into perspective. I understand more of the role of OPEC and Saudia Arabia and what we as citizens of this world need to do to find new energy sources. In one sense, Scargill was right. The government and the National Coal Board (NCB) were going to close pits. But they would have been closed more slowly if it had not been for the strike, which also had an odd effect on the way in which the history of mining is seen. It came to loom large in the collective imagination of the Left, and I suspect that the number of historians working on this single event is now greater than the number working on all other aspects of the history of British mining. The NUM often seemed – like the French army after the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 – to be building its identity around the celebration of what had, in fact, been a crushing defeat. C oal used to be everywhere in Britain. Without it, there would have been no foundries, no trains and no gas lamps. Just after the First World War, there were over a million miners. They exercised a powerful influence on the labour movement even, and perhaps especially, after they had left the mines. Anyone looking at strikes in Birmingham factories will come across men who had started their working lives underground in South Wales and migrated to escape unemployment between the wars. One of them, ‘Teg’ Bowen, eventually became lord mayor of the city. ‘Moss’ Evans, the son of another, became leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Jeremy Paxman approaches this topic with characteristic panache. His book covers almost every aspect of British history in the last couple of hundred years. It is punctuated by accounts of those moments – usually a result of pit accidents or strikes – when miners attracted national attention. Paxman is, however, as interested in the use of coal as in its production. He describes the fortunes amassed by those people, often aristocrats, who owned land from which coal was extracted: the third Marquess of Bute (1847–1900), for instance, was said to be the richest man in the world. He also shows how indifferent the rich and powerful could be to those who dug coal. During one strike, George V was more disturbed by the possibility that pit ponies might be left untended than he was by the plight of the miners.