State control of coal mining

On 3 June 1942 members of both Houses of Parliament received a document they had been awaiting for several weeks: the White Paper on coal, numbered Command Paper 6364. In it Winston Churchill’s government announced that it would “assume full control over the operation of the mines” and organise the industry “on the basis of national service”, and that the new arrangements would last until Parliament decided the industry’s future.

Some chronologies state that British coal mining was nationalised on that day. This is a simplification. The White Paper introduced so-called dual control: the state took over the direction of production, but the mines, their assets, profits and losses remained in the hands of private companies. Genuine nationalisation came only with the post-war Labour government’s act of 1946, and the state coal board took over the mines on 1 January 1947.

The coal crisis

Coal was then the foundation of the British economy: it supplied more than 90 per cent of the energy consumed in the country and drove power stations, steelworks, gasworks, the railways and ships. Yet output had been falling since the beginning of the war. Tens of thousands of young miners had left the pits, for the forces and for better-paid munitions factories, and the state, which was already calling up further age groups of men and women, was unable to replace them. Only in 1941 was mining brought under the Essential Work Order, which forbade miners to leave the pits.

The winter of 1941–1942 laid bare the scale of the problem. In March the President of the Board of Trade, Hugh Dalton, announced the rationing of coal, gas and electricity, and the scheme drawn up by William Beveridge provoked a revolt by Conservative backbenchers of the 1922 Committee. The debate on rationing turned into a dispute about the mining industry itself. Labour and the miners’ union, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, had for years demanded public ownership of the mines; the Conservatives accused the miners of absenteeism; and the owners defended private ownership. The dispute threatened to break up the coalition Churchill needed to wage the war.

The White Paper was a compromise intended to defuse both the coal crisis and the political crisis. It was published together with a decision to hold fuel rationing in reserve in case voluntary economies proved insufficient.

What the White Paper provided

Under the plan, the direction of the mines passed to the state. At the top stood a minister, below him a Controller-General, and in each coalfield a regional controller, who issued instructions to a single designated person responsible for each pit. The controllers were assisted by regional boards including owners, miners and managers, and the whole structure was advised by a new National Coal Board – a wartime body, distinct from the later state corporation of the same name. Pit production committees operated in the mines. The state could move men and machinery to the most productive seams, close inefficient pits and decide what was mined and where.

Finance was left alone. Colliery managers remained, as it was put, “servants of the owners”, although the controller could demand their removal. The companies kept their own accounts, and the state guaranteed their income through a common fund. Any owner who failed to carry out the controller’s instructions faced having the pit taken over. The plan also announced a new procedure for settling wages across the whole industry in place of the existing district agreements.

A new ministry was part of the reform. Responsibility for coal, fuel and power was taken away from the Board of Trade and other departments, and on 11 June the Ministry of Fuel and Power was created. It was headed by the Liberal Gwilym Lloyd George, son of the First World War prime minister, who had until then been a junior minister at the Ministry of Food. The ministry took over coal production, fuel distribution and energy prices, as well as petrol and electricity.

The debate in the House of Commons

The plan was defended in the House of Commons on 10 June by the Lord President of the Council, John Anderson. He admitted that output was falling: output per shift at the coal face had dropped in May 1942 to 2.89 tons, against an average of 2.94 tons in 1941, and overall output per man had fallen by about 8 per cent since the outbreak of war. At the same time miners were working a record number of shifts, an average of about 5.6 a week, which in Anderson’s view was the best answer to the charges of mass absenteeism. Asked what the words “full control” meant, he replied that they “mean exactly what they say”: the controller’s instructions were to be carried out without argument about their financial consequences, and the money “could be discussed later”. The government, he said, had not requisitioned or leased the mines not on grounds of principle, but because the experience of control in 1914–1918 had not been encouraging.

Labour accepted the plan with reservations. Arthur Greenwood recalled that for a generation the labour movement had regarded public ownership of the mines as a necessity, and called the owners “dogs in the manger”, but he accepted the plan as a step forward. Members for mining constituencies said they would give it “a fair trial”, though without abandoning the demand for nationalisation. A small group to the left of the Labour Party, gathered around James Maxton, tabled an amendment condemning the plan as too favourable to the owners and demanding that the state take over the mines. On 11 June the House rejected it by 329 votes to 8 and then approved the White Paper without a division.

In the same weeks the question of wages was settled; the government had referred it to a special board under Lord Greene. Under its award of June 1942 the miners received an increase of 2 shillings and 6 pence a shift and – for the first time – a national minimum wage, of 83 shillings a week for underground workers.

The coal in the ground already belongs to the state

The claim of “nationalisation” does, however, contain a grain of truth. Under the Coal Act of 1938, the coal in the ground itself – the mineral rights for which landowners had collected royalties from the companies – passed to the state Coal Commission. The vesting date fell on 1 July 1942. On 2 June the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kingsley Wood, informed the House of Commons that a total of £66.45 million had been paid in compensation to the previous owners. From the summer of 1942, therefore, the seams belonged to the state, while the mines still belonged to the companies.

Place in the war

Dual control did not reverse the decline in output. In 1942 Britain mined just over 200 million tons of coal, and even less in the following years, while in 1943–1944 a wave of strikes swept the coalfields. The shortage of men proved harder to remedy than the lack of organisation: from December 1943 the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, began directing to the mines, by ballot, one in ten of the men called up aged 18–25. By the end of the scheme there were almost 48,000 of these “Bevin Boys”. The country ultimately avoided the rationing of gas and electricity, but household coal deliveries were restricted by quotas for the rest of the war.

Separating direction from ownership satisfied nobody and, after the war, sealed the fate of the mines. Clement Attlee’s government made the nationalisation of coal the first of its great reforms: the act was steered through by the Minister of Fuel and Power, Manny Shinwell, and from 1 January 1947 the mines were taken over by the state-owned National Coal Board. The White Paper of 3 June 1942 was the first step along that road – a wartime makeshift in which the state for the first time took responsibility for the whole coal industry, but not yet for its ownership.