Why “rebel”?

NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

What do the following have in common? Robin Hood. Lord Byron.  DH Lawrence. Sillitoe. Luddites. Torvill & Dean. Coal miners and the 1984-85 strike. May 1, 2025 election results. The answer is that all exemplify the rebellious nature of Nottinghamshire (but scroll to the very bottom of this webpage for more information about Notts’ literary history).

This plaque is in the Nottingham Train Station. Note, too, that Nottingham is a UNESCO World City of Literature: CLICK and CLICK

We leave aside rebel literature (https://ourrebelwriters.uk/), Robin Hood, and Luddites so as to pick up the story of Nottinghamshire as a rebellious county during the 1984-85 coal miners’ strike. This played out dramatically differently in Notts than in the other coalfields of England – particularly those of Yorkshire and Durham. Notts miners overwhelmingly opposed the strike called by the NUM (National Union of Miners) and instead created their own Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM) and kept working. The rebellion against Arthur Scargill, the NUM labor leader, rended apart many Notts coal towns, as vividly and accurately depicted in the brilliant BBC drama, “Sherwood” (season 1 – 2022). Nottinghamshire showed its rebellious nature again with the massive electoral turnover of the Notts County Council to a definitive Reform UK majority on May 1, 2025.
       

COUNTY DURHAM

County Durham, in the northeast of England, was also rebellious. We might say that its rebellious nature started in 1075 AD when the Bishop of Durham became a Prince-Bishop. The institution of Prince-Bishops continued in County Durham until 1836. The Prince-Bishops governed a virtually autonomous realm within England with the right to levy taxes and gather revenue from their territory,  raise an army, and mint their own coinage so long as they stayed loyal to the Crown and protected the northern frontier of England from invasion. A second rebellion, so to speak, took place with the 1984-85 miners’ strike which was massively supported in County Durham against Margaret Thatcher’s heavy-handed strategies to weaken into submission and insignificance Britain’s labor unions (the most important of which were the coal miners). Remarkably, Durham rebelled again in 2019 when the traditional “red wall” (Labour and even socialist) in the northeast of England crumbled as the region voted out Labour in favor of the Conservative Party. [On this website we use the British spelling Labour only when specifically referring to the political party]

Easington

BBC MAP

MACOUPIN COUNTY, ILLINOIS

If the aphorism is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, then the poster (below, left) encapsulates the significance of one Illinois county in the history of America’s always contentious and sometimes brutal struggle between labor and capital. Macoupin County (map, right) was nothing if not a county in rebellion – rebellion against the dastardly coal mine operators in the mid-nineteenth century and especially  dramatically at the end of that century, and then bloodily in a fratricidal union war in the early 1930s. Throughout those decades, Macoupin County’s coal miners were pressing for and gaining labor rights that today Americans take for granted (but which appear to be at risk once more). 

The Illinois miners were the most militantly unionized in America. Indeed, “socialist” was a political term applied to many of them.  But the coal industry in Illinois went into sharp decline in the 1970s with requirements from the Environmental Protection Agency and with better (i.e., low sulfur) coal available from western states as well as the growth of the natural gas industry and push for renewable clean energy.  The traditional Democratic Party blue collar base turned red (a semantic color reversal from England) as the Democrats were unable or unwilling to address and redress downstate concerns.

COMPARISONS

We highlight two fundamental cases of rebel action for a transAtlantic comparison. One concerns the coal miners’ unions. The other concerns the extraordinary women in Illinois and England who supported their mining menfolk.

*The Unions* 

The Illinois Coal Museum in Gillespie, Illinois (in Macoupin County) features a large panel that compares rebel Durham and rebel Macoupin counties. Soon we will create a panel comparing the Progressive Miners of America union (based in Macoupin County) which broke away from the dominant United Mine Workers of America to the Union of Democratic Miners which broke away from the National Union of Miners in Nottinghamshire.

Macoupin

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Nottinghamshire

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* The rebel women in the Illinois coalfields*

A Women’s Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners of America was created at the birth of the PMA in 1932. Indeed, in the first issue of the Progressive Miner on September 16, 1932 there was a Women’s Auxiliary column, with its own editor. And one of the founding objectives of the PMA was to unite women and to educate them on the struggles of the workers, politically and industrially. Agnes Burns Wieck led the way. She had been born into a mining family and grew up knowing poverty and strikes; she later married a miner. At twenty-two she was organizing miners’ wives in Williamson County in far southern Illinois. Agnes began to write for the United Mine Workers Journal. By 1924 she was a paid columnist for the Illinois Miner. In 1925 she broached the topic of an official women’s auxiliary with the United Mine Workers of America but the UMWA did not encourage her initiative. Nevertheless, she was able to speak at the District 12 (covering Illinois miners) convention in Springfield and she enlisted the UMWA’s help in getting Life and Labor magazine to miners’ wives. She also undertook to speak to miners about their wives, arguing that wives were workers, too. As her philosophy evolved, she saw women as being able to assist in strikes and to organize campaigns. It is reported that women of the Auxiliary would “shiver in the dawn at the mine tipples, on picket lines, march from one county to another in unemployment and strike demonstrations”.  In addition to soup kitchens when needed, the Women’s Auxiliary made quilts to raffle for relief, produced labor plays, sang labor songs, and conducted labor educational classes. Agnes railed against UMWA President John L. Lewis in the Illinois Miner. Her attack was soon followed by the banner, “Miners’ Wives Urge Membership to Kick Lewis Out”. The next week the Illinois Miner carried her story, “Women Urged to Rally to Aid of Illinois and Help ‘Clean House’ in U.M.W. of A. Must Rebuild Union”.  One of the most dramatic actions of the PMA’s Women’s Auxiliary took place outside the State Capitol building in Springfield on January 26, 1933 when some ten thousand women, in their characteristic white dresses and white headbands, protested the mistreatment of the coal miners. The legacy of Women’s Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners of America continues with descendants and supporters of the original members. They parade at special events in historically significant venues such as at the Union Miners Cemetery in Mt. Olive. Below on the right you see an original banner of the Women’s Auxiliary from White City, one of the Macoupin County coal towns, being carried in a recent procession. 

 * The rebel women in England’s coalfields*

The extraordinary events of Britain’s great miners strike in 1984-85 brought women into action. The group Women Against Pit Closures formed in Barnsley (south Yorkshire) both to support the mining relatives who were out of work during the strike and to organize the means and resources to support the impacted families. The co-founder of WAPC was Anne Scargill, wife of Arthur Scargill who led the NUM strike. Similarly to their earlier Illinois cousins, these English women ran soup kitchens, lobbied and picketed. Just as Illinois’ Women’s Auxiliary marched in the thousands to Springfield fifty years before, so some five thousand Barnsley women rallied in May 1984 and then conducted a national march to London. They, too, created banners, the second one of which includes an iconic image from the Battle of Orgreave (June 18, 1984).

The Barnsley Miners’ Wives made common transAtlantic cause with American women in their own coalfield battles as shown in the banner below. The banner is iconographically explicit and also evokes multiple other links across time and space for those who know the biography of Mother Jones:

— Mother Jones was born as Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland in 1837
—– the family emigrated to Toronto
—– Mary’s arrival coincided with the Irish Potato Famine
—– At age twenty-three Mary went to the United States
—– In 1860 Mary Harris married George Jones, a member of the Iron Molders Union
— George and their four children died in the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1867
— In the intervening years Mary Jones became aware of the nascent labor movement and capital greed in the U.S. as well as racial hatred
— By the 1870s and especially in the 1880s Mary Jones had immersed herself in the labor movement – she knew of strikes and brutality toward workers, particularly the Haymarket event in Chicago in 1886: Mary Jones became the labor activist MOTHER JONES and was acknowledged as such in 1897 in a Chicago newspaper
— Mother Jones was peripatetic and totally committed to workers – to children enduring hardship in the mills, to coal miners across the country – she led marches, excoriated politicians, and motivated strikers, particularly the coal miners
— As a nonagenarian she asked the miners of Illinois to be buried in their union cemetery in Mt. Olive, which had come into existence because of the 1898 Battle of Virden

And, thus, in honoring Mother Jones, the Barnsley Miners’ Wives were drawing a connection between the coal miners of England and those of the United States, including those of Macoupin County where Mother Jones was buried in 1930. The banner is also interesting for its reference to women miners – something that did not exist in Mother Jones’ time – and to the United Mine Workers of America, the union with which Mother Jones had a difficult relationship during her years of activism.

The “Daughters of Mother Jones” came into existence in 1989 during the Pittston Coal Miners Strike in southwest Virginia when forty women declared themselves the daughters of Mother Jones and embarked on sit-ins in the company office, picketing, and other acts of civil disorder. The miners eventually won the strike. Women had played a vital role.

In 2012 a group of activists in Cork organized the first “Spirit of Mother Jones Festival.” Cork itself was known as a rebel city because of its uprisings against the British. In 2014 and 2015 Anne Scargill and Betty Cook ( co-founders of the WAPC) displayed the “Daughters of Mother Jones” banner at the Cork festival. We saw the banner paraded in the Durham Miners Gala in 2018. We are trying to find out who designed and produced the banner.      

. front of banner and detail

back of banner

The evocation of the UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) in the banner above, front and back, is interesting in the context of its iconographic association with Mother Jones for two reasons: although women eventually were permitted to work in mines and became full-fledged members of the UMWA, this was long after Mother Jones’ death in 1930 and, indeed, Mother Jones often had a quite adversarial relationship with John L. Lewis, the longtime president of the UMWA. Also, although the UMWA eventually permitted women to work in the mines, the UMWA had actively undercut Agnes Wieck and the Women’s Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners of America — so much for the empowerment and role of women in mining communities.

Women in County Durham were not to be outdone by the Barnsley miners’ wives. Some Durham coal towns, such as Easington, suffered gravely during the strike with an actual police occupation. There women such as Heather Wood organized soup kitchens and community centers to enable the Durham miners to continue their strike. In all of the towns where women organized during the miners strike they were determined to support their men and keep the communities stable and together. Schools were run, children were fed and taken care of, food parcels were delivered, holidays and birthdays were celebrated. Women were the ferocious backbone of the miners strike.

In 2017 a Women’s Banner Group formed in Durham to recall women’s coordinated action during the 1984-85 miners’ strike and to celebrate and encourage younger and other women to focus on community engagement and participation in the labor movement, trade unions, and politics overall. The women created a patchwork banner that they proudly carried in Durham’s renowned Miners Gala in 2018, which we saw.

Moreover, Durham’s Women’s Banner Group broke the traditional gender wall of the Durham Miners Association at Redhills, the exclusive meeting place of men. The DMA officially recognized the Women’s Banner Group and gave them space in the hallowed Pitmen’s Parliament to meet, hold events, and display their new banner and other banners there and elsewhere in the building.

Women came together again in Durham for the 2024 Miners Gala to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Women Against Pit Closures, linking Barnsley in south Yorkshire to County Durham as well as with supporters from elsewhere in England, the U.S., and Europe. In addition to participating the Gala, Heather Wood of Easington (who led the town’s women during the strike) worked with other women to organize a “pop-up shop” exhibition in the Prince Bishop Centre where banners were displayed and evening events were staged.

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Nottingham is a UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE 

“Nottingham became a UNESCO City of Literature in 2015 on account of our globally renowned literary heritage, a vibrant contemporary writing scene and ambition to build better futures with words. Our permanent designation as a UNESCO Creative City enables us to use the power of words to transform lives, create new opportunities and establish Nottingham as a leading destination for lovers of literature worldwide Nottingham is a place of stories, a thousand years of written history ringing from each ancient street and thoroughfare. Explore here for the vibrant creators -the poets, the authors, all who weave words in a unique way – currently making Nottingham buzz with words, as well as looking to the way the fires lit by writers such as Byron, Whipple, Lawrence and many more still burn and illuminate brightly today.” (nottinghamcityofliterature.com) Watch this June 14, 2025 Notts TV interview about the “UNESCO City of Literature” designation: CLICK

EBELLION AGAINST THE NOTTINGH