The project is a new intervention into academic, political, and public debates on the history of the British coal industry between 1947 and 1994. The study is particularly timely given the recent closure of Kellingley in December 2015 the last deep coal mine in Britain. It draws upon both the experiential and academic knowledge of PI Gildart who spent seven years as an underground coal miner in Wales between 1985 and 1992. The research will be based on extensive archival work in the coalfields, a comprehensive oral history project, interaction with former miners and colliery managers, a partnership with mining museums, and the development of a comprehensive interactive website, blog and touring exhibition. It will explore the development of the industry, its workplace cultures, industrial identities, politics, and individual and collective experiences through a detailed examination of eight collieries located in England, Scotland and Wales: Bickershaw Colliery (Lancashire, 1830-1992), Easington Colliery (Durham, 1899-1993), Hatfield Colliery (Yorkshire, 1916-2015), Annesley-Bentinck Colliery (Nottinghamshire, 1865-2000), Markham Colliery (Derbyshire, 1882-1993), Barony Colliery (Ayrshire, 1910-1989), Tower Colliery (Cynon Valley, 1864-2008), and Point of Ayr Colliery (Flintshire, 1890-1996). The oral history project will seek to understand the everyday experiences of coal miners and officials in the workplace, the community and the domestic sphere. This will involve interviews with around 80 participants and substantial community engagement in former mining localities. As such it represents a landmark scholarly intervention into the history of the industry by examining policy development, deployment and reception at macro (Government/NCB), meso (coalfield) and micro (colliery/community/domestic) levels. The project will tease out the unifying and diversifying identities and tensions in the eight collieries and their connected communities. In contrast with much of the existing scholarship on the industry there will be a specific emphasis on gender, generation, masculinity, femininity and regional/national identity and how these aspects of mining life contributed to a sense of individual and collective memory. The research will be organised around particular themes: the political evolution of public ownership and its local social/political impact, occupational culture and identity, the tensions between divergent industrial relations cultures and their impact on organisations, the changing nature of underground work, masculinity, gender relations, community fragmentation, deindustrialisation, memory, heritage, and the resilience of occupational and class identities. Chronologically the project will shed new light on key-moments in the history of the coal industry such as the debates around the nature of public ownership, the industrial disputes of 1972, 1974 and 1984/5 and the subsequent closure of all of the nation's deep mines in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Yet just as importantly it will gauge the impact of these events on miners, their wives/girlfriends, children, and the wider community in which the collieries were located. The project will go beyond the organisational/institutional frameworks adopted by many historians of the industry in order to reveal both the unifying and fragmentary nature of occupational, national, local, and class identity. The comprehensive coverage of the eight collieries, will support, stimulate and publicize research material that will be of use to academics, policymakers, schools, and the three major mining museums of England, Scotland and Wales. The website and published outputs will ensure that the project has broad impact in both the academic and public sphere. The project represents a significant reappraisal of the importance of the coal industry in shaping the identities, politics, and cultures of industrial localities in post-war Britain.

As the newspaper poetry columns, workers' periodicals, surviving records of local libraries and reading rooms, and society accounts show, industrial workers spent substantial amounts of their working lives and brief leisure time in writing, reading, and discussing works of literature. Every industrial workplace had its writer in this period. Most had more than one, like poets and journalists 'Nisbet Noble' (James Ferguson) and 'Will Harrow' (John Stanley) at Stanley Mills in Perthshire, or autobiographers and poets 'Rustic Rhymer' (Thomas Stewart) and 'Davie' (David Wingate) in the same Lanarkshire mine. 'Piston, Pen & Press' recovers the forgotten ways in which these industrial workers engaged with literary culture from the 1840s to the First World War. By focusing on miners, railway workers, and textile factory workers it will investigate how profession, location, and the perception of being part of a specific workforce community influenced workers' activities as authors, performers and readers. Our concentration is on Scotland and the North of England, with Britain's two greatest Victorian industrial cities, Manchester and Glasgow, as centres of interest. We will use archival research and scoping studies of newspaper and periodical databases to uncover the poems, songs, periodical and newspaper writings and other prose writings (including autobiography and biography) of workers in these industries. We will additionally work with the preserved records of nineteenth-century libraries and reading rooms to trace a history of reading through borrowers' records, and to study records of 'literary' associations (minute books, members' directories, manuscript magazines) linked to specific workplaces or operating in their vicinity. No previous project or published work has attempted to reflect on working-class literary cultures in the long Victorian period in terms of both profession and location. Further, existing studies and anthologies do not provide our interdisciplinary focus on the history of reading, the history of associational culture, and the literary analysis of workers' writings. Although recent historical work on Britain's industrial revolution has shifted towards a greater consideration of workers' writings, research into literary representations of Victorian industry is still dominated by accounts of observers or employers, not by how workers themselves represented their labour and presented themselves as a cultured workforce with investments in established as well as popular literature. Despite growing interest in working-class reading, much evidence of workers' cultural investments and cultural literacy remains scattered in local and regional archives. What we currently know or hypothesize about what Victorian workers (like those listed above) wrote, read or sung, and how they accessed literary works, is a fraction of what we could know through in-depth archival research and a careful and comparative analysis of findings. While the academic outcomes of this project will contribute significantly to the study of working-class culture, history and literature, and to our scholarly perceptions of Victorian industrialism, we also seek to create public awareness of this neglected aspect of industrial heritage. Building on our existing connections and developing new ones, we will work with selected museums and non-academic partners, both national and local, on ways to include this vital intangible heritage in their collections and outreach activities. In doing so we hope to foster fruitful discussions between institutions and individuals in the heritage sector in Scotland and the North of England about the status and significance of literary cultures in Britain's industrial past. Through our connections to the General Federation of Trades Unions and potentially other unions, 'Piston, Pen & Press' will also incorporate reflection on the 21st century workplace and historical workplace culture.

As the newspaper poetry columns, workers' periodicals, surviving records of local libraries and reading rooms, and society accounts show, industrial workers spent substantial amounts of their working lives and brief leisure time in writing, reading, and discussing works of literature. Every industrial workplace had its writer in this period. Most had more than one, like poets and journalists 'Nisbet Noble' (James Ferguson) and 'Will Harrow' (John Stanley) at Stanley Mills in Perthshire, or autobiographers and poets 'Rustic Rhymer' (Thomas Stewart) and 'Davie' (David Wingate) in the same Lanarkshire mine. 'Piston, Pen & Press' recovers the forgotten ways in which these industrial workers engaged with literary culture from the 1840s to the First World War. By focusing on miners, railway workers, and textile factory workers it will investigate how profession, location, and the perception of being part of a specific workforce community influenced workers' activities as authors, performers and readers. Our concentration is on Scotland and the North of England, with Britain's two greatest Victorian industrial cities, Manchester and Glasgow, as centres of interest. We will use archival research and scoping studies of newspaper and periodical databases to uncover the poems, songs, periodical and newspaper writings and other prose writings (including autobiography and biography) of workers in these industries. We will additionally work with the preserved records of nineteenth-century libraries and reading rooms to trace a history of reading through borrowers' records, and to study records of 'literary' associations (minute books, members' directories, manuscript magazines) linked to specific workplaces or operating in their vicinity. No previous project or published work has attempted to reflect on working-class literary cultures in the long Victorian period in terms of both profession and location. Further, existing studies and anthologies do not provide our interdisciplinary focus on the history of reading, the history of associational culture, and the literary analysis of workers' writings. Although recent historical work on Britain's industrial revolution has shifted towards a greater consideration of workers' writings, research into literary representations of Victorian industry is still dominated by accounts of observers or employers, not by how workers themselves represented their labour and presented themselves as a cultured workforce with investments in established as well as popular literature. Despite growing interest in working-class reading, much evidence of workers' cultural investments and cultural literacy remains scattered in local and regional archives. What we currently know or hypothesize about what Victorian workers (like those listed above) wrote, read or sung, and how they accessed literary works, is a fraction of what we could know through in-depth archival research and a careful and comparative analysis of findings. While the academic outcomes of this project will contribute significantly to the study of working-class culture, history and literature, and to our scholarly perceptions of Victorian industrialism, we also seek to create public awareness of this neglected aspect of industrial heritage. Building on our existing connections and developing new ones, we will work with selected museums and non-academic partners, both national and local, on ways to include this vital intangible heritage in their collections and outreach activities. In doing so we hope to foster fruitful discussions between institutions and individuals in the heritage sector in Scotland and the North of England about the status and significance of literary cultures in Britain's industrial past. Through our connections to the General Federation of Trades Unions and potentially other unions, 'Piston, Pen & Press' will also incorporate reflection on the 21st century workplace and historical workplace culture.