Output details
30 - History
University of South Wales
A famished coalfield or a 'healthy strike'? Assessing evidence of hunger in the South Wales 'Coal War' of 1898
This article examines the oft-stated assertion that strikers were 'starved back to work‘. It does so, primarily, by engaging with a recent argument that the 1926 lockout was a 'healthy‘ strike, at least as far as the Welsh miners were concerned. Using a different strike (that of 1898) as a case study, I argue that historical hunger is an elusive quantity and that neither the existing quantitative or qualitative evidence can be used, with confidence, to confirm or deny the existence of a famished coalfield. This should be of interest to labour historians beyond Wales – and it‘s been framed that way.