This Happy Land

I watched this on BBC iPlayer. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01k3ccx

This Happy Land is a play on words. The allusion is to Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act II, Scene I and John of Gaunt’s great patriotic speech, ‘Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings’.

          Then again it may simply be an allusion to a specific pit village in Boness called, colloquially,  The Happy Land. Mix in the General Strike of  1926 and there’s not a lot to be happy about.  Happy Lands is then a pun on certain expectations,  and a certain class of people.  

My first impressions were not good. My brother lives and works in the power plant in Boness where it was filmed, the Fife accents were good—as you’d expect from Fife actors—and  the slag heap at the back of the pit village was a suitable backdrop for the few houses that constituted a muddy pit village,  but everything was too clean. The clothes were too white and the blacks were too black and the actors too old. Mining was a young man’s game. Look at old footage of mining communities in the 1950 and 1960s and inevitably Ewan McColl (Kirsty’s  dad) will be singing some dirge about the poor working class and in the background  a grey army will be emerging from the maws of some great pit.  Children could get school leaving certificates are twelve or thirteen-years old to work in the pit and help their families. Perhaps think about that when you drop your son or daughter off at High School because it’s a mile away and it’s a bit too far. Even in the 1950s and 1960s fifteen would be the starting age, thirty would be middle-aged and fifty would be more than a miner could hope for.

Sure, one of the major characters here was diagnosed with the black lung, pneumoncosis, but he wanted to hide it, he wanted to work.  All miners wanted to work. It’s not that they craved nobility, the other option was starving and their children starving with them. Coal drove the industrial revolution. The irony is that fossil fuels are poisoning the lungs of the world— global warming, coked up pnemunocosis, or for those with a literary and religious bent, the death knells of the four horseman of the apocalypse. Perhaps we should thank mine owners for thinking of that for us, in the same way we should thank Chairman Mao for his one child policy and  Margaret Thatcher for free school milk. That’s just an aside. Let’s get back to the story.

It’s 1926 and the opening scene is verging on the dramatic as the whistle blows to signal there’s been a cave-in underground in the Boness pit. Women working on the conveyor belts at the top of the pit separating coal from scree carry on with their task. Later a miner emerges with a broken pit prop. It’s a bit like a rotted chair leg. This is filthy capitalism at its worst. Miners are making-do with chair legs to keep hundreds of tons of coal from falling on their heads. The problem a dramaturge  is how to dramatise an equation. In Emile Zola’s Germinal the mechanic Etienne Lantier searches for work. He’s cold and hungry. Before he can start working in the mine he must borrow money to equip himself to live and to start work and he witnesses women fighting.  

‘Philomene Levaque...a thin, pale-looking girl with the sheeplike face of a consumptive [and]La Pierrone’s mother, whom everybody called La Brule, an old witch of a woman who was terrifying to look at, with screech-owl eyes and a mouth as pinched as a miser’s purse. The pair of them were at each other’s throats, with the younger of the two accusing the older of raking away her stones so that it was taking her more than ten minutes to fill one basket.’    

Here it is in simple terms, the working class are not united. They need to fight with each other to make a living. In the same way the piece-rate price set by the mine owner means that gangs of workmen work against each other to get the best seams and more coal out of the ground than their rivals. But the more coal that is supplied the lower the piece-rate price they get. Miners also had to work to prop up the shafts they were cutting and in Zola’s novel, the materials were inadequate and  no extra was paid to work squads.

This Happy Land is set above ground where the negative multiplier effect means that the miner’s wages go to pay housing, owned by the mining company or to local shops (script for wages was not an Appalachian mining community invention) often also owned by mining interests.

I’m off script here.   My thoughts ran to the parallels between the 1926 General Strike and the 1984/85 mining strike. There were, if This Happy Land is to be believed, around 800 000 miners during the 1926 strike. In 1984/5 there was approximately a tenth of that number 84 000. Government tactics were much the same. Police and the army were used (in unmarked police uniforms) to brutalise pickets and those on strike. Those on strike were spied upon and jailed and immediately sacked for spurious offences. The equivalent of ‘agitation’ in This Happy Land.  Social Work bosses and DHSS were warned not to pay out any money to striking miners to starve them back to work. Scabbing was encouraged by monetary incentives. Areas of Yorkshire and Nottingham worked when others didn’t. Boness stayed out. At the end of the strike workers were defeated but walked back to the pit with brass bands playing. The aristocracy of the working class man had been brought down. The landed class, the Eton and Oxford educated masters and gentry were the winners. This Happy Land is one I recognise the landscape of very well. We are all at each other’s throat now arguing over whom has the most stones in their bucket.