GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

would allow scholars, students and trade unionists to basically access a

database and pick out figures involved in the GFTU or related trade union

organisations. That is one of the big ongoing projects which we are working

with the GFTU on.

The second one is a major research project on the history of the British coal

industry. Two years ago now I was awarded £655,000 from the Art and

Humanities Research Council to work on this research project in partnership

with the General Federation of Trade Unions and what we wanted to do in that

project was to look at the history of the coal industry, the history of mining trade

unions, but also chart the rise and fall of working class communities and mining

communities across the UK, so our focus is on eight different coalfields and

looking at the experiences of work and the experience of trade unionism within

those particular localities. Part of the project has been a big oral history

research dimension. We have currently interviewed, I think, around 75 ex

coalminers and their families, so we are also building up a database giving

voice really to those people that do not normally appear in some of the more

conventional academic histories. So the coal project is ongoing. I think we

have got another year and a half left on it, so the GFTU’s contribution to that

has been crucial. There will be a range of articles and books and more

particularly public engagement next year, so we have got some big events. We

are also attending the Durham Miners’ Gala this year with people related to that

particular project. So the dictionary and the coal project are ongoing.

I will just end my short contribution really with returning again to the importance

of history for the labour movement and particularly for the GFTU. I think Doug

and myself met probably five or six years ago now and what we wanted to do

was really reinvigorate the relationship between academic historians and those

people like myself who came out of the trade union movement and really

inserting history into the educational programmes of organisations like the

GFTU and affiliated trade unions and I think what has been said from earlier

contributions, the importance of history now is crucial for the contemporary

trade union movement, particularly given the developments in economics,

politics and social change over the last few years, so making members of trade

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