Books

Review of four books by Keith Robinson, by Francis Sheppard

Of the four books, The Black Country Miners  is the most successful in engaging the reader, while Iron, Coal and Roses is best as a study.

Regarding the two that remain, Eldon Street  and Voices from the Wednesbury Workhouse, each item of material is intrinsically interesting and Robinson has a goldmine here in what is pitiable, despicable and admirable – terms you would apply respectively to the poor, their employers, and those who stood up on the poor’s behalf. The cruel hardness of the lives of ordinary 19th-century people are conveyed through a reportage style, where participants are actually named, as their lives illustratively  portray the conditions of the time. This encourages an ‘episodic’ kind of reading, where one dips and samples, rather than plunge on through. This ‘piecemealing’ of reading is a further result of the broad spread of topic. In Eldon Street  the nature of employment of those Darlaston dwellers takes up nearly half the book. Naturally, information dwindles where ‘dressmakers’ are concerned and the writer correctly concentrates on the industry that established the town – gunlock forging – and gave the settlement prominence well into the second half of that century. The brief life-histories are interspersed with accounts of strikes and unscrupulous employers but Robinson does the reader no favours in that he never describes what gunlock forging actually is. True, we live in an internet age and can reach for an iPhone to discover that a gunlock is ‘a flintlock mechanism to be fitted to a gun’. So, Darlaston workers manufactured a device crucial in the struggle against Napoleon, and in the American Civil War, as is mentioned. The technological implications of these forging crafts surely would be worth another paragraph or two.

Similarly, in Voices from the Wednesbury Workhouse, the accounts of Wednesbury workhouse folk are grouped into broad areas – the unemployed and the paupers, the children and their schooling, the final phase of the building – and then the outcome in terms of apprenticeships and emigration. But what was the mindset of the middle classes, which could foist such conditions on the very poor? Rather than provide more examples of official callousness, would not an introductory chapter that cited Dickens and Gaskell have illuminated the historical background?

The Black Country Miners  is to be commended for its coherence. The book has consistency because it is shaped around a clear story, one that begins in degradation through exploitation and ends in a fairer deal and public respect. Here, Robinson is adept at giving relevance to the detail he cites. As in in his earlier works, the arc of individual lives supplies that detail. Now though, it is used as background to the general struggle, for justice, waged by the pit workers. The narrative, of many setbacks but eventual success, gives a cogency, forcefulness and confidence to the writing, not previously evident. It may be that repetition of phrases sometimes detracts from the writing’s dynamism – but this needn’t have been the case, for all the content is largely factual. Here however, there is an emergence of style, of pace, tending towards a compelling read.

Again, Robinson as a trained historian could have examined the wider context of nineteenth-century workers’ movements or the influence of Methodism in the region. In his introduction he insists that the writing is ‘not intended to be an “academic study” as such’ but such allusions would have added to the already-rich narrative.

A further narrative, equally rich but with more intense focus, is offered in Iron, Coal and Roses, the third in Robinson’s quartet of Black Country books. This treats the period, largely the mid-19th century, from the viewpoint of industrialists – in this case a family named Rose (not always sweet by nature!) – who suffered the swings, booms and slumps of economic life. Yet as owners they were involved with a quite separate class – the workers. As owners, the family seemed to be more businessmen than technical innovators. Their entrepreneurial dealings in land and machinery are meticulously recorded, as are the troughs and crests of the century’s capitalism, the background to their activity. Robinson refrains from direct criticism but the message is plain to see: the Roses were an unlovely bunch! They were negligent of their workers’ safety and skinflint in paying compensation, never assuming responsibility for the many avoidable accidents that took place in their ironworks and mines. Injury was of course disastrous for workers’ families – without an active breadwinner you could be poor indeed – but I had never realised the thousands and thousands of fatalities. Robinson builds the case astutely, for the interests of workers against capital. This is his best book.