Spark in Tinder

Sydney Page watched the little knot of men at the pit head as they handled the crumpled form of a badly injured miner. Sydney was 18 and worked aboveground at the Newstead Colliery in Nottinghamshire. The injured man was one of 200 seriously hurt each month in British mines, but he was the first casualty Sydney had seen.

When the works manager told Sydney he would have to work in the pits, the boy refused. Promptly he was sentenced to a month in prison; under the Essential Works Orders, no war worker may refuse the job to which he is assigned.

Older miners understood. "Pit nerves" were common in youngsters; prison was no cure. Quietly, some 23,000 miners in 20 neighboring pits struck. The unions frowned, but the men stayed out. The Regional Fuel Controller intervened: "Without the power of compulsion, the Government could not control the war at all. . . ." Still the men stayed out. There was talk that showed that Page was just the spark: the men wanted to know when the Government's plans for a postwar new deal in the coalfields would materialize.

After a week of bickering, young Page was released and the men began drifting back. Page had agreed to go underground if found medically fit.

But to coal men and labor experts, the meaning was plain: while strikes in Britain are still insignificant, war tensions are growing and the time for postwar labor commitments is at hand.

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