The Ashington Group: A North of England Men’s Shed for Artistic Miners

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Local history, Visual Arts

One of the more novel art genres to emerge in the first third of last century was the “Pitman Painters” phenomenon in northern England. Known as the Ashington Group✱, these were a small collective of unionised mine workers in county Northumberland who approached their local Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) seeking out tuition in new areas of education. Initially the pitmen were hoping WEA could find a economics professor to tutor them in the “dismal science”. When none could be arranged, their interest switched to learning painting and drawing.

⇡ ‘Coal Face’, Jimmy Floyd (1947) (Credit: Woodhorn Museum)

Artist and WEA teacher Robert Lyon took on the task of teaching the miners—mainly from the Woodhorn and Ellington collieries—all of whom had no formal art training. The workers however didn’t take to dry lectures on the Classical and Renaissance art, so Lyon adopted a more pragmatic approach of teaching the miners the basics of drawing and painting. Lyon advised the miners to simply “paint what they knew” ‘Ashington Group of Pitmen Painters’, Artist Biographies, www.artblogs.co.uk.

⇡‘Coal-Face Drawers’, Oliver Kilbourn (1950) (Image: TUC150.tuc.org.uk)

In 1934 the workers formed themselves into a small society of miner-artists who met weekly to paint and discuss their work. Most of the small group were adherents of the political platform of the Independent Labour Party) (‘Ashington Group’, Wikipedia). The Ashington men even wrote their own constitution, setting out the regulations each of the members had to abide by, including a commitment to the establishment of a permanent collection of their work (” ‘An Experiment in Art Appreciation’: The WEA and the Ashington Art Group”, Marie-Therese Maybe, North East History, Vol 37 2006, www nelh.net).

⇡ ‘Pithead Baths’, Oliver Kilbourn (1939) (Credit: Woodhorn Museum)

With guidance from Lyon and support from patrons, especially from celebrated collector Helen Sutherland, the group got to observe ‘professional’ art in galleries – Newcastle, London (Tate and National Galleries), etc. Absorbing the influences of professional art, the group of amateur artists increasingly focused on local subjects from their lives and their environs. They also experimented with art forms and styles…trying sculpture, dabbling in abstraction, but ultimately they stuck with social realism, painting mostly in a naive style. In the communal environment of the group hut members critically evaluated each other’s work.

⇡ L Brownrigg, ‘The Miner‘

The Ashington colliery was situated in what some called “the largest coal-mining village in the world”, (‘Celebrating 150 proud years of Ashington, in Northumberland – in 10 archive photos’, Chronicle Live, David Morton, 05-Oct-2017, www.chroniclelive.co.uk). The achievement collectively of the mine workers was to capture their lived experience accurately and truly on canvas, showing the severity of life in the pits. Devoid of sentimentality, the paintings depict the day-to-day reality of gruelling, dirty, backbreaking work, an experience that outsiders have no familiarity with, eg, Leslie Brownrigg’s ‘The Miner’ conveys the deprivations of the tunnel ‘hewer’, labouring away in ultra-cramped, severely restricted space, “crouching semi-naked within the tomb-like shafts” (Mayne). Painting their own lives, the pitmen “testified to a familiarity that no one else from trained art backgrounds could truly understand” (Ashington Group of Pitmen Painters).

⇡ ‘X’mas Tree 1950’, Harry Wilson

Pitmen Painters did not restrict themselves to the life of mine workers below the ground. The non-professional group of artists took on all aspects of home life, ordinary social activities, the pub, football matches, dog tracks, fish-and-chip shops, pigeon ‘crees’ (sheds), etc. What comes through in many of the paintings is just how unglamorous 1930s coal-dominated Ashington was – “dreary rows (of homes) a mile long…ashpits and mines down the middle of still unmade streets” (Mayne).

The group’s first exhibition at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in 1936, gave them new public exposure and even a critical nod from the likes of Julian Trevelyan and sculptor Henry Moore.

‘Pigeon crees’, Jimmy Floyd ⇡

After WWII interest in the Ashington Group waned but the men from the pits continued their painting. The early 1970s brought a renewal of interest in the Ashington Group due to the efforts of critic William Feaver  After meeting what remained of the group including foundation member Oliver Kilbourn, Feaver “reconstructs their history, revives their work, curates exhibitions, culminating in a China tour in  1980, the first western exhibition in China after the Cultural Revolution✧ (‘Pitman Painters. The Ashington Group 1934-1984 by William Feaver’, Vulpes Libres,  (2009), (‘Pitman Painters. The Ashington Group 1934-1984 by William Feaver’, Vulpes Libres,  (2009) (http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com)⊞.

⇡ Norman Cornish, last of the group

Despite their late rediscovery the Ashington Group’s days were numbered. Coal mines in the Ashington area and the north were closing down in 1980s Thatcherite Britain. The trigger which brought the group to a sudden halt was a prosaic and trivial matter of 50p! In 1982 the annual ground rent on the pitmen’s hut in Ashington was increased by 50p to £14 (Mayne). This proved a straw too much for the ageing handful of members still active and the Ashington Group folded in 1983, just one year shy of its half-centenary. Today the Pitmen Painters are all gone and Ashington and like towns are bereft of traces of their coal-mining past, however the art of the pitmen (or most of it) remains as a visual reminder of that life. With Feaver and other admirers’ help, the permanent collection, a key article of the group’s constitution, exists today, housed within the Woodhorn Mining Museum.

Footnote: Mining art Japanese style
Coal miner art is not the exclusive domain of Northumberland or even Britain. It also emerged in Japan in the art of Sakubei Yamamoto. Yamamoto’s entire work life from the age of seven or eight was in coal mines in the Fukuoka Prefecture. Only at age 57 did Yamamoto start painting seriously. Over the following years he produced over 700 paintings of his work milieu, providing “a visual record of the brutality of mining life, capturing the poverty of workers and their families, the personal lives, customs and superstitions, and their struggles for a better life. Like the Pitmen Painters’ permanent collection, Yamamoto’s ouevre found a home in a former mine site, the Tagawa History and Coal Museum (‘The Pitmen Painters of England and Japan’, Diana Cooper-Richet, The Conversation, 16-Jan-2018, www.theconversation.com).

⇡ (L) O Kilbourn (Image: Bellcode Books)

Pitmen personnel: the Ashington Group’s founder members include Oliver Kilbourn (probably the best known of the Pitmen Painters)⌖, George Blessed, Jimmy Floyd, Harry Wilson, Lee Robinson, John Dobson and John F Harrison.

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✱ the group initially met in a small hut in Longhorsley, but after WWII began, they were forced to relocate into Ashington proper, a small town in the coal-mining region of Northumberland

✧ on the China tour group members visited the mining province of Shansi

⊞ Feaver’s book on the group inspired a 2007 play by Billy Elliot author Lee Hall

⌖ prolific in output and broad in scope (including historical subjects among his artwork), Kilbourn exhibited his own series ‘My Life as a Pitman’ in Nottingham in 1977

The Luddites of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: Technophobes with an Excessively Destructive Bent or Practitioners of Last Resort Workplace Bargaining?

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Economic history, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

We’ve all heard the term bandied round—anyone who is reluctant to embrace new technology or the world of computers is labelled a Luddite. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “a person who is opposed to the introduction of new working methods, especially new machines”. Many of us would also have an inkling of the term’s origins, deriving from the group of English workers in the early 19th century whose method of resisting new work technologies in Georgian factories and mills took on a very “hands-on”, destructive manner. Beginning with weavers in the textile industry in Nottinghamshire taking to the new machines with sledgehammers in protest, the movement soon spread to other parts of the Midlands and the North of England.

Rampage against the machine provokes a repressive reaction

The British government wasted little time in sending in an army of soldiers✱ in defence of capital. Their assignment was to protect the factories and quell the workers’ revolts. Parliament enacted laws making the workers’ trail of destruction against the machines a capital offence, and many of the offenders were summarily and violently dealt with (shootings, hangings, transportation to New Holland). Consequently, the Luddite movement lost energy and cohesion and petered out within a few years [‘The Original Luddites Raged Against the Machine of the Industrial Revolution’, (Christopher Klein), History, 04-Jan-2019, www.history.com].

Class loyalty

The ruling elite of the day viewed the actions of the workers in attacking the private property of employers as merely bloody-minded vandalism, a perspective that still held an attraction for some modern conservative historians in the 20th century… eminent historian JH Plumb for instance dismissed the Luddites’ revolts as nothing more than “pointless, frenzied industrial jacquerie”. But was that all there was to it, the mindless, purposeless, random savagery of working class vandals? 

In a ground-breaking article in the early Fifties radical historian EJ Hobsbawn took issue with the conventional “nihilistic sabotage” view of historians like Plumb. Hobsbawn places the rebellious workers’ actions in their proper context, that of the Industrial Revolution and the economic vicissitudes of the period. The machine-breaking by the weavers and other workers was a direct action form of industrial strategy initiated by labour, Hobsbawn calls it “collective bargaining by riot” [EJ Hobsbawn, ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present, No 1, (Feb., 1952), pp.57-70]❂.

The threat accompanying automation

Workers such as the weavers in Nottinghamshire around 1811/12 foresaw the dire implications for them of the introduction of new inventions like the mechanical loom. The economic downturn Britain experienced during the drawn-out Napoleonic Wars resulted in loss of profits for the merchants who owned the mills and factories. But it harmed working families even more…unemployment was widespread, food became scarce and therefore more expensive. Magnifying the problem, trades like the stocking knitters and the lace workers were in decline. By using the new technology, employers could increase production allowing them to engage untrained workers at lower wages. This directly and adversely affected the weavers and other artisans who had spent years learning and honing the skills of their craft. Now the new machines were being taken over by untrained workers who produced inferior work. The job security of textile craftsmen were thus imperilled, by the use of the (new) machinery in (as they saw it) “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to circumvent standard labour practices❆. The danger identified, the textile workers found themselves limited in the forms of protest available to them—they could not legally form trade unions and they could not strike⦿. Smashing knitting frames and other machines was conceivably the only effective way to protest the inevitable erosion of their economic livelihood [George Binfield, quoted in Klein; ‘What is a Luddite?’, wiseGEEK, www.wisegeek.com].

Not technophobes of the Industrial Revolution

Hobsbawn is at pains to stress that the protesting mill and factory workers bore no hostility to the machines per se◙. Notwithstanding that the concept of trade unionism was inchoate and still barely nascent at this time, Hobsbawn describes the “wrecking (as) simply a technique of trade unions in the period before (and during) the early Industrial Revolution“. A more contemporary historian George Binfield concurs with Hobsbawn’s central thesis, stating that the derisory ‘technophobe’ tag is a mischaracterisation of the movement—the textile artisans were not against the new technology of the Industrial Revolution, but against the use of it to produce shoddy clothing and depress the wages of skilled workers (Binfield in Klein)¤. Actually, far from being inept, many of the Luddites in the textile industry were highly skilled machine operators [‘What the Luddites Really Fought Against’, (Richard Conniff), Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com].

Poster notice offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the frame-breakers who attacked George Ball’s Notts. workshop in 1812 🔻

Antecedents and successors of the Luddites

Luddism, as Donald MacKenzie put it, “was neither mindless, nor completely irrational, nor completely unsuccessful” [DA MacKenzie, ‘Marx and the Machine’, Technology and Culture, Vol 25, No 3, July 1984, pp.473-503]. Hobsbawn scuttles any suggestion that the Luddites’ movement was a one-off phenomena. Arguing that it’s antecedents can be traced back as far as the 17th century, he details instances of other English workers utilising the same industrial tactic as the Luddites—West of England clothing industry , 1710s-1720s; weavers in Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Devon, 1726/27✧; rioting of textile workers in Melksham (Wilts), 1738; and not confined to the textiles business – coal miners employed the same wrecking tactic in the Northumberland coal-field in the 1740s⊞. Hobsbawn notes that the Luddites’ tactic of destroying the tools of production in a calculated fashion did not end with the movement’s swift demise. He cites the riots in Bedlington (Durham) in 1831 in which strikers wilfully wrecked the capitalists’ winding-gear.

No unmitigated failure; the preventative measures tactic

Although the Luddites’ revolt ended in suppression and broken dreams, Hobsbawn makes the case that there were successes in the workers’ efforts in other episodes of machine-breaking. In some instances, the mere threat from disgruntled craftsmen to wreak havoc on factories and mills was sufficient to dissuade some employers from introducing the machinery as planned, eg, this was the case earlier with weavers in Norwich and shearmen in Wiltshire. Hobsbawn concludes that “invariably, the employer, faced with such hazards” decided to delay or not implement the new technology, cognisant of the latent threat to his property and even his own life. In several of the cases cited by the historian, the threats were a successful bargaining tool to stop employers from cuttingworkers‘ wages, and in the instance of the Northumberland coal miners, their provocative action in burning the mine’s pit-head machinery actually won themselves “a sizeable pay rise”.

🔺‘Ned Ludd’ (Image: Granger Collection, NY)

Footnote: The eponymous ‘leader’ of the movement
The Luddites’ leader was supposed to be one “Ned Ludd”, sometimes referred to as ‘General‘, ‘Captain’ or even ‘King’ Ludd. Purportedly he was an apprentice in the late 1770s who was either beaten or berated by his master and took revenge by damaging the factory’s stocking frame. It seems that in all probability Ned is apocryphal in the fashion of Robin Hood, the English personification of the mythical figure invoking social justice. Ned can be viewed as a symbolic leader for the wrongly-treated to rally round in pursuit of righting (in this instance) the workplace injustices foisted upon skilled industrial craftsmen (Ludd was even said to reside in Sherwood Forest, another nod to the inspiration of the Robin Hood legend in his invention).

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✱ some 12,000 troops in total were despatched, more than the number under the command of Wellington in the concurrent Peninsula War, a classic, heavy-handed overkill by the British authorities 

❂ one writer applies the term “labor strategists” to the Luddites as a de facto vocational appellation, [Brian Merchant, ‘You’ve Got Luddites All Wrong’, (Tech By Vice), 03-Sep-2014, www.vice.com]

⦿ being prevented from forming trade unions left industrial workers already behind the eight-ball when IR mechanisation came along—they were unable to establish a minimum wage, establish workers’ pensions and set standard working conditions

❆ the technology the Luddites railed against did not necessarily need to be new, the stocking frame for instance had been invented 200 years earlier (Conniff)

◙ nor were they “heroic defenders of a pre-technological way of life” – as romantically portrayed later in some quarters (Conniff)

¤ as Binfield contends, the Luddites were in fact willing to adapt to mechanisation…it was the direction that enhanced productivity was heading—enriching the merchant owners, not the workers—that was their beef. Their objective was a share of those profits, or at the very least, a decent wage

✧ their attack on the property and materials of masters and blacklegs had the positive outcome of gaining them a “collective contract” of sorts

⊞ workers in the East Midlands hosiery trade also resorted to frame-breaking as part of the riots in 1778 to protest wage erosion…Hobsbawn calls these hose-makers “the ancestors of Ludditism”