Last Cage Down

This novel, published in 1935, is set in a coal-mining village in Durham. The central character, Jim Cameron, is the local lodge secretary of the miners’ union. He carries the psychological burden of the death of his father in a pit accident and is determined to oppose the mine owner’s plan to introduce a high-risk industrial process to a dangerous seam. He predicts that the plan will inevitably lead to deaths and is jailed for threatening to kill the mine owner over his reckless scheme. The foreseen disaster would necessitate the closure of the mine and the destruction of the village economy. The novel was republished in 1984 during a period, as the foreword points out, of “massive pit closures and government ministers publicly discussing the privatisation of parts of the industry”.

The author, Harold Heslop (born 1 October 1898), grew up in a large mining family near the Durham town of Bishop Auckland. He left school at the age of 15 and began working as a miner. He was called up for army training at the end of 1917 and was based at Tidworth Camp in Wiltshire for the remainder of the war. He wrote, “The summer simply drooled on. Men died in Flanders while we played at being soldiers in and around Tidworth... We contributed nothing... The tale of disaster went on and on, killing ruthlessly the young men, while we stayed in Tidworth.” After the war he returned to the mines and became involved in the militant labour movement that looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration. In 1924 he wrote an essay that won him a two-year scholarship at the Central Labour College in London. While there he met other young activists, including Lewis Jones, whose novel, Cwmardy, featured in this project last year. Heslop’s first novel was written during his time in London — having come to the attention of a Soviet diplomat, it was translated into Russian and published in the Soviet Union in 1926. He went on to write five more novels as well as an autobiography.

The author describes the miners’ dispute with the mine owner in terms of warfare:
“The war was set. The old class enemies were erecting the barriers across the streets of industry with feverish anxiety; they were lining up ready for the encounter. Industrial strife is a remarkable phase of life, for it is in this strife that the meek and the lowly come forward with the mighty and the strong to form one solid phalanx of endeavour. Great companions. Strange weapons. Strange tools. Strange battle. The one holds all and is impatient; the other has nothing and is quietly determined, listening to every kind of counsel but that of despair, girding about them incalculable powers of resistance.”