Word: coaling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Gaitskell's rise was meteoric. Within two years, he was appointed Minister of Fuel and Power, was responsible for austerity fuel restrictions. Urging fewer baths to conserve coal, he joked: "Personally I've never had a great many hot baths myself. Anyway, what's underneath isn't seen by anybody." In 1950, he replaced ailing Sir Stafford Cripps as Chancellor of the Exchequer and immediately began slashing welfare expenses to pay for Britain's defense commitments. It was a decision which enraged Labor Firebrand Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health, and which began a titanic...
Rather than turn the party over to the rash and mercurial Bevan after Labor's defeat in the 1951 election, Attlee held on to the leadership and watched the developing struggle between ex-Coal Miner Nye and the middleclass, intellectual Gaitskell, who had never lived in a slum or walked in a picket line. With all the passion and eloquence of his proletarian youth, Bevan raged that Gaitskell was a "desiccated calculating machine." No phrasemaker, Gaitskell did not engage Nye in verbal combat, instead coolly and shrewdly lined up the trade union rank and file behind him. When Attlee...
...years ago when he was tapped by Prime Minister Macmillan to boss Britain's nationalized coal industry, Labor M.P. Alfred Robens, 52, hardly seemed a promising choice. A dedicated socialist and onetime Minister of Labor under Clement Attlee, Robens had had no experience at all in running a big business. And the task before him was staggering. Burdened with uneconomic mines and archaic mining methods, Britain's coal industry had piled up a deficit of $227 million since its nationalization...
...strapping (6 ft., 200 lbs.) Alf Robens turned out to be the cleverest capitalist the British Labor Party ever produced. Recognizing that the Coal Board's marketing tactics were woefully weak, he opened a string of showrooms up and down the country to woo homeowners into using more coal for heating, and sent a staff of 200 technicians out to talk British industrialists into burning coal in their plants...
More important, Robens doggedly set out to tighten up the operations of the sprawling Coal Board, which employs more than 580,000 people. Shuttling from mine to mine, he patiently explained to the miners the need to close unprofitable mines and automate the remaining ones. His down-to-earth, ex-union leader's approach won the miners' support. With a minimum of furor, Robens has closed 50 marginal mines in northern England and Scotland, moved many of the displaced workers to expanding mines in the Midlands. A 4% raise in miners' wages last year was more than...