Word: coaling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Best Friend? These messy problems land squarely on the ample frame of the coal board's chairman, Baron Robens of Woldingham, who is variously known to Britons as "Lord Coal" and "honest" Alf." After serving on Manchester's city council and running a teddy-bear-manufacturing business, Lancashireman Robens won a seat in Parliament, at 40 became Clement Attlee's Minister of Labor. In 1961 a Conservative government asked him to take over the red-inked coal board, which had become a music-hall joke. Robens moved into the board's office behind Buckingham Palace, mounted...
Britain's National Coal Board is massive by any standards. It is the third largest industrial company outside the U.S., employs 550,000 people (one in every 40 British workers), is one of England's biggest landlords (it owns 130,000 homes), and supplies most of Britain's energy needs. It also has Brit ain's worst managerial headache. Its deficit has mounted to $125 million so far this year, and it intends to close 150 coal mines and seek government forgiveness of loans equaling more than $1 billion. Last week, in the most severe shake...
...N.C.B.'s plight has been worsening despite rising productivity and the board's leading role in applying automation techniques to mines. Like coal industries elsewhere, the board suffers from the increased efficiency of rival energy products: oil, natural gas and nuclear power; coal now supplies only 65% of Britain's fuel needs v. 90% in 1950. The N.C.B.'s operating costs have risen steadily, yet the government has forced the board to hold the price line. Its wages are pegged to an obsolete piece-rate system, its mines are worked out, and unemployment insurance has suspiciously...
...Lord Coal managed to turn a modest $3.9 million profit, but rising competition, casual labor practices and overoptimistic expansion soon reddened the ink again. "If we were a private corporation," admits Robens, "the stockholders would have been bankrupt a long time ago." The government's protective measures (a virtual ban on coal imports, a twopence-per-gallon tax on oil) have been to no avail. And, despite promises that they will get new jobs, the 120,000 miners who will be thrown out of work by the pit closures are no longer sure that Alf Robens is their best...
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, wrote Robert Frost, and in this novel that something is the Pennsylvania Dutch peasantry on the farm lands and the immigrant Irish and Polish serfs in the coal "patches" upriver. A farm boy, intent on exploring the grounds, dies impaled on the spiked wall, and George bugs out to New York, leaving his lawyer to slip $500 in hush money to the family. Why does a man like this want to be a gentleman? It seems that "becoming a gentleman" was an obsession that Father Abraham had developed and that...