Dec 30, 2013 4 min read

Wyoming Valley historian Robert Wolensky is studying the coal industry, living in a 15th-century alms house (yes, as in “Alms for the poor”), serving as visiting faculty at the University of Exeter and dealing with people who always drive on the wrong side of the road.

Wolensky, a college professor known for his history books on local coal mining, is spending five months in southwest England sifting through records and visiting historic sites.

“I wanted to see if the British, who had a huge coal mining industry, had the subcontractors and lease holders prevalent in the anthracite industry,” Wolensky said in a recent phone interview. “And if they did, did it lead to the same sort of labor disputes, mine disasters and organized crime involvement.”

Wolensky’s stay in Devon County comes courtesy of a federal Fulbright Scholarship. The idea of comparing Britain’s coal history with Pennsylvania’s anthracite region was spawned from his latest book, co-authored with William Hastie, “Anthracite Labor Wars.”

The book focuses on labor unrest and the influence of organized crime in local mining from 1895 to 1959. Wolensky said one compelling aspect of the period was the penchant of big mineral companies such as Lehigh Coal to subcontract or lease mining to smaller, local operators.

“They did it because these other people could control labor, break the union and pillage the coal,” Wolensky said. “Companies like Lehigh Coal didn’t want to mine the coal, they just wanted the tonnage.”

But Wolensky contends that subcontracting led to incidents like the Knox Mine Disaster, a topic of one of his earlier books. That local disaster claimed 12 men when digging went under the Susquehanna River and the mine ceiling collapsed, pouring river water into the tunnels.

Wolensky has been in England since Sept. 1 and said his research shows that England did have subcontracting and leasing, “but not on the scale it was in the Wyoming Valley.

“We had an extremely strike-prone workforce that did not like the way the coal companies were treating them,” Wolensky said.

In contrast, his research shows, England’s miners “were less likely to strike. There was more government regulation over here, tighter inspections, and much more concern with the safety at the sites.”

English miners were more nationalistic, he added, aware they were in competition with coal from places like America and Germany. “The workforce here wasn’t as fractious and the companies weren’t as exploitative and ruthless.”

He added that the prospect of labor-management disputes all but disappeared in 1946, when the coal industry was nationalized in England.

But Wolensky said he has found some correlation between subcontracting mine work and labor unrest. “There were plenty of strikes in certain areas, like Scotland and Wales, and they had more leasing and subcontracts.”

As to organized crime, which Wolensky said entered Wyoming Valley mining when companies “hired the Mafia to break labor,” it seems to never have taken hold in England’s coal industry. “I do not find any vestige of organized crime here.”

Wolensky is leasing an apartment in what once was a poor house that turned into a hospital in the 1800s. The building was converted into nine rental units.

“They keep old buildings here. They don’t knock them down like the Sterling Hotel,” he quipped.

They also keep historic sites, simply because tourism is such a huge part of the economy.

“I just went to Cornwall and saw a brand-new historical site; it reminded me of the Huber Breaker,” he said, referring to the mammoth coal breaker in Ashley in Eastern Pennsylvania, which area residents unsuccessfully fought to save for years. “They spent about $8 million on it.”

Asked what is the best part of spending five months in England, Wolensky was quick to say “definitely not the weather,” citing the chronic rain and damp. For a historian, the real answer was obvious: The opportunity for research and the rich resources in preserved sites and copious industry records.

What has he pined for the most?

“I miss Penn State football; I miss the Green Bay Packers football,” said Wolensky, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point as well as adjunct at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre.

But he’s able to Skype his family regularly, and his wife, Molly, whose father moved from England to Kingston when he was 5, just finished an extended stay with him in that old alms house.

Besides, the University of Exeter puts on a huge dinner bash for visiting Fulbright faculty and students.

“It’s a great experience,” Wolensky said. “I’ve written six books on anthracite, and this is in many ways a culmination on that research, to take it overseas and see how anthracite compares to another major mining country.”