Working Lives. The forgotten voices of Britain's post-war working class, David Hall, Bantam Press, 2012, hardback, pp. 391, £25.00 ISBN 9780593065327

This remarkable collection of oral testimonies drawn from hundreds of hours of first-hand interviews collected by an accomplished television producer and biographer of the steeplejack and industrial commentator Fred Dibnah, explores other aspects of the legacy of post-war history of Britain than its industrial archaeology. It focuses predominantly on working-class experience in post-war contexts ranging from ‘the deep docks and towering cranes of the Tyneside shipyards to the mills and chimneys of Lancashire and beyond' in the Britain of the early 1950s, which the author contends was arguably ‘the most urbanized and industrialized nation in the world, a global power in shipbuilding and the leading European producer of coal, steel, cars and textiles'.

Like the forebears of one of his interviewees Tony Cummings' paternal grandparents, I was born not far from Burnley's Weavers' Triangle and as a secondary schoolboy heard the blast at the Hapton Valley pit which killed his younger brother and subsequently witnessed as an A and E outpatient at Burnley's Victoria Hospital those badly burned miners who survived the blast recovering from their horrendous injuries. I also experienced those contrasting alcohol-fuelled bastions and sobriety-inducing vestiges of popular culture, the working men's clubs and temperance bars of north east Lancashire, participating in Lane Head Working Men's Club's annual children's outings from Burnley to the seaside and the children's entertainments which celebrated the return of the chara as the coach was always nostalgically termed in a contraction of charabanc by the trips organisers. I also occasionally patronised Mrs McNulty's temperance bar in a stone terraced house opposite St Cuthbert's Church near Rakehead Recreation Ground as a youngster as did Stanley Bolton and his sister Mabel Ryding, interviewees, in their home town of Horwich, Lancashire in the 1930s.

Hall's unique collection of oral testimonies ‘from workers whose stories might not otherwise have been told: mill girls who risked life and limb in dusty, noisy weaving sheds; steel workers who wrestled sheets of white-hot metal in the blistering heat of the foundries; an miners who hewed coal by hand on filthy, cramped, claustrophobic coalfaces' provides a vivid complement to David Kynaston's, Austerity Britain 1945-1951 to which the author refers in his scene-setting introduction. It reaffirms the value of oral history in providing access to a now vanished world.