The first section of this appendix describes and evaluates the official records of strikes collected by the Board of Trade Labour Statistical Bureau and its successor departments and Ministries since 1888. It should be read in conjunction with our comments in chapter 1. The second section indicates how we have defined and named collieries.

THE BOARD OF TRADE AND MINISTRY OF LABOUR RECORDS OF COALMINING STRIKES

From 1901 these records exist as a series of manuscript ledgers catalogued by the Public Record Office as Trade Disputes: Record Books, Strikes and Lock-outs in 1901, etc. These are referred to in what follows as the Record Books. The ledgers for 1916–46 have been published on microfilm (Lowe 1985). For years prior to 1901 only the details published in the Report on the Strikes and Lock-outs of 1888 by the Labour Correspondent of the Board of Trade and subsequent annual Reports (later revised and collected in the Board of Trade Abstracts of Labour Statistics of the United Kingdom) and in the Board of Trade Labour Gazette survive. Our machine-readable coding of these data is available to other researchers at the ESRC's Data Archive held at Essex University. Readers who are considering using these sources or our coding of them for their own purposes may also wish to consult the Guide to this data set held at the Data Archive (Outram 1997). While this appendix focuses on the records covering the first forty years of the twentieth century the general principles governing the statistical recording of strikes have remained remarkably stable from the early 1890s and much of what we have to say pertains to the entire period since that time.