The Undisputed King of Selston
'Captivating and deeply moving' Richard Coles
Published on 5. June 2025
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-3998-1679-3 (ISBN)
Description
'Captivating and deeply moving.' Richard Coles
'Evocative, beautifully written . . . conjures locations and feelings almost magically.' Jeremy Vine
'My brain has made the decision . . . I am going to love this book.' Richard Hawley
There was a time when he felt like the undisputed King of Selston.
Then again, there were several years when he was convinced that he could talk to animals and had even mastered the power of flight - sailing nightly over the headstocks, slag heaps and doggedly beautiful countryside of an isolated East Midlands mining village.
But, deep down, Danny Scott knew that the real King of Selston was and always would be coal. Over the last seven hundred years, coal dust had settled on every inch of Selston. It was in the food he ate, the air he breathed and the words he spoke. It fashioned resilient men like his dad and The Texan; feisty women like his mother, whose right-hook was feared even more than her fondness for house fires.
Danny was a clever bugger - dangerously clever, some said - and fiercely proud of Selston, his dad and his mining heritage. Five generations of his family had spent their working lives underground, providing fuel for the Industrial Revolution, the electrical, rail and motoring revolutions. Without it, the modern age wouldn't have been so . . . modern.
But as this young boy prepared to follow in his dad's footsteps, things began to change. The Devil became captain of the local darts team. Fortune tellers held seances in the front room of his council house. And that once unassailable King's reign seemed to be coming to an end.
For dangerously clever buggers, there was only one option... somewhere else, someone new.
Funny, poignant and alive to the unheralded beauty, purpose and camaraderie of a village which finds itself on the wrong side of history, THE UNDISPUTED KING OF SELSTON shines a light onto a forgotten industry and the dark shadows that wormed their way into the families who got left behind.
'Proper working class stories don't get much of a look-in these days. A shame, really. Especially when they're as beautifully written as this one.' Noddy Holder
'Evocative, beautifully written . . . conjures locations and feelings almost magically.' Jeremy Vine
'My brain has made the decision . . . I am going to love this book.' Richard Hawley
There was a time when he felt like the undisputed King of Selston.
Then again, there were several years when he was convinced that he could talk to animals and had even mastered the power of flight - sailing nightly over the headstocks, slag heaps and doggedly beautiful countryside of an isolated East Midlands mining village.
But, deep down, Danny Scott knew that the real King of Selston was and always would be coal. Over the last seven hundred years, coal dust had settled on every inch of Selston. It was in the food he ate, the air he breathed and the words he spoke. It fashioned resilient men like his dad and The Texan; feisty women like his mother, whose right-hook was feared even more than her fondness for house fires.
Danny was a clever bugger - dangerously clever, some said - and fiercely proud of Selston, his dad and his mining heritage. Five generations of his family had spent their working lives underground, providing fuel for the Industrial Revolution, the electrical, rail and motoring revolutions. Without it, the modern age wouldn't have been so . . . modern.
But as this young boy prepared to follow in his dad's footsteps, things began to change. The Devil became captain of the local darts team. Fortune tellers held seances in the front room of his council house. And that once unassailable King's reign seemed to be coming to an end.
For dangerously clever buggers, there was only one option... somewhere else, someone new.
Funny, poignant and alive to the unheralded beauty, purpose and camaraderie of a village which finds itself on the wrong side of history, THE UNDISPUTED KING OF SELSTON shines a light onto a forgotten industry and the dark shadows that wormed their way into the families who got left behind.
'Proper working class stories don't get much of a look-in these days. A shame, really. Especially when they're as beautifully written as this one.' Noddy Holder
Reviews / Votes
Evocative, beautifully written . . . conjures locations and feelings almost magically. * Jeremy Vine * My brain has made the decision... I am going to love this book. * Richard Hawley * As an East Midlander myself, although from a leafier part than the mining village of Selston, I found Danny Scott's account of his unarguable claim to dominion of our homeland shading into something humbler and truer was both captivating and deeply moving. * Richard Coles * A tender, tough and surprisingly lyrical memoir of a working class boyhood in a disappeared world. Imagine D. H. Lawrence growing up in the era of Ronco and K-Tel. Rich and evocative. -- Stuart Maconie If you're a fan of working class memoirs, you will love this book. Set in the 1970s, it's full of humour, pathos and charm . . . I came to love his village, his family and all the other eccentrics who lived there. Danny Scott really is a very clever bugger. * Michelle Collins * Proper working class stories don't get much of a look-in these days. A shame, really. Especially when they're as beautifully written as this one. -- Noddy Holder Both humorous and profoundly moving, The Undisputed King of Selston offers us a window into a world now lost to time - a community shaped by coal dust, silent fathers, marching bands, working men's clubs, camaraderie and a steadfast sense of pride. In this evocative, unflinching memoir, Scott brings to life the Nottinghamshire mining village of his youth, portraying it as a strange sort of utopia, a place that was both comforting and suffocating. Through his vivid and emotive storytelling he captures the magic of a boyhood lived in the shadow of the pit, and the hardship faced by its miners. -- Dr Emily Webber, author of MINING MENMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
John Murray Press
Product notice
Trade binding
Illustrations
N/A
Dimensions
Height: 223 mm
Width: 144 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
348 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-3998-1679-3 (9781399816793)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Danny Scott grew up in an East Midlands mining village, serving his apprenticeship as an engineer on leaving school, before moving to London in the 1980s. After a job in counter (industrial) espionage, he became a private investigator, then a painter and decorator, then an engineer again, before becoming a journalist and interviewing people like Sir Paul McCartney, Mikhail Gorbachev, Usain Bolt and Dave Hill from Slade. He lives in Essex with his wife and their young son.