Joe Corrie was born in 1894 in Galloway but his family moved shortly afterwards to Cardenden in Fife, where his father worked in the mine and his mother was a casual worker on local farms. Corrie followed in his father’s footsteps at the age of fourteen and was as a miner in Ayrshire throughout the First World War. In its aftermath, in a period of much unemployment, he began to write poetry, some of which was collected in The Image o’ God and Other Poems (1927, 1937) and Scottish Pride and Other Poems (1955).
During the General Strike of 1926, he started to write plays for unemployed miners who called themselves the Bowhill Players, In Time o’ Strife being their first success. The play was performed in mining villages from 1926 to 1928 and another amateur group, the Fife Miner Players, toured this and other Corrie plays until the early 1930s. The play was also produced in London (March 1927) and in Leipzig (1930), though it did not receive a performance in any of the major Scottish cities.
In the 1930s, Corrie came to depend on the Scottish Community Drama Association for production of his works, and they tended to prefer his comic to his more serious works. Corrie himself felt that his serious work had been neglected because of its political content: as he wrote in ‘A Scots Dramatist’s Future’, ‘can we expect a vital Scots drama before the people of a country, especially the youth, have a vision of a fuller life and the will to strive for it and before the stage is a free institution? I don’t think so’.
Corrie’s most successful later works, such as Hewers of Coal (1937) and A Master of Men (1944) remained firmly based in the working-class naturalism that he had first adopted in the 1920s. ‘I have always written to the other fellow, shouting at him to try to get him round to my way of thinking’, he wrote in the 1950s, contrasting himself with the modern writers who ‘seem to talk so much to themselves’. Joe Corrie died in Edinburgh in 1968.