Last coal mine in UK consigned to history
Print Edition
COAL once fueled the British Empire, employed armies of men and shook the power of governments.
Yesterday, workers at Britain’s last operating deep coal mine finished their final shift, emerging — soot-blackened and live on television news channels — to cheers, applause and tears.
Some of the men carried lumps of coal as mementoes from the Kellingley Colliery, 320 kilometers north of London. The last haul of coal from the pit is destined for a mining museum as a once-mighty industry fades into history.
“There’s a few lads shedding tears, just getting all emotional,” said miner Neil Townend, 51.
Defiant to the end, the Kellingley miners sang a hit by Tom Jones — the son of a Welsh coal miner — as they headed underground for the last time.
“This is what makes us very special, the mining community,” said Nigel Kemp, who worked at the mine for more than 30 years. “The men have gone down today singing ‘My, my, my, Delilah.’ Every single man on the cage, you could hear them 400 feet down singing.”
At its peak in the 1920s, Britain's mining industry employed over 1 million people, as coal powered trains, fueled factories and heated homes. After World War II, the UK still had 750,000 underground miners at almost 1,000 coal pits, but the industry’s days were numbered.
With gas and nuclear power on the rise, hundreds of coal mines had closed by 1984, when a showdown between the British government and the miners cemented the industry’s central — and contested — place in Britain’s national mythology.
Thousands of miners went on strike hoping to scuttle then-Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s plan to shut down 20 pits and lose 20,000 jobs in a bid to destroy the powerful mining unions, which for years had used their economic clout to extract concessions from British governments.
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