At its peak in the 1920s, Britain’s mining industry employed more than 1 million people, as coal drove trains, fueled factories and heated homes.
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As union official Phil Whitehurst, national officer of the GMB, said: “The final 450 miners, the last in a long line stretching back for generations, are having to search for new jobs before the shafts that lead down to 30 million tons of untouched coal are sealed with concrete”.
Many workers lost their lives over the past century in rockfalls and fires – 439 died in the UK’s worst explosion at a mine in Glamorgan, south Wales, in 1913 – while many miners have had their lives blighted by diseases associated with inhaling coal dust. “I never thought I’d see this day come but it has, and times move on, and we have to now, and that’s that”.
It’s the end of a two-year process to close down the UK’s deep mine, after hard trading conditions caused by low coal prices.
Dubbed the “Big K”, the over 2,500-foot deep mine in the Yorkshire village of Knottingley leaves 450 miners jobless 40 years after beginning production.
“When Margaret Thatcher closed the pits in the 1980s on a massive scale, even she made sure that the miners got full redundancy pay and pensions”.
“Closing Kellingley will not cut Britain’s carbon emissions; all it will do is make us more dependent on imported coal”.
Many shared hugs and handshakes as they walked away and said they were “very sad” at the closure of the pit, known locally as the Big K. “Every pit that has shut over the last 50 years, the community has suffered”.
They have worked so hard to save the Government money, to support UK Coal and Kellingley, and to keep the pit open, but they feel that all they are getting in return is a kick in the teeth.
Keith Poulson, NUM branch secretary for Kellingley, said that being a miner at the doomed pit had felt like being “a convicted prisoner on death row”.
“This is a very sad day for everyone connected with the mine but I am proud that we have done the job safely and professionally”.
The board of UK Coal said that it was a historic moment that would have “a real impact on those people who work at Kellingley, their families and the wider community”. At the same time, up to 500,000 people were working in the coal industry nationally.
“There was a market for our coal, coal will still be burned at Drax power station for the next 10 years or more, and that’s what’s angering a lot of these men”.
“I feel gutted, like everybody else”, one miner, Tony Carter, 52, told AFP ahead of the closure.
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He continued: “The morale of the men is absolutely rock bottom, to be thrown on the industrial scrapheap”.
