Kellingley Colliery in North Yorkshire is closing today, bringing about the end of the UK’s deep-pit mining industry.
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Kellingley club is now at risk, and the communities that depend on the coal industry are also being undermined by the last pit closure.
In the last 15 years it claims to have supported more than two million people, including around 25,000 who have been helped to find work and more than a million who have acquired new skills and qualifications.
Miners began the final coal mining shift with a rendition of Sir Tom Jones’s Delilah as they travelled underground for one last time.
MP Yvette Cooper, pictured on the march to save Kellingley Colliery in January.
“There’s a few lads shedding tears, just getting all emotional”, said miner Neil Townend, 51.
The miners will receive statutory redundancy pay and severance packages at 12 weeks of average pay.
Ms Cooper added: “We fought for two years to try to keep Kellingley open”.
“Nothing had been arranged for them and we just felt that this couldn’t happen, they couldn’t just go”.
Once, coal fueled the British Empire, employed armies of men and shook the power of governments.
Ms Cooper said the miners had been given “a really bad redundancy deal”. “That feels really unfair”.
Like many post-industrial areas of Britain, former coal-mining regions have often struggled to adjust to Britain’s new service-driven economy, leading to chronic unemployment. “It feels like it’s a real loss”.
National Union of Mineworkers representative Keith Poulson says the 450 miners at Kellingley Colliery in northern England feel like “a convicted prisoner on death row”. “I feel completely let down”.
“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”. The coal they cut through generations powered the industrial revolution, stoked the trains, lit the furnaces, and kept the home fires burning.
Prospect, the union representing managers at Kellingley, accused the government of failing to provide enough support to help staff retrain or seek alternative employment.
“Most of us round here have coal in our blood – family who worked in the local pits or further afield”. Everyone at Kellingley should be congratulated as they have met the managed closure plan safely.
Following the shutdown of Hatfield earlier this year, the end of mining at Kellingley – affectionately known as the “Big K” – means that Yorkshire has lost 56 collieries in just 30 years. The closure follows that of Thoresby in Nottinghamshire.
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Many would argue that the writing had been on the wall for the mining industry since the NUM’s defeat in the strikes of the mid-1980s, but there were still more than 18,000 people working at pits a decade later, when the industry was privatised.
