An industry and a way of life will come to an abrupt halt at 12.45pm on Friday when 60 coalminers at Kellingley resurface with only their identity cards as mementos and redundancy cheques for the future.
The men will leave an estimated 30m tons of recoverable coal in the ground at the North Yorkshire colliery and will be laid off alongside almost 390 colleagues by their employer, UK Coal Kellingley, which will be wound up.
Shaun McLoughlin, the mine’s manager, said: “It’s very sad and disappointing, but we are just not economic any more when it comes to competing with cheap international coal.
“It’s a whole way of life we are losing for ourselves and the wider community that goes with the mine. I don’t blame UK Coal, or the government, it’s just the free market and rock-bottom commodity prices.”
Not everyone in the National Union of Mineworkers or among the underground teams are as forgiving of government, management or the slow demise that they all deemed inevitable.
Keith Paulson, the branch secretary of Kellingley NUM, said: “It’s like being on death row. The only difference is that we knew that our fate was being delivered on 18 December. We’re in the last couple of days now. We can see the warden coming down the corridor, hear him jangling his keys.”
The 450-strong workforce is the last of a once vast army of mainly men who scoured the geological depths of the ground for the “black gold” that fed first railways and then power stations to become the lifeblood of the British economy.
The wider UK coalmining industry, which had its first stirrings even before Roman times, once employed more than 700,000 people, but has gradually been overwhelmed by cheap imports, cleaner fuels and ministerial indifference.
The culture of the underground coal industry stretches way beyond the economic sphere, with coalworkers playing a leading role in UK political history, not least during the General Strike of 1926 and the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
The pit banks and the miners’ galas are all part of the industry’s colourful history, but underground coal has also extracted a high price over the decades in fatalities and industrial diseases.
Dennis Skinner, a former miner and the MP for Bolsover since 1970, said: “I was in the Chesterfield Royal hospital in September 1950, having been knocked over by a lorry walking back from the pit. The ward was empty and I asked where everyone was. They had cleared it because of an accident at Creswell colliery.
“That ward remained empty. No one ever came because 80 people lost their lives that night. It was shocking.”
There were once hopes that the industry might find a new lifeline in carbon capture and storage schemes (CCS), which would have enabled power stations to keep on using coal without adding to global warming. George Osborne broke a promise to give £1bn to allow Shell to build a prototype CCS plant at Peterhead in Scotland during the cuts imposed in the autumn statement.
British surface mining will go on, and low-cost imports will continue to be shipped in from places such as Russia and Colombia to feed the remaining power stations that continue to burn coal.
