End of deep coal mining in the UK

Finding yourself another job? What an utter dreadful suggestion.

> There was no help given to soften the blow of losing an industry

Yes there was, the place was awash with money. Every light industrial units with miles of my local pit was built with local development agency and EU money.

The difference is that in some areas they grabbed the money and helped people get jobs, in other areas they were too busy moaning to go out and take the opportunities available.

Finding yourself another job? What an utter dreadful suggestion.

The problem is that in some areas, usually industrial northern parts of UK, the coal/steel/mine/chemical/power plant is the ONLY employment. When it closes, so do most of the other businesses. There is no other employment, certainly for the numbers that are laid off, and trying to start a business in an area where money is tight, no-one has a job…

My grandfather in West Yorks was and his greatest pride was to see his children and grand children was to go onto into further education and university. It was a dangerous occupation where death or serious injury was a constant threat and long term illness almost inevitable. The demand for coal is falling, in a few years the UK will have no coal powered power stations, so closure of the mines is almost inevitable.

To link the closure of the mines with the fight between Thatcher and Scargill is foolish. Even Scargill knew that the mines would close in the long run, he was trying to get the best for his members. However the previous battles with the unions and the rise of Thatcher, it was a fight he was never going to win. In doing this they (Thatcher/Scargill) drove the industry into teh ground, without any planning for the long term. The legacy of this can be seen in the old pit villages and towns and will be there for generations.

Coal won’t be coming back. Not unless we can work out clean ways of extracting the energy from it.

Guardian have a nice graphic of the closures over the years at the link below. Interesting to see which areas closed when

Coal mining decline

The problem is that in some areas, usually industrial northern parts of UK, the coal/steel/mine/chemical/power plant is the ONLY employment. When it closes, so do most of the other businesses. There is no other employment, certainly for the numbers that are laid off, and trying to start a business in an area where money is tight, no-one has a job…

You sounds like an ex miner. Loads around here found jobs when some of the biggest pits in the UK closed, they went to other industries, mining abroad or switched to a new career in areas such as healthcare. Others spouted there was no jobs and what were they supposed to do.

Why does the marking of a fairly historical event have to seemingly become an argument in this place, are you all drunk?

I admire the history of mining and the people and communities that embody the industry, but I am not sad to see it go.
I live in an ex coal mining area and it has taken 25 years for these areas to truly start to bounce back from the loss of mining. Now that they are recovering I have to say they are better places.

Problem is there is now little market for coal and coal by products, coal gas, coke and oil,a brand new plant was built in north wakles to extract oil and gas from coal, but closed down , Drax has recently been converted to imported biomass, iron bridge has closed both big users of coal, local gas works have also closed due to the north sea gas, people dont burn coal in their homes to the extent we had to introduce the clean air act to reduce pollution, and basicly because there was no alternative way of heating water or providing heat,there are still a few people who burn refined smokeless coal usually imported or in industry, coke isnt widely used now due to the demise of the steel industry, and what coal and coke is required is now imported or open cast.

as for reopening the pits a steelworks where i worked was once surrounded by coal mines, when the steelworks closed the first thing they did was open cast the site and ship the coal to ironbridge and fidlers ferry coal burning power stations.

people dont burn coal in their homes

/Looks at stove.

Thatcher didn’t force the decline of the coal industry, she tackled the NUM on her terms.
In January-February 1972 the NUM called a strike during the heavy winter and won.
In January-March 1974 the NUM again voted to strike having worked-to-rule for several months running coal reserves low. Labour won the election that year and raised miners’ pay by 35%, and another 35% a few months later.

Thatcher was voted in in 1979. We came close to another strike in February 1981 (a popular month) and the NUM had started sabre-rattling again. The announcement of the closure of Cortonwood Colliery was made in March 1984, which the NUM couldn’t ignore, and led to a strike that this time took place through the warmer, lighter months. Some areas and some unions didn’t strike, and this combined with the willingness of road haulage to deliver coal (train deliveries had also been disrupted) kept coal production going. Ultimately the NUM lost a lot of its power with an alternative Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM) appearing.

Mines sometimes close due to geological problems with getting the remaining coal, or with its quality which needs “sweetening” with better quality coal from elsewhere. And in this climate-change world coal production (and use) has been on the back foot for some time

Not just the miners that lost their jobs though, all the support and convenience around the area such as shops, pubs etc. Lots of little towns in deepest darkest Ayrshire that thrived just never recovered, and are now utter shitholes. Not blaming the qovernment tbh, just saying. I used to work with a lot of ex miners, with the very rare exception they are the laziest buggers I’ve ever experienced, and have a massive sense of entitlement.

I’m sure one of them told me that more pits closed under james Callaghan than thatcher. Dunno if he was talking pish or not.

I believe it was under Wison, (first innings) not Callaghan.

A lot of small pits closed under Macmillan, but it really started to bite in the sixties – the Durham fields were decimated as the NCB centralised all their effort on the bigger pits, leading ultimately to the super pits.

‘My’ village pit was closed in 65, with the loss of 503 jobs (about half what it was at its peak) – but we were lucky, we weren’t in a category D colliery village (tagged for no investment or new development, intended to be bulldozed) supposedly no man ever retired from our pit with a full set of fingers. They open cast a big chunk in the seventies. the pit head stables were finally turned into houses a few years ago, that’s pretty much the only trace that remains apart from the village green, the old wagon way and a fenced off patch of scorched earth where a fire is still burning underground near the village boundary.

Is Big Pit suitable for kids? 3&5?

Don’t start me on open casts ninfan!. There’s a load of them round here that have been abandoned in the last few years, mining companies didn’t have the money they were supposed to set aside for whatever it is that they do to remedy the eyesore.

They’ll just lie there until the buggers decide the coal price is suitable for them to reopen, and the council will welcome them with open arms.

We had a turner at work who started his life as a fitter down the mines. On one shift a piece of machinery had broken down on the pit face and he was sent down to try and repair it with a supervisor. This seam was about 18-20 inches high so they used to tie their tool bag around their ankle and drag it behind them along the seam. This day luckily for him he’d left his bag back down by one of the main shafts. Just as they got out of the seam to walk back for the tools the seam collapsed and the air pressure blew them like rag dolls back along the shaft 20-30 yards. Several broken ribs, collar bone, ankle etc later when he recovered they tried to make him go back down. He never went underground again. They tried to finish him but luckily he got a job in the workshops.

Between Risca and Brynmawr was devastated absolutely destroyed and still isn’t the same now. That is a legacy of shame.

It’s a legacy that the local population have, in part, helped perpetuate. There are loads of people in the Valleys and surrounding areas that have hung on to the idea that your kids will do the same work as the parents and that job will be in the same town/village. It’s known as the ‘Valleys Mentality’ and is still widely evident long after the last pit closed. The families who have gone out and found work in the wider area have found that reasonable jobs are available. The hoardes of people driving out in the morning and back in the evening in decent cars are a good indication. Also as the house prices are low they don’t need to earn as much to have a good quality of life. I work with a lot of people from that area and they have the same view, we even have one or two that still bemoan having to leave ‘their valley’ to get work!

Parts of the Valleys are great with brilliant people there doing good work so it’s not all doom-and-gloom but it could be so much better if people looked forward, not back.

Yes there was, the place was awash with money. Every light industrial units with miles of my local pit was built with local development agency and EU money.

The difference is that in some areas they grabbed the money and helped people get jobs, in other areas they were too busy moaning to go out and take the opportunities available.

Exactly. MTB was a big part of this with EU money helping the trail centres pop up in the South. Lots of local start-up businesses popped up due to the grants and funding for a plethora of subsidised industrial units. Loco was in one in New Tredegar and Mojo are in one in Risca. Dig around and you will find loads of small businesses supplying stuff to big names. I know of two places supplying F1 teams with bespoke kit and lots of places that supply aircraft parts and kit to GEAS in Nantgarw. Festival Park in Ebbw Vale exists due to the EU funding the Garden Festival in the early 90’s and the subsequent regeneration into shops. The old steelworks below have been turned into a new hospital, leisure centre and college via a helping hand from the EU coffers too. Those that saw the new opportunities have prospered, to the benefit of the whole area.

As for people wanting the pits back/wishing they’d never gone? Just look at Merthyr. For as long as I can remember the locals have moaned that there’s no work without the pits, despite there being a few blue chip employers in the area. A proposal to open an open-cast mine digging out the old spoil tips above the town was met with not relief at new work, but a huge petition to stop it as it would ‘destroy the local landscape’. They totally missed the fact that it was a landscape made of waste material and pretty much wasteland full of burned out cars and illegal fly-tipping. Thankfully the petition failed so now it’s an area that is being regenerated as the diggers move from one spoil tip to the next.
I work in Merthyr regularly and the place is full of two distinct types of people: those that work and those that don’t.

The opportunities are there if only people would take off the blinkers and grab them.

Don’t start me on open casts ninfan!. There’s a load of them round here that have been abandoned in the last few years, mining companies didn’t have the money they were supposed to set aside for whatever it is that they do to remedy the eyesore.

They’ll just lie there until the buggers decide the coal price is suitable for them to reopen, and the council will welcome them with open arms.

A lot of that is because the old mining methods took only a small percentage of the coal out, they had to leave most of it to prop the roof up.

As an aside, I know a bloke who is working closely with some of the companies to try and design in MTB trails as part of the remediation and landscaping planning process – it’s an ideal time as there’s big machinery and a completley blank canvas, could show real benefits in future years.

Don’t start me on open casts ninfan!.

A lot of that is because the old mining methods took only a small percentage of the coal out, they had to leave most of it to prop the roof up.[/quote]
Open cast? Roof?

Most of the open casts are to strip out remaining coal from long abandoned underground mine seams

Most of the open casts are to strip out remaining coal from long abandoned underground mine seams

That’s only partially true. I know the old method by the name ‘stoop and pillar’ mining, whereby as you correctly say coal is left behind to prop up the roof, however in some cases many of the pillars could be retrieved upon retreat, if the intent was not to go any further, perhaps for geological reasons.

I worked at one opencast site with no previous workings, and a few where only one or two seams of up to dozens were worked. Opencast mining allows seams to be extracted that are too thin for traditional methods.

From a feasibility point of view, predicting expected tonnages largely based on previously mined seams can be quite risky. Old coal plans can be misleading and often incorrect or non existent, particularly in sites worked pre Second World War.

Also, pre start exploratory drilling is vital in pinning down tonnages, however it is an expensive process, especially if it becomes unviable. In the privatised era, distances between exploratory holes have increased, with greater assumptions made on the coal thicknesses between.

I heard of one unlucky site long ago that put a series of exploratory holes into an area, and upon excavation found unexpectedly that a 2m thick seam of coal had been about 70% worked, and every one of the test holes went through a pillar.

Apart from a grandfather that was a miner, I haven’t got much to add to the discussion. If you’ve time though, I thought this BBC Radio episode of The Reunion was good. Available on podcast too.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03zxmyt

I was extremely disappointed at this news, if it were for entirely green reasons it might have been more palatable but it’s not, it’s the difference between £43.0 per ton and £30 per ton from Columbia, then I heard on the radio that is subsidised which I found even more unacceptable given this God Awful Governments own lack of Green credentials.
Then it’s Christmas, why do these things always seem to happen just before Christmas, I feel so bad for those guys, what the hell can they expect in their future. This country is so **** up, casting it’s skill so readily on the scrap heap for the sake of short term profit. I’m beginning to hate the place.

Global coal prices have generally been on the slide since 2010, I think partially due to American switch to energy production from gas rather than coal due to fracking. The effect was that America has dumped large quantities of cheap coal on the market.

Most of the open casts are to strip out remaining coal from long abandoned underground mine seams

Ah… Wasn’t thinking.