Pride vies with sadness as Britain’s last coal pit closes

The National Coal Mining Museum for England has marked the closure of Britain’s last working deep-coal mine, Kellingley Colliery in West Yorkshire, by purchasing the final tonne of coal.

“I thought that I would see out my career here but it is not to be”, coal mine manager Shaun McLoughlin said. Communities have been devastated over the last 30 years and haven’t recovered.

“Everything spread from the pit”, said Andy Smith, acting director of the National Coal Mining Museum, which plans to put the last ton of coal from Kellingley on display.

Kellingley once employed around 2,000 people but this had dwindled to 450 by its final days, as Britain increasingly imported cheaper coal from countries like Russian Federation and Colombia.

“I feel gutted, like everybody else”, another miner, Tony Carter, 52, said in the day before the closure.

She said: “The coal industry has been at the heart of this area for generations”.

“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”.

“Margaret Thatcher in 1984 wanted to break the NUM because it was the bastion of the trade union movement but failed, but David Cameron’s Conservative Government with no industrial strategy has now succeeded where Thatcher left off and the last deep mine in the United Kingdom is to go”.

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.

The miners will receive statutory redundancy pay and severance packages at 12 weeks of average pay.

“It’s very sad but it’s the economic truth of it”.

Britain still gets a fifth of its electricity from coal, though it is giving way to cleaner alternatives.

Spokesman Mike Macdonald said: “We are proud of the hard work and engineering expertise of our members who have successfully delivered the last coal face in Britain under challenging physical and financial conditions”.

An unidentified miner comes off the last shift at Kellingley Colliery in Knottingley, northern England, on the final day of production, Friday Dec. 18, 2015.

Global coal demand fell 0.9 per cent from 7,991 million tonnes in 2013 to 7,920 million tonnes in 2014, the IEA said.