Britain | Bagehot

The end of industry

The impending closure of Britain’s last deep coal mines is a moment for reflection and awe

TRUDGING from the mineshaft, black with coal-dust from their plastic helmets to their steel-capped boots and naked legs, the Hatfield miners appear as a vision from a former age. The three-metre thick Barnsley seam they have spent the past eight hours clawing at is, in fact, merely half a mile underground. Yet the geo-economy which, over the course of three centuries, it has brought into being, sustained and sometimes blighted, in pit villages across South Yorkshire and machines, factories and power-stations across Britain, is almost dead now.

At their peak, shortly before the first world war, the deep mines of Yorkshire, Durham, South Wales and other sedimentary places, engines of the Industrial Revolution, employed over a million men and boys. They were the foundation of the modern British economy, “a sort of caryatid”, wrote George Orwell, “upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported”. But mining has ever since been in decline, marked by sudden bursts of pit closure more divisive, and calamitous for the communities affected, than any other aspect of Britain’s deindustrialisation. Twenty-three pits closed in 1985, after the year-long miners’ strike and the industry’s subsequent privatisation; 16 in 1989; and in 1991 another 14. Now, only three deep mines remain, employing 2,000 miners, including 436 at Hatfield, close to Doncaster. And in the next few months they too will close.

Under the terms of a government bail-out deal with UKCoal, a property and mining firm, its two collieries in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire will close next month and in November. That should leave Hatfield, which is owned by its employees, as Britain’s last pit; under the terms of a similar deal, it is due to close in August 2016. But this now looks optimistic, owing to a sudden crash in the global coal price, coinciding with a rise in an environmental levy Britain charges coal-fired power generators. Besides Hatfield’s ancient winding wheel, in place since the pit was opened in 1916, a vast mountain of unsold coal is rising. Unable to shift it at the global price, which is much less than its production cost, the mine is in a desperate way. Failing an unlikely injection of public money, which its directors were in London pleading for this week, probably in vain, it could close within weeks.

No wonder if the Hatfield miners, weary from their shift, tread even more heavily than usual as they head for the showers, spitting gobfuls of chewing tobacco which, like snuff, another mucous-inducing defence against dust, they are among the last Britons to use. Mining is all most of them know. “There’s not many people want a 54-year-old unemployed miner,” says Derwin Martin, a brawny Yorkshireman who has worked at the colliery since 1978, and can describe its most intricate workings in lucid detail. The mine’s computerised monitoring systems often break down, he says; its basic Edwardian infrastructure, of grease-blackened winches, winders and separation drums, rarely does. Mr Martin’s father, brothers, uncles and cousins all worked at the colliery. His grandfather was a Welsh miner, as were his fathers before him.

The Hatfield miners are angry, as well as nervous, for Britain will burn cheap Russian and Colombian coal long after its own mines have closed. In view of the pithead, rail trucks bulging with the stuff rattle across the Hatfield estate, bound for Drax, Europe’s biggest coal-fired power-station. “All we’re saying is, ‘Why can’t some come from British mines?’” says Tony Shaw, branch secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers.

It is tough, though not a rerun of the 1980s, when pit villages across Wales and northern England fell to mass unemployment, drug use and delinquency. The job losses will be much smaller. The tight local culture, based on shared endeavour, village cricket and the miners’ social club, which was the main victim of the strike and subsequent closures, is already gone. By historic standards, moreover, Britain’s last miners are well prepared for life above ground. They are relatively old and well off—the average age at Hatfield is 54 and the average salary £38,000 ($60,000)—and the government, long-since wary of aggrieved miners, is offering pretty decent retraining packages. Yet coal-mining is no ordinary British industry and its death rattle is momentous.

The camaraderie evident among the Hatfield miners, founded on 12-hour shifts underground, labouring together half-cooked and semi-naked, is something irreplaceable. In the lamp room and in the shower they greet each other warmly and tease each other relentlessly, throwing barbs that would be devastating if their solidarity were not so clearly understood. Often, they discuss the mine, which dominates their lives, almost as if it had a cussed character of its own—“pit pissed”, the real mine-heads are said to be. Their fraternity recalls nothing so much as soldiers at war. Asked why he has put up with the dust, heat and threat of injury these past four decades, Dave Wilson, 67 and black with coal, gives the answer of all fighting men: “Friendship with the lads—everybody looks after each other.”

Love in the dark

It is a working life that has changed remarkably little in a century—no more than have the polished-steel safety lamps the miners carry to check for gas. (They also carry hand-held computers for this task, but don’t perfectly trust the batteries.) It is still tough. “Cuts and fractures is part of us culture,” deadpans Mr Wilson. It is still politicised and Labour-voting—the election of the Conservative government last month, the miners say, “was a final kick in the bollocks”. It is informed by an elephantine cultural memory, haunted by past mine owners, always referred to as “Mr” someone, even if hated, and in which Nottinghamshire miners are all scabs. And even now, on the cusp of its extinction, it is defiant—like those grumbling miners who said their salaries were nothing to what City bankers take home. Bagehot had expected to pity them and their almost-dead trade, and does. He also feels awe.

Update: On June 29th Hatfield Colliery announced that it would close within a few days, with the loss of 430 jobs.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "The end of industry"

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