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The Final Lump of Coal in Britain’s stocking

Within a few years, there will be no visible reminder that coal was once dug out of the ground at the Kellingley Colliery.

As it has gone with so many other towns in Britain — Creswell in Derbyshire, Rhodesia in Nottinghamshire, Mardy in South Wales — so it will go with Beal, in North Yorkshire, the town where Kellingley was located. Today, these are small towns and villages — some with only one street, one pub, and one shop — but once they were places of international importance, whose coal powered the Industrial Revolution, drove the steam trains on Victorian railways, and fueled the ships that fought World Wars I and II.

The coal industry — a business that once defined Britain — ended in any meaningful sense with the closure of Kellingley, the last deep pit mine in the United Kingdom, on Dec. 18, though, realistically, the industry has been on life support since 1990. When the workers at Kellingley finished their final shift, surrounded by members of the media, it was with feelings of dejection and anger, but also with a calm resilience. The 450 remaining miners simply bid farewell to their jobs; some exchanged high-fives, others shuffled off to an uncertain future with somber looks on their faces. The men once employed there will have to find alternative employment. The local shops and services that relied on Kellingley’s trade will have to find customers elsewhere.

Coal has been mined in Britain since the Roman times. The Romans called it “the best stone in Britain” and carved jewelry out of it, then marveled when that jewelry could be set on fire. They would soon begin mining it for fuel, but only out of small drift mines. It would take the Industrial Revolution to bring on the golden age of coal — and the era of the deep pits that have come to shape the image of British mining we have today.

Coal was made for the new demands of the industrial era. It was more efficient than wood and could be used as fuel to power steam engines; in its “coked” form — purified in an airless, high-temperature oven — it could be used to heat homes cheaply. Coal fueled the Victorian railways, which themselves transformed daily life in Britain, connecting people, food, and industry over greater distances and at a faster pace than ever before. The British Empire was built up and governed via the journeys of steamships, which crisscrossed the oceans with bellies full of — what else? — British coal.

By the 1890s, coal was creating wealth on an unprecedented scale. Coal business made headlines on the front pages of major newspapers across the globe: Around the turn of the century, a deal for supplying coal to a shipbuilding company was made at the coal exchange near Cardiff docks — the first 1 million pound contract in the history of industry. The British navy fought World War I using millions of tons of coal, dug out of the ground by a labor force considered so important they were excused from military conscription so long as they kept digging to feed the furnaces that fueled the war effort. At its peak, in 1913, more than 3,000 pits were producing 292 million tons of British coal, with 96 million tons sold on world markets.

The coal boom transformed leafy backwaters in South Wales, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and the Midlands into bustling towns. Migrants traveled to Britain from Spain, Italy, and Ireland for good wages, and coal villages became melting pots of different nationalities with street names to match. In South Wales, there are still streets named for the nationalities of those who inhabited them: Spanish Row, English Street, and Italia Villas. It was coal migrants from the Bardi region of Italy who first introduced South Wales to ice cream.

Life in these towns could be bleak, sometimes notoriously so. Thousands died in accidents and explosions every year as the demand for coal surged. Conditions underground were grim: Men worked in seams that were barely 3 feet high, walking up to two miles underground before arriving at digging sites. They completed every task by hand, setting up roof supports, digging, and then dragging tons of coal to the surface every day. The dust and humidity were intolerable; many died of respiratory illnesses before the age of 30. At the end of the day, the miners emerged, whole bodies covered in black dust, to head back to their families, who often lived in cramped, squalid conditions.

But the constant presence of danger and hardships also had the effect of creating tightly knit communities: Towns formed pit brass bands, pit village rugby and soccer teams, and pit choirs. Part of the reason why the coal industry, and the culture surrounding it, has such a distinctive identity within the wider British public imagination today is in part because coal towns — with their danger, poverty, sense of community, and the ever-looming possibility of “industrial action” — had about them a certain brutal romance: men who went into the bowels of the Earth and suffered immeasurable struggles to dig out black rocks to feed their families. The wider drinking and violence embedded in mining communities also helped to forge the idea that these were men apart, as depicted in the novels of D.H. Lawrence, and romanticized and sexualized by George Orwell in his working-class travelogue The Road to Wigan Pier:

Source: http://foreignpolicy.com/