The closure of Britain's last coal mine on Friday in a misty corner of Yorkshire brings to an end a proud history of industrial boom and social struggle. "Britain's best miners work at Kellingley," reads a sign outside the colliery in northern England in a community that is dreading the inevitable final shift. "I feel gutted, like everybody else," said Tony Carter, 52, one of 450 miners who day in day out dig out coal 800 metres underground. "It's the end of an era. This week we're history -- the last deep mine in England. Our country was built on coal -- the industrial revolution," he said.
Britain's historic coal mines fuelled the Industrial Revolution and helped build the British Empire, as well as being at the origins of the trade union movement and helping to inspire Marxist principles. Once Britain's most important industry, coal traces its modern origins to northern England in the late 18th century and became a symbol of socialist resistance when former prime minister Margaret Thatcher began closing many mines in the 1980s.
As in many parts of Europe, the miners, the slag heaps and the trucks filled with coal will become a distant memory at the mine known as "Big K". The historical milestone will remove a vital source of income in the area, centred around the village of Knottingley, and leave many families here questioning their economic future. "My father was a miner. Most of the people, their dads have been miners, so it's in your heritage."
Crying into his pint of beer at the local miners' social club, Kevin Butler said: "It's a miner's town. The miners want to work... They don't want handouts. The lads want to work. It's killed this town". When Butler's son heard that Kellingley was closing he moved to Australia to find a job but not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to make the move. Many of the employees at Kellingley -- of whom many started mining aged 15 -- see few other jobs.
Keith Poulson, local secretary of the National Union of Miners (NUM), is particularly bitter. "It's absolutely maddening to think that we're just going to turn our backs on a profitable mine, an industry where you've got a skilled workforce," he said. Poulson, a former miner, said Kellingley was surrounded by three coal-fired power stations including one -- Drax -- which produces between seven and eight percent of Britain's electricity needs. "We've got 20 years' plus reserves of coal available to obviously be delivered to Drax but for some reason British coal is no longer needed," he said.
Drax will instead receive cheaper coal which Britain imports from countries like Colombia and Russia. In the new age of climate change commitments and renewable energy, emissions-producing coal is out of fashion. The government last month said it planned to shut down the most polluting coal power stations by 2025. Out of the three currently around Kellingley, only Drax will still be functioning beyond 2016. Poulson said miners had fallen victim to profit margins and taxes, while the cost of coal has increased only slightly in recent decades. Despite feeling abandoned, the miners reminisce of better times and the camaraderie that bonded them. "I enjoyed every minute of it," Carter said. "Fantastic group of people. You never might meet better people than miners."
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The rise and fall
Geography: Britain's coal seams ran from Scotland to Wales, with pockets in Cornwall and Kent and a long mining history concentrated in the counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland and Durham in northern England.
Employment: Coal mines employed 1.2 million people in Britain at their peak in 1920. This workforce had dwindled to just 4,000 people by 2014 as consumption of coal fell to an all-time low. Renewables outstripped coal as an energy source for the first time this year.
Production: The highest production of coal was 292 million tonnes in 1913. In the 1950s there were over 1,330 deep coal mines in operation, now down to zero.
Turmoil: The industry was nationalised after World War II. The year-long 1984 miners' strike and the closure of many mines under then prime minister Margaret Thatcher were a momentous blow to the industry. Deep-mined coal production fell by 65 percent between 1983 and 1984. The industry recovered from the plunge but continued its long-term decline, which left many former coal mining districts with chronic unemployment.
Culture: Playwright Lee Hall, whose hit musical "Billy Elliot" is set against the backdrop of the miners' strike, called the year-long standoff "a battle over not only the future but the soul of Britain". Coal mining, which features in television shows such as "Poldark" and films such as "Brassed Off", remains iconic to the political left-wing in Britain. Opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was mocked over reports he wanted to re-open the mines.
History: Coal fed the new steam engines that drove trains and ships in the Industrial Revolution. British innovations in mining technology spread around the world. Children as young as five were employed to work in the mines during the Industrial Revolution, hauling coal through narrow underground passages in danger of gases, explosions and tunnel collapses. After a disaster killed 26 children in a coal mine in Yorkshire in northern England in 1838, Queen Victoria commissioned an inquiry into working conditions. Its shocking findings spurred 1842 legislation that banned women, and boys aged under 10, from working in coal mines -- an early piece of labour legislation. Conditions in the English coal mines and factories at the time also inspired the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, who founded Marxist theory.
