Peter Unsworth takes a look back at the demise of 'black gold'

We used to call it King Coal. The thousands who laboured beneath the earth described their back-breaking task as ‘winning’ the black stuff that powered industry and warmed the millions of homes around the country.

Not that much of it was ‘won’ from below our feet in Oxfordshire or neighbouring counties. But we needed it all the same for the giant Didcot Power Station and even its one time little brother in Osney.

Now, on Friday, Britain’s last deep mine colliery, Kellingley, in Yorkshire, is to close, putting the last 450 of its one-time 2,000 employees out of work. Kellingley opened to much fanfare in 1965 . Now it will see its headgear dismantled and its buildings levelled.

Economists will tell you that what coal we now need can be bought cheaper from overseas. After all imports from China and Colombia cost about £30 a ton compared with the £43 to extract a similar amount in Britain.

Private enterprise succeeded the National Coal Board, which in 1947 had acquired 958 mines from private ownership. Forty years later coal mining was back in private hands, and now the last pit is no more.

The sadness is that the death knell for coal came about due to personal hatred and political determination. Margaret Thatcher’s obsession to beat the National Union of Mineworkers and their leader Arthur Scargill in 1984 outweighed any arguments. Union power had not only to be broken, it had also to be flattened.

The tragedy is that not only were mines closed, but communities were also destroyed. Towns and villages, united by their common work, were torn apart . Coal was taken out of the equation and little was given to replace it. Human misery – and there was much of it created as a result of promises to replace jobs not being fulfilled – was not taken into account. In these areas the grocer’s daughter from Grantham will never be forgiven.

Do not think I am getting all sentimental about coal. I might have been born in an area of Yorkshire peppered with mines and surrounded by mill chimneys belching out poisonous smoke from the boilers that powered looms and other machines.

I thank God that I had not to join many of my friends on the daily – and nightly – trudge to the pit head before returning home eight or nine hours later, drained and coughing coal dust. Like the late Lord Robens, perhaps the most famous of the NCB’s chairmen, once said, no man should have to burrow in the bowels of the earth to earn a living. But at the time it was the best we had because it was all we had.

Kellingley’s closure signals the end of 300 years of coal mining in Britain. Might I suggest that just as we rightly remember our soldiers, sailors and airmen who served their country in peace and in war, it would not be out of place on Friday to raise a glass to those miners who also served – in peace and in war.