Hi, any ex-miners online?


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Thats not the report I read Eric, the one I'm on about was to do with the coal industry and the strategy to be used to break the NUM's "back" ready for mine closures.

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Sorry, Missed firbeck's posts which were of great interest.

He is quite correct in his mention of southern Police Forces like the Met.

Although I am not sure of the sentiment of "Deliberately Drafted in"

Forces were used from all over the country, 'The Met' were one of them.

I do have knowledge that Local Police often protected miners on both sides

from the apparent heavy handed tactics of SOME outside forces.

Tales abound of Thefts occurrng from temporary Police billets, and even

local officers abducted, and abandoned half naked on well know tourists destinations

in other parts of the country.

Tales of Police waving their wage slips at the miners probably does not relate to

the acts of the local forces, who would eventually have to Police the Mining areas

after the inevitable end of the strike.

This treatment was to cause much friction between the miners and Police in general.

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I did my fair share of crawling up and down 38 inch high faces with a tool bag hanging from around my neck! Those 14 foot high seams were a Godsend!

I hear ya! Did a fair but of work on a 10ft seam in Utah (Sunnyside) - we called it the "ballroom" it seemed so spacious!

We got a rise out of the miners there by asking them if the got their full pension benefit from that face - the US union pension was based on tonnage. We told them thay should only get half value 'cause half of the coal mined itself! - They had to make two trips down the face to cut the full 10ft - they cut the lower half first, but then most of the upper half would simply fall onto the pans!

Also worked on the strip mines in Wyoming - 120ft thick seam with only 30ft of overburden. Luckily, it is low calorific value coal (but also low sulphur), or those mines would put every underground mine in the world out of business! Absolutely amazing to see!

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If you go to the Coal site Eric, I have some piccies of how the Chinese have started mining very thick seams on modified longwalls, the top caves in onto an AFC behind the chocks! They get a recovery rate of over 80% from 20 foot plus seams while using standard shearers cutting about 14 foot.

Anyway, we are getting away from the sites Nottingham theme!!!!!

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I hear ya! Did a fair but of work on a 10ft seam in Utah (Sunnyside) - we called it the "ballroom" it seemed so spacious!

They had a 3 foot face down Gedling called "Mecca'' cos thats all that was down there, Ballroom!!.......Just a joke

!jumping!

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Please don't get me wrong, the police down here have a thankless job dealing with all sorts of junkies, scumbags and pykies, I have been liasoning with them on that score, they are mostly lovely helpful people, I sympathise with them, they have a difficult job to do and I am avaliable to help them at all times.

Unfortunately, Madam Thatcher drove a wedge between the public and the police, it was deliberate and unforgivable, the police should never have had to have suffered the consequences of her actions, poor old plod has enough to do, whether you agree with my comments or not, she didn't care about it did she, as long as it suited herself to offload the blame for her actions on whowever she felt like it, and we are supposed to bow down to her memory, when the inevitable state funeral occurs, I will be quite happy to slash on the TV.

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I include Wales and Scotland togther with England and say Britains's coal-fields, sadly, were not profitable. Prior to Mrs T the coal industry was subsidised by the government owning it. The major coal customers eg the power stations were also nationalised and everyone paid a subsidy to the coal industry through their electricity bill. This fed though into prices and the UK was a country with relatively high inflation.

Mining is a horrible, dangerous and dirty industry which was artificially kept going as a sort of branch of the social services. I know in the 'romance of coal' all those Welsh miners go off to the pits happily singing but in reality few would have liked their sons to follow them down there. The industry was recognised as having no significant future in the UK.

The correct thing to have done would have been to run down the industry in a controlled way as was done in Europe but Thatcher inherited an industry which was far too big because of over-dependence on coal as a prinary fuel for power generation and earlier coal strikes where the NUM (national union of mineworkers) had asserted that mines should only close when the last tonne of coal had been extracted. That led to the situation of men travelling miles underground to work seams only a few inches thick - no matter what the price of oil might be there was no way that could be profitable.

Foreign fuel was being purchased by the then CEGB (central electricity generating board) prior to the strike as an insurance policy in the event of a strike being called. The technolgy of coal transport had advanced since the war and very large bulk carriers could bring bring 50 thousand tonnes plus in a single cargo from any country in the world where steam coal was cheap because of lower cost operations which were really just like quarrying such as Autralia, South Africa and Colombia. While all this was going on gas and oil were at historically low prices and the problem is that burning coal in a clean and efficient way is always more expensive than burning other fuels. The technology for burning coal has not developed very quickly despite the recurrent talk of new technologies on the horizon and there has not really been a huge influx of steam coal into the UK for power generation and cement-making.

The other major sort of traded coal - coking coal for steel making - had for a long time been sourced from overseas such as the USA on quality grounds as there is just not enough good quality coking coal left in the UK.

My view is that the industry had to be reduced because of its cost which was holding back other areas of the economy but that a less confrontational resolution should have been found but of course you had a belligent president of the NUM (Arthur Scargill) who wanted to bring class war onto the streets and a prime minister who was determined not to be brushed aside as had been done to her Tory predecessor Edward Heath some years previously.

We have had new labour governments for some years now and to the best of my knowledge there has been no attempt to revive any of the closed mines. Sorry but coal mining in this country apart from some very specific mines dedicated to power stations is now history

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There wasn't a profitable coal mining industry in the UK since the 1960's, which is when most of the South Wales pits were closed.

They were shut down by Labour's minister for energy - TONY BENN!

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In their last full year of operation before the (illegal) pit strike, British Coal made a loss of £485million. That figure excludes the subsidy received by British Coal from the electricity generating companies who were being forced to buy British coal at an above market price simply to keep unprofitable mines open. If this "subsidy" is taken into account, British Coal was losing £727 million per year. That is equal to £1.4 BILLION POUND in todays prices. How on earth you judge this to be "profitable" is beyond me.

There was not a single power cut in the 11 years Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister. Not one. In fact, the last power cut in the UK was 1973 when another miners strike caused the power stations to close down. If you think differently, tell me the date it happened.

The National Coal Board closed down the pits because

(a) they were losing money and better quality coal could be bought from overseas at a cheaper price

(b) The National Union of Mineworkers had, for too long, held the county to ransom by threatening strikes every time they did not get their way.

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There wasn't a profitable coal mining industry in the UK since the 1960's, which is when most of the South Wales pits were closed.

They were shut down by Labour's minister for energy - TONY BENN!

1. Based on the energy prices at the time?

Nowadays? Better start digging.

2. Nice one :)

Also see Stan's post

Our Arthur

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  • 6 years later...

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