24
The Last Deep Coal Mine in Wales
Early in January 2008, the Tower Colliery, the last deep mine in Wales, ceased operations. Until then, it was the oldest operating deep mine in the world. After eighteen years, the seams were exhausted, and the colliers who had fought so bravely against Margaret Thatcher were out of work. On hearing the news, I booked a flight to Wales. In all my exploration of coal and its history, coal has never gotten into my blood like my grandfathers before me, but coal miners, especially Welsh coal miners, plucked a particular ancestral strand. I wanted to get there before they filled in the shaft, so I could descend into the last coal mine in Wales. The United Kingdom still powers one-third of its electrical grid with coal, but jobs in the energy sector are on the decline. In the country that began the Industrial Revolution with steam power derived from its coal mines, coal mining is nearly a dead industry.
The Tower Colliery is just outside the town of Hirwaun, a name meaning “long meadow” in Welsh. A small town of four thousand, the streets curve through rows of quaint boxes of shops and homes. In our interview, Sam Quigley had suggested that part of coal mining’s bad name came from the stereotype of the coal miner on a bar stool, but in this small Welsh town, I knew this was exactly the place to find them. I walked into the Glancynon, the town’s most popular pub. It was early yet, but a group of gray-haired men lounged in a dark wooden booth across from the bar, watching curiously as I approached the bartender polishing glasses.
“I’m looking for colliers who worked in the Tower mine.”
“Wayne there worked in the mine, now didn’t ya?” She gestured toward a tall, shy, bearded man who stepped forward.
Wayne Joseph, an employee of the Glancynon, had mined for thirteen years and still lived in the coal miner’s house he grew up in. When I asked him what he thought about the closing of the Tower, he answered right off, “I think it’s a good thing, so people can move on with their lives.”
He peered out at me from the corner of his eye to see if that was the answer I was looking for, but Wayne, in truth, had a different perspective from many of his comrades. He had left Tower several years before to work in the bar. He had never liked mining, considering it too dangerous.
“Why, then, do people stay?” I asked.
Wayne responded with the same answer miners had given me in West Virginia and in Utah. I began to wonder if it was the stock answer given by miners and agreed upon across continents: “Your grandfather, your father, it comes down the line. You could say it gets in a person’s blood, basically.” He added, “But you’ve got to think of the health. I’d say for every one hundred miners, eighty have problems with their lungs.”
Alex, the cook at the Glancynon, arranged for me to meet with his father, Philip Edwards, the former environmental officer at Tower. Philip would meet me later that evening, so I took the opportunity to drive out to the mine. Just up the hill from Hirwaun and past the Penydarren brewery, I pulled over at a sign marked Tower Colliery and ducked under a metal fence. Before I got far, a blue minibus pulled up. A man wearing a neon colored hardhat got out and asked me what I was up to.
In Wales, I always told them that I was Erin Thomas and that my ancestors mined coal in Merthyr, hoping my last name and the local connection would get me somewhere. He introduced himself as Steve, and explained that I had ducked under the fence of the coal processing plant instead of the mine. Steve pointed at the belt transporting the coal and the series of pools. At Tower they cycled the water, cleaning it to be used again, rather than storing it in sludge ponds.
“Hop in, I’ll take you to the mine,” Steve offered, and swept off the front seat of a vehicle that used to be an airport shuttle. “It’s a bit messy from the boys.”
We drove not far down the road and pulled up where a gutting process was taking place. All the old equipment had been pulled up out of the mine, much of it dismembered to fit on the conveyor belt. Tires were piled around the periphery, and metal was heaped to be sold as scrap. It reminded me of the horses these machines had replaced, and how these horses had to be folded up to be brought in and out of the mine.
Steve led me to the shaft, warning me not to get too close. I had come to Wales too late to go down; the following week the mine shaft was scheduled to be filled in. A yellow strip of construction tape blocked the hallway to the elevator. The fans had been shut off, and I could smell the methane and feel the coal dust in my lungs. Standing at the mouth of that mine, I felt the same longing I had felt when I first entered Wales. I considered making a run for it just to look down.
Erin Thomas, 2008
Mine shaft at Tower Colliery
At the sorting yard, coal was separated from the shale and then large stalls according to size: grains, beans, small, large. There were still massive piles of it. People from all over the world had come to buy this coal. Anthracite is the hardest grade of coal, and the hottest burning. Coal from Tower was only 4 percent ash, so pure that it had to be mixed with other materials before being sold to the power companies. Unless ash lumps, it is too hard to clean out of the bottom of broilers. Steve picked up a piece from the pile lovingly, “This coal is so clean.”
Hours later, I sat down to drinks with Philip, his wife Mary, and his son Alex, who was taking a break from his cooking duties. Philip was a handsome man, with well-defined features and a charismatic bearing. His wife Mary had a shoulder-length bob that was just graying. They were all thin, but sturdy in the fashion of the Welsh. Mary and Alex leaned forward over the table as Philip related his story. Both Philip and Mary were of mining stock; Mary lost her brother in an explosion in 1959.
Erin Thomas, 2008
Piles of coal at Tower Colliery
In the 1980s, when the miners went on strike, Philip found himself in the position of one of the ringleaders. He was named chairman of the Tower Colliery action committee and set off marching through the villages of the South Wales coalfields with a band and signs, rallying the people for support. He and his fellow miners went door to door for donations, food parcels, and sausage.
“Police on horseback charged the picket line, managed us with buttons.”
“Buttons?”
“You know, ‘buttons.’” Philip had told me if I didn’t understand him to just “say,” but it took a few tries before baton registered. I asked how they made ends meet while Philip was out of work.
He waved a hand and glanced at his wife, “Eighty-four through eighty-five was a bitter year. Mary worked part-time. Alex was two, and we got a milk token for ‘em.”
Mary nodded, “I worked part-time at the grocery store down the way.”
After two years of striking, the miners went back to work until, one by one, each mine was closed. In 1995, they tried to close the Tower Colliery, but Philip and his buddies wouldn’t budge. Officials offered the miners £10,000 each to walk away peacefully, but they wouldn’t take it. The government then knocked their offer down to £9,000 to scare the miners into compliance, and the men were given two weeks to decide. Philip and his friends gathered at the Penywaun Welfare Club and formed the TEBO (Tower Employee Buy-Out)Team, taking their case to the legislature.
Philip scribbled on a piece of paper as he talked, writing down each consecutive price the government had offered them to walk away and crossing them out as the narrative progressed. “We were just a buncha coal boys. Two hundred and fifty of us pitched in £8,000 each. We took out a £3 million loan from the government, and paid it all back, every bit of it. We had 220 man in, and tonnage went up. In the end, we made £19 million.
“We were equal shareholders. We voted for how many holidays. Got a month off each year and sick leave. We had anniversary parties. One year, a bakery made a cake so big it filled the booty a’ Mary’s car.”
Mary nodded, “The lady at the bakery painted a miner’s cap on it.”
From Philip’s point of view, mining at Tower was like being in an adult playground. The men experienced the same sort of comradery that miners had relished for centuries, but they were able to take care of each other in a way a company or the government never would have.
“I had bowel cancer,” Philip explained. “When I came back, the boys told me just to work as much as I could and fixed a toilet on the back of my trailer.”
Philip and Mary invited me over to their home to look at pictures. A sports car was parked in the driveway. Philip led me through a backyard beautifully landscaped with a garden and trellises. We met Mary in their small front room next to the coal burning stove; she sorted through pictures of Philip leading the strikers during the eighties. Others were from later. Miners were posed in front of the colliery with their arms around each other, their hardhats on and their faces smudged. Throughout my research I had seen many pictures of miners. In older photographs, miners made straight faces, their carbide lamps clipped onto soft caps. Some of these men would have been paid in cash, and others with company scrip to spend in the company store. They would have lived in miner’s houses rented from the company. Like Philip, some of them, at some point in their mining career, would have stood along a picket line disputing their share of the company’s profits. These were Orwell’s miners from the underworld, never talked about in polite society. Mining at Tower still had risks, and burning the coal dug there, despite its purity, still released carbon dioxide into the air. Although Tower recycled its water, there was still sludge to be dealt with, and the black piles of coal contrasted with the green grass of the hills. There were likely some among Philip’s coworkers with black lung, but Philip’s photos had a very different feel than many of the miners’ photos I had seen. He pointed out his buddies, “George the Crane, Dai Milk the Bull, Dai Lumpy, and Squeaky.” Squeaky, I gathered, was derived from an undesirable personal attribute that Philip was too polite to relate. They grouped together and grinned in front of a mine they owned, a triumph for all the Welsh coal miners before them.
As I left, Philip and Mary asked me to come again, but for all I knew it would be my last time in Wales. A Welsh coal miner was a dying breed, but I didn’t need to worry about Philip and Mary. They would have plenty to do in their retirement. Only months before, they had visited their oldest son, who lived in Thailand and taught English, and they had plans to visit many other parts of the world.
Some of Philip’s coworkers from the Tower Colliery would later be employed by Energybuild, a mining company investing in coal recovery from the old mining tips scattered throughout the hill of South Wales, the remnants of an industry that many Welsh believe defined their culture. Rhidian Davies, a veteran miner and now the company’s managing director, would explain the venture: “Here is a saying which goes: once you have coal in your blood, unfortunately it stays there. We’re just trying to keep an industry and a heritage alive.” Villagers of Ellington, Lynemouth, and Cresswell would rise up in protest against the thirteen windmills to be installed in their communities, fearing it would prevent any hope of coal mining’s comeback. And in Neath Valley, former Tower Colliery boss Tyrone O’Sullivan would counter climate change activists who opposed the opening of the mine owned by Unity Power (the first deep mine in sixty years) by saying: “There is no way to save the world. You can’t stop burning coal because … you’d have no industrial base and no income being earned anywhere in the world.”
How green was my valley then, and the valley of them that have gone. I left Wales in a harried drive from Merthyr to Cardiff to return the rental car, a brand new BMW I was sure I was going to crash when negotiating the roundabouts on the highway. I did not look at the hills as I had when I had first come, but kept my eyes alert for the small road signs hiding behind the wildflowers along the shoulder. I had three pieces of coal in my purse, sorted out by Steve from the pile marked “small.” It was truly beautiful coal, the type that the Romans had named jet and carved into jewelry. The coal gleamed black and was so hard, it barely rubbed away on my hands. Wayne Joseph said it burned “so fierce” that unless it was mixed with lower grades of coal, it would devour a fireplace in a week. I took one piece for my dad to remind him of his father, one piece for my grandfather’s grave, and one piece to set next to my carbide lamp.
Erin Thomas, 2008
Philip and Mary Edwards in front of their coal burning stove
Holding the shiny piece of anthracite in my hands, I would think of Evan and Margaret, and Zephaniah and Maud. I would remember the little white chapel on Miner’s Memorial Road, and wonder if Paul Avington had worked those last ten years in the mine. I would direct my thoughts toward Larry Gibson and the few days a year he spared from his mountain-saving crusade to enjoy his small house on top of Kayford Mountain, and toward Melvin Cook, hoping he had managed to hold onto his home in Blair. I would think of Stan Christianson, supervising the operations in the Skyline mine, and Sam Quigley and Philip Edwards adjusting to their lives aboveground. But most of all, this piece of anthracite, 96 percent carbon, would remind me daily of the price of my electricity. I would think of the intricate history and the current controversy involved in flipping a light switch. This pure Welsh coal would remind me to take direct responsibility for drawing from the grid.