Last week, we told how Wearmouth Colliery, the last deep mine in County Durham, closed 30 years ago on December 10, 1993. A few miners were kept on for “salvage and maintenance” contracts which came to an end on Friday, July 8, 1994, when Chris Lloyd rode the manriders eight miles out under the North Sea to join the last of them at the coalface…
THERE'S the tramp of heavy boots in the distance, the constant rattle of the "manrider' in the background and the odd echoing clank as another piece of unwanted but expensive machinery falls to the floor.
But eight miles out under the North Sea, this, as any miner will tell you, is silence.
The shearers have stopped cutting, the coal has stopped tumbling, the conveyor belts have stopped running and the men have stopped working.
The few that are 2,000ft below ground are the last deep miners in a Durham coalfield that has supported the county for at least eight centuries. But for the last six months, when they've ridden the creaking cage back to the surface it has not been coal they've brought up with them it has been redundant mining machinery.
READ MORE: HOW 800 YEARS OF DEEP MINING IN DURHAM CAME TO AN END
And when they come up today they will never go back down. They are the last underground shift at Wearmouth Colliery. On Monday (July 11, 1994) work will begin on filling in the shafts, pulling down the surface buildings and erasing the mine, consigning it to the memory.
Millions of pounds of brand new equipment has been hauled from the coalfaces, along the roadways, and up the shafts for use at Longannet near Alloa.
"It took us three months to install and three months to take out," says one miner of the £7m-worth of gear at the GG5 face. "It only needed a push of a button to start it, but the word never came." And if the word had come, if mining had begun at GG5, this equipment would have paid for itself within 20 weeks in black gold. In coal.
READ MORE: 30 YEARS SINCE THE CLOSURE OF DURHAM'S LAST DEEP MINE
For right out to the 11 mile mark is the largest, most-productive seam Wearmouth has struck in its 168-year history. There's 100m tonnes of coal out there, enough to keep the mine mining for 30 years. It’s known as the “Thick Yard” seam as it stands 8ft deep. They've been after it for decades.
"It was to be the golden era, the bonanza that we all thought was going to put Wearmouth into the super-pit league," says Con Culkin, who was chief surveyor at the colliery for 30 years until 1987.
Yet the Thick Yard, and a large chunk of the £19m of taxpayers' money that British Coal has invested in Wearmouth over the last three years to exploit it, will today be abandoned.
Eight miles out, the men at the bait-stand taking a 20-minute break from their salvage work are bitter. Bitter at the Conservative Government (the closures were announced on Margaret Thatcher's birthday giving the conspiracy theorists a field-day); bitter at the lack of support from the Labour Party, nationally or locally; bitter at the way the sell-off was handled.
"You tell me what a 41-year-old man does with 22 years in mining when there are no mines left," says one very senior manager.
"If you rip the heart out of the pit, you take the soul out of the community," says another official.
Life with coal has changed immeasurably since the Durham community employed its first collier way back in 1193. Life down the pit has also been revolutionised since the Wearside community began developing its own deep mine in 1826.
"Me grandfatha worked down here," says colliery overman Ronnie Scott. "He was scratting around on his hands and knees in a very thin seam."
By contrast, Ronnie's generation ride to work. Their shift begins as they stand in the darkness of the cage (lift), all facing the same direction, and drop to the "fifteen-seventy" level – it is 1,570ft down – and then walk to the loco.
The small train, made of battered pieces of metal, rattles and rolls its way out under the sea. The men, in their regulation-issue grey underwear, orange overalls and donkey-jackets, gradually turn on their helmet-lamps as the shaft-bottom light peters out. A couple grimly use their lamps as spotlights to pick out a smashed corner of the roadway. Here, a couple of years ago, the loco was derailed. It careered into the wall and, with a terrible screaming of tearing metal, jack-knifed to the ceiling. Two men died.
(This was the scene of the last fatal accident at Wearmouth where, on February 13, 1992, Eric Evans, 36, and Gerard Sumby, 39, were killed. Seventy men were trapped for more than an hour when the underground train derailed, two of whom suffered terrible life-altering injuries. The Durham Mining Museum records the names of 307 men killed down Wearmouth, although the total since 1826 is believed to be closer to 500.)
After the 25-minute loco ride, there's a five minute tramp along the well-lit shale floor – it has to be well-lit because of what Ronnie Scott calls the "roadway crush" and "floor heave" which causes the ground to suddenly rise up and meet the ceiling.
The metal and timber pit props around the walls are contorted and crushed, buckled and bent by an immense, unseen force.
Then it is onto the "manrider'. It is a long conveyor belt onto which miners throw themselves face down. Then they keep their heads down as the belt rises up to a few feet from the roof. As one belt nears its end, they raise themselves onto their knees and then fling themselves forward so that they land on the next belt that, like a giant, never-ending, supermarket check-out, carries them further and further beneath the North Sea.
Out into the darkness rumbles the manrider, past the stalactites of salt dripping from the ceiling, out into the bowels of the earth.
When a Victorian owner of Wearmouth was asked how far he was prepared to dig, he said: "We will keep on going down and down, even if we have to go to hell to get cinders."
The miners say their womenfolk, on the rare occasions they are allowed underground, like the manriders because as the moving belt passes over the rollers, the rider gets a full-length body massage. Such a soothing effect, though, can cause problems for some on the early morning shift who are lulled to sleep.
Nearly an hour after leaving the surface, the Wearmouth miner is finally at the coalface.
"It would have been very noisy," says Ronnie, "very dusty, depending on what side of the wind you were on, and there was the smell of rotten eggs because when you are cutting coal, hydrogen is released."
Today, though, it is quiet. A part from echoey noises in the distance, it is all but silent. A few salvage-workers splodge around in the clarty pools in which a £680,000 shuttlecar lies rusting.
At the face, 28 abandoned Power Roof Supports (£27,000 a piece) each still withstand 1,240 tons of pressure from above. Like Atlas, they hold the rock aloft so the light from the helmet-lamp filters through to the cutting face where it glitters like silver. This is black gold. This is the coal. It towers above the head and crumbles into the hand as a sad souvenir.
"There was no roadways here," says Ronnie, surveying his domain and waving his arm expansively but sadly around. "I drawn them all, even the stenton (the small interconnecting tunnels). They're all mine."
Not for much longer. When the pumping stops in a day or so’s time, they – and everything else left underground, from the millions of pounds worth of machinery to the 30 years supply of coal – will be sacrificed to the all-consuming waters that will flood in and wash away the last traces of the industry on which has been the bedrock of the county for the last 800 years.
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