With little prospect of work, many of the Wearmouth miners found themselves relying on income from their redundancy packages, as Linday Jennings reports, in the last of our series looking at the decade since the Durham coalfield pit closures.

MINING was not just a way of life for Tom McGuigan - work at the Wearmouth Colliery had provided a livelihood for generations of his family.

Tom, of Washington, Wearside, followed in his father and grandfather's footsteps and joined the colliery in the 1950s, working his way up to deputy.

For 20 years he worked at the pit until he took a seven-year gap to work in the gold mines of South Africa. But when he returned to Britain he found his way back to Wearmouth, resuming his old job as deputy in 1977.

"Wearmouth was a very good pit for camaraderie," recalled Tom, now 67.

"Men worked there and lived behind the pit and it was like a club of some sort. When they closed some of the mines they used to transfer men from different pits and it became quite cosmopolitan."

The camaraderie and life that revolved around Wearmouth, and dozens of other pits, went some way to explaining the men's sadness and anger when it closed in December 1993.

Wearmouth was the oldest pit in the country and the last left working in the Durham coalfield when it closed, leaving 640 men out of work.

At the age of 56, Tom decided to accept the redundancy package offered by British Coal before the pit closed.

Tom, with wife Dot and daughters Carol and Kim to support, found there was little work out there for former miners, and ended up taking odd jobs until retirement.

"It was emotional when I left and also a bit unnerving because you worked for your money and you got it every week and had your money in the bank," he said.

"Suddenly, you were a bit unsure what life was going to be like and how you were going to manage. Some of the younger ones became postmen and I remember one going to work for the council.

"Other people did the same as me, invested their money, and tried to get a decent income off their investment."

In the last three years before the Wearmouth closure, British Coal had invested more than £25m to drive out three miles under the North Sea to reach a rich seam of coal 9ft high.

It was the largest, most productive, stream Wearmouth Colliery had struck in its 167-year history, with enough coal to keep it going for another 30 years.

Executives from British Coal described Wearmouth as the "best mining prospect in Britain". But in the end, no one wanted the coal, and thousands of tonnes of "black gold" began piling up at the pit.

The miners were shell-shocked when it closed because they had done everything that British Coal had asked of them.

Jack McCowliff, of Sunderland, worked at Wearmouth for ten years as a power loader, salvaging the old faces and installing the power supports and machinery for the new faces to go into production.

"There was another face to go into when they pulled the plug, which I don't think should have been allowed," said Jack, 64.

"The high coal was there and they had wanted that for years, then they just pulled out.

"I think there were a lot of men who thought Wearmouth would never close, that they were safe and it was a job for life.

"But when the others closed it came to the top of the heap."

Jack also opted for early redundancy and, in his early 50s, he found himself struggling to find work above ground having worked down the pits for 37 years.

"I'd never done anything else," said Jack. "I tried, but unfortunately there was a lot of unemployment."

Unemployment was interspersed with bouts of labouring work, and Jack also suffered from mining-related back troubles, a lasting legacy of the gruelling work down the pits.

But there were others who found work, or in Ronnie Metcalfe's case, a chance to broaden his horizons after working at Wearmouth for 40 years. Ronnie, now 69, of East Herrington near Sunderland, took his redundancy money and after a couple of courses in leadership and computing, found himself taking up a two- year course at Durham University.

Ronnie, a face overman and secretary of the Wearmouth branch of pit deputies union Nacod, gained a social sciences diploma in political history and economics before taking a four-year BA degree with the Open University, and then retirement.

"I had always been interested in what was going on around me, in politics, economics and current affairs and I found I thoroughly enjoyed it," he said.

Today, Sunderland Football Club's Stadium of Light stands on the site of the former Wearmouth Colliery.

In August last year, the club's chairman, Bob Murray, unveiled a pit wheel at the entrance to the stadium as a tribute to the thousands of men who worked at the colliery.

Unveiling the wheel, he summed up what thousands of miners across the North-East had given to the country.

"It will act as a fitting and lasting reminder of those loyal miners and their families who served the region so well," he said.