POWER IN BRITAIN

Series

Series Name

Mining Review 21st Year

Issue

Issue No.

5

Date Released

Jan 1968

Stories in this Issue:

1. 1POWER IN BRITAIN

Story

Story No. within this Issue

1 / 1

Summary

NoS synopsis: marks the National Coal Board’s 21st Birthday and uses the occasion to examine the place of coal in Britain’s power and energy structure.
NCB Commentary - Heat. Power. Energy. Industry needs them. We need them. The nation needs them, if Britain is once again to pull itself up by its bootstraps, to rise back into a position where we can hold our own in the markets of the world. This is power, based on coal - the one fuel we have under our very own feet. The one indigenous fuel we command with proven reserves to last us not 20 or 30, but 200 years.
Our standard of living, our whole relationship with the rest of the world, depend on the power with which we dispose. Power, the energe it creates, the energy which we apply to winning it, to putting it to work.
Without power the world as we know it would not exist. We’d be back two hundred years, back to where we were before this country pioneered the industrial revolution.
Two thirds of the world’s population still lives in squalor and poverty because they are deprived of the power they need - the power to make them productive. Two thirds of us, the human family, endure famine and misery - in the middle of the 20th century.
In Britain, we had greater fortune. We harnessed coal to industry: fouled our skies and our cities when we know no better: but we made a road for ourselves to industrial greatness, and paved it with invention - but still on a foundation of human misery.
But out of social scandal grew reform, and political advance, and organisation. And a technological genius which carried us forward through the 19th century and brought us to the threshold of today.
Out of the fog of suspicion and exploitation and malpractice was born in our time another great British reform - the nationalisation of our mining industry - January 1st 1947.
Just 21 years after the event the National Coal Board’s Chairman today speaks of what nationalisation has meant to the industry.
21 years ago, mining was a neglected industry - neglected in the 20’s and still staggering from the effort it put in to help fight World War 2.
Britain was crying out for more coal into the 50’s - on our hearths and in the furnaces of recuperating industries. Every extra ton was essential to post war recovery. The call went out for more men - to sink new mines, to win yet more coal, to swell the near-million strong brigade of Britons winning coal.
In those days, 21 years ago, men won coal by muscle and sweat and the inborn skill that had been handed down generation to generation. But coal had been the nation’s business for barely a few years when a new pattern of mining was born.
So machines went in - rudimentary we would think many of them today - and manpower declined as brawn gave way to brain, and new mining techniques were developed, and productivity began to mount. Machine power began to relieve the load on flesh on blood.
Today, as we look forward to the 1970’s, mining is a leaner industry, an industry of sinew and muscle that has set on example the rest of Britain by its record of rising productivity. Helped by the machines which give power to their elbow, British miners cut and loaded in 1966 175,000,000 tons of coal in this island - coal which didn’t cost a penny towards our balance of payments deficit.
If mining had concentrated only on the most profitable collieries in 1966 we would have produced 122 m. tons - and a profit of £67 m. But coal and all its by-products aren’t just made for profit - the older, more difficult mines must be shut down, - but at a rate which will allow valuable men to be absorbed elsewhere. Because mining is people, and this is the sort of people they are.
Miners make up a community inside the national family. They serve as mayors and councillors and committee - men, and as part time policemen and social workers and magistrates. And because they often live where their services are needed you’ll find miners on lifeboats and as coastguards.
And so, when Britain was about to announce her long-delayed fuel policy for the next decade. Miners flocked to London to protest. They came as reasonable men, not as belligerants. They came to make their opinions known, to make their feelings felt, to argue the case for the full utilisation of a national resource against all the imponderables of nuclear power and its cost to our pockets and our persons, of the oil imported with foreign currency from the trouble-centres of the world, of the natural gas whose ultimate price has not even yet been decided.
The government’s fuel policy was published. It was overtaken by events, as devaluation was imposed on an already ailing economy. The policy had to be re-written.
Whatever role mining will be called upon to play in the future Britain battling to re-establish herself in Europe and the world, there will still be a part to play for young people in coal. Changing techniques, the innovations in machines and management will demand a continuing flow of new and lively minds to an industry ancient and basic and yet still very much a part of tomorrow.
It will inevitably be an industry concentrated on itself, concentrating on what it calls the "long life pits" - and there may be more of them than some people think today.
The reserves we know - 200 years of them. We can’t say that of coal’s competitors. The price can be got right. We know what British miners have proved themselves capable of producting in the 21 eventful years that the mines have belonged to all of us - and they haven’t finished yet, not by a long chalk.
In a Britain which if she is ever to deserve to be called Great again, the need for energy will mount inexorably as the years go by. All our resources will be needed to supply the demand - from inside and outside these islands.
More coal, cheaper and even more competitive with the fuels which cost us foreign currency, is what we are going to need. Coal’s future opens up in terms of remote control, technicians, side by side with colliers, an ever increasing productivity. Britain’s mines, modernised and streamlined since they were nationalised, and the men who have made them what they are, stand ready to fill the future demands for the power that all of us are going to need.

Keywords

Commemorations; Mining; Energy resources

Written sources

British Film Institute Databases
Films on Coal Catalogue   1969, p.54
The National Archives COAL 32   /13 Scripts for Mining Review, 1960-1963

Credits:

Sponsor

National Coal Board

Production Co.

National Coal Board Film Unit