“I was married to t’ pit”: Memories of Britain’s last coalminers

Book recommendation: Mining Men: Britain’s Last Kings of the Coalface by Emily Webber (2025) 

Posted: June 17, 2025

With the closure of Britain’s last coal-fired plant in September 2024, a long and storied era has officially ended: the era of Britain as a nation defined by coal. Coalmining in Britain stretches back to the Roman Empire, accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, and peaked in the twentieth century, when the industry employed 1 in 10 British men and powered nearly all of its electricity. Coalminers were not only the nation’s economic backbone for hundreds of years, they were also a powerful cultural force—inspiring countless works of art and driving the country’s labor movement.   

Things changed in the 1970s and especially 1980s, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government began rapidly shutting down the pits. Suddenly, thousands of coalminers were uprooted from their livelihoods and lost the communities they had formed underground. Though coalminers fought to keep mines open, the closures continued until the final deep coal mine shuttered in 2015. For many miners and the communities who relied upon them, a pit closure could be as devastating as a death in the family. Today, many former mining towns still struggle economically, marked by generations of unemployment. 

Mining Men: Britain’s Last Kings of the Coalface, an absorbing social history of postwar British mining, revisits the long aftermath of this upheaval, told through the voices of those who lived it. Author Emily P. Webber chronicles not only the pains caused by collapse of the industry, but also the enduring pride and cheerful nostalgia many men still feel for life in the pit. Underground, miners found far more than a livelihood: they found lifelong friendships and unlikely father figures, political awakening and unshakable solidarity, a source of dignity and identity. Even decades after their final descent in the cage, many still call themselves miners. 

These men, whose labors quite literally powered Britain, are a vanishing generation. When Webber put out a tentative call for mining memories, the response from former miners was overwhelming—perhaps due to a collective sense that they are the last who can share their experiences firsthand. Webber, a millennial academic and mother of young children, freely admits the world she writes about is far removed from her own. Yet her deep curiosity for mining heritage and commitment to honoring miners’ contributions shines through in prose that is attentive, reverent, sometimes even lyrical. The miners themselves are firmly at the center of the narrative, while politicians and policemen—who often dominate histories of British mining—take a backseat role. 

Not all memories are rosy. Alongside nostalgia for the camaraderie, the miners share the harsh realities of pit life, with horror stories of gruesome injuries, tragic accidents, and daily injustices. Limbs are mangled or ripped off; comrades die in the blink of an eye. Wages stagnate; chronic illnesses emerge. Families are torn apart by tragedy, or by the bitter divisions of the picket line. Over and over, the government fails the miners. These difficult stories are told with characteristic stoicism, but often with flashes of black humor. 

What emerges most powerfully from Mining Men is not just a history of an industry, but a portrait of masculinity rarely seen—one grounded in mutual care. Through their testimonies, the miners are revealed to have mentored one another underground, stood together in fierce solidarity, and often performed selfless acts of bravery. When the pits closed, some of Webber’s subjects reinvented themselves as activists or teachers or counsellors—continuing to toil for the good of the country, just now on different terrain.