Kellingley Colliery five years on: Life as a fourth generation miner

• Five years after the closure of Kellingley Colliery, former miner Paul Hine gives David Hirst his reflection on life at 'Big K'

A miner's story

On the face of it, Paul Hine has every right to feel aggrieved.

A fourth generation miner, he served man-and-boy in the coal industry for 35 years, as a locomotive driver and in developments.

Paul was 50 when Kellingley Colliery closed down for good in December, 2015. The compensation for losing his job was a redundancy payout of £11,500.

Twenty-three years earlier his father received almost four times that, taking home £40,000 when he was forced out of work.

“I’m not a lover of Thatcher," Paul says. "But my feeling on that is that Thatcher looked after the miners better than this government did when we finished five years ago."

Yet any resentment he felt has now gone.

He earns less than half the £40,000 a year he got at  Kellingley, but is content working for Leeds City Council as a bus driver, transporting children with autism to and from the Rodillian Academy at Lofthouse, near Wakefield. 

Paul says: “I did feel bitter at first because I think it was orchestrated. But I look back and I think I had my time.

"Obviously I could have had another five or ten years, but I felt sorry for the young lads. I mean they’d just set some young lads on about four or five years earlier. They were promised about 20 years.”

What he misses most about his time in mining is his former colleagues. The banter, the camaraderie. 

“If you waved a magic wand and told me Kellingley was back open again I’d be back in a shot.”