ON SEPTEMBER 29, Tyrone O’Sullivan, OBE, gave a talk to the Dinas Powis Probus Club, entitled The Story of Tower Colliery.

Great grandson of an Irish father and a Welsh mother, the family had settled in Aberdare. Death was a common occurrence in mining families and his father was killed in the colliery in 1963. This taught Tyrone how to deal with sorrow and later in his career he visited many widows and families to console them.

At 15 years old, Tyrone joined a 12 week training course run by British Coal before he could go underground as a miner. Many of the young boys on the course couldn’t read or write but seven years of study brought Tyrone qualification as an electrical engineer.

He strongly regrets the current lack of apprenticeships now available in industry generally. He started as a miner working on a 2’6” thick coal seam, a tight fit for a boy six feet tall, but he loved it. Once above ground as an engineer, he became heavily involved in trade union matters and enjoyed the struggles in the 1970’s to improve the lot of the miners. He believes that great changes were achieved in industrial relationships at that time, all for the better.

In 1994, Tower colliery was the worst performing pit in Wales and British Coal was determined to close it. Incidentally, the name Tower was taken from the tower built by Lord Crawshaw in 1816 after the Merthyr Riots.

Brian Williams, the colliery manager, made some improvements to productivity and Tyrone was very proud to be appointed as Union secretary. However, British Coal told them the pit was to be closed unless the miners would accept a 30 per cent pay cut and achieve an impossible productivity increase. Despite strikes and protests, Ann Clwyd MP staged an underground sit-in protest for 48 hours, it was of no avail.

The miners, led by Tyrone, resolved to buy the pit, using their redundancy money, originally only 30 per cent of the miners agreed to do so, but later most eventually joined in. Their winning bid was £12.5 million, not £2 million as reported elsewhere.

A group of five miners had a meeting with financial and legal experts, all wearing identical striped suits, shirts and ties, from Rothschild bank, Barclays and PriceWaterhouseCoopers to find a way to raise capital.

The Government gave a loan, repayable at £5 million a year, Barclays made a loan of £2 million and the miners put in the rest. Tyrone led a marketing team and they signed contracts of £60 million to supply coal to power stations, although the coal was still in the ground. The pit re-opened in 1995 and was making healthy annual profits of around £3 million from the start.

The new management was always aware of people’s needs, occasional illness and the like and miners were paid in full if unable to work. Bonus schemes were replaced with a fixed basic wage. The saved pit provided work for 450 men.

Tower colliery lasted in its original form until 2008 by which time it had mined every source of deep pit coal available. Then the company owning Tower diversified into more easily accessible surface mining, now producing six million tons a year and employing 170 men.

When this source of coal becomes exhausted the hope is that the whole area will be re-instated and become a modern industrial site, with alongside, leisure facilities and housing, a lasting testament to the determination of the Tower miners to save their community from devastation.

The vote of thanks was given by John Evans.