COLUMN ONE : For British, Miners Still Go Deep : Coal made the fogs of London, fueled the Industrial Revolution, drove an empire, won wars. It seemed the nation itself bellowed when pit closures recently loomed.

The call went forth like an old battle cry among the union activists of the coal pits, most of them idled now for years, men and mines alike. It was not a fight they could win, most likely, but at least it was a fight.

“So y’ be goin’ ter march in London then, Mike?”

“Aye, nowt be keepin’ my boots off the Hyde Park Tory grass, Tyrone.”

And so, with trainloads of others, they went, Tyrone O’Sullivan, head of the Tower Colliery lodge of the National Union of Mineworkers, and Michael Richards, out of work and on disability since the last Rhondda Valley pit closed two years ago. That was the Mardy mine, up at the dead end of the valley, shut down, sealed and razed in record time, as though to wipe out any trace of a pit that hauled up its first coal in 1840, a time when Charles Dickens described its effects, not on this narrow Welsh valley but on a place to which the coal might have gone, a Lancashire milling center. In “Hard Times,” he called it Coketown:

” . . . a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it . . . a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.”

Coal powered all that, smoked the lenses of literature and national memory. Coal made the fogs of London, fueled the Industrial Revolution, drove an empire, won wars. Coal, king coal and killer coal, embedded in the childhood of virtually every Briton over the age of 40, who lugged it in off the streets and fed the family grate and grew up with news, however distant, of cave-ins and explosions, of the coal tip that buried the school full of children in Aberfan in Wales, of coal strikes and coal-miner poverty, of coal crisis and coal-driven government collapse. Long after it has ceased to irritate urban lungs, it rasps still on the national conscience.

For it is another characteristic of this evidently boundlessly available fuel that it has been suffering through the longest death throes in industrial history, a 70-year agony of resistance to what Margaret Thatcher’s political heirs describe as “market forces.” With what many now think of as a characteristic deficiency of tact, John Major’s government announced abruptly last month that it was time, at last, to apply the coup de grace : 31 of Britain’s nationalized coal pits would close, almost immediately, forcing 30,000 miners to take their “redundancy” payments and go, many before Christmas.

Scrooge had shown up for Halloween.

Which is what brought those miners from South Wales and Durham and the pit shires of Nottingham and York, those still working and those already into forced retirement and unable to resist the call, out into Hyde Park and a march on Parliament, with thousands of others, union members and ordinary folks cheering them on. But curiously, the miners actually were well behind the front edge of the public outcry.

It was not the mining unions but, it seemed, the British nation, led by the Tories, that sounded the wounded bellow of protest, which the miners echoed, almost meekly, as if startled by the unaccustomed show of support. It went on for days, until the government was forced into a turnabout, at least temporarily, the most recent in a series of U-turns that has steadily eroded its credibility.

“The media has tossed all objectivity to the winds,” complained Simon Jenkins in a commentary in The Times of London. “The 31 pit closures are reported like an air disaster, a cause of great national mourning, a Suez, a Falklands invasion.”

The fuss over the coal mines was partly code for anger over the government’s apparent inability to stem a deepening recession and its handling of Europe.

And yet, the condition of coal and coal miners has never been very far from the center of economic questions in Britain. If they are “just a symbol” now, the coal miners say, there is nothing new in that, for they see themselves as the perpetual symbol of the plight of the working man in the United Kingdom.

“Of course the coal miners have an important hold on the public imagination,” said E. H. Hunt, an economic historian at the London School of Economics. “They have had a special place in British history, the labor movement and politics. For example, virtually all the early working-class members of Parliament were coal miners, so in some way there was a sense that it was coal miners who opened up the political system.

“There was something almost mythic about coal miners,” Hunt said. “And there was connected to them some wider public guilt. It had to do with the idea of these men, descending into the bowels of the Earth, doing this incredibly dirty, dangerous work. I think of the white-collar Englishman, coming home from his office and lighting the fire in his grate and not really wanting to think too much about where the coal for that fire came from, or who got it out of the ground.”

Coal production reached its peak in Britain in 1913, the culmination of six decades of steady growth, an era of epic expansion when coal powered the ships of the British fleet, fired the steam engines of the railroads and the textile mills of Manchester and Lancashire and the blast furnaces of a growing steel industry. In 1913, 1,230,000 men mined coal in Britain, producing 287 million tons, a third of which was exported.

During those times, the mining valleys of South Wales were one of the world’s fastest-growing areas. The once-sleepy sheep-scattered valleys were literally planted with coal mines. The seaports of Cardiff and Barry quadrupled in size. The sides of the valleys were terraced with rows of houses for miners and their families.

And always the life was fiercely hard, and, then as now, difficult to avoid romanticizing, for within the hardship, the terrible pit disasters, the deaths, injuries and black lung disease, there was a spirit and a unity. The romantic imagery may have reached its peak with the 1941 movie “How Green Was My Valley,” with its scenes of Welsh miners singing splendidly as they worked in the pits and marched home from work. It was all treacle and sentiment, but powerful enough to filch an Academy Award for best picture from “Citizen Kane” and to confirm in the public mind a tone already well established.

“Miners were always really a breed apart,” said Frazer Wright, who grew up in a house 100 yards from a South Yorkshire coal mine and covered the mining industry for years for a now-defunct newspaper. “The image in ‘How Green Was My Valley’--the neat houses with roses winding down the picket fence--all that, of course, was sheer fantasy. Mostly, mining villages were pretty grim places. Traditionally, coal miners tended to live in their own small, closed communities. People living outside these areas had no idea how these people lived. So there was a certain mythology about them.”

The miners, Wright notes, were always the “Praetorian Guard” of the labor movement, and despite their leaders’ reputation as “bogymen,” they were mostly losers. Coal miners led the nine-day general strike in 1926 (the only general strike in British history) and stayed out for another six months before they were forced back to work in abject defeat, virtually at the point of starvation. That capitulation was echoed in 1984, when Prime Minister Thatcher crushed the miners again and came close to breaking the National Union of Mineworkers and its leader, Arthur Scargill.

There are some who say that the sympathy for the miners today stems from that 1984 defeat, when the miners did, indeed, seem to be bogymen. Now that the economic worm has turned and recession grips the country, the public finds it easier to identify with men losing their jobs, with no replacement employment in sight.

Wright can remember, as a child, waking to the sound of colliery bands in the street (brass bands are a long tradition of British coal mine workers) and carrying in coal from the piles outside. “Anyone over 40 can remember that,” said Wright.

“There is a strong feeling many people have of nostalgia, nostalgia in the sense of things slipping away,” he said.

James Walvin, a lecturer in social history at the University of York, agrees.

“Here is this extraordinary coal industry in this country,” he said, “and it’s almost gone, and there is regret. You have the coal miners who carried us forward industrially, who carried the working class, so to speak, on their backs. There is an image of them as good, honest, hard-working people, nonconformist, individualistic, perhaps embodying the best of working-class qualities. No matter how hard things were, they stuck together.”

The miners were always intensely political, aware of their importance to the British economy and acutely attuned to bettering their lot. Dai Smith, who is a professor of history at the University of Cardiff and who comes from a South Wales coal mining town, notes that the miners’ meeting halls in South Wales were stocked with vast libraries, containing volumes on science and art, literature and music and, of course, politics, especially Marxism and communism. In South Wales and Scotland, many miners and their leaders were Marxists, a tradition carried on still by an unrepentant Arthur Scargill.

Marx himself didn’t deal much with coal mines in his writing but relied on Friedrich Engels’ vivid reports of conditions in the mines in the 1840s, when women and children labored underground, with the men “in many cases wholly naked and in most cases nearly so, by reason of the prevailing heat, and the consequences in the dark lonely mines may be imagined. The number of illegitimate children is here disproportionately large, and indicates what goes on among the half-savage population below ground. . . . “

Today, there are fewer than 900 coal miners in South Wales. In 1913, there were 270,000. It was the year of peak production, and also the year that D. H. Lawrence published “Sons and Lovers,” his autobiographical novel set in the coal fields of Nottinghamshire, a most bleak portrait:

” . . . in summer, the pits are slack. Often, on bright sunny mornings, the men are seen trooping home again at ten, eleven, or twelve o’clock. No empty trucks stand at the pit-mouth. The women on the hillside look across as they shake the hearthrug against the fence and count the wagons the engine is taking along the line up the valley. And the children, as they come from school at dinner-time, looking down the fields and seeing the wheels on the headstocks standing, say:

“ ‘Minton’s knocked off. My dad’ll be home early.’

“And there is a sort of shadow over all, women and children and men, because money will be short at the end of the week.”

To visit now among the miners and former miners in the South Wales valleys is to discover that world that Lawrence described. In the legendary Rhondda Valley, the steep hillsides show the scars of mining, the coal tips planted over with greenery but still outcropping between the stands of blazing fall foliage. Along the valley floor are scattered flat-roofed buildings of hopeful “industrial parks” and other “clean industries” that were aimed at taking up at least some of the industrial slack here, but that have made only a faint impression, as Dai Smith attests, on the ranks of the unemployed, who range up to 80% of the male population in some towns.

Michael Richards, 53, went into the mines when he was 15 years old; 35 years later, in 1990, he worked the last day at Mardy mine, the last colliery in the Rhondda. Like virtually everyone in this region, his house has been the beneficiary of the so-called Euro-grants that have provided money to spruce up the valleys. New doors and windows and new coats of trim paint grace the serried rows of houses climbing the hillsides and have given the place a sharper look.

That has helped improve the spirits of people here, so it is not all cosmetic, as some charge. And yet there is still a deep longing for what has been lost, a feeling that will be well understood by communities across Britain when, or if, the government’s ax finally does fall on the remaining coal mines.

“Oh, I’d go back in a minute,” said Richards, sitting in his small but comfortable parlor as a coal fire (“It’s anthracite,” he said proudly. “It’s virtually smokeless fuel”) burned in a glass-fronted hearth.

His father and grandfather were miners. “You find a man my age in this valley, you can assume his family were miners. There were 27 boys in my class at school, and when the time came, all 27 of us went to the pits. . . . We all had the same outlook, and we all had the same enemies--usually a Tory government that wanted you to work for nothing.”

Small, trim, exceedingly neat in his dress, Richards has, on his chin and his cheek, the faint blue marks of the pits that mark the face of many a career coal miner, as though the seams of coal left their symbolic stamp on those who went to dig it out, some mark beyond the constricted wheeze of their lungs.

“Why did we do it? If you’re born to something that gives you a living, that gives you companionship, a way of life, it is very strong. There was a certain independence in it. . . . And I was in the union, and if you were in the union, if you’ve ever done that kind of work, it’s like injecting heroin into your arm.”

The Mardy mine was as militant as they came, once known as “Little Moscow” for its Socialist, not to say Communist, leanings. In the 1930s, it refused to allow the Western Mail, the Cardiff newspaper, to be distributed in the Rhondda, preferring instead the Daily Worker. Richards carried on the militant tradition and, with deep emotions, remembers the day in 1984 when the workers of Mardy, crushed in the National Union of Mineworkers strike effort, had to return to work, marching up the road to the pit head behind the colliery band, filmed in their pride and humiliation by television crews from all over the world. It was obvious, even then, that the days of mining in South Wales were numbered. It was, Richards says, one of the saddest days of his life, and one of his proudest.

Ivor England, 53, is now a guide at the Heritage Museum at the Lewis Merthyr Colliery at the opposite end of the Rhondda Valley. It is, in effect, a theme park, designed to preserve some undistorted recollection of life in the valley before King Coal was deposed.

England’s story is as typical as Richards’: a third-generation miner, the almost mystical bond that comes from the life underground with other men from equally typical backgrounds, the sense of pride in the teamwork, the endless hours of talk, the political awareness. He, too, shares the sense imparted by his father, who, he said, always told him that “there has to be a better way” to provide a decent life for the working man.

For more than 30 years, England was a card-carrying Communist, giving it up, finally, in 1980. He recalls the trauma suffered by the faithful of the Welsh valleys over the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. “We were misled, but our ideas were to help people,” he says now.

Naturally, England has no sympathy for the Conservative government, nor for the idea of closing down the remaining mines. But he tries to be realistic, even accepting.

“There is some kind of struggle going on to hold back the clock. We don’t like it, but it’s time. You know, there isn’t a house in the Rhondda Valley where there isn’t someone who’s died of lung disease. I don’t want to go back to seeing the things I saw as a child, to seeing men walking up the streets carrying men on stretchers. I don’t want to go back to that. The problem is that this place is becoming a rural area again, and people are trying to come to terms with that, (and) they don’t know how to do it. So for the people here, it’s very hard.

“Now, sometimes, we have people come back, people who lived here before, and they say to me that the valley looks a lot better than they remember. It’s prettier. It’s greener. They say they didn’t know it looked so nice.”