For over a century, coal fueled prosperity in northeastern England. But now that the industry is gone, many miners have found themselves desperate, out of work and just plain IN THE PITS.

Like thousands before him in this rough-hewn workers’ town beside the gray North Sea, Gary Finley left school at age 16 and became a man two years later when he got his first paycheck working in a local coal mine.

“It was almost double what I got as a shop assistant. It felt wonderful,” Finley recalls half a lifetime later.

For more than a century, coal fueled prosperity and pride here in northeastern England. In Seaham alone, three large mines employed 5,000 men during coal’s heyday. But now the industry is gone. Finley and his fellow miners have become postindustrial slag. Seaham’s suicide rate is one of the highest in Britain, four times the national average.

Dawdon mine was Europe’s largest in the 1960s, producing a million tons of coal a year from 1,800-feet deep shafts that run for miles under the sea. Today the mine site is bulldozed flat, a surreal wasteland of glittering black chips. There is not even a gravestone.

Seaham’s real tragedy, though, is that the miners’ landscape is as bleak. Prideful, two-fisted, backbone-of-society men have become a new underclass, the sort of out-of-work idlers they were raised to despise.

Worse, many young men in Seaham, sons who would naturally have followed their fathers into the mines, are also restively now on the dole. Their elders worry about crime and drugs. In a town of 24,000 that once prized the strength and skill of its miners, four times as many men are unemployed as women.

“The gap between natural anger and bitterness, and suicide, is not all that large, if people see no future,” says Alan Johnson. He is age 58, worked 40 years in the mines and eight weeks in a factory in the past 3 1/2 years. “I know I’ll never find work again; 99% of my mates are out of work, too.”

Seaham is a particularly painful example of economic and psychic distress in northeastern England, reflecting a late and painful shift away from labor-intensive heavy industry in the country where the Industrial Revolution was born.

The British coal industry, a kingpin of the northeast economy, has declined dramatically over the past decade as power plants have shifted to less polluting fuels. Citing numbers seared in their hearts, local miners say that, of Britain’s 170 coal pits, only 21 remain.

English and Irish workers came to live in Seaham, a company town, when the local landowner, Lord Londonderry, built a port in 1828 to export coal from his mines. It was well-paying work, rough, dangerous: 26 men and boys, ages 14 to 67, died in Seaham Mine in 1871; 164 perished there on Sept. 8, 1880.

“Grandfather, father and sons worked in the mines. It was not very nice working in the pit, but at least it guaranteed a job,” said David Ponshon, 51. He now works as an aide in a nursing home.

Seaham’s collieries began shutting in 1986. When the last shut in 1992, spirit as well as industry abandoned Seaham.

Townsfolk recoil at a national newspaper’s characterization of Seaham as “the most depressing place in Britain.” But the mood matches a place where a vigorous one-crop economy died overnight. There is tension. Anxiety. Desperation.

In October of last year, former mayor and former miner Harry Gustard, 44, a jovial, outgoing man, left his house one Saturday morning, ostensibly to go for a walk. He was found four weeks later hanging in an unused mine shaft.

In July, Jimmy Smith, 32, a miner, and Angela Hall, a single woman in her 30s, jumped into the sea from Seaham’s North Pier four days apart. A few years ago, Smith’s brother Mickey, another miner, died in a one-car accident that his friends think may have been suicide.

Canon Paul Jobson, vicar of St. John’s Church here, says he conducted the funerals of more suicide victims in Seaham in the past six years than in his previous 25 years as a priest elsewhere in England. He counts 18 deaths--among them a dozen miners, two jobless teen-agers, and local women who could not cope with their lives. Two locals are missing and feared dead.

At the government health clinic here, the patient backlog can mean a four-week wait for a psychiatric appointment. Jean Punshon, a psychiatric nurse, says anxiety and depression are common complaints. “There’s a lot of doom and gloom. There’s a sense that this is not a very good place to live; that nothing is going to improve,” she said.

In a town that has lost its pride, patients include a disproportionate number of middle-aged men weighed by drink and money woes--and too much time on their hands.

“In a sense it was not just the workers, but the whole community that went through the mine gates every morning. Suddenly the whole culture has changed. People are still going through great pangs of bereavement,” Jobson said.

On the quiet main shopping street, real estate agents’ windows are chock-a-block with sale offerings of $50,000 miners’ brick houses by families that either can no longer afford them or simply want to leave.

The nearby town of Sunderland lost a big ship-building industry but is recovering as the site of a new Nissan car plant. There is a new industrial park in Seaham, too, but its principal jewels, miners say, are low-paying, machine-intensive producers of pita bread and pet supplies.

“Other towns lost pits, too, but here there were three in one small town, and they were all the industry we had,” said Bobby Thompson, 57, who worked 36 years underground and now is unemployed. “I stay home, help the wife, do a bit of baking. We’ve been careful, so we’re all right for money. I only go out a couple of times a week and then only for five or six pints.”

Seaham has deteriorated, Thompson says sadly. Johnson says he made about $300 a week as a miner and now gets about a fourth as much from welfare. Town officials, as pinched as its people, scramble for a fulcrum. What price renewal? Developers covet a seaside meadow called Flowers Field that a bygone Marchioness of Londonderry left for the use of the townsfolk.

At St. John’s, Jobson is fighting to give Seaham back its self-esteem. He is particularly concerned about the unemployed “strong young men of Seaham who didn’t need to learn much at school and so have no skills, no aptitudes . . .

“We must highlight the need for jobs to be put back at the top of the political agenda so that people’s dignity and self-respect can be restored,” Jobson said. “All we see now is government tinkering with the problem. We need bold approaches to raise expectations and to create new jobs.”

Some people are angry that Jobson is speaking out. It will embarrass the town, they say, and sink property values even lower. So it might. Or it might get strangers and townsfolk to concentrate on the few former miners, such as Gary Finley, 35, who take no man’s dole.

“In 1985, I decided to get out of the pits,” Finley said. “We took a second mortgage and I bought two taxis. It was a struggle at first, but we have four now.”

Seaham has a future, Finley believes. “We’re coming out of it. People are beginning to insist on tidying up. Some are finding jobs outside, adjusting.”

Finley’s 11-year-old son Michael belongs to the first generation of Seaham boys without the certainty of a future in the mines. “He didn’t know me as working in the pits and I think he’s better off out of it,” Finley said.

As a matter of fact, his father says with wonderment, Michael is crazy about computers.