Tower boss hopes to usher in a new era for colliery site

THE chairman of Tower Colliery, the last deep mine coal pit in Wales which closed 10 years ago this week, hopes hundreds of homes and a new cultural centre will be built on the site within years.

Tyrone O’Sullivan, who has been a part of Tower’s mining and then regeneration programme for 50 years, is “very optimistic” about the “much-needed” development coming to fruition.

Mr O’Sullivan was speaking a decade after the colliery, near Hirwaun in the Cynon Valley, closed its gates for the last time as a deep pit mine.

Now grandfather-of-five Mr O’Sullivan, whose association with Tower dates from 1967, said: “We need money north of the M4. It would have a major effect on land owned by miners. I have no doubt in my mind that the Tower story is not over. This could be the second part of it.

“Why shouldn’t the pit become a facility for the community? A museum that no-one else in the world can boast? This could be a special story here in the Valleys.”

As well as Rhondda Cynon Taf Council being keen to work with Tower, Mr O’Sullivan said there’s “a lot of interest” in opportunities at the site and hopes it will create hundreds of new jobs for the area.

It is hoped that in the next six months there will be a some sort of announcement, he added.

Saved from closure by workers with a deep-rooted faith in what they were doing, Tower became the symbol for the miners’ resistance in the 1990s, after British Coal decided it was too expensive to run.

The pit made national headlines in 1995 when workers defied the Conservative Government and used their redundancy money to buy the pit, making it the only mine in Britain to be owned by its workers.

But after achieving the seemingly impossible for 13 years, in 2008 – with coal reserves finally exhausted after 140 years of production – it was the workers themselves who decided it was time to leave.

A collection of 240 miners, plus friends, families and local dignitaries, marked the closure with an emotional march away from the mine in Hirwaun that they had fought so hard to save.

Ten years later Mr O’Sullivan, 72, said: “We changed what the mining industry was and we made an incredible difference to the Cynon Valley. All our workers were in good jobs. If they were injured or their wives were pregnant, they were still paid.

“Everyone thought coal was no good. They just didn’t want to buy it, but we made millions’ worth of profit.

“People from other pits, when they closed, wanted to come to work for us. I had a load of brilliant workers who really wanted to be there. They didn’t want redundancy.

“We made enough money to keep everybody in work, as well as distribute profits among the community. Hirwaun, Mountain Ash, Penrhiwceiber, Aberdare, Abercynon, Penywaun – all were better off because of us.

“We were the only pit in Britain that worked the last ounce of mining we could – who wouldn’t be proud of that?”

Even after what seemed like the end of Tower in 2008, officials at the colliery found there were around six million tonnes of coal close to the surface and so began a huge operation to begin opencast mining at the 400-acre site.

Employing 150 men – some of whom worked in the deep pit and others from near and far – opencast operations finally began in 2012.

The opencast mining was done with a view to create some sort of housing, leisure, manufacturing and retail park after the coal had been extracted.

In March 2017, having mined up to one million tonnes of coal a year, the site’s main customer – Aberthaw Power Station in Barry – announced it would no longer use Welsh or British produce due to its carbon content, ending the site’s mining operation for good.