KELLINGLEY colliery, which is to close on December 15, is Britain’s last deep coalmine. It has also been one of the most productive and profitable.

The Yorkshire pit is modern and employs some of the most advanced coalmining technology in the world.

Exploration of the site began in the late 1950s and the pit was developed in the early 1960s, with the first coal coming out in 1965.

The coalmining industry was booming when Kellingley went into production. Coal-burning power stations produced more than 80 per cent of Britain’s electricity.

Kellingley was one of a group of Yorkshire deep mines linked by rail to Yorkshire power stations in a system known as the “merry-go-round.” The area’s canal network was also used to carry coal.

Hundreds of Scottish miners — their own old and exhausted pits closed — moved to Yorkshire to work the new “super-pit” which became known as the “Big K.”

In the 1970s it employed more than 2,000 miners and it became the first pit in Europe to produce one million tons of coal a year.

Kellingley’s coal seams were — and are — huge, eight feet from top to bottom at a time when one Yorkshire mine was operating a seam of just 16 inches.

The pit’s two shafts are around 800 metres deep. The pit cage in one shaft carries men and materials, the other lifts coal.

The roadways at the bottom of each shaft advance into Kellingley’s rich coal seams. Today the roadways have advanced seven miles underground.

Miners travel the seven miles to the face by lying on their bellies on a conveyor belt known as a manrider.

The roof on the coal face is supported by gleaming stainless steel hydraulic chock, mounted on caterpillar tracks which carry the chock forward after the coal ripper has moved along the face gouging out hundreds of tons of coal each rip.

A face I visited had 40 of the chocks along its length. Each chock cost £1 million, and were a tribute to the engineering workers who created them.

Politically, Kellingley became one of Britain’s most progressive pits. In the 1960s and ’70s the secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers was a Scottish communist, Jimmy Miller. Under his leadership the union created its own co-operative warehouse at the pithead.

Miners paid a small sum from their wages each week into the co-operative and when a mining family wanted a new washing machine or TV, they went to the union, which used Kellingley’s bulk-buying power to undercut commercial retail outlets.

Under Miller’s leadership the miners created a social club, which also became known as the Big K. In addition to the usual sporting facilities, it housed a library and education facilities.

It also had its own restaurant where miners and their families could enjoy a steak, a decent bottle of wine — rare for miners and other working-class people in the 1970s.

Miller explained this with the philosophy: “There’s nothing too good for the miners.”

In the 1920s Miller had been elected Scottish Young Communist League delegate to the October celebrations of the anniversary of the Russian revolution in Moscow.

At Kellingley, decades later, he proudly wore a hammer and sickle medal given to him at the event.

“I cannae remember who pinned it on ma breast,” he said. “It was either Trotsky or Stalin.”

Miller retired from Kellingley before the miners’ strike against pit closures of 1984-5. When he left he presented the medal to his son Davy, also a communist, who was elected to succeed him as branch secretary of Kellingley NUM.

The social club doubled as a strike centre and feeding station for pickets and families during the 1984-5 strike.

Kellingley’s mines travelled daily into Nottinghamshire to picket, often returning in the evening bloodied and battered, to be fed.

When Kellingley closes in December it will abandon tens of millions of tons of coal in undeveloped reserves, while Britain imports some 55 million tons a year from abroad.

The last coal is expected to be produced around December 12, with the pit closing on December 15.

In the lifetime of Kellingley 15 miners were killed there at work.

In 2010 a memorial to them was unveiled — a bas-relief depicting a pick-wielding miner kneeling at the coal face. In a garden next to the memorial three pit tubs filled with flowers stand on rails.

The memorial is sited outside the pit canteen so it can seen every day by miners going to and from work.

The NUM has plans to dismantle the memorial and transfer it to a new site at the National Coal Mining Museum of England, a few miles away at Caphouse Colliery, between Wakefield and Huddersfield.

The museum, complete with pit shaft and underground roadways, will soon that all is left of Yorkshire’s deep coalmines.

It is understood that planning permission is being sought to use Kellingley’s pithead site for an incinerator.

DAVY MILLER, branch secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers at Kellingley during the 1984-5 strike against closures, gained national media attention during the strike.

He carried an organ donor card on which he wrote the words: “Not for use by any Tory over 16.”

The donor card was turned into postcards by a workers’ co-operative, Leeds Postcards, which were sold to raise funds for the strike.

As the Tories tried to starve the miners back to work, Davy was also quoted as saying: “The miners will eat grass before they go back to work.”

A few days later his father Jimmy, former branch secretary, arrived from retirement in Scotland at the strikers’ Kellingley food kitchen in the miners’ social club.

In the back of his battered Volvo estate car was a stag. A local butcher dealt with the beast and the kitchens went into overdrive to roast it.

When Kellingley’s pickets arrived back from Nottinghamshire that evening expecting their usual beans or chips, they were met instead by the smell of roasting meat.

Davy called the seated gathering to order and reminded the miners, cooks and helpers of his word about the miners’ eating grass if necessary.

Then he added: “And if there’s no grass they’ll eat venison!”