BRITISH COAL MINER’S JOB IS NOT EASY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 7, 13 October 1948, Page 4

BRITISH COAL MINER’S JOB IS NOT EASY

Feels Free Under Nationalisation . . (By Reece Smith, New Zealand) Kemsiey Empire Journalist) . Nationalisation, or a shake up equally abrupt, was bound to come to the British coal industry after the war. This is a widely held opinion in Britain. For one reason or another private mine owners were stumbling on their job of securing for the present and the future the fuel vital to their country’s health and vigour. Ample warning was sounded that unless they mended their ways something would have to be done. In the main they made no response, and so found themselves nationalised. Lord Hyndley, now chairman of the National Coal Board, and in his time coal adviser to seven premier’s, says the speed with which nationisation came gave him a shorter time than he would have liked to set up his organisation. He can also be induced to concede that the coal owners had had it within their power at least to modify the terms of nationalisation by amalgamating into larger .and more efficient units, but made no such effort. Coal nationalisation is accepted now. Whether or not it was the right solution, what is done is done. People are disposed to let the Coal Board have a fair chance to prove itself. In Nottinghamshire, where I have just spent a week, the nationalised mines are looking unexpectedly fit and ' well, considering the sombre bulletins issued from time to time by the specialists in Fleet Street. It is an area where mine owners, more farsighted than their kind in South Wales, Durham and elsewhere, had put back profits . into equipment and efficient methods, instead of forking everything into the pockets of shareholders who did not know a mine from a rabbit burrow.

Through the ineptitude and mercenary attitude of their colleagues, these owners are seeing reward of their efforts falling to the Government. Cause here, it may be thought, for bitterness and revolt, yet with a few exceptions- these mines are being managed by the same men as under private . ownership. And the most successful of the Nottingham owners is now on the Coal Board, turning to the largest productive undertaking in Britain that some perception which put his own mines in the forefront. No one had so far undertaken to prove this change has transformed the owner in question from an inspired leader of industry into a bureaucratic dunderhead. Engineers, whose importance in coal is ever increasing, are busy carrying out ideas they themselves conceived long before' Vesting Day, January 1, 1947. And now, unhampered by purse strings and mineral rights, they can plan the thorough apd efficient extraction of coal over the next ten years or more. Under private ownership, so I have been told by representatives . of both workers • and management, there were manifold cases of managers worrying about nothing more than getting up enough coal to ensure the owners this year’s dividend. The old machinery would do. The cheaper the roads, the better. If the coal was hard to get, leave it for an easier seam. The engineers now endeavouring to get every piece of coal from every seam they work, and from seams earlier managers declared themselves done with, prefer the ten year plan. This does l not imply any off handed attitude to the balance sheet. The Coal Board is expected to pay its way, setting off good years against bad, though no one has laid down when ~ there will have been enough good years and bad for a reckoning to be made.