I never had any doubts, says Tower buyout hero O’Sullivan

Western Mail

Tyrone O’Sullivan, the man who led the miners’ buyout of the pit, talks to Robin Turner

IF CATHERINE Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas are scouting for film ideas the next time they visit their Mumbles home they could do worse than knock on the door of their new neighbour.

Tyrone O’Sullivan became a working-class hero by leading the team of miners who bought their pit from British Coal in 1995.

As the Conservative Government decimated the Welsh pits, he and 238 other colliers facing being thrown on the dole queue paid £8,000 from their redundancy settlements to become shareholders in the first miner-owned pit in the world.

Broad-shouldered, inspirational and unwilling to give in, Mr O’Sullivan was the National Union of Mineworkers’ branch secretary at Tower Colliery for more than 20 years.

A pit man through and through, he was training as an electrician at the mine when the father he idolised died in a roof fall at the pit which lies in the shadow of the often inhospitable Rhigos mountains.

Even though his telephone was tapped for years by the security services concerned at his radical industrial zeal, he was awarded an OBE in the 1996 in the New Year’s Honours List.

He is now an adviser on the coal industry to the Welsh Assembly Government and an Honorary Fellow of Uwic (University of Wales Institute, Cardiff) .

But he is also a proud family man, a father of two and grandfather to three children aged six, four and 18 months.

Some years ago he and his wife Elaine, the childhood sweetheart he married in 1967, bought a caravan in Mumbles with glorious views over Swansea Bay as a retreat from life at the coal face.

Now, as Tower Colliery prepares to take its place in history by marking its last shift due to exhausted reserves, he plans to retire in Mumbles in a bungalow a stone’s throw from Catherine Zeta-Jones’s newly built family home above picturesque Bracelet Bay. The bungalow is a short distance from the site where the O’Sullivans had their weekend caravan.

But he does not plan to put his feet up just yet.

Speaking at the bungalow he said, “We still have a duty to dispose of the Tower Colliery site properly. It’s 350 acres and it could become a real gem in terms of creating employment in the Hirwaun area after Tower is gone.

“There will need to be a team in place leading the disposal of the land, working with the Welsh Assembly. If I’m asked to lead that team or play a part in it obviously I would have to consider doing it. I believe if it’s done properly we could see around 1,000 jobs being created there.

“We don’t know yet whether it would be an industrial complex, businesses, offices, homes, leisure ... but whatever goes there eventually will have 350 acres of prime land that is only around 40 minutes from Swansea and around 50 minutes from Cardiff.

“Swansea has had its SA1 development coming on strongly in the past few years and Cardiff has its famous bay ... this could be a similar development boost for the Aberdare area.”

He said of Tower Colliery, “I’ll be sad when it finally closes after it’s been put to bed [the months of work needed after the final shift to prevent methane and water escaping].

“We will all miss it. You have to understand my grandfather worked down there and my dad died there ... I’ll never forget that terrible day.

“The buyout was one heck of a story.

“If you told me when I was an apprentice that one day I’d be owning my own mine and running a business with a multi-million pound turnover I would have told you to get lost.

“But funnily enough at the time of the buyout I never had any doubts we would succeed.

“I knew that pit back to front, better than any managers, much better than any Conservative politicians or Government ministers.

“In fact, I’m more nervous thinking about it now than I was back then when we were taking on the Government and British Coal.

“Buying the pit seemed the logical next step as everyone was so determined to close it down. But we as miners knew there was a lot of coal to come out of that pit and we knew we could get buyers.

“It was just the question of getting a few million quid that was the awkward bit. But even that didn’t take too long.”

Mr O’Sullivan recalls that it was a night out with mining colleagues in the Full Moon pub just outside Aberdare that the word “buyout” was first mentioned.

It was in 1995, three years after the then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Swansea-born Michael Heseltine, had ordered the closure of 31 British pits, putting 30,000 miners out of work.

The shutting of the mines was closing the book on a whole way of life in mining areas like Yorkshire and the South Wales Valleys.

Local MP Ann Clwyd had just completed a 27 hour sit-in at Tower and the Government told her the pit was safe so she came up ... only to be informed wages were to be slashed and tonnage targets were to be increased.

Mr O’Sullivan said, “We felt betrayed at that time.

“It was clear the Government wanted all the mines shut and for our coal to come from places like China.

“But Michael Heseltine had earlier said something like ‘if the miners want to keep their pits let them buy them themselves’.

“It could have been seen as a cruel taunt, offering us a seemingly impossible solution.

“Afterwards, when the miners all agreed to pay £8,000 each under TEBO (Tower Employees Buyout Team) to buy Tower and we got a £2m loan on top I never credited Heseltine with inspiring us to buy the pit.

“I always said we bought Tower in spite of people like him not because of anything he said.

“In fact, we had no choice but to buy the pit. The only alternative was to give in and go home and think of something else to do. But we weren’t going to do that.”

The Tower Colliery chairman said the colliers would stage a march from the pit tomorrow.

“We marched in with NUM banners fluttering above us during January 1995 when we started working the pit after buying it,” he said.

“So we thought it fitting the last shift should finish with a march. It’ll only be a last shift in name, the miners will have a day off but they’ll all be there for the last day.

“In my opinion this is the very last deep mine we will see in Wales.

“You won’t see a pit with a winder [pit wheel] again because of the costs.

“But it’s encouraging to see some new drift mines opening the Neath area.

“There are still a lot of top quality coal seams in Wales and with clean coal technology there is a future for coal until we go to a hydrogen economy or some other carbon-free energy source.

“That is the future but at the moment we have an energy gap that has to be filled and I think with new carbon capture technology coal pits will be with us in Wales for some years to come.”

Tyrone O’Sullivan

Born
Abercwmboi, 1945. He said of it, “I always felt loved and cared for by my parents, and my neighbours were like an extended family. In those days in Abercwmboi, nobody locked their doors and window locks were unheard of.”

Childhood memories
Miners’ fortnight holidays in Barry or Porthcawl (sipping lemonade in the trees outside the Jolly Sailor) and renting a holiday flat from a Mrs Thatcher.

Love life
Married his childhood sweetheart Elaine on October 14, 1967. He said, “We met while still at school. She was a year younger, and an A-stream girl while I was only a B-stream boy. I can remember to this day how flattered I was when she told me she really fancied me. I asked her to marry me one day on the bus coming back from Pontypridd. She accepted so it was back to Ponty to buy a ring with money borrowed from my mother.

Worst day
The death of his father in Tower Colliery. He said, “I remember the date very clearly. It was March 6, 1963. At the time I was a mining apprentice at Aberdare College. The principal told me my father had been injured and gave me a cup of tea. A family friend came to collect me and gave the grim news my father had been killed on the college steps. My knees simply fell away. 58 Park View Terrace in Abercwmboi had lost its man, its husband and its father.”

The January 1995 march back to Tower after the buyout
He said, “What an occasion. What a day in history for working people. Who would have believed at any time in the last 200, 150 or even 50 years that it when it came to the last deep pit in Wales it would be owned by the miners themselves?”

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