Foreign News: Up & Down the Escalator

The National Coal Board’s chairman, Lord Hyndley, concluded after almost four years of nationalization that mining coal in Britain was “like running up a down escalator. You have got to run hard to stay where you are. You have got to make superhuman efforts to advance.”

Last week, he announced plans for the N.C.B.’s most strenuous effort to date: it wanted to spend $1,778,000,000 in 15 years to raise coal output 40 million tons, using 80,000 fewer miners. The alternative: continuing decline of Britain’s key industry.

Centuries of British mining have exhausted promising seams, extended tortuous runways miles underground, forced workers away from the dull, dangerous pits to other work. So archaic and complicated is the system that only 25% of Britain’s mine workers directly dig coal, against 70% in the U.S. In the time it takes one British miner to haul five tons of coal to the surface, one Hollander hauls 20 to 25 tons, one American 50 tons.

Nationalization slowed the decline at first, but the drop is accelerating again. In three successive October weeks output fell below the same period in 1949. Last year Britain’s mines had produced 24 million fewer tons than in 1938. The work force slumped to 687,000 men, lowest in the century, and it is falling off by 1,000 men weekly. Absenteeism has doubled since prewar.

Last week, as winter hovered, stockpiles were 1,000,000 tons under the 16.5-million-ton safety mark. Exports had to be pared to 17.5 million tons instead of the planned 19 million to 22 million tons. Deliveries to Denmark, Sweden and Italy were behind schedule.

The N.C.B. planned drastic surgery during the next 15 years: scrapping half Britain’s present mines or linking them with other pits; opening 70 new mines; rebuilding 250 collieries; dieselizing the 19th Century haulage system; mechanizing coal cutting.

It was overdue. The London Times tartly remarked: “The long awaited plan of the National Coal Board . . . over the next fifteen years appears at a time when the chief preoccupation of the country is the likely state of coal supplies over the next three months.”