My Dad was a NCB civil engineer, he was made redundant in 1981 when the project he was working on was scrapped. He was in a team planning the ‘Margam Super Pit’, the plan was to close a number of local pits and work their coal reserves from one modern mine which would also extract the large seam from under Margam Mountain. This would have been a state of the art and highly profitable mine, providing secure, well paid jobs at the heart of the South Wales coalfield, Thatcher couldn’t face that possibility and put a stop to it. Anyone who says the pits were closed for economic reasons needs to do some research they were shut out of hatred towards the unions and communities the Tories knew would never support them.