Once it was cheaper or more convenient to use another fuel sentiment would count for nothing

Once it was cheaper or more convenient to use another fuel, sentiment would count for nothing.After leaving the NCB in 1971 he became chairman of Vickers and deliberately kept a low profile on coal and energy matters for many years afterwards, finally breaking his silence in 1977 to attack the Energy Secretary, Tony Benn. “In his first years, though,” Gormley wrote,he could charm the sparrows off the bloody trees, as indeed he must have been able to do so, since he was winning standing ovations at NUM conferences at the same time as he was cutting the industry in half.In Ten Year Stint, Robens remembered his recurring message to union conferences:You will live by pulling yourselves up by your own bootstraps You cannot look to governments to save you any more. The sometime NUM President Lord Gormley recalled in his 1982 autobiography Battered Cherub how Robens became very unpopular towards the end of his reign when he visited Yorkshire and branded local miners “layabouts”. The following year, coinciding ominously with the discovery of substantial reserves of North Sea oil and gas, Labour published its National Plan for Coal which endorsed not only a continuation but an intensification of the contraction programme.Robens, with his Labour credentials, used his charm and guile to win over right-wing NUM leaders, many of whom actively encouraged certain collieries to close. By 1971, those figures were down to 300,000 and 292 respectively and the National Union of Mineworkers’ leadership was fast preparing to shed its role of meek compliance.Forty-three pits were closed in 1964, the year Labour took office.

Naturally, he blamed Whitehall pressures for most of the ills of the industry In 1961, more than 600,000 were employed at 698 collieries. His book Ten Year Stint (1972) pulled no punches and was the story of a remarkable social and industrial revolution.He wrote bluntly of his running battle with the Communists and militants in the coalfieids; of his fight for the industry against his former political colleagues in the Labour government; of the ferocious confrontation on fuel policy in which he says he was dramatically proved right, and of the horrors of the Aberfan tragedy. During his stewardship 400 pits were closed and one job in every three – 300,000 in all – vanished, yet the industry’s wage structure was revolutionised and productivity rose by 50 per cent. He was, after all, a former official of the shopworkers’ union Usdaw, a Manchester city councillor and a Labour MP. Many Labour supporters thought this appointment by the Tory government was a plot to wreck the Labour Party by seducing one of its most prominent members.Robens was Chairman of the NCB for a decade from 1 February 1961 and approved pit closures and job losses which make later coal industry cuts appear almost minimal. At his peak Robens was described as one of the most unusual, colourful and controversial men in Britain. Certainly, he was a complex, extremely clever individual who reached the top of every tree he attempted to climb and did not endear himself to everybody along the way.He had three things going for him: an immense belief in himself; an instinctive capacity for leadership; and a shrewd and nimble brain.

He will not be remembered with excessive affection by the trade unions who felt, not unnaturally, that he could have been a saviour of many jobs in the coal industry instead of a man they viewed as a government-appointed destroyer. He explained in a television interview:This is a statement of fact and not a comment. If I had still been an MP then my name would have been included as a candidate when the leadership was being discussed. It would have been the highest probability that I would have succeeded in winning that election.He said that, if he had become Prime Minister, he would have run the country “as a huge corporation”. His was a life of considerable achievement and ceaseless activity – not without its moments of greatness.GlenamaraAlf Robens’s appointment to run the National Coal Board turned out to be a bed of nails for a man who did not shirk controversy or a challenge, writes Terry Pattinson.Indeed, during his period as NCB chairman, Robens revealed that he “would almost certainly” have become Prime Minister if he had stayed on the Labour front bench. Richard Marsh, by now the Minister, refused to accept his resignation.

After the Coal Board Robens spent eight successful years as chairman of Vickers.For three decades, until in 1993 he suffered the first of two disabling strokes, Alf Robens filled a succession of offices, including 15 years as a director of the Bank of England, and was universally portrayed and, indeed, portrayed himself, as the quintessential leader of industry. Robens offered to resign but would not allow the rest of the board to resign with him as they wished – an indication of the loyalty he evoked in those who served him. Subsequently there were long and unseemly wrangles between the Government and the NCB about who should pay for removing the remaining pit heaps.When Lord Justice Edmund Davies’s report on the tragedy was published in August 1967 the Coal Board was scathingly criticised. When Robens eventually visited the scene on the following Sunday almost everything he did and said caused offence – including his outsized cigar, which he sported as he toured the village. He was followed by the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prime Minister.