"The Duchess of Kent inaugurated the £400m Selby coalfield yesterday in a ceremony described as 'restoring King Coal to his throne'.
The Duchess operated the drilling machinery to start the first borehole in the shaft sinking work.
Mr Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the Energy Minister, said that this was the start of the reconstruction of Britain's individual strength. He then spoke of "restoring King Coal to his throne in this country" and forecast that, when the Selby mine complex begins to produce coal in four years' time, Britain will be a net exporter of energy – selling abroad North Sea oil and millions of tons of coal to Europe.
The Duchess braved teeming rain which turned the mine shaft site at Wistow into a sea of mud to operate the drilling rig while 500 invited guests watched the ceremony on closed circuit television from the relative comfort of a candy-striped marquee.
And in her opening address the Duchess paid tribute to the National Coal Board for the consultations it had had with authorities and people in the Selby area.
"Naturally there may be fears about the impact the Selby project may have in a hitherto rural area, but there will be incalculable advantages – many jobs will be available which did not exist before.
"The coalfield is so rich and the country's need for coal so great that the coalfield will have to be developed to its full capacity as soon as possible," said the Duchess.
Earlier Sir Derek Ezra, chairman of the NCB, spoke of the great progress made in the last few months in proving new resources of coal.
"Our exploration programme has been enormously successful in proving the existence of vast quantities of mineral wealth which were not even suspected by our predecessors.
"In fact, we are now proving each year four times as much coal as the country is using. Bearing in mind its long history, coalmining in Britain can hardly be described as a recent arrival in the energy business. Yet an extremely high proportion of our exploratory boreholes is proving entirely new reserves of workable coal.
"Now at Selby we are beginning to exploit this national wealth on a big scale," said Sir Derek.
The Selby mine will produce coal at a rate four or five times higher than present collieries.
But one of the present problems of the coal industry is that it is not meeting production targets, and Mr Joe Gormley, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, speaking on behalf of all the mine industry unions, appealed for greater co-operation between all workers in the pits.
Mr Gormley also welcomed the decision to house the estimated 2,400 miners who will move into the Selby area alongside existing communities in the district.
"In days gone by miners were put in pit villages and, as pits have closed, those villages have become ghost towns. Pit villages will not be built at Selby. Miners will contribute to the economy of the community, they will help to create economic stability and make the communities a little better than they are at the moment," said Mr Gormley.
Eventually the pit will have five man-riding shafts and a coal extraction drift at Gascoign Wood, near South Milford. There will be no spoil heaps.
On the noise levels, Mr William Forrest, the mining engineer in charge of the project, told guests at the ceremony: "It will scarcely interfere with the singing of the birds. In addition to the 2,400 resident miners more will travel to the pit daily to make up a workforce strength of about 4,000 men."

The Cuban missile crisis is finally resolved
1963 The world breathed easily again after teetering on the brink of armageddon for a week. The Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev backed off and agreed to dismantle all Russian missiles based in Cuba and ship them back to the Soviet Union.
The Cuban missile crisis had began on October 14 after a U-2 reconnaissance plane revealed the existence of several nuclear missiles based on Cuba capable of reaching the US. President Kennedy denounced the Soviets' actions.
He declared a naval blockade on Cuba and threatened the USSR itself with attack if any Cuban missile were launched against the US.
This was our story on October 29 1962. "Now we step back from danger," President Kennedy told Mr Kruschev yesterday. The Russian leader had agreed unconditionally to take the missile bases out of Cuba under United Nations supervision, and the President had replied he would promptly lift the blockade and give an assurance against invasion of Cuba.
Dr Castro, Cuban Premier, immediately issued five new demands, one of which
was that the United States should give up its naval base at Guantanamo, on Cuba. He said that unless the five demands were met, Cuba "would not consider that the guarantees against aggression spoken of by President Kennedy existed".
U Thant has accepted Dr Castro's invitation to visit Havana, and is expected to leave New York early this week, probably tomorrow.
Before going he will confer in New York with Mr Kuznetsov, Soviet First Deputy Foreign Minister, who is on his way to New York to take part in the negotiations to settle the Cuba crisis.
Mr Macmillan yesterday wrote to Mr Kruschev saying once the Cuban problem is normalised, "the way would be open for us all to work towards a more general arrangement regarding armaments". Mr Kruschev in his letter to Mr Kennedy suggests the regulation of "other dangerous conflicts," talks on disarmament and a ban on nuclear weapons.
Some observers regard Russia's move as a "complete climb down," and President Kennedy has been referred to as "the man who saved the world". Official circles in London, however, do not regard the Soviet move as completely unpredictable.
Foreign office officials have said all along that Russia wanted to establish these missile bases in Cuba quickly and stealthily, and then present them as a fait accompli to the Americans. But they were found out.
Having started to build them, however, the Russians decided to negotiate from the limited strength they had attained – thus the demand for the removal of United States missiles in Turkey. This, too, it became obvious, was doomed to failure."
The US ended its blockade of Cuba on November 20 1962. The Soviets removed their nuclear weapons by the end of the year and US missiles in Turkey were withdrawn in 1963. A hot line between the US and USSR was set up to prevent such a crisis happening again.


Ted Hughes's death is commemorated by Vernon Scannell
1998 When Ted Hughes died, fellow poet Vernon Scannell offered his personal and critical appraisal of the Poet Laureate on October 30.
"As a performer of his own poetry Ted Hughes could entrance audiences with the passionate intensity of his delivery and his imposing physical presence.
I knew him quite well during the 1950s and 60s and we collaborated in the editing of the Pen Anthology, New Poems 1962. This involved regular meetings to discuss the choices we had made and, while we did not always agree on what one or other of us regarded as work of quality, he showed a broad and accommodating taste for poetry very unlike his own.
He also displayed a sharp intelligence and, perhaps more surprisingly, a quirky sense of humour. He was one of the nation's finer Poets Laureate. His appointment in 1984, after the office had been turned down by Philip Larkin, proved to be a sound one, the comparison between his work and that of his predecessor, John Betjeman, providing a striking and stimulating contrast.
From the publication of his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, in 1957, it was clear that a new and important poetic voice had arrived. Poems like Hawk Roosting, The Jaguar and View of a Pig did not merely describe their subjects but, in the brawny and muscular rhythms and vigorous plain diction, enacted their physical movement and presence.
With the appearance of the subsequent volumes, Lupercal, Wadwo and Crow, it became apparent that Hughes was not only a remarkable and percipient observer of the natural world, but that he was also creating a reality which was composed of vivid and haunting reflections and echoes of the forces operating beneath the veneer of the social and political structures of 20th-century civilisation.
He retained to the end a fierce loyalty to his northern origins which was expressed in the honesty and directness of thought and utterance which his work, in both verse and prose, embodied. The literary influences most evident in the earlier poems were the powerfully organic language of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the prose and free verse of DH Lawrence.
In some of his work I think I detect strong echoes of Biblical rhythms, even a kind of psalmic quality of incantation and repetition. I was not among those critics who admired his recent versions of Ovid where it seemed that his famously powerful and earthy language misrepresented the elegance and precision of the original. Hughes translated, for example, Victa iacet pietas (piety lies conquered) as "The inward ear, attuned to the Creator/is underfoot like a dog's turd."
However, his best work in both prose and verse will, I am sure, always command the admiration of his readers and it is worth mentioning that these readers include the very young, many of whom have responded with great enjoyment and excitement to his wonderful prose fable The Iron Man.
Hughes's own literary childhood was inspired by the comics stacked up on the shelves of his father's newsagent's shop in Mexborough. The family had moved there from Mytholmroyd where Hughes was born in 1930.
The comics inspired the then 11-year-old to write fantastic and gory adventures which apparently amused his grammar school classmates – and sometimes his teacher. So from an early age, writing offered him rewards.
Recalling this time in his book, Winter Pollen, Hughes explained his writing then began to focus on anything to do with shooting, fishing and trapping – it was wartime and he had total freedom to wander where he pleased.
Sometime during his first year at Mexborough Grammar School, he was struck by a comic where one of the characters sang a long-rhymed song. "I found rhymes more satisfying to write. They were more special, but for two or three years they were no more than an occasional game.
Then at some point when I was 14, I borrowed Kipling's Complete Poems from the library. I don't know what drew me to Kipling. Perhaps the poems were a revelation. What took hold of me were the rhythms. They got into my head and evidently affected me greatly. From that point on I began to write all my verse-tales in Kipling's lock-step rhythms of resounding deadlock rhymes."
After school, he did National Service and then he went on to Cambridge to read English, and later archaeology and anthropology. He met Sylvia Plath there in 1956.
When the 26-year-old poet got together with the Fulbright scholar from New England, the match was seen by all as one wrought in heaven. Plath's journals recall how passionate a convergence it was."

BSE report criticises ministers
2000 On October 26, a long awaited report into the spread of BSE or "mad cow disease" and its fatal human equivalent, vCJD, criticised officials, scientists and government ministers.
The inquiry into the BSE crisis had begun in 1998. By this point there had been 3,253 cases of "mad cow disease" and 18 human deaths from vCJD.
The report, focusing on Britain and carried out by Lord Phillips, said the danger to the public was not identified quickly enough which created a false impression that there was no risk to human health.
"At times bureaucratic processes resulted in unacceptable delay in giving effect to policy" the report said.
Lord Phillips clarified that for the first six months after government scientists had identified the disease they did not inform the public for fear it would cause panic and damage trade.
The recycling of animal protein in ruminant feed has been singled out as the main cause of the spread of the disease.
John Gummer was among many ministers criticised in the report. Mr Gummer, agriculture minister between 1989 and 1993 was censured for his decision to publicly feed his four-year-old daughter a beef burger.
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) was identified in 1986. A probable link with the human form of the disease – Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (vCJD) – was established in 1996. On the same day the report came out the government announced plans to compensate the victims of the disease and their families.

Entry of the women peers
1957 On October 30 it was announced the Lords would admit the first women peers. The Conservative Leader of the House, Lord Home, said, "Taking women into parliamentary embrace is, after all, only an extension of the normal privileges of a peer."
Lord Samuel for the Liberals said the House of Lords was the only organisation which excluded women – directly contrary to the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act passed by the House 40 years previously but which the House had ever since refused to obey.
The Life Peerages Act was passed in 1958. It empowered the Crown to create life peers, both men and for the first time, women, who would be entitled to sit and vote in the House of Lords and whose peerages would expire on their death.
The Peerage Act of 1963 allowed hereditary peeresses to sit in the House of Lords for the first time.