The Guardian

Back in late September I spent an afternoon touring the eastern Valleys of South Wales. The Valleys all run roughly north-south between high ridges that separate one valley from another, with the even higher Brecon Beacons at their head. This makes travel awkward, unless following the line of a particular valley. All the valleys once had a railway in them - sometimes two, one on each side of the valley - primarily to serve the many coal mines that once operated. Most of these railway lines have gone now, as have the coal mines. But the Valleys - now green again, but still black and industrial in the imagination - were a gritty reality in my youngest days and have always haunted me, for not knowing them properly. More than that; when we lived in South Wales - in a brighter, cleaner place on the coast - my Mum and Dad ignored them as if they didn't exist. I now feel my parents' attitude was wrong.

I need to make amends. I have already started, with visits to Blaenavon in 2013 - going down a mine there - and to Treorchy in 2015. But it will take a long time to somehow get below the surface of such a different culture. I am Welsh; but the the Valleys reproach me for not being nearly Welsh enough.

And there's more to it. I feel guilty. I could have gone to see the Valleys in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, but didn't. I kept away. I waited until the old industry had been smoothed over and landscaped and had become a tourist attraction. Until the towns had become full of Cardiff-bound commuters, not miners. Until I could go there and not be challenged. Until there was no risk.

***

No, we didn't live in the Valleys. We lived on the coast, at Barry. The sunny, breezy Glamorgan coast was a world away from the hemmed-in, damp and shadowy Valleys only twenty miles to the north. It strikes me as odd that, throughout my childhood, Mum and Dad never mentioned the Valleys, and we never went there as a family except for one occasion, described in my last post, when we visited Dad's father in Aberdare Sanatorium.

It was as if it were a no-go area - and in a sense it was. The Valleys communities existed because of coal and coal-mining and the kind of culture that implies. The people there looked askance at we coastal-dwellers with soft jobs and airy houses. Valleys people were by reputation close-knit, inward-looking, traditional, defensive, perhaps truculent, and their lives revolved around the mine, the union, the chapel, the club and the corner shop. A tough life, a rough life, and a dangerous life; a life lived with a great heart maybe, but not that many comforts. There may have been 'a welcome in the hillsides' according to the male voice choirs, but in reality the Valleys towns looked forbidding, and were no place for the casual or prying visitor. Nor the official.

Unless you had family in the Valleys, or your work took you there - Dad worked in Pontypridd tax office for a while - you would avoid the entire area. You'd be an unwanted intruder. During my childhood - in my childhood mind - the Valleys were a dark, menacing dream on the horizon: a troublesome, unhealthy place full of strife, and unwelcoming to outsiders. 

The Valleys were once pastoral, places to graze cattle and sheep and little else. They only became dingy, industrialised places because of coal. Welsh coal was superior, and production was prodigious. It peaked a hundred years ago, but coal-mining was still a major employer in the 1950s and 1960s, and coal-mining traditions good and bad persisted almost unchanged. It's all gone now, the pits demolished, landscaped, grassed over. Healing trees grow, and if the area hasn't quite returned to its bucolic roots, it certainly looks wholesome again. But everywhere - if you know what to look for - are the bridges, embankments, tunnels and stonework of former industrial activity. And the long lines of terraced houses in each valley speak of hard, dirty work and pittance wages.

I'm painting a very bleak picture of how it used to be. Those terraced houses and corner shops, those workmen's institutes and old chapels - many now closed, because the mine workers have vanished, and not many worship any more - are a testament to a heightened sense of community, and intense local loyalties - both of them potentially good things when the work that sustained those communities was dangerous, prone to taking lives, constantly creating widows and orphans. Welsh mining disasters somehow seemed crueller than the rest: South Wales had a particular reputation for hard-hearted profit-driven coal owners who didn't care two hoots about the safety of the workforce, nor the welfare of their families. The National Coal Board (the post-war nationalised body that now ran the mines) had a better approach, but a questionable record. When I was a child in the 1950s the Welsh miner's lot was still an unhappy one. They still had to cope with darkness and danger - underground explosions, roof collapses, poisonous gas fumes, and a lung disease caused by inhaling coal dust, called pneumoconiosis, which I heard about before I was eleven. It all sounded nightmarish; and my reaction, as a child, was to be afraid.

I didn't have the whole picture and I didn't understand. Sixty years on, I want to understand as much as I can. I think that the Valleys towns can teach me something about what happens when you put profits before people. And something about community, and the human spirit.

The Aberdare visit in 1959 hadn't left much of an impression on me, but in 1960 I went on a day trip to Treorchy (in the Rhondda valley) with Peter Jones, the little boy down the lane, and his father. They were going to visit Peter's grandmother, and took me along. We went by train from Barry. This time I had my eyes open.

Treorchy was a shock. It was drab. It was grim. The little town was mired in coal dust. I'm absolutely sure that the old lady had no vacuum cleaner, and relied on a brush and pan. But she had given up. So the coal dust from the wet street outside had spread inwards from the front door, to become embedded in the mats and carpets inside the gloomy interior, staining them dark and making them gritty to walk upon. It didn't help that her heating (and cooking) was done on an old-fashioned cast iron range, black and smoky, fed from a coal scuttle, with bits of grey ash on the floor in front of it. I remember also a sticky tablecloth, rickety chairs that creaked and sagged, and cracked cups that I didn't want to drink out of. (I was too polite to refuse) In contrast, my parents' house in Barry was spick and span - nothing like this. I was a fastidious child, and found it disturbing. I must have struggled not to show how I felt. (Though politeness would have saved me)

Pensioner poverty in a Valleys town. I didn't like it. I never forgot it. It confirmed everything I'd imagined about life in the Valleys. I had a better idea why Mum and Dad treated the Valleys as if they didn't exist.

But I went back in 2015, some fifty-five years later - see my posts Rugby Club Men on 2nd November 2015 and Treorchy on 24th November 2015. The fearsome grime was gone. I explored the town with adult eyes. Despite the late-year, late-afternoon coldness and dampness, I saw how it could be a warm and familiar place to the people who lived and worked there. Not my kind of place, to be sure. But at least I could deal with it, get it into my mind, and start to comprehend it as a real town, and not a bad dream from long ago.

***

I had several objectives for my late September visit this year. One of them was The Guardian, at Six Bells near Abertillery. It was some kind of monument. I hadn't seen a picture of it, but I knew it was a giant figure. At first it was hard to spot against the modern greenery of the valley sides.

Was that it, that dark speck against the trees? I consulted the map to see how to get to it. I ended up in a nearly-new car park, next to a nearly-new Further Education complex - another Valleys Regeneration project.

A good path led along the valley bottom towards a distant figure that still looked small. But it got a whole lot larger as I approached.

It was a tall, muscular, bare-torsoed miner, standing upright with arms and palms spread out. The gesture with the arms might be the preliminary to an embrace; equally the figure might be warning anyone approaching to come no closer - to keep them from danger. This was The Guardian.

I walked around the base. The red-orange band showed the names of the forty-five men who died in the 1960 Six Bells mining disaster. The monument was built on the site of the mine, closed in 1988. I had the place to myself and read the names slowly. They were all local men.

Forty-five fathers, forty-five widows, and dozens of bereft children. 

Nearby were information panels about the 1960 disaster.

The photos speak for themselves. All I will say was that I felt very flimsy, a mere tourist coming to gawp. An accident of birth had kept me out of this, away from all the danger and tragedy. At least I had made the effort to be here. But it felt like a pilgrimage without any easy absolution or blessing. You may be sure that I was very thoughtful as I drove on to my next objective that afternoon.

On impulse, I turned off the road at Llanhilleth, a couple of miles to the south. One of the forty-five men killed, Roy Morgan, aged 44, had lived in Llanhilleth. His son, Colin Morgan, aged 22, who lived in Six Bells, had also been killed. It was a small place with long parallel streets, huddled into the valley bottom. 

How typical of a little mining village in the Valleys! The old Miner's Institute was still open, functioning as a general community centre now. 

It was mid-afternoon on a Sunday; the café was closed. On another day, I would have gone in and had a bite, and then look at the local history exhibition. I'm sure there would have been one. 

Many of these Miner's or Workmen's Institutes have not survived, and have become derelict. Here's one I saw not long afterwards, on my way over to Pontypridd, at Abertridwr.  

It would have served not only Abertridwr but Senghenydd just up the road. Senghenydd was the site of the worst South Wales mining disaster ever, when 440 men died in 1913. That had followed an earlier disaster in 1901, when 81 men perished. You can hardly imagine the consequences for the community in this little dead-end valley. 

And not very far away to the north-west, in the Merthyr valley, was the scene of yet another mining disaster, though not underground this time, and the victims were little children: Aberfan. Next post.