Released in 2000 as “Een gesprek in Zuid-Wales” in “OnVoltooidVerleden“, Cajo Brendel in this text recalls the situation of Welsh miners after the nationalisation of their industry by the Attlee administration in 1947.

PDF-Version: Cajo Brendel – A Conversation in South Wales

Abertridwr and Senghennedd are two closely situated mining villages in South Wales. In the summer of 1947 I spent a good two weeks there.

I didn’t find any picturesque village areas or shops. There was a run-down pub, of course. There were no more than two roads. Both consisted of small, adjoining worker’s cottages of exactly the same type. Other houses were, with a few exceptions, nowhere to be seen. The houses were grey and dreary, they had been “treated with” coal dust all these years. The miners lived in the cottages with their families, or rather, the men slept there during the day after entering Windsor Colliery shaft at night – or even at night, after they had been on a day shift. I wanted to talk to these miners, and for fourteen days I spoke to them, mainly in the evening hours.

I already knew a lot about the miners, their lives, their problems and worries, especially about the Welsh, because I had read Richard Llewellyn’s book “How Green Was My Valley” [1939] a few years earlier. I immediately saw that the valleys were indeed very green, but everything else was black, not only the houses, but also the faces, perhaps not pitch-black, but of dark skin colour, because the coal dust penetrating into the pores caused a shade that no thorough washing could wipe away.

Today, as I am writing these lines, there are no more mines and no miners in Britain, not a single one of the 1.2 million from the 1920s, not one of the over 300 000, who were still working at the end of World War II, and who were still the elite of the British working class at that time. And that’s how they felt, no one who came into contact with them doubted that.

I was a guest in one of those little houses in Abertridwr. The single widow of a miner gave shelter to a young man who certainly did not earn his living underground. In January of that year, the British mines had been nationalised by Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, which had ruled since 1945. The National Coal Board [NCB] replaced the private owners and their companies. Windsor Colliery, owned until the end of 1946 by Powell & Duffryn, which had a bad reputation with the miners, was now managed by NCB. As with all British mines, a metal sign had been placed at the entrance of the mine, on which everyone who wanted to believe it could read that this administration was “for the good of the British people” (!).

The summer of 1947 was warm. We sat in the evening not inside, but on the street, on wooden chairs in front of the houses. What we drank must have been beer, I don’t remember exactly. All the better I remember what we were talking about, and that was in the first place the nationalisation.

Earlier in the day, it was a Saturday, Jimmy Griffith and Bob Preece, both at my age, around thirty or less, showed me the metal sign at the entrance to the mine and said, “This is exactly why we elected a Labour government.” A few months later, I read in the newspaper Socialist Appeal that Emanuel Shinwell, the Labour government’s energy minister, had already stated in the previous year, 1946, that nationalisation was not primarily intended as a measure for the benefit of miners. I was already convinced of this in June. But Jimmy and Bob didn’t see it that way.

“Don’t you notice,” I asked in the evening, “that Lord Hyndly, one of the former directors of Powell & Duffryn, now presides over the National Coal Board?”

“Why should we notice it,” Jimmy said. He was as astonished at my view of things as I was at his. For one evening I have tried really hard to convince him that nationalisation does not actually change the existing conditions. Jimmy Griffith saw in it only the opinion of a foreigner who did not know anything about the Labour movement and therefore could not comprehend or understand it. He didn’t hold it against me. He was just trying harder, to give me all the information.

Fourteen summer evenings in a row we talked about the situation of the British working class in the narrow “main street” of Abertridwr and especially about the situation of the miners. Of course, one evening was also about the trade union movement and the National Union of Miners [NUM]. As I had expected, our opinions were very divergent. For Jimmy, for Bob and for all who listened to us, the miners’ union was the right organisation who fought for their interests. Not for me. I tried to explain to them that each union rather defends the interests of entrepreneurs than that of their base. They had never heard anything like that before. “And what’s more”, said one of those present, “there are no longer any entrepreneurs in the mining industry.”

On a hill just outside Abertridwr stood the only and certainly not small villa. “Who lives there”, I asked, although I already knew it. “Mr. Sullivan,” they said. I had already visited Mr. Sullivan and had a little chat with him at the door. A look through the open door in the hallway showed me that Mr. Sullivan, until recently one of the directors of Powell & Duffryn, still lived in the same house as he did then, the most beautiful of all houses. After all, he was now one of the top managers on the National Coal Board. “Don’t you notice anything unusual?” They understood exactly what I meant, but the class difference which I, as they admitted, had rightly noted, seemed to have lost its meaning after the nationalisation. “And Lord Hyndly?” “He is not born in East-End”, they admitted.

We were more or less at a dead end. “Have another glass”, Jimmy said,”and then go to bed. It’s getting late.” That’s how it was. Due to a gap in the opposite row of houses, I had been able to see the two winding towers of the mine all evening long. Now they gradually disappeared in the twilight.

“Sunday morning you can see them up close”, Bob said. “We’re gonna take you below. This is possible because on Sundays there is no work”. But a stranger in the mine is not allowed. “And Mr. Sullivan?” Bob laughed: “He sits in the church on Sunday morning”.

So on that particular Sunday I went in with the pit cage. In a kind of clothing room I first got an overall and a helmet with a lamp attached to it, which was connected by a cord to a battery in the right pocket of the overall. And then…. downward. More than 600 meters, Jimmy said. The lamps on the helmets burned, otherwise pitch black darkness everywhere.

Once out of the cage, we were far from where the coal was mined at that time. The seams in this mine were anything but thick and the corridors were therefore particularly low. It was impossible to walk upright. On our hands and feet we crawled over the stuffy “paths”. They were not wide, difficult to walk on and also muddy. Up to the “coal front” we had to crawl two kilometres.

What they mine here is soft-coal [bituminous brown coal]. If you didn’t know what that meant after hearing it from your companions, you could feel it – if you accidentally touched the ceiling with your hand, the coal dust would trickle down. The walls were wet, here and there were puddles on the ground. The narrow corridors were supported by iron arches, which did not look very trustworthy. It took us more than half an hour, if I am not mistaken, perhaps even three-quarters of an hour to reach our destination. It was a strange feeling, and I could hardly imagine that the miners had to spend eight hours a day here, where the passage ended in a dead end, to cut off coal, which was then filled into the iron wagons and transported on rails to the lift shaft. The wagons were pulled over the rails by small diesel locomotives. That’s what Jimmy and Bob told me, I couldn’t see them on Sunday.

Not only underground did I get to know the miner’s life. When we returned to the top after a long drive back, I learned that there were still no washing facilities, although Windsor Colliery had been nationalised for over a year. And the condition of the sanitary facilities was indescribable.

That morning Jimmy and Bob told me a lot about their life as miners. The worst thing was that they were actually threatened all their lives down there by the dreaded disease silicosis, the dust lung. It was a sad story they told: Miners die young, and there’s no cure for that.

I couldn’t dress and, as I said before, I couldn’t wash myself. I had to leave the helmet and the lamp of course. Black as I was, I had to walk back to my accommodation. “I’m bound to attract attention”, I said to Jimmy, “Attention?” he was surprised, “especially not now that you’re looking so black.”

When I arrived in my quarters, however, the widow looked somewhat surprised. But she didn’t say anything and immediately let me take a hot bath. If one thing had become clear to me by now, it was the fact that the profession of miner was associated with so many deadly perils. I had heard enough about accidents, catastrophes, ceilings that came down and blocked the way, water pipe breaks and explosions.

“It’s a dangerous job”, Jimmy said, “and yet my grandfather was a miner, my father was a miner and I don’t really want to be anything else”. In my opinion, both the family tradition and the sense of pride in belonging to this working class group played a major role here.

“Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get much grasp of the processes that are going on round you…” George Orwell had written in 1937 in his book The Road to Wigan Pier. I had only been to Windsor Colliery on a Sunday, a day when they were not working. And yet I understood some of the miners’ lives.

Of course, I don’t know if the miners I spoke to understood something of what I told them. But it’s not impossible. Two months after I returned home, in August, Grimethorpe Colliery‘s miners in Yorkshire began to strike. They resisted attempts to increase productivity. Mr. Will Walther, president of NUM, turned against the strikers and said they acted like criminals. He wanted them to be prosecuted and fined. “How high doesn’t matter” (!). Arthur Horner, General Secretary of the Mining Union and member of the British Communist Party, also turned against the miners. He explained that the strikers “must be regarded as an alien force and treated as an enemy of the true interests of the majority of the miners of this country”.

The National Coal Board acted in exactly the same way as the previous owners. Lord Hyndly explained: “The measures to increase productivity cannot be reversed. Otherwise we would undermine our authority.” The NCB brought forty miners before the judges by invoking a law dating back to the 19th century. The valiant Mr. Horner acted as witnesses to the prosecution. I have rarely encountered a more revealing picture of the real character of the trade union movement.

I returned to South Wales and Abertridwr years later. I wanted to see Jimmy Griffith, Bob Preece and many others I had spoken to. But it didn’t come to that. It wasn’t hard to find Jimmy Griffith’s house again. But he didn’t live there anymore. “Yes, you have found the right house,” said the former resident, “but Jimmy Griffith has been dead for a long time”. I understood what had happened. Silicosis had claimed its victim.