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DOWN IN THE VALLEY : SOME
WRITERS FROM SOUTH WALES
JIM BURNS
In 1921 Sir Alfred Zimmerman, writing about his impressions of
Wales, thought that there wasn’t one Wales but three – “There is
Welsh Wales; there is industrial or, as I sometimes think of it,
American Wales; and there is upper class or English Wales”. He was
of the opinion that: “These three represent different types and
different traditions”. He went on to say that: “Of American Wales,
the Wales of the coalfield and the industrial working class……let me
only say……for the benefit of those who are apt to sneer at South
Wales as a ‘storm centre’, what a joy it has been to pass a too
fleeting and infrequent weekend among men and women who really care
for ideas and love the search for truth……”
It’s not my intention to discuss what happened in terms of the
decline of the coal industry and the resultant effects on South
Wales communities. They were obviously devastating. What I’m
concerned to do in this essay is to draw attention to several
writers who grew up in “American Wales” and reflected aspects of it
in their novels and poems. Raymond Williams, writing in
The London Review of Books
in the 1980s, was of the opinion that: “the industrial Welsh
by-passed the muted tones of English culture for their version of
the brash expansiveness of North Americans….From Welsh-language
Wales this was often seen ……..as a vulgar, Anglicised betrayal of
‘Welshness’. Yet
Anglicised, at least, it was not. The work of the English-language
writers of industrial South Wales is unmistakeably indigenous; its
English in tone and rhythm is not an English literary style……In
these writers and in the everyday speech of the valleys…..a
distinctive culture is using that diverse and flexible language for
its own unmistakeably native writing and speech”.
It might be asked why, besides the reference to the “brash
expansiveness of North Americans”, it was thought that South Wales
had some similarities to the United States. I would guess that the
rapid industrialisation in South Wales in the late-19th
century reminded people of what happened in America when the Civil
War ended. Mines and mills developed and towns and villages grew up
around them. People moved into these areas, looking for work, and
along with them came social problems. Conditions in the coalfields
were harsh and class conflict was a part of everyday life. There may
not have been violence in South Wales of a kind comparable to
American industrial relations, but strikes and other forms of
protest were always present. And
the mixture fed into the novels and poems that were produced by
writers who had direct experience of life in “American Wales”.
Lewis Jones wrote two novels before his untimely death in 1939. The
first, Cwmardy, was
published in 1937, and the second,
We Live, in 1939.
Jones was born in 1897 and
went to work when he was twelve in the Cambrian Combine Colliery. He
was present when there was a strike in 1910/11 which led to a riot
in Tonypandy and troops being called in to aid police. A miner died
during the riot, possibly from being clubbed on the head by a
policeman, but there doesn’t appear to be any evidence to support
allegations of miners being shot. It’s probable that the events in
Tonypandy became confused with an incident in Llanelli in 1911 when
troops did fire on striking railwaymen, causing two fatalities.
Lewis Jones has a riot at the centre of
Cwmardy in which several
miners are shot by soldiers, but it is fiction and has no real basis
in fact.
The 1911 strikes took place against a background of the spread of
syndicalist ideas, advocating direct action and workers’ control, in
union circles, and especially among members of the South Wales
Miners’ Federation (the Fed, as it was popularly known) and
activists like Noah Ablett. He was one of the driving forces behind
a pamphlet, The Miners’ Next
Step, which circulated in the coalfields and appealed to union
activists, if not the great mass of union members. There have always
been differing views about how many people actually read the
pamphlet. Most miners were more than likely to have been interested
in the usual reasons for strikes – shorter hours, better pay,
working conditions, and other practical measures - than in theories
about syndicalism.
Jones’s We Live continued
the story of life in the valleys and the struggle to survive during
the dark days of the Depression. But Jones himself had almost burnt
out. He had been blacklisted from the mines, joined the Communist
Party in the early-1920s, and involved himself in local politics. He
was active in the Unemployed Workers Movement in the 1930s and led
several Hunger Marches from South Wales to London. When he died of a
heart attack in 1939 it was following a day when he was said to have
made around thirty or so speeches in support of the Spanish
Republic.
Both of Jones’s novels follow a traditional narrative pattern, and
there is nothing to indicate that he may have been influenced by any
of the shifts in prose styles – Hemingway or James Joyce, to call on
two examples - in the 1920s. I would guess that what he had to say
was of more importance to him than any stylistic innovations.
The narrative drive is
straightforward, and when the characters speak they do so in a way
that Jones intended to represent the common parlance of the
everyday. It may be that contemporary readers would find the writing
slow, with its attention to detail, but it has a cumulative power
and pulls the reader into the story in an emphatic way.
Jones had lived through the turbulence of the 1920s when, in 1926,
the General Strike took place, and after it was called off the
miners stayed out for several more months. So had Idris Davies. He
was born in 1905 in Rhymney and left school when he was fourteen to
go down the pit. He was injured in 1926, losing a finger, and the
fact of the strike and his doubtful future prospects as a miner,
encouraged him to train to be a teacher. In 1932 he was teaching in
a London primary school and publishing poems in magazines. One of
them, “The Bells of Rhymney”, was set to music and became popular
among folk-singers. There are recordings of it by Pete Seeger and
others. In the early 1940s he began writing
The Angry Summer : A Poem of
1926, a book-length work which Faber published in 1943.
It comprises what are, in effect, fifty short but linked poems. A
poem-sequence, in other words. The opening lines of the first poem
begin to set the scene: “Now it is May among the mountains,/Days for
speeches in the valley towns”, and it then moves through the various
stages of the miners’ bitter struggle as their spokesmen “plead and
plan and fight/For those who toil without a name/And pass into the
night”. There isn’t what might called a set scheme to the structure
of each poem. Some are longer than others, some have a rhyming
pattern, some not. And though the thread running through them all is
the strike, and its consequences in terms of poverty and hunger,
there is still time for occasional flights of fancy and moments of
romance: “Hywel and Olwen lie warm in the fern/With passionate mouth
on mouth/And the lights in the valley twinkle and turn/And the moon
climbs up from the south”.
The strike was lost and the miners driven back to work, apart from
those who had been prominent in picketing and general agitation and
found that jobs in the mines were no longer available to them. Idris
Davies continued to write and publish poetry. His collection,
Tonypandy and Other Poems,
was published by Faber in 1945. It’s worth noting that T.S. Eliot,
who hardly shared Davies’s social and political views, spoke highly
of his work, and said that it was: “The best poetic document I know
about a particular epoch in a particular place”.
Sadly, Davies died of cancer
in 1953.
The works by Lewes Jones and Idris Davies that I’ve looked at so far
leave one in no doubt that the events of the 1920s and 1930s had a
major effect on life in South Wales, particularly among the mining
communities. And unemployment and poverty are always present in Gwyn
Thomas’s two short novels,
The Alone to the Alone and
The Dark Philosophers.
But there is an element of humour present at all times in the
storytelling, The principal characters around which the narratives
revolve are survivors and determined to preserve their humanity and
individuality come what may.
Thomas was born in 1913, one of twelve children fathered by a miner
who was often unemployed. That fact may have been in his mind when
it’s said of a character in one of his novels who has been out of
work for years, but has several daughters, that love-making is just
a way of keeping warm in a house without heating of any kind. Thanks
to scholarships, one of them from the miners’ union,
Thomas managed to get to
university and to study in Spain, but when he graduated and returned
to Wales he was without work for long periods. He eventually
obtained employment in the educational system and taught at Barry
Grammar School for some years.
It was his wife who pushed him into publishing some of the writings
he’d been doing. In 1946 the short novel,
The Dark Philosophers,
appeared in print, to be followed in 1947 by
The Alone to the Alone.
Both feature the same central characters, a group of four unemployed
middle-aged men who sit on a wall and exchange ideas about life,
politics, and whatever else crops up during their conversations.
Their politics are never clearly defined, but all seem to be
ex-miners and lean to the left, if not in any clearly-specified
fashion. There is some talk of syndicalism, which is interesting
because Thomas’s novels are both set in the 1930s and, aside from
the Labour Party, many activists by then chose to relate to the
Communist Party. But direct action, and nationalisation, if not
outright workers’ control of the mines, were potent factors in the
policies of the FED.
The four men are by nature inclined to be sympathetic towards anyone
they consider downtrodden, so when they encounter Eurona, whose
father Morris is feckless and workshy, they decide to help her break
away from the confines of The Terraces, the rows of small houses
that wind their up the hillsides near the mine. As one of the men
explains: “These terraces were put up so that people could eat and
breed in between shifts and working in the pits. They were not put
up with any notion of giving the voters a full and happy life”.
Their efforts are hampered by the fact that Eurona has taken a fancy
to Rollo, a young man with prospects. He has a job as a bus
conductor so stands out in a world where almost everyone else is
unemployed. He also looks down on those without a job and is an
admirer of Oswald Mosley’s fascist organisation. But the men
persevere, guiding Eurona through the pitfalls of dealing with the
Assistance Board and local charities which might give her money to
buy clothes that will make her presentable to prospective employers.
The chaos that ensues as various schemes come unstuck (the men are
not against breaking a few rules when necessary) is humorously dealt
with. But although humour is used adroitly we are always aware that
in the background there lurks hunger. And poverty of both a physical
and mental kind.
The slightly shorter The Dark
Philosophers again has the four men at the centre of the story,
with their well-meaning efforts directed towards helping two young
people find true love. But standing in the way is the Reverend
Emmanuel, a popular preacher who was at one time a radical, but has
been seduced by the attentions of civic leaders and mine bosses into
speaking out against strikes and social protest generally. The four
friends have by this time obtained jobs, though not in the mines.
The situation is complicated because the young woman in question
admires Emmanuel, and he has obvious designs on her virginity. There
is a comic factor at work, but as in
The Alone to the Alone
the stark social conditions are always present. The men are
rough-and-ready types, but “sometimes showed the wisdom that springs
up in the heart of any man who has seen a lot of hunger and hates
it, and has met a lot of oppressive nuisances and despises them”.
Gwyn Thomas went on to become a reasonably well-known writer and
produced novels, short stories, and plays for the theatre, as well
as radio and television. He was also something of a media
personality on programmes such as “The Brains Trust” and “Tonight”.
But he’s perhaps best-remembered now as the author of the two
books I’ve referred to, and a historical novel,
All Things Betray Thee.
It might be relevant to quote what he thought about the role of
humour when he said that the valley where he grew up had been “flung
together in a series of swift, large immigrations and, like that
other great creation of multitudes on the move, the East Side of New
York, it produced a vivid, bright and often outrageous humour”. It
might also be worth taking note of his comment that “Places like the
Rhondda were parts of America that never managed to get to the
boat”.
The Welsh academic, Dai Smith, has written perceptively about Gwyn
Thomas and rightly pointed out how Americans responded more to
Thomas’s work than did English critics who “mostly saw a stage-army
of Welsh comic figures”. In America, Nelson Algren, Norman Rosten,
Howard Fast, and Maxwell Geismar spoke positively about Thomas’s
fiction in which they acknowledged how the humour was often a form
of social criticism. It was like so much Jewish writing, a “survival
humour”. Thomas died in 1981.
I have obviously been very selective in my choice of Welsh writers.
They were out of a time and a place that is now long gone. Others
will point to different writers as representative of Welsh
literature, and perhaps play down my focus on South Wales and its
industrial legacy. But it seems to me that the books I’ve dealt with
have all withstood reprinting in recent year not only because they
provide vivid pictures of their society, but also because of the
quality of the writing. Fashions in literature come and go, but the
genuine will remain.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Cwmardy
by Lewis Jones. Parthian, Cardigan, 2006
We Live
by Lewis Jones. Parthian, Cardigan, 2006
The Angry Summer : A Poem of 1926
by Idris Davies. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1993
The Alone to the Alone
with The Dark Philosophers
by Gwyn Thomas. Golden Grove Editions, Carmarthen, 1998
Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales
by Dai Smith. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1993
In the Frame : Memory in Society 1910 to 2010
by Dai Smith. Parthian, Cardigan, 2010
Climbing Mount Sinai : Noah Ablett 1883-1935
by Robert Turnbull. Socialist History Society, London, 2017
British Syndicalism 1900-1914
by Bob Holton.
Pluto Press, London,
1976
The Fed : History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century
by Hywel Francis and Dai Smith. Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1980
Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading and Popular Writing
by Ken Worpole. Verso, London, 1983
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