Do Miners Read Dickens?

One of the enduring myths of Welsh history is that of the educated miners of south Wales and quarrymen of the north who spent long hours reading weighty literature and discussing it with their fellow workers. Like most national myths it contains more than a grain of truth, as this illustrated volume amply demonstrates. Celebrating as it does the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the South Wales Miners’ Library in 1973, and the beginning of the Science and Innovation campus as a Swansea University community initiative, it not only proves the truth of the image of the self-educated miner but shows how that spirit of education has been developed and continued. The Library grew out of concern for disappearing treasures. As Trevor Fishlock wrote in The Times on 1 January 1973, working-class libraries in south Wales, which had adorned the often magnificent miners’ institutes in valley towns and villages, were fast disappearing, bought up by dealers or simply thrown away because no-one any longer recognised their value. As a result of co-operation between the South Wales Area of the National Union of Mineworkers and Swansea University, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences Research Council, what could be saved was rescued and housed in the newly established South Wales Miners’ Library. Out of about 100 libraries in south Wales, one was retrieved intact, and parts of seventeen others were acquired as part of a project to document the history of the south Wales coalfield. Yet much more than that has been acquired. The Library is home to important so-called ‘ephemera’ such as photographs, posters, programmes, leaflets and recordings of miners’ and others’ recollections of pit life, as well as significant archives of the coalfield. And this book traces much of the troubled and triumphant history of the south Wales coalfield by illustrating major events from the Library’s collections. The Library and its collections have also been the spur for considerable educational activity, ranging from lectures and seminars held at the Library to outreach programmes implemented through the Community University of the Valleys, initiatives which have revived in valley communities the spirit of education which was at the heart of the original miners’ institutes’ collections. That the story of the south Wales coalfield is momentous and often tragic cannot be denied, as the chapter headings reveal – ‘Black Friday’, ‘And we shall remember 1926 …’, ‘Poverty, dole and anti-Fascism in the 1930s’, ‘Six Bells Colliery disaster’, ‘Aberfan disaster’ and others. Yet it is also a story of sheer determination: the foundation of the South Wales Miners’ Federation in 1898, the resistance to pit closures in the 1960s and 1970s, the resilience of mining communities during the 1984/5 strike, and the will and imagination that kept Tower Colliery going long after it was expected to close. The South Wales Miners’ Library is evidently far more than a collection of historical materials. It is a power house of learning, offering the people of south Wales and elsewhere a unique opportunity to study, analyse and celebrate this most extraordinary industry and its significant contribution to Welsh life. -- Rhidian Griffiths @ www.gwales.com