South Wales Valleys in the 50s

[woodenhead]

You make it sound romantic, but how many people today would want to work down a mine.

 

How many people died directly or indirectly from the mining activity and its resultant pollution.

 

And how many jobs would there actually be down the mines today as automation replaced the hard labour.

[Northmoor]

22 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

The newer generations have grown to associate coal mining with anger, failure, and loss, and don’t ‘get’ the community, the spirit, the culture, and the rich cultural life that was the bathwater thrown out with the economically unviable baby, so they understandably want to forget it and move on.  But there is no moving on, nothing in the area to move on to, and unless you can buck the odds and manage to ejumakate yourself, no point in moving out either, you don’t look right and we don’t like your accent, or your attitude, you behave as if you were unjustly deprived of something, so you’re left to rot.  You’re stuck, and your elder rellys keep banging on about the old days under the NUM lodge banners in the club, constantly reminding you, as if the lack of jobs, ‘landscaped’ tips, Douglas firs, and grinding constant inescapable poverty weren’t enough.  And we wonder why they use drugs…

 

It is difficult for them to visuslise what it was like, even as late as the 70s though the rot was setting in by then.  My childhood and steam-chasing memories are of an intensely lively scene, plenty going on all the time, headstock wheels spinning, housewives out on doorsteps, shunting trains moving everywhere, and the constant squealing and rattling of the buckets on the aerial ropeways carrying the spoil up the mountain, busy village and town centres with shops, pubs, cinemas, clubs, theatres, Italian cafes and frequent buses.  All gone, as the snows of yesteryear.  Some of the towns still have a bit of life in them; Pontypridd, Merthyr, Aberdare, but the cancer of short-lease shops and boarded up premises is spreading.  The chapels are closed, even god gave up on you. 
 

Not economically viable, see. 

I grew up much further West where the coalfield had vanished by the end of WW2, but recognise the social decline you describe from visiting a lot of the Valleys and watching "Wales Today" throughout the 80s and into the early 90s.  Having since read much more about the history of coal mining before and after the 84-85 strike, you can conclude that both sides of the political divide let the mining communities down badly. 

 

The government (via NCB management) were predicting the substantial elimination of a coal industry by the 1990s, back in the 1960s.  In fact government departments were explicitly planning for it, in the same way as there was a planning assumption that major ports would be containerised and those that didn't, would wither.

 

The Left (and the NUM) let these areas, the miners and their communities down by claiming that they could stop the world changing if only you gave us your vote, etc. and promised that they'd make the world better and there would be jam tomorrow.  It never came.

 

Neither side had the courage to tell the people the world is going to change, it will be unrecognisable in 20 years so you need to prepare for it by doing XYZ and we will provide ABC to help you.  In some cases, the best solution would have been to "close" some communities altogether and relocate everyone en masse to the M4 corridor where the work was increasingly going to be.  This was more common in Soviet Bloc countries but there are precedents for this in the UK.  I believe there was a government-funded study that recommended doing this with Merthyr Tydfil, in the 1930s.

[Nick C]

59 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

You make it sound romantic, but how many people today would want to work down a mine.

 

How many people died directly or indirectly from the mining activity and its resultant pollution.

 

And how many jobs would there actually be down the mines today as automation replaced the hard labour.

But the fundamental problem that caused the decline wasn't the closure of the mines - it was the fact that it was done quickly, without any attempt to provide alternative employment, help with re-training etc.  The workers and communities were simply abandoned by the government of the time.

[Michael Hodgson]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

The newer generations have grown to associate coal mining with anger, failure, and loss, and don’t ‘get’ the community, the spirit, the culture, and the rich cultural life that was the bathwater thrown out with the economically unviable baby, so they understandably want to forget it and move on.  But there is no moving on, nothing in the area to move on to, and unless you can buck the odds and manage to ejumakate yourself, no point in moving out either, you don’t look right and we don’t like your accent, or your attitude, you behave as if you were unjustly deprived of something, so you’re left to rot.  You’re stuck, and your elder rellys keep banging on about the old days under the NUM lodge banners in the club, constantly reminding you, as if the lack of jobs, ‘landscaped’ tips, Douglas firs, and grinding constant inescapable poverty weren’t enough.  And we wonder why they use drugs…

 Indeed.  Not just the valleys though they were perhaps even more closed as communities because of the terrain.  Just about everybody in any pit village worked in the local mine as there was little alternative.  Education might enable you to aspire in due course to the dizzy heights of Deputy.  In the pit villages of Northumberland where my grandfather was a face worker they spoke a language known as pitmatic.  It wasn't really Northumbrian dialect (as spoken by people like shopkeepers or farm labourers), and certainly not Geordie as commonly suggested by southerners.  A lot of the words were mining-related jargon which varied slightly from colliery to colliery, and Co Durham had similar versions. 

 

The language, culture and sense of community as well as employment opportunities have now died out.  It was a dangerous job that caused health problems, but was relatively well paid by contemporary working class standards.  All the same, advice to boys reaching school leaving age was unanimous and emphatic:  "Whatever ye de lad, divvent gan doon the pits."
 

[Michael Hodgson]

2 minutes ago, Nick C said:

The workers and communities were simply abandoned by the government of the time.

... intentionally, maliciously.  And people wonder why there was dancing in the street and shouts of "the witch is dead" in places like Worksop on the announcment of Maggie's passing.

[The Johnster]

Nothing glamorous about coal mining, it was hard, dirty, dangerous work in appalling conditions; I certainly didn’t mean to make it sound glamorous!  But it provided the basis for Valleys life, and it is difficult now to envisage how vibrant and surprisingly cultured that was; opera singers and classical orchestras played to packed theatre houses in the towns, even small villages had cinemas.  Everything was on your doorstep, but now you’ve got to go to Cardiff, and even if you’ve got the bus fare it’s a 2-hour journey and the last bus home is at 6 for some Valleys.  
 

To be fair a lot of the more highbrow aspects were in decline by the 60s as they were replaced by tv coverage, but there was still plenty going on and plenty to do.  

[The Johnster]

Anyway, none of this has happened in 1950s Cwmdimbath yet.  I’ve been repositioning the buildings in the pithead area but I’m not happy yet; every configuration with the canteen/baths on the village side of the site, which is where it should logically be, looks wrong. More fiddling with it later. 
 

The basic problem is the the headframe has to be at the same level as or higher than the upper level of the Faller Old Mine structure that serves as the screening area, and there is as yet no real connection between this upper level and the yard.  Iam trying to reproduce the layout of many South Wales pits on hillsides so that the coal went downhill, helped by gravity, through the processes it went through before ending up bmin the wagons.  How are pitprops, for example, brought from the yard up to the headframe to be sent underground?  
 

A simpler solution might be to have the pithead buildings at a lower level and take the coal up to the screens by conveyor belt, an equally common solution where there was space.  
 

We’ll see…

Edited November 7, 2022 by The Johnster

[Nick C]

34 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

and the last bus home is at 6 for some Valleys.  

At least they still have a bus service - many places don't now...

 

The village where I grew up, in the 'affluent south east', there is one, but the last (on a Tuesday or Thursday - it's the only one on M,W,F...) bus home from the nearest town is currently 4:30. It was 5:05 when I was a teenager - carefully timed to make it utterly useless for anyone wanting to work in the town who didn't have a car...

[MrWolf]

20 minutes ago, Nick C said:

At least they still have a bus service - many places don't now...

 

The village where I grew up, in the 'affluent south east', there is one, but the last (on a Tuesday or Thursday - it's the only one on M,W,F...) bus home from the nearest town is currently 4:30. It was 5:05 when I was a teenager - carefully timed to make it utterly useless for anyone wanting to work in the town who didn't have a car...

 

That was pretty much what was done with branch line timetables, which many think was deliberate so that services weren't used and closure justified. Whitland to Cardigan springs to mind immediately.

[woodenhead]

20 hours ago, Nick C said:

But the fundamental problem that caused the decline wasn't the closure of the mines - it was the fact that it was done quickly, without any attempt to provide alternative employment, help with re-training etc.  The workers and communities were simply abandoned by the government of the time.

Just the miners and their families?

 

I don't think the miners were alone in being left behind, it pervades throughout the whole of the United Kingdom.

[Northmoor]

41 minutes ago, MrWolf said:

 

That was pretty much what was done with branch line timetables, which many think was deliberate so that services weren't used and closure justified. Whitland to Cardigan springs to mind immediately.

There were some examples where this was done (Alton-Winchester, where the DEMU left five minutes before the hourly EMU was retimed to arrive from Waterloo), but Whitland to Cardigan was a basket case anyway (and already closed by the time of Beeching's report).  I seem to remember that in the 1920s-30s, Cardigan and Kilgerran (1st stop) accounted for half the passengers and three quarters of the freight revenue of the whole branch.  The latter proportion would have only increased by 1960 since the two quarries served en route had closed. 

 

For passengers, it was always a very slow way to get anywhere (and via nowhere), while the Carmarthen & Cardigan could have had people from Cardigan in Carmarthen in just over an hour.  If the C&C had been built by the GWR instead of stalling at every stage, the Cardi-Bach would never have existed; it served villages that were barely classed as villages.  I know, I grew up cycling distance away from them.

[MrWolf]

It wasn't any different for those of us who grew up in the industrial Midlands, Britain's workshop where machinery for mining, textiles and printing was made, electrical engineering turned out everything from power station generators to radios and bicycle headlights. The car or motorcycle or bicycle you drove or key parts of it, the clothes and shoes you wore. It supplied most of the country and a fair slice of the world. But it was all dying by the late sixties and early seventies. Nobody did a damned thing to stop it, just asset stripped or hog tied the remains and both sides of parliament consistently betrayed the British workers who were actually making the money and pandered to anyone who wasn't. By the time I left school in the eighties, if you were lucky, a relative might get you in the back door of a skilled trade.

If you were lucky, educated and well off, you might get to university in the hope that the belief a degree opened any door wasn't a lie, which it was.

The alternative, was a youth training scheme, where you hoped that you weren't just being used as free labour until you hit eighteen, or go into an area of the armed forces where you could not only get a skilled trade, but experience and leadership training.

At least with a fistful of A levels you could demonstrate to the military that you weren't cannon fodder and they didn't say what interviewers had said to me more than once,  "You're over qualified, you'll just get bored and leave".

All that wasn't helped by companies paying £1.50 an hour or less to over 21's, in the 1990s, some only paid £32 a week, knowing that if a candidate refused interview or job, their dole money would be stopped. 

They would of course say that you could work overtime, for the same money. It's not surprising that I have had children in their early teens tell me that they're going to have three or four kids ASAP, just like their own mothers did. 

[Cwmtwrch]

4 hours ago, MrWolf said:

Britain's workshop where machinery for mining, textiles and printing was made, electrical engineering turned out everything from power station generators to radios and bicycle headlights. The car or motorcycle or bicycle you drove or key parts of it, the clothes and shoes you wore. It supplied most of the country and a fair slice of the world. But it was all dying by the late sixties and early seventies.

1950s Britain was living on memories of being the monopoly supplier, having gone through the industrial revolution first. By Victorian times other countries in Europe [and pre-eminently the USA] had caught up, and overtaken us, producing cheaper, quicker and often better; WW2 and the Korean War just made that worse. Thereafter various Asian countries also caught up and overtook, very quickly. Government, managements and workforces just buried their heads in the sand and refused to acknowledge reality, carrying on as they always had, managements expecting to sell whatever they chose to make, whether or not anyone actually wanted it, while in some industries union fought union, strikeing over demarcation issues and stopping production, without ever understanding, apparently, that they were just destroying their own jobs, because the customers could, and would, simply go elsewhere. I was born in the early 1950s and lived through much of the decline. Is it really any better now?

[MrWolf]

Definitely so and whilst busy rebuilding the defeated nations we didn't look to modernise our own industry, but nationalised the key industries, stifling them with the same attitudes and allowing the government to dip into any profit for other pet projects.

Ordinary, non politically militant people who were simply trying to earn an honest living were simply left behind. I always remember a picketer being interviewed during the miner's strike being asked what he thought if for instance the wages bill per week was £100,000 and the profit was only £75,000. He replied, it's government owned, they can afford it. I remember agitators at the gates where my father worked (a place that had been steadily shrinking during the 70s and under threat of closure) trying to get members of the AUEW to come out in sympathy, being told "When we're on even half as much money as you are...." Their work was being steadily bled away to Hungary and eventually China even then.

[woodenhead]

It should not be forgotten that at the end of WW2 Britain was bankrupt and in hoc to the Americans.

 

All that stuff they 'lent' us for the war had to be repaid in money and favours, they basically owned us after that.

 

Britain had also as mentioned above lost it's empire pretty soon after that and our last attempt to at a show of force without the US went embarrassingly wrong in Suez with the Americans telling the Government to stop or they would bankrupt the UK.

 

In some respects, it might have been better for the UK had it been flattened like some of the European countries and then we could have 'built back better' rather than limp on.  Great slogan, 75 years too late.

[Compound2632]

On 06/11/2022 at 19:26, woodenhead said:

You make it sound romantic, but how many people today would want to work down a mine.

 

How many people died directly or indirectly from the mining activity and its resultant pollution.

 

And how many jobs would there actually be down the mines today as automation replaced the hard labour.

 

But the relevant point is not "how bad it was then", about which we can do nothing, but "how bad it is now", about which we ought to be able to do something.

[MrWolf]

15 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

But the relevant point is not "how bad it was then", about which we can do nothing, but "how bad it is now", about which we ought to be able to do something.

 

If a political party came along who was willing to actually do something about it (I'm convinced that they're all able, it just doesn't suit their purposes) then they'd definitely get my vote. As things stand, nothing will change.

[woodenhead]

15 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

But the relevant point is not "how bad it was then", about which we can do nothing, but "how bad it is now", about which we ought to be able to do something.

And later I said the Valleys are not the only ones forgotten, it pervades the whole UK and no party has done a d*mn thing about it in decades but blame the other party, the EU or foreigners.  It feels like we've been on a terminal decline since the end of WW2, there was a brief respite in the 1950s as we partially rebuilt but by the 1970s the rot had set in good and proper and it's only accelerated since.  Now we've spent years running down our energy sector without replacing it with a similarly robust system and ended up dependent on gas from overseas and French technology for our Nuclear industry when in the 1950s we were one of the leaders in that field by virtue of the fact the Americans were not sharing their expertise.

 

It is as it has always been, a few rich people get rich off the woes of the rest of the population, even Nationalisation did not solve that and then it was all sold off again and in the process made a few rich people even richer no doubt when they got national assets and allowed them to go to overseas ownership.

[Flying Pig]

Plan of the month in December's RM reminded me of this thread.  It is based on Nantymoel, a small BLT in the Ogmore Valley with a kickback connection to the inbound roads of Ocean Colliery immediately outside the loop point.  The colliery is not modelled, being just a connection to the fiddle yard, but empties would run into the station before setting back into the colliery sidings.  The outbound roads formed a triangle facing up the branch and are well offscene.

 

https://www.s-r-s.org.uk/html/gwl/S1631.htm

[MrWolf]

I like that, it could be made into a very interesting and entertaining model, especially with the feeder lines.. Another one for the file, I better finish off the chunk of southwest Shropshire first!

[OnTheBranchline]

8 hours ago, woodenhead said:

It should not be forgotten that at the end of WW2 Britain was bankrupt and in hoc to the Americans.

 

All that stuff they 'lent' us for the war had to be repaid in money and favours, they basically owned us after that.

 

Britain had also as mentioned above lost it's empire pretty soon after that and our last attempt to at a show of force without the US went embarrassingly wrong in Suez with the Americans telling the Government to stop or they would bankrupt the UK.

 

In some respects, it might have been better for the UK had it been flattened like some of the European countries and then we could have 'built back better' rather than limp on.  Great slogan, 75 years too late.

 

Sorry, would you have rather had Lend-Lease or not? 

[woodenhead]

38 minutes ago, OnTheBranchline said:

 

Sorry, would you have rather had Lend-Lease or not? 

So you like to believe that the US helped the UK out of the goodness of its heart and wanted nothing in return.

 

You may want to read Noam Chomsky.

[MrWolf]

48 minutes ago, OnTheBranchline said:

 

Sorry, would you have rather had Lend-Lease or not? 

 

I know that it's popular to bash America, it's a handy cover for what the liberal elites would really like to say but can't quite yet.

The fact is that we declared a war that we were in absolutely no position to win and if we hadn't been baled out, we would have been steamrollered in a matter of months.

Soviet Russia as you probably know also had massive assistance from the USA.

A lot of those liberal intellectuals who like yank bashing would have disappeared on cattle trains, but I have a sneaky suspicion that most would have simply signed up for another form of socialism with a different coloured armband.

[Northmoor]

1 hour ago, MrWolf said:

 

I know that it's popular to bash America, it's a handy cover for what the liberal elites would really like to say but can't quite yet.

The fact is that we declared a war that we were in absolutely no position to win and if we hadn't been baled out, we would have been steamrollered in a matter of months.

Soviet Russia as you probably know also had massive assistance from the USA.

A lot of those liberal intellectuals who like yank bashing would have disappeared on cattle trains, but I have a sneaky suspicion that most would have simply signed up for another form of socialism with a different coloured armband.

Actually we might have been starved out after a couple of years, but the Battle of Britain was fought and won before any American involvement in WW2.  This forced Germany to postpone Operation Sealion (the invasion of Britain), which has been demonstrated by the combined British and German Armies in a 1970s wargaming exercise, to be impossible for Germany to sustain. 

The shape of Britain in relation to the European mainland and the German Navy's absence of landing/supply craft, would have allowed the RN and RAF to create a land bridge in the Channel with the wrecks of the supply boats.  Unable to re-supply with fuel and ammunition, the invading force would have barely got out of Kent before being forced to surrender.

I agree with the rest of your analysis though and find the anti-Americanism common in the UK (a form of discrimination so widespread it's socially acceptable) very tiresome.

[The Johnster]

Some of the figures at the end of the war are illuminating; highest number of deaths (combat and war-related) - USSR, approx. 20 million, a third of all such deaths from WW2.  Highest rate of deaths for size of population - Poland, about 30%. 

 

Interesting to look at the combatants and how they'd come out of it by 1960; 1st and undisputed winner, USA, war got it out of depression; strongest economy on planet, militarily capable of taking on the ROTW and winning in a conventional war (both still the case) at a cost of 350,000 war dead and very mimimal civilian casualties.  2nd place USSR, world power and the Eastern Bloc as an effective empire and secure buffer zone, but 20 million dead is a high price.  Joint 3rd. Germany & Japan, building democratic and peaceful societies while developing immensely powerful economies. buy both also paid a high price.  Joint 4th, Italy and France, also democratic and prosperous. 

 

Now we're getting to the overall losers: 5th, UK, on the winning side with relatively low casualties, but cost us the Empire, left us in hock to the Yanks for most of my life so we never really got much benefit from North Sea oil (ok, that wasn't known about in 1960), a second rate international power just about making it on to the UN Security Council and in to the nuclear club, economically circling the drain, about to be overtaken industrially and economically by Germany and Japan because we never had enough Marshall cash (and anyway squandered it on trying to keep the Empire, an already lost cause demanding independence after years of unrestricted racist exploitation under the guise of the 'white man's burden', the ungrateful s*ds) after paying off the Americans to re-invest in modern equipment while theirs had to be replaced after RAF and USAAF blanket bombing, by Marshall cash.  6th, China, suffered terribly in the conflict and under idealist Communist control, but laying the foundations of economic world dominance, 7th Eastern Europe, sold down the river at Potsdam by Churchill because he and Stalin were both alcoholics and got on well at a personal level while Truman was an inexperienced lightweight (especially Poland, which we'd ostensibly gone to war to protect).  And 8th, the 3rd world, where the conflict continued by proxy and arguably still does, but then they were pretty much bottom of the pile before the war, and you can't lose much if you don't have much to lose.

 

Allegedly.