The history of the Welsh working class on screen

Daryl Perrins

There has always been an uneasiness around the term ‘Welsh working class’.

If you watch the Oscar-winning Hollywood adaptation of Richard Llewellyn’s novel of the same name How Green Was My Valley (Ford, 1941) for example, you will see how the incoming working class threaten the purity of the god-fearing, Welsh-speaking, and still largely rural gwerin (folk). The latter being a Welsh national archetype synonymous with the war-poet and shepherd Ellis Humphrey Evans in Hedd Wyn (Turner, 1992).

That said, Left-leaning films like The Proud Valley (Tennyson, 1940) and Blue Scar (Craigie,1949) helped to transform the Welsh working class into what the cultural historian Jeffrey Richards called ‘the Welsh style’. It was ‘strongly communal’ and centred around ‘Working Men’s Clubs and miner’s institutions, the collieries and the ‘Fed’ (South Wales Miners Federation), on rugby and boxing, choral societies’.

In the post-war period, this ‘style’ became a swagger when worn by colliers’ sons, Richard Burton and Stanley Baker. In lieu of a Welsh film industry, each became the face of Wales in the cinema, with their success being testament to Welsh civic society and the ‘second chance’ it offered. A process played out in the biopic Mr Burton (Evans, 2025), through the Faustian pact the young Richard Jenkins made with his mentor Philip Burton in order to succeed on an English stage with one of the greatest voices in the English language.

Unlike Burton, Stanley Baker remained a man of the people. His film roles both laid the groundwork for the realism of the British New Wave and replaced the parochial/music hall Welsh of the Ealing films with world-weary Welsh cynics in Hell Drivers (Enfield, 1957) and Blind Date (Losey, 1959), respectively. Watch Baker’s ex-con trucker in Hell Drivers and witness the first Welsh working- class anti-hero on the big screen.

The most important chronicler of the Welsh working class is, however, the director Karl Francis. His ‘Rhymney trilogy’ – Above Us the Earth (1977), Ms Rhymney Valley (1985), and Streetlife (1995) – alongside the films of the women’s film co-operative Red Flannel (1986-91), offer up rare examples of politically oppositional cinema.

Francis’ drama-documentary style offers comparison with the great social realist Ken Loach. Women are, however, Francis’ real subject – as the backbone to the Miners’ Strike in Ms Rhymney Valley, or as victim to the patriarchy unleashed by its ultimate failure in Streetlife. For, as Owen Jones demonstrated in ‘Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class’ (2011), the narrative was now increasingly about escaping the working class.

Devolution in Wales heralded a similar escape plan with Gadael Lenin/Leaving Lenin (Emlyn, 1993) taking a swipe at what it saw as the ‘dinosaur’ of Welsh working-class politics, and with leading dramatist Ed Thomas declaring in a The Observer feature in 1997 decrying Welsh stereotypes that ‘old Wales is dead’.

In this febrile atmosphere, the cycle of successful English-language films culminating in Human Traffic (Kerrigan, 1999) were given iconoclastic status ‘from choirs to Cool Cymru….’ and ‘old Wales’ was jettisoned off from the end of Mumbles Pier at the finale of Twin Town (Allen, 1997).

This left the working class in the hands of television writers/performers Boyd Clack and Ruth Jones. They thankfully created ‘carnivalesque’ comedies that put class front and centre. Clack’s Satellite City (BBC Wales, 1996-1999) and High Hopes (BBC Wales, 2002-2009) offer up a kaleidoscopic but equally recognisable South Wales, one experienced through familiar nods to British variety hall comedy.

High Hopes – with its mixture of social realism, alien invasion, and anti- authoritarianism – went on to be our longest-running comedy series here in Wales. More recently, the finale of Gavin and Stacey (BBC One, 2007-2010; 2019; 2024), which topped the Christmas Day
ratings, transmitted the Welsh working class to 12.3 million British TV sets.

The relationship between the Shipmans and the Wests is redolent with the comedic representation of a marriage across the divide (the Severn Crossing). Look closely, however, and the comedy revolves around social stratification – Stacey West and her significant others represent the values associated with the traditional working class, clashing with those of the upwardly mobile Shipmans.

It’s there for all to see: the terraced house and street with doors open, the ‘Welsh Mam’ with her omelettes set against the nouveau-riche pretensions and snobbery of Pamela in her bungalow in Tory-voting Essex. Forgoing the official bilingual status of Wales, the series instead offers up dialect. One that is, on the one hand, ‘instantly recognisable to the working classes of South Wales’ (John Jewell 2009), and on the other, the best example of the Welsh ‘colonising’ the English language since Burton. As Carole Cadwalladr
(2009) put it at the height of the series’ popularity, ‘two years ago people did not speak of ‘tidy’ things. People did not inquire whether or not anything had occurred’.

Dr Daryl Perrins is Senior Lecturer: Film and Television at the University of South Wales. He is currently writing a book on the Welsh working class in film and TV