A year to remember

As the Rhondda Heritage Project draws to a close, Creative Director John Geraint reflects on a twelvemonth of communal remembrancing.

“Letting go of the past, without letting go of what it means – that’s the trick. The trick we’re all trying to master. How to build our lives on something we can never have again. Without making them captive to the longing for what we had.”

The desire I expressed in The Great Welsh Auntie Novel, a work of fiction I wrote a couple of years back, has – I like to think, in these Janus-like days at the year-end – had a factual working out over the last twelve months.

Heritage, I’ve come to realise, is about the future as much as it is about the past – it’s about the legacy we pass on to the next generation, about the history we teach our children.

The centrepiece of our Project has been the Rhondda Heritage Hour, a weekly programme broadcast on Rhondda Radio, showcasing more than a hundred contributions from local people, sharing their anecdotes, memories and family stories.

Thanks to a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, what we’ve created is a dynamic portrait of Valley life, one that’s been officially judged to be the very best community radio show in the whole of the UK.

You can listen to our Gold award-winning final episode – it’s a great Christmas Day finale – here: www.mixcloud.com/RhonddaRadio123/rhondda-heritage-hour-re-upload-25122024/

Professors and punks

Throughout the year, there have been so many highlights. Tales of campaigning grandmothers, professors and punks, Viking ancestry, world-class libraries and choirs, fossils which pre-date the dinosaurs, one-armed colliers, the Blitz in Cwmparc, mountain walks, outings to the seaside, Corona pop, Slush Puppy machines, cold water swimming, a warm welcome given to refugees, what an ophthalmologist is and how to build a gambo.

The list goes on and on like some fantastic catalogue of shared experience: the Treorchy schoolteacher who lifted the Rugby World Cup, the hat that saved a sailor, the campaign that saved the Park and Dare Theatre, the long-lost logbook that chronicles a Mid-Rhondda miners’ strike, the singer who married James Bond and the one who fell in love with a mountain.

Foundations

But the Rhondda Heritage Hour isn’t just a celebration of our astonishing, world-famous industrial history, and the community spirit it engendered. It’s about the Rhondda now, and about how the Valley’s past and its present can be the foundations on which we construct a thriving future.

So, every week, we’ve heard Young Voices of the Valley – from Ysgol Nantgwyn, Coleg y Cymoedd and Valleys Kids. This next generation of storytellers are proud to come from the Rhondda; but they’re not trapped in any sentimental version of our past. The Rhondda – their Rhondda – is about living out the values of community, which has always been the hallmark of our valley, but in new and exciting ways.

So it was fitting that the year-long festival of heritage programmes finished with a song that’s a perfect marriage of the old and the new. It was written specially for the Rhondda Heritage Project by young students from Coleg y Cymoedd, and it’s performed by them with the wonderful Treorchy Male Choir. ‘Heart of the Valleys’ features in a video promoting the Rhondda Heritage Trail – another key part of the Project.

The video went viral with more than 30,000 views when the Trail was officially opened back in August.

www.rctourheritage.com/station-header

If you’re not familiar with the Rhondda, the Trail is a great way to get to know it. Even without leaving the comfort of your own home, you can dip into that bank of people’s stories that we’ve collected here:

www.rctourheritage.com/voices-of-the-valley

And, please, don’t forget… to remember: Rhondda’s history continues… into 2025!

A very Happy New Year to you.