Ketchup and coal dust

Marjorie Thomas

I used to enjoy having a rant about the fact that if you grew up in the ex-mining communities of South Wales, your childhood would be spent commemorating the disasters of an old industrial heritage.

Perhaps it was especially so for me and my classmates, as we were educated in the village which is famous for being the location of Britain’s worst ever mining disaster.

All mining disasters are bad, but ours was the worst. Whenever there was a play to be performed, a poem to be written or a mural to be painted, it would have to refer to the heavy industries and heavier losses which were part of life in the Valleys up until that time.

Gore

Ketchup for the blood and gore, and coal dust from the flower beds to smudge on your face.

When the Urdd eisteddfod took place in Cwm Rhymni, in the beautiful grounds of Llancaiach Fawr Manor near Nelson, I was highly cynical about having to watch yet more creative dances on the theme of “tanchwa” (explosion, or fire-damp – if you’ve been brought up where I was you’d know.)

When Pontypridd opened its lovely new playground next to the restored Lido, why, I asked, did it keep harking back to the past with its theme of chainworks? Why not look to something brighter, beyond the valley walls, more aspirational? I would even scoff at Wetherspoons in Caerphilly having some of its tables in mock-mineshafts, where you can pretend you’re on a break from cutting a seam under the illumination of your Davy lamp.

The recent announcement by Reform has completely changed my mind. Faced with an Englishman whipping up controversy by suggesting that we all want the mines re-opened has made me very glad indeed that I was immersed in the stories of just how bad it was; how all the Black Brooks in the area got their names, how intergenerational trauma on a societal level set in, how the Senghennydd disaster was all but forgotten outside the valley when war swiftly followed on its heels.

Posh boys

I’ve even read comments by troll accounts on social media saying that we were all rich back then! Ha! There was wealth in black gold but it all washed down the rivers and railways to the seas and into the pockets of posh boys like the ones who say they want the mines reopened today.

We’re not rich now, are we?

In my valley there are schools on the sites of the pit heads. Schools and houses, which we all need. In Nantgarw there’s a Showcase cinema, Macdonalds, Frankie and Bennies, ten pin bowling and other businesses which will gladly pay young people a minimum wage without sending them down a shaft.

Saw mills, bus stations, country parks, garages, housing estates – jobs and houses. What would Reform do with all these? Or would they try to sink shafts in the fields we need to feed the nation?

I was wrong to criticise the people who taught me about my past. They gave me a defence against the smoke and mirrors of the politics which would drag us all back to the Victorian era, when profit for the owners was everything and labour was cheap.

Compensation

Or to the sixties, when a mine owner dragged its heels in admitting liability for the deaths of schoolchildren in Aberfan, and then offered families a meagre £50 per child by way of compensation.

To coal dust on the lungs and emphysema – see, I always knew words like emphysema, pneumoconiosis, and facts like how you’d often as not be killed by suffocation from a fire taking all the oxygen from a tunnel, rather than being burnt by the fire itself.

Keep penning those poems! Let loose the creative dance! Spray paint those murals! Our knowledge of our own history is our best defence against those who would exploit us again for their own profit.

Let us never forget who we are and where we came from.

Bring on the ketchup!