SWML @ 50The South Wales Miners' Library at 50
31. The Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities Poster
The Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities was established in the autumn of 1984 by a diverse group of organisations with the aim of consolidating the ‘alternative welfare state’ built by miners’ support groups during the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike and extending backing for the NUM’s strike throughout Wales.
The congress coordinated demonstrations, advanced a broad anti-Thatcherite democratic alliance in Wales, and aimed to stimulate debate about Welsh mining communities. It received immediate support from an array of political figures in Wales, from the Labour Party, Plaid Cymru and the Communist Party, as well as local government, trade unions, churches, the arts, farmers, the peace movement, and the women’s movement.
This poster is promoting a meeting to be held on 1st June 1985 at Maesteg Town Hall.
In the South Wales Coalfield Collection, we hold a series of recordings of the Wales Congress at Maesteg containing speeches, discussions and resolutions about the miners’ strike, imprisoned miners and the mining industry in general. Those speaking include Kim Howells and Ann Clwyd.
https://lisweb.swan.ac.uk/swcc/video/vid16.htm
We also have a selection of other posters relating to the Wales Congress which can be viewed at the library upon request.
32. The Inverse Care Law, theorised by Julian Tudor Hart
Julian Tudor Hart (1927-2018) was a general practitioner, author and political activist who moved to South Wales in the 1960s. His practice in the village of Glyncorrwg, in the Afan Valley, was the first in the UK to be recognised as a research practice, leading medical studies funded by the Medical Research Council. He was also the first doctor to routinely measure his patients’ blood pressure, working in partnership with the local community to reduce premature mortality rates by 28% relative to comparable communities. Local cooperation played a vital role in the studies and preventative healthcare strategies, and even involved coal miners taking urine sample bottles underground with them on their shifts to gather the data required.
Julian Tudor Hart proposed the inverse care law in an article for The Lancet in 1971. The law, whose title is a play on the ‘inverse-square law’ of physics, states that: ‘The availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served. This inverse care law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced.’ The simplicity and manifest perversity of the law, from the point of view of basic human need, lends it significant critical weight and it has endured as a key reference point in debates around health inequality and the marketisation of the National Health Service.
After retiring as a GP, Julian Tudor Hart continued his research as a fellow of Swansea Medical School. He was a prolific author, producing a wealth of peer reviewed papers and several books, including A New Kind of Doctor (1988) and The Political Economy of Health Care (2006). He was also a founder and first honorary president of the Socialist Health Association and an untiring champion of the founding principles of the NHS. The South Wales Miners’ Library is home to the Julian Tudor Hart Collection, which includes a section of his personal library and materials relating to his research.
33. Paul Robeson’s Transatlantic Exchange LP
In July 1950, Paul Robeson had his passport withdrawn leaving him unable to travel anywhere outside the United States. Aside from being a prominent singer and actor, Robeson was also a champion of socialist and civil rights causes and thereby seen as a threat by the U.S. State Department during the era of McCarthyism. Robeson was nevertheless able to perform at the Tenth Annual Miners’ Eisteddfod in Porthcawl in 1957, his first performance to an audience in Wales since 1949. All of this was possible with the new transatlantic telephone system inaugurated in 1956. A crowd of over two thousand people filled the Porthcawl Pavilion to hear his incredible voice booming over this new technology from a studio in New York.
He sang the spiritual Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel, This Little Light of Mine, All Men Are Brothers from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Schubert’s Lullaby. He also sang a version of All Through the Night, ending with the Welsh lyric ‘ar hyd y nos’. The Treorchy Male Voice Choir then sang in Welsh back to Paul Robeson, ‘Ni bydd diwedd byth ar sŵn y delyn aur’ [‘Without ending will resound the golden harp’]. The concert marks a significant event in the longstanding comradeship formed between Paul Robeson and the Welsh miners, which began after his chance encounter with a group of unemployed Welsh miners singing and marching through London in 1929.
34. Welsh Miners' Gala Day pamphlet
The first Welsh Miners’ Annual Gala Day was held Saturday 19th June 1954 in Sophia Gardens, Cardiff. Widely considered to be the social highlight of the year for many miners and their families, the inaugural event began with a procession of banners and brass bands from Cathays Park to Sophia Gardens. This was followed by the keynote speech delivered by The Rt. Hon Aneurin Bevan (then M.P. for Ebbw Vale) and Arthur Horner (General Secretary, NUM).
The events of the afternoon, which were less formal than the morning's proceedings, included brass band competitions, a seven-a-side rugby tournament, folk dancing, children's track events and a national dress competition.
In June 1960, filmmaker Derrick Knight and the NUM produced a short film which captured the fun and excitement of the annual gala day. According to Derrick Knight, Miners’ Gala Day, which is narrated by Gwyn Thomas, records ‘[t]he Welsh people’s love of playing, singing, dancing, but above all the love of colour and gaiety which gets so little chance of release in the drab surroundings of the mining villages...’
A copy of the film is available to view at the South Wales Miners' Library.
35. Menna Gallie’s ‘Cilhendre’ novels, Strike for a Kingdom (1959) and The Small Mine (1962)
The author Menna Gallie was born in the town of Ystradgynlais in the upper Swansea Valley in 1919. She came from a working-class background, growing up in a coal mining area during the years of struggle marked by the General Strike of 1926 and the Depression of the 1930s. As a gifted student, Menna went on to study English at Swansea University. There she met the philosopher Bryce Gallie, and the two were married soon after her graduation. She started writing fiction relatively late in life when she was 40 years old. As she later reflected, her role as wife and mother had not left ‘much time to be me, not much time to remember or think about the idea that’s long since slipped tidily down the sink with the dishwater or been wrung out hard with the nappies’ (quoted in Angela V. John, Rocking the Boat (2018), p.272).
Her first novel, Strike for a Kingdom (1959), is set in the fictional mining village of ‘Cilhendre’. The setting was modelled on the Ystradgynlais of her childhood, located in the anthracite coalfield on the western edge of the Brecon Beacons. In a video held at the South Wales Miners’ Library, Menna discusses her early life in Ystradgynlais and how she sought, in creating Cilhendre, to avoid one-dimensional depictions of Welsh mining communities. She wanted instead to capture their many nuances, tensions, and contradictions, as well as their humour, which she would write ‘with a Welsh accent’. Strike for a Kingdom was well-received, particularly in the USA where it was favourably reviewed in Time Magazine. She published a further five novels, including another set in Cilhendre entitled The Small Mine (1962).
These two ‘mining novels’ stand out from other examples of the genre for their especially sensitive portrayal of women and children in mining communities. They touch on women’s marginalisation from aspects of political life, explore how women of all classes are confined by their social roles, and expose the oppressive moralising that often accompanied issues of sex, marriage and childbirth. The novels are also full of references to women’s domestic labour, showing how crucial it was to the maintenance of the social and economic fabric of mining communities. In the video, Menna explains how her political outlook was shaped by her ‘Aunt Tillie’ [Griffiths], claiming, ‘I’m not much of an “-ist” except that I’m a socialist’ (Menna Gallie, Vid/132). Tillie was the wife of Menna’s former schoolteacher Brinley Griffiths, whose unique library of radical publications is held at the Miners’ Library, and who inspired the character of the kindly socialist headmaster in The Small Mine.
Menna Gallie’s novels are among the many available in our lending library, which complements our other collections and offers a wealth of sources on the history and culture of South Wales.
36. Audio interview with Tom Davies
Tom Davies (born 1899) was interviewed as part of the First South Wales Coalfield Project in 1973. This interview stands out as unique amongst the over 6oo interviews conducted for several reasons. Mr. Davies' sheer exuberance, wit and charm carry the listener joyfully along his varied and colourful past. This recording addresses Mr. Davies' career as a female impersonator, before, during and after the First World War and arguably stands, possibly accidentally, as a shining beacon in the under researched field of LGBT+ history in the South Wales coalfield.
“I left school at fourteen years of age and I had a lovely voice, nicer than Vera Lynn, nicer than that...And I was a very high kicker, and there wasn’t a lot of high kickers about in those days, nor female impersonators.”
37. Underground Poland Speaks (1941), pamphlet with Foreword by Philip Noel-Baker
This pamphlet is highly significant as a first-hand account of the struggles of the Polish Underground during Nazi occupation. The foreword is a direct appeal to the British public to take up the cause of defending Poland, and a call to internationalism in the face of dictatorship. The danger encountered by the pamphlet’s contributors brings a tangible level of threat to the text. The statement, “the manifesto gives us the assurance that he [Hitler] cannot win”, stands as an indication of the strength of resolve of the movement and their belief that free will, essential justice and peaceful order will ultimately return.
38. Signed poster from Public Service Broadcasting’s 3rd studio album, Every Valley
On the 7th of July 2017, London-based band Public Service Broadcasting released their 3rd studio album, Every Valley. The album, which chronicles the rise and fall of the coal mining industry and the impact it had on local communities, features a host of Welsh artists - James Dean Bradfield, Lisa Jên Brown and Beaufort Male Voice Choir to name a few. Such was its success, Every Valley reached number four in the UK charts and received nothing but praise from fans and music critics alike.
Since their debut album in 2013, PSB have sought to ‘teach the lessons of the past through the music of the future’. They do this by using archival samples in their music and, in Every Valley, extracts from the SWML’s oral history collection feature on several tracks (e.g. They Gave Me A Lamp, All Out and Mother of the Village). In They Gave Me a Lamp, PSB combine video footage from Smiling and Splendid Women, a documentary film produced by the SWML and Swansea Women’s History Group in 1985, with oral history audio clips which explore themes of gender stereotyping and political awakenings during the 1984/85 miners’ strike:
“A lot of women weren’t as fortunate as me…they weren’t taught how to wire a plug, they were taught to make a sponge. They weren’t taught how to change the wheel on a car, they were taught how to iron a white shirt. You can’t climb up this tree, you’re a girl. You can’t come with us, you’re a girl… It made me determined to do it, and it stuck with me. So, I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be out there doing what I was doing… picketing, in the support group or whatever. I think a lot of women found their feet” (SWCC/AUD/509)
On the 20th of October 2023, one of PSB's founder members, J Willgoose Esq. delivered the SWML’s 50th anniversary lecture – ‘Celebrating 50 years of the South Wales Miners’ Library’ – and shared with the audience a fascinating insight into the band’s research and creative process.
If you missed the lecture, please keep an eye on the SWML’s website. We will be uploading a copy of the recording very soon…
39. Up The DOVE!
Up The DOVE! : A History of the DOVE Workshop in Banwen by Mair Francis was published in 2008.
Mair Francis, one of DOVE’s founder members, was asked to write the history of DOVE by managers Julie Bibby and Lesley Smith when they were approaching twenty years of activities.
Up the DOVE! Celebrates the DOVE Workshop’s achievements through the success of the students, tutors and learners. It’s an important story of determination and enterprise by a group of remarkable women at a time of intense change.
The DOVE Workshop in Banwen was established by a group of women from the Dulais Valley in the wake of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, building on links forged in the local miners’ support group. They transformed the former offices of an opencast mine into a vibrant education and training centre, working with educational providers such as Swansea University and Neath College to provide learning opportunities to the local community, particularly women, amid a period of high unemployment. Women’s employment in the area had traditionally been limited to low paid, low status and part-time work.
‘Women in the valleys had little access to education or training, childcare or transport. There was a need to take control and make decisions for themselves’
Mair Francis
The DOVE workshop set out to provide flexible learning opportunities; providing childcare facilities, obtaining a minibus to transport people to classes, and housing a branch of the South Wales Miners’ Library designed to meet the specific needs of adult and part-time learners. By providing essential services such as these, the women of the DOVE workshop helped hundreds of people return to education and learn new skills.
The DOVE workshop has developed into a vital communal hub in the valley, continuing to support people amid the challenges of a changing labour market and providing classes to improve health, wellbeing and the local environment.
To learn more about the DOVE Workshop, you can read the book Up The DOVE! by Mair Francis or contact the DOVE: https://www.doveworkshop.org.uk/
40. Audio clip of an interview featuring former munitions workers at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Bridgend
In this oral history interview, recorded in 1975, Nellie Jones, Kitty Williams and Agnes Owen share their memories of working at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Bridgend during the Second World War. Thousands of women in South Wales worked in munitions factories like this, established in the counties of Glamorgan and Monmouth. They played a key role in Britain’s war effort, with the Bridgend factory employing a predominantly female workforce of around 35,000 at its height – making it one of the largest factories in British history.
Work at the munitions factories was often dangerous. Staff faced air raids, hazardous machinery and the persistent threat of explosions on the production line. The TNT powder used in the manufacture of munitions also had the effect of turning workers’ skin and hair yellow, earning them the nickname ‘canaries’.
Despite these challenges, wartime employment also gave many women a degree of independence that was a break from the norm. Social groups, such as choirs and sports teams, were formed with colleagues in the factories, and wages – often more generous relative to previous employment opportunities – gave many women greater scope for building social lives outside the home and their immediate communities.