Overview

The coal industry dominated large parts of south Wales for more than a century. This book studies the kind of landscape and society that it created in south-west Wales. The emphasis is on general features of mining and the phases in its development, from its mediaeval beginnings until its virtual end in the last years of the 20th century. Includes over 50 illustrations.

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9780862439675

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This is the first book to be published on the western section of the south Wales coalfield where coal has been mined since the Middle Ages. Ronald Rees examines how coal was formed, how it was found and how, under conditions that often were unimaginably dangerous, it was wrested from the deep earth. He explores the growth of mining villages that were spared the crowding and the tightly packed rows of terrace houses of the towns and villages in the eastern valleys. The western villages were smaller and the colliers clung to their rural roots. A miner in the western districts, so the saying went, carried a pick in one hand and a garden spade in the other. ********************************** Death, Danger and Coal The end of deep mining in south Wales this year is seen as the end of a proud era for many, but a new book discloses how coalmining destroyed thousands of young lives over the years, and how in nineteenth century Wales it was even compared to going to war. In the book The Black Mystery author Ronald Rees reveals how sending men to work in coal mines was regarded as equivalent to sending, as one observer put it, raw unarmed troops into battle against a well-equipped enemy. The average lifespan of coalworkers in some areas of south Wales was for a period as low as 40 years, and according to impartial observers there was no other land occupation that had so many ways of causing injury and death. Only manning sailing vessels on the high seas was considered to be as dangerous. As recently as the 1970s, when British mines were safer than they had ever been, a miner was seven times more likely to be seriously injured or killed than any other industrial worker. This revealing account of coal-mining in south-west Wales is published by Y Lolfa this week in a book that includes over 50 images and 300 pages of history and insight into the life of Welsh miners in the Western coalfield, a region that embraced the Neath, Swansea and Gwendraeth valleys. Never completely urbanized, it was an area where, so the saying went, the colliers carried a pick in one hand and a garden spade in the other. The Black Mystery looks at all aspects of coalmining: its history and development until the present day, conditions of work, the language and culture of the mining communities, and the changing image of the miner. -- Y Lolfa

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