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SERIES 2 |
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Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at six critical moments across the last 1,000 years.
 Listen to this programme after the broadcast
Programme 6: 28 August
Miners in the Depression: Coal and Dole
In Merthyr Tydfil in 1935, thousands of men and women, like many other thousands across the South Wales coalfield seized power to demonstrate against the decade or more of poverty that had destroyed their lives and their livelihoods.
Proud Welsh miners, once amongst the best-paid industrial workers in the country, had found themselves forced into indigence by levels of unemployment that reached as high as 75% as the full effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 yet further tightened the economic squeeze.
Melvyn Bragg is in South Wales to explore what was, in many ways, the beginning of the end of powerlessness that culminated in 1945 with the election of the post-war Labour administration.
Interviewees:
Professor Chris Williams
Director, Centre for Modern and Contemporary Wales, University of Glamorgan
Dr Sian Rhiannon Williams
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff
Professor Kenneth Morgan
Honorary Fellow of Queens College, Oxford
Read the original sources used in the programme.
Useful Links:
Museum of Welsh Life
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.
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Audio Help
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DON'T MISS |
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Thursday 9.00-9.45am, rpt 9.30-10.00pm. Melvyn Bragg explores the history of ideas.
Listen again online or download the latest programme as an mp3 file.
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SERIES PAGES |
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GO TO - Homepage.
GO TO Prog l - The Industrial Revolution: Man and Manufacture
GO TO Prog 1 - Read Contemporary Sources
GO TO Prog 2 - The Napoleonic Wars: Below Decks and Boney
GO TO Prog 2 - Read Contemporary Sources
GO TO Prog 3 - Transportation: A Journey Beyond the Seas
GO TO Prog 3 - Read Contemporary Sources
GO TO Prog 4 - Highland Clearances: The Crofters' Farewell
GO TO Prog 4 - Read Contemporary Sources
GO TO Prog 5 - The Waggoners at War
GO TO Prog 5 - Read Contemporary Sources
GO TO Prog 6 - Miners in the Depression: Coal and Dole
GO TO Prog 6 - Read Contemporary Sources
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RELATED PROGRAMMES |
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This Sceptred Isle
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USEFUL LINKS |
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www.bbc.co.uk/history
news.bbc.co.uk
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PRESENTER |
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| Melvyn Bragg |
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Melvyn Bragg presents In Our Time for BBC Radio 4, a series where he and his guests discuss the "Big Ideas" of cultural or scientific significance.
He also presented The Routes of English, his millennial series celebrating 1,000 years of the English language.
Melvyn Bragg was born in 1939 in Wigton, Cumbria - where many of his books are set. He won a scholarship to Oxford to read history, and in 1961 he gained a coveted traineeship with the BBC.
He has presented a number of television series including: Read All about It, Two Thousand Years, and Who's Afraid of the Ten Commandments? and createdThe South Bank Show.
Melvyn presented Start the Week between 1988 and 1998. In his 1998 series On Giant's Shoulders he interviewed scientists about their eminent predecessors.
As well as presenting for Radio 4, he is Controller of Arts for London Weekend Television. He's written 17 novels, the latest of which, The Soldier's Return, won the WH Smith Literary Award.
Melvyn Bragg was made a Life Peer in 1998 and he took the title of Baron Bragg of Wigton in the County of Cumbria.
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