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THIS PROGRAMME - MINERS IN THE DEPRESSION: COAL AND DOLE |
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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.
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BERT COOMBES:
A MERTHYR TYDFIL MINER WRITING IN THE 1930s
All the long shifts and the weeks without proper rest, all the dangers I had passed through and the dust I had swallowed, had gained me this much: that I had to go and beg for parish relief.
I went about every day, up and down the valley, seeing if work was to be had, but there were hundreds more on the same journey. There was a crowd every day outside the colliery offices. It is a rotten feeling for a man who is working to come outside and see that a crowd of men are waiting for work. It warns him that the masters can treat him as they wish, for he dare not insist on his rights when there are so many waiting for a chance to start.
What a worm a man feels when he must put a beseeching note into his voice when he asks for a job! It is not that he is afraid of the man or the work, but he is afraid of the refusal: of being told that his skill is not needed, that his strength and brain are useless, and that he must go home again and confess that he is not wanted.
ALLEN HUTT:
A COMMUNIST PARTY JOURNALIST DESCRIBING A VISIT TO MERTHYR TYDFIL IN 1933
With his wife and two children he lives in one-half of a house, which costs him seven shillings a week in rent. The house has not been repaired for fourteen years. Its windows do not shut tight, and it is damp. The lavatory is thirty yards away from the house, at the top of the adjacent yard. There is one water-tap for both families. This family's income is the father's unemployment benefit of 27 shillings and 3d (thruppence); after paying rent they have roughly a pound left to live on. Coal costs them half-a-crown a week.
This is their normal daily menu: Breakfast - toast, margarine, tea. Dinner - a few pennyworth of meat and potatoes, an onion, bread and tea. Supper - same as breakfast. Fresh milk is unknown in this family, who consume four tins of a cheap brand of skimmed condensed milk a week. It is not surprising that the eldest child was found to be suffering from malnutrition and was developing tubercular glands.
BERT COOMBES:
A MERTHYR TYDFIL MINER WRITING IN THE 1930s
After the event of the week - fetching the parish ticket - had been endured, we had very little to do except sit on our heels and discuss the … prospect of re-starting our work. We walked up and down the roads until the grit was working through our soles, then we made soles and heels out of old motor-car tyres… We wore out packs of old cards; we played shove-ha'penny with buttons; and sat for hours playing tippet with a stone. I read continually, gradually abandoning Western yarns and finding pleasure in serious reading.
We hunted for wood on the mountains, and opened levels so that we could have coal for our use. This was not permitted, but we took the risk.
We cut one another's hair, but kept our caps on for a while afterwards, unless we could persuade someone who was more expert to repair the damage.
When all the miners were idle we felt a sort of companionship with one another. Then the others re-started work, and we were idle. We felt the bitterness of being unwanted. The hooters were blowing for others, not for us. They would have pay on the weekend, but we would have none. I used to lie awake in the morning and listen, with despair in my heart, to the rattle of heavy boots on the streets when the other men went to work.
BILL KING DESCRIBES HOW HIS FATHER JOINED THE MARCH TO LONDON IN 1929
They'd have to be fed for that six weeks, they'd have to have sturdy working boots…main benefactor was the co-op… my father lucky because my Mother was a member of Dowlais co-op and they sponsored him… got miners' boots and a 2nd-hand coat from the Jewish pawnbrokers…planned to go through all the main towns along the way, collecting funds… but Bristol…police baton-charged them when they got to the main square… father came home looking like the invisible man! We, the NUM, had a shop in Merthyr and we put all pictures of him in the window… Daily Mail which was running a boot fund, came down and took photos… it was a great publicity stunt like, you know.
BERT COOMBES:
A MERTHYR TYDFIL MINER WRITING IN THE 1930s
We had to go early in the morning for this relief, because there were hundreds in the queue outside the chapel where they gave out the relief slips. I wonder would it cost them very much effort to be only decently civil to the ones who apply…? Or do they purposely pick men who have no sympathy or patience? I did not hear the officers speak one decent word during that period when we had to go there weekly - they seemed to hate the applicants. It seemed that we were asking them to pay out their own money.
Back to Voices of the Powerless homepage
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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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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. In 1998 he was made a life peer. 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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