B. L. Coombes

Bill Jones, Chris Williams

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786831781
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Bert Coombes settled in south Wales in 1909, where he worked as a miner for more than forty years. He was motivated to write after witnessing the death of two work mates underground, and he determined to tell his truth about the lives of miners and their families. His first book These Poor Hands was acclaimed by critics such as J. B. Priestley and Cyril Connolly and is considered to be among the most authentically vivid accounts ever written about mining. It describes with moving simplicity the harsh conditions in which he and his comrades worked and lived and the bond which existed between them in the face of poverty, hunger, danger and death. These Poor Hands was followed by several other books, all consistent in their philosophy, style and integrity - there is no hint of sentimentality, just immense sympathy for the miners' lot, its hardship and its humour. As the Times Literary Supplement noted in 1974, 'he was one of the few proletarian writers of the 1930s who were impressive as writers rather than proletarians'. As a result of his success Coombes became a frequent broadcaster and his Plan for Britain was published in the Picture Post. This excellent introduction to the life and work of Bert Coombes is valuable not just for its penetrating assessment of Coombes, but for the light that it sheds on the social and industrial context in which he lived. His writing articulated the social and economic injustice of contemporary capitalism and has enduring value because of the way in which it gives imaginative expression to the belief that working people should have greater control over their well-being and destiny.

I

I was fascinated by that light in the sky. Night after night I watched it reddening the shadows beyond the Brecknock Beacons, sometimes fading until it only showed faintly, then brightening until it seemed that all the country was ablaze.

The winter wind that rushed across the Herefordshire fields where the swedes rotted in heaps, and carried that smell of decay into the small farmhouse which was my home, seemed to encourage the burning, until the night sky would redden still more. Sometimes I felt sure that I could see these flames and feel their warmth, but it could only have been fancy, for they were more than sixty miles away from us.

Thus B. L. Coombes began his THESE POOR HANDS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MINER WORKING IN SOUTH WALES (1939). In these initial paragraphs he constructed an image of himself as a young, rural Englishman, lured from his native county and its stagnant agricultural economy by the pulsating promise of the valleys of south Wales, with their industries of iron, steel and coal.

Whether or not it was possible to see the glow of the Bessemer works at Dowlais from the village of Madley in Herefordshire, where the adolescent Coombes lived with his mother and father, is hardly important. For dramatic effect Coombes may well have sought to recreate the glow on all sides in the heaven found by his hero George Borrow, when that famous pedestrian approached the iron town of Merthyr Tydfil at night (WILD WALES, 1862). What is more significant is that, for reasons literary, personal or both, in opening THESE POOR HANDS with this clutch of contrasts (rural/urban, agricultural/ industrial, English/Welsh), Coombes deliberately simplified the complexities of his early life and experience.

B. L. Coombes, the name he used in all his published work, was born Bertie Louis Coombs Griffiths, in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, on 9 January 1893. He was the first, and only, child of James Coombs Griffiths, at that time a grocer, and of Harriett Thompson. The details of Coombes’s early life are unclear, and nowhere in his writings does he shed much light on his parents, or on his relations with them. His father was alert, active, always hurrying to do something, but was handicapped by the limp caused by a horse falling on him during the South African War (THESE POOR HANDS). His mother had been slender and quite good looking in those days when he had trotted alongside and made attempts to help her in the tasks of that country home, but she had gone wrinkled and bent before she should have because she had worked too hard and gone without so many things she needed (‘Better Off’, LEFT REVIEW, 3, No. 14, March 1938). She ended her life an impoverished widow, her son struggling to raise his own family, two counties away but a world apart, against the depressed economic climate of the inter-war years.

It is likely that Coombes’s parents, who came to use the surname Cumbs, Cumbes or Coombes rather than Griffiths, had either roots or connections in the Madley district of Herefordshire, for their son regularly referred to it as their, and his, ‘homeland’. Yet what Coombes did not explain in THESE POOR HANDS was that, by the time he considered leaving the flat, rich lands for the barren hills, his acquaintance with the South Wales Coalfield had been much more intimate than he led his readers to believe. As he explained in his second, unpublished autobiography, ‘Home on the Hill’ (1959):

I knew the smell and sound of mining as a boy. I had watched the crowds of coal grimed men coming home and had failed to recognise my own father when he was in pit clothes. I had seen many carried to their homes, and had sat up in bed many nights to watch the glowworm-like crowding of tiny lights near the pit top as the men waited to go down.

By the time Coombes was around ten years old, he was living in a terraced house in Treharris, Glamorgan, whilst his father and uncles worked, along with over 1,500 other colliers, at the local Deep Navigation Colliery. His schooling, up to the age of twelve, took place in this mining town, and the young Coombes showed some signs of literary and intellectual promise, winning a school prize for a poem written on the subject of the nearby River Taff. Yet:

After getting near the highest mark in the Scholarship... I rejected the schoolmaster’s advice and urged my parents to carry out the ambition which I had so often heard them talk about in the evenings. A small farm was vacant and they returned to their native area in Herefordshire.

(NEATH GUARDIAN, 11 October 1963)

This move took place in either 1905 or 1906, Coombes’s father obtaining the tenancy of Blenheim Farm, Madley, and Coombes himself beginning work on the land as a labourer, both on the family farm and on neighbouring estates. He learned to plough, hedge, thatch and milk, to handle horses, and to appreciate the cider that was made and kept in the adjoining barn. He grew to love the land, the seasons and the continual work that goes with them, and in summer, all our surroundings were lovely. But as he explained in THE LIFE WE WANT (1944):

it was not always summer, and we could not live and have our being on surroundings alone. Life for the small man who had to depend on the land for a living was heavily handicapped. My parents worked hard. They set no limits to their efforts. But money was always scarce and the heavy rent was an ogre that shadowed all the days of our life.

The tenancy was expensive, and the land that came with it scattered small patches of ground. Apples and swedes were picked only to fetch pitifully low prices in the markets, and the price of coal was too dear for us to buy. The relatives that remained in south Wales wrote, remarkably it seemed, telling of quite the opposite situation there, where coal was plentiful and fresh produce costly. With little money coming in, new clothes were very rare, and pocket-money was something to imagine. The temptation to leave the land was strong, for this, wrote Coombes in THESE POOR HANDS, did not suit my ideas of life. I wanted good clothes, money to spend, to see fresh places and faces, and – well, many things. In THE LIFE WE WANT he summed up his growing sense of bitterness, a sort of confused frustration and helplessness:

Here we were, working hard to produce good things from the earth and to sell them, my parents urgently needing the money to bring up our small family to be good and decent citizens who in turn could enrich our country and their fellow-beings; yet there seemed no way of getting a fair price for our stuff. Around us was some of the richest and most beautiful land in the world, yet it held no encouragement or security for me and my generation.

Coombes’s departure from Herefordshire was delayed, for one year (1909), by a job he found as a groom, working for a doctor in a neighbouring village. Living in, he made friends with Helen, a twenty-year-old maid and recently widowed miner’s daughter, who hailed from Ammanford, Carmar-thenshire. His horizons were broadened by his groom’s duties (we travelled daily, and often nightly, along the roads outside Hereford and up the Golden Valley), visiting farms, mansions and the local work-house, but:

I was growing towards manhood, and any talk of danger attracted me: but the main thing was that it seemed to me that in the mining areas there must be comfort and good pay.

Two of his neighbours in Madley, time-expired soldiers, recommended the Army as an escape from the privilege and snobbery of rural society. When Coombes showed little interest in this, ex-Hussar George ‘Tiger’ Jones observed

then up there in the works is the place for a young feller. Shorter hours and good money, not like as it be hereabouts – gotter graft all the hours as God sends. Ain’t got to call no manner of man sir up there – no, yuh ain’t.

(THESE POOR HANDS)

Coombes had a choice of destinations: relatives still in Treharris, and also some in Maerdy in the Rhondda Fach; Helen’s family in Ammanford; the doctor’s brother in Cardiff; and a friend, Jack Preece, who had already left Madley for the collieries of the Vale of Neath. Putting slips of paper in the bowler hat he wore as a groom, he drew out the Vale of Neath. One day in 1910, en route to Hereford and the railway station, he took his leave of his parents and of the countryside:

I looked back from the turn at the old home and heard the dog barking his sorrow at the parting. I carried the smell of the wood fire with me, and it has hung in my senses ever since. Little things like the thud of a falling apple, the crackle of corn being handled, the smell of manure drying on a warm day, the hoot of the owl from the orchard at night, and the smell of the new bread when my mother drew it from the stone oven on a long wooden ladle, are still very sweet to me. Every year the smell of drying grass makes me crave for the hayfields, but I have never since worked in them or been in my native place for anything more than a short visit.

Coombes’s destination was Resolven (‘Treclewyd’ in THESE POOR HANDS) in the heart of the Vale of Neath: a wide valley shut in by splendid mountains, and only the width of a mountain from the light in the sky I had watched so much. This was a coal-mining area: one-third of the adult male population of Glamorgan was occupied in that industry in 1911, and by the census of 1921 over half of the men in the Neath Rural District (including Resolven) were so employed. Yet, as Coombes noted, it was quite different both from the Treharris in which he had spent part of his childhood, and from the mining settlements of the Cynon and Rhondda Valleys in the central coalfield. The Vale of Neath marked the easternmost edge of the anthracite coalfield, and exhibited significant differences in both mining and settlement patterns. Anthracite coal, suitable for use in specialized stoves, accounted for approximately 22 per cent of coal reserves in south Wales, and was, at the time of Coombes’s arrival, yet to peak in terms of production and manpower (it did so in 1934). In contrast, steam coal (48 per cent of total reserves, suitable for raising steam in boilers) and bituminous coal (30 per cent, appropriate to household purposes and often known as ‘house’ coal), generally found in the central and eastern coalfield, were rapidly reaching their economic climax, and the inter-war years would see their decline. (Coombes was to work in seams containing all these types of coal.) Anthracite mines (often levels or drifts rather than deep-mined pits), for geological reasons, tended to be smaller than those producing steam or house coal, and because they did not attract thousands of workers, the mining settlements that clustered around them also remained comparatively modest. Thus it was in Resolven, where the largest mine in 1910 (the Rheola Colliery) employed 338 men, but the smallest (Tyra Levels) only 46, and in Glynneath, five miles up the valley, where the Pwllfaron Colliery employed 572, and the Rock Colliery 167. Unlike some of the mining valleys of the central coalfield, where ribboned housing development had led to one mining township blending into the next, the divisions marked more by custom than by urban geography, the flat-bottomed Vale of Neath retained its fields and farms, and its settlements of Resolven, Glynneath, Cwmgwrach, Blaengwrach, Pontnedd-fechan, Pontwalby and Aberpergwm their individuality. Whilst the Rhondda Valleys were home to over 50,000 coal miners, and the Taff to over 30,000, under 9,000 were to be found in the Vale of Neath. In contrast with the central coalfield, the anthracite area retained a semi-rural character, manifested in the customs and preferences of the population. As miners’ agent John James put it:

Mae Colier y Glo Carreg yn ddyn sydd â mandrel yn yr un llaw a pâl yn y llaw arall, yn gorfforol ac ysbrydol.

(The anthracite collier has a pick in one hand and a garden spade in the other, both literally and metaphorically.)

(Ioan Matthews, ‘The World of the Anthracite Miner’, LLAFUR, 6, No. 1, 1992)

Stranger to neither pick nor spade, Bert Coombes found lodgings initially, and began work in a local mine as a collier’s helper. Although, at first, he found the work arduous, he rapidly became acclimatized to it. Coombes’s st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter IX
• Chapter X
• Chapter XI
• Chapter XII
• Select Bibliography