VALLEY OF DESPAIR

Evening Star, Issue 19791, 15 February 1928, Page 3

VALLEY OF DESPAIR

DESTITUTE GOAL MINERS STARK FAMINE Am RUIN The alarming state of the coal industry in certain areas in South Wales and its consequences in the pit areas are the vital questions of the moment. A land where there are no cigarettes and no cats and where the attendance at sporting events is more sparse than it has ever been. This is one aspect of a picture drawn by a special correspondent of the 4 Sunday News’ who visited the district a few weeks ago. The writer said; “ AVlint is to become of the minors of the Rhondda \'aley and their families? All over the rest of Britain the preparations for a jovial Christmas, the season of jollity and good cheer, are in lull swing. But in this .Valley of Despair Christmas is going to be a period of deeper sadness and dejection. 41 There is n, sharper contrast than to leave Cardiff,, with its glittering shop windows, its display of obvious wellbeing and comfort, and to take the train which winds wearily up this mistwreathed Valley of Gloom. There are shops in these mining towns and villages, displaying in their homely little windows a complete and varied range of creature comforts, from candied peel and cocoa to woolly socks and clockwork trains —-but there are no customers.

“ The proprietors liave to seek ;m outlet for their onergies_ either in continuous redressing of their windows and redding up the place, or in standing on their front doorsteps in attitudes reminiscent of Mr Micawber, but not, I fear, animated by the same confidence in the future as was that worthy. The village streets are filled with bands of able-bodied but pallid and pasty-faced men.” 'NOT A CIGARETTE OR A NEWSPAPER. “Two things,” says the narrator, “ strike one as remarkable about these pathetic bands; the scrupulous neatness of their clothes —poor, thin clothes, but oh, bow well washed, brushed, and mended; and the significant fact that there is not a cigarette or a newspaper to be seen among them. “The towns and villages of the Rhondda and its tributary valleys depend entirely upon the coal pits. There is no other industry, and when the coal pits shut down famine and ruin hover like spectres over the whole community. Some of these places are merely moribund; they have three out of four pits working, but only three or four days a week. “Ferndalo is an example of this, while Maerdy, the next village, at the time of writing, was completely dead. All its pits were closed down, and there was no immediate prospect of their reopening. If the miner’s wife finds life none too easy when the pits are working full time, one can realise how painful is her existence when the pits are working only half time. “ The position of Ferndule, for example,” says the writer, “is really more disastrous for the miner and his family than it is for a man working only three days a. week, because, in the latter case, he is entitled to the dole at the rate of 3s a day for himself, lOd a day for his wife, and 4d a day for each child. A .man working four days a week will draw 325, whereas if he works only three clays he will draw 245, phis the dole, which, in the case of a man with a wife and three children, would bring his receipts up to 38s fid. “In spite of this the men prefer to work. They dread more than anything else the dismal business of standing about the street corners waiting for something to turn up. They do not want charity. The dole galls and humiliates them. To be forced to accept benefactions in the way of clothes and food for their children wounds them unutterably.” INTENSE LOVE OF HOME.

“They love their homes, these Welsh miners, with the passion always inspired hy things which demand sacrifice. For even in the fat years, when work was plentiful and well paid, they were stinting themselves of pleasures in order to buy their own houses. In those days, long enough ago now, rents were very high—even to-day, under depressed conditions, a four-roomed cottage cannot be rented at less than 11s or J2s a week—so practically the entire community formed the habit of sinking its savings in the purchase of a dwelling. And these houses are good little houses, with four or six rooms. They cost their owners from £250 to £4OO or so in the days when building was cheap. Now they are scarcely worth the price of the stones and mortar that compose them. The other day the mortgagee of some houses in Maerdy, mortgaged for £250 each, put them up for sale. The highest bid was £57 each. “The rates on these miners’ homes nverage«about £l3 or £l4 a year. They started to fall into arrears in the stoppage of 1921, and since then have gathered weight and impetus like a landslide on one of the Welsh hills. What is to become of these homes? They represent years of thrift and care. They are all these poor people have got in the world. They cannot be sold, for there are no bidders.

A YOUNG,MAN’S HARD LUCK. “ The case of one young married man I spoke to is typical. He, with his wife and four young children, share a house, bought on a mortgage, with his aged parents, for whose support he is entirely responsible, since his four brothers were killed in the war. His old parents’ little nest-egg is sunk in the cottage. They have no alternative refuge. He himself would be only too glad to go overseas to one of the dominions with his wife asd children, but

he cannot uproot this aged and infirm couple in their last years and transplant them to a, new and unfamiliar country. If he leaves them behind there is nothing for them but the workhouse.” The article proceeds; —“The fine spirit of gallant little Wales was never snown in such bright colors as it is in the way in which the people of the stricken Rhondda Valley stint and deny themselves for their little ones. Parents go pale and hungry in order that their children may have as much as possible. And that is little enough. Bread and margerine, with tea or cocoa, made with condensed milk to save buying sugar, is the fare for breakfast and supper in most homes, with some sort of soup or stew for the midday meal. “ For Sunday night’s supper an extra relish of an egg or a rasher or some such dainty may possibly, he contrived, with care. Even with the most Spartan diet there is not a halfpenny over for clothes or boots for the kiddies.” EXTERMINATING THE CAT.

“In the Rhondda Valley 1 have mot policemen’s wives, not themselves exactly wealthy folk, who wore scrimping and saving to help the miners’ children with gifts of slices and woollies. “One cannot walk a yard down the street without being ashamedly selfconscious of feeling well fed and comfortably clad in the midst of so much want and despair. Such is the leanness of these sad valleys that even the ‘harmless necessary cat’ has disappeared from the village doorsteps. When there could no longer be a saucer of milk beside the hearth for puss, it was deemed kinder to put him painlessly away rather than let him suffer, wonderingly, the pangs of famine.”