When Coal was King in Wales’ Rhondda Valley

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Scarcely an hour’s drive west of the pristine villages, prosperous cottage gardens, and sylvan landscapes of the cotswolds lies the southern Welsh county of mid-Glamorgan. Throngs of touring coaches, camera-wielding photojournalists, and well-heeled tourists don’t come here. These are the valleys of the Rhondda.

Fanning out above the Welsh capital of Cardiff, these valleys are the coal fields of South Wales, narrow glens snaking their way south to north, from the Bristol Channel coast toward the Brecon Beacons. Every few miles up and down the hills lie the skeletal remains of a pit head, rusting silently, majestic.

Though in popular parlance the name Rhondda has become synonymous with the mining district, the Rhondda itself is a dual-pronged valley rising north of Pontypridd. The ‘Little Rhondda’ threads its way from Trehafod north to Maerdy, where the road runs over the hills to Aberdare. The ‘Great Rhondda’ branches west to Treorchy and Treherdert, then winds north to meet the Head of the Valleys Road at Hirwaun. The people here just call them ‘The Valleys.’

For more than a century, high quality, smokeless coal was extracted from the earth here. Collieries dotted the valleys, and tens of thousands of men made their livelihood cutting coal from the rich seams that ran from several feet to more than a quarter mile under the surface. This huge economic engine built the industrial port cities of Cardiff and Newport, and fueled the British navy from the later years of Victoria almost until the Second World War. Today the coal mines are silent, unprofitable in the modern economy. Though the pits have closed, however, the people remain in populous, serpentine towns lining the vales.

Life in the valleys has always been hard. During the winter, a collier never saw the sun except on Sunday, going into the pits before daybreak and emerging again after dark. Boys followed their fathers down in their early teens. With little cash and no modern conveniences, women made home and hearth for large families in two-room-up, two-room-down stone row-houses without garden or lawn. The mines yielded a death, on average, every six hours, and a serious injury every 12 minutes.

In Senghynydd at the head of the Aber Valley, local historian Basil Philips recounts the story of the deep pit explosion of 1913, when 434 men and boys in this village of less than 5,000 met their deaths in the greatest colliery disaster in British history. His own father was in the mine that day.

Philips tells how the mining communities were built. As a pit was sunk, it drew men off the land, swapping the bleak agrarian life in the hardscrabble Welsh hills for the steady cash wages of the mine. As hard as the life might have been, it was an enviable step up from subsistence farming.

‘A man looked for four things coming to work in the pits,’ Philips recalls. ‘A roof over his family’s head, a chapel, a men’s choir, and a rugby team.’ While life has inevitably changed here in South Wales, the legacy is easy to see. The terraced houses are still home, though it is hard to find a block where several of them are not adorned with ‘For Sale’ signs.

The dissenting chapels, Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian, certainly punctuated every neighbourhood. Today, most of the chapels are as silent as the mines. Many sit derelict or converted to other uses in the secularism of late-20th-century Britain. Fewer than three per cent of the Welsh people now attend. This remnant keeps alive an important part of the valley’s history, a dissenting gospel, and many of the grand Welsh hymns for which the region is renowned. The justly acclaimed male voice choirs of Wales remain. In fact, Senghenydd itself is home to one of the best, the Aber Valley Male Voice Choir. Every valley and village has its own choir. Their music continues to be one of the great defining cultural institutions of Wales; opera choruses and Welsh hymns, folk songs and show music. As well as maintaining active concert schedules, most of the men’s choirs are happy to welcome visitors to their rehearsals.

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