Penallta: A Pit and its People by Gareth Salway
Old Bakehouse Publications, £12.95
DURING the 1984 miners’ strike, a dispute observed with unflinching solidarity in South Wales, an old Valleys collier remarked: “There’s a great wealth of lack of knowledge in London about the men of this coalfield.” Another vignette came from a senior civil servant visiting Wales at the invitation of Phillip Weekes, the NCB’s area director: “My difficulty is when I travel down the M4 and arrive at the Severn Bridge I have the feeling that the cavalry turns back and I go on alone.” There’s more than a little truth in both statements. Although the media concentrated on the easy option of a Scargill versus Thatcher fight the role of individual pits received less attention than was their due.
Gareth Salway’s history of Penallta, a colliery established in 1905 by the Powell Duffryn company (known by its initials as Powerful and Dirty), includes a meticulous account of the pit’s part in a strike which left an indelible mark on working class history. It was a battle. Three Penallta miners lost their lives – two died in a car crash on their way to picket Llanwern steel works and one in an underground accident while on safety duty.
The miners also travelled to North Wales where the nuclear power station at Trawsfynydd was the target. Port Talbot steel works was picketed by Penallta women. And for fundraisers, men and women ranged far and wide across Britain and the Irish republic and Europe. The response was warmhearted, widespread and generous.
The summer of 1984 was so hot striking miners played cricket stripped to the waist; the winter was so cold that the Moelwyn mountains overlooking the nuclear complex were as snowbound as the Alps. Solidarity stuck. Out of a total of 632 miners on the books fewer than ten broke the strike as the relentless forces of Thatcherism turned the screw ever tighter.
As the scythe cutting down pit communities gathered pace, Penallta closed on November 1 1991. Michael Foot, Ron Davies and Kim Howells attended the final meeting as, on a cold Friday, miners and coalfield veterans turned out with their families and hundreds of well-wishers to say farewell to the colliery and 85 years of toil.
The account of the 1984 struggle is an important section of a book to be read for its record of a community that never flinched and as an historic record of a pit from the sinking of the first shafts to a finis now complete across the South Wales coalfields. The shafts were sealed with 30,000 tonnes of stone and 70,000 tonnes of shale. Salway has assembled an impressive collection of photographs, dating from the pit’s early days, to accompany his painstaking description of an era gone, but not forgotten.
Tony Heath
