It’s cccccccold in Aberdare today.
It’s snowing.
A light, icing-sugar dusting type of snow.
We’ve put a few extra lumps of coal on the fire.
We forecast a very cold start to the early morning with many irate and blue-faced drivers having to de-frost their cars.
There will be frostbitten toes across the Valley.
And snowmen.
We hope.
Easily Wales’ most DRAMatic sculpture is Andy Hazell’s Wheel of Drams near the Hengoed Viaduct, Maesycwmmer, a village near Caerphilly.
Andy Hazell was commissioned to create a landmark sculpture to celebrate the refurbishment of the Hengoed Viaduct and its inclusion into the National Cycle Network. Wheel of Drams is a dramatic eight metre high circular sculpture of six curved steel coal drams that commemorate the original haulage companies that operated on the goods line that passed over the viaduct. The circular shape also represents the move from the route being used by coal drams to bicycles.
Although this is an eye-catching landmark sculpture it is slowly being obscured by trees growing in front of it.
See the Full Set of Photos here
The following photos were snapped in Cwmdare. In the first photo, the Tonglwydfawr Inn. The latter two landscape photos were taken from the northern end of Dare Valley Country Park. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version…
Postscript : How do you put a price tag on a landscape or a Welsh hillside ?
In the eyes of bourgeois industrial capitalism, this Welsh hillside in Cwmdare represents a resource to be exploited. The coal was mined from this area over a period of around one hundred years, exploiting thousands of workers during that period. Now that the coal has gone, the capitalist class see the potential of exploiting the landscape to harness a modicum of wind energy, albeit less energy than that invested in erecting and maintaining the wind turbines in the first place. It’s all very silly of course, but then capitalism is an irrational system.
Jane from Mountain Ash blogs here with a story on the proposed opencast plans for Mountain Ash…
We had a knock at the door last night from a nice man called Ian. It was -3*C and he was going door to door with a petition. Ian was collecting residents signatures for his petition to raise awareness of one anonymous landowners intent to dig for coal on a small plot of land behind the graveyard in Caegarw, Mountain Ash.
We had been wondering about the sounds of heavy machinery and the Apex Drilling vans seen on our street over the past few weeks.
It appears that the plot of land was sold by Lord Aberdare in the ’60’s to this man and he has twice been denied permission to excavate the coal from a 100 year old tip.
We understand that the land has a preservation order on it due to its environmental value following the tree planting which has occured on it. It is close to a hospital and two
schools, not to mention hundreds of houses.
We wonder why this is being attempted again, when the council and Welsh Assembly Government have spent over £20 million on cleaning up the Cynon Valley, when there are plans for a new community hospital less than half a mile from the site and when there are concerned residents, the authorities have done nothing.
Has planning permission again been sought? If so, wouldn’t the residents who live within 500 metres of the plot have been told? Where is our voice in all this? We understand that the land is an old tip. We don’t want a return to dust and smoke – we value our environment and hope that the council and WAG do to. Anyone know anything about this???
The residents of Caegarw are a vociferous bunch and we welcome any information that can help us get to the bottom of the drilling, digging and the looming threat of coal dust again…
Prime Minister Brown replied in kind … “I want to thank them for their efforts, proving that working people can get together and make a success of a project that other parties said would never work”.
The lack of leadership and statesmanship in the Labour Party in its present configuration remind one of Nye Bevan’s words given in speech to the Labour Party conference on October 4, 1957. Bevan warned of the perils of sending a “British Foreign Secretary naked into the conference chamber”.
And his subsequent question “Do you call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm.”
The ‘emotional spasm’ in the UK Parliament last week came from a Prime Minister who has not been elected to lead his own Party. Moreover, Gordon Brown was unwilling to call a General Election after succeeding Tony Blair in 2007, as he did not want to become known as the shortest-serving Prime Minister since George Canning, who lasted a measly 119 days in 1827.
A fortnight prior to this spasmodic exchange in the House of Commons, the Labour Government renewed their committment to Nuclear Energy. This island is made of coal and thus, to borrow from Bevan again, it takes an organising genius to ensure a future energy crisis. Prime Minister’s Question Time last week should have been used to punctuate the history of Cynon Valley with something serious and statesmanlike, but instead, we got the Labour Party emotional spasm that Bevan warned about fifty years ago.
John Redwood commented in his blog this week on the closure of Tower Colliery. He was Conservative Secretary of State for Wales at the time of the pit closure and subsequent buy-out. Without his enthusiasm for the project, it is doubtful whether the miners would ever have become owners of their own pits.
Redwood blogs thus :
When the miners arrived in my office, I think they were surprised by my enthusiasm for their cause, and by my explanation that their task was not to persuade me, but to work with me on our joint case to the Energy department and Coal Board to give them the opportunity to run the mine. As it meant being allowed to prove the Coal Board wrong it was not going to be easy, but I felt that between us we could do it.
So was forged a partnership in British politics that none had predicted. I joined forces with Tyrone O ‘Sullivan, the charismatic Lodge Secretary and leader of the buy out team to persuade Coal Board and government the should give the miners a chance. I was the only person who saw nothing strange in the alliance. I had always believed in workers participation and employee ownership. Here was a chance to show its magic in an industry that had been gravely damaged by the them and us mentality of the large corporation.
Perhaps the greatest modern legacy Thatcher left the Valleys was the Tower Colliery Story where two hundred or so workers bought their own pit and worked it by and for themselves until they dug every last tonne of coal they could dig out of the ground. The Tower Colliery Story is a success story and a story of radicalism. Every community needs a good story to tell the next generation.
There is a set of photos in the Gallery of Park Street Chapel (or Park Street Methodist Church) Blaenafon, as used by the BBC for the Hunger March Concert as part of the Coal House series.
Bramble is a six month-old lurcher.
We thought she looked so intelligent we decided to hold an impromptu interview…
Aberdare Blog > What do you think of Blair’s enthusiasm about nuclear power ?
Bramble > Woof *grrrrrr* Woof
And we totally agree with that sentiment.
In the 1990s Ann Clwyd MP was happy to take part in an underground protest and latch-on to the miner’s campaign. I interviewed the late Glyn Roberts in the mid nineties… he was one of the people who joined Ann Clwyd MP in her underground protest. His son and grandson who both bear the same name still work at Tower Colliery.
Although Glyn Roberts was familiar with the deep-rooted corruption in the local Labour Party – he had long left the Party – I am sure he would be very disappointed by Clwyd’s current lack of public support for coal.
Perhaps it is time Ann Clwyd found her old miner’s lamp, visited her constituents and gave them some moral support when it matters.
For those with no understanding of the history surrounding Tower Colliery, here is a fair account of the Miner’s Strike of 1984 and subsequent events, from a book called Cynon Coal – History of a Mining Valley published by Cynon Valley History Society (Published 2001, Gomer Press, ISBN 0 95310 760 4) :
“In March 1984 there began the strike in the nation’s coal industry which was probably the most costly in British industrial history. One estimate of the cost came to £3.25 billion and this did not include the estimated loss to each miner of £9,000 and the loss arising from the 38 working faces out of a total of 490 which did not reopen. The leader of the NUM, Arthur Scargill, called on all members of the union to withhold their labour. In the resulting pit-head ballots only ten of the twenty-eight mines in South Wales voted to comply with the request. Nevertheless the strike went ahead. Many weary and impoverished months later the men marched back to their mine, defeated but not dismayed. But in the eighteen months since the strike ended twelve of the pits of the South Wales coalfield had closed including Maerdy, and, as Dr John Davies has remarked, at the end of the 1980s there were more Welshmen working in banks than in pits. The strike was stated above to have been the most expensive in British industrial history. Certainly it was one of the most important if only because the number of pit closures which occurred after the strike caused a decrease in the number of employed in mines which permanently diminished the status and power of the union.
In 1992 the last round of pit closures began and by April 1994 Tower Colliery was conspicuous for beign the last deep mine in South Wales and, though allegedly profitable, the necessary steps were being taken to close it down.
A public campaign began for the purpose of reversing the decision to close the pit, which succeeded in its purpose. However, British Coal hung on to their intention and the pit finally closed on the 23rd April 1994.
The actions which then followed to prepare and put into being a workers’ buy-out caught the attention and, indeed, the approval of people of all political persuasions up and down the country. Apart from valuable support from the Local Authority and the Wales Co-Operative Centre, enormous public backing was received from all those who had benefitted from Tower’s solidarity in the pasdt. But most significantly, £2 million was raised by the 239 miners who had pledged £8,000 each from their redundancy payments. On the 23rd December 1994 ownership of the colliery passed into the hands of Goitre Tower Anthracite Ltd. On the 2nd of January 1995 the Tower miners marched back into their pit and took possession of it.
The mine is owned by the above-mentioned company the shares of which are owned by the company’s employees equally. There are no other shareholders. The workforce are all highly trained and experienced in their duties, and most of them are doing the jobs they were doing previously under British Coal. The present working coalface is 600 meterse below ground and 3 miles from pit bottom and from this the colliery produces 500,000 tons of Anthracite a year, 75% of which is sold to Aberthaw Power Station. Two new faces are in preparation for mining reserves when the need arises. 290 persons are directly employed and a further 85 are employed by contractors underground and on the surface”.
A ‘Coal not Dole’ badge from the Miner’s Strike in the eighties. The sentiment still rings true today.
