Download or read book These Poor Hands The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales written by B. L. Coombes and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coombes' title These Poor Hands first published in 1939, was an instant best-seller, catapulting the author to the forefront of proletarian writers. Coombes was born in England, but he lived for a large part of his in the Vale of Neath, South Wales, and as the economic problems of the 30s worsened, he turned to writing as a way to spread the news of the plight of miners and their communities to the wider world. He presented the daily life of miners in documentary fashion, with special attention to the damaging lockouts of 1921 and 1926, These Poor Hands retains the power to astonish readers with its description of the ways that unfettered capitalism can lay waste to pure human potential.
Download or read book These Poor Hands written by Bill Jones and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2002-11-09 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These Poor Hands: The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales', was first published in June 1939. It was an instant bestseller, and its fame catapulted its author into the front rank of 'proletarian writers'. B. L. Coombes, an English-born migrant, had lived in the Vale of Neath since before the First World War, but only turned to writing in the 1930s as a way of communicating the plight of the miners and their communities to the wider world. "These Poor Hands" presents, in a documentary style, the working life of the miner as well as the author's experiences in the lock-outs of 1921 and 1926. It demonstrates Coombes' desire to offer an accurate account of the lives of miners and their families, and carries a sincere moral charge in its description of the waste of human potential that is industrial capitalism in decline. Long out of print, "These Poor Hands" has been recognised for over sixty years as the classic miner's autobiography.
Download or read book B L Coombes written by Bill Jones and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book These Poor Hands the Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales by B L Coombes written by B. L. Coombes and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book These Poor Hands the Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales 1939 written by Bert Lewis Coombes and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Miner s Day written by B. L. Coombes and published by . This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited with an introduction by Peter Wakelin. Part of the Modern Wales series. Originally published in 1945, Miner's Day tells of the coalmining life of the thirties in south Wales.
Download or read book The South Wales Miners written by Ben Curtis and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The booming coal industry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the main reason behind the creation of modern south Wales and its miners were central to shaping the economics, politics and society of south Wales during the twentieth century. This book explores the history of these miners between 1964 and 1985, covering the concerted run-down of the coal industry under the Wilson government, the growth of miners’ resistance, and the eventual defeat of the epic strike of 1984-5. Their interactions with the wider trade union movement and society during these years meant the miners were amongst the most important strategically-located sections of the British workforce during this time. The South Wales Miners is the first full-length academic study of the miners and their union in the later twentieth century, in a tumultuous period of crisis and struggle.
Download or read book From the Cradle to the Coalmine written by Ceri Thompson and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely believed that the employment of children underground in coal mines ended in 1842. This book, in contrast, shows that young people remained an important part of the workforce up until the virtual demise of the industry in the late twentieth century. The Children’s Employment Commission was established in 1840 to expose the conditions under which children had to work underground; as we might expect, public opinion was outraged by what came to light, and a law was passed to prevent all females and boys under the age of ten from working underground. However, the lack of inspectors made the law difficult to enforce, and many females and boys under ten continued to work illegally until Parliament made school attendance compulsory in the 1860s. This popular and accessible book is a rich source of information about the working lives of children and young people in the Welsh coalfields, richly illustrated to include extensive work from Amgueddfa Cymru’s photographic archives.
Download or read book Childhood in a Welsh Mining Valley written by Vivian Jones and published by Y Lolfa. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vivian Jones recounts with great warmth his childhood in a working class family within the community of a small mining village in the Welsh Valleys in the 1930s. This fascinating book brings the detail of that time, place and culture vividly back to life and considers the influence that growing up in such an environment has had on who the author is today. 11 black-and-white photographs.
Download or read book Useful Toil written by Proffessor John Burnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Useful Toil engages freshly and directly with the `ordinary' people of the nineteenth century. John Burnett has assembled twenty seven telling extracts from the diaries and autobiographies of working people - wheelwrights and stone-masons, miners and munition workers, butlers and kitchen maids, navvies, carpenters, potters and ship assistants to list only a few. The men and women who speak in these pages concentrate on their working experiences, though they also write about their homes and their fears. They thus reveal, often unconsciously, the essence of their attitudes, values and beliefs. Burnett's broad and sympathetic introductions focus and contextualise the wealth of material. These stories provide the antithesis of `great name' history, yet they constantly touch on human experiences that are timeless and universal.
Download or read book A Photographic History of Mining in South Wales written by John O'Sullivan and published by . This book was released on 2011-02 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographic history of mining in South Wales
Download or read book The Women and Men of 1926 written by Sue Bruley and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work on the miners' Lock-Out of 1926 tends to focus on the perspective of the National Union of Mineworkers, while nothing has been written which attempts to examine, for example, how miner's wives coped for six months without pay. This book investigates the Lock-Out from the perspective of gender relations.
Download or read book The British Miner in the Age of De Industrialization written by Jörg Arnold and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British coal industry no longer exists and yet the figure of the coal miner lives on in the British cultural imagination. In feature films and documentaries, miners are typically portrayed as proletarian traditionalists working in a dying industry. Taking this perspective, the 1984/85 miners' strike seems a desperate last stand against forces much bigger than the miners themselves -- not just the Thatcher government but the tide of historical change itself. In this ground-breaking study, Jörg Arnold challenges a declinist reading of the people working in one of Britain's most important energy industries. The study makes extensive use of previously inaccessible records to offer a new account of the British miner in the age of de-industrialisation. The book situates the miners in broader structures of feeling, and reconstructs the miners' sense of the past and the future. Arnold argues that Britain's miners went through a cyclical movement -- from loser to winner and back again -- as Britain underwent a de-industrial revolution in the final decades of the twentieth century. The book reinserts the industry's 'new dawn' of the 1970s into the story of coal and shows that the miners wielded real power. The industry's reversal of fortunes, inscribed in Plan for Coal (1974), proved short-lived. It was significant all the same. Its significance, the book argues, did not lie in affecting the long-term trajectory of the coal industry. Rather, the 'new dawn' was important in raising the political and cultural stakes. The miners found themselves at the centre of sharply conflicting visions of the future at a critical juncture in Britain's history. The figure of the coal miner became invested with sharply contrasting characteristics: hero and villain, underdog and enemy, proletarian traditionalist and standard bearer of Socialist advance. The miners were no mere spectators in this process. They were agents, thought to be uniquely powerful by their numerous opponents, and half believing in this power themselves. The miners' special nature, however, jarred with the aspiration to lead an ordinary life, producing tensions that were most cruelly exposed in the year-long strike of 1984/1985.
Download or read book Tracing Your Coalmining Ancestors written by Brian Elliott and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A meticulous mixture of social and family history . . . Whether or not you have mining connections, this is an interesting socio-economic read.” —Your Family Tree In the 1920s there were over a million coalminers working in over 3000 collieries across Great Britain, and the industry was one of the most important and powerful in British history. It dominated the lives of generations of individuals, their families, and communities, and its legacy is still with us today—many of us have a coalmining ancestor. Yet family historians often have problems in researching their mining forebears. Locating the relevant records, finding the sites of the pits, and understanding the work involved and its historical background can be perplexing. That is why Brian Elliott’s concise, authoritative and practical handbook will be so useful, for it guides researchers through these obstacles and opens up the broad range of sources they can go to in order to get a vivid insight into the lives and experiences of coalminers in the past. His overview of the coalmining history—and the case studies and research tips he provides—will make his book rewarding reading for anyone looking for a general introduction to this major aspect of Britain’s industrial heritage. His directory of regional and national sources and his commentary on them will make this guide an essential tool for family historians searching for an ancestor who worked in coalmining underground, on the pit top or just lived in a mining community. As featured in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine and the Barnsley Chronicle.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Modern Wales written by Sabine Asmus and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses issues of Welsh literature, history and the vernacular language of the devolved region of Wales (as a part of the United Kingdom of Northern Ireland and Great Britain). In this context, the volume sheds light on various aspects of the identity construction of a small nation with an endangered language, which is a P-Celtic tongue, known for exhibiting many features alien to Indo-European and SAE languages. All the issues tackled here are presented in diachronic and synchronic perspective, allowing for correlations to be drawn with similar problems faced by other cultures. As such, the volume will be of interest to anyone promoting Wales and Welsh culture within and outside the country, as well as journalists, politicians, linguists, literary scholars, historians, and those interested in areal studies focusing on the UK.
Download or read book The common writer in modern history written by Martyn Lyons and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book underlines the importance of writing for the subordinate classes, and the variety of uses to which it was put. In eleven new studies by thirteen leading historians of scribal culture, it foregrounds the ‘common writer’ and contributes to a ‘New History from Below’. The book presents pauper letters, ego-documents, life-writing of various kinds, soldiers’ and emigrants’ correspondence, handwritten newspapers and graffiti in streets and prisons, analysing the major genres of ‘ordinary writings’. The studies draw on different disciplines, including cultural history, sociology and ethnography, folklore studies, palaeography and socio-historical linguistics. They range from the early modern Hispanic Empire to twentieth-century Australia, including studies of modern Britain, Iceland, Finland, Italy, Germany, South Africa and the USA. The book demonstrates the importance of studying manuscript culture to give a voice, a presence and dignity to the ordinary protagonists of history.
Download or read book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes written by Jonathan Rose and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a landmark intellectual history of Britain’s working classes from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century. Drawing on workers’ memoirs, social surveys, library registers, and more, Jonathan Rose uncovers which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what they knew. A new preface addresses the continuing relevance of the book amidst the upheavals of the present day. “An astonishing book.”—Ian Sansom, The Guardian “A passionate work of history. . . . Rose has written a work of staggering ambition.”—Daniel Akst, Wall Street Journal Winner of the SHARP Book History Prize, the American Philosophical Society’s Jacques Barzun Prize, and the British Council Prize cowinner of the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize for 2001; named one of the finest books of 2001 by The Economist.
