The disease that killed a generation
For those who survived another day down the pit, another foe hid in the darkness – the dreaded pneumoconiosis, also known as black lung. Nathan Bevan reports
COAL shaped Wales’ landscape and influenced the lives of generations living here.
And like the land, churned-up and blackened, it also left people scarred.
A quarter of a million miners once worked in more than 3,000 collieries across this country, risking their lives to fuel our homes and power our industry. But, while 20thcentury advancements in technology – such as increasing mechanisation – made the job progressively safer, industrial disease continued to blight the existence of the pit worker.
Pneumoconiosis, in particular – also known as dust or black lung – was one such silent killer, clogging and destroying the tissue of the lungs and robbing thousands of men of their futures.
More prevalent in South Wales than anywhere else in the UK – largely because of the young age at which such work was embarked upon – it ensured that even those families lucky enough to see their loved ones return home safely at the end of each shift did not escape heartache.
They would instead see their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons fade through slow and painful illness.
Indeed, an archive news report from Thames Television in the 1970s on its terrible effects, entitled Dust: Miners’ Disease, has recently been unearthed by the British Film Institute to mark the current 70th anniversary of the National Health Service.
Its inclusion in the celebration is apt given that David Bevan – the father of NHS founder Nye – died in his son’s arms from pneumoconiosis in 1925, the result of all the coal dust the Tredegar man had inhaled during a lifetime spent working hundreds of metres down.
In the 30-minute film, a reporter investigates the exhaustiveness of the methods by which miners were tested for the condition and how the findings impacted on how much benefit they received. The official Medical Research Council ruling back then was that only in rare extreme cases did pneumoconiosis cause much disability or shorten life.
It was a finding that didn’t sit well with exMaerdy collier Glyn Jones, a proud man for whom the inconvenience of wearing an oxygen mask 16 hours a day came second to the frustration at having to watch his wife take his place in carrying out the “heavy work” around the house, such as bringing in the coal or chopping wood.
Or even storing in the understairs cupboard the 12 cylinders of O2 delivered to the couple’s house every week – a lifeline without which her husband would be dead within months.
With 100% dust on his lungs, 63-year-old Glyn talks about being a prisoner in his own home, unable to so much as walk upstairs, or even take the tubes from his nose when he goes to sleep.
Similarly Cyril Cumpston, from Rhondda Fach, is seen coughing into his handkerchief as he slowly climbs the steep hill to his home.
Working underground for nearly four decades has left him looking much older than his 54 years, but with a matterof fact stoicism that seems characteristic of the Valleys.
“You’ve got to on, haven’t you?
“Take your time, drink plenty of cold water and walk slow,” Cyril halfsmiles, throat rattling.
“I don’t worry any more, but it’s always in the back of your mind.
“I saw my own brother die of it – gasping for air, windows never shut.”
At one point he’s asked if he’d have become a miner had he known he’d end up getting pneumoconiosis.
“No, yet I went back into the pits when I came out of the army with my eyes wide open.
“Old chaps round here, they were already full of it [dust]. carry
“So, aye, I suppose I should have taken the warning.
“They all said to me, ‘You must be mad, boy’.
“But that was the only work available back then,” he smiles.
Watching it reminded me of my own grandfather, who also died from the disease when I was 12.
I remembered a tiny, bird-like man sitting in the front room of a small red-brick terrace; frail and with skin so thin it was almost translucent.
Shirtsleeves always rolled up to the elbow, his arms would be mapped with blue marks from where coal dust had seeped its way into the wounds he incurred underground.
His days were spent sitting in an armchair in front of the cricket – his greatest love other than the dog that never left his side – with a respiratory mask over his face.
I can still hear the clink his walking stick would make against the oxygen tank on the floor next to his feet – usually at the excitement of the West Indies beating England.
Most of all I can still feel the brush of his bristly face against mine as I’d go to hug him goodbye, because shaving entailed having to take off the mask he depended on to breathe, if only for a few minutes at a time.
But don’t be fooled into thinking of black lung as some historical throwback on a par with the taking of canaries into coal mines.
Pneumoconiosis benefits are still available for any ex-miner who’s worked underground for 10 years or more – and, even though the world has marched on since the industry was decimated under Thatcher’s government, new cases still come up regularly.
Indeed, men who worked down the pits in the ‘80s would have had their lungs X-rayed regularly to check for specks or patches of dust.
But since they finished and found new employment elsewhere, those check-ups may have fallen by the wayside, thereby allowing any long-dormant problems to go unspotted.
So for some, a routine visit to the doctor could once again bring them face-to-face with a foe they’d assumed had been left to die in the darkness when they last hung up their helmet and lamp.
Instead, far from gone, the disease that tried killing a generation in the South Wales Valleys had only gone to ground.
For more information on the BFI’s NHS On Film, go to player.bfi.org. uk
“I suppose I should have taken the warning... but that was the only work available back then...” Cyril Cumpston, from Rhondda Fach