MORNING SERIAL
THOSE streets that connect them, running east to west, tend to be short and on a steep – sometimes very steep – gradient.
The housing was cheaply made and of poor quality. With the exception of some larger homes used by the families of managers (or perhaps the clergy) they sit, in general, on shallow foundations. Some were even built with proper brickwork or stonework featuring only at the front of the building, the rear walls being literally ‘thrown together’ by pouring a mixture of concrete and rubble between wooden boards.
These pit villages are not places like the towns of Breconshire to the north, or those of the Vale of Glamorgan to the south, settlements which evolved by slow accretion over many generations, all with their ancient place names and Norman churches, their local squirearchies and a mention in the Domesday Book. These pit villages were places that emerged fully formed, like mushrooms, almost overnight (indeed, there is a part of Merthyr colloquially referred to, to this day, as ‘Mushroom Town’ for this very reason). Houses, pubs, churches and chapels were all planned in from the very start, and all of them paid rent to the mine owner. Constructed in haste and on the shallowest of foundations, these were places always on the edge of anyone’s consideration, save for those who lived here.
The two new villages drew new people, sometimes from elsewhere in the coalfield, since some experienced miners would be needed, but also from further afield. People came to Aberfan and Merthyr Vale from all over rural Wales, from the west of England, from Ireland and even Spain and Italy. Both my mother and my father were born in Merthyr Vale, but into families of such incomers. The Pierces, my mother’s family, had their roots in the slate quarrying communities of north Wales. The Lewises, on my father’s side, had mixed Welsh and Irish heritage. Iron was still produced in Merthyr in those early days, and coal and iron together formed the economic base for everything that happened in the valley.