Hired by James Bloodworth

Author:James Bloodworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.

The miners of Davies’s era spent prolonged periods out of work, drawing when they could on an insubstantial social safety net to feed their families. In his 1939 mining memoir, These Poor Hands – a book that slotted into a genre once called ‘proletarian literature’ – the miner and writer B. L. Coombes, who moved to the South Wales coalfield from Hereford, relayed to middle-class readers a reality of ‘continual slavery and dust; the poor clothes and bare living; the need for decent men to beg their bread ... the eviction from his home of some miner who has opened his mouth too wide or refused to be robbed of his wages when they were due.’

Idris Davies worked underground for seven years until the General Strike of 1926, when the pit he worked in closed and Davies was left without a job. Like many others in the Valleys, he turned to Christianity and socialism for the answers.

Wales has a radical history, even if today, as elsewhere, many of its working-class actors sit metaphorically slumped in a state of perpetual defeat. The ghosts of this rebellious past exist just beneath the surface wherever you turn, whether in the statues of local Labour Party heroes like Aneurin Bevan, or along the streets named after early pioneers of the trade union movement. A plaque in the Ebbw Vale Wetherspoons informed me of the legend of the local Chartists who were rumoured to be so militant they produced their own arms and ammunition up in the moorland beyond the village of Trefil. A portrait of the late former Labour leader Michael Foot hung on a pastel-coloured wall of the same pub, squeezed incongruently between two lurid and flashing fruit machines named Bankers’ Birthday and Paddy’s Payday. Capitalism co-opts every rebellion against it. You got the impression, however, that an identikit corporate beer chain would be more reluctant to embrace radical history if the Labour movement had any oomph left in it. Impertinence is celebrated as long as it remains at a safe distance from the present. Then it is repackaged and flogged in anodyne corporate packaging, its substance reduced to trite platitudes that are sold once again by content-free politicians – the ‘shiny men’, as one local called them.

In a stroke of good fortune, on the day of my arrival in Wales I managed to secure accommodation in Brynmill, a student area around two miles west of Swansea city centre. The room itself was pricey – £100 a week, inclusive of bills – but the necessity of securing a place to stay at short notice overrode most concerns about the cost. My prospective job hinged on my finding a place to live right away. I had got through the interview process at local car insurance company Admiral, and had been offered a position renewing customers’ policies in one of its call centres. The company required immediate ‘proof of address’ in the local area. While none of the ‘professional’ jobs I have done have ever required this, at Admiral – as at Amazon and Carewatch – it was considered urgent.

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