Pride in the 1980s
Not so long ago, someone asked me if I came from the Rhondda. This surprised me to say the least. Wales has a vast range of accents (and definitely more than the one ‘Welsh stereotype’ accent that pops up in the UK media from time to time), but the Rhondda is very distinctive and you would not mistake my accent for a Rhondda one.
These days people are surprised to discover that I have a part of my past in Aberalver. The fabulous Simon Warr spoke for many people two Novembers ago when we were wheeling bicycles across Edinburgh and he said, ‘It’s suddenly occurred to me that you have not lived your whole life in Cardiff’. However, there are two things that really stand out for me as indicating my more diverse past – my football team allegiance is one and I was reminded of the second one while watching the film ‘Pride’ recently.
There must be a divide between those who were living in mining communities in the early 1980s and those who were living nowhere near any coal mines. If you followed the All the Stations project in the summer of 2017 you can hear it when the male presenter asks the guard on one of the Valley Lines trains about ‘the miners’ strikes in the 1980s’. I would guess that there spoke someone who was not living in a mining town or village back then. You would not be too surprised to learn that Aberalver had no mines nor any connection with coal mining. My understanding of things as a child was shaped by what was said about it on the news.
We think that biased news output is a 21st century thing but the coverage of the miners’ strike (note no plural, YouTube documentary presenters) is fascinating to recall. The stories were of these violent thugs trying to bring down the government by attacking the police and refusing to work and as a result the rest of us were warned not to use too much electricity and to share baths. I remember the bit about sharing baths particularly and sometimes I wish that I had been older and had more interesting opportunities to put that one into practice (‘for the good of the country, I assure you’).
I remember Arthur Scragill being arrested, I remember a man coming to talk in the local Parish Centre about miners trying to murder people but I do not remember anyone ever talking about the devastation being faced by mining communities or the day to day struggle to be part of a striking family. Indeed, I may not have understood the full implications of what happened until the film ‘Brassed Off’ examined it in detail. ‘Brassed Off’ was slammed by one reviewer for featuring a coal mine which was economically viable – why, she asked, would anyone close it if it was profitable? Yup, she must have grown up somewhere like Aberalver.
You are probably thinking at this point that I am going to compare myself to the child of a mining family in Blaenllechau. That would be pretty crass. My experience will never be the same and, besides, we know that I do not have a Rhondda accent. My comparison came while I was at university and I started to meet Welsh people from a similar background to me. Not hugely well-off people, but also people who were doing okay and living nowhere near heavy industry. Their experience of the miners’ strike was so different to mine. They may not have had a direct connection to striking miners, but they had given food for food parcels, they had donated to hardship funds, they had been horrified by the poverty and destitution that followed the removal of the only means of employment from towns and villages. For people in Aberalver, the miners’ strike had disappeared into memory but for the Welsh people I met, it was something still raw.
This is not even a political point. There is a school of thought which says that governments had been warned as early as the 1930s that coal mining was in decline and had chosen to do nothing. There is an environmental benefit to not mining coal and some areas of the countryside now look a lot better for being devoid of heavy industry (though you can argue that we have just exported the demands of heavy industry to other countries) but the human cost was immense. Back in the 1980s, the ideology told us that ‘the market will provide’ for those who lost their jobs. To this day, it seems that many people in mining communities do not join in with this worship of the infallible market ... I wonder why?
I have written before about growing up in a homophobic society (final chapter in The Seven Pillows of Wisdom) and you might say that if the miners’ strike as depicted in ‘Pride’ was an alien experience to someone from Aberalver, then LGBT rights were not exactly high on the agenda in town either. It is another contrast with what is shown on TV. At the end of the excellent drama ‘Deutschland ‘83’ (set in Germany in 1983 ... you might have had a hint about that from the title), you can content yourself that nuclear war has been averted and at least the gay peace activist couple can live happily ever after ... except one of them is feeling mysteriously ill.
It may seem a little out of place for me to mention this in a blog about Welshness, but AIDS also passed Aberalver’s consciousness by. As a child I was made to watch the ‘AIDS : Don’t Die of Ignorance’ TV adverts (which, in retrospect, said nothing to me) and I do remember that this is when I first started seeing videos of people putting condoms on things (not yet vegetables, a demonstration which I am convinced has helped the obesity crisis by teaching children that they can become pregnant through eating cucumbers). I am sure that this was true in Wales too and that there are many people whose limited knowledge of the subject at the time came from prejudice. I remember a white van that used to be parked at Harbwr Llongborth station which had a window sticker that featured a silhouette of two male stick figures having sex and the message ‘GAY = Got AIDS Yet?’. I remember Princess Anne saying that AIDS was ‘the greatest own goal scored by humanity’. Well done Princess Anne, no medical qualification or particular understanding of the situation, but always good to have a royal feed into the idea that this is all the fault of gay people (or occasionally Africans, though it seemed a vehicle for homophobia more than racism).
Just as the 1960s are now assumed to have happened to everyone everywhere, so the 1980s are rarely depicted as being about people in small towns with no coal mines and a silence over homosexuality which means that nothing is ever discussed. ‘Pride’ is an excellent and moving film by the way, just in case you have not seen it, and a welcome reminder that oppressed groups should be fighting oppression rather than each other.
I said that there are two things that mark out my past in Aberalver, but that is not quite true. Yes, the football is an obvious one and yes my ignorance of the reality of the miners’ strike is another. There is a third. Last week, a man sitting next to me in work started to complain about toothache. Anyone who is Welsh or who lives in Wales will know how he pronounced ‘toothache’. Everyone else will be wondering what on earth I am talking about. Trust me, I can talk about ‘by hyer’, ‘where’s that to?’ or ‘hiraeth’ but the moment I say ‘tooth’, everyone knows I have a mysterious past and that it was not in the Rhondda.