THE PRICE OF COAL — narration script
Save the Workies · savetheworkies.com
Chapter title from Jeff Alexander's book, used with permission — please keep his credit.

Sixty-one men lost their lives at the pit in this village. These are some of their stories.

February, nineteen fifty-eight. Glyn Jones was twenty-seven. The village called him Spadge.

That afternoon, Glyn had left his food box at home. He returned home to collect it. His mother begged him not to go back underground. He told her he'd see her later, and returned to the mine.

One of the men who lived said there was no warning at all. Three men died. Glyn Jones. Ieuan Lewis. And Mel Jenkins, who left nine children.

The Western Mail photographed the casualties being brought to the surface. His mother never saw him alive again.

The Great Mountain Colliery opened in Lower Tumble in eighteen eighty-seven.

Anthracite. Dense, hard coal, cut in exceptional heat and dust.

And every so often, the coal face would start to knock. Rap. Rap. Rap. Like a motorbike starting.

That was the warning. That was when you ran.

Glyn was not the first. The Great Mountain had the worst safety record in the Gwendraeth Valley.

Sixty-one men lost their lives. Here are forty-four of their names.

In eighteen eighty-eight, David Rees, a labourer, lost his life there.

John Phillpott. Fifteen years old. A door boy, crushed by a journey of water tanks in eighteen ninety-five.

Thomas Threharne. Also fifteen.

William Howells, a fireman, went into the gas to save his workmate, Morgan Daniels, a father of five. Other men roped Howells and dragged him back out. Both men died that night. The Carnegie Hero Fund supported Howells' wife and their nine children.

Edgar Collins and Llewelyn Evans, killed by an outburst in nineteen thirty-five. One of their brothers went in after them. The gas beat him back.

Ivor Matthews, a rugby half-back for Swansea and Llanelli. Killed by a fall of roof in nineteen thirty-six. He was thirty-two.

And on the afternoon Glyn died, Bill Picton shouted, no. The other way. It sent Malcolm Donoghue the way that got him out alive. Then the dust buried Picton. The rescuers found the top of his head, cleared his face so he could breathe, and dragged him out.

But the big killer was the dust. The old word for it in Welsh was mogfa. Suffocation.

By nineteen fifty-one, of the two hundred and ninety-nine men out of work in Tumble, two hundred and forty-seven had it. Tumble was called a black spot for the disease.

In the nineteen fifties, the men of the Great Mountain Lodge marched behind this banner to protest the way the authorities treated the dust. These were its words.

They toiled to dig the nations' coal, and breathed the deadly dust. Betrayed once more, denied the dole, by those who held their trust. They are not here amidst the throng. Their health is too impaired. We march for them, to right the wrong, so that they may be spared.

The dust dead are not in the pit's roll of sixty-one. Nobody knows how many it killed.

The pit officially closed in nineteen sixty-two. Opencast took nearly all that was left. The old site is woodland now.

But the Workies still stands. The place those men filled on pay nights, and called their own.

It's in an auction catalogue. Guide price two hundred thousand pounds. The listing suggests residential use, subject to planning.

We are not letting go of the last thing they left us.

And this story is not finished.

Help has been coming in from every corner of Britain, and the village is fighting to bring the Workies home, into the hands of its community, for good.

The miners' story may be over. But the Workies has more memories to make, more generations to support, and more stories to tell. We just have to go and find them.