29 DECEMBER 1928, Page 14

Letters to the Editor

ABERDARE AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Three hours by the Fisbguard Express from Paddington

to Cardiff, and then a longish hour while the train twists and turns up the valley of the Taff through Pontypridd, where the town stretches from the small basin scooped out by the primeval waters to the dizzy heights on either side, and on again on the right to Abercynon and on the left through Penrhiwceiber (be careful Mr. Printer) and you are clearly in the land of coal.

In the narrow defile between the hills—and in some of the

valleys it is even narrower than this—there is room only for the river, and the road, and the railway, and the merely human needs of houses and homes have to fit themselves in as best they can in streets and groups and terraces, which break the very skyline above you. And collieries, and pits, and still more collieries, all the way through Mountain Ash—with the Blessed St. Martin—" in the Hills " now, and not " in the Fields "—to keep watch and ward, and on past Aberaman on the left with Cwmanaan up the still narrower gap in the hills, until you come to what might well be a not ill-Looking town in the wide basin at the foothills of the Beacons which stretch away to Breconshire on the north-west. This is the town of our " adoption "—Aberdare—and the pleasing contrast of breadth and room to live and breathe, after the cramping of the narrow blackness through which we have come may well have given the place its name of " Sweet 'Berdar."

The way you have come as you crept up the valleys was the same journey which the itinerating Parish Priest in ancient days must have made as he came on horseback from the ancient Mother Church fifteen miles away to administer the Easter Sacrament to the few sheep-farmers who dwelt on these hill-sides some 200 or 300 years ago. From Cardiff to Aberdare is about twenty-four miles, and the saying was that a squirrel could travel from tree to tree on either side of the river the whole way. And now a cat might walk from roof to roof nearly as long a journey. And the sylvan glades and the crystal water and the beauty of gorge and glen and tree and fern—all are swallowed up in this heathen blackness of coal. All—or nearly all ; but there still remains the glory of the sun as it falls away over the western sky and tints these hills with the glory of that light which tells us of things which words cannot alter but only hearts feel.

And up and down these valleys live the men who toil in the mine. Men speak of the " mining villages " and the natives still speak of the pentre—the village. But there is nothing of the village in these towns of twenty or thirty, or fifty thousand souls. Who can visualize the change from the quiet pastoral life of these sequestered valleys to the crowded life of a great

industrial community ? Coal has been a ruthless tyrant and his black hand has sadly stained the fair picture which nature wrought. The little one has become a thousand and the small one a great people," but not all of the gain has been for good.

As time is counted it took but a few years, but tens of

thousands of folk have known no other life but this, and one of the most ruthless experiences in life must be to be tom from the roots and to be transplanted into a new plot where is said to be sustenance and life ! And that may yet have to come. But for the moment we cling to our homes, where our old folk lived and served and died, and we refuse to believe that " Coal " whom we have served so long is now to deny us our hope of life. Some of the oldest among us have seen it grow from the day when it went by the barge along the canal the whole way to Cardiff, and all the old landmarks are still with us to remind us younger ones of the way the old peOple lived. And now—our coal is still- the best in the world, and we can win through, the world must be mad if it thinks it can do without our coal.

So the miner thinks and dreams and longs for the day when the colliery engine will groan again, and the drums clatter, and face and hands and hair and feet are black and bristly again—with a Friday's pay for wife and bairns, and a God to praise on Sunday.—I am, Sir, &c., •

The Vicarage, Aberdare. J. A. LEWIS.