Letter from Wales

Do you remember 1926? That summer of soups and speeches,
The sunlight on the idle wheels and the deserted crossings,
And the laughter and the cursing in the moonlit streets?
Do you remember 1926? The slogans and the penny concerts,
The jazz-bands and the moorland picnics,
And the slanderous tongues of famous cities?
Do you remember 1926? The great dream and the swift disaster,
The fanatic and the traitor, and more than all,
The bravery of the simple, faithful folk?
‘Ay, ay, we remember 1926,’ said Dai and Shinkin,
As they stood on the kerb in Charing Cross Road,
‘And we shall remember 1926 until our blood is dry.’

These lines are from the sequence of thirty-six poems in Gwalia Deserta by Idris Davies (1938). Born in 1905 and just fourteen when he began working in a colliery at Abertysswg in the Rhymney Valley, he lost a finger on his right hand in an accident underground shortly before the 1926 strike. We are on the threshold of the centenary of that most turbulent year in British industrial history, certainly the year that comes first to my mind when I think of strife in the South Wales coalfield. I have no doubt newspapers plan in due course to commemorate the 1926 strike, each in a way that reflects its partisan editorial stance, then and now.

I had some vague familiarity with the harrowing social history of that year, at least by ...