Chapter Seven The Welsh Miners’ Libraries

At a street corner in Tonypandy I heard two young miners discussing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. I know this was exceptional, but it is significant; and it is true.

—H.V. Morton, In Search of Wales (1932)

The miners’ institutes of South Wales were one of the greatest networks of cultural institutions created by working people anywhere in the world. One would have to look to the Social Democratic libraries of Wilhelmine Germany or the Jewish workers’ libraries of interwar Poland to find anything comparable.1 Many of the Welsh miners’ libraries began in the nineteenth century as mechanics’ institutes, temperance halls, or literary societies, at first under middle-class patronage. Victorian colliers commonly authorized deductions from their wages to pay for their children’s education, but when school fees were abolished in 1891, this flow of money (usually 1d. or 2d. per pound) was redirected toward the miners’ institutes. They also received contributions from coal companies and other benefactors, but as the miners themselves usually covered the ongoing expenses, they controlled acquisitions. In 1920 Parliament set up the Miners’ Welfare Fund, which taxed coal production and royalties and directed the revenue to fund pit baths, welfare halls, scholarships, and libraries. By 1934 there were more than a hundred miners’ libraries in the Welsh coalfields, with an average stock of about three thousand volumes. In smaller villages the collection might consist of only a few hundred books, and the librarian was usually a miner who volunteered to mind the shop one evening a week.² The larger institutes were well-equipped cultural centers offering evening classes, lecture series, gymnasia, wireless rooms and photography labs for amateurs, and theaters as well as libraries.³ They hosted concerts, amateur drama, traveling theatrical troupes, opera, dances, trade union and political meetings, choirs, debating societies, and eisteddfodau (Welsh cultural festivals), and about thirty of the Welsh workmen’s halls were equipped with cinemas.⁴ The pride of the movement was the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute: by the Second World War its library was circulating 100,000 volumes a year. It boasted an 800-seat cinema, a film society, and a popular series of celebrity concerts, where the highest-priced tickets went for 3s.⁵

An Underground University

There were similar institutions in all the coal regions, many of them established by mine owners with the frank intention of making their workers sober, pious, and productive. Around 1850, nineteen out of fifty-four collieries in Northumberland and Durham had some kind of library or reading room.6 Yet there was a special ferment in the South Wales coalfields, rooted in the peculiar cultural environment of the region. Wales had a tradition of weaver-poets, artisan balladeers, and autodidact shepherds going back to the seventeenth century.⁷ Welsh Nonconformity, Sunday schools, choral societies, temperance movements, and eisteddfodau all championed education and especially self-education. Penny readings had been especially popular in Wales, sponsored by chapels of all denominations, with a high level of participation by working-class members.⁸ In 1907, thirteen out of fifty-three residential students at Ruskin College were South Wales miners.⁹ Wales could also boast high concentrations of WEA students in 1938–39: 2.90 per 1,000 population in South Wales, and 6.25 (highest in the nation) in North Wales.¹⁰ But in 1914 public libraries served only 46 percent of the Welsh population (compared with 62 percent in England), and most of the neglected areas were small towns and rural regions.¹¹ According to a 1918 parliamentary enquiry, “not a single municipally maintained public library is to be found in the central Glamorgan block of the coalfield.”¹² Miners’ libraries filled that vacuum: they were rarely established where public libraries already existed.¹³

Though affluent intellectuals denigrated the “Little Bethels” of the mining regions, collier-intellectuals recognized that they provided an enormous stimulus for debate and literary analysis, not unlike the yeshivas of Eastern Europe. Durham miner Jack Lawson conceded that “there were tendencies to narrowness and hypocrisy” in the chapels, but

if Britain holds a comparatively advanced position in her social movements to-day [1932] it is largely because the eighteenth-century Methodist Revival saturated the industrial masses with a passion for a better life, personal, moral, mental, and social. … The chapel gave them their first music, their first literature and philosophy to meet the harsh life and cruel impact of the crude materialistic age. Here men first found the language and art to express their antagonism to grim conditions and injustice. Their hymns and sermons may have been of another world, but the first fighters and speakers for unions, Co-op. Societies, political freedom, and improved conditions, were Methodist preachers.

It was at a Methodist society that Lawson first found working people who shared his intellectual passions. One had been well into his thirties before his wife taught him to read: in his old age he was successfully tackling the New Testament in Greek and Nietzsche. Others ultimately became teachers, ministers, musicians, social workers, and even professors. Their houses were open to each other and they visited on impulse:

We talked pit-work, ideals, the Bible, literature, or union business. The piano rattled, the choir was in action, and we sang with more abandon than any gang who has just learned to murder the latest film song. … I was encouraged to express myself; to preach and to speak. I was given their warm, helpful friendship, and the hospitality of their homes. No longer was I “queer” or “alone.” My thoughts and dreams were given direction. Even when they did not understand or agree they encouraged, and ignorant and intelligent alike combined to set my feet firmly on the road I had haphazardly been looking for.14

The parents of D. R. Davies (b. 1889) had no formal education and could not read English until fairly late in life, but his father (a collier) composed Welsh poetry and hymns, as well as a cantata performed by the chapel choir. Their home was often filled with neighbors discussing religion:

Conversation was invariably about things that mattered, and ideas were the staple of intercourse. Without knowing it, I breathed a strong, stimulating intellectual atmosphere. In later years I realized what a great advantage I had enjoyed. It has been my lot to know at different times wealthy, polished and educated families amongst whom argument about great ideas was bad form. An entirely different and better start was mine. In my homelife, it was ideas that mattered. By their intellectual intensity my parents created in me a zest for ideas which gave direction to my life. … My home did for me as a boy what the University is supposed to do, according to Newman, for youth—it awoke and encouraged a love of ideas for their own sake. And that advantage outweighed most of the handicaps under which I lived, handicaps neither few nor light.

All the children had music lessons and were singers, one with the Moody Manners Opera Company. “I was constantly listening to Bach, Handel, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schubert—oratorios, cantatas and masses,” Davies recalled. There was one schoolteacher who, in a class of sixty, “create[d] in his pupils an independent passion for knowledge,” and inspired Davies to read Macaulay’s History of England before his twelfth birthday. Because it was leavened with that spacious enthusiasm for music, literature, history, and theological debate,

the Welsh Nonconformity in which I was reared did not make for narrowness and fanaticism of mind as so many of the frustrated, embittered critics of my generation have maintained. Today [mid-1950s] we are living upon the capital of those same “tin Bethels”, and when that gives out (as it is now doing) the futility and leanness of our contemporary life will become more obvious and disastrous. It is true that our fathers, in Wales, taught us a religion of cast-iron dogma, which, according to all the theories, should have made us obscurantists, inhabiting a very small world. But it did not. In some mysterious way we became freemen of a spacious world. Along beside the narrow dogma went a broad culture. What happened to me demonstrates that fact clearly. Can anything promote a wider interest than history? And history led to politics, which, in turn, opened the door on many intellectual horizons. And music. It fed the spirit as an instrument of perception, as an organ of knowledge. It made for inner refinement. We had few of the graces and polish of manners, characteristic of an affluent society, but music gave us something better. It created in us a fastidiousness of moral as well as literary taste. It gave us a sense of the necessary relation between content and form. I very much doubt whether, fundamentally, Eton or Harrow would have given me a better start, educationally, than the “tin Bethel”, the elementary council school, and my home.

Even the perpetual Bible reading, in English and Welsh, stimulated an appetite for secular literature. “I defy any child of ordinary intelligence to read the Bible constantly (in the Authorized Version) without acquiring a genuine literary taste, a sense of style, and at least a feeling for the beauty of words. Before I was twelve I had developed an appreciation of good prose, and the Bible created in me a zest for literature,” propelling him directly to Lamb, Hazlitt’s essays, and Ruskin’s The Crown of Wild Olives. Later, after a day of exhausting mine work, he would attend union meetings, chapel meetings, literary and debating societies, lectures, and eisteddfodau, and then do some fairly heavy reading. He joined the library committee of the Miners’ Institute in Maesteg, made friends with the librarian, and advised him on acquisitions. Thus he could read all the books he wanted: Marx, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marshall, economic and trade union history, Fabian Essays, Thomas Hardy, Meredith, Kipling, and Dickens.15

If it still seems amazing that such a vital cultural life could flourish in the coalfields—that the Ton-yr-efail Workmen’s Institute could spend £45 for the Oxford English Dictionary—one miner offered a fairly mundane explanation. As he saw it, all British workingmen were legendary hobbyists. Some gardened, played football, or bred dogs; others pursued literature, philosophy, or classical music with the same intensity.

Every miner has a hobby. Some are useful; some are not. Some miners take up hobbies as amateurs; some study to escape from the pit. I did .… Why do we do so many things? It’s difficult to say. It may be a reaction from physical strain. The miner works in a dark, strange world. He comes up into light. It is a new world. It is stimulating. He wants to do something. It may be, in good times, pigeon racing, fretwork, whippet racing, carpentry, music, choral singing or reading. Think what reading means to an active mind that is locked away in the dark for hours every day! Why, in mid-Rhondda there are 40,000 books a month in circulation from four libraries .…¹⁶

Stephen Walsh (b. 1859), the Lancashire collier and Labour MP, offered another explanation:

There is no place like a mine for promoting discussion. There is something in the never-absent danger, in being shut away underground, that draws men to each other, that makes them anxious to break the darkness and sense of loneliness by talk on subjects many and various.

And so, in our discussions, I found that my book-learning, my ability to introduce fresh topics, gave me a status far beyond my years, and no doubt I caught something of the art of public speaking in delivering little expositions or lectures to my mates on things I had read about.17

Joseph Keating (b. 1871) read little but boys’ magazines and 3d. thrillers until he stumbled across Greek philosophy. He was particularly struck by the Greek precept “Know thyself,” and pursued that goal by reading until 3 a.m. As a collier he was performing one of the toughest and worst-paid jobs in the mine—shovelling out tons of refuse for a half-crown a day—when he heard a coworker sigh, “Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate.” Keating was stunned: “You are quoting Pope.” “Ayh,” replied his companion, “me and Pope do agree very well.” Keating had himself been reading Pope, Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, and Richardson in poorly printed paperbacks. Later, he was reassigned to a less demanding job at a riverside colliery pumping station, which allowed him time to tackle Swift, Sheridan, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Thackeray. Having acquired a violin, case, and bow from a housemaid for 18s., he took lessons and formed a chamber music quartet, playing Mozart, Corelli, Beethoven, and Schubert. Ultimately he became a journalist and novelist, yet he never forgot the almost sexual excitement that came from pursuing books and music in the coalfields:

Reading of all sorts—philosophy, history, politics, poetry, and novels—was mixed up with my music and other amusements. I was tremendously alive at this period. Everything interested me. Every hour, every minute was crammed with my activities in one direction or another. New, mysterious emotions and passions seemed to be breaking out like little flames from all parts of my body. As soon as the morning sunlight touched my bedroom window, I woke. I did not rise. I leaped up. I flung the bedclothes away from me. They seemed to be burning my flesh. A glorious feeling within me, as I got out of bed, made me sing. My singing was never in tune, but my impulse of joy had to express itself.¹⁸

Welsh miners did not have to consult Matthew Arnold to recognize the liberating power of culture. They experienced it first-hand and saw it in their workmates. In the village of Penrhiwceiber the intellectual lights were Ted, a collier who read thirty books a year, and Jeff, an engine driver who played “The Rustle of Spring” on the piano and invited his friends over to enjoy his impressive library of classical recordings:

At such times we did not feel we were colliers doing menial and dangerous jobs in the bowels of the earth, but privileged human beings exposed to something extraordinary. Most of us were badly or barely educated, but such young men as Ted and Jeff who, alone and without help and encouragement, educated themselves, and having drunk the wine of knowledge they seemed to glow with pride. The work they were engaged in, lowly as it was, never depressed them. They neither grumbled about the work they did, nor did they envy others in better positions on the surface of the pit. These characteristics I noticed about men such as Ted and Jeff, and from the examples of such men I was able to develop my own pride, my own search for knowledge which eventually enabled me to leave such a dangerous and difficult occupation. … These two characters, their attitudes, their personalities, their cheerfulness, their honesty and their kindness, I am sure made the rest of us feel that culture had done much to make them better men. They were never crude, never resorted to bouts of bad language and temper, or said mean things about others, although they took a “lot of stick” from many pit workers for being different.19

Nottinghamshire collier G. A. W. Tomlinson (b. 1906?) volunteered for repair shifts on weekends, when he could earn time-and-a-half and read on the job. On Sundays “I sat there on my tool-box, half a mile from the surface, one mile from the nearest church and seemingly hundreds of miles from God, reading the Canterbury Tales, Lamb’s Essays, Darwin’s Origin of Species, Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, or anything that I could manage to get hold of.” That could be hazardous: once, when he should have been minding a set of rail switches, he was so absorbed in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village that he allowed tubs full of coal to crash into empties. The pit corporal clouted him and snatched the volume away. He returned it at the end of the shift and offered a few poetry books of his own—“BUT IF THA BRINGS ’EM DARN T’PIT I’LL KNOCK THI BLOCK OFF.” Tomlinson tried to write his own verses and concealed them from his workmates, until one of them picked up a page he had dropped and read it: “No good, lad. Tha wants ter read Shelley’s stuff. That’s poetry!” When, during the 1926 miners’ strike, Tomlinson read “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” an obvious political message

crashed into my mind, mixing together the soldiers of the poem and the men of the pits, I was terribly excited. Why hadn’t all the clever people found this out? Wasn’t it plain enough for everybody to see? The very quality which was praised in the men at Balaclava was being decried in the men of the pits. Foolishness! they called it when speaking of the miners. Loyalty! they called it when speaking of the soldiers. As usual I invented a word for it. Britishness I called it.²⁰

Wil John Edwards (b. 1888) recalled one miner who had practically memorized Shakespeare’s works (“in a sense they had been grafted into his mind”), and another who dismissed Shaw as rehashed Ibsen (“Good ideas come to him and he chases them at speed, but his foot lands on the idea’s train; there is a rending squeak as a bit comes away”). Edwards himself pursued Gibbon, Hardy, Swinburne, and Meredith. His reading was suggested by the literary pages of the Clarion, the librarian at the Miners’ Institute (who directed him to Don Quixote), and a still more influential literary salon:

Guidance in the choice of good books came to me deep down in the pit, in the darkness and dark dust of a narrow tunnel more than a thousand feet below the earth’s surface. And it must not be thought that this guidance came through a grim atmosphere of serious, intellectual discussion. It was subject to inconsequential digressions; it was often interrupted by jokes that brought rough laughter and it was coloured, or stained, by what the rules call bad language, which, nevertheless, can flow naturally through the lips of good men. … And what an inheritance was mine! This clean, glowing gift offered to me, and accepted by me, in the dimly relieved darkness is often taken for granted, if it is taken, by boys in more fortunate circumstances than mine were but, and here you have a paradox, when offered to me it had increased a thousand-fold in value perhaps because its light shone in the darkness though black coal-dust. … Perhaps the sense of being forced to live in an invading darkness together with work, not always dull and mechanical, which demanded alertness to danger and resource, forced them to consider essentials without trimmings .…

It was in the pit that Edwards first heard the names of Spencer, Darwin, and Marx, as well as some fairly eloquent literary criticism: “Meredith is a poet who sings with a harp. Kipling is a nobody who sings what he can sing with a mouth-organ although he does talk of tambourines.” That evening he tried to borrow Meredith’s Love in a Valley from the Miners’ Library, only to find twelve names on the waiting list for a single copy.21

“Apart from religion,” recalled a Durham colliery blacksmith (b. 1895), “perhaps the most important influence at work in the village was the colliery institute. It provided some sort of alternative to the chapels, and churches, in that there was a Library.”²² Percy Wall (b. 1893) described his institute as a “blatantly utilitarian” building with a “square, cemented front” and a “drab and poorly lit” reading room, but it offered a wonderful escape from a dull Welsh village:

I could view the future through the words of H. G. Wells, participate in the elucidation of mysteries with Sherlock Holmes, … or penetrate darkest Africa with Rider Haggard as my guide. I could laugh at the comic frustrations of coaster seaman or bargee at the call of W. W. Jacobs. What a gloriously rich age it was for the story teller! … When the stories palled there was always the illustrated weeklies with their pictures of people and conditions remote from my personal experience but opening vistas of a large expanding world of architecture, art, travel and home life in foreign lands I could never expect to visit. I could laugh with Punch or Truth, although some of the humour was much too subtle for my limited education. Above all I could study the Review of Reviews and learn therein the complexities of foreign affairs.23

All that was fascinating if only because there were few other distractions in most Welsh mining towns. One housewife depended on Women’s Co-operative Guild lectures to keep up her morale in a village where the only other recreations were a cinema, a British Legion hall, and some unfinished athletic fields.²⁴ Besides the institutes, the chapels, and the pits, there might be one other center of discussion in a mining town:

As the Workmen’s Institutes were considered the miners’ Universities the shoemaker’s sheds were considered their Common Room, and therein the young “listened to the wisdom of the ancients.” … These village cobbler’s shops, in fact, were often cells of flourishing cultural activity, the boot repairers themselves often being thoughtful and wellread men who played active parts in the cultural, social and religious life of the village, keen Eisteddfodwyr, nonconformists to the core, politically minded, displaying at all times an interest in current affairs generally and the world around them.²⁵

Marx, Jane Eyre, Tarzan

Except for the occasional schoolteacher, shopkeeper, or clergyman, the miners’ libraries served a working-class clientele; and miners determined acquisitions. The book selection committee at Tredegar was headed by that stalwart of the Labour Party’s left wing, Aneurin Bevan. The borrowing records of these libraries—unlike those of public libraries—can therefore offer a profile of working-class reading preferences uncontaminated by middle-class cultural hegemony. Only three usable registers out of the hundred-odd South Wales miners’ libraries have survived, but they are the best source we have to address the question that every study of reader response must begin with: Who read what?

Historians of the Welsh coalfields have offered three possible answers: Das Kapital, Jane Eyre, or Tarzan of the Apes. South Wales was a hotbed of labor militancy where, according to historians of the left, many workers were well-versed in the Marxist classics. Then there is The Corn is Green school of novels and memoirs, which describe a thriving autodidact culture in the coalfields, where colliers fervently studied the classics in adult education classes. The third answer was proposed in 1932 by Q. D. Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public. Mrs. Leavis was nostalgic for a prelapsarian Elizabethan age, when the masses enjoyed Shakespeare and Marlowe. In the Victorian period, however, the reading public began to divide between high and low literature, and after the First World War the two audiences were irreconcilably divorced. The masses now consumed rubbishy crime fiction and romances, while the great modernists—Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot—were read only by small educated coteries.

Frankly, Mrs. Leavis’s methods of literary sociology were crude. She dismissed out of hand the notion that you might ask people what they were reading and why they were reading it. Instead, she stationed herself in Boot’s Circulating Libraries with a notebook: since Boot’s specialized in light best-sellers, she got the results she was looking for. She also seized on the statistic that three out of every four books borrowed from public libraries were fiction, which she took as prima facie evidence of low literary tastes. (It proves more conclusively that Mrs. Leavis retained the Victorian literary prejudice against fiction.)26

We can test all these theories against three miners’ libraries, beginning with the Tylorstown Workmen’s Institute. We have the complete borrowing record for the year 1941, when there was a total of 7,783 loans.²⁷ Most of them fit Mrs. Leavis’s definition of trash literature—books with titles such as Corpses Never Argue (13 loans), Lumberjack Jill (19), A Murder of Some Importance (24), The Mysterious Chinaman (18), Anything But Love (31), The Flying Cowboys (31), and P. G. Wodehouse’s deathless Right-Ho Jeeves (17). The standard adventure novels also had their fair share of readers—Jack London’s White Fang (17), Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow (6) and The Lost World (15), Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (12), Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask (4) and The Three Musketeers (11), John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (5), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (2), Robinson Crusoe (1), and The Swiss Family Robinson (5). There was considerable demand for such children’s classics as Little Women (20), The Prince and the Pauper (8), and a remarkable Victorian survival, Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (13).

On the whole, the greats and near-greats among the Victorians and Edwardians did not fare well. John Galsworthy’s A Modern Comedy (4) and The Forsyte Saga (1), H. G. Wells’s Kipps (1) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (3), Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways (2) and Anna of the Five Towns (2), Charles Reade’s Peg Woffington (2) and The Cloister and the Hearth (1), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (5), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1) and Mary Barton (2), and Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills (2) were all outpaced by A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel (6) and Stella Gibbons’s spoof Cold Comfort Farm (16). Bernard Shaw had a large number of readers, but they were spread thinly across his various works: Man and Superman (2), Heartbreak House (3), Misalliance (1), Back to Methuselah (1), The Doctor’s Dilemma (4), Androcles and the Lion (2), Pygmalion (1), John Bull’s Other Island (2), Major Barbara (1), Plays for Puritans (2), Plays Pleasant (4), Plays Unpleasant (1), and his novel Cashel Byron’s Profession (1). Only one classic could compete with the best-sellers: Pride and Prejudice was loaned no less than 25 times, but that was in the wake of the 1940 film version starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, and Austen’s popularity did not carry over to Mansfield Park (2). The only Dickens novel much in demand was A Tale of Two Cities (7), followed by David Copperfield (3), Barnaby Rudge (1), and Oliver Twist (1). Shakespeare’s plays and a volume on Shakespeare’s characters were borrowed a total of six times, Gulliver’s Travels seven, Anna Karenina only three, Bacon’s essays once, Longfellow’s poems once. It may seem remarkable that Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop was checked out eight times, but a 1930 poll of readers of the Sunday Dispatch placed it among the postwar novels most likely to be read a generation hence.28

Mrs. Leavis bemoaned the indifference of the reading public to modernist literature, and Tylorstown confirms her pessimism. A Passage to India was borrowed once, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude once, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That twice. It seems extraordinary that all of five readers took out Virginia Woolf’s The Years; but even including those, the fact remains that literary modernism accounted for barely one in a thousand loans.

Though Tylorstown was in what was supposed to be Britain’s Red Belt, there was scarcely more interest in politics. The collection included biographies of Labour Party leaders George Lansbury (2 loans), Keir Hardie (1), and James Maxton (2). There were a few readers of foreign affairs, as represented by John Gunther’s Inside Europe (5) and Michael Oakeshott’s Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (2). Beyond Reuben Osborn’s Freud and Marx (2), there was hardly any demand for either these thinkers. Books by or about Lenin were taken out by six readers, Hewlett Johnson’s The Socialist Sixth of the World by five, but the invasion of Russia on 22 June did not increase interest in the Soviet Union. Politics were more palatable if cast in the form of a dystopian thriller: there were eleven borrowers of Jack London’s The Iron Heel, a prophesy of fascism that inspired Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Closer to home, there were only two borrowers each for Walter Hannington’s The Problem of the Distressed Areas, E. Wight Bakke’s The Unemployed Man, and H. A. Marquand’s South Wales Needs a Plan; and just one for Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Miners were not much interested in reading about miners: only one of them checked out Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, and two read These Poor Hands, a memoir by Welsh collier Bert Coombes. In contrast, there were ten borrowers for a more romantic kind of proletarian literature, W. H. Davies’s The Autobiography of a Supertramp. The difference was that Davies took his readers away from the coalfields, recounting his wanderings through England, Canada, and America. “Yer writing about the pits?” a workmate asked J. G. Glenwright, a Durham mineworker with aspirations to authorship. “Nothing much to write about, is there? Just the muck and the dirt and that. An’ perhaps a nasty accident, now and then.”²⁹ The daughter (b. 1924) of an unemployed Rainton miner borrowed novels of social realism from the Carnegie Library, but her mother objected: “There’s enough misery in the world without dwelling on it. Next time fetch a nice historical novel back.”³⁰ As a WEA lecturer in the early 1930s, Roger Dataller found that emigrés from Staffordshire preferred that he did not discuss The Old Wives’ Tale: “Having left the Five Towns they did not in the least wish to be reminded of the district again.” Sons and Lovers provoked a more positive reponse among miners: one recalled vividly that he too, as a child, had listened cowering in his bedroom while his parents quarrelled.31

Fortunately, the catalogue to the Tylorstown library has survived, so we can compile a list of books the miners did not borrow but probably could have.³² In 1941 they checked out nothing by Walter Scott, John Ruskin, or Thomas Hardy. They had no interest in the poetry of Keats, Shelley, or Siegfried Sassoon. They ignored Women in Love, Testament of Youth, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The political writings of G. D. H. Cole, John Strachey, Bertrand Russell, and Ness Edwards’s History of the South Wales Miners were left undisturbed on the shelves. And no one touched Das Kapital, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, or Engels’s Origin of the Family.

Of course, there is a bias involved in any short-term study of library records. It can exaggerate the impact of a best-seller, which may enjoy a brief supernova of popularity and then, a year or two later, be forgotten. If a classic is borrowed at a slow but steady rate over the decades, it may eventually surpass the readership of the most popular light fiction. We can test that hypothesis against the Cynon and Duffryn Welfare Hall Library register, which records reading habits over a generation, from 1927 to the early 1950s. These records confirm the popularity of the authors Q. D. Leavis loved to hate: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Warwick Deeping, Jeffery Farnol, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Gene Stratton Porter, Edgar Wallace. But there was also some interest in the standard English classics. Demand for Pride and Prejudice (9 loans), Wuthering Heights (16), Robinson Crusoe (9), Oliver Twist (7), Westward Ho! (7), and Vanity Fair (10) was modest but sustained over many years. Even Culture and Anarchy had four borrowers, and there was a striking and continuing demand for some Victorian sensation novels and best-sellers—Grant Allen’s Dumaresq’s Daughter (18), R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (13), Bulwer-Lytton’s The Disowned (11), Florence Marryat’s Facing the Footlights (20), and Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (16). The last had nearly a million copies in print by 1909. In Welsh miners’ libraries, Mrs. Wood was the fourth most frequently stocked novelist, behind only Dickens, Scott, and H. Rider Haggard.³³ She was also the most popular author among working people in Middlesbrough, as Florence Bell discovered in 1901.³⁴ In the Cornish working-class town of Megavissey in the early 1920s, East Lynne and The Channings “occupied half the population all the time,” wrote a fisherman’s daughter.³⁵

There was not a trace of interest in modernist fiction at the Cynon and Duffryn Library. For these readers, the art of the novel culminated with Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells. As for books on politics and social issues, only five can be located in the entire collection. Understandably, no one read what Lloyd George had to say about The People’s Will in 1910, or a clergyman’s report on Ten Years in a London Slum. What is more remarkable is that these miners, like those at Tylorstown, cared little for books about themselves: only five borrowed James Hanley’s Grey Children, a report on unemployed Welsh colliers. Wales was a pacifist stronghold, and the only political tracts that really engaged this community dealt with the horrors of war: H. L. Gates’s The Auction of Souls (13 loans), an account of the Armenian massacres, and Disarm! Disarm! (15), a novel by pacifist Bertha von Suttner. Following that pattern, perhaps the most popular political book in Tylorstown was The Bloody Traffic, Fenner Brockway’s 1933 exposé of the munitions industry. It had eight borrowers in 1941, when Britain’s survival depended on her arms factories.

This neglect of politics was entirely typical. A survey of nineteen miners’ libraries catalogues between 1903 and 1931 found that all the social sciences accounted for only 5.3 percent of book stock; at only one library did the proportion rise above 10 percent. There was nothing by Marx on the shelves at Treharris in 1925, Tredegar in 1917, or the Cwmaman Institute in 1911; and only 1.6 percent of stock at Cwmaman was in the “Politics, Economics and Socialism” section. Granted, many libraries built up their socialist collections over time, especially during the “Red Thirties,” but though Tredegar eventually acquired the complete works of Lenin, he remained unread. At Cwmaman, as at other miners’ libraries, readers mainly demanded fiction, which rose from 52.6 percent of loans in 1918 to 81.7 percent in 1939: politics never accounted for more than 0.5 percent. At the Senghenydd Institute library in 1925, on the eve of the General Strike, the proportions were 93.4 percent fiction, 0.4 percent economics.36 Any historian of working-class culture in early twentieth-century Britain must deal with this inescapable fact: the readers of Marx and Lenin were infinitesimal compared with the fans of Mrs. Henry Wood.

Very revealing, in this context, is a 1937 survey of 484 unemployed men aged eighteen to twenty-five in Cardiff, Newport, and Pontypridd. Only 3 percent were involved in any kind of political organization, compared with 16 percent in religious groups, 11 percent in sports clubs, and 6 percent in adult education classes. One might expect these young men to be the shock troops of discontent, but none of them completely rejected Christianity. Though only 8 percent were active church members, 35 percent attended church or chapel at least once a month. Only seven of these men were politically active—either Labour, Communist, or Conservative. Fifty-seven percent identified reading as a major leisure activity, but it was usually the daily paper (if their family took in one), mainly for sports, news headlines, and the horoscope. They read books for escape (Westerns, aviation, crime and detective stories), purchasing cheap paperbacks, then exchanging them among friends, family, and comrades in the Employment Exchange queue. Hardly anyone was aware that such books were available at the public library—only 20 percent ever visited the libraries, and just 6 percent were regular borrowers. Another escape was the cinema: nearly everyone went at least once a month, 22 percent at least twice a week. Only 8 percent listened to anything on the radio but dance bands and variety: everything else was dismissed as “highbrow.”³⁷

Where, then, were the Marxist miners of South Wales? The most plausible answer is that the literary and political interests of Welsh working people could vary enormously from town to town. As an adult education bulletin noted in 1929, the Welsh valleys were remarkable for their isolation:

The miner or his wife may pay a visit to Cardiff once or twice a year, or spend Bank Holiday on Barry Island, but it is quite likely that he has never been into the next valley, while the one beyond that may be entirely terra incognita to him. Communications are bad, and the geographical isolation has led to a corresponding mental isolation. This is aggravated by the fact that the whole population of the valley is dependent on the coal industry. There is no variety in industrial life, and there is almost no differentiation into social grades such as may be found in any ordinary town. This makes for an extraordinarily friendly spirit; there is little shyness and much hospitality. But it has tended to make also for a narrowness of outlook. The miner may never have met an agriculturalist, a factory worker, or a docker, nor mixed with any society but that found in his own immediate surroundings. He never sees either the inside or the outside of a really fine building, be it church or office, public building or home. His horizon is formed by the tops of the bare hills which for so long have shut him away from the rest of the world. His middle distance is furnished with the seemingly endless rows of slate-roofed cottages, each as cramped and ugly as the one which he and his family occupy, and his foreground is the tiny kitchen, the untidy street, or the narrow seam of coal at which he expects to spend 47 hours every week between the ages of 14 and 70. Death is an ever-present possibility down the pit; life seems anyhow precarious when the chance of employment is, at the best, dependent on unknown forces and incomprehensible world movements, or, at the worst, dependent on the word of an unpopular manager, himself the tool of some remoter authority distrusted and disliked.

This cultural environment was hospitable to sectarian dogmas of various kinds: Welsh Nonconformity, miners’ syndicalism, and the Marxism preached by the National Council of Labour Colleges (itself subsidized by the South Wales Miners’ Federation). Steeped in the Welsh tradition of theological debate, miners plunged quite readily into adult classes in philosophy and history, though instructors often found them wedded to a simplistic economic determinism: “Any superstructure of Church or State, institutions or art, was disregarded as being irrelevant.” A class that included some non-miners was likely to be receptive to a more complex view of historical causation.38 The village of Mardy was a “little Moscow,” where in 1933 ninety colliers were studying the proletarian philosopher Joseph Dietzgen at the Miners’ Institute,³⁹ but reading tastes were very different in Tylorstown, just a few miles down the valley. Miners in the anthracite region to the west, around Llanelly, Swansea, and Port Talbot, were not so Marxist as those farther east;40 and Aneurin Bevan’s Tredegar was a moderate Labour town with hardly any Communists.⁴¹ The intellectual climate could vary dramatically from mineshaft to mineshaft: as one collier explained, “The conveyor face down the Number 2 Pit was a university,” where Darwin, Marx, Paine, and modernist theology were debated, while “the surface of Number 1 Pit a den of grossness.”⁴²

These extreme cultural variations can also be attributed partly to the fact that literary activities in a given community usually depended on the initiative of a few energetic individuals. Whatever their class, whether they patronized miners’ institutes or Boot’s Circulating Libraries, readers relied heavily on the advice of librarians in choosing books. A miner with a passion for the English classics was a likely candidate for institute librarian: in that capacity he could acquire the books he wanted to read himself and recommend them to his neighbors. In Penrhiwceiber the collier who supervised the Miners’ Library three evenings a week steered a fellow pit worker toward Jack London, Gorky, A. E. Coppard, Chekhov, Maupassant, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and A Simple Heart.⁴³ If Marxists were in charge of acquisitions (and they often were) they could do the same for leftist literature.⁴⁴ And if no one in town provided intellectual guidance, there was always Tarzan of the Apes.

Library acquisitions policies could shape reading habits, especially in isolated villages where there were few other sources of books. This pattern becomes apparent in the borrowing ledger of our third miners’ library, maintained by the Markham Welfare Association. Here at last we find a coal town with classic literary tastes. In the first period covered by the ledger (September 1923 to December 1925), Jane Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, and George Eliot are the most popular authors. In Markham as in Cynon and Duffryn, no one borrowed Marx, but there was a continuing demand for Mrs. Henry Wood. Even in the depressed interwar years, there were still a few readers of Victorian self-help tracts: Samuel Smiles, James Hogg’s Men Who Have Risen, and W. M. Thayer’s From Log Cabin to White House.

Then there is a gap in the ledger. In September 1928 a new Markham Village Institute was opened, paid for mainly by the Miners’ Welfare Fund.⁴⁵ The record resumes in March 1932, revealing that reading habits had hardly changed at all over nearly a decade. Indeed, judging from the borrowings, it appears that the Markham Library acquired very few if any new volumes. The probable cause was the prolonged and deep depression that crippled the coal industry from the early 1920s. After the boom years of the First World War and the immediate postwar period, demand for coal collapsed. French and German mines resumed full production, more efficient American mines captured markets, oil was becoming an increasingly important energy source. Daily wages, which averaged as much as 21s. 6³/₄d. in February 1921, were down to 9s. 5¹/₂d. by October 1922. Between 1920 and 1937, 241 pits closed in South Wales, the employed workforce shrank from 271,161 to 126,233, and total annual wages plummeted from £65 million to £14 million.⁴⁶ The Welsh unemployment rate was 13.4 percent in December 1925, 27.2 percent in July 1930, and in the Merthyr area as high as 47.5 percent by June 1935.47

The miners’ institutes had been funded by deductions from miners’ wages, the Miners’ Welfare Fund, and by local governments. Now all these sources dried up. Between 1920 and 1928 the Cwmaman Workmen’s Institute and Library saw its income cut from more than £2,500 to just over £450. At the same time, circulation more than doubled, from 14,966 to 31,054. That was a common pattern throughout South Wales, where armies of unemployed miners had plenty of time on their hands and few other distractions. If their libraries did not close down completely, librarians’ wages were slashed, central heating was done without, and acquisitions of new books came to a dead stop. (Even in good times the Miners’ Welfare Fund rarely subsidized the purchase of books.) The book budget for the Ferndale Workmen’s Institute went from more than £315 in 1920 to zero in 1929. Under those conditions, the old stock would be borrowed over and over again until it was reduced to waste paper. By 1929, investigators for the Carnegie Foundation were reporting that, in the typical miners’ library, 50 to 100 percent of the collection was unfit for circulation. By 1937, many libraries had bought no new books in the past decade.

A few miners of this era remembered reading every book in their library. Though the borrowing ledgers show that some volumes were never touched, these claims may not be much exaggerated. One library in Ynyshir was patronized by 300 out-of-work miners who borrowed a total of 500 books a week, an average of eighty-six books per miner per year.⁴⁸ Enduring prolonged structural unemployment, any one of them could have exhausted a collection of several hundred volumes. Out-of-work men commonly and quite plausibly claimed to read three or four books a week.⁴⁹ In a collective memoir of twenty-five unemployed people, eleven testified that the Great Depression gave them more time for reading (including a London fitter who went through a novel a day), four took up adult classes, and a colliery banksman used the opportunity to write a novel.⁵⁰ “It brought a bubbling sense of freedom at first,” wrote dole-queue veteran Walter Greenwood, “a secret elation in being at liberty to indulge in a feast of uninterrupted reading at home, the public library or in those Manchester bookshops where, by tacit consent, the kindly proprietors permitted young men and students to browse among the new books.”⁵¹ “Thousands used the Public Library for the first time,” recalled itinerant laborer John Brown, who read Shaw, Marx, Engels, and classic literature until he exhausted his South Shields library. “It was nothing uncommon to come across men in very shabby clothes kneeling in front of the philosophy or economics shelves.”⁵² If the library stocked Jane Austen (or Mrs. Henry Wood, for that matter) she would have been read, simply because she was on the shelves. “I just went through the catalogue,” recalled Jack Lawson, and without any more guidance than that he was introduced to Dickens, Scott, Charles Reade, George Eliot, the Brontës, Hardy, Hugo, Dumas, Shakespeare, and Milton.⁵³

The lack of new books only encouraged literary conservatism among the miners, who continued to read Victorian best-sellers into the 1930s. Even in prosperous times their libraries had relied partly on purchases and donations of used books, and they always tended to preserve their old stock. Of 1,433 volumes in the Treharris Institute library catalog in 1894, about 900 were still there 31 years later; and all but thirty of the 953 volumes in the 1896 Cymmer Institute catalog were in the 1913 catalog as well.54

Availability, according to Q. D. Leavis, explains why the masses attended Shakespeare in 1600: “Happily they had no choice.” Except for bearbaiting and a few chapbooks, what else competed for their attention?⁵⁵ In the twentieth century, she argued, capitalism produced an ever-increasing flood of trash novels—and by virtue of their sheer volume, these diverted readers from the great books. In an isolated mining village, where there was nothing much to read but some tattered copies of Victorian classics, the corruption of reading tastes might be delayed, but inevitably The Bowery Murder and The Slave Junk would penetrate the remotest Welsh valleys. As if to confirm Mrs. Leavis, the Markham library acquired, by March 1935, a new batch of books by lowbrow authors: Warwick Deeping, Jeffery Farnol, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace. The borrowing record up to October 1936 does indeed manifest a literary Gresham’s Law, with bad books forcing out the good. In the rush to read Anna the Adventuress, Captain Crash, The Sloane Square Mystery, and Pretty Sinister, borrowings of the English classics drop precipitously.

The next phase in the ledger, from April 1937 to March 1940, reveals an even more striking shift in quite another direction, produced by a world in crisis. Ethiopia had been conquered, the Japanese had invaded China, a civil war was raging in Spain, a European war was on the horizon. In Markham, the escapist fiction that was so popular a few years before had dramatically given way to the literature of political commitment: Zola’s Germinal (18 loans), Henri Barbusse’s antiwar novel Under Fire (7), Walter Brierley’s Means Test Man (11), Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (22), Ralph Bates’s Lean Men (on the Spanish Revolution of 1931, 13 loans), Mulk-Raj Anand’s The Coolie (9), and Robert Tressell’s bitter proletarian novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (20). Markham miners read Quiet Flows the Don (10) and the socialist realism of Feodor Gladkov’s Cement (22). Salka Valka, a portrait of Icelandic fishermen by Halldór Laxness, won a large following (18 loans) with its Christian communist message. The same readers still found Marx hard to tackle, but ten of them borrowed Engels’s The Origin of the Family. Proletarian intellectuals like T. A. Jackson, Bert Coombes, W. H. Davies, Willie Gallacher, and Joseph Dietzgen had a few borrowers each. But even in this politically conscious phase, readers in all three communities were more interested in conflicts abroad than in issues closer to home. Ellen Wilkinson’s polemic on unemployment in Jarrow, The Town That Was Murdered, had only one borrower. There was more interest in Agnes Smedley’s China Fights Back (7), John Langdon-Davies’s Behind the Spanish Barricades (3), and Mein Kampf (6). Hywel Francis may have exaggerated the proletarian internationalism of the Welsh coalfields, but it certainly existed here, where the banner of the Markham Miners’ Lodge proclaimed “The World is Our Country: Mankind are Our Brethren.”56

The final section of the register covers July to December 1940—the Battle of Britain—and once again there is a marked change in borrowing habits. Now politics gives way to Outlaws of Badger Hollow, Murder Must Advertise, Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Wallace, and Marie Corelli. Perhaps the Nazi–Soviet Pact had dampened interest in Russia. The war had created new jobs, but not necessarily in the mines: many former colliers now made long and tiring commutes to munitions factories.⁵⁷ That might explain why the people of Markham now sought relief in easy reading. Only two of them borrowed anything as challenging as Point Counter Point—the only appearance of modernist literature in the entire ledger.

Decline and Fall

There were, then, intellectuals and Marxists among the Welsh colliers, but they were minorities concentrated in certain places and certain intervals in time. As the prime movers behind the miners’ libraries, they represented the last efflorescence of the Victorian ethos of mutual improvement. When they died or moved away (between 1921 and 1931 more than a third of the population aged fifteen to twenty-nine left the Rhonnda valleys) there were no successors to carry on the institutes. By 1934 the signs of decline were obvious:

To-day a number of the Institutes are dormant; housed in dull buildings, painted in sombre browns and deadly terra cotta; cinema and billiards going strong and education going weak; a complete neglect of the needs of women and girls, and more often than not of the younger generation of boys; no cooperation with other Institutes; a very small annual addition of new books; little or nothing being done to help the leisure problem of the unemployed.⁵⁸

In 1937 the Blaina Institute had 300 to 400 members (down from 1,000) paying 3d. weekly. (The population of the district had fallen by more than a quarter since 1923.) Books could still be borrowed from the institute library for 1d. each, and nearly 400 individuals did so, but of those only thirty went in for any kind of serious or leftist literature: the rest only read escapist fiction. Lectures at the Blaina Institute still had a following, but adult education was much less popular and far less available than it had been before the war.⁵⁹

Maes yr haf Educational Settlement, established in 1927, found a ready audience among unemployed miners for its courses in philosophy and history, and it succeeded in overcoming the isolation of the mining villages, where even diligent autodidacts knew little of towns in the next valley. Among its students, as one observer noted, it managed “to create a sense of confidence in the outside world, and so to help break through the reluctance and doubt of men trained from childhood with little or no idea of other places or other work beyond that of mining.” In so doing, however, Maes yr haf encouraged the best minds to leave the coalfields. As early as 1929, it was apparent that

The keenest people—those who are attracted by the prospect of further education—are also those who have, or who gain, the enterprise to embark on new ventures and a new life far removed from the old. Incidentally, this creates a real difficulty in the maintenance of attendance and standards of work in the classes .… Maes yr haf is continually losing some among its most promising students; it would be failing in duty if it did not encourage and help men to leave the stricken locality. It is only by working out to its own destruction continually in this sense, that the Settlement can make its fullest contribution to South Wales.60

Walter Haydn Davies, a colliery worker turned adult education teacher, recalled that most members of his miners’ institute debating society aimed to acquire the intellectual skills necessary for upward mobility. “By the time the late Twenties came most of us had obtained positions in such institutions as the church, in teaching, the police force, the automobile industry, in electricity and chemicals, and in the distributive trades.” There was also a singer, a labor relations officer with the National Coal Board, a miners’ agent, some colliery officials, and a bookie.⁶¹ In 1939 an investigator reported a general awareness among miners that the decline of coal was irreversible. Of fifty colliers’ sons in an elementary school, he found only six who wanted to go into the mines, of whom four aspired to be foremen. All the students at a Junior Technical School were aiming at other lines of work, usually clerical, teaching, or skilled mechanical.⁶²

“There are marvellous opportunities for educational and cultural development, of which we were deprived in our days,” said an old miner-intellectual after the Second World War, “but they are not used.” Only the least educated and ambitious remained in the pits, and their reading tastes ran to romances and crime stories.⁶³ Welfare institutes closed their libraries as the expansion of public library services made them superfluous. One Yorkshire coal town had no public library until 1925, and no full-time librarian until 1942. By 1953 the public library was issuing more than 5,000 books a month in a community of 14,000, and had effectively replaced the reading room at the imposing Miners’ Welfare Institute, which was no longer used for that purpose.⁶⁴ In Bargoed the miners’ institute only issued 2,661 books in 1961, down from 33,021 in 1931. The typical institute had become, said one ex-collier, a “stark waste of froth and strip-tease, surrounded by the slick decor of vinyl-covered easy chairs and formica-covered tables and glistening counters that click to the sound of glass.”⁶⁵ The Tredegar Institute, which spent more than £1,000 a year on books in the late 1940s, was broken up in 1964. Nearly all of its magnificent collection is lost.66 The last Rhonnda colliery (Mardy) closed in 1990. Only two Welsh miners’ libraries (at the Cwmaman Institute and Trecynon Hall) survived to the end of the century.⁶⁷

For comparison, one could look to the vast network of libraries maintained by the German Social Democratic Party and trade union movement. The trade unions alone supported at least 547 libraries in 1911. By then they were already reporting patterns of borrowing that would later show up in the Welsh miners’ libraries. The Central Workers’ Library in Gotha was typical: in 1909 light literature accounted for 1,818 loans, more than two-thirds of the total. There was limited demand for the classics (150 loans), science (162), history (239), and social science (66), and scarcely any interest in party literature (13) or trade unionism (6). A Mittweida library reported that in 1909 its 404 volumes of literature had been checked out 6,288 times, more than fifteen loans per volume, whereas 552 volumes on politics and economics were borrowed 1,076 times, just under two loans per volume. There is evidence, moreover, to support Mrs. Leavis’s theory that increasing availability of light reading crowded out serious books. Between 1891 and 1911, loans of fiction from the Berlin Woodworkers’ Library increased from 14.6 to 70.4 percent of the total; at the same time, natural science fell from 13.5 to 3.4 percent, social science from 22.7 to 2.2 percent, poetry from 12.6 to 4.3 percent. German workers did read novels with a social conscience, such as Germinal and Disraeli’s Sybil, and they were interested in utopian literature, particularly August Bebel’s Woman Under Socialism and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. But like their counterparts in South Wales, they found Marx difficult to digest. Friedrich Stampfer borrowed Karl Kautsky’s popularization of Das Kapital and found only the first twenty pages heavily thumbed: the rest was “virgin purity.”⁶⁸

By and large, then, Mrs. Leavis was right, but with some qualifications. Though Welsh miners certainly had an enormous appetite for thrillers, Westerns, and tepid sex, they did not entirely ignore Charlotte Brontë. They did ignore the moderns, but in the late 1930s more than a few of them wanted to know more about Germany, Spain, the Soviet Union, and even Iceland. The “mass reading public” was not an undifferentiated mass: even within the circumscribed area of the Welsh coalfields, reading tastes could vary considerably over time and between communities. And after all, these conclusions are based largely on a sample of only three towns: they may well be upset when someone finds a fourth library ledger. Perhaps, across the valley, they were reading Mrs. Dalloway.