These Poor Hands:

The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales

B. L. Coombes. Edited by Bill Jones and Chris Williams

‘Bill Jones and Chris Williams are to be congratulated for giving us this fine new edition of Bert Coombes’s bestseller.’ New Welsh Review

These Poor Hands: The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales, was first published in June 1939. It was an instant bestseller, and its fame catapulted its author into the front rank of ‘proletarian writers’. B. L. Coombes, an English-born migrant, had lived in the Vale of Neath since before the First World War, but only turned to writing in the 1930s as a way of communicating the plight of the miners and their communities to the wider world.

These Poor Hands presents, in a documentary style, the working life of the miner as well as well as the author’s experiences in the lockouts of 1921 and 1926. It demonstrates Coombes’s desire to offer an accurate account of the lives of miners and their families, and carries a sincere moral charge in its description of the waste of human potential that is industrial capitalism in decline.

Long out of print, These Poor Hands has been recognized for over sixty years as the classic miner’s autobiography. This new edition of the text is fully annotated and accompanied by an introduction that places Coombes’s writing in its historical and literary contexts.

‘The re-publication of this classic volume of reminiscences, out of print for decades, is to be warmly welcomed. Originally published by Victor Gollancz three months before the outbreak of the Second World War, it was immediately acclaimed within Wales and beyond, even earning the fulsome commendation of English critics like J. B. Priestly and Cyril Connelly. The first literary offering of a native of Wolverhampton who had moved to Treharris in his boyhood and had then begun work at a colliery at Resolven in the Vale of Neath in Glamorganshire in 1912 at the age of 18, it was at once deemed to be one of the most vivid and authentic accounts of life in the coal mining industry. Like all of B. L. Coombes's writings, this volume is marked by a lack of sentimentality, but it is infused with a first-hand sympathy for the lot of the south Wales miner and his family during that fateful generation.

The book was applauded as delineating with a moving directness the harshness of living and working conditions in industrial south Wales in the 1920s. The author is at his most compelling when he describes his periods of unemployment during the miners' lockouts of 1921 and 1926. It was during this inauspicious period that he taught himself how to play the violin, trained to be an ambulance man, became prominent within the all-embracing 'Fed' (the South Wales Miners' Federation) and began to put pen to paper seriously for the first time. Coombes's writing also carries a distinct moral message: the tragic waste of human potential which is an inevitable corollary of capitalism in decline. The writer Raymond Williams considered Coombes's work to be 'the most effective writing about mining life in South Wales'.

For this new edition, two of the most prominent of the younger generation of Welsh historians, Professor Chris Williams of the University of Glamorgan and Dr Bill Jones of Cardiff, join forces to provide the text with a most valuable, highly readable introduction and explanatory glossary notes which are genuinely helpful. They were previously the joint authors of a volume on B. L. Coombes in the 'Writers of Wales' series and joint editors of an anthology of his writings entitled With Dust Still in his Throat, both published in 1999 and notably well received. My advice would be to read and savour all three tomes – it would be a richly rewarding experience.’ www.gwales.com

Chris Williams is Professor and Director, Centre for Modern and Contemporary Wales at the University of Glamorgan. Bill Jones is Senior Lecturer in the School of History and Archaeology, Cardiff University. They are authors of B. L. Coombes in the Writers of Wales series and the editors of With Dust Still in His Throat: A B. L. Coombes Anthology.