How Black Was My Valley
Poverty and Abandonment in a Post-Industrial Heartland
by Brad Evans
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Pub Date 9 Apr 2024 | Archive Date 14 Jun 2024
Repeater Books | Repeater
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Description
How Black Was My Valley is a people's history of the former mining communities of South Wales.
Weaving together the personal with the political, it offers a damning depiction of the hardship and suffering, the tragedy and pain, as a politically abandoned people went from powering the British Empire and the Great Wars, to a broken post-industrial community, lost in time.
It travels with devastating and yet humane insight across the dark shadows of the valley’s history. In doing so, it deals with disaster and resistance; memory and landscapes of despair; the brutal past and the neglected present; hardship and poverty; unemployment and isolation; lack of opportunity and the normalisation of hopelessness; death and suffering; structural violence and everyday subjugation; onto the crises of white male subjectivity and the exponential rise in drug abuse and personal suicide, whose troubling effects can no longer be easily contained within its mountainous walls.
This is not a story of resilience. Instead, readers are taken on a journey into an open wound, whose once silent screams can no longer be ignored.
Advance Praise
“Anybody interested in the history of working class resistance, and people’s daily struggles when confronting deep poverty blighting post-industrial communities should read this devastating study”
-- Paul Mason
“Evans’ beautifully crafted words and thoughts are now seared into me forever. Sit with each chapter for a while as its true devastation dawns on you. Thank God these stories are now being told. The boy of the valleys has come home and roared.”
-- Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles: Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster
“A cliche-free, myth-lancing account of a ‘Coal Colony’ discarded by the powers that were after tearing use and relentless abuse. Sometimes lyrical, never romantic he offers analytical passion, acidic candour, some love, deep melancholy, dry mirth, scorn for nostalgia about ‘a past that never really existed’ and an unbreakable grip on truth.”
-- Neil Kinnock
“How Black Was My Valley is more than a memoir. Each carefully constructed sentence, every beautifully recorded or imagined moment, is placed alongside tragedy’s reality, ensuring that the ‘view from below’, as lived by the people who remain in the grip of economic marginalisation, is heard.”
--Phil Scraton, author of Hillsborough: The Truth
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781913462840 |
| PRICE | US$24.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 400 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Tracey M, Bookseller
Intense and well researched. A milestone book (that all politicians should read).”
In the words of Conrad, ''The horror!... The horror!''
The author was brought up in poverty in the valleys of South Wales, which had for so long been reliant on the coal industry. He explains how it was to live in those places and how the way of life changed.
It's very comprehensive, in terms of describing the area geologically , but also its history, culture and traditions (eg chapels) It takes in a broad sweep of history whilst also meditating on what can be drawn from this. In places he is arguing for the poverty inflicted upon the local population as its own form of colonialism/ exploitation (although this lacks all the nuances and ambiguities within this argument that he explores) It's a world away from the romanticised film How Green Was My Valley, which the author reflects in the book's title.
The overwhelming "colour" is black, from the miners to the spoil heaps and the blackness of depression. The abstract pictures which are contained reflect this alternative "hell"
Of course a book about this area is going to be political and especially when it comes to the 80s with strikes and Margaret Thatcher. The author admits that he escaped through education and is no longer living here , which gives him the distance he needs to see it more clearly? However that also raises questions of loyalty and how valid it is to hold the views he does.
He draws on many sources from first person testimony, to the media, music, poetry and art.
Feelings run strongest in the chapter on Aberfan. If you don't know about Aberfan please look it up. You can feel how difficult it is for the author to write on this subject at all . He acknowledges that there are no words (see Conrad's quotation above) He quotes from some excellent poems in this chapter that perhaps do come the closest to expressing it.
He does also discuss contemporary issues like the tragic "spate" of suicides in this region as well as the numbers of people who are poor, depressed and lack hope.
I asked for an ARC of this book (thanks to the publishers ) as I am from North Wales and my Dad was a miner and then worked in the steelworks before that shut in the 80s- there are similar threads. It did make me question my "escape" from Wales but also reflect on the lives of family still there
I would characterise this book as intense and well researched. Brad Evans is also a political activist in his writing of this book. I just hope that local politicians and others read this milestone book.
I would advise reading the great "introduction " by Neil Kinnock- poetic and astute.
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