Ton-y-Pandy

Ton-y-pandy, a dreadful name to have sud­denly thrown at you. However, it came like a bomb-shell one Sunday evening. Only once I had heard it before, and that when reading about this year’s two-year-olds: Ton-y-pandy was, I noticed, the curious name of one of them! On hearing there was a real Welsh town of that name, something told me it must be a small mining metropolis, surrounded by mountains, with a railway station, a post-office, a few chapels, and numbers of cottages. On arriving at the station I found my conjectures were fairly right, but again very much wrong—the station, post-office, chapels, and cottages were certainly there, but instead of the bare places noted, I found a large and densely-populated district, of which Ton-y-pandy is the centre. The whole way along the valley, from Ponty­pridd to Treherbert, a distance of fifteen or twenty miles, is one series of mining villages, connected up with a railway, a river (which once, I am told, was a first-class trout stream, but now black with coal-dust and rubbish), and a road, along which you see heavily-loaded trains, winding slowly from one row of cottages to another.

Ton-y-pandy is the centre of the strike area, to which I was bound. There one can see twelve thousand idle men (what a chance for Haldane and his Home Guards!) lounging about the one and only main street: staring at the shop windows, coveting the bric-a-brac behind the plate-glass, which they no longer dare break.

The only occurrence during the week for them is Friday. when strike pay is drawn, and on Saturday the place appears to be a trifle more opulent. The picture palaces, of which there are three, are full. Other days they practically offer bribes to get people there. One can see legs of mutton hanging outside the doors, like a butcher’s shop; these, they tell you, will be given away during the evening; another time large bags of groceries are displayed. I have been to the Ton-y-pandy Empire myself, but no one presented me with a leg of mutton ! I had hopes of swelling the mess fund, which we are running to a very fine art.

On speaking to these idle gentlemen they will tell you they are putting up a very fine fight, and so they are to a certain extent; but little do they know that it will be at least twelve months from the day work commences before the whole twelve thousand will be digging at the bowels of the earth again. A large percentage are beginning to find this inactivity wearisome, and talk of migrating to the country, there obtaining work on the various farms scattered about.

I have been down several pits myself, and no wonder they have to be well paid; the heat is so great down below that in places even if you are only sitting down your clothing becomes soaked in a few minutes. For eight hours these men are cutting out the coal. This coal is cut by day; at night a new relief comes down and repairs the new galleries made by removing the coal; they fill up bare spaces with rubbish and keep it in place by means of baulks and rafters, wedged together by what they call a Welsh notch; by this means the weight of the sur­rounding rock keeps the wood in position, and the wood keeps the rock from falling. The whole, however, sinks to a very appreciable extent, and instead of looking on the ground in front of you, as one usually does when walking, you have to keep a constant eye on the roof, otherwise you bang your head, which usually bleeds and makes a nasty mess, one’s blood running at such a high pressure when four hundred yards below the surface, that even a bruise bleeds.

The four posts in which we are installed are on the four extreme corners of the strike area, and the whole has very aptly been named the Great Quadrilateral. The police have their headquarters in the Skating Rink, which has been turned into one huge barrack room; this is in the centre of Ton-y-pandy. They have small detachments in all the various public houses in the vicinity. Each place is joined up by telephone, and therefore the moment trouble commences everyone can be informed.

But we are still waiting for that trouble everything has been quiet and peaceful since our advent. I believe some of us are looking forward to a wee bit of scrapping!!

I am sure by this time I have bucked too long about Ton-y-pandy and its troubles, and so will not bore either the Editor or readers of the L.B.G. any further.

R. B.