Overview

History on Our Side is an account of the great miners' strike of 1984-85 as it happened in the Welsh coalfields, written by a well-known historian of the miners who was also an active participant in the strike. As chair of both the Neath, Dulais, Swansea Valleys' Miners' Support Group and also the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities, Hywel Francis had a unique insight into the way the way in which the struggles for jobs and communities broadened into a powerful national movement in Wales, involving trades unions, political parties, churches, the Welsh Language Society, community, peace, lesbian and gay groups. The study, in particular, highlights the very special role played by women's support groups. The strategy of a broad democratic alliance across Wales is analysed as is the experience of defeat and renewal after 1985. The author contends that the seering experiences of the year-long struggle was a major contributory factor in the founding of the National Assembly for Wales with the slogans 'the NUM fights for Wales' and 'Cau Pwll, Lladd Cymuned' (Close a Pit, Kill a Community), symptomatic of that wider, national struggle and identity. This very personal history explains why the South Wales valleys were the strongest and most loyal of all the British coalfields is based on the author's personal diaries, his articles and essays in several Welsh and British journals including Barn , Llafur , Marxism Today and The New Statesman . This is a story of the individual and collective courage and pain of Welsh miners, their families and their communities; this study will be seen as an important contribution to our understanding of a defining moment in modern Welsh history.

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9781905762453

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Reviews

Hywel Francis is a rare being - a scholar activist whose historical research is also a quest for good politics and for emancipating solidarities. This is his story of South Wales miners' stalwart contribution to the historic1984-5 strike - when women created the means of survival not only for the men but also for entire communities. He brings both insider insights and a wide, humane focus to that fateful year, and the inevitable defeat; the valleys fell silent, but the creative alliances of '84-85 infused new politics in Wales. Beatrix Campbell Award-winning Journalist, Author, Broadcaster, Guardian, Independent, New Statesman ...it is really good; the right tone and the right interpretation! Excellent... Professor Deian Hopkin Vice chancellor, London South Bank University This book is both a retelling of the coal struggle and the struggle for coal. He mines a rich seam of the personal and political, unearthing complexity and heartache Menna Elfyn Internationally renowned Welsh poet Hywel Francis is both historian-as-witness and activist-as -historian in this engrossing account and personal recapture of the Miners' Strike of 1984/5 Professor Dai Smith The Raymond Williams Research Chair in the Cultural History of Wales at Swansea University.

Author Information

Hywel Francis has been inextricably linked to the South Wales mining community all his life. He and his wife, Mair, and all their children, Hannah, Dafydd and Sam, were all active participants in campaigning in support of the miners cause in 1984 85. Towards the end of the strike, Mair was the prime mover in the setting up of DOVE, a women s training workshop at Banwen that grew out of the local women s support group in the Dulais Valley. She is now its president and recently published its history, Up the DOVE!(2008). Hywel Francis was born in the mining community of Onllwyn in the Dulais Valley, the first in five generations (on both sides of the family) not to go underground . His father, Dai Francis, was the general secretary of the South Wales Area of the NUM (1963 76) and the first chair of the Wales TUC (1975). With Dai Smith, Hywel was the official historian of the miners union, publishing The Fed: A History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (1980, reprinted 1998). He also published Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War (1984, reprinted 2004). He was the founder in 1973 of the South Wales Miners Library at Swansea University and an organiser of trade union day release courses for the NUM (1975 90) and community education programmes in the valleys which culminated in the creation of the Valleys Initiative for Adult Education (1987) and the Community University of the Valleys (1993). During the miners strike he was chair of both the Neath Dulais and Swansea Valleys Miners Support Group and the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities and was on the editorial board of Marxism Today. He wrote extensively on the strike in such diverse journals as Barn, Y Faner, Marxism Today, New Socialist and The New Statesman, as well as chapters in Striking Back (1985). He was made a member of the Gorsedd of the National Eisteddfod in Cardigan in 1986 in recognition of his writing and campaigning for the South Wales miners. He has been Labour MP for Aberavon since 2001. He is currently chair of the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs and a trustee of the Bevan Foundation, the independent social justice think tank. Before entering Parliament he was Professor of Continuing Education at Swansea University.

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