Miners’ lives

Published: 22 September, 2011

• MANY years ago a Durham miner Jim Ellwood wrote a song advising young miners to get out of the pits before their hair turned grey and they were thrown onto the scrapheap.

Idris Davies, a young miner from Rhymney in south Wales did that; studied in the evenings, went to Nottingham University and became a schoolteacher in London.

He was a friend of Dylan Thomas and they drank together in the Fitzroy Tavern.

Idris Davies published three books of poetry and died at the age of 44 from cancer.

One of the poems he wrote, Bells of Rhymney, Pete Seeger put a tune to and the Byrds made the song internationally famous.

The first of three verses goes:

Oh what will you give me?
Say the sad bells of Rhymney.
Is there hope for the future?
Cry the brown bells of Merthyr.
Who made the mine owner?
Say the black bells of Rhondda.
And who robbed the miner?
Cry the grim bells of Blaenau.

In 1960 Pete and his wife Toshi went to visit Mrs Davies, Idris’s mother. Pete described Rhymney as a typical coal mining town 50 yards wide and one mile long.

To the thousands of men, boys and girls who have lost their lives working in the coal mines over the centuries (and do not let us forget the young Bevin Boys who likewise were killed in the 1939-45 war) are now added four more; a terrible tragedy.

Thomas Armstrong, another Durham miner, wrote a song to be printed and sold to raise money for the widows and orphans of the Trimdon Grange disaster which occurred in February 1862 with the loss of 74 men and boys from that small mining community called the Trimdons.

Men and boys set out that morning for to earn their daily bread.
Never thinking by the evening they would be numbered with the dead.
Let’s think of Mrs Burnett once had sons but now has none.
By the Trimdon Grange explosion Joseph, George and James are gone.”

BOB DAVENPORT, WC1