Cwmbran

My father was born in 1915, and grew up in the small village of Cwmbran in South Wales.

Cwmbran is on the eastern edge of the huge South Wales Coalfield, an area of more or less parallel valleys flowing south from the Brecon Beacons to the sea. The valleys were rich in the mineral resources which fueled the Industrial Revolution. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the small villages in the valleys, and their emerging industries, were connected to seaports first by canals, and then railways. The second half of the nineteenth century was a gold rush: impoverished farm workers from elsewhere in Wales flooded in, and terraced houses were built along the hillsides.

This was the pattern of Cwmbran’s transformation from a quiet rural village to a hive of industry. The valley developed into a smoke-laden network of coal mines, iron foundries, brickworks, and other industries. But the population of the immediate area remained relatively small, and fields and farms were scattered between the villages and factories.

Boom and Bust

In 1915, when my father was born, the area was booming more than ever, thanks to war demand. The ships of the Royal Navy were still predominantly coal-fired, and a “vast mileage” of barbed wire was produced in Cwmbran for the trenches of the Western Front.¹ Those first years must have been happy and secure. His father was the village chemist (pharmacist), a man with some standing in the community.² The family home, the chemist’s shop, and the village elementary school were all a very short walk from each other.

But all this changed around the time my father started intermediate (secondary) school, six miles up the valley in Pontypool. As the BBC described it:

“Danger signals became apparent in the mid 1920s when unemployment among coalminers rose from 2% in April 1924 to 12.5% in January 1925 and to 28.5% in August. The south Wales coalfield, more dependent upon exports than the other British coalfields, was the worst hit.

The decline in the foreign demand for coal was caused by increased coal production elsewhere, the change to oil, the high exchange rate of sterling, the capture of South American markets by the United States, the unmodernised character of British production methods and the loss of European markets because Germany was paying reparations in coal.

The structural unemployment which struck the coalfield in the mid 1920s was exacerbated by the cyclical unemployment caused by the Wall Street crash of 1929. By 1932, when unemployment among Welsh insured males reached 42.8%, Wales was among the world’s most depressed countries.

While unemployment was at its most extreme in coal mining, the depression also hit steel, tinplate, slate and transport workers. Agriculture experienced great hardship, with many fully employed smallholders and farm labourers earning less than those on unemployment benefit.

The depression halted and reversed the industrial growth which had been in full flow for 150 years. It caused massive emigration: Wales lost 390,000 people between 1925 and 1939, and its population did not regain its 1925 level until 1973.” ³

It was no different in my father’s community: “life for ordinary folk [in Cwmbran] in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s was dominated by worry. The area was rife with malnutrition, diptheria, and T.B., as well as economic deprivation.”⁴

There were no opportunities in that time and place for a bright young man.

Next page: Leaving the Valley

1. W.G. Lloyd, Days That Have Been, A Cwmbran History, Pontypridd: self-published, 2006, p. 156.
2. “Pharmacists usually spent much of their time dealing with customers and giving advice. They often spent their working lives in the same place, and became respected members of the community.” Stuart Anderson, “Community pharmacy and public health in Great Britain, 1936 to 2006: how a phoenix rose from the ashes” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 2007 Oct; 61(10), 844-848, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652958/, accessed 21 July, 2024. For a readable and informative overview of medicine in the South Wales valleys, see the 1937 bestselling novel The Citadel by A.J.Cronin, adapted into a successful film (nominated for four Academy Awards) the following year.
3. Guide to Welsh history, chapter 20, War and depression, BBC Wales https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/guide/ch20_part2_war_and_depression.shtml, accessed 4 November, 2020.
4. Tomos Povey, “Seventy years on ‘It’s incredible to see how much Cwmbran has changed’.” South Wales Argus, November 3, 2019. https://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/18012312.seventy-years-it-incredible-see-much-cwmbran-changed/, accessed 25 April, 2020.
   After the Second World War, Cwmbran was chosen as the site of a New Town (one of only two in Wales), a government initiative to revive economically blighted areas. The place became almost unrecognizable to people who grew up there in the prewar years.