How Green Was My Valley

This was one of my favorite books as a child and probably one reason I became an anthropologist of mining.

Though I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, I found it fascinating that in a place where everything is doing the same job, especially a highly dangerous and damaging job, other aspects of culture coalesce around that job and its meanings—things like religion, kinship, gender, leisure, ecology, etcetera. I was deeply moved by the description of the vast slag heap that slowly came to tower over the town, eventually engulfing the narrator’s small house. 

This book is a childhood favourite.

A touching and intimate account that brings me to tears every time I read it. I love how its simple narrative is infused with poetry and how you can hear the gentle Welsh lilt.

All this brings the story to life, and makes its hopes, joys, and tragedies so very poignant. 

Another book that features striking miners but, this time, set in Victorian Wales. It’s more fiction than autobiography, but I do believe in its portrayal of a family trying to deal with the change from Victorian values to more modern ones. The father clings to his belief in traditional forms of authority and in the power of prayer. The sons believe in unions and fighting for what they feel are workers’ rights. There’s more to How Green Was My Valley than that, but I felt I learnt something. It hadn’t occurred to me that the growth of unions could be… show more.