The Rumney Valley is where I come from. The miners in them days were beginning to organise themselves. It was them (the mine owners) on one side and we on the other. It was them and us, more vividly then than it is now. The result was they got to a crash. The miners stuck out for more money which by God they were entitled to. I can tell a host of stories in which they were manhandled — always. They were locked out.
I'll give you an instance and I worked down the mine for two years, previous to the 1926 strike. The colliers weren't allowed to throw any small coal into their drams. This was the injustice of it all. They were supposed to load the dram with all lump coal, which was saleable. By the time the coal got to the bottom of the pit, it had got shaken about. It had travelled as much as three or four miles from where they had worked it. Instead of a ton of lump coal, which they would get paid for, there was perhaps half a ton or three quarters of a ton. The small coal would be put into coke ovens and made into gas and coke. They'd sell that to people. I myself used to go up and get coke because you couldn't afford coal.
The reason why I came up from South Wales to Bristol was because we were only getting one basin full of soup. It wasn't enough was it! Dad said, 'Well I'm going to go back up to Bristol.' He originated from Bristol He was born and bred on Barton Hill. He was a carpenter. He came to Bristol because he managed to get a job as a foreman carpenter with a firm that came from London to build nouses out at Somerdale. They finished up building about a hundred houses out there. Dad came up about six months before us, and was living in Avondale Rd.
I came to Bristol via London. You remember the hunger marches.
Well we marched to London from South Wales. As I say the miners had organised. When we got to the Forest of Dean, we linked up with another crowd, from another part of Wales. Then when we got the other side of Gloucester, we linked up with the Barrow mob. Loads of books was written about the Barrow shipyard. Now that was terrible.
Then we were at a very rough estimate about 20,000 or 30,000 men. If you think of the Rovers ground chock-a-block with people, that was the crowd we had. I was only about 15 at the time. Never been outside of South Wales before, apart from coming to Bristol. We weren't allowed to dress up tidy and neat. It was run on a military basis, and you had military discipline as well. You had the outrunners.
They'd go ahead and arrange for the mob coming up behind. They'd be eight or nine hours, perhaps a day ahead. And they'd contact farmers and such like people.
When you'd come to a town the band would strike up. And a very good band at that too. Ex-servicemen most of them. Singing — you know what the Welsh are like singing. Male voice choirs. Going along you'd see the women crying with the emotion of the singing. Very stirring. I wouldn't have missed it - not for all the tea in China. We never starved. I sat down many a time with half a chicken. If we couldn't get it we did rustle it. If there were a lot of chickens running about, someone would say in a typical Welsh lingo,
'Well the farmer there he's got a lot of cattle. Look at all them chickens running about. He wouldn't miss a couple of them . . ..'
When I got to London, my particular mate, a chap by the name of Jimmy Davis, he got a job then in a restaurant. And I was there for six weeks. I was down in a cellar washing up. All I could see was, through a small window, people walking by, through a grating. Me and Jim Davis, we never see daylight. Then we came back to Bristol.
Mr. Boyce: I've seen the miners in the old days. The miners marches down
from Wales, singing the old songs and the police trying to run them in — trying to frogmarch them.
I was a builder during the bad days, when the miners got locked out. The only thing I've got to say about the building trade, its no bloody good and never will be. Every job I was on — if it was outside — it was rough. There was nothing laid on for you. You had to make your tea in a bucket. Of course conditions could vary. You could make more demands on the employers for more facilities.
There are too many olduns in the building trade who suffered those conditions and say what was good for them is good enough for everyone else. Before the war things was busy — you moved from one job to another. But in the old days when things were tight you had to stick it out. There was many a job where you had to hang on to it or else you was out of work. And of course if you chucked the job up you'd get no dole money. You had to get the sack. You had to persuade the bloke to sack you. There was no security — there was no sick money. Its not much good now.
And the number of blokes I've seen killed in the building trade. I've seen any number of chaps killed or with their backs injured. It was all unnecessary, though sometimes it was the chap's own fault.
You'd get some jobs you'd hang on to because the foreman was alright. In the building trade, if the foreman's alright, the job's alright, no matter how dirty it is. The first job I can remember is working on the Christian Science place. I can remember going down through the joists and skinning my legs. You got used to it. I've had ten thousand jobs since. I've been a sparrow not a canary — till I got on the hospitals in the last few years. But I did not like it. That was the BRI, the General Hospital, the Childrens Home, Dr. Fox. All over the'place.
The foreman in the BRI — he was alright. He was too timid to tell you off. He was that kind of bloke. I expect he's retired now, because the last time I heard about him, he wasn't interested in the job anymore. He was only waiting for his retirement pension to get out of it. There was happy moments there but I didn't like the place.
