These Poor Hands - The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales

By B. L. Coombes

Coombes' title These Poor Hands first published in 1939, was an instant best-seller, catapulting the author to the forefront of proletarian writers. Coombes was born in England, but he lived for a large part of his in the Vale of Neath, South Wales, and as the economic problems of the 30s worsened, he turned to writing as a way to spread the news of the plight of miners and their communities to the wider world. He presented the daily life of miners in documentary fashion, with special attention to the damaging lockouts of 1921 and 1926, These Poor Hands retains the power to astonish readers with its description of the ways that unfettered capitalism can lay waste to pure human potential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781447496199

Reviews for These Poor Hands - The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't think I can quite say I liked reading this: it's an autobiography of a miner who worked in various mines for most of his life. While parts of it are fictionalised slightly to avoid libel and so on, and there isn't much of Bert Coombes as a person in it, it's very informative about the conditions in the mines and the kind of men who worked there.

The title has been thought self-pitying, but I think it's perfect. In the introduction to The Valley, The City, The Village, by Glyn Jones, by Stevie Davies, he points out that 'hands' has many meanings, that the miners themselves are referred to as 'hands'. They were referred to by the use they were put to, as so many pairs of hands rather than as people. Coombes' title for his work takes on so many meanings then... his own hands, no doubt cut and bruised and twisted by his work; the likewise mistreated hands of those he refers to; the miners as a whole; their poverty...

You get the idea.