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

By Bill Jones and Chris Williams

"These Poor Hands: The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales", was first published in June 1939. It was an instant bestseller, and its fame catapulted its author into the front rank of 'proletarian writers'. B. L. Coombes, an English-born migrant, had lived in the Vale of Neath since before the First World War, but only turned to writing in the 1930s as a way of communicating the plight of the miners and their communities to the wider world. "These Poor Hands" presents, in a documentary style, the working life of the miner as well as the author's experiences in the lock-outs of 1921 and 1926. It demonstrates Coombes' desire to offer an accurate account of the lives of miners and their families, and carries a sincere moral charge in its description of the waste of human potential that is industrial capitalism in decline. Long out of print, "These Poor Hands" has been recognised for over sixty years as the classic miner's autobiography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2002
• ISBN: 9781783160853

Book preview

THESE POOR HANDS

THESE POOR HANDS

The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales

B. L. COOMBES

With an Introduction by

Bill Jones and Chris Williams

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2002

The text by B. L. Coombes © Vivian Davies, 2002

Introduction © Bill Jones and Chris Williams, 2002

First published in 1939 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London.

This edition first published by the University of Wales Press, 2002.

Reprinted 2004, 2010 and 2011.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7083-1563-7

e-ISBN 978-1-78316-085-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A Note on the Text in this Edition

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

Glossary Notes for These Poor Hands

Acknowledgements

The editors and publishers would like to express their thanks to Vivian Davies, the copyright holder of the works of B. L. Coombes, for permission to publish the text of These Poor Hands.

DEDICATED

TO

JOHN LEHMANN

(Editor of New Writing)

who cheered me

by publishing my first short stories

and who encouraged me

to write this book

INTRODUCTION

Bill Jones and Chris Williams

When you read this I shall, probably, be at my work underground and you will know what I have recorded is not what has been told to a journalist as copy, or the recollections of one who has been but a short time as a worker … it is the feelings of a man who has written it while he was still inhaling the dust and taking the ‘bumps’.

B. L. Coombes¹

These Poor Hands: The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales was published in June 1939 by Victor Gollancz Ltd of London. This introduction to its reissue, more than sixty years later, seeks to explain the book’s genesis and describe the response it generated amongst readers and reviewers on first release. It also assesses the status of the book both as a canvas depicting the work and society of the Welsh mining valleys and as a working-class autobiography that sought not just to describe that world but also to change it for the better. First, this introduction must tell the story, rather more fully than These Poor Hands does itself, of the book’s author, B. L. Coombes.

Bertie Louis Coombs Griffiths was born on 9 January 1893 at 30 Dudley Road, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, the son of James Coombs Griffiths, grocer, and of Harriett Thompson.² The details of Coombes’s early life are unclear: in These Poor Hands it is implied that his father served with the armed forces during the ‘South African War’; presumably meaning the Boer War of 1899–1902 (rather than that of 1880–1, or of any other imperial conflict in southern Africa in the late nineteenth century). What is not explained in These Poor Hands is that, by the time Coombes was around ten years old, he was living in Treharris, Glamorgan, whilst his father and uncles worked at the local Deep Navigation colliery.³ At some stage, probably in 1906, the family (now using the surname Cumbs, Cumbes or Coombes) moved again, to Madley in Herefordshire, which Coombes regularly referred to as his family’s ‘native’ county, which may suggest that they lived there before going to Treharris.⁴ Coombes’s father became the tenant of Blenheim Farm, Madley and Coombes himself worked as an agricultural labourer, both for his father and on neighbouring farms.⁵ The opening chapter of These Poor Hands gives a vivid account of Coombes’s disillusionment with rural life and its prospects: however, it does not tell of the year Coombes spent as a groom (1909), working for a doctor in the Herefordshire countryside, which he was only to write about in his autobiographical memoir, ‘Home on the Hill’.⁶

Coombes moved to Resolven in the Vale of Neath in Glamorgan to work in the mines, probably in 1910 when he was seventeen.⁷ In September 1913 he married Mary Rogers, who was of a similar age and whose father was the checkweigher and South Wales Miners’ Federation (SWMF) lodge secretary at Ynysarwed colliery.⁸ Mary was a local, who spoke Welsh as her mother tongue, and Bert learned sufficient Welsh to be able to carry on a conversation, although there is no evidence that he ever read or wrote the language. In 1914 daughter Rose was born, followed in 1924 by son Peter.

In 1919 the Coombeses moved to 10, New Inn Place, Resolven, a terraced house next to a public house of the same name, where they lived until 1937. Bert became a keen reader, cricketer and, from 1926 onwards, a violinist. He took a leading role in the local St John Ambulance Association and occasionally trained as part of the Military Hospital Reserve in Aldershot. He also acted as secretary or impromptu letter-writer for a number of societies in the area. As he explains in These Poor Hands, he worked at various local collieries, including the Empire colliery, Cwmgwrach, in diverse capacities: hewer, repairer, machine man and ambulance man. He suffered serious injuries in underground accidents in 1930 and 1934, and witnessed the mutilation and even death of many colleagues and friends. According to his later testimony, it was one such experience, when a colleague was killed alongside him, that stimulated him to write. This episode he fictionalized, using his own character as a neutral foil rather than as the actual observer, in chapter 13 of These Poor Hands. The same experience also formed the basis for his renowned short story of 1939, ‘Twenty tons of coal’, published in New Writing.⁹

Coombes began writing in the early 1930s. He was already a student of literature, drawing his most direct inspiration from writers including Thomas Hardy, Robert Tressell, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Jack London, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and, subsequently, Lewis Jones.¹⁰ He benefited from adult education classes run locally by the National Council of Labour Colleges (he later wrote ‘I owe these classes a debt I shall not forget’).¹¹ He joined the British Scribbler writing circle, where aspirant writers circulated stories and plays for mutual and constructive criticism, the whole enterprise having been initiated by two Oxford dons.¹² Balancing what was frequently an exhausting job, family life, involvement in a wide variety of social activities and the dedication necessary to succeed as a writer demanded an immense commitment both from Coombes and from his wife Mary. With only a basic education, and with no prior experience of writing anything much longer than a letter, he had to withstand repeated rebuffs before encouragement came: ‘Each story I sent out I thought was a masterpiece – but they came back.’¹³ Once success began to flow, he had to learn to survive on little sleep – ‘I have no time to waste – my problem is to get forty-eight hours’ work into each day’ – and to be prepared to write on the kitchen table amidst the regular hurly-burly of the household, with the local brass band practising in the pub next door every night of the week save one.¹⁴ Only in 1937 did the Coombes family move from New Inn Place to Oak Lodge, where for the first time Coombes had a room of his own for writing, in which he could meditate and select his material.¹⁵ However, this room had no fireplace and was bitterly cold in winter.¹⁶ Coombes later wrote of the ‘terrific struggle a man of the working class must put up before he can get through as a writer … writing must be in every pulse of his being if he can survive and express himself at last.’¹⁷ It was fortunate then for him that ‘reading or writing, those activities which give the majority of people headaches, seemed to charm my pains away’.¹⁸

Often an observational writer, Coombes could find his raw material all around him. He carried a small notebook to record unusual sayings and rehearsed mental descriptions of pit life whilst he worked. Every day he tried to ‘learn and remember one little point or trick’.¹⁹ In a newspaper article in 1946 Coombes considered that although, for working-class writers, the relentless demands of a working life could be exhausting, there were significant compensations:

In one respect only are they most fortunate, for they have abundant material for making literature and drama right near their doors. They know how their fellows live and work, hope and despair. Their hard conditions of living and working have given them a forthright view of life. Their writing should have a simplicity and a virility which cannot be copied by those who have lived more comfortable lives. They feel as the workers feel, and if they have the gift, can find a drama in every house in every grey street.²⁰

Coombes felt that he had to maintain a strong contact with this vibrant social world, or else he might ‘lose intimacy’ and risk a creative death.²¹ Notwithstanding the persistent physical danger, mental strain and relatively poor monetary rewards of mining, Coombes prized his ‘rootedness’, his secure grounding in his craft, class and the society of the valley in which he lived.

From 1934, initially attempting to write a novel rather than an autobiography, and searching for a style ‘that he could wear like a skin’, Coombes gained confidence in his abilities, and began to enjoy a measure of success.²² In 1935 he penned a critique of the government’s Distressed Areas policy for the monthly political magazine the Welsh Labour Outlook.²³ In 1936 he was a prize-winner in an essay competition run by Left Review, and that year John Lehmann, the poet, publisher and editor of New Writing, accepted his short story ‘The flame’, which was published in 1937.²⁴ Coombes won another prize for an essay on the life of a colliery ambulance man, published by the Daily Herald, and by this stage was sending off short stories and articles to numerous magazines and reviews, with publications following in Left Review, Life and Letters Today, Reynolds News, Health and Efficiency and New Writing.²⁵ Coombes was approached by Fact magazine to write a pamphlet for their series.²⁶ His contribution, I Am a Miner, came out in February 1939, and was hailed as a ‘brilliant example’ of a ‘worker-autobiography’ in its own right.²⁷

Coombes was clearly fortunate in that the political and intellectual climate of the late 1930s was particularly receptive to the sort of documentary ‘truth’ in which he specialized.²⁸ To many observers, capitalism, whether it appeared in its international or its local guise, was manifestly in crisis. Fascism, unemployment, poverty, ill health and social decay were clear signs, at least to those who believed in constructing a more just and humane society, that their mission was critical, and that the current state of affairs could no longer be tolerated. Through his writing, Coombes articulated the social and economic injustice of contemporary capitalism and its dissipation of human talent, resources and lives. Like latter-day Latin American writers of testimonio (testimonial literature) his was a ‘subaltern’ voice bearing witness to the exploitation of the (British) working class and to its continuing struggle for survival.²⁹ These Poor Hands was a 1930s version of the narración de urgencia, inspired by ‘the hope and will to effect change’ and seeking to raise popular consciousness.³⁰ These characteristics made its author, Lehmann thought, ‘most significant of the moment in English [sic] history in which he lived’.³¹ Coombes had the necessary credentials to win favour and attention from progressive intellectuals: undeniably proletarian, he married the gift of clear expression with a stamp of authenticity.

Coombes’s initial and continuing inspiration was to rectify what he felt was an overwhelming public ignorance of the nature of miners’ lives, in and out of work. As Christine Millar, reviewing I Am a Miner for Plebs magazine, noted, there were many members of the general public for whom

the word ‘miner’ signifies underfeeding the family to get titbits for the whippet, squandering high wages on horses and pools or loafing on the dole. Intelligent interest in efficient mine-working, and sympathy for the miner’s case appear to be growing, but there is still a vast body of ignorant and unsympathetic critics who, without bothering to seek accurate information, denounce the miners wholesale, as a class, and their wives, as improvident and incapable of making ends meet …³²

The best way to combat such misrepresentations, considered Coombes, was to provide a simple record of life: ‘I’ll try to tell the world what really happens underground and in our villages as a miner sees it.’³³ There was no need for hyperbole or sentimentality, for aggressive rhetoric or stereotyped dogma, as he explained in a later radio broadcast:

Propaganda in plenty had been sent out but usually that is so blatant that it defeats its aim. What I felt was needed was the stories which came direct from the miners themselves. Books by working miners would increase people’s knowledge and such books would endure after the speeches were forgotten.³⁴

In aiming for the widest possible readership and in allowing his sharp anecdotes to tell their own stories, Coombes’s subtle but uncompromising political critique found a receptive audience far larger than that open to more obviously didactic prose.

The first mention we have of what was to become These Poor Hands is in a letter Coombes wrote to Victor Gollancz in February 1937.³⁵ Coombes explained that he had heard that Gollancz was searching for an account of the mining experience and suggested that he write a novel. He expressed his awareness that to write for the Left Book Club was to write for a specific market – ‘a book written on the lines the Club wants would be alarming to the ordinary publisher’. Gollancz’s reply encouraged not a novel but autobiography or ‘direct description’.³⁶ Apparently simultaneously, and as they exchanged the proofs of ‘The flame’, Lehmann suggested that Coombes should write his autobiography. Coombes accepted this idea with enthusiasm: ‘If any one knows the inside of mining it should be myself.’ He committed himself to write the first 20,000 words within a month and to send it to Lehmann for his opinion.³⁷ Lehmann advised Coombes to take more time, while securing his agreement to give Lehmann’s publishers, Lawrence and Wishart, first refusal.³⁸ Coombes informed Lehmann that Gollancz had also asked him to write something similar, and explained how he intended to open the work: ‘I have started somewhere about my eighteenth year with a few hints about my earlier life. It was at that age I came to the mines and I surmised you wanted my mining experiences most.’³⁹ By June Coombes had written about 50,000 words of what he termed an ‘autobiographical novel’ and sent this to Lehmann in mid-July. At this stage he was clearly aware that Gollancz might still be interested in the manuscript if Lawrence and Wishart were not, and that it would stand a chance of being published as a Left Book Club choice.⁴⁰ Lehmann’s response, in late July, was that the work was ‘intensely interesting’ and he told Coombes that he would very much like Lawrence and Wishart’s proposed New Writing Library to have first option on its publication, also suggesting A Miner’s Life as a title.⁴¹ Coombes spent the summer and early autumn working on the manuscript, producing the alternative title of These Poor Hands.⁴² However, in mid-October, Lehmann wrote with the disappointing news that the New Writing Library would not be launched after all and offered to help Coombes find an alternative publisher.⁴³ At this point Coombes turned to Gollancz, whom Lehmann also approached on his behalf, and Coombes sent the manuscript to Gollancz in late October.⁴⁴ Whilst they waited for a response, Lehmann asked Coombes if he could publish ‘something from that last part’ of the book in New Writing.⁴⁵ This request was eventually to generate ‘Twenty tons of coal’.⁴⁶ In March 1938 Coombes heard from Gollancz that he would like to publish These Poor Hands, possibly as a Left Book Club choice.⁴⁷ Lehmann, delighted at the news, requested that Coombes mention his help in a foreword, and Coombes agreed immediately.⁴⁸ There then followed, according to Lehmann, ‘a long and tiresome wait’ whilst Gollancz attempted to find room for These Poor Hands in the Left Book Club schedule.⁴⁹ Finally, in February 1939, Gollancz wrote to Coombes to tell him: ‘I think your book should stir the conscience of people more than any book published for very many years.’⁵⁰ Gollancz believed that These Poor Hands could ‘throw a searchlight on civilisation as it is here in England today’, and his recommendation that it should be the club’s June 1939 ‘book of the month’ had been endorsed by the political scientist Harold Laski and the Labour MP John Strachey.⁵¹ Sales of These Poor Hands reached 50,000 copies by the end of 1939, and it went on to be translated into many European languages, as well as appearing in a Braille version.⁵²

It is interesting to consider the extent to which Coombes’s manuscript was subjected to changes at the hands of Lehmann and Gollancz. It needs to be understood that Coombes was fully aware that his first draft was only that, and that revision would be necessary.⁵³ As he explained to Lehmann in July 1937, his ‘method of working’ was first to make ‘rough notes’, then to ‘type out more fully’, and then to have ‘a final and better typing to get it ready for market’. The version he sent to Lehmann at this time was the ‘first typing’, and Coombes solicited Lehmann’s ‘opinion and suggestion’ before putting the manuscript in its final form:

There may be parts you wish me to cut out, or incidents you want me to enlarge upon – I shall value your suggestions and do my best to carry them out to your satisfaction. I feel I have not included enough of the family life in this draft, I will alter that and include further experiences in unemployment struggles, in ambulance work in the mine, impressions of training centre and forestry, and the struggle to get, and our failure in the end to have, pit head baths.

Coombes sought Lehmann’s advice on whether to include his ‘writing experiences or only tell it as a straight-forward mining tale’ and asked him whether he should mention ‘real names and place names’.⁵⁴ Lehmann advised him to keep ‘all your experiences as a writer’ for a future volume and not to ‘bother much about family life or the training centre and forestry’. He felt that Coombes’s ‘discoursiveness’ (sic) was a weakness and that he was better when he adopted a ‘tense and vivid style’:

… I think you could improve it by cutting out quite ruthlessly all sentences and paragraphs which seem to you on second reading not to have any very direct bearing on the theme of whatever chapter it may be.You want as far as possible to give each chapter a unity of its own, and also perhaps to make the book progress a little more than it does at the moment.

As for giving ‘real names of people and places’, Lehmann advised not, on the grounds of the risk of libel.⁵⁵ Coombes then began his complete rewriting, intending at this stage to send the revised manuscript to Lehmann by the end of September 1937, and granting him ‘permission’ to ‘revise as you wish’.⁵⁶ However, the failure of the New Writing Library meant that Lehmann never saw the revised manuscript.⁵⁷ As for any revision by Gollancz, this concentrated on ensuring that These Poor Hands was neither libellous nor would lead to Coombes being ‘victimised and dismissed’.⁵⁸ Gollancz asked Coombes to distance himself from the ‘Twenty tons of coal’ episode by rewriting it as a letter from a friend.⁵⁹ Coombes however ‘could not imagine that effective’ and so rewrote it as happening elsewhere and to others.⁶⁰ Of course Coombes, a tyro writer, was influenced by Lehmann’s and Gollancz’s experience and worldliness, but ultimately it was his story, and his alone. When it was suggested to Gollancz that he had ‘asked for more class-war stuff – which was duly put in’, Gollancz responded that that was ‘a damned lie’ and threatened to sue were such an allegation to be repeated.⁶¹

On its publication in June 1939 These Poor Hands aroused widespread interest and praise for its authenticity, its understated but natural style and its powerful, persuasive critique of capitalist control of the coal industry. Left Book Club meetings across Britain, from Falkirk to Canterbury and from Weston-super-Mare to Newcastle upon Tyne, took Coombes’s life story as their text, and a syllabus and notes for discussion were circulated to local club leaders to assist them in focusing the enthusiastic response of the left-leaning reading public.⁶² Coombes himself received letters complimenting him on his achievement and thanking him for his message from strangers far and near: Joyce Harrison of Letchworth wrote of being ‘very deeply moved’ by These Poor Hands; Meurig James of Abercwmboi thought it ‘a remarkable and vivid chronicle’; Gwilym Davies of Seven Sisters praised Coombes for having ‘done a great service to the sons of toil’; and George Bayliss, from Merthyr but living in Kent, was just one Welsh ‘exile’ to thank the author for his evocation of the friendship and communal solidarity of the mining valleys. Tom Harrisson of the Mass Observation movement conveyed his appreciation, as did Resolven District Miners’ Welfare Association, and others wrote in similar vein from Belfast, Bournemouth, Cornwall, London, Scotland and New Zealand.⁶³ D. Jeffrey Williams wrote to Victor Gollancz saying he was ‘deeply impressed’, that the book’s ‘simple humanity and simple diction have an overwhelming appeal’ and that ‘Mr Coombes makes that other world of the mines and the mining valleys a reality.’⁶⁴

The majority of published reviews also welcomed These Poor Hands, although some were uncomfortable with Coombes’s politics. Anthony Powell in the Spectator considered that Coombes was at his best ‘when he keeps to his personal experience’ and did not plead ‘for a change in the social order’.⁶⁵ The Times Literary Supplement felt that, whereas ‘Mr Coombes commands the reader’s sympathy for his miners when they are underground’, ‘if Mr Coombes be taken as a typical spokesman for the miners what does emerge is disquieting’.⁶⁶ On the other hand, Punch was happy to consider These Poor Hands ‘an excellent piece of objective writing, in which humour and a gift of quick description are marked’ and, although The Listener felt Coombes’s style to be ‘pedestrian’ and his ‘occasional descriptions poor’, it praised his lack of vindictiveness and acknowledged that ‘some of the injustices he describes make one sick’.⁶⁷ The opinion of Colliery Engineering (a trade journal for mining engineers), that the ‘fine picture of colliery life’ in These Poor Hands was nevertheless ‘marred by the author’s bias’, particularly towards mine officials, was perhaps to be expected.⁶⁸ Yet, notwithstanding the Cardiff daily Western Mail’s historic status as the mouthpiece of the coalowners, its tribute that ‘one had the safe feeling that what is here described is truth and not propaganda’ was rather more revealing.⁶⁹ As for Coombes’s local weekly, the Neath Guardian, it called These Poor Hands ‘a great book’, ‘a revelation’ and ‘a virile work crowded with interest’.⁷⁰

Attitudes on the political left were, by and large, even more enthusiastic. In Left News John Strachey felt that Coombes had produced a book ‘which hardly anyone could read without great pleasure and without great emotion’.⁷¹ The reviewer for the Daily Herald thought These Poor Hands ‘one of the most moving autobiographies I have read’, Ernest Bairstow in Tribune praised its humanity, and the novelist, critic and short-story writer V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman and Nation considered it ‘an honest, humane document, absorbing in its simplicity and dignity’.⁷² In Reynolds Sunday News, D. R. Grenfell, the Labour MP for the Gower constituency, and soon to be secretary of state for mines in Churchill’s wartime coalition government, ended his review of Coombes’s story thus:

I would like to say ‘Shw Mai’ to him, and I want him to be read by his fellow workers, by gaffers and measurers, and by the general public, who will learn from him something of the underworld where men and machines are yoked more and more closely in modern methods for winning and transporting coal for the greater power and comfort of those who dwell above.⁷³

A few reviewers to the left of the Labour Party found fault with the apparent absence of political didacticism in These Poor Hands. Common Cause, the official organ of the Miners’ Federation of Australia, paid Coombes’s autobiography a tribute by comparing it with Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, but also felt that it was, in part, ‘politically unconscious’ and ‘defeatist’.⁷⁴ In Labour Monthly the Welsh Communist Idris Cox acknowledged that ‘as a piece of descriptive writing on the dangers and trials of a miner’s life there is nothing to beat this book’. However, Cox suggested that Coombes himself did ‘not seem capable of drawing any political conclusions’, had ‘not yet understood the real nature of class society’, and ‘is not yet convinced that our job is to change the world as well as describe it’.⁷⁵ SWMF president (and also a Communist) Arthur Horner felt that Coombes fell short in giving ‘so little space to the effect of the work of the trade union: it is clear that the author has been a loyal member of the organisation throughout, but that he has not participated sufficiently in it to be able to give a more complete appraisal of its work’. Yet Horner, sophisticated pragmatist that he was, immediately qualified this criticism by adding: ‘Perhaps in the circumstances it is better to have a straightforward simple life story of a miner, for the facts revealed will speak for themselves in such manner as to win the support of all honest people for the miners.’⁷⁶ In a letter to Coombes Horner subsequently acknowledged that ‘it is just as well that a book had been written which was not too propaganda [sic] in character’ and pledged that he would ‘follow with great interest anything you write because I appreciate the reality which you express’.⁷⁷

Virtually all commentators, whatever their political stance, agreed that These Poor Hands did express the reality of the miner’s life, that it was a ‘genuinely recorded experience’ and a ‘living portrait’. Coombes, it was felt, demonstrated the capacity ‘to convey his experience to others’, to reach out at one and the same time to miners and to non-miners, to the working class and the middle class, to the Welsh and to the English, and to the world beyond.⁷⁸ The easy, conversational style of These Poor Hands, and the sprinkling of humorous anecdotes throughout the text, gave it humanity and personal warmth. Coombes’s restraint, his absence of bitterness, even when telling stories of death, injury and injustice, was judged to be all the more effective in evoking public condemnation of the conditions under which he and his fellow miners laboured. As Lehmann put it, the ‘absolute simplicity and sincerity of his sketches of miners at their work gives them great strength’.⁷⁹ The cumulative effect of These Poor Hands, he wrote, was to show that miners ‘have a belief in life, a courage and devotion to one another that make those who sit in ease and profit by their labour petty and unworthy as human beings in comparison’.⁸⁰

However, Coombes did attract some criticism for labelling his book an ‘autobiography’. The Times Literary Supplement thought it failed ‘as autobiography because Mr Coombes brings out little about himself except that he has a grievance against society’. Fellow ‘working-class writer’ Herbert Hodge, author of I Drive a Taxi for Fact, reviewing in Life and Letters Today, judged Coombes to be ‘one of the most modest men who ever attempted autobiography. He tells us hardly anything about himself – no more than the minimum of personal detail necessary to explain his reactions to the mine.’⁸¹ In the Welsh Review Glyn Jones lamented that, despite its values, These Poor Hands was too ‘exclusively concerned’ with coal mining as an occupation. Jones thought Coombes ‘an incurable talker of shop. I kept on wishing he could come out from behind his coal dust oftener and tell us more about himself as a human being – about his family and his cricket, and his fiddle, and his writing of course.’⁸² In a letter to Jones, Coombes agreed that he disliked ‘talking about myself’, but promised to ‘alter a little’ in his future work.⁸³

If Coombes’s star as a writer was in the ascendant well before the publication of These Poor Hands, it was his autobiography’s success that confirmed his importance as a working-class writer, a ‘miner-writer’, and which provided the foundation for the rest of his literary career. The book did not make Coombes rich, although he wrote that ‘it smoothed out some of the rough times we lived through’.⁸⁴ He continued writing for Lehmann, bringing out the short story ‘Sabbath night’ in Folios of New Writing in 1940, and the documentary ‘The way we live now’ in Penguin New Writing in 1941.⁸⁵ He responded to Virginia Woolf’s ‘The leaning tower’ with his own ‘Below the tower’ in Folios in 1941, and provided the three-part ‘A miner’s record’ for the same imprint between 1942 and 1943.⁸⁶ Other journals to publish his work during wartime included Fortnightly, Argosy, The Listener, New Statesman and Nation and Geographical Magazine.⁸⁷ He wrote a weekly column for the Neath Guardian from 1940 to 1941 and again from March 1944 to 1971.⁸⁸ Famously Coombes fronted the ‘Plan for Britain’ issue of Picture Post in January 1941 with his piece ‘This is the problem’ and was an occasional contributor to the magazine thereafter.⁸⁹

During the war Coombes also made a handful of radio broadcasts, was involved in writing scripts for documentary films and penned a sizeable section of a pamphlet sponsored by the Liberal Party – The Life We Want – that appeared in 1944.⁹⁰ (Although Coombes was a committed socialist, he seems never to have been an individual member of the Labour Party and occasionally expressed his appreciation of the Liberal Party as well

Reviews for These Poor Hands

[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.