Where the Stream Ran Red - Memories and Histories of a Welsh Mining Valley

The memoir of writer and editor Sam Adams. It’s the story of the place where he was raised, Gilfach Goch, Glamorgan, in the early and middle years of the twentieth century; it’s the story of his family yet, in many ways, it’s also a story which will ring true with families throughout the south Wales coalfield, because the narrative takes us as far as the West Indies at the time of slavery, the high seas off Singapore and the pogroms of Tsarist Ukraine.

And this is the story of the entry of Gilfach Goch into history as a mining valley, separate from the anthill of the forked valleys of Rhondda, with its own curious tripartite administration and its own special part to play in the turbulence of the south Wales coalfield.

Out of those years of productivity and optimism and the grinding misery of long, bitter strikes and economic depression, rises a compendium of stories, in which stark and sobering facts jostle with speculative reconstruction of events in past centuries and memories of boyhood in the Valleys. ~Publisher: Y Lolfa

Where the Stream Ran Red is, as its subtitle suggests, part memoir, and part history of the close-knit mining community of Gilfach Goch where Sam Adams (b.1934) grew up. It is also – though this is touched on lightly – the memoir of one of a generation of clever boys and girls who went from elementary to grammar school and then on to university (in the author’s case, Aberystwyth), a development which led to a subtle insider/outsider relationship to the family and community that shaped him as a child. It was an education which, among other things, separated Sam Adams from his father (while he never ceased to love him) and the world of ‘The Squint’, the pit where his father worked as an electrician, and where he suffered a horrific accident to his hand which incapacitated him for the rest of his life, though he kept on working. The memoir moves back and forward in time, and from close-ups of family members – especially his parents and his sisters Barbara and Joan – to wider considerations of the impact of the coal industry on Gilfach Goch and its development, and the effect of the two world wars on the town, especially the second in which his brother-in-law Leighton was lost at sea in the Far East. Probing into family history turns up surprises. He discovers, for example, that three of his mother’s great uncles emigrated to the West Indies in the early nineteenth century at a time when agriculture there was driven by slavery, something in which, he feels, they must have been implicated. It is also possible, though not proven, that a story of there being a bishop in the family may have been true. This is the ‘grander past’ of the family, though for at least three generations before Sam Adams was born, the men had worked in the mines in the days before mechanisation. As is known, that was a hard and dangerous life, which the author recreates memorably here. Even so, some family members had aspirations, with one grandparent, especially, revealing an entrepreneurial turn, setting up a shop that sold furniture, household goods and electrical fittings while continuing to work in the mine. This venture cushioned the family economically and although Sam Adams gradually became aware of the political and industrial turmoil of the inter-war years, it is significant that this was almost never mentioned by his parents when he was a boy. Perhaps it is of a piece with the fact that a favourite drinking place for the men was the Conservative Club – the Con Club – even though most of the ‘members’ voted Labour. Where the Stream Ran Red is a loving portrait of a community which has all but disappeared, not only because almost all the main protagonists are dead, but because the very fabric of Gilfach Goch as a mining town has been airbrushed out of existence with the ‘greening’ of the valley after the coal mines closed for good. It is tinged with a sadness, too, for his mother whose neuritis eventually necessitated the amputation of both her legs, for his maimed father, and for his sisters who suffered a number of personal tragedies in their lives. But it is above all a story of striving to overcome, of making something of life, no matter what life might throw at you. For this reason it is a moving and compassionate memoir. Thoroughly recommended. ~John Barnie @ www.gwales.com