These Poor Hands

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.

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.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

THESE POOR HANDS The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales -- CHAPTER ONE-- I WAS fascinated by that light in the sky. Night after night I watched it reddening the shadows beyond the Brecknock Beacons, sometimes fading until it only showed faintly, then brightening until it seemed that all the country was ablaze. The winter wind that rushed across the Herefordshire fields where the swedes rotted in heaps, and carried that smell of decay into the small farmhouse which was my home, seemed to encourage the burning, until the night sky would redden still more. Sometimes I felt sure that I could see these flames and feel their warmth, but it could only have been fancy, for they were more than sixty miles away from us. Then in the cold and wetness of the winter evenings, when we had finished feeding the animals and had cut enough chaff for the next day, we crowded near the fire of damp logs that Mother was coaxing into flame with the bellows. I would look at our feeble fire and think, with longing, of the heat and brightness that must be about those distant flames. We could not get a good enough price for our swedes to make it worth the six miles of cartage to the station, and the grass was spoiled in the orchard where the unwanted apples had fallen, but every night we shivered in our damp clothes because coal was too dear for us to buy. We did get some before each Christmas, because some years before a lady had left a sum of money sufficient for eight poor families to be given one half-ton of coal each and the carter thereof to have one ton for his services . We had the contract to be the carter thereof, so we had coal at Christmas time and as long after as carefulness madepossible. I can remember how I stood minding the horses while my father loaded the coal at the station, and how I pushed my hands under the horses collar so that my fingers would keep warm. I was astounded to see several full trucks of coal and was puzzled as to how they managed to get it into a truck. I asked the porter about this mystery, and he did not seem to be any more of an expert on coal-loading than myself. By the time I was eighteen years old I had decided that I must get away somewhere. There was plenty of work at home, but little pay. It was a very dear holding that we rented, and all ready money had to be saved for rent. New clothes were very rare, and pocket-money was something to imagine. This did not suit my ideas of life. I wanted good clothes, money to spend, to see fresh places and faces, and-well, many things. I had a deal of advice about my future from our two nearest neighbours. They were time-expired soldiers, and lived next door to one another about half a mile from our place. Both were bachelors, and did their own house-work-occasionaIly. They were often at our place, and it was usually about four oclock in the morning when they arrived, laden with as many dead rabbits as they could carry. I have seen them bring seventy between them. They would throw them into the back of the pony-trap, and my father would get away early to town to sell them. They always called before he returned, and it was my job to give them some weak cider to soothe their thirsts until father returned and brought the money for them to have a real drink at the Comet Inn. During one of these waits I told them of my determination to go away...

One of the Best 5 Books of 2014 — Esquire "I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myself – if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado’s life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. Tirado is the real thing." —from the foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed We in America have certain ideas of what it means to be poor. Linda Tirado, in her signature brutally honest yet personable voice, takes all of these preconceived notions and smashes them to bits. She articulates not only what it is to be working poor in America (yes, you can be poor and live in a house and have a job, even two), but what poverty is truly like—on all levels. Frankly and boldly, Tirado discusses openly how she went from lower-middle class, to sometimes middle class, to poor and everything in between, and in doing so reveals why “poor people don’t always behave the way middle-class America thinks they should.”

Both Hands Tied studies the working poor in the United States, focusing in particular on the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers. Grounded in the experience of thirty-three women living in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, it tells the story of their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying and often state-funded jobs with inflexible schedules—and the moments when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid. Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer here examine the situations of these women in light of the 1996 national Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other like-minded reforms—laws that ended the entitlement to welfare for those in need and provided an incentive for them to return to work. Arguing that this reform came at a time of gendered change in the labor force and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state, Both Hands Tied provides a stark but poignant portrait of how welfare reform afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants’ economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.