The Richard Burton Diaries Read Online Free PDF

were four more sons – Ivor (born 1906), William (born 1911), David (born 1914) and Verdun (born 1916) – and four daughters: Cecilia (born 1905), Hilda (born 1918), Catherine (born 1921) and Edith (born 1922). Two other daughters, both named Margaret Hannah, had died in infancy (in 1903 and 1908, respectively). So Richard junior was the twelfth child and the sixth son of a prolific union, even by the standards of coal miners’ families in the early twentieth century. 2
    Pontrhydyfen was a mining village. The coal industry was the primary employer, although a greater diversity of industrial jobs existed a few miles to the south at Cwmafan and Port Talbot. At its immediate pre-war peak there had been a large pit in Pontrhydyfen and an associated drift mine together named the Cynon colliery, employing around 700 men, as well as the Merthyr Llantwit and the Argoed collieries, both of which employed around a hundred men each. Smaller concerns employing about twenty men operated at Graig Lyn and Wern Afon. There were other collieries within relatively easy travelling distance to the north, around Cymmer, and to the south, at Cwmafan.
    The steep valley sides were, and remain, the dominant landscape motif and give the area an Alpine feel. The dramatic atmosphere is enhanced by two large viaducts: a seven-arch railway viaduct of red brick, and, looming above the Jenkins family home, what had originally been the Bont Fawr aqueduct, powering waterwheels at the long-closed Oakwood ironworks. This four-spanned structure in Pennant sandstone by 1925 carried a minor road.
    Pontrhydyfen enjoyed the standard facilities of South Wales mining communities. There was a pub (the Miners’ Arms), a Co-operative store, a primary school, an Anglican church (St John's) and two Nonconformistchapels. Bethel Welsh Baptist was the one favoured by the Jenkins family. Welsh was the language of the home, although all but the youngest children would also have been fluent in English.
    By 1925 the South Wales coal industry was on the cusp of decline. South Wales coal had always been high in quality but also high in price, owing mainly to geological factors. Many of its favoured export markets had been lost during the First World War, or were now threatened by competitors able to undercut prices. Long-standing structural difficulties were exacerbated by Britain's return to the Gold Standard in 1925, which raised the prices of exports, by the facility given to Germany to pay some of its reparations under the Paris Peace Settlement in the form of coal, and by a succession of industrial disputes, including a three-month stoppage in 1921. A major dispute was narrowly postponed in 1925, but a showdown between the coal industry's notoriously intransigent employers and its equally robust trade unions appeared inevitable.
    The crisis in the coal industry would have profound consequences for the Jenkins family, for not only did Richard Sr work underground but so did sons Tom, Ivor, Will, David and Verdun. The year after Richard's birth, 1926, was a profoundly traumatic one in the coal industry. A seven-month-long industrial dispute wrought havoc in areas such as South Wales, and plunged many families into serious poverty and debt. Richard Jenkins Sr's colliery closed, along with most in the immediate area, and he was forced to seek employment in a series of casual jobs.
    But whatever the troubles in coalfield society at large, a more profound tragedy would befall the Jenkins family in 1927. Richard's mother Edith gave birth to her thirteenth child, Graham, on 25 October. Six days later she was dead, aged forty-four, having succumbed to septicaemia.
    The response of the Jenkins family to this catastrophe revealed both its strengths and its weaknesses. Richard Sr – always a heavy drinker, a gambler and someone who was incapable of exercising control over his spending patterns – appears not to have had the sense of responsibility that, fortunately, his older children