by Terry Walton
Homes were going up everywhere when ours was being built. Even though many people were moving to areas outside the valley with more employment and less distance to travel to work, there was a huge demand for new housing here. The valleys were actually starting to experience a new industrial revolution following the collapse of traditional employment.
About the time I was moving to my new job, for example, the Royal Mint had just transferred from Tower Hill in London to a new plant next door to Perkin-Elmer’s factory. It was a standing joke at work that we never managed to finish the tunnel – in fact we had a grinding shop in one corner of the factory, right next to the Mint, and whenever we were entertaining visitors I’d say that I would have shown them our secret had I been allowed to, and that the machine we were looking at could be moved aside to expose a tunnel between us and next door.
The Mint employed a thousand people once it was up and running in its new premises, so it was a huge asset to the valley, and Frams, who made oil and air filters for the growing car industry, employed another thousand. The three factories were the only ones there at that time, but within a few years there were thirty-two different companies on our industrial estate.
It was largely due to the regional development grants available that new businesses were being attracted into the area in the late sixties and early seventies. Electronics companies and big television names like Sony, Panasonic and Hitachi were moving in because they could get huge amounts of capital investment paid for, together with subsidies towards labour costs and a suspension of rent and rates for the first three years after a factory opened. It was an extremely good deal all round.
These new employers needed staff with very different skills from those used in mining and heavy engineering, so it wasn’t easy for the out-of-work colliers in the district to retrain. There were some who managed it, mainly younger people, but above a certain age you were rooted deep in a different culture if you had been working down the pit. There you worked hard at the coalfaces, always as a team with everyone dependent on one another, whereas in a factory you are often working on your own with someone breathing down your neck all the time.
Understandably the older miners didn’t want to know, and sadly a lot of them never found work again after the pits closed. But there was another generation coming along, the younger element that industry and production always tended to favour because they could be trained to suit the requirements of the job.
Many employers brought their key skilled workers with them: the Japanese companies, for example, were run by all-Japanese management teams, but they would recruit the rest of their staff locally. German companies similarly, and there were a number of these investing in the area – Bosch set up a factory that made alternators, and Borg Warner manufactured transmission systems.
A lot of the incoming industries offered new opportunities for women and the amount of female employment grew phenomenally. Factories making televisions took on large numbers because the sets were valve-based in those days, with large printed circuit boards, and it was women who assembled them. Simple purpose-made connectors were not yet commonplace, so televisions needed lots of wiring and cable harnesses, all produced by female labour.
A strange result of all this new employment was a kind of unofficial demarcation between different jobs, which took a long time later to break down again. A factory tended to be planned around the assumption that men worked on the heavy machinery or as sheet metal workers and that sort of thing, on the shop floor, whereas electronics assembly-line work and office jobs were taken up totally by women.
You were trained to suit the needs of the particular trade, barriers were seldom crossed, and jobs became stereotyped. Boys came in as shop-floor apprentices and girls became secretaries or trainees in work that required dexterity. Porth Textiles opened up a new factory making Christmas trimmings, and that was almost entirely staffed by women. It was a time of great changes in work attitudes that would persist throughout the next decades.
For me the decade of the sixties closed with one door slamming and another opening up on a completely new world. I soon found that the people I was starting to work for were gentlemen: Perkin and Elmer ran the company like a family, and their influence cascaded from the top right down to the shop floor.
Everybody knew everyone else’s first name and even the standard of dress was unusually high, as if the top quality and high cost of the instruments we produced spread a kind of stimulating influence throughout the company. The senior staff were all high calibre, too, and I often used to reckon there were more doctors per square inch at Perkin-Elmer than in most general hospitals, because they all had PhDs and were clever scientific men.
So starting there wasn’t a change that I regretted, and in the end I had twenty-nine fantastic years with the firm.
But, like everything else in life, nothing stays the same for ever, and the last four years were far from happy. We were eventually sold to a company with no appreciation of scientific instruments, and then it all started to go wrong. The new management changed from making components to a policy of buying everything in, which led to the wholesale dismantling of the company.
First I had to sell the machine shop to one company, then the sheet metal shop to another, and the electronic assembly plant to someone else. I came under increasing pressure to do less and less in-house, and buy in larger quantities made elsewhere for assembly: the management were looking at Chinese, Indian and the burgeoning East European suppliers for components because they seemed to be cheaper.
From 275 employees the labour force fell to just 90, and I felt I was spending half my time calling people into the office and laying them off. All the fun went out of the job, and I heaved a sigh of relief when I finally left there and was able to concentrate once more on my allotment plots, where I knew I could find lasting contentment and continuity.
* * *
Terry’s Tip for June
Summer lettuces
THROUGHOUT THE HOT summer months salads are an important element of most people’s daily fare, and lettuce one of the main ingredients.
All lettuce varieties grow fairly fast, given enough warmth and water, but they can bolt to flower and seed quickly in a hot summer, especially if allowed to go dry.
I manage (usually!) to maintain an unbroken succession by sowing little and often, generally two main types: a cos, for its unrivalled texture and food value, and a red-leaved type to add colour to the salad bowl.
Sow the seeds of these in cell trays, those seed trays which are divided into nine separate compartments: this helps avoid pricking out the seedlings as well as root disturbance at transplanting time, both of which can check growth. Remember lettuce seed does not germinate well at high temperatures, so keep the trays in cool shade in a hot season.
As soon as the seedlings emerge, sow another batch to follow on. Transplant the young plants outdoors when they are large enough, and you should find you have a succession of lettuce without any waste (most gardeners grow too many that mature all at once) and some left over to give to fellow plotholders.
* * *
Anthea’s Recipe for June
Courgette Loaf
COURGETTES (OR ZUCCHINI) are strange plants. Their large seeds make robust seedlings that quickly fatten into lush plants, which then seem to take ages to produce more than the odd fruit, like a miniature green, yellow, white or striped marrow. And then suddenly you have too many, all ripening in quick succession and almost becoming an embarrassment in the kitchen. That’s the time to make this delicious fruit ‘bread’, to eat fresh or freeze for later.
Quantities make 1 loaf
1½ cups plain wholemeal flour
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp baking powder
½ cup honey
1 egg (beaten)
½ cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup grated raw courgette, unpeeled
choppe
d nuts, raisins to taste
Preheat the oven to 175°C/325°F/gas mark 3.
Combine flour, cinnamon, baking soda and baking powder in a mixing bowl.
Add honey, oil, beaten egg, vanilla and courgettes, and blend all together with a mixer or fork.
Add nuts and/or raisins, and blend again.
Pour into a greased and lined 8–9 in (20–23 cm) loaf tin.
Bake for 1 hour. Test by inserting a sharp knife, which should come out clean. Turn out on to a wire rack to cool.
Eat within 3–4 days – on its own, spread with butter, or hot with custard.
* * *
CHAPTER SEVEN
Major Changes
THERE’S A REASSURING sense of permanence at the heart of life in the Rhondda, echoing perhaps the hard, ancient rocks underlying the valley itself. The family home, the allotments, the locality generally always seemed constant when I was young and gave everything a feeling of stability, even though superficially things might appear to change.
My parents never moved from the house where I was born. My father died in 1977 when he was sixty-eight, still relatively young, but my mother lived on there. My aunt and uncle died and my cousin and his wife returned to live at the family home. They bought the house in the late seventies and my mother lived with them until her own death at the age of eighty-eight. My cousin and his wife live there to this day.
I found there was the same kind of continuity in my market gardening business, where demand didn’t change much before the end of the sixties, and members still grew the same stuff on their plots. I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of being unadventurous as gardeners, but as a rule what you see growing next to you is a strong influence and you tend to follow suit. There weren’t really any pioneers or revolutionaries on the allotment plots; no one came in with radically new vegetables.
* * *
Valley character
IN MANY RESPECTS the Rhondda is a very insular society. People have a long tradition of staying put, and even those who come back from living away don’t tend to bring new customs and ideas with them. If you did a straw poll of the inhabitants of the valleys, you’d find most have lived there all their lives, as did the generation before and the one before that.
It’s not like a major city or suburb where people from overseas tend to congregate, taking on allotments to grow the food of their native countries and creating a new demand in shops. There are very few ethnic groups in the valleys. You might see programmes and magazine articles about allotments in Birmingham or London, featuring a wide variety of crops because there are so many nationalities and gardening cultures there, but we don’t get that in the valleys.
Books and magazines and innovations from outside the valley don’t have that much influence. It’s only proof of the pudding which induces people to change here. Every now and then somebody might introduce something new on the plots, like I started using rye grass as a winter green manure, and now there are a couple of other people who can see the benefits and are trying it for themselves. It’s nothing dramatic, though.
Change on our allotments is a gradual process, in many cases introduced by default. From time to time people bring in surplus plants they’ve grown. Allotmenteers are a thrifty race and will usually accept them, whatever they are – waste not, want not. In that way we were introduced to kohl rabi, aubergines, artichokes and many more novel crops. When these were harvested they were passed around for other plotholders to adopt if they liked them. Who said allotment gardeners have no sense of adventure?
* * *
Wales has always been very much a sheep-farming country and, apart from Pembroke and their renowned early potato tradition, there was nowhere that produced market garden crops in commercial quantities, and no farm shops to stock new vegetables for people to try, so most people either grew their own basic crops or were content to buy whatever was on offer. The range of choice in greengrocers and even in the first supermarkets hadn’t really evolved in the early 1970s, small, local shops tended to supply what the customers wanted, and there wasn’t the diversity of fresh food we see today. People didn’t travel much or explore new ways.
Few of us could predict the radical changes that were just round the corner.
There had been the long war years and then the rather grey fifties, with poverty and rationing and normal life apparently a long way off. And then suddenly in the late sixties everything began to explode. The growth in new industry developed an enormous momentum, the structure of the family began to change significantly as wives became an important part of the work community, and everyday life changed for ever.
The decline of coal mining was the major catalyst. As a pit closed down it would be replaced by a large estate of light industries, like Creeds, who made teleprinters, British Airways, Aero zips and various clothing companies such as Polikoff’s, which is now Burberry. There were a couple of large heavy engineering firms, but many men travelled out of the immediate area, to Treforest or Bridgend and their large industrial estates, while much of the local work was now for women.
Prosperity began to increase as households now had two breadwinners instead of just one, with more disposable income, and this affected the traditional pattern of family life. When both parents were out at work children had to be farmed out to grandparents or became latchkey kids, often from an early age, and so were left unsupervised, free to do whatever they wanted.
And with the extra income that two wage-earners could bring in, the need to grow your own began to decline. People didn’t want to come home from work and then go out digging an allotment or growing vegetables: why bother when you could afford to go to a shop and buy it?
Throughout the seventies the allotments were pretty quiet. We were losing members and only a small handful of people were really interested. Enforcing the rules became pointless, and there was no way you would evict anyone because soon you’d have nobody left. The tradition of cultivating a whole allotment was ignored, and often people would come in and tend just a couple of bits, enough to keep themselves going, and not worry about the rest of the plot.
It was a real depression from the point of view of people’s attitudes towards allotment gardening, and not just on our site. The valleys once had lots of allotments – they seemed to be everywhere you went – but complete sites began to disappear before your eyes.
Over in Pont Rhondda, for example, there was a huge established site alongside the railway line, and that’s where they built the Rhondda College – the whole of the allotments went suddenly to make way for the college buildings. There’s a good allotment site in Trealaw that has survived, but on the other side of the valley, opposite the cemetery, a big site disappeared to make way for a new cottage-type hospital.
Whole chunks of allotment land were vanishing at a rapid rate wherever plots were not being used or were falling derelict. Up and down the valley the demise of allotments was reminiscent of the decline of the coal industry and the constant pit closures.
As tenancies dwindled on our own site, the shrinking number of stalwarts left began to fear their long association with their plots might soon be lost altogether. Not that the staunch hard core was that easily dismayed: after years of coping with the vagaries of everything Mother Nature might throw at us, we weren’t prepared to give up easily. Our slogan could have been ‘We shall not be moved’!
We were always under threat anyway because of the local geography. A big council-house estate had been built to one side of us, and an existing estate on the other side had been expanded. We sat in the middle and were always afraid the council would try to combine these two estates. Ours might be a statutory site, but once plots become vacant that status doesn’t count for much, and there was a serious worry at the time that the allotments might go to allow a road to be built along the mountain to link the estates.
Nonetheless the letter from the council dropped through my letterbox one morning like a bolt from the blue. I feared the worst immediately, b
ut still felt shell-shocked as I read the enclosed notice of termination on our agreement. I passed the news on to the rest of the members, and gloom settled like a large cloud over the allotments.
The situation needed a measured approach, so I got in touch with our contact at the council, who allayed some of my fears by explaining they actually rented the site from a local farmer, and it was he who had terminated the agreement over some dispute with them. All was not in fact lost, and they were applying for a compulsory purchase order for the land. We were to sit tight!
So we all carried on as normal, in a kind of rent wilderness, for three years while the wrangling about the compulsory purchase went on over our heads. Eventually the council bought the site as agricultural land and all threat of building on it disappeared. That left a group of very happy and relieved plotholders, not least myself: the equilibrium in my life had been restored and I could now carry on gardening there for as long as I was able to draw breath.
With those two estates flanking us, we might have expected an increase in our numbers, but the people who tended to move in there were younger or had been relocated, and they weren’t really interested. There wasn’t even an influx from residents without much of a garden – perhaps one here and there, to give it a try, but they certainly didn’t reverse the downward trend.
I was still in there with my ten plots and loyal customers, but revolution was in the air at home as much as in the valleys generally. What with getting married in 1968 and starting at Perkin-Elmer the same year, I realized the new decade was going to bring different pressures into my life.