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Aimed at 12-14 year olds, the Looking at Britain series (BBC, 1960-64)
covered British life, countryside and environment. The three industries shown
here - farming, forestry and mining - all harvest different resources from the
earth but use and need the products of the others. They are interdependent,
sharing skills and often workers. The miners use pit props provided by the
foresters; land is ploughed for the forestry commission prior to planting trees;
horses are used to move felled trees out of the forest; trees are planted on
disused slag heaps. Some miners are also tenant farmers, thus working both on
and under the land.
In the Afan Valley, miners are seen leaving work after the morning shift. The
narrator mentions that they will use the pit-head baths before going home -
perhaps unusual in a film dating from 1961, bearing in mind that pithead baths
are presented almost as one of the wonders of the world in Ocean Collieries
Recreational Union (c.1934). The producers may have felt that schoolchildren
from non-mining areas would not be aware of such a facility or even of the need
for it.
Not all mines, however, employ people on such a large scale, nor have the
same kind of facilities and equipment. Although pits were nationalised in 1947
(i.e. the government compulsorily purchased them from private operators), some
remained independent, too small to be of interest to the National Coal Board. In
1961, as stated in this film, there were between 500 and 600 private mines in
the UK, a large proportion of them - over 200 - in south Wales. These small
mines, licensed by the NCB, were worked horizontally, each basically a hole in
the side of the valley (as Ritchie Griffiths' mine is described) and owned by a
miner - or several miners - who would have invested his/their savings (or
redundancy money following a pit closure) in the enterprise, employing a small
number of men.
The film maintains that the Port Talbot steel works has ensured that the
prosperity formerly in the coal valleys is now also found on the coastal plain
with its great steel and allied industries - industries fuelled by and therefore
dependent on coal.
The programme's narrator, Geoffrey Johnson Smith, later became director of
London Weekend Television and a Conservative MP.
Mary Moylett
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Complete film (19:42)
