The Intellectual Life of the Welsh Miners

Stumbling accross the book 'The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes' by Jonathan Rose, a new perspective on the Welsh Miners has come to light.

'At times we did not feel we were colliers doing menial and dangerous jobs in the bowels of the earth, but privileged human beings exposed to something extraordinary. Most of us were badly or barely educated, but certain young men, alone and without encouragement, educated themselves, and having drunk the wine of knowledge they seemed to glow with pride.The work they were engaged in, lowly as it was, never depressed them.'

'There is no place like a mine for promoting discussion. There is something in the never-absent danger, in being shut away underground, that draws men to each other, that makes them anxious to break the darkness and sense of loneliness by talk on subjects many and various.' 

Stephen Walsh (b.1859)

'Guidance in the choice of good books came to me deep down in the pit, in the darkness and dark dust of a narrow tunnel more than a thousand feet below the earth's surface.'