ABSTRACT
The Rhondda Valleys in South Wales were still in 1945 among the most famous coal-mining areas in the world. The string of terraced houses, small villages and townships that clung precariously to the rocky hillsides made up a remarkably homogeneous, and still geographically fairly isolated, culture, even as its dependence on coal declined precipitously in the post-war world. Many of its men had fought all over the world in the recent war, while others stayed put to work in the pits, which had zoomed back into full production to power the war after a decade or more of disastrous underuse. Its women had tended the home front and toiled in war work, including in the famous munitions factory at Bridgend. But whatever the commonalities with other working-class parts of Britain, it had a distinctive ethos, part of a distinctive South Wales mining history where the valleys shared a common history of labour and struggle, yet managed to produce recognizably different ways of being.
