This is the first comprehensive study of one of the most distinctive voices of the south Wales coalfield.

Considered by Raymond Williams to be ‘the most effective writing about mining life in South Wales’, the work of B. L. Coombes portrays coal-mining and coalfield society in south Wales in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in England in 1893, Coombes began to work in the mines before the First World War, coming to prominence as a miner-writer in the late 1930s. His autobiography, These Poor Hands, was published in 1939 and was followed by two further books, Those Clouded Hills and Miners Day, as well as by hundreds of shorter pieces of fiction and non-fiction

Drawing on new archival sources as well as on Coombes’s published work, this volume examines the man, his writings and the society of which he was a part.