Oh What A Time... - #191 Jonny Owen on Industrial Wales (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re joined by friend of the show, producer, writer and actor (and proud Welshman), Jonny Owen to discuss the golden age of Industrial Revolution era Wales!We’ll chat copper in Swansea, the iron town of Merthyr Tydfil, and the sheer volume of steam coal dug out of the Cynon Valley, the Rhondda Valley and the Taff Valley.Jonny is heading to Hamburg in his one day Time Machine so what better time to ask you if this is a good idea? Or what you’d do with yours? Do email: [e-mail] 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Tuesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hello, this is part two of industrial Wales. Let's get on with the show. Now, I'm going to tell you all about a little place called Mertha Tidville. I've got some wonderful notes here on the Industrial Revolution History of that place, and Johnny has read out about 95% of them. But let's see what we're... He hasn't seen them. That's incredible.

It is. I love Mertha Tidville. I've never been. It's on my bucket list. I really want to go. I just love how this place grew up and became such an important part of the industrial world. Do you want to hear a story that'll make you love Murther even more?

Go on. A awful lot of boxers. Amazing boxes, world champion boxers, come from Murtha. Mike Tyson is fascinated by the history of Boxing. So he went to visit Murtha because he was like, I want to see where all these boxes came from. And he's walking on the town. And a lot of people are coming out at the pubs going,

Oh, Mike, you think you're fucking hard. He's like, that's amazing. I am quite hard. I think you're hard. I'm Mike Tyson. Yeah. Harder than you, because you've had 11 points of strong bull. Yeah.

So Swansea had copper, but between the 1750s and the 1850s, if you wanted iron, there was only one place to go in the world. For roughly 100 years, this Welsh town at the head of the Taft Valley was the year. most important centre of iron production on earth. If you wanted to build a railway, anywhere in the industrialising world, the US, Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Latin America, the chances are you bought your rails, your fittings, and even your locomotives from Murtha. It was effective in the metalworking factory floor of the entire industrial revolution. But why Murtha, as Johnny touched on? You had vast quantities of iron ore embedded in the local geology but also effectively unlimited coal, which was of a really good quality in the valley below.

But crucially as well, you had lots of water from the surrounding hills which was needed for power. But what it did not have was a transport network, a large population or much in the way of capital. So all three of those things were brought in. The story starts in 1750s with the founding of the Dowlice Iron Works by a partnership headed by Thomas Lewis, A Welshman from near Cardiff. The technical expertise, though, came from a man called Isaac Wilkinson, originally from County Durham. Wilkinson had learned his trade running a furnace in Workington in Cumberland,

then moved to Bersham near Exham, where he built up the Bersham Ironworks. Wilkinson's speciality was cannons. And in the middle of the 18th century, people needed a lot of cannons. Britain was fighting the French across multiple theatres in the Seven Years' War. government contracts for artillery flowed freely. When the war ended with British victory in 1763, that market suddenly contracted. Wilkinson looked for new opportunity South.

In that same year, Mertha's second great ironworks opened. I remember watching a documentary about cannons and how the metal has to be perfect. There can't be anything wrong with it, otherwise it will just explode and kill everyone around it. And the smallest issue, the smallest issue, the smallest defect, anything, will just ruin the whole thing. Like the boy was there when Nelson, that's what happened, probably.

Yeah. Exactly, yeah. But you don't want to buy a shoddy cannon. Not worth it. Don't get one off eBay. The Cavarthur Ironworks was founded in 1763 by Anthony Bacon, who had made his fortune in the Caribbean, and William Brownrigg, another Cumberland man.

Over time, the cavartha passed into the hands of the Crayshaw family from Yorkshire, who ran it for generations and became one of the wealthiest industrial dynasties in Britain. Dowlice, meanwhile, was taken over by the guests from Brosley in Shropshire. Under Crayshaw and the guest ownership, Kavartha and Dalaius became the largest and most important ironworks in the world. Two other works completed Murtha's industrial map. The Penny Darren Ironworks opened in the 1780s

and the Plymouth Ironworks at Pentaback. Penterbach. Initially a joint, Pentabrach, initially a joint venture, but eventually most associated with the Hill family. So you had four works in one town and a share of a world industrial output that would be almost unthinkable today. And what I love about reason I want to go to Murtha, Johnny,

is that so much of the infrastructure is still kind of there, right? You can imagine the scale of these works. Yeah, they were huge. There's an amazing photograph of Dola saying works. and when you show people it they literally go, because what you realize you're looking in and there's a human being there

and he's like a tiny... And there's this giant works behind him, like chimneys, everything you're possible and you just realise the scale of the size of it. Because Mutha grew up in an industrial sense about 50 years before the rest of Wales. Swansea was the other one, but it was, he didn't have the sort of the cliché rows

of terrace houses. It was much more, they were saying they were almost like a feudal system. You were these multi-millionaires for the time. In these mock castles and built these giant houses around them would be the workers sort of like shantytown

almost like a sort of shack sort of thing because they were just arriving there was no infrastructure they were just building quickly and getting to work in these ironworks and I always think that it's one of the things I'd love to do

it. I would love to seem up with and Mirtha became an incredibly exciting place so it was a saying in Wales that's in the conundit, it was a sain in Wales if somebody went missing in West and North Wales they used to go they've gone to Mertha it became a saying

because usually they'd go to Murtha they just disappeared. So if somebody got in a bit of trouble or a woman got pregnant or whatever, so you were leaving these very traditional rural parishes in West Wales where they've lived like they have for a millennia and there's a beauty...

Still do. Beautiful. Yeah, yeah. There's a great saying by a brilliant Welsh historian called Gwynalph Williams, who I think was one of the greatest historians ever and he was incredible.

He went, you could have two... We did a special about his life. We have, we've covered his life, yeah. Did you? But there we go. So he said this wonderful, he said that you could have two brothers, one keeping sheep in a snow cat valley in West Wales.

I don't really said this, the way they had for a millennia while his brother worked at the cutting head of world innovation in an ironworks. So there's two brothers, one living the way they had for thousands of years and the other one living in a completely different way. And don't forget, there was lots of pups.

There was loads of people, both sexes, people were flying and they lived hard and they would be paid in beer tokens. They drank beer because it was much safer than water, as we all know, it was weaker beer. But apparently, Murtha was a place to go.

If you were young and you were Welsh, it was accredited, exciting, you know. I really want a night out in Murtha. Is that advisable in 2026? Yes, good crack. I mean, I obviously got a Murtha boy born and bread. It's still, I think, is something in the DNA. It's got a nightclub there,

which Ellis would know, it's called Coolers, right? And it's been going, it's been going for 100 years. I can remember being in a queue there once. I was a funny story. I was about 18, and there was a scuffle at the door.

And this guy, he pulled, like, honestly, it was, like, a fucking sword out. And anyway, there's always a police car in the corner of the corner. He runs off, and everybody's carries on, you know, K-Wain to go in. He knows somebody's just pulled, like, a sword out. And somebody in the front went, did you see her? He said he was, like, fucking Excalibur.

And the bunsters were like, he's a pain. He's banned, you know, his fella runs off with, like, a sword. Amazing. I'd never forget it. Like, everybody just carried on going in there. like, you know, it was at Murtha. Do you not, though, when you think, when you hear about all the money that was flown into Swansea and Murther and places like that, you know, Cardiff Docks as well.

Yes. I wouldn't change being much for anything. I'm sure Johnny's the same. But I should be a multi, multi-millionaire. That's such a Johnny. That's exactly what I was thinking. It's like, where has this infinite money gone? Yes, gone.

There's a famous book that was written. And the book was quite dramatically called The Rape of the Fair Country. And it was a theory that actually all the resources of Wales were, you know, there's a really famous speech made by a fantastic reverendale called Phil Bennett, which has become a T-shirt now. And they play in England. And he says something along the line.

It's like, who are you playing today? I'll tell you who you're playing today. These bastards, they've stole our water, our coal, our iron, our steel. And what are they ever given us? Fuck all. That's what you're playing today on Wales. So there's a lot of people that feel that a lot of people that feel that a lot of, A lot was taken out of Wales and not reinvest.

And I think there is a truth in that, no doubt about it. All these families that, like the Torchase Programme, said there was still a very rich family. They did very well at the move. And now there's an argument to say, you know, they were capitalists of industry and they were there and they had the idea. But there was a lot of people that were working in those ironworks, like my great-grandparents.

And they would work day after day over these things. And the amount of industrial accidents, my father, just one generation back, he had worked underground. You know, this part of his finger was missing. He had a ribbed of stuck out, where he fell off a crane working for Jack Walker Steel. And when he died, they said to me, he had dust because he'd broken pits.

And they said his asbestos level was one of the highest they'd ever had on record. And that was just my father. They were a different breed to us. And I, like, L.A. says, and I'm sitting sometimes when I'm filming something, I'm doing radio, and listening to you know, you're having your makeup done, and somebody's bringing you a coffee.

And I'm thinking, just one generation back, my father, he's in a pit during the steelworks. That would be a cup of, Asbestos, they're handing. That's what it was. I know, yeah. Back to the fireworks. Cavartha was famous for making weapons.

So it supplied cannons for British forces in the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, basically whenever Britain was fighting, Kovatha was busy making the weapons. Dowice, on the other hand, it did specialize in railway infrastructure.

So Russia's first railway, the early railways of Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, and Belgium, most of Latin America and the Caribbean, most of the British Empire, and significant portions of the United States as well. Incredible. In the peak in the 1820s, Murphi Titville produced around 40% of Britain's iron. Britain at that point produced most of the world's iron.

It was called Guest Keen, that's guest. And it's to have a GK stamp on the rails. Please say that if somebody ever laid down in front of a train in the world, they'd have GK stamped on them as the train went over them. So, like, this, it's this irony, like, Ellis is right, it's this weird thing we've got where, again, Guernalph Williams said, we're living in the morning after the night before in Welch Street. It was this extraordinary moment where we were the world's source of power.

We like the Persian Gulf of its day, really. And with that, Kim, all this extra, you know, we were very proud about where our place was in the world. And because when the pits went and where we are now, is, that's why Wales, you know, kind of has a bit of sort of like, almost like a post-traumatic stress, really. the people of Wales, you know, we're constantly thinking, oh, can we rule ourselves?

Even power has devolved very slowly in comparison to Scotland, you know, to this day, you'll hear people in Wales going, we can't, we can't manage ourselves. And I think that comes from, we were a story of the first colony, really, of England. I know people are, but it was Wales first. Wales was first conquered by England.

You know, the laws were adapted and absorbed under Henry the 8th. And so Wales was always having a battle about what his identity was, because it was so small. And then we were just this, out, you know, Western Europe, a rainy little outcrop

to 2,000 people, 100,000 people. And then suddenly, we're like, we're the people that make the rails to the world. We dig the coal for the Royal Navy. So there's an extraordinary pride. But the irony is, exactly what you're saying, all that wealth was taken up away. So it was such a strange, sort of weird thing we've got.

The dragon has two tongues. It's such a famous series. And I think it's true. We've kind of got a weird sort of schizophrenic panic to know, Ellis, aren't we? I totally agree with that. I'll end by talking about the story of immigration, which you touched on, Johnny. Yeah.

You had Scottish shopkeepers and doctors, this is over the course of the 19th century. So Scottish shopkeepers and doctors, Irish workers arriving in vast numbers, particularly after the famine, a Jewish community, Italian and German craftsmen, surprisingly, arriving first as clockmakers and then instrument makers rather than cafe owners, Spanish workers in the early 20th century, a Chinese community established around the First World War. And then also, there's so many. many languages getting spoken as well. It's a Welsh, English, but also Yiddish, Italian, Spanish,

Cantonese, a half a dozen regional British dialects. And then you've also got Anglican churches, Roman Catholic parishes, non-conformist chapels in five separate traditions, General Baptist, particular Baptist, Calvinistic Methodist, Wesleyan Methodist, Congregationalist in both Welsh and English, Unitarian Meeting, a synagogue, and room at last also for those with no religious belief at all. And the numbers are just staggering. 1,800, around 7,700 people. Fast forward at half a century, 1851, over 47,000. And by 1901, 70,000 people living in Mertha.

And by 1850s, the Mertha region as a whole was heading towards at 100,000. Roughly one in every 10 Welsh people at a time when the country's total population was around 1.1 million. It is astonishing the growth of this place and how important it was to the Industrial Revolution. and I really want to go, especially to coolers. To wrap up today's episode, we're now going to move on to the big boy. If you think copper and iron provided enough industrial history to last several lifetimes, they pale compared to the singular significance of coal. It's unbelievable the size of the industry, the coal industry, the money.

We will come to this, but it blew my mind reading up on this. most specifically steam coal, which is the most highly prized sought after fuel source the 19th and early 20th century. And nowhere in the world was steam coal in greater abundance and mined with greater intensity than the Ronda Valley. Now, Johnny, for people who might not be familiar with the Ronda Valley, can you describe how big it is and where it is and kind of how much coal is there, basically, it would be significant to this one part of Wales?

Yeah, that's where... So they've got these three famous industrial valleys in South Wales. The Rhonda, the Cunnan and the Taft Valley, Murtha. And they run in a straight line down towards the coast. They were dug out by obviously glaciers in the Ice Age. And so it's a very severe-looking landscape. It's like two giant mountains and sort of a valley path. And talking about nobody lived in Murtha.

Nobody lived in Ronda. That was like 30 people lived there. And so, of course, they discovered Stephen calling Murtha Tidville, and they worked out of the band run from Murtha underneath the Cunham Valley. which is another massive mining valley as well and the Rhonda Valley. And the Rhonda Valley, like Mertha, becomes the most famous mining area,

arguably in the world, because of the output. And again, they built these terrace streets for the workers. And there's these amazing stories. I always remember it being described once. You watch like a Western sometimes and they've got, they lay in the train

and they've actually got the steam train on the track as they're going along because they're building a lot. And Romney was a bit like that. They were literally, as they were digging, as they were dropping the pits, they were building houses along the way because they were just trying to get people in there to work as much as they can.

They couldn't get enough men in there to dig the call out. I mean, the Ronda Valley had something like a hundred pits at one point. And the brilliant story is the Welsh knew that the bottom of the valley is the flood. So what ended up in the Ronda was? They always built that. The miners built their houses up on the side famously. And they'd let sometimes somebody coming in from out and build a big house and they'd end up getting flooded.

That's amazing. Some English persons come in with illusions of grandeur. So it was like, it was, the Ronda Valley then, like I said, from the 1850s, it actually sucked in people from Mursa. So a lot of people from Mursa, as the ironworks are sort of declining, they move it to Cardiff. It's much cheaper to have it on the course to, you know, to export it. So the iron works are being run down. But then when they discover steam coal, Murtha gets a massive, massive lift up again because there's so much coal under Murtha. So Murth sort of has a double thing.

It has the iron era, but then is the coal era after in Mursa. but Ronda and the Canaan Valley, these three, and they're the most militant. They all grew up the same time. The union is incredibly important in Welsh history because it's so dangerous. So the other thing of the Welsh mines were, they were very fault-ridden.

So the coal was brilliant, but the death and the injury rates were shocking to a modern sentiment. It was something like about three Welsh miners a week are being killed in these pits at the height. It's just extraordinary. And it's not just death. You'd have injuries where you'd lose an arm.

And it's all pre-welfare state. So, you know, if your father, like what happened to me, died in the pit. That family was, you know, if you didn't have a good extended family around you or community, you were in trouble pretty, pretty quickly. So this is why you had incredibly clannish,

a close community brother. So the South Wales Valley is the people were famously close to be. Because the work was so dangerous that you could have died and then you needed the people around you to help support you. I mean, that must provide such a strong. wrong bond. It does.

You are responsible for one another's safety, really, aren't you? That's what it is. Other people's lives and your life are in their hands,

basically. I went down a few pits. I went to Tower, I did a little dock for them and my dad took me down a pit. And the noise it makes down there

is extraordinary because it just goes crack. And you know, you realise you're on the ground. And they always have this to say, they're sitting in Welsh and they used to go,

every old place, glomorgan. That's what the old place. Every old place. That's amazing. Well, The Ronda Valley, incredibly important, but actually it kind of enters the story of coal quite late. The commercial value of steam coal was actually proven in the Cunnan Valley and an English industrialist and mining engineer by the name of John Nixon.

Now, I'm sure you're familiar with him. John Nixon, he's kind of crucial to this story. He comes from Gateshead in the northeast of England. He eventually ends up in France and sort of cut a long story short. He sees an opportunity to introduce well-steen coal to France. This is the, his big, he thinks there's a real opportunity here to bring it across to France. Wells steam coal was already being used at this point in the power steamers on the Thames and was supplied, as you mentioned, a lady called Lucy Thomas, who's a Welsh businesswoman who owned one of the large pits at that point. She was illiterate, interestingly, and she left most of the management of her business to a bristolian called George Insol who dealt with the contracts and the paperwork.

And it was these two that John Nixon, he petitions to try and get them to give him Welsh coal to take to the French market. But they say no. So, Johnny, do you know what he does? Do you know what he does in reaction to this rejection? No. He charters a small vessel and he gets hundreds of tons of Welsh steam coal himself and just takes it across to Nance on his own back, basically. He goes, right, I'm going to prove to the French how good this stuff is. He turns up in Nance.

He shows them how well this stuff can be used, you know, how efficiently it can be used. And the French government are like, this is incredible. We need this. We need this now. And immediately they're granting Nixon lucrative contracts for its supply. And although Lucy Thomas is often referred to as the mother of Welsh coal and George Insoul had done much of the legwork, really it is John Nixon who transformed the fortunes of South Wales Coldfield with this French connection. This French connection was kind of key. And spoiler, listeners, it really worked, okay?

Coal worked out big time. His navigation colliery sunk at the mountain ash in the Cunan Valley in 1860 was the first deep pit in South Wales. I'm going to take you through a little roll call here of how successful this Welsh coal became after this point. Okay, first thing, over the next 50 years, how many of the major naval fleets in the world do you think adopted Welsh steam coal as their fuel source?

How many of the major naval fleets? What do you think around the whole world? Well, it was pretty much all of them, wasn't it? Correct. Every single major naval fleet took well steam coal as their fuel. So much so in 1904-5, during the Russia-Japanese War, both sides operated with their navies using well-steam coal. And in 1914, Britain and France used well-steen coal,

as did some of the Russian fleet, as did the German Navy. So all sides in the same war are using the same fuel. Murtha should be like Dubai. Exactly, yeah. It should be like a wet Dubai or a wet Doha. Yes, I know. They didn't pivot to tourism fast enough. No, yeah.

All they needed was an F1 race. It wasn't just the navies that were using this. I'll continue with this list because it's staggering where this car was ending up. Commercial shipping adopted the same supplies. including one particularly famous ship. Any guesses which ship used Welsh coal? Titanic. Would you like to apologise now on behalf of your nation joining?

It was the call. Exactly, exactly. Railways, of course. How many of the major railways on earth do you think South Wales colleries supplied coal to once again? I'll just tell you it's every single one again. It's incredible. From domestic lines in Britain and Ireland to Europe, North Africa,

India, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Turkey, the United States. London also grew reliant on it. The reason was steam coal was smokeless and therefore ideal for using the locomotives which ran in the underground. Underground, yeah. Exactly. And in fact, by the end of the 1860s, the Metropolitan Railway ran all of its underground

lines in this way using Welsh steam coal. And even when the underground then transitioned to the electrification at the end of the 19th century, they still use steam coal from Wales in power. generation with Battersea Power Station being one of the coal fields, many clients. And like all of this was made possible by the sheer volume of steam coal that was dug out of the Kunun Valley, the Rhonda Valley, the Taft Valley and all the tributy valleys beyond. Kind of a vast enterprise which needed eye-watering sums of money. It's like the modern equivalent to billions of pounds. This money paid for the sinking of the

mines, building of roads, railways and houses, shops and schools, chapels and libraries, parks and playing fields, hospitals, welfare clinics. And that's before you even begin to consider the money paid to the workers, the shareholders, all this sort of, literally anyone in touch with it, this money that was pouring in and out of this industry. And those who made the most money, do you know this man, a Welshman such as D.A. Thomas, you're familiar with D.A. Thomas, basically turned their wealth into global capital.

They were essentially like the Bezos, the Gates, the Zuckerbergs of their era. They really were. These are global moneymen. Although, interestingly, Thomas was one of the very first to see that coal had no future and its time was kind of limited as early as 1903. I couldn't believe it was this early. In 1903, he is warning investors to get out, basically, and to look for something else before it's too late, understanding that the next fuel supply was around the corner.

That, of course, oil. Oil, that was the big one. And indeed, within a few years of his death in 1918, oil was beginning to displace steam coal as the premium fuel supply of the world. And with that, the Ronda Valley started to shrink too. But I end, though, on its staggering growth due to coal, because this is the bit that kind of just blew my mind. We've talked about population growth generally, but the stats here are just remarkable. In the start of the 1800s, how many people do you think lived in the Ronda Valley? I would say, the whole valley itself, I'd probably say as little as 20,000, 15,000, something.

This is the start of the 1800s. It's so much less than that. It's in the hundreds. Is it? Yes, in the hundreds. They think 500 people at most lived in the Ronda Valley in the early 1800s.

A hundred years later in 1901, it's risen to 115,000 people. By 1921, it's up to 163,000. Get this percentage, L. That is a percentage increase over the period of 32,500 percent. And for comparison, New York City growth over the same period, from 60,500 to 5.2 million, is only 8,500% growth.

So it completely blows New York out of the water in terms of population growth over that period. If you're one of the original 500, you're a little kid. But the time you're 80, like, yeah, it has changed quite a lot, actually. I would say almost unrecognizable. Yes. And do you know, it's interesting, the owners are very interesting because obviously there was loads of industrial unrest because, you know, they were so dangerous. And then, you know, they had to sort of like piece by piece, form unions to get some kind of, you know, safety in place and all the rest of it in protection. But one of the great clashes over wages. And what they do is these billion, these people making hundreds of millions at the time. Yeah. They used to pass, so there was a dip in the market and say their profit that year was down to five million rather than ten. They would pass that on to the miners' pee.

No. Yeah, we have to cut your pay, boys, because we didn't make quite as much a sliding scale, it's to call it. So the miners would be, they'd be upper about this. And this is where the sort of the militarism they say comes from. In South Wales, the union, the union was incredible because the union was life for them, because it was called the Federation.

It was so, my grandfather was a, my father was a union man. They died. And I was my father's father's saying to me once, and this was just by the time, this was being dispersed strike because I was young. And he went, and this was ingrained in the South Wales Valley's mind, especially Rhonda Merth and the Cunning Valley. You can never cross a picket line. As long as everybody adheres to that, if there's a picket line done,

you never, ever cross a picket line. And my conference said, imagine this as a kid, he went, to cross a picket line, son, it's worse than death. I don't being a kid going, how could have been worse than death? And I always remember he said to me, he said to me, because nobody will come to your funeral.

And I'm thinking, fucking hell, that's the worst thing for human being. But, you know, there's this book. And that was, I was told that as a kid and everybody carried that in their fucking heart into the workplace. But if there's somebody said, so this is why in the minor strike in the mid-80s, Thatcher's government couldn't believe the South Wales

Wales, everywhere else had fractured, I mean, even like Yorkshire by the end is gone. South Wales, there were pits in South Wales like the Mardi Tower, Murther Vale famously, when nobody went back to work after a year. There wasn't one single strike breaker in the area. So look at this, right, observation of the strike

in terms of levels. of participation, 84, 85. So in South Wales, 99.6% of the workforce went out on the 19th November, 1984. Wow. By the 14th of Feb, 1985,

there were still 98% of it. Wow. So they just, you know, and if you compare, let's just, you mentioned Yorkshire, let's see if I can see the, if I've got the statistics for Yorkshire. Well, northeast of England, I'm a very militant place, 95,

and decepty, you know, sort of, Kent was quite militant. So, do you, you know the story of Kent? I never knew this. They get forgotten about the Kent, man. So there was these pits in Kent boys, right? And all the left-wing nutters in Wales, the north-easts in Scotland,

was too militant for Wales. Imagine that being too militant. They'd have sent them to Kent, right? They all ended up in Kent. It's a true story. And not one single minor in Kent brought the strike. And the boys in Wales took this call, they were brilliant lads.

They were all second, third generation, Welsh, Scottish militants and not one of them broke the strike. And it's heartbreaking this. I've guessed what happened with the strike that's that she shut the whole Colfield down. Didn't open a single pit after. Wow, wow.

Just to sort of punish them. South Wales collapsed in extra... I mean, like you said, shocking figures of what Thomas in is right. The collapse of South Wales coal field is one of the great tragedies of British history of that period. They've been something like about 36,000 people attached to the industry.

But within five years, years, there was only 250 work in a tower. It was tens of thousands of jobs. It was just, they looked at South Wales and went, that's extraordinary that in the mid-80s, people would stay out for a year to that level, and they'd be like, we can't have this, and the industry was just gone. They'd shut them.

That Kent thing, it's a bit like Dave Mustaine of who started Megadeth, got chucked out of Metallica, been too mad. That's it, yeah, yeah. You've been chipped out of Metallica. Yeah. That year, Megadethethon, yeah. That year, Megadetheth,

produced a three-song demo with drummer Lee Roach. Roach left after Mustaine convinced him to play with a broken foot. I mean, there are lots of parallels. We're ending this episode on a bit of a sad note, learning about the fate of industrial Wales and sticking with the theme of a sad note, Johnny, you've created a series called The Murder Map of Great Britain.

Where Johnny take us through his many murders, and where he's left the bodies. Wales is most successful. murderer. But do you know what I did? I managed to do, and Ellis will laugh this, and this is so me and every sister, I actually managed to get Murtha, an episode in Murtha. Did you? Yeah, because the last, famously,

it was a guy, a Welsh minor from Murtha Vale, that was hung. The Christie Moor, the serial killer in London, it was an innocent man hung. It was a moot's part of the abolition of the death penalty in the end, and he was a Murther boy called Timothy Evans. It was kind of illiterate, and he actually worked in the pit, and he went to London, and he was a bit of a

Walter, Mitty, and lived on the fringes. I like to drink, but he, They hang him, and they realised they hang the wrong guy. It was Christy admitted it after. It was him that killed his wife and daughter. So we set one in Murtha, and we obviously spoke about the history and the colon and all the rest of it. For our listeners, so quickly, take us through what the series is, basically,

and where can people watch it? It's on Sky. It's on Sky History. It's called Murder Map of Britain, and they're about murders that change the history of Britain, change the law. So obviously you've got the body snatchers in Edinburgh, where they changed the anatomy act came in after that, and then the abolition of the death, but they're murder.

So there are murders that had as a profound effect on our history because, you know, they're saying the law was changed because of this murder. So it was great to do that. So I was able to sort of like contextualise about what the place was like at the time and still given background history. Vicki was much more into sort of finding out

with the victims and, you know, the stories and things like that. It worked really well. I really enjoyed it. It's done really well. But it is, you know what? If you do that, I did a documentary once about the Avalvan disaster because obviously my father worked at that pit.

He was in the footage that day. He worked in the sister pit. So he's in the footage. my great Uncle Trevor's there. So it was a very profound effect on my hometown of me with the tiddville. And every anniversary comes up when people say, no, I was like,

I did one, I couldn't do it again. It's too harrowing. It's too difficult story to do, you know, because it's, you know, it's our legacy,

as Ellis says, as our heavy industry, but also we'd had an incredible toll on the people and the land and everything. So it's this kind of, we've got this weird relationship with our industrial past. We're very proud of it. But like you're saying,

it is all the wealth was sucked out in Wales. You know, what's been left in its place, you know, there are huge areas of social deprivation in South Wales where I'm from and everybody works very hard because there's no work. So it's got, it's a very complex but fascinating story and, like you said,

ultimately, I'm proud because the people that I knew and loved and grew up with were gone now, those men and women of industry aren't with us anymore. But I remember them and I remember them fondly and they were a brilliant tribe. I loved them. What a great place to end. Well, thank you, John. He's been absolutely

fantastic avenue on the pot. I really enjoyed it, Lance. Thank you very much for having me. I'm going to have to go back and listen to this one. If you just mentioned one, you've got, I should go back and listen to. You said, the Gwen Alf Williams one.

Yeah, the Gwen Alph Williams one. I'll go and do that tonight. Oh, please do, absolutely. Fantastic sounds passing in. And also, leave a nice review and subscribe. That'd be good. Yeah, five stars. No, brilliant.

Thanks for asking me. Thank you, Johnny. Thank you, nice. Enjoy all right. Cheers, boys. And thank you for listening. We'll see next week. Bye. Bye.

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