The Joneses

The pit village

Evan Jones, 1848–1911

The first Jones we know by name went underground at the age of eleven. Evan worked forty years at the Abergorki pit, and the family still has his brass lamp, worn smooth where his thumb held it. On Sundays he walked his children to chapel twice and sang bass in a voice that, people said, could be heard at the bottom of the valley. He died in 1911 and is buried above Treorchy, looking down on the terrace where he lived.

The choir

David Jones, 1875–1940

David followed his father down the pit and into the choir. In 1905 the choir sang at the National Eisteddfod, and David travelled further from home than ever before, with his only good suit pressed under the mattress the night before. He brought back a china cup with a red dragon painted on it. The cup is chipped now, but Nan Joan kept it on the dresser until the day she died, and Seren drinks her milk from it on birthdays.

1926

William Jones, 1903–1972

In the General Strike of 1926 the pits closed for seven months. The chapel ran a soup kitchen, and William, twenty-three, helped carry the pans. When the strike ended there was no job for him, so he walked to Cardiff with a friend — twenty-five miles in a day — and found work on the docks loading coal onto ships for Argentina. He used to say he left the valley with one shilling and a sandwich, and spent the shilling on the tram.

The dance at the Docks Hall

Elsie Jones, née Hughes, 1906–1990

Elsie worked in a biscuit factory and went dancing every Saturday at the Docks Hall. William could not dance at all, so he asked her to teach him. By the third Saturday he had stepped on her feet so often that she said she might as well marry him — and she did, in the spring of 1930. They lived in two rooms off Bute Street, and for their first anniversary William bought her a gramophone on the never-never.

Under the stairs

Thomas Jones, 1931–2009

Thomas was ten during the Cardiff Blitz. When the sirens went, the family squeezed into the cupboard under the stairs, and Elsie sang hymns so loudly that the children couldn't hear the bombs. One night in January 1941 the house two doors down was hit. In the morning Thomas found a toy soldier in the rubble and kept it for the rest of his life; it stood on his desk all the years he taught school.

Mr Jones, Standard Four

Thomas and Joan Jones, 1958

Thomas was the first Jones to stay at school past fourteen. After National Service he trained as a teacher and got his first post in Swansea, where he met Joan, the school secretary, who corrected the spelling in his reports. They married in 1958. For thirty-five years he taught Standard Four, and grown men would still stop him in the street and say, “Sir, you were the one who made me read.”

London

Gareth Jones, 1958

I went to London in 1982 with a guitar and a sleeping bag. I lived in a bedsit in Camden, played bass in a band nobody remembers, and worked nights sorting post at Mount Pleasant. That's where I met Susan — she was the supervisor and told me off for reading the postcards. My father didn't say much when I left Wales, but every Sunday a letter came, always ending the same way: “Eat properly. Dad.”

Nan's voice

Rhys Jones, 1987

In 2019 I sat with Nan Joan at her kitchen table in Swansea and recorded her on my phone for three afternoons. She told me about the dances, the war, and Grandad Tom's terrible singing. She died two years later. Now Owen asks for “Nanna's story” at bedtime. He never met her, but he knows exactly how she laughs, and so will his children.

Rub the butter into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs, then stir in the sugar, nutmeg and currants. Add the egg and just enough milk to make a firm dough. Roll it out to the thickness of your little finger and cut rounds with a glass. Cook them on a hot bakestone — or a heavy frying pan — three minutes a side, until golden. Dust with sugar while warm.

Nan never weighed anything — “a cup of this, a knob of that”. Gareth stood next to her one Sunday with kitchen scales and wrote it down.