by Tim Moore
After a long and vacant round of follow-the-brake-lights I found myself in total darkness, bypassing Kidderminster. This rang a bell in my cloudy mind, but too quietly; I dully proceeded south-west, leaving a nationally reviled 1960s town centre unexplored. Only when BBC Radio West Midlands fuzzed and crackled its last, somewhere in the Worcestershire night, did I pull up into a lay-by and take stock. A riffle through the itinerary, a few bleepy jabs on Ozzy’s screen. Window down, volume up: a bracing twin blast of cold wind and The Essential Wally Party Medley. I was going where the pubs were hard, and the miners ex. I was going to Merthyr Tydfil.
The final approach to most settlements in distress, as I had established, was invariably a broad stretch of under-trafficked carriageway, the legacy of better and busier times. For long black miles Craig and I had the generously proportioned A465 to ourselves; for good measure, at the last moment it swept down from the Brecon Beacons and into a bowl full of cold, wet fog. Streetlights cast a muted glow across fuzzy, winding ranks of tiny terraced homes, dating to a mid-Victorian, heavy-industrial prime. It sounded all wrong when I researched the town’s history, and still seemed slightly ridiculous now that I saw the humble place with my own eyes, but the facts are these: Merthyr Tydfil was for many decades the world’s dominant producer of iron, and comfortably the largest town in all of Wales.
I’d phoned ahead to book a room at the Castle, the only surviving hotel of any sort in Merthyr but an establishment with quite a heritage. On 3 June 1831, ten thousand local ironworkers massed around the Castle Inn, seeking to impress a committee of local employers gathered therein with their low opinion of the ‘truck system’: the payment of wages as vouchers that could only be redeemed at company stores, which offered a modest range of staple comestibles at outrageous prices. What followed was a bloody four-day siege that came to be known as the Merthyr Rising, feted by trade unionists both as a pivotal moment in their development and as the first outing of the red flag as a rallying symbol of the working class. The scale and fury of the protest petrified the authorities: concerned that the army’s massacre of twenty-four protestors might prove an insufficient deterrent, prime minister Lord Melbourne covertly demanded the execution of at least one rioter; in the end, contrived evidence bagged him two.
But one glance at its Formica-faced, five-floor frontage suggested the Castle Hotel I now approached had witnessed little in the way of revolutionary martyrdom. My room duly harboured all the humdrum trappings of a hugely lapelled executive’s life on the road: rosewood trouser press, buttoned Dralon headboard, swagged pelmet concealing view of pebble-dashed tax office. Anyone looking for evidence of native radicalism would have had to content themselves with the sachets of gel baddon and siampw in the en suite.
Named in honour of a fifth-century martyr, Merthyr Tydfil has spent much of its recent history striving towards a sympathetic end. The town’s vast ironworks began downsizing in the 1860s, undone by their logistically unhelpful inland location. Coal mining picked up the economic slack, but as at Easington, the local collieries fell into decline after the Royal Navy switched to oil just before the Great War. Huge numbers of migrants from all across Europe had swelled Merthyr’s population in the boom years – a synagogue was consecrated in 1875 – but their grandchildren now moved out in droves. The town shed a third of its citizenry in the Twenties, and by 1932 local unemployment stood at 80 per cent.
Even in its prosperous heyday, Merthyr had been a challenging place to live and work: after a visit in 1850, Thomas Carlyle described the town as ‘a vision of Hell, filled with such unguided, hard-worked, fierce and miserable-looking sons of Adam as I never saw before’. Almost ninety years later, readers of The Times were appalled by the fate of those who had chosen to remain in the jobless town: ‘Men and women are starving: not starving outright, but gradually wasting away through lack of nourishment.’ The government decided the only answer to Merthyr’s irredeemably dreadful plight was to evacuate and demolish the town and start again from scratch: a well-developed plan to relocate Merthyr Tydfil to a site 30 miles away in the Usk Valley was only interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939.
A handful of local collieries struggled on in peacetime, but were employing no more than a couple of thousand men of Merthyr by 1966. That was the year of the terrible Aberfan disaster, when a rain-loosened flank of the Merthyr Vale pit’s slag heap thundered into a village school up the valley, killing 121 children. This tragedy rather drained Merthyr’s enthusiasm for the business of coal mining, and Margaret Thatcher did the rest. Merthyr Vale closed in 1989, and the area’s final survivor followed it a couple of years later. That should have been Merthyr’s one-way ticket to Easington – but it wasn’t, not quite. Back in 1948, the many Welshmen prominent in Clement Attlee’s post-war government had helped put together a package of inducements that persuaded the American-owned Hoover company to open a washing-machine plant in Merthyr Tydfil. It sounds like the sort of ill-considered venture that would end with two-thousand half-made Maestros sitting in a weed-pierced Bulgarian car lot, but the Hoover factory proved a runaway success, a beacon of hope for all those British towns then sliding into the bottomless abyss set aside for former mining communities. The light after the darkness: from filthy-faced past to white-coated, technocratic future. By 1973 the plant employed five thousand workers, already well established as one of Europe’s largest white-goods factories; when the Queen visited that year, she was shown plans for an expansion that would create a further three thousand jobs. The Castle Hotel, I now realised, had been built to accommodate executives on Hoover-centric visits.
The first suggestion that Hoover’s management might be losing their touch came in 1985, when they proudly announced that the Merthyr plant would be producing Clive Sinclair’s extravagantly ill-fated C5 ‘twat chariot’. The second, and effectively last, followed in 1992 – the very year that Merthyr’s final colliery closed, leaving Hoover as the area’s only significant employer. Tasked with clearing a glut of unsold vacuum cleaners, that summer Hoover’s marketing team contrived a promotion which offered two free return flights – to any European or American destination – for all British customers who spent £100 on any Hoover product. It is now universally acknowledged as the stupidest thing any company has ever done.
Accustomed to dealing with malleable and witless American consumers, the marketing executives calculated that those drawn in by the offer could initially be cajoled into spending much more than £100 on Hoover goods, and afterwards confused into defeat by the convoluted redemption conditions. In doing so they failed to account for the gimlet-eyed tenacity of the British bargain hunter: a failure that would cost the firm £48 million, and – as a final and very British humiliation – its royal warrant. ‘Fair enough, but we certainly shifted a few vacuum cleaners,’ said one executive, as three large Welshmen wordlessly crammed him into a front-loader.
This trumpeting fiasco was enough to bring Hoover to its knees, and Merthyr with it. Acquired by an Italian white-goods firm shortly after, the factory was steadily downsized; by the time it closed for good in 2009, just 337 workers were made redundant. In desperation, Merthyr now volunteers for even the most demeaning, disfiguring and unsavoury work. The town is home to one of the UK’s biggest abattoirs, and its three landfill sites accommodate most of South Wales’s rubbish. Inaugurated in 2008, Britain’s largest opencast coal mine now scars a whole hillside on the outskirts, feeding one of the dirtiest power stations in Europe. A new prison, a massive incinerator – if it means jobs, the people of Merthyr will welcome it with open arms. I’m reminded of the heartbreakingly work-eager Bulgarian who stayed with my wife and me one summer, and the advertisement we dissuaded him from displaying in our local newsagent’s window: Healthy young man will do anything for £10.
Yet despite all this, the town’s unemployment rate remains entrenched at 28 per cent, meaning that a huge number of the 38,600 people who still call Merthyr Tydfil home have nothing to do but find new ways to express their
idle hopelessness. A dumbfounding ten thousand of them claim incapacity benefit, by some margin the highest proportion in the land. Some 58 per cent of residents are overweight or obese. The town’s GPs prescribe anti-depressants to one in ten patients – the second-highest proportion in Britain. Two thirds of children leave Merthyr’s schools with fewer than five A*–C GCSEs, half of those without a single academic qualification of any sort to their name. It might only have made fifth place in the Location survey, but Merthyr Tydfil stands alone as Britain’s capital of blank-faced, empty-headed, chip-fed loitering.
I put on an extra layer and hit the streets. They didn’t hit back: misty drizzle, empty pavements, the look of a town that had faked its own death. Fronds of thick vegetation cascaded down the front of an old cinema. The narrow, wandering high road was home to the usual Chicken Lands, Cash Generators and soaped windows, along with an unusual preponderance of adult education and training centres. EMPLOYMENT MATTERS! insisted the sign above one. A tackle shop reminded me of a report in The Times that declared Merthyr ‘the unlikely host of an international angling contest’. Not unlikely at all, I thought, given the presence of a river and an embarrassment of free time. What do you give to the man who has nothing? A fishing rod and a stool.
I’d walked halfway round town and ingested a cone full of vinegared potato mush before finding the place I’d been looking for – had I turned left outside the hotel instead of right I’d have been there in a skip and a jump. Because I hadn’t come to see Merthyr’s sad and sickly youth, born into a town with no future and vacantly tagging along as it shuffled off its mortal coil. My quarry was the leathery reveller who had known Merthyr in its black-faced, white-goods pomp, and now raged against the dying of the light.
‘What type of hard bastard drinks in the Wyndham Arms?’ enquired the rhetorical voiceover, introducing the stand-out segment in Britain’s Toughest Pubs. A pause, and a shot of a grizzled cackler baring all three of his teeth right into the lens. ‘Old hard bastards.’
There it stood, opposite a double-fronted Money Shop, its aged frontage painted cerise since Sky 3’s visit in 2003. I pushed open the dark little door wondering if this bold redecoration was an experiment in the psychology of colour, a cunning ruse to soothe incoming regulars bent on reproducing the alcoholic turbulence so fulsomely portrayed on television.
‘Get your fucking facts right – you think you’re an attractive man, but you fucking are not!’
Not words I expected to hear bellowed at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday, or indeed at any time from the wrinkled lips of a sixty-five-year-old man, into the hairy ear of another. All the same, I should have savoured this rare encounter with a communication that was soon extinct: the intelligible sentence.
Ignoring a long, tapering annexe at the rear, the Wyndham Arms was a snug, dim, beam-ceilinged affair with all the usual trappings: framed old photos of colliery sporting teams and Brylcreemed boxers on the battle-scarred wainscoting, bare wooden floors, a NO BLOODY SWEARING brass plaque by the bar. Above the filled-in fireplace hung a TV, broadcasting World’s Rudest Adverts at low volume. My entrance had raised the total of incumbent drinkers by 10 per cent, but the rest were all squashed up in the darkest corner, too busy belittling each other’s physical appeal to notice me. I gave them a discreet once-over as the young barman poured my pint. All were cut from the same beer towel: the bridge of every nose deeply crevassed by decades of clumsy or violent mishap, the surrounding flesh ruddy and porous. But one or two looked extremely familiar, even allowing for the seven years of ravaging Wyndhamian excess that had elapsed since the harrowed Sky 3 crew beat a hasty retreat. In particular, the one with the hairy ears, who bore a striking resemblance to the sausage-fingered former bare-knuckle fighter – not the Wyndham’s oldest bastard, but certainly its hardest. I remembered him now, fixing the interviewer with a rheumy stare and rasping, ‘We get the odd stranger in here, but they don’t stop long. Put it that way. They don’t stop long.’
I’d just sat down at a table by the door when it opened and another familiar figure walked in. I say walked, but it was more of a rotary collapse, effected in such faltering instalments that I had long since raised my glass safely away from the table before the new arrival upended it and himself via heavy lateral contact. For a good half-minute thereafter man and table wrestled it out lethargically on the floor, a fitful thrashing of trousered and wooden legs. I raised my own clear of the mêlée and looked up to see that not even the barman deemed this noisy enmeshment worthy of attention. Presently the man kicked himself free and tottered stagily to his feet, wearing a prank-victim’s expression of bemused innocence, as if he’d just opened a wardrobe full of Space Hoppers. As I righted the table our eyes met, after a fashion: only then did I recognise him as one of the chest-prodding protagonists in a televised dispute about who had acquitted themselves best on the night the Wyndham took on a platoon of gurkhas.
And so it continued. I nursed that single pint all night, reluctant to compromise my defensive reflexes, and powerfully deterred by scenes that came to suggest a cautionary tableau put on by the Temperance Society. Every jelly-brained, jelly-limbed trans-pub journey – stool to bar, bar to bog, bog to stool – was undertaken via all points of the compass, with my table as magnetic north. Twice more I had to snatch my pint aloft as its supporting surface was dashed to the floor – the second time by a seated man being carried outside to have a fag. I was intrigued to behold so many different ways of not being able to walk: the arms-out Karloff blunder, the Pingu-on-ice quickstep, the clenched determination of a naval night-watchman crossing his deck in high seas.
Between wary sips, I watched the Wyndham slowly fill. The most conspicuous arrival was a fearsomely dishevelled man who pushed the door open with a stick and shuffled across to a table in front of the telly, where he sat down and began cramming haphazard chunks of a Subway sandwich through the hole in his beard. He was a good 10 feet from me but I very swiftly became aware of a quite extraordinarily pungent odour. His coat, a padded high-visibility number of the type favoured by binmen, had been freshly tarred and feathered, and the trouser bottoms beneath looked waxy and rigid; it had clearly been some considerable time since any of this clothing had been removed, or – how can I say this? – in any way lowered, loosened or otherwise adjusted. The barman walked across to him with a pint of Guinness in one hand and an aerosol in the other. The first he laid on the table, in exchange for a phlegmy grunt. He aimed the second at the ceiling directly above the man’s head, and in an air of weary ritual shared by both parties hissed out a huge, choking cloud of floral air-freshener. ‘Sorry about this, but what can I do?’ he said to me as he walked past. ‘He spends thirty quid a day in here.’ When the air cleared, the Guinness had been drained.
By now even the briefest exhortations were demanding an oral dexterity that proved beyond most, though not through want of trying. ‘F-F-FAH-G-G-A-GAH-F-F … FUGOFF!’ Then ragged jeers and harsh laughter. It wasn’t yet half nine and we were pretty much down at the level of tramps hanging out under a canal bridge, with all the confused volatility that defines such gatherings, the sense that at any moment someone might get bottled for saying something that someone else hadn’t even said. Amongst its many ailments and disabilities, Merthyr ranks as the deafest town in Britain: 19 per cent of the population find it either difficult or impossible to hear a voice in a conversation.
It was like Last of the Summer Wine scripted by Irvine Welsh, or Under Milk Wood gone Shameless. Every so often Pig-Pen’s granddad would abruptly emit a farmyard snort or honk, or embark on a horrible, hacking, everything-must-go mucus clear-out. When he shot out a wild arm and whelped I had a flash of déjà vu: the most voluble, and drunkest, of the Wyndham regulars depicted in Britain’s Toughest Pubs had punctuated his most spirited utterances in precisely this manner. ‘Fuck the English, fuck everybody!’ – out went the arm. ‘This is the best bastard pub in fucking Wales!’ – out went the arm. It jerked around like a man fighting off a swarm of be
es during the account of how he’d seen off a party of French tourists by sitting at their table and setting fire to his hair. Could it really be him? Both had beards and very few teeth, but beyond that it was very hard to tell. Seven unshaven years on a £30-a-day pub habit must exert a potent levelling effect on the appearance of the senior male.
It was my good fortune, I suppose, to return from the Gents and find that I would henceforth be sharing my table with the least incapable Welshman this side of the bar. He was a pudgy chap with the benign, rumpled look of a hungover Ken Barlow, though his opening gambit revealed a rather more vigorous way with words.
‘What do you think of the fucking pub we run here, then?’
The humming nod I essayed in response would soon be seeing a lot of action. For an hour or more my companion kept me supplied with highlights from his inner monologue, and the occasional pundit’s take on the eight-way shouting match that slurred endlessly on in the corner. The mellifluous Welsh emphasis he lavished upon each syllable ensured I plainly understood every individual word he said, which only served to highlight the impenetrable mysteries of their sense and context.
‘Quite a girl, is that Naa-taa-lee!’
‘Fucking funny that, though, wasn’t it? Bought his Vi-aa-ga-raa on a Barr-clee-card! Fucking Bar-clee-card!’
‘You know, it didn’t really work out for me that year, Madge-orrr-ca.’
‘Fucking Barr-clee-card! Funny that, wasn’t it?’
