Episode 2 The Taff: The River That Made Wales

'This is the River Taff in South Wales.

'It runs from the wild summits of the Brecon Beacons

'to the capital city, Cardiff.'

I love this river, I absolutely love it.

'40 years ago, the Taff was declared officially dead,

'killed by centuries of heavy industry.

'But today, it's one of the finest fishing rivers in Wales.'

HE CHUCKLES How is that fish still on?

'My name is Will Millard. I'm a writer and a fisherman.

'I want to see how this river has come back to life.'

It's so cold!

'It may be short - you can walk the length of the Taff in three days -

'but it runs through a stunning landscape, packed with history.

'I want to get to know this river...'

Damn! '..from source to sea.'

Salmon from the city centre.

What a river.

This is the story of the River Taff.

I grew up fishing the still waters of the Norfolk Fens,

a long way from the Taff Valley,

but my grandfather was from Yorkshire

and spent his life working in the coal mines.

My grandad had an immensely hard time down the pits.

Throughout his life, he always carried

these big, white handkerchiefs and he would cough up coal dust

into his handkerchief.

I remember even as a kid thinking, "Why is my grandad coughing black?"

I felt so far removed, really, from what he'd done.

Then as he got into his later years

and he started to suffer from ill health,

I remember going to see him

in hospital and I'd been working in a pub.

I was quite tired and I thought he wasn't watching.

He was an exceptionally tough man

and I rested my head on the end of his bed

and he said, "Is thee tired?"

He said it in a way that wasn't sort of, "Oh, are you tired, my grandson?

"I hope you're not tired."

It was very much in that kind of, "Cos you shouldn't be.

"Get your head off my bed," basically.

And, um...

it was the first time I'd ever seen his knee,

in the hospital bed before he passed away

and I remember it was peeking out the side of the bed sheet.

And it was tattooed black...

..with coal.

You don't forget stuff like that.

I'm halfway on my journey down the River Taff

and I'm heading south from Merthyr Tydfil.

On this stretch of the river,

it was coal that shaped almost 200 years of history.

The industry created communities

employing hundreds of thousands of people

packed into terraced houses on the banks of the river.

WHISTLE HOOTS

The Taff was a vital resource.

It fed the canals that carried this black gold down to the sea.

But water from the river was also used to wash coal,

resulting in dust and lethal chemicals entering the watercourse.

To travel down the Taff today,

you have to look carefully to see any signs of coal mining.

The slag heaps have been grassed over

and the pit wheels dismantled.

To find out more about the industry that transformed the Taff,

I'm heading up one of its tributaries,

the Rhondda River.

This was once the Lewis Merthyr Colliery,

but it's now the Rhondda Heritage Park.

It's part of history.

Even for me now - I finished, um...

I'd have said a couple of years ago - it's 20 years ago

since I finished in the pits.

Ivor England and Graham Williams

spent almost 80 years underground between them.

-So that's what it's all about?

-That's what it's all about.

A lot of lives were lost

getting that stuff up from under the ground, innit?

Hmm?

The coal from pits like this fuelled the British Empire,

but it came at a heavy price.

Waste from the collieries was washed into the rivers.

It's estimated that in a single year,

over 100,000 tonnes of colliery waste was dumped into the Taff.

But for men like Ivor and Graham,

mining was a way of life.

This, in my opinion,

is what all men who started work remember.

You stood in the queue and waited till the time came.

-To go into what?

-To go in the cage.

-To go into that?!

-Yeah.

The cage was going down, coming up...

I assumed that was just for the truck!

Shift men were still coming up from the pit.

The banksman, as they called him,

he's responsible to make sure you go in, come out.

Bring it down.

Press the button - "Ding, ding, ding!"

"Pff-shew!" Down it should go.

Ivor and Graham were both teenagers when they first went underground,

descending almost 500 metres to pit bottom.

I remember the first time I got out the cage,

seeing horses for the first time that I'd heard so much about.

-Horses were stabled underground, weren't they?

-Aye.

They came up once a year.

Life in the mines was tough,

dark, dirty and dangerous,

but a camaraderie was formed between the men

who shared an equally dark sense of humour.

I can remember when I was about 18 and I went on the coal first, Ivor,

I was going to a rough place, in the rib.

It was all crushing and cracking and everything was moving

and two of the old collies there show up, and he said,

"Do you think he'll come out of there?"

The one said, "Maybe a man would have a chance,

"but not a bloody boy, like that. No chance at all."

One said, "You courting?" "Yeah, beautiful girl."

-"Blonde girl, she'll look lovely in black."

-Oh, God!

I was going in there shaking.

-Good grief.

-A lot of black humour.

-Yeah.

I can remember going home and my mother saying,

"Oh, look at your hands."

All blisters and cuts and things like that.

"What's the matter with your stomach?

"What's the matter with your stomach?" I'd been laughing so much.

The deep mineshafts here have been capped,

but the lifts remain

and now simulate the sensation of going underground.

The signal to the winder

and we'd be on our way.

Normally this would be about nine metres a second

and by now it would take your breath away,

your stomach would be left in your mouth.

I know that we're not going underground

-and I still feel nervous.

-You would get used to it.

-Yeah, well, Ivor's behind you!

-LAUGHTER

I'd be nervous with Ivor on my shoulder!

Now we're down, lads. I can open the door, all right?

The tunnels of the working pit would have stretched for almost 30 miles,

but with the help of ex-miners,

a section of this old mine has been recreated.

This is where we show you how to use explosives in a coal mine.

-Right.

-I'll see what I can show you.

Cor, it's like TNT from the cartoons, isn't it?

A bit more powerful than dynamite!

In one of those,

you put an electronic detonator with these wires attached.

The shotsman then would just connect that to a little battery.

Go on, have a go, Will, you can press the button.

Of course, nothing's going to happen today.

No. Of course, it's all...

LOUD BANG

God's sake!

THEY LAUGH

-The floor did shake then.

-No, you must have imagined that.

-It did shake.

-I didn't know it was charged up.

-I...!

-Yes.

'Today, these proud men spend their days telling visitors

'about the industry that shaped their lives.'

Pneumatic pick, "puncher", we call it.

'The tools they used are now artefacts in a museum.'

So you can have that.

How is he holding that with one hand?

Working down here in the heat, the dust and the dark took its toll.

Injuries and death were all too common,

with tens of thousands killed underground.

But even those who survived still carry the scars.

You've got pneumatic tools vibrating and shaking

-and it breaks the nerve endings in your fingers.

-Right.

So I haven't got it to that extent, actually...

..but some men who worked in the pits,

they can barely pick up a pint.

It's like my dad -

he had it quite badly. He had to pick up a pint with two hands.

For me, as incredible as this place looks,

as authentic as you guys can get it,

the most authentic thing in this museum right now is you

and once your generation passes on,

who's going to be there to tell the stories?

I tell the kids now,

I say, "Look, talk to us,

"we're like dinosaurs - we'll be extinct shortly."

So Ivor, an authentic coal miner, and I was.

But, yeah, we are a dying breed.

BOISTEROUS CHATTER

There are men here to tell the story of the tremendous social culture

that built up around coal mining.

The life in the pubs, the life in the clubs,

they played in the band.

All these things were there,

all coming out of the miner's pay, didn't it?

A miner's determination to make life easier.

Education.

Learning.

There was an optimism - "Things are going to get better."

There was a belief in people - "Things are going to get better."

-I wouldn't say that's now.

-That's not something you can replicate?

I don't think people are going to say

things are going to get better, no.

There's a disillusionment. We know what we come from,

but the difficulty is finding where we're going.

Coal mining created the South Wales valleys,

but it killed the River Taff.

This film shows what the river was like in the town of Pontypridd

during the 1950s.

-FILM NARRATOR:

-What's he after?

Has he caught anything?

No fish, I'm afraid, here.

No, not in 1956.

While the Taff perished, the communities on its banks flourished.

Rugby, chapels, choirs,

working men's clubs,

were born out of the pits.

And some still persist.

BRASS BAND MUSIC PLAYS

Founded here in the Rhondda Valley in 1880,

this is one of the oldest colliery bands in Wales.

Ivor once played the trombone for the band,

but there are few miners here today.

I think 18 of the men, of the 25 men in this band

when I started work were working underground,

including the band conductor.

Wales and the United Kingdom have got a great tradition of bands

that have been associated with collieries.

They closed the last ones in the early '90s

and ever since then, the bands have been reliant on themselves

to kind of reinvent themselves,

find a new way of sustaining themselves

without the support of the collieries

and indeed, without the influx of members from the colliery as well.

A lot of the members are young, a lot of the members are female.

It's a different world.

The challenge is now that loss of employment.

That was the thing that kept everybody together,

that was the thing that was the cohesive unit in the community

and we don't have that any more.

We train the kids and as I did, they go away, they go to university.

They don't necessarily come back

and it would be the employment that would draw them back,

so that's the constant challenge for us, really.

THEY PLAY Cwm Rhondda

Do you think the brass bands, then,

have helped to sort of keep the community together

and give you guys something to sort of bond around?

Um, yeah, cos my father, he was...

well, he is a musician as well, so he's passed on that to me as well.

My brother, he's also a musician as well

and he's gone through the brass bands as well,

so I think it's a great opportunity for communities to bond

and get to know each other.

These bands were hugely important to the life of the colliery

and following the miners' strike of the 1980s,

it was the bands who led the men back to work.

Ivor was there, proudly playing his trombone.

The bells were ringing in the church there,

all the media were there,

we lined up in front of all the people -

huge, hundreds of people.

I was playing the trombone, I was on the corner there

and we marched up the roadway.

Then the manager shook hands with us all

and down the pit I went.

THEY SING

BRASS BAND MUSIC PLAYS

How can you not be moved by this?

It's, um...

It's absolutely beautiful.

This music carries the sadness and the pride

of an industry brought to its knees.

The collapse of coal mining in Wales left thousands of miners unemployed

and many Valleys communities broken.

I'm rejoining the Taff in Pontypridd.

I've coming to meet Paul Jenkins,

an ex-miner and now captain of the Welsh fly-fishing team.

The river in those days would be black,

absolutely black.

If you put your hand in the water, you wouldn't be able to see it

three inches below the surface.

-Is that right?

-Most of the time.

In fact, we used to look forward to...

..the two-week miners' holidays,

cos the river would clear a little bit then for those two weeks.

-Really?

-Yeah, just for those two weeks.

We're in the centre of town, fishing for grayling.

That looks good.

That cast deserved a fish.

-Yep.

-WILL SIGHS

If the fish takes again, just lift gently into it, rather than strike.

-Yes!

-Yes!

-Oh! It's another grayling, I think.

-First grayling.

First grayling on the fly...

Oh, and that's what you get for talking about fish

that you haven't got into the bank.

-Nearly your first grayling.

-Yeah, yeah, NEARLY my first grayling.

Right, your turn, I think.

I knew he was going to be a lot better than me at this,

but whenever he sees a rising fish, he's on it straight away.

He's in!

Whoa, brilliant.

-Here it comes.

-Grayling.

-Grayling.

-Fantastic.

-There you go.

He's not more than a year or two old.

-There's a lot of grayling this size in the river this year.

-Right.

Which means the last couple of years have been good spawning years,

so in a couple of years' time, these fish will be up over a pound.

-Fantastic fish.

-Gorgeous.

-He's away.

-He's away.

Paul spent decades working underground.

But for him, it all came to an end with the 1984 miners' strike.

Tell me what life was like on the strike.

People really struggled, you know?

At the time, I was there with my father.

My mother had died a couple of years before.

And he was a collier, I was a collier,

so we had two colliers in my house

and there was no money coming in at all

for the 12 months.

It was tough.

It was really tough.

ANGRY SHOUTING

The miners' strike saw violent clashes between miners and police,

conflict within coal mining towns themselves

and desperate times for miners and their families.

We were relying in those days on the generosity of the community.

And I think it became apparent

that the strike was more than just about closing pits.

The ultimate goal, I'm sure, of the government at the time

was to defeat not only the NUM

but the unions in total,

and over the years since the strike, they have, they've achieved that.

While the end of heavy industry was devastating

for the people of the Valleys,

it was a lifeline for the Taff.

Without the coal dust from the collieries,

the river began to run clear again

-and the fish began to return.

-They say every cloud has a silver lining.

And yeah, we lost the pits, but look at this.

I don't know what's for the best. Perhaps it was a blessing.

I've just got to watch that pink indicator on the surface

and when that goes, I strike.

That's the theory, anyway.

There's the salmon again.

Did you get that?

Not paying attention and he's in again!

THEY LAUGH

-Yes, get in.

-You've got him.

Oh, that's a lovely fish.

That's how they're able to turn so sharply,

that massive, massive sail dorsal fin.

I bet 30 years ago when you were still working in the pits,

you'd never imagine you'd catch a fish like this.

No, no, certainly not grayling.

They will only really survive in clean water,

so that's an indication that this river has recovered.

Right, let's get him back in.

Ooh, he's a good fish!

Take your time now, cos there's a very light leader on it.

-That's a trout, innit?

-This is definitely the best fish of the day.

Oh, without a doubt. Oh, it's a trout.

-Oh, it IS a trout!

-A big trout.

-Nearly there.

-Oh, there's a salmon!

-WILL CHUCKLES

-Where are we going?

I'm playing him by hand now, you better get him.

-He's still on.

-He's still on.

-I can't see where he is.

-I've got the hook in my hand!

Ah!

This is getting worse!

All right, all right, we're getting under control now.

How is that fish still on?

Right, stop playing games now, Will.

Get him in the net, then, get him to the surface.

-There we go.

-Ah, here he comes.

Way! THEY LAUGH

We did not deserve that fish!

-Oh, my goodness me!

-Look at the colours on that.

Wow, look at that.

What would you give me for that, 2lb, maybe?

Getting on for two, getting on for two.

There you are, you can let him go, if you like.

I would love to let him go.

It's been 30 years since the majority of the pits closed...

..but there is still coal beneath these hills.

Ten miles back upriver, coal is once again coming out of the Taff Valley.

But it's a far cry from the deep mines of the last century.

What do you think, Will?

That is unbelievable.

Ffos-y-fran, on the ridge above Merthyr Tydfil,

is the biggest open-cast coal mine in Britain.

How deep is that, Denzil?

-It's 165 metres.

-165 metres?

Denzil Hopkins has been working here since the operation began in 2007.

We're just going down into the mine now.

There is a stigma attached to this sort of mining, isn't there?

-Yeah.

-People say it's dirty,

that we shouldn't be reliant on fossil fuels any more,

that we should be trying to move on

-and look for more sustainable, greener energy.

-Yeah.

And until we can get this greener energy,

or until we can find another alternative fuel,

we've got to have coal.

Concerns over climate change

mean the age of coal is drawing to a close.

But the UK is still heavily reliant on coal.

Even with mines like these, we still import 80% of the coal we burn.

And this mine is a big employer in a valley that needs jobs.

Over 200 staff work on site.

Most of the coal from here is either sent to be burned

in Aberthaw Power Station or for steel production in Port Talbot,

supporting thousands more jobs.

Whatever your views,

it's hard not to be impressed by the scale of this operation.

That is quite an intimidating piece of machinery.

Operating this 250-tonne excavator

is one of the most skilled jobs on site

and at the controls is Brian Wilkins.

Will, if you just want to press the top button and lift the ladder up.

-Right.

-We're all ready to go.

This is a hell of a vehicle.

There we go.

No way back now.

WILL GASPS AND CHUCKLES

Cor, Brian, incredible feeling of power, is it?

It can be, yeah,

but it's just like getting into my car in the morning coming to work.

-What car do you drive?!

-Ha, just a Ford Focus.

THEY CHUCKLE

There are four of these huge machines on this site,

plus a dozen smaller diggers,

filling 28 massive dump trucks.

How much does each pass weigh?

Round about 25 tonnes.

25 tonnes? So there's 100 tonnes of rock going in that?

In one load, yeah.

You're quite delicate with it, really.

Yeah, it's just cos you're, like, doing it so much,

you spend so much time doing it,

-it just comes natural, really.

-Right.

Yeah, it just comes natural.

-Do you want a go?

-I'd love a go.

You're not going to let me have a go, are you?

I would, but I don't know whether they would.

On an average week, man and machine

can move around 200,000 cubic metres of rock to reach the coal.

We've got it really easy compared to what the miners had years ago.

I've got all my comfort in here - radio, air conditioning.

-Yeah.

-Everything, really.

-Yeah.

-And you're digging, one man...

-Yeah.

..shifting, what, 100 tonnes in less than five minutes?

'In the past eight years, over six million tonnes

'of high-quality steam coal has been mined from here.

'From the bottom of the hole, you can see the distinct seams,

'the riches of the South Wales Coalfield laid bare.'

That's an old pillar, that's part of an old pillar.

'But it isn't only coal the miners have unearthed.'

So right now, Denzil, I'm standing in

-effectively an old coal mine?

-Yes.

So not that long ago, there would have been people down here

-working on their hands and knees with tools?

-Yes.

-Just with a pick and shovel.

-Right.

And here we are now with the sunshine on our backs.

Sunshine miners.

Sunshine miners!

Before the open-cast mining began here,

the mountain was strewn with dozens of old mineshafts.

-Look at that.

-That would have been still in, wouldn't it?

-Yeah.

Cor, it's mad to think, isn't it, Denzil,

that people trusted their life in that piece of wood?

They depended on that piece of wood for their lives.

-And you look at how bent that has become.

-Yeah.

You're stopping the weight of all of those hundreds of metres of rock

and coal from crashing down on your head with a piece of wood

that I can hold the width of with just one hand.

It's, um... It's absolutely mind-blowing, it's amazing.

-It's amazing.

-It IS amazing.

Today, with the latest technology

and by literally moving the mountain,

these miners are able to extract almost every last ounce of coal.

But there is another side to this open-cast operation.

As well as removing the coal,

the owners also have to put right a landscape

that has been exploited for over 100 years.

So what's happened here?

We've just restored it all the way from the outer edge there,

-restored it all back.

-Yeah?

Last year, we baled hay on here.

There was hay baled off here, you know.

-Three years ago, this was the same as that hole over there?

-Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm proud of the fact that I've been part

of not only the way we're taking the coal out,

-but the way we're putting the ground back.

-Yeah.

Coal mining has changed beyond recognition.

An industry that once choked the Taff

is now subjected to strict environmental controls

to put right the wrongs of the past.

For centuries, our insatiable demand for coal drew people to this valley.

Communities were created and the environment was changed forever.

The guts of this landscape have been torn right out of this valley.

I can't imagine a place that's been exploited

to such an extent as this place has been.

So, so much wealth.

And yet...

it's all been flushed downstream and gone elsewhere.

While the industry and much of the wealth it created may have gone,

the people and their pride are still here.

'Next time, I'm heading to the city.'

This river is completely hidden.

'I meet people who have fallen in love with the river.'

On three, yeah?

One...!

THEY YELL

'But as I approach the end of my journey,

'the Taff has one final surprise.'

I do not believe it!