Cwmardy () von Lewis Jones

InCwmardy, Big Jim, collier and ex-Boer War soldier, and his partner Sian endure the impact of strikes, riots, and war, while their son Len emerges as a sharp thinker and dynamic political organizer.

Lewis Jones was born in Clydach Vale in 1897. He started work underground at the age of twelve in the Cambrian Combine Colliery, which was central in the famous 1910-1911 strike that culminated in the Tonypandy riots. Jones absorbed the syndicalist philosophy of direct action and workers' control by which he was surrounded, and, in the Central Labour College which he attended in London from 1923 to 1925, the Marxism that led him to join the Communist Party. Jones became a full-time worker for the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, and led a number of the famous hunger marches of the 1930s from Wales to London. He was elected to the Glamorgan County Council in 1936, and died of a heart attack in 1939, after addressing numerous public meetings in support of the Spanish Republic. Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939) are his two epic novels of the experience of south Wales from the 1890s to the 1930s.