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Victory to the miners
May. 9th, 2022 01:39 pmLast Friday there was a screening of Pride in JP which obviously meant that I had to tell Talya and then a group of us went to see the screening of Pride because them’s the rules now. Now that I am on the Pride bandwagon it is apparently also time for me to read the companion book, Pride: The Unlikely Story of the Unsung Heroes of the Miners’ Strike, written (or, perhaps, curated) by Tim Tate, with most of the content provided by surviving members of LGSM and the Dulais Valley’s miners’ support committee (which has a name, but I have forgotten it already–in the movie it’s just “the committee” most of the time). There are interviews from a whole load of people who became movie characters (Mike Jackson, Jonathan Blake, Steph Chambers, Dai Donovan, etc) and ones from a whole load of people who did not become movie characters (Hefina’s daughter Jayne, for example). It is not addressed if there are any rivalries between the people who got movie-character-ified and the people who didn’t, although that is the sort of petty gossip I would absolutely love to know.
One thing I knew going into the book was that one of the more common criticisms of the movie is that they sort of glossed over the involvement of many of the characters, including Mark Ashton, in socialist and communist party politics. Reading about the various organizational ties of all the players I actually think made me come ‘round on that a bit because I think what they streamlined in order to make an easy-to-follow, coherently structured feature film was the thicket of organizational names and networks. Activism is generally a chaotic mess and very boring to put on screen, so I definitely understand from a movie-making point of view why they had LGSM pick the Dulais Valley out of a phonebook and cold call them, rather than what really happened, which is that some guy who was sort-of in LGSM knew some other guy through the South Wales Communist Party and had the party secretary ring him up and be like “comrade so-and-so has some money for you” and he was like “cool, I’m sending Dai up to London to try to schmooze people anyway, I’ll tell him to meet up” and like, nobody wants to follow all these chains of contacts on-screen, do they. So I’ll forgive it from a craft perspective, even though I found it really fascinating to read about everyone’s political histories and prior involvement with various parties and unions and groups.
The interview sections are very short so it doesn’t really feel like you’re reading anything too in-depth, but it still does give a good amount of additional context and behind-the-scenes information about how the miners’ strike went down.
One thing I knew going into the book was that one of the more common criticisms of the movie is that they sort of glossed over the involvement of many of the characters, including Mark Ashton, in socialist and communist party politics. Reading about the various organizational ties of all the players I actually think made me come ‘round on that a bit because I think what they streamlined in order to make an easy-to-follow, coherently structured feature film was the thicket of organizational names and networks. Activism is generally a chaotic mess and very boring to put on screen, so I definitely understand from a movie-making point of view why they had LGSM pick the Dulais Valley out of a phonebook and cold call them, rather than what really happened, which is that some guy who was sort-of in LGSM knew some other guy through the South Wales Communist Party and had the party secretary ring him up and be like “comrade so-and-so has some money for you” and he was like “cool, I’m sending Dai up to London to try to schmooze people anyway, I’ll tell him to meet up” and like, nobody wants to follow all these chains of contacts on-screen, do they. So I’ll forgive it from a craft perspective, even though I found it really fascinating to read about everyone’s political histories and prior involvement with various parties and unions and groups.
The interview sections are very short so it doesn’t really feel like you’re reading anything too in-depth, but it still does give a good amount of additional context and behind-the-scenes information about how the miners’ strike went down.