Library of Wales: Black Parade

Jack Jones was born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1884. He left school at twelve to work with his father as a miner. His political engagement saw him act for the Miners' Federation; join the Communist Party, then Labour. He stood as Liberal candidate for Neath in 1929. Married with five children, he earned a living through mining, as a platform-speaker, navvy, salesman, assistant cinema-manager and writer. In 1948 he was made a CBE, and in 1968 he was elected first president of the English section of Yr Academi Gymreig.

One of Merthyr’s Victorian brickyard girls, Saran watches the world parade past her doorstep on the banks of the stinking and rat-infested Morlais Brook: the fair-day revellers; the chapel-goers and the funeral processions. She never misses a trip to the town’s wooden theatres, despite her life ruled by the 5 a.m. hooter, pit strikes, politics and the First World War that takes away so many of her children.Her Glyn will work a treble shift for beer money; her brother Harry is the district’s most notorious drinker and fighter until he is ‘saved’. The town changes and grows but Saran is still there for Glyn, for Harry, for her children and grandchildren.In his 1935 novel Black Parade, writer, soldier and political activist Jack Jones creates a superbly riotous, clear and unsentimental picture of Merthyr life as his home town reels headlong into the twentieth century."Black Parade (1935) is strong because ... it includes the many-sided turbulence, the incoherence and contradictions, which the more available stereotypes of the history exclude. It can be properly contrasted with ... Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley (1939) ... widely and properly seen as the export version of the Welsh industrial experience."Raymond Williams*****************************************Writer and critic Mario Basini, whose recent Real Merthyr has brought a fresh approach to the literature of the town, has provided a fascinating introduction to Black Parade. Here’s the opening paragraph:'Merthyr Tydfil for Jack Jones was a stern and forbidding father, a nurturing mother, lover, friend and mortal enemy. His native town, built on its four great iron works, forged his talent and purged his prose of its impurities…. the town is never the mere backcloth against which the lives of his characters are played out. With its massive heart, its indomitable soul, the Merthyr of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dominates his best books…'