Library of Wales: Voices of the Children

George Ewart Evans was born in 1909, in the mining village of Abercynon. He was one of a family of eleven children whose parents ran a grocer's shop: the setting of his semi-autobiographical novel Voices of the Children(1947). After education at Mountain Ash County School and University College Cardiff, where he read classics and trained as a teacher, he had ambitions of being a writer. He published verse and short stories - many with a Welsh background - in various literary journals. In 1948 he gave up teaching and turned from writing fiction to producing a sheaf of studies, now regarded as classics, based on conversations with his elderly East Anglian neighbours.

This book was first published in 1947. In the foreword to this new edition, George Brinley Evans describes how he met the author when George Ewart Evans was researching a book about men who had worked in the anthracite coal industry. The author had become gripped by the stories told by the men of the coal-mining community, which brought back memories of his childhood in a similar valley. George Ewart Evans was born and raised in Abercynon where his family ran a grocer’s shop and after school and university he became a teacher. So he was not himself a miner or the son of a miner but lived among miners and miners’ children, whose stories had a profound effect on him.This book is a semi-autobiographical work of fiction based on the author’s childhood memories and his research. The narrator, a boy of about 8 years at the start, is one of several children who are expected to help with the chores, including looking after their one cow, and are trusted to deliver surplus milk and other goods, so they meet many of the valley people. Also they escape to the hills or to the farms scattered around the area and the book is peppered with tales of escapades, family events, village gossip and descriptions of the characters which inhabited the boy’s world. This is a delightful book which can be enjoyed as a simple tale of a child’s upbringing in a mining valley, but it is also a book of social history – a faithful record of life in the mining valleys in the first half of the 20th century.