Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT)
We're known as the MOTley Crew and you can find us here every morning at 7:00 am Eastern (and sometimes earlier!). Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanently or just once in awhile. With the Auto Publish feature you can set it and forget it. Sometimes the diarist du jour shows up much later: that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Volunteer in the comment threads.
Click on the MOT - Morning Open Thread ♥ if you'd like us to show up in your stream.
Good Morning Motlies.
As many of you are aware, I grew up ( "was raised" in American English ) in South Wales. South Wales is loosely defined as the area between the River Wye and Swansea to the West, bounded by the Brecon Beacons to the North and the Bristol Channel to the South. This is about 2000 square miles, about the size of Delaware It is home to three quarters of the population of Wales, 2.2 Million despite representing less than one quarter of the land mass.
South Wales owes its high population to its former status as one of the richest areas of coal and iron ore in the world. The industrial revolution was powered by steam produced by burning coal in iron boilers, and South Wales had both. For a large part of the 19th century, first Newport, then Cardiff were the largest exporters of coal in the world, and one of the largest producers of iron.
Merthyr Tydfil (Welsh: Merthyr Tudful) grew around the Dowlais Ironworks which was founded to exploit the locally abundant seams of iron ore, and in time it became the largest iron producing town in the world. New coal mines were sunk nearby to feed the furnaces and in time produced coal for export. By the 1831 census, the population of Merthyr was 60,000: more at that time than Cardiff, Swansea and Newport combined, and its industries included coal mines, iron works, cable factory, engine sheds and sidings and many others
source wikipedia.
But by the 20th century, the iron ore had run out, coal was competing with oil and a decline in the fortunes of the area was finally finished off by Margaret Thatcher and the the National Coal Board, who after the the 1982 miners' strike closed every single deep pit except one, and even that one closed a few years ago to become a museum.
With the loss of the coal, followed the loss of the iron and steel industry, with large steel works in Newport, Ebbw Vale and Port Talbot closing down.
The destruction of the economic core of the region ripped the guts out of the people and its culture, and it is still yet to recover. The area is now very low income, high unemployment, and relatively high crime. ( In Uk terms that means that Newport population 120,000 has one or two murders per year, none using firearms).
But South Wales has a hidden asset - it has a rich history of music and drama, and this can be seen by some of its most recent exports as shown below.
Richard Burton
Anthony Hopkins
Tom Jones
And of course - Doctor Who
So what's on your mind today?