Black Parade

by Jack Jones

An unsentimental picture of life in the Welsh mining town of Merthyr Tydfil at the turn of the last century. This portrait of working-class life in the Victorian era explores the hardships of family life. Saran, the novel’s female protagonist, faces hard times as the wife of a hard-drinking miner and deals with the devastating effects of World War I.

Genres: Fiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Jack Jones was a Welsh coal miner, socialist politician, novelist and playwright. He wrote mainly about life in the industrial Welsh Valleys.

Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
List of authors: Jack Jones

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jack Jones was, in his time, a bit of a jack of all trades. He was a miner, and a political speaker, and goodness knows what else, before he was a writer. So Black Parade is informed by all of those things: a lively and vivid account of Merthyr, as he knew it, both during the height of its industrial life, and during the decline. At the center of his story is a woman called Saran, a Welsh woman who manages her husband and brother and brings up her family -- losing some of them to war -- in that environment. According to Glyn Jones in The Dragon Has Two Tongues, Saran is based on Jack's own mother.

There is something very spontaneous and quick about the prose; in places, Jack seems to have lost his way mid-sentence. That gives something very authentic to the narrative voice, to me, but it can also definitely be an irritant.

I suppose, overall, not much happens -- there's little by way of character development, except perhaps when it comes to Harry: certainly Saran changes little and her husband Glyn is still as argumentative and prone to drinking too much at the end of the story as he is at the moment. But the world around them develops, and the kind of work they do, and the entertainments available... It's very valuable as a picture of Merthyr at the time.

[Ben Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jack Jones was a political man. In his day he joined the Miners’ Federation, he joined the Communist Party, then Labour and then the Liberals, standing as Liberal Candidate for Neath in 1929. He served as a regular soldier in the First World War. He was a man involved in the South Wales collieries, active in his community. Like all great writers, he watched and listened, and Black Parade, his novel of 1935, is the fruit of all this engagement.

His first novel was Rhondda Roundabout, a year before, but Black Parade (at one time called Saran, after the lead character) was the novel that made his name. Written in South-Walian inflection, it reveals a Merthyr Tydfil that is at once beautiful and horrific, a place blighted by success, and torn apart by poverty. Its men spend their days working and their nights drinking, while its women attend the theatre, reproduce, care for their children, and spend their nights fretting about whether their man will come home from work or from play: the mines are just as dangerous as the bars.

Black Parade details most of Saran Morgan’s life, from her courtship with the hard-working, hard-fighting Glyn, through her motherhood, until close to her death: through the prism of this life Jack Jones reveals the grotesquery of the First World War, the General Strike, the changing face of this most Welsh of towns. Immigration, harlotry, the refusal of Whitehall to acknowledge the debt of the miners and so much more beside fills these pages. Saran’s life is – for her – a mostly happy one. We meet her, an independent working woman: she drags her Glyn from the pub when he is in one too long, an unimaginable insult to a man, and yet Glyn sticks with her. Saran has children with him, some who survive the War and the mines, some who do not, and their loss is as sudden and unexpected as such things are, and Jack Jones simply shows life continuing: in this harsh life there is no point in mourning the unalterable.

Jack Jones’s Merthyr comes to life through Saran and her family, but it thrives because of its supporting cast. Some characters appear only for a chapter, others appear throughout, all of them one feels drawn from real life counterparts. Twm Steppwr, a “feckless pub entertainer and balladeer” (as Mario Basini calls him in his introduction to this novel) is a character still alive in Welsh pubs: indeed the prototypes for so many are here, living and breathing and surviving.

The closest cousin to Black Parade that might be known outside Wales is Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, turned into an Oscar Winning film by John Ford in 1941: unlike Llewellyn who raised in England and only briefly worked in the mines, Jack Jones lived this existence: he knew these people, these lives, this hardship and it infuses every page. I cannot say that it is a better novel than Llewellyn’s, having not read it yet, but I suspect it will have a hard time trumping Black Parade as the definitive portrayal of this now forgotten life.

Once again The Library of Wales have presented a forgotten Welsh novel with excellence: they are beautifully presented volumes with insightful commentary (this time, as I said, by Mario Basini). I cannot recommend this series enough.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

First published in 1935, Black Parade chronicles the lives of hard-working, hard-drinking miner Glyn and his wife Saran in the Welsh coal town of Merthyr, from the 1880s to the then present.

It is inevitably compared with Richard Llewellyn’s more famous How Green Was My Valley, published in 1939. Where Llewellyn is lyrical, nostalgic, and sentimental, Jack Jones – himself a former miner – is unsentimental, matter-of-fact, and plain-speaking. That may sound like a compliment, but Llewellyn’s is the better novel. Black Parade, it has to be said, is a bit of a trudge.

It is essentially a family saga, detailing incidents in the lives of Glyn, Saran, and their large family over a period of some fifty years. Jack Jones obviously did not hold much with description, because Glyn’s lifetime down the pit takes place almost entirely off stage. The mines and ironworks are frequently mentioned, but almost never seen. Even Merthyr itself is only glimpsed fitfully, as the passage of the years changes it from the chaos of an industrial, Welsh-speaking boom town to a tamer place of English-speaking civic respectability. Jack Jones maintains a steady, low-key, monotone voice throughout.

Black Parade is not without interest for its content – especially if you live in the Valleys – but as a novel, it could have done with some of Llewellyn’s vitality to stir it into life.