Levelling up

The latest clarion call of the government, most enthusiastically sounded by the prime minister, is ‘levelling up’. It is nothing new, one of the unsolved and possibly insoluble problems going back generations, centuries even.

Among the most obvious examples are environment, housing, wealth and lifestyle.

I have been fortunate. I have always had a comfortable, if modest home, never been too cold or hungry; and been well cared for.

Rosemary and I were able to provide the same for our children, Beverley and Robert. It has been the same with my family, originating from the Skinners and Dymonds.

When my grandmother Fanny Dymond and her husband left Pembroke Dock in the late nineteenth century to settle in Cardiff they were able to buy a comfortable three bedroom home in Splott, Cardiff, not one of the growing city’s most salubrious areas, but comfortable and pleasant where they brought up their six children, including my mother, Gwendoline.

My grandfather died young but Granny Dymond lived there for most of her ninety years.

As a young reporter in South Wales my first experience of poverty and hardship was in the mining community of the Rhymney Valley which I ‘covered’ for almost twenty years.

The contrast between rich and poor was evident, exemplified most starkly by the homes of the masters of coal, the fortunates who discovered their land covered coal, black gold’, under their land. All they had to do was to let others ‘win it’ - dig it up and sell it letting them enjoy a life of opulence and, in some cases, immense wealth.

Their names still resonate; grand families like the Windsors and the Butes. In the mid 17th century the third Marquis of Bute, with his huge estate in Scotland, spent millions with his architect creating the uniquely designed spectacular Cardiff castle in the heart of the city.

At the other end of the scale were the hovels of the miners, mostly tiny ‘two up two down’ back-to-back houses where the predominately large families huddled together, often in squalor that increased year by year.

I saw the worst ones in what was then then the small village of Pontlottyn, four miles from the so different Caerphilly, dominated by its castle.

I reported one result of the poverty and squalor week by week from the reporters' bench at the police court in Bargoed, the town for decades overlooked, dominated, by the ever growing mountain of coal slack and dust. I wrote stories of crimes ranging from stealing food to serious assaults, even murder attempts.

Fortunately, those days, like that tip, are long gone. All fifteen mines in the valley closed, tipping 15,000 miners out work There are new communities, better housing attractive towns and villages.

The valley is green again. 

It has not ‘levelled up’ and there are still differences.

These thoughts came to me during my holiday last week when I stayed with Robert and family in  their smart, roomy house in the lovely village of Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, surely one of the most salubrious counties in England, with its bustling towns, charming villages and multitude of homes that, to me qualify, as mansions.

To put it simply, the whole county seems to reek of money and, for many, a privileged life, earned and paid for. Deserved, too, no doubt.

Naturally, not everyone is so fortunate but it is a whole world apart from the days of the industrial revolution and the Pontlottyns of my experience.

There has been some levelling  almost everywhere but it is still far from prevalent in Wales and throughout Britain and will probably never be achieved

Good luck, prime minister!