YESTERDAYS 1969

THEY travel just a short distance from the slag heaps and huddled terraced homes to the sun, sand and sea.

They come in droves by train, double-deck bus and crowded car...

It is the miner’s pilgrimage to the coast.

Every year, as regular as the seasons themselves, South Wales Miners say goodbye to the pithead baths and head for Porthcawl, Barry, Aberavon and Tenby.

For a fortnight the coal dust in their boots is replaced by sand. They can be seen swilling beer at noon and sweating on the beach after closing time.

Wives fret as daughters strip for that “Continental tan,” as one red-skinned girl aged 18, described it.

Sons swim out into the Bristol Channel, while Mam and Dad are content to paddle in the shallows.

The annual trip to the sea is as much a part of their way of life as chapels and arguing about Sunday drinking.

“We come because we always have, said a face worker from the Deep Duffryn pit between kicking a beach ball to his offspring.

“I’ve come to Porthcawl ever since I can remember. Years ago everyone in the street came, now some go to Spain.

“I don’t know why they want to go so far – we enjoy ourselves just as much here,” he said. A MERTHYR man living in a house due for demolition, claims his home has been over-run by rats since the council started work on a site nearby for a road improvement scheme.

Mr Rufus Lewis, of Tramroadside North, said the council had promised to rehouse him more than six years ago.

“Since the work started nearby, a sewer has been disturbed and the rats come into the house,” he said.

“They jump on my bed and play all night. I keep stones and a pair of old boots by my bed to throw at them and I get only two or three hours sleep a night.” BEFORE people can start playing bingo in a Cardiff cinema on a Sunday night, services have to be over at a Methodist church in the area, stipulated the Secretary of State for Wales, Mr George Thomas – himself a Methodist lay preacher.

Mr Thomas made the order after making a change in a Welsh Office inspector’s report of a planning appeal.

In approving the report, Mr Thomas ruled the club should not be open for bingo before 8pm on Sundays.

Mr Thomas said in February that he was not satisfied the report was proper on the evidence before him because the possible effect bingo sessions on Penarth Road Methodist Church had not been considered. PEOPLE living on a Cardiff housing estate complained today that roaming dogs have bitten children, knocked old people to the ground and fouled the pavements.

Some women on the estate at Ely said they were so afraid of the dogs that they no longer walk down certain streets.

Mrs Beryl Baker, of Caerwent Road, said: “My daughter Cheryl, aged three, used to go shopping with my mother in the afternoon, until one day a rather wild-looking dog bit her hand for no apparent reason.

“She had to receive medical treatment and now she no longer wants to go near the shops.”

Two women from Deere Road, Mrs Gladys Husson and Mrs Julia Sutton say they no longer take the shortest route to the shops – because they have to make a detour around the streets where they know they will not be pestered by dogs.

Mr C Jones, of Deere Road said both he and his wife had been bitten.

“Now my wife refuses to leave the house,” he added.

A police spokesman said: “We have dealt with a number of complaints in the area and in one or two cases the animal concerned has been put to sleep.” SIX members of a South Wales aircraft preservation society will set out on a gruelling hike in the Brecon Beacons on Sunday – in the cause of historical research.

The men, members of the South Wales Historical Aircraft Preservation Society, will manhandle a 12ft-by-5ft