My father, Marijan Podpadec, who has died aged 91, was one of the last people to work with ponies in the deep mines of Wales.
One of a number of expatriate Eastern Europeans invited to work in Britain after the second world war, he settled in south Wales and worked in many of the region’s coal mines until his retirement in 1986. Unlike many of his compatriots who left the mines to work elsewhere, he remained underground for almost 40 years, a well respected colleague in a tough industry.
Marijan was born in the village of Šentjanž in the rural depths of Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia. He was brought up with his sisters Mitsi, Jose and Malci and brother, Anton, on a smallholding in the heavily wooded valley of Pekel. The family ran one of the few water mills in the region, milling flour and baking bread for the local community.
They had vineyards and orchards, producing a good quantity of wine and cider each year. His father, Johan, was a gamekeeper and forestry official. His mother, Amalia, worked on the family farm. The family was torn apart in the war during the German occupation, and Marijan became one of Europe’s “displaced persons”. In 1948 he arrived in Britain.
On one of his visits back to Yugoslavia, he met Cornelia Marusic, who came from a big family on the Italian border, near Trieste. In 1956 she joined him in Britain, they married and settled on the outskirts of the busy mining town of Aberdare. The local community was welcoming and although the contrast with the life they had left behind – the food, language, weather and landscape – was difficult for them in the early years, they were accepted and made to feel valued.
In the 1960s and 70s, a Slovenian Roman Catholic mass was held twice a year at St Joseph’s, Aberdare, celebrated by Father Ignatius Kunstelj from the Slovene RC mission in London. Dozens of Slovenes from across the Welsh valleys would come to these services and they provided an important way of meeting up and remembering.
Marijan worked at Tower No 4 Colliery, Hirwaun, until he retired. One of his last jobs was to work with the pit ponies that still operated in the mine. The ponies were used to haul materials in and out of difficult areas where the use of machinery was not suitable. It was a job he loved, reminding him of his forestry childhood and the horses his family kept and worked with. The ponies at Tower were brought to the surface at the beginning of the miners’ strike in 1984, never to return.
Cornelia died in 1991. Marijan is survived by me and his grandchildren, Bella, Lewis, Joseph and Liliana
