Steve Partridge was in sombre spirits as he set up for the Port Talbot Cymric choir’s annual concert in the “heartbreaking” atmosphere brought by the closure of the last blast furnace at the vast local steelworks this week.
A “lifer” at the plant, he is now the choir’s chair, organising the concert that will take place on Friday night in a former art deco cinema only five days after one of the most significant days in the south Wales town’s recent history.
The Port Talbot steelworks used to employ nearly 20,000 people and was “the beating heart of the town”, says Partridge, 60. But today it employs about 4,000 people – and will soon lose nearly 2,000 more from the blast furnace closure, despite the protestations of unions and £500m in government funding to construct a greener electric arc furnace.
Partridge urges the government and its Indian owner, Tata Steel, which also owns Tetley Tea and Jaguar Land Rover, to “really think about what you’re doing to the area. It’s not just facts and figures, it’s people’s lives … “[These are] young men, who thought it was a job for life … it’s devastating.
“I spent 40 years in the steelworks,” says Partridge, who retired in 2021, and whose grandfather, father, two brothers, brother-in-law, nephew and countless friends worked in the industry. “I’m lucky. I had a job for life.”
But he adds: “My nephew works there, has a mortgage, and he’s just had a second child. What’s going to happen to him? There are hundreds of them.”
After years of heavy losses, Tata shut the plant’s blast furnace 5 in July. On Monday afternoon, blast furnace 4 followed, falling quiet for the last time. The choir posted a moving tribute that Partridge, a second tenor, says has been viewed more than 40,000 times.
Steven*, a GP based in Port Talbot, says he has seen the impact on patients who have gone from secure and well-paid jobs to precarious low-wage work.
“Some of the effects that we see are not only financial … we see increased rates of alcohol use, depression, anxiety, domestic abuse, homelessness,” he says.
The symptoms often affect whole families, Steven says, with children experiencing behavioural issues or constipation amid stressful situations like mass redundancies.
In recent months, Steven says, there has been “a palpable gloom around the town”.
When Gwyneth*, 72, was growing up in Port Talbot, her father worked at what was once the biggest steel complex in Europe. “My dad used to say: ‘We make the best steel in the world’,” she says.
“The buses would be coming from all over – Swansea, Neath, Porthcawl – bringing men in.” The work gave the town a strong sense of pride and resilience, Gwyneth says, but she fears the cuts will hurt the community.
“It’s just going to be such a devastation,” Gwyneth says, adding that she is concerned for the future of other businesses – high street shops, cafes, restaurants, taxi and bus firms and more that rely on workers spending their wages locally.
“I worry for the youngsters, there’s no hope here for anybody now,” she says. “It’s such a shame. It’s an ‘ugly, lovely town’, to quote Dylan Thomas [who coined the phrase about Swansea], but it’s our town.”
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People who left the area remember what the loss of a core industry can do to a region. James, a 57-year-old IT manager living in London, grew up around Maesteg, a former mining community a few miles from Port Talbot. The last Maesteg coalmine closed in 1985, when James was just leaving sixth form, and he saw the town’s rapid decline.
He recalls his headteacher telling pupils to get out of the area while they could. James returned home after his studies in about 1989. “I went back to look for jobs – I was an engineer at that point – and there was nothing,” he says. “I was earning more … working in bars in London.”
Unemployment was “brutal” in the town, he remembered, meaning all four of James’s siblings moved away – and even now, he says, Maesteg is “an economy that has not got out of second gear”. He fears the same future for Port Talbot down the road after the job cuts.
Nick Winstone-Cooper, 59, was a laboratory manager in Port Talbot steelworks during the 1990s and his job included tasks such as sampling and analysing iron ore. He says the job losses will be “devastating for the town”, as well as harming jobs among suppliers.
Port Talbot “will be ruined”, Winstone-Cooper says, noting that it has hosted an ironworks since the 13th century – but without the steel industry “the local shops and cafes will empty the town”..
“The town is built around the steelworks,” Gwyneth says. “When we come home from holiday, you come in down the M4, and when I see the steelworks I think, ‘OK, I’m home.’”
*Some names have been changed.