Reading this biography of a man who spent most of his life as a coal miner, suffered considerable personal hardship and yet achieved so much, is a humbling experience. William Hazell’s contribution to local organisations was immense and he was a prodigious writer on a vast swathe of subjects.

Ynysybwl is a village four miles from Pontypridd, a dead-end but for mountain roads over to the Rhondda Fach and Aberdare valleys. Hazell (pictured) was born in St Pancras in 1890 but by the time he was 16 he was a miner in Lady Windsor Colliery, the main employer in Ynysybwl.

It is unclear how or why he came to this close-knit community in south Wales, with its population of just over 5,000, but he quickly made an impression.

Throughout his life he was a member of the Ynysybwl Co-operative Society and its president for 30 years until his death in 1964. At various times he was Chairman of the Miners’ Lodge, secretary of the Workmen’s Institute and a Labour councillor for almost three decades. The way the Ynysybwl Co-op kept itself afloat and sustained the community during the hardships of the 1920s and 1930s is simply heroic.

Burge’s book is filled with the authentic and often forgotten working-class voice of the South Wales valleys, those men and women who organised union branches and miners’ lodges, workmen’s institutes – builders of the local labour movement and shapers of valleys society.

Hazell believed co-operation to be the alternative to capitalism. He lived his beliefs through his actions and expressed them in his writings, which reveal a sharp social observer and chronicler of the life and history of south Wales.

His one book, Gleaming Vision, was published in 1954 and is a history of the Ynysybwl Co-operative Society from a single village shop to a business undertaking with a million-pound turnover stretching across and beyond the valleys towards Cardiff.

Burge makes excellent use of Gleaming Vision as a source but he has also diligently studied Hazell’s vast journalistic contributions to Co-op publications and local papers. We find a man of action, a voracious reader with huge respect for Marx and Engels but whose inspiration was Robert Owen.

He had deep concern for the environment and women’s rights. As a councillor he advocated free family planning advice to be made available at the local hospital.

Of late, the co-operative movement has had its difficulties, yet here we have clear evidence of a collective entrepreneurship that deserves a place in labour and business history in South Wales and beyond.

In case the book’s modest price gives a false impression, this is a substantial and detailed work and the price has been kept low thanks to the support of the Wales Co-operative Centre and the Wales Books Council.

Gwyn Griffiths