Biographies

Abstract

Elizabeth Andrews was born in Hirwaun near Aberdare in south Wales on 15 December 1882, the third child and eldest daughter of the 11, of whom nine reached adulthood, born to Samuel Smith, a coal miner, and his wife Charlotte, née Evans. The family moved from Hirwaun to Mardy in the Rhondda valley when Elizabeth was just two years old. Her father survived an underground explosion at Mardy pit in 1885; subsequently they returned to Hirwaun. Clearly a very bright child, Elizabeth, like many working-class girls of her generation, found that her services were urgently required at home as an assistant to her mother, and her formal education ended at the age of 13. Her labour was much needed in a household of three working miners and six schoolchildren, where babies arrived every two years: ‘The washing, ironing, cooking and mending were endless’[Andrews (1951) 3]. In a way that is generally seen as more typical of working-class men, particularly in mining communities, than of women, the young girl took the opportunities offered by the new evening classes after her day of hard domestic work. However her hope of entering teaching, encouraged by her instructors, foundered on the family’s poverty, and her waged working life began at the age of 17.