A WREXHAM photographer who was one of the first on the scene of the Gresford Mining Disaster has had his life and work celebrated in a new book.

Iconic photographs taken by Geoff Charles of the Gresford mining disaster, the drowning of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn Valley, Lloyd George’s funeral, and many other landmark moments in Twentieth Century Wales are published for the first time in an English book.

Born in Brymbo in 1909, Geoff Charles studied journalism at King’s College, London, and worked as a newspaper reporter before exchanging his typewriter for a camera.

The eldest son of three children of John Charles and Jane Elizabeth Charles. John was the manager of the Brymbo Water Company and his family had lived in the village for generations.

Having worked as a reporter in Cardiff and Surrey, he returned home to his beloved Wrexham in 1933 to work alongside his friends as a reporter at the Wrexham Star.

During his time at the Star he captured one of the biggest and most terrible stories of his life, the Gresford Mining Disaster. He was living with his parents in Brymbo on that fateful day, September 22 1934. A family member called him at 5am to say that something was wrong in the pit. Living a short drive away he drove over in the car, and was invited into the lamp room;

“When I asked the men in charge how many lamps had not been returned and not come up from underground, he said 264. My heart missed a beat.”

Two special editions of the paper were released with Geoff’s eye witness accounts of the disaster.

Later in his career he swapped his words for pictures and became a photojournalist capturing many memorable events and mainly working for the Welsh language newspaper Y Cymro.

Geoff Charles: Wales and the Borders – Photographs of a lost way of life 1930s–1970s, published by Y Iolfa, is a book of stunning black and white photographs that documents ordinary life and extraordinary events.

It is the first book in English that chronicles the life and work of Charles.

The book, available at local book shops and from www.ylolfa.com for £14.99, includes 120 photographs of Wales and the border areas of England taken from the 1930s to the 1970s and a biography written by a journalist colleague Ioan Roberts who knew the photographer well.

“I first met Geoff Charles beneath the statue of Lloyd George in Caernarfon on St David’s Day 1969. We were covering a rally protesting against the forthcoming Investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales for Y Cymro. Over the next six years we shared numerous car journeys throughout the northern counties of Wales in pursuit of stories,” says Ioan Roberts.

“Consciously or otherwise we were recording history. Taking good photographs required a lot more technical and visual skills in those days and he possessed the equally vital knack for getting on with people and making his subjects feel at ease.”

Amongst the powerful and evocative images in the book are the Gresford mining disaster of 1934, the effect of the Second World War on rural Montgomeryshire and the controversial flooding of the Tryweryn Valley to provide water for Liverpool.

The pictures are part of Geoff Charles Collection at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

On his death in 2002, Geoff Charles left an unique collection of 120,000 photographs to the National Library of Wales. This outstanding collection of photographs preserves a way of life that has now disappeared.

Author Ioan Roberts was born on the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales. Starting out as a civil engineer, he soon moved on to journalism, and has been an editor for HTV, a news broadcaster for BBC Radio Cymru and a producer for S4C, as well as writing and editing several books. He now lives in Pwllheli.