“The Little Five-Foot Nation”

It may seem paradoxical, even perverse, to devote an issue of Finest Hour to Winston Churchill’s activities and reputation in Wales. Lauded over the generations as the dominant British hero, leaving Shakespeare and Newton trailing in his wake, in Wales Churchill was uniquely unpopular. This was for a highly specific reason. The use of armed troops during the violent 1910 coal strike at Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley, followed shortly afterwards by two railwaymen being shot down in another fierce clash at Llanelli in 1911, pursued him for the remainder of his career. Decades later, as Labour prime minister in November 1978 during further troubles in the coal industry, James Callaghan, heckled in the Commons by Winston Churchill’s namesake grandson, observed with somewhat unusual (and perhaps contrived) bitterness that he should not pursue the family vendetta against the Welsh miners.

As shown in the article that follows by Dai Smith, the leading historical authority on these matters, Tonypandy was an unusually violent episode in British labour history. Unrest was widespread in the valleys. There were centres of socialism throughout the coalfield, notably in Merthyr Tydfil, where the leader of the Independent Labour Party, Keir Hardie, was the MP. There were widely read Labour newspapers, notably Llais Llafur (Voice of Labour) published in Ystalyfera, a small mining community in the far north of the Swansea Valley, and the Merthyr Pioneer. After that, the old alliance between Liberal and Labour politicians rapidly deteriorated. More important, the trade unions became politicized and pushed the policies of the new Labour Party further to the left. In 1908 the South Wales Miners’ Federation (SWMF), with almost a quarter of a million members, became affiliated to the Labour Party. More alarming still, there were undercurrents among the rank-and-file miners of revolt against their own leaders, including their president, William Abraham, known by his bardic name of “Mabon.”¹

There were specific issues at Tonypandy: the quasi-syndicalist Unofficial Reform Committee (meeting in an Italian café) took up the cause of workers’ control rather than centralised state-owned nationalisation, a version of industrial devolution. Key aspects of industrial discontent soon led to bitter protests. This created tension around new wage demands such as that for additional pay surrounding work in so-called “abnormal places,” where it was claimed that the price