Cylchgronau Cymru

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST COMPANY UNIONISM IN THE SOUTH WALES COALFIELD, 1926-1939 THE Western Mail in its editorial for 26 March 1936 referred to an episode in the fight against Company Unionism as 'one of the most sinister pages in the history of what is called the labour move- ment in South Wales'.1 This newspaper revealed, as so often in those years, its agitated state by recourse to the hyperbole 'sinister pages'. The historian can, none the less, detect in that impassioned rhetoric the significance of this phase of industrial relations in south Wales. It is a theme that leads on to the most vital social and industrial matters affecting the mining community in the 1930s, providing the unique insight into the tensions tearing that society apart that we can see in the technicolour daubings of a schizophrenic. If the study of Welsh labour history is still in its infancy, then the twentieth-century branch is as yet of embryonic form. As the late Professor Mowat lamented, how little we know in detail about such things as the influence of the Labour College or the inter-war history of Wales'.2 For this reason the approach here will be chronological, though not uniformly narrative. The South Wales Miners' Federation, from its inception in 1898, had been concerned with the problem of non-unionism. Before and after this date, organized miners combined concerted 'official' campaigns against the non-unionists with the more traditional, and presumably more terrifying, white-sheet tactics of their women folk. In such a large coalfield recruitment and maintenance of membership, the first aim of any union, was continually bedevilled by a feature of union life that was at times trivial, in some areas of real import- ance and always intensely irritating. During the first world war the S.W.M.F. made several attempts to forward their desire for a closed shop by allying it to the patriotic appeal that it would help prevent coalfield stoppages by removing one source of discontent. The owners, even after the successful strike of 1915 in defiance of the Munitions Act, remained adamant in their 1 Western Mail, 26 March 1936. 1 C. L. Mowat, ante, Vol. IV, no. 4 (1969), 420.