Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

CHURCHILL AND THE TONYPANDY RIOTS IN 1910, when Winston Churchill was Home Secretary, the south Wales coalfield witnessed a series of strikes and lockouts, picketings, riots, hardships, lootings, injuries and prosecutions which gave the area a widespread reputation as the great cauldron of industrial confrontation. Police from the main towns of south Wales and beyond, contingents of Metropolitan Police, cavalry and, finally, infantry were drafted into the coalfield in response to fears at local and national level that law and order had broken down. Above all, the so-called 'Tonypandy riots' acquired an evocative and venerable reputation in the history of the British working class. After the Second World War, the accusation that Winston Churchill had sent soldiers to south Wales as strike-breakers during the 'Tonypandy riots' of 1910 gained momentum. By 1949, for example, with talk of a general election beginning to emerge, criticism of Churchill's actions as Home Secretary almost forty years earlier became current in Labour circles. Churchill wrote a private letter to the Lord Mayor of Cardiff in February 1949: I see that one of the Labour men referred to Tonypandy as a great crime I had committed in the past. I am having the facts looked up and will write to you again on the subject. According to my recollection the action I took at Tonypandy was to stop the troops being sent to control the strikers for fear of shooting, and I was much attacked by the Conservative Opposition for this 'weakness'. Instead I sent Metropolitan Police who charged with their rolled mackintoshes and no one was hurt. The Metropolitan Police played football with the strikers at the weekend.2 Soldiers had, nevertheless, been drafted into the coalfield, and whatever reluctance Churchill may have shown in deploying them was rapidly overturned in 1911, when he used the military with alacrity in the face of a rising tide of industrial unrest. This remarkable change of policy can, The official account is contained in Colliery Strike Disturbances in South Wales, Correspondence and Report, November 1910, Cd.5568 (HMSO, 1911). Among the main secondary sources for the Tonypandy riots, see David Evans, Labour Strife in the South Wales Coalfield, 1910-11 (Cardiff, 1911; 1963); R. Page Arnot, South Wales Miners: Glowyr de Cymru: A History of the South Wales Miners' Federation, 1898-1914 (London, 1967); Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life, Vol. I (London, 1924); Sir Wyndham Childs, Episodes and Recollections: Being Some Records from the Life of Major-General Sir Wyndham Childs (London. 1930); E. W. Recollections: Being Some Records from the Life of Major-General Sir Wyndham Childs (London, 1930); E. W. Evans, The Miners of South Wales (Cardiff, 1961); Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, Young Statesman, 1901-14 (London, 1967); David Smith, 'Tonypandy 1910: Definitions of a Community', Past and Present, No. 87 (1980). 2 Churchill to Lord Mayor of Cardiff, 7 February 1949. Photocopy of the original letter kindly supplied by David Maddox.