Cylchgronau Cymru

The scene here is of a working class, disillusioned with politics and discontented with low wages, a bush ready to be set alight. Historians have dealt with south Wales in terms of Tonypandy and 'Churchill's Cossacks', but the seamen's and dockers' strikes have not yet been chronicled. As K. O. Morgan has pointed out, 'There is no satisfactory account of the industrial unrest in south Wales during these years' (from 1908 onwards).5 We propose to examine the situation in Cardiff in detail and note that the 1911 strikes in the city were not planned. The Cardiff Trades Council Report for 1911 states 'The extraordinary strike which broke out in July was of so spontaneous and unpremeditated a character that the Council was unable to take its proper position as an organising medium'. 6 Nor was the man who organised and conducted the strike, and inspired others, a syndicalist. Captain Tupper 'V.C.' had little to do with socialism or syndicalism, and based his attack on low wages, Chinese and foreign 'blackleg' labour. Captain Tupper brought the strike to Cardiff. Little is known of him before 1910, when he joined Havelock Wilson in the Seamen's Union, although he claims to have spoken on Liberal platforms and to have run a private detective agency. Sir Ernest Gough, Lord Mayor of Cardiff in 1933, and now 93 years old, remembers him well as an orator and an agitator, but also as a man of mystery. There is no evidence that Tupper was ever a captain, naval, military or merchant navy, and certainly not a V.C., which he sometimes claimed. He took an active part in building up his own myth. The South Wales Daily News, 7 July 1911, has the following inter- view: 'Captain Tupper. Who he is and what he has done' 'I 6 Morgan, op. cit., p. 247. He also writes 'there is virtually no published material on the political wing of the movement in Wales and very little on the industrial. The story needs to be pieced together from fragmentary evidence in local newspapers, and the records of local trade unions, trades councils, I. L. P. branches, etc.' p. 198. In spite of Cardiff's interesting labour history, documentary records of organised labour are scarce. 6 Cardiff Trades and Labour Council, Annual Report 1911 (Cardiff, 1912). The political quiescence can be noted, in spite of the strikes, in that the number of delegates was 121, but the attendance only averaged 40 per cent. The Trades Council appealed to delegates to attend during 1912.