Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

as a beacon for a cause which he described as not simply desirable but absolutely essential, throughout the coalfield. It was also part of a wider movement for reform which he was promoting, linking this issue with garden cities and the beginnings of national insurance. He raised some laughter when he pointed out that the miners would be getting a better deal than ninepence for fourpence! At a meeting at Trealaw he expressed disappointment that so few women were present, emphasising the role which they were seen as having in promoting the cause.29 Within a few weeks of the creation of the agents' wives committee, it formed itself into a deputation to the Executive Committee of the SWMF. It asked for financial assistance £ 50 for the campaign so that public meetings could be held and a door-to-door canvass conducted. The Executive readily gave its assent to this and the move was endorsed by a Special Conference. This women's campaign ran alongside, and co-operated with, the lectures which Henry Davies continued to give in support of thecause, and the work done by social reformers like Edgar Chappell for the South Wales Garden Cities Association.30 Yet the timing could not have been worse, for exactly a month before the deputation waited on the miners' executive the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo. On the day of the deputation Austria declared war on Serbia and by the time the campaign should have started in earnest Europe was at war. The outbreak of the war was obviously a setback for a movement which was just then gathering a head of steam. Despite the hope that the Treharris baths would be opened before the end of 1914 it was in fact 1916 before they were operational and the campaign was not to pick up impetus until post war reconstruction began to be a political issue in the later stages of the conflict. In 1917 the Welsh Outlook pointed out that 500 out of the 1500 men employed at Treharris used the baths daily, with an immense saving in women's labour.31 By the beginning of 1918 agitations were beginning again and the Women's Labour League once more came to the forefront in this. The central figure was Elizabeth Andrews who, in March 1919, became a full time Labour Party organiser (and the next year Woman's Organiser for Wales) and who did as much as anybody to make the cause into one of the central issues of social reform of the day. In May 1919 she described her work to the Sankey Commission: This reform like all other reforms at first met with opposition owing to the fact that it would bring a change in customs, and naturally would meet with prejudice. But a revolution in ideas among the miners and their wives has taken place since then. The question has been discussed in public meetings all over South Wales during the past 18 months, and especially in the last five months it has become the question of the day. It was the women of the Rhondda Valley who renewed this agitation by asking the Executive of the South Wales Miners' Federation to urge the lodges to take the matter up, and correspond-