Labour – Dropping the Donkey Jacket:

From 1980 to 1983, Michael Foot’s leadership had saved the Labour Party from splitting into two, but in all other respects, it was a disaster. He was too old, too decent, too gentle to take on the hard left or to modernise his party. Foot’s policies were those of a would-be parliamentary revolutionary detained in the second-hand bookshops in Hay-on-Wye. I enjoyed this experience myself in 1982, with a minibus full of bookish ‘revolutionaries’ from Cardiff, who went up there, as it happened, via Foot’s constituency. When roused, which was often, his Cromwellian hair would flap across a face contorted with passion, his hands would whip around excitedly and denunciations would pour forth from him with a fluency ‘old Noll’ would have envied. During his time as leader, he was in his late sixties, and would have been PM at seventy, had he won the 1983 General Election, which, of course, was never a remote possibility. Unlike Thatcher, he was contemptuous of the shallow presentational tricks demanded by television, and he could look dishevelled, being famously denounced for wearing a ‘donkey jacket’, in reality, a Burberry-style woollen coat, at the Remembrance Service at the Cenotaph. But he was more skilled than anyone I saw then or have seen since, in whipping up the socialist faithful in public meetings, or in finger-stabbing attacks on the Tory government in the House of Commons, both in open debates and questions to the PM. He would have been happier communing with Jonathan Swift and my Gulliver forbears in Banbury than attempting to operate in a political system which depended on television performances, ruthless organisation and managerial discipline. He was a political poet in an age of prose.

Nobody in the early eighties could have reined in its wilder members; Foot did his best but led the party to its worst defeat in modern times, on the basis of a hard-left, anti-Europe, anti-nuclear, pro-nationalisation manifest famously described by Gerald Kaufman as the longest suicide note in history. Kaufman had also urged Foot to stand down before the election. It was a measure of the affection felt for him that his ‘swift’ retirement after the defeat was greeted with little recrimination. Yet it also meant that when Neil Kinnock won the subsequent leadership election he had a mandate for change no previous Labour leader had enjoyed. He won with seventy-one per cent of the electoral college votes, against nineteen per cent for Roy Hattersley. Tony Benn was out of Parliament, having lost his Bristol seat, and so could not stand as the standard-bearer of the hard left. Kinnock had been elected after a series of blistering campaign speeches, a Tribunite left-winger who, like Foot, advocated the unilateral abandonment of all Britain’s nuclear weapons, believed in nationalisation and planning and wanted Britain to withdraw from the European Community. A South Wales MP from the same Bevanite stock as Foot, he also supported the abolition of private medicine and the repeal of the Tory trade union reforms. To begin with, the only fights he picked with the Bennites were over the campaign to force Labour MPs to undergo mandatory reselection, which handed a noose to local Militant activists. Yet after the chaos of the 1983 Campaign, he was also sure that the party was in need of radical remedies.

To win power, Labour needed to present itself better in the age of the modern mass media. Patricia Hewitt (pictured above), known for her campaigning on civil liberties, joined Kinnock’s new team. She was chosen to fight Leicester East in the 1983 Election but was unsuccessful. In her new role, she began trying to control interviews and placing the leader in more flattering settings than those Foot had found himself in. Kinnock knew how unsightly ‘old’ Labour had looked to the rest of the country and was prepared to be groomed. He gathered around him a ‘Pontypool front row’ of tough, aggressive heavy-weights, including Charles Clarke, the former communist NUS leader; John Reid, another former communist and Glaswegian backbench bruiser. Hewitt herself and Peter Mandelson, grandson of Herbert Morrison and Labour’s side-stepping future director of communications, led the three-quarter line with Kinnock himself as the able scrum-half. Kinnock was the first to flirt with the once-abhorred world of advertising and to seek out the support of pro-Labour pop artists such as Tracy Ullman and Billy Bragg. In this, he was drawing on a long tradition on the Welsh left, from Paul Robeson to the Hennesseys. He smartened up his own style, curtailing the informal mateyness which had made him popular among the ‘boyos’ and introduced a new code of discipline in the shadow cabinet.

Neil Kinnock attacking the Militant Tendency at the party conference in 1985.

In the Commons, he tried hard to discomfit Thatcher at her awesome best, which was difficult and mostly unsuccessful. The mutual loathing between them was clear for all to see, and as Thatcher’s popularity began to decline in 1984, Labour’s poll ratings slowly began to improve. But the party harboured a vocal minority of revolutionaries of one kind or another. They included not only the long-term supporters of Tony Benn, like Jeremy Corbyn, but also Arthur Scargill and his brand of insurrectionary syndicalism; the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, a front for the Revolutionary Socialist League, which had been steadily infiltrating the party since the sixties; and assorted hard-left local councillors, like Derek Hatton in Liverpool, a Militant member who were determined to defy Thatcher’s government, no matter how big its democratic mandate, by various ‘ultra-vires’ and illegal stratagems. Kinnock dealt with them all. Had he not done so New Labour would never have happened, yet he himself was a passionate democratic socialist whose own politics were well to the left of the country.

Neil Kinnock was beginning a tough journey towards the centre-ground of British politics, which meant leaving behind people who sounded much like his younger self. On this journey, much of his natural wit and rhetoric would be silenced. He had created his leadership team as if it were a rugby team, involved in a confrontational contact sport against opponents who were fellow enthusiasts, but with their own alternative strategy. He found that political leadership was more serious, drearier and nastier than rugby. And week after week, he was also confronting someone in Thatcher someone whose principles had been set firm long before and whose politics clearly and consistently expressed those principles on the field of play. Yet, like a Welsh scrum-half, he was always on the move, always having to shadow and shade, to side-step and shimmy, playing the ball back into the scrum or sideways to his three-quarters rather than kicking it forward. The press soon dubbed him ‘the Welsh windbag’, due to his long, discursive answers in interviews.

The first and toughest example of what he was up against came with the miners’ strike. Neil Kinnock and Arthur Scargill (above) had already shown their loathing for each other over the mainstream leadership’s battles with the Bennites. The NUM President was probably the only person on the planet that Kinnock hated more than Thatcher. He distrusted Scargill’s aims, despised his tactics and realised early on that he was certain to fail. In this, he was sharing the views of the South Wales NUM who had already forced a U-turn on closures from an unprepared Thatcher in 1981. Yet they, and he had to remain true to their own traditions and heritage. They both found themselves in an embarrassing situation, but more importantly, they realised that like it or not, they were in an existential struggle. As the violence spread, the Conservatives in the Commons and their press continually goaded and hounded him to denounce the use of ‘flying pickets’ and to praise the police. He simply could not do so, as so many on his own side had experienced the violence of the police, or heard about it from those who had. For him to attack the embattled trade union would be seen as the ultimate betrayal by a Labour leader. He was caught between the rock of Thatcher and hard place of Scargill. In the coalfields, even in South Wales, he was shunned on the picket lines as the miner’s son too “frit” in Thatcher’s favourite phrase, to come to the support of the miners in their hour of need. Secretly, however, there was some sympathy for his impossible situation among the leadership of the South Wales NUM. Kinnock at least managed to avoid fusing Labour and the NUM in the mind of many Labour voters, ensuring that Scargill’s ultimate, utter defeat was his alone. But this lost year destroyed his early momentum and stole his hwyl, his Welsh well-spring of ‘evangelical’ socialist spirit.

The Enemy Within?:

Above: Striking Yorkshire miners barrack moderate union leaders in Sheffield.

The first Thatcher government was had been dominated by the Falklands War; the second was dominated by the miners’ strike. Spurred on by ‘the spirit of the Falklands’, the government took a more confrontational attitude towards the trade unions after the 1983 General Election. This year-long battle, 1984-5, was the longest strike in British history, the most bitter, bloody and tragic industrial dispute since the General Strike and six-month Miners’ Lock-out of 1926. The strike was eventually defeated, amid scenes of mass picketing and running battles between the police and the miners. It resulted in the total defeat of the miners followed by the end of deep coal-mining in Britain. In reality, the strike simply accelerated the continuing severe contraction in the industry which had begun in the early eighties and which the South Wales NUM had successfully resisted in what turned out, however, to be a Pyrrhic victory. By 1984, the government had both the resources, the popular mandate and the dogged determination to withstand the miners’ demands. The industry had all but vanished from Kent, while in Durham two-thirds of the pits were closed. They were the only real source of employment to local communities, so the social impact of closures proved devastating. In the Durham pit villages, the entire local economy was crippled and the miners’ housing estates gradually became the ghost areas they remain today.

The government had little interest in ensuring the survival of the industry, with its troublesome and well-organised union which had already won a national strike against the Heath government a decade earlier. For the Thatcher government, the closures resulting from the defeat of the strike were a price it was willing to pay in order to teach bigger lessons. Later, the Prime Minister of the time reflected on these:

What the strike’s defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left. Marxists wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics. They failed and in doing so demonstrated just how mutually dependent the free economy and a free society really are.

It was a confrontation which was soaked in history on all sides. For the Tories, it was essential revenge for Heath’s humiliation, a score they had long been eager to settle; Margaret Thatcher spoke of Arthur Scargill and the miners’ leaders as ‘the enemy within’, as compared to Galtieri, the enemy without. For thousands of traditionally ‘militant’ miners, it was their last chance to end decades of pit closures and save their communities, which were under mortal threat. For their leader Arthur Scargill, it was an attempt to follow Mick McGahey in pulling down the government and winning a class war. He was no more interested than the government, as at least the other former, more moderate leaders had been, in the details of pay packets, or in a pit-by-pit review to determine which pits were truly uneconomic. He was determined to force the government, in Thatcher’s contemptuous phrase, to pay for mud to be mined rather than see a single job lost.

The Thatcher government had prepared more carefully than Scargill. Following the settlement with the South Wales NUM, the National Coal Board (NCB) had spent the intervening two years working with the Energy Secretary, Nigel Lawson, to pile up supplies of coal at the power stations; stocks had steadily grown, while consumption and production both fell. Following the riots in Toxteth and Brixton, the police had been retrained and equipped with full riot gear without which, ministers later confessed, they would have been unable to beat the pickets. Meanwhile, Thatcher had appointed a Scottish-born Australian, Ian MacGregor, to run the NCB. He had a fierce reputation as a union-buster in the US and had been brought back to Britain to run British Steel where closures and 65,000 job cuts had won him the title ‘Mac the Knife’. Margaret Thatcher admired him as a tough, no-nonsense man, a refreshing change from her cabinet, though she later turned against him for his lack of political nous. His plan was to cut the workforce of 202,000 by 44,000 in two years, then take another twenty thousand jobs out. Twenty pits would be closed, to begin with. When he turned up to visit mines, he was abused, pelted with flour bombs and, on one occasion, knocked to the ground.

Arthur Scargill was now relishing the coming fight as much as Thatcher. In the miners’ confrontation with Heath, Scargill had led the flying pickets at the gates of the Saltley coke depot outside Birmingham. Some sense of both his revolutionary ‘purity’, combined with characteristic Yorkshire bluntness, comes from an exchange he had with Dai Francis, the Welsh Miners’ leader at that time. He had called Francis to ask for Welsh pickets to go to Birmingham and help at the depot. Francis asked when they were needed and Scargill replied:

“Tomorrow, Saturday.”

“But Wales are playing Scotland at Cardiff Arms Park.”

“But Dai, the working class are playing the ruling class at Saltley.”

Many found Scargill inspiring; many others found him scary. Like Francis, he had been a Communist, but unlike Dai (pictured above, behind the poster, during the 1972 strike), he retained hard-line Marxist views and a penchant for denouncing anyone who disagreed with him. Kim Howells, also a former Communist and an officer of the South Wales NUM, gained a sense of Scargill’s megalomania when, just prior the 1984-5 strike, he visited his HQ in Barnsley, already known as ‘Arthur’s Castle’. Howells, a historian of the Welsh Labour movement, later becoming an MP and New Labour minister, was taken aback to find him sitting at this Mussolini desk with a great space in front of it. Behind him was a huge painting of himself on the back of a lorry, posed like Lenin, urging picketing workers in London to overthrow the ruling class. Howells thought anyone who could put up a painting like that was nuts and returned to Pontypridd to express his fears to the Welsh miners:

And of course the South Wales executive almost to a man agreed with me. But then they said, “He’s the only one we’ve got, see, boy.  The Left has decided.”

Scargill had indeed been elected by a huge margin and had set about turning the NUM’s once moderate executive, led by Joe Gormley, into a militant group. The Scottish Miners’ leader, Mick McGahey, although older and wiser than his President, was his Vice-President. Scargill had been ramping up the rhetoric for some time. He had told the NUM Conference in 1982, …

If we do not save our pits from closure then all our other struggles will become meaningless … Protection of the industry is my first priority because without jobs all our other claims lack substance and become mere shadows. Without jobs, our members are nothing …

Given what was about to happen to his members’ jobs as a result of his uncompromising position in the strike, there is a black irony in those words. By insisting that no pits should be closed on economic grounds, even if the coal was exhausted, and that more investment would always find more coal, from his point of view the losses were irrelevant. He made sure that confrontation would not be avoided. An alternative strategy put forward by researchers for the South Wales NUM was that it was the NCB’s economic arguments that needed to be exposed, along with the fact that it was using the Miners’ Pension Fund to invest in the production of cheap coal in Poland and South Africa. It’s definition of what was ‘economic’ in Britain rested on the comparative cost of importing this coal from overseas. If the NCB had invested these funds at home, the pits in Britain would not be viewed as being as ‘uneconomic’ as they claimed. But Scargill was either not clever enough to deploy these arguments or too determined to pursue the purity of his brand of revolutionary syndicalism, or both.

The NUM votes which allowed the strike to start covered both pay and closures, but from the start Scargill emphasised the closures. To strike to protect jobs, particularly other people’s jobs, in other people’s villages and other countries’ pits, gave the confrontation an air of nobility and sacrifice which a mere wages dispute would not have enjoyed. But national wage disputes had, for more than sixty years, been about arguments over the ‘price of coal’ and the relative difficulties of extracting it from a variety of seams in very different depths across the various coalfields. Neil Kinnock, the son and grandson of Welsh miners, found it impossible to condemn Scargill’s strategy without alienating support for Labour in its heartlands. He did his best to argue the economics of the miners’ case, and to condemn the harshness of the Tory attitude towards them, but these simply ran parallel to polarised arguments which were soon dividing the nation.

Moreover, like Kinnock, Scargill was a formidable organiser and conference-hall speaker, though there was little economic analysis to back up his rhetoric. Yet not even he would be able to persuade every part of the industry to strike. Earlier ballots had shown consistent majorities against striking. In Nottinghamshire, seventy-two per cent of the areas 32,000 voted against striking. The small coalfields of South Derbyshire and Leicestershire were also against. Even in South Wales, half of the NUM lodges failed to vote for a strike. Overall, of the seventy thousand miners who were balloted in the run-up to the dispute, fifty thousand had voted to keep working. Scargill knew he could not win a national ballot, so he decided on a rolling series of locally called strikes, coalfield by coalfield, beginning in Yorkshire, then Scotland, followed by Derbyshire and South Wales. These strikes would merely be approved by the national union. It was a domino strategy; the regional strikes would add up to a national strike, but without a national ballot.

But Scargill needed to be sure the dominoes would fall. He used the famous flying pickets from militant areas to shut down less militant ones. Angry miners were sent in coaches and convoys of cars to close working pits and the coke depots, vital hubs of the coal economy. Without the pickets, who to begin with rarely needed to use violence to achieve their end, far fewer pits would have come out. But after scenes of physical confrontation around Britain, by April 1984 four miners in five were on strike. There were huge set-piece confrontations with riot-equipped police bused up from London or down from Scotland, Yorkshire to Kent and Wales to Yorkshire, generally used outside their own areas in order to avoid mixed loyalties. As Andrew Marr has written, …

It was as if the country had been taken over by historical re-enactments of civil war battles, the Sealed Knot Society run rampant. Aggressive picketing was built into the fabric of the strike. Old country and regional rivalries flared up, Lancashire men against Yorkshire men, South Wales miners in Nottinghamshire.

The Nottinghamshire miners turned out to be critical since without them the power stations, even with the mix of nuclear and oil, supplemented by careful stockpiling, might have begun to run short and the government would have been in deep trouble. To Scargill’s disdain, however, other unions also refused to come out in sympathy, thus robbing him of the prospect of a General Strike, and it soon became clear that the NUM had made other errors in their historical re-enactments. Many miners were baffled from the beginning as to why Scargill had opted to strike in the spring when the demand for energy was relatively low and the stocks at the power stations were not running down at anything like the rate which the NUM needed in order to make their action effective. This was confirmed by confidential briefings from the power workers, and it seemed that the government just had to sit out the strike.

In this civil war, the police had the cavalry, while the miners were limited to the late twentieth-century equivalent of Oakey’s dragoons at Naseby, their flying pickets, supporting their poor bloody infantry, albeit well-drilled and organised. Using horses, baton charges and techniques learned in the aftermath of the street battles at Toxteth and Brixton, the police defended working miners with a determination which delighted the Tories and alarmed many others, not just the agitators for civil rights. An event which soon became known as the Battle of Orgreave (in South Yorkshire) was particularly brutal, involving ‘Ironside’ charges by mounted police in lobster-pot style helmets into thousands of miners with home-made pikes and pick-axe handles.

The NUM could count on almost fanatical loyalty in coalfield towns and villages across Britain. Miners gave up their cars, sold their furniture, saw their wives and children suffer and lost all they had in the cause of solidarity. Food parcels arrived from other parts of Britain, from France and most famously, from Soviet Russia. But there was a gritty courage and selflessness in mining communities which, even after more than seventy years of struggle, most of the rest of Britain could barely understand. But an uglier side to this particularly desperate struggle also emerged when a taxi-driver was killed taking a working miner to work in Wales. A block of concrete was dropped from a pedestrian bridge onto his cab, an act swiftly condemned by the South Wales NUM.

In Durham, the buses taking other ‘scabs’ to work in the pits were barraged with rocks and stones, as later portrayed in the film Billy Elliot. The windows had to be protected with metal grills. There were murderous threats made to strike-breaking miners and their families, and even trade union ‘allies’ were abused. Norman Willis, the amiable general secretary of the TUC, had a noose dangled over his head when he spoke at one miners’ meeting. This violence was relayed to the rest of the country on the nightly news at a time when the whole nation still watched together. I remember the sense of helplessness I felt watching the desperation of the Welsh miners from my ‘exile’ in Lancashire, having failed to find a teaching post in the depressed Rhondda in 1983. My Lancastrian colleagues were as divided as the rest of the country over the strike, often within themselves as well as from others. In the end, we found it impossible to talk about the news, no matter how much it affected us.

Eventually, threatened by legal action on the part of the Yorkshire miners claiming they had been denied a ballot, the NUM was forced onto the back foot. The South Wales NUM led the calls from within for a national ballot to decide on whether the strike should continue. Scargill’s decision to accept a donation from Colonel Gaddafi of Libya found him slithering from any moral ground he had once occupied. As with Galtieri, Thatcher was lucky in the enemies ‘chosen’ for her. Slowly, month by month, the strike began to crumble and miners began to trail back to work. A vote to strike by pit safety officers and overseers, which would have shut down the working pits, was narrowly avoided by the government. By January 1985, ten months after they had first been brought out, strikers were returning to work at the rate of 2,500 a week, and by the end of February, more than half the NUM’s membership was back at work. In some cases, especially in South Wales, they marched back proudly behind brass bands.

Above: ‘No way out!’ – picketing miners caught and handcuffed to a lamp-post by police.

Scargill’s gamble had gone catastrophically wrong. He has been compared to a First World War general, a donkey sending lions to the slaughter, though at Orgreave and elsewhere, he had stood with them too. But the political forces engaged against the miners in 1984 were entirely superior in strength to those at the disposal of the ill-prepared Heath administration of ten years earlier. A shrewder, non-revolutionary leader would not have chosen to take on Thatcher’s government at the time Scargill did, or having done so, would have found a compromise after the first months of the dispute. Today, there are only a few thousand miners left of the two hundred thousand who went on strike. An industry which had once made Britain into a great industrial power, but was always dangerous, disease-causing, dirty and polluting, finally lay down and died. For the Conservatives and perhaps for, by the end of the strike, the majority of the moderate British people, Scargill and his lieutenants were fighting parliamentary democracy and were, therefore, an enemy which had to be defeated. But the miners of Durham, Derbyshire, Kent, Fife, Yorkshire, Wales and Lancashire were nobody’s enemy. They were abnormally hard-working, traditional people justifiably worried about losing their jobs and loyal to their union, if not to the stubborn syndicalists in its national leadership.

Out with the Old Industries; in with the New:

In Tyneside and Merseyside, a more general deindustrialisation accompanied the colliery closures. Whole sections of industry, not only coal but also steel and shipbuilding, virtually vanished from many of their traditional areas.  Of all the areas of Britain, Northern Ireland suffered the highest level of unemployment, partly because the continuing sectarian violence discouraged investment. In February 1986, there were officially over 3.4 million unemployed, although statistics were manipulated for political reasons and the real figure is a matter of speculation. The socially corrosive effects were felt nationally, manifested in further inner-city rioting in 1985. Inner London was just as vulnerable as Liverpool, a crucial contributory factor being the number of young men of Asian and Caribbean origin who saw no hope of ever entering employment: opportunities were minimal and they felt particularly discriminated against. The term ‘underclass’ was increasingly used to describe those who felt themselves to be completely excluded from the benefits of prosperity.

Prosperity there certainly was, for those who found alternative employment in the service industries. Between 1983 and 1987, about 1.5 million new jobs were created. Most of these were for women, and part-time vacancies predominated. The total number of men in full-time employment fell still further, and many who left the manufacturing for the service sector earned much-reduced incomes. The economic recovery that led to the growth of this new employment was based mainly on finance, banking and credit. Little was invested in British manufacturing. Far more was invested overseas; British foreign investments rose from 2.7 billion in 1975 to a staggering 90 billion in 1985. At the same time, there was a certain amount of re-industrialisation in the South East, where new industries employing the most advanced technology grew. In fact, many industries shed a large proportion of their workforce but, using new technology, maintained or improved their output.

These new industries were not confined to the South East of England: Nissan built the most productive car plant in Europe at Sunderland. After an extensive review, Sunderland was chosen for its skilled workforce and its location near major ports. The plant was completed in 1986 as the subsidiary Nissan Motor Manufacturing (UK) Ltd. Siemens established a microchip plant at Wallsend on Tyneside in which it invested 1.1 billion. But such industries tended not to be large-scale employers of local workers. Siemens only employed about 1,800. Traditional regionally-based industries continued to suffer a dramatic decline during this period. Coal-mining, for example, was decimated in the years following the 1984-5 strike, not least because of the shift of the electricity generation of the industry towards alternative energy sources, especially gas. During 1984-7 the coal industry shed 170,000 workers.

The North-South Divide – a Political Complex?:

By the late 1980s, the north-south divide in Britain seemed as intractable as it had all century, with high unemployment particularly concentrated in the declining extractive and manufacturing industries of the North of England, Scotland and Wales. That the north-south divide increasingly had a political as well as an economic complexion was borne out by the outcome of the 1987 General Election. While Margaret Thatcher was swept back to power for the third time, her healthy Conservative majority largely based on the voters of the South and East of England. North of a line roughly between the Severn and the Humber, the long decline of the Tories, especially in Scotland, where they were reduced to ten seats, was increasingly apparent. At the same time, the national two-party system seemed to be breaking down. South of the Severn-Humber line, where Labour seats were now very rare outside London, the Liberal-SDP Alliance were the main challengers to the Conservatives in many constituencies.

The Labour Party continued to pay a heavy price for its internal divisions, as well as for the bitterness engendered by the miners’ strike. It is hardly Neil Kinnock’s fault that he is remembered for his imprecise long-windedness, the product of self-critical and painful political readjustment. His admirers recall his great platform speeches, the saw-edged wit and air-punching passion. There was one occasion, however, when Kinnock spoke so well that he united most of the political world in admiration. This happened at the Labour conference in Bournemouth in October 1985. A few days before the conference, Liverpool City Council, formally Labour-run but in fact controlled by the Revolutionary Socialist League, had sent out redundancy notices to its thirty-one thousand staff. The revolutionaries, known by the name of their newspaper, Militant, were a party-within-a-party, a parasitic body within Labour. They had some five thousand members who paid a proportion of their incomes to the RSL so that the Militant Tendency had a hundred and forty full-time workers, more than the staff of the Social Democrats and Liberals combined. They had a presence all around Britain, but Liverpool was their great stronghold. There they practised Trotsky’s politics of the transitional demand, the tactic of making impossible demands for more spending and higher wages so that when the ‘capitalist lackeys’ refused these demands, they could push on to the next stage, leading to collapse and revolution.

In Liverpool, where they were building thousands of new council houses, this strategy meant setting an illegal council budget and cheerfully bankrupting the city. Sending out the redundancy notices to the council’s entire staff was supposed to show Thatcher they would not back down, or shrink from the resulting chaos. Like Scargill, Militant’s leaders thought they could destroy the Tories on the streets. Kinnock had thought of taking them on a year earlier but had decided that the miners’ strike made that impossible. The Liverpool mayhem gave him his chance, so in the middle of his speech at Bournemouth, he struck. It was time, he said, for Labour to show the public that it was serious. Implausible promises would not bring political victory:

I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

By now he had whipped himself into real anger, a peak of righteous indignation, but he remained in control. His enemies were in front of him, and all the pent-up frustrations of the past year were being released. The hall came alive. Militant leaders like Derek Hatton stood up and yelled ‘lies!’ Boos came from the hard left, and some of their MPs walked out, but Kinnock was applauded by the majority in the hall, including his mainstream left supporters. Kinnock went on with a defiant glare at his opponents:

I’m telling you, and you’ll listen, you can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services, or with their homes. … The people will not, cannot abide posturing. They cannot respect the gesture-generals or the tendency tacticians.

Most of those interviewed in the hall and many watching live on television, claimed it was the most courageous speech they had ever heard from a Labour leader, though the hard left remained venomously hostile. By the end of the following month, Liverpool District Labour Party, from which Militant drew its power, was suspended and an inquiry was set up. By the spring of 1986, the leaders of Militant had been identified and charged with behaving in a way which was incompatible with Labour membership. The process of expelling them was noisy, legally fraught and time-consuming, though more than a hundred of them were eventually expelled. There was a strong tide towards Kinnock across the rest of the party, with many left-wingers cutting their ties to the Militant Tendency. There were many battles with the hard left to come, and several pro-Militant MPs were elected in the 1987 Election. These included two Coventry MPs, Dave Nellist and John Hughes, ‘representing’ my own constituency, whose sole significant, though memorable ‘contribution’ in the House of Commons was to interrupt prayers. Yet by standing up openly to the Trotskyist menace, as Wilson, Callaghan and Foot had patently failed to do, Kinnock gave his party a fresh start. It began to draw away from the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the polls and did better in local elections. It was the moment when the New Labour project became possible.

A Third Victory and a Turning of the Tide:

Yet neither this internal victory nor the sharper management that Kinnock introduced, would bring the party much good against Thatcher in the following general election. Labour was still behind the public mood. Despite mass unemployment, Thatcher’s free-market optimism was winning through, and Labour was still committed to re-nationalisation, planning, a National Investment Bank and unilateral nuclear disarmament, a personal cause of both Neil and his wife, Glenys, over the previous twenty years. The Cold War was thawing and it was not a time for the old certainties, but for the Kinnocks support for CND was fundamental to their political make-up. So he stuck to the policy, even as he came to realise how damaging it was to Labour’s image among swing voters. Under Labour, all the British and US nuclear bases would be closed, the Trident nuclear submarine force cancelled, all existing missiles scrapped and the UK would no longer expect any nuclear protection from the US in time of war. Instead, more money would be spent on tanks and conventional warships. All of this did them a lot of good among many traditional Labour supporters; Glenys turned up at the women’s protest camp at Greenham Common. But it was derided in the press and helped the SDP to garner support from the ‘middle England’ people Labour needed to win back. In the 1987 General Election campaign, Kinnock’s explanation about why Britain would not simply surrender if threatened by a Soviet nuclear attack sounded as if he was advocating some kind of Home Guard guerrilla campaign once the Russians had arrived. With policies like this, he was unlikely to put Thatcher under serious pressure.

When the 1987 election campaign began, Thatcher had a clear idea about what her third administration would do. She wanted more choice for the users of state services. There would be independent state schools outside the control of local councillors, called grant-maintained schools.  In the health services, though it was barely mentioned in the manifesto, she wanted money to follow the patient. Tenants would be given more rights. The basic rate of income tax would be cut and she would finally sort out local government, ending the ‘rates’ and bringing in a new tax. On paper, the programme seemed coherent, which was more than could be said for the Tory campaign itself. Just as Kinnock’s team had achieved a rare harmony and discipline, Conservative Central Office was riven by conflict between politicians and ad-men. The Labour Party closed the gap to just four points and Mrs Thatcher’s personal ratings also fell as Kinnock’s climbed. He was seen surrounded by admiring crowds, young people, nurses, waving and smiling, little worried by the hostile press. In the event, the Conservatives didn’t need to worry. Despite a last-minute poll suggesting a hung parliament, and the late surge in Labour’s self-confidence, the Tories romped home with an overall majority of 101 seats, almost exactly the share, forty-two per cent, they had won in 1983. Labour made just twenty net gains, and Kinnock, at home in Bedwellty, was inconsolable. Not even the plaudits his team had won from the press for the brilliance, verve and professionalism of their campaign would lift his mood.

The SDP-Liberal Alliance had been floundering in the polls for some time, caught between Labour’s modest revival and Thatcher’s basic and continuing popularity with a large section of voters. The rumours of the death of Labour had been greatly exaggerated, and the ‘beauty contest’ between the two Davids, Steel and Owen, had been the butt of much media mockery. Owen’s SDP had its parliamentary presence cut from eight MPs to five, losing Roy Jenkins in the process. While most of the party merged with the Liberals, an Owenite rump limped on for a while. Good PR, packaging and labelling were not good enough for either Labour or the SDP. In 1987, Thatcher had not yet created the country she dreamed of, but she could argue that she had won a third consecutive victory, not on the strength of military triumph, but on the basis of her ideas for transforming Britain. She also wanted to transform the European Community into a free-trade area extending to the Baltic, the Carpathians and the Balkans. In that, she was opposed from just across the Channel and from within her own cabinet.

In the late eighties, Thatcher’s economic revolution overreached itself. The inflationary boom happened due to the expansion of credit and a belief among ministers that, somehow, the old laws of economics had been abolished; Britain was now supposed to be on a continual upward spiral of prosperity. But then, on 27 October 1986, the London Stock Exchange ceased to exist as the institution had formerly done. Its physical floor, once heaving with life, was replaced by dealing done by computer and phone. The volume of trading was fifteen times greater than it had been in the early eighties. This became known as ‘the Big Bang’ and a country which had exported two billion pounds-worth of financial services per year before it was soon exporting twelve times that amount. The effect of this on ordinary Britons was to take the brake off mortgage lending, turning traditional building societies into banks which started to thrust credit at the British public. Borrowing suddenly became a good thing to do and mortgages were extended rather than being paid off. The old rules about the maximum multiple of income began to dissolve. From being two and a half times the homeowner’s annual salary, four times became acceptable in many cases. House prices began to rise accordingly and a more general High Street splurge was fuelled by the extra credit now freely available. During 1986-88 a borrowing frenzy gripped the country, egged on by swaggering speeches about Britain’s ‘economic miracle’ from the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and the Prime Minister. Lawson later acknowledged:

My real mistake as Chancellor was to create a climate of optimism that, in the end, encouraged borrowers to borrow more than they should.

In politics, the freeing up and deregulation of the City of London gave Margaret Thatcher and her ministers an entirely loyal and secure base of rich, articulate supporters who helped see her through some tough battles. The banks spread the get-rich-quick prospect to millions of British people through privatisation share issues and the country, for a time, came closer to the share-owning democracy that Thatcher dreamed of.

The year after the election, 1988, was the real year of hubris. The Thatcher government began an attack on independent institutions and bullying the professions. Senior judges came under tighter political control and University lecturers lost the academic tenure they had enjoyed since the Middle Ages. In Kenneth Baker’s Great Education Reform Bill (‘Gerbil’) of that year, Whitehall grabbed direct control over the running of the school curriculum, creating a vast new state bureaucracy to dictate what should be taught, when and how, and then to monitor the results. Teachers could do nothing. The cabinet debated the detail of maths courses; Mrs Thatcher spent much of her time worrying about the teaching of history. Working with history teachers, I well remember the frustration felt by them at being forced to return to issues of factual content rather than being able to continue to enthuse young people with a love for exploring sources and discovering evidence for themselves. Mrs Thatcher preferred arbitrary rules of knowledge to the development of know-how. She was at her happiest when dividing up the past into packages of ‘history’ and ‘current affairs’. For example, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was, she said, part of history, whereas the 1968 Prague Spring was, twenty years on, still part of ‘current affairs’ and so should not appear in the history curriculum, despite the obvious connections between the two events. It happened at a time when education ministers were complaining bitterly about the lack of talent, not among teachers, but among civil servants, the same people they were handing more power to. A Hungarian history teacher, visiting our advisory service in Birmingham, expressed his discomfort, having visited a secondary school in London where no-one in a Humanities’ class could tell him where, geographically, his country was.

At that time, my mother was coming to the end of a long career in NHS administration as Secretary of the Community Health Council (‘The Patients’ Friend’) in Coventry which, as elsewhere, had brought together local elected councillors, health service practitioners and managers, and patients’ groups to oversee the local hospitals and clinics and to deal with complaints. But the government did not trust local representatives and professionals to work together to improve the health service, so the Treasury seized control of budgets and contracts. To administer the new system, five hundred NHS ‘trusts’ were formed, and any involvement by elected local representatives was brutally terminated. As with Thatcher’s education reforms, the effect of these reforms was to create a new bureaucracy overseeing a regiment of quangos (quasi/ non-governmental organisations). She later wrote:

We wanted all hospitals to have greater responsibility for their affairs.  … the self-governing hospitals to be virtually independent.

In reality, ‘deregulation’ of care and ‘privatisation’ of services were the orders of the day. Every detail of the ‘internal market’ contracts was set down from the centre, from pay to borrowing to staffing. The rhetoric of choice in practice meant an incompetent dictatorship of bills, contracts and instructions. Those who were able to vote with their chequebooks did so. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of people covered by the private health insurance Bupa nearly doubled, from 3.5 million to a little under seven million. Hubris about what the State could and could not do was to be found everywhere. In housing, 1988 saw the establishment of unelected Housing Action Trusts to take over the old responsibility of local authorities for providing what is now known as ‘affordable housing’. Mrs Thatcher claimed that she was trying to pull the State off people’s backs. In her memoirs, she wrote of her third government,

… the root cause of our contemporary social problems … was that the State had been doing too much.

Yet her government was intervening in public services more and more. The more self-assured she became, the less she trusted others to make the necessary changes to these. That meant accruing more power to the central state. The institutions most heart in this process were local councils and authorities. Under the British constitution, local government is defenceless against a ‘Big Sister’ PM, with a secure parliamentary majority and a loyal cabinet. So it could easily be hacked away, but sooner or later alternative centres of power, both at a local and national level, would be required to replace it and, in so doing, overthrew the overbearing leader.

Sources:

Andrew Marr (2008), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan.

Peter Catterall, Roger Middleton & John Swift (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

 

 

 

Chapter Four: Migration, Marriage and Militancy – The Case of the Cowley Garwites.

Nowhere were the features of ‘voluntary’ migration from South Wales more marked than in Cowley, the centre of the car industry to the south of Oxford. The ‘Barnett House’ investigators of 1936 found a distinct tendency to ‘lumpiness’ in the migration streams to the Oxford District, providing further evidence of the familial and fraternal networking. Of the 1,195 Welsh workers in Oxford at this time, 215 had employment books which originated in the Maesteg District, covering the Llynfi, Ogmore and Garw valleys. By contrast, the numbers from all the Rhondda and Pontypridd districts amounted to 224. An even more striking fact was that of a hundred and fifty Welsh ‘foreigners’ in the city, one-sixth were from the Pontycymmer Exchange Area in the Garw Valley. In the period 1930-36, out of the 1,841 people whose employment books were transferred from that exchange, 270 (15%) went to Oxford and ‘local observers’ stated that the percentage in the late 1920s was probably in the region of 25%. Goronwy Daniel’s research lent further support to the thesis that considerable networking had taken place. Of the sixty immigrants interviewed by him, forty-six said that they had moved to Oxford rather than any other town because they had relatives living there.

 

One of the earliest ‘Garwite’ migrants to Cowley was Tom Richards of Pantygog. He left the valley as a young, single man in October 1926 with the intention of heading to London. Chance encounters on the road led them to the Pressed Steel factory, under construction. They were interviewed by the foreman for the Leicester firm of Ashworth and Nesbit, who were fitting pipes on the factory:

We asked him for a job and he said ‘are you used to hard work?’ We said, ‘we are three miners’ and he said, ‘that’s alright then, you can start tonight’. My uncle said, ‘I’ve got a brother – will you give him a job?’ ‘Alright’, he said, ‘but don’t bring all the family down here!’ So we sent for him … Then my brother came up from Wales… all my mates, three or four cousins and people by the name of Allport.

The advent of the Allport family was a significant factor in subsequent migration because they were well-known shopkeepers. The eldest son, aged twenty-five, was the to arrive in the late autumn of 1926. By the end of the year, there were in the region of twenty-five ‘Garwites’ forming half of all the Welsh labourers working on the site, who in turn formed half of all those employed there. Tom Richards’ mother, brothers and sisters arrived the next summer, together with the rest of the Allport family, joining the two eldest sons, as Vyall Allport recalled:

We were a very close family and kept together, so the boys wrote and Mam came up, and the next thing was that Iris and myselfcame up … Mam sold what property we had and that money put a deposit on a new house… on the Oxford Road. We came up in September 1927… in the van with all the furniture… Everyone was was sorry to see us going because we were part of the community, shop, football team and everything.

J. J. Williams, the local ‘journalist’ for the Garw, who by now was beginning to report this ‘exodus of worthies’ in his weekly column for The Glamorgan Gazette, included a paragraph to this effect:

Garwites regret the departure of Mr and Mrs Allport and family from Pantygog to Oxford. Mr and Mrs Allport have resided in the valley for twenty-eight years. Master Vyall Allport was well known in musical circles, and especially on the Eisteddfod platform. He has been successful at all the principal Eisteddfodau in South Wales.

Undoubtedly, their presence in Cowley as house-owners and contributors to Welsh cultural life had a major stabilising effect on the nascent Welsh community in Cowley. Many young single men stayed with Mrs Allport as lodgers and she helped to settle a large number of other families by supplying information and advice. Their house, re-named Pantygog, became part of a Welsh Corner, an informal advice centre for recently arrived immigrants, including the ‘British Legion’ and the ‘Cowley Workers’ Club’. The preponderance of ‘Garwites’ among the Welsh immigrants at this time and their establishment of sporting and musical societies helped to give the immigrant community a sense of cohesion at a very early stage. The presence of a Congregational Church also played a major part in this. The dynamism of Rev. Whatley White, inducted as pastor in 1926, and his successful ministry among young people, prevented many of the early immigrants from returning to the valleys, as their own testimonies record.

By the late twenties, many of the young migrants were beginning to get married and start their own families, adding further to the stability of the burgeoning immigrant community. The Glamorgan Gazette reported that Mr Edward Bowden, formerly of Pontycymmer, and Miss Maggie Thomas of Blengarw, both well known in the Garw, had got married in Oxford. Stan Smith, also of Pontycymmer, who had obtained work for both himself and his brother in 1927, found that his Whitsun Holiday was the cause of some light-hearted speculation in the Pressed Steel Works’ magazine, Pressings in June 1928:

Stan Smith has had a week in Wales and he had his pockets very well lined before he went. We can hardly believe that it was matrimony that called him there, but one hears so many rumours.

Welsh marriages and courtships appear to have provided a source for a good deal of humour among the workforce at the Pressed Steel factory during the latter half of 1928. When such events were conducted between Cowley bridegrooms and Garw brides they further strengthened the ties which bound the two places together. By the Easter holidays of 1929, the obvious prosperity of the returning natives provoked the Garw columnist, J. J. Williams, into witty comment concerning their fashionable clothes. Apart from the wedding mentioned above, the marriages which were solemnised in the early years of the migration must have taken place in Wales, since the first marriage to be recorded at Temple Cowley Congregational Church involving a Welsh couple was that of Iris Allport and David Price in April 1930, by which time all of the Allport family had moved to Oxford. Many of the young men had left their fiancées behind when they first arrived in the city, regarding their successful settlement there as the prerequisite of marriage. The considerable and continual coming and going between Oxford and Wales during seasonal spells of unemployment, holidays and even weekends enabled them to maintain long-distance relationships and even to form new ones from girls ‘down home’ in preference to Oxonion girls. Of the twenty-one men interviewed by Goronwy Daniel who had married after leaving Wales, eleven had married Welsh women by 1938. Six of the remaining ten men who had married English women were either Englishmen who had lived in Wales or were Welshmen who had lived in England for many years before marriage.

This preference for Welsh-Welsh matches is reflected even among the marriages which took place in Oxford. Nineteen of the seventy-nine weddings at Temple Cowley Congregational Church between 1927 and 1940 involved Welsh people. Of these, at least nine were ‘all Welsh’ affairs, eight were between Welsh bridegrooms and English brides, and two were between English bridegrooms and Welsh brides. Other significant facts are that only four of the seventeen Welsh bridegrooms were under twenty-five and that five out of the eight men who married English brides were aged between twenty-seven and thirty-four, whereas only two of the men who married Welsh brides were in this age group, five of them being aged twenty-six and two, who married after the outbreak of war, aged twenty-one and twenty-two. These figures confirm that many Welshmen deliberately delayed their marriages until they were settled and that those who did not have Welsh fiancées at the time of their migration married still later. The church records together with Daniel’s findings confirm that courtship and marriage formed an important thread in the migration network and that, despite the opportunities presented by the wide range of leisure activities for new relationships to be formed in Oxford, the retention of Welsh traditions in this aspect of life was particularly strong. As Daniel pointed out, the Welsh working class male’s stereotypical image of women was transferred to the new social context:

A factor which no doubt affects marriage is the preference expressed by many of the migrants for Welsh wives. These men considered women born in Oxford to be ‘different’, ‘too reserved’, ‘too fond on going into pubs – a thing that no respectable girl would think of doing in Wales’, ‘bad hosewives’ and ‘poor cooks – too fond of tins and bakers’ bread’. Some of those asked agreed that perhaps the same could be said of many a Welsh girl living in England, but maintained that ‘a girl from home’ would make the best wife.

It is possible that these statements are merely an expression of patriotism, or that they are the result of a natural tendency to idealise those things which are left behind… We can look upon the Oxford Welshmen as men adjusted to the behaviour and values characteristic of Wales, who are uprooted and forced to readjust themselves to alien surroundings. From this point of view it is easy to understand their loneliness on arrival in Oxford, their feeling that Welsh women are more ‘homely’ and ‘make better wives’ and the high proportion of them who marry Welsh women.

The experience of one of Daniel’s interviewees can, therefore, be seen as fairly typical in this respect. Whilst on holiday in the Garw, he met a girl from Ystradgynlais, in the Swansea Valley, who was staying with a friend. She later came to work in Cowley and they were married in 1935, seven years after his initial migration as a teenager. No doubt this pattern was repeated many times, after many of the migrants returned home dressed in the latest fashions, ‘Oxford bags’ and smart blazers, and, by the end of the thirties, in their own motor-cars. Cadwallader Jones left the Garw for Cowley in 1933 and having obtained work, found digs with a family from Pontycymmer. He then married a woman from his home village and they moved into a house on the Florence Park Estate, which had become very Welsh by the mid-1930s.  Even in those cases where Welsh men married English women, contact was often made through the chapel or the choir. Very rarely, it seems, were future spouses found more informally through dances or attendance at other forms of popular entertainment.

Social Service agencies also helped to define and stereotype young, single immigrant women as a ‘problem’ in terms of immoral conduct. It is probable that their concern had less to do with a real problem than with their desire to secure funding for their projects. To begin with, in the late twenties, these were organised and funded on a purely local basis. In Oxford, members of the Local Aid Sub-Committee of the Mayor’s Mining Distress Fund met the young workers on their arrival and arranged for them to become members of the local juvenile organisations. One of the committee members established a special club for Welsh girls which further facilitated the contact between these girls in circumstances in which the nature of their employment counteracted their own efforts to support each other socially. In March 1935, the Oxford Moral Welfare Committee for Outside Work issued an appeal for the provision of a new outside worker for moral welfare in Oxford which they justified by reference to the extraordinarily rapid growth of the city since the war which had outstripped the existing organisations for preventive and rescue work. Their thinly-veiled desire to regain a degree of social control over the lives of working-class women  as a whole led them to reinforce the stereotypical image of young immigrant women:

This increase, consisting as it does chiefly of a newly settled artisan population, practically of the same social class and without educated leaders of public opinion, has transformed the problem of Moral Welfare by bringing into Oxford hundreds of young wage-earning girls and women who are as yet strangers to the City and to one another. For them, some friend able to devote most of her time to their welfare will be the simplest way of bringing them into touch with the protection, healthy evening recreation, and general friendliness which the various organisations for young people in Oxford provide.

Four months later the Pilgrim Trust responded to this appeal by providing two hundred pounds per year for the first three years to guarantee the social worker’s salary. The job was mainly concerned with unmarried mothers, pregnant girls and girls with ‘loose associations’ (e.g. with married men).

The accusation that Welsh immigrants habitually undercut wages was a prevalent one. An American writer recorded that it was repeatedly said of the Welsh that they would work for wages that no Englishmen would dream of accepting. The accusation carried some potency in Oxford, where it seems to have derived from the immigrants who secured jobs in the building trades through the Merthyr-based firm of Moss and Sons. One of Goronwy Daniel’s witnesses recorded how she had been upset by a conversation she had overheard on a bus. An Oxford woman had said that the Welsh are stealing jobs by working for low wages. Although this became an oft-repeated epithet, contemporary left-wing activists like Abe Lazarus recognised that, although men from the depressed areas, ‘DA men’, might be glad enough to accept low standards after years of unemployment, Oxfordshire agricultural labourers were far more likely, due to their non-industrial background, to accept low rates of pay in the car industry than Welsh miners. Nevertheless, this negative stereotype of the newcomers persisted well into the thirties. One of Daniel’s other interviewees who had migrated into the town in 1933 had found a strong dislike of Welsh people on the part of Oxford men, who thought the Welsh were taking their work and were all “reds”. The juxtaposition of these two remarks provides a graphic illustration of the emotive and illogical of much of the invective directed against the Welsh immigrants; they could be branded, at one and the same time, as ‘dilutees’ and ‘militants’.

 

In Oxford, the Welsh were easily scapegoated as the agents of social and political disturbance more generally. Unlike Coventry, Oxford was not a working-class city, and had always been a town dominated by the ‘gown’ of the university colleges. In the early 1920s there was an informal, but a well-defined hierarchy of employment in the city and this was accompanied by traditional attitudes of servility and deference among the working population. A decade later, this hierarchy and the low-wage economy which underpinned it had been disrupted and displaced by a high-wage mass-production hub in its suburbs, namely the Cowley car works of William Morris, later Lord Nuffield, and the US-based Pressed Steel company. Whereas ‘kith and kin’ connections had been important in getting employment in the colleges and domestic service, a factor which had protected the essentially parochial character of the servant population, this was not the case in the new industries. The sense of ‘dilution’ and ‘devaluation’ of tradition therefore found expression in an antagonism towards the immigrants, who were seen as alien disruptors of that tradition. Moreover, their industrial trades unionism was seen by many Oxford natives in a similar light, as being alien to the City’s traditions of craft unionism in the printing and publishing companies. Among Oxfordians, whilst it was recognised that trade unions were necessary in some jobs like mining, in Oxford they caused nothing but trouble, with the chief trouble-makers being the Welsh, who were all out for all they can get. 

 

From the very beginning, the case of the ‘migrating militants’ among the ‘Cowley Garwites’ was different from at other plants because there were a number of older men with significant experience in the SWMF and who had been active in the institutional life of the valley before migrating. There were also a significant number of Garw families who had already established themselves in Cowley by the end of the twenties, as we have already noted. These men had begun to organise an unofficial and underground movement in 1928, and by 1932 this had grown strong enough for a pamphlet to be produced and distributed throughout the works at lunchtimes. This complained that workers at the Pressed Steel factory were being degraded to the Coolie level and that, despite the Company’s increasing profits, piece-rates were being cut by as much as ten percent. In addition, workers were being forced to work overtime without pay, and female workers, it claimed, were working long hours for very low rates of pay. The pamphlet concluded that it was absolutely essential that every worker should join the Transport and General Workers’ Union as soon as a branch could be set up and that every worker should then play an active part in the union to bring about the abolition of overtime, the acceptance by the company of a workers’ representative to approve the decisions made by the rate-setters, and a fixed rate for ‘dead time’.

Although we have this oral and documentary evidence that the will for organisation and trade union recognition existed before the famous strike of 1934, we have none about what happened in response to their demands. There is nothing to suggest that any breakthrough was made until then. Seasonal unemployment remained a problem in the works throughout the early period. Whereas the company had discharged slightly more workers than it had engaged in 1930 and 1931, 1933 saw its biggest net gain of employees and this was followed by another substantial gain in 1934, as the general economy continued to recover. It then continued to show a net gain of workers each year until it reached a total labour strength of 6,411 in 1940. Also, by 1933-34 many more of the Welsh had married and moved onto the Florence Park Estate and other estates near the works. This made social conditions, in terms of the proximity of home and work, more comparable with those prevailing in coalfield communities, giving a greater sense of permanence to the immigrants. The ownership of houses provided venues for meetings and tactical discussions. The immigrants had become the ‘local’ element in the workforce, whereas the quarter of the workforce who were Oxonion, living in villages within a wide range of Oxford rose to more than a third by 1941. This factor tended to accentuate the role of the immigrants in the organisation of the works since many of the Oxonions could only be brought together at lunchtimes.

It was during a heat-wave in July 1934 that affairs came to a head. The grievances in the factory were similar to those set out in the unofficial broadsheet of two years earlier. On a Friday night, 13 July, almost every man in the press shop considered that his wage had been arbitrarily cut by the management.  When the management failed to meet the workers by the following Monday, the press shop workers walked out. They were led in this by two key figures. Tom Harris, a crane operator in the press shop, was born in Monmouthshire and had migrated to Scranton, Pennsylvania in his early twenties. As a miner, he was active in the United Mineworkers of America before returning to South Wales in the mid-1920s to work in a Maesteg colliery, becoming active in the SWMF. He arrived in Cowley shortly before the strike in 1934. Dai Huish, probably from the Garw, was also an experienced member of the SWMF before arriving in Cowley. Huish was one of those elected to the deputation which, once outside the gates on that Monday night, met to discuss the situation and to find a way of persuading the day shift to support the action taken by the night shift in the press shop. They went to Huish’s nearby house, where Huish had been planning the strike action over the weekend. Significantly, it was the idea of his wife, joining in the lengthy discussion, that the deputation should send delegates to ask for assistance from the Local of the Communist Party. Her rationale for this was that The Communist Party had provided invaluable help and assistance in organising the miner’s struggles in Wales.

The decision to involve the Communist Party was not taken because there were already CP members active in the deputation. The impetus for it was based entirely upon a response to the immediate conditions in the light of a long-held desire of a largely immigrant workforce to retain and re-establish their trade union principles in their new industrial context. The Local advised the deputation to extend the strike to bring in other departments with similar grievances. It was also decided to put forward broad demands on wages and conditions, to press for a closed shop for all semi-skilled men and women, and to demand trade union recognition.  A leaflet was drafted and printed overnight, to be handed out to every day-shift worker the next morning. The press shop shift, comprising 150 men and thirty women, came out after ten minutes. The women elected representatives to the Strike Committee, as the ‘deputation’ had now become. They proceeded to lead a demonstration through the factory and on through the town.

The strike involved over a thousand workers and lasted for a fortnight, and by the time they returned to work at the end of July, 98% of the unskilled workforce at the factory had joined the T&GWU. Of the eleven members of the provisional strike committee, two were Scottish, two were from the North East of England, one was from Manchester and five from South Wales. Only one was Oxonian. Tom Harris became Chairman of the new 5/60 branch, and Dai Huish became its Secretary. Unfortunately, the sources reveal little more about his wife, or about the women press shop workers and their representatives, but they do testify to the strength and significance of familial ties in the growing self-confidence among the immigrant workers at Pressed Steel. In April 1938, at least six of the shop stewards were ‘DA men’, though there were undoubtedly others about whom little or no information is available. We do know that only six of the shop stewards lived at any significant distance from the works so that local residence appears to have continued as an important aspect in the leadership of the union within the works. This pattern continued, although forty percent of Pressed Steel’s workers lived outside Oxford. Considering this, the ‘DA men’ undoubtedly continued to play a disproportionate role in the leadership of the 5/60 branch. Thus, the settled immigrant community which was contiguous to the works provided an important support system for the development of trade unionism within it.

During the 1938 strike at Pressed Steel, the wives of the strikers were refused public assistance by the Relieving Officer. Councillor Evan Roberts was able to take up their case with the Public Assistance Committee, informing them that the Relieving Officer had hounded them out of his office and shown bias and prejudice. Roberts was born in Cwm-y-Glo in Caernarfonshire in 1898, and was a monoglot Welsh-speaker, brought up by his grandmother on Anglesey until the age of eight when he rejoined his remarried father in the Garw Valley and went to work in the Glenavon Colliery at the age of fourteen. In 1923 he became Lodge Secretary in the SWMF and in the 1926 General Strike and Miners’ Lock-out was on the Council of Action, helping to organise the soup kitchens and the sporting activities in the valley. Following the strike, Roberts was one of those victimised and he and his young wife coped with eighteen months of unemployment before finding work at the sugar beet factory at Eynsham. He then became a building labourer in Headington, and during a brief period working for the City Highways Committee led a successful deputation to its Chairman about the payment of tea money.

Roberts then became involved in the Trades Council in Oxford and was asked to fight the City’s West Ward for the Labour Party in 1935. Later that year, he became Chairman of the City Labour Party. Though the Public Assistance Committee rejected his claims about the treatment of the strikers’ wives, Evan Roberts had demonstrated that a working-class voice could be heard in the corridors of local power. In true Dick Whittington-style, he was made an alderman in 1956, Sherriff of Oxford in 1957, becoming the first Lord Mayor of Oxford five years later. Few human stories could better epitomise the setbacks and achievements of the British Labour movement over the inter-war and immediate post-war period. But it was also closely related to the growth of the Labour Party in Cowley and Iffley, dominated by car workers, and especially by former South Wales miners and their wives. In January 1937, Enid Harris was its social organiser and a Mrs Rees was also a member of the Executive Committee.

In Oxford, as the camaraderie of the Pressed Steel factory began to develop, much of the antagonism between the Welsh and Oxonian men began to subside and turned to good-natured jibes at the Taffies, some of which is recorded in the company’s magazine, Pressings. By the mid-thirties, as the new estates were built, the pressure on accommodation was relieved to a considerable extent. Then it was the women and children who had to bear the brunt of the residual hostility against the Welsh, through more subtle forms of discrimination. The essential companionship of the terraced neighbourhood which the women had known in their coalfield communities was almost entirely absent from the new estates and many women suffered acute loneliness in their new homes. Whereas in the valleys the neighbour’s door was always unlocked, there was no such welcome in many English family homes. 

 

The erection of the new housing estates brought the possibility of renting or even owning a newer, more spacious property with better facilities well within the reach of those who left Wales with some savings or those who had been successful in maintaining relatively high wage levels in Cowley despite seasonal unemployment. In the mid-thirties, houses with three bedrooms in Headington and Cowley could be bought for under five hundred pounds, with a deposit of twenty-five pounds and weekly payment of 13s. 2d. These were all terraced, brick houses with bay windows and good gardens. By the mid-thirties, many migrants were able to cross the divide and join the significantly high proportion of owner-occupiers in Cowley. The Allports were able to raise the deposit for their Cowley home from the sale of their house and shop in the Garw in 1927. Iris Allport described the contrast between these new living conditions and those they had been used to in South Wales, and her reaction to it:

When we arrived we were impressed. Don’t forget we were coming from Wales and the house had the old fires in the best rooms. This was a modern hose with small grates – it was heaven – I can remember how I ran around the room! There was a bathroom, which we had never had before – we had baths in front of the fire. You just imagine the difference – we were delighted, like walking on air!…

The Allports were by no means typical of the first wave of Welsh migrants to Cowley, many of whom could not afford the deposit necessary to secure a new property, and had to wait eight years or more before they could afford to do so. Nevertheless, many of those interviewed in the 1980s shared their impressions of the quality of craftsmanship and the contrast with conditions in South Wales whether they owned or rented the houses to which they moved. Those interviewed for Goronwy Daniel’s 1940 survey were content with their housing conditions, though not with the rents they had to pay for them.

Better housing conditions, modern conveniences and labour-saving devices meant that Welsh women in the new housing estates suddenly found that they had more ‘free time’ than they had had when living in the coalfield terraces. They no longer had to spend whole days each week on washing pit clothes by hand or on cleaning and blackleading the grates. Yet when they tried to take advantage of this by venturing out and joining local women’s associations, they were often met with prejudiced attitudes and behaviour. In one case, a minister’s wife was overheard discussing with her gossips whether it is wise to accept wild folk from South Wales. The effect of such attitudes and behaviour, involving acts of both commission and omission, upon Welsh women is fully revealed in the following comments by two of Goronwy Daniel’s interviewees. A husband and wife from the Rhondda who moved to Oxford in 1933 both felt ‘very lonely’ during his first few months in the town. In the Rhondda, they had gone to chapel, to concerts and occasionally to the cinema. They had also gone for long walks together. In Oxford, they felt isolated from the ‘little cliques’ of men from the works who spent their time in public houses or at football matches or sometimes went to dances with their wives. The wife commented:

“People are so independent here. At home they wouldn’t ask, but come in and help if the children were ill; if things were bad they would bring a loaf of bread with them. In Oxford we could all be dead and no one would know until the rent collector came round at the end of the week.”

In Oxford, as to a lesser extent in Coventry, the Welsh faced a genuinely peculiar paradox: the more ‘clannish’ they became in their attempts to re-establish themselves in a hostile environment; the more they relied upon familial and institutional networks  as a means of mutual support and encouragement, the greater was their contribution to the social and cultural life of the cities and the greater was their integration into full citizenship. In turning inwards to defend themselves against a plethora of prejudices, they found the means to define, develop, articulate and promote a self-image of ‘respectability’ which could be held up against their reputation for ‘roughness’ which was so often held up to them.

Key figures in the social service movement, such as C. V. Butler, also appeared to a somewhat ‘matronly’ view of the ‘new leisure’ which they saw emerging among that city’s new working class. Interestingly, Butler could only explain the popularity of these new forms of mass entertainment by reference to the patterns of mass production in the new industries of the locality:

Morris’s, the Pressed Steel Works … have long periods of overtime working … periods of overtime and rush work in Oxford bring with them their own problems so far as leisure occupation is concerned. While they last, young people are at a disadvantage if they are inclined to take up something in their leisure time which demands consecutive thought or attendance; clubs, evening classes, systematic reading, for example … This often results in a tendency among them … to get the most excitement possible out of their leisure time. Perhaps this is one explanation of the popularity of dancing, cinemas and dog-racing …

That sense of responsibility which is developed in the craftsman is not brought out in the worker in the mass production factory … It is an aimless kind of work, and seems to breed an attitude of aimlessness and irresponsibility on the part of the young people who are occupied with these tasks. It is an explanation of the dance craze and the cinema craze … There is practically nothing else to do on Saturday night except dance or go to the cinema. No clubs, except the YMCA and very few churches have organised anything … The minds of the young people are being stultified by this feeding with not always wholesome material.  

These contemporary social investigators were sharply critical of the way in which rapid and unplanned development in Oxford had failed to take account of the need for a range of facilities around which communal life could be established. The local press often reflected these criticisms, as this editorial from the Oxford Times from 23 April 1937 demonstrates:

It must be admitted that in a great many cases, including that of Oxford, the authorities at first failed to look sufficiently far ahead in planning these estates, and often left them without shopping centres, churches, schools, halls and other amenities which are now recognised as essential … although in the majority of cases there are to be found … among them (the immigrants) people willing and able to start social activities, they are usually sadly handicapped by the lack of a meeting place. At best most of them have only a schoolroom in which to meet.

A Welsh-speaking couple from Neath with three adult and two teenage children felt equally isolated in their leisure time. ‘At home’ they attended chapel and Sunday School and were members of the chapel choir; a great deal of their time was spent in gardening. In Oxford they only went occasionally to the cinema and missed the social life of their village:

They (Mrs & Mr B) expected a minister from one of the local chapels to visit them and give them a welcome, but no one came. Oxford people were antagonistic. On her way home in a bus one day an Oxford woman began to say that the Welsh were stealing jobs in Oxford by working for low wages, and that they were uneducated and could not speak English properly. Mrs B. told her that she wouldn’t speak like that if she knew what it was like to have been for years out of work and to have seen her little children with faces like old men for lack of food. But Mr and Mrs B felt very upset.

The transcripts of Daniel’s interviews show that many Welsh women, despite these overt and covert forms of discrimination, did join choral societies and church groups. Some reported that their children had been teased and bullied at school, being called ‘Taffy’ and having the old rhyme sung at them:

Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief;

Taffy came to my house and stole a leg of beef …

But many of their children, particularly their daughters, who were perhaps less prone to rise to baiting, to fight and form gangs than their brothers, did make friends with English children after a short space of time in Oxford. In addition, many immigrants adapted to the ‘new leisure’ after initial loneliness and homesickness, especially when they married local women. A twenty-seven-year-old Bargoed brick-layer who spoke Welsh had felt ‘miserable’ in Oxford for a long time after migrating in 1928. In Wales, he had attended chapel regularly, played billiards and had gone to evening classes. Following his marriage to a local girl, he felt far more settled in Oxford. Another twenty-seven-year-old man, also with a wife and two small children, had also migrated, from the Garw Valley, in 1928. His social activities had changed significantly since migration. In Wales, he had spent his leisure hours in the chapel, in playing football, going to the cinema and reading novels. When he moved to Oxford, at first as a single man, he began to visit dances and public houses for the first time, followed football matches and boxed a little. He continued to read. He never went to chapel except on his occasional visits to Wales and seems to have enjoyed the freedom from chapel domination. He told of how he had persuaded his mother, on a visit to Oxford, to visit a public house with him; when she returned home, the minister there had heard of this and called to see her about it.

Daniel’s social survey was one which allowed the Welsh immigrants in Oxford to speak for themselves in response to a wide range of questions. In his illuminating 1940 article, he included an appendix containing the detailed and varied, yet edited responses of six migrants and their families. Unfortunately, the full transcripts were lost in his own migrations after the war, these edited transcripts reveal both the common and varying impressions of Oxford formed by the immigrants. None of these lent themselves to stereotypical interpretations by contemporary sociologists. Together with the oral evidence I collected from Welsh Oxonions in the 1980s, they also reveal how Historians need to take care with the available sources neither to exaggerate the extent of social conflict nor to underestimate the ability of the immigrants to withstand and transcend the various forms of discrimination to which they were subjected. For example, in examining the attitudes towards the immigrants, it was often said of the Welsh that they were untruthful and untrustworthy; that they were, as the oft-heard age-old rhyme above suggested, given to stealing.

Another frequent criticism which had little, if some, grounding in reality, was that Welsh people left their ‘digs’ and returned to Wales without paying their rent bills. One of Daniel’s female research assistants knocked at the door of a house where a Welsh correspondent was known to be lodging. His landlady came to the door and became quite agitated, saying that he had departed a fortnight earlier without paying his rent. She told her that the police had been looking for him and then asked the young researcher, You’re not the young lady he’s got into trouble, are you? 

The reporting of isolated incidents of this kind sometimes led to a general withholding of credit from Welsh families, which made it still more difficult for them to remain in their new environments during spells of unemployment. Such incidents were frequently blown out of all proportion by the press until they became a significant source of open conflict. The other common stereotype which developed from incidents like the one reported above concerned the sexual behaviour of the Welsh. It was said of Welsh men that they had loose morals and would marry a girl only after they had impregnated her. According to Daniel’s calculations, fifty-two percent of Oxford Welshmen who were already married before migration caused conception before marriage and fifty-seven percent of those married after arrival caused conception before marriage, in those cases where marriages were accompanied by the birth of children. The equivalent figure for Oxford natives was forty-seven percent.

In addition to the effects on men labouring on the production lines, periods of seasonal unemployment in the new factories were a factor in significant increases in infant mortality and increased susceptibility to a range of diseases.  Despite its apparent general prosperity, Oxford’s infant death rate increased from 30.5 per thousand in 1935 to 47 per thousand in 1936. Thus, although there was a widening gulf between the prosperous and the depressed areas in health terms as the 1930s progressed, the image of these new areas as havens of health and wellbeing was far from the reality. While the former Welsh miners were generally more healthy than those who had gone back down the pits in 1936-38, as the coal industry recovered, it was, again, the women who bore the greatest cost of migration to their mental health.

One of the expanding leisure areas in which the Welsh had the most success in projecting their self-image was that of sporting activities. Three well-known gymnasts from the Garw Valley comprising Stan Davies, Evan Harris and Billy Cooper, also known as Chick, Will and Comrade, helped to organise the ‘Oxford Physical Culture Club’. Cooper had also become its instructor in October 1927 when he had promised that within six weeks of his election he would produce the finest troupe of local acrobats. By the following February, the Club had gained its first female celebrity, in the shape of a Mrs Parker, who had already become ‘Champion Lady Swimmer of Wales’. At its first display in February 1928, she gave an exhibition of club-swinging before joining the musicians to perform a series of songs during the interlude. By 1933-34, the Club was meeting three times a week and had a large membership, forty-eight of whom were under twenty-one.

Finally, nowhere could the immigrants’ self-image of ‘respectability’ be better expressed than in the religious culture of the cities. Temple Cowley Congregational Church was a small chapel in the 1920s, holding between sixty and seventy people for worship. Within five years of the arrival of the first Welsh immigrants, the number of regular worshippers had swollen to five times that size. In October 1929, The Oxford Times reported that the need of Cowley for a larger Congregational Church was emphasised on Sunday when the existing church was packed to the doors for the harvest thanksgiving services. The foundation stone of the new church was laid later that month and the role of the Welsh in the church was affirmed by the presidency at the ceremony of Isaac Edwards of the Union of Welsh Independents. It has been estimated that roughly half of those who packed the new church every Sunday was Welsh. By 1935 many of the young immigrants had married and started families and their children made up a large part of the 360-strong Sunday School. The Welsh immigrants provided a real lift for the Church especially in their singing, and it became a United Nations’ Chapel with the Welsh and the Scots and a few Irish.

(to be continued)