Demographics and Reconfigurations:

The 1960s were dramatic years in Britain: demographic trends, especially the increase in the proportion of teenagers in the population, coincided with economic affluence and ideological experimentation to reconfigure social mores to a revolutionary extent. In 1964, under Harold Wilson, the Labour Party came into power, promising economic and social modernisation. In an attempt to tackle the problem of poverty, public expenditure on social services was expanded considerably, resulting in a small degree of redistribution of income. Economically, the main problems of the decade arose from the devaluation of the currency in 1967 and the increase in industrial action. This was the result of deeper issues in the economy, such as the decline of the manufacturing industry to less than one-third of the workforce. In contrast, employment in the service sector rose to over half of all workers. Young people were most affected by the changes of the 1960s. Education gained new prominence in government circles and student numbers soared. By 1966, seven new universities had opened (Sussex, East Anglia, Warwick, Essex, York, Lancaster and Kent). More importantly, students throughout the country were becoming increasingly radicalized as a response to a growing hostility towards what they perceived as the political and social complacency of the older generation. They staged protests on a range of issues, from dictatorial university decision-making to apartheid in South Africa, and the continuance of the Vietnam War.

Above: A Quaker ‘advertisement’ in the Times, February 1968.

Vietnam, Grosvenor Square and All That…

The latter conflict not only angered the young of Britain but also placed immense strain on relations between the US and British governments. Although the protests against the Vietnam War were less violent than those in the United States, partly because of more moderate policing in Britain, there were major demonstrations all over the country; the one which took place in London’s Grosvenor Square, home to the US Embassy, in 1968, involved a hundred thousand protesters. Like the world of pop, ‘protest’ was essentially an American import. When counter-cultural poets put on an evening of readings at the Albert Hall in 1965, alongside a British contingent which included Adrian Mitchell and Christopher Logue, the ‘show’ was dominated by the Greenwich Village guru, Allen Ginsberg. It was perhaps not surprising that the American influence was strongest in the anti-war movement. When the Vietnam Solidarity Committee organised three demonstrations outside the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square, the second of them particularly violent, they were copying the cause and the tactics used to much greater effect in the United States. The student sit-ins and occupations at Hornsey and Guildford Art Colleges and Warwick University were pale imitations of the serious unrest on US and French campuses. Hundreds of British students went over to Paris to join what they hoped would be a revolution in 1968, until de Gaulle, with the backing of an election victory, crushed it. This was on a scale like nothing seen in Britain, with nearly six hundred students arrested in fights with the police on a single day and ten million workers on strike across France.

Wilson & the ‘White Heat’ of Technological Revolution:

Andrew Marr has commented that the term ‘Modern Britain’ does not simply refer to the look and shape of the country – the motorways and mass car economy, the concrete, sometimes ‘brutalist’ architecture, the rock music and the high street chains. It also refers to the widespread belief in planning and management. It was a time of practical men, educated in grammar schools, sure of their intelligence. They rolled up their sleeves and took no-nonsense. They were determined to scrap the old and the fusty, whether that meant the huge Victorian railway network, the Edwardian, old Etonian establishment in Whitehall, terraced housing, censorship, prohibitions on homosexual behaviour and abortion. The country seemed to be suddenly full of bright men and women from lower-middle-class or upper-working-class families who were rising fast through business, universities and the professions who were inspired by Harold Wilson’s talk of a scientific and technological revolution that would transform Britain. In his speech to Labour’s 1963 conference, the most famous he ever made, Wilson pointed out that such a revolution would require wholesale social change:

The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods … those charged with the control of our affairs must be ready to think and speak in the language of our scientific age. … the formidable Soviet challenge in the education of scientists and technologists in Soviet industry (necessitates that) … we must use all the resources of democratic planning, all the latent and underdeveloped energies and skills of our people to ensure Britain’s standing in the world.

In some ways, however, this new Wilsonian Britain was already out of date by the mid-sixties. In any case, his vision, though sounding ‘modern’ was essentially that of an old-fashioned civil servant. By 1965, Britain was already becoming a more feminised, sexualized, rebellious and consumer-based society. The political classes were cut off from much of this cultural undercurrent by their age and consequent social conservatism. They looked and sounded what they were, people from a more formal time, typified by the shadow cabinet minister, Enoch Powell MP.

Education – The Binary Divide & Comprehensivisation:

By 1965, the post-war division of children into potential intellectuals, technical workers and ‘drones’ – gold, silver and lead – was thoroughly discredited. The fee-paying independent and ‘public’ schools still thrived, with around five per cent of the country’s children ‘creamed off’ through their exclusive portals. For the other ninety-five per cent, ever since 1944, state schooling was meant to be divided into three types of schools. In practice, however, this became a binary divide between grammar schools, taking roughly a quarter, offering traditional academic teaching, and the secondary modern schools, taking the remaining three-quarters of state-educated children, offering a technical and/or vocational curriculum. The grandest of the grammar schools were the 179 ‘direct grant’ schools, such as those in the King Edward’s Foundation in Birmingham, and the Manchester Grammar School. They were controlled independently of both central and local government, and their brighter children would be expected to go to the ‘better’ universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, from where they would enter the professions. Alongside them, also traditionalist in ethos but ‘maintained’ by the local authorities, were some 1,500 ordinary grammar schools, like George Dixon Grammar School in Birmingham, which the author attended from 1968.

The division was made on the basis of the selective state examination known as the ‘eleven plus’ after the age of the children who sat it. The children who ‘failed’ this examination were effectively condemned as ‘failures’ to attend what were effectively second-rate schools, often in buildings which reflected their lower status. As one writer observed in 1965, ‘modern’ had become a curious euphemism for ‘less clever’. Some of these schools were truly dreadful, sparsely staffed, crowded into unsuitable buildings and sitting almost no pupils for outside examinations before most were released for work at fifteen. At A Level, in 1964, the secondary moderns, with around seventy-two per cent of Britain’s children, had 318 candidates. The public schools, with five per cent, had 9,838. In addition, the selective system was divisive of friendships, families and communities. Many of those who were rejected at the eleven plus and sent to secondary moderns never got over the sense of rejection. The IQ tests were shown not to be nearly as reliable as first thought. Substantial minorities, up to sixty thousand children a year, were at the ‘wrong’ school and many were being transferred later, up or down. Different education authorities had widely different proportions of grammar school and secondary modern places; division by geography, not even by examination. A big expansion of teachers and buildings was needed to deal with the post-war baby boom children who were now reaching secondary school.

Desperately looking for money, education authorities snatched at the savings a simpler comprehensive system, such as that pioneered and developed in Coventry in the fifties, might produce. Socialists who had wanted greater equality, among whom Education Secretary Tony Crosland had long been prominent, were against the eleven plus on ideological grounds. But many articulate middle-class parents who would never have called themselves socialists were equally against it because their children had failed to get grammar school places. With all these pressures, education authorities had begun to move towards a one-school-for-all or comprehensive system during the Conservative years, Tory Councils as well as Labour ones. So when Crosland took over, the great schooling revolution, which has caused so much controversy ever since, was well under way. There were already comprehensives, not just in Coventry, but also on the Swedish model, and they were much admired for their huge scale, airy architecture and apparent modernity. Crosland hastened the demise of the grammar schools by requesting local authorities to go comprehensive. He did not say how many comprehensives must be opened nor how many grammar schools should be closed, but by making government money for new school building conditional on going comprehensive, the change was greatly accelerated.

Population ‘Inflow’ and ‘Rivers of Blood’:

Although the 1962 Commonwealth and Immigration Act was intended to reduce the inflow of Caribbeans and Asians into Britain, it had the opposite effects: fearful of losing the right of free entry, immigrants came to Britain in greater numbers. In the eighteen months before the restrictions were introduced in 1963, the volume of newcomers, 183,000, equalled the total for the previous five years. Harold Wilson was always a sincere anti-racist, but he did not try to repeal the 1962 Act with its controversial quota system. One of the new migrations that arrived to beat the 1963 quota system just before Wilson came to power came from a rural area of Pakistan threatened with flooding by a huge dam project. The poor farming villages from the Muslim north, particularly around Kashmir, were not an entrepreneurial environment. They began sending their men to earn money in the labour-starved textile mills of Bradford and the surrounding towns. Unlike the West Indians, the Pakistanis and Indians were more likely to send for their families soon after arrival in Britain. Soon there would be large, distinct Muslim communities clustered in areas of Bradford, Leicester and other manufacturing towns. Unlike the Caribbean communities, which were largely Christian, these new streams of migration were bringing people who were religiously separated from the white ‘Christians’ around them and cut off from the main forms of working-class entertainment, many of which involved the consumption of alcohol, from which they abstained. Muslim women were expected to remain in the domestic environment and ancient traditions of arranged marriages carried over from the subcontinent meant that there was almost no inter-marriage with the native population. To many of the ‘natives’ the ‘Pakis’ were less threatening than young Caribbean men, but they were also more alien.

Wilson had felt strongly enough about the racialist behaviour of the Tory campaign at Smethwick, to the west of Birmingham, in 1964, to publicly denounce its victor Peter Griffiths as a ‘parliamentary leper’. Smethwick had attracted a significant number of immigrants from Commonwealth countries, the largest ethnic group being Sikhs from the Punjab in India, and there were also many Windrush Caribbeans settled in the area. There was also a background of factory closures and a growing waiting list for local council housing. Griffiths ran a campaign critical of both the opposition and the government’s, immigration policies. The Conservatives were widely reported as using the slogan “if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour” but the neo-Nazi British Movement, claimed that its members had produced the initial slogan as well as spread the poster and sticker campaign. However, Griffiths did not condemn the phrase and was quoted as saying “I should think that is a manifestation of popular feeling. I would not condemn anyone who said that.” The 1964 general election had involved a nationwide swing from the Conservatives to the Labour Party; which had resulted in the party gaining a narrow five seat majority. However, in Smethwick, as Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths gained the seat and unseated the sitting Labour MP, Patrick Gordon Walker, who had served as Shadow Foreign Secretary for the eighteen months prior to the election. In these circumstances, the Smethwick campaign, already attracting national media coverage, and the result itself, stood out as clearly the result of racism.

Griffiths, in his maiden speech to the Commons, pointed out what he believed were the real problems his constituency faced, including factory closures and over 4,000 families awaiting council accommodation. But in  1965, Wilson’s new Home Secretary, Frank Soskice, tightened the quota system, cutting down on the number of dependents allowed in, and giving the Government the power to deport illegal immigrants. At the same time, it offered the first Race Relations Act as a ‘sweetener’. This outlawed the use of the ‘colour bar’ in public places and by potential landlords, and discrimination in public services, also banning incitement to racial hatred like that seen in the Smethwick campaign. At the time, it was largely seen as toothless, yet the combination of restrictions on immigration and the measures to better integrate the migrants already in Britain did form the basis for all subsequent policy.

When the author went to live there with his family from Nottingham in 1965, Birmingham’s booming postwar economy had not only attracted its ‘West Indian’ settlers from 1948 onwards, but had also ‘welcomed’ South Asians from Gujarat and Punjab in India, and East Pakistan (Bangladesh) both after the war and partition, and in increasing numbers from the early 1960s. The South Asian and West Indian populations were equal in size and concentrated in the inner city wards of the city and in west Birmingham, particularly Sparkbrook and Handsworth, as well as in Sandwell (see map above; then known as Smethwick and Warley). Labour shortages had developed in Birmingham as a result of an overall movement towards skilled and white-collar employment among the native population, which created vacancies in less attractive, poorly paid, unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in manufacturing, particularly in metal foundries and factories, and in the transport and healthcare sectors of the public services. These jobs were filled by newcomers from the Commonwealth.

Whatever the eventual problems thrown up by the mutual sense of alienation between natives and immigrants, Britain’s fragile new consensus and ‘truce’ on race relations of 1964-65 was about to be broken by another form of racial discrimination, this time executed by Africans, mainly the Kikuyu people of Kenya. After the decisive terror and counter-terror of the Mau Mau campaign, Kenya had won its independence under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta in 1963 and initially thrived as a relatively tolerant market economy. Alongside the majority of Africans, however, and the forty thousand whites who stayed after independence, there were some 185,000 Asians in Kenya. They had mostly arrived during British rule and were mostly better-off than the local Kikuyu, well established as doctors, civil servants, traders business people and police. They also had full British passports and therefore an absolute right of entry to Britain, which had been confirmed by meetings of Tory ministers before independence. When Kenyatta gave them the choice of surrendering their British passports and gaining full Kenyan nationality or becoming foreigners, dependent on work permits, most of them chose to keep their British nationality. In the generally unfriendly and sometimes menacing atmosphere of Kenya in the mid-sixties, this seemed the sensible option. Certainly, there was no indication from London that their rights to entry would be taken away.

Thus, the 1968 Immigration Act was specifically targeted at restricting Kenyan Asians with British passports. As conditions grew worse for them in Kenya, many of them decided to seek refuge in the ‘mother country’ of the Empire which had settled them in the first place. Through 1967 they were coming in by plane at the rate of about a thousand per month. The newspapers began to depict the influx on their front pages and the television news, by now watched in most homes, showed great queues waiting for British passports and flights. It was at this point that Conservative MP Enoch Powell, in an early warning shot, said that half a million East African Asians could eventually enter which was ‘quite monstrous’. He called for an end to work permits and a complete ban on dependants coming to Britain. Other prominent Tories, like Ian Macleod, argued that the Kenyan Asians could not be left stateless and that the British Government had to keep its promise to them. The Labour government was also split on the issue, with the liberals, led by Roy Jenkins, believing that only Kenyatta could halt the migration by being persuaded to offer better treatment. The new Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, on the other hand, was determined to respond to the concerns of Labour voters about the unchecked migration.

By the end of 1967, the numbers arriving per month had doubled to two thousand. In February, Callaghan decided to act. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act effectively slammed the door while leaving a ‘cat flap’ open for a very small annual quota, leaving some twenty thousand people ‘stranded’ and stateless in a country which no longer wanted them. The bill was rushed through in the spring of 1968 and has been described as among the most divisive and controversial decisions ever taken by any British government. Some MPs viewed it as the most shameful piece of legislation ever enacted by Parliament, the ultimate appeasement of racist hysteria. The government responded with a tougher anti-discrimination bill in the same year. For many others, however, the passing of the act was the moment when the political élite, in the shape of Jim Callaghan, finally woke up and listened to their working-class workers. Polls of the public showed that 72% supported the act. Never again would the idea of free access to Britain be seriously entertained by mainstream politicians. This was the backcloth to the notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech made in Birmingham by Enoch Powell, in which he prophesied violent racial war if immigration continued.

Powell had argued that the passport guarantee was never valid in the first place. Despite his unorthodox views, Powell was still a member of Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet which had just agreed to back Labour’s Race Relations Bill. But Powell had gone uncharacteristically quiet, apparently telling a local friend, I’m going to make a speech at the weekend and it’s going to go up “fizz” like a rocket, but whereas all rockets fall to earth, this one is going to stay up. The ‘friend’, Clem Jones, the editor of Powell’s local newspaper, The Wolverhampton Express and Star, had advised him to time the speech for the early evening television bulletins, and not to distribute it generally beforehand. He came to regret the advice. In a small room at the Midland Hotel on 20th April 1968, three weeks after the act had been passed and the planes carrying would-be Kenyan Asian immigrants had been turned around, Powell quoted a Wolverhampton constituent, a middle-aged working man, who told him that if he had the money, he would leave the country because, in fifteen or twenty years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man. Powell continued by asking rhetorically how he dared say such a horrible thing, stirring up trouble and inflaming feelings:

The answer is I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that this country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking … ‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.’ We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual flow of some fifty thousand dependants, who are for the most part the material growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping its own its own funeral pyre. … 

 … As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the river Tiber foaming with much blood”.

He also made various accusations, made by other constituents, that they had been persecuted by ‘Negroes’, having excrement posted through their letter-boxes and being followed to the shops by children, charming wide-grinning pickaninnies chanting “Racialist.” If Britain did not begin a policy of voluntary repatriation, it would soon face the kind of race riots that were disfiguring America. Powell claimed that he was merely restating Tory policy. But the language used and his own careful preparation suggests it was both a call to arms and by a politician who believed he was fighting for white English nationhood, and a deliberate provocation aimed at Powell’s enemy, Heath. After horrified consultations when he and other leading Tories had seen extracts of the speech on the television news, Heath promptly ordered Powell to phone him, and summarily sacked him. Heath announced that he found the speech racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions. As Parliament returned three days after the speech, a thousand London dockers marched to Westminster in Powell’s support, carrying ‘Enoch is right’ placards; by the following day, he had received twenty thousand letters, almost all in support of his speech, with tens of thousands still to come. Smithfield meat porters and Heathrow airport workers also demonstrated in his support. Powell also received death threats and needed full-time police protection for a while; numerous marches were held against him and he found it difficult to make speeches at or near university campuses. Asked whether he was a racialist by the Daily Mail, he replied:

We are all racialists. Do I object to one coloured person in this country? No. To a hundred? No. To a million? A query. To five million? Definitely.

Did most people in 1968 agree with him, as Andrew Marr has suggested? It’s important to point out that, until he made this speech, Powell had been a Tory ‘insider’, though seen as something of a maverick, and a trusted member of Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet. He had rejected the consumer society growing around him in favour of what he saw as a ‘higher vision’. This was a romantic dream of an older, tougher, swashbuckling Britain, freed of continental and imperial (now ‘commonwealth’) entanglements, populated by ingenious, hard-working white people rather like himself. For this to become a reality, Britain would need to become a self-sufficient island, which ran entirely against the great forces of the time. His view was fundamentally nostalgic, harking back to the energetic Victorians and Edwardians. He drew sustenance from the people around him, who seemed to be excluded from mainstream politics. He argued that his Wolverhampton constituents had had immigration imposed on them without being asked and against their will.

But viewed from Fleet Street or the pulpits of broadcasting, he was seen as an irrelevance, marching off into the wilderness. In reality, although immigration was changing small patches of the country, mostly in west London, west Birmingham and the Black Country, it had, by 1968, barely impinged as an issue in people’s lives. That was why, at that time, it was relatively easy for the press and media to marginalize Powell and his acolytes in the Tory Party. He was expelled from the shadow cabinet for his anti-immigration speech, not so much for its racialist content, which was mainly given in reported speech, but for suggesting that the race relations legislation was merely throwing a match on gunpowder. This statement was a clear breach of shadow cabinet collective responsibility. Besides, the legislation controlling immigration and regulating race relations had already been passed, so it is difficult to see what Powell had hoped to gain from the speech, apart from embarrassing his nemesis, Ted Heath.

Those who knew Powell best claimed that he was not a racialist. The local newspaper editor, Clem Jones, thought that Enoch’s anti-immigration stance was not ideologically-motivated, but had simply been influenced by the anger of white Wolverhampton people who felt they were being crowded out; even in Powell’s own street of good, solid, Victorian houses, next door went sort of coloured and then another and then another house, and he saw the value of his own house go down. But, Jones added, Powell always worked hard as an MP for all his constituents, mixing with them regardless of colour:

We quite often used to go out for a meal, as a family, to a couple of Indian restaurants, and he was on extremely amiable terms with everybody there, ‘cos having been in India and his wife brought up in India, they liked that kind of food.

On the numbers migrating to Britain, however, Powell’s predicted figures were not totally inaccurate. Just before his 1968 speech, he had suggested that by the end of the century, the number of black and Asian immigrants and their descendants would number between five and seven million, about a tenth of the population. According to the 2001 census, 4.7 million people identified as black or Asian, equivalent to 7.9 per cent of the total population. Immigrants were and are, of course, far more strongly represented in percentage terms in The English cities. Powell may have helped British society by speaking out on an issue which, until then, had remained taboo. However, the language of his discourse still seems quite inflammatory and provocative, even fifty years later, so much so that even historians hesitate to quote them. His words also helped to make the extreme right Nazis of the National Front more acceptable. Furthermore, his core prediction of major civil unrest was not fulfilled, despite riots and street crime linked to disaffected youths from Caribbean immigrant communities in the 1980s. So, in the end, Enoch was not right, though he had a point.

Trains, Planes and Motor Cars:

By the 1960s, British road transport had eclipsed railways as the dominant carrier of freight. In 1958 Britain had gained its first stretch of dedicated, high-speed, limited-access motorway, and by the early 1960s, traffic flow had been eased by a total of a hundred miles (160k) of a three-lane motorway into London (the M1, pictured above). In 1963 there were double the number of cars on the road than there had been in 1953. Motorways allowed fast, convenient commercial and social travel, household incomes were rising, and the real cost of private motoring was falling. Workplace, retail and residential decentralisation encouraged the desertion of trains and a dependence on cars. That dependency was set down between 1958 and 1968. By the mid-sixties, there were brighter-coloured cars on the roads, most notably the Austin Mini, but much of the traffic was still the boxy black, cream or toffee-coloured traffic of the fifties. The great working-class prosperity of the Midlands was based on the last fat years of the manufacture of cars, as well as other goods.

The map above shows what Britain’s transport network looked like by the early seventies. The start of Britain’s largest-ever road-building programme in the 1960s coincided with a more rapid decline in the railways. Roughly half of Britain’s branch-lines and stations had become uneconomic and its assets were therefore reduced. By 1970, the loss of rolling stock, locomotives, workforce, two thousand stations, 280 lines and 250 services meant that the railway network in Britain had been reduced to half of the length it had been in 1900. By the mid-sixties, flight frequencies and passenger loads on intercity air routes were also increasing vigorously. Nonetheless, rail passenger mileage remained stable for most of the second half of the century as rising oil and fuel prices put a ‘brake’ on motor vehicle use in the 1970s. Plans to triple the 660 miles of motorway in use by 1970 were also frustrated by a combination of the resulting economic recession, leading to cutbacks in public expenditure, and environmental protest.

(To be continued… for sources, see part two).

Total War and the Temper of the People:

Besides the course of the war itself, in the early part of 1916, the two subjects which, according to John Buchan, most agitated the popular mind were the temper of Labour and the matter of conscription. In addition to the troubles in the first two years of the war on Clydeside and in the south Wales coalfield, the new munitions policy, with its wholesale suspension of trade union rules, increased the tension. In spite of high wages, industrial troubles were always on a hair-trigger until the end of the war. There was, Buchan wrote, a work-weariness as well as a  war-weariness, factory-shock as well as shell-shock. British Labour reflected the mood of the country; it had moments of revolt and discontent as well as its steady hours of resolution. In 1915 Lord Derby had made to organise recruitment on a more scientific basis, but in the figures published in January 1916 showed that ‘voluntaryism’ had failed and that conscription would soon follow.

There was little opposition to conscription in the country, and although an official Labour congress instructed the Party in Parliament to oppose the measure, and although this was upheld at the annual conference three weeks later by a majority of more than a million card-votes, it was also decided by a small majority not to agitate for repeal should the bill become law. Furthermore, it was agreed that the three Labour members whom Asquith had invited to join the war cabinet should keep their positions, despite Ramsay MacDonald’s pacifist stance. Buchan commented:

“The result was a typical product of our national temperament, and only the thoughtless would label it inconsistent. The Labour delegates were honest men in a quandary. They were loath to give up a cherished creed even under the stress of a dire necessity. But they were practical men and Englishmen, and they recognised compelling facts. If they could not formally repudiate their dogmas, they could neglect them.

A week after the Battle of Jutland, about which I have written elsewhere, the cruiser carrying Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, was sunk by a mine west of the Orkneys, while on course for Russia. The news of the sinking and Kitchener’s death filled the United Kingdom and its allies with profound sorrow. Labour leaders and trade union delegates, according to Buchan, were as sincere in their mourning as his professional colleagues and the army which he had created. At the time he was beyond doubt the most dominant personality in the Empire, and the foremost of Britain’s public servants… In twenty-two months he had expanded six divisions into seventy and made a great army.

As the late summer and autumn of the Somme campaign wore on, the temper, not just of the British Labour movement, but that of Britain as a whole, was beyond the mood of exasperation of 1915. Britons were beginning to learn the meaning of the task they had undertaken. The civilian hatred of the enemy had gone and the mood of the people was more like that of the men at the Western Front, one of resignation to fate. As Buchan pointed out;

The War was no more a reported tale; enemy aircraft had stricken down men and women in English streets, the life of the trenches could be envisaged by the dullest, and death, which had left few families unbereaved, was becoming once more the supreme uniter.

This new mood of poise nevertheless emboldened people to be more critical of the War Government which, according to Buchan, was trying to cure an earthquake with small political pills. Far from being a mobilisation of the best minds and talents of the nation, the Coalition cabinet had turned out to be a mere compromise between party interests. Neither were its traditional processes fitted for the swift dispatch of business. During the autumn men of all classes were beginning to ask themselves, and each other, whether such a government was fit for the vital purpose of winning the War. The great majority of the British people had become convinced by the late summer that a change was necessary, but the Government was slow to discern this shift in public opinion. Thus, when the attack came, there was a tendency to attribute this to a combination of conspiracy and calumny by the press.  However, it was evident that no government could have been driven from office purely by these means. The press owed most of its power to its ability to echo popular opinion which felt entitled to criticise results which were not adequate to the sacrifice and spirit of the nation. David Lloyd George was, as ever, the one leader capable of interpreting the subconscious popular mind. Buchan had this to write about him:

Alone of his Liberal colleagues, he realised that the political ‘expertise’, of which they had been such masters, was as much in the shadow as the champion faro-player in a Far Western township which has been visited by a religious revival. His powerful intelligence was turned into other channels, and he brought to the conduct of this war between nations the same passion which in other days he showed in the strife between classes. When he succeeded Lord Kitchener at the War Office he found himself with little authority; he was convinced that things were being mismanaged at the front, and he was determined to infuse into their conduct a fiercer purpose, and to win back policy and major strategy to the control of the Cabinet. To do this he must either be Prime Minister himself, or head a small War Directory which had full executive responsibility. At the close of November he put the latter proposal before Mr. Asquith.”

The matter soon found its way into the newspapers. The Conservatives in the Cabinet had little love for Lloyd George, but were anxious that Asquith should resign in order to reconstruct his Cabinet. At first, Asquith seemed inclined to accept Lloyd George’s proposal for a War Directory, but due to the press campaign and on the advice of his Liberal colleagues, he withdrew his offer. Lloyd George resigned, and so too did Asquith, believing himself to be indispensable to the King. However, George V sent for Bonar Law instead, who declared that he was unable to form an administration, so the King turned to Lloyd George, who became Prime Minister on 7 December. Balfour accepted the role of Foreign Secretary and his fellow Conservatives followed. Lloyd George was therefore able to create his War Cabinet of five to include Bonar Law, Lord Curzon, Lord Milner, Arthur Henderson (Labour leader) and himself as president. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, both of whom had served in Liberal-led governments for more than a decade, retired to the back benches. Buchan believed;

beyond question the change was necessary, and it had behind it the assent of a people not careless of the decencies. That new leaders should be demanded in a strife which affects national existence is as natural as the changes of the seasons. Few men are so elastic of mind that, having given all their strength to one set of problems, they can turn with unabated vigour to new needs and new conditions. The nation, again, must be able to view its masters with hopefulness, and in all novelty there is hope. There was that, too, in the temperament and talents of the Prime Minister himself upon which men had begun to look coldly. He left on the ordinary mind that he thought more of argument than of action. It seemed to his critics impossible to expect the unresting activity and the bold origination which the situation required from one whose habits of thought and deed were cast in the more leisurely mould of an older school of statesmen… When a people judges there is usually reason in its verdict, and it is idle to argue that Mr. Asquith was a perfect, or even the best available, leader in war-time.

 Below: Lloyd George with Balfour at the Versailles Peace Conference, 1919

Share this:

Chapter Three: 1937 – A Reunited Kingdom?

Chronology:

Jan:

 7    Princess Julianna of the Netherlands married German Prince Bernhard

24  United Campaign for Spain launched at Manchester Free Trade Hall

April:

26  Bombing of Basque town of Guernica by German aircraft

 

 

 

 

May:

 6    Germany’s Hindenburg airship blew up in New Jersey, USA

 12    Coronation of King George VI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

14    Imperial Conference in London (to 15th June)

Labour Party Distressed Areas Commission on South Wales published

28    Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as PM

June:

 1    Amelia Earhart’s last flight

 4    Duke of Windsor married Wallis Simpson near Tours, France

7    Death of Hollywood actress, Jean Harlow

 23    Germany and Italy left Non-Intervention Committee

July:

 5      Japan invades China

10   Harold Nicholson’s mission to Evreux

Aug:

 28  Japanese Bombing of Shanghai

 Oct:

 17  Rioting in Sudetenland

 Duke and Duchess’ Berchtesgarden meeting with Hitler

 Nov:

 6   Italy joined Germany and Japan in Aniti-Comintern Pact

 7   Death of Ramsay MacDonald

19  Lord Halifax visited Hitler  

 Dec:

 12      The Panay Incident, Yangtze River

More general events included the imposition of ARP (Air Raid Patrol) duties on local authorities and the passing of A P Herbert’s Divorce Bill extended the grounds for divorce. On the stage, new plays included Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears and J B Priestley’s Time and the Conways. Flanagan and Allen also had a new hit show, Me and My Girl. Films included Show Boat with Paul Robeson, Oh, Mr Porter, with Will Hay, Lost Horizon, with Ronald Coleman and Camille with Greta Garbo. Among the most popular songs of the year were ‘Leaning on a Lamppost’ and ‘I’ve got you under my skin’.

Narrative:

 A United Front?

Despite the non-interventionist position adopted by ‘official Labour’ in the previous autumn, Stafford Cripps had held behind-the-scenes discussions with the Communist leader Harry Pollitt and William Mellors on the possibility of united action in support of the Spanish Republic. In January 1937 the first issue of Tribune was published, with a controlling board that included Aneurin Bevan, Cripps and Ellen Wilkinson. On 24^th January, the United Campaign was launched at a mass meeting at Manchester Free Trade Hall, the platform being shared by Stafford Cripps, veteran Clydeside ILP MP Jimmy Maxton, Harry Pollitt and William Mellors. As the right-wing of the Labour Party fought back, the United Front packed meeting after meeting with thousands of Labour, Communist, ILP, Socialist League and trade union supporters, organising practical aid for their Spanish comrades with devoted intensity. Eventually the Popular Front won wide acceptance, with David Lloyd George appearing on the same platform as Harry Pollitt and Clement Attlee visiting the International Brigade, giving the clench fist salute.

George Orwell had arrived at the front in Spain under the aegis of the Independent Labour Party in December 1936. As an officer in the anarchist POUM militia, he was able to put both his parade-ground practice in the Cadet Corps at Eaton and his training in the Burma police college to good use in drilling the raw Republican recruits. However, his eccentric dress in balaclava and long woolly scarf combined with his great height made him a target for snipers and he took a bullet in the neck outside Huesca. Orwell survived, but the damage to his vocal cords made it impossible for him to bark out orders. His faith in international socialist solidarity did not survive, however. In Barcelona he had witnessed first-hand the Republican cause being sabotaged by splits and feuds within the ‘Popular Front’. The communists, driven by instructions from Moscow, in return for the only material support, apart from volunteers, which came from outside Spain, seemed more interested in hunting down heretics like the anarchists and Trotskyists than taking on Franco’s crack Moorish troops. Returning home to heal these physical and mental wounds, his disgust with the official left’s rhapsodies about the Soviet Union only served to reopen the latter, and he decided to try to write the truth as he now saw it, that fascism and communism had more in common than most people realised and that the Soviet variety of it was ‘furthest of all to the Right’. The pillars of the Left like The New Statesman rejected his work. So too did Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who described Orwell as ‘a little middle-class boy’ who had day-tripped through socialism but returned from his trip the imperialist reactionary he had always been.

Back on the ground in Spain, by the Spring of 1937 there were 30,000 Germans and 80,000 Italians in Spain. The Germans marched and flew aeroplanes. The Republican Government had practically no aircraft and had to pay huge sums of money to freelance pilots. The deliberate bombing of civilians was regarded as unimaginable barbarity at that time, before the experiences of the Second World War. When the Germans bombed the Basque town of Guernica for Franco, practically wiping it out, on 26th April 1937, their involvement could no longer go entirely ignored by the Chamberlain Government, although they tried to downplay the evidence of their own Consul’s own eyes, reported to them the next day. They were tempted to play along with Goebbels’ propaganda machine which went into a fury of action to try to convince everybody that the Basques had blown up their own city in order to discredit General Franco. They certainly couldn’t ignore the broader implications of the attack, that inland cities were vulnerable to aerial bombardment. Britain’s island status would no longer be enough of a defence against a potential Nazi attack, and its government would need urgently to strengthen its anti-aircraft defences, as well as the Royal Air Force, speeding up aircraft production. The movement of the population to the South-East of England would need to be halted, if not reversed.

The rest of the world was outraged and Picasso’s famous picture went on tour all over Europe, including Britain. Now everybody seemed to be taking a hand in the war, and the International Brigades had volunteers from dozens of countries, including two British contingents, one of them named after the mild-mannered military man, Clement Attlee. Harold Nicholson, who had previously muttered secretly at a dinner party to Eden that he wanted ‘the Reds to win’, had his convictions reinforced by the destruction of Guernica, telling his wife Vita ‘….I do so loathe this war. I really feel  that barbarism is creeping over the earth again and that mankind is going backward.’ In public, however, he continued to support the National Government’s policy of non-intervention, praising Eden and instructing the House that ‘Britain could no longer indulge in a ‘missionary foreign policy’ from the nineteenth century by imposing ‘our views, our judgements, our standard of life and conduct’ upon other countries. Britain must fall back on ‘the preservation of peace’  through ‘the arrangement of the balance of power’.

When the Foreign Affairs Committee met in July to discuss the Spanish situation, Nicholson, now its vice-chairman, was agitated to find ‘an enormous majority anti-Government and pro-Franco’. There seemed little alternative to continuing the non-intervention policy, although Eden agreed with Nicholson that it had failed. Britain could not risk the Civil War spreading to an all-out Europe-wide conflagration. Churchill had been feeding Nicholson with an inflated assessment of Germany’s air strength, which if augmented by the Italian air force, meant that Britain was not ready to go to war, except  with ‘very active Russian assistance’. Malcolm MacDonald, Secretary of State for the dominions, reiterated that Brritain was too weak to go to gamble on war at that time. ‘It would mean the massacre of women and children on the streets of London’, he said, adding that ‘no Government could possibly risk a war when our anti-aircraft defences are in so farcical a condition.’

Although the Spanish Civil War continued until 1939, the surviving British volunteers came home in 1937. They had had a rough war. For every five of them who had been gone to Spain the previous year, one had been killed and  another three had been wounded. As they disembarked from the ferry giving their clenched fist salutes to the awaiting press photographers, it was evident not just that the outcome of the great clash between Left and Right was a clear victory for the Right, but that this had not been the real confrontation, merely the dress rehearsal for something much worse. The Fascists had been greatly encouraged by their successful alliance and joint adventure in Spain. Hitler and Mussolini left the Non-Intervention Committee in June, cementing their ’Rome-Berlin Axis’ and beginning a gigantic build-up of forces. The Non-interventionists in Britain and elsewhere had given Hitler the green light to acquire more territory in the East, at the very least, though he knew that Germany, too, would need more time to prepare for the coming campaign of conquest.

The Spanish Civil War had an even longer-term impact on British literature and culture, through Orwell’s writings, as well as those of others for whom the experience of it had been a pivotal experience. Homage to Catalonia, written in 1937, but not published until 1938, suffered from being seen as a shot from the sidelines at the internecine wars of the Left both in Spain and at home, and it was for this reason that Orwell decided to preach the same message in the more popular form of a fable. He wrote:

On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could easily be understood by almost anyone…However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.’

In this way, the germ of Animal Farm, not published until 1945, was already in Orwell’s mind in 1937. In the meantime, however, his acerbic wit was mainly reserved for those who opposed the arm conflict with fascism, in a review of some military memoirs, in August 1937:

General Crozier is a professional soldier and by his own showing spent the years between 1899 and 1921 in almost ceaseless slaughter of his fellow-creatures; hence as a pacifist he makes an impressive figure, like the reformed burglar at a Salvation Army meeting.’  

Today We Live! The Unemployed Miners

In 1937 Donald Alexander, a Cambridge ’double-first’, arrived in South Wales to produce a film called Eastern Valley which dealt with the relief work organised by the Quakers at the top of the Monmouthshire Valleys. In this short film one unemployed miner explained that he was working now ’not for a boss but for myself and my butties’ and another said that ’a new interest in life’ had been created by the Quakers. The best known documentary was Today We Live, made in the same year by the National Council of Social Service. The Welsh scenes were directed by Ralph Bond who told a story using real miners as actors, in which the unemployed miners of Pentre in the Rhondda agree, after some debate, to co-operate with the voluntary relief agencies. Despite the obvious coaching of the miners, the difficulty in dealing with poverty and boredom, living on a shilling a day, are movingly conveyed and it is not surprising that the film was so well received in the art-houses of London and New York. The film made its impact not only because of the realistic dialogue, which the miners interpreted themselves, in their own words, but because of the stunning images of life in the depressed Valleys. Bond’s assistant on the film was Donald Alexander and his shot of the unemployed searching for waste on the slag heaps was not only the highlight of the documentary itself, but also became the most iconic image of proletarian hardship in Depression Britain. It has been used many times in subsequent films and, at the time, played a similar role to that of Dorothy Lange’s still photographs of the migrant mother with her children in California, for American audiences.

The documentary film-makers of 1937 achieved a real breakthrough, despite being constrained by sponsorship and distribution problems. Grierson, Rotha, Bond and Alexander never knew whether their films would be seen outside of London’s Weat End or New York’s Museum of Modern Art. As the Socialist cause became stronger in 1936-7, several groups attempted to challenge Hollywood and the Ealing comedies by producing independent films with independent outlets. The Communist Party was instrumental in this, showing classic Russian feature-films in halls in London, and some of these were shown in the miners’ institutes in South Wales, together with other independent and radical films. Films like Spanish Earth, also made in 1937, were shown alongside more commercially successful films, such as Night Must Fall, based on Emlyn Williams’ stage play. British film-makers had become concerned about the extent of the domination by American-made films in British cinemas, and in 1937 a Quota Act was passed to restrict this, which led to American companies, like MGM, establishing their own studios around London in order to make ’British’ films. They could also be far more radical, since the British film censors were becoming more lenient.

Paradoxically, many of the English middle-class documentary film-makers had a very idealised view of ’the Welsh miner’ which came through in their work, often in the dialogue which contained vocabulary and idioms which were alien to the coalfield. One of the few film-makers to join them from an authentic background, Jack Howells, was openly critical of this, but was unable to effect a greater sense of realism. Howells shared their conviction that the camera could be used to show the world how the miners lived, but that the Cambridge intellectuals were too earnest and lacking in the ability to use humour both to entertain and inform. Penrose Tennyson, Eaton-educated, had left Balliol College Oxford after only one term, to become a film-maker. He was twenty-six when he made the film Proud Valley with Paul Robeson playing a rather confected role as a black sailor who comes to work in a Welsh pit and is recruited to sing in the local male voice choir. The film proved too radical for the censors, and its release was delayed by the Ealing Studios until the outbreak of war in 1939, when it was given a new ending in which the pit is saved from closure, not by the action of the miners, but by the demands of war. The dialogue was written by Jack Jones, which probably saved it from the music-hall stereotypes of Welshness which its actors, including Rachel Thomas and himself were meant to play. Robeson himself was no stranger to South Wales, as he had been singing in concerts to raise money for the Spanish Republicans, and the song ’You can’t stop us singing’ became a powerful resistance theme as choral singing became the means of suggesting solidarity, not just in films, but also in real life. When Penrose Tennyson began making the film early in 1937, his motivations were very clear, as his brother later revealed:

I think Pen felt that the mining community was the only working-class community in the country which had retained their dignity, their sense of community, and their own cultural life and values. I think he had a very special feeling; I don’t know quite what personal contact it was based on until the film, but I think he had a very special feeling for the miners, particularly for the South Wales miners. I remember at the time of the abdication of Edward VIII… that he quite seriously thought that the Welsh miners were going to march on London and insist on Edward VIII being reinstated and put to rout the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr Baldwin, and all the people who had wanted Edward VIII to give up the throne. I think Pen was perfectly ready to join the march as soon as he could, and I think he was very disappointed that nothing ever happened.

Militant Minorities and Migrants

Penrose Tennyson’s belief that the miners were on the point of insurrection in 1937 was not entirely fanciful, but the Communist Party was already beginning to focus its attention on following up its success in winning the leadership of the SWMF with gaining support in elections. At the beginning of April 1937, the people of the Garw Valley were prepared to vote for a respected local Communist in the Council election:

The declaration of the poll in Ogmore and Garw Council elections took place amid scenes of enthusiasm…culminating in the singing of the ’Red Flag’ when Communist candidate for the Pontycymmer ward, Mr. James Redmond, miner, was announced as having gained the large total of 889 votes, and topped the poll. Edward John Evans (Soc), Schoolmaster, gained the other seat with 830 votes. Mr Daniel Davies (Soc) who has served upon the Council for 18 years, loses his seat, the number of his votes being 814. Mr Redmond is the first Communist to be elected in the Garw Valley…After the declaration the crowd became most excited, and the election proved to be the most enthusiastic and keenly followed for years.

 Clearly, while the South Wales valleys may have been a long way from the verge of revolution in the Spring of 1937, they were experiencing some seismic political shifts. It was no coincidence that Redmond’s election came in the same week that a new wages agreement was reached between the SWMF’s Communist leadership and the coal-owners. Also, a decade-long struggle against company unionism in the valley had finally secured almost 100% membership of the Federation. Redmond’s success was a recognition of the organisational abilities of local Communists, rather than a wholesale shift towards the avowal of revolutionary socialism in mining communities. Those communities were simply expressing their growing self-confidence, which the Communist Party had helped them recover.

 The 1935 Hunger Marches against the introduction of the Means Test were still strong in the imaginations of both people and politicians, but the popular image, presented in contemporary newsreels and photographs of thousands continually on the march, is a myth. Demonstrative action was sporadic, localised and uneven, and, where it involved large numbers, it was motivated by immediate concerns, basic frustrations and deep resentment. Such feelings could just as easily lead to a cynical withdrawal from political action, as they did for many. Nevertheless, the determination of militant minorities, well-organised in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, helped to facilitate a partial institutional and political recovery in 1936-7. However, these minorities, with their emphasis on extra-parliamentary marches and demonstrations, were often seen as a threat by the more mainstream Labour movement, especially its parliamentary leadership. This was a time when direct action on the streets had very negative and sometimes sinister undertones for those who believed in the traditionally British  representative form of democracy. This helps to explain why the Labour Party conference held in Edinburgh in October of the previous year had refused to support the Jarrow Crusade or any other kind of ’hunger’ march, preferring instead to appoint a Commission of Enquiry into the Distressed Areas.  This was the leadership’s idea of getting something done, but at least the words it produced were far removed from those which appeared in The Times on January 19th, which reflected closely the Government’s, when it claimed that the Distressed Areas were:

…economic cemeteries, the character of which may be made more pleasant by planting a few flowers, straightening a few tombstones and employing a sexton or two, but cannot be radically changed.

 Towards the end of that month, the Commission began its tour of investigation in South Wales.  Joining Hugh Dalton and other national figures were two local MPs, George Hall (Aberdare) and Arthur Jenkins (Pontypool). A large amount of written evidence had been received at the preliminary conference in Cardiff in December, much of which had already appeared in published form, since there had already been many quasi-official enquiries, investigations and surveys of the coalfield published throughout the thirties; some regional, some local in focus. The Minister for Labour, Ernest Brown, who had accompanied Edward VIII on his legendary tour the previous November, admitted on 9th March that no fewer than 32 out of 38 special area districts in the region had had over 30% unemployment during the previous year. Only one had had a rate of less than less than 20%, somewhere near the national, British average for the year of about 15%. In the previous July a special Ministry analysis had revealed that of nearly a hundred thousand unemployed men, one in eight had been out of work for more than five years, two in every five for over two years continuously, and more than half for over a year. Only one in five had been unemployed for less than three months. What’s more, the numbers of those who had been out of work for more than five years had doubled between the summers of 1935 and  1936.

Most of these older, long-term unemployed were located in local pockets of unemployment, or ’black-spots’ which had the highest levels of unemployment overall. These were spread throughout the coalfield from Garnant in the Amman Valley in the western anthracite area, generally less hard-hit than the dominant ’steam-coal’ section,  with 58% unemployed, to Ferndale in the Rhondda in the centre with 56%, to Brynmawr and Merthyr on the northern edge with 57% and 46% respectively. These were the four highest levels of all the labour exchange areas of the industrial region. The Report of the Commission, published in May, was essentially a summary of these already-available statistics, including details of population loss, mainly by migration, and local rates. For Merthyr Tydfil, the Commission stated the obvious, that ’Migration has been very heavy. Persistent efforts have been made to attract new industries. Excellent sites are available.’ It also gave a list of the new industries which had been suggested to replace the jobs for the three thousand steelworkers in Dowlais to whom Edward VIII had promised something would be done six months earlier. Evidently, nothing had yet been done apart from the repetition of vague proposals. Meanwhile, the rates in Merthyr continued to climb to 29s in 1936-7, the highest in the region, of which just over half was spent on public assistance. At the same time, industrial properties accounted for less than 5% of the rateable value.

The miners’ ’Fed’, the SWMF, had put forward a long list of specific proposals, including the establishment of oil-from-coal plants, afforestation, and the raising of the school-leaving age to sixteen, with maintenance grants payable. A wide range of evidence was also received from the local Labour Groups, ’showing how the social services were at least blunting the edge of the depression, and how essential it was that much greater financial aid should be given by the Exchequer.’ Without the efforts of the Labour-controlled local authorities, they concluded, ’the results of unemployment and poverty would have been even more disastrous’. They also concluded that this was not enough, that prosperity could be brought back to the region, but only by ’thoroughgoing State action’. Above all, they highlighted the mantra of contemporary economists, that ’South Wales must be considered as an economic unit and its future must be planned.’ This planning needed to be coordinated by ’a vigorous and authoritative Minister of Cabinet rank’ with responsibility for all the Special Areas and their planning, with the commissioners for each of the areas becoming ’his chief executive agents’. Substantial funds needed to be put at his disposal and discretion by Parliament, free from detailed control by the Treasury. No more red tape and ’restrictions’ which had ’throttled’ Sir Malcolm Stewart, causing him to resign six months earlier, on the eve of Edward VIII’s visit to the region.

The Report went on to propose that for proper economic planning of South Wales, the Special Area should be extended to include the whole of industrial South Wales from the River Towy in the West to the River Usk in the East, including Cardiff, Swansea and Newport. It argued that a road bridge over the Severn was vital, and that the central Government should take direct responsibility for this. Bypasses should be built around the coastal towns and a first-class route should be provided to link the heads-of-the-valleys’ towns from Garnant and Brynamman through Merthyr Tydfil to Abergavenny and the Severn Bridge road. They recommended that a number of oil-from-coal plants should be established and owned by the State, since there was no shortage of suitable coal in the region. For older miners, they proposed the immediate introduction of a pension scheme. For those of a younger working age, the Minister for the Special Areas should have the power to require all new industries to establish themselves in the Areas, unless it could be proved to his satisfaction that there was an overwhelming case for their locating elsewhere. To that date, not a single new factory or extension was recorded as being established in the South Wales area.

Whether or not there was a fear of war, South Wales should be used for defence purposes, including the storage of oil, food and other supplies, as well as for the manufacture of defence requirements. Trading estates should be established, distributed throughout South Wales, one of which should be for electro-chemical industries requiring huge supplies of cheap electric power. Public Assistance rates needed to be reduced to the average for Britain as a whole, with a special Exchequer grant making up the difference, twelve shillings in the case of Merthyr. Local authorities should be given the powers and resources to clean up the debris of dead industry and to prepare them for use as building sites or open spaces. All children at school, and all juveniles receiving education or training should receive milk and a free meal per day, all year round. The report concluded that ’only the most drastic action  by the State’ could save the people of South Wales ’from the suffering and misery and despair which for long years’ had ’engulfed them’.  Most significantly, perhaps, for the first time, the Party came out against the Transference Policy:

 The transfer of young persons to other parts of the country is very undesirable.

Neville Chamberlain did, eventually, introduce a new act of Parliament for the distressed areas, the Special Areas (Amendment Act), in 1937. For the first time he promised regional planning with some directed investment. His main motivation in doing so was not an acceptance of the Keynesian economics, so clearly articulated in the Labour Party’s ‘plan’, but the twin concerns over the need for Rearmament and the uncontrolled migration to the South-eastern area of England, visibly vulnerable to aerial attacks from the continent. Prior to the war in Spain, Chamberlain had believed that the only effective solution to the mass unemployment in the distressed areas was internal migration. Hence his support for Transference schemes as the main means of government policy and his rejection of locating new industries in the area, which would militate against migration. 1936 had been the most successful year of the Transference policy, especially because the government had come to understand the importance of family transference to the overall success of the scheme. Young men from areas where familial ties were strong were far more likely to settle more permanently in the new areas if their parents and other members of the family could join them. In fact, most of the successful migration schemes were those that had been organised, since the late twenties, along familial and institutional lines, free from government control.

In addition to political action, resistance to state intervention could be expressed in a refusal to participate in Government training and transfer schemes; it could also form part of a rejection of the ‘demoralisation’ involved in the lives of individuals and families by a host of bureaucrats and social service volunteers. Migration could be an effective expression of this spirit of resistance. It was far from being an acquiescent response to unemployment for many who decided to leave the valleys. As one of the older unemployed men from the Rhondda wrote in a written statement to the Pilgrim Trust later that year:

For an outsider, who views the situation from the angle of the people in the abyss, or the slum worker out of work, the idea he gets of the depressed areas or Special Areas may be totally wrong…I want to suggest that our people are fully conscious of the economic principles which have brought change to the valleys. The question is, to migrate or remain. I have chosen to remain….

Migration was not simply a knee-jerk reaction to economic conditions; it was a conscious response for the hundreds of thousands who undertook it. The Ministry of Labour’s ‘General Review of the Industrial Transference Scheme’, circulated in 1938, found that 72% of the men known to have migrated in 1936 and 1937, had done so ‘on their own account’ without any reference to the official scheme. The overwhelming majority of workers who left South Wales either knew nothing of it, or they chose to ignore its provisions. It was frequently linked to training, which took place in work camps and centres. Resistance to these can be gauged from the fact that, of 3,000 men interviewed by the Unemployment Assistance Board in Merthyr in 1937, 2,300 refused to even consider it. The lack of flexibility in the location and organisation of the centres, the menial type of training offered and the scheme’s failure to guarantee employment that these forms of provision did not match the needs of coalfield communities already naturally resistant to government intervention. Moreover, of the 90,000 men officially transferred by the Ministry of Labour between 1930 and the middle of 1937, 49,000 returned home. The successful resettlement rate among juveniles was little better; it was estimated that between October 1934 and September 1937, approximately 40% of boys and 50% of girls transferred by the Ministry returned home to stay. It classified ‘homesickness’ as the main cause of this, but this was often intensified by the conditions under which the young people were made to live and work, and could be mitigated by careful placement and thoughtful after-care. Such planning was largely absent from the Scheme at its inception, and the reports given by returnees to the coalfield of the conditions they had been forced to endure undoubtedly fuelled resistance among other potential transferees and, more particularly, their parents, who were more and more likely to feel that ‘it was better for their children to be half-starved in Wales than hopelessly corrupted in London’.

Naturally, most of the Industrial Transference Board’s reports stressed the successes of the Scheme, and where cases of re-migration were reported these were written off as hopeless cases of homesickness, defying all the counter measures taken by local officials and employers. However, many of the placements were in domestic service, particularly in the London area. Wages were insufficient for the teenage boys to support themselves, the work was often arduous, the hours long and there was little time off for visits home. As a consequence, they simply ‘ran off’, giving the local officials no opportunity to relocate them. The solution was found by placing the boys in industrial employment. In 1937, the officers of the Birmingham Juvenile Employment Bureau visited Merthyr to interview juveniles and explain to their parents the opportunities available.  This resulted in the successful transfer of sixteen boys and seven girls. They were accommodated together at a hostel until suitable lodgings could be found close to their place of work. The managing director of one of the Birmingham firms of electrical engineers then employed a whole family from Merthyr, and they were given a bungalow from which the woman looked after a number of the firm’s transferred juveniles. Employers in Coventry also established a hostel in 1937, guaranteeing the employment of the Welsh juveniles for a year. However, most of the migration that took place, certainly among adults, was autonomous in organisation. As Captain Crawshay remarked in his survey for the Special Areas Commissioner’s 1937 Report, ‘Dai in the Midlands finds a job for Ianto at home’. Professor Marquand also noted that younger men were ‘subject to waves of feeling’ connected to the receipt of letters from friends who had already left Wales’, from which he concluded, in his 1937 Report for the South Wales Industrial Development Council, that a programme of training and transfer would only be successful if it were operated through a policy of group transfer. Social solidarity was the only means of real protection against an alien atmosphere characterised by precariousness and prejudice often encountered in the new industry areas.

The Hindenburg Blows Up

Following her triumphant first crossing of the Atlantic of the season, Germany’s huge airship Hindenburg, the biggest ever built, nosed down to the aerodrome at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on the evening of 6^th May. A severe thunderstorm had just ended. As the landing lines were dropped, the ground crew began pulling the ship towards the mooring mast, when flames suddenly leapt from her tail. In a matter of a few seconds, the whole airship, filled with 6,700,000 cubic feet of inflammable hydrogen, was on fire; she began to buckle in the middle and fell to the ground. Passengers and crew jumped for their lives as flames and explosions destroyed her. Within five minutes, the fire had burnt out, leaving thirty-five dead among the wreckage. The dramatic pictures of the explosion, exclusive to The Daily Express, were flown across the Atlantic by two American pilots, who then returned to the United States a week later with exclusive pictures of the Coronation.  

 

The Twelfth of May: Coronation and Kind Hearts

At midnight on 30^th April, London’s quarter of a million busmen came out on strike, after negotiations for a seven and a half hour day had broken down. London had to walk to see the coronation, but they were rewarded for their efforts by fine weather. The Coronation of King George VI in Westminster Abbey, the crowning place of thirty-seven monarchs since William I, of Normandy, required twenty-five thousand police and eight thousand special constables to handle upwards of ten million people who had thronged to London to see the world’s greatest free show. It was estimated that the show cost forty million pounds, and its preparation had lasted six months, since planning had first begun for the coronation of Edward VIII. At 10.30 a.m. the royal coach left Buckingham Palace with King George and Queen Elizabeth inside. In Westminster Abbey, the assembled Lords and Ladies, who had been in their 19-inch-wide seats before nine o’ clock, tried to conceal, as best as they could, the sandwiches and drinks they had brought with them, many using their coronets as picnic boxes. Outside the Abbey, forty thousand soldiers lined the route, with the crowds packed in behind them. They cheered at the six-mile-long procession, with its royalties in glass carriages, distinguished men and women from every country in the world. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, bands and prancing horses preceded the golden coach.

The crowning moment belonged to seventy-four year-old Cosmo Lang, no doubt relieved that he no longer had to crown an adulterer.  Immediately after, the hundreds of peers and peeresses put on their coronets and cried ‘God Save the King’ with everyone else in the Abbey. Guns at the Tower Of London and all over Britain were fired to mark the moment. At four o’ clock, the King and Queen were back at the Palace, appearing on the balcony with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose. For this appearance, the King wore the State Crown, not the heavy St. Edward’s Crown placed on his head earlier at the Abbey.

The Coronation also demonstrated how much George VI felt he owed to his speech therapist, Lionel Logue. He and his wife were given pride of place in the Royal box, much to the displeasure not just of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but also to many others in the Establishment. It was clearly of great importance to King George’s confidence that Logue should be physically close at hand during the ceremony. That night he broadcast to the Empire, the first time ever that a newly crowned monarch had talked to his people directly, and live, in their own homes. Logue’s coaching helped him to overcome his stammer, so that it was this speech of thanks to his people, which was the first of many successful encounters with the ever-present microphone he had previously dreaded. Edward had had two decades as Prince of Wales to prepare for the duties of King. His brother, as Duke of York, had not had to undertake many official engagements, but now found himself thrust into the limelight, and within five months had gone from being a diffident and unwilling inheritor of the Crown, sobbing for an hour on his mother’s shoulder, to overcoming all doubts and prejudices as to whether he could cope with the excessive pressures of kingship.

Many among those in the Abbey commented on the regal manner in which he carried himself throughout the event commended the King. During the ceremony, Churchill is said to have turned to his wife, Clementine, and said, ‘you were right! The other one would never have done!’ Although he had been a close friend and supporter of Edward VIII to the point where he, and many others, felt that he had blown his chances of a return to government, Churchill now accepted that the crown would now be safer on the head of King George VI. His love of formal ceremony, like that of his father, was clearly evident, just as his brother’s hatred of it had also been evident in the summer and autumn of the previous year, when he had used the very un-British excuse of ‘rain stopped play’ to cancel major events.  George VI only had to speak six words in response to the Archbishop’s questions; ’all this I promise to do’, which he managed by pausing in the right place rather than stammering. His wife and children, beautifully dressed, added to the occasion, and all those watching in the Abbey, outside, or on the newsreels later, fell even more deeply in love with the new royal family. The effect of the event was to unify both Right and Left behind the monarchy, especially because the pomp of pageantry, containing all the symbolism of the monarchy as the defender of the freedom of the people of Britain, seemed far more benign than the Blackshirts goose-stepping in the carefully choreographed fascist rallies of Nuremberg and elsewhere on the continent. Kingsley Amis wrote of how the coronation had ’upstaged’ Goebbels and Hitler. The summer Olympics of 1936, held in the German capital, may have been a triumph for Nazi Germany, but in 1937 it was Britain which was revealing its best bright clothes to the world, and London was putting on its own kind of show, which only it could do. May was a bad month for Germany in the propaganda stakes, beginning as it had done with the Hindenburg disaster.

Exits and Entrances

At the end of May, Neville Chamberlain finally replaced Stanley Baldwin, the worn-out ‘dear vicar’, as Prime Minister. Baldwin had been planning for many months to retire from political life, but the events that precipitated the Abdication and those which followed it, had kept him in office. As soon as George VI had been crowned, Baldwin decided to hand over the Premiership to his Chancellor, and on May 28^th the Chamberlains moved next door in Downing Street. The former PM went to the House of Lords as Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. As René Cutforth observed, ‘his chief influence had been anaesthetic’. Stability and the status quo had been obsessions that he shared with the great majority of voters in the first half of the decade at least and, unless forced to do otherwise, ‘he had preferred to drowse’. He had a genuinely poetic passion for the idea of ‘middle England’, but had done precious little for working-class regions of Britain as a whole. Like many in his generation, Baldwin had continued to ‘bleed inwardly for the sufferings’ of the Great War, and had promised both himself and his country that those evils would never be repeated. ‘Its memory sickens us’ he said, and Britain needed to be protected from the twin evils of extremism, fascism and communism.

Baldwin had been the epitome of sleepy village England virtues that no longer fitted with the modern age. However, just as Baldwin had not been fond of first class minds, Chamberlain’s cabinet, when announced, excluded most of the able men who might be suspected of supporting Churchill, like Duff Cooper, Harold Macmillan and Julian Amery. The old gang was given the top jobs, including Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare and Lord Halifax. When Sir Thomas Inskip was announced as Minister of Defence, the House of Commons sat there laughing for several minutes. Halifax, an aristocratic Anglo-Catholic, was intensely loyal to his native Yorkshire. He was also shrewd, having spent a lifetime in public office, and was proud of his ability to see behind the public rhetoric of Churchill. As Viceroy of India, he had done what was necessary to keep the imperial connection. Neville Chamberlain, however, represented the economic imperialism his father had campaigned for, even though his parental home, Highbury, was a way from both the screw manufacturing industry and municipal radicalism that had first brought the late Victorian dynasty to pre-eminence. His more patrician stepbrother, Austen, had seemed more destined to lead the Conservatives, especially as foreign and imperial affairs had been his speciality. Apart from being another Midlands industrialist, Neville Chamberlain had little in common with Baldwin. He was an upright provincial businessman with an old-fashioned moustache who had once been Lord Mayor of Birmingham. To some, both these were signs of his lack of imagination and vision. A political observer at the time he became Prime Minister wrote of him:

This seeming lack of breadth of mind and culture…arouses some misgivings about Mr Chamberlain. Clarity of mind – and he has it in an unusual degree – is not enough if the mind, so to say, sees the field as part of the landscape, and that kind of limited vision is not necessarily compensated by courage such as Mr Chamberlain has. The two together should be a positive danger.

Neville Chamberlain had remained true to his Birmingham roots, committed to the improvement of local government, especially education, and possessing a strong instinct for what the professional middle classes wished to see in a Conservative Prime Minister. Above all, they valued the preservation of peace. Churchill, sensing that Chamberlain was a far more principled appeaser than Baldwin, felt renewed in his opposition to the policy. Simon Schama has written of how Chamberlain and Lord Halifax represented a more pro-active Britishness that Churchill understood, while Churchill understood ‘this England, this Britain of… the village institute, the small town chapel, the brass band’. However, he continued to insist that this England, this Britain, would never survive by simply hoping that the new powers on the continent could be persuaded to leave it alone. That would be to depart, as Duff Cooper remarked, from two and a half centuries of British opposition to one-power dominance of the continent.

On November 9^th, 71-year-old Ramsay MacDonald, died from a heart attack in mid-Atlantic while on his way for a vacation in South America. In his long career he had been a radical ILP MP, a founding member of the Labour Party, a pacifist during the Great War, Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, and Prime Minister of the National Government six years earlier. George V had told him that he was his the PM he had liked most during his reign. A suggestion of a burial in Westminster Abbey was made, but he was buried in Lossiemouth in Scotland, where he had been born.

Famous Females

Amelia Earhart, America’s ‘Miss Lindy’ had become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic when she landed in South Wales on June 18^th, 1928, after a 1,900-mile non-stop flight from Newfoundland in the triple-engine seaplane, Friendship. Four years later, she had appeared with Lord Astor at the Epsom Derby, after flying the Atlantic for a second time, but the first time this had ever been done solo by a woman, landing this time in a field near Londonderry, in Northern Ireland. She had hoped to reach France. On 1^st June 1937, she set out in a Lockheed Electra plane, a “flying laboratory,” to make a round-the-world flight. She reached South America, Africa, India and Batavia, but after beginning the last stages to tiny Howland Island, a mid-Pacific airbase, neither she nor her aircraft were ever seen again. After intensive searches, she was presumed dead. A week later, another American female icon of the early twentieth century, film star Jean Harlow, best known for her platinum blonde bleached hair which had started a vogue among hundreds of thousands of girls, died from uremia at her home in Beverley Hills, Hollywood, on June 7^th.

The Windsors’ Saga Continued

The most famous American woman of 1936 had been Wallis Simpson. After the granting of her divorce had been made absolute in the first week of May, she was free to marry Edward, now Duke of Windsor. They wed on 4^th June, at the Chateau de Condé near Tours in France. No member of the royal family was among the sixteen guests, but the sixty-year-old vicar of Darlington, Rev J A Jardine, against the wishes of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was there. Writing privately to the Duke a week before, he had been invited to officiate at the ceremony. After the wedding, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who received more than three thousand congratulatory telegrams and thirty thousand letters, left for a honeymoon in Austria, staying at the Schloss Wasserleonburg, near the Wörther See, throughout the summer. In July, Harold Nicholson performed one last service for Wallis. On her hurried flight to Cannes, during the Abdication Crisis, she had inadvertently left some notes at the Evreux hotel she had stayed in. These notes apparently ‘reflected greatly to her credit’ and upon hearing about them, Harold offered to retrieve them. Having succeeded in doing so, he then gave thanks in the city’s Cathedral for the completion of his mission. He needn’t have bothered, for some years later he discovered that the notes he had so painstakingly recovered had been carelessly lost once more by the Windsors.

The following October, they had a controversial rendezvous with Adolf Hitler at his mountain villa in Berchtesgarden, near the Austrian frontier. While the Duchess chatted with Nazi leaders, the Duke had a twenty-minute private audience with Germany’s dictator. Criticism followed this decision to make Germany the first country to visit on a tour of Europe planned by the Duke to investigate social conditions. Early in November, in his first public speech since his abdication address, he told journalists in Paris that he was mystified by the attribution of ulterior motives to his action. “Though one may be in the lion’s den,” he commented, “it is possible to eat with the lions if one is on good terms with them.”

However, Harold Nicholson was among those who thought the Windsor’s visit was ill advised, and its political connotations were clear, even if weakly discounted by the Duke himself. It left Nicholson, for one, considerably on edge. He himself had refused to travel through Germany ‘because of Nazi rule’, telling ‘Chips’ Channon that whereas ‘we stand for tolerance, truth, liberty and good humour…they stand for violence, oppression, untruthfulness and bitterness’, distinguishing traits that had obviously escaped the notice of the Windsors. It must have confirmed for Harold what many suspected: that the couple had fallen heavily for the ‘champagne-like influence of Ribbentrop. Rumour had it that the man nicknamed ‘Ambassador Brickendrop’ had ‘used’ the Duchess. Even Channon admitted that King George VI himself was ‘going the dictator way, and is pro-German, against Russia and against too much slip-shod democracy’. It has often been argued, somewhat with the benefit of the hindsight of what happened in the following three years, that Edward differed in many aspects from the government’s foreign policy, and foolishly allowed his tongue to run away with him in an unconstitutional manner. In Germany, these utterances created an impression of warm sympathy and an exaggerated idea of his power and influence. There is no evidence to suggest, however, that the former King’s views, however ‘pro-German’, influenced either the new King’s views, or government policy. After some deliberation, Nicholson concluded that Edward believed more than he should have in Herr Hitler’s integrity as well as in his own ability to continue to influence the course of events. In this, of course, he was not alone, as the events of 1938 were to reveal, though he was no longer, in any sense, in charge of those events. The man now in charge of Britain’s appeasement policy was Neville Chamberlain.

Living with the Dictators

Anthony Eden remained at the Foreign Office throughout 1937, but looked, at forty, increasingly out-of-place among the dull, grey knights of Chamberlain’s 1937 Cabinet. Worse still for him, whereas Baldwin had preferred to leave his Ministers to their own devices, Chamberlain was an interfering PM: he liked, he said, to give each member of his government a policy to pursue, and it was in foreign affairs that he chiefly meddled, because although he had little experience in that field himself, his policy of ‘Appeasement’ was not the same as Eden’s. It was believed by almost every liberal mind in Britain, including that of Churchill, that the Versailles Treaty had been unfair to Germany and needed to be revised, so that some form of ‘give and take’ policy might be needed in the highly charged atmosphere on the continent.

As winter approached,  Harold Nicholson was invited to participate in a kind of ‘brains trust’ on foreign affairs at All Souls College, Oxford. Its purpose was to set out guidelines which would neutralise the menace of the totalitarian states. It included A L Rowse, the historian and fierce critic of government policy, Arnold Toynbee, a loyal defender of it, Harold Macmillan, Basil Liddell Hart, and H A L Fisher.  With the Austrian and Sudeten Conflicts beginning to foment, the group suggested a ‘package deal’ to Germany, including allowing the Anschluss, getting the Czech government to allow cantonal status to the Sudetenland, and recognising Germany’s economic rights in eastern Europe. In return, Germany would be asked for assurances about the territorial integrity and autonomy of its eastern neighbours, to agree to limit its arms to giving it preponderance but not supremacy in central-eastern Europe, and that it would not support Italian ambitions in Africa and the Mediterranean. Nicholson put on record his outright opposition to this ‘deal’, and his belief in Germany’s ‘aggressive ambitions’ which he believed were based on the Nazi propaganda of the ‘heroic motive’ that inspired German youth and conditioned them to sacrifice themselves in the pursuit of world domination. The group, divided into ‘traditionalists’ and advocates of  ‘a new policy of trying to conciliate the strong’, between ‘moralists’ and ‘realists’, failed to reach a consensus, eventually breaking up in May 1938.

In November 1937, Chamberlain had dispatched Lord Halifax to Berlin. Halifax was very interested ‘getting together with Hitler and squaring him’, and also met Goebbels and Goering (picture left) but wasn’t able to ‘square’ the Führer on this occasion. ‘We have a different set of values,’ he confided to his diary, ‘and were speaking a different language’. However, Halifax reported to the Cabinet that, in his view, the Germans had no policy of immediate adventure. Their country was still in a state of revolution. Nevertheless, they would press their claim in s in Central-Eastern Europe, though not in a form to give the Western powers cause to interfere. The PM took the view that an atmosphere had been created in which ‘practical questions’ involved in a European settlement could be discussed. Even though Halifax did not pretend to himself that he was using the same language as Hitler, he did want to go on talking in the hope that, sooner or later, some breakthrough of understanding may occur. The ‘state of revolution’ would eventually cease, and then the appeasers would have their role to play in the adjustments of world power that seemed to be taking place. Change could not simply be resisted, but it could be made as harmless British Imperial interests as possible. This condescending attitude transferred itself to the physical sphere of Halifax’s diplomacy, as he was a very tall man, six feet five inches. By contrast, he referred to both Hitler and Goebbels in his diary as ‘little men’. Hitler was the nasty one, Goebbels the more likeable one.

Whereas Eden was contemptuous of Italy, and was pursuing a strong line on non-intervention in Spain, insisting that both the Germans and Italians should take their promises more seriously, Chamberlain set about conciliating Mussolini, accepting his conquest of Abyssinia. He decided to go ahead with an Anglo-Italian agreement, without terms, to ease the bad feeling between the two countries that had existed since Il Duce’s invasion in 1935. Eden, firmly committed to the League of Nations policy, insisted that Mussolini should first agree to withdraw Italian troops fighting under Franco’s command. Finally, in a conversation between Grandi, the Italian Ambassador, Eden and Chamberlain, the PM actually argued Grandi’s case for him against Eden. The Foreign Secretary was eventually to resign over this issue in February 1938, to be replaced by Halifax, who had no qualms about letting Chamberlain run the Foreign Office. His view had not changed since the time of his Berlin visit, and was remarkably similar to that expressed by the Duke of Windsor; ‘you have got to live with the devils whether you like them or not’, Halifax wrote, reflecting on Eden’s ‘natural revulsion’ for dictators.

Incidents and Intervals

In many ways, 1937 represented a brief interval in the British inter-war drama before the curtain rose on the last act of the thirties. There were now two ‘open’ wars in progress, as well violent persecutions and civil strife across the continent. One a civil war in Spain, which it seemed Franco was going to win, and one in the Far East, which had partly emerged out of a decade-long civil war between nationalists and communists in China. Taking advantage, expansionist Japan had marched into Peking in July, following its annexation of Manchuria in 1931. A shooting incident near this frontier had led to the invasion, but China’s resistance under Chiang-Kai-Shek, its nationalist dictator, was greater than the Japanese had bargained for. He had built up a well-disciplined, well-equipped army, aided by his American-educated wife, Mei-Ling, who had taken over the organisation of propaganda, censored the news and negotiated foreign loans, using her connections as a member of China’s influential Soong family.  At Shanghai on 28^th August, sixteen Japanese planes had bombed the area around the South Station, killing two hundred civilians. An estimated 136 million people all over the world, in newspapers and newsreels, saw the picture (above right) of an abandoned baby crying amid the ruins. It was an abiding image and a warning of what might be to come in Europe as strong as those from the bombing of Guernica, four months earlier.

In December, on Sunday 12^th, there was an international incident. This time the Japanese planes swooped down to bomb the US gunboat Panay, which was steaming along the Yangtze River, carrying Chinese refugees from Nanking, China’s capital at that time. The Panay seamen fired back with antiquated Lewis guns, but the planes kept in line with the sun, blinding the gunners. In two hours, the Panay sank and fifty-four survivors, who had got to the riverbank under heavy machine-gun fire from the planes, lay hidden, many badly wounded, in the rushes until the Japanese flew away. Hiroshi Saito, Japan’s ambassador to the United States offered immediate apologies when he heard the news, claiming that the bombing was ‘completely accidental’ and calling it ‘a terrible blunder’. Soon after, Tokyo made offers of full compensation and promised to punish offenders. Apologies were accepted by the ‘pacific’ Americans.

Britain, although having important commercial interests in China, was not strong enough to take on Japan alone. The French were busy building an impregnable fortified strip stretching all the way across northern France to the Belgian border, with hundreds of miles of underground workings. It never occurred to anyone that this might not turn out to be the fortification to provide the West’s main guarantor on land. Since Chamberlain’s accession, the speed of rearmament in Britain had quickened, but by no means feverishly, and the Army was being brought up to date, to make it less class-ridden, with commissions being given to intelligent NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers). Despite the need for speedy rearmament, however, there were still 1,600,000 unemployed, and the efforts of Leslie Hore-Belisha, the new thoroughly modern War Minister, were resisted by the Generals with references to his Jewishness.

There had been a large influx of Jewish refugees from Europe, so large as to be noticeable on the streets of London, the continental cut of their clothes making them conspicuous even in crowds. The Nazis were already at war with their Jews, and particularly the intellectuals among them, so the number of these among the refugees was disproportionately large. The universities benefited from this, especially in the sciences, though the newcomers to Britain had little to do with the most shattering of all the scientific discoveries of the century: the atom had already been split at Cambridge and a handful of physicists already new that it might be possible to make an atomic bomb. The application of this knowledge in the US in the 1940s was, however, very largely the work of exiles from central and eastern Europe, fleeing Nazi tyranny. But that’s a different, well-documented story. In Britain in the late thirties the ordinary refugees were unpopular, but, after Cable Street, not to the point of open violence. The attitude of plebeian Londoners at the time seemed much the same as those of the patricians, like Duff Cooper, who once announced ‘although I loathe anti-Semitism, I do dislike Jews’. A well-known bus-conductor expressed his feelings by providing a free translation for his Jewish passengers, bawling out ‘Swiss Cottage – Kleine Schweizer-Haus’.

‘So ends a historic year’, Harold Nicholson observed in the last pages of his diary for 1937. His garden home of Sissinghurst on the Weald of Kent was ‘developing splendidly,’ and his life was ‘as gay as an Alpine meadow patinated with the stars of varied flowers’. For him, as for many in Britain, it had been a happier, more useful year. The only snag was that it was ending ‘clouded by the menace on the Continent.’ Taken together, the two years of 1936-7 contained a remarkable series of events in every aspect of British life – royal, political, economic, social, and cultural – which changed the course of the twentieth century experience of every creed and class in the country and forged a new age of modern Britain.

 A Literary Interlude: The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro was published in 1989, and became an international bestseller in English. It was adapted into an award-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, by Merchant Ivory Productions. Both book and film became celebrated evocations of life between the wars in a Great English House.

In the strory, the fictional ’Darlington House’ becomes a venue for the aristocratic games of diplomacy which typified the deluded times of the setting, spawning a film and television genre from Gosford Park to Downton Abbey. A ’Conference’ on Germany is held in 1923 at the time of the Reparations Crisis and Locarno Treaty, and in 1936, an ’unofficial’ meeting takes place between Lord Halifax, shortly to become Foreign Secretary upon the resignation of Anthony Eden, and the German Ambassador to London, Herr Ribbentrop, the first of a series. Halifax arrives first, exclaiming somewhat nervously to his host, ’Really, Darlington, I don’t know what you’ve put me up to here. I know I shall be sorry.’ As Lord Darlington takes him on a tour of the House to relax his nerves, Halifax continues to express his doubts about the evening ahead. At one point, however, the butler, Stevens, hears the distinguished guest comment on the quality of the silver he is shown, which puts him into ’a quite different frame of mind altogether’. The butler looks back on this some twenty years later with a sense of pride that ’the state of the silver had made a small, but significant contribution to the easing of relations between Lord Halifax and Herr Ribbentrop that evening’. The butler goes on to defend his employer’s rlationship with the German Ambassador:

It is, of course, generally accepted today that Herr Ribbentrop was a trickster: that it was Hitler’s plan throughout those years to deceive England for as long as possible concerning his true intentions, and that Herr Ribbentrop’s sole mission in our country was to orchestrate this deception… It is, however, rather irksome to have to hear people talking today as though they were never taken in by Herr Ribbentrop – as though Lord Darlington was alone in believing Herr Ribbentrop to be an honourable gentleman and developing a working relationship with him. The truth is that Herr Ribbentrop was, throughout the thirties, a well-regarded figure, even a glamourous one, in the very best houses. Particularly around 1936 and 1937, I can recall the talk in the servants’ hall from visiting staff revolving around “the German Ambassador”, and it is clear from what is said that many of the most distinguished ladies and gentlemen in the country were quite enamoured of him.

The fictional Lord Darlington, Stevens tells us, received hospitality from the Nazis on several trips made to Germany during those years, which was nothing unusual. The guest lists for the banquets held by the Nazis at the time of the Nuremberg Rally would make interesting reading if published in The Times, he suggests. The great majority of these ladies and gentlemen were returning to England with ’nothing but praise and admiration for their hosts’. He goes on to describe as ’salacious nonsense’ any suggestion that his master was anti-Semitic, or that he was closely associated with Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, despite the ’blackshirt’ leader visiting the Hall on three occasions ’in the early days of that organisation before it had betrayed its true nature’. Lord Darlington quickly disassociated himself from Mosley’s movement when its ugliness became apparent. As the butler saw it, the BUF was ’a complete irrelevance to the heart of political life in this country’. On the other hand, his employer, as he also saw it in his grand delusion was ’the sort of gentleman who cared to occupy himself only with what was at the true centre of things, and the figures he gathered together in his efforts over those years were as far away from such unpleasant fringe groups as one could imagine.’ These were figures with ’a real influence on British life’, including politicians, diplomats, military men and clergy. They included Jews, he points out, at pains to bury an earlier incident in which he was instructed by Lord Darlington to discharge two Jewish chambermaids, despite the objections of the housekeeper. Towards the end of the book, Stevens describes, in flashback, one of these evening gatherings at Darlington Hall:

At almost precisely eight thirty, there came the sound of motor cars pulling up on the courtyard. I opened the door to a chauffeur, and past his shoulder I could see some police constables dispersing to various points of the grounds. The next moment, I was showing in two very distinguished gentlemen, who were met by his lordship in the hall and ushered quickly into the drawing room. Ten minutes or so later came the sound of another car and I opened the door to Herr Ribbontrop, the German Ambassador, by now no stranger to Darlington Hall. His lordship emerged to meet him and the two gentlemen appeared to exchange complicit glances before disappearing together into the drawing room. When a few minutes I was called to provide refreshments, the four gentlemen were discussing the relative merits of different sorts of sausage, and the atmosphere seemed on the surface at least quite convivial.

Meanwhile, Lord Darlington’s godson, Reggie Cardinal, an international affairs columnist has arrived, and begins a conversation with Stevens in the library. He has received a tip-off about the events going on in the drawing room and claims to be concerned that his lordship is getting into deep waters, and is out of his depth:

Over in that room…there is the British Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the German Ambassador. His lordship has worked wonders to bring about this meeting, and he believes – faithfully believes – he’s doing something good and honourable.

He asks Stevens if he knows why the three gentlemen have been brought together. The butler does not, nor is he curious to know. It is not his place to do so. Reggie tells him that his lordship is being made a fool of, being manoeuvred like a pawn by the Nazis, through Herr Ribbentrop, just as easily as Hitler’s pawns back in Berlin. Fuelled by copious amounts of brandy, he continues:

His lordship is a gentleman. That’s what’s at the root of it. He’s a gentleman, and he fought a war with the Germans, and it’s his instinct to offer friendship to a defeated foe. It’s his instinct. Because he’s a gentleman, a true old English gentleman. And you must have seen it… the way they’ve used it, manipulated it, turned something fine and noble into something else – something they can use for their own foul ends?…Today’s world is too foul a place for fine and noble instincts…Over the last few years, his lordship has probably been the single most useful pawn Herr Hitler has had in this country for his propaganda tricks. All the better because he’s sincere and honourable and doesn’t recognise the true nature of  what he’s doing. During the last three years alone, his lordship has been crucially instrumental in establishing links between Berlin and over sixty of the most influential citizens of this country. It’s worked beautifully for them. Herr Ribbentrop has been able virtually to bypass our Foreign Office altogether. And as if their wretched Rally and their Olympic Games weren’t enough,… his lordship has been trying to persuade the Prime Minister himself to accept an invitation to visit Herr Hitler. He really believes there’s a terrible misunderstanding on the Prime Minister’s part concerning the present German régime… At this very moment, unless I am very much mistaken, …his lordship is discussing the idea of His Majesty himself visiting Herr Hitler. It’s hardly a secret that our new King has always been an enthusiast for the Nazis. Well, apparently he’s now keen to accept Herr Hitler’s invitation. At this very moment, Stevens, his lordship is doing what he can to remove Foreign Office objections to this appalling idea.

Stevens replies that he trusts his lordship’s judgement, to which Cardinal responds that no one with good judgement could persist in believing anything Herr Hitler said after the Rhineland. Although this is a fictional account, it does represent the atmosphere of aristocratic delusion which accompanied the development of the appeasement policy in the years 1936-7.

Sources: 

Norman Rose (2005), Harold Nicholson. London: Pimlico

Andrew J Chandler (1989), ‘The Re-making of a Working Class’ . Cardiff (Phd Thesis)

Keith Robbins (1997), Appeasement. Oxford: Blackwell

Tony Curtis (ed.) (1986), Wales: The Imagined Nation. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press

René Cutforth (1976), Later Than We Thought. Newton Abbott: David & Charles

Simon Schama (2002), A History of Britain, 3, 1776-2000: The Fate of Empire. London: BBC Worldwide

The Labour Party (1937), South Wales: Report of the Labour Party’s Commission of Enquiry into the Distressed Areas.

Related articles

• Why George Orwell is as relevant today as ever | Geoffrey Wheatcroft (guardian.co.uk)
• Orwell should have his statue at the BBC (telegraph.co.uk)
• The BBC declined to have a statue of George Orwell outside its headquarters. Quite right – his genius deserves better (dailymail.co.uk)
• BBC George Orwell statue turned down as ‘too left-wing’ (guardian.co.uk)
• Orwell is ‘too Left-wing’ for statue, says BBC… (telegraph.co.uk)
• Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell’s Political Mind (vanityfair.com)
• Books of The Times: ‘Diaries,’ by George Orwell, Edited by Peter Davison (nytimes.com)
• Trolling for Anti Semites in the Graveyard (desertpeace.wordpress.com)
• Orwell’s Big Fat Lies (thedailybeast.com)

Britain, 4 October, 1936 – The Battle of Cable Street.

They Shall Not Pass!

At the beginning of September, twenty-year-old John Cornford was still in Aragon, where there had been little fighting In the Spanish Civil War for some weeks. He found some time for writing, including three poems he wrote in his mind, while on sentry duty, and then scribbled in his notebook. Full Moon at Tierz, written on 2nd September, contains a penultimate verse revealing the connection which he felt between the fight against Fascism abroad and poverty and unemployment at home:

England is silent under the same moon,

From Clydesdale to the gutted pits of Wales,

The innocent mask conceals that soon

Here, too, our freedom’s swaying in the scales.

O understand before too late

Freedom was never held without a fight.

Five days later, he wrote in his diary, ’Asleep! By the shit house. Beginning of the sickness.’ On 12th September, his thirty-seventh day in Spain, he was back in Barcelona, from where he was to be invalided back to England. His final poem, ’A Letter from Aragon’, contains a moving message from the Spanish anarchists to his comrades at home:

Tell the workers of England

This war was not of our making,

We did not seek it.

But if ever the Fascists again rule Barcelona

It will be as a heap of ruins with us workers beneath it.

Those who heeded this call suffered an appalling casualty rate. Of about 2,400 British volunteers, 1,700 were wounded and 500 killed . Wales as a whole sent 174 men, many unemployed miners, 33 of whom died there. Most of them were members of the Communist Party, some were members of the Independent Labour Party, which gave money and goods, as well as men to the Republican cause at a time when both Ramsay MacDonald’s ‘National Labour’ and the Labour Party, led by the respected pacifist hero of the Poplar Rising, George Lansbury, were divided against each other, yet both non-interventionist as far as Spain was concerned. That same September, Ernest Bevin, Walter Citrine and Hugh Dalton won over the Trades Union Congress for the Eden-Baldwin policy.

Meanwhile, the struggle against fascism, between Right and Left, was beginning to be fought out on the streets of London and other major British cities. In 1936, about 330,000 Jewish people lived in Britain, less than one per cent of the population. Half of them lived in the East End of London, most of them in a concentrated area on Brick Lane. During the Depression years, it was a pocket of poverty as bad as anything in the distressed areas of South Wales, Clydesdale and Tyneside, with ‘the eternal slums, the litter, the filth, the futility of it all’, as Bill Fishman recalled, having grown up there. Many, like Fishman, were second-generation Jewish ‘immigrants’, the children of parents who had been forced to flee the pogroms of Eastern Europe for the sanctuary that Britain offered. Most of the first generation spoke only Yiddish and lived in what was effectively a ghetto, an enclosed community of crowded tenements. They worked mostly in the furniture and clothing trades, and were an easy target for the Jew-baiters of the BUF, who regularly smashed their shop windows and shouted insults during street meetings. Throughout the summer of 1936, they seemed to be enjoying the protection of the police. In September, there was particular anger over two incidents. Fascist thugs threw a Jewish boy through a plate-glass window, blinding him. Then a Jewish girl was caught and strapped to an advertising hoarding in the attitude of a crucifixion. Neither incident led to a prosecution.

Many in the second generation were determined to fight back. Even though British-born and British-educated, they felt alienated from British society. They saw Germany, boosted by the success of ‘their’ Olympic Games, the Civil War in Spain, and feared that Fascism would spread to Britain. Many became Communists, seeing the Party as the most vehemently anti-Fascist organisation, some joined the Labour Party, but still more formed street-gangs for self-defence. The BUF had already announced its plans for a fourth anniversary march through the East End on 4^th October, so the battle lines had already been drawn. At a rally in Leeds on 27^th October, Oswald Mosley had been showered with missiles. Labour MPs and the mayors of London boroughs pleaded with the Home Secretary to ban the planned march, together with 100,000 petitioners. He refused to do so.

Despite the urging of every organisation from the Jewish Board of Deputies through to the Labour Party for people to stay off the streets, as many as 310,000, liberals as well as young Jews and communists turned out to stop Mosley’s blackshirts in their tracks, chanting ‘they shall not pass’, the cry of the Republicans defending Madrid.  The mounted police charged them, in an attempt to clear a path for the marchers. Resisting passively at first, the anti-Fascist demonstrators then attempted to remove the police from their horses. The Police Commissioner, Philip Game, decided that there was no way of clearing the planned route through to Commercial Road, so he decided on an alternative: Cable Street, by the docks, lined in those days with ships’ chandlers, lock-up garages and warehouses. The demonstrators made barricades from the contents of these. The police again charged them, without success. Retreating, they were barraged by women from the tenement blocks, to such an extent that many ‘surrendered’. Others fought a pitched battle with the demonstrators, arresting eighty-three. At six in the evening the news filtered through that the march had been cancelled on the Police Commissioner’s orders, after consulting with the Home Secretary. It was a moment of jubilation for the anti-fascists, matched only by the despair among the BUF. For the Left, the Battle of Cable Street was a great victory, not only because they achieved their objective of stopping Mosley’s march, but also because it brought together a broad movement which had previously been fractured on the major issues, uniting different races, classes, and traditions.

A week later, the Cabinet met and agreed the Home Secretary’s recommendations for a public order bill banning the wearing of military uniforms and giving the police the power to stop processions if they considered there was a serious risk to public order from them. The House of Commons passed the Bill a month later, and it became law, recognition that in the modern age there would have to be limitations on civil liberties. These measures may have been designed to prevent a repeat of the widespread street violence, which had reached its peak at the Battle of Cable Street, but they also crippled the BUF. Much of the appeal of membership lay in the uniform, which gave working-class men the opportunity to look as good as their social ‘superiors’ in the movement, and the curbs on marches also took away the potential for street brawls with the Communists, which had added spice to otherwise depressed lives.  Mosley observed that ‘the British Government’ had ‘surrendered to red terror.’

Mosley and The Mitford Girls

In reality, Mosley’s retreat may have had more than a little to do with his need to keep an important personal date in Berlin on 6th October. On 5^th, the day after the Battle of Cable Street, a tired and frustrated Mosley had flown to Germany to marry the Mitford girl, Diana Guinness, in a ceremony to be held in the Reich Chancellery. Her sister’s friend, Josef Goebbels, had persuaded Hitler and had made the necessary arrangements. These remained strictly confidential both in Germany and Britain. Apart from the unpopularity of an affair that had resulted in Diana leaving her husband, the hosting of the event by the Führer himself would have put paid to any remaining hopes Mosley had of winning broad public support. For his part, Hitler still believed he could gain the support of respectable British politicians, and any obvious links with the BUF would have ruled these out completely. So, the wedding had to be kept a secret. Mosley himself had met Hitler only once before, though Diana knew him well, as did her sister, Unity, and both had learned German so that they could converse fluently with him. Diana had persuaded the Führer to take the day off for the ceremony.

At 2.30 p.m. on the 6^th Hitler walked across the Reich Chancellery gardens to Goebbels’ official residence for the short ceremony. Watching her hero from Mrs Goebbels’ window, Diana later described it to her sister as ‘the happiest moment of my life.’ Perhaps, then, Oswald Mosley could be forgiven for sensing that his bride was more in love with Adolf Hitler than himself.  He was also jealous of the man who had achieved everything that he had wanted to achieve, but seemed to have failed in, especially in winning street battles with opponents. He couldn’t speak German, and was therefore excluded from his new wife’s gleeful conversations with the Führer. The resulting argument between the newly weds threatened to spoil the day for Diana, but their attendance, with twenty thousand others, at the Sportpalast that evening, to hear Hitler speak, helped her to blot out the quarrel.

The marriage turned out to be almost as disastrous for Mosley as the Battle of Cable Street. When it became public in Britain in 1938, with the birth of their first child, the link to Hitler did prove as damaging to the BUF as they had expected. Diana also suffered when both of them were imprisoned during the war. She complained afterwards that she had missed the childhood of both of her two sons as a result, and a large part of the childhood of her other two. There was little sympathy for her after war broke out, and even less for her sister when Unity arrived in Dover with a bullet in her head, following an attempted suicide in Germany.

 

When Aneurin Bevan came to Coventry to make an impassioned defence of the Labour Government‘s housing policy in the summer of 1947, challenging Anthony Eden to debate the issue, he was given ‘a great reception from the people of Coventry, in particular from members of the Welsh Community, many of whom knew him in their native valleys.’ (1) His choice of this ‘Blitzed’ city was an apt one, since the city had become, like Bevan’s work itself, a symbol of a municipal socialism which was born out of the determination of leaders and led alike to attain better living conditions than many of them had been forced to endure for much of the inter-war period. These were new leaders and this was a re-made working class; the memory of the depression years had become, and remained, as powerful a motive force for social transformation throughout the new industry areas of the Midlands and the South East of England as ‘the Spirit of the Blitz’. In Coventry itself, municipal socialism was already a decade old and the workers who cheered Bevan had re-made themselves, and were determined to maintain their autonomy.

The scale of the demographic changes which the British people had experienced in the two decades between the wars had been confirmed to the Labour movement in 1943, when the Fabian Society published a report by Mark Abrams, who had shown that whereas between 1911 and 1929, a high level of net emigration from Britain had been maintained at 50,000 per year, the world-wide depression had rapidly closed the doors to migrants wishing to go overseas, so that between 1931 and 1939 Great Britain gained 525,000 by migration, almost cancelling out the losses of the previous decade. Besides the influx of immigrants from both parts of Ireland and the refugees from Germany and Central Europe, much of this ‘turn-around’ in the statistics was the result of Britain retaining its population increase through internal, long-distance migration to the Midlands and South-East of England from the north of England, Scotland and south Wales. Whilst in the 120 years to 1921 the population of these ‘old’ industrial areas increased seven-fold, from 1921 to 1938, 86% of the 3,343,000 total population growth was concentrated in the ‘new’ industry towns of the Midlands and the South of England, including those of ‘Greater London’ as it later became known. Abrams observed that these trends had been due largely to migration, rather than to any natural increase. (2) However, to understand the nature and effect of this immigration into these towns and areas, it is essential to go behind the ice-cube precision of the statistics, important as such quantitative evidence is, to the many and varied real-life narratives of individuals, families and communities with their own ‘organic’ social networks.

Much has been written about the inter-war period, much of which portrays it as a ‘dark’ period in recent British history. In particular, the experience of ‘Migration’ has often been portrayed as an ‘anguished one’, synonymous with that of ‘Transference’ under schemes introduced by government from the late twenties onwards. (3) This is hardly surprising, since these terms were frequently and often quite deliberately confused by contemporary Communists and, in the case of the south Wales coalfield, propagandists of the nascent Welsh Nationalist Party. Although they did not produce their pamphlet, Transference Must Stop until 1943, already in 1938, with reference to the Czech Crisis, they had drawn a link between the policy and ‘appeasement’ by describing it as ‘just another Fascist way of murdering of a small, defenceless nation without going to war’, stating that ‘the majority of those who leave Wales for work in England do so under compulsion.’  Welsh MP’s and civil servants were denounced as collaborators and Aneuirin Bevan attacked the complacency and defeatism of the self-appointed leadership of ‘the Welsh Nation’, by which he meant the still-powerful ‘old’ Liberal establishment, many of whom remained closely connected with officials in the Ministries of Health and Labour throughout the thirties. The officials were quite naturally concerned to show that the large volume of unassisted migration was closely related to their efforts to promote the transference policy ‘as the main measure of relief of the distressed areas in South Wales’. (4) Social Service agencies were also concerned to demonstrate the need for their intervention in the migration processes by exaggerating and generalising from the worst experiences of transference, making only passing references to the role of autonomous organisation

by the migrants. In allowing the Transference policy to continue into the early thirties, that old ‘Welsh Nation’ of liberal and Nonconformist Edwardian times was certainly motivated by the possibility that they would regain the political hegemony over the industrial valleys they had lost over the course of the previous decade. If only ‘English’ immigrant militants like A J Cook could be persuaded to leave the valleys, the true Welsh worker, they argued, cleansed of an alien ‘syndicalist’ ideology, would return to ‘the fold’ of paternalistic liberalism. (5) Marxist propagandists also tended to confuse state-sponsored and voluntary migration, principally because they saw any large-scale movement of workers from one part of the country to another as a capitalist device aimed at the creation of a standing army of labourers, the dilution of labour and the undermining of trade union organisation. Their propagation of a negative image of the immigrant was again produced by a narrow focus on the worst experiences of young transferees. (6) Thus, much of the contemporary literature is dominated by the view that migration was something done to the working classes in the ‘distressed areas’ like south Wales against their will. Recent studies relying exclusively on this literature, have tended to maintain this focus, thereby ignoring the broader and more positive perspectives on the processes and products of migration. (7)

Even in purely quantitative terms, those officially transferred represented a small minority of the migration streams. The Ministry of Labour’s  ‘General Review of the Industrial Transference Scheme’, conducted in 1938, showed that 72% of the men known to have migrated in 1936/1937 had done so ‘on their own account.’ (8) Although the scheme had begun in 1928, it was unable to operate effectively until 1933 and some labour exchanges, such as Oxford, did not begin participation in it until this date. (9) Yet the movement out of south Wales had already begun in the early twenties, gaining momentum during and following the 1926 Lockout. Between 1920 and 1939, it is estimated that Wales lost a total of 442,000 people by migration, a figure equivalent to 17% of its 1920 population. The three ‘coalfield’ counties of Glamorgan, Monmouth and Brecon lost most of this; 391,000 or 20%. These figures disguise much heavier losses of as much as 30% by particular valley communities. (10) Neither do these figures reflect the full extent of the Welsh exodus since they express net emigration only and so conceal the many thousands who left but returned by 1939. The Ministry of Labour admitted that there was a considerable ‘seepage’ back to the valleys, perhaps as much as one quarter of those officially transferred. Even assuming that those who migrated voluntarily were more likely to remain in the new areas, it is apparent that exodus, if not permanent exile, was an experience in which more than half a million Welsh people shared. (11) When the scheme was revamped in the mid-1930s, and despite the publicity given to it by a growing body of opposition, the majority of workers who left the depressed areas chose to ignore its provisions. (12) Their choice was determined both by a complex of causes, catalysts and constraints in which ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors were equally significant, as well as by the processes of internal migration. (13) Bevan’s exiled supporters in Coventry in 1947 had transposed much of what he had described in 1936 as ‘that social, institutional and communal life peculiar to Wales’ from their native valleys into the new industry areas of England. (14)

This collective experience of migration to these areas also contrasted sharply with the atomised experiences of those who migrated, often under a greater degree of governmental constraint or direction, to ‘Greater London’. It was this latter group of young, single men which attracted most attention in the social service movement and its reports were critical of the London Welsh societies which it claimed were ‘concerned mainly in preserving in the Welsh colonies the Welsh language, culture and traditional interests’; most of the transferees from south Wales knew ‘little or nothing’ of these. Their sense of isolation was intensified by the Ministry’s deliberate policy of mixing transferees from different home areas in order ‘to diminish the overpowering “home” affinities and thus increase the chances of assimilation in their new community.’ (15) This policy was undoubtedly counter-productive, working against the grain of Welsh migration traditions.

Transferees had to meet their friends in central London rather than being able to develop local friendship networks around the suburban neighbourhood of their lodgings. The local churches displayed an inability to provide any alternative focus for social activity except for those few among the transferees who held strong religious beliefs. (16) Research into the new London Welsh, which formed the basis of a radio broadcast by Miles Davies, confirmed that among these young, single immigrants, there was a ‘feeling of being adrift, the feeling of foreignness, of being among strange people.’  One of the forty-five respondents wrote that ‘unless one has the sheet anchor in the form of a circle of friends or a home life, there is very little of lasting benefit in the type of existence one is practically forced into living in London.’ The responses generally contrasted the ‘bottling up’ of home life and the ‘latchkey’ existence in London with the ‘open door’ of the valleys. Of course, there were many established working-class districts in London in which more neighbourly contacts were the norm, but few Welsh people could find accommodation there. (17)

A similar picture emerges from contemporary ‘social service’ surveys of Southall and Hayes where the Welsh were found ‘scattered and isolated’. Successful settlement was also more likely to occur where there was one major employer. In Luton, by 1937, there was a well-established Welsh community because the Vauxhall works had attracted large numbers of voluntary migrants in the earlier years of the Depression. The Welsh Society there was therefore strong enough to organise the migration itself, with the help of a Welsh Minister at one of the local churches. The local press carried a number of letters from migrants expressing their need for a social centre, a clear indication of growing self-confidence. The Ford works at Dagenham also provided employment for large numbers of people from south Wales, although the migrants had to live at some distance from the works at Ilford and Barking. Despite this, the Dagenham Welsh Society was said to be ‘flourishing’ with ‘an excellent programme’ and an average weekly attendance of over sixty. (18) The concentration of migrants at one large industrial concern was clearly of crucial significance for successful settlement. This was not the case at Slough, perhaps the best-known but least typical example of Welsh migration.  At least one fifth of the town’s population of 50,000 was said to be Welsh in origin, most of the immigrants being concentrated on the Farnham estate. The residents of this estate had the social needs met by a giant centre which Lady Astor, self-appointed Matron of the ‘Depressed Areas’ and ‘rich friend’ of Thomas Jones, Secretary to the Cabinet, claimed ‘was probably the only building of its type in the world.’ A J Lush wrote in his survey that he felt it could only be compared with the State Institutions in the Don Cossack area of Russia, and commented that it was ‘bound to give rise to some doubts in the minds of people nurtured in a more democratic condition’ in South Wales, since it undermined the desire for autonomous organisation. (19)

This diversity of local conditions existing within the South-East Division of the Ministry of Labour led to an equally diverse set of experiences and responses among the migrants themselves.  Migrants to the towns connected with major new industrial concerns were able to maintain a framework of social solidarity, since these concerns attracted large volumes of labour with little or no reference to government schemes. The extent to which the social conditions of the coalfield could be reproduced in the new environment determined the success of the Welsh settlements. The two main features of this process were the independent and collective organisation of networks supplying information and support, and the retention of cultural traditions and institutions as a means of reinforcing a collective identity and of establishing a sense of stability and respectability. A large number of the unskilled vacancies, which occurred, were not notified to exchange offices, because employers preferred to engage that type of worker ‘at the gate’ or from recommendations from within the works. Help given by friends or relatives in this respect was therefore paramount in the successful migration of large numbers of individuals. This help consisted of a combination of offers of work and accommodation or assistance with both. As Captain Crawshay, of the Merthyr ironmasters, somewhat paternalistically commented in his l937 report as ‘Commissioner’ for the euphemistically re-named ‘Special Areas’, ‘Dai in the Midlands finds a job for Ianto at home.’ In the same year, a leading Cardiff Economist, H A Marquand, also noted in his three-volume industrial survey, that younger men were ‘subject to waves of feeling’ connected to the receipt of letters from friends who had already left Wales and concluded that a programme of training or transfer would only prove successful if it were employed through a policy of ‘group transfer.’ (20)

This ‘networking’ was a primary feature of voluntary migration, in contrast with government Transference programmes. It extended far beyond the bounds of kith and kin and became something of an institution in itself, operating between the valleys and the recipient towns and cities. Often it was a daughter or son who secured the first job and the strength of family solidarity would lead, eventually, to its reunification in the new area. Once a family had become established in the new area, fresh impetus was given to the migration of additional relatives and friends, followed by casual acquaintances or even comparative strangers. In this way, a multiplier effect was created whereby large numbers of people migrated from a particular locality in South Wales to a particular area of the Midlands. For instance, one family from Cwmamman was responsible for the removal of a further thirty-six families from the village. (21) In this way, small numbers of initial migrants determined the subsequent predominant direction of the migration from their localities, so that substantial pockets of people from particular coalfield communities were to be found in particular Midland cities by the end of the l930s. In general, there appears to have been a preponderance of Rhondda people among the migrants to Coventry, while Birmingham seems to have attracted a good number of workers from the Monmouthshire valleys, and Oxford, or more particularly Cowley, was the chosen destination for many from the ‘Bridgend valleys’.

The second major feature of the migration, cultural retention, was not only a product of the collective migration experience but also a paramount part of the process itself since the presence, or lack, of Welsh cultural institutions in the new areas was a strong factor in determining the direction of the out-flow from the coalfield. These institutions acted as bonding agents in the lives of migrants, providing them with a badge of identity and helping them to convey a notion of respectability to those among whom they settled. The institutions were often, in part, the outward expression of the immigrants’ inner idealised image of the communities they had left behind.  To paraphrase Idris Davies’ 1930’s poem, they grew sentimental in Oxford over things that they had smiled at in Wales, and in Coventry they saw the mining valleys more beautiful then they ever saw them with their eyes. (22) It was these ‘imagined’ valleys which fired the imaginations of the Welsh working class communities in the Midlands, empowering the exiles to circumnavigate the economic, social and cultural obstacles to their acceptance. A social solidarity reinforced by the re-enactment of this idealised image of ‘the valleys’ provided protection against a tangible atmosphere of precariousness and prejudice.

Nowhere were these features of migration more marked than in Cowley, a quiet Oxfordshire village before the Great War, which by 1926 was being transformed into an industrial district of Oxford by the Morris Works and the giant American Pressed Steel factory. The Barnett House Survey of the 11,000 foreign unemployment books exchanged in Oxford in l936 found a distinct tendency to ‘lumpiness’ in the migration streams, providing evidence of the influence of familial and fraternal networking. This, they noted, militated against the Ministry’s plans for a more nation-wide and complete distribution of manpower in accordance with the shift in the demand for labour and the ‘assimilation of the new elements of the population by the old.’ (23) Of the 2,000 Welsh workers in Oxford at this time, 215 had employment books, which originated in the Maesteg District (covering the Llynfi, Ogmore and Garw Valleys). An even more striking fact was that 150 of these were from the Pontycymmer Exchange, which served by far the smallest of these three, the Garw. This prompted the Barnett House enquirers to consult colleagues in South Wales, who advised them that the flow from the valley to Oxford started in l926 when a few men made the journey, found employment for themselves and subsequently for friends and relatives (24). From that point onwards, Oxford attracted a large percentage of those leaving the Garw. In the period l930 to l936, out of nearly 2,000 people whose unemployment books were transferred out of the Pontycymmer Exchange, 270 (15%) went to Oxford and ‘local observers’ stated that the proportion in the late l920s was probably in the region of 25%. The contemporary sociologist, G H Daniel’s researches 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. (25)

These contemporary findings have given rise to comment and controversy among historians about the nature and role of the Welsh community in Oxford. (26) This can only be adequately interpreted by focussing upon individual experiences described both in documentary and oral sources, as the author has done in more detail elsewhere. In addition, local newspaper sources reveal that both the scale and the nature of the migration were beginning to attract comment from local correspondents, such as the local miner and correspondent for the valley in The Glamorgan Gazette:

“It is said that owing to the number of local men who have obtained work at the Cowley Motor Works, Oxford, a street in that town is about to be named Garw Road. Furthermore, now that one of their number includes a once popular Garw chairman, it is intended to open a Garw Club there. Of course, we were all pleased to see home over the Christmas holidays, the ‘Cowley Wallers’.” (27) 

Oral evidence from a series of interviews conducted in the early 1980s with the immigrants and those they came into contacts with, confirms that a number of important Garw figures were among the to arrive in Cowley, then litlle more than a village. (28) By the summer of l927 there was a gang of young ‘Garwites’ in Cowley, including famous troupe of Garw gymnasts, which had become reunited in Cowley, establishing the Oxford Physical Culture Club with 54 members. (29) Other Garw exiles joined the Headington Silver Band due to the influence of its bandmaster, who was also the foreman in the trucking department at Pressed Steel, a Welsh-American from Detroit When he was told of ‘a good man wanting a job’, Tudor Brooks would tell his compatriots to ‘bring the bugger up’ from the Garw, which led to the migration of large parts of the Garw and Maesteg Salvation Army Bands. (30) It was this growing presence of respected cultural organisers which gave greater stability to the young Garwites from an early stage in their exile, together with the reunification of well-known families, such as the Allports, who had been one of the few shop-keepers in the valley as well as organising concerts and ‘eisteddfodau’. Not only did they transfer their musical skills and organising abilities to their new environment, but they also provided many young, single men stayed with board and lodging on first arriving in Cowley, as well as helping to settle a large number of families by supplying information and advice. Their house, Pantygog, near to what soon became known as ‘Welsh Corner’ acted as an unofficial advice bureau for recently arrived immigrants. (31) By the autumn of l927, the Welsh community was well enough established for a Rugby Team to be formed within the Pressed Steel Works. In the first season, at least eleven of the sixteen players were Welsh, eight of whom were of Garw origin. The team’s success continued throughout the period and provided another ‘pull’ factor for many potential migrants; in some cases it was said to be the major factor in their decision. (32) In the 1937-8 season, seven team members given county trials. (33) Certainly, the preponderance of ‘Garwites’ among the Welsh immigrants helped to give a sense of solidity at a very early stage and it was estimated that as many as two thirds of the immigrants were from the Garw in early 1927. (34) One was even recruited from the valley primarily for his ‘organising abilities’ needed by the growing Cowley Congregational Games Club, his paid employment evidently being considered as purely secondary to his position on the Club’s Executive. (35) The Congregational Church continued to play a major role in aiding the settlement of the newcomers, who were attracted to the church in large numbers during the late l920s and throughout much of the succeeding decade.  Many of them stated that they would have returned to Wales had it not been for the support received through the chapel. (36) The number of worshippers had already grown from sixty to over three hundred in the late l920s, so that a new church had to be built. It has been estimated that half of those who packed the new church every Sunday were Welsh, so that hymns were sometimes sung partly in Welsh. (37)

A further degree of stability was acquired early in l928 through the formation of a Glee Party with about a dozen members. Encouraged by the Conductor of the Congregational Church Choir, who was also the personnel manager at Pressed Steel, a meeting was called a meeting to address the major concern of many of the Welsh at the growing level of prejudice they were encountering in Oxford.   It was considered that a small male voice choir could do much to project a more positive and respectable image as well as providing a leisure-time focus for the large number of young, single men, who were arriving every day from Wales. (38) The Glee Party, like the Physical Culture Club, the Rugby Club and the Games Club, soon became part of the migration network itself. ‘One of the best tenors we ever had in the Garw’ was given employment at Pressed Steel on condition that he remained a member of the Party and this was by no means the only case where influence at Pressed Steel was used to acquire new members of the choir. The personnel manager’s positive attitude towards the Welsh community, his insistence on engaging their members at the full rate and his leniency in re-engaging those who had been laid off eventually led to his American bosses discharging him. (39) The Party grew from a dozen founding members to the point at which in 1931-32 it had a membership of forty-four and was able to compete at festivals in various parts of England, also coming second by one mark in the competition for exile choirs at the Cardiff National Eisteddfod. However, most of their work took the form of charity concerts in various churches and halls throughout Oxfordshire, by which they ‘succeeded in creating a better impression’ than some of the ‘bad characters’ who got their names and nationality into the newspapers, so that the Welsh became ‘better understood by the Oxford people.’ (40) The Glamorgan Gazette reported in April l931 how ‘a large colony of Welsh exiles’ in Oxford was adding to ‘the musical status of the great educational centre’  (41) The fact that the Party succeeded in filling the Town Hall and the extent of recognition it received seemed to symbolise the growing self-confidence and sense of responsibility felt by the Welsh community, despite the problems posed by the deepening trough of general economic recession. (42)  By the turn of the decade, the Cowley Welsh had already attracted the attention of the Welsh dons and students at Jesus College, famously beaten by the Pressed Steel workers on the Rugby fields. The academics called a meeting to establish a Welsh Society, which could span ‘town and gown’. However, as with the London Welsh societies, the working class Welsh regarded those connected with the College as a ‘Welsh-speaking element’ and ‘a different type of people altogether’. (43)

A sociological survey of Oxford in the 1950s confirmed that the tendency for the immigrants to be more actively involved in autonomous and collective forms of working class culture than their fellow Oxford workers continued to be a major feature of the city’s social and institutional life in the post-war period. Its author commented that whilst Oxford people might resent this domination by ‘foreigners’, they themselves did little to redress the imbalance.(44) In the late twenties and early thirties, the Welsh had endured prejudicial remarks from Oxonian workers that they were ‘all reds’ or ‘nearly all communists.’ The stereotypical mirror image held by the immigrants of the natives was of workers who were ‘insular and prejudiced and politically dead…very reserved and independent’, Conservative in politics and ‘apathetic towards trade unions.’ (45) In 1929, officials of the National Union of Vehicle Builders (NUVB) displayed some awareness of the fact that there were  ‘a large number of men from the Welsh coalfields’ at the Pressed Steel who might be more sympathetic to joining the Society than the Oxford ‘tradesmen’ they had found working there two years previously. However, their half-hearted attempts to make contact with the unskilled immigrants were thwarted by the problem of seasonal lay-offs.   An entry in the NUVB Journal highlights this problem and the condescending attitude of the official towards immigrant workers when it states that ‘our would-be helper had been discharged along with a number of others…and had departed for his native woods and fields, not to say colliery refuse heaps in South Wales’. (46)

Nevertheless, from the very beginning of the migration from the Garw to Cowley, there were a number of older men with significant experience in the Miners’ Federation as well as in the leadership of the cultural institutions of their communities.  While seasonal unemployment remained a problem at the works throughout the period, there is little difference in the figures of engagements and discharges at the works for l927 and l934. (47) In fact, there were stifled attempts to organise from within the works during this early period and it is possible to call upon oral evidence to fill some of the discernable, deliberate silences left by the lack of documentary sources. In the late twenties the underground movement for a union in the works had at its centre important personalities among the Welsh community outside the works, though ‘there were no particular leaders’, perhaps because of the need to avoid the victimisation many had experienced after the 1926 lock-out, and which had driven many in the largely autonomous local lodges to leave the valleys. Even then, without the support of proper shop-floor organisation, young migrants risked or in some cases lost their jobs to live up to the traditions of solidarity, which they had learned in their coalfield communities. (48)

By l932, the underground organisation in the works had grown strong enough to produce a pamphlet which was distributed throughout the works at lunchtime, complaining that Pressed Steel workers were ‘being degraded to the coolie level.’  The pamphlet concluded that it was ‘absolutely essential’ that every worker should join the TGWU as soon as a branch could be set up and also set out a list of demands which found their echo in the successful l934 strike. (49) The will for organisation had existed long before l934; what was lacking was the means of organisation that could have been provided by the ‘craft’ unions, which already had a foothold, however precarious, in the works.  However, their typical reaction was ‘nothing doing, we don’t want unskilled in a skilled union’. (50)  This lack of external interest and support made it difficult for the unofficial shop floor leadership of the unskilled workers to formalise itself and make itself known to the management. It was during the heat wave of July l934 that affairs came to a head within the factory when, on the night of Friday 13th almost every man in the press shop considered that his wage had been arbitrarily cut by the management. The following Monday they walked out when the management refused to meet their elected deputation. (51)

One of the leaders of this ‘deputation’ was Tom Harris, a crane operator in that shop. His personal narrative is worth telling because it reflected the earlier transatlantic experience of Welsh migration and its tidal impact on the British trade union movement both before and after the Great War. Born in Monmouthshire in the early l890s, he had emigrated to the Welsh-American town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in his early twenties. There he had worked as a miner and, significantly, had gained organising experience by assisting John L Lewis in building up the United Mineworkers (UMWA).  Returning to South Wales in the mid-l920s, possibly to Maesteg, he became active in the SWMF before arriving in Cowley shortly before the strike of l934, to work at the ‘American’ Pressed Steel Works, a connection that may not have been entirely coincidental. (52) Harris and the other members of the unofficial deputation planned the strike action over the weekend following the wage-cut, and one of their Welsh wives, joining in the lengthy discussion, suggested that the deputation should send representatives to ask for assistance from the local Communist Party, since ‘the Communist Party had provided invaluable help and assistance in organising the miner’s struggles in Wales.’ (53) This decision to involve the Communist Party was based on a reflexive response to immediate conditions emerging from a long-held desire of a largely immigrant workforce to retain and establish their trade union principles in their new industrial context.

The deputation soon became a ‘provisional strike committee’ consisting of eleven members, the majority of whom were immigrants from ‘the Distressed Areas’, known as ‘DA men’ by this time. Of these, two were from Scotland, two from the North East, and five from South Wales. Only one of the members was local, from Oxfordshire, the other hailing from Manchester, not officially classed as a ‘DA’ (54). The official Labour movement had failed to see the potential of the works for organisation and was soon watching a situation that was getting more and more out of their control. A mass rally was held at St. Giles, and in scenes that must have been reminiscent of that ill-fated coalfield summer of 1926, a fete was organised in support of the strike. One Welsh striker was arrested on the picket line when a ‘blackleg’ car was overturned, and spent the night in gaol. (55) By the end of the strike, Harris had become Chairman of the Strike Committee and then Chairman and Secretary of the new 5/60 branch of the TGWU, which moved in quickly where the craft unions had failed to do so. Ernest Bevin, then General-Secretary of the T&GWU, became personally involved rather than risk the strike entering an even more militant phase. The branch accounted for 98% of the workforce at the works. (56) Thereafter, despite the way in which the Glee Party had exploited its contacts and good relations with specific Pressed Steel Managers to secure employment for its members, it never accepted any form of sponsorship from the Company, fearing that to do so would weaken the negotiating power of the 5/60 branch. (57) Although the management had agreed that there would be no victimisation, at least one worker who was elected to the Strike Committee claimed that he had lost his job because of these activities and had been forced to return to Wales for a short period. (58)

The strike, led by ex-miners, represented an important landmark in the development of trade union organisation among semi-skilled engineering works in the new industries throughout the country as well as providing the spur for the growth of the Labour movement in Oxford itself. It was clear evidence of the general recovery of the British working classes following the recession of l929-33. (59) Pressed Steel soon became known as the ‘Red Factory’ because of the reputation of the 5/60 branch for militancy and unofficial action. Harris, perhaps in recognition of the catalytic role it had played, became a ‘secret’ member of the Communist Party locally, shortly after the strike, and by October l934 was delegate to the Trades Council, winning its support for the ‘United Front’ against fascism, and becoming its Vice-President in 1936. The following month the Council agreed to proceed with an organising campaign in the City, beginning with the motor industry, which Harris led. (60) Another immigrant worker, who began work at Pressed Steel in l935 after moving to Cowley from Wigan, has argued strongly that the trade unionists from Pressed Steel were largely responsible for spreading the movement throughout the city. (61)

By April l937, Bevin had appointed a full-time organiser in Oxford who helped Harris to keep the membership of the branch to over 90% of the workforce and a strike at the end of that year firmly established the branch’s strong position in all the departments at the works. (62) Among the thirty shop stewards elected from every department, only six of them were ‘local’, despite the fact that 40% of Pressed Steel workers lived in the villages outside Oxford. (63) The remainder were ‘DA’ men and in December l938, three new shop stewards were added to the list, one a native of Glasgow and the other two from south Wales. (64) Despite this consolidation, at the end of l938 the branch suffered a serious setback when Tom Harris ignored warnings and was sacked for organising a meeting at his place of work. The ensuing strike did not lead to his reinstatement, however, and he left the works to set himself up as a coal merchant. (65) This defeat needs to be put in the context of a long series of successful representation at the factory, and to contrast that experience with the lack of an effective recognition at the nearby Morris Works, where the relatively few ‘DA’ men who led the underground movement were unable to make much progress. (66)

 It was not only the Welsh who saw the difference between the attitude of the largely Oxonion workforce at Morris’ and themselves. (67) A neutral social ‘surveyor’, writing in l937, remarked that the distinction between the two workforces was widely acknowledged. (68) There is thus a strong case to be made for the primacy of general social and cultural factors in the growth of trade unionism in Oxford; the sense of heritage and solidarity, or ‘clannishness’, among immigrant workers provided a powerful motivation to organisation in Pressed Steel, and infused a quiescent trade union movement with militancy. Those who were thrust into the leadership of the trade union movement in the city also found themselves in leading positions in left-wing politics and, in becoming involved in the city’s political life, they reflected a growing sense of permanence and regenerated self-confidence among the immigrants to Cowley. The ‘twelve days that shook Oxford’ provided the springboard for the sudden elevation of working-class politics within the city, in which the ‘DA’ men also played a major role. (69) The assertion of a leading Welsh immigrant – ‘we changed their outlook’ – reflects with considerable accuracy the reality of the immigrant contribution to the transformation of Oxford political life in the l930s to the point at which, on the outbreak of war, the previously unimaginable became thinkable – the possibility of the City being represented by a Labour M.P. (70)

The experience of Welsh migrants to Cowley was not dissimilar to the experiences of those who went to other Midland industrial centres in the period between 1926 and 1940.  It is impossible to assess in clear, quantitative terms whether or not a ‘Garw’ factor was at work among the 13% of foreign unemployment books exchanged in Coventry and North Warwickshire in l937, which came from Wales. However, evidence from church and civic records, combined with a range of more qualitative written, oral and anecdotal evidence, does tend to suggest that there was a preponderance of people from the Rhondda and Monmouthshire valleys among these migrants. (71) The retention of kinship and friendship ties was made more difficult than in Cowley because both industry and housing were scattered throughout a city which was already, by the twenties, expanding rapidly along arterial roads, in all directions, to swallow up the surrounding Warwickshire villages, which were incorporated by the end of the decade. Most areas of Coventry were predominantly working-class; it was a city with a long tradition of engineering and textile manufacture, stretching back into the previous century and beyond, and therefore comprising several Cowleys. There were many more factories to which Welsh labour was attracted, spread out around the city and later in the thirties, with the advent of the ‘shadow factories’, around its outskirts. These factors meant that the Welsh immigrants were not as concentrated in density or distribution as in Oxford, due to the more diverse domestic and industrial conditions prevailing in Coventry even before their arrival. Nevertheless, there were detectable pockets of Welsh immigrants. (72) Also, familial and fraternal relationships were significant in the way labour was engaged at the factory gates, except that Coventry firms also actively recruited in the depressed areas by means of advertisements and ‘scouts’. This encouraged still further the tendency to network migration, and many men in well-paid jobs attracted relatives and friends for whom they had found definite openings. A sizeable proportion of these friends or relatives was already in employment or had only recently become unemployed. Others were ‘second stage’ migrants, attracted from their original destinations by the lure of the high wages in engineering, and the prospect of a more secure future among friends. As in Cowley, some felt ‘called’ to Coventry for musical or cultural reasons, and only looked for employment upon arrival. (73)

Despite the lack of contemporary social surveys, and their research data, such as exists in Oxford, the importance of kinship and friendship networks in Coventry is revealed by painstaking reconstruction of 84 ‘Welsh households’ on the new estates from public records. These include Church Rolls, Electoral Registers and ‘The Roll of the Fallen’, the record of those who died due to enemy action both in the armed services in the War of 1939-45, but also at home, during the ‘Blitzes’ of the City in 1940 and 1941. With these combinations of records, it is possible to trace names and addresses in relation to ‘places of origin’ outside the City. Of these 84 ‘traceable’ Welsh households, 48 showed clear signs of sub-letting accommodation throughout the period and in many cases it is obvious that the sub-tenants were either adult relatives or were of Welsh origin. In some cases, this could be confirmed through oral evidence from family members still living at the properties forty years later. Many of the immigrants appear to have stayed with friends or relatives for a long enough period for their names to have appeared on the Electoral Registers and for them to establish themselves in work and wages before moving into homes of their own. (74) Prominent among these households were the Shepherds of Treherbert, a family who had much to do with the predominance of Rhondda people amongst the immigrants and with their successful settlement. Jehu Shepherd was among the earliest Rhondda immigrants and remained a powerful influence on Coventry Welsh life throughout the period and beyond. He was one of a family of nine, all of whom left Wales. Jehu himself was found a job at the Morris Works in Coventry by his brother-in-law and left the Rhondda just before the General Strike. The family in general and Jehu in particular appear to have given an early cohesion to the Welsh community, especially through the formation of the Coventry Welsh Glee Singers in l926. (75)

The Glee Party, as in Cowley, provided an important focal point for the Welsh immigrants to Coventry. In fact, since the Welsh were more disparate than in Cowley, it was even more important. It also became a means of encouraging social solidarity through the projection of an idealised image of  a respectable, Nonconformist Wales. Jehu was also choirmaster at Queens Road Baptist Church from l926, but in l937 he decided that he had to give up this duty in favour of keeping the Gleemen together, because ‘most of them didn’t go to church, some of them liked to drink…and he felt he must keep them together’ (76) In February l926 they gave two concerts in one week, one to raise money in aid of the Mayor’s Fund for the Distressed Areas. This was well-attended and was presided over by Philip Handley, the Manager of Coventry Employment Exchange, who appealed to the audience on behalf of the distressed miners who, he said, ‘deserved heaven’s interest and sympathy.’  Engagements such as this, combined with his employment exchange and social service work, led Handley to champion the immigrant cause, often in the face of criticism from other civic leaders, trade unionists and employers.  He attempted to counter much of the negative propaganda with a positive vision of a progressive, cosmopolitan city in which ‘the Welshman’s love of music and art’ would make ‘the Coventrian of 25 years hence a better man in body and possibly in brain.’ (77) This comment reveals a more positive, forward-looking attitude among the ‘host’ population than the more ‘hostile’ reaction experienced by the Cowley Welsh, as previously described, whose role in that City’s ‘progress’ seemed only to be recognised, in retrospect, by its left/liberal intelligentsia and newspaper media.

The class divide in Oxford between town, gown and the new working classes, which prevented the formation of a citywide Welsh Society did not seem to be a problem in Coventry, where the Welsh working classes were obviously more dominant in music, culture and sport. The creation of a ‘Society’ helped to further fulfil the need for respectability. One evening every month a ‘social’ was held in a large room above Ellis’ Cafe in Broadgate, to which Welsh people came to play games and to sing, from all over Coventry. Welsh was spoken, but the Society was obviously not dominated by academics, as in Oxford, and was able to meet a need for ‘gathering’ or ‘gymanfa’ among the wide variety of Coventry Welsh, which included nurses and school teachers as well as factory workers. This image of respectability had become well established by February l929, when the Society and the Gleemen combined to give a performance in aid of the Lord Mayor (of London’s) Fund for the Distressed Areas. The Midland Daily Telegraph praised the ‘careful training given by Mr. Shepherd to his singers’ during their weekly rehearsals.   The exiles’ empathy with those they had left behind was portrayed to full effect, if in somewhat bizarre fashion, when Miss Chrissie Thomas played ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ as an encore on her mandolin, ‘in reference to the Prince’s recent visit to the distressed areas.’  At the end of that month the Coventry Welsh were able to give vent to ‘their intense national patriotism’ at the Welsh Society’s Annual Social. (78) Events such as these were symbolic of a growing sense of solidity and self-confidence in the immigrant community.

As was the case in Cowley, the links with the homeland were not simply in the heart and mind of the immigrant. Holidays were an important part of the migration network. The Welsh in the Holbrooks area each paid fifteen shillings and hired a bus between them every Easter and August Bank Holiday. (79) On the Whit holiday weekend, l939, The Midland Daily Telegraph reported that the number of buses leaving Pool Meadow for Wales was surprisingly large.  One company had to use another company’s vehicles to accommodate the extra bookings, several of these vehicles being brought in from Nuneaton. (80) Such holidays provided the opportunity for information about the quality of life in Coventry to be passed on to those considering migration. In particular, those already involved in sporting teams, choirs and musical societies were very keen that people ‘at home’ with abilities in these areas should join them.  Welsh members of the GEC Orchestra recruited members of the Cory Brothers’ Band and violinists who accompanied the silent pictures in Rhondda workmen’s halls. In these cases, musicianship was the qualification needed to get a job at the GEC. (81)

The chapels also played a significant role in helping the immigrants to become settled, secure and self-assured, although their support for initiatives such as the Glee Party and for Welsh social and cultural activities was perhaps more important than their attempts at practical involvement in the after-care of the migrants and transferees. In 1936, the Juvenile Employment Committee reported that ‘one denominational’ society had been supplied, at the request of its secretary, with the details of young people arriving in the city to take up employment, ‘the society’s aim being to offer friendly interest in their religious and social welfare’. (82) However, three years later Philip Handley wrote to Sir Wyndham Deedes of the National Council of Social Service that this experiment, which had developed into his passing the names of immigrants to the nearest church of the same denomination as that last attended, had ‘had no practical result’. He went on to comment that the churches had a hard task ahead of them ‘in a community so materially minded as this’. (83) Whilst there can be little doubt that the majority of Welsh immigrants did not attend church regularly, both Queens Road Baptist and West Orchard Congregational had regular contact with a larger number of immigrants than their counterparts in London.  Many migrants were ambivalent in their attitudes towards chapel-going, feeling that they no longer needed to follow the stricter mores of ‘down home’, but also that the London chapels did not have the same ‘hwyl’ as they found in Coventry. (84)

The attractiveness of chapels such as Queens Road and West Orchard to the immigrants was due, in no small part, to their inspirational Welsh ministers, Howard Ingli James and Ivor Reece. Ingli James grew up in Barry where his father was pastor of Bethel Baptist Church. Before his arrival in Coventry in 1931, James had had ‘powerful ministries’ in Accrington and at Pantygwydr, Swansea, during which ‘he saw that the working classes in this country were drifting from the churches and he set himself resolutely to stop the drift’. Whilst in Swansea, he played an important part in the life of the town, lectured in philosophy to WEA classes and took an active part in politics. (85) Throughout the 1930s he provided strong leadership for the element among the Welsh who showed an interest in the chapel’s activities, and Queens Road thus became a central, stabilising influence on their lives, since there were already a great many Welsh in the congregation, although few had transferred their membership at this stage. (86) He continually referred to the miners in his sermons and his unapologetic championing of working class causes and politics frequently brought him into conflict with the established professional Coventrians both in the church and the city. In general terms, the impact of immigration upon the church and city was a major factor in determining the development and direction of his ministry as the article he wrote for the Midland Daily Telegraph in 1936 reveals:

” Coventry is today faced with the difficult task of welding a host of newcomers into a community, in fact of making a city, which is not the same thing as a mere collection of streets, or conglomeration of people…Almost every week strangers appear in our congregation, often in such numbers that one has difficulty in getting in touch with them.   Many are young, and trying their wings for the first time.  It is an important part of our work to meet their needs both spiritual and social, to provide them with a place where they may find friends and feel at home.”  (87)

Some of these newcomers were among the ‘convinced and articulate group of Christian Socialists with strong pacifist convictions’ which Ingli James’ ministry produced in the late l930s and l940s. (88) For them, as for Ingli James himself, the experience of the ‘two Britains’ of the inter-war period would resonate in their post-war visions. James articulated this impetus to reform in a book, Communism and the Christian Faith, published in l950, in which he acknowledged his indebtedness to the Queens Road congregation for the way they had given him ‘a new vision of what a Christian community in a busy industrial city might be and do.’ In the book he also suggested that ‘those who wonder why ten thousand electors voted Communist in the Rhondda Valley in l945, should reflect on the plight of the valley during that period, when thousands of eager youngsters were compelled to seek employment far from home’. (89)

Most importantly, Welsh working class culture was able to locate itself within a broad, dominant working class and immigrant culture in Coventry; such a culture was poorly developed in Oxford and was almost entirely absent in the ‘Greater London’ experience. Coventry was, from the beginning of the period, a working class city, in which miners and immigrants were not strangers.   One among them contrasted his experience of Coventry with that of London by stating that in Coventry he felt that he was back in his ‘own sphere amongst the working class’ with ‘everybody working at our level’ and was ‘sharing similar characteristics’ with former miners from the Durham coalfields. (90) This was the type of environment in which the Welsh could establish and assert themselves, not perhaps as so distinctive a community as in Oxford, but with similar stimulating and stabilising effects both on the processes of migration and settlement and on the development of the city itself.

In terms of its long-term effect, perhaps the most significant contribution made by the Welsh in Coventry was, as in Oxford, the broad field of working class sporting and leisure activities. In 1939, The Coventry Welsh Rugby Club came into being at a meeting in the Railway Hotel, Foleshill, and soon became the cradle for the City of Coventry Rugby Club in which many of the latter’s players were nurtured. The Welsh also played a significant role in building up the workingmen’s clubs. Holbrooks Workingmen’s Club was predominantly Welsh, and there were large numbers of Welsh in the Wyken, Coombe and Binley Clubs, partly because of the large numbers of Welsh miners who found their way into the pits in these areas. In Coombe and Binley, male voice choirs were formed, the one at Binley remaining strong for decades. (91) It was perhaps, in part, this emphasis on club culture that earned the Welsh their reputation for drunkenness among Coventrians. In fact, cases of drunken and disorderly behaviour involving Welshmen were few and far between, though they received graphic and detailed coverage from the local press, under headlines such as ‘A Violent Welshman…Miner Assaults Coventry Police Officers.’  These cases usually involved young men who had recently arrived in the city and had not found their way to clubs where their drinking might be controlled and institutionalised. They behaved in this way precisely because they ‘knew very well that they wouldn’t do it down home.’ (92)

In the factories, although some of the trade unions were concerned about dilution to the point of being slow to organise among the unskilled and semi-skilled immigrants, there is little doubt that by the end of the period these immigrants had settled well into the pattern of militant trade unionism which was already well established in the city at the beginning of the period. Despite comparatively advanced level of trade union organisation, there were no strikes recorded in Coventry’s motor industry until l934, largely due to shop-floor manipulation of piecework through the ‘gang’ system. The Welsh immigrants appear to have fitted well into this system; when a Welsh shop steward gave evidence to a sub-committee of the Coventry District AEU set up to investigate complaints against a particularly uncooperative and belligerent member at the Humber Works, Defending himself, he stated that ‘they were not likely to have harmony in the shop when the other members were Welshmen but were only paying into the trade union for their own advantage.’ (93) There were also Welsh shop stewards at the Standard Works who later helped to establish trade unionism at the GEC.  However, most of the new leaders of militant trade unionism in the l930s came from other depressed areas with stronger engineering traditions in the north of England and Scotland, donating significantly larger numbers of workers to Coventry than they did to Oxford, in contrast with Welsh immigration. (94)

In politics, the fortunes of the Labour Party were closely related to patterns of immigration.  In l926, the Labour group on the Council was reduced to only three members. However, following boundary changes in l928, which incorporated many of the new estates, and therefore added many of the immigrants to the electoral roll, eleven Labour members were elected. The Party continued to make headway in the local elections to the point where they actually took control of the Council in l937. (95) The Midland Daily Telegraph  advanced the argument that ‘the large influx of labour from socialist areas’ over the year preceding November l937 was ‘the major factor in the Labour victory.’  In a l938 By-election, it was still possible for the Lib-Con Coalition Candidate to win his seat by playing upon the fears of ‘old Coventrians’ that their city was being run by ‘the sweepings of the nation’. (96)

However, in reality the Welsh and other immigrants were not as well established in this sphere of leadership by the late l930s in Coventry as were the Welsh in Cowley and it was not until the post-war period that they began to play a significant, leading role in local politics, producing, as in Oxford, some real ‘Dick Whittingtons’. (97) Two Rhondda exiles became Lord Mayors and shared their motivation for their involvement in local politics with Councillor Elsie Jones, who wrote poignantly in l958 of how being ‘born and reared in a mining area’, she had ‘realised the need for reforms very early in life.’ (98)

Finally, the case of the Birmingham Welsh is worthy of some consideration, since it represents a similar example of autonomous immigrant organisation, to that already explored in Oxford. It is apparent that a significant proportion of those who settled in Longbridge area of Birmingham during the period were from Monmouthshire mining villages such as Blaina, Nantyglo and Risca.  By the Autumn of l934 these immigrants were settled enough to combine with immigrants from Durham to form a self-help organisation known as the Birmingham Association for the Relief of Distressed Areas (BARDA), whose main aims were ‘to provide a welcome for people from distressed areas taking up work in Birmingham and put them in touch with social activities; to maintain a register of lodgings and houses available for families and individuals from distressed areas seeking employment in the Midlands; to help families who have already one or more members settled in Birmingham to remove their homes to this district and to collect and record information as to vacancies available for individuals out of employment.’ (99) Monthly meetings were held close to where the immigrant car-workers lived and worked, and it had a membership of about two hundred. During its first eighteen months it effected the removal and resettlement of twenty-one families, all but one of whom remained in Birmingham, thus reuniting over a hundred individuals. It was successful not only in the autonomous organisation of migration but also in its representation of the migrants’ needs to both local and national government officials. In this, it was able to go further than the network in Cowley, because it acquired an official status due to its constitution. BARDA was the clearest expression that emerged, of the working classes accepting migration on their own terms and directing it within their own cultural framework. (100)

However, the conditions in other parts of Birmingham and the West Midlands, such as Handsworth, Soho and West Bromwich, were not as favourable to so advanced a level of autonomous organisation, so that BARDA’s influence seems to have been restricted to southwest Birmingham. In Smethwick, an older town, Rhondda people were able to find homes in close proximity to each other and most were working in the Tangies Munitions Factory by l936-37. These two factors enabled them to find some social cohesion and they made good use of the local chapels, forming a male voice choir. Lush was told that ‘any South Walian’ was regarded as having a good voice and that membership of the choir was almost compulsory. (101) Whilst distinctive Welsh communities emerged in those parts of Birmingham and the neighbouring towns where housing and industrial conditions were conducive to the development of a sense of neighbourhood and the retention of distinctive forms of culture and organisation by the immigrants, attempts to provide institutional points of focus for the Welsh throughout the city were more limited in effect than in Coventry. This was partly due to the difference in scale, but also because the ‘Welsh causes’ which existed in Birmingham at this time had grown up in the Victorian and Edwardian periods and their congregations were largely made up of professional, Welsh-speaking people from rural Wales, the language of the chapels also being Welsh. Those among the working class, largely English-speaking immigrants from the industrial south soon found that they had little in common with their country cousins. Nevertheless, Wheeler Street Congregational Church claimed 337 regular worshippers in l938, over half of whom were said to be ‘exiles from the depressed area.’  Numbers had increased considerably as a result of social activities and in l936 the Church began an organisation called ‘Urdd y Brodyr’ specifically to cater for the needs of young Welshmen coming to the City. Its chief purpose was to help them find work and accommodation, in addition to providing a more general link between the chapel and the wider society in which they lived and worked. A link with home was also provided through a newspaper library, comprising local weeklies from the Rhondda, Aberdare, Merthyr and other coalfield areas. Nevertheless, it is apparent that, as in London, the ‘Welsh causes’ and societies touched the lives of only a very small proportion of the exiles from the coalfield. The image of Wales, which was celebrated in their worship and social activities, was that of a rural, Liberal, Nonconformist Welsh-speaking society, their ministers and deacons lacking the experience and understanding of the industrial south so well displayed by Ingli James in Coventry. (102)

These case studies of the Welsh working class inter-war experience of exodus and resettlement reveal that the contemporary, and sometimes historical, characterisation of migration as synonymous with enforced dispersal, implied by the indiscriminate use of the term ‘Transference’, does not match the diverse realities of that experience. Those who were moved under government schemes made up a small minority of those who left the coalfield. The experiences of atomisation, isolation and alienation endured by many transferees and migrants who entered employment in domestic service, the distributive trades and relief work in London and other parts of the south-east of England, were not shared by those who found employment for themselves in the developing centres of the new industries. In these centres, despite significant variations in local patterns of employment and housing, the processes of migration and settlement were conducted on a collective and largely autonomous basis, which reflected the traditions and institutional life of the coalfield communities. The careful cultivation of migration networks through a combination of marital, familial, fraternal and institutional relationships ensured that migrants were able to retain a collective identity and distinctive working class culture in their new environment. Their concern for, and idealisation of, the communal life they had left was an essential stabilising and reinforcing element in their projection of a self-image of a hard-working and respectable immigrant community. Most importantly, their retention of the capacity for autonomous organisation in all the stages of the migration process meant that, in these centres, they were able to act as self-assured, self-empowered agents in the formation and negotiation of a broader working class culture which met the new industrial and social conditions of their chosen environment. This, then, was no Babylonian captivity, and in their transportation of traditional values and institutions they fashioned a ‘new covenant’ made up of various contributions to the economic, political, social, cultural and religious life of the new industry centres. By these means, they also enabled and enhanced the recovery and reconstitution of working class politics and culture in the l930s. Coming from ‘Proud Valleys’, they were determined to prove that no one could stop them singing. (103) In 1927 they may have felt like extras in an epic which ran out of backers, but by 1937 they were setting the scenery for a new post-war production in which one of their own, Aneurin Bevan, played a leading role and they were the chorus. The manner in which they overcame the prejudices they met over much of the inter-war period, demonstrates the importance of perspective in examining the true nature of migration and immigration in twentieth-century Britain. The locally-grown ‘model’ followed in Britain by ‘guest’ and ‘host’ communities alike, although sometimes painful in construction, has been one of integration, rather than one of assimilation.

©Andrew James Chandler

Kecskemét, Hungary

March 1^st 2012

Notes & References:

(Key:

CSLS = Coventry Local Studies Library;  CRO = Coventry Record Office;

NCVO = National Council of Voluntary Organisations;

OCL = Oxford City Library and Archives;

PRO = Public Records Office;

RCL = Ruskin College Library.)

1. Coventry Tribune ,19 July 1947.
2. M. Abrams, The Condition of the British People, 1911-45: A Study prepared for the Fabian Society (Gollancz, 1945), Preface by G D H Cole; chapters I & II, tables I & II.
3. Gwyn Thomas, The Subsidence Factor, Annual Gwyn Jones Lecture (University College Cardiff Press, 1979)
4. W. Samuel, Transference Must Stop, (J E Jones, 1943): N & D Davies, Can Wales Afford Self-Government? (Foyles Welsh Press, n.d.); The Welsh Nationalist, October 1937: On the ‘Liberal Establishment’, see my PhD thesis, ‘The Re-making of a Working Class: Migration from the South Wales Coalfield to the New Industry Areas of the Midlands, c.1920-1940’ (Cardiff,1988) chapter four; on the growth of Nationalism in Wales, see D. Hywel Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party, 1925-1945; A Call to Nationhood (Cardiff,1983)
5. PRO Lab 23/102: ‘Report of a Conference on Transference, convened by the South Wales and Monmouthshire Council of Social Service, 15-16 May 1936’.
6. W.Hannington, The Problem of the Distressed Areas (Gollancz,1937) chapter eight, especially p.124.
7. K.O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation (Oxford 1981) pp. 230-231.
8. PRO/Lab 8/218: Hunt & Scott’s report.
9. F.C. Bourdillon, A Survey of Social Services in the Oxford District  (Barnett House Survey, Oxford,1938) p.60; Bodleian Library/Butler Papers, box 40, paper by S.P.R. Maud.
10. See my thesis, op.cit., chapter one & appendices.
11. G.H. Daniel, ‘Some Factors Affecting the Mobility of Labour’ in Oxford Economic Papers, (1940) p.152.
12. The precise details of the scheme are given in journal Planning, 24  March 1936.
13. See my thesis, chapters five and six for further details.
14. PRO Lab 23/102; Report of a Conference on Transference, loc. cit. , 1936
15. Ibid.; ‘note on Miss Hilda Jennings’ Investigation into Social Transference Problems’, August 1935, pp.1-2.
16. NCVO/NCSS papers; ‘Migration to London from South Wales’  p.7;
17. M. Davies, ‘Exiled in London’ in The Listener, 20 April 1938.
18. PRO/Lab 23/102; SWMCSS Committee on Transference; ‘Preliminary Report on Social Provision at the Reception End for Workers Transferred from South Wales’ by A.J. Lush, 2 April 1937 pp. 7-8.
19. Ibid., pp.9-10: Many of the newcomers had initially been brought to Slough to work in the Government Training Centre; see PRO/Lab 2/1396/ET 1275; Reid letter: On Lady Astor, see Peter Stead’s article on ‘The Voluntary Response to Mass Unemployment in South Wales’ in W. Minchinton (ed.), University of Exeter Papers in Social and Economic History, 1981.
20. G. Crawshay, ‘Survey and Prospects of the Position in the South Wales and Monmouthshire Special Area’ in The Special Areas Commissioner’s Fourth Report, November 1937,p.43ff.: H.A. Marquand, The Second Industrial Survey of South Wales (Cardiff,1937; National Industrial Development Council), Volume III, p. 28.
21. PRO/Lab 8/218; Hunt & Scott, op. cit., pp. 8,
22. Idris Davies, ‘London Welsh’ in Gwalia Deserta (London, 1938).
23. Bourdillon, op. cit., p.58.
24. Ibid., pp. 58-60; appendix 1, p.290. See also PRO/PIN 7/172; extract from the typescript  drafts of the Survey Report, pp.20-21.
25. G.H. Daniel, ‘Labour Migration and Age Composition’ & ‘Labour Migration and Fertility’ in The Sociological Review, May & October, 1939, especially p. 297; ‘Some Factors Affecting the Mobility of Labour’ in Oxford Economic Papers, 1940, esp. p.157.
26. R.C. Whiting, ‘Oxford Between the Wars; Labour and the Motor Industry’ in Rowley (ed.) The Oxford Region, (n. d.) & his Oxford D. Phil. thesis, ‘The Working Class in the “New Industry” Towns Between the Wars; The Case of Oxford’ (1978); J. Zeitlin, ‘The Emergence of Shop Steward Organisation and Job Control in the British Car Industry; A Review Essay’ in History Workshop Journal (Autumn 1980); D. Lyddon’s ‘Critique’ & Zeitlin’s ‘Rejoinder’, both  in  HWJ  (Spring & Autumn, 1983); P.D. John, ‘The Oxford Welsh in the 1930s; A Study in Class, Community and Political Influence’ in Llafur, Volume 5, Number 4, 1991; draw on my thesis, op. cit., chapter seven.
27. Interviews with T. Richards, D. Husk, Cowley, 1982, transcribed, loc. cit.
28. Glamorgan Gazette, 31 December 1926.
29. Interviews with Richards, Husk, C. Jones, loc. cit & F. Jeffery, Cowley, ’82, transcribed: Frank Jeffery was a deacon & Secretary in Temple Cowley Congregational (later URC)
30. Interview with D. Husk; Oxford Times, 20 March 1931; Glamorgan Gazette,24 April 1931: Davies was son of a Blaengarw miners’ agent.
31. Husk interview, loc. cit.
32. Glamorgan Gazette, 16 September 1927
33. Interviews with T. Richards, Vyall Allport & Mrs. I. Price (née Allport), D. Husk; OCL/Pressed Steel Company, Social & Athletic Club; Rugby Football Club minute book, 3 October 1927; Pressings (Pressed  Steel Company magazine), January 1928: This contains a photograph of the first season’s team; names & places of origin of the players were  supplied by Dai Husk, the former also appearing in the minutes.
34. OCL/Pressed Steel Co. Social & Athletic Club minute book; Secretary’s report for the 1936-37 season; Oxford Times, 25 June 1937;  September-December 1927; 27 July 1927; 23 April 1937; Glamorgan Gazette,13 & 27 July 1934; interview with the Wilcox family, Cowley, 1982, transcribed.
35. Interview with T. Jones, Cowley, 1982, loc. cit.
36. Glamorgan Gazette, 23 December 1927.
37. Interviews with F. Jeffery, T. Jones, T. Richards, loc. cit.
38. Oxford Times, 4 & 25 October, 1929; Temple Cowley URC records, ‘Order of Service, November 27th, 1932’; interviews with F. Jeffery, T. Richards, loc. cit.
39. Interviews with T. Jones, T. Richards, loc. cit
40. Ibid.; interview with F. Jeffery, loc.cit., interviews with Haydn Evans, Cowley, 1982, transcribed: Interviews with T. Richards, T. Jones, loc. cit.
41. Glamorgan Gazette, 10 April 1931; Oxford Times, 3 April 1931; 20 March 1931; Oxford Welsh Glee Singers’ Attendance Register, 1931-39; Minutes 14/26 Jan, 2 Feb 1936.
42. Glamorgan Gazette, 13 July 1934; January-September 1937 (10 references); interviews with C. Jones, Wilcox family,  H. Evans, loc. cit.
43. Interview with T. Jones, loc. cit. Glamorgan Gazette; Oxford Times, 7 October 1960
44. J.M. Mogey, Family and Neighbourhood; Two Studies in Oxford, (Oxford, 1956)  p.6
45. Daniel, op. cit., (1940), pp. 174-179.
46. NUVB Journal, November 1925, January 1929, January 1930; NUVB Oxford Branch Minute Books, August 1927.
47. See note 25 above; for unemployment and migration statistics, see my thesis, appendix ten.
48. Interviews with T. Richards, D. Husk, op. cit.
49. OCL/Howse Collection; pamphlet, 6 October 1932 and Company memorandum, 7 October 1932.
50. Interview with Jack Thomas, Cowley 1982, op. cit.
51. Interview with H.Evans, op.cit.; The Conveyor, September 1934, p.2.
52. RCL/Abe Lazarus Collection; MSS 1/4; ‘note on Harris by J. Mahon’; also information from interviews with H. Evans, T. Richards, T. Jones, loc. cit.: On Welsh transatlantic migration to Scranton, Pennsylvania, US, see W D Jones (1993) Wales in America: Scranton and the Welsh 1860-1920. University of Wales Press.
53. Interview with J.Thomas; D.McEvoy, ‘From Firm Foundations: A Study of the Trade Union            Recognition Strike at Cowley : July 13 to 28, 1934′, Dissertation for Cert.Ed., Oxford 1972 chapter five, passim.
54. The Conveyor, loc. cit., p.2.
55. Oxford Times, Daily Worker, 27 July 1934; H. Evans interview, loc. cit.
56. The Conveyor, loc. cit, p.5.
57. Glee Party Attendance Register; R. Bedwin, Fifty Years of Song; A Brief History of the Welsh Glee Singers,1928-78 (Oxford 1978) p.10.
58. Daniel, op. cit., (1940) p.178.
59. The Record, August & September 1934
60. RCL/Abe Lazarus Collection: Oxford Trades Council Minutes, Dec 1934 – March 1936; circular letter to members of the Oxford Local of the Communist Party; J. Thomas interview, loc. cit..
61. ‘Television History Workshop; Making Cars’ (video) (London,1985), pp.24,33.
62. Interviews with J.Thomas & Arthur Exell, op. cit.
63.  OCL/Howse Collection; The Spark, March 1937.
64.  BL/Butler papers; Barnett House Survey of Trade Unions, 1937; OCL/Howse Collection; list of TGWU shop stewards, 28 April 1938; BL/Butler papers/Box 43;  letter from O. Moeller to Bourdillon, 1937; Howse Collection; memo. from Howse to Moeller,6 December,1938.
65. Oxford Trade Council Minutes, November-December 1938; interviews with J. Thomas, T. Richards, T. Jones, H. Evans, loc. cit.
66. A. Exell, ‘The Politics of Production Line’, HWJ, 1981.
67. Interview with H.Evans: Interview with Wilcox family, op. cit; see my thesis, chapter five.
68. Butler papers/Box 43; letter to Plummer, 12 July 1937.
69. RCL/ACL/MSS 1/4, ‘A Long Climb Beyond Dreaming Monuments’ n.d.
70. For more information on the leading role of Welsh personalities in the Oxford Labour Movement, see;  Oxford Labour Party Minutes, 31 July & 4 September, 1935, 1935-1939; Oxford Times, 3 January 1958; R. Crossman’s introduction to G.Hodgkinson, Sent to Coventry, (1970); Oxford Times, 23 April, 18 June, 24 September 1937, 3 January 1958; Oxford Mail, 25 June, 1979; OCL/PAC Minutes, 13 December 1938; Oxford Times, 15 January 1937. The Gazette (Oxford T.U. paper), February 1938.
71. See my thesis, pp. 314-5 (notes 181-2) & p.208ff.
72. Interview with H. Roberts, Coventry 1982, transcribed; letter to author from I. Williams,1978
73. CRO/Minutes of Coventry PAC, 6 May 1936; interview with H. Roberts, loc. cit;  on the length of unemployment before migration, see my thesis, chapter five.
74. See my thesis, op. cit., p. 316, and notes 191-2.
75. Interview with Mrs. J. Shepherd, Coventry, 1982, transcribed.
76. Interviews with Mrs. J. Shepherd, Mary Nicholas & Martha Jones, Coventry 1982; C. Binfield, Pastors and People; The Biography of a Baptist Church; Queens Road, Coventry (Coventry 1984), chapters 11-13.
77. Midland Daily Telegraph, 11 February 1929, 1 September 1937.
78. Interview with Mrs. Shepherd, loc. cit; Midland Daily Telegraph, 6 & 11 January, 28 February 1929.
79. Interview with H. Roberts, loc. cit.
80. Midland Daily Telegraph, 27 May 1939.
81. Interview with H. Roberts, loc. cit.
82. CLSL/JEC Report, 1936.
83. NCVO/NCSS local files; letter from Handley to Deedes.
84. Interview with H. Roberts, loc. cit.
85. Baptist Times, 5 April 1956, obituary by Rev. W. Davies.
86. Interviews with Mary Nicholas & Martha Jones, loc. cit.; Binfield, loc.cit., wrote that Queens Road was known as ‘New South Wales’.
87. Midland Daily Telegraph, 1936; Mrs J. Shepherd, Mary Nicholas & Martha Jones gave information about his sermons, loc. cit; see also Binfield, loc. cit., p.215, re. the ‘How Green Was My Valley’ sermon.
88. CRO/708/Richardson papers; Rev. G.Hastings, ‘Queens Road Baptist Church, Coventry, in the Life of the City’, February 1969.
89. H.I. James, Communism and the Christian Faith (1950) pp.5, 82-3, 172.
90. Interview with H. Roberts, loc. cit.
91. Ibid.; Midland Daily Telegraph, 12 May 1939.
92. Midland Daily Telegraph, 22 January 1929; H. Roberts interview, loc. cit.
93. Coventry AEU Minutes, 24 April 1939.
94. Interview with H. Roberts, loc. cit.; see my thesis, chapters five & seven.
95. J.A. Yates, Pioneers to Power  (Coventry,1950) pp.69-70, 73, 81-83; K. Richardson, Twentieth Century Coventry (1972) pp. 189-207.
96. Midland Daily Telegraph, 2 November 1937; 20 July 1938.
97.  Coventry Evening Telegraph, 2 May 1965; South Wales Daily News, 3 December 1926; Coventry Evening Telegraph’s Who’s Who, 1977. Coventry Who’s Who, 1985.
98. CLSL/Coventry Labour Party, ‘Reaching a Majority; Twenty-One Years of Labour Rule in Coventry’ (1958)
99. PRO/Lab 23/97, BARDA: General statement & Report to Feb. 1936.
100. See my thesis, pp. 298-301.
101.  A.J. Lush’s ‘Report’, op.cit.,p.4.
102. For more on the Welsh personalities in the Birmingham Labour Movement, see my thesis,  p.318 (notes 226-232);   plus N. Tiptaft, My Contemporaries (Birmingham, 1952) p. 40ff.; and see also R.P. Hastings, ‘The Labour Movement in Birmingham’, University of Birmingham M.A. Thesis (1959) pp. 62-64.
103. Oxford Mail, ‘You can’t stop them singing’, reproduced by the OWGS as a postcard, copy in the choir’s archive, n.d.; used as part of a frontispiece to my thesis (p. ii).