For ‘Migration’ read ‘Transference’? Processes of Resistance & Retention:

The terms ‘Migration’ and ‘Transference’ were continually conflated in contemporary usage. Certainly, ‘migration’ was (and still is) used as an inclusive term covering voluntary and assisted forms of population movement. In simple geographical terms, it refers to that part of the ‘population equation’ which cannot be accounted for by natural increases or decreases brought about by an excess of births over deaths and vice versa. However, in previous chapters on the ups and downs of the Labour Party, the trade union movement and the Left, I have already established that there were important differences in the causes and catalysts involved in the processes of migration, retention and resettlement. The term is not, however, synonymous with importation or deportation, as a form of enforced movement of population. It was in the interests of many contemporary politicians of diverse ideological persuasions to blur these definitions and distinctions to suit their own purposes. In addition, the National Government and its officials in the Ministries of Labour and Health were naturally concerned to demonstrate that the large volume of unassisted migration, which they estimated as being over seventy per cent of the men known to have migrated in 1936-37, was closely related to their efforts to promote transference as the main policy of dealing with mass unemployment. Social Service agencies and social ‘surveyors’ were concerned to demonstrate the need for their intervention in the migration processes and therefore tended to exaggerate and generalise from the worst consequences of ’emigration’ rather making only passing references to the role of autonomous organisation.

Welsh ‘nationalists’, both of the old ‘Cymric-liberal’ and the ‘new’ narrowly partisan variety, were concerned, by 1936, to represent it as expatriation rather than repatriation, as an imposed deportation or ‘diaspora’ rather than as an exodus. These fringe ‘extremists’ developed their viewpoint into a complete inversion of the truth, claiming that:

… sporadic investigations into and reviews of the living conditions of the transferees … are strictly materialist in scope and ignore for the most part the evil consequences of transference – the loss of corporate life, … of religious life, in many cases the enforced change of language, in fact all that goes to putting off one culture and putting on another … the majority of those who leave Wales for work in England do so under compulsion.

The Welsh Nationalist, October 1937.

Propagandists on the ‘Marxist’ Left also tended, quite deliberately, to conflate state-sponsored and voluntary migration, principally because they saw the ‘free movement’ of workers as a capitalist device aimed at the creation of a ‘standing army’, the dilution of labour and the undermining of trade union organisation in the ‘new industry’ centres. Their propagation of a negative image of the immigrant did not allow for an analysis of differences in the organisation of migration. The negative image was again produced by a narrow focus on the worst experiences of the younger transferees. Thus, the interests of both nationalist and communist propagandists combined to ensure that much of the contemporary literature related to migration was ‘pessimistic’ in nature, dominated by the view that it was something which was done to the unemployed against their will. It is therefore understandable that more recent studies, particularly those done in the 1980s, have tended to maintain that narrow focus. These tended to characterise migration from the Coalfield as an act of defeatism, demoralisation and desperation. But although transference was the only significant aspect of Government policy in respect of unemployment in the period to 1936, the actual level of state involvement was quite limited. Even when the scheme was revived and revised, and despite the publicity given to it by a growing body of opposition, the majority of workers who left the ‘Special’ areas chose to ignore its provisions.

The Strange Case of the Cowley ‘Garwites’:

The researchers for Barnett House in Oxford which published its local Survey in 1936 found a distinct ‘lumpiness’ in the migration streams to the city over the previous decade, providing clear evidence of familial and fraternal networking. This, they noted, militated against the Ministry of Labour’s plans for a more rational and even distribution of manpower in accordance with with the shifts in the demand for labour and the assimilation of the new elements by the old. Of the 1,195 Welsh workers in Oxford at this time, 215 had employment books which originated in the Maesteg District (covering the Llynfi, Ogmore and Garw valleys). By comparison, the numbers from all the Rhondda and Pontypridd districts combined amounted to 224 and those from Merthyr and Dowlais to fifty-five. An even more striking statistic was that a hundred and fifty, or one in six of all the Welsh ‘foreigners’ in the city were from the Pontycymmer Exchange area (i.e. the Garw Valley).

This prompted the Barnett House enquirers to consult their fellow ‘surveyors’ in South Wales, who advised them that the flow from the Garw to Oxford started in 1926 when a few men made the journey, found employment for themselves and subsequently for friends and relatives. From that point onwards, Oxford attracted a large percentage of those leaving the valley. In the period 1930-36, out of the 1,841 people whose unemployment books were transferred from the Pontycymmer Exchange, 270 (15%) went to Oxford and ‘local observers’ stated that the percentage in the late 1920s was probably in the region of a quarter. The Oxford University sociologist, Goronwy Daniel, lent further support to the view that considerable networking had taken place, as forty-six of the sixty immigrants interviewed by him said that they had chosen Oxford because they had relatives living there.

From the summer of 1934, the Welsh migrants who found themselves in Cowley, Oxford, began to make major contributions to the Labour and trade union movement in the city. Part of the impetus for the early and extensive migration from the Garw to Oxford was the deliberate act of collective victimisation on the part of one of the colliery companies in the wake of the lock-out. Some of the earliest migrants, like Tom Richards of Pantygog, did not wait until the end of the six-month lock-out in 1926 to leave, setting out on foot for London. Having walked to Oxford along the A40, they had found jobs at the giant US-owned Pressed Steel Works, newly-opened, which supplied Morris Motors and other car manufacturers with ready-pressed bodies for their products. A major strike at the factory for better conditions and union recognition was successful, partly as a result of its being led from ex-miners from South Wales. By that time, a number of older men from the Garw and other valleys, with considerable experience of trade union organisation in the SWMF, had arrived at the works. Whilst the Communist Party in Cowley played a significant supporting role in shaping the course and outcome of the strike, the agitation for it from within the works came from the ‘DA’ (depressed areas) men, among the largely immigrant workforce.

There is a significant body of both documentary and oral evidence to support the assertion that the retention of the trade union ‘complex’ by these workers was a critical factor in the formation and development of the TGWU 5/60 Branch from 1934 to 1939, which contrasted sharply with the failure of the movement to make headway at the Morris Works. That failure can only in part be explained by Willam Morris’ determined anti-union stance since the management at the US-owned Pressed Steel factory was equally hard-line in its attitude to trade union organisation, both before and after the 1934 strike, and organisers continued to be victimised for related activities throughout the latter part of the decade. Also, wages at the Morris Works remained lower by comparison throughout these years. Most observers from the time shared the perception that this was due to the difference in the cultural background among the two workforces.

Haydn Evans, originally from Merthyr Tydfil who took an active part in the strike and who later became a shop steward and foreman at the Pressed Steel, felt that the Oxfordians and Oxonians, mainly farm workers at Morris’, didn’t know what a union was about, weren’t interested and didn’t want a trade union, their fathers having been used to living off the crumbs from the rich men’s tables in the colleges. On the other hand, the Welsh workers had been brought up in the trade union movement, … had lived on ‘strike, strike, strike’ and had been taught “fight back, fight back!” In fighting back, they were just as much at risk from victimisation as the Morris workers but were more willing to run this risk. Haydn Evans again explained:

We had to win … We’d come from a distressed area. We were battling for our livelihood. It was a matter of life and death. If we had lost, many of us would have been blacklisted by other car firms.

A ‘neutral’ observer from the Barnett House Survey, writing in 1937, also remarked that the distinction between the two forces was widely acknowledged by contemporaries:

It is said … that workers in the Cowley plant are mostly natives of Oxford and lack therefore any trade union tradition; in Pressed Steel on the contrary the men are largely from other parts of the country …

Thus, there is a strong case to be made for the primacy of social and cultural factors in the growth of trade unionism in Oxford; the sense of heritage and solidarity, or ‘clannishness’ among immigrant workers providing a powerful motivation to getting organised by infusing a quiescent trade union movement with militancy.

This is not to say that the Welsh were ‘nearly all Reds’, as they were popularly labelled by Oxonians. The number who joined the Communist Party was probably as small as those who wittingly undercut wages on building sites. But those who were thrust into the leadership of the trade union movement in the city soon also found themselves in leading positions in left-wing politics either as members of the Labour Party or the Communist Party and sometimes, from 1935 in the period of the ‘United Front’ as members of both parties.

One of them, Tom Harris, was a crane operator in the crane shop. He was born in Monmouthshire in the early 1890s, and emigrated to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in his early twenties. There he worked as a miner and helped John L Lewis in building up the United Mineworkers (UMWA). He then returned to South Wales in the mid-1920s, possibly to Maesteg, becoming active in the SWMF. It was with this transatlantic experience of migration and union organisation that he arrived in Cowley shortly before the 1934 Strike. Dai Huish, probably from the Garw, was also an experienced member of the ‘Fed’ before arriving in Oxford. Huish was one of those elected to serve on the deputation which, once outside the factory gates, met to discuss the strike situation. Although Huish had been planning the strike action over the previous weekend, it was the idea of his wife, who joined the lengthy meeting, that the deputation should send representatives to the Local of the Communist Party. She suggested this because the Communist Party had provided invaluable help and assistance in organising the miners’ struggles in Wales. In this way, they soon became involved in the city’s trade union and political life more broadly, thus reflecting a growing sense of permanence and a growing mood of regenerated confidence among the immigrants to Cowley.

Images of the Immigrants – Coventry, Slough & London.

In Coventry, it was not until 1934 that the engineering employers faced difficulty in recruiting semi-skilled workers, who were previously available locally through the City’s traditional apprenticeship schemes. It was then that they were forced to look to the Government training centres and transference schemes for a fresh supply of labour. Even then, however, the employers were insistent on such youths, aged between eighteen and twenty-five, having ‘factory sense’ and felt it necessary to ‘earmark’ funds in order that the men could be given a period of training in the works, in the hope that they might be absorbed. Not all engineering employers were as progressive as this, and many trainees faced the ignominy of failing to make the grade and being forced to return home disillusioned and discouraged from making any further attempt at resettlement. Even in those cases where the ‘improver’ from the depressed areas was capable of acquiring enough skill to survive, he was not always made particularly welcome by workmates who generally regarded him as a pawn in a ploy by the employers and the government to reduce wage rates.

Even Wal Hannington, although severely critical of the training centres, was also concerned by the attitude of the conservative-minded craft unionist who refused to allow the recruitment of trainees on the grounds that to do so would represent an acceptance of dilution. Hannington argued that to admit them to membership would enable the unions to control their wages and conditions. His admission that this argument was ‘unorthodox’ is a measure of the extent to which the engineering unions deliberately ostracised men who themselves were firmly rooted in trade unionism. A perusal of the minutes of the Coventry District of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) for this period provides strong supportive evidence that little or nothing was done to integrate trainees and that this inaction stemmed from a policy of principled opposition to the importation of labour in this manner, a policy that was consistently applied throughout the period. Craft-unionists in the engineering industries scapegoated the immigrants for the revolutionary structural changes that were taken place in them, rather than re-organising their unions on an industrial basis, a form of organisation which the immigrants themselves were familiar with and did much to recreate in their new work environments. They were, however, too often seen as perpetrators of dilution rather than as participants in the process. Accusations of under-cutting became generalised to the point where Labour leaders, like Aneurin Bevan, in opposing transference, reinforced the negative stereotype themselves:

… resistance should be made, for considerable resentment and hostility was shown in the South East of England, and Welshmen had acquired a bad reputation for offering their services at wages below the standard Trade Union rates. …

In making this remark, Bevan was probably echoing comments made to A. J. ‘Archie’ Lush in Slough (Lush was a close friend of Aneurin Bevan and acted as his political agent for most of his parliamentary life – see below). It is therefore of paramount importance that, in studying the contemporary sources, historians should distinguish between prejudicial statements and accurate observations based on the actual reality of the impact of immigration upon the new industrial centres. A detailed study of newspaper and oral sources reveals that the Welsh working-class immigrants to these centres were able to counter the negative propaganda and prejudice which confronted them by making a significant contribution to the growth of trade unionism, municipal socialism and working-class culture in these cities. The problem of distinguishing between image and reality was highlighted in contemporary debates concerning the role of Welsh immigrants in trade unionism in the new industries. In 1937, A. D. K. Owen wrote an article for the Sociological Review in which he assessed the Social Consequences of Industrial Transference. Despite his generally negative attitude towards immigration, he concluded that it did have some redeeming features:

It appears that some transferees from South Wales are already enlivening the fellowship of some London political associations and that the tradition of Trade Unionism respected by transferees from Wales and the North is now being appealed to with some prospect effective results as a starting point for organising the workers in many of the new industries in which Trade Unionism has so far obtained no footing.

The following year, Michael Daly published a reply to Owen’s article in which he claimed that, after several months of research into the difficulty of organising the workers in the South East and the Midlands, he was convinced that… the most difficult people to organise are the Welsh transferees. He asserted that the fact that the Welsh came from an area with a low standard of living made them more willing to accept low wage rates and that they were universally hated because of their alleged tendency both to undercut wages and to ‘rat’ on their fellow workers. From this flawed analysis, based largely on the experiences of Welsh transferees in Slough, Daly went on to produce a caricature which undermines his validity as a dependable source. He concluded that the staunch trade unionists among the Welsh had remained in Wales:

For the most part, they are the older type of craftsmen  whose belief in trade unionism is emotional rather than reasoned, and who tend to appreciate unduly the beer-drinking aspect of branch activities … even if they had transferred to the newer areas, it is doubtful if they would be given a hearing.

Unsurprisingly, Daly’s remarks met with stinging criticism in Owen’s rejoinder:

I have personal knowledge of far too many Welshmen who are pulling all their weight in trade union branches in the London area to accept Mr Daly’s broad generalisations on this subject. Moreover, his remarks about the social characteristics of the ‘staunch trade unionists among the Welsh’ are … completely wide of the mark … The ‘older type of craftsmen’ are far from being characteristic of the active membership of the South Wales Miners’ Federation. A ‘reasoned attitude’ to trade unionism is probably commoner in South Wales than in most other parts of the country with a long tradition of working-class organisation. …

‘Archie’ Lush, who was conducting his researches in Slough and elsewhere in the South East, also found considerable anti-Welsh feeling which was usually attributed to a tendency of Welsh workers to work for less than Trade Union rates. Both he and Owen accepted that this allegation was true only in a small number of cases, and in particular where a long period of unemployment had preceded transference, but what is most significant in Lush’s report is the remark that he found no evidence of trade union activity anywhere on the estate. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that Slough was less typical of the experience of Welsh exiles than was made out by Daly, and it is also important not to confuse the role played by individual Welshmen, either positive or negative, with a collective assertion of trade union values among the Welsh in London. Unfortunately, some contemporary politicians, like Nye Bevan, some in the social service movement and some historians, writing in the 1980s, adopted and restated Daly’s unfounded assertions, and those of Lush, uncritically, the latter in the context of assessing the role of the Welsh in trade unionism elsewhere in the South and Midlands of England. Eli Ginzberg recorded that:

… it was repeatedly said of the Welsh that they would work for wages that no Englishman would dream of accepting. 

Owen also heard many of these criticisms of the transferees who were often subjected to very hostile criticism of their fellow-workers who resented their presence on the grounds that they depress wages. Although much of this criticism was completely unfounded, he found that it sometimes had a basis in fact. The NCSS’s 1939 report on Migration to London from South Wales was equally equivocal in dealing with the issue:

… there have been, and still are, criticisms made of Welshmen  that they are ready to work for low wages, accepting as little as 8d or 10d an hour. Such stories, some mythical and some authentic, are at the root of a certain prejudice against Welshmen on the part of Londoners. … It is, however, not difficult to understand the temptation to a man who has managed to scrape up enough money for a trip to London to take work at any wage rather than go home defeated, or to face unemployment in a strange and impersonal city with no friends behind him.

The Immigrants in Industry – Propaganda & Prejudice:

Of course, this image of the immigrant as one brow-beaten into submission by long-term unemployment which had broken his courage was one which suited the purposes of the ‘social surveyors’. But the reality was that the vast majority of those who migrated had been unemployed for comparatively short periods, if at all. That reality was often conveniently ignored by those who needed to paint the destitution and demoralisation of the ‘depressed area’ men as bleakly as possible. Although more frequently heard in Slough and London, the accusation also carried some potency in Oxford, where it seems to have derived from the immigrants who secured jobs in the building trade and in particular in relation to the Merthyr-based firm of Moss and Sons. This firm was said to have brought many workers with it from South Wales and to have employed them at rates which were below the standards which existed in the Midlands. It did not take long for this to lead to a widespread prejudice against Welsh immigrants in general, wherever they worked. One of Goronwy Daniel’s interviewees remarked about how she had been offended by hearing a woman commenting on a bus that the Welsh were stealing jobs by working for low wages. Marxist propagandists also asserted that the ‘DA’ immigrants depressed wages in order to show that they were in need of the leadership which only the Communist Party could provide. Abe Lazarus, the Party’s leader in Oxford, regurgitated this myth in his article for the Communist Review in 1934:

They came from Wales, from the North-East Coast, glad enough many of them to accept low standards after years of unemployment.

But Lazarus also acknowledged that the major factors involved in wage depression were automation, rationalisation and the dilution, or de-skilling of engineering jobs which the new processes of production entailed. He also accepted that it was the Oxonian agricultural workers who were far more likely, given their non-industrial background, to accept low rates of pay in the car industry, rather than the Welsh miners. In fact, the evidence shows that although at first, the American managers at Pressed Steel tried to use DA men to depress wages, they were unsuccessful in doing so and that, by the time of the 1934 strike, this was not an issue among a largely immigrant semi-skilled workforce whose wage rates were better than those paid to skilled engineers at Morris Motors, where there were far fewer DA men employed. Nevertheless, popular prejudices prevailed. One of Daniel’s interviewees who had migrated to Oxford in 1933 recalled how he had found:

… a strong dislike of Welsh people on the part of Oxford men, who thought the Welsh were taking their work and were all ‘reds’. 

The juxtaposition of these two remarks provides a graphic illustration of the irrational nature of much of the invective which was directed against the Welsh immigrants; they could be branded as ‘diluters’ and militants literally in the same breath. There were others among Daniel’s witnesses who found these labels freely applied to them and their fellow countrymen. One man who moved to Oxford in the late twenties said that the native Oxfordians regarded the Welsh as rowdy and nearly all communists. In turn, the same man’s attitude towards the natives had not changed in the decade he had been in the city. He saw them as insular and prejudiced and politically dead … A much younger man, with little direct trade union experience before leaving Wales also found Oxford natives to be:

… very reserved and independent, and found it hard to understand their Conservative politics and apathetic attitude towards trade unions. 

As late as the 1950s, industrial trade unionism was still seen by many Oxfordians as being alien to the City’s traditions and as a means for the immigrants to exploit a high-wage economy. Unions such as the TGWU were seen as primarily the province of ‘the Scotch and the Welsh’ and whilst it was acknowledged that trade unions are necessary in some jobs like mining, in Oxford they caused nothing but trouble with the chief trouble-makers being the Welsh who were out for all they can get. 

The minute books of the Coventry District AEU demonstrate a continual concern about the impact of immigrant labour upon wages and, in particular, about the tendency of some DA men to go to the factory gates and offer themselves ‘at any price’. However, the frequency with which complaints like this appear in the minutes is perhaps more indicative of a Union which was struggling to overcome its own conservatism and to come to terms with the transformation of work patterns in the engineering industry, than of a tendency among immigrants to accept lower wages. If some of the younger transferees and migrants were involved in undercutting, propagandists such as Wal Hannington had no doubt where the responsibility for this should be laid. However, rather than taking up the challenge of developing new solutions to the problem of dilution, the craft unions simply gave justification to their members’ prejudices. This sometimes gave rise to abusive behaviour on the part of, and even to disciplinary action against some AEU members. When a Welsh shop steward gave evidence to a sub-committee of the District AEU set up to investigate complaints against Bro. Underhill, a particularly uncooperative and belligerent member at the Humber works, Underhill 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.

Well into the 1930s, the possibility that Welsh migrant workers might transfer their trade union traditions to their new environments was a major concern of the industrialists participating in the Industrial Transference Scheme. Their image of the Welsh miner, ever since the 1926 lock-out, had remained one of a potential disease-carrier: the disease was ‘Militancy’. The same applied in the new industries more generally; personnel departments were ordered not to hire Welshmen; employment exchanges were asked not to send Welshmen for interviews; the immigrants were blamed for strikes regardless of the origin of the dispute. As Eli Ginzberg, this evidence suggests that the Welsh were no favourites with English foremen and managers. He also suggested that, while in general terms the Welsh were not the major instigators of the drive for organisation, they frequently lent their support to that drive and were seldom as uninterested as they appeared to be in Slough. At the same time, he thought it not unreasonable to expect that out of half a million immigrants there would be some who cut wages and many who would obtain work locally before the local unemployed had been absorbed. When she conducted a survey among the young immigrants in London in 1939, Hilda Jennings was difficult to understand why previously loyal SWMF members were so slow to join trade unions in the capital. One of the reasons given was that membership of the Federation was seen as a tradition to which they had subscribed without exercising much thought:

It was felt generally that Welshmen are not unduly backward at joining the Trade Union movement compared with Londoners and workers from other parts of the country. Indeed, several key positions are held by men who have recently come from the mining valleys. But, considering the traditions of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, it was urged by the Trade Unionists who had contributed to the enquiry that there were too many Welshmen  in London outside the movement, and too much tendency to apathy among them. 

From this evidence, it is clear that it would be wrong to assume that strong, collective trade union traditions could simply and easily be transferred from the coalfield context of homogeneous, close-knit communities to the diasporic and atomised existence which many migrants found themselves living in a large and heterogeneous metropolis. Conditions within the recipient areas needed to be favourable in order for retention to take place successfully. By contrast, although some of the trade unions in Coventry 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 decade these immigrants had settled well into the pattern of militant trade unionism which had already been well established in the city’s factories before they arrived. Also, from about 1934, trade union membership began to grow again in Coventry, as elsewhere, though it wasn’t until 1937 that this became more rapid. Richard Crossman, the Labour parliamentary candidate at this time and subsequently MP, wrote of the DA men in 1970 that:

Once they had uprooted themselves they looked back with horror on the distressed areas they had left, and accepted both the management’s insistence on ever increased intensity of labour in return for the swelling wage packet, and the collective solidarity and discipline on which the shop-stewards from the first insisted, as the price of admission to the mass production line.

The St. John Ambulance Brigade leads a parade along Cross Cheaping in Coventry in 1933 (photo by Sidney Stringer).

The ‘Influx’ to the Cities & its Impact on Local Politics:

Organisationally, the local Labour Party in Coventry was successful in drawing together a team of spokesmen and women who could handle municipal politics. More time and effort was required to prepare for municipal power, and Labour slowly came to attract candidates who were not active in their union or working in factories. Of the thirty-one Labour councillors and aldermen whose occupations can be identified in 1936-38, only seven were, or had close links with engineering workers. There were a number of middle-class activists, including clergymen, a number of women recorded as housewives, and about one-third were Co-op employees. A number of Labour activists got jobs with Coventry Co-op because jobs in engineering would not give them enough time off to attend Council meetings and carry out Council business.  The Co-op was the only source of patronage, and thus a useful refuge for Labour activists. However, it’s clear that Labour in the 1930s was also able to attract some non-working-class support, while its leadership was only able to remain in office because they had severed many of their links with the trade unions.

Over a period of fifteen years, Labour leaders had succeeded in taking the Party from a situation where it had ill-defined policies and no clear electoral strategy to one where it concentrated all its energies into the drive for municipal power. The result of its victory over ageing if not senile opposition meant that Labour, far from having stormed a citadel of capitalism, had to preside over the renewal of the city, making up for several decades of neglect. Though many of Labour’s policies were aimed at improving the conditions among working people, such measures were bound to improve the services to employers as well.

By 1937, the car industry in Coventry was enjoying unbridled expansion and the editor of the Telegraph acknowledged that Coventry’s problem was not one of a shortage of employment, but rather one of a shortage of the right type of labour. Such unemployment as existed, he suggested, was due to an increase in the number of people who had come to the city to try to find work for which they were unsuited. Thus, the continuation of unemployment at five per cent could largely be accounted for by these ‘industrial misfits’. In an interview with the enigmatic Captain Black of the Standard Motor Company, the Telegraph discovered that over five hundred additional workers had been taken on by the Company in the previous twelve months. New factories were being built or planned and existing workshops reorganised to cope with the demand for increased supplies. The output of one large manufacturing works was fifty per cent up on ‘the normal’ for September. Thousands of cars were leaving the city every day. The following month it was reported that two firms of body-builders were setting up new factories on the outskirts of the city, giving employment to a further seven thousand workers. The expansion was so overwhelming that some elected representatives began to ‘call halt’ and to reflect the growing national concern about the concentration of industry. In October 1937, the Midland Daily Telegraph was reporting almost daily on the debate among councillors which was becoming non-partisan:

Councillor J. C. Lee-Gordon … questioned whether Coventry required these new factories, and raised the issue of the new schools and houses that would have to be provided to meet the needs of the labour which, he assumed, would have to be imported … Similar opinions have been heard in Labour circles … The viewpoint has been expressed that towns situated in the prosperous areas should not encourage the construction of new factories, but that industrialists in search of these sites should be quietly shepherded into the distressed areas. …

By this time the Labour Party in the distressed areas and nationally had begun calling unequivocally for the end of the Transference policy and its replacement with the planned relocation of new industries. Its report on the ‘Distressed Areas’ had been published earlier in the year, produced under the chairmanship of Hugh Dalton MP. Its recommendations included these two points. Brinley Thomas’ 1938 article on The Influx of Labour into the Midlands examined the origin of ‘foreign’ employment books exchanged in the Midlands Division of the Ministry of Labour in July 1937. As in Oxford, the presence of these ‘foreign’ books in the Coventry Labour Exchange indicated that at some point between 1920 and the middle of 1937 the owners of the books had moved into the area. The Coventry and North Warwickshire area, including Rugby and Nuneaton, had 18,822 foreign books exchanged within it, of which 4,044 (21.5%) were originally issued in Wales, 2,364 in Scotland (12.6%), 2,010 (10.7%) from the North East and 3,271 (17.4%) from the North West.

In Oxford, the Communists had remained weak until the founding of the October Club at the University in December 1931. This doubled their membership and led to the reorganisation of the party branch in 1932. However, it was the Pressed Steel strike of 1934 which transformed the branch into an effective force in local politics with a significant working-class base. The ‘twelve days that shook Oxford’ provided the spring-board for the growth in tandem of trade unionism and working-class politics within the city. Soon after the strike, the party had about seventy members, though less than five per cent of these were openly members. The majority were public members of the Labour Party. Local leaders were already moving away from the ‘Class Against Class’ policy, doing their best to play down the ideological divisions between the two parties. For their part, local trade unionists and councillors had little time for the TUC circular which called for Communists to be debarred from office. The leaders of the Pressed Steel TGWU 5/60 Branch decided to appoint what delegates the branch so wished. The ‘United Front’ line won support in the Trades Council, which adopted the following resolution in April 1935:

(The Council’s) strength and activity is due in no small measure to the presence on the Council of members of the Communist Party … In our daily experience CP members have … thrown themselves into the work of strengthening the Trade Union movement … In the past twelve months, the local Trade Union membership has increased by well over three thousand and we cannot understand why the TUC should want to disrupt this splendid work …

In July 1935, the Cowley and Iffley Labour Party and the local CP agreed to a ‘United Front’ slate for the forthcoming local elections. Their decision was endorsed by the City Labour Party with only one vote against. This ‘United Front’ was led by workers from the ‘DAs’ who were beginning to gain prominence in local politics. In September, four of them were endorsed as Labour Party candidates, though they were also secretly CP members, with one nominated as an openly CP candidate on the same ‘slate’. One of the five, Tom Harris, told the Oxford Mail that he was a strong supporter of the municipalisation of all the public services… However, by the end of the local party was clearly under some pressure to adopt a more moderate slate and the CP candidate was persuaded to withdraw his nomination in order to relieve the situation and maintain the unity of the Party (presumably, the Labour Party).

At this point, a young man who had cut his political teeth helping to organise the housing campaign in south Oxford earlier in the year, Richard Crossman, was announced as a candidate for the Headington Ward. Later in life, after becoming a Labour MP in Coventry and a Cabinet minister in the Attlee Government, Crossman acknowledged the debt he owed to the working-class politicians he had worked alongside in Oxford. Another post-war national political figure, Patrick Gordon-Walker, was adopted as Labour’s Parliamentary Candidate for Oxford for the General Election of November 1935, in which he was unsuccessful. Throughout 1936 and 1937, the Oxford Labour Party continued to defy the line taken by the national party, supporting affiliation by the CP. The Labour Party NEC’s rejection of this was deplored by the local party. By the Spring of 1936, the strength of the party in both the colleges and ‘the town’ was such that Oswald Mosley was forced to leave the City ‘by the back gate’.

Concern about the frequency of ‘wildcat’ strikes at the Pressed Steel, where the 5/60 Branch had come under increasing control by the CP, led to Ernest Bevin and the National Executive of the TGWU to appoint a full-time organiser for the area. Tom Harris was one of the candidates for the new post, but he was passed over in favour of Jack Thomas, who hailed from the Aberdare Valley. Thomas had become Chairman of the Lodge at Aberavon pit at the age of eighteen and then moved to Swansea to work as a labourer for the Corporation, becoming a rank and file delegate at the first TGWU Conference at Scarborough in 1925. As the Secretary of the Union’s Corporation Branch in Swansea for twelve years, he also became Chairman of the Swansea Labour Association in 1935. He began work in Oxford in January 1937. The Communists at Pressed Steel had their suspicions about his appointment which were confirmed by a speech he made to the Trades Council soon after his arrival, and they issued a stern warning to him in their factory broadsheet, The Spark:

Let him remember that the Pressed Steel Branch of the TGWU was built up by the UNITED forces of the workers long before Mr Thomas had heard of Pressed Steel. The workers in Oxford active in the Trade Union and Labour Movement believe in Unity. Mr Bevin’s anti-unity ideas don’t cut any ice here. Mr Thomas’ job is not to make anti-unity speeches … but to get our works organised.

As the Communists’ strength grew, their argument in favour of the ‘United Front’ grew louder, and a resolution was carried which led to the establishment of the Oxford Unity Committee. The Labour Party almost doubled its membership between 1936 and 1938, to over six hundred, including many Communists. The real roots of this growth were laid, not in the October Club or the University Labour Club, but in the building up of a strong party organisation in Cowley and Iffley, dominated by car workers and especially by former South Wales miners. In January 1937, in addition to the Chairman, treasurer and her husband, Frank Pakenham, all the other six ward officials were Welsh. In 1938, Patrick Gordon-Walker was selected to stand again in the Oxford by-election. The Liberal Party had selected Ivor Davies, who offered to stand down from the by-election if Labour did the same and backed a Popular Front candidate against the Conservatives. Eventually, Gordon Walker reluctantly stood down and both parties supported Andrew Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, as an Independent Progressive. Quintin Hogg, the Conservative candidate, defeated Lindsay in the by-election, but the latter was in no doubt about how the political complexion of the City had been changed by what had happened in Cowley:

We have heard a lot about Oxford ceasing to be a sleepy University town in an agricultural county. There lies the fundamental reason for Labour’s growth.

Red ‘Influx’ – Rule by the Sweepings of Great Britain:

The phenomenal growth of working-class politics in Oxford in the five years before the outbreak of war to a point where a left-wing victory, previously unimaginable, had become possible, was a key indicator of what might have happened in other ‘new industry’ centres had a general election taken place in 1940. However, the process of political recovery on the Left had to wait a further six years to come to fruition, though the seeds were widely sown before the war. Historians have argued about the role of the war itself in bringing about the Labour ‘landslide’ victory of 1945. What is clear is that immigrant workers from the Depressed Areas played a key role in this political recovery. Their success lay in the way they were able to reflect, articulate and organise a general mood of resistance and recovery among the new working class in Cowley and East Oxford, which was forged from old traditions of trade union organisation and militancy originating in the older industrial areas. The fact that Abe Lazarus, District Organiser for the CPGB, missed election as a Cowley Councillor by only twenty votes in 1937 gives a clear indication of the extent to which the newcomers had succeeded in shifting Oxford politics to the left. The assertion of a leading Welsh immigrant – we changed their outlook – reflects the reality of the immigrant contribution to the transformation of the political life of ‘the City of Dreaming Spires’ in the 1930s.

In 1935, the Communist Party developed a campaign about the housing conditions on the new Florence Park Estate which began with a deputation of the estates’ tenants to the Sanitary Committee of the Town Council in May. It had been built on marshland which had regularly flooded and when the estate was finished there were a series of related problems, both major and minor, which resulted partly from the speed with which the houses were erected. These problems have been described by one of the first tenants on the estate, a Welsh immigrant, and are well documented in the civic archives. The Tenants’ Committee published a pamphlet entitled The Oxford Rent and Housing Scandal – Who is Responsible? But from the other sources, and in particular, from the report of the independent surveyor, it is apparent that, although the problems provided a focus for a broad-based tenants’ campaign, serious cases were isolated and that the majority of the housing on the estate provided attractive, if expensive homes, to immigrants who had generally experienced far worse housing conditions in South Wales. The Allport family from the Garw Valley described the contrast:

When we arrived we were impressed. … we were coming from Wales and the house had the old fires in the best rooms. This was a modern house with the small grates – it was heaven! I can remember how I ran around the rooms. There was a bathroom, which we had never had before – we had had baths in front of the fire. … just imagine the difference – we were delighted – like walking on air…

By the late 1930s, the militancy of the immigrants had spread to the housing estates in East Oxford. The Welsh workers interviewed by Goronwy Daniel were paying between twenty and twenty-five shillings for five-roomed houses. The average net weekly pay packet of the fifty-five men interviewed was fifty-eight shillings and their usual payment for board and lodging was twenty-five shillings, almost identical to the rent they had paid in Wales. The married Oxford Welshman, however, had rented colliery houses for his family for only 10s. 6d. in south Wales, but paid 17s. 9d. in Oxford. Moreover, the loss of the ‘sub-economy’ made available through allotments, coal ‘patches’ and slag-heaps affected the migrant family more than it did the individual migrant. Thus, the relatively high wages which could be earned in periods of full-time working in the car factories were offset to a considerable extent by high rents and other financial factors which closed the gap between income and expenditure.

The rent strike which took place on the Great Headley Estate in July 1939 demonstrated the apparent intractability of these problems. The majority of the husbands on the estate were employed at Morris’ or Pressed Steel and were continually faced with the risk of being laid off, often for extended periods. The lowest rent on the estate was nineteen shillings and the highest twenty-four. The Gazette, the Labour Party’s local periodical paper, claimed that the risk of the landlords in building the estate was negligible compared with that taken by many of the tenants who have been compelled to emigrate from the Distressed Areas. Faced with the impossibility of getting a cheap house, they had no alternative but to take houses at exorbitant rents. The paper went on to report the case of one man who had been out of work for five years before arriving in Oxford and securing a job at the Morris Radiator factory. He then sent for his wife and family, who had only been in Oxford for a fortnight when he was thrown out of work. He received thirty-three shillings unemployment benefit for himself, his wife and two children, out of which he was expected to pay nineteen shillings per week in rent. He was being threatened with eviction. With the migration streams to Oxford drying up in 1938-39, as workers were being attracted to Coventry and elsewhere, the local Labour Party campaigned for greater security for migrant workers and their families in terms of their housing needs as well as in employment.

By 1936 in Coventry, the pressure for accommodation and the increased cost of living in the new housing estates was such that sub-letting was a common practice, especially among immigrants. Despite the Corporation’s belated attempts to catch up with the demand for cheap housing, there were regular complaints in the local press throughout the summer and autumn of 1937 that the costs were ‘greater than in most places’ and were ‘ridiculous’ with many immigrants finding themselves ‘at the mercy of landlords’. In September 1938, a local report on Coventry by the NCSS found that many migrant families had no choice but to rent housing at high rents. Nevertheless, oral evidence shows that, by 1939, migrant families were able to rent houses at fourteen shillings per week. The Labour administrations after 1937 had, by this time, led to the Corporation’s house-building programmes so that immigrants to Coventry were able to maintain a significant gap between earnings and rental payments. Neither did Coventry’s builders have similar problems to those faced in Oxford. The Nuffield Survey’s war-time report on Coventry and East Warwickshire found that in 1941, despite the effects of the November 1940 Blitz, the City’s sixty thousand houses and shops were a goodly number for the population as it had stood at the outbreak of war and that, although larger family houses were few, the great majority of houses provided accommodation superior to the average for the whole country. Mary Jones described her reaction, similar to that of the Allports in Cowley, to the change in accommodation involved in her migration from the Rhondda to Coventry:

Comparing the house I was living in with the house I came from I thought I was in heaven! I thought of the old house and black-leading the grates. …

In Coventry in 1929, Philip Noel-Baker had captured nearly half of all the votes cast at the general election and whilst the fortunes of the Party in the 1931 election followed the national trend, in 1935 the role of former Welsh miners in municipal affairs in England attracted the attention of leading politicians. In November, Herbert Morrison, then Chairman of London County Council, spoke at a meeting in Coventry in support of Noel-Baker. In his speech, he contrasted the practical failures of Government ministers with the successes of a new breed of working-class politicians:

Mr Oliver Stanley, the Minister of Labour, with all his university education, had made a mess of his job. The Chairman of the London Public Assistance Committee was a common workman, formerly a South Wales miner, yet in the speaker’s opinion was better than all the Oliver Stanleys in the Tory Party.

In the local elections in Coventry, the Labour Party made steady headway against the Lib-Con coalition until it finally won control of the City Council in 1937, becoming one of the first local parties in the country to take control of a municipal authority. The taking of municipal powers by the Party had no impact on class relations within the city, nor on industrial relations in the workplace, but it remained dedicated to advancing the cause of municipal socialism. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the gulf between workplace and municipal politics was such that the growing power of Labour in the Council was not challenged by the growing power of the Communist Party in the unions. It seems from this that ‘activism’ in the trade union movement, especially among engineering workers, did not generally lead to candidacy for the city council. There appears to have been a clear division between the two representative roles.

The tendency of Welsh migrants to Coventry towards left-wing politics reinforced a pre-existing tradition, in marked contrast to the situation in Oxford. This tradition was primarily ‘syndicalist’ in nature since it focused its attention upon industrial struggles within the factories. Immigrant trade unionists such as Jock Gibson were already spreading the influence of the Communist Party in the 1930s to the point where it had a ‘significant presence’ at forty factories throughout the city. However, its growing industrial strength was not reflected in the general party politics, since those engaged in ‘the struggle’ in the economic field did not show any great interest in the social field, unlike in Oxford, mirroring the position adopted by many of the leading employers who, despite many appeals, refused to involve themselves in local politics. Hence the dominant political élite in the life of the city remained a group of small businessmen and professionals who formed themselves into a Lib-Con coalition which by the Thirties had remodelled itself as ‘the Progressive Party’. Their loss of supremacy, from 1937 onwards, was attributed by their supporters, not to an overspilling of militancy from the factories into the social sphere but, according to the Midland Daily Telegraph to:

… the rapid drift of population from the depressed areas … a steady stream of potential left-wing supporters. 

The truth was that, with no common principles other than the opposition to socialism, no policies other than curbs on public spending, no electoral machinery and a declining social base, it was clear by the mid-thirties in Coventry that the Con-Lib Coalition had been clinging to power by default. It had been able to protect itself as the social leadership of the city and use its powers to look after its social base but had lacked the will and ability to develop policies that could have encouraged industry to support it, or to attract working-class voters to it. Its inability to plan to meet the needs of the city and develop a modern infrastructure meant that its removal ended an obstacle to progress, not just for working people, but to a wide range of commercial and industrial interests. It had outlived its usefulness, and Labour’s victory in November 1937, besides making possible the application of genuinely progressive policies, also provided an opportunity to make the city more responsive to the needs of modern mass manufacturers. The ‘influx’ in itself provided a further factor in Labour’s progress to power in Coventry, but it was not a primary one. Nevertheless, in the 1938 municipal by-election, the ‘Progressive’ (Lib-Con) candidate in St. Mary’s Ward, near the city centre, had played upon the prejudices of electors who were predominantly ‘old Coventrian’ in winning his seat. This ploy was attacked in a Labour eve-of-poll leaflet, which in turn brought a strong retort from the Progressives’ leader:

They had picked out from Mr Friswell’s speech at his adoption a sentence referring to rule by the sweepings of Great Britain, and had divorced it from its context … What Mr Friswell had indicated was that the coming of so many of the Labour Party’s supporters to Coventry had had a serious effect on Council elections. He was sure that the old Coventry people did not want Socialists in control of their affairs.

Midland Daily Telegraph, 20 July 1938.

The ‘context’ referred to was Friswell’s claim that when he had spoken of ‘the sweepings of Great Britain’ he was quoting what a small shopkeeper had said to him about his district. However, in the full civic elections the Labour Party, surprisingly, did not advance on its 1937 position. This was due to the fact, as George Hodgkinson noted, that many of the newcomers had not yet been registered to vote despite the rapid growth of artisan dwellings reported by the Telegraph. Evidently, the immigrants to Coventry from the South Wales valleys were not as settled in the city by the late thirties as were their compatriots in Cowley, although larger in numbers. Thus, the argument advanced by Conservative agencies within the City that it was the large influx of labour from socialist areas over the year preceding November 1937 that was the major factor in the Labour victory reflected their belief in ‘the myth of the old Coventrian’ as much as it did the reality of the processes of migration and settlement.

The 1937 victory was greatly facilitated by the creation of a large individual party membership which enabled many managerial, professional and clerical workers to play an increasingly important role alongside shop stewards, conveners and trade union officials. It was an ‘alliance’ which was carefully nurtured by strong leaders like George Hodgkinson and Sidney Stringer who shaped the Party into an organisation which was capable of winning elections and running the City successfully. In addition, the radical liberalism of many chapel-goers in the City was transformed into support for Labour’s progressive provision and planning of social services at the municipal level. In particular, the advocacy of Christian Socialism by Rev. Richard Lee, the Unitarian minister; George Binns, Methodist lay-preacher; John Fennel, Ivor Reece (Congregationalist) and Howard Ingli James (Baptist), led to growing support among their congregations fuelled by the influx of workers from areas of the country, like South Wales, where Nonconformity was still comparatively strong. All of these pastors spoke on Labour platforms within the city.

The Immigrant Road to 1947:

Many of the Welsh immigrant workers, like ‘Jehu’ Shepherd, were attracted to Queen’s Road Baptist Church in the city centre, where Ingli James had his ministry in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Shepherd became the organist and choirmaster and for many years ran a Male Voice ‘Glee Society’ in the city for the young Welsh immigrants. Besides supporting the initiatives which the immigrants had taken to establish an image of respectability in their new environment, such as the Glee Singers, Ingli James also affirmed to a wide audience, the society and culture from which they had come. He continually referred to the miners in his sermons, and his unashamed championing of working-class causes and politics brought him into conflict with the established professional Coventrians among on the diaconate in the church and more broadly in the city. May Shepherd recalled one of his sermons:

Ingli James was a great preacher, very down to earth, and a pacifist. He was a strong Labour man and he upset quite a few people because he just said what he felt – he was true to himself, he would not say one thing and mean another, or say something to please people. Ingli was not bombastic and what he said was true. I always remember once when he talked about the miners, he said:

“I had a load of coal the other day, and paid for it. Did I say I paid for it? No, never, when I think what those men had to go through to get that coal for me to enjoy, and then I say I paid for it. No money would pay for what they did!”

I can see him now in that pulpit!  

James’ sermons also dealt constantly with unemployment. In 1942, he preached a sermon entitled How Green Was My Valley, coinciding with the distribution of the Holywood film in Britain. The politics of the young immigrant men and women in his congregation, like the Shepherds, had a major effect on the development and direction of James’ ministry, as his 1936 article for the Midland Daily Telegraph 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.

‘Before the Blitz’: Broadgate, Coventry City Centre in 1939.

Some of these newcomers were among the convinced and articulate group of Christian Socialists with strong pacifist convictions. James shared their impetus to social reform, which he articulated in his book, Communism and the Christian Faith, published in 1950, in which he acknowledged his indebtedness to the Queen’s 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. He then went on to describe how he came to his vision of Christian Socialism during his ministry in Swansea before arriving in Coventry:

The depression of 1929-33 left a profound mark on my mind. All around me I saw the bitter struggle of the unemployed … I also realised that the world contained an abundance of the necessities of life which the system denied to the people. However, these ideas were all vague, and I played no active part in the struggle of the unemployed.  At the end of 1934, I read my first copy of ‘the Daily Worker’. What I read filled the gaps in my political development…  

Of course, many of those he ministered to in Coventry had experienced ‘the struggle’ first hand but came to their visions via a variety of routes. But in his writing, as in his sermons, he was also distilling the essence of the shared experience of a significant section of the British working class between the wars, the migrating millions from the Depressed Areas. Compared with Cowley, some of the most prominent Welsh figures in the local party in Coventry did not arrive in Coventry until the later 1930s and made their impact after the Second World War. These included Ernie Roberts, AEU District Chairman, William Parfitt from Tylorstown and Harry Richards from Tonypandy, both of whom became Lord Mayor, and Cllr. Elsie Jones, who, in 1958, made the following poetic contribution to a Party publication celebrating twenty-one years of Labour rule in the City:

Born and reared in a mining area I realised the need for reforms very early in life –

Because I loved loved light and sunshine I knew men and young boys who, during winter, seldom saw either –

Because I loved peace and a tranquil home, and I saw peaceful men become violent at the spectacle of their semi-starved families –

Because I loved music and culture, and the arts, and I knew boys and girls with wonderful natural gifts who would never get a chance to express them –

Because I loved freedom and independence, and I saw proud men grovelling for the ‘privilege’ of working for a week road-mending.

How green and beautiful was my valley. How black the despair in the heats of its people.

More broadly, it is apparent that together with Elsie Jones, the political attitudes of those living in Coventry’s new housing estates were largely conditioned by their memories of the ‘depression years’ elsewhere in Britain. When the Labour Government’s housing policy came under attack in 1947, Aneurin Bevan chose to defend it in Coventry and issued a challenge to Anthony Eden to debate the issue and, according to the Coventry Tribune (Labour’s own local paper) 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. If we are to take this statement literally,  there certainly was quite a large ‘lump’ of exiles from the Monmouthshire Valleys in Coventry at the end of the thirties, so it is quite possible that a number of them would have known him personally as their former MP. The growth of municipal socialism in Coventry, from 1937 onwards was, like Bevan’s own role as Minister for Health and Housing, a practical expression of the principles of progress and planning which arose out of the determination of both leaders and led to attain to better living conditions than those which they had been forced to endure between the wars. Reflecting on his experience of the ‘two Britains’ he witnessed in the Thirties, Ingli James recognised that although Marxism was ultimately incompatible with his Christian Faith, it provided an empirical means for Christian Socialists to explain the injustices and inequalities of the capitalist system:

Probably the most powerful weapon ever put into the hands of the British Marxists was the prolonged period of widespread unemployment between the wars. Those who wonder why ten thousand electors voted Communist in the Rhondda Valley in 1945, should reflect on the plight of the valley during that period, when streets of empty shops testified to its bitter poverty, when every male member of many a church was unemployed, when thousands of eager youngsters were compelled to seek employment far from home.  The memory of what happened to Merthyr, to Jarrow, to many a small town in Lancashire during these years is still the most powerful weapon the Marxist propagandist can use. Conversely, the most convincing argument against Marxism would be a demonstration that we can build a relatively just society in which every citizen is assured of useful employment and a decent livelihood, without infringing the rights of the individual and without resorting to violence. … we must show how it might be done.

Labour’s coming to municipal power in 1937 proved to be a harbinger of their post-war supremacy in local and parliamentary politics; the election of Richard Crossman and Maurice Edelman as the City’s two MPs in 1945 confirmed the Party’s status as the leading political party in Coventry. By that time, the migrants from the Depressed Areas, and in particular those from the coalfield valleys of South Wales had shown, by their various contributions to the economic, political, social, cultural and religious life of the new industry towns, that they were not prepared to be treated as mere pawns in an economic and political system which had displaced them. Nor were they prepared to be acquiescent in the face of stereotyping, which was often grotesque and prejudices which were always difficult to overcome. In the retention and transposition of their traditional values and institutions, they made an ‘ark of the covenant’ for themselves and thereby found a powerful means of confronting and overpowering those stereotypes and prejudices, and of fostering a positive self-image in their new environment. In doing so, they enabled and enhanced the recovery of working-class politics and culture in the 1930s. When the Lord Mayor of Oxford visited the Garw Valley in 1960, he told those assembled that those who had left the valley thirty or so years before had…

… entered into the life of the community of Oxford to the fullest, … in churches, chapels, football matches and in the Council; in all walks of life … they were highly respected citizens of Oxford.

The memory of the depression years had become a powerful motive force throughout industrial Britain, old and new, long before 1945. Those who had lost everything had also lost their fear; they had everything to regain and were determined to be in control of their own remaking. The trade union movement and the Labour Party were the major and long-term beneficiaries of this resistance and recovery.

Sources (for both ‘case studies’):

A. J. Chandler (1988), 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: Unpublished PhD thesis.

Dai Smith (1984), Wales! Wales? London: George Allen & Unwin (Publishers).

Tony Curtis (ed.) (1986), Wales: The Imagined Nation. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press. (Especially Peter Stead’s chapter on ‘Wales in the Movies’).

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (eds.) (n.d.), Life & Labour in a Twentieth-Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry: Cryfield Press (University of Warwick).

Denys Blakeway (2010), The Last Dance: 1936 – The Year Our Lives Changed. London: John Murray (Publishers).

 

 

 

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(to be continued)

Chapter Three: Migrant Women, Work and Marriage:

In the early 1930s, migration to the new factories for both men and women was hampered by prevailing economic conditions. Despite payments of fares and expenses for the removal of household goods, only 1,200 families had been removed from the depressed areas under the provisions of the Transference Scheme up to the end of 1931. In the seven years which followed, approximately ten thousand more families migrated under government assistance. Apart from the difficulties associated with finding employment for adults in the ‘new areas’ during the general depression, local Ministry officials at both ends of the transference process were also very conservative in procedure, rarely committing time and resources to finding openings for families in the same way as Juvenile Employment Officers were prepared to in the case of young men and women moving independently of their parents.

For much of the period, Ministry officials would only advance rail fares in cases where the transferee had definite employment to go to. In 1935, however, this was broadened to the provision of free fares plus a loan equivalent to one week’s wages for men with good prospects of finding work. Since such prospects were dependent upon the residence in the ‘new area’ of friends and relatives, transference in this form amounted to the subsiding of voluntary migration. Even then, the subsidy was ‘hedged around’ by bureaucratic stipulations, which deterred people already suspicious of government motives and cautious about making a commitment to permanent resettlement, to become entangled in this way.

The state subsidies were sometimes made use of, however, when the head of a family had established himself a new area and was confident enough of the of the prospects for his family to apply for a grant to help with removal expenses. The assistance in this form was in the region of ten pounds in the mid-thirties, and this was probably the most successful aspect of the adult transference scheme. However, its successful operation came too late for large numbers of actual and potential Welsh migrant families. In the case of the Oxford Exchange District, with its huge Morris and Pressed Steel car plants in Cowley, hardly any use was made of the Family Transference Scheme until 1933 when thirteen families were assisted to migrate into the district. By the end of 1936, 186 families had received help, 115 of which were from Wales, including the Wilcox family among thirty families from the Pontycymmer Exchange in the Garw Valley. It would be more accurate to describe this as ‘assisted migration’ rather than transference, as most of the work was found by the migrants themselves, with help from friends and relatives already in Cowley, many of them working in the building trades. It was only after settling in Oxford that the migrants found more stable employment in the car factories.

Where the state machinery was used to direct and control the movement of workers via placements notified through the exchanges, the processes involved in resettlement were largely alien to the experience of these individuals so that the end product was frequently accompanied by a sense of atomisation and alienation. In turn, these feelings often led to large-scale re-migration to South Wales; of the ninety thousand men transferred by the Ministry of Labour from the depressed areas between 1930 and the middle of 1937, forty-nine thousand returned home. Despite the after-care provided for juveniles, it was estimated that between October 1934 and September 1937 approximately forty percent of boys and fifty percent of girls transferred by the Ministry returned home. The Ministry classified ‘homesickness’ as the most important reason for this and the social environment was as important in fuelling this as the working conditions. As one commentator put it, parents became convinced that it was better for their children to be half-starved in Wales than hopelessly corrupted in London. 

While official reports attempted to play down the cases of re-migration as hopeless cases of homesickness, unpublished sources show a growing concern among officials with the unsuitable nature of many of the domestic situations into which the juveniles were being placed, particularly in the London area. Wages paid to boys under eighteen were insufficient for them to maintain themselves; they were ill-prepared for the kind of work involved, which was often arduous, involving long hours and little time off, certainly not enough for an occasional weekend at home in Wales. As a consequence, many boys returned home without giving local officials the chance to place them elsewhere.

The Ministry recognised from the early thirties that the success of the scheme in placing a large number of boys in the South East of England would depend on finding them industrial placements. By this time, Welsh girls were also becoming increasingly resistant to being placed in domestic employment. In its Annual Report for 1930, the Oxford Advisory Committee for Juvenile Employment stated that only eight boys and fourteen girls from Wales were placed in employment, compared with forty-nine boys and eighteen girls in the previous year. This was due to fewer suitable vacancies being notified to the exchange. The reasons for this were seen as being very specific:

… An employer who has previously had in his employment Welsh boys or girls who have not proved satisfactory has declined to consider any further Welsh applicants for his vacancies. Of the Welsh boys who have been brought into the area during the past year, six boys and two girls have already returned home.

The young people concerned had been placed in hotels, as domestics in the colleges, or, in the case of many of the girls, in resident domestic situations. In small private houses where only one maid was kept, evidence of the increase in middle-class prosperity, Welsh girls were said not to settle easily. Their sense of isolation intensified and the resulting homesickness led them to return home. By contrast, those girls and boys who were placed in ‘bunches’ in the colleges were far more settled and were also able to return home during the vacations. However, even these young people found the expense of return rail fares a powerful disincentive to returning at the end of the vacations. Thus, by 1931, the experiment in placing juveniles in domestic service in Oxford had largely failed, and employers were showing a distinct preference for local labour.

Far more significant than the involvement of the Ministry of Labour in the reception and settlement aspects of transference was the role played by voluntary agencies. At a national level, organisations such as the YMCA and YWCA were keen to look after the social and moral well-being of the young immigrants. ‘Miss’ Allen, Secretary to the organisation’s Unemployment Committee, was thus able to report in October 1936 that all the organisers were working very closely in cooperation with the Ministry of Labour in the matter of the transference of girls… and were very much alive to the necessity of commending girls so transferred to the YWCA in places to which they went. Two months later, the Ministry informed the National Council of Girls’ Clubs that it was prepared to make a grant available for the establishment or extension of club facilities in certain areas to which juveniles were being transferred. In the following year the NCGC, the Central Council for the welfare of women and girls and the YWCA were involved in a conference on the problem of Transferred Girls and Women.

Concern for the moral as well as the material welfare of transferees is also evident in local sources dating from the late 1920s. These reveal an early provision of support for young transferees to the industrial Midlands which contrasted sharply with the lack of after-care provision in Greater London found in the mid-thirties. In 1935, Captain Ellis of the NCSS was no doubt mindful of this contrast when he arranged for Hilda Jennings to be released from the Brynmawr Settlement, where her survey of the Distressed Area was finished, to conduct a six-week enquiry into the efficacy of the methods of the various Welsh Societies in the Metropolis which catered for the welfare of Welsh migrants. The enquiry was paid for out of ‘private funds’ but was conducted with the fullest cooperation of the Divisional Controller of the Ministry of Labour.

The enquiry found that most of the transferees to Greater London were in the eighteen to thirty group, and were single men and women. It was 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. As Jennings pointed out, most of the transferees from South Wales knew little or nothing of these. The problem was further compounded by the deliberate policy operated by the Ministry of mixing transferees from different home areas in order to diminish the overpowering “home” affinities and thus increase the chances of assimilation in the new community. Given the evidence identifying the importance of migration networks based on particular coalfield localities to successful settlement in the industrial towns of the Midlands, this policy was undoubtedly counter-productive, and a further example of the way in which the official Transference Scheme worked against the grain of the voluntary migration traditions of Welsh communities. 

The Ministry’s policies exacerbated the sense of isolation and meant that migrants were forced to meet at a central London rendezvous rather than being able to develop a local kinship and friendship network in the suburban neighbourhood of their lodgings and/or workplace. Moreover, the local churches displayed a complete incapacity to provide an alternative focus for social activity except for the minority of migrants who possessed strong religious convictions from their home backgrounds. However, Jennings’ suggestions for a strong central committee to coordinate and develop local district work met with considerable resistance from ‘the Welsh Community’, who resented both her criticisms and her dynamism, by the NCSS which by 1936 was divided on the issue of transference and therefore unwilling to provide the funds for such a project, and by the Ministry, who doubted its practicability. Consequently, the young adult migrant to London, lacking the conditions favourable to self-organisation which existed in smaller industrial centres, was left largely unorganised by the social service movement and its voluntary bodies.

It was the experiences and responses of those scattered throughout Greater London which received most contemporary attention from social investigators such as Hilda Jennings. This research into the new London Welsh, which formed the basis of a radio broadcast by Miles Davies, were focused on forty-five men and women living in different parts of London, working at different trades and occupations and coming from various parts of South Wales, most of whom were young, single people who had been in London between one and five years. A significant proportion had been transferred by the Ministry; others had arrived ‘on chance’; only a few had migrated with the help of friends or relatives already working in London. It is therefore not surprising that the respondents complained of the feeling of being adrift … the feeling of foreignness, of being among strange people. They generally contrasted the ‘bottling up’ of home life and the ‘latchkey’ existence in London with the ‘open door’ of the valleys. The impersonal and business-like visits of the tradesmen in London left the newly-arrived housewife in London with a real sense of isolation and loneliness. Of course, there were many older established districts of London in which more neighbourly contacts were the norm, but few Welsh people could afford accommodation in these districts.

One of the young women interviewed, however, pointed out that friendships in London had to be doubly precious and long-lasting, as against the casual half-hearted friendships of the village. The Welsh societies and chapels were unable to compensate for the loss of companionship; they stood aloof both culturally and geographically from their potential recruits. There was no easily-identifiable Welsh colony for them to serve. The eighteen respondents who were members of Welsh associations had to travel considerable distances to attend, and few migrants could be expected to go to the lengths of one girl who had actually learned Welsh in London in order to worship with Welsh people.

When the spotlight was shifted away from London and the South-East Division of the Ministry of Labour to the industrial Midlands, a more positive picture of the experiences of migration becomes more apparent. Captain Geoffrey Crawshay commented in his survey for his Special Areas Commissioners’ 1937 Report that there were many cases known to him personally where Dai in the Midlands finds a job for Ianto at home. Professor Marquand of Cardiff University also noted that younger men were subject to waves of feeling connected to the receipt of letters from friends who had already left Wales and he concluded that a programme of training and transfer would only prove successful if it were employed through a policy of group transfer.

That individuals should migrate with the help of friends or relatives already established in the new area is, in itself, hardly remarkable. What is significant is the way in which this informal ‘networking’ extended far beyond the ties of kith and kin and became, in itself, almost an institution. Often it was a daughter or son who secured the first job and the strength of familial solidarity would lead, eventually, to reunification in the recipient area. In turn, once a family, especially one of some social prominence, had become established in the new area, a new impetus was given to the migration of additional relatives and friends, and eventually to that of casual acquaintances and even comparative strangers.

In this way, a ‘snowball’ effect was created whereby large numbers of people migrated from a particular locality in South Wales to a particular place in the Midlands. For instance, one family from Cwmamman were responsible for the removal of a further thirty-six families from the village. By the end of the 1930s, substantial pockets of people from particular coalfield communities were located in particular Midland towns. Workers from the Llynfi, Ogmore and Garw valleys were dominant among the migration streams to Oxford while there appears to have been a preponderance of Rhondda people among the migrants to Coventry, and Birmingham seems to have attracted a good many workers from the Monmouthshire valleys. Although there is some evidence to support the view that workers from other depressed areas were influenced in their choice of destination in a similar fashion, the geographical patterns are not nearly as distinct. Moreover, the Ministry noted that a significantly higher proportion of Welsh people found work for themselves than was the case among migrants from Northern England. Indeed, the Welsh networks were so strong that many of those who accepted help from them were actually employed when they made this decision.

Besides this independent and collective organisation of familial networks supplying information and support to fellow migrants, the retention of cultural traditions and associations helped to reinforce a collective identity and to establish a sense of stability and respectability in the recipient communities. These associations, or institutions, which the exiles carried with them, were outward expressions of an internal idealised image among the immigrants, an image which came complete with its ‘Welsh mam’ in Miles Davies’ 1938 radio broadcast:

What is there in this Rhondda Valley which is missing from… London? Climb with me for a moment to the top of mountain overlooking Tonypandy … past rows of cottages, with their slate roofs glistening in the sun … across the valley are the long streets of Penygraig, some tilted up the hill, some terracing the mountainside. It is all so near and so clear. You can pick out Dai Jones’ house below. There is the wash that his wife has just put out blowing in the wind; a brave show of colour. You can perhaps see Mrs Jones herself talking to her neighbour over the fence … That is the kind of picture that often comes to the mind of the Rhondda exile.

Dunraven Street, Tonypandy, circa 1914

Above: Glamorgan Colliery, Llwynypia, Rhondda, circa 1920

It was precisely this type of imagined scene which helped to provide the invisible binding ties for the Welsh exiles in the Midlands, ties which proved strong enough to hold them together in solidarity and resistance against the tangible tensions which were brought to bear on them in an atmosphere of economic precariousness and social/ cultural prejudice.

The Welsh working-class immigrants in England, men and women, like many other immigrant communities before and following them, found that their attempts to propagate a self-image of industriousness and respectability were in open conflict with a powerful panoply of counter-images and prejudices forged within host societies and reinforced by a variety of social and political commentators. Although long-distance and international migration was a major component of the social and cultural experience of many of the rural and older industrial areas of Britain, it was alien to the experience of most of the ‘new industry towns’ which had obtained their craftsmen in previous generations predominantly from surrounding rural artisans and labourers. The ‘local’ character of the populations of these centres meant that they were essentially conservative in social and cultural, if not in political terms.

The accusation that Welsh immigrants habitually undercut wages was a prevalent one. An American writer recorded that it was repeatedly said of the Welsh that they would work for wages that no Englishmen would dream of accepting. This view was a myth without much grounding in reality. Among the immigrants to London interviewed for the NCSS Report on Migration to London from South Wales in the late 1930s, eighteen young men and women had either left Wales upon leaving school, or held no job between leaving school and moving to London, or were too young to join a union in Wales. Twenty-one men had belonged to trade unions in Wales, eighteen of them to the South Wales Miners’ Federation (SWMF, or The Fed). Only ten of the interviewees, nine men and one girl, had joined unions since arriving in London. Those among the contributors who were active in the trade union movement in London said that they found it difficult to understand why previously loyal SWMF members were slow to join unions in London. They did, however, suggest a number of reasons, including that membership of The Fed had been accepted as a tradition to which they had subscribed without exercising much thought. On finding themselves in London trades, industries and services where no such tradition existed, they did not bother to seek out and join the appropriate union. Some complained that in the course of years of employment in London they had never been asked to join a union.

The age-old stereotype of the Welsh as being dishonest, even to the extent of thieving, was also alive and kicking. When it was revived and reinforced by the agents of authority in society, most notably by magistrates and the press, it was difficult to counteract. In 1932, Merthyr’s Education Committee resolved to send a letter of protest to the Lord Chancellor concerning remarks reported in the press as having been made by a Mr Snell, a magistrate at Old Street Police Court, London, during the hearing of a charge against a young ‘maidservant’ from Troedyrhiw:

Did your friends tell you when you came to London from Wales you could steal from your master, as I find a great many of you do?

The Committee protested that these remarks cast a very serious aspersion upon the integrity of the people of Wales, and in particular upon the inhabitants of the Borough. Of course, not many magistrates were as prejudiced in their attitudes, but cases of theft by Welsh immigrants were given pride of place in reports from the police courts. For example, in 1928, another domestic servant, nineteen years old, from Cwm Felinfach, pleaded guilty to stealing from a bedroom at the house in Oxford where she was employed, the sum of five pounds, six shillings. She was arrested at the GWR station, presumed to be on her way back to South Wales. Her employers asked the bench to be lenient with her as she had not been in trouble before. She was therefore remanded in custody for a week while enquiries were made with a view to helping her. Naturally, such individual cases were a considerable hindrance to those who were attempting to break down this popular prejudice against the Welsh, though they occurred with far less frequency than Mr Snell suggested.

In 1937, the National Council of Social Service made an application to the Special Areas Commissioner for funds to establish a reception service for Welsh immigrants to London. They presented detailed evidence from both London and Slough to show how, among the migrants, a certain amount of hostility had developed between those of Welsh extraction and other migrants. Hilda Jennings, one of the key social service figures in this proposal for a Government-funded initiative, emphasised the degree of prejudice and hostility which  immigrant girls from the depressed areas had to contend with from ‘local’ people as well:

In many districts to which migration takes place there is a growing uneasiness on social grounds. Sometimes, in default of precise knowledge, prejudice, due to the failure or misbehaviour of a few individuals, is allowed to determine the prevalent attitude to newcomers. Generalisations with regard to the ‘roughness’ of girls from Durham or the instability and ‘difficult’ temperaments of the Welsh, make it less easy for even the most promising persons from those areas to take root in new communities. Many of them make good, but others, for lack of better company, gravitate to the less socially desirable groups and reinforce existing anti-social tendencies.

In addition, Welsh women were often stereotyped as being ‘highly sexed’. Many commentators certainly took the view that they were more feminine than their English cousins. On the whole, they were more content than Oxford or Coventry women to accept traditional roles as either maidservants or housewives and mothers. Both oral and documentary sources suggest that very few Welsh women entered insurable employment in Oxford or Coventry before the war, compared with ‘native’ women or immigrant women from Lancashire. If the ‘highly-sexed’ charge related to a stereotype of the Welsh immigrants as having larger families than the natives, then the charge was as fallacious as the stereotype. Research showed that while the fertility of married migrants in Oxford differed little from that of the South Wales population, the fertility of both of these populations was less than that of the Oxford natives.

Given the scope and level of prejudice with which the immigrants had to contend, it would hardly be surprising to find that they also tended to conform to the stereotype of them as ‘clannish foreigners’. However, this was not only a tendency common among Welsh women, whether married or single. In this regard, the dilemma that both men and women migrants found themselves in was clearly articulated in the NCSS report of the late thirties on Migration to London from South Wales:

… instead of being encouraged to use the gifts of sociability and social responsibility which he has brought with him from the small community, he does not seem to find any demand for his services except in gatherings of his own people… The more Welshmen are able to keep together, the happier they will be. But at the same time they are building up a reputation for clannishness which does not help them to find a place in the mixed community in which they live.

There may be a danger that men and women from South Wales coming to London after, perhaps, long years of unemployment, tend to lose their courage. They use the Welsh churches and societies that they find in London as something of a shelter and do not make efforts to integrate themselves into the life of the metropolis. If this is so, then some of the blame must lie with London for presenting to the stranger the face it shows. 

In a 1936 edition of their journal, the ‘Middle Opinion’ group, Political and Economic Planning published statistics showing that immigration into the South East of England was in excess of total emigration from Britain as a whole, claiming that while the national importance of emigration has long been recognised, the practical significance of internal movements has often been overlooked. The pressure which groups like P.E.P. brought to bear led a year later to the appointment of Sir Montague Barlow to head a Royal Commission on the distribution of the population. Although the Commission’s full report was not published until 1940, it began receiving evidence in March 1938. By  then, there was considerable disquiet among the British public about events on the continent, not least in the Spanish Civil War in which bombing by Italian and German planes had led to a mass refugee problem.

On its sixteenth day, the Commision received evidence from a group of councillors, industrialists and academics from South Wales. They pointed out that in 1934, South Wales still possessed a high birth-rate compared with the other regions of Britain, at 16.1 per thousand of its population, compared with a rate of 15.4 in the West Midlands and 13.9 in the South East. However, Professor Marquand of the University College in Cardiff also pointed to the falling fertility rate due to the migration of men and women likely to have families elsewhere. This was borne out by the fact that, in the period 1937-39, there were on average sixty-six births per thousand South-Welsh women aged fifteen to forty-four, a rate less than that produced by women in the West Midlands. Demographic historians have highlighted the role played by the involvement of women in manufacturing industry in the Midlands, the North-west and South-east as an important factor in spreading birth-control techniques; the highest birth rates continued to be recorded in those areas where employment was mostly dominated by males.

Even before the Barlow Commission began to sit, concerns about the increasingly uneven distribution of the population had begun to be heard, especially from those living in London, as the following extract from The Round Table reveals:

London and its satellite towns have already expanded too far and too fast, from the social, health, and ascetic points of view. The heaping up of population in the quarter of these islands nearest to Europe constitutes a grave and growing strategic liability.

Although the increasingly dangerous international situation referred to created nervousness about the excessive concentration of the population in the Midlands and South East, it also created increased demand for labour in the industries which were responsible for rearmament, most of which were located in these areas of the country. It was not until 1939 that the economy of South Wales began to be transformed by rearmament in general and the resultant mushroom growth in women’s industrial employment in particular.

 

In this context, the work of the Barlow Commission, completed in August 1939, was too late in taking cognisance of the widespread agitation for regional planning in response to the twin concerns about the denuding of the Special Areas and the threat from the continent. Its conclusion served as an indictment of pre-war governments and their piecemeal and paradoxical policies on the planning of population:

It is not in the national interest, economically, socially or strategically, that a quarter of the population… of Great Britain should be concentrated within twenty to thirty miles or so of Central London.

However, this still did not mean an end to the policy of Transference or to the continued voluntary exodus of workers from South Wales, especially since the rearmament boom meant that engineering centres like Luton and Coventry were swallowing up more and more labour by offering ever higher wages in their shadow factories producing aircraft. Welsh Nationalists denounced MPs and civil servants alike as ‘collaborators’ in the ‘murder’ of their own ‘small, defenceless nation’, a theme which was repeated in the Party’s wartime pamphlet, Transference Must Stop. Nevertheless, the Transference Policy had long-since ceased to occupy centre-stage by the time the Nazis occupied the Sudetenland, and there is evidence to suggest that the ‘Blaid’ leadership was itself slow to give priority to the issue, favouring a policy of deindustrialisation and being opposed on pacifist grounds to the location of armament industries in Wales.

On 3 September 1939 Neville Chamberlain made his famous radio broadcast to tell the British nation that it was at war with Germany. In London, an air-raid siren sounded in earnest for the first time, though it was a false alarm; a Royal Proclamation was issued calling up the Reserves. The lesson of the fascist bombing of Guernica on 26 April 1937 was not entirely ignored by the Chamberlain government, despite their acquiescence. Cities were vulnerable to air bombardment and the civilian population would be a prime target in any Nazi attack. Such an attack would not discriminate in terms of gender or age, so women and children would, for the first time in British history, become the primary targets of the large-scale bombing. By September, a year before the beginning of the blitz on London began, the government had published plans for the evacuation of two million from London and the southern cities, and by 7 September, three and a half million had been moved to safe areas. The social effects on all sections of the community were traumatic, though the greatest hardship fell upon the working classes, of whom a million were still unemployed at the outbreak of the war.

Billeting arrangements were often discriminatory against both girls and women. Pamela Hutchby, a ten-year-old girl, exhausted and travel-dirty after a slow train journey to Stafford recalled being driven from house to house, the billeting officer asking, do you want an evacuee? The reply came, what is it? A girl? Sorry, we wouldn’t mind a boy, but not a girl. Sarah Blackshaw, a cockney mum with a baby, remembered standing on Ipswich station and being left unchosen from a line of evacuees as farmers took their pick as though selecting cattle, their first choice being for strong lads who would be of most help on the farm. Elsewhere, middle-class families recoiled as billeting officers attempted to place poorly-dressed and underfed kids into their genteel homes, a world of oak biscuit barrels and fretwork-cased radiograms. Happily, there were those who took in and treated the city refugees as their own children and formed deep relationships which survived the war. The picture below shows children from Walthamstow, London, on their way to Blackhorse Road Station for evacuation.

At 3.50 a.m. on 7 September 1940, the Nazis began their blitz on London, the target being the London docks and the solidly working-class areas around them. In the small terraced houses that had back gardens, the people took to their Anderson shelters, dug into the earth, but for tens of thousands in tenements and houses without gardens there were no deep shelters, only inadequate surface shelters built of brick. Buildings with large cellars opened them to the public and conditions were often appalling as thousand crammed into them night after night. People looked enviously at the London Underground stations, deep, warm and well-lit, but the official policy was against their use as shelters. In Stepney, the people broke down the gates when the stations closed and went down to the platforms. The authorities then relented and opened the underground stations as night shelters. At first, people simply took a few blankets and slept on the platforms like those in the photograph taken in October 1940 at Piccadilly. Seventy-nine stations were used as shelters and at the peak, 177,000 people were sleeping in them each night.

In 1940, the general willingness of the British people to meet the demands of mobilising an entire economy for war production was a remarkable feature of the nation’s experience of the war.  This economic mobilisation had to be achieved while several million men were in the services. To meet Britain’s labour needs, therefore, over seven million women were drawn into the workforce. Recruitment campaigns were mounted by the government to encourage women to enter the factories, but ultimately compulsion had to be used. This was a controversial step, given existing social values and the fact that women were paid far lower wages than men.  It was made plain that female employment was a wartime expedient only: women were expected to return to domesticity once the war was over. Of course, many didn’t, partly because this profound social change towards a ‘dual role’ for women had already begun five years earlier in many engineering centres like Coventry.

Nevertheless, the scale of the rearmament and restructuring task is best illustrated by the aircraft industry, in which the workforce increased from about thirty-five thousand in 1935 to nearly two million in 1944, some forty percent of whom were women. It became the largest industry in Britain, employing about ten percent of the total workforce. One typical company, De Havilland, builders of the Mosquito, had to expand rapidly from its Hatfield base into nearby ‘shadow factories’.  Factories in Luton, Coventry and Portsmouth, also built Mosquitoes. It was one of the most successful aircraft of the war, with nearly seven thousand produced and large numbers repaired. Those women who remained as housewives became involved in government initiatives such as the ‘Saucepans into Spitfires’ campaign (see the photo below). In 1940, housewives saved forty shiploads of paper and enough metal to build sixteen thousand tanks.

(to be continued)