In recent days, we have been ‘treated’ to the view of Winston Churchill held by the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain, John McDonnell. He apparently challenged the affectionate national memory of the war-time leader held by many in Britain, suggesting that Churchill was more of a “villain” than a “hero”, especially given his belligerent attitude towards the trades unions in general, referring specifically to the popular myth of the British left and modern Welsh legend that ‘he sent the troops into Tonypandy’. In fact, he was given a ‘binary’ choice by an interviewer and had to answer in one word. In fact, he uttered two: “Tonypandy – Villain.” This uproar which his response created in the press and media intrigued me, as I had once interviewed an elderly Welsh lady, born in 1901, in the early 1980s in Coventry who remembered, as a child, watching the ‘riots’ from her bedroom window overlooking the main street in the town. Although she clearly remembered scuffles between striking miners and police, she could not recall seeing any ‘hussars’, mounted or otherwise, on the streets below.
Above: Budget Day, 1910. David Lloyd George (centre left) and Winston Churchill (right) head for parliament.
At Christmas 1980, my (then) PhD tutor, David Smith, of University College Cardiff, gave me a copy of his article from ‘Past and Present’ (A Journal of Historical Studies), published in May 1980. Dai was born in Tonypandy, and he signed it, appropriately, ‘The Tonypandy Tradesmens’ Historian’, Dai. It was entitled, ‘Tonypandy 1910: Definitions of a Community’ and contained the following comments from a contemporary, recalling the events of 1910 in 1951, the year of Churchill’s election as a peace-time Prime Minister:
The rougher section of the Rhondda Valley crowd had got quite out of hand. Shops were being looted and property destroyed. The Chief Constable of Glamorgan sent a request to the Home Office for troops to protect the lieges … But Churchill was so horrified at the possibility of the troops coming face to face with a crowd of rioters that and having to fire on them, that he stopped the movement of the troops and sent instead a body of plain, solid Metropolitan Police, armed with with nothing but their rolled-up mackintoshes. The troops were kept in reserve, and all contact was made by the unarmed London police. The only bloodshed in the whole affair was a bloody nose or two … That was Tonypandy. That was the shooting-down by troops that Wales will never forget.
(Josephine Tey, ‘The Daughters of Time’ (London, 1976), originally published in 1951.)
In his article, ‘Dai’ Smith pointed out that this account too contained various ‘inaccuracies’ which by 1951 could be used to dismiss the events as a minor scuffle as opposed to the ‘proletarian uprising’ of the latest Welsh legend. ‘The very name’, Smith wrote, ‘had come to symbolise the subsequent militancy in the south Wales coalfield, … to stand as a dramatic focus for epic novels, which he had written about elsewhere (David Smith, “Myth and Meaning in the Literature of the South Wales Coalfield: The 1930s” in The Anglo-Welsh Review, xxv (1976).
The events of 1910 in Tonypandy indicated to David Smith that Churchill’s liberalism, as the then Home Secretary could be seen as ‘a smoke-screen for the domestic bellicosity’ he subsequently demonstrated in the General Strike of 1926. It also ‘heralded the great wave of industrial unrest in pre-1914 Britain; the ten-month strike, though ending in defeat, paved the way for an airing of the issues which led to the national strike of 1912 with its minimum-wage provisions. But what attracted attention at the time was the violent outburst which happened on Tuesday 8 November, when the town’s commercial high street was wrecked. This was the event which, at a time of high industrial tension elsewhere in the coalfield, marked Tonypandy out and brought the troops in.
Dai Smith then addressed the issue of Churchill’s role in respect of the decision to deploy troops:
Miners waiting to go into a mass meeting at the Empire Theatre, Tonypandy, November 1910, during the Cambrian Combine Strike.
Note 7: ‘Colliery Strike Disturbances in South Wales: Correspondence and Report, November 1910’, Parliamentary Papers, 1911; K. O. Fox, ‘The Tonypandy Riots’, Army Quart. & Defence Jl., civ (1973); J. M. McEwen, ‘Tonypandy: Churchill’s Albatross’, Queens Quart. ixxviii (1971).
Thus, while Churchill’s stationing of the troops, including the hussars, in the vicinity, had a significant effect on the outcome of the strike, they were not involved in quelling the initial outbreaks of rioting and disorder in the town on 8th-9th November. The death of the one miner showed that the Glamorganshire police were at least armed with truncheons on the first day of the violence and that the Metropolitan police were able to use their greater experience in dealing with mass demonstrations to good effect. From the point of view of the Home secretary’s role, this was a much more guarded intervention than those made, under Churchill, by the Black and Tans in Ireland, and General Dyer’s trigger-happy troops in Amritsar in 1919, the latter being the responsibility of the Colonial Secretary. It should also be remembered that there were significant clashes between the Metropolitan force in the Suffragette demonstrations in London in the 1910-14 period, in which far more force was used. That doesn’t excuse any of those uses of violence against men or women, of course, but it does help to place these events in the context of the times and the need for holding troops in reserve to support ‘stretched’ police forces, especially the mounted police.
Dunraven Street, Tonypandy, circa 1914
Both Josephine Tey and Churchill himself were right about the manner in which other events had been conflated into the ‘cruel lie’ about Tonypandy. Nobody was shot in the mid-Rhondda though this was constantly alleged, in both fact and fiction, in the 1930s. Two men were shot by troops in Llanelli in 1911 towards the end of the Rail Strike of that year (and several others were blown up by an ammunition truck), sparking off a riot there. In 1911, a fourteen-year-old butcher’s boy, Aneurin Bevan, witnessed an affray in Tredegar which had anti-Semitic overtones, also involving shop-smashing. Tonypandy did not stand alone. Even in strictly industrial terms, its unofficial strike had been preceded by unrest in the adjacent Cynon Valley when eleven thousand miners came out on strike in a dispute over wages and customary concessions, lasting from October 1910 to January 1911. Riots and attacks on blacklegs, communal involvement and troop mobilisation were all direct parallels with Tonypandy. Yet it was this Rhondda town that became synonymous of the coalfield society in crisis and a world turning upside down.
Why did Tonypandy become so important? Partly because Churchill and Grant were wrong to claim that there was no bloodshed. Samuel Rays died of his head-wounds, and the jury was advised that ‘if they found that his injuries were caused by a policeman’s truncheon’, they would also have to decide if ‘the police were justified in the action they had taken in using force to repel force for the purpose of preventing disorder’. Not surprisingly, they decided that it was ‘not sufficiently clear’ how the injuries had been caused. In his death, this forty-year-old unknown bachelor became a martyr. Above all, it was the sheer scale of the conflict, both in the economic and political terms of Capital, Government and Labour, and in terms of the huge numbers of the whole community out on the narrow streets from the pits and the terraces, which on the night of 8-9 November ‘wrote the name Tonypandy into the commonplace book of twentieth-century British history’ in the words of Dai Smith.
In his 1984 book, ‘Wales! Wales?’, Smith describes Churchill as the ‘villain’ of the piece, like an opera star ‘protesting his innocence before the howling rage of the mob-like chorus’. It is as though, he suggests, ‘through this person the constellation of events continued to radiate around Tonypandy’. Did he send the troops in to crush the strikers or not? The question not only boomed out from the same miners and their sons in the 1926 General Strike but was raised more privately by Attlee in 1940, who wondered if the Labour Party could support Churchill as Prime Minister because of the identification of him with Tonypandy. In 1978, when this author settled in South Wales and began researching Tonypandy and other coalfield towns and villages, James Callaghan, during a routine question in the House of Commons over miners’ pay, informed Churchill’s namesake and grandson that South Wales would never forget the ‘vendetta’ his grandfather had waged against the miners of Tonypandy. For those who collect small facts about great men, this has always been the issue we keep coming back to. Although those facts are readily ascertainable, it has been a surprisingly contentious and enduring issue.
Besides this, the troops were, on the whole, used circumspectly and as Home Secretary, he had not only the right but the duty to deploy them if he considered life and property to be endangered. Nevertheless, it was not true, as he himself tried to maintain, that ‘the troops were kept in the background’. They were clearly visible on the streets of the town and throughout ‘mid-Glamorgan’, even if mainly deployed in support of the mounted police. Their presence and the threat of their more active front-line use ensured that all mass demonstrations against blackleg labour would be controlled and therefore rendered ineffective. And on occasions they were more than simply a presence and a threat, combing into contact with strikers at the points of their bayonets and by so doing preventing the mass picketing which was the strikers only weapon and their only hope of victory. The defeat of the miners of the Cambrian Combine was, in the eyes of the local community, the result of the state’s intervention in the dispute, authorised by Churchill.
On the other hand, Churchill was reluctant to accede to the somewhat intemperate demands of the local magistracy and judiciary who had been sending out ‘distress signals’ a week before the riots began. They were anxious for a military presence to overawe the miners on strike both in the Rhondda and the Cynon Valleys. He was concerned to avoid any unseemly provocation. To this end, early on 8th, he halted the movement of infantry to south Wales by countermanding the War Office’s agreement with the Chief Constable of Glamorgan. Instead, he sent in the Metropolitan police. He did allow the cavalry to proceed to Cardiff, however, and when disturbances occurred on that night, he instructed General Macready to proceed to both the Rhondda and Cynon with troops. The large numbers of Metropolitan police combined with the armed forces to form an effective army of occupation, and a substantial ‘foreign’ police and military presence was maintained well into 1911.
The other aspects of how we ‘reflect’ on, re-mythologise, research and re-interpret past events as both politicians and historians have been well dealt with by Simon Jenkins in ‘The Guardian’ (click on the link below) and elsewhere. Churchill’s legacy is certainly not straightforward, as one might expect of someone who was in parliament or government for more than half a century. As Dai suggested, however, his attitude to trade unions was perhaps more belligerent in the 1926 General Strike, when his experience in the war cabinet was put to use as if he were still planning military campaigns at the various fronts, including the home front. As a war-time leader, the people of Coventry had, and still have, good reason to question if he could have at least given earlier warning of ‘Moonlight Sonata’ as soon as it was detected by the enigma machine. Did he deliberately choose not to do so in order not to give away to the Luftwaffe that their codes had been cracked? If so, we might choose to charge him with sacrificing scores of Coventrian civilians in a ghastly war-crime. Did this give him the guilty conscience which led to the later, largely pointless, blanket bombing of Dresden an other German cities?
The point is that powerful figures like Churchill have both their successes and failures magnified in popular imagination and mythology, and even in historical narrative, however well-researched. History should not be used to ‘absolve’ them of the sins they committed, and certainly not their ‘crimes’, but the fact that they appear larger than life should caution us against judging them too harshly. In power, they are still flawed individual human beings and don’t deserve to be classed either as ‘heroes’ or ‘villains’. Dai’s close colleague, Professor Gwyn Williams, often repeated the phrase ‘heroes are for pimply adolescents’. In his past, both John McDonnell and his close ‘comrade’ Jeremy Corbyn have been known, rather foolishly, to list Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao among their heroes. Dissenters and Nonconformists of religious or humanistic persuasions who possess a modicum of maturity do not have ‘saints’, except in the sense that we are all sinners who can be sanctified. Even then, we go on sinning and need forgiveness. When making judgements about the people of that’foreign country’ we call the past, we must be aware of both our own prejudices as well as the different cultures in which they lived, especially a century or more ago. We are not judging them by our own moral standards, but interpreting their behaviour according to the mores of their own time. That’s how we learn from the past, rather than re-enacting it. After all, when it comes to our current politicians, stones and glass shop frontages spring to mind!
Sources:
David Smith (1980), ‘Tonypandy 1910: Definitions of Community’ in Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, May 1980. Oxford: Corpus Christi College.
Dai Smith (1984), Wales! Wales? London: George Allen & Unwin.
Bill Jones (1993), Teyrnas y Glo: Coal’s Domain – Historical Glimpses of Life in the Welsh Coalfields. Cardiff: National Museum of Wales.
Simon Schama (2002), A History of Britain (3), 1776-2000: The Fate of Empire. London: BBC Worldwide.
This year’s Armistice Day (Saturday 11 November) also marks the end of the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Ypres), which ended on the 10th November, following the fall of the village of Passchendaele to Canadian troops on 6 November. It was claimed the offensive succeeded in stopping German forces from taking advantage of French weaknesses, but if this were true, it was only at a cost of 275,000 British casualties in return for just five miles of territory.
While British troops were dying in the Flanders bogs, the usual autumnal sacrifice of an ally was all but consummated. Twelve Battles of the Isonzo were fought on the Italian Front between June 1915 and November 1917. The Italians had little success after joining the war on the Allied side and suffered heavy losses in defeats by the Austro-Hungarian forces. Machine-gunners were heard to shout to Italian troops to stop and go back, promising to stop shooting. Italian commander Luigi Cadorna punished his underperforming units by shooting every tenth man, in a throwback to the Roman system of decimation.
In 1917, the Battles on the Isonzo continued between June and November. On 24 October 1917 on the middle Isonzo, an army of nine Austrian divisions and six German burst in the misty morning through the Italian front, and in a fortnight’s fighting forced it back from river line to river line with a loss of 600,000 men. The German and Austro-Hungarian allies then advanced to positions just fifteen miles from Venice following their overwhelming victory at Caporetto in October and November, after which 260,000 Italian soldiers surrendered. The Italians eventually found standing ground on the River Piave, where they stopped their seventy-mile retreat, covering Venice, though only just. Britain and France sent reinforcements, and their generals helped to reconstitute the broken Italian forces.
Back on the Western Front on 20th November, British forces, at last, achieved a breakthrough by deploying 476 Mark IV tanks at Cambrai. For a moment, they almost brought back the warfare of manoeuvre. Although first used at Flers-Courcelette, Cambrai was where tanks first showed their true potential. Additionally, the battle incorporated new tactics from the air as well as on the ground. Ground-attack aircraft and coordinated artillery fire ensured the advancing troops were able to move forward in a way which had hitherto been impossible or, at least, uncommon, along the front. The surprise was achieved across a broad section of it, and troops broke through the Hindenburg Line, in places gaining five miles of territory. Church bells were rung in celebration, somewhat prematurely, as it turned out.
Yet Passchendaele had so drained and depleted British reserves that they were unable to develop their initial victory into an outright one at Cambrai or to prevent a determined German counter-attack ten days later. The reach of British forces had exceeded their grasp. The German counter-attacks reversed the successes. Casualties amounted to 45,000 on each side, but the battle at least, and at last, gave hope to the Allies that new tactics could succeed where the war of attrition had failed. Cambrai remains one of the key actions of the War, for it offered them a means of release from the bondage of sieges. For the first time the British, in particular, were able to learn the true value of a weapon of which they were the exponents.
At Cambrai, the British forces were pioneers in new tactics which their enemy did not grasp the full meaning of. But the Germans had also been innovative in their tactics. All former offensives had, sooner or later, come to a halt for the same reason – wearied troops were met by fresh reserves. The attackers continued hammering at an unbreakable front because they had ‘set the stage’ for action in that one area, and could not easily shift their batteries and communications. In a word, all offensives lacked mobility. Germany’s first business, therefore, was to make the battle mobile and introduce the element of surprise.
Above: An ammunition column at the Battle of Cambrai, 21 November 1917.
Yet their plan was not a breakthrough in the older sense of puncturing the line in one spot, but a general crumbling of the line. It was based on the highly specialised training of certain units, and the absence of any preliminary massing of near the point of attack. There was no longer to be any prolonged bombardment to alarm the enemy. The advance was made by selected troops in small clusters, carrying light trench-mortars and many machine-guns, with the field batteries close behind them in support. The actual mode of attack, which the French called infiltration, was like a hand with steel finger-tips being pushed through a yielding substance, like loose earth. The élite troops at the fingertips made gaps through which those behind them passed, till each section of the defending line found itself outflanked and encircled. Rather than an isolated stroke, the offensive was like a creeping sickness which could demoralise a hundred of miles of front.
In fact, the Germans had first used these tactics at the capture of Riga in September, but the true test had come in October at Caporetto. The Allied Staffs had been slow to grasp the significance of the new method for the Western Front. Caporetto was explained by a breakdown in Italian nerve, hence their ill-preparedness for the counter-attack at Cambrai. There the attack on the British left, carried out using the old tactics, signally failed, while the assault on their right, deploying the new ones, was an obvious success. Yet the Allied Staffs blamed their defeat on defective local intelligence. As a consequence, four months later, their armies read the true lessons of Cambrai in letters of fire.
After Passchendaele and Caporetto some inquisition into military methods was inevitable. The first changes were at British Headquarters. The Prime Minister was in favour of a change in the chief command, but Haig could not easily be forced from his place. He made a bold bid for more unity in command, securing some lesser resignations in order to improve the efficiency of his staff. After Caporetto it was decided that a War Council should sit at Versailles, consisting of the Prime Minister and one other statesman from each of the Allies. The soldiers naturally objected to being mere advisers without executive power, so in January 1918 a revised machinery was framed – a military committee with Foch as president, empowered to create a general reserve by contributions from all the Allied armies. The committee soon failed, however, since it is one of the first principles of war that the same authority which controls general operations must also control reserves, and a committee cannot, therefore, command an army. Added to this, Haig refused to allocate British divisions to the general reserve since he believed that he had no divisions to give since they were all already deployed at the front.
If at the beginning of 1918, Haig and Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had proposed Foch as their overall Commander, they would have carried the day, but in November 1917 Lloyd George was more interested in a great offensive in Palestine and determined to make the Versailles machinery work. He had complained, perhaps unfairly, that he did not get sufficient help from his official military advisers. Nevertheless, as John Buchan pointed out in 1935,
In a democracy relations between soldiers and statesmen must always be delicate, but they were notably less strained in Britain than in France or Italy.
At the close of 1917, British public opinion could no longer see a clear outline of the war. Russia had fallen out of that line, and new and unknown quantities had entered the conundrum. It had been a depressing year which, beginning with the promise of a decision, had closed for the Allies in a deep uncertainty. They had taken Baghdad and Jerusalem, indisputable successes, but ones which affected only Turkey, and even there weakening her extremities rather than striking at her heart.
Discomfort was growing in every British home since lights were darkened and rations were reduced, and there was the unvarying tale of losses to rend the heart. One such tale was that of Mrs Amy Beechey, who had eight sons, all of whom served in the armed forces. Five were killed: Barnard at Loos in September 1915; Frank on the Somme in November 1916; Harold at Arras in April 1917; Charles in Tanzania in October 1917 and Leonard, who died in December 1917 after being wounded at Cambrai. When the King and Queen met Mrs Beechey, she told the Queen:
I did not give them willingly.
Of her three other sons, Chris suffered severe injuries after being hit by a sniper at Gallipoli, Samuel served in France at the very end of the war, and Eric became a dentist in the Royal Army Medical Corps. In addition to these bereavements, women were also being killed in the munitions factories at home. In 1916-17 ninety-six died from poisoning caused by working in TNT. Women munitions workers became known as ‘canaries’ due to the toxicity affecting the liver and causing jaundice, turning their skins yellow. The economic cost of war was also taking its toll, with seventy percent of Britain’s Gross National Product being spent on it in 1917.
Above: Women making shells
Peace, Bread and Land were what the Bolsheviks promised the Russian people in the October Revolution (which took place in November in the western, Gregorian calendar). Protests had led to the end of the tsar’s rule in March, after which the Provisional Government had kept Russia in the war. The minister of war, Alexander Kerensky, advocated a fresh attack but the lacklustre Kerensky Offensive in June, although initially successful, saw the Russian Army disintegrate as the Germans overwhelmed their opponents, reaching Riga in September. The First Women’s Battalion of Death was set up to shame male Russian soldiers into fighting, though they were also antagonistic towards those seeking to prolong the war. In total, several hundred Russian women took part in the war.
Kornilov, the one fighting General left, wasted his in futile quarrels; a weary people turned to whatever offered leadership; and in October the Bolshevik revolution, inspired by Vladimir Lenin and organised by Leon Trotsky, marched swiftly to power. On 7 November (in the west) its triumph was complete, the triumph of a handful of determined men. When Lenin and Trotsky established the Bolsheviks as the dominant group in December, he was then in a position to take Russia out of the war. An armistice soon followed, on 16 December, with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, thus ending Russia’s involvement in the war. At Brest Litovsk before the close of the year, the new Russian rulers accepted from Germany a degrading peace. The victory of the Bolsheviks and the defeat of Russia meant Germany would no longer be fighting on two fronts, and so troops were released to take part in the Spring Offensive – Germany’s last chance to win the war.
In Britain, the Russian Revolution, followed by the Stockholm Conference, let loose a flood of theorising; there were incessant Labour disputes. John Buchan observed that the British people were…
… war-weary, puzzled, suspicious, and poisoned to some extent by false propaganda. All zest and daylight had gone out of the struggle. The cause for which the British people had entered it was now half-forgotten, for men’s minds had grown numb. Civilians at home, as well as soldiers in the field, felt themselves in the grip of an inexorable machine.
He remarked that it was a dangerous mood;
… dangerous to the enemy, for it meant that grim shutting of the teeth which with Britain is a formidable thing. But it was also dangerous also to ourselves, for it might have resulted in a coarsening of fibre and a blindness to the longer view and the greater issues.
But Buchan believed that Britain had an effective antidote to this mood in the stoical form of George V:
That this was not its consequence was in large part due to the King, who by his visits to every industrial centre kept before dazed and weary minds the greatness of the national purpose and the unity of the people. Wherever he went he seemed to unseal the founts of human sympathy.
He visited the shipbuilders on the Clyde and the Tyne, as well as most of the major munitions works. To the disquiet of the War Cabinet, he also went to Lancashire during a strike, where he was warmly welcomed. Lloyd George paid the following tribute to his role:
The loyalty of the people was heartened and encouraged… by the presence of their Sovereign in their midst, and by the warm personal interest he showed in their work and their anxieties. In estimating the value of the different factors which conduced to the maintenance of our home front in 1917, a very high place must be given to the affection inspired by the King, and the unremitting diligence with which he set himself in those dark days to discharge the functions of his high office.
The Autumn and early Winter of 1917 were indeed the darkest days of the war for Britain, but exactly how dark was only realised by the Government and the Admiralty. Lloyd George himself also rose to the crisis. The loss of British shipping to the U-boats in the early part of the year had left the country with only six weeks of corn supplies. It was impossible to lay a mine-field close to the German bases or to attack them because the Battle of Jutland had left the Royal Navy without full command of the North Sea. Much was done by rationing, by increasing home production and through the expansion of shipbuilding, but the real remedy, which, before the summer had gone had relieved the situation, was a new plan of defence. The convoy system was pressed upon an unwilling Admiralty at a time before Britain had even the promise of a multitude of American destroyers. With the help of some of the younger naval officers, it was finally accepted and put into force. It had an immediate effect, as the losses to convoyed ships amounted to only one percent, compared to the one in four being lost in April. By September, the monthly tonnage lost was under two hundred thousand, compared with the 875,000 lost in April, at the peak of the losses. When peace came, eighty-eight thousand merchant vessels had been convoyed, with a loss of only 436. At the same time, the advent of better depth charges led to the destruction of more than half of the U-boats by the Royal Navy before the end of the War.
Despite this improving picture at sea, by the end of 1917, the initiative in the war on the land had passed once again to the Central Powers. Russia’s collapse enabled the Germans to redeploy large forces from the Eastern to the Western Front which meant that they could muster more men on the latter than the Allies, who had resigned themselves to a defensive campaign until the Americans could send their armies. Germany had one last chance to beat the Allies before that happened. The U-boat campaign had failed and the German people were weak with privations and their hope was failing, having suffered so many military disappointments. A decisive Spring Offensive was all that stood between them and ignominious defeat in the year to come.
Sources:
Norman Ferguson (2014), The First World War: A Miscellany. Chichester: Summersdale.
John Buchan (1935), The King’s Grace. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Andrew James 
You must be logged in to post a comment.