Local Heroes [militant miners in South Wales 1910-12]

Every nice girl loves a collier
In the Rhondda valley war
Every nice girl loves a striker
And you know what strikers are
In Tonypandy they’re very handy
With their sticks and their stones and boot
Walking down the street with Jane
Breaking every window pane
That’s loot! Pom pom. That’s loot!

Taken from a children’s verse during the riots and strikes.[1]

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’[2]

Historians and ‘teachers’ being the empty vassals of the bourgeoisie have consistently since their inception lied to us. They tell us tales about a history of class consent but in fact we know the reality of this: class war. Beneath the superficiality of kings and queens there lies a hidden history of ordinary people struggling to create a better society; I want to look at just one tiny part of that vast history: industrial disputes in South Wales 1910-12 and see how docile Welsh workers really were.

The dispute arose in the Cambrian Combine, September 1910, when miners returned up to work a new impure seam. Being paid for productivity they knew the impure seam would mean more work and less pay. They walked out, and so did miners at other pits in solidarity. The South Wales Miners Federation (SWMF) and its reformist leadership appealed for ‘conciliation’ and a return to work. But this didn’t hold with the rank and file and as many as 30,000 stayed out. Addressed by men like Big Bill Haywood, from the U.S Wobblies (IWW) and Tom Mann from the Industrial Syndicalist Education League, ideas of direct action and workers control of industry spread.

IDEAS INTO ACTION

In November ideas turned into action; collieries and their pump houses were sabotaged, trains going to the mines were stopped, scabs attacked, their homes daubed and windows smashed. But anger was not just limited to scabs, mine managers and owners were beaten up and even dynamite used against their houses.

MASS PICKETS

Mass picketing however was the most frequent form of direct action. Scuffles and fights often broke out on the picket line. Many Policemen and scabs were taken out by a well aimed brick thrown in anger. It was after one such encounter at Llwnpia [Llwynypia] mine, that the infamous Tonypandy riots took place. One striker was killed by the Police as pickets looted shops, in particular those belonging to anti-strike shopkeepers.

Though the strike in the end was lost the spirit it engendered was not. Noah Ablett and others, before the end of the strike, had formed the militant syndicalist ‘Unofficial Reform Committee’; to attack the reformist nature of the SWMF. In March 1911 they issued the Miners Next Step – probably the most important manifesto to emerge from South Wales

CLASS WAR

It ‘called for the class war between labour and capital to be escalated’. This was to be organised by union lodges, by the rank and file, not by Politicians and Bureaucrats on ‘behalf’ of the workers. The pamphlet also foresaw that nationalisation would be no solution to miners. Instead it called for “Industrial Democracy” ie. workers control to meet the needs of people, not just in the mines, but throughout the whole economy.

MILITANCY SPREAD

These ideas of direct action and sympathetic industrial action was advanced enough that South Wales workers came out to help Irish workers during the Dublin lock out : Two train drivers who refused to handle traffic for Dublin were sacked, but 1,000’s of both other drivers and porters supported them with strike action: “At Briton Ferry docks, the steelworkers on their home ground, surrounded a Great Western Railway engine, and compelled the driver and fireman to leave.…”  However Union Officials (in their role as ‘soft cops’) were able to secure a return to work. But the atmosphere was such that in 1912, on Swansea Railway Station platform, Guy Bowman and George Hicks, when addressing a group of strikers, called for revolutionary change, by industrial unionism to destroy both state and the employing class: “Hicks ended by calling for the abolition of capitalism and thereby ‘banishing forever from our eyes such things as feeding the necessitous school child, insurance acts, workhouses, goals and all things that are bad’ 

He looked instead to a system at once ‘more just, more sane and much brighter, where all would share wealth collectively, and no one would be forced into degrading occupations like prostitution. 

These views brought ‘three cheers for the industrial revolution’ among those present” 

Most of the information for this article came from British Syndicalism 1900-1914 by Bob Holton (Pluto Press) now out of print but available at Libraries etc. The best place for original material is from the South Wales Miners Library in Swansea, up at Hendrefoilan.[3]

Noah Ablett: 
… the future does not lie in the direction of bureaucracy. The roadway to emancipation lies in a different direction than the offices of a Minister of Mines (operating state nationalisation). It lies in the democratic organisation, and eventually control of the industries by the workers themselves in their organised capacity as trustees for a working-class world. No Minister of Mines will lead us to our emancipation. That must be the work of the workers themselves from the bottom upward, and not from the top downward, which latter means the servile state.

KSL Notes

1, A nod to the popular song of the time ‘Every nice girl loves a Sailor’
2, From Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.
3, See https://www.swansea.ac.uk/library/south-wales-miners-library/  

From Swansea’s Angry Side [1989?]