The Tonypandy Riots, 1910
In January 1949, four years into the Labour Government of Clement Attlee created by a landslide electoral victory over Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party in 1945, the Lord Mayor of Cardiff proposed to his Council that a new road development in the city centre be named “Churchill Way.” The motion was carried on a split vote, with one dissenting councillor stating, “Tonypandy men had long memories.” Long enough, it seemed, to reverberate through the Rhondda Valley after two world wars in echo of the yearlong coal strike of 1910–11 and the infamous riots of November 1910. At that time, the commercial high street of the mid-Rhondda town of Tonypandy was wrecked, and both Metropolitan Police and the military were sent in by Winston Churchill, then the Liberal Home Secretary.
What followed from that action was to haunt Churchill four decades later. He tried to exorcise the accusing spirit of what he and his supporters took to be both false memory and unfair interpretation. In a gracious reply to the Lord Mayor in February 1949, acknowledging the honour being paid to him, the great war leader—but then defeated politician—wrote: “I see that one of the Labour men referred to Tonypandy as a great crime I had committed in the past. I am having the facts looked up and will write to you again upon the subject. According to my recollections the action I took at Tonypandy was to stop the troops being sent to control the strikers for fear of shooting. Instead I sent Metropolitan Police who charged with their rolled mackintoshes and no one was hurt....I will let you know the result of my researches.”
Exactly one year later, in February 1950, a General Election took place, which eventually returned the incumbent Labour Government with a much-reduced parliamentary majority but on the highest percentage of the popular vote ever recorded—and more than a million votes beyond the Conservative total. During the campaign Churchill gave the electorate the further benefit of his researches into the events of 1910–11 that took place in the coalfield just twenty miles north of Cardiff. This time, addressing a rally at the Ninian Park football ground of Cardiff City, he stoked the fires of controversy in public. His account was adamant and clearcut. Troops had been held back by him, at first, and later had no direct contact with the men on strike. A few bloody noses were all the Metropolitan Police had caused.
Churchill thus gave his rapt audience what he called “the true story of Tonypandy, in order, to replace in Welsh villages the cruel lie with which they have been fed all these long years.” This was not some spontaneous reference made in the course of a long speech, nor were there any hecklers to whom he was merely responding. In 1950, the linkage between the once-and-future Prime Minister and a distant dispute was still a live issue, even one toxic enough to have all Conservative candidates briefed about the Cambrian Combine strike and for the Conservative Party to issue a circular stating that Churchill “allowed the troops to be drafted into the area as a reserve to the police, but they were
