The Towns in Wales Where Churchill Was Loathed

Wales Online ^ | 13 JAN 2018 | David Williamson

[nickcarraway]

Many in Tonypandy and Llanelli saw Churchill as someone who would use troops against workers

Tourists line up each day in Whitehall to enter Winston Churchill’s subterranean war rooms and Gary Oldman is a favourite to win an Oscar for his portrayal of the Prime Minister in The Darkest Hour.

The Conservative leader was voted the “greatest Briton” of all time in a television poll in 2002 in which he was championed by Mo Mowlam, perhaps the most enduringly popular Labour figure of modern times. Wholehearted admiration for Churchill unites the UK – but not, perhaps, in Wales.

Stories of his handling of industrial unrest have smouldered for decades, and he was booed at Cardiff’s Ninian Park in the 1950 election campaign.

The Tonypandy Riots of 1910 and the Llanelli Riots of 1911 coincided with his time as Home Secretary and stories have been passed on of his alleged readiness to dispatch troops against workers.

Llanelli Labour AM Lee Waters recalls the depth of animosity.

He said: “I’d a very sweet old grandmother... The only person she would swear about was Churchill.

“She’d refer to him as a ‘b******’. She literally never said a bad word about anybody, not that I can remember, and she certainly never used bad language...

“Her father, who’d been involved in the general strike, clearly took a very dim of Churchill and I think that was typical of Welsh working class opinion.”

It is not just the older generation who are keen to give a different perspective on Churchill. Type “Churchill miners” into the search bar on Twitter and you will find many people who want to tell the world that he sent “in the military to crush a strike by striking Welsh miners”.

His true role in the Tonypandy Riots is the focus of debate.

Tensions soared in September 1910 when 950 miners were locked out of the Ely Pit in Penygraig. Owners had claimed that miners were deliberately working slowly on a new seam.

This triggered a strike across the Cambrian Combine network of pits. On November 7 miners gathered outside Llwynypia Colliery, the only one still in operation.

When stones were thrown and wooden fencing was ripped up the police staged baton charges. Miners were driven back to Tonypandy Square.

The chief constable requested Army reinforcements.

Author Phil Carradice wrote for the BBC: “[Churchill] ordered that soldiers, despatched by the War Office from barracks at Tidworth, should be held back, kept in readiness at Cardiff and Swindon. Churchill did agree, however, to send in an extra 270 mounted and foot officers from the Metropolitan police force.”

There was more rioting the next evening and on November 9 soldiers arrived and went on patrol.

Cultural historian Peter Stead said: “The soldiers were in fact quite well used in the strike and slightly lowered the tension compared to the police – because the police were so clearly in the pay of the coal owners. The coal owners could do what they wanted with the police.

“There was a note of caution and detachment with the troops.”

According to Rhondda Cynon Taf’s heritage website : “Although no authentic record exists of casualties of these disturbances, as many of the miners would have refused treatment in fear of being prosecuted for their part in the riots, nearly 80 policemen were injured and over 500 other persons, one Samuel Rhys later dying of his injuries.”

The Churchill family has deeply resented the narrative that soldiers attacked miners.

In 1978 then-Prime Minister James Callaghan told his grandson – also called Winston Churchill – in the Commons that he hoped he would “not pursue the vendetta of his family against the miners at Tonypandy for the third generation.”

Mr Churchill said his grandfather’s “vendetta was against not the miners, but the Nazis”, adding that far from sending in troops he “detrained them at Didcot and sent instead policemen from the metropolis”.

But there is also resentment towards Churchill over the Llanelli railway riots of August 1911.

Railwaymen went on strike over average wages of just £1 a week. Troops charged to clear the line for a passenger train but strikers were able to immobilise it by raking out the fire.

The confrontation that followed culminated in soldiers opening fire. Two men were killed – John ‘Jac’ John, a 21-year-old tinplate worker, and Leonard Worsell, 19, who is understood to have had nothing to do with the strike.

Major rioting followed in which four people died.

Former Llanelli Plaid Cymru AM Helen Mary Jones said that one of the legacies of this time was an “ambivalent” attitude towards Churchill.

She encountered “a sense that he was the right person at the right time when it came to World War Two but essentially not a good man”.

Swansea’s Prof Stead – who found himself riding in a lift with the former PM on a visit to the Commons at the start of the 1960s – argues the “stronger charge” against Churchill concerns the impact of his decisions on the Welsh economy in the wake of World War One.

He said: “Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer in that five year period after the war when the miners’ wages were driven down and the country came off the gold standard. The economic consequences of Mr Churchill were far more devastating for south Wales.”

[miss marmelstein]

He must be reading The Guardian again where it is received wisdom that the Yanks did nothing (as well as the Brits) and the Ruskies won the war singlehanded. Pure garbage. If that had been true, why wasn’t Churchill on the phone every day with Stalin? In fact, he was visiting FDR and phoning him endlessly during WWII.

[nickcarraway]

Not true. Nothing to do with liberals. FDR made a huge mistake allowing the Soviets to get off the hook.

Look when Japan met to decide to surrender. It was a couple days after the first bomb, but before they had time to react to the second bomb. We had already bombed almost every Japanese city to rubble by conventional bombing.

When the council met to surrender, it was right after Russia had invaded Japanese mainland territory, and demolished them. The Japanese and Russia were already enemies, with their last skirmish being in 1939. They wanted to surrender to the U.S., not deal with the Russians.

And by the way, the reason the Soviets picked that day, is it was basically the end of the period Russia was OBLIGATED to declare war with the Japanese by their agreement with the Allies.

Truman told Stalin about the existence of nuclear weapons in July. But Stalin already knew about them before Truman did. FDR kept that information from Truman, and Truman wasn't brief until a couple weeks after FDR died.

[colorado tanker]

What facts can you cite to support your claim that Churchill “hoodwinked” FDR or “screwed” the US?

[CodeToad]

Tearing down Churchill is an attempt to also tear down conservatives.

Neville Chamberlain was a wimp and led England to war with Germany. Churchill came in and cleaned up that mess.

We had FDR get us into the war and he, too, tried a wimpy appeasement tactic with Germany.

[nickcarraway]

Neville Chamberlain was a Prime Minister for the same Conservative Party Churchill was a member of then. Churchill appeased the Soviet Union and let them take advantage of the Allies and screw them over.

[CodeToad]

You’re trying to trivialize the nuclear weapons used on Japanese soil.

You’re trying to trivialize the fact that for 4 years we beat the crap out of them across the Pacific.

You’re trying to trivialize the fact that for 2 years we fire bombed their cities to ruin and killed countless Japanese.

You’re trying to be dismissive of our efforts to give the USSR credit for Japan surrendering.

That is nothing but anti-American liberal propaganda.

[CodeToad]

“Churchill appeased the Soviet Union and let them take advantage of the Allies and screw them over.
“

You still haven’t stated how. I’ve heard these liberal talking points for years. Tired old anti-strength liberalism in favor of cowardice by appeasement.

Every major conflict the US has gotten into was started by your buddies the cowardly Democrats.

The fact is strong leaders win wars, weak ones get us into them.

[dfwgator]

Make no mistake, Churchill was still loathed by many in Britain even during WWII, that’s why they threw him out once the war was over.

[nickcarraway]

I am not trying to minimize anything.

By the way, FDR screwed use over the U.S. by putting that all on us. (And a little bit on Britain) The other Allies farmed out all the heavy lifting of the Pacific War to the U.S., while expecting the U.S. to bail them out in Europe.

And you are missing a HUGE point. First of all, Russia or no, the U.S. had to put that effort in. Most importantly, if all those things you mention hadn't happened, Japan would have been an Iron Curtain country. Not an ally of the U.S.

[miss marmelstein]

All of these men were complex, intelligent politicians. I understand going slowly into war - they had just gone through a devastating war 25 years earlier. As Gertrude Stein’s gardener (a French vet of WWI) told her: it’s impossible to have one generation following another into war. There is always at least one generational gap between wars. He was wrong but many people believed this at the time.

[x]

Only the liberals in England think those things and that tell us a lot about you.

I don't even know why I bother responding to your post, but Britain's a very different country from the US.

First of all, most of England is liberal compared to the US. Why else would the elect the leaders they do?

Secondly, Thatcher's own party gave her the boot in 1990.

She wasn't that popular with the party Establishment from the beginning, but she didn't have much of a base left by the time she was done.

40% of the country hated her all along and by the time she left only 20% approved of her.

There is some respect for her abilities in Britain, but Thatcher was never as popular with the British people as she was with US conservatives.

[CodeToad]

The Soviets were blue on black, a piss into a wave.

What the US did is what drove the Japanese to surrender all by itself. The fact that another nation might wipe them out was at that point immaterial.

Blue on black.

[CodeToad]

Polls are for feeble minded dolts. Thanks for proving it.

[x]

Why was Churchill resoundingly voted out of office when the war ended?

My point wasn't that Britons hate the guy -- they voted his party back in five years later -- but that they have a more complicated view of Churchill and see both sides of the man.

They don't have the simple hero-worshiping view of Churchill in the UK that US neocons do.

[miss marmelstein]

I don’t think many Americans hero-worship Churchill. Most Americans, at this point, have hardly heard of him. Again, it is British moviemakers who produce all these movies and tv shows, not Americans. I’m reading a major bio of him now - written by a Brit. I’m sure they have a complicated view of him in England - he was on the scene for absolute decades making major decisions in at least two major wars.

[dfwgator]

We had FDR get us into the war and he, too, tried a wimpy appeasement tactic with Germany.

FDR wanted us in the war from Day One. I'm surprised after his "Arsenal of Democracy" speech that Hitler didn't declare war right there, because for all intents and purposes, it was a declaration of war on Germany.

[Savrola]

The absolute garbage spewed over the decades about the Tonypandy Riots and Churchill’s role in them is staggering.

The Left grabbed a myth and ran with it, and continue to run with it, even though they must realise that the facts are against them.

Certain newspapers at the time (The Times, for instance) criticized Churchill for his restraint. But let’s not allow the original documents and newspaper reports get in the way of a good myth. This utter fabrication of the Left got so bad, that in the 1960s, the story had snowballed to such an extent that an Oxford Undergraduate asserted that Churchill ‘had sent tanks in against the miners.” Quite an achievement in 1910.

Of course the Great Man had enemies. That’s a good thing, as he said himself, “You have enemies? Good. That means you have stood up for something, sometime in your life.”