Violent rioters, Winston Churchill holding back - and a cynical twisting of the truth: GUY WALTERS on the real story of the Tonypandy miners’ strike

For many people, the name Tonypandy means little, except perhaps when applied to the late Viscount Tonypandy, a much-loved Speaker of the House of Commons in the Seventies and Eighties. However, for socialist rabble rousers such as Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, the name of this former coal-mining town is seared as deeply into their memories as Orgreave, Wapping and other places where violent militancy was dealt a bloody nose by the forces of law and order.

According to Left-wing mythology, Tonypandy was the scene of the shameful and brutal suppression of a coal-miners’ strike and rioting in November 1910, with the insurrection finally quelled by the then home secretary — none other than Winston Churchill — who sent in the Army to crush the disturbance.

If you listened to McDonnell this week, you might start to believe that the way Churchill and the British Army behaved at Tonypandy outweighed their courage decades later in liberating Europe from tyranny.

Yesterday, when justifying calling Churchill a ‘villain’, McDonnell told ITV News: ‘He sent the troops into Tonypandy to shoot the miners, and a miner died. Others were injured. It was to break a strike.’

Later in the interview, McDonnell repeated his claim that the troops killed a miner: ‘Tonypandy was a disgrace, sending the troops in, killing a miner trying to break a strike.’

McDonnell added that if his comment ‘prompted a more rounded debate about Churchill’s role, well, I welcome that’.

As a historian, I would certainly welcome a more rounded debate about Winston Churchill — or indeed any historical figure.

No serious historian would ever claim that Churchill was without flaws, some of which were very large indeed. And yet McDonnell’s egregious misrepresentation of the events that took place in Tonypandy are so shocking that they cannot go unchallenged.

The truth is almost the complete opposite of what the Shadow Chancellor claims.

The problem is that hard-Leftists such as McDonnell and his acolytes — who predictably attacked Churchill on Twitter yesterday — are utterly wedded to the Marxist narrative that the murderous forces of capitalism crush the workers into poverty and early graves.

Any presentation of facts that may conflict with their blinkered worldview will simply be dismissed as Right-wing lies.

So what exactly are the facts? What did happen in South Wales back in November 1910, and why do the events in a small town a long time ago still resonate so deeply for the Left?


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6706845/PM-goes-war-Churchill.html

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There was a strike for about a year 1910/1911 due to the mine owners forming a cartel in the area - The Cambrian Combine, this kept wages down and meant it was a struggle to live for the miners. In the Nov things came to a head when strikebreakers were said to have been called in to operate pumps to keep the mines from flooding, all but one colliery at Llwynypia had been closed down, so the miners made for this mine and began stoning the pump house and fighting with the police. The whole thing turned into a riot and the main street of shops was attacked, hand to hand fighting ensued and one man Samuel Rhys did die but from being hit by a police baton. Troops were billeted in hotels in surrounding towns. There was a lot more to it than that of course.
A relative of my OH was given a medal for going into a mine to rescue pit ponies from drowning due to the pumps not working, he and another man led them all out. He and the other man received their awards from the then Chief Constable Lionel Lyndsay, his gg grandson recently donated the award to the Mines Museum.

Interesting Vintage and always adds to the story, local history of those involved, so thanks for that. Alwways add more to history, to hear such personal accounts

The one point where the miners, where wrong espcially, as well as all the violence hey caused, was how they could have caused far more and denied them work in the long run. It would have been devastating for local communities with work

Striking and picketing miners tried to stop the enginemen and stokers from ensuring that the pits did not fill up with water and poisonous gas.

I'm not sure what else they could do in the circumstances to bring their plight to the fore., no one had been listening for years not even when they were on strike for a year.
As for Churchill didn't he personally attend the Sydney Street siege in the same year and is seen to be cheering when the building caught fire? I think he was a fairly ruthless man when his mind was made up, hence he was such an asset in WW2.

Vintage wrote:I'm not sure what else they could do in the circumstances to bring their plight to the fore., no one had been listening for years not even when they were on strike for a year.
As for Churchill didn't he personally attend the Sydney Street siege in the same year and is seen to be cheering when the building caught fire? I think he was a fairly ruthless man when his mind was made up, hence he was such an asset in WW2.

I disagree that destroying a place causing untold damage is the way to tackle a problem. As others will suffer at nothing they did, like shops, buildings of families etc.

That is never the answer to bring about change

Striking is one way to bring a problem to the fore, but they here choose violence

Only after a year of striking, it goes to show just how bad their situation was as they managed to survive in a similar fashion to when they were paid a wage, I think that's pretty telling how dire their wages were. Wages were docked if there was too much poor coal in the loads, according to the checkers that is, something the miners could do little about because it depended on the quality of the seam they were working. In fact every excuse was used to dock pay.

Vintage wrote:Only after a year of striking, it goes to show just how bad their situation was as they managed to survive in a similar fashion to when they were paid a wage, I think that's pretty telling how dire their wages were. Wages were docked if there was too much poor coal in the loads, according to the checkers that is, something the miners could do little about because it depended on the quality of the seam they were working. In fact every excuse was used to dock pay.

Which again was wrong also that they had wrongs done to them.
That to me does not againexcuise any violence.
They should have protested outside parliment, to make this more visual to the public their plight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=122&v=py5mmAScScU

As The Mail on Sunday’s serialisation of Tom Bower’s searing biography of Corbyn proves, McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, is the driving ideological force behind the weirdly obsessive Labour leader. So his views denigrating genuine British heroes such as Churchill are a troubling glimpse into a cabal that has real designs on Downing Street and power.

First, some facts about Churchill and the episode commonly used to besmirch his name: in early November 1910, up to 30,000 miners went on strike in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales over pay. The Chief Constable of Glamorgan had 1,400 policemen there, but asked for more, and also for troops. Churchill, who was the Liberal Home Secretary, sent 300 Metropolitan Police officers, and although troops were dispatched, they were not deployed.

On November 7 and 8, serious rioting broke out in the town of Tonypandy, where 63 shops were damaged and looted. The police used rolled-up raincoats to control the rioting. Four hundred standby soldiers were dispatched, but on November 8, Churchill ordered that ‘in no case should soldiers come in direct contact with rioters unless and until action had been taken by the police’.

NO ONE at this point was accusing Churchill of using unnecessary force. In fact, the decision not to use troops was criticised by The Times for showing weakness and praised by the Manchester Guardian as having ‘saved many lives’. When the BBC interviewed the Tonypandy strikers 55 years after the riots, Will Mainwaring, an ardent Labour Party activist, said: ‘We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military that came into the area did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers.’

Lives were eventually lost at a strike in Llanelli in South Wales in August 1911, when events grew so out of hand that Churchill did send in troops. They shot dead two rioters who had attacked a train under military protection and beaten its engineer unconscious. But it was only during the General Strike of 1926 that Churchill was turned into a bogeyman. In the Labour Party mythology that followed, he was held personally responsible for brutally suppressing the innocent workers of Tonypandy through military action. (He has even been accused of sending in tanks, seven years before they were invented.)

There was also an unpleasant whiff of anti-Semitism to the story, to which McDonnell – perhaps because of the controversy in his party – made no reference. For the rioting in Monmouthshire and eastern parts of Glamorgan in late 1910 and 1911 took on a more disturbing aspect when a mob of 250 people attacked Jewish-owned businesses in what has been termed the ‘Tredegar pogrom’. Churchill and Lord Haldane, the Secretary for War, were quick to send troops there, to protect the Jews.

It has uncomfortable echoes of current Labour politics. Today’s extract from Bower’s book charts how anti-Zionism became a near obsession for Corbyn since his early days as a trades union researcher, leading him to believe in what Bower describes as ‘the malign collective power of Jews’.

The company Corbyn keeps is significant. Quite aside from welcoming bloodthirsty terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, he has played host to Raed Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, a man who described Jews as ‘bacteria’. He has also accepted a £2,000 donation from a London-based Hamas sympathiser who applauded the stabbing of Jews. Corbyn refuses to say what he has done with the money.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6713289/John-McDonnell-dangerous-Corbyn-writes-ANDREW-ROBERTS.html

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The Sooner the moderate left in Labour wake up to the extremes of Corbyn, Mcdonald and co the better for the survival of Labour. They are nothing more than islamist supporters and antisemites.

Coal miners before WWII had shit conditions and  pathetic pay for a dangerous job at the time...

Coal barons were even worse bastards back then, than what they are now;  so I would be very wary of any writer who is trying to whitewash the coal industry and the then British gov't at that time, while falsely portraying struggling and starving coal miners as "Marxist" thugs and criminals..

Any government who brings in the Army as strikebreakers, and proceeds to shoot at striking coalminers are a bunch of fascist cunts, pure and simple.

As for Churchill, that arsehole was a " Home secretary"    , not the most senior ministers at the time --  so it should be his bosses and the slimy senior politicians (and probably the Royal family as well !) back then who should be blamed for their criminal actions..

And the present day slimeball cunt (the Daily Flail's 'Guy Walters') who so willingly glorifies the use of direct military action against civilian workers.   He obviously hates the working class people in Britain..  That anti-union scumbag piece of shit should be let loose in his local coalminers' lodge...

Ooohh, hark at her, so fucking sure of himself !

miners went on strike during the second World war, while our Soldiers were fighting for their lives, so did the Dockers, Money grabbing scum !

WhoseYourWolfie wrote:

Coal miners before WWII had shit conditions and  pathetic pay for a dangerous job at the time...

Coal barons were even worse bastards back then, than what they are now;  so I would be very wary of any writer who is trying to whitewash the coal industry and the then British gov't at that time, while falsely portraying struggling and starving coal miners as "Marxist" thugs and criminals..

Any government who brings in the Army as strikebreakers, and proceeds to shoot at striking coalminers are a bunch of fascist cunts, pure and simple.

OMG, you never read any of this did you?

Where you are now excusing out of control violence by rioters

Read the two articles again  and then understand you have not a clue what you are talking about

Educate yourself

https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/myths/striking-welsh-coal-miners/