Welsh Journals

The significance of the struggle is still deeper: men made sacrifices in it that were out of all proportion to the actual influence that the Federation, even if strengthened, could wield at this time. Their loyalty was fierce because it was primal; in the space of fifty years south Wales had moved through a relentless cycle of industrializa- tion, prosperity and slump, and in the course of which men, sucked from rural hinterlands into the mining valleys, had created out of that fragmentary world a sense of community that was almost unequalled, begun by shared dangers and bolstered up by the creation of all sorts of shared social amenities. Out of their work- experience they had made for themselves a communal life-style. In all this the S.W.M.F. was their instrument, from representation in national politics to the smallest individual case of hardship; in village after village, checkweighers and lodge committee men played the role reserved elsewhere for the Roman Catholic priesthood.77 Edward Thompson, writing of the creation of the I.L.P. in the West Riding, lamented that working men outside London 'are credited with every virtue except the capital human virtue of conscious action in a conscious historical role'.78 It is the conscious- ness of these men that the Federation and the community-life of south Wales had been synonymous and that it alone could allow them to re-assert some degree of control over their own working lives which lifts the struggle waged out of the morass of industrial minutiae into the history of human freedom. DAVID SMITH Swansea 77 See Edwards, op. cit., pp. 225-28; and W. Paynter, 'The "Fed" in Men of No Property (1971): 'The "Fed" was the single decisive union operating in the pits, the com- munities existed around the pit, and union branches were based upon it, hence the integration of pit, people and union into a unified social organism' (p. 68). 11 E. P. Thompson, 'Homage to Tom Maguire', Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History (1967), p. 278.