Welsh Journals

THE RURAL REVOLT THAT FAILED: FARM WORKERS' TRADE UNIONS IN WALES, 1889-1950, David A. Pretty, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1989, xiii, 291pp. £ 30. This study is imbued with a Hammond-like sense of indignation at what the author sees as the injustice and oppression of a forgotten class in Welsh history, the Welsh farm labourer forgotten alike, he rightly emphasises, by contemporary Liberal middle- class leaders and later by Welsh historians. David Pretty fills this gap admirably, and in viewing the farmers and labourers as divided along increasingly pronounced class lines from the 1880s he confronts us with a challenging new thesis. Not for him the long- accepted notion of a fairly close-knit, harmonious relationship between masters and men. The study falls into three parts. The first examines early farm labourers' organisations in Wales between 1889 and 1893, concentrating upon the movements in Anglesey. We are here presented with a major re-assessment of the thinking and influence of the Anglesey men's leader, John Owen Jones, 'ap Ffarmwr'. The second part concentrates on the awakening of Welsh farm labourers under the particular circumstances of the war years, 1914-18. They were offended by the selfishness of their employers in making large profits which they kept for themselves. E. Lima Jones of Aberaeron branded them in summer 1917 'the locusts of the country'. Farmers, too, were accused of protecting their sons from military service by putting them to work on their farms and so turning off the labourers who were thereby forced to join- up. Thus the Llandysul tribunal heard how six servants in the Rhydlewis district had been sacked to make room for farmers' sons. Such resentments, coupled with the impact of the Corn Production Act of 1917, saw trade unions emerging in the Welsh countryside from autumn 1917, and these were to grow in confidence and assertiveness before their collapse from 1921. The events and personalities involved in the spread of the movement in Cardiganshire are thoroughly covered-the tireless labours of the colourful Revd. T. E. Nicholas, the involvement of schoolmasters, mariners and ministers of religion, the farmers' vindictive response, as, for example, towards R. L. Jones of Llanilar who lost his job, and (a feature of other Welsh counties) the close association between farm labourers' unions and the county Labour Party, although everywhere success on the political front, both national and local, was very limited. The third section examines the years 1921 to 1950. The labourers' movement was to undergo a shattering blow in 1921 with the end of the post-war boom. With the repeal in 1921 of the Agricultural Act, 1920, labourers lost their Agricultural Wages Board and the guarantee of a minimum wage. They were forced to take lower wages and altogether 1921-1929 were years of 'decline and retreat'. Thus during 1921-22 the National Union of Agricultural Workers lost thirteen branches in Cardiganshire. Labourers were without leaders: in January 1924 the Cardiganshire conciliation committee was rendered inoperative because no labour representative turned up! With farm workers' unions almost disappearing in the 1930s it, once again, took the particular circumstances of the Second World War to revive them. Although 1950 could boast far more branches of the National Union of Agricultural Labourers in Wales than in 1919, nevertheless they did not secure for their members a share of the good fortunes of post-war agriculture. While applauding this fine study for its wealth of detail and humane approach, I would want to make a couple of criticisms. First, we don't hear about the fact that in the years