Welsh Journals

LABOUR'S EARLY STRUGGLES IN SOUTH WALES: SOME NEW EVIDENCE, 1900-8 THE triumph of the Labour Party in south Wales, and its supplanting of the Liberals in the industrial valleys, has too often been regarded as an inevitable process. In reality, the advance of Labour in the early years of the twentieth century was a chequered and erratic affair, with many setbacks. The kind of difficulties which Labour faced, and the manner in which they were partly overcome, are graphically illustrated in the letter-files of the first secretary of the Labour Representation Committee (re-christened the Labour Party in February 1906).1 The secretary of the LRC at this period was J. Ramsay MacDonald, years later (in 1924) to become Labour's first prime minister. The letters printed below illuminate aspects of the growth of the political Labour movement in a variety of constituencies in the years after the formation of the LRC in February 1900.2 Letters 1 and 2 deal with the remarkable contest in Gower in the 'khaki election' of October 1900.3 Here, John Hodge, an Englishman and secretary of the Steel Smelters' union, stood for Labour against a local Liberal employer, J. Aeron Thomas. To the general astonishment, Hodge was only very narrowly defeated in this most Welsh of constituencies by the margin of 426 votes. As Hodge tells MacDonald, he was handicapped in Gower by the opposition of prominent local miners' leaders, notably John Williams, the miners' agent for the Western district of the coal- field (and later to become first 'Lib-Lab.' and then Labour M.P. for the Gower, 1906-22). In addition, there was strong pressure in the constituency for Labour to run a Welsh candidate there next time. Even so, as Hodge points out, the strikingly high Labour poll set off something of a chain reaction throughout the Swansea valley, and in the town of Swansea itself. The journal, Llais Llafur, edited by D. J. Rees at Ystalyfera, carried the message of the ILP throughout the valley community. One consequence, as Matt Giles (secretary of the Swansea Socialist Society) tells MacDonald in letter 3, was that the Swansea Trades' Council decided to affiliate to the LRC in November 1 90 1.4 Giles, who had come to Swansea in 1899 as an advertising agent for Fry's Cocoa and was later to become the full-time organiser for the Workers' Union in south Wales, was himself a major propagandist for the socialist cause over forty years. By 1908 he had made the Swansea branch of the Workers' Union, with 500 members, the largest in the British Isles.