14 - ‘A Doctrine of Lawlessness’

Summary

THE redistributive People’s Budget (which became law in April 1910) prefigured an ‘implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’ for the reformist wing of the Liberal Party, but in many of Britain’s industrial areas the lives of a great deal of ‘the people’ continued to be marred by falling wages, rising food prices and systematic underemployment. Nowhere, perhaps, was this more noticeable than in the coalfields of South Wales, where in late 1910 approximately thirty thousand miners of various pits in the Mid Glamorgan region (more than a sixth of the entire mining workforce) were engaged in a protracted and hopeless strike against their employers.

The strike had begun back in August 1909 with a petty wage dispute between the workers of the Naval Colliery in the Rhondda Valley and the alliteratively named Cambrian Combine Colliery Company, a conglomerate which owned that colliery and many of the surrounding ones. The miners demanded a rate of 2s 6d per ton of coal while the owners refused to go a penny over 1s 9d. On 1 September the miners struck, setting in motion an unforeseen wave of sympathy strikes which, by early November, had paralyzed all the collieries of the Cambrian Combine. Meanwhile, up north, in the Aberdare Valley, the workers at Powell Duffryn Collieries had also gone on strike in late October because of the management’s refusal to recognize their traditional right of using discarded wooden props for firewood.

Despite the scale of the conflict, long-drawn-out strikes were not an uncommon occurrence in South Wales – as the example of an unsuccessful fivemonth strike in 1898 attested – and initially there was little to indicate tensions between workers and management would flare out of control. Things took a turn for the worse, however, when on 2 November 1910 miners in the village of Cwmllynfell rioted over the importation of strikebreaking labour, sabotaging the local pit and driving the proprietors out of town. As the Chief Constable for Mid Glamorgan, Captain Lionel Lindsay, explained in a report to the Home Office, the ‘doctrine of lawlessness which has been preached in this valley for some time… has made the rowdy element… rather more difficult to deal with than heretofore’. Fearing the worst, local magistrates decided ‘that it was necessary to call in Military aid’.