The woman who became UK’s first communist mayor
Famous communist Annie Powell made history when she was elected Mayor of Rhondda, as Jean Silvan Evans reports...
ANNIE POWELL, a spirited and wellknown communist in Rhondda when it was still a mining valley, burst on to the world stage in her old age.
At 72, she made history and headlines when she was elected communist Mayor of Rhondda.
Widely hailed as the first mayor ever elected on a communist ticket in the whole of Britain, she received letters of congratulations from all over the world.
Ironically, her far-left triumph came in 1979, about the same time that rightwing Conservative Margaret Thatcher was famously elected the first woman prime minister. Two firsts within about two weeks of each other – by two women who were politically poles apart!
But, although she was new to an international audience, Annie was a household name in Rhondda, where she had served as a communist councillor on Rhondda Borough Council for more than 20 years. As a councillor, she was known for her integrity, commitment and and compassion. As a campaigner to improve living standards, she won such universal respect that she could defy the antipathy to communism in the post-war Labour stronghold of Rhondda to take pride of place as its mayor.
Annie’s background gave no hint of what was to come. She was born into a devout nonconformist family, the eldest of four girls. Her Welsh-speaking parents, Tom and Sarah Thomas, were both teachers and she was educated at Pentre Grammar School. Life was good and centred first around a Welsh-speaking chapel and later Methodist Central Hall, Tonypandy. There was no sign at that time that Annie would turn her back on the church and become a communist.
It started when Annie followed her parents into teaching, the main professional career open to women in the early 20th century. She became a student at Glamorgan Training College in Barry and it was there, during the bitter 1926 General Strike, when many of her fellow students were children of unemployed miners, that she first saw the abject poverty that had taken hold of the Valleys as the foreign demand for coal declined.
Then, teaching in Trealaw during the
Great Depression of the 1930s, she came up against the desperate poverty of so many of her pupils’ families – something that she always said hit her “really hard”. These were the experiences that focused her lifelong commitment to working to improve life for people in the valley. Her first move was to join the Labour Party.
The intense industrialisation of the Rhondda had made it a hotbed of political radicalism by the 1930s. While it was natural that Annie should turn first to the Labour Party, the main electoral power in Rhondda, it did not satisfy her urge for action and change.
After a great deal of reading and reflection, and persuaded by the communist emphasis on political theory and action – as she said, at least the communists were “doing something” – Annie joined the Communist Party in 1938.
Communism in Rhondda was not then the lost cause it became later. In the 1930s, communism, always powerful in the unions, could compete strongly too in electoral politics – Maerdy, at the top of Rhondda Fach, was known as “little Moscow”. Communism continued to thrive during the war, with the Soviet Union fighting on the side of the Allies. As late as the post-war 1945 election, communist Harry Pollitt (1890-1969) lost the parliamentary seat of Rhondda East, which included Maerdy, to Labour by fewer than 1,000 votes. But that was the high-spot of communist success in vying for Parliament. Only five years later in 1950 the communist vote collapsed – Pollitt was more than 20,000 votes behind.
The communist cause had crumpled in the face of the radical legislation of the post-war Labour government which created the welfare state, the National Health Service and nationalised major industries, including the coal that was the lifeblood of Rhondda.
So when Annie took over as the communist parliamentary candidate for Rhondda East at the following election in 1955, she knew she could not win. But, known for her vigorous campaigning, she was proud she was always above Conservative and Plaid Cymru candidates and boasted she never lost her deposit. Even these figures reflect the personal respect in which she was held. The new communist candidate who eventually took over from her came bottom of the poll.
It was in the politics of Rhondda Borough Council that Annie’s electoral triumph came. In 1955 she was elected the communist councillor for Penygraig. It took her 13 attempts but, once elected, she became something of a fixture and represented Penygraig, with just two breaks, until she retired from the council at the age of 76. One break came early when she was, briefly, defeated, the other from illness with the long-term arthritis that plagued her.
Known for her integrity and commitment, Annie won universal respect. She campaigned tirelessly for child welfare, pensions and allowances, education, compensation for miners suffering industrial disease, hospital services and nursery education.
It was a time when women teachers often took a role in securing the welfare of their pupils, both in and out of school, and for the 40 years she was a teacher Annie was part of that culture, both in the National Union of Teachers and in the community, starting when she was active in helping to relieve the difficulties of families of unemployed miners during the Depression. She was insistent on the need to build new council houses – Rhondda had the reputation of having some of the worst housing in the country – and helped to secure a large new council estate in Dinas. She even succeeded in ending the racially discriminatory practices in the bar of a local club.
Her election as mayor was a tribute to the respect in which she was held across political boundaries. By then, her seniority on the council made her “next in line”, but the majority Labour councillors did not have to accept that. They took a definite decision to elect Annie. The die was cast, really, the previous year, when she was elected deputy mayor, as it was known the deputy would succeed.
Annie was widely respected in wider communist circles. She was a member of the executive committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) for 20 years, chair of the Welsh committee for 25 years. She visited Russia several times and taught herself to read Russian.
In 1960, when Nikita Khrushchev initiated a thaw in east-west relations, Annie was one of the British delegates who travelled to Moscow for a major international conference and there are lovely tales of how she impressed Khrushchev by singing him the Welsh national anthem Hen Wlad fy Nhadau.
As mayor, Annie welcomed Soviet ambassador Nicolai Lunkov when he was on a civic visit to Wales. A few years later, when new Russian ambassador Victor Popov made a civic visit, he and his wife Natalia made a special point of visiting Annie in her own home in Railway View, Llwynypia, before making their way to greet Rhondda’s then mayor.
Not that Annie always agreed with the party line. Indeed, she was well-known for often arguing against Soviet policies. Although she supported the way they looked after their people, she said, she thought the country was strong enough to allow more individual freedom.
Away from politics, Annie was active in community organisations and was known as friendly, open and popular. She was honoured by being invited to be vice-president of the famous Morlais Male Voice Choir and awarded an honorary MA by the Open University for her support of students. On her retirement from the council in 1983, she was made an honorary Alderman of Rhondda.
So, although Annie was in her seventies when she was thrust into the international media spotlight as the first communist mayor, she was an experienced politician and took it in her stride.
She was relaxed and communicative in newspaper and radio interviews – and, as a regular reader of the Morning Star, she delighted in the irony of being interviewed by right-wing newspapers. When she died in August 1986, just days before her 80th birthday, her death was reported as far afield as the New York Times.
Annie was supported in her life and work by a happy marriage of more than 40 years to Trevor Evan Powell, a fellow Communist Party member who had worked in men’s outfitting. He died in 2006 at the age of 100.
Her funeral was held at Rhondda’s Glyntaff Crematorium, when 700 people overflowed the two chapels and the Morlais Choir supported in song. Leading Labour Party and Plaid Cymru members were among the congregation, as well as her fellow communists. Annie’s life and work were reflected in the esteem and affection expressed by mourners.
As GPGB general secretary Gordon McLennan said in the funeral oration, Annie was one of the best-loved figures in the Welsh Labour movement. She had reacted to the poverty and unemployment around her with a determination to fight for a better world. There was hardly an aspect of Rhondda life in which she was not involved, he said. She was no career politician but someone dedicated to helping working people.
The claim that Annie was the first communist mayor in Britain, widely reported at the time, has since been contested. It was pointed out that Joe Vaughan of Stepney was the first communist mayor in 1920 and that Finlay Hart held an equivalent position in Clydebank some years earlier. Even so, Annie was the first and still only communist mayor elected in Wales and the first woman communist mayor in Britain.
Annie was a woman in a man’s world. She was a household name when there were still few women among political or community leaders. But although she has been an inspiration to many women since, Annie was not part of the women’s rights movement – any more than was her nemesis Margaret Thatcher!
As Annie said, she never saw her fight against poverty and poor living conditions as an aspect of feminism. She just never questioned her right to stand up and fight for people to live better lives.
The story of Annie Powell is about to be published in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, the online archive that holds accounts of the lives of 5,000 people who have made an impact on life in Wales. It is written by Jean Silvan Evans.