Why a revered wartime leader divides opinion in southWales
Political editor David Williamson assesses the ambivalent attitudes towards Winston Churchill’s controversial role in handling industrial unrest in south Wales
TOURISTS line up each day in Whitehall to enter Winston Churchill’s subterranean war rooms and Gary Oldman is a favourite to win an Oscar for his portrayal of the wartime Prime Minister in The Darkest Hour.
The Conservative leader was voted the “greatest Briton” of all time in a television poll in 2002 in which he was championed by Mo Mowlam, perhaps the most enduringly popular Labour figure of modern times. Wholehearted admiration for Churchill unites the UK – but not, perhaps, in Wales.
Stories of his handling of industrial unrest have smouldered for decades, and he was booed at Cardiff’s Ninian Park in the 1950 election campaign.
The Tonypandy Riots of 1910 and the Llanelli Riots of 1911 coincided with his time as Home Secretary and stories have been passed on of his alleged readiness to dispatch troops against workers.
Llanelli Labour AM Lee Waters recalls the depth of animosity.
He said: “I’d a very sweet old grandmother... The only person she would swear about was Churchill.
“She’d refer to him as a ‘bastard’. She literally never said a bad word about anybody, not that I can remember, and she certainly never used bad language...
“Her father, who’d been involved in the General Strike, clearly took a very dim view of Churchill and I think that was typical of Welsh working-class opinion.”
It is not just the older generation who give a different perspective on Churchill. Type “Churchill miners” into the search bar on Twitter and you will find many people who are keen to tell the world that he sent “in the military to crush a strike by striking Welsh miners”.
His true role in the Tonypandy Riots is the focus of debate.
Tensions soared in September 1910 when 950 miners were locked out of the Ely Pit in Penygraig. Owners had claimed that miners were deliberately working slowly on a new seam.
This triggered a strike across the Cambrian Combine network of pits. On November 7 miners gathered outside Llwynypia Colliery, the only one still in operation.
When stones were thrown and wooden fencing was ripped up, the police staged baton charges. Miners were driven back to Tonypandy Square.
The chief constable requested Army reinforcements.
Author Phil Carradice wrote for the BBC: “[Churchill] ordered that soldiers, despatched by the War Office from barracks at Tidworth, should be held back, kept in readiness at Cardiff and Swindon. Churchill did agree, however, to send in an extra 270 mounted and foot officers from the Metropolitan police force.”
There was more rioting the next evening and on November 9 soldiers arrived and went on patrol.
Cultural historian Peter Stead said: “The soldiers were in fact quite well-used in the strike and slightly lowered the tension compared to the police – because the police were so clearly in the pay of the coal owners. The coal owners could do what they wanted with the police.
“There was a note of caution and detachment with the troops.”
According to Rhondda Cynon Taf’s heritage website: “Although no authentic record exists of casualties of these disturbances, as many of the miners would have refused treatment in fear of being prosecuted for their part in the riots, nearly 80 policemen were injured and over 500 other persons, one Samuel Rhys later dying of his injuries.”
The Churchill family has deeply resented the narrative that soldiers attacked miners.
In 1978 then Prime Minister James Callaghan told Churchill’s grandson – also called Winston – in the Commons that he hoped he would “not pursue the vendetta of his family against the miners at Tonypandy for the third generation”.
Mr Churchill retorted that his grandfather’s “vendetta was against not the miners, but the Nazis”, adding that far from sending in troops he “detrained them at Didcot and sent instead policemen from the metropolis”.
But there is also resentment towards Churchill over the Llanelli railway riots of August 2011.
Railwaymen went on strike over average wages of just £1 a week. Troops charged to clear the line for a passenger train, but strikers were able to immobilise it by raking out the fire.
The confrontation that followed culminated in soldiers opening fire. Two men were killed – John “Jac” John, a 21-year-old tinplate worker, and Leonard Worsell, 19, who is understood to have had nothing to do with the strike.
Major rioting followed in which four people died.
Former Llanelli Plaid Cymru AM Helen Mary Jones said that one of the legacies of this time was an “ambivalent” attitude towards Churchill.
She encountered “a sense that he was the right person at the right time when it came to World War II but essentially not a good man.”
Swansea’s Professor Stead – who found himself riding in a lift with the former PM on a visit to the Commons at the start of the 1960s – argues the “stronger charge” against Churchill concerns the impact of his decisions on the Welsh economy in the wake of World War I.
He said: “Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer in that five-year period after the war when the miners’ wages were driven down and the country came off the gold standard. The economic consequences of Mr Churchill were far more devastating for south Wales.”