MORNING SERIAL
THE cornerstones of the life were no great help. He’d been born in 1856 into the large family of a hustling, bustling mid-Victorian coal speculator, Samuel Thomas, who’d branched out from the Aberdare valley to hit pay dirt with the opening up of rich seams in the mid-Rhondda from the 1870s. Enough to pay for a public school education and then a Cambridge degree for his bookish son who, in turn, inherited what became the Cambrian Combine agglomeration of pits. I could see why that might be of interest to the old man. It was around aggressive managerial demands that the Tonypandy riots of 1910, along with the year-long Cambrian Combine strike, occurred. But this was clearly no historian’s quest. No spinning inquiry either into the political detail that festooned the days of a Liberal MP in Imperial Britain until Thomas gave it up to concentrate on a dedicated career as coal capitalist. And more than that, one who longed to control destinies, shape lives, fulfil them through his own power and will. He had spelled it all out in chilling detail in essays and speeches of overweening ambition.
I skimmed a book of memorial essays by his devoted daughter and other contemporaries, along with a hagiographic biography, picking out the salient factual points: that he had been a fortunate survivor when the Germans torpedoed the Lusitania, with the loss of 1,200 lives, on its return transatlantic voyage from New York in May 1915, and that his chief contemporary and one-time political rival, Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions in that year and made the Prime Minister of the British Empire in December 1916, had been quick to use Thomas’ negotiating skills in America to ensure consistency of supply in the wartime crisis over munitions, and then placed him in his wartime cabinet, from 1917 as Food Controller, from where supreme administrative and imaginative genius allowed besieged Britain to live on rations rather than borrowed time. That won Thomas his Viscountcy, and probably hastened his early death at 62. How large their lives were. How central was their Wales. How significant was coal itself. How it all still lingered.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW