The legacy of Welsh Labour’s most radical MP
FORGET
Bevan.
The most radical Labour MP elected in Wales was SO Davies, who served his Merthyr Tydfil constituents from 1934 until his death in 1972.
His militancy was inherited from his father Thomas Davies, known as Y Llwynog (the Fox), who wrote poems attacking the mine owners and after being identified was blacklisted across the South Wales coalfield.
SO – Stephen Owen, but always known by his initials – followed in his father’s footsteps and became a leading figure in the South Wales Miners’ Federation.
Unusually for a working-class man of his time, he went to university, graduating from University College, Cardiff, in Latin, history and geography. His original intention had been to become a nonconformist minister, but he was rejected when it became clear that his Christianity was of a socialist stripe.
After the 1926 General Strike, the Dowlais district for which he was responsible was the last to return to work.
He was elected to Parliament at a byelection in 1934 and quickly established a reputation as a firebrand.
Keir Hardie and Aneurin
Always on the left of the Labour Party, he was often the conscience the party needed. He was a firm opponent of appeasing Hitler.
After the war, when Clement Attlee led Labour to a landslide victory and embarked on a series of widespread reforms, SO was constantly urging the party to go one step further.
He was a pivotal figure at the time of the Aberfan disaster in 1966, opposing those in the government like the Welsh Office Minister George Thomas who wanted the families’ relief fund to pay towards the remediation of the site.
The Labour Party deselected him in advance of the 1970 General Election, but he stood as an Independent and won, dying two years later aged 90.
Rob Griffiths, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, has written a new biography of SO to supersede his own earlier book from 1983.
Asked why he had brought out a new version, Griffiths said: “I found out so much new information about SO’s life and times from sources I either hadn’t been aware of or, more commonly, sources that have been opened or made more easily accessible. I’m thinking of the archives of the World Anti-Imperialist League in Amsterdam, papers relating to the Red International Labour Union, Special Branch and Intelligence service files, and much easier access to local newspapers and left-wing newspapers of the time.
“There was just so much more to say, not just about SO but about his family background. I’ve dug up so much new material that it’s not so much updating, it’s almost a complete rewriting of the original book.”
Griffiths said it was only when he read the contemporary newspapers of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties in particular, that he realised SO was a more significant figure than perhaps appeared from the vantage point of the Eighties and the Nineties.
“In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, he spoke across the length and breadth of Britain. He wasn’t just a South Wales union leader or a South Wales politician. He addressed meetings across Britain and Ireland, and very often he was the headline speaker. He was the speaker that people wanted to come and see.
“He was so controversial, so outspoken – and I hadn’t realised that. Clearly I’m an admirer of SO and much of his politics, but I hadn’t realised he was a fairly significant figure in left-wing and Labour politics.
“Similarly his trade union career, particularly when he was vice-president of the South Wales Miners. He was a senior representative of the union at major national and international events, to an extent I hadn’t realised – even during the lock-outs that followed the General Strike in 1926, he was such a prominent figure.
“His international links as well were more extensive than I realised. He had links with the trade unions and the Communist Party in Germany throughout the 1920s to the point that they worried British intelligence.
“Even after the Nazis took power in 1933, he retained those links with the underground movement in Germany, to the extent of going there in 1936 with another MP and demanding that they release the Communist and trade union leaders that were then in the concentration camps – an act of great courage, actually, which also hit the national and international headlines.”
“He wasn’t a member of the Communist Party – if I could find such evidence, I would publish it. But, with some disagreements here and there, he was by and large a close ally of the party. He supported almost all of the party’s policies on every domestic and international question.
“But he was very clear in the early part of his political life that the mass electoral party of the working class had become the Labour Party and that’s where socialists should be.”
■ Reddest of the Reds, by Robert Griffiths is published by Manifesto Press at £19.50.