‘Rhodri had always nursed the possibility that he would see some sort of dawn of devolution’
On Tuesday, Welsh Labour will celebrate its centenary as the largest political force in Wales, having won more seats than any other party at the 1922 General Election – a status it has held ever since. As part of a series of events called Llafur 100, political editor-at-large Martin Shipton interviewed historian Professor Emeritus Prys Morgan of Swansea University about the influences which made his brother Rhodri Morgan the politician he was...
MANY people in Wales will remember Rhodri Morgan as an unstuffy politician of considerable charisma who was first a popular MP and then led what was then the National Assembly through its crucial first decade.
But most will not be aware of the unique and complex background that shaped who he was.
His father, TJ Morgan, was a distinguished professor of Welsh, while his mother, Huana Morgan, was one of Swansea University’s first female students who went on to teach at Rhymney County School in the Valleys town.
Rhodri’s elder brother Prys, now 85, said there were at least three strands to the early influences on the future First Minister.
He said: “We came from a Welshspeaking, Nonconformist family with a conventional background in that sense. So we absorbed all the values of Welsh chapel radicalism and in addition to that my great grandfather Thomas Rees had been turfed out of his farm just north of Swansea for speaking on radical platforms about land reform.
“He spoke on the reform of tenant farmers’ tenancies in the 1880s and 1890s with Tom Ellis, the Liberal MP for Merioneth who became Gladstone’s chief whip and was one of the pioneers of the Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) movement, which was one of the embryos of 20th century devolution.
“Not only that, but Thomas Rees’ own grandfather, Morgan Morgan, from the same area, had been imprisoned in 1843, with his wife, daughters and sons for leading the Rebecca Riots in west Glamorgan.
“So Rhodri’s heritage wasn’t just conventional chapel, Liberal Party radicalism. It was practical, direct action protest radicalism of the 19th century.
“On top of that was my father, who was a Celtic scholar, and my mother, who was a graduate in Welsh, the first research student of Saunders Lewis [co-founder of Plaid Cymru] in Swansea University.
“Many of my mother’s and father’s friends were people they met in Eisteddfodau and all sorts of Welsh society meetings, Cymmrodorion meetings, that kind of thing. They’d discuss Wales and Welsh culture, so clearly Rhodri breathed and ate that kind of Welsh culture plus Welsh radicalism. That was the first theme and clearly that meant a great deal to Rhodri.
“The second theme is slightly more difficult to define. And that seems to me to come from the fact that we were not brought up on a farm in the hills behind Swansea.
“We were brought up in the 1930s [Prys was born in 1937 and Rhodri in 1939] in Radyr, just outside Cardiff. Radyr had been set up as a wonderful, managerial, capitalist colony by the Earl of Plymouth in about 1895 or 1890. It was deliberately developed on a hillside about two miles from St Fagans Castle.
“It is ideally placed, or so the Earl of Plymouth thought, because it could be developed with a beautiful set of villas around a great golf course. The one thing that the middle classes of the 1880s and 1890s wanted was golfing. The villas were for businessmen from Cardiff. If you asked what they did, the answer was always ‘something on the docks’. It meant stocks and shares, coal export, import of pit props, all sorts of things.
“And there was another set of businessmen in Radyr all around us who couldn’t find a golf course up in Pontypridd – there was no flat land for it – and so they had to come and live in Radyr, play golf, catch the train, not down to the docks but up to Pontypridd and then on the various lines which went up into the Rhondda Fach, the Rhondda Fawr, the Taff Valley
and so on.
“That was the kind of village it was – one half consisted of rich, but now slightly impoverished, capitalists in the 1920s and 1930s and the other half were the servants of these houses, the chauffeurs, the maids, the gardeners and also the staff of St Fagans Castle. They were the most snobbish of all in many ways – people who tracked across the fields to work in the castle and its grounds for the Earl and the Countess themselves.
“But my parents had chosen that place not because it was a capitalist paradise but because it also allowed my father to catch the train down to the university in Cardiff very easily in seven or eight minutes. It also enabled them to walk from Radyr north
wards two miles to Gwaelod y Garth, which still had the remains of what had been one or two extremely troublesome coalmines, back in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s.
“Radyr was dominated by capitalism, but Gwaelod y Garth was a former mining village. By then all the miners were unemployed. My mother used to walk to Salem Chapel, a Baptist chapel, and my father walked to the Congregational Chapel.
“I remember my mother saying that, when the collection plate went around Salem Chapel, the collector would actually shout out to the treasurer in the big seat what each member was giving in the plate.
“It was the most embarrassing collection plate I ever saw in my life – and I never saw it in any other chapel. Miners who were out of work and had no income had their names shouted out, with the congregation told they had contributed nothing. It was humiliating.
“That was the contrasting world of our childhood. We were brought up in a world where, when we were taken out of the pushchair, there was a parade of nannies in Radyr – about 25 to 30 of them in grey uniforms and hats pushing their beautiful babies in Silver Cross prams, the Rolls Royce of the perambulator world. And that was the contrast with the povertystricken world of Gwaelod y Garth.
“That went deeply into Rhodri’s soul. Another thing that went deep into his soul was that my mother found she couldn’t teach children from Rhymney on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday because they were hungry and too tired to concentrate.
“But they could be taught on a Friday because every week a train would arrive with food parcels from Eastbourne. Eastbourne fed, on one day a week, the poverty-stricken and hungry children of Rhymney. Otherwise they would have slept through the lessons.
“That sort of thing went deep into Rhodri’s soul and created for him in Radyr a deep sense of the ridiculous injustice of the system that was surrounding him as a child. So it’s not surprising that he became deeply interested in politics.
“The third element I saw was that, during our childhood, there was a tendency for the capitalists of Radyr to move to villages like Llanblethian in the Vale of Glamorgan. What took their place were apparatchiks, technocrats and managerial people who came to run Welsh institutions – people like Alun Oldfield-Davies, our closest friend, who became head of the Welsh BBC, like Bill Arnold from Briton Ferry, another neighbour and friend who became head of the Temple of Peace and started the United Nations Association for Wales. Iorwerth Peate was a friend of ours – he became head of the new museum at St Fagans in 1948. Another great friend was William Thomas, head of the department for local government in Cathays Park.
“These were a new kind of Welsh person. A lot of them came to live in places like Radyr and they presented Rhodri with another kind of society that was developing and which came to appeal to him greatly.
“He thought why can’t Cardiff develop not as a coal-exporting city, but as a kind of capital. This was what his first book was about – Cardiff: Half And Half A Capital, after the famous ‘arf and arf’ – half chips and half rice.
“He thought this was the future of Cardiff – as a city that would use up all these brilliant organisers at the health board or distributing petrol coupons for the whole of Wales.
“My father himself had headed a Welsh institution during the war – he was secretary of the tribunal on national service and military conscription for the six years of the war. So he formed part of this new importance for Cardiff.
“These three influences, it seems to me, formed Rhodri as a very unusual character, even as a boy. And he was passionately interested in politics as a boy and determined that we should go to political meetings with him.
“He was absolutely furious with the way the Radyr crowd of people, who usually discussed politics at the bar of the golf club, would shout down any Labour candidate in a Parliamentary election meeting in the church rooms. So in Rhodri’s case the child really is the father of the man.”
Asked why, despite his role as a Welsh speaker and his Welsh cultureoriented background, Rhodri was drawn to Labour rather than Plaid Cymru, Prys said: “In 1963, when he became a member of the Labour Party, he’d just come back from America. Two years in Harvard had separated him from the Welsh experience.
“I think his American experience was also very formative and he came to understand that the problems he had seen in south Wales were in fact worldwide problems and to be seen in an even more grotesque and bizarre contrast between rich and poor in America.
“And he’d been at Oxford for three years. Again, that was a broadening experience which introduced him to the wider world of British politics.
“We should also not forget that, in 1963, most young Welsh people who were interested in politics would have joined the Labour Party, not Plaid. The popularity of Plaid among young people came after 1966 [when Gwynfor Evans won the Carmarthen byelection to become Plaid Cymru’s first MP]. So there was a crucial short time-lag here.
“Maybe if Rhodri had been entering politics in 1973 he might have turned to Plaid. He did have many Plaid friends in Cardiff.
“However, when he returned from Harvard he rented a house near Roath Park. One of the rooms was taken by Neil Kinnock, who could out-talk even Rhodri, and it was Neil who persuaded him to join the Labour Party.”
Asked why, despite Rhodri’s early interest in politics, he didn’t become an MP until he was 47 in 1987, Prys said: “Something held him back. One of his passions was administration.
“He was a very good technocrat. He liked doing things through administrative methods.
“I think he found it passionately interesting just becoming a civil servant, going to the Board of Trade and then becoming the economics advisor to the new South Glamorgan County Council in 1974.
“He enjoyed the work of economic planning. He loved city planning – designing things for cities, for the city of Cardiff. He loved economic planning and found the work extremely absorbing. I think that’s the only explanation I can give you, really.”
In 1979, a proposal to set up a Welsh Assembly was heavily defeated by four to one in a referendum. Asked whether, at the time he was first elected as MP for Cardiff West eight years later, Rhodri had believed that Welsh devolution would come to pass during his political career and that he’d play a significant part in taking it forward, Prys said: “I think he was always hoping for that. I never heard him despair about devolution. He always thought that sooner or later the tide would change. He always nursed this possibility and he never gave up hope.
“One of the things that annoyed him about Tony Blair favouring Ron Davies over Rhodri in 1998 [as leader of Welsh Labour] was that he’d converted Ron to devolution when he’d been against it in 1979, whereas Rhodri was always for it and in the minority of strong Labour supporters for devolution. Rhodri felt narked because he had stayed true to devolution and Ron was a fairly recent convert.
“I think Rhodri always nursed the possibility that he would eventually see some sort of dawn of devolution.”
In 1997, Rhodri had been very upset when Blair had failed to make him a minister and subsequently when as Prime Minister he’d backed Ron Davies and then Alun Michael to lead the Assembly.
Prys said: “I think that all strengthened Rhodri’s sense of the importance of devolution. And we’ve got to remember that the Radyr upbringing and so on meant that Rhodri didn’t see himself in any way as inferior to Tony Blair. After all, he’d been to the same college at Oxford [St John’s] as Tony Blair and therefore couldn’t be all that impressed by him.
“Although I do remember that when my mother and myself went to the Commons one day at Rhodri’s invitation to hear him make an intervention [in a debate] before making his maiden speech, this very smart chap in a trenchcoat appeared and talked to Rhodri and then went. Rhodri said, ‘That’s Anthony Blair, you know – Tony Blair – he’s the most brilliant chap really. I think he’ll go very, very far’.
“So he must have thought very highly of Tony Blair’s abilities, but nevertheless Rhodri was never overwhelmed by these public school people, because he himself had been surrounded for three years at Oxford by public school people in the very college where Blair was.
“Since childhood we’d known these kinds of people, although we were sort of left wing Welshie versions of the same society.
“Such a lot of Labour people adored Tony Blair. Rhodri didn’t adore him. His father was a judge living in Radyr – why should he look up to such a chap? Tony Blair was only the sort of Oxford person he’d met in college for three years.
“So Tony Blair saw Rhodri as untrustworthy – as someone who wouldn’t kowtow to him. He wanted loyalty and Rhodri would not give that sort of loyalty. He was always very prepared to be critical. Rhodri was always very critical of everybody – he wasn’t afraid of anybody.
“But I do remember one thing – Rhodri never criticised Alun Michael in my presence. I never heard Rhodri say a word against Alun Michael. He felt somehow that Alun had been forced into a most unpleasant position. He blamed Blair for all this business – not Alun Michael at all.
“And he always told me he felt that Blair’s dislike of Wales was caused by Blair’s little-publicised episode in his childhood – the death of Mrs Blair in Radyr at 52. And it was devastating for the teenager and he seemed to associate Cardiff and the Cardiff area with horror, tragedy and nastiness and so on. In a way there was an element of forgiveness in Rhodri.
“His attitude to Blair was a very complex one. In the end he never says anything really nasty about Blair in his autobiography.
“Rhodri was constantly expecting Blair to ruin devolution, to go back on his word. I remember Rhodri telling me that he’d said to Blair, ‘Why the heck do we have to have a bloody referendum, if the whole of Wales has voted for Labour and for non-Tory
MPs, all of whom stood on a devolution platform?’
“‘Ah’, Blair had said, ‘Yes. But if you don’t have a referendum, in the future when things turn against us, they will be able to blame us for not having a referendum. And they’ll push a referendum on us at an awkward moment, which we might lose. So we’ve got to have a referendum when things are going well for us’.
“Rhodri was always worried that he would go back on his word, but he never did, so Rhodri was eternally grateful to Tony Blair.”
Alun Michael was ousted after just nine months as the first leader of the Assembly, with Rhodri being elected unopposed as his successor.
Asked what Rhodri had hoped to achieve as First Minister, and to what extent his hopes were fulfilled, Prys said: “I think at the very beginning he felt all he could do was stop the boat being rocked, keep it on an even keel without quite knowing what port we’re sailing to, but as long as we don’t sink on the way to that particular port, wherever it may be. That’s how he felt.
“But in practical terms, the first thing he wanted to do was just to establish the Assembly in the Welsh mind as a respectable, solid, responsible institution, using what little power it had – and not making a mess of things.
“Everyone had said, if you let the Welsh loose, give them a budget, give
them an Assembly and they’ll hang themselves within about two or three years. And at the opening stages of the Assembly, my brother seemed to think it was going from one horror to another and doing absolutely nothing.
“When I complained to him that when he took over he wasn’t doing that much either, ‘Ah’, he said, ‘You’ve got to realise my first job is to make it a respectable institution. We’ve come in with such a tiny majority [in the 1997 referendum] that obviously large numbers of people don’t like us. So I’ve just got to be respectable, rather than revolutionary, for a couple of years’.
“But then he realised within a few years, for example when the foot and mouth disease had broken out, quite clearly within a short time the way that Carwyn Jones was running things was so efficient and showing up Margaret Beckett [who was in charge in England]. The agricultural side in
England made some howling mistakes that the Welsh side put right.
“There was the empirical localised knowledge of the way the Assembly was able to micro-manage where to put barriers up in such a brilliant way that even the Hay Festival was able to take place within hundreds of little barriers that prevented the sheep and the cattle from coming near Hay-onWye.
“It was so extraordinarily brilliant that the micro-management that was possible from Cardiff was not possible from the Ministry of Agriculture in London. It earned the spurs of certain ministers and made people think, ‘Well, maybe there is something in this Assembly – we seem to be able to deal with things quite effectively’.”
According to Prys, a serious mistake made by Rhodri led him to understand that the Assembly had developed more quickly than he’d realised. Prys said: “Rhodri scored an own goal in 2004 when he should have accepted an invitation to go to Normandy to the commemoration of the D-Day landings. Instead he sent minister
Edwina Hart to represent him.
“There was a terrible outcry. Why hadn’t the First Minister who is now our national leader gone? And the Assembly is our National Assembly. The First Minister can’t just send a deputy – he should have been there himself. Rhodri was taken aback by this. How could people regard him as a national leader? The Assembly had barely existed for five years.
“It was a bad mistake on his part because his efforts to make the Assembly a national institution had succeeded far more rapidly than he’d expected.
“Another example of how Rhodri was taken by surprise at how quickly the Assembly was accepted as a national institution was the way in which places abroad began to pay attention to it. He was having requests from the government of Poland, for example, which was struggling with how to get a balance between the government in Warsaw at the centre and a devolved government of the great big industrial province of Silesia, with its capital in the sort of Port Talbot of Silesia, which is Katowice.
“Rhodri had to go out to Katowice one horrible cold winter to advise the Polish government on the Welsh experience. He did the same in Brazil – providing another example of the standing of this infant Assembly in Cardiff with people abroad.
“Wales had the only government in the world at the time which had evolved a children’s policy, so when the governments of South America conferred with each other they came up on a computer with this government of ‘Gales’.
“Where the hell was Gales? The Argentinians said, ‘We know all about Gales, because the Galesas founded Patagonia. We know where Gales is and the government is in Cardiff’.
“They immediately got hold of the Welsh Government to discuss the children’s policy and out Rhodri had to go to a conference in Argentina.
“Rhodri himself was a bit taken aback at how quickly the Assembly had evolved, but of course he was held back by the dreadful limited legislative powers in the early years.
“He used to say how being in the Assembly was like watching paint dry – it was about as interesting as that. So he was always anxious to expand it from the awful county council-type model which was all he could sell to the Labour Party in the late-1990s.
“Rhodri was very pleased with the [constitutional] developments that allowed him by 2006/2007 to do a great deal more. In a sense he was disappointed by not doing more, but he felt positive by 2011 when the second referendum took place [to give the Assembly full lawmaking powers in devolved policy areas] and was won with a big majority.
“He told me, ‘Isn’t it nice to get a pat on the back at the end of your career? It’s wonderful and I can retire a happy man’.
“I said to him, ‘You can’t say you’re a happy man because Enoch Powell said every political career ends in disappointment’. Rhodri replied, ‘As with everything else, Enoch was completely wrong’.
“In the end, he thought the next generation of politicians would reap the benefit of his changes and his efforts.”
Rhodri didn’t see himself in any way as inferior to Tony Blair. After all, he’d been to the same college at Oxford as Tony Blair and therefore couldn’t be all that impressed by him
Prys Morgan