'The Kaiser's Black Guards' - Our History 16 (Vol. 2 New Series)

No. 16

HISTORY Vol.2 New Series

£1.50

‘The Kaiser’s Black Guards’:The South Wales Miners Strike of July 1915 by Robert Griffiths

Britain’s Road to Socialism The latest edition of the CP’s programme - presents and analyses capitalism and imperialism in its current form; answers the questions of how a revolutionary transformation might be brought about in 21st Century Britain; and what a socialist and communist society in Britain might look like.

The first edition was published in 1951 after nearly six years of discussion and debate across the CP, labour movement and working class. Over its 8 editions it has sold more than a million copies in Britain and helped to shape and develop the struggle of the working class for more than half a century.

Published by the Communist Party August 2015 Copyright © Communist Party 2015 Author: Robert Griffiths Series Editor: Graham Stevenson ISBN 978-1-908315-28-1

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HISTORY 1

Our History No. 16

No. 16

Vol. 2, New Series

£1.50

“The Kaiser’s Black Guards” The South Wales Miners Strike of July 1915

by Robert Griffiths CONTENTS page

Introduction by Graham Stevenson The Kaiser’s Black Guards Notes “War! And the Welsh Miner” by W F Hay V. I. Lenin’s letter to Comrade Thomas Bell

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Introduction Will Hay is better known to history as W.F. Hay, one of the original authors of The Miners’ Next Step, although Noah Ablett has become known (probably wrongly) as the principal author. But Hay was also the president of the South Wales Socialist Society (later the South Wales Communist Council) and his article in the Industrial Syndicalist in November 1910, one of a linked series of pamphlets edited by Tom Mann and produced by the Industrial Syndicalist Education League, was arguably the first shot in a period of intense class struggle.

It focused on a major industrial dispute that aimed to regulate wages and this culminated in a conflagration when forces from the Glamorgan and Bristol Constabulary engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with local miners.

Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, reputedly sent in British Army troops, a cause of ill-feeling towards him that has never quite faded in south Wales.

In 1912, The Miners' Next Step was produced. This call to action urged coal miners to adopt a more rigorous form of trades unionism and, going beyond that, changing the whole of society through a form of revolutionary trade unionism, followed by workers’ control of industry. Strictly speaking a suggested scheme for the reorganisation of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, it was issued by the Unofficial Reform Committee and published in Tonypandy in 1912.

The critique of the style of union leadership that focused on social partnership and moderation hit the mood of the times. Whilst ideas about the adoption of a unified strike policy and the nationalisation of the mines were incredibly far-sighted.

Rob Griffiths’ invaluable work brings to light a sometimes neglected but hugely important success story of the South Wales miners. It also provides the backcloth for a reading of W.F. Hay's extraordinary pamphlet, War! and the Welsh Miner, the text of which we reproduce here in its entirety, since the very few copies available in archives are not easily accessible to all. The pamphlet is reproduced with the same font and spelling as the 1914 edition.

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Police occupy the town of Tonypandy in 1910

Hay was an early opponent of the war that began in August 1914, calling on the miners to down tools in opposition to imperialist intrigue. Issued under his by-line of editor of the South Wales Worker, his argument was simple - war offered nothing to the working class. Over a century later, such clarity rings as true as it always did.

Graham Stevenson Convenor, Communist Party History Group

The Communist Party History Group is always interested in any suggestions for future editions of Our History, contact: history@communist-party,org.uk “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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“THE KAISER’S BLACK GUARDS”: The South Wales Miners Strike of July 1915

At the outset of the imperialist Great War in 1914, the South Wales coalfield was not only the biggest in Britain; it also produced the highest quality steam coal which exclusively powered the Royal Navy, having won a series of Admiralty trials between 1847 and 1851. Other navies had then followed suit. [1] Sinking shafts to the deeper seams of steam coal had enabled the Rhondda valleys to displace the Cynon and Monmouthshire valleys as the centre of the industry.

On the eve of the war, and at its peak, the coalfield was employing 233,000 men to produce 57 million tons in 1913. There were 53 collieries operating in the Rhondda alone. The high capital investment needed to reach the steam coal and the struggle against rival producers, notably in north-east England, had accelerated the process of monopolisation, so that half a dozen companies came to dominate the south Wales coalfield. The biggest included Powell Duffryn, PD – widely referred to as ‘Poverty and Death’ – headed by one-time Liberal MP David Davies, and the Cambrian Combine headed by another former Liberal MP, D.A. Thomas, soon to go the House of Lords. The coalowners – or at least their top managers – were hard, driving men. In May 1915, Thomas had been aboard the Lusitania when it was sunk by a German torpedo. A local Cardiff paper had carried the poster: ‘Great National Disaster. D.A. Saved’. [2] Together with the dangerous conditions in their mines (the deepest in Britain), such coal barons helped to shape a new generation of militant union leaders in the South Wales Miners Federation (the ‘Fed’). The old guard had begun to lose ground in the first decade of the 20th century.

Embodied by the President of the ‘Fed’ and Rhondda miners’ agent William Abraham (universally known by his bardic name ‘Mabon’) and General Secretary Thomas Richards, they preferred conciliation to “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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confrontation, believing that the age of strikes had passed. Both of them had been elected originally as ‘Lib-lab’ MPs, claiming to represent the interests of labour through the Liberal Party; both had subsequently campaigned against the union’s affiliation to the Labour Representation Committee in the ballots of 1906 and 1908. But in the upsurge of working class militancy that swept across Britain between 1910 and 1913, it was the class collaboration preached – sometimes literally – by the old Fed leadership that looked more and more like the relic of a bygone age.

In the South Wales coalfield, a series of lock-outs and strikes began in August 1910, when Cambrian miners were locked out for not accepting the withdrawal of extra money for working in ‘abnormal places’. A strike then broke out in PD collieries in Aberdare, before all 12,000 Cambrian miners came out officially in November. As other strikes and ferocious street battles broke out across south Wales, intensified by transport and other strikes in the great summer unrest of 1911, the region in effect came under military occupation.

It was in this climate that the Unofficial Reform Committee sprang up and formulated its famous manifesto for workers’ control of industry, The Miners’ Next Step (1912). The Rhondda miners who helped draft it – notably checkweighers Noah Rees and Noah Ablett (pictured right), W.F. Hay, Charlie Gibbons and Tom Smith – had received a Marxist education at Ruskin or the Central Labour College and through the Plebs League. [3] While some were members of the ILP or the British Socialist Party, many were also heavily influenced by ‘syndicalism’: the doctrine of revolutionary trade unionism. In 1911, Ablett and Cambrian strike committee leaders Rees and Smith were elected to the Fed’s executive council, while continuing to exercise democratic leadership on lodge and combine rank and file committees. Three of the Fed’s most senior officials were voted off the union’s British executive in favour of three rank and file militants and, his industrial and political policies rejected, Mabon stood down as president the following year.

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Communist Party History Group The memoirs of General Sir Nevil Macready, the unofficial governor of south Wales during the Cambrian dispute, paint a vivid portrait of the respective class leaderships of the time. He wrote: On the one side was Leonard Llewellyn [the company’s general manager – RG], a forceful and autocratic man, admired by the miners for his sporting instincts and gallantry whenever a disaster took place in one of his mines, but a man who, by his rough-andready methods, was apt to drive those working for him to a state of desperation. Behind him was Mr D.A. Thomas, who, from the dealings I had with him seemed to be under the impression that his standing as a member of Parliament gave him the right to lay down the law on any matter in which his interests were concerned ... [4]

On the other side, Macready continued: In the Rhondda Valley [there are two of them – RG] the strike committee consisted of half a dozen fanatical socialists, strongly impregnated with the ideas of Karl Marx. On several occasions they came to see me. Sparing of words as a rule, rigid teetotallers, unable to see beyond the narrow tenets of their creed, they undoubtedly exercised a strong hold over the strikers, and defied the authority of the miners’ agents, the elected representatives of the men, a fact which complicated the situation as the employers very properly refused to recognise these self-constituted leaders ...

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Macready recounts several examples of the self-constituted mine owners and their managers exaggerating or inventing horror stories about the strikers, and makes plain his distaste for their own arrogance, dishonesty and ‘dictatorial tone’. At the same time, his respect for the strike leaders breaks through. In a private meeting to discuss picketing and scab labour, their hostility to him thaws a little over tea and ginger beer. He concluded: ‘Except for occasional outbursts of wild talk about the terrible things that would happen if their demands were not met, the committees were reasonable men to deal with, and adhered strictly to any engagements they entered into’.

Although they were defeated in the Cambrian battle after eleven months, not least by the machinations of their leaders at British level, these were the Marxists, syndicalists and militants who agitated successfully for the Britain-wide strike which won a statutory national minimum wage throughout the industry in 1912. They published papers such as the Rhondda Socialist – subtitled the ‘The Bomb of the Rhondda Workers’ – and organised Marxist education in the miners’ libraries and institutes across the South Wales coalfield.

Battle weariness, a shortage of funds and the illusion of victory all contributed to a decline in militancy after 1912. The Senghennydd disaster, with its loss of 439 lives, cast a shadow across the coalfield from October 1913. Nonetheless, industrial and political confidence remained high enough, among Fed activists at least, for its executive council on August 1, 1914, to reject a request from the Admiralty to work during two days’ holidays, in view of the deteriorating international situation. ‘We decline to encourage or in any way countenance the policy of active intervention by this country in the present European conflict, and we are also strongly of the opinion that there is no necessity for Great Britain to become involved in the war between Austria and Serbia’, the executive resolved at its meeting in Cardiff. Instead, the Fed urged the British government to maintain its neutrality and work for a peaceful settlement of the conflict, while the International Miners Organisation convene a peace conference of its constituent unions. [5] “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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But within three days, on August 4, Britain had declared war against Germany and all the fine statements of international working class solidarity were blown away. The people of south Wales, including the miners, danced to the war drums as much as anyone else. Almost immediately, and as Hay’s anti-war pamphlet began to circulate, the Fed leadership acceded to an Admiralty request that miners producing coal for the Navy work extra hours, even on Sundays. Thereafter, the union became preoccupied with military recruitment and problems of industrial dislocation, unemployment, poverty and the profiteering so rife in the food industry.

Responding to press reports of sweeping triumphs and atrocities on the part of the barbaric ‘Hun’, many Fed leaders urged their members to volunteer for the armed forces. One in six south Wales miners rushed to the colours, as high a rate as any coalfield in Britain. Many were moved by appeals to their Welsh patriotism from the pulpit and Chancellor Lloyd George (who had opposed the Boer War), summoning up the spirit of Owain Glyndwr to fight in defence of plucky little Belgium, a fellow member of the ‘five foot five nations’. [6] A Welsh Army Corps was formed, with bilingual recruitment posters and Welsh-speaking officers, despite initial objections from Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener. He actually told Prime Minister Asquith that ‘no purely Welsh regiment is to be trusted; they are always wild and insubordinate and ought to be stiffened by a strong infusion of English or Scotch’. [7] A minority in the labour movement remained true to socialist and anti-imperialist principles. Although he wobbled once or twice under enormous pressure, Merthyr Tydfil MP Keir Hardie and a section of the ILP continued to oppose the war, some on pacifist grounds. So did many members of the British Socialist Party, although not its leader Henry Hyndman. Among the South Wales miners, former militants such as C.B. Stanton, George Barker, Frank Hodges and Charlie Gibbons went over to the war party, while Noah Ablett and the young Arthur Cook (pictured right in later years) went quiet, at least for a time. A veteran miner of those days, “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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J.L. Williams, later recalled the position taken by Ablett on the war: ‘Oh well, he was against it, but not in the way that the ILPers were. I mean, there was a tendency I would say among the more revolutionary to regard the war as more or less inevitable, and the war had to be accepted as a stage in the development of capitalism. So, we shouldn’t be concerning ourselves unduly with opposing the war, but rather take advantage of the war situation to further our own industrial work for instance. I think that would be it, a fair reading of their attitude’. [8] An outstanding exception to the war fever was William Ferris Hay. Originally from Reading, staunch syndicalist, co-author of The Miners’ Next Step, editor of the South Wales Worker (as the Rhondda Socialist was renamed in 1913) and a miner at the Standard Colliery in the Rhondda, his pamphlet War! and the Welsh Miner was a savage polemic against ‘European capitalism’, whose conflicting nations he likens to ‘half a dozen shopkeepers, each utterly unscrupulous, who have hired bravoes to protect their property and lives from their fellow thieves’. Published in August 1915, it railed against the ‘profit mongers’, the ‘prostitute press’ and militarism for their role in “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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turning the ‘working cattle’ of rival countries against each other, in the name of patriotism and the flag, but really in the service of the capitalists who are competing for markets and territory. [9] In appealing to labour to oppose the war, Hay identified the potential power of the Welsh miners: We know that the only defence of the British Capitalist, against the clutching hands of his fellow pirates across the channel, is the British Navy. The effectiveness of this depends upon a continuous and ample supply of Welsh Steam Coal. This can only be produced with the consent of the Welsh Collier. We have been taught, my Lords and Gentlemen, the Capitalist Class, that it is legitimate to take advantage of every accident of circumstance, to make the best bargain for ourselves. You have taught us this by many a bitter lesson in the past. Your present action in raising food prices but confirms your previous teaching. We propose to apply that teaching to existing conditions. If, Gentlemen, you imagine that to serve your need, we are going to slave on reduced rations ... to produce the wherewithal to save your Empire and continued dominations over us in the future, you imagine a vain thing!

By spring 1915, other workers were beginning to shed their illusions about war as a romantic adventure that would crowned with a swift victory.

Engineers and shipbuilders had struck for a much-needed pay rise on Clydeside. But when the Fed asked the Monmouthshire and South Wales Coalowners Association for talks on a new wages agreement, they met with an unprecedented snub. During the three months from April 1, as the old agreement expired, the owners would refuse to discuss a replacement with the miners’ representatives. At British level, the union’s demand for a ‘war bonus’ pay rise of 20 per cent to meet escalating food and fuel prices was rejected. On April 19, the 292 delegates representing 143,000 South Wales miners decided in Cardiff that their delegation to a forthcoming Britainwide conference would call for strike notices to be tendered in pursuit of the bonus. However, this South Wales proposal was subsequently opposed by all the other coalfields in the Miners Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), who preferred government intervention to convene a conference with the coalowners – which ended in deadlock, with Prime Minister Asquith ruling “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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that district settlements be negotiated rather than a national one.

In May 1915, the South Wales conciliation board agreed a bonus of 17.5 per cent, higher than most although none were awarded the full 20 per cent.

Within the week, the Liberal government had broadened into a coalition one, with Tories and labour movement leaders joining it, including Fed president William Brace whose union duties were assumed by vice-president James Winstone – himself no revolutionary syndicalist either, but an ILP member who had neither proselytised for the war nor repudiated the need for strikes.

On June 9, the owners now told the South Wales conciliation board that they would not – for the duration of the war – negotiate a new settlement on all the different wage rates. Their man inside the Ministry of Munitions, Macready’s acquaintance from the Cambrian dispute Leonard Llewellyn, knew that Lloyd George’s Munitions of War Bill might include the mining industry in its anti-strike provisions. In the event, it did not – but only because the union’s British leadership had volunteered to arrange a compulsory arbitration scheme with the owners in each district to resolve disputes. However, the Fed made clear that South Wales would not be bound by any such undertaking. Even so, the union and the government could see that it was, above all, the owners’ intransigence that could provoke action in the Welsh coalfield.

Throughout late June, daily meetings at the Board of Trade in Whitehall produced no movement on the Fed’s claim for consolidated and simplified wages scales. Although the owners had doubled the price of Welsh steam coal being supplied to the Admiralty since the outbreak of the war, they were determined not to move much beyond the pay rates imposed on their employees five years previously (and capped at 60 per cent above their level in 1879!). A special conference of the Fed decided on June 30, the final day of the old settlement, to continue at work while negotiating on the basis of improved proposals from the Board of Trade.

Then, twelve days later, fed up with eight more quibbling points from Board “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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of Trade president Walter Runciman, Fed delegates voted almost two-to-one to overturn the recommendation of their executive and set a 48-hour deadline for resolving all outstanding matters before the commencement of industrial action. As news was being reported of a munitions shortage and of the fighting in Italy, Gallipoli and the Dardanelles and German South West Africa, the 156,000-strong South Wales Miners Federation had decided to stop work in the middle of a world war, on Thursday, July 15, 1915.

As a miner in Bedlinog, J.L. Williams could remember that this had not been a decision taken without conflicting sentiments. Although he opposed the war like most of his fellow ILP members, plenty of other miners in his own locality and beyond the coalfield did not: ‘The Lodge would be divided, divided. There were factors coming in of course, so many people had relatives out in the war, I mean that would be a big thing locally, of course in every mining town as in other towns.

And, it was a delicate question in many places, but, the stories ... but everybody agreed pretty well that we had to get better wages and conditions to produce this coal, and at that time when there was a demand for this higher output, and prices going up so rapidly ...’ [10] Two days before the stoppage was due to begin, a royal proclamation was issued under the Munitions of War Act, making it a criminal offence for anyone in the South Wales coalmining industry to engage in a strike or lockout. The punishment would be a fine of £5 a day (more than twice the weekly wage). Posters appeared at 700 or so collieries ordering the miners to work and proclaiming ‘God Save the King’, although it looked likely that neither he nor they – except for pickets – would be there to see them on Thursday. The bourgeois papers unanimously welcomed the proclamation, although only the Daily Mail could have carried the headline: ‘Effect in South Wales – Miners Glad at Action’. [11] Informed that the Fed had decided not to refer conduct of the dispute to the British union, the MFGB executive declared the coalowners responsible for the deadlock, but urged the South Wales miners to carry on working in view of the ‘serious national crisis’ caused by the war. The Fed executive met on “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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the eve of the strike and agreed to propose that the following day’s special conference order an immediate return to work while negotiations take place with the government. By 18 votes to four, it rejected recommending to delegates that the strike continue. The two Noahs had led the minority against the old guard and ex-militants turned jingoes such as C.B.Stanton.

At the special conference in Cardiff, delegates rebuffed the executive’s proposal by 180 to 113. When Winstone suggested from the chair that the Fed leadership go to London for more talks, he met an angry response from a speaker who had already rejected the ‘Runciman rubbish’ and who now told him: ‘No, you have been to London too often, that city of the Philistines, until you have become as bad as them ... We have stated our demands, and if the Government wants to negotiate, let them come to us here in South Wales’. [12]

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The strike was solid from the outset and proceeded with enthusiasm despite the barrage of press denunciation. Throughout the British Empire, newspapers exploded in fury. The Times confidently asserted that German agents were behind this mortal threat to the realm, while at the same time the unfortunate miners were the ‘cat’s-paws of a small number of agitators’. Its editorials insisted that any trouble should be ‘resolutely met’ and with no concessions, because ‘the question is no longer one of wages but of governing the country’. The Standard, too, condemned ‘Germany’s allies in Wales’. The Manchester Guardian insisted that ‘the enemy must be met literally by all the resources at the disposal of the State’, with union funds seized, strike pay banned, food supplies halted and ‘the whole area treated as if it were an enemy’s country’. The Morning Post declared that ‘there are German agitators and German money at work’, wondering why the government was protecting them and adding that: ‘For years South Wales has been a hotbed of class hatred, radicalism, syndicalism and socialism’.

The Daily Express claimed that the miners had been forced to strike without a secret ballot and, in a poem, described those in favour of the action as ‘the Kaiser’s Black Guards’ who had ‘captured England’s coal supplies’. The paper offered a £5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the German and other enemy aliens responsible for the strike.

Going one better, the Financial News revealed that £60,000 in gold coins had been disbursed to the miners and their supportive publications. [13] On the other side, Keir Hardie’s weekly paper in Merthyr Tydfil, The Pioneer, reported how the borough’s previously divided miners had largely united around the strike call and reprinted George Lansbury’s suggestion of how the government could settle the coal dispute: ‘put the coalowners under lock and key until the end of the war’. Another contributor saw the strike as ‘deplorable’ but inevitable after the coalowners of south Wales had revealed themselves to be a ‘body of unreasonable, greedy, rapacious, and unpatriotic employers’. [14] A story circulated in the mining communities that Glamorgan police chiefs were so concerned about the influence of Karl Marx in the south Wales valleys, they had issued a warrant for his arrest. [15] “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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Although government discussions with Fed leaders and coalowners found little compromise over the weekend, a few newspapers – even the Daily Mail – began to tone down their anti-miner rhetoric, a few going so far as to acknowledge that some blame might lie with the employers. But still the Times wanted the miners charged with treason, while the Board of Trade refused further discussions for as long as the miners stayed above ground.

Then, suddenly, out of the blue, Munitions Minister Lloyd George, Runciman and Labour leader Arthur Henderson announced their intention to come to Cardiff by train on Monday evening, July 19. As the first official historian of the South Wales miners, Robin Page Arnot put it, ‘Mahomet Goes to the Mountain’. [16] All day on the Tuesday, the three Cabinet ministers and their civil servants met the Fed’s executive council to hammer out a settlement. Almost all the miners’ amendments to Runciman’s final pre-strike memorandum were accepted, the government would secure the compliance of the coalowners and the miners would immediately resume work with no victimisation.

On Wednesday, a delegate conference endorsed the settlement by a large majority and the pit-head wheels began turning again on Thursday, July 22.

The coalowners acceded to the new terms in almost total silence. Most of the press went quiet, too. Everybody knew the miners had won a famous – or infamous – victory, but only the militants and Marxists wanted to proclaim it. Announcing the settlement in the House of Commons, Asquith did his best to claim at least a moral victory for his side, commending the coalowners for their ‘public spirited action’ in helping secure a ‘reasonable’ agreement against the forces of coercion. [17] As the dry, official history of the Ministry of Munitions recorded: In effect the miners obtained nearly everything they had demanded ... The strike demonstrated the impotence of legal provisions for compulsory arbitration where a large body of obstinate men were determined to cease work rather than surrender their claims. [18] Britain’s ruling class and its press understood this point all too well, hence their determination to move on from the dispute in near silence as quickly “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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“Wallowing in the Sewer” Western Mail 17 July 1915

as possible. All the shouting about bountiful German agents bribing Welsh miners to sabotage Britain’s war drive fell silent, Prime Minister Asquith admitting at the end of the strike that there had been ‘no foundation whatever’ for the reports. Board of Trade president Runciman concurred, although by then the lies had served their purpose, however unsuccessfully. [19] It may also be significant, in this respect, that while Lloyd George in his War Memoirs (1933) happily recounts his relative success when intervening in other wartime industrial disputes, including in south Wales, he makes no mention of the biggest dispute of all.

Certainly, the Fed’s victory confirmed the importance of having a layer of “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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militants who understood the nature of the forces ranged against them, recognised the class enemy’s points of vulnerability and had the political self-confidence to believe that a united and mobilised workforce could secure a clearly defined and popular objective. In this, they had been assisted by the Fed’s democracy, imperfect though it was. Proposals in 1912 to reorganise the coalfield’s 20 districts, limit their autonomy and elect the whole SWMF executive council by coalfield ballot had been rejected by the “membership in a referendum, thereby perpetuating the power of the miners’ agents”. [20] But the Fed’s leadership could always have its recommendations overturned at special delegates’ conferences – as had just been demonstrated so dramatically.

Of course, for the Fed the strike had been primarily an industrial dispute.

But given its national and international context, it had been bound to acquire a political character, especially given the response of the government and the press. Doubtless emboldened by their success, the Welsh miners proceeded to take further action in the course of the war. In the second half of 1915, at least four local stoppages occurred in the Rhondda and Aberdare against the employment of non-unionists. Further battles broke out until the government agreed in March 2016 that all new entrants to the industry must join a recognised trade union.

By then, an even bigger fight had loomed over the coalfield and demonstrated not only the solidifying economic class consciousness of the South Wales miners, but their advancing political consciousness as well. The spectre of military conscription had reappeared. A growing shortage of ‘cannon fodder’ at the front had prompted the government to introduce a Military Service Bill in January 1916. The Fed’s policy was for strike action should the bill become law – but it could not win this position within the MFGB. The initial exclusion of coal mining and other ‘essential industries’ from the military net subsequently reduced and divided the opposition.

According to Ness Edwards, later a Labour MP but then the young chair of the Fed’s Vivian Lodge, the mood in the South Wales coalfield had become markedly anti-conscription on both pacifist and political grounds as an “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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‘active rank and file movement with a working-class view of war’ emerged.

[21] The case made by Will Hay was winning many more converts (although not yet enough to produce victory for ILP candidate and SWMF president James Winstone over pro-war Aberdare miners’ agent C.B. Stanton in the Merthyr Boroughs by-election following Keir Hardie’s death in September 1915). Certainly, the July 1915 strike had a lasting impact on political loyalties in the valleys. Many decades later, Robin Page Arnot would still meet men who were boys back then and could remember how those events played a big part in prising people away from Liberalism. [22] Early in 1917, the Fed proposed strike action against the planned ‘comb out’ of miners into the armed forces, but again failed to win sufficient MFGB support and chose not to go it alone. By this time, political hostility to the war was spreading rapidly at home as the bodies piled up abroad.

Edwards was among those jailed for refusing military service; Rhondda rank and file leader Arthur Cook was locked up for sedition; and Arthur Horner – later the Communist leader of Britain’s mineworkers – was imprisoned upon his return from Ireland, having preferred a stint with the Irish Citizen’s Army to military service with His Majesty’s forces.

Inspired by the first Russian revolution of 1917, 66 Fed lodges decided to send representatives to the inaugural meeting of a South Wales Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates on July 29 in Swansea. As it turned out, the proceedings never began as ex-servicemen occupied the hall with the connivance of the police, press and local politicians. Anthracite delegate S.O. Davies stayed behind to argue with the mob before being ejected from the Elysium Hall. [23] Nevertheless, by then the die had been cast as far as the politics of the Fed and the South Wales coalfield were concerned. These would be Labourist – but with a strong dash of Communism. Between 1918 and 1923, all local councils and parliamentary constituencies in the coalfield fell to Labour, most of the new MPs being former Central Labour College students and ex-miners sponsored by the Fed. Social democrats, socialists and Marxists contested union positions against one another, often found ways to unite in the struggle for wages, conditions and ‘100 per cent trade unionism’, usually took left-wing positions on international questions, but “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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found it more difficult to reach a stable compromise on matters of domestic politics.

The beginning of Lenin’s letter to Tom Bell

During the war, the Unofficial Reform Committee had been revived and, in 1919, its supporters in the South Wales Socialist Society published a plan for workers’ control – rather than state control – of a nationalised coal industry, although in the end the MFGB failed to fight the return of the pits to their owners from wartime government control. [24] Around the same time, militants such as S.O. Davies (Dowlais), Ablett (Merthyr) and Cook (Rhondda) were elected as miners’ agents.

Although left-wingers such as Horner and Davies were elected to senior Fed positions in the 1920s, and Cook became national secretary of the MFGB, other leading posts continued to be filled by such non-Marxist Labour Party members as Tom Richards and Enoch Morrell. While many Fed activists followed the South Wales Socialist Society into the Communist Party, established in 1920, plenty of them stayed with Labour and the ILP. “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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After a 13-week lockout the following year, the Fed’s annual conference voted by a 2:1 ratio to call upon the MFGB to affiliate to the Red International of Labour Unions, based in Moscow, Lenin enthusiastically proposed that communists create a mass party in the South Wales coalfield and begin publishing a left-wing daily or weekly paper there. [25] These developments – mirrored in the industrial districts of central Scotland, northern England, the Midlands and east London – produced the same alarm in ruling class circles as had the strike of July 1915. But by then, in reaction to the rise of Marxism within a more militant working class movement, the Security Service (MI5) had been reorganised and was producing its fortnightly reports to the Cabinet on ‘Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom’. Arthur Cook, Horner, S.O. Davies and their Welsh comrades featured prominently, no longer as the ‘Kaiser’s Black Guards’, but as the Red Guards of the Kremlin.

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Notes 1. Andrew Lambert, Battleships in Transition, the Creation of the Steam Battles Fleet 1815-1860 (1984); Michael Asteris, ‘The Rise and Decline of South Wales Coal Exports 1870-1930, Welsh History Review, vol.13 no.1 (1986).

2. Evening Express, 8 May 1915.

3. David Egan, ‘The Unofficial Reform Committee and The Miners’ Next Step’, Llafur vol.2 no.3 (1978).

4. Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life Vol.1 (1924) p.140.

5. SWMF minutes quoted in Robin Page Arnot, South Wales Miners: A History of the South Wales Miners’ Federation 1914-1926 (1975) p.3.

6. Speech at the Queen’s Hall, London, reported in The Times, 20 September 1914.

7. Michael & Eleanor Brock, eds., H.H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley (1982) letter no.193, 30 October 1914.

8. South Wales Miners Library, J.L. Williams interviewed by David Egan, 24 April 1973, http://cymru1914.org/en/view/sound/aaaab00000030.

9. The pamphlet, printed by Thomas Bros. in Tonypandy, carries no publication date. But the author makes clear his desire for the Fed executive to stand by its rejection of the Admiralty’s request for holiday working, indicating that it must have been written between August 1, 1914, and capitulation on August 4.

10. As 8 above.

11. Page Arnot (1975) p.66.

12. Ness Edwards, History of the South Wales Miners’ Federation (1938).

13. Page Arnot (1975) pp.73-78.

14. The Pioneer, 24 July 1915.

15. As 8 above.

16. Page Arnot (1975) p.83; cartoon—Western Mail 14 July 1915, “Portrait of a Welah Collier as He Must Appear in the Eyes of the Western World” 17. House of Commons, Debates, 21 July 1915, vol.73 col.1500.

18. Official History of the Ministry of Munitions Volume IV: The Supply and Control of Labour 1915-16 (2008 edn.), part II p.9.

19. House of Commons, Debates, 21 July 1915, vol.73 col.1500; 26 July “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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1915, vol.73 col.1967.

20. Robin Page Arnot, South Wales Miners: A History of the South Wales Miners’ Federation 1898-1914 (1967) pp.321-25. The Fed could not agree on a radically more centralised democratic model of organisation until 1934: see Hywel Francis & David Smith, The Fed: A History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (1980) pp.183-89.

21. Edwards, (1938).

22. South Wales Miners Library, ‘Lecture given by Robin Page Arnot, “The Years of Ordeal: South Wales Miners 1914-1926”’, 22 October 1973, http:// cymru1914.org/en/view/sound/aaaab00000034.

23. David Egan, ‘The Swansea Conference of the British Council of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Delegates, July 1917: Reactions to the Russian Revolution of February 1917 and the Anti-War Movement in South Wales’, Llafur, vol.1 no.4 (1975).

24. See Mike Woodhouse, ‘Mines for the Nation or Mines for the Miners?’ in Llafur vol.2 no.3 (1978).

25. V.I. Lenin, ‘To Comrade Thomas Bell’, 13 August 1921, Collected Works Vol.32 (1965); reprinted in Page Arnot (1975) pp.345-46,

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WAR! and the Welsh Miner.

By W F Hay _________________________________ “War! the sport of Kings, the assassin’s trade” – Shakespeare. _________________________________ ARMAGEDDON. From a cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, the cyclone of death has rapidly extended until it covers Europe with a nightmare of horror. A population of over three hundred millions are affected. Throughout this vast concourse of humanity, the tremors and rigors of approaching social dissolution herald the death pangs of the present order.

Capital, panic-stricken, cowers affrighted at the spectacle of the monster Militarism unleashed. And Labour – not yet realising the vast issues, or too dull-brained to be actively interested – stands idly by, with no reasoned policy or tactic, except that of negation, which fittingly expresses itself in pious prayers and resolutions. Had organised Labour in Great Britain been but partially organised along the lines we have laid down and stood for, it could have made a decisive stand to force a policy of neutrality on Great Britain in this struggle. If instead of worshipping political fetishism, the German Social-Democracy with its four and a quarter million voters, had employed its energies in industrial organisation – instead of becoming critics where they could never hope to have control, organised British and German Labour, could, by means of a General Strike, have enforced a peaceful resolution of the political situation. As it is, the powers of high finance and militarism are working their own sweet will with none to stay or hinder.

ITS CAUSE.

The real issue is obscured by all sorts of pretexts. Britain’s jealousy of the rise to power of Germany. The Germanaphobia of chauvinist France, seeking revenge for the humiliations of 1871. The territorial and political ambitions of Austria and Russia.

The desire of Serbia to obtain a seaport on the Adriatic, in order to develop her economic resources. All these are factors in the problems it is true, but they are not the main factors. The determining influence in provoking the situation, which now threatens to swamp civilisation, is the economic effects of militarism itself. The “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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crushing burden imposed by the insane competition in armaments, has had for its result such heavy taxation, as to entail almost universal bankruptcy. Under these circumstances European Capitalism is forced to put its fortune to the test of war, in an endeavour to decide which nation or alliance of nations is strongest, before all demonstrate their equal financial weakness. The conflicting nations are like half a dozen shopkeepers, each utterly unscrupulous, who have hired bravoes to protect their property and lives from their fellow thieves. In the result, this hiring and equipping of armed mercenaries is eating so deeply into the profits, that either the shop has to be closed, or the decision come to as the result of a struggle, to find which unit or combination is strongest.

ARMAMENTS. In reality every commercial nation is always at war with every other commercial nation. This commercial warfare is carried on by means of the weapon of cheapness.

The working-class population in each country have their labours intensified, are speeded up and used remorselessly to this end. Every scheme which craft can devise, or villainy execute, will be employed by the various Governments of such Countries, to obtain markets for their products. Territory-grabbing, Tariffs, Patent Laws, and a hundred and one other manoeuvres to this end will be employed. But since the final argument is bound to be force, and since force is necessary both to obtain and retain new markets, and also to keep the working cattle of each country in order, i.e., to ensure that these working cattle shall work at the maximum intensity on a maximum [minimum – RG] of fodder; it follows that so long as Capitalism is split up into rivaling nations, huge forces must be maintained to protect the interests of one nation against the others. These forces grow, as the rivalry becomes more intense, until the point is reached, where not only the taxation becomes so heavy with its resultant decline in profits, but so many of the working cattle are employed as fighting cattle, that certain countries become handicapped in competition. When this happens, such countries are compelled to put their fortunes to the test of war. Then it is that patriotism of the master class, who in times of peace show it to be the duty of the work beast, to work harder than his foreign brother, and for relatively less fodder in comparison with the work done, then it is that this patriotism takes on a new and strident note. The prostitute press in every country dins the war cry of Capitalism into the ears of the working cattle. “Honour” has been smirched, “National interest and safety” are threatened, the working cattle are invited to defend with their hearts-blood, “the Flag,” “the Empire,” and “the Constitution.”

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“PATRIOTISM.” And the irony of it is that many of the work-beasts will think that to fight in defence of their masters’ interest is to fight in that of their own. That to defend their masters’ own mansions is to defend their own stables. To secure the masters’ banquets and luxurious ease, to be the securing of their own corn bin. That the defence of the exploiter’s privilege and piracy is the defence of their own progeny. That a change of masters means a change in conditions. The situation is enough to provoke the inextinguishable merriment of every fiend in the Capitalist metaphysical Hell! These very working cattle in every country “will rally as one man” in the defence of their masters’ interest, the masters’ interest which has time and time again used the baton, rifle and machine gun against the revolting work-beasts.

ITS RESULTS. Every Capitalist nation is simply a section of the Capitalist whole. Each section fights the other in its own interest. All combine together to crush the working cattle if they revolt. These latter, not having the sense to apply the proverb, “When thieves fall out honest men get their rights,” will shoulder their rifle, abandon their wives and little ones, meet other work beasts of different nationalities, but of the same class, with the same joint interest, and then in deadly slaughter settle which section of the masters shall exploit them in future. The widows and orphans, the crippled and maimed, the aged parent bereaved, will be left at the conclusion of the war to the tender mercy of the Capitalist class. “And his loving mercy is over all his works.”

TACTICS. If reports from the continent can be trusted, the socialist and labour movement has gone to pieces. Contrast the attitude of the vaunted German Social Democracy, the French Confederation du Travail, of Hervé, the Anti-militarist, with that taken up by the S.W.M.F. Executive. Their decision, that their members’ interest would best be served by not shortening their holiday, in spite of the frantic appeal by the Government and the Press for coal, does them infinite credit. We hope they will pursue the principle implied to its logical conclusion. If our difficulties, our disorganisation, our folly and lack of vision, our starvation and long suffering misery of the drawn out strike for fair conditions, are the Capitalists’ opportunity, then their hour of trial and tribulation, their danger and necessity, must be seized to obtain every advantage possible for the workers.

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Already, at the very moment when they appeal so hysterically for our support and aid to protect their interests, their harpy-like interests force them to extract an extra profit. Food prices are rising rapidly, not because of any shortage, but because, with its usual callousness, Capitalism seeks to coin misery into money. At the same time, that with every passionate appeal they can command, they implore our assistance, their thieving hands are snatching a portion of our fodder! In such circumstances what is our duty? Our first duty is to ourselves and those dependent on us!

THE MINERS’ POWER. We know that the only defence of the British Capitalist, against the clutching hands of his fellow pirates across the channel, is the British Navy. The effectiveness of this depends upon a continuous and ample supply of Welsh Steam Coal. This can only be produced with the consent of the Welsh collier. We have been taught, My Lords and Gentlemen, the Capitalist Class, that it is legitimate to take advantage of every accident of circumstance, to make the best bargain for ourselves. You have taught us this by many a bitter lesson in the past. Your present action in raising food prices but confirms your previous teaching. We propose to apply that teaching to existing conditions. If, Gentlemen, you imagine that to serve your need, we are going to slave on reduced rations, for that is what a rise in the price of food-stuffs means, to produce the wherewithal to save your Empire and continued dominations over us in the future, you imagine a vain thing!

CALIBAN, THE SAVIOUR! Yours is indeed a satirical fate! The Welsh Collier, defeated in many a bitter conflict to obtain human conditions, cheated in his work by unscrupulous managers, speeded up by an iniquitous system of piecework, under price-lists instituted by a process of unvarnished swindling, victimised and hounded from pillar to post, thrown on the road and blacklisted for demanding simple justice, robbed by the decisions of so-called “independent” chairmen, murdered by the hundred and thousand through the neglect of elementary precautions, cheated by Judge-made law from the scanty “compensation,” for the “accidents” which greed of profit made inevitable, the victim of a thousand extortions and villainies, this grimy slave of the lamp can hold the British Empire to ransom! Such as he is you have made him! In your heartless pursuit of profit, you cared not if he became a veritable Caliban! You degraded him to the level of the pit pony, and now expect him to immolate himself on the altar of your menaced Mammon God! But your tyranny and inhumanity, your swinelike greed and “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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proud disdain have a bitter fruition! Caliban to-day holds the key of the situation, and can hold your slave Empire to ransom! If he knew but his power, if he in common with his fellow workers realised his best interest, he would shake that Empire into the dust to-morrow! As it is, he cannot fail to see that his opportunity has arrived to bleed you, even as in the day of your power you bled him. Your Navy is your only hope, and his labour is the only means of providing the coal, without which your Navy is but scrap iron. If he fails under these conditions to wring from you his own terms, if he loses this golden opportunity in response to your shoddy appeal to his “patriotism,” then he is beyond all hope and nothing remains, except to congratulate you on possessing the most docile and thickheaded working cattle in the World!

DULL WORK-BEASTS. If he is that, then your task is very easy. High prices for food will keep him working at full pressure on a half-empty stomach. At the end of the war, he will be enmeshed in debt, and with this just payment for his “patriotism” you can make your own arrangements in order to ensure that the reduction of the number of beans in the nosebags of your working cattle is permanent. His idle dreams of doing something to benefit himself in some mythical 1915 can be easily discounted. If he cannot distinguish now between the patriotism of his class and the “patriotism” which only conserves your interest, then your task is easy. You can work him to death on starvation rations, and when he grows restless and dangerous it will be quite easy to create “a grave national crisis,” or “international complications,” and the dull obedient brute will return to work in the sacred name of patriotism!

POWER! That the South Wales Miner will be so foolish is unthinkable. Surely he is now schooled, by the bitter logic of experience, to know his real duty and his real power.

His duty in the first place to himself is to see that he gets the best possible conditions under your slave system for himself, secondly, that the only patriotism he has any use for is the patriotism of his class. That this will lead him at the present juncture, to use the power within his hands to protect, not only himself, but the rest of his fellowworkmen, from the extortions of the famine mongers. That in future he will see to it that industrial organisation is carried to the point, nationally and internationally, when the workers shall be able to paralize [sic] any attempt by the parasitical lunatics who govern us, to create a similar world-wide shambles to that which at present confronts us. That this organisation will be directed towards ending the existing system of legalised thieving, and the establishment of a system of Society where civilisation will not be endangered as a result of a quarrel in a thieves’ kitchen.

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ACTION! Fellow-Workmen! You need to take two lines of action to protect your own interests and that of your class. Insist, as a condition of working, that either the Government take over all available food supplies, or that it lay down a scale of maximum prices for the necessaries of life. And further, use your present power to force better rates of pay in all departments, under the threat of withholding your labour if your demands are not granted. To stand idle now and take no action is to become the prey of the war and famine mongers. Their policy will be to raise prices to such a pitch, that you will only just be able to live by working full time at full pressure. You can only counteract this by concerted action. A policy must be drafted, and a series of demands for increased payment and better conditions. This will become the business of the various Trades Unions affected. The bringing of pressure to bear on the Government, to establish maximum rates for food-stuffs, must, in the first stage, arise as a public demand, and this must be reinforced by the determination of the miner to withhold his labour if this demand is not granted. These two demands must be pushed forward by agitation, both inside and outside of the Trade Unions. It is useless to enforce higher rates of wages if the prices of food soar to a higher ratio. The two lines of action are supplementary one to the other. The results of the above lines of action should find the workers at the conclusion of the war, not worse, but better off than to-day. Further, it will assist by squeezing the pockets of the Capitalist, in hastening the conclusion of the war with all its ruthless horrors.

DUTY! Your duty to yourself, your duty to your class, your duty to civilisation shows clearly what your path should be. It is clearly to be seen that at the conclusion of the war, you will, if you let things slide and the profit monger do his worst, find yourself confronted with an epoch of industrial depression, the labour market flooded by disbanded troops, prices at famine rates, and yourself impoverished. Under these circumstances your past experience tells you the treatment you will receive from those whose property and interest you are asked to defend, by cutting coal and other useful work. The line [sic] of action indicated above show you how to safeguard your present interest, and to make some provision for a period when, however things turn out, the working class will be plunged into misery and destitution.

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Our History No. 16 THE PROFIT MONGERS.

The Capitalist class stand to gain in every way, as a class, from the present struggle.

The rise in prices will go wholly to benefit them unless you take action. In any case the result of the war is bound to mean a decrease in the burden of armaments, and this will enhance their profits. The probable result after the whole sordid and horrible business is finished is the establishment of the principle of the Federation of the States of Europe, with a super-State above all, which alone will levy and control an army and navy. This will save an enormous revenue to the Capitalist class, and further, set free a large number of those who have been fighting cattle, to become working cattle.

THE WORKERS. This will make the position of the working class, not better but worse, since it will intensify the competition amongst the capitalists for the World market. This is bound to lead to a further intensification of labour for the workers, and the substitution of labour displacing machinery. To the throwing on the scrap-heap of all workers who are not at the very height of their powers and to making the Hell of poverty worse than at present. That the workers will, because of this Hellish intensity, be driven to effect a great social revolution is undoubtedly true. One of the first steps towards the revolution, which shall establish a sane system of society instead of the rampant lunacy which goes by that name to-day, is for the working class to demonstrate by their action now, that they see clearly, and act according to, their own class interest. That the Welsh miner will consult his own interest, and set an example of sanity and foresight to the working class the World over, is a hope not beyond the bounds of possibility, but one which, if he upholds at the present juncture his reputation for logical acumen, probable.

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V. I. Lenin’s letter to Comrade Thomas Bell Written: 13 August, 1921 First Published: First published in the Workers’ Weekly No. 205, January 21, 1927 The Russian translation appeared in Pravda No 21, January 27, 1927 Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 1st English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 32, pages 510-511 Dear comrade, I thank you very much for your letter, of August 7. I have read nothing concerning the English movement last months because of my illness and overwork.

It is extremely interesting what you communicate. Perhaps it is the beginning of the real proletarian mass movement in Great Britain in the communist sense. I am afraid we have till now in England few very feeble propagandist societies for communism (inclusive the British Communist Party[1]) but no really mass communist movement.

If the South Wales Miners’ Federation has decided on July 24 to affiliate to the Third International by a majority of 120 to 63-perhaps it is the beginning of a new era.

(How many miners there are in England? More than 500,000? How much in South Wales? 25,000? How many miners were really represented in Cardiff July 24, 1921?)

If these miners are not too small minority, if they fraternise with soldiers and begin a real “class war”—we must do all our possible to develop this movement and strengthen it.

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Economic measures (like communal kitchens) are good but they are not much important now, before the victory of the proletarian revolution in England. Now the political struggle is the most important.

English capitalists are shrewd, clever, astute. They will support (directly or indirectly) communal kitchens in order to divert the attention from political aims.

What is important is (if I am not mistaken): 1) To create a very good, really proletarian, really mass Communist Party in this part of England, that is, such party which will really be the leading force in all labour movement in this part of the country. (Apply the resolution on organisation and work of the Party adopted by the Third Congress to this part of your country.)

2) To start a daily paper of the working class, for the working class in this part of the country.

To start it not as a business (as usually newspapers are started in capitalist countries), not with big sum of money, not in ordinary and usual manner—but as an economic and political tool of the masses in their struggle.

Either the miners of this district are capable to pay halfpenny daily (for the beginning weekly, if you like) for their own daily (or weekly) newspaper (be it very small, it is not important)—or there is no beginning of really communist mass movement in this part of your country.

If the Communist Party of this district cannot collect a few pounds in order to publish small leaflets daily as a beginning of the really proletarian communist newspaper “The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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if it is so, if every miner will not pay a penny for it, then there is not serious, not genuine affiliation to the Third International.

English Government will apply the shrewdest means in order to suppress every beginning of this kind. Therefore we must be (in the beginning) very prudent. The paper must be not too revolutionary in the beginning. If you will have three editors, at least one must be non-communist. (At least two genuine workers.) If nine-tenths of the workers do not buy this paper, if two-thirds 120/120 + 63 do not pay special contributions (f.i. 1 penny weekly) for their paper it will be no workers’ newspaper.

I should be very glad to have few lines from you concerning this theme and beg to apologise for my bad English.

With communist greetings, Lenin

The British Communist Party was founded at the Inaugural Congress held from July 31 to August 1, 1920. It united the left wing of the British Socialist Party, the Communist Unity Group of the Socialist Labour Party, the South Wales Communist Council and a number of others. In January 1921, at the Unity Congress in Leeds, it was joined by the Communist Workers’ Party (consisting mostly of members of the shop stewards movement in Scotland, headed by Willie Gallacher) and the Workers’ Socialist Federation. A section of the Independent Labour Party joined it in the spring of that year and more came in during the 1930s.

“The Kaiser’s Black Guards”: The South Wales Miners’ Strike of 1915

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