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HISTORY
Pamphlet No. 8
New Series
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S. O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War by Robert Griffiths
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Communist News & Views
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HISTORY
Our History No. 8
Communist Party www.communist-party.org.uk
Pamphlet No. 8
New Series
£1.50
S.O. Davies
‘fellow travelling’ and the Cold War CONTENTS page Introduction Hatred of Capitalism Opposition to militarism and war Anti-Imperialism Welsh Patriotism Relations with the Communist Party Labour Anti-Communism The Left in the South Wales Coalfield Notes
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This pamphlet is an extended version of an article published under the same title in Llafur (vol. 10 no. 4, 2011), the Journal of Welsh People's History. Robert Griffiths is the author of S.O. Davies – A Socialist Faith (1983), Streic! Streic! Streic! (1986), Driven by ideals – a history of ASLEF (2005) and Killing No Murder: South Wales and the Great Railway Strike of 1911 (2009). He is currently (2012) general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, ====================================== In his diary for 15 February 1956, future Labour Cabinet minister Richard Crossman wrote of events to celebrate the 50th jubilee of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP): 'The only really piquant show was at Merthyr Tydfil, where Nye Bevan and Jim Griffiths were on the same platform with fellowtravelling S.O. Davies in the chair'. [1] This was not the first time for Merthyr Tydfil MP Stephen Owen Davies (or 'S.O.' as he became universally known) to be described thus, nor the last. In June 1953, for instance, National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) president Sir Will Lawther had publicly declared it 'well-known that for a long time he has been a fellow-traveller of the Communist Party', after Davies – an MP sponsored by the NUM – had tabled a motion in Parliament denouncing alleged United States funding of unemployed workers, neo-fascists and agent provocateurs to foment unrest in communist-run East Berlin. [2] Not surprisingly, historians have since used the same term when characterising S.O. Davies' political outlook, at least as far as foreign and military affairs are concerned. For example, in a study of relations between the British Labour Party and the former Soviet Union, Bill Jones refers to an amendment to the King's Speech in October 1946 as 'supported most notably by the fellow-travellers Solley, S.O. Davies, Pritt, Platt-Mills, S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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Hutchinson, Zilliacus and by others of similar mind ...' [3] In his account of post-war Labour Party foreign policy under Ernest Bevin, Kenneth O. Morgan remarks that: Most left-wing critics were disarmed by events in 1947-8 from the 'coup' in Prague to the Berlin blockade and the Tito-Stalin split. Only a few incorrigible fellow-travellers or pacifists, such as S.O. Davies or Emrys Hughes (Keir Hardie's son-in-law), were left to complain, and Bevin could brush them aside with disdain. [4] As S.O. Davies was markedly more sympathetic than Hughes to Communist Party and Soviet foreign policy, the 'fellow-traveller' label can only be intended for him. The term 'fellow-traveller' is intended to identify a political outlook held to be identical to that of the Communist Party in Britain – and by extension – of the Soviet Union's communist leadership, or so near as to make no meaningful difference. Thus MPs and other 'fellow travellers' of communism inside the British Labour Party were held to have sided with Soviet Union and its 'socialist' allies (or, rather, totalitarianism and Soviet expansionism) on the one side, against the capitalist powers and 'imperialism' (or freedom and democracy) during the Cold War, opposing British and US rearmament and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), hailing the 'peace' initiatives of the Soviet leadership, condemning UN intervention in the Korean War to prevent a communist victory and so on. The charge of 'fellow travelling' also carried with it insinuations of disloyalty, not only to the Labour Party but to Britain itself. Whether or not the accusation of being a 'fellow traveller' is defamatory is itself a matter of political perception and outlook. S.O. Davies did not take any notable exception to it. He was called a lot worse during the post-war period when words such as 'freedom', 'peace' and 'democracy' became weapons of mass ideological destruction. Indeed, one Tory MP denounced him as a 'Russian agent' and a 'lunatic' in June 1953, when Davies demanded that the US embassy be closed and all US armed forces expelled from Britain following the execution in the US of Julius and Ethel S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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Rosenberg as Soviet spies. [5] In my view, characterisations of S.O. Davies as a 'fellow traveller' of the British Communist Party and the Soviet Union (or as a 'crypto-communist') are reductive, restrictive and – in essential respects – inaccurate and misleading. Furthermore, they may imply or reflect an underestimation of the breadth and depth of support for at least some of his views within the Welsh labour movement. Four features of his political outlook explain why Davies took a supportive and largely uncritical view of the Soviet Union, its society and its government's foreign policies. They predate the Cold War and would have existed independently of it. They also indicate that there was a perfectly explicable basis for his stance on issues that defined the Cold War, unrelated to any lack of patriotism or some secret relationship with King Street (Communist Party headquarters in London) or Moscow.
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Hatred of Capitalism The first feature was his passionate, lifelong hatred for the capitalist system and its main political representatives: the Conservative Party. Unlike others who espoused aspirations for a socialist society, but then pragmatically settled for a reformed, improved, more civilised capitalism (whether or not they still harboured hopes for its distant replacement), Davies did not mellow in his detestation of a society based – as he believed and experienced it – on class exploitation and oppression. His father wrote a subversive column in the weekly paper Tarian y Gweithiwr ('The Worker's Shield') exposing the iniquities of coal mining and its communities, becoming a target for vindictive coalowners, managers and chapel deacons. Young Stephen himself went to work in Cwmpennar pit, Mountain Ash, at the age of twelve. He later rose through the ranks of the South Wales Miners Federation (SWMF or the 'Fed'), from Tumble checkweigher and Dowlais agent to vice-president, the militant comrade of Arthur Cook and Noah Ablett. As MP for Merthyr Tydfil from 1934, he helped lead a desperate struggle for the town's very survival through the Depression, when governments, think-tanks and members of the English royal family thought it might be better to close the town and move its surviving population to Canada or, at least, rural Monmouthshire. In later years, Davies moved private members' bills to combat pensioners' poverty – predating policies enacted two decades later – and, successfully, to secure the first state compensation scheme for lung diseases linked to pneumoconiosis. These and other battles against powerful, vested and often contemptuous interests reaffirmed his abiding hatred of capitalism. This, in turn, limited his capacity for tolerance towards those parliamentary colleagues who softened their antagonism when not abandoning it altogether. Hence the obituary for him in the Times, which S.O. Davies would have regarded as the highest accolade: S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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He was one of the left wing 'rebels', and time and again was a source of trouble to the official Labour Party leadership in the House of Commons. No disciplinary action seemed to moderate his extreme views, and he maintained a stubborn, aggressive attitude ... In appearance, Davies was anything but a revolutionary. Tall, with a not unpleasing personality, he had an outwardly quiet demeanour. But underneath fires were forever smouldering, and could be fanned into flame at the least provocation. [6] Davies saw Russia for himself, as a society in transformation from capitalism to socialism. A month in Moscow and the Donbass coalfield in 1922 furnished him with evidence of what workers and peasants – the 'pioneers of a new civilisation' – could achieve, free from capitalist exploiters and oppressive landlords. [7] Forty years later, in a message written for Radio Moscow, Davies wrote of the Soviet Union's 'dazzling successes in the scientific world, its vast educational and productive achievements, and its social system in which the overwhelming emphasis is placed on the sacredness of human life'. [8] As a reader of Soviet publications in the English language, and those published by bodies such as the British-Soviet Friendship Society (then proscribed by the Labour Party), he followed developments in domestic Soviet economic, social and political life. His wife Sephora Davies was an active member of the BSFS, travelling to the Soviet Union with one its delegations in 1950. Undoubtedly, reports from these sources would have reinforced his optimal view of Soviet socialism; critical and hostile reports could be easily dismissed as untruthful capitalist propaganda – as, indeed, much of it was. His attitude to the 'People's Democracies' and socialist systems in eastern Europe was much the same. Here were fellow-socialists liberating the people from their capitalist exploiters and, like the Soviet Union, building an alternative society in a 'hostile, jealous, and an extremely dangerous world'. [9] This is the main context in which to understand his attitude to large-scale revolts against communist rule in eastern Europe, such as that which began S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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in East Berlin in June 1953. An additional factor in this case was his longstanding involvement with the German communist and working class movement. His links with the Berlin Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions (the trade union arm of the Communist International) dated from the early 1920s. [10] He had led a parliamentary delegation to Germany in the mid-1930s in a vain effort to save German Communist Party (KPD) leader Ernst Thaelmann from death in a concentration camp. [11] S.O. attended meetings in London of the British Council for German Democracy, founded in 1949, whose objectives included the full deNazification of Germany and a unified government for the country. Its offices and most prominent members were communists and their wellknown allies in the labour movement, the churches and academia. [12] Moreover, in standard Marxist fashion, he regarded fascism as a particularly brutal form of capitalist rule. S.O. Davies was far more troubled by the revolt in Hungary in 1956 than by the East Berlin events. Outspoken in his defence of President Nasser's right to nationalise the Suez Canal, and in condemnation of the British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt, Davies said little if anything in public about the use of Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces to suppress the popular uprising in Budapest and replace one Communist government there with another. He did not publicly endorse the British Communist Party's line that the Soviets had acted to prevent counter-revolution. His widow, Sephora Davies, was the unrecorded source of my previous account of his feelings: S.O. received news of the outbreak of fighting whilst attending a meeting of the British-Soviet Friendship Society. He maintained a sad silence, in private at the time and in public afterwards. As a Welsh patriot he could understand the Magyars' ardour for national freedom; but he understood, too, why the Soviet Union and its Communist allies in Hungary would feel justified in quashing a rebellion that threatened the strategic interests of 'the Socialist countries' (as he called them). He also feared the creation of a pro-Western inroad deep into Eastern Europe via Austria and Hungary. Like the Soviets, Davies would not S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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forget that the pre-war regime in Budapest had been a crypto-Fascist one with a large following; during the war it had joined in the German attack on the Soviet Union and later transported over half-a-million Jews to the Nazi extermination camps. If Soviet-Socialist rule were the only sure guarantee against such recurrences in the future – so be it, even though he was never an advocate or an apologist for the show trials and executions deemed necessary by the Communist authorities in Eastern Europe. [13] His view of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 is not a matter of public record, either. Given his doubts about Hungary, he would probably have had considerable sympathy with the Prague Spring and Dubcek's 'socialism with a human face' (although his friend and communist poet T.E. Nicholas did not). He was also well aware of the comparatively large basis of popular support for the Czech Communist Party going back to the 1946 elections and its subsequent seizure of power two years later (which Davies warmly welcomed at the time). The leadership of Britain's Communist Party made clear its opposition to the Soviet military intervention in 1968. His early and unyielding hostility to capitalism predisposed him to look for and concentrate upon everything that was positive in the socialist countries. Privately, Davies was aware of negative features too – if not their extent – but believed that these would prove transitory, especially if socialists in the West fulfilled their responsibility to abolish capitalism and imperialism in their own countries. He would not join in public criticism of the Soviet Union and its allies and thus, as he saw it, give comfort to socialism's enemies.
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Opposition to Militarism and War The second cardinal feature of his political outlook was his deep attachment to the cause of peace or, more precisely, his hatred for capitalist militarism and war. Davies was not a pacifist. He did not believe it possible for anyone who had fought the coal owners to be so. He certainly did not dispute the right of socialist states to defend themselves, or of oppressed peoples to gain national independence in arms if necessary, and welcomed Soviet military advances during the Second World War. But for him, the history of capitalism had relentlessly been one of war and preparations for war. As a young checkweigher in the Anthracite coalfield, he had bombarded the local newspapers with letters and articles designed to demystify the 1914-18 Great War and discredit its rationale. Davies insisted that 'history teaches that war invariably brings in its wake a lower standard of morality, a restriction of the liberty of the masses, and a degradation of their social conditions'. [14] He opposed military conscription in 1916 and, together with his Great Mountain colliery members, even tried to persuade the district's miners to strike against the imprisonment of a conscientious objector and fellow-miner who had refused to enlist. [15] Davies adopted a similar standpoint during the Second World War, albeit one with some modification. Having opposed the appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini and savagely attacked Chamberlain and his ministers, he did not believe that the British capitalist class was sincere in wishing to fight fascism (which he regarded as another, more brutal form of capitalism). He had therefore supported the Popular Front campaign of the Communist Party, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and such fellow-Labour MPs as Aneurin Bevan (Ebbw Vale). When Attlee and other Labour leaders joined the War Cabinet, Davies expressed grave doubts and demanded that the 'Patriotism Ltd.' of high finance, profiteering and the stock exchanges be eliminated. These were the powers that brought Nazism into being in Germany and could do so in Britain and elsewhere. [16] S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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Much though he desired the defeat of Nazi Germany, he did not accept that doing so required the restriction of trade union or political rights (except for fascists) at home. Thus he opposed the indiscriminate internment of all German and Italian immigrants, the tightening of military conscription, the imposition of the Essential Work Order shackling miners to the coal industry, the ban on strikes in essential industries and Labour's electoral truce with the Tories. In this vein, too, he campaigned against the Home Secretary's decision to suppress the Daily Worker. Unlike Britain's Communist Party, however, he did not switch to a stance of almost unqualified support for the war effort after Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Hence his despondent letter to S.O. Thomas ten months later, regretting a 'catastrophic war' in which the working class had lost most of its cherished achievements, and calling for the labour movement to recover its militancy against private ownership and profitseeking. He believed that capitalism would never establish the basis of permanent peace. [17] Where Britain's communists now placed top priority on winning the war, and dropped the call for a 'People's Government' to fight capitalism's fascist tendencies at home, S.O. Davies continued to argue for anti-capitalist policies and no reconciliation with the Tories in a coalition government. In continuing to emphasise that socialism alone could create the basis for a just and permanent peace, his position after June 1941 was closer to that of the ILP – of which he had been a member for twenty years before becoming an MP – than to the Communist Party. He carried this same, consistent analysis – that capitalism means militarism and war – into the Cold War that followed. One of his fears during the East German crisis of 1953 and the Hungarian one of 1956 was that belligerent circles in the USA and revanchist elements in West Germany might seize upon them to instigate war. He would say nothing that afforded any credibility to their cause. His concern for peace featured more prominently in his articles and speeches over the next two decades S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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than his claims that the Soviet Union and its allies represented a superior form of society. In the West as the East, he believed, capitalism had to be replaced by socialism because, as Davies put it in his message to Radio Moscow listeners in October 1962: It is only in a Socialist State that war and the preparations for war bring profit to no-one. Nor do you profit on the hunger and oppression of others. Hence, may your Socialist State, your class-less society from which the profit-monger has been eliminated, be the inspiration of the working-classes the world over to fight with you for World Peace and world comradeship. It was this uncompromising, life-long opposition to capitalist militarism and war – rather than a desire to strengthen the military position of the Soviet Union – that drove S.O. Davies to oppose Britain's post-war military conscription, rearmament, the acquisition of nuclear weapons, the formation of NATO (six years before the establishment of the Warsaw Pact), the remilitarisation of West Germany, Western intervention in the Korean War, the treaty to establish a European Defence Community (EDC) and the establishment of a US Polaris nuclear submarine base in Britain. His rebellions on some of these issues led to withdrawal of the Labour whip and suspension from the PLP on four occasions. He became chair of the Welsh Peace Council, despite it being on the list of bodies proscribed by the Labour Party as a 'communist front' and thus out of bounds to Labour Party members. In December 1951, Davies had asked Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe whether he would admit foreigners to attend a meeting of the bureau of the World Peace Council in Britain the following January. After consulting the Foreign Secretary, Fyfe informed Davies that there would be no ban. The policy was subsequently changed in March 1952, when the Home Secretary proposed to the Cabinet that while foreign communists and 'fellow travellers' would still be allowed in on the invitation of British trade union, student and similar organisations, and the Communist Party, nobody could come to Britain to attend peace meetings because the world peace movement was nothing more than 'an instrument S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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of Soviet policy' and had to be exposed as such. [18] The standpoint taken by S.O. Davies on NATO, Korea, the EDC and the world peace movement differentiated him sharply from the 'Bevanites' and their incarnations around the Tribune journal and in the Keep Left (later Keeping Left) group of Labour MPs. Until they lost their seats, his closest parliamentary allies were the so-called 'crypto-communists' in the PLP (Platts-Mills and company) and the authentic Communist MPs Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, together with non-Bevanite left-wing Labourites such as Emrys Hughes, Sidney Silverman and Harold Davies. Like most of them, S.O. Davies would have taken the positions he did regardless of the existence and interests of the Soviet Union, or the views emanating from King Street. In the case of the Communist Party, of course, he found it in agreement with himself on most foreign policy and military issues, except for a period from 1957 when the communists – along with Aneurin Bevan and Soviet leader Khruschev – placed more emphasis on the value of a British Labour government's potential role in multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations (as a positive influence on the US) than on the call for Britain's unilateral divestment of its atomic bomb. S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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Anti-Imperialism A third aspect of S.O. Davies' world view also pre-dated and has outlived the Cold War: his implacable opposition to imperialism, to the domination of one country by another for profit. During his earliest political involvement as a student and ILP member in Cardiff in 1913, he had expressed support for Irish Home Rule. As an MP, he opposed the Labour government's legislative guarantee of Northern Ireland's status in 1949 and the mass internment of Irish republicans in the north 22 years later. He played an active role in the 1920s and 1930s in the League Against Imperialism, working closely with the Communist Party to support national independence movements in the British colonies. While condemning British policy in Malaya and Cyprus, he concentrated much of his fire after Indian independence on 'the most abominably imperialist country on earth – that is America'. [19] His charge in the House of Commons that the US had used Japanese scientists and war criminals to wage biological warfare against North Korea and its Chinese allies attracted outrage and accusations that he was merely a dupe of the communists. [20] Further revelations since have reinforced the credibility of his allegations, although his insistence that the South invaded the North has found less substantiating evidence. Because the anti-imperialist movements in south-east Asia were communist-led, Soviet-backed and fought against US-backed regimes and mostly US troops, it is easy to cite this as further evidence that Davies was 'pro-communist', pro-Soviet and 'anti-American'. Yet he also spent a political lifetime supporting other national movements, not led by communists, against other foreign occupiers. On humanitarian and anti-war grounds alone, he might have been expected to raise his voice against the US slaughter of more than two million civilians in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia.
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Welsh Patriotism The fourth significant dimension to his political outlook is pre-figured in the third: his empathy with people's desire for national freedom. This was given greater depth and passion by his identification with the Welsh language and a sense of Welsh nationality imbued with a strong class content. From a cultured home in what was then the near monoglot Welshspeaking working class community of 'Cap Goch' (today Abercwmboi) near Aberdare, he developed an early sensitivity to 'anti-Welsh' prejudice and discrimination. Government ministers, senior civil servants and parliamentary colleagues would all feel the sharp edge of his tongue when he sensed a slight to the nationality, capability, potential or territorial unity of the Welsh people. It should be remembered that for many decades it was commonplace for politicians, planners and commentators to argue that the Welsh were simply not capable of governing themselves, and that the country (or 'region') was best divided for administrative purposes. During the 1930s Depression, Davies had witnessed once-vibrant Welsh working class communities being drained of their lifeblood through mass emigration, as governments and other decision-makers denied Wales the resources and powers to rebuild itself. This experience reinforced his enthusiasm for the Parliament for Wales campaign in the early 1950s. There, his only allies in the PLP were a handful of MPs from largely Welsh-speaking constituencies in mid and north Wales. The Labour MPs from urban south Wales and its coalfield were almost unanimously hostile. The only political force in the labour movement to join him in the campaign – and then not unanimously – was the Communist Party. [21] But the campaign suffered a mortal blow when its policy was rejected by the South Wales Area NUM conference in May 1954, despite the efforts of communist delegates. Undaunted, Davies introduced a Government of Wales Bill in the House of Commons early in 1955. On the eve of the Second Reading, he received a letter of encouragement from Idris Cox, former Welsh district secretary of the Communist Party, congratulating him on his stand for a Welsh Parliament: S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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SO Davies (Peoples Collection Wales photographed by Geoff Charles 10-3-1955)
'it's good to know someone is forcing the pace on this matter. CYMRU AM BYTH'. [22] S.O. Davies displayed this acute sense of nationality, national rights and their violation in his attitude to the Soviet Union and the Cold War. He never forgot his discussions with philologists, musicians and geologists in Russia in 1922, as they prepared to travel east of the Ural mountains to transcribe and thus help preserve the languages and cultures of illiterate peoples. The development of their natural resources would provide them with the material basis of modern nationhood. As Davies told the Soviet News in April 1962: 'There was no enslavement and exploitation of defenceless peoples, so characteristic of the imperialist powers'. [23]. His S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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was a memory unsullied by the subsequent violations of national rights, especially during the last period of the Stalin regime. His Welsh patriotism also reinforced his opposition to the US-UN-British intervention in the Korean War. For Davies, the five-year-old partition of that country did not change the fact that 'North and South, the Koreans are one people – just as in North Wales and South Wales, we are one people'. [24] Nothing better illustrated his combination of anti-capitalism, antimilitarism, anti-imperialism and Welsh patriotism than his intervention in the 1953 annual Welsh Day debate. Having protested about the 'subjection of our country by a people of alien tradition, alien culture and alien tongue', he told MPs: 'The Wales we have been discussing all day strongly objects to this Parliament irrevocably dragging it into the abyss of destruction. We have no quarrel with any people or nation in this world. We are instinctively hospitable and we are a nation of workers. We can feel no enmity against any other people or nation, whatever their colour, creed or religion. We abhor the swashbuckling, fire-eating speeches that we have had in this House, and as a Welsh nation we repudiate their sentiments. The heart of our hospitable country goes out to those who are struggling against tyranny and against obstruction, because we know that obstruction has been placed in the way of this little country to which I am proud to belong'. [25]
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Relations with the Communist Party As already indicated, S.O. Davies enjoyed warm, comradely relations with the Communist Party and many of its leading members in Wales and Britain. Most of those relations pre-dated the Cold War. As far back as 1921, he had featured in weekly intelligence reports from the Special Branch to the Cabinet as an ally of the CP, the Communist International and the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU). Along with Arthur Cook, Noah Ablett and at least five others, he was one of a group of members of the South Wales Miners Federation executive committee who met the local Communist Party leadership to coordinate their activities. [26] Davies was the Miners' Agent for Dowlais District at the time. The following year, Special Branch noted that 'this man is particularly active on behalf of the Red International of Labour Unions in the South Wales coalfield and has been appointed a delegate to the forthcoming meeting of the Miners' International Propaganda Committee in Germany'. [27] A short while later, it was reported that he had been elected to the IPC executive at a conference of 'Revolutionary Mineworkers' in Moscow, in December 1922. [28] As SWMF vice-president from 1924, he had worked closely with Robin Page Arnot from the Labour Research Department (who much later wrote an official two-volume history of the 'Fed'). In 1929, Davies had intervened in an attempt to rescue Arthur Horner (future SWMF president and NUM general secretary) and the communist-dominated Mardy Lodge from expulsion, receiving a brickbat from the Communist Party for his troubles. Undaunted, he forged strong friendships with Horner and later Welsh communist miners' leaders. In September 1950, after he and Aberavon MP Will Cove had proposed a Commons amendment attacking the huge hike in Britain's military budget, and the extension of military conscription from one year to two, Davies received more than a thousand messages of support. Among them were congratulatory letters from former Communist MP Willie Gallacher (recently defeated in West Fife), life-long friend T.E. Nicholas (in Welsh, S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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naturally) and one of his allies in the communist-dominated Miners Minority Movement of the 1920s, Nat Watkins [29] On Gallacher's 80th birthday in 1961, S.O. was one 12 coalfield Labour MPs, including Michael Foot and even Ness Edwards, who signed a letter recalling 'your great work and above all your working class integrity' and ending: 'We salute you with affection and respect'. [30] Furthermore, Davies probably wrote more articles than any other Labour MP for Labour Monthly, the journal edited for 53 years by unwavering Moscow-liner R. Palme Dutt. Whether dealing with the wartime suppression of the Daily Worker, rearmament, the Korean War or Labour Party manifestos and programmes, the Merthyr MP's arguments were virtually indistinguishable from those of the Communist Party. He spoke at 40th birthday celebrations for Labour Monthly alongside another longtime communist acquaintance, Wal Hannington, the former National Unemployed Workers Movement leader who had spent time organising in Merthyr Tydfil. The South Wales Area NUM delegation to the event reported extensively on the address of 'our old friend' S.O. Davies in the next issue of their own journal, The Miner. [31] Davies also wrote occasionally in the Daily Worker, where he was frequently quoted and encouraged. Through his wife Sephora, who sat on the executive of the World Peace Council, he would also have met and known leading communists from many other countries. Yet there were occasions throughout his political life when he disagreed with the Communist Party's line. In 1925, he had fallen out with Hannington over how best to organise the unemployed (although the communist Sunday Worker had given Davies space to defend his standpoint). The Mardy Lodge controversy was symptomatic of the party's 1929-33 'Third Period' turn to the left, when he found himself opposing it over questions of trade union and political orientation. Hannington stood against him in the 1934 by-election that sent S.O. Davies to Parliament. Davies clashed with local communists over tactics towards the Unemployment Assistance Board, before joining them in the fight for the S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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Popular Front and solidarity with the Spanish Republic. In March 1942, his bitter personal attack on Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, at a conference in solidarity with the banned Daily Worker, annoyed Communist Party general secretary Harry Pollitt. According to a Special Branch transcript, Pollitt told a clandestine meeting of the party's leading trade unionists that, as a consequence, the MFGB executive had then decided – albeit narrowly – to disown the attack and endorse the ban in a vote on the TUC general council. Reportedly, Pollitt had said to his comrades: 'Personal abuse has been our stock-in-trade for twenty years and it has got us nowhere. It has got to stop'. [32] As we have seen, S.O. Davies maintained a sceptical attitude to British government policies throughout the Second World War, was more enthusiastically in favour of the Parliament for Wales campaign than Horner and the Communist Party centrally, and did not endorse the Soviet intervention in Hungary. On some of these issues of divergence, Davies was closer to the traditional outlook of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), of which he had been a member from around 1910 until 1934. During this formative period in his political development, therefore, he engaged with a political outlook that itself was shaped by its development in working-class and often Welshspeaking communities. Its ideology emphasised the moral and ethical basis for socialism and its absolutist values – when held to – left less room for compromise and expediency than either social-democratic or Communist Party pragmatism and flexibility. From Keir Hardie (and T.E. Nicholas) in Merthyr Tydfil onwards, the left-wing trend in the ILP had maintained an absolutist opposition to capitalism, imperialism, militarism and war. Through the writings of Nicholas and David Thomas, in particular, the ILP had also attempted to combine socialist ideology with Welsh nationalism or patriotism and argued for the Labour Party to organise itself on a national all-Wales basis. But whereas sections of the ILP (including Nicholas) had joined the S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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Communist Party on its foundation in 1920, and again in the mid-1930s, S.O. Davies was always clear about his reasons for remaining in the Labour Party. Especially in the wake of Hitler's accession to power, he warned in 1934 that the Communist Party's policy of violent revolution could open the door to fascism and, instead, he urged unity around the Labour Party. For similar reasons, he rejected the ILP's turn to the left in the early 1930s and – like the communists but not the ILP – he looked to the League of Nations for international collective security and sanctions against fascist aggression. While he often worked closely with the Communist Party, Davies was also prepared to cooperate with others on the left such as the Bevanites, Trotskyists and pacifists where agreement existed on an important issue. Thus he wrote a front-page article calling for British withdrawal from Korea in Socialist Outlook, a journal managed by Trotskyists, linked to ILP members and associated with a few Labour MPs in the (later proscribed) Socialist Fellowship. [33] However, some of the ILPers and Labour MPs did not share his condemnation of US policy or his advocacy of Korean unification, while many Trotskyists would have distanced themselves from his praise of North Korea's domestic achievements. Certainly, Britain's communists would not have approved any links between a left-wing Labour MP and their own Trotskyist detractors, although some of the latter were moving towards a pro-Communist Party, pro-Soviet outlook.
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Labour Anti-Communism S.O. Davies never did join the Communist Party, or even take out a cryptomembership card. After his death, it was revealed that he had been included in lists of Labour MPs suspected of secret membership of the Communist Party drawn up by Labour's deputy leader George Brown and colleagues and passed to the Security Service (MI5) in 1961. The handwritten page contained one list of sixteen Labour MPs labelled 'CP' and another of nine 'Possible' secret members including S.O. Davies. While MI5 believed that the twenty-five 'posed little threat and had limited influence', it nonetheless compiled notes on 'the ten MPs who appear to be of most significance'. Citing an intelligence source, the entry here for S.O. Davies records that there was 'evidence from LASCAR to show that if not of the Party, he is at least very close to it indeed'. [34] It is likely that 'LASCAR' is an intelligence agent or source within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Despite the machinations of Transport House in London and, after its formation, the Welsh Regional Council of Labour (WRCL) in Cardiff, S.O.'s political base in the local Labour Party was solid. He drew large and supportive audiences to hear his views on Korea and peace, with the local party issuing its own statements backing him on these issues and others such as West German rearmament and the Cuban missile crisis. The expulsion of Sephora Davies from the Labour Party, in December 1951, was carried out by Merthyr Trades and Labour Council only on threat of disaffiliation by the WRCL. Jonathan Schneer is right to suspect that, like Emrys Hughes, S.O. probably escaped the same fate of expulsion as PlattsMills and other so-called 'crypto-communist' MPs because of his deep roots and support in the local party and labour movement. [35] If Sephora's excommunication was meant to be a shot across her husband's bows, it was a dud. As Davies had informed Labour Party general secretary Morgan Phillips when threatened with expulsion for sending a telegram of support to the Italian Socialist Party, then (1948) in an electoral alliance with the communists: S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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Our Movement embraces millions of men and women, and not merely a few hundred Members of Parliament and a few dozen who may constitute from time to time our National Executive. The Executive must forgive me if I am habitually inclined to give our millions my first thoughts and consideration. In so doing experience has taught me, as a Socialist, that I need entertain no fears of ever betraying our people and their Movement. [36] The same sentiments compelled him to intervene in the Commons debate on London docks strike in summer 1949. Amid much hysteria about communists seeking to 'bring Britain to her knees', Davies recalled how previous State of Emergency declarations had deepened the anger and resentment being felt by striking south Wales miners. All the talk by government ministers and other MPs about the communists was 'imbecilic prattle'. He remembered the epithets flung at him and his contemporaries in earlier industrial struggles: in 1921, they were 'Bolsheviks' and, in the General Strike of 1926, 'Communists' in the pay of Soviet Russia. Rather engage in name-calling, strike-breaking and declaring a State of Emergency, the government and its supporters should concentrate on negotiating a settlement. [37]
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The Left in the South Wales Coalfield When reporter Richard West visited the constituency in 1961, Tal Lloyd (a 'shrewd, wary official of the Amalgamated Engineering Union') told him: 'The Merthyr Party is anti-Bomb, anti-American (in a soft sense), antiGerman (troops in this country) and would be anti-Russian troops in this country'. Lloyd, an official on the right wing of the trade union movement, also conceded that the movement in support of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell locally was 'small'. [38] Davies continued to enjoy the overwhelming support of his constituency party until non-Cold War divisions arose in the late 1960s and he refused to back the Labour government in two votes of confidence. Then, in 1970, Lloyd ran as the official Labour Party candidate in Merthyr Tydfil against S.O. Davies – who stood as an 'Independent Socialist' – and lost heavily. While a case can be made for Merthyr Tydfil 'exceptionalism', given the remarkable political history of the town and surrounding area, it broadly reflected the proletarian, left-wing and internationalist political culture of the South Wales Coalfield. This was due, primarily, to the dominant politics of the 'Fed', carried into the South Wales Area of the NUM (SWANUM) from 1945. The policies adopted by the area's annual conference and executive committee on foreign and military matters largely coincided with the views of S.O. Davies and almost no other Welsh Labour MP, with the occasional exception of Bevan and the pacifist-inclined Will Cove. This was true of West German rearmament, China's exclusion from the UN, a world-wide ban on nuclear weapons, the British H-bomb, civil defence, US bases in Britain, East-West trade, peaceful co-existence, British military expenditure, international trade union unity and from the late 1950s unilateral nuclear disarmament, German-NATO exercises in Wales, the European Common Market, Cuba and the Vietnam war. Articles in The Miner also reflected the same standpoint, frequently praising economic, technological and social advances in the 'socialist' countries of the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and China, especially in their coal industries. At the same time, editorials and feature articles attacked McCarthyism, racial S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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segregation and anti-trade union policies in the USA, together with imperialist-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship around the world. The same political outlook featured in the extensive education programme launched in 1956, whereby numerous communist and other left-wing guest tutors addressed many hundreds of miners at day-release and weekend schools. From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, the SWANUM exchanged delegations of miners and officials with the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and China as well as France (the Communist-aligned CGT confederation), Belgium and Canada. Visitors from the socialist countries often toured the coalfield and attended executive council and lodge meetings, canteens, miners' social clubs, medical facilities, colleges and, usually, the annual miners' gala in Cardiff. S.O. Davies headed the pre-gala march through the city in June 1956, alongside Bevan – frequently a speaker at the ensuing rallies – and Welsh communist miners' leaders Will Paynter, Dai Dan Evans and Arthur Horner. [39] Visitors from China and Czechoslovakia also marched and spoke that year. Davies attended the Wales peace conference organised by the SWA-NUM and the Glamorgan Federation of Trades Councils on in May 1961, before leading its deputation to the House of Commons and the Ministry of Defence to protest against West German-NATO military exercises in Pembrokeshire. [40] When the SWA-NUM and the National Union of Railwaymen organised a lobby of Westminster in February 1963 against rising unemployment, Davies featured rather more prominently in the event – and afterwards in the pages of The Miner – than any of his parliamentary colleagues. [41] His 1966 private members' Bill for chronic bronchitis and emphysema compensation was drawn up in close consultation with the miners' union. [42] This is the working-class, left-wing and internationalist political culture that S.O. Davies reflected and upheld. While it was created by a relatively small number of communists and their Labour Party allies in the miners' union, it permeated the coalfield on a substantial scale. It did not turn the majority of people into uncritical admirers of the Soviet Union and its policies, but it did ensure that Davies and his views were not marginalised S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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or isolated in the Welsh labour movement as they were in the PLP at Westminster. It is also true, nevertheless, that this political culture found only a faint echo among the South Wales Coalfield group of Labour MPs and the WRCL. Of the fourteen coalfield Labour MPs elected in 1951, for example, only Davies and Bevan were clearly on the left of the party; two others were in the radical-pacifist tradition (Cove and Abertillery's Llewelyn Williams); the ex-ILPer Walter Padley in Ogmore sometimes spoke or voted with the left, but moved to the right as the decade wore on; while the other nine were consistently on the right of the party, including most of the NUM-backed former 'Fed' officials (such as D.E. Thomas in Aberdare, Harold Finch in Bedwellty, Jim Griffiths in Llanelli, D.J. Williams in Neath and Iorrie Thomas in Rhondda West) and ex-Marxists (such as Ness Edwards in Caerphilly and Bill Mainwaring in Rhondda East). Likewise, S.O. Davies had few like-minded allies on the WRCL – and probably fewer still after he attacked that body as a 'conglomeration of nonentities'. [43] Three factors help to explain this discontinuity between a strong leftwing trend in the coalfield and the predominance of the right in its parliamentary representation. Firstly, many coalfield Labour MPs were able to draw on the credit of past deeds and utterances, replenishing it with dashes of anti-Tory rhetoric until they entered the House of Lords. Secondly, most of the other major unions affiliated to the Labour Party – representing the transport, manufacturing, municipal, engineering, steel, shop and general railway workers – were under right-wing control as much in Wales as outside, until at least the 1960s. While the NUM exercised decisive influence in many of the coalfield constituency Labour parties, other unions and local councillors dominated the others and the WCRL (whose powerful executive committee had a majority of Justices of the Peace, if 1950-51 was typical). To a greater or lesser extent, the right more than the left in the other unions gained in influence inside the Labour Party through the 1950s and 1960s. They were assisted by a third S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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factor: the exclusion of communists from participation in the Labour Party through their unions, most significantly through the NUM. Although there was a substantial left-wing NUM element in the Labour Party in south Wales, there was a right-wing NUM element, too. Although the latter were constrained to some degree by an obligation to represent South Wales Area policies inside the Labour Party, the area's annual conference and executive council were not in a position to dictate or enforce attitudes towards specific NUM-sponsored Labour MPs. Yet, still, there was sufficient support among Labour Party activists across Britain to pass conference resolutions against West German rearmament, British possession of nuclear weapons, Polaris bases, the European Common Market and associating with 'communist-front' organisations. S.O. Davies espoused these causes with more consistency and went beyond them. His pro-Sovietism was never a majority view in the Labour Party in Wales or Britain, or even in the South Wales Coalfield. But in international and military affairs he represented a significant trend of opinion in all three arenas. Like the contribution of various groups of workers to the history of the English working class, this trend should, in the words of E.P. Thompson, be rescued from the 'enormous condescension of posterity' as recorded by Welsh labour historians. [44] The latter have so far paid scant attention to the international dimension of Welsh labour movement politics in 'Cold War Wales'. [45] Consequently, the pro-peace, anti-imperialist and more-or-less pro-Soviet trend represented by S.O. Davies and a significant section of the South Wales Area NUM and Trades Councils movement lies largely unmarked beneath the rubble.
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Notes 1. Janet Morgan ed., The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman (London, 1981) p.471. 2. Western Mail, 27 June 1953. See also Robert Griffiths, S.O. Davies – A Socialist Faith (Llandysul, 1983) pp.226-27. 3. Bill Jones, The Russia Complex: the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union (Manchester, 1977) p.138. See also note 19, p.119. 4. K.O. Morgan, Labour People: Leaders and lieutenants, Hardie to Kinnock (Oxford 1987) p.153. 5. House of Commons, Debates, 25 June 1953, vol. 516 col. 2096. 6. 'Mr S.O. Davies: Rebel MP for Merthyr Tydfil', Times, 26 February 1972. 7. S.O. Davies, 'Russia in December, 1922', The Colliery Workers' Magazine, February 1923. 8. S.O. Davies Papers (1A, ii), South Wales Coalfield Archives, Swansea. 9. As 7 above. 10. Special Branch, 'Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom', 2 Aug 1923 CAB 24/161. 11. Archive of the German Communist Party (KPD), Federal Archives, Berlin, NL 4003/45 and 59, quoted in Stefan Berger and Norman LaPorte, 'Welsh Labour and the Cold War', Llafur, vol. 10 no. 4, 2011. 12. Stefan Berger and Norman LaPorte, Friendly Enemies: Britain and the GDR 19491990 (2010) p. 82. 13. Griffiths (1983) p.253. 14. S.O. Davies, 'Education, Progress, and Economy', Llanelly Mercury, 2 December 1915. 15. Amman Valley Chronicle, 14 September 1916. See also Ioan Matthews, '"Hen Arwr Maes y Glo Carreg": John James 1869-1942' in Hywel Teifi Edwards ed., Cyfres y Cymoedd: Cwm Aman (Llandysul, 1996) p.341. 16. House of Commons Debates, 13 May 1940, vol. 360 col. 1519. 17. Letter to S.O. Thomas, 4 April 1942, S.O. Davies Papers (1A, ii), Swansea. 18. Memorandum by the Home Secretary, 'World Peace Movement: Admission of Foreigners to Meetings Held in the United Kingdom', 26 March 1952, CAB 129/50. 19. House of Commons Debates, 17 July 1951, vol. 490 col. 1200. 20. Griffiths (1983) pp. 219-21. See also, for example, the editorials 'War of Lies', 'Whose Lies?' and 'Germ Warfare in the Western Mail, 1 April 1952, 7 April 1952 and 4 March 1953. 21. Douglas Jones, 'The Communist Party of Great Britain and the National Question in Wales, 1920-1991' (UCW Aberystwyth thesis, 2010) pp. 117-33; available online at http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/6117/
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The_CPGB_and_the_National_Question_in_Wales,_1920-1991_/Second_Draft/ D.pdf?sequence=1. 22. Idris Cox letter to S.O. Davies, 2 March 1955, in this author's possession. 23. S.O. Davies Papers (1A, ii), Swansea. 24. S.O. Davies, 'Labour and War', Labour Monthly, vol. 32 no. 9 (September 1950). 25. House of Commons Debates, 22 January 1953, vol. 510 col. 499. 26. Special Branch, 'Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom', 30 June 1921, CAB 24/125. 27. Special Branch, 'Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom', 21 September 1922, CAB 24/139. 28. Special Branch, 'Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom', 15 February 1923 CAB 24/159. 29. S.O. Davies Papers (1A, i), Swansea. 30. Ellis Smith and others, letter to Gallacher, 12 December 1961, reproduced in William Gallacher, Last Memoirs (London, 1966). 31. The Miner, vol. 9 no. 4 (July/August 1961) p.18. 32. 'Communist Party. Memorandum by the Home Secretary', 24 April 1942, CAB 66/23/48. 33. 'Withdraw British Troops from Korea! An appeal to the Labour Movement', Socialist Outlook, vol. 2 no. 8 (August 1950). 34. See Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London, 2009) pp. 413-5, note 90 p.932. 35. Jonathan Schneer, Labour's Conscience: The Labour Left 1945-51 (London 1988) p.118. 36. Schneer (1988) p.116. 37. House of Commons, Debates, 13 July 1949 vol. 467 cols. 546-47. 38. Richard West, 'A Town Like Malice', Time & Tide, 19 October 1961. 39. See The Miner, vol. 4 no. 4 (July/August 1956) p.11. 40. See The Miner, vol. 9 no. 3 (May/June 1961) and Griffiths (1983) p.248. 41. The Miner, vol. 11 no. 3 (March/April 1963); see front cover and p.12. 42. Harold Finch, Memoirs of a Bedwellty M.P. (Risca, 1972) p.182. 43. Comments made by Davies at a Merthyr Trades Council and Labour Party meeting, 25 October 1950, as recorded in the WRCL executive committee minutes, 26 February 1951. 44. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963) p.12. 45. Notably Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams and Deian Hopkin, The Labour Party in Wales, 1900-2000 (Cardiff, 2000) and Hywel Francis and David Smith, The Fed: A History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (London, 1980).
S.O. Davies, ‘fellow-travelling’ and the Cold War
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