7 MAY 1977, Page 10

Mud-slinging in Merthyr

Richard West

Writing on Merthyr Tydfil in 1962,1 quoted a Labour councillor, Tal Lloyd, as saying: 'It is quite inconceivable that any other party could win power here during our lifetime'. Yet last May the Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalists) took control of Merthyr Council; they may have done well in this week's Mid-Glamorgan elections; and stand a good chance of winning the parliamentary seat of Merthyr, held from 1900-15 by no less a person than Keir Hardie. Returning to Merthyr this week I bumped into Tal Lloyd, who recalled our previous meeting and said: :I got a thing wrong when I was talking to you last'. But even such an experienced politician as Mr Lloyd could not explain why there had been such a change in Merthyr, of all places.

The article that I wrote on that previous visit was headlined 'A Town Like Malice', so I was pleased to find that Merthyr has not lost one jot of its passion for blackguarding all and sundry. Conversation is spattered with potted biographies of those one sees in the street: 'She's the most famous abortionist in Great Britain. Give her a hard luck story and she'd do it for a packet of Woodbines'. 'He looks quite young but he has his wife dye his moustache'. 'He's a bloody wet blanket of a political speaker — never finishes a sentence. The only sentence he'll ever finish is three years'.

I asked after a nonconformist minister who had been leading the local campaign against Sunday licensing (and had begged us to take him over to Swansea, where he could drink without meeting his congregation). 'He was getting so drunk', came the reply, 'that he almost fell out of the pulpit. And then he was had up for a homosexual offence'.

Even the Aberfan disaster, in which dozens of homes were buried by mud from a slag heap, resulted in local scandal. When money and gifts for the stricken started to come in, a Merthyr bigwig did not distinguish himself by exclaiming in public: 'It's like winning the pools!' And soon rumours began to spread that the help was going astray. 'There were suitcases of fivers', said one Merthyr man never given to understatement, 'and American cigarettes, and toys as though Santa Claus had arrived in October. And Wellington boots? I'm telling. you, they had enough Wellingtons in this town to wade to New York'.

As I observed in the former article, it is often the very Welsh Nationalists who most savage their own compatriots, and a Merthyr Plaid supporter told me in 1962: 'Everyone hates one another in this town. They are consumed with envy, suspicion and malice'. Merthyr, tu n'as pas change.

By an odd coincidence, I had met on the train Merthyr's most famous poet Charles (also called 'Horace') Jones, who had shown me around the town fifteen years earlier. At that time he was keenly engaged in, a feud with the Labour Party pinning up on the Merthyr trees a verse lampoon implying a Sapphic relationship between. two Labour ladies. But even in those days he hated the Plaid Cymru still more, and left for England last year when they came to power. This was his first visit home but his fame is still bright. 'They ought to put up a plaque to him, outside W. H. Smith's,' said a man who had suffered Jones's satite. 'It would read: "Here on this pavement Horace Jones stood, leaning against the lamp-post, and talked for twenty years' ".

He was back on the pavement this week, still talking: 'Take a look at that new court house. The night before it was opened, the bandits came down from the hills and took all the copper off the roof. . That's the pub my parents kept — "The Narrow Gauge". It used to be called the "Green Fields of Erin" but then the railway came and they changed the name. And do you see that white house right over there? That's where William Crawshay, the iron master, lived. tie was a great shagger. All the husbands used to let their wives go with him so they could get promotion. He sired a whole village. When the vicar rebuked Crawshay, he threatened to pour molten metal over the church'.

The Charles Jones view of local historY does not conform with received opinion. There is a plaque to 'Richard Lewis, a martyr of the Welsh working class' who was hanged in 1831, after a rising against the Crawshays, as also a bust of Keir Hardie, whom Jones calls 'a bloody Scotch hypocrite'. Nor does his own life story conform to what we are normally told of life in the Valleys during the pre-war depression: 'Don't believe all that balls they tell you about South Wales in the 'thirties. Those were the best years of my life. I'd gone down the pit at the age of fourteen and when I was unemployed I had a suntan all the summer. We always had money for the pictures on a Saturday. It's all rubbish that we were starving. There was the soup kitchen, a blood good meal each day of corned beef an,d potatoes. And then I'd go to take a job 01 London, 8s3d return on the train compared to £15.42 now. I'd take a job in an hotel and then come back. The people who suffered were small traders, like drapers, who lent money and never got it back and were taken over then by the chain stores . . . And for a health service we paid a penny in the pound' or "poundage". We got very good medical treatment. "Poundage" covered the familY as well. I know, because my father vas killed underground when I was four. We were covered far better than they are today'. Over the years, Charles Jones has cornpiled an anthology of the wit and wisdom of Merthyr politics. There was the councillor, in a debate on colliery-tips, who protested against 'all this rubbish about forestation. Why don't we plant trees, and another thing, it's much cheaper too'. There was another who said to the chairman: 'We are having so many complaints regardinS favouritism and unfair allocation of council flats and houses that I herewith propose we appoint, as soon as possible, an omnibus' man to deal with them'. There wasthe, councillor who, on hearing of the proposa.' to buy a gondola for Merthyr's lake, asked. 'Why not buy two and breed them?' And another, who when reproached for the lack of public conveniences, swore to provide 'not just urinals but arsenals'. And cai councillor who is also a local shopstewn..; was heard to say at a strike meeting: `Sa"'.. 0! It's two-thirty, time we got cracking — pass me the loud inhaler . . The people of Merthyr call they neighbours in Aberdare 'the rats', who turn call the people of Merthyr 'the snakes which may explain why they have left dle party of Keir Hardie, first Labour Ml',9 Aberdare and Merthyr. The 'treachery the place might more fairly be called volatn: ity, readiness to experiment, even distrusit of received ideas. The Labour Party tha had been in power for fifty-seven unint.er" -rupted years was complacent, self-seeking, even corrupt. Much the same applied to the rest of South Wales although in towns like Cardiff and Swansea it was the Tories 0„r Ratepayers who exploited the disconteni. There have been several corruption cases involving Labour politicians; many have lost touch with the voters; perhaps James Callaghan's friend, the banker, pyramid seller and double mortgage wizard Sir Julian Hodge, is not quite the best-loved man in South Wales. His company has been active in Merthyr. The cracks in the Labour fortress at Merthyr first began to appear in 1962 when two Plaid Cymru councillors were elected. This was followed by an internal quarrel When some of the younger members tried to get rid of the MP, an ancient, absurd man in a black hat, S.O. (`the Petrolman') Davies, now best remembered for his impassioned utterances in the cause of North Korea. However, when Tal Lloyd stood against him as the official candidate, 'Esso' was sent back to Parliament with a still huge majority. The present MP, Ted Rowlands, IS a junior minister in the Foreign Office, Charged apparently with the task of ceding the Falkland Islands to Argentina and of helping Mozambique to overthrow the government of Rhodesia. The people of Merthyr also, rightly, resented the town centre development that ;vas introduced by Labour during the sixties, when such demolition work was in fashion. The Communists and a few of the Labour left-wingers opposed it because it would benefit capitalists; the Plaid Cymru °PPosed it because it would benefit English capitalists, and the Merthyr Express to it because the Labour Party tried to prevent them knowing about it. When the Merthyr Express finally did print the Plans, including the names of the board of the Property company, opponents of the :"'nerne were being anti-semitic, to which of course came the answer that nobody wanted to keep our Welsh Jews; only English Jews. In some respects, Merthyr has still been sPared the worst effects of Labour town Planning, as seen in for instance Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, Northampton, or Cardiff. One morning I was invited to JOi two Plaid Cymru men on a canvass of Nhtingale Street in the old colliery village of Abercanaid, outside Merthyr but part of the Merthyr constituency. I was prepared to [Ind that a street with such an attractive name would turn out to be a traffic-infested, Pertl°us road through a ghastly, high-rise council estate, but in fact it is a long, narrow Street, bordered on either side by rows of They cottages, two up and two down. t hey date from the eighteen-forties and are Pr,eserved as buildings of architectural and nstoric interest because of an oddity that I have never before seen: the cottages on either side of the street do not face each Other, but front in the same direction, so that One side looks out onto a blank wall. Nightingale Street is precisely the sort of Place that Labour planners want to demolish in order to have an excuse to build flew towns and estates. Indeed any modish Planner or architect would describe the street as a slum. It is, on the contrary, quite

outstandingly clean compared to most modern housing estates, many of which have been genuine slums from the moment of occupation. Of course people in Nightingale Streets have complaints about their cottages, particularly over the law that prevents them making extensions, but on the other hand they enjoy the inestimable pleasure of living in a real community, in which everybody knows his or her neighbour. It is a fact incomprehensible to the planners that a village atmosphere is as possible and desirable in an industrial as in a rural village.

Disillusionment with the Labour Party was not confined just to local issues. The introduction of comprehensive schools, and fears that standards might be lowered, has bothered a town that greatly respects education. (In a terraced cottage at one of the nearby mining villages, an old lady showed me the photograph of her son, an Oxford don, being introduced by Harold Macmillan to Prince Charles.) The replacement of cottage hospitals by impersonal and distant giant hospitals is only one of the grievances against the National Health Service. In neighbouring Ebbw Vale, the birthplace and seat of Aneurin Bevan, who founded the NHS, many miners have reintroduced the 'poundage' which is a form of private health insurance. The new system of local government is just as unpopular here as in England and although the Tories framed the Bill, Labour takes some of the blame for wanting it. Finally, wild-cat strikes and social security swindlers are quite as unpopular here in South Wales as in middle-class south-east England.

But why was it Plaid Cymru, rather than any other party, that took power in Merthyr Tydfil? Although there are local pockets of Welsh speakers, most people know only English, and many are not even Welsh by ancestry, since there was much immigration here when Crawshay opened his iron works. Irish, Jews, Italians and Germans all settled here; a leading local historian who has

written a memoir of Merthyr during the 'thirties is Chinese.

Perhaps Plaid Cymru took Merthyr by default. 'The town was an open sewer, smelling to heaven', one man told me. 'They'd have voted for the Tories if they'd been organised'. This may be an exaggeration; dislike of the Tories dies hard in these parts. Yet Plaid are the first to admit that in winning Merthyr they played down the abstract issues like nationalism and language to concentrate on 'community' subjects that Labour had ignored. They campaigned like our Liberals with a Welsh accent.

Plaid Cymru's term of office in Merthyr has not been an unqualified triumph. Some say that for arrogance, incompetence, folly, corruption and scandal, they have surpassed Labour in only one year. Much of the bitterness against Plaid concerns the language issue, especially the new Welsh school and youth group, which some think intolerant of English monoglots. The Welsh Arts Council is accused of giving grants only to Welsh speakers. 'BBC Wales is a Plaid Cymru propaganda machine', a local journalist told me. 'They're mostly North Walians, although they try to disguise their accents. But I can spot them because I've been on holiday in Llanberis'.

When a nearby motel was about to open, a Plaid councillor, Ifor Davies, who runs a prosperous bingo hall, demanded that signs there should be bilingual; to which Labour agreed, provided that Davies employed only bilingual bingo-callers.

Throughout the year some of the new Plaid councillors have been at odds with the council staff, many of whom are left-over Labour placemen. Hostility came to a head when the Leisure Services Department, which had been asked to erect sets of goal ' posts at opposite ends of a playing field, erected a single set by the half-way line. Understandably enraged, Councillor Eddie Bartlett called the ,staff uncooperative, singling out Frank Ryder, Director of Leisure Services. It so happened that the meeting hrquestion was being filmed by the BBC, as part of a programme on Plaid in office. The cameras turned on Mr Ryder, who started to make a defence, then burst into tears. Subsequently the local government union went on strike for four days until Mr Bartlett apologised.

Merthyr would not be Merthyr if it were not also bruited abroad that Plaid were up to their necks in scandal. And indeed a Plaid vice-chairman of a committee for fair awards of council housing soon put himself at the head of the list, later resigning. Again, Plaid had a little bit of bad luck when the man they had chosen as mayor-elect was soon after convicted of gross indecency.

Enough of this tittle-tattle!lt does not become a town of Merthyr's historic political righteousness. As one of her councillors once exclaimed in a rebuke to his enemies on the other side of the town hall: 'Call yourselves Socialists! If Keir Hardie was alive today, he'd be turning in his grave'.