Another voice

Tremors of Tonypandy

Auberon Waugh

Obsessed as we all must be by Mrs Thatcher's restoration of hereditary peerages to her Honours List — the one solid and constructive achievement of her government to date — I had a bad moment when it appeared that Speaker Thomas, in choosing to be known as Viscount Tonypandy, had sufferred some infantile regression and let the side down. [think it was Attlee, but it might have been Herbert Morrison, who always swore that if ever he was made a peer he would take the title of Lord Luv-a-duck. In the event, of course, they both chose sensible titles. But was not Tonypandy the site of some dreadful massacre of Welsh miners by Mr Churchill when he was briefly Home Secretary in the Asquith Government of 1908-15?

My history of the Labour movement in Wales is rather sketchy, but I had a distinct memory of Churchill directing the rifle fire — 'shoot left', 'shoot right' — and piles of tiny Welsh corpses building up. Perhaps it was all in ichard Attenborough's film about Young Winston. It seemed in the worst of taste for a former Speaker to re- mind us of this unhappy episode, rather as if Pratap Chitnis, on being created a life peer, had taken the title Lord Amritsar, or Wedgies old father had insisted on calling himself Viscount Peterloo.

The greatest danger seemed to me that Speaker Thomas's rash act might discourage Mrs Thatcher from further hereditary creations. There must surely be two sides to the massacre of Tonypandy. Perhaps Speaker Thomas's gesture could be interpreted as a mark of respect and gratitude for the restoration of firm govern- ment.

Welsh history is riddled with lies, exag- gerations and poetic inventions, and the same might be said of the history of the Labour movement. Certainly Mr Atten- borough's account of the massacre of Amritsar in his worthless film Gandhi was a travesty of the truth. He did not mention that Amritsar had been given up to wholesale rioting for three days, that the civil authorities had surrendered control to the mob, that many buildings were gutted and two banks had been looted, or that it had all started when a mob, without pro- vocation, had murdered five Englishmen and assaulted a lady missionary, leaving her for dead. Nor did Mr Attenborough men- tion that in gratitude for his firm handling of the riot the Sikhs made Brigadier- General Reginald Dyer — portrayed by At- tenborough as a raving sadist — an honorary Sikh, or that the Morning Post collected £26,000 for him from its readers.

But history, of course, has decided other- wise. The Bagh Jalianwala, in Amritsar, where the massacre occurred, has long been established as a shrine to racial hatred, and General Dyer's name is reviled wherever the fat cats of showbiz have a chance to flaunt their social consciences. It was obviously not a glorious moment in our empire story, but equally obviously it was the sort of tragedy which can occur only too easily in violent riots where the forces of law and order are heavily outnumbered and where rioters' intentions are liable to be misinter- preted.

What, then, of Tonypandy? I telephoned Sir Alan Watkins to ask exactly what hap- pened on that bloodstained day in November 1910. He told me not to believe anything I was told on the subject. 'They are all the most terrible liars, boy,' he said. Did many people die, I asked timidly. Oh yes, there was no doubt that several had been shot and lost their lives. But it was all quite right. The riots had gone on for a year, and the troops spent their time play- ing football with the miners. The important thing was not to believe the lies of Churc- hill's biographer that he had sent in the Metropolitan Police first. That was all wrong.

Wearily, I turned to an alternative ver- sion, contained in the memoirs of the rele- vant general, Sir Nevil Macready (Annals of an Active Life, 1924). By this account, not a shot was fired and nobody was hurt. The Metropolitan Police, using rolled-up mackintoshes as truncheons, had more or less quelled the riot long before troops ar- rived on the scene. He has nothing but praise for Churchill's conduct (writing at a time when Churchill was out of office and out of favour, long before he emerged as a national saviour): 'It was entirely due to Mr Churchill's forethought that bloodshed was avoided.'

Ah well! In time, no doubt, Welsh history will merge whatever happened at Tonypandy in 1910 with whatever happen- ed at nearby Aberfan in 1966, and we will have Churchill ordering his troops to shovel coal slag and slurry over the innocent school-children. But at this stage I discovered that Speaker Thomas had chosen to be called Lod Tonypandy because he was born there, son of Zachariah Thomas, on 29 January 1909, nearly two years before the massacre. It seems unlikely that as a toddler of 20 months he even remembers playing among the corpses of good Welsh miners, piled as high as any slag heap. He was just indulging in a little Welsh whimsy, to which he is surely entitled.

But his choice has undoubtedly brought this little mining village in the Rhondda Valley back into the news after nearly 73 years' absence. Even as it happens we can see another corner of Welsh proletarian history unfolding. I refer, of course, to Mr Moss Evans's magnificent stand against the regiments of infantry with fixed bayonets, the machine guns, light and heavy tanks, cluster bombs, nuclear missiles and infinite- ly more sinister biological weapons of Mr Norman Tebbit.

Mr Tebbit, whom I met for the first time just before the election and who struck me as an extraordinarily mild and humorous man, at peace with himself and the world, may not yet have reached the heights of Winston Churchill, the Butcher of Tony- pandy, in left-wing demonology, but he has long since overtaken General Dyer. The fiendish glee with which he supervises masi starvation on Merseyside, just waiting for them to open a new biscuit factory before closing it down, is a byword wherever the Pilger-Dutt-Pauker features service is received. When confronted by firm evidence that people are dying like flies'in Newcastle, he laughingly suggests that they should eat their bicycles.

Informed opinion (at any rate in such authoritative journals as the New York Times) has it that this long-term strategy is to provoke violent riots which will turn into a racial conflict and wipe out the coloured population in a series of National Front firebomb raids, thereby crushing all opposi- tion to a hundred years of Thatcherite Teb- bitism. His present ploy is to publish a pro- posal that the unions might be prepared to democratise themselves a little, holding the occasional ballot on such matters as the election of officials, major strikes or com- pulsory subscriptions to the Labour Party.

This, of course, marks a return to the sort of slave system which built the Pyramids. 'Unions are bastions of democracy,' declares Mr Evans. Decision- making by policy conferences is much bet- ter than people sitting at home marking a piece of paper without the opportunity to hear arguments or ask questions. In any case, the Transport and General Workers' Union cannot possible afford the postage stamps: 'Our task is to defend the socialist base. We reject Tebbitism and we reject the con- cept of tame trade unions. The battle is on ans we must stand united to win.'

Mr Evans, who was 58 on Wednesday, announces that he is ready to go to jail rather than submit to such ballots. 'That is not a very great sacrifice at my age,' he says.

He need not worry. In Welsh song and story, it has already been decided that he spent 30 years in prison, 20 of them manacl- ed to a wall while rats chewed his toes. I wonder whether in real life he will succeed in persuading a single policeman to wave a mackintosh at him.