The Dowlais Communist, J.S. Williams

by his son Iori Williams

I was born on October 12^th 1926, the second son of John Samuel and Jane. Later there were 4 other brothers and of this number 5 survived childhood. Our first home was a one up and one down terrace house in Dowlais. The one bedroom was divided into two by a draped blanket and the part where my brothers and I slept had a tiny window through which we used to watch the sky light up when the furnaces in the local steel works were working. The mother of this very happy brotherhood came from a family steeped in music. One of my uncles was the organist at Bethania Chapel. Another uncle, two aunts and Mam herself were members of the famous Dowlais United Choir.

The father of the family was from Bethesda in North Wales but due to a shortage of employment there the family moved south to the coalfield. Dad left school at the age of 12 to work underground. He was an avid scholar and throughout his life he read and read. He had thought of becoming a minister at some chapel but the more he studied the less enchanting that seemed. He was deeply concerned about society and the way it was structured with the few amassing capital at the expense of the hard-working exploited masses. He became a very active trade unionist and a founder member of the Communist Party. All this was looked on with disfavour by the mine owner and so he was sacked in 1923. We his children would never remember him working for cash. But work he did.

He continued to read and built up an impressive personal library the bulk of which David and I donated to the South Wales Miners Library at Swansea University College when we were adults. Another illustration of his love of learning was that he became the local organiser of the Left-Wing Book Club. He loved children and organised two camps for the children of the unemployed in 1934 and 1935. These were my first holidays shared by hundreds of other children. One of my clear memories of Dad was his taking me to the dentist but on the way, we called in several establishments and I was the mute witness to Dad’s scrounging equipment, food and cash to sustain those camps.

Dad was the founder and organiser of the local branch of the N.U.W.M.  (National Unemployed Workers Movement) and was the main organiser of the Hunger Marches from South Wales to London. Dad was a very good public speaker on the soap box or in a more formal setting. In 1935 Dad gave evidence to a Royal Commission on the status of the County Borough of Merthyr Tydfil and the Commission Chair Sir Arthur Lowry CB complimented Dad at the end saying that he ‘admired very much his ‘fluency and eloquence’. Afterwards he ‘disappeared’ from our lives to follow his convictions. The men who went to fight in Spain left in the dead of night and were careful not to involve their families. They never spoke afterwards about who had helped them get to Spain, not even fifty years after their return home. Dad was different, because before he left, he sat the family around a table and explained his reasons. He had encouraged young men to fight fascism in Spain and so he felt a moral obligation to go himself. He returned barely alive, suffering from malnutrition and various conditions and he did not live for long after his return to Merthyr Tydfil.

Mum was widowed when I was twelve years old and so she had to do all for us. Tom was seven, John five and Owen a babe of three. David aged fifteen left grammar school to become the bread winner. The family income then was a widow’s pension of ten shillings a week plus parish relief of two shillings and sixpence for each child. Mam herself supplemented this by cleaning for others, by taking in laundry and lodgers. The paying guests were key workers who came from N.E. England and Scotland to man the new shadow factories being built nearby. By this time of course we had moved into a new council house which had three bedrooms and a bathroom. The days of baths in a portable wooden tub were gone. The move into this house was the result of Dad’s pressure on the local council.

I was brought up in a family that loved music and that encouraged reading and scholarship and above all a sense of identity with the local community and its problems and challenges. I followed my older brother by winning a scholarship to a local grammar school that was located in Cyfarthfa Castle, a mock Norman castle built in the 19^th century by a local ironmaster and set in a large park. Not all the castle became a school, a part of it became the local museum. There was a side door connecting school and museum and I quickly developed the tendency of sneaking into the museum and that has become a habit of a lifetime.