Arthur Horner – The Melting Pot

Caedraw

by Carolyn Jacob

Following on from the last post here’s a potted history of Caedraw by Carolyn Jacob.

Caedraw means ‘the field beyond’, as it was just outside the traditional village of Merthyr Tydfil and a district beside the River Taff. Although in the eighteenth century it was just a field, as soon as Merthyr started to develop an iron industry this area had houses erected on it for workers and it soon became a built up area. Caedraw first started to have houses from 1800 onwards. Streets here included Taff Street, Upper Taff Street, Picton Street and streets with curious names, such as Isle of Wight and Adam and Eve Court. There was once an old woollen mill in Mill Street. This district was bordered by the River Taff and the Plymouth Feeder.

Along the banks of the river as well as a woollen mill there was a tannery, a laundry, a gas works, together with shops and public houses. The Taff was at its most polluted here, having industrial and household waste, together with the black waters of the Morlais Brook, ‘the Stinky’, carrying the filth of Dowlais and Penydarren Ironworks. Thankfully the herons on its banks find the river much cleaner today.

A hundred years ago Caedraw School was multicultural with English, Irish, Italian, Jewish and Welsh pupils. The old Caedraw School was built in 1872 and had some very famous ex pupils, such as the freeman of Merthyr Tydfil and miner’s leader, Arthur Horner. The school was situated by the old gas works.

Caedraw School with St Tydfil’s Church behind. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive

Because the district was very near to the river Taff, the first laundry in Merthyr Tydfil was set up here but sadly the workers here succumbed to cholera in the 1849 epidemic and this resulted in the Parish publishing a newspaper advertisement to tell people not to boil their water. According to the 1881 census there was a woollen factory between numbers 37 and 42 Picton Street. There were a number of public houses, lodging houses, and a bakehouse in Vaughan Street.

This built up area consisting of lots of small courtyards was very densely populated. The houses themselves were very clean, but small and without any modern conveniences. The old rambling buildings along tightly packed streets of Caedraw became very old fashioned and in need of repair by the 1950s. Merthyr Tydfil Borough Council decided to redevelop Caedraw and build modern flats here to replace the old houses. From 1959 onwards old Caedraw was gradually pulled down but not without a certain feeling of sadness, despite a headline in the Western Mail on 24 April 1959, ’12 Acres of ugliness being razed, Merthyr’s biggest face lift. More than 200 houses, two shops, two pubs and a club were put under the sledge-hammer in one of the biggest redevelopment schemes in South Wales’.

An aerial view of Caedraw before it was redeveloped. Caedraw School can be seen in the bottom right hand corner with the gasworks in front of it, next to the river. Photo courtesy of the Alan George Archive

The official opening of the Caedraw ‘Central Housing Redevelopment Project’ was on Thursday 22 April, 1965 by James Griffiths, Secretary of State for Wales. The Caedraw Scheme of 193 dwellings consisted of 66 one-bedroomed flats in the 12 storey point block. There are 64 two-bedroom maisonettes, 24 three-bedroomed maisonettes and 8 bed-sitting room flats in 8 4-storey blocks. The remainder of the accommodation is contained in two 3-storey blocks containing 19 two-bedroomed maisonettes, 9 one-bedroom flats and 3 bed-sitting room flats. The tender of George Wimpey and Co. Ltd. was accepted by the Council in January 1963 and work on the flats commenced four months later in April. The completion date in the contract was April 1965 but the scheme was completed and handed over six months ahead of this date.

Caedraw in 1965 after the redevelopment. Photo from the official ‘Opening’ programme of the Caedraw Project

Each block of flats was named after an important figure in the history of Wales. St Tydfil’s Court (the Celtic Saint buried here), Portal House (Portal wrote the report of the Royal Commission of 1935 into the state of Merthyr Tydfil), Wilson Court (Harold Wilson was Labour Prime Minister when the flats were opened), Buckland House (Lord Buckland a wealthy financier born in Merthyr), Attlee House (Clement Attlee Labour Prime Minister after 1945), Hywel House (Hywel Dda was a Welsh King who had the laws of the country written down), Trevithick House (Trevithick was the first to use a locomotive to transport iron from Penydarren and unwillingly carried passengers too).

Arthur Horner – part 2

courtesy of John Simkin

It soon became clear that A. J. Cook and Horner would play an important role in the proposed strike. David Kirkwood remarked that: “Arthur Cook, who talked from a platform like a Salvation Army preacher, had swept over the industrial districts like a hurricane. He was an agitator, pure and simple. He had no ideas about legislation or administration. He was a flame. Ramsay MacDonald called him a guttersnipe.

That he certainly was not. He was utterly sincere, in deadly earnest, and burnt himself out in the agitation.”A Conference of Trade Union Congress met on 1st May 1926, and afterwards announced that a General Strike “in defence of miners’ wages and hours” was to begin two days later. The leaders of both the Trade Union Council and the Labour Party were unhappy about the proposed strike, and during the next two days frantic efforts were made to reach an agreement with the Conservative Government and the mine-owners.

The Trade Union Congress called the General Strike on the understanding that they would then take over the negotiations from the Miners’ Federation. The main figure involved in these negotiations was Jimmy Thomas. Talks went on until late on Sunday night, and according to Thomas, they were close to agreement when Stanley Baldwin broke off negotiations. The reason for his action was that printers at the Daily Mail had refused to print a leading article attacking the proposed strike. The TUC negotiators apologized for the printers’ behaviour, but Baldwin refused to continue with the talks. The General Strike began the next day.

The Trade Union Congress adopted the following plan of action. To begin with they would bring out workers in the key industries – railwaymen, transport workers, dockers, printers, builders, iron and steel workers – a total of 3 million men (a fifth of the adult male population). Only later would other trade unionists, like the engineers and shipyard workers, be called out on strike.

On 7 May, Sir Herbert Samuel, Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry, approached the Trade Union Congress and offered to help bring the strike to an end. Without telling the miners, the TUC negotiating committee met Samuel and worked out a set of proposals to end the General Strike. These included: (1) a National Wages Board with an independent chairman; (2) a minimum wage for all colliery workers; (3) workers displaced by pit closures to be given alternative employment; (4) the wages subsidy to be renewed while negotiations continued. However, Samuel warned that subsequent negotiations would probably mean a reduction in wages. These terms were accepted by the TUC negotiating committee, but were rejected by the executive of the Miners’ Federation.

On 11 May, at a meeting of the Trade Union Congress General Committee, it was decided to accept the terms proposed by Herbert Samuel and to call off the General Strike. The following day, the TUC General Council visited 10 Downing Street to announce to the British Government that the General Strike was over. At the same meeting the TUC attempted to persuade the Government to support the Samuel proposals and to offer a guarantee that there would be no victimization of strikers. This the Government refused to do. As Lord Birkenhead, a member of the Government was to write later, the TUC’s surrender was “so humiliating that some instinctive breeding made one unwilling even to look at them.”

On 21 June 1926, the British Government introduced a Bill into the House of Commons that suspended the miners’ Seven Hours Act for five years – thus permitting a return to an 8 hour day for miners. In July the mine-owners announced new terms of employment for miners based on the 8 hour day. The miners were furious about what had happened although the General Strike was over, the miners’ strike continued.For several months the miners held out, but by October 1926 hardship forced men to begin to drift back to the mines. By the end of November most miners had reported back to work. However, many were victimized and remained unemployed for many years. Those that were employed were forced to accept longer hours, lower wages and district agreement. It was a terrible defeat for A. J. Cook and Horner. Horner remained a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and in 1933 he stood unsuccessfully as a Parliamentary candidate in the Rhondda East by-election.

Horner retained his popularity with union members and in 1936 he became President of the South Wales Miners’ Federation. According to Will Paynter: “It is my opinion that Arthur Horner was without question the ablest negotiator to come out of the British coalfields.”

On the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Horner and the CPGB was involved in the creation of the International Brigades. Horner was a major critic of the British government policy of Non-Intervention. According to the author of The Spanish Civil War and the British Labour Movement (1991): “Arthur Horner moved the resolution which called on the government to abandon Non-Intervention and to give Spain the right to buy arms, and called on the TUC to convene a meeting of executive committees to examine how to achieve this.”

Horner became president of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1946. He retired from the post in 1959 and was replaced by Will Paynter.

Arthur Horner died in 1968.

To read more of John Simkin’s excellent essays, please visit:
http://spartacus-educational.com

Arthur Horner – part 1

courtesy of John Simkin

Arthur Horner was born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1894. Poverty forced Horner to leave school at the age of eleven. He worked at a barber’s, as a grocer’s delivery boy and also at the local railway office.

Horner was deeply religious and at seventeen obtained a scholarship to attend the Baptist College in Birmingham. However, he left six months later and found work at Standard Collieries in the Rhondda Valley.

Horner also joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and also became an active member of the National Union of Mineworkers. He joined forces with other left-wing radicals such as A. J. Cook.

In 1914 Horner began is campaign against Britain’s involvement in the First World War and took part in the fight against conscription. A close friend of James Connolly, in 1916 he travelled to Dublin to join the Irish Citizen Army and took part in the Easter Rising.

On his return to Wales he became a checkweighman at Maerdy Colliery. He refused to be conscripted into the British Army and in 1917 he was arrested and charged with sedition, under the Defence of the Realm Act. He was found guilty and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs.

Horner had been impressed with the achievements of the Bolsheviks following the Russian Revolution and in April 1920 he joined forces with Tom Bell, Willie Gallacher, Arthur McManus, Harry Pollitt, Helen Crawfurd, A. J. Cook, Rajani Palme Dutt, Albert Inkpin and Willie Paul to establish the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). McManus was elected as the party’s first chairman and Bell and Pollitt became the party’s first full-time workers.

After the war A. J. Cook became leader of the South Wales Miners’ Federation. Horner became his deputy. Cook left the Communist Party of Great Britain over disagreement over industrial policy and rejoined the Independent Labour Party (ILP). However, Horner remained a loyal party member. In 1924 Harry Pollitt was appointed General Secretary of the National Minority Movement, a Communist-led united front within the trade unions. Pollitt worked alongside Tom Mann and according to one document the plan was “not to organize independent revolutionary trade unions, or to split revolutionary elements away from existing organizations affiliated to the T.U.C. but to convert the revolutionary minority within each industry into a revolutionary majority.” Horner became one of the leader of the Miners’ Minority Movement.

Later that year Frank Hodges, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers was forced to resign following his appointment as Civil Lord of the Admiralty in the Labour Government. A. J. Cook went on to secure the official South Wales nomination and subsequently won the national ballot by 217,664 votes to 202,297. Fred Bramley, general secretary of the TUC, was appalled at Cook’s election. He commented to his assistant, Walter Citrine: “Have you seen who has been elected secretary of the Miners’ Federation? Cook, a raving, tearing Communist. Now the miners are in for a bad time.” However, his victory was welcomed by Horner who argued that Cook represented “a time for new ideas – an agitator, a man with a sense of adventure”.

In 1925 the mine-owners announced that they intended to reduce the miner’s wages. The General Council of the Trade Union Congress responded to this news by promising to support the miners in their dispute with their employers. The Conservative Government, decided to intervene, and supplied the necessary money to bring the miners’ wages back to their previous level. This event became known as Red Friday because it was seen as a victory for working class solidarity.

The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, stated that this subsidy to the miners’ wages would only last 9 months. In the meantime, the government set up a Royal Commission under the chairmanship of Sir Herbert Samuel, to look into the problems of the Mining Industry. The Samuel Commission published its report in March 1926. It recognised that the industry needed to be reorganised but rejected the suggestion of nationalization. The report also recommended that the Government subsidy should be withdrawn and the miners’ wages should be reduced.The month in which the report was issued also saw the mine-owners publishing new terms of employment. These new procedures included an extension of the seven-hour working day, district wage-agreements, and a reduction in the wages of all miners. Depending on a variety of factors, the wages would be cut by between 10% and 25%. The mine-owners announced that if the miners did not accept their new terms of employment then from the first day of May they would be locked out of the pits.

To be continued…..

To read more of John Simkin’s excellent essays, please visit:
http://spartacus-educational.com

Keir Hardie: Leader of the Labour Party – part 3

by Carolyn Jacob

In January 1971 John Williams remembered James Keir Hardie in a Merthyr Express article called ‘The cloth-capped charismat’. There were only a few local people left who had seen James Keir Hardie in person. John recalled him as being of medium stature with white hair and beard. What made him stand out was that he walked firmly and always held his head. He looked dignified and serene. He was usually dressed in a tweed suit and soft collar. When he was but a small boy, John Williams remembered seeing him walking down Wind Street, Dowlais.

Famous people came to Merthyr Tydfil to support Keir Hardie’s election campaigns in 1906 and 1910. George Bernard Shaw was the principal speaker at Keir Hardie’s meeting in the Drill Hall. He was reported to have said: ‘If he met a working man who was not going to vote for Keir Hardie he would not talk to him, but he would put him in a museum as a curiosity.’

Merthyr Express, 8 January, 1910.

In 1912 the Independent Labour Party had their annual conference in Merthyr Tydfil, and the Suffragettes also had their important meeting here.

‘It is greed, cruelty, selfishness and the exploitation of man by man which a world-wide Socialist movement must unite to end’.
Keir Hardie in the Merthyr Miners’ Hall, 1908, following a recent trip to India.

He was committed to international socialism and toured the world arguing for equality. Speeches he made in favour of self-rule in India and equal rights for non-whites in South Africa resulted in riots and he was attacked in newspapers as a troublemaker. After his visit to India he spoke about the exploitation of women and child labour and the huge profits which are made on the back of their labour. He pleaded for the workers to rally against injustice and oppression the world over.

He later found injustice closer at home, the Dowlais Works strike of 1911, and he used it to emphasise the need for class unity in face of the industrial unrest sweeping Britain. Dowlais was notorious for its anti-unionism and shocking work conditions. Keir Hardie saw to it that Dowlais got no government contracts until the strikers were reinstated but the moulders were not taken back. He seized the opportunity provided by the Royal Visit to Dowlais in 1912 to write an Open Letter to the King and ensure that the moulders were reinstated in their employment. Nothing could be allowed to upset a Royal Visit.

‘The barber’s shop in which I worked was down by the Fountain, where Keir Hardie made some of his best speeches …… When I was thirteen or fourteen I joined the Independent Labour Party and Hardie became the first Socialist candidate, and I remember that he used to share the constituency of Aberdare and Merthyr with D.A. Thomas, who later became Lord Rhondda’.

Arthur L. Horner, Merthyr as I Knew it

21 years ago:- ‘It was tenaciously upheld by the public authorities, here and elsewhere, that it was an offence against laws of nature and ruinous to the State for public authorities to provide food for starving children, or independent aid for the aged poor. Even safety regulations in mines and factories were taboo. They interfered with the ‘freedom of the individual’. As for such proposals as an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, the right to work, and municipal houses, any serious mention of such classed a man as a fool’.

Keir Hardie’s , ‘Sunshine of Socialism Speech’ , 11 April 1914

He campaigned for such extreme and radical issues as home rule for Wales, old age pensions, votes for women, the nationalism of basic industries and the abolition of the House of Lords. The Merthyr Express of August 1907 reported that Keir Hardie had gone to America for his health. During a lecture he delivered on Socialism in Winnipeg, not only did someone run off with his hat but his vest and tobacco pouch also disappeared!

Although he shone on the public platform, it has been said that he was no politician as compromise was not in his nature. He preached that poverty was not inevitable but sprang from man-made conditions. Hardie declared that what was bad in the social system was not to be endured but abolished. However, he did enjoy some entertaining moments in Merthyr Tydfil. His 1910 election success was celebrated by a dance and reception at Cyfarthfa Castle at which he sang.

‘The man and his gospel were indivisible”. His simple heroism made our party and our world’.

Bruce Glasier

To be continued….