Sir Edgar Rees Jones – The Melting Pot

R. C. Wallhead, M.P.

Following on from the last post, we’ll have a look at S O Davies’ predecessor as Merthyr’s Member of Parliament – R C Wallhead.

Richard Christopher Wallhead (he later changed his middle name to Collingham) was born in London on 28 December 1869. He was educated at St Edward’s Elementary School at Romford before beginning his career as a clerk with the Great Eastern Railway. He then re-trained as a decorator and designer.

Remembering some of the privations of his youth, he became increasing drawn towards socialism, and he joined the Independent Labour Party, under the leadership of Keir Hardie, becoming an active member, and was noted as a successful orator on behalf of the party. In 1906 he was appointed manager of the ‘Labour Leader’, the official publication of the party. With the headquarters of the publication housed in Manchester, Wallhead moved to the city, eventually becoming a member of Manchester City Council in 1919, this despite the fact that, as a committed opponent of World War I, he was detained in 1917 under the Defence of the Realm Act, following an anti-war speech he delivered in South Wales.

Wallhead unsuccessfully contested Coventry in the 1918 general election for the Labour Party, to which the I.L.P. was affiliated, but was elected as chairman of the Party in 1920. In 1921 he resigned his seat on the Manchester City Council to devote his time to his own political career, and to the administrative affairs of the Party.

In 1920 he represented the I.L.P. on the British Labour delegation to Russia to investigate conditions there, where he met Lenin. He would subsequently visit Russia again in 1925.

British Labour delegation to Russia. Wallhead is in the centre.

In 1922, he contested his former mentor, Keir Hardie’s seat at Merthyr. The previous incumbent Edgar Rees Jones, the Liberal candidate, chose not to stand for re-election, and Wallhead, standing as a Labour candidate beat his only rival in the election, the Independent candidate, Richard Mathias, with 53% of the vote. He was subsequently one of only five I.L.P. M.P.s to retain their seats in the 1931 general election, after Labour withdrew their support, and he initially supported the party’s disaffiliation from Labour.

In 1933, however, Wallhead, having become increasing disillusioned with the I.L.P.’s gravitation towards the Soviet policies of violence since its cessation from the Labour Party the previous year, resigned from the I.L.P and joined the Labour Party.

By this time however, concern had been growing for a few years about Wallhead’s health, and he died at his home in Welwyn Garden City on 27 April 1934. Following his death, Clement Attlee, the then acting head of the Labour Party said:

“Dick Wallhead will be mourned by many thousands in the Labour Movement, for he was a man who sacrificed himself to the cause of Socialism….There was no more popular and effective exponent of Socialism than Wallhead in the days when the foundations of the Labour Party were being laid.”

Sunday School Demonstration

From the Merthyr Express 110 years ago today…

The Price of Politics

From the Merthyr Express 110 years ago today….

Merthyr’s M.P.’s

Following the recent article about Charles Stanton, I have received a number of messages asking for a list of all of Merthyr’s M.P.’s, so here we go….

Charles Stanton M.P.

102 years ago today a by-election was held in Merthyr to elect a new M.P. for the town to fill the vacancy left by the death of Keir Hardie on 26 September. The victor in that by-election was Charles Butt Stanton.

Charles Butt Stanton was born at Aberaman on 7 April 1873. After his education at Aberaman British School, he obtained his first job as a page boy in a Bridgend household, later returning home to work in a local colliery. An incident during the Hauliers’ Strike of 1893 brought him to public notice when it was alleged that he fired a gun during a clash between miners and the police. Arrested and tried, he was found guilty of possessing an unlicensed gun and sentenced to six months imprisonment. Prison did not cool his spirit and he played an active part in the South Wales miners’ strike of 1898.

Soon after the 1898 strike, Stanton went to London and found work as a docker, taking an active role in the London dock strike in the same year. He did not stay long in London but returned to Aberdare and was elected Miners’ Agent for Aberdare by a large majority in 1899, on the death of agent David Morgan (Dai o’r Nant). In this role he became involved in activities linked with the Cambrian Combine Strike of 1910, which led to the Tonypandy Riots.

During this first decade of the twentieth century, Stanton had not confined his activities to the South Wales Miners’ Federation. He became the first Secretary of the Aberdare Socialist Society in 1890 and was an active member of the Independent Labour Party, later serving as South Wales President.

In 1904 he was elected to the Aberdare Urban District Council as a member for the Aberaman Ward. A militant, he was critical of the more moderate approach adopted by the local Labour MP, Keir Hardie. When Britain entered the First World War, Stanton became a strong supporter of the national war effort, and publicly opposed Keir Hardie’s stance opposed to the war.

Hardie’s death, on 26 September 1915, a year after the outbreak of the war, caused a vacancy in one of the two Merthyr Tydfil parliamentary seats. The by-election to fill the vacancy was called for 25 November 1915.

The official Labour choice to succeed Keir Hardie was James Winstone (1863–1921). Winstone was a leader of the miners’ union – a miner’s agent since 1906, he had served as Vice-President of the South Wales Miners Federation since 1912, and had recently been elected President of the South Wales Federation. He had also been a County Councillor in Monmouthshire since 1906, and was a former chairman of the Urban District Councils of both Risca and Abersychan.

In the four by-elections held in Wales since the outbreak of war, the candidate of the former member’s party had been returned unopposed, in accordance with an electoral truce agreed between the parties. It was assumed therefore that the Labour Party candidate to succeed Keir Hardie would also be returned unopposed.

Stanton announced that he would stand against Winstone on a patriotic, win-the-war platform. Stanton’s campaign focused its attack on the Independent Labour Party. Stanton presented himself as a ‘National’ candidate – “… standing on a National platform, and respecting, as I am, the political truce, I am considering not only the opinion of Labour men but of all sections of the community. And hence I do not hesitate to say that my candidature is national in the truest sense of the term. Surely, it is obvious that the success of Mr. Winstone, which is unthinkable, would be a message of discouragement to our soldiers in the field …”

Stanton won the vacant seat with a majority of over 4,000 votes.

After the two-member Merthyr Tydfil seat was divided into two single member seats, Stanton focused on the Aberdare division, which he won at the 1918 general election. In Merthyr the new set was won by Sir Edgar Rees Jones.

Stanton again fought the Aberdare division at the general election of November 1922, this time as a Lloyd George National Liberal candidate. He was defeated by the Labour candidate, George Hall. In 1928 Stanton joined the Liberal Party.

Following his retirement from politics he settled at Hampstead, where he took over an old inn. Charles Butt Stanton died in London on 6 December 1946, survived by his widow, Alice and son Frank. His funeral was held at Golders Green Crematorium on 10 December.