From the Pioneer 110 years ago today….
Votes for Women
Tag: Suffragettes
The Temperance Hall
Most of us have passed, or even visited the Temperance Hall (or the Scala to those of you who were born after the 1960’s), but how many of you realise that it was in fact Merthyr’s first purposely built public meeting place?
The Temperance Hall was built by the Merthyr Temperance Society as somewhere to provide “instruction and amusement for the masses of the people”. The Temperance Movement began in the 1830’s. At first temperance usually involved a promise not to drink spirits and members continued to consume wine and beer. However, by the 1840s temperance societies began advocating teetotalism. This was a much stronger position as it not only included a pledge to abstain from all alcohol for life but also a promise not to provide it to others.
The Temperance Hall was opened in September 1852 by Henry Bruce, the M.P. for Merthyr. The original building measured approximately 80 foot by 40 foot, with a 12 foot wide platform, with a capacity of between 100 – 150 people.
In 1873, the Hall underwent major enlargement, was said to hold up to 4,000 people. For the next 20 years the Hall was the main theatre in Merthyr, mostly seeing off competition that came and went, from the Drill Hall, the short-lived Park Theatre and the many visiting portable theatres. Performances at the Temperance Hall ranged from musicals like “Les Cloches de Corneville” and the marionette spectacular “Bluebeard”, to performances of plays by Shakespeare and other leading dramatists.
As well these, the Hall was also used to host lectures and also religious and political meetings. One of the most famous of these was the meeting held in 1872 by Rose Mary Crawshay, one of the leaders of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the late 1800’s, which led to a petition for Women’s Suffrage being sent to Westminster.
In 1885 the management was controlled by a group of four brothers: Charles, Joseph, George and Harry Poole who continued with the mixed policy, and encouraged local amateur groups to use the premises as their regular base. By the turn of the century, however, the Temperance Hall was gradually becoming a music-hall and variety theatre, with the touring productions of musicals and straight plays tending to go to the Theatre Royal.
By 1914, the Temperance Hall was listed in the Kinematograph Year Book, so it was clearly an early cinema conversion. The manager of the theatre by now was Mr Israel Price, who would become a legendary theatre manager of the South Wales area. From the outbreak of the War until the start of the “talkies” Israel Price provided variety performances and reviews as well as silent films. In 1927 he was able to advertise that the Temperance Hall was “now the only live theatre in the town”.
The Temperance Hall was renovated and re-seated in 1930 and re-opened in August of that year, promoting itself as “Now one of the most comfortable theatres in the provinces”.
In 1939, Israel Price’s son (also called Israel) took over the running of the Temperance Hall, and he also eventually took over the management of the Theatre Royal. The Hall seems to have been used almost exclusively as a cinema during the Second World War, but in the post-war years it resumed live theatre, and in 1948 ran a forty-week repertory season under the direction of Barney Lando.
By the 1953 edition of the Kinematograph Year Book the proprietors were listed as Messrs Price and Williams, and there were 624 seats, and by 1980 the Theatre had ceased presenting live shows and was used exclusively as a cinema having been renamed the Scala Cinema. It was owned by Dene Cinema Enterprises Ltd. and had 480 seats.
The cinema closed in the early 1980’s and in 1985 the building was converted into a bar and snooker club.
Keir Hardie: Leader of the Labour Party – part 4
by Carolyn Jacob
‘The life of one Welsh miner is of greater commercial and moral value to the British nation than the whole Royal crowd put together.’
Keir Hardie June 1894
‘One day in June, 1894, in the Commons, an address of congratulations was moved on the birth of a son to the Duchess of York. Hardie moved an amendment to this address, crying out that over two hundred and fifty men and boys had been killed on the same day in a mining disaster, and claiming that this great tragedy needed the attention of the House of Commons far more than the birth of any baby. He had been a miner himself; he knew. The House rose at him like a pack of wild dogs. His voice was drowned in a din of insults and the drumming of feet on the floor. But he stood there, white-faced, blazing-eyed, his lips moving, though the words were swept away and he was dismissed for spoiling the joy of a Royal occasion’.
R. Clynes, Memoirs, 1937
Attacking the Royal Family was hugely unpopular but Hardie was grief-stricken for colliers’ families and bitter that others did not seem to even care. He later criticised the visit by the Russian Czar because Russia had recently treated trade unionists savagely, shooting demonstrators. In reply Keir Hardie and two others were removed from the list of Members invited to Court functions. In the Merthyr Express Keir Hardie seemed amused not to be invited to the Royal Garden Party, an invitation he would not have accepted, as he could not return the compliment by inviting the Court to tea in his small terraced house in Lanarkshire.
‘I thought the days of my pioneering were over but of late I have felt, with increasing intensity, the injustice inflicted on women by our present laws’.
Keir Hardie, speech at the Labour Party Conference, 1907
‘That there is difference of opinion concerning the tactics of the militant Suffragettes goes without saying, but surely there call be no two opinions concerning the horrible brutality of these proceedings? Women, worn and weak by hunger, are seized upon, held down by brute force, gagged, a tube inserted down their throats and food poured or pumped into the stomach’.
Keir Hardie, letter to Votes for Women, 1 October, 1909
The Pankhursts converted Hardie to the cause of women’s suffrage, although not all of his fellow socialists shared this commitment. In 1907 when Miss Arscott of Merthyr Tydfil, daughter of the Brecon Road grocer, was imprisoned in London for taking part in a demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament Keir Hardie visited her in prison to offer his support and encouragement. He had many female supporters in Merthyr Tydfil, including the daughter of the Liberal MP, D.A. Thomas.
‘Keir Hardie has been the greatest human being of our time. Asked to write a motto, he would choose Votes for Women and Socialism for All.’
The Women’s Dreadnought, 2 October, 1915
‘His extraordinary sympathy with the women’s movement, his complete understanding of what it stands for, were what first made me understand the finest side of his character. In the days when Labour men neglected and slighted the women’s cause or ridiculed it, Hardie never once failed us, never once faltered in his work for us. We women can never forget what we owe him’.
Isabella Ford, a member of the NUWSS
‘Politics is but a kind of football game between the rich Tories and the rich Liberals, and you working men are the ball which they kick vigorously and with grim delight between their goalposts’.
Keir Hardie, The Labour Leader
Keir Hardie devoted his life to the working class and, contrary to the lies of the Conservative Party, he accepted no money for himself. Hard work wore him out, in some photographs he looked like Old Father Time but he was only 59 when he died.
‘The moving impulse of Keir Hardie’s work was a profound belief in the common people. His socialism was a great human conception of the equal right of all men and women to the wealth of the world and to the enjoyment of the fullness of life. He had a touching sympathy for the helpless. I have seen his eyes fill with tears at the news of the death of a devoted dog. He carried to his end an old silver watch he had worn in the mine, which bore the marks of the teeth of a favourite pit pony, made by the futile attempt on its part to eat it’.
Philip Snowden
Keir Hardie could not understand how working-class men could fight each other for a ‘Capitalist Cause’. He was a firm opponent of all wars.
‘I knew that Keir Hardie had been failing in health since the early days of the war. The great slaughter, the rending of the bonds of international fraternity, on which he had built his hopes, had broken him’.
Sylvia Pankhurst
‘The long-threatened European war is now upon us. You have never been consulted about this war. The workers of all countries must strain every nerve to prevent their Governments from committing them to war. Hold vast demonstrations against war, in London and in every industrial centre. Down with the rule of brute force! Down with war! Up with the peaceful rule of the people’.
Keir Hardie at the Merthyr Olympia Skating Rink, 30 October 1914
Keir Hardie disagreed with the Labour Party over the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, as a pacifist, he tried to organize a national strike against Britain’s participation in the war and was saddened that the recruiting in Merthyr showed patriotic zeal. He was concerned about the threat to civil liberties and to the living standards of the working class. Although seriously ill, Hardie took part in several anti-war demonstrations and some of his former supporters denounced him as a traitor.
In December, 1914, Hardie had a stroke and he returned to the House of Commons in 1915 before he had made a full-recovery. Numerous meetings in various parts of the country and staying in people’s homes took their toll. His London home, was an attic in Nevill Court and he does not appear to have taken much care of himself. Politics concerned him more than personal comfort. Once when his doctor told him to rest, he went to Belgium to meet other social democratic leaders but was arrested as he was mistaken for an anarchist!
‘Hardie died of a broken heart. He had always been a pacifist; when British Labour refused to inaugurate a great strike on behalf of peace, Hardie became a broken man’.
R. Clynes, Memoirs
‘What could Hardie do but die?’
George Bernard Shaw
Rose Mary Crawshay – part 2
by Irene Janes
The efforts of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffragist movement are not denied but perhaps in this year of 2018 when women, in this country, celebrate a hundred years of having the right to vote we should raise awareness of our very own Rose Mary.
Here in our town, Rose (I feel I know her so well I can drop the Mary) was one the most vocal members of the early feminist movement. The Women’s Herald described her as ‘one of the most enlightened pioneers of women’s emancipation’. She and twenty-six other women gave Welsh addresses when they signed the first women’s suffrage petition 1866.
1870 saw Rose became the first woman appointed to the school board in the wake of the Education Act of the same year.
What confidence and conviction she must have had when she spoke at meetings in Merthyr about the rights of women, one of which was held in The Temperance Hall, (now the Scala snooker hall), John Street. She spoke of how the vote would ‘benefit women’s characters’. Perhaps not surprisingly for those days, she was taken to task for ‘disturbing the peace and leading the women of Wales astray’.
Late in 1884 there was a decision by the delegates of the Aberdare, Merthyr Tydfil and Dowlais District Mine Association to support a series of talks by Jeanette Wilkinson on the rights for women to be able to vote. This may have been the reason there was little campaigning on the subject in Wales. This is the first recorded instance of interest by Welsh working men supporting female suffrage.
‘Lady Helpers’ this is not something I had heard before. However, Rose had some. She employed women to work alongside the male servants waiting on the Crawshay table. She hoped her scheme would encourage others to employ females for jobs other than dirty work. Rose was delighted when her husband suggested their home was becoming a home for the destitute. I would have loved to have been a fly on their bedroom wall. (Well they did have five children together so they must have met up now and again.)
This is not a rogue paragraph – these are quotes from the 1997 winner Dame Hermione Lee ‘the prize of five hundred pound isn’t a huge amount of money but the impact it has on its winners, including myself, can be huge’. Catherine Bates of author of ‘Masculinity and the Hunt’, the 2015 winner recently told me ‘Women are still under represented in academia’ ‘Wonderful to have a prize that goes some way towards addressing the gender imbalance’ ‘it helps to give women scholars a visibility and recognition they may not get otherwise and ‘an encouraging and validating experience’. Their indebtedness is down to our Mrs Crawshay.
The above was because in April 1888 Rose showed her suffrage side by setting up the ‘Byron, Shelley, Keats in Memoriam Yearly Prize Fund’ -a literary prize for female scholars. Since 1914, The British Academy has taken over the administration of the prize fund. Aptly renamed The Rose Mary Crawshay Prize Fund, one hundred and thirty years later, in this year of 2018, good old Mrs Crawshay is still enabling women.
My first conclusion, Rose Mary married an autocratic, showy, and notoriously tyrannical man in an era where woman were suppressed so she must have had a strong personality. My second, I bet she hated the title Mrs Robert Crawshay attached to her good deeds perhaps today as a philanthropist she would have been credited under her own name Rose Mary Yates.
Sadly there is a but – why did she have virtually nothing to do with her own daughters, Rose Harriette and Henrietta Louise? Odd don’t you think?
Rose Mary died in 1907 at Rose Cottage, Cathedine, Breconshire, at the age of seventy-nine.