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TYLERI TALES: THE BLAINA RIOTS - by Martyn Thomas

This essay is reproduced here with the express permission of Martyn Thomas to whom thanks are due. © Martyn Thomas 1986

  

No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electrical or mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author. E-mail: martyn142@yahoo.com

This is the story of that march and the subsequent violence, but hopefully it a more than that. It is also intended to depict the circumstances, both immediate and more general, which led to the march. Those readers who just want the bare facts will find them here. But good history tries to explain events not just to relate them, so readers will also find out about the social, economic and political catalysts which triggered the violence leaving hundreds of people injured.

 

Information has been obtained from a variety of sources. Although the event is familiar, in name at least, to people throughout the area, there has been very little written about it. This is a familiar tale where South Wales working class history is concerned (How many of us could name the six wives of Henry VIII but would be unable to name the Abertillery man who gave his life in the great Chartist uprising of 1839?).

 

Consequently, whilst a number of books have provided some valuable background information, the majority of the details of the event itself were obtained through an examination of the newspapers of the day, and through interviews with the elderly, but at the time of the interviews, still very enthusiastic veterans of the march. This is an important point: there are some people who still claim history can be entirely objective. The author isn’t one of them. This story is told from the perspective of, and with a great deal of sympathy towards, the marchers, their colleagues and families. No apologies are offered for this.

 

So…what does this story comprise? Chapter One examines the economic and social conditions which prevailed in South Wales, and in the upper Western valley in particular, during the 1930s. Special attention is given to the problem of unemployment, which was almost a defining feature of the period. Chapter Two continues this theme by looking at the Means Test which was applied to the unemployed, and the reaction that it provoked.

 

Chapter Three looks at the objectives of the march which led to the riot, and the particular circumstances which brought the march about. An attempt will be made to identify the main planners and participants involved, and to find out the sorts of organisations to which they belonged.

 

The march itself and the violence which ensued will be the subject of the fourth chapter. The march's progress and the police attempts to prevent it will be examined, and the incident itself will be looked at to try and establish the balance of responsibility for the violence.

The subsequent trials provide the basis for the final chapter. By evaluating the detailed evidence given by both prosecution and defence, a clearer picture of events of 21st March should be obtained. The chapter also provides an outline of the activities carried out in the towns in support of the defendants, and tells of the fate of the individuals concerned.

 

Sincere thanks for a great deal of information regarding the 'Blaina Riots' are offered to Herbie Morgan and Clarence Lloyd, two participants of the march. If it is not too pompous an idea for this story to be dedicated to anyone, then it is very definitely dedicated to the memory of Herbie Morgan, a man of principle and compassion, whose friendship and unlimited enthusiasm are sorely missed. Hopefully Herbie would agree that this story does, in a small way, add to the record of the 'Hungry Thirties' for which Wal Hannington called.

 

CHAPTER 1.            ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS

 

The 1920s and 1930s were the classic example of capitalism in crisis. Unemployment reached colossal levels in the advanced capitalist countries, and whole industries were laid waste as the peculiar affliction of overproduction left its scars. After the First World War ended in 1918 it was assumed in Britain that the recession which followed closely behind was merely the result of a post-war upset in the economy. Production and trade, which fell during the 1920s, were expected to pick up again as they resumed their normal peace-time rhythm. After all, was not the outstanding success of the United States in the ‘Roarin' Twenties' an example which hard work and technological advance could achieve for Britain? Karl Marx, it was said, had been proved wrong.

 

The crash which began in Wall Street in 1929 soon shattered any illusions which may have existed about the prospect of a smooth transition to a boom economy. The slump spread its effects worldwide, and the British economy, which had been sliding gradually into recession anyway, foundered along with the rest. By August 1931 unemployment had reached 2.7 million and 20 percent of this jobless army had been out of work for over six months [1]

 

By 1933 this tragic figure had risen to very nearly three million which represented a record 23 percent of the insured workforce.[2 ] Nevertheless, Britain was better placed than some in that it still possessed a vast empire which cushioned the blow for British capital through the provision of cheap food, cheap raw materials and overseas investment income. In this way, the excesses shown by the German and Italian ruling classes were avoided (at the expense, of course, of the indigenous populations of the colonies).

 

But the period still proved to be a bitter experience for the British working class, and the brunt of the attack on their living standards was suffered by the unemployed. In fact, the trade union movement, which had adopted a defensive stance after the defeat of the 1926 General Strike, was actually able to raise average real wages for those still in work during this period, whilst vicious cuts were made in unemployment assistance.

 

The effects of the Depression were by no means felt uniformly throughout Britain. Particularly badly hit were areas of traditional staple industries such as coal, steel. shipbuilding and textiles. As early as 1927 Neville Chamberlain had declared that, "The devastation in the coalfields can only be compared with the war devastation of France". [3]

 

By the mid 1930s, the picture had not improved. When the recovery started in 1934-35 it was slow, uneven and whole industries were left out completely. So whilst the growth areas of the South and the Midlands sprang into life, others in the North and Wales appeared to have died outright.

 

The South Wales valleys, based extensively upon coal production, would have well-fitted Chamberlain's description accurately. The decline had set in very early on as German war reparations to France, Belgium and Italy under the Treaty of Versailles, and the French occupation of the Saar Valley coalfields, hit the demand for British coal exports. Churchill's infamous decision to return to the Gold Standard in 1925 aggravated an already serious situation, with a greatly overvalued pound and foreign protectionism further reducing the level of demand for British coal abroad.

 

Increased competition amongst British coal owners led to a spate of mergers, cartels, price agreements and production quotas in an effort to maintain prices and so profit margins. These changes, encouraged by both the banks and government, resulted not so much in a scaling down of production in individual mines, but in the wholesale closure of entire areas in order that the remaining collieries could operate profitably.

 

A commission appointed in 1934 to assist these 'Distressed Areas'  was both relatively powerless and came too late. Output in the South Wales coalfield, which had already fallen from a high of almost 57 million tons in 1913 to 48.1 million in 1929, plunged yet again to 35 million tons by 1935.[4]

 

A major reason for this reduction was the extent of the coalfield's dependence on exports, which, as has been shown, dropped dramatically. From 36.7 million tons in 1913, South Wales coal exports fell to just 19.1 million in 1935. [5] Of course, such a massive drop in production was accompanied by a comparable reduction in manpower. 271,161 men had been employed in the coalfield during the peak year of 1913. By 1935 the number was just 131,697.[6]

 

The effect on the economy of the region can be imagined. It was not only the direct loss in mining jobs which had to be contended with. The loss in buying power which accompanied a reduction in the mining wages bill from £65 million in 1920 to £14 million in 1933 [7] meant that a 'downward multiplier' went into operation and further devastated the coalmining communities, which thus decimated tended to exist in twilight worlds with obscene levels of unemployment.

 

The Monmouthshire coalfield possessed many of these 'twilight communities' created, as described, by the drop in coal exports which had plunged to just 2.6 million tons from Newport by 1936.[8 ]In the Western valley, life revolved almost solely around coal production. In the Nantyglo and Blaina area there were seven collieries in existence in the 1930s: Coalbrookvale, Deep Coal Pit, North Blaina, Beynons, Lower Deep Coal Pit, West Blaina Red Ash, Henwaun and South Griffin.

 

In Abertillery there were six others: Roseheyworth, Six Bells, Cwmtillery, Vivian, Gray and Penybont. Apart from these workplaces there was precious little else. In Nantyglo, for instance, the only other source of industrial employment in 1937 was a crusher making ballast employing around twenty men, a clayworks with thirty employees, and a gasworks.

 

As with other coal producing areas, the rot set in early. The 1921 lockout which put 10,000 men on the unemployment register at Abertillery was a major turning point. Around one third of this number were not re-employed after the lock-out had ended. In the same year 4,800 men were laid off in the district of Nantyglo and Blaina. Of course, large numbers of these miners would be taken on for varying periods throughout the 1920s and 1930s as the collieries reopened with temporary increases in demand, only to close once again as it dropped away.

 

But henceforth the area would be plagued by large residual pools of unemployed which would continue up to and beyond the 1935 incident. So by 1933, at the very bottom of the Depression, unemployment in Blaina had reached 60 percent and in Abertillery it measured 85 percent.[9 ]These two areas, which suffered not only from the fall in demand for export coal, but also from the reduced output of the nearby Ebbw Vale steelworks, were the only two parts of western Monmouthshire which had appreciably more unemployment in 1935 than in 1931. In fact by 1935 Abertillery accounted for around one third of the unemployed coalminers in the Western Monmouthshire district.[10]

 

These levels of unemployment, together with the accompanying multiplier effect, produced problems in the condition of both the people who lived in the pit villages and in the physical structure of the towns themselves. The valley communities became rundown in appearance and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Wyndham Portal, who toured the South Wales coalfield at the time, reported that many of the heads of the valleys villages such as Abertillery and Brynmawr were “derelict”.[11]

 

Philip Massey, in his 'Portrait Of A Mining Town' of 1937, wrote extensively of the housing conditions in Blaina and Nantyglo. In describing Nantyglo itself he reported that, “Practically all this property is unfit for human habitation  - a good many houses are back-to-back or without through ventilation, the sanitary arrangements are of a primitive type and in some cases shared between houses". Winchestown (a part of Nantyglo) consisted of especially aged and deplorable housing, and Cwmcelyn (in Blaina) possessed a number of houses built circa 1800.

 

Massey went on to describe conditions which would have seemed more at home in Friedrich Engels' 'The Condition Of The Working Class In England', written 90 years earlier, than in a report of life in a twentieth century community. He found at least forty cellar dwellings in the process of his investigation, and houses where “in many cases the back is against the earth, so that the walls are constantly damp  - the earth sometimes goes up to the full height of the house”.

 

In many of the houses there was no direct connection with the main sewer, and drainage was instead allowed to flow untreated into the river Ebbw which consequently itself resembled an open sewer. Overall, Massey estimated that in order to relieve overcrowding and provide accommodation which would be needed if a programme of slum clearance and reconstruction was carried out, around 600 houses would be necessary.

 

The combination of a lack of money and the appalling housing conditions described above was quite obviously not conducive to good health amongst the towns' inhabitants. In his report Massey stated that whilst the men of the towns  - except those suffering from industrial diseases  -  looked their age, the women of the communities generally looked older than they were. The children of the valley were particularly badly affected by the Depression.

 

The infant mortality rate doubled from 56.6 per 1000 children under twelve months in 1930 to 118. [8] in 1934.[12] If they survived the early years of life, these children had little to look forward to. In 1935, the Monmouthshire County Health Department reported that 80 percent of Abertillery's schoolchildren were physically incapacitated to some degree. Only ten percent were in normal health.[13] Boots and shoes were rare, so that children either wore plimsolls to school or stayed at home in wet weather. Those that did manage to obtain boots had them supplied by philanthropic daily newspapers, whose names were stamped upon them.

 

Poor nutrition was a contributory factor to the general bad health of the period. A 1932 inquiry into nutrition in Monmouthshire described the children of nearby Rhymney as "small with a tired expression, lacking bright sparkling eyes and with no tone to the skin". [14] A similar report in 1937 at Blaina Boys' School produced the following results on the standard of nutrition amongst the schoolchildren.[15]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One can understand the outrage which must have been felt in the communities when the Reverend Bradshaw of Ebbw Vale declared just three weeks before the riot occurred that there was no poverty in the towns of the heads of the valleys area, a statement which was unanimously condemned by the Blaina Council of Evangelical Churches and other organisations in the area (see right). Poverty there most certainly was, and the major contributory factor was the infamous Means Test which was applied to the unemployed and which serves as the focus for the next chapter.

 

>> Click here for Chapter 2
 

REFERENCES

 

INTRODUCTION

1.        Wal Hannington, ‘Never On Our Knees’ (1967), p.246

 

CHAPTER ONE

1.        N.Branson and M.Heinemann, ‘Britain In The Nineteen Thirties’ (1971), p.1

2.        Ibid

3.        Ibid, p.44

4.        H.Francis and D.Smith, ‘The Fed’ (1980), p.508

5.        National Industrial Development Council For Wiles And Monmouthshire, ‘Second Industrial Survey Of South Wales: Volume One’ (1937), p.445

6.        H.Francis and D.Smith, ‘The Fed’ (1980), p.508

7.        Ibid, p.33

8.        A.Clark, ‘The Story Of Monmouthshire’ (1979), p.176

9.        H.Francis and D.Smith, ‘The Fed’ (1980), p.248

10.      National Industrial Development Council For Wales And Monmouthshire, ‘Second Industrial Survey Of South Wales: Volume One’ (1937), p.73

11.      N.Branson and M.Heinemann, ‘Britain In The Nineteen Thirties’ (1971), p.58

12.      W.T.Angell, ‘Some Observations And Notes’ (1946), p.13

13.      H.Francis and D.Smith, ‘The Fed’ (1980), p.248

14.      ‘Radical Wales’, No. 5, Winter 1984

15.      P.Massey, ‘Portrait Of A Mining Town’ (1937), p.68

16.      Ibid, p.69

INTRODUCTION

 

Commenting on Britain during the 1930s, the prominent unemployed workers’ leader, Wal Hannington said, “The unemployed did not quietly suffer their degradation and poverty. They were hungry; their wives and children were hungry; they marched on the streets with mighty protest demonstrations, and savage battles were fought from day to day in one town after another against the police who were ordered to suppress these militant activities. If history is to be truly recorded our future historians must include this feature of the 'Hungry Thirties'.”[1]

 

One of the worst affected areas in the country at that time was the Ebbw Fach or Western valley in South Wales, and there, on 21st March 1935, an incident occurred which helps to confirm Hannington's description of the period. Unemployed people in their thousands from the towns of Abertillery, Blaina, Brynmawr and Nantyglo marched on the local Public Assistance Committee (PAC) offices at Blaina. They were marching to demonstrate their opposition to the Committee's operation of the infamous Means Test, but were prevented from reaching the PAC offices by a cordon of police waiting outside the ‘Blaina Inn’. The outcome of this confrontation was to become known throughout the area as the 'Blaina Riots', as police armed with batons fought with crowds of stone-throwing demonstrators.

South Wales Gazette
Headline, 1 March 1935

 

As can be seen, the Blaina schoolchildren fared significantly worse than average.

 

In view of the fact that average milk consumption was less than one pint per family per day, and some unemployed families spent only 1½d per meal per day when the average middle-class family spent 7d, [16], the findings were not surprising.

 

Whilst hunger as such may not have been common, it was avoided only by the sort of diet which resulted in continuous physical and mental dissatisfaction and deterioration.