May 14, 2013

LEADING CHURCHILL MYTHS: FINEST HOUR 140, AUTUMN 2008

ABSTRACT
“Churchill crushed striking Welsh coal miners by sending in troops” Randolph S. Churchill Excerpted by kind permission from Winston S. Churchill, vol. 2 Young Statesman 1901-1914 (London: Heinemann, 1967), 373-78.

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In 1911, a strike began in the coal mines at Rhondda in early November of the same year. It arose out of a dispute concerning wage differentials in the working of hard and soft seams. Many men were involved, estimates varying between 25,000 and 30,000, and many different pits were affected.

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There was looting and the local authorities appealed to the War Office for troops. On hearing of this, Churchill as Home Secretary consulted the Secretary of War, Haldane, and they agreed instead to send police, but to hold some troops in reserve nearby.

Churchill’s whole conduct has since been grotesquely distorted, and it has become a part of socialist demonology that Churchill sent troops who fired upon the miners of Tonypandy. Socialist propagandists have sought to make martyrs of the miners of Tonypandy comparable to those of Tolpuddle in 1834. Around 10 November, WSC wrote to the King: “No need for the employment of the military is likely to occur….The whole district is now in the effective control of the police, and there appears to be no reason at present why the policy of keeping the military out of direct contact with the rioters should be departed from.”

A study of the contemporary Press confirms the facts set out in Churchill’s letter to the King. The fact that Churchill did not use troops against the miners is underlined by the fact that Lord Northcliffe’s Times, “ever strong upon the stronger side” as Hazlitt had earlier said of it, attacked him on 9 November for not having used troops: “Mr. Churchill hardly seems to understand that an acute crisis has arisen, which needs decisive handling.”

The Manchester Guardian the next day rebuked The Times and said in an editorial: “It needed some courage after the Chief Constable had asked for troops to stop the troops which were on their way and to send policemen instead. But, as usual, the brave course was also the wise one….imagine what would have happened if the soldiers instead of the policemen had come on the rioters while they were pillaging. Bayonets would have been used instead of truncheons; the clumsier methods of the soldiers would have exasperated the crowds, and instead of a score of cases for the hospital there might have been as many for the mortuary.”

In the light of the facts so clearly shown in the public prints of the time, it is all the more remarkable that the Tonypandy label should have hung around Churchill’s neck all his life. The lie was still being energetically spread in the 1960s, and received what should have been its quietus in a brilliant article by Sir Alan Herbert in The Spectator of 28 June 1963. Yet the rumour persists and has even been improved upon.

In January 1967 the author was informed that an Oxford undergraduate, discussing Churchill’s career with his tutor, asserted with some confidence that “Churchill had ordered tanks to be used against the Welsh miners at Tonypandy.” His tutor commented that this showed remarkable farsightedness on Churchill’s part, as the tank had not yet been invented. 

 

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