John Luckwell was born in 1886 in Porth, Glamorgan, Wales. He was my grandad's cousin. He lived and worked in the Rhondda Valley as a ‘hewer’ in a coal mine. This was the person who travelled underground to the coal seam and, using a pick, actually ‘hewed out’ the pieces of coal. They usually worked alternate shifts - perhaps four in the morning till ten one week, then ten in the evening till four in the morning the following week. At least two of John's brothers also worked in the coal mines.
The coal industry was nationalised during the First World War. The average earnings of coalminers trebled to 16s. a shift between 1914 and 1920 but when the mines were returned to their owners wages dropped dramatically. In 1921 average earnings were 8s. a shift and they remained at about that level during the rest of the inter-war years.
In 1925 the owners tried to protect dwindling profits by demanding pay cuts and an extra hour on the working day. The miners refused. The Government was forced to intervene and paid the owners a subsidy to balance their losses.
In 1926 a Royal Commission concluded that the coal industry was in need of re-organisation and that some miners should accept wage cuts. The owners insisted on average wage cuts of 13% and an increase in the length of a shift from seven to eight hours. The miners refused and on 30 April 1926 the pit gates were closed.
The TUC promised support for the miners and called for a national strike – The General Strike. From 4 May Britain was paralysed as most of the workforce came out on strike to support the miners. The government was prepared for this and responded by recruiting 226,000 special policemen, sending a warship to Newcastle and calling the army to London. The government also tried to take control of the media and seized all supplies of paper, which affected publication of the TUC’s news sheet ‘The British Worker’.
The middle classes became increasingly concerned about the violence being perpetrated during the strike and the evidence of communist influence. Fears had been heightened by a letter leaked to the ‘Daily Mail’ and ‘The Times’ in 1924 purporting to be from the Russian Communist leader Grigory Zinoviev in which he urged British communists to start a revolution. The letter is now generally accepted to have been a forgery and to have been part of an attempt by some MI5 and MI6 officers to bring down the Labour government. However, the general public didn’t know that... Increasing numbers of middle-class volunteers took over essential roles such as driving trains or buses.
On 11 May the TUC backed down, called off the strike, and the other strikers returned to work. The promised support had vanished and the miners were on their own. They were forced to accept charity in the form of food and clothing parcels. The onset of winter compounded the hardship and by the end of the year even the most resolute were forced back to work.
The Ministry of Health refused to support unemployed miners and encouraged local Boards of Guardians to refuse or limit the amount of relief given to unemployed miners and their families.
The ‘Red Sunday in Rhondda Valley’ demonstration was held on Sunday 18 September 1927 on Penrhys mountain. One of the speakers, A.J. Cook (general secretary of the Miners’ Federation), called for a march to London on 8 November when Parliament re-opened. By November however, the march had lost the support of the Executive Committee of the South Wales Miners’ Federation (SWMF), partly because of opposition from the TUC, but was still supported by A.J. Cook, S.O. Davies (later MP for Merthyr), the SWMF Rhondda section and the Communist Party.
At the time of the march John Luckwell was married with nine children, ranging in age from 17 to a new-born baby. Four other children had died in infancy. One of those was a daughter who died on 5 July 1926. She was 2 days old and had been born prematurely. One can speculate that the strike and possible maternal malnutrition and stress may have been factors in her early birth. John was to have one further child, a boy born in 1929, who died aged 4 months from convulsions and pneumonia.
On 8 November 1927, in spite of hostility from the TUC, press and government, 270 men marched to London. Each was carrying a miner’s lamp that was to be lit when they reached their destination. They gained support from Trades Councils in every town and village they passed through. The marchers were referred to as a ‘workers army’ and organised on military lines, divided into detachments and companies. Their senior ‘officer’ was Wal Hannington. Alleged harassment by Fascists caused the organisers to be met by an armed escort of 100 members of the Labour League of Ex-Serviceman at Chiswick.
Two miners died on the march. Arthur Howe from Trealaw died in a traffic accident and John Supple of Tonyrefail died from pneumonia following a rain-soaked rally in Trafalgar Square.
Although the march generated hope in the valleys economic conditions did not improve. Successive inter-war governments chose to ignore the evidence of deprivation, preferring to regard the unemployed as unfortunate but necessary casualties of a brutal economic reality. However, it was difficult to ignore the evidence of medical officers and specialised committees of enquiry into infectious diseases. Tuberculosis, diphtheria and scarlet fever were rife in the Welsh valleys and expert opinion was virtually unanimous in attibuting many of these to the high level of malnutrition. There was a malnutrition rate of 25% in the Pontypridd area in 1934 and 1935 and it was ‘the universal cry of commentators that the full impact of malnutrition was being staved off by the sacrifice of mothers’ who were going without in order that their children could eat.
By 1935 the Government had abandoned the pretence of being able to ‘solve’ the unemployment problem and introduced a bill whose net result was to reduce the benefit paid by making payment more uniform, more bureaucratically assessed and more severely means-tested. Mass community demonstrations in early 1935 in south Wales forced the government to slap a stand-still order on the Act and it was subsequently introduced in a modified form.
These conditions forced the young, the able-bodied and the adventurous to depart in their thousands for the alluring prospects of Slough, Sussex and even New South Wales - 430,000 departed between 1921 and 1940. John and his family were amongst those who left. By 1938 they were settled in Eton, Buckinghamshire, near Slough.
National Museum Wales
BBC Bitesize
The Open University
Tribute to the Rhondda
Coalfield Web Materials
The National Archives
Archives Wales
Durham Mining Museum
South Wales Echo
Comments
Post a Comment