First published in 1967, South Wales Miners: Glowyr de Cymru is a vivid portrayal of contending personalities in the generation before the first world war, often set forth in their own words. Outstanding amongst them are the founder of the Labour Party., Keir Hardie and the young Liberal politician Winston Churchill whose successive ministerial duties brought him into close relation with the miners of South Wales. Out of the almost insurrectionary situation of 1910 in Glamorgan there has come a widespread belief that Churchill was responsible for the shooting down of Welsh miners and that Tonypandy in the Rhondda was once a scene of massacre. In destroying this picturesque myth, Page Arnot uncovers an array of facts that are stranger than this long-lived fiction and also richer in their interplay of personalities. Here, soberly, recorded, are the facts that could make a chronicle play with dramatis personae ranging from Monarch and Minister to mineowners and working miners who daily lives create the tensions of the time. Their national characteristics and their exceptional conditions, at home or in chapel, underground or on the surface, form one side of the picture, of which the other is furnished by the entrenched position of the associated coal owners. This book will be of interest to students of history, economics and labour studies.

A political history of the south Wales miners, their industry and society, in a tumultuous period of crisis and struggle.

There can be few statesmen whose lives and careers have received as much investigation and literary attention as Winston Churchill. Relatively little however has appeared which deals specifically or holistically with his first senior ministerial role; that of Secretary of State for the Home Office. This may be due to the fact that, of the three Great Offices of State which he was to occupy over the course of his long political life, his tenure as Home Secretary was the briefest. The Liberal Government, of which he was a senior figure, had been elected in 1906 to put in place social and political reform. Though Churchill was at the forefront of these matters, his responsibility for domestic affairs led to him facing other, major, challenges departmentally; this was a time of substantial commotion on the social front, with widespread industrial and civil strife. Even given that ‘Home Secretaries never do have an easy time’, his period in office was thus marked by a huge degree of political and social turbulence. The terms ‘Tonypandy’ and ‘Peter the Painter’ perhaps spring most readily to mind. Rather less known is his involvement in one of the burning issues of the time, female suffrage, and his portrayal as ‘the prisoners’ friend’ in terms of penal reform. Aged 33 on appointment, and the youngest Home Secretary since 1830, he became empowered to wield the considerable executive authority inherent in the role of one of His Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State, and he certainly did not shrink from doing so. There were of course commensurate responsibilities, and how he shouldered them is worth examination.

This is the first significant study of the entrepreneurial society created by the Welsh coal boom (most books up to now having concentrated upon the workers and the unions). Using the Porth-Pontypridd area as its example, it looks closely at the networks of power created by the second-generation middle classes of the Valleys towns, and at the often hair-raising business methods that they used. Close examination of individuals, and of family groups, gives a vivid sense of the reality of the relationships and contacts, and of the nature of the society in which they moved.

Reference book comprising a bibliography aiming to bring together secondary source interdisciplinary material on labour relations in the UK between the years 1880 and 1970 - covers employees attitudes, trade unions and employees associations, employers organizations, the labour market and working conditions, etc.

This study examines the spread of socialism in late-Victorian and Edwardian Wales, paying particular attention to the relationship between socialism and Welsh national identity. Welsh opponents of socialism often claimed it to be a foreign import, whereas socialists often asserted that the Welsh were socialist by nature. This study – the first full-scale study of the influence of early socialism across all of Wales – demonstrates that the reality was more complex than either assertion would admit. Rather than focusing on the structural growth of socialism, the topic is discussed in terms of the spread of ideas and the development of a political culture. The study culminates in a discussion of attempts, in the period before the Great War, to create a specifically Welsh socialist tradition. In approaching the topic from this angle, this study restores a part of the lost diversity of British socialism that is of striking contemporary relevance.

In Reform, Revolution and Direct Action amongst British Miners, Martyn Ives offers a new perspective on one of the most volatile periods in labour history. His research into the astonishing coalfield militancy of 1919 reveals it was a watershed year on a par with 1926. Indeed the General Strike was in many ways merely its dim echo. Whilst historians have skated over the labour unrest of 1919, Martyn Ives uncovers a remarkable incidence of unofficial mass strikes in the coalfields, waged against mine-owners, government and trade union leaders alike. Led by revolutionaries, and infused with political radicalism, this mass movement offered a glimpse of an alternative road to socialism, based upon the organised industrial power of the working class.