Wales and Socialism

Political Culture and National Identity Before The Great War

Martin Wright

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783169184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Communisme, post-communisme et socialisme

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.

1

PIONEERS, 1790s–1880s

Cyril Parry, the pioneering historian of socialism in Gwynedd, asserted over 40 years ago that ‘there was no indigenous Welsh socialism’,¹ and his stark statement still awaits full interrogation. In structural terms it is certainly true that modern socialism developed relatively late in Wales. Although provincial centres in England and Scotland witnessed the establishment of socialist societies in the early 1880s, it was not until the 1890s that similar societies were established in Wales on anything like a sustainable basis. It is also true that some of the most prominent socialists in Wales in this period were incomers. In terms of independent labour representation – the form of politics that was most often forced and pioneered by socialists – Wales was also a relatively late developer. While independent labour parliamentary candidates were returned in other parts of Britain as early as 1892, it was not until 1900 that a similar breakthrough was made in Wales. Indeed, Welsh historiography supports the view that in its early years socialism ‘seemed an alien growth’ in Wales.² Existing studies of the impact of socialism upon late-nineteenth-century Wales focus upon its structural growth, tending to see it in the context of the later emergence of the Labour Party, as, in other words, ‘Labour’s roots in Wales’.³ Viewed in this way the weakness of early Welsh socialism is striking. In the words of Deian Hopkin, Wales was ‘[f]rankly, nowhere’ in the events of the Socialist Revival of the 1880s, and remained a ‘socialist desert’ into the late 1890s.⁴ Regional studies add weight to these conclusions. Chris Williams argues in his study of the Rhondda that socialism was ‘marginal’ in the politics of the two valleys up to 1898.⁵ In Llanelli, as doubtless elsewhere in Wales, participation in socialist politics in the 1890s was ‘an act of high individualism, at once risky and outré’.⁶ In the anthracite district of the south Wales coalfield socialist and labour activity before 1900 was ‘minimal’,⁷ and the workers of Swansea were ‘singularly untouched’.⁸ At the other end of the country in Gwynedd ‘the concept of socialism as a distinct political faith remained ill defined … few appreciated its meaning and fewer still were aware of its implications’ until well into the 1900s.⁹ In the large geographical space between, early socialism is generally agreed to be so much of a non-event that it is not even mentioned. According to the established historiography, socialism in Wales did not begin to make inroads into the social and political bedrock of nonconformist Liberalism until some time in the second half of the first decade of the twentieth century. As Ryland Wallace states, ‘[i]n general, geographical remoteness and linguistic and cultural differences … kept the Principality almost immune from the doctrines of the Socialist societies of England’.¹⁰

While the substance of these statements is doubtless correct, it must be conceded that the tardiness of Wales in the socialist growth of the 1880s and 1890s does present a historical problem. When socialism and independent labour representation did develop in Wales it did so with remarkable rapidity. More than this, within a short space of time the Welsh socialist and labour movement became an integral and deeply influential part of the wider British movement. By 1903 Keir Hardie could state that ‘For some reason or other, Wales had become the cockpit in which the great questions affecting labour were being fought out’.¹¹ He wasn’t wrong. The previous five years had witnessed a series of events of major significance in the history of British labour and socialism, all taking place in south Wales within barely a dozen square miles of each other. These included the formation of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, Hardie’s own return to Parliament at Merthyr Boroughs and the portentous Taff Vale rail dispute. In the course of the next decade not only was there a dramatic proliferation of Independent Labour Party (ILP) branches in Wales, but the name of south Wales in particular was to become synonymous with left-wing militancy, epitomised by the Cambrian Combine dispute and the publication of the Miners’ Next Step. During the decade after that, moreover, the region was to become one of the engine houses of the British socialist and labour movement. This apparent dichotomy between the early absence of socialist activity in Wales and the country’s subsequent centrality to British labour history invites questions about the apparent failure of Wales to take part in the early growth of British socialism. At the very least the sudden animation of socialism in Wales in the early 1900s might suggest that something more was going on beneath the surface of Welsh society in the final decades of the nineteenth century than the existing historiography admits.

This book does not contest the structural weakness of late-Victorian Welsh socialism. Rather it seeks to re-examine the period from another perspective. Instead of viewing the development of socialism as part of that collection of events which is often assumed to amount to ‘the origins of the Labour Party’, in which the creation of formal organisational structures is an all-important measure of progress, it aims to examine the spread of socialism in Wales in terms of an interplay between Wales and the wider world. In this light, structural growth is less important than the spread of ideas. Such ideational development is, of course, more difficult to assess. It takes place, for the most part, beneath the level of the historical record, much of it in the private rather than the public sphere, and it is unquantifiable. It is also extremely complex. In the case of socialism new ideas were undoubtedly introduced to Wales by propagandists who arrived from beyond its borders, but the flow of these ideas was not unidirectional. Frequently, it was diverted and complicated by contact with Welsh culture and society. Sometimes it borrowed from and fused with existing traditions of Welsh radicalism, and sometimes it eddied and fed ideas and influences back into the mainstream of British socialism. It flowed unevenly across Wales as a whole, influencing different regions in different ways and at different speeds. Undeniably, though, the permeation of socialist ideas into Wales in the 1880s marked the beginning of a process that was to have a major long term impact upon both Wales and Britain.

Beginnings and ends of historical processes and movements must, of course, be approached with circumspection. Indeed, the tendency to see what used to be called the Socialist Revival of the 1880s as a historical watershed has long been under question,¹² and the elements of it that comprised the interplay under discussion here might be seen as part of a greater metanarrative concerning the place of Wales in the world. Certainly, radicals had been exchanging ideas and influences across the Welsh border for hundreds of years. The French Revolution initiated what might be considered the modern phase of this dialogue, and in its wake radical influences began to permeate Welsh society.¹³ Sometimes these came in the form of individual activists from England, among whom was John Thelwall, one of the heroes of E.P. Thompson’s great narrative, The Making of the English Working Class.¹⁴ Escaping the intensity of London in the late 1790s, he tried to find his way back to the land – thus engaging in another of the great radical traditions of the British Isles, and one that has direct bearing upon the arguments in this book – at a smallholding near Llyswen in Breconshire. During what turned out to be a brief and near-disastrous stay there he made contact with Welsh radicals, including Iolo Morganwg, before ultimately abandoning his new life, his rural dream having warped in the rain.¹⁵ A failure at farming though he was, Thelwall might be seen as a forebear of the socialists who came at the end of the next century to spread their beliefs under the same Welsh rain.

His experience was linked to theirs not just by the continuity of the weather, but by an ongoing interplay across the intervening generations. A prominent example of human and ideological traffic in the other direction, from the generation following Thelwall, is, of course, Robert Owen of Newtown. Often considered the ‘Father of British Socialism’, Owen was seen by some, in the words of another Welsh export, Tom Ellis, to be taking the message of Wales to the world. If this was the case, the Owenite communitarians who came from England to settle in Meirionnydd and Carmarthenshire in the 1840s and 1850s were bringing it back again.¹⁶ Their ideological cousins in the Chartist movement were also furthering the same radical cross-border dialogue. It was, after all, the prosecution of a Londoner, Henry Vincent, in south Wales that acted as the catalyst for the Newport Rising in 1839.¹⁷ Another Chartist, Thomas Powell, provides a better example of the geographical complexity of this radical interplay. He moved from Newtown to Shrewsbury and then to London, before returning in the 1830s to Montgomeryshire, where he was prosecuted for his role in the Llanidloes disturbances of 1839. Throughout his life’s journey he doubtless imparted and absorbed ideas and influences in various forms and at varying levels of intensity along the way.¹⁸

One final example from the next generation will suffice to make the link with the socialists of the 1880s. John Ruskin was a formative influence upon most of them, and although his work might be considered quintessentially English, he was no stranger to Wales. Indeed, Wales provided a perfect setting for the implementation of the pastoral ideal set out in works such as Fors Clavigera. In 1871, as part of this agenda, he established the Guild of St George, the ultimate aim of which was variously described as ‘the salvation of England’ or ‘the health, wealth and long life of the British nation’, and to this end the Guild received the gift of a row of cottages in Barmouth, to be run as a type of social housing. When, in 1876, Ruskin went to Barmouth to visit the cottages, he found that one of the established tenants was a Frenchman by the name of Monsieur Guyard, a ‘reformer, experimenter and philanthropist’ who had left France during the Franco-Prussian War. The two men got on well, and shared a belief in ‘the practical conviction that in flying from cities and luxurious lives, and in leading laborious days combined with the education of heart and mind, the perfect way was to be found’. Their liaison on the steep hillsides of old Barmouth provides a fine illustration of the diverse and cosmopolitan nature of the interplay that embraced even some of the most apparently rural and isolated parts of Wales in the nineteenth century.¹⁹

This process of interplay was by no means limited to secular radicalism. Indeed, its main theatres were the closely related activities of religion and education. Wales was subject to waves of heterogeneous religious and educational influences during the nineteenth century, which were mediated and shaped by a class of more or less cosmopolitan Welsh opinion formers, epitomised by individuals such as Kilsby Jones, William Williams, Hugh Owen and Henry Richard.²⁰ Of Henry Richard, for instance, it was written on his death in 1888 that ‘he fulfilled for Wales a double political function: he not only stood in the breach between Wales and England to explain as a Welshman the mind and wishes of the Principality to the English people, he was also the political spokesman from England to Wales’.²¹ By the late nineteenth century these influences had been fused to create a distinct and powerful sense of Welsh identity. The ability of Wales to absorb such apparently foreign influences and make them its own was, moreover, not lost on some Welsh socialists, who saw their own creed as another religion and sought to mould it to the same ends. ‘Just as Christianity came here from Palestine’, one of them observed, ‘and Protestantism from Germany, and Nonconformity from England, and Calvinism from Geneva, and were welcomed here, each in its turn – so also will it be with Socialism.’²² Welsh patriots, on the other hand, were also aware of the ambiguities beneath their own identity, and towards the end of the nineteenth century they were increasingly making a case on behalf of Welsh particularism: that ‘the sentiment that cherishes and strives to maintain all the particular institutions that belong to Wales as a nation apart from England’ should be developed.²³ ‘The most unlovely feature of modern civilization is the tendency to destroy distinction. Originality is dying out, and we are in danger of settling down on a dead level of universal mediocrity’,²⁴ argued one such patriot (from beyond the Welsh border), and socialism might have been counted among the influences he had in mind. These debates were barely underway when the first socialists began their propaganda in Wales,²⁵ but they remained unresolved throughout the period under discussion in this book.²⁶ Considered as a whole, they form an essential context in which to understand the activities of early socialists in Wales who, when they began to propagate their ideas in the 1880s, were initiating yet another phase in a long historical process of ideological interplay between Wales and the wider world.

If the national context for the arrival of socialism was fluid, the socialists’ own ideology was likewise suffused with what R.H. Tawney later called ‘radiant ambiguities’.²⁷ Already by the early 1880s there were several different varieties of thought that were broadly grouped under the term socialism. These included the ‘utopian’ ideas of Proudhon, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, the Christian socialism of Kingsley and Maurice, and the more recent ‘scientific socialism’ of Marx and Engels. The diversity of socialist belief was to become even more marked as socialism grew in popularity in the 1890s, but even in the 1880s the problematic nature of defining socialism was not lost on Welsh observers. One of them summarised his views in 1889: ‘The difficulty one always has to encounter with modern Socialists is to attempt to get an approximate definition of their theory.’ Their ideology, he continued, was imbued with ‘vague teachings and fearful uncertainties’, and

if there is one thing certain at all about modern democratic Socialists it is this, that when they assemble together, the divergent views which they entertain, both as to the methods and meaning of their propaganda, are so extraordinary, that it places any material progress out of the question.²⁸

Such statements were to some extent justified by the schismatic tendencies of the British socialist leadership of the 1880s, which by the middle of the decade had already resulted in the es...