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107 pages

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This book is the first biography of Huw T. Edwards (1929 – 1970), a key figure in the Welsh labour movement, who was known in the 1950s as the ‘unofficial Prime Minister of Wales’. He was of working-class origin, a Welsh speaker and trade unionist involved in a wide range of activities associated with Welsh culture. He represented Wales to the BBC, chaired the Welsh Tourist Board, and was president of the Welsh Language Society.

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Political Science

Wales

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Publié par	University of Wales Press
Date de parution	15 février 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783164455
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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HUW T. EDWARDS
HUW T. EDWARDS
BRITISH LABOUR AND WELSH SOCIALISM
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Paul Ward -->

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF
©Paul Ward, 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2328-1 e-ISBN 978-1-7831-6445-5
The right of Paul Ward to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover: Huw T. Edwards c .1960. By permission of the National Library of Wales
In memory of John Ramsden 1947-2009
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Born in the Mountains
2 Western Front and Home Front
3 Union and Unemployment
4 The People s War
5 Attlee s Wales
6 The Unofficial Prime Minister
7 Two Resignations
8 Return and Retrospect
Conclusion: Sosialwr Cymreig a Chymraeg (A Welsh and Welsh-Speaking Socialist)
Notes
Select Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has taken rather longer than I thought it would. It would have taken much longer still without the substantial help I received from my research assistant, Martin Wright, now an accomplished Huw T. scholar himself. His employment was made possible by a Major Research Grant from the British Academy, without which this book could not have been written. The publication of this book has been made possible by the Welsh Books Council. Colleagues at the University of Huddersfield continue to provide a hospitable place to conduct historical research. In particular, Keith Laybourn, Katherine Lewis, Rebecca Gill, and more recently Barry Doyle and Rob Ellis make good company. Many others at Huddersfield also made valuable contributions to the progress of the book.
I was helped further in my researches by interest in Huw T. from across Welsh studies. I am grateful to Paul O Leary for his support for the project, and also to Keith Robbins, Chris Williams, the late Duncan Tanner, Andrew Edwards, Martin Johnes and John Ellis. I would like to thank the staff at the National Library of Wales and especially the family of Huw T. Edwards for allowing me to make such extensive use of the Edwards papers. I am also indebted to Sarah Lewis, Dafydd Jones, Siân Chapman and Henry Maas at the University of Wales Press.
Jackie, Georgia and Oscar have seen the book through from its conception in Fulton, Missouri, to its completion looking at Castle Hill. I am deeply grateful to them all, though I am sure they will be glad to lose Huw T. Edwards as a lodger.
INTRODUCTION
Nad oedd yn angenrheidiol iddo gyflwyno y siaradwr, yr Henadur Huw T. Edwards; yr oedd ef yn hysbys i bawb.
There was no need to introduce the next speaker, Alderman Huw T. Edwards; he was known to everyone.
(David Thomas, The Anglesey Workers Union Day School, June 1948) 1
Everyone in Wales in the 1950s knew Huw T. Edwards of Shotton. D. J. Williams was a founding member of Plaid Cymru. He had been jailed for nine months in 1936 in England for the symbolic nationalist act of setting fire to a hut at the RAF Bombing School at Penyberth near Pwllheli to mark the 400th anniversary of the Act of Union between England and Wales. On 20 May 1957 he went into a tobacconist s shop in his home town of Fishguard, about as far away from Shotton as it is possible to get in Wales. He wanted to buy some sweets. The shopkeeper told him that her daughter had overcharged a previous customer for some Havana cigars, and after some discussion she had worked out that it must have been Huw T. Edwards. She asked Williams to return the difference to Huw T., which he duly did by post later that evening, enclosing 6s 2d. 2
Edwards rose from being born into poverty in the mountains of north Wales to being known in the 1950s as the unofficial prime minister of Wales . His papers at the National Library of Wales are extensive. 3 There are about a thousand letters to Edwards but only just over 250 from him, and while some are clearly missing, one gets the impression that much of Edwards s communication and interaction was conducted in personal meetings. Many of his correspondents refer to meeting him in the previous days and are writing to add something to the conversation. Edwards was, without doubt, very affable, full of jokes and conversation. Understanding his sociability is a key part of understanding his life, both personal and political. This naturally results in an anecdotal method to parts of this biography, because some anecdotes, like that relating to the shortchanging of Huw T. in Fishguard, express authenticity more than strict empiricism can do. Other sources are provided by Edwards s two volumes of autobiography, written in Welsh and translated into a single English-language volume by his friend Lyn Howell. Additionally, Edwards wrote poems, short stories and radio broadcasts and was reported extensively in the Welsh press. His writing of poetry and drama (though only one play survives in his papers) emerged from the Welsh democratic cultural tradition associated with the gwerin ( folk ) and eisteddfodau and while he drew some relationship between his writing and rebellion, the poems he wrote during and after the First World War fell rather too much within conventional values of the time to see politics as the major inspiration behind his putting pen to paper. Instead, often his poems are about his life and his connection to Wales through the land. The surviving play, on the other hand, written in the 1920s or 1930s, deals much more centrally with Edwards s life as a trade union activist, but is a drama about family relationships as much as about class politics.
Apart from his service in France and Belgium in the First World War, Edwards lived the whole of his life in Wales. His home was in rural Conwy for his childhood years, in the Rhondda and Taff Vale in his late teens and early twenties, and he returned to north Wales after the war, where he lived in and around Penmaenmawr for a decade, after which he and his family moved to Flintshire, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Edwards s life was almost entirely Welsh. It seems fitting, therefore, that the first full biography, by Gwyn Jenkins, published only in 2007, should have been in Welsh. 4
Yet to see Edwards as a figure only in Welsh life does not do justice to his contribution to British history, nor indeed does it do justice to the substantial advances in historiography made possible by the new British history since the 1970s. The rise of demands for devolution in the 1970s encouraged historians to approach British history from the perspective of the four nations within the British Isles, rather than the frequently Anglocentric predisposition of many (English) historians prior to that. It took a New Zealander - an imperial Briton - J. G. A. Pocock, to formalize this plea for a new subject as he urged full consideration of the plural nature of Britain, its Empire and its global relationships. 5 This new form of history took two directions. Many historians preferred to look outwards, connecting the Empire and the metropolis in historical inquiry, recognizing that the United Kingdom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries existed at the centre of a global world of its own making. Such explorations entailed a discussion of the British nature of the British Empire, so that the distinctive contribution of the Scottish in particular to the Empire has been widely recognized. 6 Hence by globalizing the study of British history it has become possible to cast new light on the relationships inside the United Kingdom. As it is essential to see Britain s history also as imperial history, it is essential to recognize that Welsh history is also part of British history (and that Wales contributed extensively to British history). Much work has been done in this field of the new British history , and I owe a methodological debt to historians like Keith Robbins and Hugh Kearney who have influenced my thinking enormously. 7 Both see British history as the product of the interrelationships between nations and regions inside the British Isles.
Edwards s life, while it was chiefly Welsh, provides a clear example of the British nature of Welsh history. The structures of economy, society, politics and culture within which he operated were British even while they too were also Welsh. His life was lived out in a multinational context. Understanding this enables a more rounded understanding of his life, yet probably more importantly it means that British history is fleshed out. It means that British history is more than what happened in London and England but is instead the sum of the lives of those residing within the British Isles. 8 This book is therefore about the way in which Edwards contributed to both British Labour and Welsh socialism. Such an approach allows for the recognition of the inevitable diversity within the unity of the United Kingdom. Kearney uses the notion of a multicultural British Isles, so that within a single nation a variety of cultures can coexist and interact. This approach works especially well when tryi