“Villain — Tonypandy”

Mr. McDonnell’s swipe at Churchill was brief. Asked if he saw Churchill as a hero or villain, he replied: “Villain—Tonypandy.” The Guardian completed the drive-by assassination, not only by headlining the remark, but with an inaccurate rehash of the Tonypandy riots in 1910.

Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, focused on McDonnell, calling him a “Poundland Lenin.” Maybe, but what about the Guardian? Ironically, at the time, the same newspaper had defended Churchill for his moderation.

There was one death at Tonypandy, but that occurred during the rioting and before Churchill was involved. However, troops did cause two to four deaths nine months later, during another strike at Llanelli. Quoting from my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, Chapter 8….

Rhondda Valley, 1910

For over a century the story has been part of socialist demonology. Churchill, as Home Secretary in 1910-11, “sent troops to attack striking coalminers” in the Rhondda Valley, Wales. In an otherwise generous tribute following Churchill’s death in 1965, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson found it necessary to remind Parliament of Sidney Street, Gallipoli, and “the sullen feet of marching men in Tonypandy.”

In concern over possible rioting during the Rhondda miners’ strike, Churchill met with Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane. They resolved to dispatch police constables, but no troops. Churchill declared the use of soldiers inappropriate in a civil disorder. He also promised the strikers an immediate Board of Trade inquiry into their grievances. He sent them this message:

[Your] best friends here are greatly distressed at the trouble which has broken out and will do their best to help [you] get fair treatment…. But rioting must cease at once so that the enquiry shall not be prejudicial and to prevent the credit of the Rhondda Valley being impaired. Confiding in the good sense of the Cambrian workmen we are holding back the soldiers for the present and sending police instead.

Lo the Poor Horses!

The Tory press attacked. The Times said that Churchill

hardly seems to understand that an acute crisis has arisen which needs decisive handling. The rosewater of conciliation is all very well in its place. But its place is not in face of a wild mob drunk with the desire of destruction. Men’s lives are in danger, not to mention the poor horses….

The Liberal press defended Churchill, praising his restraint. “The brave course was also the wise one,” wrote the Manchester Guardian: 

One can 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… Instead of a score of cases for the hospital, there might have been as many for the mortuary.

Tonypandy, 1910

The decision to withhold troops was short-lived. Rioting did not end, and spread to the town of Tonypandy, where one man was fatally injured and sixty-three shops were vandalized. The officer commanding the Southern Command dispatched 400 standby soldiers. On 8 November, Churchill ordered that “in no case should soldiers come in direct contact with rioters unless and until action had been taken by the police.” If police were overpowered, troops could be deployed. But even then, a number of police should remain, “to emphasise the fact that the armed forces act merely as the support of the civil power.”

“By preventing bloodshed,” Paul Addison wrote, “Churchill also prevented a debacle for Liberalism.” Writing to David Lloyd George the following spring, Churchill attempted to follow-up his November promise to address grievances. The government, he said, should institute stronger safety regulations and inspections. It should finance the expense with a surcharge on mineowners’ royalties.

His hopes were thwarted, Addison continued: “The soldiers did not kill anybody, but they remained in the Rhondda until October 1911 and as David Smith observes, their presence ‘ensured that the miners’ demands would be utterly rejected.’”

Llanelli, 1911

Nine months later at Llanelli, during a national railway strike, the only fatalities from the use of troops against strikers occurred. Ironically, they happened two days after the strike had ended. Rioters held up a train and knocked the engine driver senseless. Soldiers attempted to clear the track but looting began, and they fired into the crowd, killing either two or four rioters (accounts vary).

In handling the rail strike, Ted Morgan wrote, what Churchill’s critics could not see

was the number of saved, and the number of tragedies averted. In their drunken frenzy, the Llanelli rioters had wrought more havoc and shed more blood and produced more serious injury than all the fifty thousand soldiers all over the country.

Why use military force at all? Defending himself to William Royle, organizer of the Manchester Liberal Party, Churchill explained:

The progress of a democratic country is bound up with the maintenance of order. The working classes would be almost the only sufferers from an outbreak of riot & a general strike if it c[oul]d be effective would fall upon them & their families with its fullest severity.

Churchill told Royle, as he had Lloyd George, that wages were far too low. The rise in the cost of living, he wrote, required higher wages. “I believe the Government is now strong enough to secure an improvement in social conditions without failing in its primary duties.”

Old Men Remember

Among those interviewed by the BBC fifty-five years later for their memories of Tonypandy was W.H. (Will) Mainwaring, one of the youngest militants in the South Wales coalfields. He was subsequently co-author of a famous pamphlet, The Miners’ Next Step. Half a century on, he still spoke with pride of championing the miners and of his record as a protestor.

Of Churchill’s decision to send troops into the Rhondda in 1910 Mainwaring said on camera:

We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers. On the contrary, we regarded the military as having come in the form of friends to modify the otherwise ruthless attitude of the police forces.

Further Reading

“Churchill, Troops and Strikers, Part 1”
“Churchill, Troops and Strikers, Part 2”

Transformers: Blenheim Palace bedizened with Nazi Swastikas? File this in the overflowing catalogue of much ado about nothing.

Blenheim Affront

On September 25th, several Churchill writers received an email: “Urgent Media Request—the Sin.” (A typo for the Sun newspaper, though ironically appropriate.)

“I’m a journalist with the Sun,” we were told by a member of their staff. “I’m working on a story in our paper tomorrow about a disgusting act which tarnishes Sir Winston Churchill’s memory.” He didn’t say what, but it was easy to guess.

The disgusting act, already blasted around via the Internet, was to drape Blenheim (“Churchill’s home” according to reports) with huge Nazi banners. This was for an episode for the fifth “Transformers” film, The Last Knight, opening next June.

Offense

Transformers huff and puff! Not only was Blenheim Churchill’s home, the Jerusalem Post informed its readers. Sir Winston himself “is buried on the grounds.” (Blenheim was never Churchill’s “home,” and he is buried in the nearby village of Bladon.)

None of us replied to this naked attempt to stir artificial uproar. A friend and colleague in London wrote: “I told the Sun when they called that I can manufacture synthetic outrage as much as the next man, but couldn’t on this occasion.”

Of course that did not stop the quality press from flogging newspapers over movieland’s affront to Churchill and Blenheim. The scene crawled with Nazi storm troopers, they reported. Why, there was even a representative German Jeep (Kübelwagen). The newspaper found two veterans to denounce the sacrilege. “I know its a film,” said a colonel who served in Afghanistan. “But it’s symbolically disrespectful to Churchill. He will be turning in his grave.” The grave in Bladon, I presume.

Some Churchill admirers joined the ruckus, saying it would mislead the young. Into what? Believing the Nazis won World War II? Even assuming the film identifies the building as Blenheim, the young are familiar with the Internet. Two or three clicks will inform them that the Germans, er, never got quite that far.

Remarkably, but perhaps typically, the Sun seems the only paper willing to publish photos of the offensive scene. It was in place only for a short time. It appears to have been shot in the dead of night. The banners were pulled down before the day trippers arrived.  Blenheim is a popular venue, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Marlborough.

Defense

“Transformers” director Michael Bay defended the shoot, claiming Churchill would in fact be pleased with the plot of The Last Knight. “People have not been fortunate enough to read the script and they don’t know that Churchill in this movie is a big hero,” he told the BBC. “Churchill would be smiling. When you see the movie, you’ll understand.”

What is the problem with using Hitleriana as a prop in some fictional story? It’s been going on for years. Back in 1972, Norman Longmate displayed a Swastika flying over the Palace of Westminster on the jacket of his alternate history, If Britain Had Fallen. Nobody was even slightly outraged. Perhaps this latest kerfuffle is a product of our all-too-ready habit of taking “offense” at anything that might disturb 0.001% of the citizenry.

Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames, is always able to put nonsense in perspective. Speaking to the Guardian, he described the episode as “a completely manufactured row” and “absolutely the most dismal, idiotic story I’ve ever read….

“They do as all newspapers do,” Soames continued. “They go until they can find some wretched veteran who is prepared to say, ‘Winston would be turning into his grave.’ They’ve no idea what my grandfather would have thought!”

Transformers: What Would Churchill Think?

I know what he would have thought! Churchill loved movies. He’d be fascinated, and would greet the fiction with a guffaw as he puffed on a big cigar in his easy chair at Chartwell.

I have no particular objection to the “offensive” photo. But I won’t add to its fifteen minutes of fame. So you’ll have to click on the Sun link to see it.

Unintentionally, perhaps, the Sun included a photo of Churchill giving his famous V-sign palm-in, not palm-out. In England, this means quite something other than “Victory.” Perhaps it is appropriate to the occasion.

•Coming up: another Swastika-bedraped British icon, in my review of Norman Longmate’s alternate history, If Britain Had Fallen.

Part 2: Alice Bateman

Two other Westerham common folk who benefitted from Churchill’s characteristic kindliness were Tom and Alice Bateman, farmers who scratched out a living near Chartwell. Percy Reid, a stringer for a London newspaper, who kept an eye on Chartwell doings after World War II, wrote charmingly of a cattle sale in his book, Churchill: Townsman of Westerham (Folkestone: Regency, 1969):

Capt. and Mrs. [Mary Churchill] Soames—who then lived at Chartwell Farm—were at the sale most of the time and [their children] Nicholas and Emma were also taking a child’s interest in what was going on. A daughter of one of the cows offered for sale that day grazed quietly in a less distinguished field nearby. As a calf it had been given to Tom and Alice Bateman, brother and sister, farming in a small way nearby, by Winston Churchill when he heard that they had been out of luck in their farming.

“Pedigree?” repeated Alice when asked about her two-year old Shorthorn: “I suppose we could have had the pedigree if we’d liked but then—we don’t farm their way.” A touch of rural common sense cropped up: “The paper wouldn’t make much difference to whether it was a good cow or not.”

Not surprisingly Alice Bateman had lots of time for Churchill. “Got more in his little finger than most of us have in our whole bodies,” she said. Alice worked for three years at Chartwell. “Not to sleep in,” she made clear, quickly. “Always has a word for you, has Winston. So has Mary, his daughter.”

Phil Johnson, a Westerham livery agent and sometime Churchill driver, told me a delightful story showing another side to Alice. Once the great man, being driven up the hill to Chartwell from Westerham village, found her trudging along the road to her farm and stopped his Humber limousine. His impulse was to offer her a lift, but realizing she would be too proud to accept one, he shouted encouragement: “Come on Alice, you can do better than that!”

“G’wan, you fat old man, you get out of that car and walk yourself, you’ll live longer!” Alice retorted.

“I’ll outlive you, Alice!” chuckled Churchill, who liked to claim (inaccurately) that he took exercise only as a pallbearer for friends who had exercised all their lives. “You will not!” Alice shot back. “And he didn’t,” Phil Johnson added, “Alice survived him by six or eight years.“

“Kent folk don’t make friends easily,” wrote Percy Reid. “Theirs is a sturdy independence which is readily mistaken for surly insularity. Once won over, however, Kentish people will remain your sincere if somewhat over-frank friends for good. It was somewhat on these lines that the unusual relationship, which finally developed between Westerham folk and Churchill and his family, grew up.”

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With thanks for kind assistance in research to Paul Courtenay, Phil Johnson and Andrew Roberts, and to a dear friend, the late Grace Hamblin.

continued in part 3…