The Red Commune of Merthyr, 1871

[Udo Erasmus]

There was a campaign led by the late former Cardiff Cllr. Charlie Gale for a pardon for Dic Penderyn, who almost certainly was innocent of the crime for which he was hanged. I think they chose Penderyn for punishment precisely because he wasn't one of the leaders. They wanted revenge and they picked a typical worker, to show all workers what faced them if they stepped out of line.

I'm a little dubious about the concept of a pardon. For though Penderyn was innocent, it kind of implies that it was a crime for working people to be prepared to defend themselves, and who is giving a pardon? The same rulers and bosses who are screwing us today. Why do we need anything from them?

Gavin Bl criticises English socialists, but more to the point how is the Welsh Left remembering the moment when Merthyr was the storm-centre of rebellion? There was an event supported by the Wales TUC around five years ago, I recall Niclas mentioning something last year or the year before, a comemoration of Dic Penderyn at the indoor market a couple years back, but hardly a sustained attempt to keep the flame of memory alive! What is Dic Penderyn on this board doing to make sure the people remember Dic Penderyn? What is Lewis Lewis doing? And the trotskyist Penderyn from this website?

Comrades, Udo, the People's Remembrancer, declares that at Cardiff Indoor Market the anti-capitalist left, the unions, the workers must come together on August 13th or thereabouts to remember the flower of Merthyr, our martyr, Dic Penderyn and the spirit of the Merthyr Rising!

Discuss.

 

[Belushi]

Comrades, Udo, the People's Remembrancer, declares that at Cardiff Indoor Market the anti-capitalist left, the unions, the workers must come together on August 13th or thereabouts to remember the flower of Merthyr, our martyr, Dic Penderyn and the spirit of the Merthyr Rising!

Lets hope its more succesful than your anti-St Davids Day protest!

 

[Gavin Bl]

Gavin Bl criticises English socialists, but more to the point how is the Welsh Left remembering the moment when Merthyr was the storm-centre of rebellion?

Cheeky sod, I fair gave you bloody guided tour in post #9

 

[Udo Erasmus]

Well there are all kind of annual commemorations: Leveller Day, Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, Burston School Strike

Seems English Left is better than the Welsh Left at remembrance, No?

 

[Gavin Bl]

Well there are all kind of annual commemorations: Leveller Day, Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, Burston School Strike

Seems English Left is better than the Welsh Left at remembrance, No?

that's a really dumb remark Udo - no ones saying the Welsh are better than the English - is it really that awful an idea that the Merthyr Rising might be so badly remembered outside Wales because it happened in Wales, which is viewed as a rather marginal place?

 

[Brockway]

No it doesn't, it reads like a history book - which it is.

There was always going to be a detachment from his subject as there is a 150 gap, but that's historiography....

His attitude to his subject is precisely what I'm on about. For a start it isn't totally detached - he has an agenda which he openly states - you know, going on about wanting to save the stocking makers etc from obscurity and all that. There's something of the missionary about him I reckon - maybe that's his parents' religious background coming through.

The distance I was referring to was social and cultural: posh boy writes book about the working-class after spending all his time in the library.

 

[Brockway]

Well there are all kind of annual commemorations: Leveller Day, Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, Burston School Strike

Seems English Left is better than the Welsh Left at remembrance, No?

Dunno about the Welsh left but the Welsh in general don't know their own history. Looking at your list there I learnt about the Levellers and the Tolpuddle Martyrs in school but nothing about the Merthyr Rising. Maybe things are different these days but in my Cardiff comprehensive we learnt British history which is, of course, English history.

 

[llantwit]

Dunno about the Welsh left but the Welsh in general don't know their own history. Looking at your list there I learnt about the Levellers and the Tolpuddle Martyrs in school but nothing about the Merthyr Rising. Maybe things are different these days but in my Cardiff comprehensive we learnt British history which is, of course, English history.

I learned about those, but also the Rebecca Riots, Merthyr, and the Welsh Chartists. GCSE history in a Beddau comprehensive circa 1993, to be fair.

 

[Gavin Bl]

I learned about those, but also the Rebecca Riots, Merthyr, and the Welsh Chartists. GCSE history in a Beddau comprehensive circa 1993, to be fair.

We studied the Merthyr Rising at school, but that was in, errr, Merthyr!

 

[zog]

Dunno about the Welsh left but the Welsh in general don't know their own history. Looking at your list there I learnt about the Levellers and the Tolpuddle Martyrs in school but nothing about the Merthyr Rising. Maybe things are different these days but in my Cardiff comprehensive we learnt British history which is, of course, English history.

I didn't learn about the chartists , levelers or the Tolpuddle martyrs in my English school. I think it may have just been the time we were educated, or the crapness of our teachers, rather than an English conspiracy to keep the Welsh down

 

[niclas]

The modern-day commemorations of the Merthyr Rising began in 1981 (the 150th anniversary) by Welsh socialist republicans. Attempts to revive these last year were studiously ignored by the English/British left until, er, now.
V glad you've read Gwyn Alf's book Udo. Next on the list should be Ivor Wilks's excellent Marxist study of the Newport Rising 1839.

 

[Udo Erasmus]

His attitude to his subject is precisely what I'm on about. For a start it isn't totally detached - he has an agenda which he openly states - you know, going on about wanting to save the stocking makers etc from obscurity and all that.

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'Utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties".

The work is quite famous for its attack on Methodism. There's the cliche that English socialism and the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than Marx, it's been quiet awhile since I read the book, but I think that he blames methodism for chanelling revolutionary energies into reformism.

Surely, what you are attacking this is a radical and humanist approach to history, the essence of "history from below" that rather than concentrate on the minutiae of ruling class politics, trying to re-construct the fabric of a whole class and bring into focus neglected individuals, groups and even regions. This was part of a general trend in history in which the contribution of workers, women and other groups were rediscovered by historians. This was a movement that was also very powerful in Wales with a whole group of social historians emerging here, who discovered that a whole history hadn't been written.

I'd also argue that while Thompson has been criticised as having a too subjective conception of the working class, he was polemicising against a certain type of crude marxist history that portrayed the working class being driven by impersonal economic laws and as a statistical bloc. He describes a class becoming conscious of itself as a class, that rather than just being victims of structural changes and historic and economic processes, the working class was present at its own making. He tries to give some flavour of the experience of these people, their popular societies, their life, their debates.

 

[JTG]

If English ignorance of Welsh working class history is such a problem, starting this thread in the politics forums rather than the Welsh one would be a small start in widening people's knowledge

 

[dennisr]

I didn't learn about the chartists , levelers or the Tolpuddle martyrs in my English school. I think it may have just been the time we were educated, or the crapness of our teachers, rather than an English conspiracy to keep the Welsh down

Yep, exactly - I did learn about Welsh, English and Scottish working class history* from fellow Welsh, English and Scottish socialists (the Militant's original founding groups were a combination of mainly Swansea and Liverpool lefts)


* And, lets not forget Irish

 

[dennisr]

If English ignorance of Welsh working class history is such a problem, starting this thread in the politics forums rather than the Welsh one would be a small start in widening people's knowledge

 

[lewislewis]

I learned about those, but also the Rebecca Riots, Merthyr, and the Welsh Chartists. GCSE history in a Beddau comprehensive circa 1993, to be fair.

By the early 00's I learnt about Merthyr, Rebecca, Chartists as part of the new Welsh national curriculum. A step forward. We also were taught alot of working class history from outside Wales too and I had a good teacher (a Plaid member ironically) who phrased it in class terms.

Trying not to derail the thread but i read some statistics recently that something like 68% of school children in Wales have their national identity as Welsh, and only 30% have British or some other idea. Might be to do with the way kids are learning about Wales' history for the first time now.

 

[Brockway]

tell us more

The Battle of Frederick Street (which is now a big hole in the ground). A crowd of about 300 - mainly unemployed people, communists and members of the Unemployed Workers Movement were baton charged by the fuzz causing mucho mayhem. Lots of people were hospitalised and all the ringleaders were arrested but not before getting battered.

They'd been holding a demo in Frederick street for about 2 hours where lots of inflammatory speeches were made (allegedly). They then decided to have a march thru the city starting off outside the Empire Theatre in Queen Street. It was at this point that the coppers moved in.

The main agitator was a guy called Leonard Jefferies who somebody ought to write a book about. He once got sent to prison for a long stretch for dropping literature into a Newport barracks urging the squaddies to mutiny. A cool man.

 

[zog]

cheers

 

[Udo Erasmus]

There's an article on the birth of the Cardiff labour movement from late 19th Century through to the 20s by Neil Evans in an old copy of Llafur magazine from '84 that gives an example of the birth of left organisation, talks about the history of Cardiff Trades Council and the launch of the Labour Party, In 1918 they stood winning no seats. Evans claims that the right wing were always in the ascendant in Lab in Cardiff.

In relation to Lewislewis's point, there's a dry but kinda interesting article by the same Neil Evans on the teaching of history and calling for a people's museum in merthyr here: http://www.iwa.org.uk/publications/pdfs/celeb_citiz.pdf

 

[Udo Erasmus]

The main agitator was a guy called Leonard Jefferies who somebody ought to write a book about.

You sound like your volunteering

 

[Brockway]

You sound like your volunteering

Politics is not really my bag. But for you politicos with a literary bent he's definitely a good subject. Bit of a forgotten man. Maybe I should email Dai Smith. Or something.

 

[Udo Erasmus]

Is he still alive?

 

[Brockway]

Is he still alive?

Nope - he's dead I presume. But there are recordings of him speaking somewhere or other. I know he lived in Ely, Cardiff for a bit. He's mentioned here too as Len Jeffries:

http://www.archivesnetworkwales.info/cgi-bin/anw/fulldesc_nofr?inst_id=35&coll_id=11724&expand=

 

[chilango]

Difficult to write the history of chartism in england without referring to wales though. Dorothy Thompson wrote stuff on John Frost.

Turning to that moment Gavin talks of when the movement vapourised, surely part of the poblem was precisely that history was being made. What the working class was doing at Merthyr had never been done before, so they had no maps.

I do see an afinity with Mexico in the early 20th Century when the Nestor Makno of the Western Hemisphere, Zapata takes Mexico City along with Villa.
Let's qualify the use of the phrase "take Mexico City". They both march at the head of armies into the capital. But then they don't actually know what to do. They have no conception of the working class seizing power in the state. They wait, hesitate, and finally just march out of the capital again.

You can still have coffee in the place where Zapata and Villa met up.

 

[Udo Erasmus]

Nope - he's dead I presume. But there are recordings of him speaking somewhere or other. I know he lived in Ely, Cardiff for a bit. He's mentioned here too as Len Jeffries:

http://www.archivesnetworkwales.info/cgi-bin/anw/fulldesc_nofr?inst_id=35&coll_id=11724&expand=

Sorry the reason I referred to that Llafur article was because it mentions him!

 

[Udo Erasmus]

You can still have coffee in the place where Zapata and Villa met up.

Bit out of my way. I should mention the classic Sergio Leone flick set in the Mexican Revolution - Fistful of Dynamite (or if you are viewing in America: Duck you Sucker!)

 

[chilango]

Bit out of my way. I should mention the classic Sergio Leone flick set in the Mexican Revolution - Fistful of Dynamite (or if you are viewing in America: Duck you Sucker!)

The "Zapata trail" is a big tourist draw for Mexican familes (and others), they're certainly keen on celebrating revolutionary heritage here. I've been to the mud hut where Zapata was born, the hacienda where he was killed (though I met an old guy there who whilst pointing out the bullet holes claimed that Zapata had sussed the plot, sent a body double and fled to "arabia"...), Zapata's grave, the aforementioned cafe, some cantina with Villa's bullet holes in the ceiling etc etc.

You can buy these posters everywhere

However, the revolution has largely been utterly coopted and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) are a bucnh of nasty murdering bastards who killed the students in 68, Zapatistas thru the 90s and are supporting the ongoing dirty war against indigenous and peasant activists to this day.

 

[Terrie]

The Battle of Frederick Street (which is now a big hole in the ground). A crowd of about 300 - mainly unemployed people, communists and members of the Unemployed Workers Movement were baton charged by the fuzz causing mucho mayhem. Lots of people were hospitalised and all the ringleaders were arrested but not before getting battered.

They'd been holding a demo in Frederick street for about 2 hours where lots of inflammatory speeches were made (allegedly). They then decided to have a march thru the city starting off outside the Empire Theatre in Queen Street. It was at this point that the coppers moved in.

The main agitator was a guy called Leonard Jefferies who somebody ought to write a book about. He once got sent to prison for a long stretch for dropping literature into a Newport barracks urging the squaddies to mutiny. A cool man.

Len Jefferies was my great grandfather. Your right someone should write a book about him.

 

[bendeus]

Len Jefferies was my great grandfather. Your right someone should write a book about him.

Hello and welcome. Great ancestry you have there

 

[Gromit]

And there was me thinking the most exciting things to have happened in the history of Merthyr was
1. Mike Tyson's visit
2. That crazy afternoon where Red Dragon Radio chose it as the location of their Phrase that pays competition.

The number of wild eyed loons that ran up to me shouting some random phrase on the off chance I was the bloke from the radio. Quite scary.