Welsh Journals

THE RISE OF LABOUR IN WALES 1890-1914 Deian Hopkin The rise of Labour generally has been well documented and thoroughly explored. Even as it occurred, there were contemporary accounts by, among others, Philip Snowden in 1908, G. D. H. Cole in 1913 and Max Beer in 1919. Soon a trickle of memoirs and autobiographies began to appear; Ben Tillett, Will Thorne, J. R. Clynes, Philip Snowden, resonant with titles like, My Life's Struggles. One erstwhile socialist even had the audacity to write about The Rise and decline of Socialism in Great Britain, and that was only in 1926. In the twenties there came a three volume encyclopaedia of Socialism, and numerous biographies of the great leaders MacDonald and Hardie, among others. Then, after the Second World War, came the historiographical flood, the work of Pelling, Hobsbawm, Saville, Thompson, Briggs, Pollard and the new generation of the 70s and 80s, Howell, Pimlott, Schneer, Stedman Jones and Hinton. Even more recently we have a major new synopsis by Duncan Tanner.1 The Welsh experience has, oddly enough, received somewhat less attention, though there was a significant surge of publishing in the 70s and early 80s. There is still no general history of the Labour party in Wales, as there is for England and Scotland. Welsh trade unions, except for the miners, tinplate workers and agricultural workers in North Wales, have generally been little studied while Welsh urban history, though containing some splendid individual examples, is still very patchy. The quarrymen have found their historian but the dockers of Cardiff and Swansea await theirs, as do the building workers or the teachers. This is not to complain hardly. We have had a splendid historiographical feast in the past twenty to thirty years, but there is no doubt that the twin problems of a small base of historians no more than a few dozen and the dwindling opportunities for new women and men to establish themselves and make their mark in the field, means that the general output on recent Welsh history has been relatively small. Welsh historians have always been a small, dedicated group. Yet they have constructed firm historiographical foundations and in the context of the present, and greatly welcomed, tribute to the work of L. J. Williams, it is salutary to remind ourselves that LJ's studies of the mining industry and its politics remain, after a quarter of a century, the definitive works.2 It is generally accepted that the Welsh contribution to the rise of Labour has been important, both in individual and in institutional terms, especially if one also accepts the proposition that the evolution of Labour is a composite process, in which national trends are mediated through highly specific, often unique, local developments. E. P. Thompson argued that the Independent