|
D. Ben Rees, A Glimpse of Mabon: Proud Welshman, Politician
for the Rhondda and President of the Miners of South
Wales (Modern Welsh Publications)
This most attractive, appealing A4 sized volume is a real credit
to Modern Welsh Publications. It is an accomplished, sensitive
adaptation of the author's Welsh language biography of Mabon
published to great critical acclaim back in 2023 and rapidly
re-printed to satisfy the growing popular demand.
Dr D. Ben Rees is the author of substantial biographies of
several prominent Welsh Labour politicians of the era after the
Second World War, notably Aneurin Bevan, Gwilym Prys-Davies, Jim
Griffiths and Cledwyn Hughes. In each case, largely because of
his own active involvement in Welsh Labour politics, the author
knew everyone personally over a long period, a close connection
which much informed his research and writing.
William Abraham, 'Mabon', (1842-1922), on the other hand, is by
now a largely forgotten figure, his many real achievements
ignored, marginalized by modern historians. After all, he died
over a century ago. A worthy pioneering biography by E. W.
Evans, also the author of the substantial tome The Miners of
South Wales (Cardiff, 1961), appeared in 1959. But the time
is certainly ripe for a fuller, updated, detailed volume, and Dr
Rees has truly succeeded beyond measure.
Although, regrettably, there is no composite archive of Mabon's
papers, the author has quarried diligently the papers of many of
his political contemporaries. This archival research is
buttressed by painstaking searching through countless issues of
national and local newspapers (most notably the revealing pages
of Tarian y Gweithiwr and the widely read South Wales
Daily News) and periodical columns, secondary works and
unpublished postgraduate theses.
The author has achieved considerable success in chronicling
Mabon's boyhood and youth, the invaluable contribution of his
'pious mother' Mary Abraham (who ensured her able son was fluent
in both Welsh and English at an exceptionally early age and
indeed read widely in both languages too), the key support of
Tabernacle chapel, Cwmafan, near Port Talbot, where he had been
born in June 1842, and where the young Mabon became a precentor,
and by the Sunday school, the weekly seiat and the Band
of Hope, and the local eisteddfodau where he adopted his
lifelong pseudonym 'Mabon'. Nonconformity flourished mightily in
that area at that time.
Employment difficulties at home in south Wales encouraged Mabon
to venture to Peru in South America for a generally unrewarding
thirteen-month stint. He returned to a south Wales seething with
industrial unrest where he was soon appointed to the key, then
novel office of 'miners' agent' to the Rhondda miners, a
position which he helped to develop in importance.
As is analysed in chapter 4 of this fine study, following seven
years’ service in the Rhondda valleys, Mabon's political career
developed apace in 1885 when he was elected the Lib-Lab MP for
the Rhondda constituency, a success depicted here as very much a
personal victory for the new MP, widely seen locally as a worthy
successor to Henry Richard MP. Both men were revered locally.
'Without effective organisation, the politics of the Rhondda
were in the hands of the charismatic, colourful personality of
Mabon' (p. 75). The celebration of Mabon's Day, the first Monday
of the month, when the miners put down their tools to help
stabilise prices, was hugely popular locally.
His standing as a Lib-Lab reflected his generally moderate
political views. In the words of Dr Rees, 'Mabon was a perfect
example of that emerging Lib Lab movement between 1880 and 1908.
He was not the only one – many of the mining leaders were in the
same boat. … They were cultured and religious men of stature who
understood and respected the institutions and movements of
ordinary Welsh society' (p.50). By 1908 he had joined the Labour
Party and subsequently sat as a fully-fledged Labour MP right
through until his death in 1922.
Mabon's outstanding contribution as a trade union leader is
dissected in chapter 6, notably his backing for the adoption of
the sliding scale on miners' wage levels and his support for
numerous pieces of key parliamentary legislation. In 1898 he was
elected the president of the all-embracing South Wales Miners'
Federation, powerful throughout south Wales, his political
authority reflected in a succession of unopposed returns in each
general election until 1900 when local Tories resolved to put up
a candidate to oppose him. Each successive general election
campaign is meticulously analysed here.
Mabon was to play a vital role as a 'mediator' in the Tonypandy
Riots of 1910 (see chapter 10). Throughout the text his
entrenched nonconformist credentials are stressed as a vital
buttress to his political beliefs. And in chapter 13 of this
volume Mabon's standing in contemporary society, a full century
after his death, is sensitively delineated. The key point is
made that he is remembered today primarily as an influential
trade union leader over many years rather than as a high-flying
politician.
J. Graham Jones |
