In memory of Hywel Francis

Sally Davison

Hywel Francis

Image: (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66969618

Hywel Francis, who died on 14 February 2021, was a cherished Lawrence Wishart author and a long-term friend and comrade. He was also a true organic intellectual. His writing reflected his deep roots in the socialist political culture of the South Wales coalfield; and he was always concerned to engage critically with the specificities of the region while also seeing the links to the wider world within which it was situated – including the world of ideas.

Hywel was the first person in his welsh-speaking mining family to go to university, and his commitment to this inheritance never wavered in his subsequent academic and political career. After studying history at Swansea University he completed a PhD there on the involvement of the anti-fascist organising of South Wales miners in the Spanish Civil war. This became the book Miners against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War, published by L&W in 1984. During this period he also co-wrote, with Dai Smith, the classic trade union history of the coalfield, The Fed: a History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (L&W 1980).1

Oral history was central to both these works. Hywel was a passionate supporter of the tradition of working-class self-education, and the importance of preserving working-class voices in history, and this was reflected in his collection of material from closing-down Miners’ Institutes and welfare halls, which eventually found its way into South Wales Miners Library, of which he was the founder, and the unique collection held by the South Wales Coalfield Archive, in which he also played a central role.2 Both these institutions are now based at Swansea University, and he remained closely involved with them throughout his life. In 1970, along with a small number of other Labour historians, he also founded the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History, soon to become Llafur , which is still going strong, and of which he was President at the time of his death. All of these books and institutions were strongly linked to trade union organisations, which Hywel saw as central to working-class education and culture.

Both The Fed and Miners against Fascism had a widespread resonance across South Wales. The influence of Miners against Fascism can be heard in the Manic Street Preacher’s fine song ‘If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will be Next’, which draws on quotes from Welsh International Brigaders featured in the book. And Dai Smith and Hywel later noted (in the introduction to its centenary edition) that the Fed’s impact in South Wales was so strong that they had been blamed for the rash of strikes of the early 1980s, while the book had even been described as the origin of the Lewis Merthyr stay-in strike of 1983. They conceded that such accusations did perhaps exaggerate their direct influence as historians, but added that the ‘frequency with which The Fed was quoted by rank-and-file miners and presented to public supporters of the struggle all over Europe, especially in 1984-5, was testimony to its catalytic purpose’ (1998 edition, pxxii).

From 1974 Hywel worked as a teacher of History in Swansea’s extra-mural department. This allowed him to continue his links with mining communities through educational programmes but also to continue to collect oral history material for his research. Later on he quoted Irish president Michael D. Higgins’s comment on Raymond Williams – on more than one occasion: ‘I welcomed his [RW’s] commitment to a politics that opposed economic exploitation, cultural domination and personal repression through his practical involvement in the democratic work of university extension’. That is how Hywel saw his work, and in this he was part of a long tradition of workers’ education teachers, including Williams himself.

Hywel was actively involved in supporting the miners in the 1984-5 strike, including in his roles as an historian and adult educator. He described this period – for himself as well as his wife Mair – as ‘the most profound learning experience of my life’. Hywel and Mair were both actively involved in the Neath, Dulais and Swansea Valley Miners’ Support Group (whose minutes are now duly deposited in the Swansea archives), which was the support group whose relationship with Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners (LGSM) was celebrated in the film Pride. This alliance was not, as portrayed in the film, a lucky chance. It came out of a strong commitment among key people in both groups to the idea of a ‘broad democratic alliance’, which in the 1980s was at the centre of the CPGB’s strategy for change. This strategy of alliance was also central to the South Wales approach to the strike, which saw communities as being at the heart of the struggle (which put them at odds with the more syndicalist approach of the national NUM leadership). In the chapter Hywel added to the second issue of his history of the strike in Wales, History on our Side: Wales and the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike (published by L&W in 2015), he reasserted the importance of the idea of broad alliance and listed some of the alliances made with their support group: as well as trade unionists and other labour movement supporters, the group had support from women’s groups, black communities and Welsh language activists, alongside LGSM. One of the crucial alliances in Wales during the strike was the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities (which Hywel chaired), which included in its membership Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Language Society.3 His view – then and later – was that this should be recognised as the beginning of the ‘national popular’ alliance that eventually led to Welsh devolution.

After the defeat of the strike, and in the wider context of all the pit and other workplace closures in South Wales in the 1980s, the scope for education liaison with workers’ groups became smaller. But the community-organising experience of the strike had led to greater contact with other groups with whom the department could liaise – including the DOVE Women’s Workshop at Banwen, in which Mair played a key role. From these networks, and in light of the changes then being introduced in adult education, including to its funding, the department now launched the Community University of the Valleys. In 1996 L&W published a collection edited by Hywel alongside Jane Elliott, Rob Humphreys and David Istance, Communities and their Universities, which sought to rethink this relationship, and conceptualised universities as being in the service of local people rather local business development. I remember Hywel telling me at the time how much he was hoping that they would be able to keep alive the vibrant political and intellectual culture of the valleys communities through helping to sustain their traditions of self-education.

As well as having strong loyalties within their local community, the South Wales miners had always been internationalist, and an important part of this was the strong bond that developed between the miners and the African American singer and political activist Paul Robeson.4 Hywel was keen to honour this relationship and played a major role in recognising and celebrating Robeson’s role in shaping the adoption of anti-colonial perspectives by the South Wales miners in the 1940s and 1950s. For him, Robeson was part of a group of ‘talented black political thinkers and activists’ who, from the late 1930s, broadened the political horizons of Welsh miners beyond the myths of ‘barricades from Tonypandy to Madrid’.5 As chair of the Paul Robeson Wales Trust, Hywel’s work, which included collaborating with Paul Robeson Jr, was central to maintaining the enduring interest in Robeson in Wales.

Hywel stayed on at Swansea as Professor of Continuing Education until he was elected as Labour MP for Aberavon in 2001 (the CPGB having ground to a halt and dissolved itself only a few years after the defeat of the miners). Throughout his career as an MP (which is not the focus of this note), he continued to be involved in historical and cultural work, in his community, in the coalfield, in Wales and in the UK parliament (where, for example, he was chair of the all-party Archives and History Group); he also continued to be politically active at the heart of his constituency and in the life of Swansea University. This pattern continued after he stood down as MP in 2015. He always had some project on the go and would be in regular touch with L&W about his books and ideas. The last time I saw Hywel was in March 2015, when I travelled down to the Onllwyn Miners Welfare Hall in the Dulais Valley with my L&W colleague Lynda Dyson, to celebrate both the second edition of History on Our Side and the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the miners’ strike. I didn’t think that would be the last time I saw him. I thought that there would be many more books and events to celebrate together.

That evening we spent in Onllwyn represented so much of what was great about Hywel. First of all it was an event to celebrate his historical work that was so deeply embedded in the working-class communities of the South Wales coalfield. Secondly, it was a celebration of the alliance with LGSM – a coach party of LGSM members travelled down for the event, making it a very emotional evening. Thirdly, the event was held in the miners’ welfare hall in the village where Hywel was born, and was packed with hundreds of people with whom Hywel had worked and struggled, and who wanted to celebrate Hywel, the valleys and their culture as well as the occasion itself. Finally, it was a great party, where, thirty years on, old allies could share the dance floor one last time.

Thanks to Dave Featherstone for his contributions to this commemoration.

Notes

  1. Hywel also started work around this time on a biography of Arthur Horner, which he then worked on with Nina Fishman, before she went on to become the sole author. This was eventually published by L&W in 2010, shortly after Nina’s death. Hywel contributed an ‘Afterword’ to the book and hosted a launch event at the House of Commons, which was partly a memorial for Nina.
  2. Information on Hywel’s career at Swansea University is mainly from Hywel’s own account: ‘From Miners’ Library to Community University: A Personal Backstory (1959 -1994)’, which can be found at https://collections.swansea.ac.uk/s/swansea-2020/page/miners-library.
  3. For more on this see Hywel Francis, ‘Mining the popular front’, Marxism Today, February 1985. Available at http://banmarchive.org.uk/archive_index.htm. Also reprinted in Hywel’s collection Stories of Solidarity, Y Lolfa 2018, which was reviewed in Soundings 70 by Darrel Leeworthy: https://lwbooks.co.uk/product/reviews-soundings-70-autumn-2018.
  4. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/02/how-paul-robeson-found-political-voice-in-welsh-valleys.
  5. Stories of Solidarity, p160.