TONYANDY 1910, was a lockout that turned into a massive strike against the coal owners and the state. It began in the Ely pit in a struggle by seventy colliers for a new piece rate on a particularly difficuft seam. The coal owners responded by locking out, not only the 70 men involved in the dispute, but the whole 800 men in the Ely pit. The men throughout the coalfield were outrage. The owners were answered by the South Wales Miners' Federation who called out on strike 12,000 men of the Cambrian Combine, as they said, "to teach that particular company that tyranical action over certain men to influence others was not a paying policy". Strikes spread to the Aberdare Valley and Ogmore Valley. By the end of the first month of the strike in November there were some 12.000 miners out in the Rhonda Valley, and 11,000 outin Aberdare Valley. By mid-winter there were some 30,000 locked out or on strike.
Then as in the present miners strike, the men had to face the whole power of the state behind the coal employers. It was not long before troops were sent in. The Tonypandy miners were the most militant and stubborn in their resistance. During the rioting that broke out in their Valley the police were stoned and suffered heavy casualties. But what frightened the government most was the political ideas which gave that part of the strike its specially militant flavour. As Churchill's agent in the Rhonda reported, "... the strike committee consists of half a dozen fanatical socialists, strongly impregnated with the theories of Karl Marx .... couldn't find another port in Britain to unload, and had to limp back to Rotterdam.
The Government and the University put tremendous pressure on the NUM to call the men back to Yorkshire. The first response to the bureaucracy was a resounother universities and colleges in Britain It represents a progressive move away from the limited, spontaneous massconfrontation student politics to the practical use of the campus for proletarian ends in a major struggle of the working class. We saynow is the time