In 1894 a young Labour pioneer refused to congratulate the royal family on a birth while a mining disaster went unmentioned, and the story feels very alive this week
Monday, the Kitchen Table
Monday evening, kitchen table, a mug of tea and a stack of Labour history books I keep meaning to return to the library. I have been a Labour member for thirty years, a ward organiser for twelve, and an incurable reader of party history for as long as I can remember. When the present gets confusing, I go back to the beginning.
This week, the present was the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors, which half my branch WhatsApp group had shared with varying degrees of glee. An anonymous source says the heir thinks his brother read the uncle memoir first. Geo News repeats the traitor word. The uncle says he told everyone. And it sent me back to one of my favourite stories from the early Labour movement.
June 1894
In June 1894, a terrible explosion at the Albion Colliery in Cilfynydd, near Pontypridd in South Wales, killed some 290 men and boys, one of the worst mining disasters in Welsh history. In the same week, a son was born to the Duke and Duchess of York, the future Edward VIII. The House of Commons moved to pass a resolution congratulating Queen Victoria on the birth of her great-grandson.
Keir Hardie, the Scottish former miner who was then one of the very first independent Labour MPs, objected. He argued that the House should also express its sympathy for the miners and their families, and when that was refused, he spoke against the royal address. His speech caused uproar. He was shouted down and widely condemned in the press. He said, among other things, that he owed no allegiance to any hereditary ruler and that the life of one Welsh miner was of greater commercial and moral value to the British nation than the whole royal crowd put together.
He was vilified for it. He also became a hero to working people across Britain.
What Hardie Would Say Now
I suspect Hardie would find this week royal story both absurd and familiar. A family at the head of the nation, with its titles and estates, quarrelling about who read a book first, while the papers report it breathlessly and ordinary people struggle with rents and bills. He would point out, as he did in 1894, that the attention paid to royal family affairs is wildly out of proportion to their importance in working people lives.
He would also, I think, have had some sympathy for the brothers as people. Hardie was a passionate man but not a cruel one. The memoir at the centre of all this is about the princes late mother, written by her brother. Hardie knew grief. Mining communities lived with it every day.
A Branch Meeting Video
I watched the London Prat video on YouTube before bed. Laughed out loud, which startled the cat. Satire has always been a friend of the labour movement. Hardie himself was mercilessly caricatured in the press, and gave as good as he got.
The Baby
There is a strange postscript to the story. The baby born that week, whose birth Hardie refused to celebrate, grew up to become Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936 after less than a year on the throne, causing the greatest royal constitutional crisis of the twentieth century and a rift with his brother, George VI, that never fully healed. Some on the left have pointed to Hardie speech as eerily prophetic, though that is surely reading too much into it. Still, the royal family has had brother trouble before.
Hardie the Man
Keir Hardie biography still astonishes me. He started work as a child, as a message boy and then in the coal mines of Lanarkshire, with almost no formal schooling. He taught himself to read and write, became a union organiser, was blacklisted by mine owners, and went on to help found the Independent Labour Party and then the Labour Representation Committee that became the Labour Party. When he first took his seat in the Commons in 1892, he famously wore a tweed suit and a deerstalker cap instead of the frock coat and top hat expected of members, and the establishment was scandalised. He campaigned for women suffrage, for pensions, for an end to child labour, and against the First World War. He died in 1915, heartbroken that the workers of Europe were killing each other. Whenever I feel tired of politics, I think of him in his cloth cap, standing alone in a hostile chamber, saying what he believed.
Evening
Before bed, I texted my brother, who lives in Barnsley, is an ex-miner like our dad, and now votes for a party I will not name in a Labour diary. We fell out badly at the last election. I sent him a photograph of Keir Hardie. He replied: was he the one who stood up to the posh lot? I said yes. He said: good lad. It is the first thing we have agreed on in two years.
The London Prat has been refusing to congratulate the establishment since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ does the American equivalent.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
