Welsh Journals

Keir Hardie, C.B. Stanton, and the First World War Anthony Mor-O'Brien Wars and similar crises, according to some historians, are not aberrations but the norm in our recent history and yet the justification usually given for otherwise unacceptable constraints on individual liberty is a state of emergency. Many contemporary critics of the First World War, indeed, pointed to the irony of a war ostensibly being fought for democracy but using increasingly undemocratic means. Speaking at Aberdare in 1917, for example, Rev. Herbert Dunnico secretary of the National Peace Society won rousing cheers when he said that even though the war was avowedly being waged for freedom there was less freedom now than at any time during the last hundred years. Yet in spite of the emotional excesses provoked by the exigencies of war, the British Government did not embark on a policy of absolute coercion against the various strands of the peace movement. Such reticence may have been due to the love of liberty and rights of conscience infusing British society. It may also have been due to the watchful eye which interested M.P.s kept on potentially unacceptable developments. When the magistrates at Neath ordered the local branch of the I.L.P. not to sell or distribute certain pacifist pamphlets in 1916 Philip Snowden complained directly to the Home Secretary and threatened to raise the matter in Parliament.4 Furthermore, as Deian Hopkin has noted, a court case against peace campaigners would give minority groups the publicity they craved, would impair the Government's image at home and abroad, and because of the vagueness of the process by which prosecutions were instituted would have no guarantee of success.5 It is worth adding that the Government could afford to be tolerant because the force of public opinion was usually the strongest weapon of all against the advocates of peace. When Keir Hardie tried to denounce the war on August 1914 he was shouted down by his own constituents in Aberdare; when the I.L.P. and the National Council for Civil Liberties endeavoured to hold a monster peace meeting at the Cory Hall, Cardiff, on 11 November 1916 it was comprehensively broken up by patriots. Numerous other instances could be cited but the two occasions already mentioned have a special interest to historians. The first may have led Keir Hardie to waver in his pacifism, and the second may have merged with it in the folk- memory of the First World War to create a rather inaccurate impression of patriots and pacifists in the South Wales coalfield. At any rate certain fundamental details obviously need clarification. On 6 August 1914 Keir Hardie was denied a hearing by his own constituents at Aberdare when he tried to address a large meeting in favour of peace arranged by the local I.L.P. It is often said that the patriotic prowd which drowned Hardie's words was led by C.B. Stanton, the miners' agent for Aberdare, who had long enjoyed a nationwide reputation as an industrial militant eager for social revolution.6 In fact, Stanton kept well away from the peace meeting, even though he had been advertised as its chairman. Other accounts assert or imply that Keir Hardie was in physical