Churchill was appointed Home Secretary in 1910. Aged thirty-five he was the youngest since Robert Peel.
One of his challenges was a Welsh miners’ strike. Roy Jenkins, in Churchill, takes up the story.
”In early November 2010, a convoluted dispute about the relative payment for working difficult and easier coal-seams broke out in the Rhondda and Aberdare valleys, bringing about 25,000 men out on strike (a tenth of the total then employed in the whole South Wales coalfield). This led to a tense situation at several collieries in the locality, and eventually to fairly serious window-breaking and looting of shops in the small centre of Tonypandy. This began on the night of Monday, 7 November, and although the Chief Constable of Glamorgan had, according to a report of Churchill’s to the King, no fewer than 1,400 constables at his disposal, a cornucopia compared with that of his poor cousin in Newport, he decided to apply direct to the GOC Southern Command for troop reinforcement. There are several points here.
Just as the miners were gradually (and certainly by 1926) coming to be regarded as the most battle-hardened troops of industrial labour, so by a sort of symbiotic relationship the Glamorgan County Constabulary came to assume some of the characteristics of the crack battalion of the countervailing forces. As I recall from my childhood they had, like members of the Prussian Guard, silver spikes on their helmets, a form of aggressive decoration eschewed by the lesser Monmouthshire force. However, to judge from their Chief Constable’s application, the Glamorgan nerve was not quite up to their insignia. …
Fortunately the general put in charge of the operation – Nevil Macready – was a very sensible man, who was anxious to co-operate with the more cautious view of the Home Office. The infantry, advancing from Salisbury Plain, were at first halted by Churchill at Swindon, and the cavalry allowed no nearer the scene of potential battle than Cardiff. A little later Churchill agreed to the cavalry advancing to Pontypridd, at the junction of the Aberdare and Rhondda valleys. However, as the rioting persisted over several days and nights, with damage to sixty-three shops and one man killed, but accidentally in a scuffle rather than by punitive action, Churchill did eventually allow a detachment of the Lancashire Fusiliers into the valley, where indeed they remained for nearly a year. They never engaged with the strikers. The battle, such as it was, was fought by the Glamorgan Constabulary, reinforced by some London policemen (the Metropolitan Police, under Churchill, saw quite a lot of non-metropolitan England and Wales) with rolled-up mackintoshes as their hardly lethal weapons. There were no serious casualties, apart from the one man who died before either the Metropolitan Police or the military reinforcements arrived.
On any objective analysis it is difficult to fault Churchill in the Rhondda for any sin of aggression or vindictiveness towards labour. Indeed at the time he was more criticised from the opposite direction. The Times thundered at his weakness. Yet there are lines of attack to which some politicians, whether or not they are ‘guilty as charged’, are peculiarly vulnerable because they seem to fit in with their general character and behaviour. Thus a charge of trickiness in Lloyd George or indolence in Baldwin or indiscretion in Hugh Dalton clung to them like a spot of grease on a pale suit. And there was always sufficient of the ‘galloping major’ about Churchill to make it easy to assume that he was acting with over-boisterous irresponsibility, power having gone to his head.”