Lindsay, Chief Constable of Glamorgan, telegrammed the Home Office at 10.00am on 8 November 1910 to request troops.
Churchill, Home Secretary, telegrammed Lindsay at 1.30pm on 8 November “... infantry should not be used till all other means have failed” and sent 10 mounted and 200 foot constables of the Metropolitan Police to Pontypridd, moved 200 cavalry in the district “as a precautionary measure”, and infantry to Swindon, stating that troops “will not however be available unless it is clear that the police reinforcements are unable to cope”.
Lleufer Thomas, Stipendiary magistrate, telegrammed the Home Office at 7.45pm on 8 November “Police cannot cope with rioters ... troops at Cardiff absolutely necessary for further protection. Will you order them to proceed {i.e. from Cardiff to the Rhondda] forthwith”.
Churchill telegrammed General Macready (commander of the troops at Swindon) at 8.10pm on 8 November “As the situation appears to have become more serious you should if the Chief Constable ... desire it, move all the cavalry into the disturbed area without delay.”
General Macready, in his report to the Home Office for 9 November, stated: “ At 1.20am [on 9 November] orders were sent to Colonel Currey at Cardiff to despatch the squadron 18th hussars at that place so as to reach Pontypridd at 8.15aam. On arrival at Pontypridd one squadron patrolled through Aberaman and the other through Llwynypia ... At about 5pm I received [further] instructions from the Home Secretary to go to Llwynypia and relieved the 18th Hussars who had been there during the day ... on their return to Pontypridd [they] arrived at Porth just as a disturbance was breaking out. They held the crowd until the arrival of 50 Metropolitan foot police who had been sent from Pontypridd. Major Corbett, 18th Hussars, reported that the crowd showed a rather hostile attitude towards the troops. 300 more Petropolitan foot police arrived tonight and will be despatched to Tonypandy. The troops in the district were billeted as follows during the night:
12 squadrons 18th hussars at Pontypridd.
1 company Royal North Lancashire Regiment at Pontypridd.
1 company Lancashire Fusiliers at Llwynpia.
1 company West Riding Regiment at Cardiff.
1 company Devonshire regiment at Newport.
1 company Royal Munster Fusiliers at Newport.”
“Investigations on the spot convinced me that the original reports regarding the attacks on the mines on 8th November had been exaggerated [by the police]. What were described as ‘desperate attempts’ to sack the power house at Llwynypia proved to have been an attempt to force the gateway ... and a good deal of stone throwing ... and had the mob been as numerous or so determined as the rports implied, there was nothing to have prevented them from overrunning the whole premises. That they did not was due less to the action of the police than to the want of leading or inclination to proceed to extremities on the part of the strikers.” General Macready “Annals of an Active Life”, 1924, pp.144-5.
“The angry, wealth-producing crowd turned against the symbol of social attainment, the conspicuous, wealth-making shops. And they did so in a manner that expressed contempt and resement rathe than fear and greed. The shops were smashed systematically but not indiscriminately. The amount of looting was not so important as the display of bravado on the streets... No police were seen until the Metropolitans arrived at 10.30pm (almost 3 hours after the riots began) and then the disturbance fell away of its own accord.” T.Herbert & G.E.Jones “Wales 1880-1914, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988, p.114.
Churchill had difficulty living down his reputation as the Home Secretary who sent troops into the Rhondda; “this incident continued to haunt Churchill throughout his political career” (Herbert & Jones, p.111). As late as 1950 he was attempting to rewrite history: “When I was Home Secretary in 1910, I had a great horror and fear of having to become responsible for the military firing on a crowd of rioters or strikers... The Chief Constable of Glamorgan sent a request for the assistance of the military and troops were out in motion in the usual way. But here I made an unprecedented intervention. I stopped the movement of troops and sent instead 850 Metropolitan police... The troops were kept in the background and all contact with the rioters was made by our trusted and unarmed London police who charged, not with rifles, and bayonets, but with rolled up mackintoshes. ... That is the true story of Tonpandy and I hope it may replace in Welsh villages the cruel lie with which they have been fed all these long years.” Churchill: general election campaign 1950, speech in Cardiff, Western mail, 9 February, 1950. Contrast this with the minute detail in the government report “Colliery Strike Disturbances in South Wales: Correspondence and Report 1910”, London: HMSO, 1911, from which the extracts above text of the telegrams are taken, and in which troop movements are fully recorded.
Although the Tonypandy Riots of 8 November 1910 dominates recollections of this period, disturbances continued spasmodically until 25 July 1911 when, at Naval Colliery Penygraig “a company of the Somerset Light Infantry, under the command of Major Thickness, surprised the rioters by appearing in extended order on the mountain top armed with fixed bayonets and ball cartridge. They carried their rifles in their hands ... The troops drove the rioters into the town, where they were charged and dispersed.” D.Evans “Labour Strife in the South Wales Coalfield 1910-11”, 1911, pp,110-111.
Interestingly, Herbert & Jones opinion (p.111): “There is no doubt ... that the troops acted more circumspectly and were commanded with greater common sense than the police force whose role under the peppery Lionel Lindsay was indeed that of an army of occupation. The troops were not regarded by the community with the same level of hostility as were the police.”
At Tonypandy, “one man, Samuel rays of Tonypandy, died from a fractured skull, a martyr for the Welsh working class as much as Dic Penderyn had been in 1831, though far less well recalled.” “For Churchill .. the reputation he gained, accurately enough, as the man who had sent the troops to Tonypandy, made his name reviled amongst the British working class. ‘Tonypany’ joined Peterloo, Tolpuddle, and Featherstone in the people’s martyrology.” K.O.Morgan “Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980”, Oxford University Press, 1981, p.147.
Late Edwardian Britain experienced numerous disturbances and labour strife. A year after Tonypandy, troops shot two men in the Llanelli Railway Strike Riots, and third died when a railway van he was looting, exploded. (J.Edwards "Remembrance of a Riot: the story of the Llanelli Railway Strike Riots of 1911", Llanelli, 1988). Tonypandy should be viewed against this wider background: it was not unique.