Stephen Owen Davies (before 1889 – 25 February 1972), generally known as S. O. Davies, was a Welsh miner, trade union official and Labour Party politician, who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Merthyr Tydfil from 1950 to 1972, and previously Merthyr from 1934 to 1950. In 1970, when well past 80, he was deselected as parliamentary candidate by his local party association on account of his age. He fought the constituency in the 1970 general election as an Independent and won comfortably, a rare example in British politics of an independent candidate defeating a major party's organisation.
Most records show Davies's birth date as November 1886, but he is widely thought to have been born at least four years earlier. After leaving school aged 12 and working for some years in local pits, Davies studied mining engineering and later took an Arts degree at University College, Cardiff. He returned to the coalfields in 1913, and established a reputation for militancy. In 1918 he was elected miners' agent for the Dowlais district of the South Wales Miners' Federation (SWMF), and in 1924 was appointed SWMF's chief organiser, legal adviser, and vice-president. After a visit to Moscow in 1922 he became a firm advocate of the Soviet Union, a position he maintained for the rest of his life.
After his election to parliament in 1934, Davies was a consistent advocate for the interests of Merthyr Tydfil and mining in Wales. Largely indifferent to party discipline, he defied official Labour policy by championing such causes as disarmament and Welsh nationalism. His persistence in doing so brought him several suspensions from the party, and he was never offered ministerial office. An immensely popular figure locally, he was regularly returned at general elections with large majorities. In 1966, after the Aberfan disaster and loss of 144 lives, Davies controversially stated that he had long thought that the tip was unsafe. He had not reported his suspicions, for fear that an inquiry would cause the closures of local pits. Not long after his unexpected 1970 electoral triumph, Davies died early in 1972 aged at least 85 and possibly 90 or more.
Early life Birth, childhood and early career
There is uncertainty about Davies's date of birth. Most sources say November 1886, though usually with the caveat that he might have been born several years earlier. His birthplace was 39 John Street, Abercwmboi (then known as Cap Coch) in the South Wales coalfields, the fourth child of Thomas Davies and his wife Esther ( Owen). Thomas was a miner and trade union activist, who under the pseudonym Y Llwynog ("the Fox") wrote a column for the Welsh language newspaper Tarian y Gweithiwr ("The Worker's Shield"), in which he berated pit management and safety practices. His general militancy led to his blacklisting by pit owners, and after spells of unemployment he eventually found work as an insurance agent.
Davies attended the local Cap Coch school, leaving at the age of 12, as was usual at that time, to begin work in the Cwmpennar coal mine. He remained there until the mine was exhausted in 1905, when he moved to Mountain Ash to work at Nixon's Navigation Colliery. His ambition and intelligence were quickly recognised by his superiors, and he was encouraged to study mining engineering, at first locally in Aberdare and, in 1907, at the Royal College of Science in London. In 1908, with sponsorship from the Brecon Memorial College, he passed his matriculation and began studying for a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree at University College, Cardiff, with a view thereafter to entering the nonconformist ministry. However, Davies's religious beliefs were influenced by R. J. Campbell, a noted preacher who rejected much traditional Christian teaching and asserted that socialism was the practical expression of Christianity. Davies's association with such supposed heresies was unacceptable to the Brecon college, which withdrew its financial support.
Despite this loss of sponsorship, Davies completed his studies and graduated in 1913. His plans to enter the ministry were abandoned; he was an active member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and his religious vocation had been replaced by a commitment to working-class politics. In 1913, while still a student, he stood for election to Cardiff's Board of Guardians, as the ILP candidate in the Grangetown ward. This first foray into electoral politics ended in a narrow defeat, by 47 votes.
Mineworker and union official
After graduation, Davies returned to work in the mines, initially at Tumble in the Gwendraeth Valley. In December 1913, he unsuccessfully sought election as miners' sub-agent for the Anthracite Miners' district of the SWMF. When the First World War began in August 1914, he opposed it as capitalist militarism: "History teaches that war invariably brings in its wake a lower standard of morality, a restriction of the liberty of the masses, and a degradation of their social conditions". In 1917, Davies founded and was first chairman of the Burry Port and Gwendraeth Valley Trades and Labour Council. He was initially selected as the Labour candidate for the Llanelli constituency in the 1918 general election, but stood down when the SWMF backed his rival, J. H. Williams.
In 1918 Davies sought the position of miners' agent for the Dowlais district of the SWMF. Against strong competition—his main opponent was William Mainwaring, later a long-serving Labour MP for Rhondda East—Davies gained the seat by 100 votes. The main role of the agent was to represent miners in disputes with their employers; typically these would involve issues of pay, redundancy, working hours, and compensation for injuries. Davies's surviving day books reveal the extent to which he was concerned with cases where the mining companies denied liability for underground injuries.
In the summer of 1919 Davies married Elizabeth Margaret ("Madge") Eley in Cardiff;"Davies, Stephen O. / Eley / Cardiff 11a 850"; "Eley, Elizabeth M. / Davies / Cardiff 11a 850" in Civil Registration of Marriages in England and Wales (1919, 3rd quarter), ancestry.com, accessed 9 January 2021 the couple had three daughters. The years following the First World War saw economic decline and hardship in the South Wales coalfields, conditions which deepened Davies's radical instincts, and he began to acquire a reputation for militancy. Contrary to mainstream Labour Party policy, Davies advocated workers' control rather than the nationalisation of the mining industry. In 1921, he unsuccessfully advocated affiliation of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain (MFGB, precursor of the National Union of Mineworkers or NUM) with the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU). The following year, he was a delegate from the SWMF to the Second World Congress of the RILU in Moscow, and acquired a warm sympathy towards the Soviet system. He did not, however, join the recently formed Communist Party of Great Britain, and remained within the Labour Party.
In 1924 Davies was appointed SWMF's chief organiser and legal adviser, and was elected its vice-president. He also served as the South Wales representative on the executive committee of the MFGB from 1924 to 1934. During the May 1926 general strike, the South Wales miners were among the most fervent in support of the action. When the national strike collapsed after nine days, Davies led the continued resistance from the Welsh coalfields through months of lockout, before capitulation on harsh terms in December. Dowlais was the last district to return to work. The period following 1926 saw much in-fighting between communist and non-communist factions in the coalfields. Davies and other non-communists found themselves accused of collaboration with "social fascism"; a leaflet issued by the communist-led National Minority Movement termed him "the sham militant". Nevertheless, he continued to work for cooperation between all factions on the left. After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Davies argued for unity around the Labour Party, believing that the ILP's increasingly left-wing stance, and the Communist Party's commitment to violent revolution, might create the conditions for fascism. In 1931 Davies was elected to Merthyr Tydfil Borough Council.
Member of Parliament By-election June 1934 When Richard Wallhead, the Labour MP for Merthyr, died on 27 April 1934, Davies was selected as the party's candidate for the June by-election, with the support of the MFGB. Wallhead had held the seat since 1922, with large majorities; in the 1931 general election he had defeated a single opponent, a candidate from Oswald Mosley's New Party who had received tacit support from the Conservative Party. Davies faced opposition from the Liberal Party, the Communist Party and the ILP. With no candidate from the ruling National Government in the field, Davies was denied an obvious target for attack; as The Manchester Guardian stated in its pre-poll analysis, he was put on the defensive: "His is the dispiriting task of trying to lose as few votes as possible". The paper predicted a close result.
Using the slogan "Peace, Prosperity, Security, Freedom", Davies advocated the extension of public ownership, abolition of the means test, increased unemployment benefit, better education, and international co-operation especially with Russia. He dismissed the ILP as having no function beyond the splitting of the Labour vote. With strong support from the local trade unions and helped by a well-organised campaign, Davies swept to an easy victory on 5 June. His 18,645 votes gave him a majority of 8,269 over his Liberal opponent, with his ILP and Communist challengers lagging far behind.
In the House of Commons Member for Merthyr
Davies gave his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 21 June 1934. Breaking with the tradition that such speeches should be non-partisan, he delivered a fierce attack on the government's policy towards the mining industry. He had come, he said, from a coalfield that "has had very little help from the present government ... we see communities with a great industrial history dissolving and disintegrating". An uncompromising approach on any questions affecting Merthyr Tydfil, or the mining industry generally, became Davies's parliamentary hallmark. In December 1934 he rebuked the veteran Conservative MP Nancy Astor when she referred to Merthyr as having "no social consciousness or initiative to do anything". Davies replied: "I object to irresponsible and brutal charges coming from people whose knowledge is derived from the enjoyment of vast wealth, especially when I am not certain that they have made their contribution towards producing that wealth".
In 1934, two years after his wife Margaret's death from cancer, Davies married Sephora Davies, a schoolteacher from Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen in Carmarthenshire who shared Davies's political outlook. The couple lived at Gwynfryn Park Terrace in Merthyr Tydfil, and had two sons. In November 1936, having been returned in the 1935 general election with an increased majority, Davies ridiculed the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, for his refusal to meet a delegation from the National Unemployed Workers' Movement's 1936 Hunger March, which included a large contingent from South Wales: "A bigger man would meet these people who have tramped the roads of this country and would show that he had sympathy with them". In 1938, having modified his earlier position, Davies supported a bill introduced by the Labour opposition for the nationalisation of the coal industry. Miners worked, he said, in intolerable conditions to ensure that cheap raw material was available to industry. Reasonable wages and working conditions would never be granted by private coal-owners. The bill was defeated.