Hywel Francis 1946-2021 - Socialist historian who chronicled the making of the twentieth century Welsh working class

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 72 (Spring 2021)]

Hywel Francis 1946-2021

Socialist historian who chronicled the making of the twentieth century Welsh working class. 

The historian and former Labour MP Hywel Francis has died at the age of 74. Wikipedia gives some idea of his life and works here. 

I didn’t know Hywel, although I heard him speak on occasion, and I, after all, convene the London Socialist Historians Group and the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research at London University. On the other hand I have lived partly in central Cardiff for over 25 years now. There is no doubt that Hywel Francis did a huge amount to chronicle the making of the Twentieth Century Welsh working class. Of course, its traditions and organisation were not hugely different to elsewhere in the UK. Wales-based landowners and businessmen made money out of the slave trade and imperialism, as their counterparts in England did. But on our side, to give one example, the great miners’ leader in the 1926 General Strike A.J. Cook, who was a Welsh miner, came from Somerset. 

My concern is how the history of the working class in Wales has been written or not. Both Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson had holiday homes in Wales but it was quite deliberately The Making of the English Working Class. It has fallen to others to write the history on (as the English see it) the far side of the Severn. Gwyn A. Williams wrote and spoke marvellously and invariably idiosyncratically on Welsh history, but when it came to the history of Welsh workers Hywel Francis was central. His book (with Dai Smith) The Fed: The History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century, is a fascinating piece of labour history and stands out as such. Likewise his Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War brought to life the input that Wales had to the International Brigades. 

Francis was key to setting up the South Wales Miners’ Library at Swansea University which is a great resource for historians. I researched there myself looking at the impact of the 1984/5 miners strike and its defeat. Somewhere in that one can find some of the seeds of what became New Labour (I making the point historically not as a political judgement) and Hywel Francis became a Labour MP from 2001-2015. I’m sure if you delve far enough you’ll find occasional chunterings from myself that he would do much more important work focusing on the history. However clearly he did a good deal in this time that was appreciated, although not support for the Iraq War. 

The Welsh working class of 2021 is not employed in mines (or in most cases steel works)but in quite different occupations from which develop different attitudes and traditions and ways of grappling with capital. At the same time the history remains a live presence and ideas of solidarity and working class organisation are just as important now as they were in 1926, 1948 and 1984. Hywel Francis did a huge amount to help our understanding of that.

Keith Flett