ABSTRACT
The coal trade was prospering. Output of coal in South Wales which had gone up from nearly forty million tons in 1899 to forty-three million in 1905, leaped up to fifty million in 1908. All the miners’ aims, legislative and political and other, seemed to be coming nearer to achievement. Amongst the colliery owners in deputation at the Home Office there was one who made a quite distinctive statement. The Bill stayed long in the House of Commons. The main defect of the Act, in opinion of the Miners’ Federation, was the Sixty Hours Clause to which they were inflexibly opposed. By middle of 1906 some Districts, notably Ogmore and Gilfach, put forward proposals for a “system of Centralisation”: and the Pontypridd and Rhondda District. There could hardly have been anything more conclusive in wording or in weight of numbers than this decision, which apparently wrote “finis” to nearly ten years of proposals for one or another kind of reorganisation.
