ABSTRACT
The attack on Newport had to be the subject of judicial proceedings, but no end would be served by exposing to public view the full ramifications of the Welsh workers’ movement. The government prosecutors decided that it was enough to show that there had been an attack on Newport, that it was premeditated, and that John Frost led it with the assistance of Zephaniah Williams and William Lloyd Jones. It might be thought that the story of the rising would fare rather better at the hands of those writing, in some sense or other, within the tradition of chartism or, later, socialism. In 1924 a serious attempt to establish a context for the rising was made by Ness Edwards, then a militant socialist and activist in the South Wales Miners’ Federation. In Williams’s writings the ironworkers and colliers are shadowy figures, lacking unity, completely undisciplined and fatally deluded by a sense of their own power.
