ABSTRACT
Wales has been regarded as an extremely radical part of the British Isles, the home of militant unionists, of socialist or communist activists. Trade unions would be a powerful force in twentieth century Wales. Organisation in the 1850s and 1860s had been sporadic and rather weak, and conflicts had a defensive and even desperate quality, but matters changed in the following decade. In the early twentieth century, the focus of labour conflict would move decisively to the south, above all to the coal industry, and people find many points of resemblance to the slate conflicts. The Welsh organiser for the National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM) was Horner's friend Lewis Jones from Clydach Vale in the mid-Rhondda, a veteran of the Central Labour College. The Labour Party had become a fundamental part of the network of institutions on which daily life depended in much of industrial Wales, as essential as the union, the 'Fed', or the Coop.
