Tonypandy
Tonypandy is a place in the South of Wales. In 1910, British troops were sent by the government to fire upon and kill Welsh miners who were striking for their rights. Winston Churchill was the Home Secretary at the time and he was, of course, responsible for commanding these actions. If you ever go near this place, you will be told, “Never forget Tonypandy!”
Except…the story is untrue. Churchill was prevailed upon by the Chief Constable of Glamorgan to provide assistance in the area because the demonstrations were growing out of control and degenerating into violence and looting. Churchill baulked at the idea of sending in troops and sent instead unarmed London Police who were involved in a limited number of scuffles with the rioters. That was all Tonypandy really was. No deaths. No shootings. Just a couple of bloody noses.
This story is told is Josephine Tey’s detective novel The Daughter of Time1 in an exchange between Inspector Alan Grant and an American research assistant called Carradine.
‘Yes’, Carradine said, considering, ‘Yes. It’s…someone blowing up a simple affair to huge proportions for a political end.’
‘…The point is that every single man who was there knows that the story is nonsense, and yet it has never been contradicted. It will never be overtaken now. It is a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on a said nothing.’
‘Yes. That very interesting; very. History as it is made.’
‘Yes. History.’Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, p.102
“Tonypandy” becomes a metonym for the same historical phenomenon: a story, perhaps with some element of truth to it and exaggerated out of all proportion, concretised into unchallengeable historical fact by its retelling.
The mystery unfolds: Inspector Alan Grant, bored out of his mind after breaking his leg and being consigned to a hospital bed, decides to investigate the ultimate cold case: Richard III and the ostensible murder of his nephews in the Tower of London. Grant becomes firmly convinced that the legend around Richard III is absolute bunk: worse than bunk, the opposite of the truth. In fact, he becomes certain that it is Tudor propaganda, history told by the victors.
There is far too much detail to explain why Grant comes to think this but, one of the most fascinating observations he makes is that, Henry VII, upon coming to the throne after the Battle of Bosworth with a very weak claim, systematically wiped out anybody who might have a conceivably better claim than him. Those who survived the purge were destroyed by his even more murderous and psychopathic son Henry VIII. These details are reported in history books dispassionately, as though Henry VII and his son were perfectly reasonable people doing what they would have been expected to do in such a situation. But, when Richard III is spoken about, things are quite different: he is a scoundrel, a liar, a usurper, a murderer, a despicable man who eventually got what was coming to him, even though the crimes he is accused of are of the same kind as the Henrys. Why the discrepancy?
But the rabbit hole doesn’t stop there for Alan Grant: if the mainstream narrative about Richard III is bunk, what about everything else that you read in the standard history textbooks? How much of that is Tonypandy too?
There is a complex and subtle psychological phenomenon going on here. A characteristic feature of stories is that they help us to make sense of the world, to position ourselves in it and to bolster our contemporary outlook. During the course of the novel, a friend of Grant’s, Laura, writes him a letter which finishes with this postscript:
P.S. It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed.
Very odd, isn’t it.
Ibid., p.132
Grant puts this to the test by asking a nurse what she would think if he contradicted the legend of Richard III and she responds by comparing him to people who believe the Earth is flat or to those who predict the world is going to end in 2000AD, of course before she hears the facts of his case.
How much of our historical knowledge - how much of our knowledge in general - is Tonypandy? Bits and pieces picked up in school, in books, in the media, in films, things not properly analysed but accepted because so frequently assumed and repeated.
As part of the writing project I’m engaged in, I’m going through a list of legends around the ignorance and superstition of the so-called Dark Ages and the ostensible Scientific Revolution. When scrutinised to any degree, legends such as that which surrounds Galileo simply dissolve into thin air as one recognises that stories like these can’t be easily deployed to fit a simplistic Science vs Religion narrative. And yet, people still propagate them all the time. In a television debate I was involved in with Jayne Ozanne, I felt I had to issue a correction when the latter said that Christians used to believe the Earth was flat and suggested that this was reason to reevaluate our current beliefs about homosexuality. It was not the right format to go into detail, of course, but this is yet more Tonypandy: total nonsense when one looks at the details.
How can we free ourselves from living in this delusory world of mistaken belief, prejudice against the innocent and general Tonypandy? I have some suggestions on broadening one’s outlook.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Good Things to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.