Remembering Annie Powell

John Geraint

Annie Powell. An inspiring social campaigner, respected across political divides.

That’s the wording on a Blue Plaque being unveiled in her honour today at Valleys Kids’ Soar Centre in Penygraig.

Mrs Powell was one of the first trustees of Valleys Kids, and represented Penygraig on the Rhondda Borough Council for decades. She remains Britain’s only-ever woman Communist mayor.

I have very fond memories of Annie Powell. Born in 1906, she’d been brought up, I think, in Soar, Penygraig, the Welsh Baptist chapel where my mother was baptised; certainly, the two families were close friends. But by the years of the Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, Annie Powell had joined a remarkable generation of young Rhondda people at the Methodist Central Hall, Tonypandy. There, under the visionary leadership of two gifted ministers who preached and practised a social gospel, Annie Powell learned to reason and to debate a massive injustice: that the Rhondda, which had created so much wealth in the coal it produced, had been left to languish in poverty.

Reflection

That led her – after a long period of reflection – to membership of the Communist Party. She wasn’t alone. In the 1945 General Election, the Communists came within a thousand votes of winning the Rhondda East constituency.

By the following decade, the Communist voted had collapsed, but in 1955 the indomitable Mrs Powell won a council seat in the Penygraig Ward.  As a councillor, she commanded respect far and wide beyond her card-carrying comrades, by her willingness to ‘take up the cudgels’ on behalf of the people who elected her – and against the intransigent bureaucracy of the Welfare State, as well as the naked self-interest of private landlords and the like.

My Mam and Dad were chapel people through and through, and wary of atheistic Communism, but they admired Mrs Powell for all that she did for the people of Penygraig.

When as a young teenager, I began to show an interest in the Rhondda’s history, my parents arranged for me to visit Annie and Trevor Powell at their home in Railway View, Llwynypia for what was, I suppose, a series of personal tutorials.

Somewhat to my disappointment, Mrs Powell didn’t tell me the story of how, as part of a British Communist delegation to a high-level conference in Moscow, she impressed by singing our Welsh national anthem, Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, for no less a person than Nikita Khrushchev. Yes, she was a very Welsh communist.

In taking me through the industrial history of our valley, she did stress how outward-looking, how internationalist the Rhondda always was, even in the dark days of the Depression. But she also went back much further into Welsh history telling me about the warlike leader Cadwgan, and his famous motto hog dy fwyell, ‘sharpen your battle-axe’. It wasn’t exactly a call to revolution, but perhaps she thought the chapel influence had made me a little too well-behaved for a young man!

She certainly influenced me – and when I got the vote for the first time as an 18-year-old in the Council elections in the late 1970s, I travelled back from university in England to make sure she had my support.

Ever since, I’ve half-wondered if was put on an MI5 watch-list as a result. When my mother sent me a copy of the Rhondda Leader with the detailed election results the next week, I well remember the astonishment of certain English fellow students that a Communist had topped the poll in my hometown.

By the early 1980s, Mrs Powell was suffering badly with rheumatism, but she recorded a memorable radio interview with Teleri Bevan, who’d become my boss at BBC Wales. So when I had the chance to make a television documentary about Central Hall, Tonypandy, I was more than keen to involve Annie Powell. I went to see her. She’d just retired from council work and, though I wasn’t to know it, she had only a couple of years left to live.

Her husband Trevor sat quietly by the fire, reading his copy of the Morning Star. “How are you, Mrs Powell?” I began brightly. “Well, my hands are not so good,” she said, holding them up for me to see the ravages of rheumatism. “But my tongue is alright!” And so she gave me my interview.

It was, shall we say, unusual for a leading Communist to go on public record in praise of a Christian church, but that wasn’t going to stop Annie Powell. She made a number of telling contributions to the finished programme, speaking warmly of the work Central Hall did to support the unemployed, and to campaign for a fairer world at a time when thousands had to leave the Valley, had to leave Wales, to find work.

Sunday school

She also talked about how she and others in the Sunday School organised a boycott of a particular verse in the hymn book which spoke of “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them, high and lowly, and ordered their estate.” That wasn’t all what the Gospel taught, she insisted. And indeed, her entire life was dedicated to removing such iniquitous inequalities, and ordering society with fair do’s for everyone.

I can’t transcribe the entire documentary for you, but this brief clip from the very beginning will give you a flavour of what she said, and why she said it:

“People very often ask me why Annie Powell, a prominent member of the Communist Party, has such a regard for the Central Hall. The regard I have for the Central Hall is that the Central Hall was built at a time when the Rhondda was in a very bad state indeed, very high level of unemployment, when our young people had to go to ‘sing their songs in a strange land’. And the part that Central Hall played at that time is worthy of remembrance forevermore.”

And I’m absolutely sure that, in the same way, Annie Powell, in what she stood for and all that she did for the Rhondda, is worthy of remembrance… forevermore.