Gwyn (Alf) Williams ((30 /09/25 -16/11/95) - The People's Rememberancer

Gwyn "Alf" Williams was born this day in Dowlais, near Merthyr Tydfil. A.Socialist historian and broadcaster, of powerful force who I recognise as an early informing political influence when I first read his brilliant  books and subsequently saw his spellbinding documentaries he produced in the 1980's for  television in which he used his stammer to brilliant effect. Which was living proof also that speech impediments are no bar to acquiring great oratorical skills. I am grateful to him for helping me rediscover my peoples history, not the English history that was forced down our throats when we were at school, who is regarded as  an important influence on the way we now think about our country and people.
Like many others at the time of the Spanish Civil War he joined the Young Communist League . He did not mage to get to Spain but did become a D-Day lecturer and went on to read history at Aberystwyth University, and became Lecturer in Welsh history there in 1954 He was such an entertaining speaker that students from other departments, regularly sat in on his lectures, for the entertaining and passionate way he spoke about industrial Wales, after which he would often adjourn to the nearest pub to continue the flow of his lectures. .By now he had found himself opposing the party line on Tito, and left the party
He left Aberystwyth to take up a Readership at York University and spent from 1964 to 1974 as Chair of history. During this period he became a member of the Labour Party for a spell, then rejoined the Communist party in 1979 but left again to become an uneasy home in the Labour Party but eventually found a political home on the left wing  of Plaid Cymru, for a while he was a leading member of the editorial board of the magazine Radical Wales and served on the party's Executive Committee.
He had  learnt Italian and Spanish for his study of the history of Communism in Italy and his study of the life and works of Antonio Gramsci and Goya and the impossible Rrevolution.His wife, Maria, belonged to the community of steelworkers from northern Spain who were long established in Dowlais.Returning to Wales in 1974 he becameas Professor of History at University College, Cardiff,
But it was with his books on Welsh history that made the most impact " The Merthyr Rising" inspired by ten years of class struggle,it stands as a classic of Marxist historical writing and was the first full account of the workers' revolt of 1831 and the execution of Dic Penderyn, one of the earliest martyrs of the Welsh working classhttps://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/cofiwch-dic-penderyn-remember-dic.html.  In Madoc; the making of the myth,  he critically examined the evidence for the discovery of America by Prince Madog ab Owain Gwynedd in about 1170 and in particular, for the existence of a tribe of Indians , known as the Mandans, who were said to be his descenants who were said to speak Welsh, then there was "When was Wales?", which was perhaps his most popular and influential work, an excellent book which demolishes all the myths that are the stock in trade of Welsh nationalism. The 1980s also spawned his career as a broadcaster with the television series, The Dragon Has Two Tongues, which brought his passionate wit to a wider audience, as he sparred with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, a typically puffed up specimen of the Welsh establishment. In 1983 Williams took early retirement from his Chair at Cardiff (he was fond of describing himself as "a redundant historian") and began making films with Teliesyn, one of the independent companies on which the reputation of Welsh broadcasting now largely depends.Among the people about whom he made fascinating films were James Gillray, Sylvia Pankhurst, Pushkin, Mary Shelley, and the Welsh writers Saunders Lewis, T.E. Nicholas and Iolo Morganwg, showing of his impressive range.He cast a  marvellous figure, a unique cross of a Welsh revivalist preacher, revolutionary communist, distinctive with his shock of flowing white hair and obvious stutter.He moved from Cardiff to the village of Drefach Felindre, in Dyfed, where he shared a home with Sian Lloyd zt Ty Dyffryn.
Gwyn Alf was not content with scholarly work that was not backed up by political engagement. He tried to influence public opinion and in all his work the capitalist, centralist, British State (and English hegemony) had to be undone if Wales was.to survive and prosper I wonder what he would have thought of the state of Wales post Brexit , perhaps he would passionately remind us to us that the poorest communities across Wales will get sympathy from Conservative governments we are now face an onslaught more devastating than back when Gwyn Alf roared so passionately in the 1980's. Do we never learn from our historians or do we simply ignore them.
Gwyn Alf Williams saw himself as “a people's remembrancer”, attempting to influence contemporary opinion by a dramatic presentation of Welsh history. More than anyone of his generation Gwyn A. Williams infused scholary history with immediate concerns, and his books, in range and content, reflect both his rooted particularity and his international perspective.
He died in 1995 in Drefach Felindre of cancer, he was a heavy chain smoker and was cremated at Parc Gwyn crematorium, Narberth, after a ceremony in which ‘The Internationale’ was sung together with a Welsh hymn. Even after death, he remains one of Wales’s greatest and most influential historians.
I will add the following poem that I dedicated jointly to Gwyn, when I heard about the passing of his fellow historian John Davies on a previous post of mine in February 2015..

Hanesydd/Historian.

As pages turn, they help us remember,
what has lay forlorn, almost erased
allows us to search for the past again,
to capture memories, tales of yesterday,
the hiraeth of longing of byegone time.
In our nations soil,tales of struggle buried deep,
ancient shadows, greeting today and tomorrow,
reflecting what has been, what will continue to grow,
as our nation drowns in the tears of history,
lessons can be still learnt from those that shared
forever unfolding, what began so long ago,
carrying the vision of the past
present and future for mankind.        

Andre Breton (19/2/1896-28/9/66) - Revolutionary, Poet and founder of Surrealism.

 
" In the world we live in everything militates in favour of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again"

It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere"

"No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily."

"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all" - Quotes by Andre Breton

Aptly described by playwright Eugene Ionesco as "one of the four or five great reformers of modern thought", Andre Breton (1896-1966) was the founder and prime mover of Surrealism, the most influential artistic and literary movement of the 20th century. Poet and theorist, artistic impresario anti-fascist and political agitator, Breton was a man of paradoxical character: inspiring one moment, crushingly tyrannical the next; embracing friends like Brunuel, Dali, Duchamp, Miro, Man Ray, Aragon and Eluard, only to exile them as enemies later. From its emergence from Dada after World War I through its culmination in the 1960s, here is his  Surrealist world.
André Breton was born  into a working-class family on February 18, 1896, in Tinchebray, a small town in Normandy, France, although his family relocated to a Parisian suburb soon after. He excelled in school and developed literary interests quite early. Breton read the French Decadents, such as Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, Stephane Mallarme, and the German Romantic writers, all of whom informed his early thoughts on Avant-Gardism. By 1912, Breton had a cultivated knowledge of Contemporary art and begun to study Anarchism as a political movement. While he loved the French Decadent artists, such as Gustave Moreau, he began to separate himself from their belief in "art for art's sake," in favor of art that appealed to the masses.In 1916, Breton joined the group of artists associated with the subversive Dada movement in Paris, including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
But he  moved away from Dadaism, which itself began during World War One as an irrational, nonsensical expression of anti-war rhetoric and along with Louis Aragon and Phillippe Soupault, Breton  in 1919 co-founded a journal called Littérature to showcase the first surrealist writing. His definition of surrealism was summed up as:" psychic automation in its pure state, by which one  proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - The actual functioning of thought."  In 1924, he published Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (The Manifesto of Surrealism), a document announcing the new movement's embrace of all forms of liberated expression and its rejection of social and moral conventions.
Breton studied medicine and psychiatry and showed a particular interest in mental illnesses.His early interest was in being a psychoanalyst and met Freud in Vienna in 1921. During the first world war Breton served in the neurological ward in Nantes,as a nurse but never qualified as a psychoanalyst. But  no doubt this experience laid the foundations for his theories on the concept of the unconsciousness. His first poems, Decembre and Age, were written while he worked there.He developed a passion for psychiatric art, which informed his interest in Dada, and later surrealism. Here he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/alfed-jarry-891877-11107-life-as-riot.html Jacques Vache whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at the age 24 in 1919. Somewhat later Breton conducted his first experiments with the insane at a psychiatric center in aint-Dezier. He drew pictures of their dreams and committed their free associations to paper in order to nalyse the patients by Freudian methods. In 1919 he published a slim volume Les Chants magnifique, consisting of texts developed together with Phillipe Soupalt  by the free association method that is automatically.
He married Simone Kahn in 1921 and while they lived in Paris he amassed a massive collection of artwork, photographs and books. He went on to marry a further two times.
His Surrealist Manifesto, the first of three, was produced in 1924. This explained his definition of surrealism and sought to highlight the importance of dreams and the merging of realities in an absurdist way,which outlines surrealist preoccupations and is considered to be the beginning of the Surrealist Movement. It also established Breton as the spearhead of Surrealism, a role he would maintain for the entire duration of the movement. Breton credited several contemporaries in the work including Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard and others.And he became associated with a number of writers including Benjamin Peret, Antonin Artaud,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/antonin-artaud-18961948-revolt-against.html
Robert Desnos https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/robert-desnos-47-00-paris-8645-some.html Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/paul-eluard-14121895-261152-poetic.html.and also associated with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/tristan-tzara-441896-251263-radical.html

                                 Breton third on left pictured will fellow Surrealists

  
His second Manifesto came in 1930 but the third was never published. After writing his Manifestos he published poems and novels throughout the 1920s and 30s. His most acclaimed novel, from 1928, is Nadia, believed to be a semi-autobiographical story of his relationship with a mad woman who was a patient of Pierre Janet. It begins with the question “Who Am I” and ends with “beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”L'Amour Fou (Mad Love), published in 1937, is a poetic meditation on obsessive love.
Anxious to combine the themes of personal transformation found in the works of Arthur Rimbaud with the politics of Karl Marx, Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927.The revolutionary aspiration is at the very source of Surrealism,it is not by accident that one of the movement’s first collective texts, written in 1925, is called “Revolution First and Always.” That same year, the desire to break with Western civilization led Breton to investigate the ideas of the October Revolution, for example, Trotsky’s  essay  Lenin. .In 1933 however Breton and Eluard were expelled from the party due to nonconformist behaviour. In 1935, there was a conflict between Breton and the Soviet writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg during the first "International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture" which opened in Paris in June. Breton had been insulted by Ehrenburg—along with  fellow surrealists—in a pamphlet which said, among other things, that surrealists were "pedrasts". Breton slapped Ehrenburg several times on the street, which resulted in the  surrealists being expelled from the Congress.He also criticised Stalins repression of public opinion, and quoted from Lenin (1905) ; " Everyone is free to say and write whatever he pleases; freedom of the press must remain unimpeded."
Breton considered everything else reactionary, " Whether we move in the realm of politics or of art, there are always these two forces; the refusal to accept conditions as they are and the irresistable need to change them, on the one hand, there must be lasting loyalty to the moral precepts that have stood for progress. No one can suppress these forces for years, or fight against them in the name of messianic idea of what the Soviet Union is doing."
Now the break with the Soviet Union was official, Lenin and Trotsky had become the new heroes of the movement, not Stalin. A Militant Federation of Revolutionary Intellectuals , by a group that included Breton, Eluard and Peret. It was called Contre-Attaque and its aim was class struggle and the nationalisation of the means of production.
In April 1938 Breton accepted a cultural commission from the French government to travel to Mexico with his wife the painter Jacquline Lamba. After a conference  about surrealism, Breton told a story about getting lost in Mexico City (as no one was waiting for him at the airport) "I don't know why I came here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world". They stay with Guadalupe Marin, Diego Rivera's previous wife, and meet the Kahlo-Riveras. When Breton sees Kahlo's unfinished "What the Water Gave Me", the metaphorical self-portrait of what life had given her - floating on the water of her bathtub - he immediately labels her an innate "surrealist", and offers to show her work in Paris.

                                              Frida Kahlo's - What the Water Gave Me                                       

Immediately he circumscribed her as one part the essence of the surrealist movement and wrote an essay to her „a strip of silk around a pump”. This label of surrealism of the work of Frida Kahlo is one of the “mistakes” that have been continued between the massive public with respect to their classification and understanding.In her own words she said " They thought I was a surrealist , but I was not, I never painted my dreams, I only painted my own reality."
Visiting Mexico also provided the opportunity to meet Leon Trotsky. Breton and other surrealists traveled via a long boat ride from Patzcuaro to the town of Frongaricuaro. He Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo were among the visitors to the hidden community of intellectuals and artists. Together, Breton and Trotsky wrote a manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art (published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera) calling for "complete freedom of art", a call to arms, pens and brushes addressed to radical artists and writers. It denounced fascism and Stalinism, two dictatorships suffocating artistic expression as they were drowning workers’ opposition in blood. It was also a comment on the role of art and culture in class society, it contains  this famous passage:
The revolution must, from the very start, establish and assure an anarchist regime of individual liberty for cultural creation.  No authority, no constraint, not the slightest trace of commandment! On this issue Marxists can march hand in hand with anarchists…. https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/rivera/manifesto.htm 
The result was a manifesto that would be of  great importance for both Trotsky and  Breton . Communist and Surrealist met on their common ground of their reaction to Stalinism and their interest in the revolutionary function of art.

                                            Breton, Riviera and Trotsky            

 
At the start of the 1940s Breton had returned briefly to work in the medical wards in French hospitals but when the Nazis invaded and occupied France he fled to America along with his friends Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. He lived in New York City at this time, and managed a Surrealist exhibition at Yale in 1942.In 1945 he married Elisa Bindhorf in Reno, Nevada.
He returned to Paris after the war in 1946, where he opposed French colonialism (for example as a signatory of the  Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian war) and continued, until his death, to foster a second group of surrealists in the form of expositions or reviews (La Breche, 1961–1965). In 1959, he organized an exhibit in Paris.
 Breton’s anarchist sympathies manifested more clearly in the postwar years.By the end of World War11 the surealist group led by Breton had decided to explcitly embrace anarchism. In the 1947 book Arcanum 17, he describes the emotion he felt when, still a child, he discovered in a cemetery a headstone with the simple inscription, “Neither God Nor Master.”  Commenting on these words, he raises a general reflection:  “Above art and poetry, whether we wish it or no, flies a flag alternately red and black”—two colors between which he refused to choose."
From October 1951 to January 1953, the Surrealist group in Paris regularly contributed articles and leaflets to the journal Le Libertaire, the organ of the French Anarchist Federation. Their principal correspondent in the Federation was, at that time, the libertarian communist George Fontenis.  It was during this time that Breton wrote the flamboyant 1952 text entitled “La claire tour/The Light Tower,” which gives the libertarian origins of Surrealism:
Surrealism first came into being in the black mirror of anarchism, well before it defined itself, when it was nothing more than a free association among individuals rejecting spontaneously and outright the social and moral constraints of their timeBreton was consistent in his support for the francophone Anarchist Federation and he continued to offer his solidarity after the Platformists  around Fontenis transformed the FA into the Federation Communiste Libertaire. He was one of the few intellectuals who continued to offer his support to the FCL during the  Algerian War (1954-1962) when the FCL suffered severe repression and was forced underground. He sheltered Fontenis whilst he was in hiding. He refused to take sides on the splits in the French anarchist movement and both he and Peret expressed solidarity as well with the new FA set up by the synthesist anarchists, and worked in the Antifascist Committees of the 1960s alongside the FA. His apartment at la Rue Fontaine #42 became the heart of Paris’s anarchist writers and artists, and home to his collection of over 5000 artworks, manuscripts, African masks and objects of Oceanic art.
This interest and active sympathy for anarchism did not at all  lead Breton to renounce his adhesion to the October Revolution and the ideas of Leon Trotsky.  In an intervention on November 17, 1957, André Breton insisted and signed, " Against winds and tides, I am among those who still find, in the memory of the October Revolution, a high degree of that unconditional enthusiasm which I bore toward it in my youth and which implies total self-sacrifice."
Finally, in 1962, in an homage to Natalia Sedova Trotsky, who had just died, he hoped that one day history would  accord Leon Trotsky “not only justice…but will be called to accept, in all their vigor and amplitude, the ideas to which his life was given.”
During his lifetime, Breton produced a tremendous body of work that contained poetry, novels, criticism, and theory. Of his oeuvre, the collection of poems Mad Love (1937), the novel Nadja (1928) and the critical text Communicating Vessels (1932) are considered to be his most valuable contributions to the literary world.He published three books of poetry, in all Arcane 17 in 1945, and a further Surrealist work in 1953 called The key to the fields. He also mentored young surrealist writers and artists.
Andre Breton died in Paris on this day September 28th 1966 at the age of 70 and was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles in Paris.He remains  one of the most outstanding literary representatives of surrealism, who tried to link art with revolutionary politics. Who with singlemindedness clung to his idea of Surrealism and the revolution of the mind.His rich contribution  to the idea of surrealism, art, and the meaningful poetry, that he left means his legacy lives on.After coming to New York during World War II, his ideas on Surrealism were essential to early Abstract Expressionists, like Arshile Gorky, Roberto Matta, and Yves Tanguy, as well as second generation Surrealists, like Joseph Cornell. He pioneered the concept of fusing art and culture, which became a basic tenet in Pop Art. Breton's use of the media as a tool of art practice also helped shape many contemporary artists who build personas as part of their work. In this way, he foresaw Performance Art, Fluxus, Conceptualism, and what has followed on from those movements. Perhaps above all, Breton's love of absurdist humor continues to inspire artists to the present day..
Here's a link to a previous post about him :-

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/andre-breton-1896-1966-surreallism-and.html

Freedom of Love

(Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

The Spectral Attitudes

I attach no importance to life
I pin not the least of life's butterflies to importance
I do not matter to life
But the branches of salt the white branches
All the shadow bubbles
And the sea-anemones
Come down and breathe within my thoughts
They come from tears that are not mine
From steps I do not take that are steps twice
And of which the sand remembers the flood-tide
The bars are in the cage
And the birds come down from far above to sing before these bars
A subterranean passage unites all perfumes
A woman pledged herself there one day
This woman became so bright that I could no longer see her
With these eyes which have seen my own self burning
I was then already as old as I am now
And I watched over myself and my thoughts like a night watchman in an immense factory Keeping watch alone
The circus always enchants the same tramlines
The plaster figures have lost nothing of their expression
They who bit the smile's fig
I know of a drapery in a forgotten town
If it pleased me to appear to you wrapped in this drapery
You would think that your end was approaching
Like mine
At last the fountains would understand that you must not say Fountain
The wolves are clothed in mirrors of snow
I have a boat detached from all climates
I am dragged along by an ice-pack with teeth of flame
I cut and cleave the wood of this tree that will always be green
A musician is caught up in the strings of his instrument
The skull and crossbones of the time of any childhood story
Goes on board a ship that is as yet its own ghost only
Perhaps there is a hilt to this sword
But already there is a duel in this hilt
During the duel the combatants are unarmed
Death is the least offence
The future never comes

The curtains that have never been raised
Float to the windows of houses that are to be built
The beds made of lilies
Slide beneath the lamps of dew
There will come an evening
The nuggets of light become still underneath the blue moss
The hands that tie and untie the knots of love and of air
Keep all their transparency for those who have eyes to see
They see the palms of hands
The crowns in eyes
But the brazier of crown and palms
Can scarcely be lit in the deepest part of the forest
There where the stags bend their heads to examine the years
Nothing more than a feeble beating is heard
From which sound a thousand louder or softer sounds proceed
And the beating goes on and on
There are dresses that vibrate
And their vibration is in unison with the beating
When I wish to see the faces of those that wear them
A great fog rises from the ground
At the bottom of the steeples behind the most elegant reservoirs of life and of wealth
In the gorges which hide themselves between two mountains
On the sea at the hour when the sun cools down
Those who make signs to me are separated by stars
And yet the carriage overturned at full speed
Carries as far as my last hesitation
That awaits me down there in the town where the statues of bronze
and of stone have changed places with statues of wax Banyans banyans.

  
Link to Less Time - Andre Breton

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/less-time-andre-breton-1921896-2891966.html

Further reading :-

Breton, “Homage to Natalia Sedova-Trotsky,” in What is Surrealism, pp.306-308.

Surrealism- Uwe M. Schneede ; Harry N Abrams, New York,

Surrealism -Patrick Waldberg ; Thames and Hudson

dada; art and anti art - Hans Richter; Thames and Hudson

The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology, ed. Michael Benedikt (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1974).

World of echo ( dedicated to Arthur Russell 21/5/51- 4/3/92)

Spent the morning revisiting the work of Arthur Russell 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wbtsz

inspired me to write the following words.

World of echo


It should not be a crime to be sad
eternities music at least releases a smile,
deep with penetrating love, returns
moving round in everlasting circles,
catching our revolving reflections.

Melancholia always has a place
flickering in the day with grace,
making noises of sustainment
generating light to break the pain,
before escape becomes infinite.

Alpha is past, Omega is future
lovers breeze continues to serenade,
garnered from a myriad of stars
to kiss and awaken sources within,
a world of echo will keep on calling.

Solidarity is so nourishing, but action needed too.

My partner currently very ill, but still carries so much strength, it's left me feeling rather wobbly, but this morning  I have got on laptop to find so many positive messages.
It really is so moving  to see so much humanity, to see so much kindness. Solidarity is so nourishing.
However despite this  and my gratitude please keep pressuring your Governments to acknowledge the plight of refugees, facing incredible difficulties too at this moment in time. This is after all what makes us human. Doing nothing is simply not an option anymore.It is more than time that our lazy Governments find some humanity too, so keep up the pressure.
At the end of the day, all the compassion and empathy in the bloody world, is useless without any actual change taking place. It is our duty as humans to achieve real change, not just for ourselves, but for every future generation. Collectively we have the power to do this, to shape the world and make sure better policies are actually put in place.
This winter will be especially cold and conditions enormously difficult for  people basically fleeing for their lives, we have to continue to speak out, defend and protect. This crisis that our own Govenments have created must be defeated. Everyday now because of no fault of their own thousands of ordinary people like you and me are forced to flee their homes, in search for a better future, escaping violence, they leave everything behind,everything except their hopes and dreams.
It is so important to continue to share the reality of the inherent violence and repression  that comes with the current existence of states and borders, so please continue to amplify your voices for those affected as active agents in the struggle for freedom and justice. Many thanks.

Well done Jeremy Corbyn: The fight continues

Like many people up and down the country I have been inspired by Jeremy Corbyn's radical vision. Today he has once again  won the Labour leadership election, winning convincingly by a large margin, taking 333,000 votes compared to rival Owen Smith's 193,000 votes, picking up .61.8% of the votes cast to beat his rival despite a media onslaught against him, and dirty tricks that saw many members losing their right to vote.An increase by the way  on the 59.5 percent he won last year in a crushing victory.
With this result comes an increased mandate for his leadership, who has won in every single group and sees the complete demolishment of the ideas of the Labour right from its grassroots movement. In the following speech he has vowed to wipe the slate clean, calling for unity. I wish him success in this endeavor, and hope people will  be energised by this victory, and sees people getting  behind his clear voice and continuing the job of opposition to the Tory's toxic policies and building a movement that continues to change society for the better, not just for the privileged few. That will continue to drive forth the complete opposition to the politics of austerity and spread the message of social justice at home and abroad and harness the energy and enthusiasm for real change for  the people across this land, that is so  needed in the current climate.

.
Here is his victory speech in full :-


"Thank you all for being here today. 
I want to thank the more than 300,000 supporters, who’ve given me their support and trust in this Labour leadership election.  
I’m honoured to have won the results of a majority of members, affiliated supporters and registered supporters, who’ve given me the second mandate in a year to lead our party.
I want to thank all the volunteers in our amazing campaign. The tens of thousands who’ve helped all over the country in my campaign. 
I also want to thank all those volunteers and worked so hard and helped in Owen Smith’s campaign as well.Volunteers and the work they put in are the very life blood of democracy and we both had amazing sets of volunteers. So I say thank you, to all of them, for all the work they did over the summer. 
And I want to say thank you to Owen Smith as well. Owen, we’ve had an interesting summer of debates all over the country, thank you very much for all of that, for the good discussions and good humoured debates that we’ve had. And no doubt it will continue, because we’re part of the same Labour family and that’s how it’s always going to be. Thank you. 
And it has been an amazing summer, we’ve had good weather of course, and we’ve had events and rallies and hustings all over the place. 
But it’s been about our Labour family facing the future of how we do things together in the future.
 I will do everything I can, to repay the trust and the support, to bring our party together. To make it an engine of progress for our country and the people that depend on the Labour party, to protect their interests and win power to deliver real change in this country. 
Elections are passionate and often partisan affairs and things are sometimes said in the heat of the debate on all sides which we sometimes later come to regret. 
But always remember in our party: We have much more in common than that which divides us. 
As far as I’m concerned, let’s wipe that slate clean, from today, and get on with the work we’ve got to do as a party together.
We are proud as a party to that we’re not afraid to discuss openly, to debate and disagree. That is essential for a party that wants to change people’s lives for the better. That isn’t prepared to accept things as they are. 
It’s also an essential part of what has drawn half a million people into membership of what is now the largest political party anywhere in Western Europe. We have almost tripled our membership since last spring. 
Those new members are part of a nationwide movement who can now take our message into ever community in the country. To win support for the election of a Labour government.  
Our party has a duty of care to our members. That means intervening to stop personal abuse and also abiding by the principles of natural justice in the way that we handle it. 
Politics is demeaned and corroded by intimidation and abuse. It’s not my way and it’s not the Labour way and never will be. 
Now, friends, is the time for all of us to focus every ounce of our energy on exposing and defeating the Tories and the damage they are doing to our country. 
Theresa May’s government isn’t a new government. It’s David Cameron’s government with a hard right edge, repacked with progressive slogans, but threatening to take the country backwards and dithering as we face the historic challenges of Brexit.
So, if you believe that education is better than segregation; that we need an NHS that isn’t threatened with breakdown and loaded with debt; that older people deserve dignity and  care they need in their own home; that we have a duty as a country to refugees and promote peace, rather than conflict; if like me, you believe that it’s a scandal that here in Britain, the sixth largest economy in the world, four million children are in poverty, six million workers are paid less than the living wage; and if like me, you believe we can do things far better, then help us build support for a genuine alternative that would invest in our future. 
A more prosperous future, in which the wealth we all create is shared more equally. 
Together, arguing for the real change this country needs, I’ve no doubt that this party can win the next general election, whenever the Prime Minister calls it, and form the next government.
To do that, we need to work together. This time next week, we’re all going to hit the streets, united as a party. I’m calling on Labour party members, all over the country, to join us in a national campaign for inclusive education for all, next Saturday. 
The Tories’ plans for grammar school segregation of our children exposed their divisive and damaging agenda for our country. 
My responsibility as Labour leader is to unite this party - at conference this week, here, in the wonderful city of Liverpool, in Parliament and in every community around the country. 
But it’s also the responsibility of the whole party - MPs, councillors, party members and our wonderful supporters across the country - to work together and respect the democratic choice that's been made.
Labour is a party brimming full of ideas, of talent, of creativity. And so is this country. Unleashing that potential is the job of all of us. 
Let us work together for real change in Britain. 
Thank you very much 

Solidarity Forever - Ralph Chaplin (1887-1961)

This  Labour Song ' Solidarity Forever' was  written by Industrial Workers of the World songwriter and their poet Laureatte Ralph Chaplin, he wrote the song for a hunger march, which was led by Lucy Parsons in Chicago in mid January 1915. He wrote of the songs origins in Wobbly an IWW journal, ' I wanted the song to be full of revolutionary fervour and to have a chorus that was ringing and defiant.  It was sung to the tune of 'John Brown's Body'  and was inspired by 'the Battle Hymn of the Republic'.
Ralph Chaplin was born in Ames, Kansas in 1887. The family moved to Chicago 1893, he did a variety of low-paid jobs before moving to Mexico  where he became a supporter of Emilliano Zapata He  joined the International Workers in 1913,but got distracted  after converting to Roman Catlolicism but  continued to back grass-roots activism and libertarian radicalism and to publish poetry. He died in Tacoma in 1961.
The following version of  his song was recorded in 1941 by Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers  and is contained on their album ' Talking Union'. It is still probably one of the most well known union anthems after the Internationale.
It is still being sung by people still at war against capitalism's tyranny, and by those who are convinced in nothing less than the solidarity of freedom. As austerity grips, its message resonates even more,as  the greedy still try to lay the blame at the doors of the ordinary man. The song still chimes today because it describes the realization that collective power of workers and unions is greater than those with armies or hoarded gold etc.
The wobblies and the IWW still going strong, standing as a dedicated force for social change, internationally across the globe. It is still a member led union, for all workers, (whatever your job, whether unemployed or not.) Their motto being 'an injury to one is an injury to all.
.

Solidarity Forever

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yest what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:

Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the Union makes us strong.

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organise and fight?
For the union makes us strong.

Chorus

It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they  trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes  us strong.

Chorus

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.

Chorus

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single whell can turn,
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

Chorus

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold,
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

Click on following to enlarge:-

you can connect at following link:-

http://www.iww.org/

Gresford Colliery Disaster

The Gresford  disaster took place this morning on September 22, 1934, at Gresford colliery near Wrexham , which employed 2,220 men, at about 2am in the morning. In total 266 men and boys were killed with only 6 men surviving, caused by poor safety standards combined with poor management.
After a few hours of the first explosion, more than 1,000 men had assembled around the pithead standing silently in the cold and pouring rain, waiting to help their comrades who were trapped down below.For two days brave men fought to reach their entrapped colleagues, until came the terrible inhuman decision to withdraw and seal the pit shaft, with men still trapped inside. The roads and shafts were burnt and collapsed forever entombing the bodies of the victims closed.
With this some 800 children lost their fathers and more than 200 women lost their husbands and loved ones. It was not to be the worst mining disaster in the  history of  British mining though, Senghennyd holds that dubious privilege,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/100th-anniversary-of-senghenydd-mine.html but still serves as a tragic reminder of how in a single day a community was to see and witness and feel the real price of coal .

Following the disaster there was a huge cover up,plus the wages of over 1,000 miners were docked by the owners adding further insult and injustice that would add much further pain d bringing much untold hardship to the area, with the result being that by the end of autumn, an estimated 1,100 Gresford men thrown on the dole. This combined with the fact that the management were never prosecuted,  because they  destroyed all records of this disaster was  an absolute betrayal of the men who perished. 
In its aftermath however numerous breaches of law were eventually exposed  in which saw the pit owners eventually  getting fined, but only by a meagre £140 each. It would also get a Royal Commission on mines safety being established, but it would be yet another twenty years before the lessons learned would bring fresh legislation in the form of the 1954 Mines and Quarries Act.

The colliery was to eventually be closed down for good for economic reasons in November 1973.Eventually in 1982 a memorial to the victims was erected nearby, constructed by using a wheel from the old pit-head winding gear. We should remember the desperate situation of those who were trapped, and their darkest hours just before dawn. An incident of national importance that should never be forgotten.

The Gresford Disaster