‘Wild disorder’ in Aberaman: A new window on the political scene in South Wales, 1910–11.

A political meeting being held in Aberaman, Glamorganshire, in the early summer of 1910, broke up in disorder. The speaker had meant to attack the miners’ union, the South Wales Miners’ Federation, but objections and counter-objections led to the meeting’s collapse. Using this debacle as a starting point to investigate events at a microhistorical and highly focused level, new information is revealed via neglected local details about the remarkable actions going on in south Wales at that time and during the forthcoming year. Hitherto unstudied reports of militant rhetoric shed fresh light on the reasons for the miners’protests and the anti-Jewish riots that took place in the Welsh valleys.