This week in Blaenau Gwent in south Wales we have had a wonderful opportunity to celebrate our socialist past by paying tribute to Aneurin Bevan and Paul Robeson and hearing some great music when the Welsh Eisteddfod came to town.
Rhodri Morgan, the former Wales First Minister, was also here to reflect on Nye’s legacy for post-devolution Wales and look at how Bevan’s principles have shaped policies and politics in Wales today. Carwyn Jones, his successor as First Minister, made it plain that such values will shape Labour’s campaigning for the Welsh Assembly elections next May.
Susan Robeson, granddaughter of Paul, the great singer and human rights activist, visited the Eisteddfod too, showing a documentary about her grandfather and talking to visitors.
Susan is an award winning documentary filmmaker and author. As well as a series of music documentaries on jazz legends, including Ella Fitzgerald, she is the author of The Whole World In His Hands: A Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson, about the life of her grandfather.
The Eisteddfod coming back to Ebbw Vale reminds us of the occasion when there was a strong transatlantic bond between New York and south Wales, when politics and culture were intertwined and the internationalist element of Welsh politics was very strong.
Hywel Francis, the Labour MP for Aberavon, recalls witnessing Paul Robeson singing to the Miners Eisteddfod after famously visiting the National Eisteddfod in Ebbw Vale in 1958, as the guest of local MP Nye Bevan.
The welcome Robeson received indicated the breadth of his popular support in Wales. While his links were specific to the valleys of the south, over a period of nearly three decades, his appeal as an artist, civil rights campaigner and humanitarian extended across the whole of Wales. This was summed up by Robeson’s request for a Welsh hymn book at Ebbw Vale, because its music reminded him so much of his own people.
Nye’s invitation to Robeson followed on from the successful campaign to let Paul Robeson finally travel abroad, after he had been banned from leaving the country by the American authorities for his radical and uncompromising views.
These were to the fore in a speech Robeson prepared for broadcast on September 23, 1946. He said: “I stand here ashamed – ashamed that it is necessary, 84 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, to rebuild the democratic spirit that brought that document into being. I speak of the wave of lynch terror and mob assault against Negro Americans. Since VJ Day,
scores have been victims, most of whom were veterans, and even women and children.
“But I am not ashamed to stand here as a servant of my people, as a citizen of America, to defend and fight for the dignity and democratic rights of Negro America – to fight for their right to live.”
For his staunch and steadfast defence of basic human and civil rights, Robeson was banned from theatres and radio broadcasts, and ultimately from travelling abroad in the 1950s. The campaign for the return of his passport lasted for almost a decade and extended across the world involving old friends and world statesmen such as Nehru of India, Nkrumah of Ghana and, of course, Nye Bevan, architect of the National Health Service.
We are proud that, just over 50 years since those great men met, we are able to celebrate that historic occasion and hear about their fantastic achievements.
In commemorating our radical past, we also look to the future and how we can promote and regenerate our valley towns today. There is much to do, with local unemployment nearly 12 per cent and the Conservative Liberal-Democrat Government cutting vital Labour initiatives such as the Future Jobs Fund, which has so far helped more than 500 young people. We face tough fights and hard struggles ahead. But Nye Bevan and Paul Robeson have given us shining examples to follow.
