Martyrs & a Hero of Llanelli

John "Jack" John, a 21-year old rugby player was a very popular fellow. He lived next to the railway tracks in Llanelli, a city in South Wales. One day he and his friends were looking over his garden wall at a mass of striking railwaymen who were stopping a train. Soldiers were there and read out the "Riot Act," ordering them to disperse. They did not disperse and the soldiers fired, but the two men who fell dead had nothing to do with the strike. Jack John and Leonard Worsell, 20, lived a few doors apart and are buried now, about a dozen yards apart. Worsell was home on leave from a sanitarium, suffering from tuberculosis, and he paused during a shave to step outside and see what the fuss was about. Dead instantly.

We visited the site of the 1911 riot after these graves, but earlier we spent a few hours at the town's wonderful bird sanctuary. I was tired last night and didn't have the energy for this blip, so I was tempted to show a pair of downright wondrous Mandarin ducks. But there are countless bird blippers out there and every one of them has a better camera than mine. The birds were extremely beautiful and the organization has saved some species from extinction. But Llanelli is a slow-moving, depressed town now, its tin plate industry long-disappeared. The 100th anniversary of the riots brought some attention and memorializing to the riots, but we're a long way from the 200th, so I thought I'd put in a few words for them here.

Another marty of the riots was 22-year old Harold Spiers, a soldier. It came to light that

"He had been instructed to shoot a man sitting on a garden wall. When he refused to kill somebody "in cold blood" he was arrested and placed under military guard, but escaped amid all the pandemonium of Saturday night. He was accused of "desertion whilst in aid of the civil powers." and remanded for a district court martial.

He became a hero, both locally and nationally, with the Railway Unions and ILP taking up his cause and demanding his release. The workers of Llanelli paid for his defence. Fearing a "cause celebre" his charge was commuted to a far lesser one and in all likelihood he is the character "Dai Bach y soldiwr" in the folk song "Sosban Fach."

Harold Spiers was the great hero of the day, in my opinion. He may actually have been ordered to shoot Worsell or, more likely, Jack John in particular, BUT those two men did nothing to put themselves at risk. On the other hand, Spiers found himself in a crisis and did the right thing, offering his own life instead of slaughtering a stranger.

More on The Llaneli Riots HERE, and there's a related blip by Ceridwen HERE.