"An election which has transformed utterly and in an instant the prospect of a Welsh nation." Gywnfor Evans
Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru was formed in 1925 at a time of growing Welsh nationalism. Ever since the 19th Century, a Welsh national consciousness was being reformed out of a fear that the Anglican Church would destroy the Welsh language and therefore much of Wales' culture. Plaid Cymru, as it would later be known, aimed to be the embodiment of that fight to protect Wales in a political and cultural sense.
In its early years Plaid Cymru acted less as a political party and more as a pressure group, calling for greater teaching of the Welsh language and Welsh history but this began to change with the 1943 University of Wales by-election (until 1950, some universities had their own elected representatives in the House of Commons). With Saunders Lewis (a former Plaid Cymru leader from 1926-1939) as the candidate, the party gained 22% of the vote but lost against the Liberals who won 52.3% of the vote.
John Davies, the Welsh historian, states that this was the "first time they were taken seriously as a political force" and the by-election bolstered their membership numbers.
This trend of increasing political activity followed the election of Gwynfor Evans as Party President in 1945. Plaid Cymru began fielding more candidates in elections and by-elections, although still lost by large margins. For example, in the 1945 Caernarvon Boroughs by-election, PC won 24.8% of the vote but the Liberal Party won 75.2%. Despite these losses, Evans kept the party together by developing into a nationally known figure in Wales. This arrived from his work with the Cwm Tryweryn campaign which rejected the attempt by Liverpool City Council to develop a water reservoir in the Tryweryn Valley. The reservoir would have flooded, and did following its approval, one of the last Welsh-only speaking communities in the area, the village of Capel Celyn. He also spoke in front of crowds numbering in their thousands about the needs for a Welsh government.
However things were getting somewhat dire for the state of Plaid Cymru in politics. Their electoral performance in the seats they stood in shows stagnation:
The party was also internally divided, with internal troubles brewing. Some blamed its leader for this lack of success with a former Plaid Cymru general secretary saying he was "shy, weak, unimaginative and lacking in drive."
This however would begin to change with the Carmarthen by-election. Triggered following the death of the Labour MP Megan Lloyd George, the daughter of the former Liberal Prime Minister, it presented Plaid Cymru with a strong opportunity to achieve parliamentary representation, and it achieve that they did. Gwynfor Evans created a swing of 22.8% towards Plaid, going from 3rd to 1st and becoming the first MP from Plaid Cymru.
This victory would propel Welsh nationalism into the mainstream of electoral politics. Former Plaid Cymru General Secretary, Dafydd Williams, said in an interview with By-election Bonanza that the "by-election was the first time in the eyes of the outside world that Plaid Cymru had secured success and secured a mandate from a significant constituency in Wales."
Success was attributed partly to a modernization process that Plaid Cymru had conducted prior to the election. Asked of how the party handled election campaign tactics like canvassing and leafletting, Dafydd Williams had this to say: "Those techniques had been developed quite widely by then and so by the time of the by-election Plaid Cymru had gone through a process of modernization in techniques. Yes canvassing... it was a well-established part of how we worked. There was sufficient people around that made it quite effective. Plaid out canvassed the parties by a margin of 3 or 4 to 1." This modernisation also included effective targeting, for example they used different slogans in different areas of the constituency. 'For a better Wales' was used in the rural west and 'For work in Wales' was used in the more urban and industrial east.
Additionally, success was also put down to the candidate being the right person. He had been a county councillor since 1949 and so was known locally. It was also summer time and so people were able to travel, especially students during the university holiday, and help campaign. The constituency had a range of key issues that were readily exploited by Plaid Cymru to send a message that Labour wasn't working for Carmarthen, such as taxes on farmers being perceived as too high as well as rural schools and the local mining industry being in a state of near closure with little relief. All in all, PC were gifted a campaign that made it easier to exploit the weak state of Labour.
Others, more sceptical of Plaid Cymru's own role in the victory, say that the result was an anti-Labour backlash. The large mining communities present in Carmarthen hoped that a Labour government would halt the long-term decline in the mining industry but those hopes had been ruined by a significant downward revision of coal production estimates by the national government, and therefore their votes were a backlash to that decision. The Labour candidate has also been characterised as being patronising, weakening his internal party support and limited the ability to draw in activists. The anti-Labour backlash angle holds some truth given the seat would flip back to Labour in the 1970 General Election, suggesting that the desire for change was very much a snapshot in time. A Caernarfon newspaper subscribes to this angle as it argued economic problems showed "vividly the irrelevance of what he represents. The peoples of Britain - all of us - stand or fall together".
Short term this was huge for showing that Plaid Cymru could win elections. Two further by-elections, Rhondda West and Caerphilly would have the party within just a few thousand votes of winning and in seats with heavy anglicanised industrial areas, showing that they could win outside of their presumed base of rural Welsh-speakers. Yet it was clear that Plaid Cymru was limited in how far the by-election created the conditions of success. Plaid Cymru contested every Welsh seat for the first time in the subsequent 1970 election but 25 of its 36 candidates lost their deposits, while Evans was defeated by nearly 4,000 votes. Overall, Plaid won more than 20% of votes in just seven constituencies and it only secured 11.5% of the vote in Wales as a whole. Not a single victory was achieved in 1970 but in the following Feb 1974 election, Plaid Cymru would go on to win 2 seats and from that point on always have representation in Westminster, showing that there was continued success from the 1966 by-election years later. Dafydd Williams said that "It was a setback but not a disaster, there was disappointment certainly at the time but the process was under way and Carmarthen really marked the starting pistol on that process."
Many people all over Wales who had not publicly admitted to Plaid Cymru leanings took out party membership in the first few days after the by-election result and two years later signed-up membership is claimed to have reached 30,000 throughout Wales (double what it was before the by-election). The by-election victory united a divided Plaid Cymru who now fully backed their leader who had delivered their first electoral success, repairing many of the splits that were beginning to emerge prior to their victory.
Carmarthen created a number of concessions in Parliament as Labour attempted to weaken the talking points of Plaid Cymru. In 1967 the Welsh Language Act was passed, giving Welsh and English equal validity. In 1968 Harold Wilson established the Royal Commission on the Constitution which released a report in 1973 advocating for legislative parliaments in Wales and Scotland. The foundations of the Senedd (originally the National Assembly for Wales), Plaid Cymru's current place in UK politics and decades around the question of Welsh independence were all founded in the success of Plaid in Carmarthen. Alt-history writers should get all over this.
Thank you so much for reading By-election Bonanza, I've been Adam Lawless and I'll see you in 2 weeks where we'll take a deep dive into a rather grumpy member of the 'Gang of Four'.
If you enjoyed today’s article you can SIGN UP below to easily access all future posts right in your inbox.
P.S. many thanks to Plaid Cymru's historical society for being a great tool to assist in writing this article, you can check them out here.
They're especially cool because they have a huge catalogue of old leaflets from Plaid's past. Here’s one from the 1966 by-election: