The Statue of Lady Rhondda: Still Celebrating a Notable Welsh Woman
Richard Rhys O’Brien
A striking bronze and weathered steel statue of Margaret Haig Thomas, Lady Rhondda, created by artist Jane Robbins, has been erected on Millennium Walk in Newport, at the Rodney Road end of the Millennium Bridge in the city centre. It is the fourth of five statues of Welsh women being erected in Wales by a group of women volunteers known as Monumental Welsh Women, chaired by the indefatigable Helen Molyneux, and in Newport led by the tireless Julie Nicholas. chair of the Statue for Lady Rhondda campaign group. The statue was unveiled by Lady Rhondda’s family members and celebrated by a large crowd in Newport on Thursday 26 September 2024. The rain held off long enough to allow the proceedings to pass in glorious sunshine. Holding a copy of Time & Tide, standing on the prow of the Lusitania, the business-woman, suffragette, publisher and campaigner for women’s rights looks across the Usk River. Ringed in support behind her is a circle of some 40 clasped hands, sculpted from women and children of Wales.
Margaret Rhondda – Photograph by Julie Nicholas
The celebratory mood was set by the Lady Rhondda Suffragette Choir, a specially commissioned poem from the Third National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, and performances from local school children from St Woolos primary school and Maindee primary school, the familiar suffragette purple, white and green colours on display. Compered by the BBC’s Felicity Evans, speakers included: Jane Hutt, MS, the Welsh Government Minister for Culture; Councillor Dimitri Batrouni, Welsh Labour, the Leader of the Newport Council; Professor Angela V. John, the biographer of Lady Rhondda; Jessica Morden, Labour MP of Newport East (in whose constituency the statue stands); Jane Robbins, the artist; and family descendants.
Monumental Welsh Women. Photograph by Molyneux Associates.
Adding a centenary flavour to the celebration, Angela V. John, author of the biography Turning the Tide: The Life of Lady Rhondda,[1] took us back to 26 September 1924. She highlighted the international side of Margaret Rhondda in the business world, referencing the Time & Tide issue of that day, precisely a century before the statue unveiling, when the paper’s publisher penned an article on whether university-trained women make the best businesswomen, prompted by a conference she had just addressed in Norway, run by the International Federation of University Women. Margaret Rhondda herself had gone to Somerville College, Oxford, though chose to leave after a couple of terms, having found university constricting. She later regretted this move.
Time &Tide appealed especially to newly enfranchised women, later becoming a significant arts journal and, later still, a leading commentator on national and international affairs. In 1941 the Observer newspaper called it ‘the strongest political and literary force that has been created by women.’[2]
Also in 1924, Margaret Rhondda was chairing many meetings calling upon the first Labour government to grant, for example, equal guardianship for married parents, one of the six points advocated by the Six Point Group that she founded and chaired to advocate social and legal rights to complement the recent limited vote for women over 30.
A century ago she was also still a director of more than a dozen Welsh colliery companies, having inherited most of her father’s business empire, with which she was familiar having worked for him at his Cardiff Docks headquarters. However, by now she was reducing her own industrial portfolio in the difficult economic climate, having at one point been on 33 boards and chairing seven. In 1921 she wrote and curated an appreciation of her father’s life, D.A. Thomas, Viscount Rhondda, by His Daughter and others, with contributions by, inter alia, the Welsh MP Llewelyn Williams, Lloyd George’s ally and later opponent, by Sir William Beveridge who worked at the Ministry of Food, and by the Rt. Hon J. R. Clynes, Leader of the Labour Party in 1921-1922.[3]
In 1926 Margaret Rhondda became the first female president of the UK Institute of Directors.
Plaques, Performances, Portraits
A tribute to Margaret Rhondda was previously unveiled in Newport on 12 June 2015 – a crowd-funded Blue Plaque on the wall of the house adjacent to the post-box on the Risca Road to which she had set fire. This was more than a century since she had been active as a suffragette. Secretary of Newport’s W.S.P.U., Women’s Social and Political Union, she was imprisoned in Usk Gaol, before being released under the Cat and Mouse Act. Her activist career has been more recently, and dramatically, portrayed on stage, in the Welsh National Opera’s Rhondda Rips it Up! production that premiered in 2018.
Since 2011 there hangs, in the House of Lords, a striking portrait of Margaret Rhondda, painted eighty years earlier, by Alice Mary Burton in 1931. She is facing her nemesis F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, across the room, who as Attorney General had prevented her from taking her seat in the Lords. Lloyd George had agreed to her father’s request to allow her to inherit his baronetcy, in the absence of a male heir, but ‘The Persistent Peeress’, as she was dubbed, had to campaign for the rest of her life to take her seat. Success was achieved only with the passing of the Life Peerages Act 1958, shortly after Margaret Rhondda herself had died. The first woman to take a seat in the Lords was Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, Baroness Swanborough, the widow of Lloyd George’s long-time ally and friend, Rufus Isaacs, the first Marquis of Reading, and himself Attorney General before the First World War. The portrait remained in private hands until recently.
A second, less formal portrait, again by Alice Mary Burton, again until recently in private hands, was presented to Lady Rhondda in 1933 by her friends and colleagues at a celebratory dinner for 130 guests in London, at the Hotel Rembrandt (then owned by a Welsh Jones hotelier family from Swansea). A similar version of the portrait hangs in the St Fagan’s National Museum of History at Cardiff. The 1933 dinner followed the release of her autobiography This Was My World. [4]
Politics and Publicity
Margaret’s father, D. A. Thomas, later 1st Viscount Rhondda, was one of the two Liberal MPs for Merthyr Boroughs, along with William Pritchard-Morgan, ‘the Gold King’ of Wales, in 1892-1900, and in 1900-1910 alongside Labour’s Keir Hardie, ‘DA’ having opposed his fellow Liberals over their differing stance on the Boer War. The traditional Liberal seat finally turned to Labour in 1922 and, through successive constituency boundary changes, has remained in Labour’s hands.
Like Megan Lloyd George, Margaret was from a young age immersed in the world of politics, and Lloyd George was a regular visitor to Llanwern, her parents’ Newport home. My grandfather Rev. J. T. Rhys (who campaigned with Margaret’s mother Lady Sybil Rhondda before moving to Downing St to work for Margaret Lloyd George) later related the occasion when Margaret Haig Thomas made her impromptu maiden speech at a political meeting hosted by her father at Llanwern.
Though not always seeing eye to eye with fellow Welshman Lloyd George, D. A. Thomas did, despite his poor health, take on the unpopular and difficult job of Food Controller during the war, the strain probably contributing to his death in July 1918. He also, with some reluctance, sailed across the Atlantic again on a wartime mission for Lloyd George, not long after surviving the Lusitania sinking.
Margaret Rhondda survived the Lusitania disaster, having been picked up out of the water, kept afloat by a wicker chair and initially thought to be lifeless by her rescuers. She went on to teach herself to swim and to make the most of her prominent position to promote her causes. As Angela John commented in Newport just before the unveiling:
Exactly one hundred years after 1924, we are unveiling a wonderful statue to this capable and courageous woman. I don’t want to give too much away but I shall say that it reflects its subject’s STEELY determination to persevere and succeed against the odds. Lady Rhondda would have understood that such a statue sends a potent message to others, especially young women. She once declared that ‘Publicity is Power’. What she sought was not so much glory for herself as the value of demonstrating women’s visibility and potential. And what better way of doing this than via the symbolism of a statue for all to see, here in Newport?
It is a remarkable statue of a remarkable woman.
Five Statues of the Hidden Heroines of the Monumental Welsh Women Campaign
The first five statues being erected by the Monumental Welsh Women campaign is of Betty Campbell MBE, Wales’ first black head teacher and champion of equality and diversity, standing proud near Cardiff Central Station, surrounded by images of her educational charges. The statue was unveiled in 2017.
The second statue, of Elaine Morgan, screenwriter, newspaper columnist and revolutionary evolutionary theorist, was unveiled in 2022, in Mountain Ash. Her television portfolio includes the BBC biographical drama The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, starring Philip Madoc in 1981.
The third statue, unveiled in Llangrannog in 2023, is of Sarah Jane Rees (1839-1916), known by her bardic name of Cranogwen. Temperance campaigner and preacher, Cranogwen was the first woman to win an award for poetry at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, having started her groundbreaking career as a master mariner.
The fifth statue, to be erected in the Cynon Valley in 2025, will be of Elizabeth Andrews, one of 11 children born into a poor mining family who became one of the most influential Welsh female political activists of the early 20th century, her motto being ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise’, with the needs of women and children at the heart of her campaigns. As the first Labour Party Women’s Organiser for Wales, she set up women’s sections, describing them as ‘working women’s universities’. An early task was translating leaflets from English to Welsh to urge women to use their newly-won vote. She also became one of Britain’s first female magistrates. Elizabeth was at the heart of relief efforts during the miners’ lock-out following the General Strike in 1926 and the hungry years of the 1930s Depression, and also turned her attention to improving maternity and childcare, establishing a service of clinics, midwives, home helps and one of the earliest nursery schools in Wales. Raising such ‘domestic’ issues in the male-dominated world of Welsh local government at the time was often unpopular but she never wavered in her commitment to the politics of the home front. To the generations of women she helped and inspired she was simply known as Our Elizabeth.
Richard Rhys O’Brien, with many thanks to Angela V. John, Helen Molyneux and Julie Nicholas for their contribution and advice.
Support is most welcome to complete the Monumental Welsh Women mission of 5 statues of 5 real Welsh women in 5 years.
Richard Rhys O’Brien, author The Campaigns of Margaret Lloyd George, The Wife of the Prime Minister 1916-1922, Y Lolfa 2022; with a prequel due in 2025 on her wartime campaigns; and online on the 1933 dinner for Margaret Rhondda; and What the Janitor Saw in 1924: A Liberal Critique of the First Labour Government: a weekly critique by Rev. J. T. Rhys in the Welsh Gazette.
[1] Angela V. John, Turning the Tide: The Life of Lady Rhondda, Parthian, 2013.
[2] See also Catherine Clay, Time and Tide: The Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine, Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
[3] D.A. Thomas, Viscount Rhondda, by His Daughter and Others, Longmans, Green and Co., 1921
[4] The 130 guests, which included a young Harold Macmillan, Vera Brittain, Sir Norman Angell, Winifred Holtby, Edith Shackleton, Rebecca West, Cicely Hamilton (artist and composer of the words of the WPSU anthem ‘March of the Women’); W. R. Lysaght, H. N. Brailsford, and Lord Camrose, to name just a few, covered Margaret Rhondda’s wide network in publishing, activism, politics, literature, and business, many of whom had co-funded the portrait. The online www.thedinnerpuzzle.com provides pen-portraits of as many of the named guests as can be identified, some still a puzzle, and imagines the conversations that might have engaged the attendees, on a warm evening which coincidentally coincided with Adolf Hitler’s final overthrow of democratic rule in Germany.
