The daughter of the other neighbours agreed:
His mother was loth to let him out of her sight. When he had an ordinary appendix operation in hospital Hattie stayed with him for three days and nights refusing to go home. Even when Roy went down the road to Pontypool railway station to collect train numbers, along would go Hattie to sit and knit on the platform with him.14
That may be a bit unfair. The appendix operation, when Roy was seven, was serious enough to involve three weeks in hospital and six months off school; and Hattie certainly did not follow him around all the time, as Derek Powell’s memory of their ‘little gang’ makes clear. In most respects Roy was a quite normally active, if privileged, boy:
We were pretty lucky kids. Other boys in the valley . . . played on slag heaps. They had little else to do. But Roy and I had bicycles and splendid model railways and plenty of good things at Christmas.15
He also loved cricket, rugby and swimming. Moreover he was not entirely an only child, since for much of his childhood two elder cousins, Sybil and Connie Peppin, the daughters of Hattie’s widowed sister, stayed with the Jenkinses much of the time, particularly in the school holidays: Sybil and Connie played with Roy in the sandpit, and later cricket in the garden – not cowboys and Indians, as Hattie did not allow guns; and in the summer the two families would go together to Swansea, Porthcawl or Weston-super-Mare. Later, when their mother died, Connie came to live with the Jenkinses. She was five years older than Roy, but he used to treat her, with a boy’s assumed authority, as though she were the younger: ‘He treated me like a sister. He’d give me worms to hold.’16
At the same time he was always a studious boy; and unusually – indeed, obsessively – numerate. ‘The main thing about Roy as a boy was his addiction to numbers,’ Connie remembered. ‘He was always silent and counting or working out some sum. He was like that ever after!’17 He loved collecting facts, and once he had learned them he never forgot them, as he characteristically demonstrated in an essay on Glasgow written in the last year of his life:
An excellent encyclopaedia (Harmsworth’s) published in the early 1920s, to the study of which I devoted many childhood hours, gave with complete confidence the exact population of every major city down to the last digit. Glasgow then scored 1,111,428 compared with Edinburgh’s 320,318.18
Likewise he relished cricket not so much for the game itself as for the statistics that it generated. As a boy, he wrote nostalgically in 1996, ‘my life was dominated by cricketers, their scores and their enshrinement in the temporary pantheon of Players’ cigarette cards’.19 All his life he loved making lists and grading things – cities, wines or Prime Ministers – in rank order.
Like many boys in those days, his love of numbers found an outlet in trainspotting. Not only did the Eastern Valley line from Newport up to Ebbw Vale run past the bottom of his garden; but Pontypool Road, just three miles away, was then a major railway junction where the GWR (Great Western Railway) expresses from Bristol and Plymouth up to Manchester and Glasgow crossed – ‘sometimes exchanging coaches’ – with those from Cardiff to Birmingham.fn2 ‘The train for Glasgow, I remember vividly, had two engines, which made me feel that it must be both a distant and an important destination.’20 Trains and distant destinations captivated him. ‘He used to plan train journeys,’ another schoolfriend recalled, ‘– complete with times and interchanges – to Jerusalem and Constantinople, and he could recite all the stations on the Paris metro at a very young age.’21 Though not a mathematician, this numerological precision stayed with him all his life.
They were a very close family. Among themselves they all had animal nicknames. Arthur was ‘Jumbo’, Hattie was ‘Pony’ and Roy was ‘Bunny’. Even when Roy was grown-up and away in the army, Arthur still signed his letters to him ‘Jumbo’ and gave him the news of ‘Pony’. The maid, Kathleen Tuttle, remembered that Roy wanted her to have a nickname too: ‘He started calling me “Kathlet”, but his mother put a stop to that. I think she felt I might think it cheeky but I really rather liked it.’22 Kathleen did not think Roy was spoiled, rather that he was quite strictly brought up, always made to do his homework and piano practice (which he hated). Arthur could be stern if Roy disappointed his expectations, whereas Hattie more easily forgave him. But Kathleen never once heard Arthur raise his voice. If Roy was naughty, which was not often, his punishment was not to be allowed to join Arthur on his evening walk on Penyrhoel, the nearby hill. ‘That would really hurt Roy. He worshipped his father, and because Arthur had to give so much of his time to dealing with the problems of other people, Roy used to clutch at the moments he could spend with him.’23
Arthur, for his part, took Roy around with him to political meetings and union conferences all over South Wales and beyond. His earliest memory was of being taken to the Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, when he was three. On Sundays they would drive to Abergavenny, Raglan or other places of interest around Monmouthshire. They went quite frequently to Cardiff – twenty-two miles away, but ‘very much the local metropolis’ – for shopping, theatre visits, rugby internationals or ‘semi-celebratory meals’ in the best hotels;24 and occasionally to London. In 1929, when Roy was eight, Arthur took him (with Hattie) abroad for the first time, to Brussels where he was attending a Socialist International meeting. Two years later they went to Paris for six days, visiting all the usual sights but also the house that Arthur had stayed in twenty years before. To a ten-year-old from Pontypool, Paris in those days was ‘a very attractive but slightly shabby city . . . interesting but strange, and potentially hostile’.25
In 1993 another boyhood friend whose memories had been awakened by reading Jenkins’ memoirs wrote him an almost idyllic recollection of these days:
Snatchwood Road, games in ‘the wood’ . . . cricket in back gardens (those ‘Test Matches’), the swimming pool, or rather baths, at Pontrenewydd with Derek Powell pounding out length after length much to the astonishment of us all, your kindly, caring mother and father, trips to the country in your father’s car (if memory serves me right, an early Jowett), brown blazers and brown caps, listening to rugger internationals on the radio . . . What a happy and carefree, but cosseted childhood we had.26
The most famous episode in Roy’s childhood, however, was one he was unaware of at the time. Roy was not yet six when Arthur was involved in a violent incident at the Quarry Level colliery in Pontypool in August 1926, one of many such skirmishes during the bitter miners’ lockout which continued for seven months after the collapse of the General Strike in May. Pickets at the pithead were attempting to stop around forty ‘scabs’ from going to work, while the police tried to escort them. Stones were thrown and the police baton-charged the pickets – the sort of scenes that were to be familiar again half a century later in 1972 and 1984. As agent, Arthur had undoubtedly helped organise the picketing; but he was almost certainly trying to prevent violence, not foment it: anything else would have been utterly out of character. The Times report the next day supported this interpretation:
Mr Arthur Jenkins, the miners’ agent, scrambled to the top of a coal truck and called a truce. He then addressed the crowd, saying: ‘I have seen all that has happened here. The attack was a most ferocious one on the part of the police without the slightest cause.’ Members of the crowd shouted: ‘Let’s give it to them.’ Mr Jenkins replied: ‘No, we don’t want that. I shall say what I have to say elsewhere.’ The police ordered the demonstrators to leave the premises, and they dispersed.27
Nevertheless Arthur was arrested with several others for riotous assembly, and additionally charged with inciting his co-defendants to commit riot and damage. When the case was heard at the Pontypool police court three weeks later the police gave evidence that he had told the crowd, ‘I can do no more. They have . . . decided to work. I now leave them to you’, as a result of which the crowd turned hostile and started throwing stones.28 The case was passed up to the Monmouthshire Assizes in November, where it lasted for five days. Several impeccable witne
sses testified to Arthur’s good character; but the police, in his view, ‘lied terribly’,29 and Mr Justice Swift chose to believe the police. ‘I am satisfied,’ he declared, ‘that from the early morning of August 30 . . . you were laying plans to intimidate these workers and to thwart the police.’
Your position was deplorable. You were a man of high position, not only in the Miners’ Federation, but in the county, and it was above all things your duty as a public man, as a member of the County Council and as one of the Standing Joint Committee, to have assisted the police in maintaining order.
His co-defendants got three months; but Arthur was sentenced to nine months in prison.30
The sentence was widely seen as a travesty of justice and a campaign was launched, supported not only by local and national newspapers but by the chairman of the South Wales coal owners, to have it reversed. Far from considering Arthur disgraced, his fellow county councillors placed flowers on his seat to mark his absence. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour Leader of the Opposition, raised the case in the House of Commons,31 and a petition of 40,000 signatures was presented to the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. Perhaps fortunately for Arthur, the notoriously hardline ‘Jix’ was ill; deputising for him, Lord Birkenhead (the former F.E. Smith, now Secretary of State for India) ordered his release after only three months. He returned home to a hero’s welcome, with miners and their wives cheering his car as it passed through every village in the valley.
Roy remembered the emotional homecoming, but not until years later did he learn where Arthur had been. At the time he was merely told that his father was visiting coalmines in Germany – the sort of thing he did quite regularly – while Hattie took Roy away from Abersychan (he had not yet started school) to stay with friends in Newport. Leo Abse alleged that Hattie kept the truth from Roy ‘not out of protectiveness but from sham respectability’;32 in her defence Alan Watkins wrote that ‘most Welsh mothers would have behaved in the same way. In any case, she had been instructed to act as she did by Arthur, who did not wish his son to grow up with hatreds or prejudices.’33 Even so, Connie Peppin remembered that ‘Aunt Hattie took it all very badly. Absolutely knocked out. She needed a lot of support at that time, otherwise she would have stayed in her own house. But she couldn’t, and could never bear to talk about it.’34 Nor could Arthur. ‘To the end of his life,’ Roy recalled, ‘my father hated the memory of that jail sentence.’35 Even three months must have been a painful ordeal for a man of his tastes and temperament, and Hattie believed it did lasting damage to his health. But he had no wish to pose as a martyr or make political capital out of his imprisonment; nor did he want his son to do so, and Roy never did. The one lasting effect it had on him was to instil a healthy scepticism about police evidence.
Roy did not go to school till he was seven (and then he had six months off following his appendix operation – possibly an example of Hattie’s over-protectiveness). For the next three years, however, he attended the local primary school at Pentwyn, which was dramatically sited between a bare mountainside and a large coal-tip: his memories of sliding down the latter on his way home contradict the idea that Hattie accompanied him everywhere. From Pentwyn he easily won a place at one of the two local grammar schools. West Monmouth, a semi-boarding school partly owned by the Haberdashers’ Company, was universally recognised as the top school in the area. Arthur was a governor and would have had no difficulty in sending Roy there. Instead he chose to send him to Abersychan County School, slightly closer, but much less highly regarded. The choice was strange since Arthur was already determined that Roy should follow him to Oxford. There survives in Roy’s papers a fragment of a letter or diary entry dated 21 May 1929 – when he was just eight and a half – typed but childishly spelled:
This year for Witsun we decided to go to Oxford so that I could deside whitch college I wanted to go to . . . When we arrived at Oxford Daddy drove up to Russgin Colleg to see the . . .36
Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, a family friend, believed that Arthur was torn – like many a Labour parent since – between his ambition for his son and his political need to support the local school. He was a governor of Abersychan too, and thought highly of the headmaster; so on this occasion he made the political choice. But Bulmer-Thomas believed it set Roy back academically.37, fn3
One or two more childish letters have survived. From one, dating from April 1930, typed on SWMF paper – ‘Agent: Alderman Arthur Jenkins’ – it seems that Roy was being allowed to have a dog:
Dear Jum,
I think I have decided to have one of Peter’s brothers or sisters . . . one that rolles over on her or his back, and wags his wager . . . who has a nice dispsishon and is very playful . . . I am in diviculty bying a he or a she i want to by a she but mammer wants me to buy a he. you do not mind me having it? do you!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
LOVE FROM
Bun38
Another, six months later, handwritten in pencil, shows a marked improvement in spelling. Arthur and Hattie were evidently in London:
Dear Mammy & Daddy,
I got your letter this morning. I thought you would enjoy the journey up . . . Walter Daniel has got a scooter and I can’t half go on it . . . I read Oliver Twist in three hours this morning . . . Mrs Thomas told me two tell you that I have been a good boy . . .
Love from Bun xxxxxxxx39
Roy started at Abersychan in September 1931, two months before his eleventh birthday, and left at sixteen. Being so young, and the son of a local bigwig, he was given a rough initiation. Another new boy named Norman Edwards recalled, sixty-five years later, how he had got into a fight trying to protect Roy and been given a hundred lines for his pains:
What struck me . . . was that you were unwilling to defend yourself or me, and that the fashionable dogma of Ghandi [sic] of passive resistance . . . held sway. My view was that a miner’s son fought for every crust of bread and principle.
The charge of reluctance to fight would frequently be levelled at Jenkins in years to come. Looking back, however, Edwards saw things differently:
You were hard on yourself when you say that you lacked steel. You must not forget that you were 1 year younger than the rest of us, and that makes a vast difference in academic attainment, physical prowess and sheer guts. You lived with that for six years.40
Roy was already a budding journalist with a high sense of his own importance. At the age of ten he produced two editions of a newspaper called the Greenlands News, filled with items about pets, illnesses and cricket scores, all broken up into paragraphs with a crossword and weather forecast. The first edition contained the following report:
Important Member of Greenlands Ill
From our special correspondent Middle Bedroom Wednesday.
It is reported that Roy H. Jenkins who is suffering from Broncitis is improving rather rapidly. But I regret to state that he is unable to run in his School sports at Talywan on Friday July the 3rd where he would undoutbably have won!41
Two years later he relaunched the newspaper on a larger scale, reporting TERRIBLE SNOW STORMS and DOG’S TERRIBLE FRIGHT, but also:
The following agreement has been written out and drawn up by Sir R.H. Jenkins K.C.
‘It is hereby agreed, sealed and signed that Arthur Jenkins shall pay Roy Harris Jenkins the sum of 6d (six pence) every Saturday morning without fail.
Should R.H. Jenkins get into Class B, then the amount will become 1/- (one shilling) and should R.H. Jenkins get into Class A then the amount will become 2/6 (two shillings and sixpence).
Should Arthur Jenkins fail to pay on Saturday morning, then he must pay the amount plus 3d as soon as possible.
It now remains for the signatures to be added.’
There was also ‘OUR GRAND COMPETITION . . . S’EASY. Send in your efforts with two penny stamps to Roy Jenkins, Snatchwood Road Abersychan Mon not later than Sunday March 5th’; and a useful fact: ‘ON THIS DAY 1882 – Electric tramcars were first intriduced into the world’.42 The tw
elve-year-old editor was already an avid newspaper reader.
Despite some initial bullying, Jenkins claimed in his memoirs to have been ‘thoroughly happy’ at Abersychan, though academically he did not shine.43 ‘It wasn’t an intensely competitive school,’ another boyhood friend, Hugh Brace, recalled, with no tradition of sending boys to university beyond Wales. The quality of the teaching was variable: the French mistress was ‘particularly bad’, the history teacher ‘all right, but no more’.44, fn4 But Roy, oddly, did no history for two years before the sixth form – which he later blamed for gaps in his knowledge. For his School Certificate in 1935 he took six subjects (English, geography, French, maths, physics and chemistry), to which he added Latin – ‘absolutely necessary for Oxford’ – the following year. (He and Hugh were taught Latin together by the head.) Then, after a misguided flirtation with chemistry, he switched course and took history, geography and English for his Higher Certificate. His reports recognised his intelligence, but thought he lacked concentration. ‘I am convinced that if Roy would concentrate more resolutely in class he would improve his position very considerably,’ his form master wrote at the end of his first year: significantly he did better in exams than course work. In his final year his English master described the budding writer pretty well:
Thinks for himself and is interested in life & books . . . Work expresses mental alertness and keen interest in ideas and literature. Essays are clear and logical and vocabulary expressive. Roy has read outside the limits of his books and has acquired general ideas. He would be wise to confine himself to set books for the next few weeks . . . If he does himself justice he should do very well.46
Roy Jenkins Page 3