Constituency : Rhondda 1885-1909, 1909-18, Rhondda West 1918-20 ( Labour )
William is our fourth Liberal- Labour MP and the first MP to serve beyond World War One.
William was elected for the new seat of Rhondda . His candidature had been opposed by a majority of the newly formed local Liberal Association. The president was a local coal owner and put up his nephew Frederick Davis instead. The miners refused to accept this on the grounds that Mabon had been effectively adopted before the Association was established.
Therefore the two men went head to head. They actually disagreed on little apart from the payment of MPs. Both sides accused each other of intimidation during the campaign. William won by 867 votes. To their credit Davis's camp accepted the result and joined with the Rhondda Labour and Liberal Association set up to run William's campaign. William was unopposed in 1886 and on most subsequent occasions.
William was born in Cwmafan and educated at the National School there. He found work in the local mines as a "door boy" at the age of ten. In 1864 he was part of a group of 12 miners who sailed to Chile to take up work there and then had to work his passage back home when the job offer evaporated. In 1869 he started working at a tinplate firm in Swansea. Around this time he began earning some extra money as a tenor singer and poet attracting the nickname "Mabon" after a Welsh bard. Despite this he was generally an opponent of Welsh nationalism. In 1871 he started work at the Caergynnydd pit near Swansea and became the miners' representative in a management dispute. Following that William became an agent for the Amalgamated Association of Miners until it was bankrupted by a strike in 1875 Nevertheless it did lead to the establishment of the Joint Sliding Scale Association on which he represented the miners until its abolition in 1903. In 1877 he moved to the Rhondda and built up the Cambrian Miners' Association.
William was never convinced by the idea of separate Labour representation and always wanted to work within the Liberal party. He supported Lloyd George's newspaper venture.A staunch Nonconformist, in his maiden speech he called for Welsh disestablishment.
William always opposed strike action believing that compromise could be reached without it. From 1892 to 1898 the South Wales miners didn't work on the first day of each month to limit output and so maintain wages and allow miners' meetings. It became known as "Mabon's Monday".
In 1898 William was one of the negotiators in the Welsh coal strike which led to the foundation of the South Wales Miners' Federation of which he became president.
In 1909 the Miners Federation of Great Britain affiliated to the Labour party and demanded that miners' MPs make the switch. William reluctantly complied although it had little parliamentary effect at the time. He omitted the word "Labour from his election address in 1910.
William stood down in 1920 and died two years later aged 79. He left a considerable fortune in his will which has excited some suspicion that his opposition to strikes was purchased.
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