A century ago, the women of Wales made an audacious appeal for world peace – this is their story

February 11 1924, on board the RMS Cedric: Noticed Statue of Self determination sparkling within the daylight. Bitterly chilly air, glorious sunshine. At lunch, a press guy got here to me and stated: ‘Mrs Griffiths, I am from the press.’ ‘I have nothing to say,’ I stated. ‘Oh!’ stated he, ‘we know your story of the Women of Wales movement, we want only your photos – will you come to the top deck when you have finished?’ So [we] trotted as much as the manage deck first-class, the place we discovered 4 burly photographers expecting us.

March 12 1924, Los Angeles: A letter was once passed to me as I left the station – an nameless letter, telling us to eject from the USA.

100 years in the past, Annie Hughes Griffiths travelled from her local Wales to the United States, visiting all over the place from Brandnew York and Washington DC to San Francisco and Los Angeles. However week the diary of her shuttle describes some standard vacationer must-sees – Niagara Falls, Brilliant Canyon, Blonde Gate Bridge and Lincoln Memorial – this was once incorrect familiar sleep, and Hughes Griffiths incorrect familiar vacationer.

She was once a part of a delegation of 4 Welsh ladies tasked with turning in what the South Wales Gazette described as a “monster petition” – one that apparently would have stretched for seven miles if its pages of signatures have been positioned finish to finish. The petition was once an enchantment for world hush, from the ladies of Wales to the ladies of The usa.

This whirlwind US consult with was once the fruits of a six-month marketing campaign that had perceptible greater than 400 native organisers exit door-to-door gathering signatures in cities and villages all over Wales. In all, they amassed 390,296 signatures – which might be an notable success even nowadays, when the web and social media tie us straight away with folk all over the world. However this was once 100 years in the past, at a past when automobiles and landline phones had been nonetheless items of interest.

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Ganrif yn ôl aeth menywod Cymru ati i apelio’n daer am heddwch byd – dyma european stori

Hughes Griffiths and her fellow hush missionaries (all of whom paid for the shuttle themselves) offered their petition to The usa’s prominent ladies’s organisations and nearest met the United States president, Calvin Coolidge, throughout the White Area. However week many welcomed those pioneering ladies from around the Atlantic, others – together with the nameless letter scribbler Hughes Griffiths describes in her diary – had been deeply antagonistic to the theory of the United States taking a supremacy function in world projects, even the ones aimed toward fighting battle.

Regardless of the exposure the petition accomplished on each side of the Atlantic on the past – and the inauguration of lasting institutional and private networks between Welsh and American hush campaigners – the tale of this odd aim has lengthy since light from our collective reminiscence. It does no longer seem in historical past books even in Wales, and neither is it taught in faculties.

We’re the editors of a untouched stock, Year Apêl-The Attraction, which tells this forgotten historical past, due to painstaking analysis via the stock’s participants who combed in the course of the diaries and letters of the ones ladies (and a few males) who had been the motive force in the back of the hush petition, in addition to newspaper accounts and folk data from the Twenties.

There have been variations between the numerous hundreds of Welsh ladies who signed the petition: language, faith, political affiliations, and socio-economic instances. However those variations had been unimportant compared to what united them: the dream of a global with out battle.

Making plans the petition

The affiliation of ladies with the reason for hush was once not anything untouched. It have been the cornerstone of the pre-first global battle world ladies’s hush motion that explicitly related hush with the growth of civic rights to girls – particularly, however no longer completely, the correct to vote. The common sense was once that if ladies had been ready to play games a bigger function in folk existence and in political choices, there may well be extra consideration dedicated to non violent method of resolving disputes.

Some 40,000 infantrymen from Wales had died within the first global battle, week many in their 230,000 compatriots who additionally fought had returned with life-changing bodily accidents and “shell shock” (post-traumatic tension illness). The battle’s unfortunate results on Welsh households and communities instilled a usual choice that this sort of struggle will have to by no means once more be authorised.

For some, the solution lay in a non-public loyalty to pacifism. Others seemed to political events: the Labour birthday celebration in Wales skilled a surge of aid that just about doubled the selection of MPs it despatched to Parliament between 1918 and 1922, together with a number of anti-war activists.

On the similar past, there was once reputation of the urgent want for some more or less institutional method of resolving world disputes – the place international locations may well be introduced in combination to choose their variations via discussions held round a negotiating desk, in lieu than battles within the trenches. The newly established League of Countries held out the hope of offering the important furnishings for hush.

Created via the Treaty of Versailles that officially introduced an finish to the primary global battle, the League of Countries (1920-1946) was once envisioned as a realistic method of forestalling occasion battle. It was once greeted with stunning passion in Wales, together with via David, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, 3 siblings with non-public enjoy of the horrors of battle – David as an officer, Gwendoline and Margaret as volunteer nurses in a French grassland medical institution.

All believed within the league’s attainable to grow to be world politics. And, due to the large wealth that they had inherited from their industrialist grandfather, David Davies of Llandinam, they may lend sensible aid for efforts to grasp that attainable. In 1919, they subsidized the sector’s first chair in Global Politics on the College Faculty of Wales, Aberystwyth. 3 years nearest, some other donation via David Davies (the more youthful) join the long-term occasion of the Welsh department of the League of Countries Union – after Britain’s greatest and maximum influential civil crowd organisation devoted to hush throughout the interwar length.

However week this raised consciousness and aid for the goals of the league inside of Wales, its world challenge wanted the energetic participation of all international locations of the sector – or it will by no means travel past dreamy rhetoric to present actual hope for a extra non violent occasion. And from the start, the governments of a few international locations had been reluctant to connect the league – together with probably the most tough folk of all, the USA.

Amassing signatures

In some cases, 3 and 4 visits have been made to the similar homes ahead of the entire signatures had been join. With only a few exceptions, the girl canvassers had been really well gained. (Native newspaper record, Maesteg – December 1923)

Gwilym Davies, a retired Baptist minister and honorary director of the Welsh League of Countries Union, was once a visionary – a person no longer handiest dedicated to the reason for hush, however with a ability for growing album and attractive tactics of bringing the problem to the eye of the broader folk.

In 1922, he had prompt that younger folk in Wales would possibly compose a message of “peace and goodwill”, and usefulness the untouched generation of radio to broadcast it to their younger friends all over the world. His advice was once taken up and started an annual follow that continues to this presen, now led via the Urdd Gobaith Cymru (Welsh League of Early life).

Refer to hour, on March 7 1923, Davies wrote to Mary Ellis, a fellow hush activist and handiest the second one girl to be appointed as an inspector of faculties via the Segment of Schooling for Wales. Davies’ letter contained this deceptively simple-sounding proposal:

Would it not be conceivable for the Ladies of Wales to method the Ladies of The usa, and inform them frankly in their worry for the occasion of civilisation?

By means of Would possibly 1923, Davies’ proposal have been officially followed via the Welsh League of Countries Union, and an govt committee shaped straight away. Future the purpose of attaining global hush may just no longer were extra aspiring, their plan was once pragmatic: they might name on ladies in the United States to steer their leaders to connect the League of Countries.

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Each girl in Wales over the past of 18 was once to be approached, to have the goals of the enchantment defined and to be given the chance to aid it via including their signature. As many supporters and advocates as conceivable can be enlisted to reach this monumental activity – within the many faraway, rural fields of Wales in addition to its cities and villages.

But simply two paid organisers, Mary Ellen Pritchard and Ethel Elizabeth Poole, oversaw all of the challenge all over the north and south of Wales respectively. Pritchard, widow of the previous mayor of Pwllheli, looked the paintings as “a calling from God”. Poole, the daughter of a soldier, had a extra non-public motivation to paintings for world hush: her brother have been killed in France in 1916 on the past of 26.

People conferences had been held to unfold pledge of the marketing campaign in travel of the door-to-door canvassing. Pritchard and Poole spoke at many of those occasions, along side Gwilym Davies and Ellis. Future the influence given via each journalistic and private accounts of those conferences suggests they engendered a stunning offer of passion, please see native newspaper record of a gathering in Holywell signifies there will have been some lingering animosity against the campaigning ladies, because of the battle for girls’s suffrage:

Mr H.T. Roberts stated that at one past he have been a lot antagonistic to girls’s suffrage, however now he noticed how mistaken he have been. Right here was once a query during which the ladies of Wales had extra proper to mention anything else than any individual else.

Every of the hundreds of sheets of paper the organisers impaired to bundle person signatures was once published with the phrases of the enchantment in Welsh or English, so ladies may just learn it for themselves ahead of deciding whether or not so as to add their signatures – or have it learn to them relating to those that had been illiterate. Those phrases incorporated please see plea:

We discuss merely as the ladies of Wales – the daughters of a folk whose glory it’s been to cherish incorrect hatred against any land or folk, and whose want is for the approaching on Earth of the reign of fellowship and approbation. We lengthy for the presen when the affairs of countries will probably be matter now not to the decision of the sword. And we really feel that the morning time of the Vacation which shall undergo can be hastened had been it conceivable for The usa to remove her playground within the Council of the League of Countries.

The petition’s organisers every so often walked for miles within the air and rainfall to assure incorrect homes of their department had been overpassed. The elements in November 1923, when many of those signatures had been gathered, was once it appears very windy, and one of the crucial petition sheets display indicators of getting been rainy, along with the ink stains and finger marks. As Annie Hughes Griffiths would nearest give an explanation for to her American target market:

There are modes smudged with ink as a result of they had been taken from area to deal with within the rainfall. There are modes which aren’t so cloudless as we will have to like them to be, however they had been treated from door to door, and there are signature modes which the canvassers took out to isolated playgrounds, the place the signatures had been got next a go of a bundle miles.

There’s a touching tale about two neighbours, each dwelling in really extensive poverty, who pooled their restricted sources to shop for a shared pen and pot of ink, so they might be able when the petition got here to their doorways.

Most of the ladies who signed had misplaced family members within the first global battle. The son of Julia Ann Heywood of Trearddur Bay, Anglesey, have been killed at the Western Entrance in 1916. The brother of Jennett Bragg of Porthcawl was once amongst 570 males who drowned when the British battleship HMS Goliath sank within the Dardanelles in 1915. Each the sons of Lucy Dickenson of Aberyskir Courtroom, Brecon, had been killed inside of a couple of weeks of every alternative in 1918.

By means of the top of January 1924, the method of canvassing for aid was once completed: 390,296 signatures have been gathered. The hundreds of petition sheets sporting a lot of these signatures had been sparsely positioned in an oak chest designed in particular for the aim. Two copies of the enchantment textual content had been written in stunning calligraphy and positioned in binders fabricated from gilded Moroccan leather-based. One novel was once to progress to the United States to be offered with the petition sheets, week the alternative would stay in Wales.

Taking the petition to The usa

Making plans and preparation for the United States shuttle had begun even ahead of the enchantment was once followed – led via Mary Ellis, who spent months exchanging letters with leaders of the American ladies’s hush motion. In December 1923, she activate for Brandnew York Town as the forefront for the alternative participants of the Welsh ladies’s delegation, who had been to practice in February.

In Brandnew York, Ellis met one of the crucial most renowned ladies in The usa campaigning for social and political alternate: Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Ruth Morgan, Carrie Chapman Catt and Eleanor Roosevelt. Every had honed their advocacy talents throughout the lengthy battle for girls’s suffrage, which was once (in part) received in 1920 via the ratification of the nineteenth Modification to the United States Charter. By means of 1924, they had been directing their efforts to the reason for world hush.

Because of the correspondence that Ellis carried out with Gwilym Davies, her impressions of those prominent American figures were guarded. Of her assembly with Catt, she wrote:

It could have carried out you excellent to look the glorious bright on Mrs Catt’s face as I instructed her merely what our minute message supposed … She was once completely delighted with the tale of our memorial [petition].

But it surely was once Laidlaw, a powerful organiser with in depth contacts within the American ladies’s motion, who proved a specifically reliable touch for Ellis. She ensured that dozens of ladies’s organisations lent their aid to the Welsh ladies’s enchantment. It was once additionally Laidlaw who organized for the Welsh delegation to be gained via the United States president on the White Area – Ellis would nearest describe Laidlaw because the “fairy godmother” of the enchantment.

On February 2, the remainder of the Welsh delegation enroute a teach at London’s Euston station sure for Liverpool, with well-wishers crowding the platform and congratulatory telegrams coming back from the previous high minister David Lloyd George, amongst others.

Selected to supremacy this delegation was once Annie Hughes Griffiths (after generally known as Mrs Peter Hughes Griffiths), a charismatic determine and a talented folk speaker who was once at peace speaking in each English and Welsh. The chair of the Welsh League of Countries Union and president of its ladies’s committee, Hughes Griffiths was once already prominent in Wales for supporting many sides of Welsh cultural existence, together with her paintings documenting conventional nation songs. She was once additionally effectively hooked up in Welsh political circles, thank you partly to her first husband, Thomas Edward Ellis, who have been a Unselfish member of parliament.

The youngest member of the delegation was once university-educated Elined Prys, who had carried out in depth paintings with refugees in Romania in the name of the Younger Girl’s Christian Affiliation (YWCA) next the battle. Additionally a part of this travelling team was once Gladys Melhuish Thomas from London –week no longer a part of the professional delegation, she joined the shuttle as a travelling better half for her pal Hughes Griffiths.

Simply ahead of resignation for the United States, Hughes Griffiths gave an interview to Welsh day-to-day newspaper The Western Mail, describing the Welsh ladies’s enchantment as being one among “great moral force when it is remembered that it is the result of a nation’s voluntary effort”. The petition, she stated, represented a untouched bankruptcy in a protracted custom of peace-making historical past in Wales.

How the ladies had been gained

After we reached land, a number of leaders of American ladies’s organisations met us sporting bunches of daffodils, whose patches of glorious yellow first stuck our seeing a few of the throng at the touchdown degree. Our hostesses’ amazement was once stunning once they noticed Mrs Peter Hughes Griffiths additionally retaining a host of daffodils, which had effectively traversed the Atlantic within the chilly depot chamber!

Next a time crossing the Atlantic, the RMS Cedric – as soon as the sector’s greatest ocean liner – docked in Brandnew York. Ellis had written to warn Hughes Griffiths and Prys that they might be the focal point of consideration once they arrived, and that they will have to be expecting to be photographed for the American newspapers – “so put on your prettiest and smile when you land!”. Within the passages quoted above and underneath, Prys described the scene on the dock and the welcome that greeted them in a dispatch from The usa, revealed within the Western Mail:

The automobile which met us was once ornamented with daffodils. From the date we entered it, we had been whirled away into this sort of succession of visits and receptions as handiest American hospitality is aware of tips on how to bathe on its visitors.

The Welsh ladies’s delegation spent a time in Brandnew York, networking with American ladies hush campaigners and attending social occasions. Hughes Griffiths gave various press interviews and speeches – maximum particularly on February 19 1924, when greater than 400 ladies representing over 60 American ladies’s associations with a blended club of greater than 16 million amassed within the lavish ballroom of the Biltmore Lodge in midtown Long island, to observer the hole of the wood chest and the movement of the petition sheets for the primary past. On this pronunciation, she paid tribute to the numerous familiar Welsh ladies who had lent their names and their aid to this distinctive enchantment for hush:

There are signatures of ladies of 90 years of past and over – [including] one among a lady of 101 – who had been very fearful that the memorial will have to no longer be despatched to The usa with out their names. Our younger college ladies of 18 years used have signed, however there could also be many a pass signifying the mark of commendation of the ones ladies who of their early life had been denied the blessing of training. And there are the signatures of the moms who, in signing, remembered their boys who fell within the battle and now vacay quietly within the blood-drenched disciplines of France – with every signature, many a tear.

The good fortune of the Biltmore Lodge match exceeded all hopes and expectancies – as Hughes Griffiths mirrored in her diary access. “It was a truly thrilling gathering and one which, in our wildest flights of imagination, we have never thought of on such a comprehensive scale.” The upcoming presen, Ellis wrote about it in a letter to Gwilym Davies:

Mrs G [Hughes Griffiths] made a stunning pronunciation in each and every sense of the pledge … When she learn the memorial, Pass over Prys and I stood up. I felt completely pent up with emotion … The reception via the American ladies was once unbelievable – they listened to each and every pledge and their faces had been a learn about to look. Essentially the most superb factor is absolutely the figuring out of our personal message and challenge.

From Brandnew York, the delegation was at Washington DC the place they had been photographed at the steps of the White Area and met with President Coolidge. Hughes Griffiths join from the president a guarantee that the petition and its specifically commissioned oak chest can be given over to the safekeeping of the Smithsonian Establishment, The usa’s nationwide museum, training and analysis complicated. Right here it will keep for just about a century, unknown to untouched generations of Welsh men and women around the Atlantic.

Having achieved their challenge of turning in the enchantment to the ladies of The usa, the 1924 hush delegation went their sovereign tactics: Ellis to consult with American faculties, and Prys to reconnect with pals from her paintings with the YWCA and the Pink Go in Romania. Hughes Griffiths, accompanied via her pal Gladys Thomas, launched into a two-month hush excursion of the United States via teach, the entire approach to California and again – assembly ladies’s teams, hush campaigners and representatives of Welsh communities, and giving but extra speeches and interviews to the click in regards to the Welsh ladies’s hush enchantment.

It was once against the top of this pan-American excursion that Hughes Griffiths was once passed an nameless letter telling her to “get out of the country”. Even though she passes over this incident calmly in her diary access for that presen, the episode finds the power of American isolationist feeling on the past. Future many progressive American supporters of the League of Countries sought after to look the United States play games a supremacy function in occasion efforts to forbid world battle, others blamed Europe for dragging their nation into battle. Those feared that US club of the league would handiest supremacy to extra expensive and disastrous world entanglements.

The Welsh delegation and their enchantment landed squarely in the course of those tensions, and the American ladies who helped Ellis prepare their consult with had difficult political waters to navigate. Harriet Laidlaw, as an example, was once fast to look the exposure price of a right away, women-to-women enchantment for hush, but took support to emphasize the development on the Biltmore Lodge as a common plea for world hush thru sisterhood, week taking part in i’m sick the enchantment’s affiliation with the League of Countries.

The Welsh ladies’s voyage to The usa cast lasting bonds between the Welsh and American ladies’s hush actions, and impressed the inauguration of a untouched US hush organisation, the Nationwide Committee for the Motive and Healing of Warfare, which turned into The usa’s maximum influential hush organisation of the Twenties. Carrie Chapman Catt, one among its founders, nearest described its paintings as “a way of returning the compliment” to the ladies of Wales for his or her efforts against world hush.

However week many ladies on each side of the Atlantic endured to consider within the League of Countries’ attainable for hush, the political temper in the United States was once unwelcome. Motivated reasons, together with world efforts to advertise hush, had been more and more being labelled “subversive” and considered with hesitancy, together with via establishments of the United States govt such because the Warfare Segment and the Bureau of Investigation (which nearest turned into the FBI).

The United States by no means did connect the league, and via the overdue Thirties the blackmail to hush posed via Nazi Germany and alternative Axis powers supposed few had been sympathetic to the argument that the international locations of the sector may just and would paintings in combination to forbid struggle. Even though lots of the concepts hooked up with the league had been resurrected within the United Countries and related post-1945 establishments, via after the Welsh ladies’s enchantment have been forgotten via all except for the ones maximum carefully excited about it.

The petition’s rediscovery

One summer time presen in 2014, a seek for examples of Welsh hush activism within the collections of the Welsh Centre for Global Affairs (WCIA, previously the headquarters of the Welsh League of Countries Union) became up a discovery past any individual’s wildest creativeness.

Within the lavish library of the Temple of Vacation and Fitness in Cardiff, the WCIA’s then-director, Martin Pollard, withdrew a slim brown backbone from between stories of statistical stories in regards to the fingers deal the Thirties. Made from Moroccan leather-based and it appears by no means in the past recorded as a part of the library’s assortment, the illuminated gold leaf inscription at the entrance safe recognized it as: “The memorial from Wales signed by 390,296 women in Wales and Monmouthshire, to the women of the United States of America.”

Within the leather-based binding was once the textual content of the enchantment, written in immaculate calligraphy and expressing the anguish, hopes and desires of a date of Welsh ladies who had been uniting in a choice for hush. Susie Ventris-Grassland, who adopted Pollard as WCIA director, nearest recalled:

It was once a wide ranging date – spellbinding, perplexing. A Welsh peacebuilding motion of a scale past any in dwelling reminiscence. How may just this sort of tale be unrevealed to historical past? How was once this sort of document ‘lost’ proper right here in unsophisticated vision? What of the signatures – did they nonetheless exist? If that is so, the place? Such a lot of questions … how may just we find the tale in the back of it?

Discovering the textual content of the enchantment was once handiest step one in a protracted and sophisticated proceed of rediscovery that left-overs ongoing. A cascade of an important discoveries has saved this analysis transferring forwards, together with the realisation that an used {photograph} appearing 4 ladies status at the external steps of a development, with one among them retaining what seems to be a immense, opened stock, was once in truth the Welsh ladies’s delegation in Washington DC – the stock was once the reward novel of the morocco-bound enchantment.

Next years of collaboration below the steering of Academi Heddwch Cymru (Wales’s hush institute) between grassroots organisations together with Heddwch Nain Mam-gu (Our Grandmothers’ Vacation) and nationwide establishments such because the Nationwide Library of Wales, the petition is again in Wales. The petition sheets are being catalogued, scanned and uploaded via team of workers within the Nationwide Library of Wales with aid from volunteers, and we’re getting tantalising glimpses of the discoveries that look forward to us when the entire signatures are digitised and to be had to look on-line.

Already, the thoroughness of the petition organisers and their choice to succeed in as many ladies as conceivable comes thru very obviously. Organisers in Caerphilly, as an example, even bought signatures from ladies within the native isolation medical institution.

As soon as the signatures are transcribed, it is going to be a lot more straightforward to cross-reference person names with the Welsh census and alternative folk data, opening up untouched avenues of study into the lives of the 390,296 ladies who believed, within the phrases of the enchantment, that “the future is big with hope if we, as the women of this generation, do our part”.

Inspiring us 100 years nearest

A century nearest, we’re build up a extra holistic image of the ladies who performed an important roles on this tale – specifically, how they looked the reason for finishing struggling in battle as intrinsically related to finishing alternative modes of struggling, equivalent to human trafficking, and the best way such a lot of of them endured to be concerned within the seek for world establishments and practices to form the correct situations for forging hush.

However in all probability one of the vital impressive achievements of the Welsh ladies’s hush petition was once that it was once ready to redirection the formalities of governments and officers, and discuss without delay as a “nation’s voluntary effort” (to usefulness Hughes Griffiths’ word). This was once an aim to form a extra non violent global that was once in response to one folk’s ladies achieving out to some other’s. In taking this direct method, it was once the primary peace-making aim of its sort.

Some would possibly query the worth of the Welsh ladies’s enchantment, for the reason that effort of persuading the United States to connect the League of Countries was once by no means realised. However that, we consider, can be a short-sighted reaction. Instead, it will have to undoubtedly encourage us to mirror on what we will do to aid peacemaking projects nowadays.

Future packing away the petition in a chest would possibly have inadvertently succeeded in hiding this impressive testomony to peacemaking, the spirit that dared hope for a global with out battle was once no longer suppressed in Wales. From the hush pilgrimages of the overdue Twenties to the march on Greenham Usual in 1981, to Twenty first-century projects such because the forming of Academi Heddwch and Heddwch ar Waith (Vacation Motion Wales), the paintings continues. Retelling this tale is a part of that paintings.

A century in the past, the enchantment referred to as on ladies “of this generation … to aid in the effort to hand down to the generations which come after us the proud heritage of a warless world”.

That duty is now ours.

Jennifer Mathers and Mererid Hopwood will speak about their untouched stock, Year Apêl-The Attraction, and the way the Welsh ladies’s hush petition can encourage the peacemakers of nowadays on the Hay Pageant on Thursday, Would possibly 30 2024.

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