Thanks Dad…
When the BBC wanted to make a film to commemorate 70 years of Cwmbran New Town, it was no surprise that amongst their interviewees was veteran Labour councillor Nye James. Nye and his late wife, Maris, were part of the generation of young couples who moved to Cwmbran in the 1950s, making homes for their families in the new town that promised a different life.
To those who knew him, it was no surprise that Nye talked to the BBC about housing, and the standard of housing the new town offered. His roots were sunk deep into the practical, domestic socialism of the generation who grew up in the welfare state Nye Bevan campaigned for and helped create. He was also talking about his choices, his experiences.
As the son of a miner and community activist from Cwmfelinfach, Nye’s world was Bevan’s world, and his championing of decent homes, secure work and trades union rights was a reflection of that tradition. Nye the young man went from his National Service in the RAF, where caring for casualties deeply affected him, to a job, like so many of his new neighbours, at Girlings in Cwmbran. He went on to become a local government officer, a town and borough councillor, and a stalwart of his local government trade union, staying true to the values of his youth.
For the impatient younger generation of left wingers who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s Nye might have seemed an unlikely radical, but his brand of municipal socialism, and his commitment to it, was a key strand in the place making that helped Cwmbran avoid the new town failures that dogged similar experiments elsewhere.
Nye was not alone in his experience of local politics; Maris was also a Labour councillor and played a full role in the church. They brought up a family which was central to Nye’s view of himself, and he was never happier than when hosting family reunions made more challenging as his children pursued their careers far from home.
I’m writing about my dad of course, but in the third person. That’s part of the experience of being the child of a political and trade union activist, that the person who lives in your house is not just the person the outside world perceives. It’s also part of growing up that I was one of that generation of self identified left wingers who could only be so ‘radical’ because we took for granted the world that our parents had made.
People are made by the milieu in which they exist as well as the economics of survival. Matters of faith, to dad, were a sideshow, and perhaps a reminder of the compulsory anglicanism that marked out his school life and national service. He was happily tolerant of Maris’s deep and abiding faith, and moved closer to the church in old age as his own certainties about Labour wavered, but also, I suspect, because he saw in a revitalised church some parts of the Labour movement he believed mattered, including a growing commitment to community work, to activism, and the growth of voluntary ministry. His sister was an Anglican priest who founded a church in a pub that was once a miners institute; there’s a lot to unpack in that story about community, place and activism that the left in Britain might need to address. I think Dad certainly did, and drew conclusions from it.
How could he not? Nye brought up five children; two of them are ordained, and one of his grandchildren will shortly follow. When I resolved to step out of active politics as a councillor, and not seek to be elected again, to question whether Labour had the answers, Dad was one of the voices who encouraged me to focus elsewhere. In later life he surprised me with his tolerant and pragmatic understanding of queer life events that reminded me strongly that my generation did not invent queerness as an experience, even if we are busy trying to define the language and ideas that better explain our world, and those experiences. I never heard him say, this is my truth, tell me yours, but as I grew to understand him it seemed closer to his praxis than I would have assumed. In reflection, he couldn’t have been a lay official of his union for so long without listening to and being able to represent the views of all the membership.
In a world where it’s too easy to see politicians as only their public face Nye was an anachronism, someone who was never really not a politician . As a devoted rugby fan he was never happier than when he was at Rodney Parade with family and friends around him, and he cultivated a social hinterland around Pontnewydd and Cwmbran that overlapped and fed into his sense of public service.
By the time he retired from local politics to care for Maris in her last illness Nye will have seemed to some to be a man out of time, left behind by the politics of a new era and a new world. A decade on, it would seem that the world Nye has now left still needs those values that set his political compass, around building communities on good housing, secure jobs and a sense of belonging that could include the whole community. His sense of place, of purpose, and of neighbourliness was utterly authentic. On the day of his funeral I walked up the street where I was born, to be greeted by neighbours, the children of mam and dad’s neighbours, who wanted to talk not just about the politician, but the man who, even in old age, went up and down the row of houses putting out and taking back in his neighbour’s bins, because that was what a good neighbour did.
In my work, part of what I try to do is also to think about and enable places that have a purpose, which is to engender community, to make neighbourliness possible, and to think about the building blocks of those places; jobs, homes, education and the possibility of a full and inclusive life. Dad would, I hope, approve.
