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 Liberty glowing within the daylight. Bitterly chilly wind, vibrant sunshine. At lunch, a press man got here to me and mentioned: ‘Mrs Griffiths, I’m from the press.’ ‘I’ve nothing to say,’ I mentioned. ‘Oh!’ mentioned he, ‘we all know your story of the Ladies of Wales motion, we would like solely your images – will you come to the highest deck when you’ve completed?’ So [we] trotted as much as the highest deck top quality, the place we discovered 4 burly photographers awaiting us.

March 12 1924, Los Angeles: A letter was handed to me as I left the station – an nameless letter, telling us to get out of america.

100 years in the past, Annie Hughes Griffiths travelled from her native Wales to the US, visiting all over the place from New York and Washington DC to San Francisco and Los Angeles. However whereas the diary of her journey describes some typical vacationer must-sees – Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, Golden Gate Bridge and Lincoln Memorial – this was no abnormal trip, and Hughes Griffiths no abnormal vacationer.

She was a part of a delegation of 4 Welsh girls tasked with delivering what the South Wales Gazette described as a “monster petition” – one which seemingly would have stretched for seven miles if its pages of signatures had been positioned finish to finish. The petition was an attraction for world peace, from the ladies of Wales to the ladies of America.

This whirlwind US go to was the fruits of a six-month marketing campaign that had seen greater than 400 native organisers go door-to-door gathering signatures in cities and villages all through Wales. In all, they gathered 390,296 signatures – which might be a powerful achievement even at this time, when the web and social media join us immediately with individuals world wide. However this was 100 years in the past, at a time when automobiles and landline telephones had been nonetheless objects of curiosity.

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

Hughes Griffiths and her fellow peace missionaries (all of whom paid for the journey themselves) introduced their petition to America’s main girls’s organisations and later met the US president, Calvin Coolidge, contained in the White Home. However whereas many welcomed these pioneering girls from throughout the Atlantic, others – together with the nameless letter author Hughes Griffiths describes in her diary – had been deeply against the thought of the US taking a lead position in worldwide initiatives, even these geared toward stopping warfare.

Regardless of the publicity the petition achieved on either side of the Atlantic on the time – and the creation of lasting institutional and private networks between Welsh and American peace campaigners – the story of this extraordinary effort has lengthy since light from our collective reminiscence. It doesn’t seem in historical past books even in Wales, and neither is it taught in colleges.

We’re the editors of a brand new ebook, Yr Apêl-The Enchantment, which tells this forgotten historical past, due to painstaking analysis by the ebook’s contributors who combed by means of the diaries and letters of these girls (and a few males) who had been the driving drive behind the peace petition, in addition to newspaper accounts and public information from the Twenties.

There have been variations between the numerous 1000’s of Welsh girls who signed the petition: language, faith, political affiliations, and socio-economic circumstances. However these variations had been unimportant compared to what united them: the dream of a world with out warfare.

Planning the petition

The affiliation of ladies with the reason for peace was nothing new. It had been the cornerstone of the pre-first world warfare worldwide girls’s peace motion that explicitly linked peace with the growth of civic rights to girls – particularly, however not solely, the fitting to vote. The logic was that if girls had been in a position to play a bigger position in public life and in political choices, there could be extra consideration dedicated to peaceable technique of resolving disputes.

Some 40,000 troopers from Wales had died within the first world warfare, whereas lots of their 230,000 compatriots who additionally fought had returned with life-changing bodily accidents and “shell shock” (post-traumatic stress dysfunction). The warfare’s devastating results on Welsh households and communities instilled a widespread dedication that such a battle ought to by no means once more be permitted.

For some, the reply lay in a private dedication to pacifism. Others seemed to political events: the Labour get together in Wales skilled a surge of help that just about doubled the variety of MPs it despatched to Parliament between 1918 and 1922, together with a number of anti-war activists.

On the identical time, there was recognition of the urgent want for some form of institutional technique of resolving worldwide disputes – the place nations could possibly be introduced collectively to settle their variations by discussions held round a negotiating desk, quite than battles within the trenches. The newly established League of Nations held out the hope of offering the mandatory furnishings for peace.

Created by the Treaty of Versailles that formally introduced an finish to the primary world warfare, the League of Nations (1920-1946) was envisioned as a sensible technique of stopping future warfare. It was greeted with nice enthusiasm in Wales, together with by David, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, three siblings with private expertise of the horrors of warfare – David as an officer, Gwendoline and Margaret as volunteer nurses in a French area hospital.

All believed within the league’s potential to remodel world politics. And, due to the big wealth that they had inherited from their industrialist grandfather, David Davies of Llandinam, they may present sensible help for efforts to understand that potential. In 1919, they sponsored the world’s first chair in Worldwide Politics on the College Faculty of Wales, Aberystwyth. Three years later, one other donation by David Davies (the youthful) secured the long-term way forward for the Welsh department of the League of Nations Union – then Britain’s largest and most influential civil society organisation devoted to peace through the interwar interval.

However whereas this raised consciousness and help for the goals of the league inside Wales, its world mission wanted the energetic participation of all nations of the world – or it will by no means advance past dreamy rhetoric to present actual hope for a extra peaceable future. And from the start, the governments of some nations had been unwilling to hitch the league – together with essentially the most highly effective nation of all, america.

Accumulating signatures

In some situations, three and 4 visits had been made to the identical homes earlier than all of the signatures had been secured. With only a few exceptions, the woman canvassers had been very properly obtained. (Native newspaper report, Maesteg – December 1923)

Gwilym Davies, a retired Baptist minister and honorary director of the Welsh League of Nations Union, was a visionary – a person not solely dedicated to the reason for peace, however with a expertise for creating novel and fascinating methods of bringing the problem to the eye of the broader public.

In 1922, he had urged that younger individuals in Wales would possibly compose a message of “peace and goodwill”, and use the brand new expertise of radio to broadcast it to their youthful friends world wide. His suggestion was taken up and commenced an annual apply that continues to today, now led by the Urdd Gobaith Cymru (Welsh League of Youth).

The next yr, on March 7 1923, Davies wrote to Mary Ellis, a fellow peace activist and solely the second girl to be appointed as an inspector of faculties by the Division of Training for Wales. Davies’ letter contained this deceptively simple-sounding proposal:

Wouldn’t it be potential for the Ladies of Wales to method the Ladies of America, and inform them frankly of their concern for the way forward for civilisation?

By Could 1923, Davies’ proposal had been formally adopted by the Welsh League of Nations Union, and an govt committee shaped instantly. Whereas the objective of reaching world peace couldn’t have been extra bold, their plan was pragmatic: they’d name on girls within the US to steer their leaders to hitch the League of Nations.

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Each girl in Wales over the age of 18 was to be approached, to have the goals of the attraction defined and to be given the chance to help it by including their signature. As many supporters and advocates as potential can be enlisted to attain this monumental activity – within the many distant, rural areas of Wales in addition to its cities and villages.

But simply two paid organisers, Mary Ellen Pritchard and Ethel Elizabeth Poole, oversaw your entire mission all through the north and south of Wales respectively. Pritchard, widow of the previous mayor of Pwllheli, regarded the work as “a calling from God”. Poole, the daughter of a soldier, had a extra private motivation to work for worldwide peace: her brother had been killed in France in 1916 on the age of 26.

Public conferences had been held to unfold phrase of the marketing campaign upfront of the door-to-door canvassing. Pritchard and Poole spoke at many of those occasions, together with Gwilym Davies and Ellis. Whereas the impression given by each journalistic and private accounts of those conferences suggests they engendered an excessive amount of enthusiasm, the next native newspaper report of a gathering in Holywell signifies there could have been some lingering animosity in the direction of the campaigning girls, on account of the combat for girls’s suffrage:

Mr H.T. Roberts mentioned that at one time he had been a lot against girls’s suffrage, however now he noticed how mistaken he had been. Right here was a query by which the ladies of Wales had extra proper to say something than anybody else.

Every of the 1000’s of sheets of paper the organisers used to gather particular person signatures was printed with the phrases of the attraction in Welsh or English, so girls may learn it for themselves earlier than deciding whether or not so as to add their signatures – or have it learn to them within the case of those that had been illiterate. These phrases included the next plea:

We communicate merely as the ladies of Wales – the daughters of a nation whose glory it has been to cherish no hatred in the direction of any land or individuals, and whose need is for the approaching on Earth of the reign of fellowship and goodwill. We lengthy for the day when the affairs of countries shall be topic now not to the decision of the sword. And we really feel that the daybreak of the Peace which shall endure can be hastened had been it potential for America to take her place within the Council of the League of Nations.

The petition’s organisers typically walked for miles within the wind and rain to make sure no homes of their space had been neglected. The climate in November 1923, when many of those signatures had been collected, was apparently very stormy, and a number of the petition sheets present indicators of getting been moist, along with the ink stains and finger marks. As Annie Hughes Griffiths would later clarify to her American viewers:

There are kinds smudged with ink as a result of they had been taken from home to deal with within the rain. There are kinds which aren’t so clear as we must always like them to be, however they had been dealt with from door to door, and there are signature kinds which the canvassers took out to lonely locations, the place the signatures had been obtained after a stroll of a dozen miles.

There’s a touching story about two neighbours, each dwelling in appreciable poverty, who pooled their restricted assets to purchase a shared pen and pot of ink, so they’d be prepared when the petition got here to their doorways.

Most of the girls who signed had misplaced family members within the first world warfare. The son of Julia Ann Heywood of Trearddur Bay, Anglesey, had been killed on the Western Entrance in 1916. The brother of Jennett Bragg of Porthcawl was 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 Court docket, Brecon, had been killed inside a couple of weeks of one another in 1918.

By the tip of January 1924, the method of canvassing for help was completed: 390,296 signatures had been collected. The 1000’s of petition sheets carrying all these signatures had been rigorously positioned in an oak chest designed particularly for the aim. Two copies of the attraction textual content had been written in stunning calligraphy and positioned in binders manufactured from gilded Moroccan leather-based. One copy was to journey to the US to be introduced with the petition sheets, whereas the opposite would stay in Wales.

Taking the petition to America

Planning and preparation for the US journey had begun even earlier than the attraction was adopted – led by Mary Ellis, who spent months exchanging letters with leaders of the American girls’s peace motion. In December 1923, she set off for New York Metropolis because the vanguard for the opposite members of the Welsh girls’s delegation, who had been to comply with in February.

In New York, Ellis met a number of the most well-known girls in America campaigning for social and political change: Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Ruth Morgan, Carrie Chapman Catt and Eleanor Roosevelt. Every had honed their advocacy expertise through the lengthy combat for girls’s suffrage, which was (partially) gained in 1920 by the ratification of the nineteenth Modification to the US Structure. By 1924, they had been directing their efforts to the reason for worldwide peace.

Because of the correspondence that Ellis carried out with Gwilym Davies, her impressions of those main American figures have been preserved. Of her assembly with Catt, she wrote:

It could have achieved you good to see the fantastic gentle on Mrs Catt’s face as I advised her merely what our little message meant … She was completely thrilled with the story of our memorial [petition].

However it was Laidlaw, a formidable organiser with intensive contacts within the American girls’s motion, who proved a very worthwhile contact for Ellis. She ensured that dozens of ladies’s organisations lent their help to the Welsh girls’s attraction. It was additionally Laidlaw who organized for the Welsh delegation to be obtained by the US president on the White Home – Ellis would later describe Laidlaw because the “fairy godmother” of the attraction.

On February 2, the remainder of the Welsh delegation boarded a prepare at London’s Euston station certain for Liverpool, with well-wishers crowding the platform and congratulatory telegrams arriving from the previous prime minister David Lloyd George, amongst others.

Chosen to steer this delegation was Annie Hughes Griffiths (then usually known as Mrs Peter Hughes Griffiths), a charismatic determine and a gifted public speaker who was comfy speaking in each English and Welsh. The chair of the Welsh League of Nations Union and president of its girls’s committee, Hughes Griffiths was already well-known in Wales for supporting many features of Welsh cultural life, together with her work documenting conventional people songs. She was additionally properly related in Welsh political circles, thanks partially to her first husband, Thomas Edward Ellis, who had been a Liberal member of parliament.

The youngest member of the delegation was university-educated Elined Prys, who had achieved intensive work with refugees in Romania on behalf of the Younger Girl’s Christian Affiliation (YWCA) after the warfare. Additionally a part of this travelling group was Gladys Melhuish Thomas from London –whereas not a part of the official delegation, she joined the journey as a travelling companion for her pal Hughes Griffiths.

Simply earlier than leaving for the US, Hughes Griffiths gave an interview to Welsh day by day newspaper The Western Mail, describing the Welsh girls’s attraction as being certainly one of “nice ethical drive when it’s remembered that it’s the results of a nation’s voluntary effort”. The petition, she mentioned, represented a brand new chapter in a protracted custom of peace-making historical past in Wales.

How the ladies had been obtained

Once we reached land, a number of leaders of American girls’s organisations met us carrying bunches of daffodils, whose patches of vibrant yellow first caught our eyes among the many throng on the touchdown stage. Our hostesses’ amazement was nice after they noticed Mrs Peter Hughes Griffiths additionally holding a bunch of daffodils, which had efficiently traversed the Atlantic within the chilly storage chamber!

After per week crossing the Atlantic, the RMS Cedric – as soon as the world’s largest ocean liner – docked in New York. Ellis had written to warn Hughes Griffiths and Prys that they’d be the main target of consideration after they arrived, and that they need to count on to be photographed for the American newspapers – “so put in your prettiest and smile whenever you land!”. Within the passages quoted above and beneath, Prys described the scene on the dock and the welcome that greeted them in a dispatch from America, revealed within the Western Mail:

The automotive which met us was ornamented with daffodils. From the second we entered it, we had been whirled away into such a succession of visits and receptions as solely American hospitality is aware of learn how to bathe on its visitors.

The Welsh girls’s delegation spent per week in New York, networking with American girls peace campaigners and attending social occasions. Hughes Griffiths gave quite a few press interviews and speeches – most notably on February 19 1924, when greater than 400 girls representing over 60 American girls’s associations with a mixed membership of greater than 16 million gathered within the grand ballroom of the Biltmore Resort in midtown Manhattan, to witness the opening of the wood chest and the circulation of the petition sheets for the primary time. On this speech, she paid tribute to the numerous abnormal Welsh girls who had lent their names and their help to this distinctive attraction for peace:

There are signatures of ladies of 90 years of age and over – [including] certainly one of a girl of 101 – who had been very anxious that the memorial shouldn’t be despatched to America with out their names. Our younger college girls of 18 years previous have signed, however there’s additionally many a cross signifying the mark of approval of these girls who of their youth 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 warfare and now sleep quietly within the blood-drenched fields of France – with every signature, many a tear.

The success of the Biltmore Resort occasion exceeded all hopes and expectations – as Hughes Griffiths mirrored in her diary entry. “It was a really thrilling gathering and one which, in our wildest flights of creativeness, we’ve by no means considered on such a complete scale.” The following day, Ellis wrote about it in a letter to Gwilym Davies:

Mrs G [Hughes Griffiths] made a fantastic speech in each sense of the phrase … When she learn the memorial, Miss Prys and I stood up. I felt completely pent up with emotion … The reception by the American girls was unimaginable – they listened to each phrase and their faces had been a examine to see. Probably the most fantastic factor is absolutely the understanding of our personal message and mission.

From New York, the delegation went to Washington DC the place they had been photographed on the steps of the White Home and met with President Coolidge. Hughes Griffiths secured from the president a promise that the petition and its specifically commissioned oak chest can be given over to the safekeeping of the Smithsonian Establishment, America’s nationwide museum, training and analysis complicated. Right here it will keep for nearly a century, unknown to new generations of Welsh men and women throughout the Atlantic.

Having achieved their mission of delivering the attraction to the ladies of America, the 1924 peace delegation went their separate methods: Ellis to go to American faculties, and Prys to reconnect with mates from her work with the YWCA and the Crimson Cross in Romania. Hughes Griffiths, accompanied by her pal Gladys Thomas, launched into a two-month peace tour of the US by prepare, all the way in which to California and again – assembly girls’s teams, peace campaigners and representatives of Welsh communities, and giving but extra speeches and interviews to the press in regards to the Welsh girls’s peace attraction.

It was in the direction of the tip of this pan-American tour that Hughes Griffiths was handed an nameless letter telling her to “get overseas”. Though she passes over this incident flippantly in her diary entry for that day, the episode reveals the power of American isolationist feeling on the time. Whereas many enthusiastic American supporters of the League of Nations wished to see the US play a lead position in future efforts to forestall world warfare, others blamed Europe for dragging their nation into warfare. These feared that US membership of the league would solely result in extra pricey and lethal worldwide entanglements.

The Welsh delegation and their attraction landed squarely in the course of these tensions, and the American girls who helped Ellis organize their go to had sophisticated political waters to navigate. Harriet Laidlaw, for instance, was fast to see the publicity worth of a direct, women-to-women attraction for peace, but took care to emphasize the occasion on the Biltmore Resort as a basic plea for worldwide peace by means of sisterhood, whereas taking part in down the attraction’s affiliation with the League of Nations.

The Welsh girls’s voyage to America cast lasting bonds between the Welsh and American girls’s peace actions, and impressed the creation of a brand new US peace organisation, the Nationwide Committee for the Trigger and Remedy of Conflict, which turned America’s most influential peace organisation of the Twenties. Carrie Chapman Catt, certainly one of its founders, later described its work as “a manner of returning the praise” to the ladies of Wales for his or her efforts in the direction of worldwide peace.

However whereas many ladies on either side of the Atlantic continued to consider within the League of Nations’ potential for peace, the political temper within the US was unfavourable. Progressive causes, together with worldwide efforts to advertise peace, had been more and more being labelled “subversive” and considered with suspicion, together with by establishments of the US authorities such because the Conflict Division and the Bureau of Investigation (which later turned the FBI).

The US by no means did be a part of the league, and by the late Thirties the risk to peace posed by Nazi Germany and different Axis powers meant few had been sympathetic to the argument that the nations of the world may and would work collectively to forestall battle. Though lots of the concepts related with the league had been resurrected within the United Nations and related post-1945 establishments, by then the Welsh girls’s attraction had been forgotten by all besides these most carefully concerned in it.

The petition’s rediscovery

One summer time day in 2014, a seek for examples of Welsh peace activism within the collections of the Welsh Centre for Worldwide Affairs (WCIA, previously the headquarters of the Welsh League of Nations Union) turned up a discovery past anybody’s wildest creativeness.

Within the magnificent library of the Temple of Peace and Well being in Cardiff, the WCIA’s then-director, Martin Pollard, withdrew a slender brown backbone from between reviews of statistical reviews in regards to the arms commerce within the Thirties. Manufactured from Moroccan leather-based and apparently by no means beforehand recorded as a part of the library’s assortment, the illuminated gold leaf inscription on the entrance cowl recognized it as: “The memorial from Wales signed by 390,296 girls in Wales and Monmouthshire, to the ladies of america of America.”

Contained in the leather-based binding was the textual content of the attraction, written in immaculate calligraphy and expressing the anguish, hopes and desires of a era of Welsh girls who had been uniting in a name for peace. Susie Ventris-Subject, who adopted Pollard as WCIA director, later recalled:

It was a panoramic second – spellbinding, perplexing. A Welsh peacebuilding motion of a scale past any in dwelling reminiscence. How may such a narrative be hidden to historical past? How was such a document ‘misplaced’ proper right here in plain sight? What of the signatures – did they nonetheless exist? If that’s the case, the place? So many questions … how may we uncover the story behind it?

Discovering the textual content of the attraction was solely step one in a protracted and complicated journey of rediscovery that is still ongoing. A cascade of essential discoveries has stored this analysis shifting forwards, together with the realisation that an previous {photograph} displaying 4 girls standing on the outside steps of a constructing, with certainly one of them holding what seems to be a big, opened ebook, was in actual fact the Welsh girls’s delegation in Washington DC – the ebook was the reward copy of the morocco-bound attraction.

After years of collaboration underneath the steering of Academi Heddwch Cymru (Wales’s peace institute) between grassroots organisations together with Heddwch Nain Mam-gu (Our Grandmothers’ Peace) 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 by employees within the Nationwide Library of Wales with help from volunteers, and we’re getting tantalising glimpses of the discoveries that await us when all of the signatures are digitised and accessible to look on-line.

Already, the thoroughness of the petition organisers and their dedication to succeed in as many ladies as potential comes by means of very clearly. Organisers in Caerphilly, for instance, even acquired signatures from girls within the native isolation hospital.

As soon as the signatures are transcribed, it will likely be a lot simpler to cross-reference particular person names with the Welsh census and different public information, opening up new avenues of analysis into the lives of the 390,296 girls who believed, within the phrases of the attraction, that “the longer term is large with hope if we, as the ladies of this era, do our half”.

Inspiring us 100 years later

A century later, we’re increase a extra holistic image of the ladies who performed essential roles on this story – specifically, how they regarded the reason for ending struggling in warfare as intrinsically linked to ending different types of struggling, reminiscent of human trafficking, and the way in which so lots of them continued to be concerned within the seek for worldwide establishments and practices to create the fitting situations for forging peace.

However maybe some of the outstanding achievements of the Welsh girls’s peace petition was that it was in a position to bypass the formalities of governments and officers, and communicate immediately as a “nation’s voluntary effort” (to make use of Hughes Griffiths’ phrase). This was an try to create a extra peaceable world that was based mostly on one nation’s girls reaching out to a different’s. In taking this direct method, it was the primary peace-making effort of its sort.

Some would possibly query the worth of the Welsh girls’s attraction, because the goal of persuading the US to hitch the League of Nations was by no means realised. However that, we consider, can be a short-sighted response. Reasonably, it ought to absolutely encourage us to mirror on what we are able to do to help peacemaking initiatives at this time.

Whereas packing away the petition in a chest might need inadvertently succeeded in hiding this outstanding testomony to peacemaking, the spirit that dared hope for a world with out warfare was not suppressed in Wales. From the peace pilgrimages of the late Twenties to the march on Greenham Widespread in 1981, to Twenty first-century initiatives such because the founding of Academi Heddwch and Heddwch ar Waith (Peace Motion Wales), the work continues. Retelling this story is a part of that work.

A century in the past, the attraction known as on girls “of this era … to assist within the effort at hand right 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 talk about their new ebook, Yr Apêl-The Enchantment, and the way the Welsh girls’s peace petition can encourage the peacemakers of at this time on the Hay Pageant on Thursday, Could 30 2024.

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