THOMAS EVAN NICHOLAS (“Niclas y Glais”) was born in 1879 into an age in which imperialism was spreading across much of the world, led by British monopoly capital but with US and German capital increasingly demanding their place in the sun. 

The British raj was approaching its peak, while the British subjugation of Africa was on the verge of completion.

Nicholas began his life in Crymych, north Pembrokeshire, north-west of the south Wales coalfield which by then largely powered the British imperial navy. 

Those miners came to play a significant role in the rise of the British labour movement, especially when they established the South Wales Miners Federation in 1898. 

The “Fed” formed part of the bedrock of that movement, its political organisations such as the Independent Labour Party and then the mass Labour Party itself, and of the many institutions — the miners’ libraries, the Plebs League, the Central Labour College, weekly newspapers such Llais Llafur and the Rhondda Socialist — which mobilised and politically educated the cadre force of a militant working class.

This was the world into which Niclas y Glais was about to throw himself. 

But before that, he worked briefly in Treherbert before studying for the ministry at the Gwynfryn Academy in Ammanford. 

There he came into contact with the Christian socialist ideas of the Reverend RJ Campbell, the communist co-operatism of Robert Owen — which chimed with the tradition of co-operative working between the smallholders of his native locality — and the progressive Welsh patriotism, poetry and socialism of Robert Jones Derfel. 

After a brief stint as the minister of Welsh chapels in Llandeilo and Wisconsin, US, Nicholas arrived at the coal mining village of Glais in the Swansea valley. 

There, and even more so in Merthyr Tydfil as the editor of the Welsh-language columns of Keir Hardie’s paper, The Pioneer, Niclas encountered class warfare in all its naked brutality. 

In this first of the worlds of Nicholas, Glais, we see his dawning realisation in the poem Mae’r Byd yn Fwy na Chymru (“The World is Bigger than Wales”) and his attempts to provide the labour movement and its fight for social justice with divine justification, as in Weithwyr Fy Ngwlad (“Workers of My Country”). 

Within a few years of the publication of his first major poetry collection Salmau’r Werin (“Psalms of the Working People”), however, Nicholas is mocking the narrowness and sense of national superiority of patriotic poets. 

Echoing Hardie, he argued for a Welsh nationalism that rejected class collaboration, the British empire and the English monarchy in favour of class struggle, official status for the Welsh language, home rule and socialism.  

In Y Streic, Nicholas is full of anger and class hatred following the clashes between miners and imported police in Tonypandy and other towns and villages in 1910, in a south Wales under military occupation. 

He flayed the idle landowners, the rich, the “guardian of the peace” who “strikes down elderly women” and the soldiers who “walk the streets and terrorise the valley with their guns.”

From that moment on, he resolved to “breathe revolution into every man everywhere.”

The Great War between the imperialist powers created the conditions in which the first of the worlds of Niclas y Glais would vanish forever. 

In the first weeks of the slaughter, he wrote possibly the most powerful of all his poems, Dros Eich Gwlad (“For Your Country”), which savagely mocks the appeal to young Welsh workers — who like their fathers and grandfathers own not a single square inch of their country — to take the King’s colours. 

The second world of Niclas y Glais — Byd y Werin (“The World of the Workers”) — was born in the carnage of the Great War and the outbreak of the socialist revolution in Russia. 

By then, Nicholas was helping to organise the first trade union for farm workers in west Wales, building the Labour Party at the same time. 

He was defeated as the ILP candidate for Hardie’s old seat in Merthyr Tydfil in the 1918 general election, physically attacked in a brutal campaign won by a demagogic working-class jingo and the local Tory press.

He knew the working class was still in political transition from liberalism to labourism, but he also understood that the labour movement required a bold, visionary and uncompromising vanguard. His place was on the footplate with the Communist Party at its foundation, shovelling the coal in the heat, the sweat and the danger — not in the carriages or the guards’ van in the rear.

From 1920, his commitment to the party, the international communist movement and the Soviet Union was the central defining characteristic of his politics, his journalism and much of his poetry. 

Although workers were leaving the chapels in their thousands, just as Nicholas himself was abandoning the pulpit, he expressed the ideas of socialism and communism in religious metaphors. 

For instance, he portrayed Hardie and Lenin as Christ-like figures, come to lead the lost souls out of the wilderness, thereby drawing the wrath of Mammon upon their heads. 

His visit to the Soviet Union in 1935 confirmed his belief that the workers could build a new world of comradeship, co-operation and social justice. There was no need to wait for the next world after death. As Nicholas put it in a letter to Y Cymro, the system in Russia “reflects the religion of Christ more completely than our system here.” 

Certainly, Nicholas could not remain a pacifist in this, the second of his worlds. More than any other single issue, the war in Spain against international fascism compelled him to accept that there were times when military force was necessary in a just cause. He remained a lover of peace but ceased being a pacifist.

He played a leading role in the great popular crusade to send food, clothing and the volunteer fighters and medical staff of the International Brigades to defend the democratic Spanish Republic against the combined forces of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. 

After the defeat of the republic, he acted as the treasurer of a committee which successfully raised funds to place a memorial in the new Stalingrad hospital to the slain International Brigaders from Wales. 

In line with Britain’s Communist Party, he believed that nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, together with the emergence of mostly communist-led resistance movements against fascist occupation in central and western Europe, turned an imperialist war into a people’s war against fascism. 

The second world war certainly brought his own second world — “Byd y Werin” — to an end. Out of this second set of ashes would arise the third world of TE Nicholas.

He knew on whose side he stood as the two biggest nuclear powers confronted one another in a cold war which, should it turn hot, would wipe out whole cities and regions. 

Nicholas sat on the general body of the council and its British Peace Committee. Three Security Service (MI5) files on him — now in the National Archives — contain copies of intercepted letters and internal peace movement documents. 

His mail to the British Peace Committee was regularly read; his phone calls to the Communist Party headquarters in King Street, London, were recorded; and his involvement in the World Peace Council was monitored by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). 

Unlike the 1940s, the ’50s were not a fertile decade for Nicholas’s poetry. However, the arrival in Pembrokeshire of West German Nato tanks, and in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs of an invasion force organised by the United States, moved him to compose a sonnet in 1961. 

It drew comparison between the “soldiers of doom and the Yank in Cuba” and the “legions of Hitler and extinction in Wales.” 
He also opposed the plans to build the Wylfa nuclear power station.

In the sonnet Atomfa Môn (“Anglesey’s Atom Site”), he feared that it would blight the island. its economy and the Welsh language and culture there, poisoning the land, sea and sky.  

One of his last sonnets, in 1969, was to mark the investiture of the son of the queen of England as “prince of Wales.” “Syrcas Caernarfon” represents Niclas at his coruscating best. 
Fifty-eight years previously, he had mocked those Liberal “Welsh nationalists” who had attended an investiture in Caernarfon to “commemorate England’s supremacy over the Welsh” and “glorify a foreign prince.”  

Niclas died in 1971 and the world has certainly undergone another transformation since then. 

Since the demise of the Soviet Union and its allies, monopoly capitalism and the main imperialist powers have extended and tightened their grip on even more of the world, especially as the European Union and Nato have expanded eastwards and war has once again become a normal way of removing non-compliant regimes.

Niclas would understand more than most why organisations such as CND, Stop the War, the British Peace Assembly and the World Peace Council are still needed as much as ever.

He would also be rejoicing at the rise of China as major economic and political power in the “New World Order.” 

He would be insisting that the future of Wales, its communities, identity and Welsh language will never be secure on the basis of capitalism and its market forces. He would urge us to look beyond our national boundaries, too, for socialist unity and working-class solidarity against imperialism, Nato and the European Union. 

The question for today’s Welsh poets is: who will be the new Niclas, the new “Llais y Werin” (“voice of the people”) in the New World Order which grows ever more dangerous?