William Henry Mainwaring (1884 – 18 May 1971) was a Welsh coal miner, lecturer and trade unionist, who became a long-serving Labour Party Member of Parliament.
[1] Mainwaring was born in Swansea and went to local schools,[2] leaving to work as miner in the South Wales coalfield.
[3] He was a member of the South Wales Miners' Federation, and through their sponsorship was able to continue his education at the Central Labour College in London where he studied economics.
[5] Mainwaring ran for the South Wales nomination for a candidate to be Secretary of the Miners Federation of Great Britain in 1924, but was narrowly defeated by A. J. Cook.
Mainwaring's name was immediately mentioned as a possible candidate, with rivals including Alderman David Lewis, Mrs Watts-Morgan (the widow of the former MP), and some local party figures.
[13] Mainwaring was selected, and faced opposition from Arthur Horner of the Communist Party and William Thomas, a local Liberal, in the byelection.
[17] In Parliament, Mainwaring concentrated on mining issues, calling in July 1933 for the Home Secretary to examine the circumstances of the Bedwas colliery dispute where miners and their families had been imprisoned for breaches of the peace.
The Communists caused some amusement when they appealed to Labour to withdraw their candidate to stop splitting the working-class vote.
[30] He criticised the Government for failing to direct industry to the "Special areas" in South Wales suffering unemployment, pointing to statistics which showed they had been developed elsewhere.
He supported an amendment to criticise the poor position of old age and widow pensioners in 1942, along with 48 other Labour MPs but against the wishes of the front bench.
[36] At the 1945 general election, Mainwaring faced a tough fight against Harry Pollitt who had kept up his connection with the Rhondda East constituency.
[4] Mainwaring was a strong supporter of the Government policy of fighting the Korean War, which he declared to be in the interests of workers of Britain.
In 1955 he denounced the assumption that the English "were in some peculiar way wholly foreign and alien to Wales", and ridiculed basing a nation on "poets, preachers and musicians".