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Some 40,000 Welshmen died during the First World War. The deaths were only one aspect of the tribulations which the Welsh, in common with the rest of combatant Europe, suffered as a result of the conflict.

Among the most important of them was the dislocation of the economy. Coal production, at its peak in 1913, had clearly reached an unsustainable level, but war demands and the amazing post-war boom ensured there was no rational reassessment of production.

The boom collapsed in 1921, a foretaste of the depression which would haunt the subsequent years. The war undermined allegiance to the Liberal Party and destroyed the optimism characteristic of pre-war Welsh society. Welsh nationality, so robust at the turn of the century, became something which needed to be defended and cosseted.

The war had a profound impact upon the countryside, striking the final blow which destroyed the estates of the landed gentry. Organised religion, a dominant feature of Victorian and Edwardian Wales, went into rapid decline, partly because of the cynicism caused by the activities of clerical recruiters.

The millenarian hopes inspired by the Communist seizure of power in Russia, and the expectation that the sacrifices of war would bring about a fairer society, made the immediate post war years a period of much unrest.

The South Wales Socialist Society was one of the constituent bodies of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Lenin considered the South Wales Miners' Federation to be the vanguard of a British revolution.

In 1919 the government seemed to be at the mercy of the coalminers who demanded the nationalisation of their industry, but adroit manoeuvres by Lloyd George ensured the survival of the old order. Despite a bitter strike in 1921 many of the advances made by the working class during the war were lost.

In 1926 the TUC organised a general strike in an attempt to force the government to accede to the miners' demands, but the Congress - a moderate body - did not really have the stomach for such a revolutionary course of action.

The collapse of the strike and of the long miners' struggle led to a decline in syndicalist beliefs, although the Communists, who were influential in parts of the coalfield, retained faith in the efficacy of industrial action.