Recollections Diverge

I have on numerous occasions found that recollections diverge. By this I mean that an account, a re-telling of happenstance, is subject to confirmation bias and personal perceptual preference. People have told me of an event, for example, which I was engaged in and the recollection which they verbalized strayed considerably from my own recollection of the same event.

My take home memory of the football last night was of the so-called role models taking off their silver medals. This morning the press are still saying that the England team are role models. Models of what? Sore losers? Petulance?

Otherwise, it was a close fought if slightly boring game, to a neutral observer like me. It was a game that Italy deserved to edge.

My take home memory is those people rejecting their silver medals.

No doubt people are waking up this morning a bit crestfallen and perhaps hungover. It is a strange part of the English psyche to over hype and then crash and burn. Pride comes before a fall and all that.

From Wikipedia

The Tonypandy Riots

The Miners Strike of 1910-11 was an attempt by miners and their families to improve wages and living conditions in severely deprived parts of South Wales, where wages had been kept deliberately low for many years by a cartel of mine owners.

What became known as the Tonypandy riotsof 1910 and 1911 (sometimes collectively known as the Rhondda riots) were a series of violent confrontations between these striking coal miners and police that took place at various locations in and around the Rhondda mines of the Cambrian Combine, a cartel of mining companies formed to regulate prices and wages in South Wales.

Reaction to the riots

Purported eyewitness accounts of alleged shootings persisted and were relayed by word of mouth. In some instances it was said there were many shots and fatalities. There are no records of any shots being fired by troops. The only recorded death was Samuel Rhys. In the autobiographical “documentary novel” Cwmardy, the later communist trade union organiser Lewis Jones presents a stylistically romantic, but closely detailed, account of the riots and their agonising domestic and social consequences. The account was criticised for its creative approach to truth. For example, in the chapter “Soldiers are sent to the Valley”, he narrates an incident, in which eleven strikers are killed by two volleys of rifle fire in the town square, after which the miners adopt a grimly retaliatory stance. In this account, the end of the strike is hastened by organised terror directed at mine managers, leading to introduction of a minimum-wage act by the government – hailed as a victory by the strikers. The accuracy of this account is disputed.


I grew up with the stories of how Churchill sent the troops in, and I heard word of mouth stories about the shootings. These were told to me by someone who worked in the pits concerned as did many of his brothers. He told me of working a 24-inch seam of coal and how hard it was. I used to look out from his room across the Rhondda to Tonypandy. It was kind of strange because I was going to a “posh” English prep school paid for by Nchanga Consolidated Copper Mines of Zambia. When I was asked at prep school what my politics were I said socialist, and many scoffed at me. Clearly, I was a pleb and a commie.

Churchill sent in the cavalry on mainland Britain, not so long ago.

I got this from the Times Higher this morning.

The new director of the UCL Institute of Education has said the centre “should be at the forefront of the decolonising education agenda”.

It is typical of selective blindness, how can you decolonise when you are in effect an occupying power, still!

If I am right, because of the property invasion of North Wales brought about by the pandemic, Meibion Glyndŵr are starting again to stir.

Recollections diverge, people make up their own version of events and imagine them to be comprehensively true.

It was ever thus.