In the winter of 1921, a group of men gathered in a café in a small working class town. Almost all were colliers used to the hard life hacking coal from the rich seams of the south Wales valleys - the region that had powered the industrial revolution and underpinned the growth and wealth of the global British Empire. But few of the benefits of that wealth had trickled down to the people who produced it.
These men met in Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, to debate how could they change that. This was the launch of the Query Club, a semi-secret society that began examining socialist ideas and ended as a force which changed their town – and later, through their ideas, the whole country. One of those young debaters was Aneurin Bevan, the man who would go on to found the NHS and revolutionise housing for ordinary people when he became minister for health and housing two decades later.
It was revealed recently that MI5 followed him from around this time for 20 years, considering Bevan a firebrand left-winger linked to prominent communists. In the 1920s, Tredegar was a town like many in south Wales. Private collieries and iron works held a grip over the working people, with owners and managers powerful in local institutions such as the town council and hospital board.
Bevan, the son of a miner, had spent time underground and was all too familiar with the lack of control ordinary people had over their working lives and living conditions. The Query Club gradually came to realise that if they wanted to change things, they had to be where the power was. "The Query Club was this organisation which was Bevan and his comrades asking 'how do we actually achieve change here in Tredegar?
How do we try to influence things?'," said Dr Nye Davies. "I think they decided what we need to do is be on every single committee, every single board, every single institution that has some level of influence in the community and we need to get like-minded socialists on to those boards." Davies, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University who was written books on Bevan, believes the search for power was central to everything the Query Club wanted to achieve. One of its leading figures was Walter Conway, the only member over 30, and an orphan raised in the local workhouse.
Rather against the popular perception of neglect and brutality the name often evokes, the master of the house had taught Conway to read and write and given him a lifelong love of learning. This was something he shared in common with Bevan. In 1915, Conway beat 50 other applicants to become secretary of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society.
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