Rob Phillips outlines the work of the Welsh Political Archive to make a huge archive donated by the former Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who died in 2023, available to researchers.

Ann Clwyd, former Labour MP for the Cynon Valley, enjoyed a long and colourful political career. Prior to her election at a by-election in 1984 she had been a Member of the European Parliament for Mid and West Wales between since 1979, a journalist with the BBC and The Guardian and had also run a fashion boutique in Cardiff. She was an MP for 35 years.

Although she had periods on the Labour front bench, she was sacked twice and never became a government minister. She did however carve out a niche as a formidable backbencher, committee chair and champion of various causes including international development, human rights and the plight of the Iraqi Kurds. She never shied away from difficult or unpleasant issues and was a vocal backer of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This dismayed many of her colleagues on the left of the party but was entirely in keeping with her support for the Iraqi Kurds and her work with organisations such as INDICT and CARDRI to document human rights abuses by Saddam Hussein’s government in order to bring perpetrators to justice. Following the invasion, she was appointed as a Special Envoy on Human Rights to Iraq by Tony Blair.

Ann transferred a large archive to the Welsh Political Archive at the National Library of Wales between 2015 and 2020. This is a wonderful resource and contains a huge amount of material on many of Ann’s international interests including international development, human rights and Iraq. On domestic matters the archive reflects Ann’s interest in regulating private cosmetic surgery and in care standards in the NHS. There is plenty of material on Welsh affairs including the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal. While the run-down of coal mining was immensely damaging to Ann’s constituency, the archive documents work to deal with the legacy of the industry and highlights the campaign to save Tower Colliery, the last deep coal mine in Wales, from closure. As part of the campaign, Ann staged a sit in at the bottom of the pit. The miners invested their redundancy pay into a new company and successfully operated the mine as a workers’ co-operative until 2008.

Above: the photo-gallery shows the sorting team of Rhys Davies, Esyllt Jewell, Sian Smith, Rob Phillips, and the boxes containing the collection.

Ann was very keen that the collection should be as open as possible and that it should be used for study. Many of the topics covered require sensitive handling and contain a great deal of very sensitive personal data, but we’ve tried to follow that spirit as much as possible. Thanks to a generous contribution from Ann herself we were able to employ a dedicated project archivist, Siân Smith, which has sped up the process immensely. We also worked with Aberystwyth University to help them obtain funding for a PhD studentship which will study the collection along with others to research the British Left and the Middle East.

The collection is large. When complete we estimate it will be around 200 boxes so it is a challenging project. We have had two big sort sessions where a team of us have worked together to sort the collection into sub-fonds, series and files so that Siân has been able to work on the collection in more manageable chunks. Benjamin Woodburn was appointed to the studentship in March 2023 and began work in the Autumn. We are now two-thirds of the way through the archive project and we hope that the collection will be fully catalogued and fully available to researchers towards the middle of 2024. It’s a fascinating archive of a varied political career.

Rob Phillips is the Archivist responsible for the Welsh Political Archive at the National Library of Wales and is a member of the SSLH Archive and Resources Committee.