A BLUE plaque will be unveiled in Rhondda on Friday June 6 in honour of social campaigner Annie Powell, who was elected communist mayor of Rhondda in 1979, soon after Conservative Margaret Thatcher was elected as the first female prime minister of Britain.

Two firsts, within some two weeks, by two women, politically poles apart!

What was called the “spectacle of a communist mayor taking office during the first weeks of a new Tory government” added to the media frenzy, and Powell found herself at the centre of international headlines.

At the time, she was acclaimed worldwide as the first communist mayor ever elected in the whole of Britain — reported as far away as the New York Times.

It’s a claim since denied, but there was no concern for such niceties when she was elected, nor, indeed, when she died and all the “first communist mayor in Britain” headlines were repeated.

Powell was interviewed by newspapers and broadcasters from all over the world. As a regular reader of the Morning Star, it’s easy to see how she delighted in the irony of being interviewed by so many right-wing newspapers.

But although Powell was new to an international audience, she was already an experienced politician.

A household name in Rhondda, she had served on the Rhondda Council for nearly 30 years as the communist councillor for Penygraig, so she was relaxed and communicative in newspaper and radio interviews.

Known for her integrity and commitment, Powell was an inveterate campaigner to improve life for the community around her.

From her early days, her mission was to relieve poverty in the valley. Popular across political parties — the Labour Party and Plaid Cymru as well as the Communist Party — she was able to defy the antipathy to communism in post-war Labour stronghold Rhondda to take pride of place as its communist mayor — a testament to the universal respect she had won across political boundaries.

Powell followed her parents into teaching, and it was as a student at Glamorgan Training College in Barry that, during the bitter 1926 General Strike, she saw for the first time the abject poverty of many of her fellow students whose fathers were unemployed miners.

This was confirmed in her first teaching jobs during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when she helped to relieve the difficulties of families of unemployed miners and worked tirelessly in committees of the National Union of Teachers.

Powell first joined the Labour Party, but it did not satisfy her urge for action and change, and she joined the Communist Party in 1938.

Intense industrialisation of the valley had made it a hot-spot of political radicalism, and in the 1930s, communism, always powerful in the unions, could compete strongly, too, in electoral politics.

In the post-war 1945 election, communist Harry Pollitt lost the parliamentary seat of Rhondda East by only 972 votes.

Communist parliamentary challenge came to an abrupt end in the post-war 1950 election, when the communist vote collapsed in the face of the fundamental legislation of the post-war Labour government.

When Powell took over as the long-time communist parliamentary candidate for Rhondda East in 1955, she knew she could not win.

She always came a poor second to Labour, but prided herself as always above the Conservative and Plaid Cymru candidates, and she never lost her deposit.

Powell was known as a communist far beyond Rhondda, long before she became famous as a communist mayor.

A famous story about her was when Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev had initiated a thaw in East-West relations and called an international conference in Moscow in 1960. Powell attended as a member of the British delegation and famously regaled Khrushchev with her rendering of the Welsh national anthem Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.

She was a member of the executive committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain for 20 years, chair of the Welsh committee for 25 years, and was called “Wales’s best-known and best-loved communist.”

Not that she always agreed with the Communist Party line. Indeed, she was well known for arguing against some Soviet policies and was outspoken about it.

She made the point that, although she wholeheartedly supported the way they looked after their people, she thought the country was by then strong enough to allow more individual freedom.

Powell was a woman in a man’s world. She bestrode politics in Rhondda when there were very few women among political leaders. But although she has been an inspiration to many women since, Powell was not part of the women’s rights movement, just stirring then, any more than was Thatcher. As Powell said, she had learnt to make the grade in a man’s world long before women’s lib. She just never questioned her right, as a person, to stand up and fight for people in her community to live better lives.

The blue plaque will hang at Soar Community Centre, home of the Penygraig Community Project and its associated charity Valleys Kids, which supports individuals, families and communities to create opportunities to achieve their full potential.

Powell was one of the first trustees of the Penygraig Community Project, and its work reflects her lifelong concerns.

The blue plaque application was made by Dr Chris Chapman, former chair of Women’s Archive Wales, who has done all the hard and detailed organisational work and worked with Darren Macey of Rhondda Heritage, and by me, who provided the historical justification for the honour.

I have also written about Powell for the Dictionary of Welsh Biography.

Jean Silvan Evans is a retired journalist and former lecturer at the Cardiff School of Journalism.