There has recently been a variation on Facebook of the myth that Churchill sent troops to shoot the miners in Tonypandy. It needs repeating that there is hard evidence that, though local magistrates among others wanted the riot put down by force, Churchill as Home Secretary deliberately held back troops, relying instead on a detachment of Met. Police and some cavalry.
Indeed, though Churchill's attitude to foreigners as, in Kipling's words, "lesser breeds without the law" was reprehensible, he would not have contemplated British troops shooting fellow Britons.
What seems to have happened is that the authentic atrocities involved in the Llanelli riots the year after Tonypandy have been attached to folk myths surrounding the latter.
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