Lord Tonypandy, who has died aged 88, was the 133rd Speaker of the House of Commons and the first known to a wider public through the broadcasting of Parliament. His lurking thespian qualities made him eminently suitable for the role, and he greatly enjoyed the job.
As Mr Speaker Thomas, he used his natural theatricality, nurtured by 40 years on Labour platforms and even longer in the pulpits of South Wales - party and chapel being the two institutions which decisively shaped him.
A dry wit combined with a folksy manner, a fine sense of timing and a melodious voice quickly made the holder of this traditionally aloof office a radio star after the broad- casting of proceedings began in 1977 -- one year into his six-year tenure. The ritual cry, "Order, Order," used to open BBC Radio's Yesterday in Parliament, became (with a Welsh accent) a household phrase, and Thomas, in Lord Hailsham's phrase, became "a national institution".
He had not wanted the deputy speakership, with the prospect of succeeding Selwyn Lloyd. As a natural chairman, he had been tipped for such advancement in 1964, but Harold Wilson's majority was too small to permit that luxury. Instead he went to the Home Office under Sir Frank Soskice; served briefly under a fellow Welshman of sorts, the "permissive" Roy Jenkins (not a natural ally); and after the 1966 election, moved to become Cledwyn Hughes's deputy at the Welsh Office. He was there during the Aberfan disaster in 1966, but in 1967 moved to the Commonwealth Office -- and was visiting Nigeria on the day the civil war with Biafra broke out.
Thomas was said to have been unhappy with British policy towards Nigeria, but did not resign. That was not his style. Instead, the peak of his ministerial career came between 1968-70 when he served his patron, Harold Wilson, as Secretary of State for Wales. They were close, and when Wilson was at logger-heads with Jim Callaghan, Thomas was very much in the Wilson camp against his old Cardiff rival; there was never great affection between Jim and George.
When Wilson returned unexpectedly to Downing Street in 1974, Thomas expected to return to the Welsh Office, where he had enthusiastically presided over the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarvon in 1969; 30 years on it seems an event from another world, but then it was judged a success.
But his outspoken attacks (while in office) on the Welsh Nationalists and on Labour's proposals for limited Welsh devolution had been reinforced by virulent newspaper articles in opposition. They prompted Wilson to deploy the more conciliatory legal talents of John Morris.
Politically, Thomas ; was right, as the disastrous rejection of Welsh devolution (by a ratio of 4-1 in 1979) helped bring Labour down and usher in Thatcherism. In 1997, the Welsh "Just Say No" campaign had two prominent patrons, Callaghan's old friend, the banker Sir Julian Hedge, and Viscount Tonypandy. It was his last campaign.
Back in 1974, Thomas had been offered "something better" by Wilson -- and so it proved to be. Thomas George Thomas (nickname: "Tommy Twice") was born in Port Talbot, the second son of a miner who died early from illness contracted in the first world war and aggravated by drink. That miner had already left home and his wife, Emma Jane, had moved to Trealaw, across the river from Tonypandy. George was the son singled out for education, so revered in the Rhondda, as the way out of the valleys. His own route took him first to Tonypandy Grammar; then to Dagenham as an uncertificated teacher; next to University College, Southampton, followed by a year at Rockingham Street School in the Elephant and Castle, South London -when he first visited the public gallery at the Commons. In 1932, he returned to teach in Cardiff.
Thomas was already a lay preacher and was gradually drawn into politics through the National Union of Teachers. Medically unfit for war service, he became a special constable and was elected to the union's NEC in 1942. Two years later, at his first attempt, he was runner-up for its presidency. But his union career was shortened by the lure of Westminster. He was nominated with young Barbara Betts (later Castle) for the dual seat of Blackburn, but was then approached to fight Cardiff Central, which he won in the Attlee landslide in 1945.
At one public meeting, a young man in the crowd announced that the Labour candidate had paid for his half-penny bottle of milk at school each day after he had seen the lad faint in class. Such reminiscences became part of George Thomas's rhetorical stock-in-trade. As a Welsh Nonconformist, he opposed Attlee's conscription policy and spoke against the tide in favour of pub and cinema opening on Sundays. It did him little harm at the polls. He had a reputation as a leftwinger, not diminished by a scrape in 1947, when he spoke for Greek guerrillas who had abducted him on a visit to Greece. "I was young and innocent," he said later.
By 1950 Callaghan, who had pipped him to the safer Cardiff seat in 1945, had become a junior minister, while George Thomas was only a noisy backbencher. One campaign he stuck to with substantial success in the end was lease-hold reform -- a major concern to South Wales people whose homes were in danger of reverting after 99 years to former coalmine-owners who held their freeholds.
If Thomas's career owed more to Methodism than to Marxism, it also owed much to his Mam. Though Emma Jane re-married, her son never married (though he was engaged twice) and the two became political allies to the irritation of some colleagues and the amusement of others. But she lived long enough to see "My Son George" -- "Mother's Pride" to his detractors -- become Welsh Secretary. When she died, at 91, in 1972, she had outlived all her children except George, and Cardiff saw its biggest funeral for years.
The 1970s isolated Thomas from Labour's pro-devolution drift, though not as the 1979 referendum showed, from Welsh voters. It proved no bar to his becoming Speaker in 1976, enjoying support among MPs and press.
Six weeks later came the arcane row over the "hybridity" of a Labour nationalisation measure, subject to a knife-edge vote and amended only with Labour defections. On the night of the third reading, Labour MPs sang the Red Flag in the Chamber and, in a symbolic gesture which looked more like an attempted assault, Michael Heseltine picked up the mace and offered it to the Labour benches. Mr Speaker Thomas suspended the sitting for 20 minutes. Heseltine apologised. Mr Speaker suspended it again - to allow tempers to cool. It was a baptism of fire without recent precedent. He was judged to have done well.
All Speakers are eventually said to be outstanding, but after the customary uncertain start. Mr Speaker Thomas gradually acquired a reputation which, old hands were to say when he retired, placed him pre-eminent for 50 years. (Madam Speaker Boothroyd is certain to have her adherents,) The arrival of television in the mid-1980s has raised the stakes for Speakers - and the glory.
Parliamentary wit travels badly. "Many people have an accent," he once quipped. "I wish I had one myself." But what Thomas was able to do was to judge the mood of the House and deflate tension with a gentle witticism. Often it was self-deprecating, but sometimes fierce, often pious and occasionally censorious. He was upset by the noise in the House, magnified by the microphones when broadcast. It brought him, so he often said, an indignant postbag.
Critics of Thomas's speakership were mainly on the back benches and the anti-consensus left and right of the major parties; they complained that he was instinctively too much of a government man, especially in his anxiety to show no bias against the Tories after Mrs Thatcher's accession in 1979.
Establishment man might be a better description, in the lace-curtain Welsh sense - and the Buckingham Palace sense, too. One thing which delighted him about his high office was friendship in high places. One such new chum was the Queen Mother, "Mam" in a tiara. Time and time again in interviews, the boyish glee shone through in phrases like "Fancy me, a miner's son..." or "a poor boy from Tonypandy" riding with the monarch or -- in a moving performance -- reading the lesson ("...and the greatest of these is charity") at the wedding of the Prince of Wales in 1981. It is a strain familiar in Labour history.
His critics had a point. It was evident during the Falklands crisis when the small "peace party" felt (despite figures produced to the contrary) that they had not a fair amount of debating time. But the record was actually more complicated. At the Welsh Office, he had combined attacks upon the nationalists with a greater accretion of power to his department, and obtained more money for the Welsh language (which he spoke only indifferently); as Speaker, he tried to uphold the dignity and powers of the House against the executive.
Speeches got shorter in his time, select committees with modest teeth were first established; MPs wanted both. He made little progress with reforming Prime Minister's Question Time -- or reforming Dennis Skinner; that most turbulent backbencher was an instinctive adversary with whom he often clashed. But Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP who fought the Welsh and Scottish devolution bills line by line for two years between 1977 and 1979 (thereby sustaining Labour in office), retained considerable respect for him.
Norman Tebbit once recalled that, as an obscure backbencher, he had twice been called to cross-examine Harold Wilson, then prime minister, after an evasive answer. The PM was cross, but Thomas later confided to Tebbit: "No one deserves an answer like that."
Retirement from the chair was delayed, according to rumour, by a government determined to prevent Bernard Weatherill's accession. It coincided with the end of the 1979 Parliament. But praise for "Our George" was fulsome from all quarters. Perhaps the most telling, was that from Robin Maxwell-Hyslop, a senior Tory and self- appointed guardian of Commons procedure, who said that the Clerks of the House had increasingly usurped the Speaker's functions, until the trend had been reversed by "the greatest Speaker in living memory".
Thereafter he retired to the Lords, raised eyebrows by taking an hereditary title (though Tonypandy Labour Party swallowed hard and sent its best wishes) and began a life of lectures, sermons, broadcasts and writing his autobiography - all of which he appeared greatly to enjoy -- all the way to the gala 80th birthday party for him in Cardiff's St David's Hall. He never formally left the Labour Party which made him, but his old Labour and old Welsh Labour instincts showed through in the years of modernisation.
Not only did he oppose Blairite devolution this year, he backed Sir Jimmy Goldsmith's Referendum Party campaign in the general election, appearing in a video campaign shoot. As he would have said, for a poor boy from the valleys, he ended up in exotic company.
Viscount Tonypandy (Thomas George Thomas), politician, born January 29, 1909; died September 22, 1997