A shot rings out. The group of young men stand their ground. “It’s blank” shouts one “They won’t shoot.” Another rifle crack. “It’s all right, they’ve only got blank cartridges”. Suddenly, a bullet slams into the throat of a man sitting on the wall, driving him backwards into the garden. Everyone runs, “That’s a bastard shot!” Blood splashes the grass. One of the men cries out as a bullet glances off his thumb, bringing down the man behind him. There is more firing. Three men are down. The two most seriously injured are carried into the house and are laid out, bleeding profusely, on the table in the middle room, where they die. Outside on the railway track Major Brownlow Stuart orders the soldiers of the Worcester Regiment, who have fired the shots, to withdraw to the railway station.These events occurred not in some beleaguered war zone, but in the back garden of a house in Llanelli High Street on 19th August 1911 during the first ever national railway strike. The last time troops on the British mainland fired on workers during an industrial dispute.
Neither of the two dead men Leonard Worsell and John "Jac" John were railway workers at all. Leonard was not even a Llanelli resident, he was a Londoner suffering from tuberculosis being treated at Alltymynydd sanatorium on weekend leave in the town. Jac was was mill worker at the Morewood Tinplate Works. The tinplaters turned out in force in support of the more poorly paid railway workers and were considered some of the most militant.
