George Thomas, 1st Viscount Tonypandy

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Thomas George Thomas, 1st Viscount Tonypandy, PC (29 January 1909 - 22 September 1997) was a British Labour politician.

The second son of a Welsh miner, he was born in Port Talbot, and raised by his mother in the village of Trealaw in south Wales, just across the river from the town of Tonypandy. At the time, a good education was seen as the best means of escape from the valleys and he was chosen to attend Tonypandy Grammar School. After attending University College, Southampton, he worked as a teacher in both London and Cardiff.

Elected to Parliament in the Attlee landslide at the 1945 general election, he held the seats of Cardiff Central (1945–1950) and Cardiff West (1950-83) until his retirement from the Commons at the 1983 general election.

Thomas was one of the first on the scene of the Aberfan disaster, which occurred while he was a Minister at the Welsh Office. Thomas showed sympathy with the people of the village, bereaved and devastated by the calamity which cost the lives of 144 people, 128 of them children at the Pantglas Junior School. However, he subsequently insisted on taking over £150,000 from the charity fund established to assist the bereaved, in order to meet the cost of removing the remainder of the coal tip and the remaining tips which still loomed above the village of Aberfan. This money was susbequently returned to the fund in 1997, by the then Welsh Secretary Ron Davies, and even then returned without any financial interest.

As Secretary of State for Wales from 1968 to 1970, he presided over the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle in 1969.

During Thomas's term of office as Speaker of the House of Commons from 1976 to 1983, the first broadcasting of Parliamentary proceedings brought him unprecedented public attention, but he proved more impartial than party colleagues had expected. In 1983 he retired and was created Viscount Tonypandy, one of the last creations of a hereditary peerage. Thomas was always opposed to Welsh nationalism: one of his final areas of political activity was the public expression of opposition to the Blair government's devolution proposals of 1997. It was during this year that he also gave his very high-profile endorsement of Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party, believing that the European Union was compromising the sovereignty of Parliament. He also wrote the Foreword to Adrian Hilton's book on this issue, The Principality and Power of Europe, the only book he endorsed as a Peer, and the last before he died.

After Tonypandy's death, a former Welsh Labour MP, Leo Abse, created a controversy by alleging that Thomas had been homosexual and had been the victim of blackmail for this reason. Abse, the MP who introduced the private member's bill which decriminalised homosexuality in Britain, discussed this incident in his book Tony Blair: The Man Behind the Smile. He said that Thomas had paid money to blackmailers to keep information related to his sexual life secret. Abse said that he had once lent Thomas £800 to pay off blackmailers.

Throughout his career he remained a deeply religious man, and was a prominent member of the Methodist church. Known by the nickname "Tommy Twice" (from his full name), his Welsh-accented cries of "Order! Order!" as Speaker were familiar to a generation of Britons.

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Ernest Bennett	Member of Parliament for Cardiff Central 1945–1950	Succeeded by (constituency abolished)
Preceded by (new constituency)	Member of Parliament for Cardiff West 1950–1983	Succeeded by Stefan Terlezki
Political offices
Preceded by Cledwyn Hughes	Secretary of State for Wales 1968–1970	Succeeded by Peter Thomas
Preceded by Selwyn Lloyd	Speaker of the House of Commons 1976–1983	Succeeded by Bernard Weatherill
Peerage of the United Kingdom
Preceded by New Creation	Viscount Tonypandy 1983–1997	Succeeded by Extinct

Speakers of the House of Commons (20th Century)
William Court Gully | James William Lowther | John Henry Whitley | Edward FitzRoy | Douglas Clifton Brown | William Morrison | Harry Hylton-Foster | Horace King | Selwyn Lloyd | George Thomas | Bernard Weatherill | Betty Boothroyd