Edward “Ted” Williams was one of many socialist Conscientious Objectors working in the collieries of South Wales during the First World War. An area with a strong socialist tradition, it was a hotbed of organised resistance to both the war and the conscription that followed - but surprisingly was home to relatively few Conscientious Objectors.

Why this was forms part of the story of Ted’s Objection to war. Ted was the Secretary of the local branch of the No-Conscription Fellowship and a member of the Independent Labour Party, making him well connected to anti-war politics and an integral part of the Conscientious Objector and war resister movement in Wales. It seems though that he was not, technically, a Conscientious Objector. Ted may have applied to his local Tribunal for exemption as a CO in 1916, though no records have survived. What is known is that he was granted an exemption on the grounds that he was undertaking war-essential work. Sub-surface colliery workers were largely either automatically exempt or immediately granted exemption from conscription by their Tribunals in an effort to keep up the coal supply to feed both domestic and military requirements. Ted, along with thousands of other anti-war, anti-conscription socialist miners, was made exempt not because of any political or moral objection to war, whatever his opinions on the matter, but because he was judged as invaluable to the war effort. Such an exemption may have rankled with men who wanted no part in the war on political grounds, but enabled them to do what Absolute Exemption would have entitled any CO to do - stay in their jobs, while registering a consistent and deeply held opposition to the war.

Ted worked in one of the many pits around Pontypridd for the rest of the war, and, given his membership of the ILP and NCF, was probably a participant in the wave of strikes and protests around pay and intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918-1920. He died in 1963.