What Truly is "Tonypandy?"

What truly is "Tonypandy?" Grant and Carradine use the term all throughout The Daughter of Time to describe the outcome of certain historical events. Now, I know we have discussed the fiction versus history and what the true definitions are in class, so I won't pose it that way again. I believe we all came to the conclusion that history is a series of significant events that have been recorded, either by documentation, or audio and/or visual representation, to describe the past. Fiction is a fabrication of reality, which can sometimes seem realistic. Finally, historical fiction is using the fabricated world to tell the series of historical events.

I believe Josephine Tey uses historical fiction to tell her story of what she believed really happened to Richard III. Grant, the main character, is diving into all of this research that exists in the "real" world. All of the books, he uses and quotes from all had to be read by Josephine Tey herself before she could have put them into her novel. The author portrays herself as Grant in the story, and is bringing in other characters to help her solve the mystery of what really happened to Richard III.

But let's bring it back to Tonypandy, what is it? Grant presents the term tonypandy to Carradine, after he had informed Grant that the history we know of the Boston Massacre was fabricated into a larger event than what it actually was. We know it as a mass murder of Boston citizens after an uprising against the British soldiers stationed there, when it is revealed in the book that it was really only four people that had died. The story was exaggerated to get more press. Grant brought up the issue between the government of South Wales and looters, and how the story was exaggerated to make it seem that the government sent the military in on welsh miners. Grant used the name of the city, Tonypandy, that the riots took place in to describe events that were exaggerated in similar ways.

Tonypandy Riots of 1910 to 1911

So based off of Grant's and Carradine's examples of Tonypandy, I believe that it is the exaggeration of an event to get everyone to believe it is a "good" versus "bad" situation. The "good" being the victims, and the "bad" being the government. They speak of Tonypandy so much in this novel because they make the realization that the majority of the history of Richard III's time was written after his reign ended, which was in the Tudor reign, and the Tudor's were not very big fans of Richard III. Josephine Tey had to read through all of the Tonypandy herself to find her answer as to what really happened to Richard III, so she published her struggle of reading in between the lines in the novel as Grant's struggle.