Communist mayor Annie Powell was celebrated at the weekend (8 June 2025) as a blue plaque was unveiled in her honour in the Rhondda Valley.
Rhondda Cynon Taf Mayor Councillor Sheryl Evans unveiled the plaque at the Soar Community Centre in the former mining village of Penygraig.
Members of the Pontypridd branch of the Communist Party were among a diverse audience at the ceremony.
Annie Powell was elected communist mayor of Rhondda in 1979, soon after Conservative Margaret Thatcher was elected as the first female prime minister of Britain.
Two firsts, within some two weeks, by two women, politically poles apart!
What was called the “spectacle of a communist mayor taking office during the first weeks of a new Tory government” added to the media frenzy, and Powell found herself at the centre of international headlines.
At the time, she was acclaimed worldwide as the first communist mayor ever elected in the whole of Britain — reported as far away as the New York Times.
Read more about the unveiling event and Annie Powell’s life in the recently published Morning Star articles:
