mining industry generally, became Davies's parliamentary hallmark. In December 1934, he rebuked the Conservative MP Nancy Astor when she referred to Merthyr as having "no social consciousness or initiative to do anything". Davies replied: "I object to irresponsible and brutal charges coming from people whose knowledge is derived from the enjoyment of vast wealth, especially when I am not certain that they have made their contribution towards producing that wealth". In 1934, two years after his wife Margaret's death from cancer, Davies married Sephora Davies, a schoolteacher from Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen in Carmarthenshire who shared Davies's political outlook. The couple lived at Gwynfryn Park Terrace in Merthyr Tydfil, and had two sons. In November 1936, having been returned in the 1935 general election with an increased majority, Davies ridiculed the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, for his refusal to meet a delegation from the National Unemployed Workers' Movement's 1936 Hunger March, which included a large contingent from South Wales: "A bigger man would meet these people who have tramped the roads of this country and would show that he had sympathy with them". In 1938, having modified his earlier position, Davies supported a bill introduced by the Labour opposition for the nationalisation of the coal industry. Miners worked, he said, in intolerable conditions to ensure that cheap raw material was available to industry. Reasonable wages and working conditions would never be granted by private coal-owners. The bill was defeated. As Europe moved towards war in the late 1930s, Davies opposed the appeasement policies of the Chamberlain government. He doubted the will of the British ruling classes to wage a determined war against fascism, and called for a workers' "Popular Front" of resistance to the dictators. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, Davies demanded from the British government "a more specific and detailed statement" of war aims, to allay "suspicions ... as to the real and possibly as yet unstated war aims of this country and of France". He criticised Labour's decision in May 1940 to join Churchill's wartime coalition government, and thereafter opposed many of the coalition's domestic policies, such as indiscriminate internment of aliens, restrictions on industrial action, and the suppression of the communist newspaper the Daily Worker. The bitterness of Davies's personal attack on Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary who had authorised the paper's closure, shocked even the British Communist Party's general secretary, Harry Pollitt, who cautioned Davies that