Historical "fact", often as (re)written by the victors, that is not true, is rediscovered periodically to be not true, and yet the myth persists. Google Tonypandy and you'll find riots, massacre, police brutality. Far, far from the truth.

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of TIme, one of the best murder mysteries ever written [detective solves four-hundred-year-old case from his hospital bed], discusses the Tonypandy incident towards the very end of the novel.

Here's one commentator's brief description:
Quote:
... Tonypandy is Inspector Grant’s name for those incidents that the conventional books portray as history but that never happened. Or, as Grant’s historical researcher puts it, echoing Henry Ford, “History is bunk.”
- (source)


And why is "'ruthful" Tonypandy? Because I'm by no means the first to encounter it in modern literature. (If you will accept 1910 as "modern.") Tsuwm has it on his wwftd page. Nevertheless -- I had never seen it used seriously either, which is the reason I got excited.