Chapers 6 - 10

Chapter 6. The Irish And Their Famine, 1845 - 47

“I have seen the Indian in the forest of South America, and the Negroes in their chains, and I thought that I had seen the lowest form of misery: but I did not know the lot of the Irish.”

(A French traveller in Ireland, 1843)

“The problem of Ireland is totally beyond the power of men. The cure for the over-population has been directly provided by an all-wise Providence. Though unexpected it is likely to be effective.”

(From a letter written by Charles Trevelyan, The English Secretary of the Irish Famine Relief Committee, 1846)

There are, in every nation’s life, some great dividing lines, discontinuities, which mark one period off from the one which follows, and the memories of which live on in the minds of the descendants of those who experienced the ‘dividing line’ as ‘current affairs’. South African Boers retain a folk memory of the concentration camps set up by Kitchener during the Second Boer War of 1899 -1902: the stories of the deaths from fever and starvation have been handed down from generation to generation and serve to influence relationships between Dutch-speaking and English-speaking South Africans. The Jews will for ever have a memory of the holocaust of the 1940s when millions of Jews died in German concentration camps. And, on a less sombre note, the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s has left its mark in folk memories in many countries.

For the Irish the great dividing line was the famine, ‘the Great Hunger’ of the 1840s, during which a million or more died and another two million or more emigrated to America, Canada, Australia and Merthyr and Dowlais. You will have seen that I haven’t been able to find out when and where our earlier ancestors were born. I have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that all the heads of the four families were born in Ireland - and came to live in the valley. Given that claim, it is at least possible to argue that some of them (all of them?) came during the Famine Years. Even if that was not so, and they had come to the Valley before 1840 (as many Irish did), they would have known all about the Famine years, maybe from the Irish who did arrive during those dreadful years, maybe from relatives left behind in famine-ridden Ireland.

And, with the great tradition of tale-telling around family grates and pub tables, the Lanes, Scannells, Barrys, Sullivans and McCarthys of the 1850s would have heard - from eye-witnesses and others - of the dreadful sufferings of the many millions. I heard some of the stories - at third hand. My limited awareness of the horror of those years was reinforced when I went to the De La Salle Novitiate in Castletown in County Leix in what was still called the Irish Free State. There I had to learn to eat potatoes in their skins: the folk memory of the Famine lived on some hundred years later among a people to whom the common vegetable was too important for any part to be wasted.

Trevelyan, the hard-hearted proponent of laisser-faire during the famine, was, to put it mildly, a liar. If the famine had broken out, say, among the population of London or Manchester in 1845, and if a quarter of the population of either of those cities had either died or been left to wander, starving beggars, through the rest of England, would the government have claimed that there was nothing it could do? that the problem was ‘beyond the powers of men’? A young and relatively unknown politician, Benjamin Disraeli, had foreseen the Famine in a speech he made in 1844:

“Her overcrowded population totally depends on agriculture. Ireland lacks those sources of wealth that develop with civilisation. The people live on the most basic diet and would starve if the potato crop fails. This dense population lives in extreme distress. The established Church is not their Church. The richest members of the land-owning aristocracy live in England. In Ireland you have a starving population, an absentee land-owning aristocracy and a foreign church. That is the Irish question.”

And you will never begin to understand the history of the emigrant Irish - including the Lanes, Scannells, Barrys, Sullivans and McCarthys and their descendants - unless you reflect on the Famine of 1845- 47.

Mrs Cecil Woodham Smith has written the definitive study of this tragic period: in the Great Hunger you will find a detailed and graphic study of the ways in which the Irish suffered. Our ancestors’ families formed the raw material which was to form the basis for that important study. And while not all of them were eyewitnesses to the horrifying scenes that Mrs Woodham-Smith describes, all of them had relatives who had seen it all - or all that passed in their locality - for themselves.

One thing that they did not have to ‘recreate in the telling’ was the way in which the English (and Welsh) had been allowed, indeed encouraged, to become the owners of most of Ireland’s countryside. Over the centuries an ancient Celtic aristocracy had been replaced by an English one, a Catholic land-owning class replaced by a Protestant one, a native group replaced by a largely absentee group which, living in England, allowed its bailiffs to run the estates on its behalf and for its profit. The aristocracy retained some of the better land for its own use - as sites for the great houses, as parks around those houses, and as privately run farms whose produce sustained the inhabitants of those mansions. The rest of the land was rented out to the native Catholic Irish.

And, as time went on and the population increased, the size of a family ‘farm’ had become smaller and smaller. Most of our earlier relatives had raised their families from the produce of five or so acres, on which they sowed for some small portion of wheat and, most importantly, a large output of potatoes. The potato was the all important crop and it was easy to grow. First the grass, heather or furze on top of the ground was burned, the ash acting as fertiliser. Then a layer of dung was spread over the flat earth into which the seed potatoes were laid. The earth was then shovelled back over the ‘lazy bed’ from furrows formed on each side.

Easy work: small wonder that the people had time to spare for the ‘crack’ and the telling of stories. As the Limerick man is alleged to have said: “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits”, while waiting for the potato crop to grow. And, all being well, it grew plentifully, and, as Adam Smith had pointed out, it was a very nutritious vegetable, the major cause, said Smith, of the ‘rude health’ enjoyed by the Irish and of the ‘great beauty’ of their women. They had potatoes four times a day - roasted, boiled, made into potato cakes and, when available, mixed with salt of herrings. During the summer, when the old potatoes had been eaten, and the new crop was not yet ready, the people ate cabbage. Meat was a rarity: Patrick would meet a boy who told him that he once had a piece of goose. So what of the pig, which, like Teddy O’Neil, almost all peasants kept in their mud cabins? The pig was fattened on the surplus potatoes and sold to get the money to pay the rent and any debts the family might have run up.

There were, of course, years when the crop failed - perhaps because of a disease, perhaps because of bad weather, perhaps because of both. 1821-22 had been one such bad year. But it had always been that such a bad year had always been followed by an exceptionally good crop the following year. So, in a bad year, the men crossed over to England to work on coastal farms in Wales and southern England to get the money for the rent, and to enable their families to eke out a bare existence while waiting for the expected bumper crop.

So there was not undue alarm when the crop failed in 1845 because of ‘potato blight’. And, in the spring and early summer of 1846 all the signs were that the new crop would be, in keeping with tradition, a healthy and large one. Then, in a mere fortnight, over almost the whole country, the healthy-looking haulms and leaves withered. Bewildered people watched as the blight passed before their eyes, from furrow to furrow, from lazy bed to lazy bed, from small field to small field, until, wherever they looked they could see only dank-looking stalks where minutes before they had watched healthy stalks fluttering in the breeze. ‘It was,’ said one man, ‘like watching the rain come up the hillside, and you knew, as you watched, that that field over there, now green and healthy, would turn, in minutes and as you watched, into the same smelly mess’.

Ah, the smell. That was what most people remembered: anxious men running to turn up the crop, only to find that the growing potatoes had turned into a rotting mess of evil-smelling vegetation. “All gone”, they remembered, “and all gone everywhere”.

The autumn of 1845 had been a bad one: the autumn and winter of 1846 was even worse. The poorly-clothed peasants and their many children tramped their unhealthy way to the nearest Workhouse in the hope of getting some relief here. My generation would get some idea of what the Famine must have meant from seeing the starving peoples of Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Sudan, Rwanda, and Burundi gathered in their dying thousands in refugee camps in the 1980s and 1990s. But at least the starving Africans got some help from various aid agencies and from voluntary charities: it is not unconnected with our story that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Irish should have given more, per head of population, to African Famine Relief appeals than any other nation: folk memory is a powerful thing.

And what when the family not only had no food, but had no money to pay the small rent for their small plot? A sympathetic government to provide some form of assistance, you think? On the contrary, few people in England believed the reports which flooded in from starving Ireland: reminds one of the way in which reports of the Holocaust were discounted in the 1940s. Perhaps a sympathetic land-owning aristocracy, which had, after all, gained a great deal from the Irish? In 1846 alone, some 316,000 peasants were evicted from their mud cabins for non-payment of rent. Eye-witnesses and victims would tell how:

“...on the morning of eviction, armed soldiers and many policemen would come to the small village with its scattered cottages. One by one the cabins would be destroyed: the women would be running around, crying, hanging on to some pot or pan, a blanket or two: men, women and children hanging on to door posts from which soldiers and police would have to tear them: men cursing, frightened children screaming.

And when it was all done and night came, the starving people slept in the ruins only to be driven out the next day so that the very foundations of the cabins could be torn up and ploughed over.”

316,000 such evictions in a single year of the three-year long Famine. Such careful record keeping by some ghoulish actuary. If we take an average of 6 to a family (an unusually low average for nineteenth century Ireland) we have some 2 million people thrown out of their cabins to join the starving masses wandering the fields of Ireland. If we assume that there were 10 to a family...work it out for yourself.

Nor was it much better for those who were allowed to remain in the one-roomed, turf-roofed cabins. Here the starving and slowly dying lay in abject apathy. The Duke of Wellington was not only a major landowner; he was also a leading English government minister. He received a letter that told of a magistrate’s experience:

“I was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted. I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and all the scenes which presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, and their wretched legs hanging over, naked below the knees. I approached in horror and found by a low moaning they were alive, they were in a fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man.”

1845:1846:1847: the potato crop failure went on from dreadful year to even hungrier year. Thousands died of starvation, their dying places kept visible by pitiful crosses along the wayside. Thousands more died ‘of fever’, of typhus, of cholera and of ‘old people’s friend’ pneumonia. And from Queen Victoria came the message in a speech made in 1847:

“It is satisfactory for us to observe that in many of the most distressed districts, the patience and resignation of the people have been most exemplary.”

Thank you, Ma’am. Small wonder that the Irish were almost instinctively republican. And from the state-serving Bishops came the message:

“Scores of persons are dying of starvation and fever, but the tenants are bravely paying their rents.”

Thank you, my Anglican Lord. Small wonder that the Irish Catholics, in general remained faithful to their Church, even if this meant refusing the offer of Anglican-provided relief at soup kitchens where the price demanded was, all too often, renunciation of the Faith. Some succumbed, as the doggerel says:

They sold their soul,

For a penny roll,

And an ounce of hairy bacon.

I learnt those few lines in the 1940s while living in Ireland where the fourth post-Famine generation showed that it retained its old memories as vividly as did the fourth post-Crawshay generation which remembered “the old bastard up there in Vaynor Churchyard”!

And from the British government? Trevelyan’s famine relief Committee with its thanks to ‘an all wise Providence’ which rid Ireland of its surplus population. Food aid? Indeed not, because such aid would ‘interfere with the working of the free market’: so, from the prosperous wheat-growing districts of the Irish Midlands, the corn carts carried the bumper harvest to the docks in Waterford and elsewhere so that the teeming masses of England’s industrial towns might be fed with bread, if not with circuses. Few saw the sad irony of laden wagons passing the starving and dying on Ireland’s crowded roads.

Two millions of the hungry left Ireland: a million or more died: in a mere four years the population of Ireland went down by one-third. Among the emigrants were the half-million or so who came to England and Wales. They would have preferred, if they had had their ‘drathers’ never to have come to that hated island: they would have wished to have gone, if they had to go, to America. But only the better-off had the fare for that longer trip. So they came, reluctantly, to England and Wales. And once there, “cousins would bring over cousins once they had found work, with the idea that, once they’d earned enough they, too, would go on to the States”. The lucky ones who found work would send the few pence needed for the fare to another relative so that he, too, might write later on; ‘I’m away to England to make money for you’. Few of them intended to stay. As one writer noted in 1917:

“.... the notion of being buried in England made many a death-bed uneasy. It was long before the practice lost its hint of sacrilege in the minds of survivors. It was longer still before they lost a heartbreak feeling of home-sickness. Many a tombstone marks little spaces on consecrated ground beneath which rest many poor exiles, who, in thought, had always been going back to end their days in Ireland.”

In the 1930s I used to see one such tombstone in the graveyard attached to the Catholic Church in Aberavon. I can’t remember now the name: I have never forgotten the inscription beneath the name: ‘native of Wexford’. Write your own novel around the inscription of that poor exiled worker. Or sing, as even my generation did, the romantic, and almost never fulfilled promise:

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,

Across the ocean wild and wide.

To where your heart has ever been,

Since first you were my bonny bride.

Few Kathleens were taken home: my Lane Grandmother died in Merthyr, my Lane Grandfather died in Aberavon but lies buried in Merthyr, and my father, while teaching us 'Kathleen’, never even visited Ireland, let alone dreamt of taking his 'Kathleen' to die there. She, my mother, a McCarthy born, with her concert-trained contralto voice, would often be invited to sing Danny Boy with its romantic references to ‘glen to glen and down the mountain side’ from which Danny ‘must go, while I must bide’. There would be tears in the eyes of many of the listeners among the Irish generation of the 1930s as my mother’s voice swelled into the lines:

But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,

And when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,

For I’ll be here, in sunshine and in shadow,

Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.

But there would be even more tears when Mum went into the more realistic second verse of the lament of the ‘biding one’:

And when ye come, and find where I am lying,

If dead I am, as dead I well may be,

Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying,

And kneel and say an Ave there for me’.

Too any ‘biders’ waited in vain for the return of ‘The Lost Emigrant’ to whom they had said a farewell as ‘carrying a young lifetime and memories of a homeland in the small confines of a shabby case’ they set out for what they hoped would be a better life. Born to a life of servitude and farming, blind to the harsh realities of life in industrialised towns such as Merthyr, they were, in the main, content to exchange an Irish mud cabin for the cramped cottages of Crawshay’s town, to accept the lowest place in the social strata, for ‘they change the sky but not their minds, those who cross the seas.’ They took with them too, an innate sense that their country had failed them: it was only in later life that they would hand on a bizarre nostalgia for an Ireland which, in truth, had been ‘ a hard place for us all’.

Chapter 7. The First Irish In The Valley, 1820-50

Traditionally, as we have seen, men from the southern counties of Ireland had crossed the Irish Sea to do seasonal work on Welsh and English farms, making their way from farm to farm during harvest and potato picking seasons, saving enough from their low wages to pay the rent for the family plot back in Ireland. In the 1820s there was a quickening of the emigration process, a growth in the numbers involved. In part this was a response to the famine of 1821-22, and to the continued growth of population in a country which had no industry to absorb such a growing population, and in part it was a realisation that, with the coming of the steam-packets, passage to and from Wales and

England was both quicker and cheaper - the fare to Cardiff being a mere 4 pennies.

We have some evidence of this increase in emigration. In 1821 there was merely one Irishman listed on the annual census in Cardiff. In 1841 there were some 1,200 Irish-born Catholics on the registers of Cardiff’s first Catholic Church, St David’s. As for Merthyr: until 1836, it was the parish registers of Abergavenny which recorded the births, marriages and deaths of Merthyr’s Catholic population. Here the first Irish name appears only in 1820. But by 1824, Fr Edward Richards, a Franciscan from Abergavenny was writing of “three hundred Irish-born Catholics in Merthyr”, from whom he first said Mass on 5th September 1824. Fr Richards was responsible, then, for the religious lives of people in several valleys - as far away as Maestaeg - whom he visited on horseback. By November 1827, the number of Catholics in Merthyr had grown to the extent that the Bishop-in-charge of South Wales, Bishop Collinridge, sent Father Patrick Portal, ‘a Waterford man’, to live in Merthyr itself.

He was almost entirely dependant on the ‘old Catholic’ family, the Herberts of Llanarth, for food, clothing and other necessities. He reported that “the vast majority of the flock were very poor, and this mission is one of the most severe and disagreeable I have ever heard of. The poor people are extremely kind, but they cannot afford the upkeep of a priest. Sadly, I have to report that many of them have not been to Confession of Communion for between three and ten years”. Father Portal hired a large room in Merthyr at a rent of £14 a year: he was allowed the use of a room in the Inn at Old Rhymney, and he heard Confession in these places on alternate Fridays and Saturdays, often staying in the prefabricated Confessional until midnight. Ill-health, mainly brought on by “nothing here but hardship when out and solitude at home” forced him to leave Merthyr in 1831, and the Catholics of the town and the neighbouring valleys were without a priest for five years. Incidentally, it is worth noting an early example of what, in our later days, we are prone to assume is a radical novelty - the part played by lay people in the life of the Church. In Father Portal’s Merthyr was a Catholic Welsh speaker, a Mr Lewis from Crawshay Bailey’s Nantyglo. After Father Portal had said Mass on Sunday, Mr Lewis used to explain the faith in Welsh for the benefit of the small number of Welsh-speaking Catholics and, the newspapers reported, “crowds of non-Catholics used to gather to listen to this teaching done in their own language.” Lewis’ son, Peter, was ordained a priest in March 1843 and died in Nazareth House, Cardiff, on 24 October 1902. ‘From age to age you gather a people to yourself’ says our Mass to-day.

In August 1835, Father James Carroll, M.A. ‘of Dublin’, was given charge of the Catholics in Merthyr, Dowlais, Tredegar and Rhymney. He began the first Parish registers of Merthyr on 28 January 1836. Catholic records show that there were some 940 Catholics in Merthyr, compared with 900 in Cardiff and 3005 in Wales as a whole. This growth of the Catholic community in Crawshay’s Merthyr is shown by the fact that between 1836 and 1841, there were 273 infant Baptisms, a growing number of marriages between Irish and non-Irish, and a slow growth in the number of non-Irish Catholics: the first Spanish name appears in the Register for 30 August 1840, doubtlessly one of the Spanish ore workers brought from Northern Spain during this period. An analysis of the Baptismal records shows the dominant position of the Irish among the Catholic population of Merthyr:

Year Both Parents One Parent Neither Parent Total

Irish Irish Irish

1836 35 13 3 51

1837 20 7 1 28

1838 13 7 0 20

1839 36 10 5 51

1840 34 21 1 56

1841 43 18 6 67

[Note: Years 1837 and 1838 were years of cholera epidemic.]

It is hardly surprising that the majority population should have thought that ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ were synonymous - as they were to do even in the 1930s. Nor did the behaviour of the Catholic population do much to disabuse them, with our schools having a holiday on 17th March in celebration of the Feast of St Patrick and not, as did the state schools, on 1st March, the Feast of St David: I could not have been the only ignorant one who thought that St David must have been ‘a Protestant saint’, if such a being were possible.

What had brought this immigrant community to South Wales in general and, obviously, to Merthyr in particular? The rapid growth of the Irish in Cardiff was due, almost entirely to the building of the Bute Docks between 1834 and 1839. The second Marquis of Bute “loathed Catholicism as a religion”, wrote the official historian of the Bute family, while his wife, “Lady Sophia, as befitted the great-grand-daughter of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, was a zealous Protestant who paid to have bibles given to the Glamorgan Irish”. Bute was alleged to have gone to his death in 1848 lamenting ‘that I brought the Irish to Cardiff’. He had done so because of the reputation that Irish workmen had gained in the building of canals and railways: hard economic reality was more powerful even than religious bigotry.

As for Merthyr: they came to find work in a town where cousins and others stayed on after the building of the Glamorganshire Canal and where, they believed, there was a chance of work and money. We have seen that for the mass of Merthyr’s population, life was grim. However, that ought not to hide the fact that Merthyr was a relatively attractive and lively town. There was, as we have seen, a fairly well demarcated social hierarchy, including an ‘aristocracy of labour’ consisting of puddlers and rollermen who, along with skilled colliers, earned relatively good wages in the years when trade was good. And for the well-off agents and others, as well as for relatively well-off skilled craftsmen, there were a variety of shops and other outlets where they could spend their money. Merthyr was not all slum cottages and ironworks: there were rows of shops; along High Street, Castle Street, Union Street and elsewhere were milliners, watchmakers, grocers, tailors, bakers, booksellers, chemists...and so on through the Kelly's Directory of shops. Merthyr also had a weekly fair when farmers’ wives brought their produce to the stalls in or near the market where, amid the flaring naptha lamps, luckier housewives bought fresh food, lengths of flannel, pots and pans and other household goods as well as ornaments, broaches and other decorations for person or house. Here, too, on Saturday nights butchers, in pre-refrigeration days, auctioned off their remaining meat to the less fortunate whose children meanwhile might be engaged in stealing a vegetable or two to grace the Sunday table. No early closing days then - or indeed in the 1930s, for I remember the huckstering of meat and fresh vegetables on a late Saturday night.

And for those brought up in the isolation of the Irish hamlet with its dozen or so scattered cottages, Merthyr may indeed, have ‘roared’ and seemed like ‘a Wild West town’ - particularly after enough ale had been drunk to help men forget the cottage to which they had to return, and the long hours they had worked during the week.

The rate of immigration went up in the Famine years as the Irish sought refuge with their fellow-countrymen in the hope that they, too, might find work and money. The 1851 census showed that the Irish-born population of Merthyr, with their families, made up some 4,000, or about 9 per cent of the population. And, as various death and marriage certificates show, among those Irish were our Lane, Scannell, Barry, Sullivan and McCarthy ancestors.

Chapter 8. The Immigrants At Work

“The Irish provide much of the manual labour in the Merthyr ironworks, but such a wonder as an Irish puddler was never heard of.”

(The Morning Chronicle, 21 March 1850)

The Irish who arrived in Merthyr before 1850 were fleeing from a backward country which had provided few, if any, opportunities for them to have acquired any of the skills which would have fitted then for life in industrialised Merthyr; they were refugees from a rural-based society in which they had little, if any, experience of urban life, and simply no experience which would have prepared them for life in the social and economic jungle to which they came. It is small wonder that the vast majority of them were bewildered by what they found, fearful of what might happen to them, and longed for the never-to-arrive chance of returning home.

The Irish had been, traditionally, tied to the slower pace of rural life; to the demands of seasonal work. Fields or bogland had to be cleared, dung spread, seed potatoes planted and furrows made. Then, for long periods, there was little activity: furrows to be deepened as earth was lifted to cover the growing haulms in the lazy bed, a little weeding perhaps - but little else. At least until the time for harvesting the crop. And even in that slightly feverish period, the family worked at its own pace, with time to stop to chat, to smoke, to take a snack....

But the demands of life in the ironworks, brickyards and coalmines was very different. In the 1770s and 1780s, the early years of the so-called first Industrial Revolution, British factory owners had had to create a system of fines and punishments to break-in the first factory workers in Britain - most of them ‘refugees’ from rural England. In post-1917 Russia, Lenin had had to create an even more savage system of supervision and punishment to mould the countrified Russians to an industrial pattern. In the ‘new world’ to which the Irish came in Merthyr, they, too, had to learn to live by the clock - the clock which, over Crawshay’s ironworks had only three faces: one faced the Castle from where it could be seen by the ironmaster; one faced to Merthyr town, and its immediate opposite faced towards Brecon. The fourth face, looking on to the works, was blank, as if Crawshay was unwilling to allow the sweating workers to get any idea of how much longer they had to remain at their work.

It was, indeed, ‘a new world’ but hardly ‘a brave’ one to which the Irish came. They had to learn to obey not the seasonal demands of nature, but the seemingly continuous whistles and works’ hooters which signalled times for starting (with warning hooters going off every five minutes before the start of a shift), for meal-breaks if any, and for the end of a shift. Whereas once they had dug at their own rhythmical pace, now they had to learn to become virtually slaves to the machine or the furnace - which ‘waited for no man’.

It was a strange world indeed. It was made even more strange for the vast majority who, when they arrived, spoke only Gaelic, or, as it was called, Erse. English, after all, had been the language of the conquerors, the occupiers, the Ascendancy. In many counties of the south and west of Ireland, the native Irish, the latter-day refugees, spoke only Gaelic. These people were even more lost than others when they came to Merthyr, where English was the norm, with Welsh being commonly used by the indigenous majority. A family tradition has it that, from an early age, young Patrick Lane was recruited by the priests to help teach English to later newcomers. Don’t ask me how he had gained his own grasp of the language: we do know, for example, that in the 1860s, a young Scottish seven year old taught himself to read; Keir Hardie’s account of his struggling, by the light of an oil lamp, through Carlyle’s Heroes may well be a mirror image of how young Lane learned to read. Whatever

had happened, and however he learned to read, I do know that he gave my father a love for reading which has, almost genetically, been inherited by his children and theirs ‘from age to age...’. And I do remember being brought up, in a relatively small house in Aberavon in the 1920s, with plenty of books around the place:

huge three-decker Histories of Ireland, of The Labour Party, of Our Times. But of that more later.

The fact remains that the vast majority, maybe all, of the Irish immigrants were ill-equipped for life and work in Merthyr. So it is not surprising that, like modern immigrants into this country, they were lucky if they got any work, and what they got called for the least skill, was the most laborious and dangerous, and was the most badly paid. “...such a wonder as an Irish puddler was never heard of”. Too, they were the one who would be first to be laid off in times of trade depression, the ones who suffered the longest periods of unemployment as Welsh foremen and gang-managers looked after their native own. And for their women - wives, daughters and sisters - there was even less prospect of decent work. Many, from the age of six years found work as ore scrabblers, out on the mountains in all weathers digging the iron off the face of the mountain. Dressed in rags, with empty bellies, they dragged their drumstick limbs to a twelve-hour day to get the two or three pennies handed out by the gang-master. The fortunate were those who found work as domestic servants - at least they worked in shelter and might even expect to get some food. But even here the Irish were given the work of the lowest level, and if it was that there was no Irish puddler, so too it was that there were few, if any, Irish ‘ladies’ maids’ but plenty of floor scrubbers, water carriers, pot washers and the like. In the 1890s, a mature Patrick Lane, now ‘ale house keeper’, would meet and later marry Anastasia Scannell who was housekeeper to the future Catholic Bishop of Salford in his then home at St Bede’s College, Manchester. I do not know how my Grandmother Lane (Scannell) made her way from poverty-stricken Dowlais to the comforts of the Bishop’s house. I do know that she had her only child christened Patrick (after his father) Aloysius (which was shortened to Louis, the name of her former priest-employer). And Louis he was always known as, although he signed himself ‘Patrick Aloysius’. And I know that I grew up with one or two beautiful pieces of furniture in our home, gifts from a wonderful Bishop to my Gran. Of that, more later, but it is worth noting that in both Patrick and Anastasia, we were fortunate in our ‘from age to age’. For, as too many records show, the vast majority of the Irish immigrant community suffered from what Ernie Bevin would later describe as ‘a poverty of desire’. Said a Birmingham employer, “The Irish seldom get any better, they are born bricklayers’ labourers, and they die bricklayers’ labourers”: and he might have added, they wish nothing better for their sons than that they, too, become bricklayers’ labourers. Nor did much change over the years. In 1920, the Dundee Catholic Herald complained, “among our Catholic boys and girls there is a dearth of social and educational ladder-climbing”.

Some of our apologists would argue that the main, maybe, in their opinion, the only reason for this lack of social mobility was anti-Irish and anti-Catholic discrimination. They would claim that “with a fair field and no favour, the Irishman is bound to come to the front”. And, in defence of this argument, there was, as we shall see, plenty of discrimination by both employers and workers. But other immigrant communities faced as much, indeed maybe more, hostile discrimination. The Jews who fled from Russia and Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century replicate in their own history much of what I have said of the Irish: unskilled, ill-equipped for life in London and other cities, lacking a knowledge of the English language, poorly paid, badly housed.... and yet they made much more progress in the early years of the twentieth century than did the Irish and their descendants.

A more likely cause of the lack of social mobility was the inferior education of the Irish immigrant. We know, for example, that in the 1850s, two-thirds of the Irish-born who married here were unable to sign their name in the Parish Register, whereas among the Welsh the proportion was only a quarter. Perhaps the Church’s insistence on ‘a Catholic education for every Catholic child’ handicapped those children, because the Irish community could not provide the financial support needed to bring Catholic schools up to the standards of Protestant and, later, State schools. There was also the sad fact that the bulk of Irish parents, poorly educated themselves, attached only slight importance to schooling. In this they were at odds with their Welsh counterparts - even the poorly-educated. For if the Protestants in general may be said to have been imbued with ‘an educational ethic’, only the Scots, perhaps, can rival the Welsh for the value they place on their children’s education. I take it as a blessing that, somehow or other, Grandfather Lane and his Bishop-influenced wife, ‘caught’ that Welsh-based evaluation of education and that, in his turn, my father passed it on to us ‘...from age to age’.

Chapter 9. The Irish And The ‘Old’ And ‘New’ Catholics

There were also religious and psychological factors at work to impede the Irishman’s social mobility. We have seen that the majority of the Irish-born hoped that their stay in ‘pagan Wales’ would be merely temporary, so that they might “take Kathleen home again to where your heart has always been...”. Their church, too, taught them that life ‘in this vale of tears’ was a mere pause between two eternities - before birth and after death. This encouraged an ‘other worldly’ attitude and a reluctance to become worldly-minded and to adopt the policy of ‘getting on’.

That ‘other worldliness’ was an attitude long adopted by the handful of families in England and Wales which had held on to ‘the old faith’ in spite of ‘dungeon, fire and sword’ of the penal days. In Wales there were, for example, the Vaughans of Courtfield, the Mostyns of Talacre and the Herberts of Llanarth. Merely a glimpse at their families’ histories is a reminder of their doggedness throughout the centuries and to be given some understanding of their defensive attitude towards the outside, Protestant, world. The Vaughans of Courtfield were a branch of the Herbert family. In their Herefordshire home they had had Mass said by recusant priests in the sixteenth century, paid their fines for non-attendance at the prescribed Anglican services and suffered their share of imprisonment’s. In 1855, when young Patrick was born, William Vaughan was Bishop of Plymouth, his brother, Richard, a famed Jesuit preacher, their brother, Edmund a noted Redemptionist, and their two sisters were nuns. The remaining son, John Francis married Elizabeth Rolls of Hendred: six of their sons became priests and all five of their daughters became nuns. The roll call of those sons ought to have allowed the parents a sense of triumphalism: Herbert, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Roger, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, John, titular Bishop of Sebastopol, Joseph, Prior of the Benedictine Abbey at Fort Augustus, Scotland, Bernard, ‘society’s own Jesuit’ at Farm Street in Mayfair...

Patrick’s son and grandchildren and other Scannells and McCarthys would know more of the Mostyns of Talacre near Prestatyn in North Wales. Here the family had maintained ‘the old Faith’ and had provided the Church with martyrs such as Philip Howard and Margaret Pole. One Mostyn was Vicar Apostolic for the Northern District from 1840 to 1847, in the last years before the Restoration of the Hierarchy of England and Wales in 1850. We shall see how that Restoration affected Catholic life in Merthyr and elsewhere, and how the ebullient leader of that restored Hierarchy, Wiseman, was attacked. The Mostyns’ home at Talacre was merely one of the ‘old Catholics homes’ where Wiseman was a welcome visitor. Here, in the early 1860s, he said that the three year-old, playing in front of him, would “one day be another Bishop Francis Mostyn” - a reference to the former Vicar Apostolic. And so it proved, and in 1924, Francis Mostyn, Bishop of Menevia for twenty-six years, became Archbishop of the diocese of Cardiff with his home in Newport Road. It was this Mostyn who would confirm Patrick’s grandchildren in the 1930s and so provide them with a link to the penal days ‘...from age to age’.

Vaughans, Mostyns and Herberts in Wales, Stourtons, Howards, Frasers and others in England and Scotland, were of aristocratic stock or, at worst, ‘country gentlemen’. They had their links with their Protestant peers with whom they hunted and shot, played cricket and shared a common patriotism. But they were estranged from their peers by virtue of their painful adherence to the ‘old Faith’, an adherence which they took for granted, to which they rarely if ever adverted, and for which they had suffered much. In Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh wrote of one such family:

“The family history was typical of the Catholic squires of England [and, we may add, Wales]: from Elizabeth 1’s reign until Victoria’s, they lived lives sequested among their tenantry and kinsmen, sending their sons to school abroad, often marrying there, intermarrying, if not, with a score of families like themselves, debarred from all preferments and learning in those lost generations, lessons which could still be read in the lives of the last three men of the house.”

It is not surprising that many of these families came uneasily to the relatively new freedom enjoyed by Catholics following the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829: the ‘marks’ of their families recusancy were too many and too deeply ingrained to be sloughed off and forgotten. Centuries of the private practice of their faith, of the need for prudence in a Protestant and hostile world, had given them that ‘other worldly’ attitude which, oddly, they shared with their Irish fellow-Catholics, drawn from very different social backgrounds.

The Merthyr Irish were, in all probability, unaware of the existence of those of the ‘old Faith’ adherents in England and Wales. They knew nothing, at first, of the lives led by the Herberts, Vaughans, Mostyns, Stonors and others with their private chapels and domestic priests. For them the memory was of Fr Carroll who had died in the 1847 cholera outbreak, but whom they remembered for his rented workman’s cottage-home, where he dug his garden, from which he sold vegetables to get money on which to live: he was remembered as walking through Merthyr and Dowlais in broken shoes, wearing a tattered coat - a people’s priest, indeed.

But, unwittingly, the Irish were taught by the people of the ‘old Faith’. It was they who wrote the sermons which many priests preached, who held positions of authority in a reviving Church in England and Wales, and who directed the lives and teachings of their priests. Nowhere, perhaps, is this influence more clearly shown than in the hymns which the Irish sang in their new Church in Merthyr - as they had sung them in the stinking warehouse loft. Shelley had written:

“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”.

And the same might be said of the popular hymns of the time, hymns which remained popular with successive generations of Irish-based Welsh Catholics down to the more ecumenical (indifferent?) times in which my own children have matured. One such is Hail Queen of Heaven, a hymn written by John Lingard, an ‘old Catholic’ and a protégé of the Stonor family. As Vice-President of Crookhall College near Durham he heard the folk song

Sweet Mary, Sweet Mary, my age is sixteen

My father’s a farmer on yonder green....

And he wrote his hymn to fit that catchy tune: the words of the hymn are indicative of the other worldly view of the Catholics, ‘old’ and Irish alike.

Hail Queen of heav’n, the ocean star,

Guide of the wand’rer here below;

Thrown on life’s surge, we claim thy care,

Save us from peril and from woe.

Sojourners in this vale of tears,

To thee, blest advocate we cry;

Pity our sorrows, calm our fears,

And soothe with hope our misery.

Chesterton was to write of “the great Gaels of Ireland, ...the men that God made mad, for all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad”. Whatever of the ‘merry’ wars, there is little doubt that the laments of the emigrants were, indeed, sad. So, too, were their hymns as befitted a people for whom life was, indeed, harsh and grim, ‘a vale of tears’ through which they had to pass prior to entering ‘into the joy of the Lord’.

The Irish, unlike those of the ‘old Faith’, had, since 1829 at least, been used to practising their faith openly, in a country where the vast majority shared their Catholicism one with another, and where their religion was to be enjoyed with some degree of enthusiasm. This put them at odds with many of the ‘old Catholics’ whose unobtrusive religion was based on the unemotional piety as typified by eighteenth century Bishop Challoner’s The Garden of the Soul, and restrained prayer - practices such as sung Vespers. And this ‘quietism’ was also at odds with the ideas and practices of a third element in the Church in England - if less so in Wales - after 1845 when John Henry Newman led a small group of largely Oxford-educated intellectual Anglicans into the Catholic Church. Newman and his exuberant followers expected that this was to be the ‘Second Spring’ during which England would be restored to the ‘true faith’. The majority of ‘old Catholics’ made it clear that the converts were acceptable provided that ‘they were prepared to enter within the citadel and conform to Old Catholic habits and tradition’. The ‘excessive enthusiasm’ of many of the converts was described by one ‘old Catholic’ in 1855, as ‘peculiar antics and far-fetched ideas, making a caricature of the Catholic faith’. Clearly, the Irish in Merthyr in 1855, shared none of the intellectual attitudes of the ‘new’ Catholics, but they did share their ‘enthusiasm’ for their faith and its practices. It was this willingness to witness to their faith which helps to explain the way in which, from their poverty, they provided the bulk of the money needed for the huge volume of building which the Church had to undertake - of churches, schools, orphanages, refuges and the like. As a Bishop wrote:

“...there are few monied men, and as regard the gentry, we can’t get anything from them. I think we may fairly say, as experience has taught me to say, “Thank God we have the Poor”. Our faithful Poor who are or ought to be our golden mine from which, if we neglect and trust to the Rich, I should say “Serve you right”. I often wonder why our Poor do not demand masses on their behalf as did the rich lady when she sent in a half sovereign.”

And it was from the ‘enthusiast’, indeed, the arch-enthusiast, Frederick Faber, that the Irish learned another of their favourite, if in Chestertonian terms ‘sad’, hymns:

Mother of Mercy, day by day ......

Though poverty and work and woe

the masters of my life may be.

When times are hard who does not know,

darkness is light with love of thee?

In the ‘hard’ 1930s that was a hymn well-sung by poor Catholics in Aberavon, who well understood that ‘poverty and woe’ - if not ‘work’ - were the ‘masters’ of their deprived lives. My own children never heard the hymn sung in the churches to which they went in the well-heeled suburbs of outer London and prosperous Bournemouth.

Chapter 10. Catholicism In The Valleys.

For the vast majority of the immigrant Irish the faith was central to their lives. As Father Carroll would report to his superiors:

“...most of them are poor Irish workers in ironworks, pits and brickyards. The majority of them are practising and fervent. Unfortunately there are a great number who are negligent in their duties, partly because of their contact with Protestants, partly because of their appallingly excessive drinking”.

And so, as tradition would recall of him, he would constantly visit, encourage or reprimand every family, asking what was happening to the children, restoring peace in quarrelsome families and urging the ‘fallen away’ to return to practice. His Bishop, for his part would write of:

“The very talented and zealous pastor of Merthyr who has under his care about 700 poor Irish. He has no chapel, but says two Masses every Sunday: one in Merthyr in a granary over a slaughterhouse, and the other at six miles distance (Dowlais) to which he travels on foot, in a washhouse. He has a school for about 50 poor children of both sexes, in a one-horse stable, about eight feet wide and sixteen feet long. His own dwelling is a workman’s cottage, without a single article of decent furniture and, often, it is feared, without a sufficiency of food”.

In the small schoolroom the more fervent would gather every night to say their evening prayers, the coming together being, for them as much a tribal bonding as a religious service. Such gatherings were, at one and the same time, religious occasions, self-admitting awareness of the ghetto in which they lived, and a form of social bonding of people who, in general:

“...lived in the very worst conditions in the area, and yet whose vivacity and contentment was wonderful to behold: features which, among the native poor, I rarely see, but which, among the Irish seemed so natural that I never felt dejected in their houses. The priest visits them assiduously, keeps alive religious feeling, and inspires them with veneration and hope...”

Father Carroll was not alone or peculiar in his fervour and zeal. The histories of other parishes in South Wales were much like that of Merthyr: priests were accustomed to travelling - on horseback or on foot - over wide areas to bring mass to the huddled Irish in the various iron towns, to visit their people in good times and bad, and to suffer along with them the physical and verbal attacks from the native community. In Aberavon, for example, the parish where I grew up, the first Masses were said in 1852 by priests who came from Swansea. Records show that the priest would walk or ride from Swansea along the coast to the river at Briton Ferry: there he would cross to be met by a bodyguard of men from Aberavon who walked with him the nine miles or so along the beach to Aberavon: and this, it should be remembered, when Church law had it that the Eucharist could only be received by people who had fasted from midnight. It is small wonder that, to the tune of Robin Adair, the Irish sang:

Who, in the winter’s night, Sogarth Aroon (priest dear)

When the cold blast did bite, Sogarth Aroon,

Came to my cabin door,

And, on the earthen floor,

Knelt by me, sick and poor, Sogarth Aroon?

As the number of immigrants increased - even before the vast post-Famine influx - Father Carroll decided to build a permanent Church for his people. He made repeated efforts to buy the necessary land - only to find that no one was willing to sell even a small plot to a Catholic priest set on building a Catholic Church. Not to be outdone, he recruited the help of some of the few Irish who had enjoyed a limited success in Merthyr - as hauliers and as small building contractors. They, in their turn, were fortunate in that a handful of Welsh people were appreciative of the work that Father Carroll had done and was doing among the sick and aged and with the children. In the event, it was in the name of an Irish haulier that four small cottages in Dowlais were purchased with money which Father Carroll raised - from friends in Ireland, from Irish Americans whom he visited to make an appeal, from better-off ‘old’ Catholics (and specifically from ‘Mrs Eyre of Bath’) and from the Bishop. These cottages were demolished, the site cleared, and work begun on building Dowlais’s first Catholic church. All of that preliminary work was done by self-helping Irishmen who worked before or after having done a day’s work for Crawshay or some other local employer. It was the same with the initial work on the building of the Church: the men dug out the foundations, laid the footings and put up the first layer of stone for their projected church. After all, as was remembered in oral tradition, they or their fathers had built the famine walls around the landlords’ estates in Famine-stricken Ireland when landlords took advantage of their tenants’ plight to get them to work (for a penny a day or less) on constructing the stone walls which would serve to keep the tenants out of the landlords’ parks while also helping to hid the plight of the starving poor from the genteel eyes of the Ascendancy.

But the Welsh did not take kindly to the appearance of the first stones of the proposed church. On at least four occasions, gangs, armed with hammers and bars, knocked down the emerging walls, which forced the Irish to organise a system of night watches to ensure that, as the walls sent up, they remained up. And the stories of the night watches, of the attacks by the Welsh and the efforts of the builders of this first Church, became part of Catholic folklore, to be recalled, for example, when, in later days, the Church was enlarged. For, if you go to the church to-day you can still see, at least with merely a little imagination, the outlines of that first (‘four cottages’) church, now surrounded on two sides by large side aisles and, at either end by a chancel and a choir loft area. Could Father Carroll have imagined that his small Church would, one day and in God’s good time, become much more ‘a thing of beauty and a joy forever’?

The Catholic Church of St Illtydd the Martyr, Dowlais’ was opened and consecrated in 1844 by a Bishop who spoke of:

“The men who had dug the foundations of the church, men who had come from another country, and who had come to do what they had first done in their own country. It was they who, driven by poverty from the land they had left, had come to a land of a stranger, and Jesus Christ would make that land their home, because they had determined to consecrate their faith to his cause. Their presence that day - Catholic boys and girls, Catholic people, children of the ancient Church, working with their hands worn with toil, with their brows (‘all furrowed with care’) - their presence there that day marked to God and marked to man that the love of Jesus Christ had not yet perished, and that because it rested on them it should go on from generation to generation”.

Ah! The optimism of the Bishop of 1844. In fairness to him, subsequent history showed that for perhaps a century or so, the ‘tribe’ remained fervently Catholic, its priests continued to be the ‘Sogarth Aroons’ for their people. And it would be unfair to condemn the Bishop for not having been able to perceive the effects of social mobility and assimilation on both people and priests. For the sad fact is that, in the 1990s, there is a dearth of that fervour among both priests and people for ‘the ancient church’ and its teaching. But that is part of the story to be told. By 1846, the last pre-Famine year, there were 1200 Catholics in Merthyr and they felt confident enough to begin the building of a priest’s house, described in the Ordo of 1847 as ‘a Mission-house’. By then, the first post-Famine influx had arrived so that there were 4,000 Irish in Merthyr where a second school was being built to cater for one hundred boys and girls.

Father Carroll died, a victim of the cholera outbreak of 1847-49 and is believed to have been buried in his church, although his grave has never been found there. He was followed by Fathers James Dawson (1849-52), John Dawson (1852) and Patrick Millea (1852-73). Each of these said Mass at 9.30 a.m. on Sundays in St Illtydd’s and then went – by horse and trap – to serve ‘Rhymney, Tredegar and other outlying parts of the far flung Parish’. From 1853 to 1859 Father Millea had the help of an assistant priest. But in March 1859, the Bishop divided the parish into two: the parish of St Illtydd became the Dowlais parish and Merthyr had its own, new, Church of St Mary’s. The Catholic population continued to grow throughout this period, with immigrants helping to keep alive the sense of ‘Irishness’ among a Catholic community of the second and third generations. The combined Baptism Registers of the two Churches illustrate the growth of that community. In 1859-61, for example, the registers show that there were 970 live infant Baptisms:

Merthyr Dowlais Total

1859 95 223 318

1860 200 153 353

1861 150 149 299

Father Millea served the Catholic community well, and, as can be seen from the extract below, helped win the community’s ‘respect and admiration’ in the face of ‘religious prejudice’.

“After twenty years of toil, Father Millea died in March 1873. On the day of his funeral at Pant Cemetery, the works came to a standstill, all the places of business were closed and the route was lined by literally thousands of men and women of all Creeds and Denominations. It was said by the ancient caretaker of the cemetery that the funeral of Father Millea was the biggest there had ever been at Pant. Thus, after a lifetime of toil and his fight against religious prejudice, he had won the respect and admiration of all men irrespective of their religious opinions. Fr Robert Cotter took his place until June of the same year. The Bishop then placed the Mission in the care of the English Benedictine Fathers”.

And in so doing, opened yet another chapter in the history of the community.