Chapter 16 - 20
Chapter 16. Hubris And Nemesis: A Crawshay Interlude
This interlude is a very truncated account of the end of the Crawshay story which throws some light on the lives of Scannells and others, and helps to explain that terrible slab of granite on the grave in Vaynor Churchyard.
Robert Thompson Crawshay (1817-79) had, for a Crawshay son, an unusual upbringing. A much-loved and younger son, spoilt because he was delicate, he grew up knowing that he would have some post in one or the other family’s undertakings, but would not have the problem of running the works, nor the preceding problem of facing the jealousies of a reluctant ‘king’, fearful of an heir.
However, in 1839, his eldest brother (and heir to the ‘throne’) was drowned in a ferry accident on the River Severn. This threw the question of the future control of Cyfarthfa Works into the melting pot. His father, living at
In 1846 he married the intelligent and socially acceptable Rose Mary Yates, daughter of one of his father’s landed neighbours at Caversham. She supported him in his social activities – in Merthyr, in their various holiday homes and in
By 1859 they had five children, and the paterfamilias and proud owner-to-be of the Castle and the Works might well have said with Robert Browning:
God’s in heaven,
All’s right with the world.
And then, in 1860, his world was largely wrecked. On 18th January he suffered a stroke, which left him completely deaf. While he recovered from the initial paralysis, the deafness remained. A tall man, he seemed to shrink in stature so that the once-vigorous sportsman of 43 years of age, came to look like a seventy year old; with his increasing baldness and the growth of a long beard, he came to have an almost patriarchal air.
A broken man, he suffered almost continual pain for the rest of his life. Sometimes it was rheumatic gout, sometimes it was his eyes that gave him trouble. Unkind members of the family and of his circle of friends dismissed the battered ageing man as a hypochondriac. His wife often showed her anger at his harping on about his ill-health.
For the first six or so years of their marriage, Rose Mary Crawshay was the loyal, loving and dutiful spouse that all Victorian women were supposed to have been. Even when she became fully aware of his continuing liaisons with local girls, she tended to entertain the vain hope that she might be able to ‘kill it with kindness’. She knew, both then and later, that these couplings with servants, girls living near the Castle, and the girls employed in the Works, did not really threaten her position as chatelaine of the Castle and spouse to the Iron King. For a while she pretended that his behaviour and the girls with whom he coupled were both beneath her notice.
However, his persistence in seeking sexual adventure outside the marital bedroom finally proved too much even for the seemingly submissive Rose. As she remarked, “I learned that you follow a man somewhere and you’ll get nowhere”, a remark which also indicates that perhaps she had come under the influence of one or other of more of her social-campaigning feminist friends in
As it was, the combination of his selfishness in sickness allied with his persistent immoral behaviour proved too much, and in the 1860s she ceased to love him although she continued to live with him – in between increasingly long trips away from Cyfarthfa.
She knew, from many of her friends, that other husbands were unfaithful to their wives, at least from time to time. But as she bitterly remarked, “most men seem to make infidelity a hobby: my husband makes it a vocation to be avidly pursued”. And she resented, as she said, that he brought his filth into the house, degrading everything, which she might have to touch after he had handled it. He might have protested that “these casual affairs mean nothing to me”, to which she riposted with “how can an affair of this kind be merely casual?” Clearly, they were at loggerheads and there was no possibility of their opposing positions being reconciled.
I have to admit that I knew none of this when I first went to visit the Crawshay grave in Vaynor in May 1979, a century after ‘God forgive me’ had been buried there. I did not, then, understand the old Cefn man’s reference to ‘R.T.’ as ‘the old bastard’, for my father, who did know of the Crawshay stories, was too prudish a man to have shared such memories with his children. However, as I went on with my research into my family’s Merthyr background, I was forced to develop an interest in the last of the iron kings. I read the family history in which the author writes delicately of the “numerous liaisons....temporary concubines”. I could appreciate the difficulty of an author who had forged close links with some of the surviving Crawshays and could see that these links might, of themselves, have led her to deal ever so gently with ‘R.T.’ and his proclivities. I have no such links and, this sexual issue apart, I found the last of the iron kings to be an unsympathetic character.
Why did Crawshay – and other ironmasters before him – behave in this licentious fashion? Was it that they thought themselves heirs to the feudal droit de seigneur? Was it that they had read Tom Jones? Did they see themselves as the valleys’ Byronic figures? Or was it that they were bored by the company and gentility of the women to whom they were married, whom they bedded to beget heirs but from whom they found little sexual pleasure.
For me? I’m left with a sense of the man’ hypocrisy – the builder of
I better understand, now, the granite slab and its terrible inscription. I better appreciate why the old Cefn man could call ‘R.T.’ an ‘old bastard’. I do not really know what lay behind his damning condemnation of the long dead Crawshay. A family memory?
Certainly the Scannells and Barrys ought to have ‘family memories’ of ‘R.T.’ In 1870, my great grandfather Patrick Scannell (1828 – 1901) worked in Cyfarthfa Works as did my great grandfather Patrick Barry (1826 – 1888). Their families, like those of the 6,000 men and women who worked in Crawshay’ works and mines were entirely dependent on him for their weekly income. If, by the way, we assume that 3,000 of his workers were married men, and that each of these had six children (a less than average number for that time), you have some 20-25,000 people directly dependent on Crawshay. And indirectly dependent on him were the majority of the rest of the town – builders, shopkeepers of all descriptions, carters, printers, transport workers and so on almost ad infinitum. All these people dependent on the decisions of one man, who, on his father’s death in 1877, inherited the Works, the Castle and 7 million pounds, while they lived in the massive slum that was ‘his’ town. Other industrialist-dictators had shown, or would shortly show, that high profits could be allied to a social conscience. Salt had built Saltaire for his workers (1853): Lever would build Port Sunlight for his (1888) and Cadbury would build Bournville (1900). Any of the Crawshays might have done something similar – but didn’t.
Even worse was yet to come. Crawshay had been angered by his men’s refusal to obey his call for the election of Bruce in the 1868 Election (Chapter 14). In 1871 he was further angered by
In angry retaliation he simply announced the closure of the once-dominant Works.
No Works: no carts taking limestone to furnaces or iron goods to the Taff Vale railway station: no chimneys belching smoke over the town; no furnaces shedding a fiery glow in the night sky: no hammering of forges: no hooters and whistles signalling the change of shifts: no thousands of men, women and children making their hob-nailed way to and from the Works: no anything.
How did our people manage? Some moved to work in the expanding guest steelworks in Dowlais. Some found work in the growing number of Crawshay mines. Some left to find work elsewhere – some Scannells went to
But the majority of people stayed, and starved and formed part of the crowd which lined the streets in 1879 to watch Crawshay’s funeral procession make its way to Vaynor and that terrible grave.
In 1819, Shelley wrote a vicious attack on the then royal family. As I write about ‘R.T.’ in his Castle in the late 1870s, Shelley’s view of George III comes to mind:
“An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king....”
Crawshay was not ‘old’ when compared, say, to Gladstone (born 1809) who was fretting as Leader of the Opposition and eager to have chances to form future Liberal-Whig Governments. Nor was he ‘old’ in Crawshay family terms: his father was 79 when he died, while one of his sons, William, was 71 when he died and another, Robert, was 89 when he died in 1944, having been at the funeral of ‘R.T.’s daughter, ‘Trotty’ in 1943. So, all in all, he was not old, although his several illnesses coupled with his angry and selfish nature may have aged him.
Mad? Not as George III was, for R.T. did not embrace or talk to trees. Irrational? You might think that his reaction to his workers’ adoption of trade unionism was vicious. But he thought that “my Works is mine to deal with as I wish.” So the closure of the Works in 1875 was, in his terms, rational.
Blind? Well, almost. Certainly he was unable to walk to the Works, enjoy the Park around the Castle, take part in shooting parties or enjoy to the full the company of the many distinguished people who came as guests to the Castle.
Dying? Certainly he thought so. He had long since shown his head gardener the particular tree in the Park from which his massive coffin was to be made. He had also spelt out for a stone mason the inscription to be carved on the huge slab of granite that was to be placed on his grave, and left written instructions about the high wrought iron fencing which was to surround it.
Despised? Rarely, if ever, publicly. His workmen came each year to the Castle on his birthday – even after the closure of the Works – to offer their congratulatory messages – hoping, maybe, to get the Works reopened. His children obeyed his every whim – at least until 1875: they endured constant humiliation and remained dutifully submissive to the Victorian paterfamilias. Merthyr newspapers paid their homage, thanking him for supporting the Merthyr Flower Show, for his contribution to the cost of
But, in truth, he was despised: by his wife Rose Mary with whom he rowed over the dinner table and who, by 1877, had become ‘an absentee wife and mother.’ His response was shown by the will which he made in 1878 which made no mention of his wife at all.
One outcome of this marital breakdown was his increasing reliance on his elder daughter, Henrietta (1848 – 1943) who was nicknamed ‘Trotty’. Extracts from her diary reveal the decline in the relationship between father and the daughter whom her mother planned to use as a vicarious substitute for her absent self. In 1865, some five years after his stroke, she informed her father that she was seriously thinking of getting married. Both her father and mother used what one of her brothers called ‘the illness and dependency cards’ in a form of emotional blackmail to get her to give up thoughts of getting married so that she could remain as companion to her dictatorial father.
Her diary reveals how the wealthy father used money in his efforts to stop her thinking of marriage:
“
Maybe, with
Shortly after this, her younger sister got married, and in her diary Trotty wrote:
“What have I to look forward to? Only a life that, to the world, would seem happiness and luxury and no cares. But it is really a life from which most would turn in disgust. Nothing before or behind but the irretrievable doom of loneliness and isolation. No hope of being able to feel and possess that love that shares each innermost thought. Limping on from year to year, listless and sad, only to wonder and mourn more each year.”
Then, in May 1877, love came for Trotty again. Among her mother’s friends was Sir William Groves, eminent scientist and lawyer. In May 1877 he brought a rising young barrister, John Williams, when he came to the Castle. And William and Trotty fell in love.
However, as Shakespeare wrote; “The course of true love never did run smooth.” In her diary, Trotty wrote of that ‘course’:
7 June: feel ‘engaged’ to John.
5 July: Settle for September 30.
9 July: All returned from Tenby [the family holiday home].
Settled for Easter if conditions agreed to.
10 July: Conditions came: not agreed to.
The ‘conditions’ concerned her inheritance. As with other brides from rich families, Trotty had the right to expect that, on marriage, she would get a dowry which would ensure proper financial support for her own children when they arrived. Her father’s ‘conditions’ were the expressions of the revenge of a vengeful father. He had
banned Williams from the Castle once he had heard, on 5 June, that Trotty meant to marry him. Now, in July, he laid down that, while she might expect to get her £100,000 when R.T. died, she would get no dowry.
Neither father nor mother was at Trotty’s wedding, which took place in
“And whereas the said Rose Harriet Thompson Crawshay is engaged to be married to Mr. Arthur John Williams, and such marriage is not approved of by me, and I do not wish any child thereof to have any benefit of the funds bequested by my Will. Now I hereby declare that none of the children of my said daughter by the said Arthur John Williams shall in any way take any share or interest whatsoever in the said funds.”
Neither Trotty nor any other member of the family knew of that cruel codicil until the Will was read after Crawshay’s death in 1879. And, in spite of the bitter wrangling that had preceded her wedding, and in spite of her parent’s absence from that wedding, Trotty remained concerned about her ailing father. When her barrister-husband was on circuit in
In February 1878 she spent several days at Cyfarthfa with her lonely father. In her diary she wrote:
“Papa talking a good deal about the grave.”
He had long since chosen the site – in the north-east corner in Vaynor Churchyard. He had also given strict instructions about the grave. It had to be 13 feet deep (maybe to prevent his cremation-supporting wife from having him dug up and thrown into a furnace.) It was to be 8 feet long and 4 feet wide, brick-lined (like some of his furnaces) and surrounded by high railings (another obstacle to possible body-snatchers?). We have seen that a mason had been instructed to have a single slab of polished red granite prepared to cover the grave with that “God Forgive Me” inscription.
R.T. died while convalescing in
But what of the Nemesis in the heading of this Chapter? Trotty and Arthur Williams had two children, both boys. The elder, Leonard Crawshay-Williams, was born in 1879, the year of R.T.’s death. The younger, Leslie Crawshay-Williams married Joyce Collier, daughter of the artist John Collier. Their daughter, Gillian, married the politician Anthony Greenwood. And there’s the first appearance of Nemesis. For Anthony was the son of Arthur Greenwood (born 1880, the year after R.T.’s death). Arthur Greenwood was Minister of Health in the 1929 Labour government and served as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party under Clement Attlee after 1935. Anthony Greenwood became a Labour MP in 1946 and, a leading left-winger, was Minister of Housing and Local Government in Harold Wilson’s government 1966-70. There is a pleasurable piquancy in that Crawshay –
But there was a second visit from Nemesis. In 1889, R.T.’s heir William (1847-1918) and his wife, Florentina, left
William used to go to mass with his Catholic wife, arriving at the church in a carriage drawn by two horses and with two liveried servants. Shortly before his death in 1918, he, too, became a Catholic and he was buried from the Catholic church in Caversham. A Crawshay Catholic! I wonder what the irascible R.T. would have made of that. I don’t think that my grandfather and father knew of this conversion: if they had, I’m sure it would have formed part of family lore along with stories of R.T., the Works, the Castle and its lake. Their ignorance of Crawshay’s Catholicism is understandable. Caversham was a long way from Aberavon where granddad and my father were living in 1918, and the local press was hardly likely to have picked up reports from there, while the national newspapers were more concerned with news of the war than of the doings of a country gentleman. A pity, really, because it would have given many Lanes, Scannells, Barry’s, Twomeys and the rest a deal a pleasure to read of this sign of God’s grace.
Chapter 17. In And Out Of Little Homes
For economic and social historians, the 1875 closure of the Crawshay works by the vindictive Robert Crawshay, has its own significance. For my great Grandfather Patrick Scannell and his family in their small cottage in Penydarren, it was of immediate importance. Because he, and thousands of his fellow-workers, lost their jobs. Then, and for almost forty years more, there was no unemployment benefit, no social security system to provide at least some income for some of the time when men were out of work. Nor could Pat Scannell and the others look to any help from the Guardians of the Poor. When Robert Crawshay retired from public like after 1860, his place as Chairman of the Guardians was taken by G.T. Clark, senior trustee and controller of the Dowlais Iron Company. In his report for 1875 he wrote:
“Of late years the great mass of men employed in the ironworks and collieries have been content to do as little as possible and often in a slovenly manner. All this, if curable, can only be cured by years of financial distress, and by such personal privation, out of which and out of which alone, a more healthy state of things can be expected to rise.”
It is not surprising, then, that as Chairman of the Guardians, Clark laid down a policy of refusing relief (help) to striking workers; he argued that they had earned good money in the recent past and ought to be able to manage on their supposed savings for at least three months.
Some had, indeed, not spent all that they had earned in the good years 1870-74. Some of them, among the Irish, had long had the habit of setting aside part of their earnings to send back home to help pay the rent on the family landholding; many had saved to provide money for other relatives to leave
Many of the Irish, like many of their non-Irish neighbours, failed to make any savings: ‘easy come, easy go’ was a way of life to people who took advantage of increased earnings to buy for themselves ‘luxuries’ such as a chair or two, a mat or two, some china for the table – and more, better and more varied food. True, many of them also spent a good deal on drink – “the curse of the Irish” according to more than one observer. There were often ‘words’ between ‘savers’ and ‘drinkers’: a ‘drinker’ taunted my mother-in-law (in the 1930s) on the smart dresses worn by her daughters – “and himself hardly back at work”. “There’s less money on their backs than you’ve poured into your belly”, replied the thrifty Ellen. And so it had been in the 1870s – and still is in the 1990s. Some manage, many either can’t, or don’t or won’t.
My grandfather,
I don’t know how the Scannells managed to make ends meet once the works had closed – and remained closed until after the monstrous Robert had been buried beneath that awesome slab. Maybe the children, including my Uncle Johnnie and my future grandmother, Anastasia, helped out along with their other brothers and sisters. I do know, that unlike many others, the Scannells stayed in Merthyr.
Many hundreds of the their fellow Irish left the area. I have mentioned Joe Hennessy’s grandfather’s migration to
Some, at least, of Pat Scannells great grandchildren (i.e. my generation) were to show the same attachment to their own roots and refused to move away – from Aberavon or Cardiff – in search of what others of us were to see as ‘better opportunities’. And who can say which of us made the better decision?
For the healthy and willing, there was work to be had – in the Crawshay collieries and in the Dowlais Works and its attendant collieries. For while Crawshay’s Cyfarthfa had stagnated, the Dowlais Works had adopted successive new methods of steel-making and had become a major force in that relatively new industry. Under the leadership of enterprising Trustees, led by
So, too, did the demand for workers in both Dowlais and Cyfarthfa pits. Fortunately for colliery owners, including Crawshay and the Dowlais Company, the demand for Welsh coal rose dramatically in the 1860s and 1870s and kept on rising until 1914. One effect of that rise in demand was the opening up of new districts, such as the Rhondda, the expansion of mining in older – but still new – areas such as Aberdare, and the emergence of Wales as not the home of the iron industry (which it had been under the first Crawshays and Guests) but as the centre of the country’s coal industry.
So there was a demand for labour in the expanding coal industry in Merthyr, Dowlais and the neighbouring valleys. My great grandfather,
The Scannells, Lanes, Barrys and many others were fortunate in that they had their own small cottages. Thousands of others – some single men, many of them married men with families – had to live in lodgings in the small cottages which served as homes for better-off families. You can still see such cottages in the preserved Triangle in Merthyr; you can see other examples in Museums such as the one at Beamish in
First we go down an unmade roadway, strewn with clinker from the works to provide some sort of surface. The heavy stones which formed some sort of foundation stick up through the ash, making it difficult to push prams, to cycle or indeed, for the infirm, even to walk. Dusty in the summer, the roadway was a muddy mess in the almost constant wet weather. Then, no pavement, we pass the small windows and half-doors of the terrace of cottages. Half-doors? These were modelled on the doors used in stables: the top half of the door could be opened while leaving the bottom half closed. The doors were made of simple planking, sometimes tongued-and-grooved, most often simply side-by-side, nailed on to cross pieces. The top half had its latch and a simple bolt, the bottom half a simple bolt. As some form of protection against the rainwater, there was a wooden strip laid beneath the door – often worn down by constant coming-and-going of clogged feet. Because of poor materials and poorer workmanship by jerry-builders, the wooden frame and door was liable to shrink in hot weather and to swell in the damp. One result was the bottom of the half door was scarred with the boot marks of those who had to force the door open.
Now, out of the muddy or dusty roadway, through the shoddy door and into the living room. This measured some 14 ft by 12 ft. The floor was, in the better cottages, a series of slate slabs laid on the earth. In the worst cottages, the floor was the earth itself. In either event, the floor was all too often as irregular as the floor which, many years later, I was to lay in a room in our holiday hut in Whitsands. My sons will remember helping to lay this – carrying stones for foundations and mixing the concrete which I inexpertly tried to trowel into some sort of shape. We would claim that the ‘up and down’ effect was a deliberate attempt to carry into the hut the motion of the tide we watched from our ‘garden’. In Whitsands it may have been funny: in wintry, muddy Dowlais, it was a nightmare.
The stone walls were plastered and, in the Scannells and other decent homes, whitewashed annually – partly to try to get rid of lice and other pests, partly to try to give some air of cleanliness. The room was dominated by the large coal-burning grate with its hobs and oven.
The fireplace was surrounded by its mantle – the high shelf on which Victorian families kept their knick- knacks: candlesticks, statuettes, family photographs and the like. In Catholics homes, there would be statues of the Sacred Heart and Our Lady, calendars cut from some magazine or paper, with their ‘holy pictures’ of this or that Saint. The children and grandchildren of these earlier Scannells, Lanes, McCarthys and Barrys would carry on that tradition of having ‘reminders of their Faith’ in almost every room and passageway so that, as one irreverent one said, “It’s like going into a bloody repository”. I fear that in this more ecumenical (lukewarm?) age, and under the influence of Conran-Habitat notions of home furnishing and decoration, there are few, if any, signs that this Catholicism of the home has been carried on. Maybe this is one outward sign of an inward attitude toward the Faith.
As for furniture, there was the simple table with a form against the wall on which three or four would sit for meals. There were a few simple chairs and, in the better-off cottages, a high backed ‘fathers’ chair – sometimes a rocker, often times not. I remember my grandfather in his high backed wooden chair – which must have been ‘lost’ in one of our family’s many moves, or maybe just thrown out as we ‘modernised and improved’ in the prosperous (for us at least) 1930s. I was delighted to have been able to buy such a chair in the 1970s and to give it a place in our own kitchen. “From age to age...” with chairs as with so much else. In the back wall of this living room was an opening which might have been meant as a doorway but which most often was either left as a simple opening or was cloaked by a curtain. Through that opening was the cottage’s second downstairs room – a washhouse, a kitchen, a scullery, call it what you will. When much later, the Gas Company provided domestic gas, the cooker would be put out here. Here, too, when, much later, the Water Company laid on a supply, would be the sink and taps. But in 1875, lighting was done by paraffin lamps, and cooking was done on the fireplace in the main room.
In the living room was the rickety wooden stairs leading to the two or maybe three rooms upstairs. Originally there would have been two, each with a small window and each measuring some 12 feet square. In many cottages one, at least, of these rooms would have been subdivided – maybe by a mere curtain hung from the ceiling, maybe by means of a flimsy wooden ‘wall’.
Some men found lodgings with families who, as a result, crammed themselves into less room than they would otherwise have had. Many others went to live in what were advertised as ‘lodging houses’ where a woman (normally it was a woman) would let out all her rooms save one she kept for herself. She would charge by the day (maybe four or five pence) or by the week (maybe two or three shillings). Men shared not only a room, but even the beds, with maybe two or three sleeping in the same bed. In many such lodgings, beds were rarely out of use: the night shift men took the places left empty by the men who worked the day shifts. In some lodging houses, but not all, the woman might provide the men with a cup of tea in the morning and evening, and have cut their bread which they took to eat at work.
What did the Lanes – père et fils – look like when they set out to work? In mid-Victorian times, artists used to make engravings of ‘Men at Work’: these were usually over-romanticised illustrations in which, as in Stalinist Russia, workmen were shown as muscular heroes as they hammered at forges or dug out railway systems. By the 1870s the new ‘art’ of photography enabled men to be shown more as they really were. You can see them for yourselves in various illustrated histories. And there you will see that the workmen looked worn, poorly clothed and shod, and always weary. No wonder that some of them died at a relatively early age as did my great grandfather Pat Scannell.
So, what did the pit banksman Lane and his son look like? Young Patrick, like almost every other workman, had his heavy, hobnailed boots: there’s a term to help some of us recall the clatter of the streets as men came and went to and from work in their hundreds. Why the hob-nails? Mainly to make sure that the leather soles and heels did not wear out: it was cheaper to put in a new set of nails than it would have been to get a pair of boots repaired by a cobbler. A cobbler: a word which recalls the hours we spent watching men at work on heaps of shoes and boots in their street-facing workshops. But cobblers charged, so that many more enterprising men were their own cobblers, buying the awls, hammers, knives and nails needed to repair their own footwear and those of their family. Every man had his own last – and I am reminded of that by the one which we use here as a doorstop. Teresa’s father gave it to me in the vain hope that I might cobble my own shoes.
The workman’s boots were important – whether he was miner or ironworker. They kept out the rain, saved his feet from being scorched in the ironworks or crushed in the mine. No wonder that, weekly, they spent time with the Dubbin tin to make sure that the leather uppers were supple yet strong. Dubbin: some of the older boys will remember having to dubbin the old-fashioned leather footballs to make them more waterproof than they would otherwise have been. The smell, the almost sensuous feel of the greasy dubbin as we rubbed it into the leather casing. Another pleasure lost by the advent of the plastic ball used by a plastic generation.
And, at shift end, the Lanes, along with hundreds of other colliers – and, in Dowlais, hundreds of iron and steel workers – would obey the hooter and hand over to a new shift. Then it was out of the mine or works, past the offices of managers, out into the streets and away to home or lodgings again. Day after repetitive day the same trek, although the food tins and the water bottles were empty at the end of the shift when the shirt was mucky with sweat and dirt, and the trousers filthier than when the men had started out at the start of the shift.
Back in the family home, the Lane men would welcome the pots of boiling water which great grandmother would have ready for them to have their ‘all over’ wash in a zinc bath out in the small courtyard or, in the winter, before the living room fire. She would have had to carry the water from the standpipes in the terrace – as she had to carry all the other water she used for cooking, cleaning, the clothes-wash and so on. Not every woman was willing or always able to carry enough water – and so, in too many homes there was less cleaning than there might have been, and fewer baths that there ought to have been. Indeed, the myth was created that ‘too much washing weakened the men’s backs’ – an excuse for the dirty to cherish.
In a moment I want to look at the children who were brought up in this and other crammed cottages. But before that just two small points: first, the overcrowding that was normal, as was the absence of water and sewage systems, which helps to explain the high rate mortality and the high incidence of diseases which spread from one to another (‘communicable diseases’). If one person caught scarlet fever, almost everyone caught it; if one member of the family developed tuberculosis, it was probable that others would be infected. And the most vulnerable – babies and infants – suffered proportionately more than older children and adults. So every family had its memories of at least one, maybe more, child who had died in infancy. None of our people were strangers to death, for they saw it all around them. Second: those same conditions also help to explain why many men – and women, too, - tried to find an escape from their horrible lives in drink – and so helped make their conditions even worse. From an early age, boys went to pubs and alehouses: indeed, Gangers and foremen responsible for sharing out the shift money among their subordinate workers, paid out in pubs and alehouses – so ensuring that they themselves got free drink from their men (and maybe a cut from the publican, too). There are too many sad stories, in our own family and others, of women waiting at pub doors for their men to be paid in the hope that they could get them to hand over some, at least, of the wage before they settled down to a night’s boozing.
In more unfortunate homes, the effects of drink were obvious and clearly evident. Here were the less well-dressed children: here the more slatternly mothers and girls – the mothers of future generations of feckless boys and girls. Here, too, the homes where parents fought physically as did brother with brother and sister with sister. Nor did this physical confrontationalism die out quickly. I remember being terrified as a thirteen year-old fought my schoolmaster in 1934: I remember watching two old women fighting outside a pub in
What I did know was that when a fight started outside the Red Lion pub one night in 1938, I heard someone tell my father, “That’ll be the Collins gang”. “From age to age...” the harsh conditions in which most people lived led too many of them to become more animalish than their better selves might have wanted to be. For myself, I am glad that granddad had the Scannell example to live with and by – and not that of so many of those with whom I grew up.
Chapter 18. The Role Of The Church
In 1960 David Butler and Richard Rose, eminent students of elections and political parties, examined the continuing decline of the Labour Party, which had suffered its third successive electoral defeat in 1959. They noted that, before 1939,
“An individual’s life often centred around communal meeting – places – the street, the pub, the fish-and-chip shops, the cinema, the union, the chapel or perhaps the Co-op Hall.”
They then noted that in the more affluent 1950s,
“...in new homes, the living-room has become more attractive than the pub...TV provides more entertainment than the cinema...the car is a focus of family life [and the means of getting to the seaside for a break].”
Social and economic change, they claimed, had its political and electoral consequences, and, for our purposes, we may add that social and economic change has had consequences for the place of the Catholic Church in the lives of the descendants of
In 1859 – a century before
But there were other nationalities, which appeared among the Catholic community. There were the Spaniards who came from the Basque country and other ore-bearing regions of
Like the Irish immigrants, too, the Italians were far from homogeneous as regards capacity to work, willingness to save and ambition. So it was that in the 1930s, in
But the continuing increase in the number of Catholics in Merthyr-Dowlais and elsewhere in South Wales, and the need to found new parishes in valleys and along the coastal strip, provided the Bishop of Newport and Menevia with the problem of finding priests to serve the growing community. In 1860, Bishop Brown had 34 churches in his widespread dioceses. In 1881, his successor, Bishop Hedley, had 47 churches in his care as well as ten convents. But, as Hedley discovered, he had only 13 ‘secular’ (as distinct from members of religious orders) priests to call on. Fortunately for both Bishops, they could call in the services of fellow-Benedictines from
And of the 13 ‘secular’ or ‘diocesan’ priests, only two or three had been ordained for the diocese: the others had been ‘borrowed’ from other dioceses or had come from abroad – mostly from
To help finance the training of a diocesan clergy, Hedley appealed to various people: parents of clerical students were invited to contribute what they would to their sons’ training; a Clergy Training Fund was set up and people invited to make annual subscriptions to the Fund; rich Catholics living elsewhere in Britain and abroad were subject to appeals from the Bishop and his fellow-Benedictines. And, slowly, the number of students increased and, in due course, more were ordained.
This still left the Bishop with a problem which also faces Bishops today (1995). Where was he to send the newly-ordained priest to get practical experience before being sent to live on his own in some isolated parish? Because Hedley knew, from his Visitations, that it was difficult for a priest to live in the poverty of the scattered missions in the valleys and along the coastal strip. Indeed, many broke under the burden of the difficult life, and one of Hedley’s main attributes was the careful way in which he helped those who broke, or threatened to break, under the burden of their isolated poverty. It was this concern which lay behind his efforts to find some way of easing the path of the newly-ordained.
He was fortunate in that many of the religious orders, and particularly his fellow-Benedictines, were willing to have young priests to live with them – in Merthyr,
Looking back on it, the wonder is not that a small number of men broke under the strain, but that so many of them emerged – from their sheltered seminaries and a year or so with the Benedictines or Rosminians in their parishes – to become the leaders of their people in their isolated parishes. And they had to be the leaders, in, for example, the fight to get schools built and financed. It is not an accident that the two Catholics elected to serve on the Merthyr (and Dowlais) School Board in 1879 were two priests. Who else, among the community, would have had the confidence to sit among the ironmasters and their agents, Mrs Crawshay and the rest, and to speak out for Catholic needs? Owners, agents, foremen, shopkeepers and professional men, all had a self-confidence deriving, in part at least, from their economic and social positions. There were, in the 1870s, too few Catholics with such economic or social influences generating self-esteem. Nor did their Church do much, if anything, to help generate such self-esteem. On the contrary, a deal of Catholic teaching – in sermons, writing and schooling – seemed to be aimed at the development of humility, modesty, recognition of duties as ‘servants’ and acceptance of one’s place in society. Church structures, too, reinforce this notion of submission to a higher authority in a semi-feudal way: Popes ordered Bishops, who ordered priests, who ordered parishioners, who, in the infamous words of the influential Mgr Talbot were supposed to “pay, pray and obey”.
In both Dowlais and, after 1859, Merthyr,
In a real sense then, the lay people ‘owned’ their churches and, in spite of Talbot, some were ‘empowered’, to use the modern jargon, as a result. And when built, the church, usually with its attendant parish school, became the centre of the lives of the ghetto people. For the ghetto people they were. There were constant external reminders of the hostility of the wider community.
And that hostile bigotry towards Catholics and their beliefs continued. In September 1908,
Cardinal Bourne had got police approval for a procession along the streets around the Cathedral, planned for the last Sunday of the Congress. Some fanatical Protestants threatened to attack such a procession, but the police assured the Cardinal that they could deal with any trouble. A few days before that Sunday, Bourne had a message from the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone (son of the former Prime Minister) suggesting that the procession would be “provocative to Protestant sentiment” and asking him to cancel it. Bourne wrote to Prime Minister Asquith saying that he would, of course, obey any official order to cancel the procession, but that he refused to obey the suggestions of
It is not surprising, then, that in Dowlais as elsewhere, Catholics made their church the centre of their lives and so ‘internalised’ the ghetto. With their men finding their religion a barrier at work, their women often mocked in the narrow and crammed streets, their children physically attacked as they went to and from schools, it is easy to see why they saw the church as ‘the Rock’, ‘the Fortress’ inside which they could find some shelter.
But it was inside this shelter that, paradoxically some of them developed that self-confidence and self-esteem which had been largely lacking. For in the parish, led by enterprising and confident Benedictines, they formed societies and guilds 'for almost every stage of life. There were guilds for choir members, altar servers, schoolboys and girls, Catholic Young men, Children of Mary, Catholic Women...almost ad infinitum. Better-off ladies ran an Altar Society which met to make and mend altar cloths and vestments: better-educated men organised the collection of the Building Fund and many of us had our first introduction to church work as we pedalled around a district with our Collection Books, knocking on doors as families prepared for Sunday dinner so that we could get the pennies or sixpence or shillings which families paid towards the cost of paying off the debt on their church. There was the Society of St Vincent de Paul run by men who collected money and materials from better-off families, and who distributed money, goods and food to the poor. And there were those who organised parish entertainment – whist drives, suppers, lectures and slideshows. And there were the ones who ran the United Irish League aimed at supporting the work of Parnell and his campaign for Home Rule for
Such a plethora of activity – for the many who were interested. It would be foolish to pretend that all Catholics were involved in this way. But it is worth noting that the vast majority were involved in one or more of the church organisations. For many this was, perhaps, merely a social bonding – but nonetheless valuable for all that. For some, albeit a minority, the formation, organisation and running of such societies and guilds provided the first opportunities to take responsibility for something other than their own lives. There were chairmen and women, secretaries and treasurers, committee members and guild wardens... and the erstwhile downtrodden discovered depths and abilities that they never knew they had. So it was that ‘leaders' were developed.
In writing of the experiences of a
“whose participation in the organisations and social occasions was only peripheral.”
Maybe this showed a lack of interest; more likely it was sheer poverty that kept so many people from joining in parish life. Parents who were forced to send their ill-dressed and barefooted children to school hungry were undoubtedly ashamed of going to parish functions in their ragged clothes. And, in Dowlais in the 1870s and later, the majority of Catholics belonged to the poorer end of the social spectrum. It would be to romanticise the position of the societies and organisations in Catholic life to suggest that they were all-embracing.
What was all-embracing was the notion of the Church and its liturgy as the centre of the lives of the mass of the people – poor and better-off. In particular, attendance at Sunday mass was seen as the most important part of the week. As one man recalled – and he spoke for so many – “This is the time of the week to cast aside the temporal life – the smoking, drinking, and socialising, the day-to-day slog of work. Now was the time to reassess the week that has just gone. Have I been doing the right things? Have I been helping people in trouble? Have I left undone the things I ought to have done? Have I, in brief, been a good Catholic?”
To help set aside the ‘temporal life’, the Church interior was ‘other worldly’: it was cleaner than most homes; the altar had its flowers; the walls carried their statues – of the Sacred Heart, Our Lady, St Benedict, St Francis, St Anthony and so on; there were the stained glass windows through which the light filtered; there were the candle stands beneath some of the statues, the record of the faithful’s prayers and, as it were, their wish that they could stay at prayer as long as the candle flickered.
Medieval cathedrals, such as
“Our aim is to make the ritual simple and dignified, as solemn and devotional as possible, that the people might learn from all the outward associations of this solemn service. Processions, lights, incense, choral services, pictures and music – these accessories of worship are the rightful claim of the clergy and people, and appreciated by them. The people love and glory in their church. To many it is their only quiet retreat, all that they have to soothe them in the privations of a hard life. It is their home. It is God’s house, but is also theirs, and they feel a pride in its adornment”.
Archer, writing of
“The Mass was exclusively about God...a miracle ...regularly performed”.
And, in 1982, the Sunday Times examination of the lives of the London Irish noted:
“He goes to Mass at least once a week and to him it is a miracle... He goes to Communion to receive the Body of Christ. He does not think it is symbolic: he believes it is the Body of Christ, transubstantiated from the bread, there in Wapping, in front of his very eyes.”
That simple faith was that of
They accepted the ‘miracle’ as an article of Faith. They could not have explained the process of transubstantiation: indeed, they probably couldn’t have spelt the word. Many of us will remember having to learn to do so a part of our Catechism lessons. And even being able to spell it took us no further along the road towards being able to explain it rationally. Mind you, I couldn’t have explained breathing either, but I did it all the time: nor can I, now, understand electricity, but I use it happily. As the half renegade
‘Twas Christ, the Word, that spake it;
He took the bread and brake it;
And what the Word did make it,
That I believe and take it.
For the lucky few, whose working or home patterns of life allowed them, there was daily Mass – at
And threading through the year were a cycle of devotions centring on the church and attracting, always, large crowds of the faithful. Maybe the most emotional were the May processions for which a May Queen was chosen from the school. She placed a crown, carried by a chosen boy, on the statue of Mary that was carried around the Church by six men. School children carried baskets of flower petals to strew in front of the statue, while older children carried posies. In many homes there was a May altar which, as I remember, had its vases of bluebells around the Lady statue and which was the centre where we said our night prayers.
Less emotional, but of great importance was the devotion of the Forty Hours, which we ‘sanctified’ by having it called, even in working class Aberavon, Quarant Ore. Each parish in the diocese was allocated a two or sometimes three day period in the year when it held this devotion. During this time the Eucharist was placed in a Monstrance and set above the High Altar. Here there would be hundreds of tall candles, gifts from parishioners whose names might be inscribed on the candles which burnt before the Eucharist. Continuous prayer was offered for the allocated period with listed teams of ‘watchers’ ensuring that the sacrament was never left ‘ unwatched’. And, until 1939 and the wartime blackout, such ‘watching’ went on throughout the night as well as the day. In later times the Eucharist is put back into the Tabernacle at
In Dowlais, as in many other places, there was a weekly saying of the Rosary (7.30 p.m. on Wednesday), and the singing of Vespers on Sunday (6.00 p.m.), while there were evening prayers said in the Church each day at 7.30 p.m. Both the Rosary and Vespers were followed by Benediction when the Eucharist, in the Monstrance, was placed on the altar for half an hour or so. During this time, familiar and quickly learned Latin hymns were sung with the choir leading and the congregation adding what one priest described as “loud and draughty singing.” Benediction was not, nor is, part of the ‘official’ liturgy of the Church and this may help explain why, for many, it was a very popular service. True, there was the miracle of the Real Presence in the Monstrance; true, the use of Latin by mainly uneducated people gave a sense of ‘the other worldly and supernatural’. But the communal singing of Latin and English hymns was both a sign of and a helpful cause of a sense of solidarity. And while, after most Masses, people had to hurry home – some to get their first meal of the day, mothers to prepare the Sunday dinner, after evening Benediction there was time for people to hang around, to chat, catch up on the doings of this one and that one who had left home – and to add to that sense of communal solidarity. Then, for many people, there was time for the walk to one or other relative’s house for a family get together, which, in many homes, was an occasion not only for family gossip but for the sing-a-long of mainly Irish songs – which confirmed the Irishness of the Welsh-born – and of those romantic ballads so loved by the Victorians and, later, Edwardians.
I enjoyed such Benedictions and their social aftermaths in the 1930s – as I hope to show later. I regret that, for a variety of reasons which again I hope to explain later, we have lost both the well-attended Benedictions, the Evening Prayers, and, not the least significant loss, the social gatherings which followed. Writing in 1970, the Dominican Fr Kerr pleaded that:
“we must surely do what we can to retain and develop that old-fashioned sense of community and the supernatural... it seems to me that both are threatened .../so that we face/the danger of secularism”.
In the 1990s both major political parties talk of developing ‘communitarianism’ as a means of correcting the social breakdown that has followed the Thatcherite rush towards selfish individualism. Until 1939 at least, the majority of Catholics enjoyed a deep sense of community – in their worship and liturgy, in their many societies, organisations and guilds, and in their intertribal reliance on one another and their Church. It is not only the wider society which has suffered the death of ‘communitarianism’: Our Catholic community, too, has suffered, as its societies and guilds have been allowed (sometimes even encouraged) to die, and our liturgies have become more secularised and less ‘mystical and miraculous’.
Chapter 19. Catholic Schools For Catholic Children
We have now returned, but not fully recovered, from Damien’s wedding to Sarupa. Of that more later. But here to note that it was a chance to see, in the flesh, some of the outward signs of some of the things I am trying to do in this book. There were ‘oldies’ such as Terry and Frances Ryan (one of my Welsh cousins from the McCarthy side of our families). Like us they are somewhat bemused, from time to time, at what happened to their children in terms of living standards and styles. Then there were our children – or most of them – graduates all, married to graduates and full of ambition for their children – of whom there were ten helping to enliven the evening’s happenings.
And, most poignant for me, there was
On our return, we have seen Christopher’s children – and their friends – make their way to the nearby Catholic primary school. All in their neat uniforms, all washed and brushed clean, all well fed and all looking forward to starting on a new Key Stage of their National Curriculum-based education. Like every other child of their varying ages, they will go through a well-planned system – primary school, secondary school and, if they are willing and able – on to higher education. And in all of this they will be helped by government money. Our Catholic schools are built with the help of a grant of 85% of the costs from
central government: we have to find only 15% of the building and maintenance costs. The running costs of the schools – teachers’ salaries, heating, books and the rest, - comes from a mix of government and local council money, and the formulae for such grants make no distinction between Catholic and State schools. And, should they go on to some form of higher education, our grandchildren will be helped by government funding, as will their non-Catholic peers – although that help will not be as generous as was the help received by their parents in their time.
And we, and our children and theirs, now accept so much of all of that as ‘rights’: buildings, salaries, books, grants, healthy well-dressed children, comfortable homes, government funding. How different from the schooling, if any, that was available to the Catholic children growing up in granddad’s Merthyr and Dowlais in the 1870s. How different from the experience of my father (born 1900) and mother (born 1893). And, indeed, how different to my own experience, and Teresa’s, and Frances Welsh’s. Our children’s ‘better’ experiences are the outward signs of the social changes that have taken place in the wider community in general, and in the Catholic community in particular.
Talking to a variety of Catholic professional men, now retired, I find that my own experience matches theirs in that none of us – ex-lawyers, bankers, teachers and so on – ever knew a Catholic graduate when we were growing up in the 1920s and 1930s. My junior school headmaster, Will Greenway, was a graduate from the
And if it was so in the 1920s and 1930s, it was even more so (‘In spades’ as my father might have said), in earlier generations. No Catholic parent in Granddad’s Dowlais could have ever even conceived of the notion that his or her children would go on to University education. We shall see that a small handful paid for their children to receive some form of secondary schooling, and that an even smaller number went on to train as teachers: but these were rare animals among the Catholic masses.
Nor did governments think that it was a duty to do over much for the education of children in general – let alone to pay for the education of Catholic children in separate Catholic schools.
Parents who earned low wages, lived crowded into small rooms, dressed all too often in rags, and often hungry, must have thought that schooling was a luxury they could not afford. Indeed, their poverty forced many parents to send children to work at the earliest possible age, and they looked on time spent at school as time wasted. One told the priest that:
“if the child can read that is enough. They should thank God for that and be satisfied”.
We have seen that Fr Carroll built St Illtydd’s church in 1846, a mere year before he died of cholera. But in 1838, when there were 700 Catholics in the area, he rented a stable measuring 8 ft by 16 ft where he ran a school for Dowlais Catholic children. In 1841, by which time there were 1200 Catholics in Dowlais, Fr Carroll bought a plot of land from Sir John Guest measuring 80 ft by 160 ft for the building of a
“The 2000 Irish of the poorest class in Merthyr are forced to appeal to the charity of Irish Catholics elsewhere, to provide the funds to build these schools”.
And this explains why Fr Carroll and his successors spent some of their time in
As the Irish population expanded and as the number of children increased, so the schools were enlarged, and we know that Dowlais had its first Master, a Mr Cronin, who was paid £60 a year. His appointment also marked the year when, for the first time, the Dowlais school became eligible for funds from the Cabinet Committee which supervised the contribution of government money to Voluntary Schools. Most of these schools were run by the Anglican National Society and by the Nonconformist British and Foreign School Society. There was no such national organisation for Catholic schools until 1884. It was left to the energy and far sightedness of local priests to apply to the Cabinet Committee to have individual Catholic schools put on the list of schools eligible for a grant. In 1859 the
What was taught in Dowlais and Merthyr conformed to what the government expected of schools – arithmetic, geography, English grammar, reading and writing. John Hickey, a Catholic historian, comments that this was “a not unambitious programme for the children of the poorer classes of the time”. Here we have a benchmark against which to set the changes that have taken place during the generations covered by this book.
We also have a benchmark as regards the children and their behaviour and appearance. They were, it is true, from the poorer classes, as Hickey noted. So, as a report commented, they came to school:
“shoeless, ragged and starving, to learn the three ‘R’s’, to burden their scanty brains with sums and tasks, while their stomachs are empty and their bodies weakened by disease and neglect”.
In 1862 Robert Lowe introduced a new system of School Inspection and funding. This involved ‘payment-by-results’. Schools, such as those in Merthyr and Dowlais, would get their funds from government (such as they were) according to two criteria:
2. How many children were present at school on the day the annual inspection took place?
2. How many children ‘passed’ the tests set by the Inspector for children of different ages?
The insistence on ‘attendance’ was meant to prevent schoolmasters simply enrolling children and claiming a grant. Neither government ministers nor Inspectors had a high opinion of teachers’ honesty. One result of this need for attendance on a particular day was that children were dragged to school from sick beds, even if suffering a contagious fever.
The importance of the test in the three ‘R’s’ helps to explain the nature of much of the teaching that went on. Multiplication tables had to be chanted by the hour so that even the dullest pupil might know that ‘7 7s are 49’. I have an abiding memory of table-chanting. So, too, with the reading of passages that were to be tested. These were gone through endlessly, with child after child reading sentences aloud. Woe betide you if you didn’t have your finger on the last word read when your name was called on to “carry on reading”.
But what has all this and that to do with granddad? He was involved, as were many others, in the collection of money needed to provide for the schools in Merthyr and Dowlais: he had nephews and nieces who, from time to irregular time, went to the schools. For in 1870,
In brief what his 1870 Act said was that:
1. The country was to be divided into about 2,500
2. In each District, the ratepayers were to elect a School Board. This, by the way, gave various areas another Board to add to the Boards of Guardians and of Health. The Victorians were struggling to create the administrative framework needed to cope with an industrial and urban society.
3. The Boards were to check on the number of school places already provided in the districts by the various Voluntary bodies – including the Catholic Church. If there were not enough places to provide a place for every child in the District, then the Board could collect an Education Rate and build, maintain and staff its own Board Schools.
4. Boards could charge a school fee for each child attending school – although attendance was not compulsory. However, Boards could remit fees in the cases of children of the poor who were unable to pay a fee. Such remissions were to be subsidised from the Education Rates.
It was Cardinal Manning who best recalled the dangers of this Act for the future education of Catholic children. What would happen to such children living in a district where there was no existing Catholic school? Their parents might well be attracted to the idea of sending them to the new
It is therefore all the more remarkable that, in spite of their relative poverty and the absolute poverty of many of their children, the Catholic schools managed to produce year after year, the best rate of ‘complete passes’ in the annual inspections. And this, in spite of the fate that the Voluntary Schools, built at private expense, had to pay rates on their buildings and land to help provide for the upkeep of the rate-aided
Led by Cardinal Manning, Catholics became politicised in a way which the government could never have foreseen. My grandfather and his Irish peers were, like their Irish-Welsh forefathers, well used to being politically involved. But their involvement was, in the main, concerned with Irish affairs. Their Fenian clubs met in church or school halls, as did, later, the members of local branches of the United Irish League and the Home Rule of Ireland movement. But it was the ‘battle for the schools’ which brought my grandfather, and others, to concern themselves with domestic issues. We shall see, in the next Chapter, that, by accident, this prepared them to become involved in social issues and to become members of, or supporters of, the infant Labour Party.
And the ‘battle for the schools’ went on being fought for almost a hundred years, so that, for many Catholics of my father’s generation it was the pre-eminent political question and remained so for many of my own generation until it was replaced by the abortion issue in the 1960s and 1970s. By then, Catholics had won many privileges for their separate schools so that, for most of us, there was no longer a battle to be fought, but merely victories to be consolidated. It was far from clear that this would be the outcome when the battle was first joined in the 1870s.
Why did Bishops, priests and people attach such importance to the provision of Catholic schools? Many of the Bishops were the products of one or other of the fee-paying Catholic boarding schools run by religious orders or by secular priests. But the ‘battle for the schools’ was not fought over these fee-paying schools, but over the provision of schools for the mass of the Catholic population. The Irish immigrants came from their home country where, even in the Penal days of 1750, there was a full parochial structure and where most parishes had a school for its children. Additionally there were the celebrated, and often mythologised, ‘hedge schools’ which stressed the classic and Gaelic culture, and which provided the bases for the education of many future priests. After Emancipation (1829) there was a rapid development of education: in 1841, just before the Famine, there were 12,000 registered teachers in
So, it is not surprising that the priest and people, once removed from
Indeed, in some senses it was more imperative to provide that church-school link in Dowlais than it had been in, say,
It may seem ironic that the battle of the schools should have been launched by Manning, a former Anglican and a member of the well-to-do classes. But in his first Pastoral Letter (1865) he had appealed for help:
“to gather in from the streets of this great wilderness [
He called on the richer ‘old Catholics’, led by Lord Howard of Glossop, to fund his ‘Crisis Fund’ which provided schools for 70,000 children in London alone. He set up a Poor School Committee, chaired by an ‘old Catholic’, T.W Allies, to negotiate for the building of schools and to persuade Poor Law Guardians to accept responsibility for paying the weekly fees for the poorest children.
And, in their own ways, the priests of Merthyr and Dowlais imitated Manning. Fathers Bruton and Millea were elected to the Merthyr School Board when it was set up in March 1871 (the election day being, by coincidence, March 17, the Feast of St Patrick). They, and later priest-representatives, saw the Merthyr Board open its first school at Penydarren in 1874 where children paid 9 pence a week, until the government made education free (1891) so increasing the pressure on Catholic governors and managers.
It was Manning who best expressed the need for Catholic schools when he was challenged by the Nonconformist, R.W. Dale, who said religious education was best left to the home. Manning replied:
“It is now fifty years since I began to work among the poor; and I think I know their state. The home ought to be the best school, but it is not so. A Christian people can only be perpetuated by Christian education; but Christian education is not to be given in the unaided homes of
Manning encouraged Bishop Vaughan of
“The Catholic schools may be the iron head to the spear, but the iron head will make but a poor weapon unless it have the weight of the wooden shaft behind it”.
Manning, and Vaughan, argued that:
“Religion without doctrine is like mathematics without axioms, a triangle without bases or sides”.
Religion, like maths, had to be ‘taught’ in schools as well as ‘caught’ from examples in homes and schools. And, as part of that teaching – from Catechism classes – there was the learning of common prayers (and I can still see the room in which Rosie Shannon taught us the Memorare), of popular hymns (and I well remember the ‘singing in the ‘all’ on Friday afternoons when Bill Greenway taught us Archbishop Mostyn’s new hymn to St David), and of common devotions – such as the Nine First Fridays, Guardian Angels and the like. It is now commonplace for former convent schoolgirls – lapsed from the Faith – to pour scorn on what they were offered by the nuns: too few of them pay tribute to the education which allowed them to become media heroines; they prefer to call attention to the ‘guilt factor’ arising from the ‘drumming in’ of the truths of their Faith which they received in childhood. Many of us, however, are grateful for much of the Catholic rote learning we had – which has allowed us, in later days, to reflect on the meaning of the words and phrases we rattled through as children. What a summary of faith, and what a basis for prayer, lay in the Act of Hope which I never understood as a child:
“My God, I hope in Thee for grace and for glory, because of Thy promises, Thy mercy and Thy power”.
Pick out the nouns and reflect on them – by the hour if you want.
My granddad was not, in 1871, one of the ratepayers who helped elect his priest on to the School Board: but he was to become one in the not too distant future and with his father was, in any event, one of the many non-voters who were still politicised by the ‘battle for the schools’.
One final point. The creation and development of our separate schools helped strengthen the ‘internal’ nature of the ‘ghetto’ while creating an external hostility which further strengthened that ghetto-nature. Like Catholic children everywhere – and down into the 1940s at least – the boys and girls going to the Catholic schools in Merthyr and Dowlais were often stoned by other children as they came and went to school. My brother Pat went to his grave carrying the scar of one such attack made on us in Neath in 1933 or 1934: that attack was caused by an Irish victory over
Chapter 20. Some Rites Of Passage Among The Four Families 1889 – 1901
My Great Grandparents Die
Margaret Scannell (b. 1834) died
Patrick ) Scannell (b. 1828) died
Patrick Barry )both died before 1888 as shown by the
Jeremiah McCarthy )marriage certificate of their children, my grandparents
My Grandparents Marry
McCarthy – Barry
Jeremiah McCarthy (b. 1858) and Mary Anne Barry (b 1864) were married on
Lane – Scannell
posted by therealtonylane at 1:12 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home