Chapters 1 - 5
“From Age to Age...”
The Lane family, c. 1798 - c. 2004
| |
INTRODUCTION
He died on
He was one of the many millions who left
Now, in May 1998, I think of his great-grandchildren and of our dozens of children in an extended family: university teachers, company directors, accountants, lawyers, senior managers in various industrial companies, city bankers, venture capitalists..., almost everyone male and female, professionally and/or academically qualified. Clearly, to adapt John Donne, none of these is unique, because each one’s story is, in many regards, the story of the others.
Nor is the social and economic mobility of this extended Lane family a peculiar or isolated example. Their mobility over four generations is something that they share with hundreds of other families of Irish descent.
And that social and economic mobility is not peculiar to the Irish-based: in Dowlais, my great-Granddad lived, moved and had his being - and died - alongside many thousands of Welshmen, Scotsmen and English migrants. Many of these, too, have great-grandchildren who have experienced the same social and economic improvement, as have the Lanes in particular and many Irish families in general.
So the Lane story which unfolds in the following pages is, mutatis mutandis, the story of countless other Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English families.
*****
I spent some 50 years teaching and lecturing in a variety of schools, colleges and American-style Universities. During some 30 years or so I wrote a number of history textbooks. So it is, perhaps, not surprising that in the first half or so of what follows I have (maybe unconsciously) sought to answer a number of questions. “Why did the founders of my four ancestral families (Chapter 1) leave
Clearly, answers to those and other similar questions do not involve members of my family only. The Health Inspectors and others who reported on living and working conditions in nineteenth century Merthyr never named my ancestors in their condemnatory accounts of life there. Mine was but one of thousands of other families who lived in squalor and saw children die in and out of ironworks and mines.
In the second half of the book I have concentrated on the family begat by my parents and, to a degree, on my own part in that story - as child and, now, as father and grandfather. Clearly other Lanes, Scannells, McCarthys and Barrys have their own developing story. So, too, do my own children and grandchildren, and I hope that they, and others, may carry the story forward again.
In loving memory of so many Lanes, Scannells, McCarthys, Barrys and others,
and in thanksgiving for my wife, children and grandchildren.
Ed. Huge thanks must also go to the many generous, people, who have patiently helped me to gather much of the extra (interesting?) information.
Thank you to Merthyr Reference Library, The Sec’, Poor Clare’s of Mill Hill, St Vincent de Paul’s, Mary Fletcher, Teresa Hill and last but not least, John Scannell.
To the author, my Dad, I thank you for the joy you have expressed at each of my little discoveries, for your praise for my editorial and typing efforts and your patience with my errors.
Finally, thank you for this gift, that provides me and my children, and those pictured above, and theirs, with our history.
Author’s final? note. My deepest thanks to editor Anthony Paul for typing and re-typing the M.S., for chasing down all the welcome illustrations and for his pertinent comments and captions.
| |
Chapter Title
Title page
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
1 The four families
2 Two towns or one? but two families
3 The state of the towns, circa 1850
4 No room for water in rainy Merthyr and Dowlais
5 Cholera and other epidemics, circa 1840 - circa 1870
6 The Irish and the famine 1845 - 1847
7 The first Irish in the valley 1820 - 50
8 The immigrants at work
9 The Irish and the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Catholics
10 Catholicism in the valleys
11 The Ghetto
12 The Ghetto - II
13 The Fenians and the Irish in
14 The first Catholic voters - 1868
15 A Catholic Marquess of
16 Hubris and Nemesis: a Crawshay interlude
17 In and out of little homes
18 The role of the Church
19 Catholic schools for Catholic children
20 Some Rites of passage among the four families, 1889 - 1901
21 The first step on the Irish Socialist road
22 How Catholic socialism came to Dowlais, 1891 - 93
23 The Irish and the Keir Hardie’s election as
Merthyr’s MP, 1900
24 Reform, rebellion -and family death
25 Louis Lane at school, 1905 - 14
26 Some Rites of passage 1914 - 1932
27 Leaving of Dowlais for Aberavon
28 Aberavon Catholics, 1914 - 22
29 Two families become one: The Lane-McCarthy marriage
30 The
31 Aberavon life, 1925 - 30
32 A
33 A job for Dad and a new home for us: Neath, 1931 -32
35 The Scholarship
36 At the Secondary school
37 At the Sec’ - 1938-39
38 A Mum’s life
39 Lanes to war and work 1939-42
40 Life as a religious novice
41 Mallow, 1943-45
42 Kintbury 1945-47
43
44 Getting a job-and a degree 1950 - 53
45 To marriage
46 Children and our first house
47 Children - at home and school
48 More children in
49 The Wallington years
50 On writing
51 On politics 1964-74
52 Closing Coloma - 1978
53 1978-79 and on to Thatcher’s
54 Thatcherism 1979- 83
55 The waning of my Church, 1965 - 98
56 Towards the end, 1983 - 1998
57 And now ...
Chapter 1. The Four Families
The First Lane
I am looking at the death certificate of
The death certificate shows that he was “formerly banksman at colliery”. A pit banksman was chosen by colliers, who worked underground, to look after their interests above ground: he would ensure that the management check weigh-men made the correct entries in registers of tubs as they were brought up, deal with men’s complaints about conditions below ground in the absence of organised trade unions. As someone at British Coal told Gerard, “The banksman was someone whom the rest of the men trusted: he would have been known and respected by all others.” In passing, I note that his son, my grandfather, was also a pit banksman, as can be seen on my father’s birth certificate. So, for whatever reasons, both the first two Patrick Lanes were held in some regard by their fellow workers who chose them for this ‘overlooking’ post.
This
We shall see that my father was born at
One final point about
Ed.
On my copy of the attached census I have scrawled that
Patrick’s sister, Mary married a Timothy Sullivan.
Tim’s aunt, Frances, was married to a Patrick Barry.
They had a daugher called Mary Ann Barry.
MA Barry would marry marry Jeremiah McCarthy,
and so would be born Mary Ann McC (
So, the two families marry twice in two generations.
The Lanes must have moved from
Though the census shows Merthyr as the place of living, Dowlais is the named placed (same address (
Changes that we will see from the 1881 census will be that soon the Lanes, by the 1901census, will have moved, next door, from 14, to
I found
Witnesses to the wedding of Patrick and Anastasia are Elizabeth Sullivan (Tim and Mary’s Sullivan?) and James Baldwin (who will later marry a Sullivan himself).
The first Scannell
My other paternal great-grandfather was Patrick Scannell who died on
On his death certificate he is described as “formerly a steelworks labourer” and not, as he was described on his wife’s death certificate (dated
Patrick Scannell had lived at
Ed.
John Scannell, cousin to Dad, assures me that Patrick Scannell (b. 1827) originates from Aghada,
Margaret Scannell
She was my paternal great-grandmother and the wife, as shown above, of Patrick Scannell. She was 64 years old when she died on the Feast of St Joseph,
The first McCarthy
Here you can have two for the price of one. I have the death certificate for Jeremiah McCarthy, my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1858 or 1859. More of that in a moment. But on his marriage certificate (
For reasons already given I assume that my McCarthy great-grandfather was born in
Grandpa McCarthy belongs to the second generation of my ancestry. So it is cheating a bit to have him listed here. But it is worth noting that his death certificate noted that he had been “Traffic Foreman Railway: Retired”. In fact he was a foreman on the Bute Docks Railway system that was part of the old Great Western Railway. I remember him well, with his big black tin box, his guards’ flags and whistle.
He died in
The first Barry
I am looking at the marriage certificate of Patrick Barry and Fanny Sullivan, dated
Patrick Barry and Fanny Sullivan were my maternal great-grandparents. Patrick was born in 1826 and Fanny in 1827. As with all earlier ancestors, I have no record of were they were born, but, for well-explained reasons, I assume they were born in
Their marriage certificate is of additional interest, because it has the names of the fathers of each of the newlyweds. Patrick Barry’s father, Richard Barry is described as “labourer” of Ynysgau, Merthyr. Fanny Sullivan’s father was “John Sullivan, deceased”. Taking a line from the dates of birth of their children, it is likely that Richard Barry and John Sullivan were born somewhere around 1790 - 1800. So here, folks are my great-great-grandparents, most surely born in Wolfe Tone’s rebellious
Patrick Barry (so many Patricks in this first generation) was described as “Labourer”, the role of the majority of the unskilled immigrants of the period. This marriage certificate shows that, in 1849, neither Patrick Barry nor his bride could write, but had to be content with giving “the mark of ...” in each case. However, Patrick Sullivan, who gave his sister Fanny away, could write his name on the register, although the chief bridesmaid, Ellen Hurley couldn’t. Maybe we ought to take this inability to write as a starting point for our consideration of the social mobility that has gone on since then.
One of the children of this marriage was Mary Ann Barry (born
Ed.
For 5 years I had wanted to go to the Dublin Library where the many of the Kerry registrar records are held with the thought of searching further up the family tree for the beginnings of
That showed a
Chapter 2. Two Towns Or One? But Two Families
The valleys
You will have seen in Chapter 1 that our ancestors came to live in Merthyr and Dowlais. I have lived so long with this work that I feel that I know a good deal about both these places. But it is, perhaps, unfair of me to expect that everyone else knows about them. So, for a start, have a look at a map of
If you have looked at the map, then try this next exercise. Lay your hand
My use of the word ‘town’ may be misleading in some ways. To-day, all of us live in some town or city. We know what we mean when we use the word ‘town’: a number of paved roads and streets, pavements, street lighting, street cleansing, planned housing, proper water supplies, sewage systems, refuse collection, shopping areas, transport systems, playgrounds and parks, libraries, schools.... you can add your own nouns to the list. None of these were provided by God or nature: they are the result of Acts of Parliament, the work of Local Governments, the demands of voters, and the payment of taxes of various sorts. We shall see that almost none of these amenities or facilities could have been found in Merthyr or Dowlais when Pat Barry married Fanny Sullivan in 1849. Neither they, living in Merthyr, nor the Lanes, Scannells and McCarthys who lived in Dowlais, lived in a ‘town’ as we understand the word. Rather they occupied a place or places in a sort of Wild West shambles along with maybe some 60,000 people. But of that, more later.
Both Merthyr and Dowlais were, in a real sense, ‘company towns’. The Crawshay family, who owned the huge Cyfarthfa Ironworks and dozens of collieries, ‘owned’ Merthyr: the Guest family, which owned the once smaller but later much larger Dowlais Ironworks, ‘owned’ Dowlais. The Guests and Crawshays were often at odds with one another and were major competitors in the iron trade when the valley was ‘the iron capital of the world’. But they were united in their opposition to attempts by what they termed ‘radicals’ who tried to persuade Parliament to allow Merthyr to have an elected Town Council. They were able to use their economic muscles in their towns to force voters to reject any such democratic notions. Only in 1907 after the Crawshays had sold Cyfarthfa and the Guests had sold the Dowlais Works did Merthyr become a Borough and so gain the right to have a Council. For the first sixty years or more, the first Lanes, Scannells and others, lived in towns controlled by the whims of dictators. Nothing like it can be found today.
Why the towns grew.
Until the late eighteenth century, the makers of iron (or ironmasters) used charcoal as the fuel for their small, portable furnaces. Not surprisingly, the old iron industry was centred on well forested areas, such as the Weald of Kent and the
The squirrels leapt from tree to tree,
From highest Brecon down to the sea.
During
If you want to know more about the history of the Guest family and the Dowlais Iron Works, you could do no better than read A History of Guest, Keen and Nettleford, by Edgar Jones. Similarly, if you want to know more about The Crawshays and the Cyfarthfa Works of Merthyr, you would do well to read The Crawshays of Cyfarthfa by Margaret Stewart Taylor. Some ideas of both families and their history are essential for our story: these families built the towns in which our ancestors lived: both were the largest employers in the Valley, and ones for whom our ancestors worked: both, then, left marks on our family history. To begin at the beginning (and then merely to summarise):
1759 A group of English ironmasters and merchants founded the Dowlais Iron Company and built a small works with the blast for furnaces provided by a huge water wheel built over Dowlais Brook.
1767 They invited John Guest (of Broseley in
1781 John Guest became the principal shareholder and, in effect, the owner of the Company and its expanding works.
1783 Richard Crawshay, an iron merchant of
1786 On Bacon’s death, Crawshay bought a substantial share in the Cyfarthfa Company.
1794 Crawshay bought out Bacon’s son and became sole owner of the Company and its works. He was a shrewd manager: he was the first ironmaster to use Henry Cort’s new ‘puddling’ process which allowed him to produce more iron more cheaply than any of his competitors: he ploughed back into the Works the profits made in both the Cyfarthfa Company and in the London end of his business. Guest was less adventurous and became, in effect, a supplier of pig iron to Crawshay whose works transformed this into the more valuable bar iron. Indeed, so successful was Crawshay, and so poor was the record of the Dowlais Works, that in 1792 Guest offered the Dowlais works to Crawshay for a mere £60,000. He refused the tempting offer, maybe because he was already overstretched by his building of new and larger furnaces, mills and sheds at his own works.
1804 The Cyfarthfa Works was already described as the ‘largest in the kingdom and, therefore, in the world’. Merthyr was ‘the iron capital of the world’, with Crawshay described as ‘the first Iron King’. This ‘royal’ title was one that all his descendants were to claim and to have it given them in the biographies, which appear in the Dictionary of National Biography.
The relative failure of the Dowlais Works was due largely to the timidity of Thomas Guest, who succeeded his father when he died in 1787. The recovery of the Works was, in turn, due to the energy and farsightedness of his son, John (later Sir John) Guest who succeeded his father in 1807. By the time he died in 1852, the Dowlais Company was at least equal in output and profitability to Cyfarthfa. He employed skilled engineers who were allowed to run the various parts of the ever-expanding Works. He ploughed ever-increasing shares of the annual profits into innovation and expansion. He started primary and technical schools for his people so that his workers were better qualified than those at Cyfarthfa.
Much of his success was due to his wife, Lady Charlotte, a member of the Churchill family, who led the campaign for schools and was proud that Dowlais became known as ‘the Prussia of Britain’. When Guest died in 1852, she took over the running of the Dowlais works: she continued the policy of recruiting able and talented managers and engineers to work for her.
At Cyfarthfa, as we shall see, one Crawshay followed another as owner-manager of the works. None of them were allowed any but the simplest education: all were put to work in Cyfarthfa at the age of sixteen. On the other hand, none of the many children of Sir John and Lady Charlotte Guest were educated in Dowlais. The eldest son, Ivor, (who was to become Lord Wimborne in 1880) went to
The Crawshays, on the other hand, went along with the opinion of the majority of British industrialists. These argued that “small is beautiful” and that family firms ought to continue to be the order of the day. Never mind that in France, Germany and the USA, large publicity owned limited liability companies had already shown that only such heavily financed organisations could afford the outlay needed to maintain and develop industry in the new technological age. Never mind that such foreign companies had shown that publicly educated men, products of universities, technical institutions and colleges, brought to industry an energy, an understanding and a capacity that were not available to British family-based firms, with their reliance on ‘sons and heirs’ to be managers. Robert Crawshay, who was to be the last of the ‘Iron Kings’, had full control of Cyfarthfa when he was only 22 years old. On Guest’s insistence on qualified managers, he argued:
“Technical education can surely only mean the teaching of an art. I can conceive of no better school than the workshop. You have there the experience and skill of the best workers; you are in the very atmosphere of your craft; you are learning by doing.”
And therein lies a major reason for
The Crawshays
When Richard Crawshay died in 1810, his son, William (‘the First’) became owner of the Works. But he had never liked Merthyr so that he ran the
Like almost all successful industrialists, William the First had bought for himself a large mansion (at Stoke Newington). In Merthyr, each of the main ironmasters built for themselves large houses almost all near their works. Maybe the most imposing was Guest’s Dowlais House built around 1810. This still exists although it has now been converted into offices. William the Second envied Guest this ‘commodious mansion built inside the Works’ boundary’ and got his
By 1820 William had enough money of his own to buy the land on which he wanted to have his ‘mansion’ built. He then engaged the architect Robert Lugard to prepare plans for this proposed new home. With the recovery of the iron trade in the 1820s, William instructed Lugard to hire the builders and others required for the construction of the planned home. Lugard reckoned that it would cost £25,000 to build. Contemporary accounts note that this was “a princely sum”.
In mock Gothic style it had fifteen towers, 365 windows and 72 rooms. Large country houses (which Crawshay meant to imitate) also had dairies, brew houses, coal bunkers.... The house stood in a landed estate of some 18 acres, with plantations, shrubs, lawns, flowerbeds as well as kitchen gardens and large flower gardens.
A note on one more feature of the estate, because it was this which links my family with the Castle and which I knew about long before I even saw the Castle. It was the lake which Crawshay ordered to be dug out between the house and the main road. Early in this century the Castle was bought by the Merthyr Corporation and turned into two Grammar schools, one for boys and one for girls. Admission to these schools was open to fee- payers and, for a small number, those who passed ‘the scholarship’ when they were aged eleven and had their fees paid by the Corporation. In 1911 my father sat this scholarship examination and one of his stories (tall?) was how he and his friend, Jimmy Walsh, missed the first ten minutes of the examination because they had sneaked away and gone rowing on the lake.
Jimmy Walsh went on to become James Walsh, PhD and to be a noted editor of Catholic journals. My father went on to become.... but that belongs to later parts of this story.
In 1839 William the Second (but the third ‘Iron King’) left
William preferred to spend his time at
“My father feared his father: I feared my father: and, by God, I’m going to make sure that my sons fear me.”
Happy families indeed.
Richard Crawshay’s son, William the First, wrote of “a life of strife with my father”. He, in his turn, was forever at odds with his second son, William (the Second) whom he made manager of Cyfarthfa in 1813 while he went to live in Stoke Newington. It was left to a sister, Elizabeth, to persuade William not to carry his row with their father to breaking point. She wrote:
“ ‘The King’, my dear brother, is quite determined to have his way, and I hope his three legitimate sons, Richard, William and George, will never oppose him.”
Even his children acknowledged the ‘kingship’ of the Crawshay owner: even a daughter, too, seemed to have been aware of the many by-blows or illegitimate children fathered by ‘the King’ - a common trait, as we shall see, of Crawshay men.
In 1820 William threatened to resign from the managing of the works. In reply his father wrote:
“You may tread as close as you will, but do not trip. How it would surprise you of His Majesty [such arrogance] was graciously pleased to accept your offer of resignation. My dear Will, do not play the fool. You are now Vice-Roy [again, the arrogance] of Cyfarthfa and will be Sovereign early enough if you will be content to allow his present Majesty his enjoyment of royalty for his remaining days.”
With
Once William the First had died, William the Second left Merthyr to live in
His wife, Laura, bore nine children, and seemed to have acquiesced in the husband’s rutting, the most immediate evidence of which had to have been the appearance of successive of his ‘mistresses’ in the domestic staff.
William the Second had another son, Henry (born 1812) who was, for many years, his father’s favourite. In 1829, when he was only seventeen, he was sent to a Scottish Ironworks to learn more about iron making and, in 1831, on his return, he has made manager of the family’s ironworks at Hirwaun. Here he impressed his father by his painstaking and industrious approach to iron making, and by his ability to handle his work-force. Some time later he was sent to take charge of the family’s works in the
When his father visited him there he wrote:
“Henry’s pits, engines and collieries are the most perfect in the Kingdom”.
But, sooner rather than later Henry became almost a non-person in the Crawshay family.
Like his older brother, Francis, Henry was said to ‘have enjoyed liaisons with village girls’. This ironmasters’ version of the feudal droit de seigneur seemed not to have offended more mature Crawshays and their seemingly complaisant wives and mothers. Maybe ‘the sowing of wild oats’ among ‘village girls’ was preferable to attempting the same ‘sowing’ among the more respectable females of their own class. Because ‘class’ was something of which Victorians were ever conscious, and the social hierarchy was well marked and understood. But sexual relationships with ‘village girls’ had to have been very much ‘a rough trade’, because ‘village girls’ in the iron making valleys were not rustic dairymaids. From the age of five or younger, most ‘village girls’ in Merthyr, Dowlais, Hirwaun, Treforest, Nantyglo and the rest, were sent to work by desperately poor parents. They worked at the coal face dragging baskets of coal to be hauled to the surface: they worked near furnaces in ironworks, chipping the lumps of iron ore which men fed into the furnaces; they dug and carried limestone; they carried heavy clay to be made into bricks for furnace lining; they were described as “plying their shovels like navvies and able to lift blocks of stone and coke that make your arms ache even as you fancy yourself lifting them” (Good Works, 1869). Their clothes were of the poorest and most ragged, their hair matted, their hands coarsened, their skin marked with the signs of their laborious industry.
What sort of ‘kick’ did ironmasters’ sons get out of sexual relations with these unfortunate women and girls? Why had the founder of Cyfarthfa Ironworks, Anthony Bacon, gain the soubriquet ‘the Pig of Cyfarthfa’? Not because of his surname but because of his seemingly constant rutting with women of the working class - whether working in his large home or in his works.
So Henry’s relationship with ‘village girls’ was not unusual, nor condemned by his parents. However, in 1834, Henry told his father that he had fallen in love with Eliza Harris who worked in the Hirwaun Ironworks. At first, his father was angrily astonished: “Pay her £50 or £100 for any child that she might bear you: but marry such a one”? Perhaps it was fear of his father that restrained Henry at first, because his first child, a son, was born out of wedlock. This child died shortly after birth - a common enough occurrence. But soon after this death, Henry went ahead with his original plan and married Eliza Harris of Penderyn.
From 1835 onwards Henry was socially an outcast as far as the older Crawshays were concerned: his name rarely appeared in family letters or records: his wife’s name never appeared there. However, the ever-realistic William ‘the Second’ took advantage of Henry’s industrial ability in spite of refusing to meet him socially. Henry stayed on as manager at Hirwaun until 1847 when he went to manage the Crawshay businesses in the
By the time when our first ancestors arrived in the valley in the 1840s, and by the time my grandparents were born there (in the 1850s and 1860s), it was Robert Thompson Crawshay (the fourth and last ‘Iron King’) who dominated life there. By then the Guests had all but gone, retaining their financial interest in Dowlais and all its works and pumps but exercising no personal influence there. ‘R.T.’ on the other hand was very much master of all he surveyed from the Castle.
My father told us many stories about the man and about the Castle. In May 1979 I was in the Castle doing some early research into the history of the Crawshay family as part of my work on this family history.
I read that ‘R.T’ was buried in an awesome grave in nearby Vaynor Churchyard. So I drove from the Castle through Cefn in search of the grave. Uncertain of the way, I stopped in Cefn to ask the help of a group of five small, cloth-capped men. “Can you tell me where I have to turn to get to
“See the bus up by there? Well, just follow it: it’s going to turn into
Poor Crawshay had been dead for thirty years or more when even the oldest of that small group had been born. Why then “the old bastard?” What folk memories lay behind this immediate description of the hundred-years buried ‘King’?
So to the churchyard. Here there was that terrible grave. A huge slab of polished granite on which was the inscription made by the mason on Crawshay’s own instructions.
Maybe we all ought to have such an epitaph on our gravestone. Indeed, many saintly people, suffering the pangs of over-scrupulous consciences, have mistakenly thought that their petty sins had seriously offended a generous God. But as we shall see, the tragedy of Robert Crawshay was that he had been endowed with so many gifts, so much of the world’s wealth and a capacity for good, all of which he had misused as he abused wife, children, work-people and the environment. Indeed, he had plenty to ask God to forgive. But that’s another story.
Chapter 3. The State Of The Towns, Circa 1850
A new generation of our four families
I have headed this Chapter as ‘circa 1850’ because around about that date a new generation of our four families were born, as we shall see. Round about that date, too, the heads of the Crawshay and Guest families bought their landed estates at Caversham (1844) and Canford (1846) while the Canford-based Guests ended their close supervision of their Dowlais iron and coal businesses in 1855. Finally, as a later Chapter shows, it was ‘roundabout 1850’ that the two towns suffered from the worst epidemic of cholera that those disease-ridden places had ever suffered, with the Irish suffering more than most.
The state of the two towns
“Merthyr, the unhealthiest town in
(Morning Chronicle, 4 March 1850)
Many forests have been cut down to provide the paper used in the many histories of the ‘iron capital of the world’: more trees were consumed to make the paper carrying the many Reports of commissions of one sort and another - Child Labour, Health of the Town of Merthyr, Housing Conditions of the Merthyr Workers and so on almost ad infinitum. And still more wood was pulped to provide the newspapers which, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carried articles and news items involving the town and its people. From these, and from the Journals of Lady Charlotte Guest, from the letters and diaries of the better-off and from company account and reports, it is possible to get a picture of what Merthyr was like and how it developed.
Novelists have been inclined to write of Merthyr as ‘a Wild West town’, ‘a lawless frontier town with hucksters, ballad singers and harpists, acrobats, pickpockets and nymphets’, and to tell of ‘the sky is roseate hue when the furnaces were opened’. Such writing, romantic in tone, reminds me of the
Year Total Males Total Females Total Population Housing
1801 4,273 3,432 1,401 - making it the largest town in
1811 11,104 males and females
1821 17,404
1831 22,083
1841 34,997 6,413
1851 46,378
This doubling of population every twenty years was due almost entirely to the coming of workers and their families from rural
The once-rural workers of Carmarthenshire,
“The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
All things bright...”
And if ‘God’ had indeed ‘ordered their estate’, then it were rankly irreligious to try to alter (to pervert?) that divinely ordered state of things. It is then, perhaps, easier to understand why people endured the sufferings they underwent - at work and in the homes - in nineteenth century Merthyr, and why radicals campaigning for unions, democracy and social reform, found little support - and, indeed, much opposition - among those whom they were trying to help.
In 1852, following a major outbreak of cholera and a very high death rate, a recently formed Central Board of Health in
At the top of the social hierarchy were the two great ironmasters, Crawshay and Guest, closely followed by somewhat lesser (although still wealthy) ironmasters such as Hill of the Plymouth Ironworks, Fothergill and Homfray. All these were Englishmen, all married to English ladies. A third rung on the social ladder was occupied by a number of men in the professional and commercial class.
There were, in this rich middle class, auctioneers, managers at the ironworks, solicitors, including William Meyrick, Crawshay’s solicitor who bought Gwaeleodygarth House from William ‘the Second’ when he moved into
Then there was ‘an aristocratic working class’ element: there were twenty-two independent (and fiercely independent) craft groups, many connected with the iron industry, but many consisting of men who earned their living outside the works - carpenters, bricklayers, glaziers, tilers, brushmakers and so on through the galaxy of Friendly Societies, Benefit Clubs and embryonic trade unions. There were hundreds of hauliers, who owned their own horses and wagons and enjoyed an independence unknown to the hauliers who worked as Crawshay employees.
And, finally, at the bottom of the social pile were ‘the poor’: the old who were unfit for work, the injured and maimed, the widows with young families, the unemployable - whether because of physical deformity or mental defect. Edward Davies, a surgeon at Guest’s Dowlais Works, wrote:
“...the work of iron founders, refiners, puddlers, ballers and rollers are laborious and exhausting. So much so
that it affects the duration of life while also continually subjecting the men to accidents of a highly dangerous king. What with the casualties in ironworks and pits, the very streets are thronged with the maimed and mutilated In a distance of a mere hundred yards I once saw three men trying to move - two of them had each lost a leg and the other had lost both legs. During the years 1841 to 1847, the deaths by accidents in Merthyr averaged fifty a year.”
William Kay had, rightly, reported on ‘the working classes’: for there was no homogeneous ‘working class’ in mid-century Merthyr. Each craft jealously guarded its own ‘secrets’ and claimed its own rights - and the devil take the worker who tried to demand change that adversely affected the craftsman. Given that the vast majority of the workers were immigrants from rural societies, given that the number of newcomers tended to continually overwhelm the ‘resident’ population, there had not been time for traditions of co-operation, solidarity and empathy, to be developed: few people had had time to form real friendships - as distinct from relationships formed at work or when drinking. The middle classes had managed to organise a social nexus for themselves - with their schools, reading rooms, libraries, banks, and chapels and churches that they dominated. The working class had to wait until the latter part of the century before a fully urbanised and more self-confident leadership emerged to help organise a social and political framework for working class groups.
The people among whom
The records of the Crawshay Ironworks and the Dowlais Company showed that, in that decade, the following wages were paid to various classes of workers:
Sales agent £1,000 a year (an early example of quoting annual ‘salaries’)
Manager of Dept £740 a year
Engineer £200 a year
Rollerman 40 shillings per week in prosperous year
Puddler 35 shillings a week --ditto--
Collier 25 shillings a week --ditto--
Labourer 10 shillings a week --ditto--
Girls and boys 4 shillings a week --ditto--
The workmen’s wages were paid for a 12-hour day and for 6 days a week in a prosperous year. If there was a ‘drop in trade’ and a fall in demand for iron goods, them employers simply announced cuts in wages - and workers were expected to accept these unilateral decisions. And there were many years in which such cuts were enforced by the iron masters - who, not surprisingly tended to act in unison: ‘one cut, all cut’. And although some of the skilled men had their Benefit clubs and Societies, attempts to form trade unions generally came to naught. Those who were thought to be trying to organise such unions - and so create a workers’ force to oppose wage cuts and to try to gain better conditions - were dismissed.
Not even the most skilled and loyal worker could guarantee that he would have either a job or, if employed, a given wage, from week to week or month to month. A drop in demand for iron rails - as happened when the Russian government cancelled an order to Crawshays at the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 - could mean, at best, a drop in the number of days worked and/or cut in wage rates, and, at worst, the sack. And while the skilled man might have paid into a Benefit Society over the years of work, he would never received more than 4 shillings a week if he were out of work - not enough to keep a family or, indeed, to pay the rent on a small cottage for a week. For the unskilled, the chances of wage cuts, casual unemployment or, worse, long-term unemployment, were much higher.
For men, women and children who worked in the ironworks, collieries and ancillary works in Merthyr, the risk of injury was always high. Rollermen lost arms if they mishandled the flaming ingots: many puddlers went blind by the time they were fifty, the result of gazing at the furnaces and at the flowing metal which they poured out: all furnace workers knew of the danger of being splashed by molten iron - splashes which, if small, meant ‘merely’, a series of scars which turned blue in time, but which, if large, meant that slivers of metal - large or small depending on the nature of the accident - were embedded into the affected worker’s body and, all being well, led to them being cut out with the worker left a bleeding mess. Workers lost arms, legs, eyes and hearing in the works: some had their lungs turned into sacks of coal dust if they worked in the collieries where they also faced the danger of underground fires and explosions caused by the explosion of fire-damp.
The human detritus of the works and collieries could be seen every day in Merthyr - the maimed and mutilated reported by the surgeon. Too, there were the mass of children born into these working (or unemployed) families who could be seen begging with their tinkling tins, or caught stealing from any of shops or stalls in the town, suspect because of their ragged clothing, starved looks and drumstick limbs. And, between work times, there were to be seen the hundreds of children who worked for Crawshay - in ironworks, brickyards, coalmines and elsewhere. Attempts to limit the employment of children had been made repeatedly since the start of the nineteenth century: but such attempts had been vigorously opposed, on spurious grounds, by the representatives of commerce and industry.
Frequently looked into the question of working children: there were a plethora of Commissions, Reports, Parliamentary Debates - and a few Acts aimed to reform the evil system which saw five year olds at work chipping the iron from the face of ore-laded mountains, six year olds sitting in pitch dark in mines where they opened and closed the doors which allowed fresh air to get to their seven year old brothers and sisters who helped out their parents at the coal face. And it is from the reports of these Commissions that we get our picture of what sort of lives these children lived in Crawshay’s Merthyr, with ‘the King’ in his Castle, his middle class minions secure in their large mansions, and his agents enjoying the fruits of their thousand pounds per year salary. You have to allow some room for your imagination as you read the reports: you have to remember that these are not some novelist’s attempts to recreate a past: they are, in very fact, the past itself speaking to us. So here goes: first from the evidence given to the Commission which examined conditions in British mines in 1840:
Evidence of Philip Evans, aged nine years, his face badly scarred by an explosion in one of Merthyr’s mines.
To the Inspector of Mines he said:
“I started work when I was seven. I get very tired sitting in the dark by the ventilating door so I go to sleep. Nearly a year ago there was an accident and most of us were burnt. It hurt very much because all the skin was burnt off my face, and I couldn’t work for six months. I have seven brothers and sisters, but only five can find work; none of us have ever been to school.”
Evidence of John Fugue, aged eleven:
“I began work when I was seven, cutting slate in
Evidence of Richard Richard’s, aged seven:
“I was six when I first came below. I work for about ten hours a day with my father; sometimes he lets me cut coal in his stall.”
And so relentlessly the evidence goes on: The Report of the Commissioners who looked into conditions in the Merthyr Ironworks make just as brutal reading, with constant references by children of ‘been burnt...been beaten...pushing wagons filled with red-hot slag from the furnaces to the waste tips [the work of cinder girls]...’. Crawshay employed four hundred under-tens in this Merthyr in 1840. Their working conditions were explained by a furnace manager giving evidence to the Commission:
“I have about 37 children working about the furnaces under my charge, the youngest being about seven years old. I have some boys between eight and twelve years old helping to tip the fuel and the ore into the top of the open furnace. There are fourteen girls from ten to sixteen years of age in the coke yard and six lads in the casting-house and refinery of from ten to fourteen years, some of whom get burned, but not too badly: there are a few girls at the mines, working below; they all work twelve hours a day, and the furnaces and refineries work all night.”
Crawshay and the other ironmasters needed a constant supply of new bricks to line their furnaces. Each ironmaster had his own brickworks, whose child-workers gave their evidence to Commission. Allow your imagination to work as you read this child’s evidence:
“When I was nine years old, my work consisted of continually carrying about 40 lbs of wet clay upon my head from the clay heap to the table where they bricks were made. This I had to do without stopping for thirteen hours a day. Sometimes I had to work all through the night, carrying 1,200 bricks from the makers’ tables to the floors where they were placed to dry. During such a night I would walk about fourteen miles. I was paid sixpence a day.”
And who was to blame for the continuation of this state of affairs? Why did young
failed to push through reforming measures, or opposed such measure when proposed by outsiders such as Shaftsbury, or paid mere lip service to reforms as reached the Statute Book? Or was it the fault of employers such as Crawshay who either ignored such Acts as were passed, or trusted to the apathetic government not to appoint enough interfering Inspectors to check on his observation of the law, or, and with good reason, trusted to his fellow-magistrates not to carry out the letter of the law should any bold Inspector dare to bring a case to court against him? Who was to blame? Well, hardly the children at any rate, though they suffered.
Were the owners ever aware to the conditions in which their work-people worked, lived, died? At one level, maybe a superficial one, the answer has to be ‘Yes’.
All of them saw children at work in mines and works, all of them saw the injured and maimed who thronged Merthyr’s streets, and all of them saw the cottages in which ‘their’ people lived. Or did they? Is merely ‘seeing’ to be also ‘aware of’? In the 1990s, modern communications system brought hunger, disease, homelessness and helplessness into our sitting rooms’ with TV pictures from Africa, Cambodia and other centres of war. We were, clearly, ‘aware of’ the horrors because, clearly, we could ‘see’ them? But really ‘aware of’, conscious of, responsible for alleviating? The relatively pitiful response to appeals for help, the refusal of governments and voters to really act to close the economic and social gap between prosperous North and poverty-stricken South suggests that ‘to see’ is not necessarily to be ‘aware’.
The various social classes lived in homes of varying sorts, from the ironmasters’ mansions through the agents large houses down to the workers’ cottages. As early as 1804, a visitor had noted that the first workers’ homes had been built with no plan in mind (‘in scattered confusion’), that, as the works increased in size so the newer cottages were built ‘in spaces between those that had been previously built’ so that ‘the streets...many in number [were] close and confined...very filthy...very unhealthy’. And that was when the adult population was a mere 7,600 and there were only 1,400 houses in the town. By 1851 the population was six times as large (46,378) and there were some 7,000 houses in the town.
Many of the workers’ cottages were built by the ironmasters: they charged a rent of 5 shillings per week for the two-up and two-down cottages, a rent clearly beyond the means of the unskilled worker with his wage of ten shillings a week, and barely affordable by the collier on his twenty-five shillings per week. Skilled workers, such as puddlers and rollermen, were well able to afford these rents: they were also the ones who took advantage of a company scheme, whereby they could get a company loan (at a rate of interest) to help them buy their own cottages outright. Given the uncertainty of trade and the possibilities of at least temporary unemployment and/or cuts in wages, it is not surprising that few took advantage of this early move to ‘a property-owning people’.
The Kelly's Directory of 1901 shows that ‘
Having seen
The greater proportion of the houses in Merthyr is occupied by those who are employed in the iron works, either in smelting the iron itself, in the subsequent processes (puddling, rolling and refining), or in procuring the necessary coal and ironstone. A large number of these cottages consist of only two rooms, the upper being the sleeping apartment for the family, and usually ill-ventilated. In these two-roomed houses, occupied by workmen, there are generally three beds in the sleeping department, containing five or six persons. These cottages are often very small, 8 feet by 10 feet, and 8 feet by 12 feet being not uncommon. Some are of less dimensions. The average rent of these houses is about 6 shillings [in modern terms 30 pence] per month. - high rent for such tenements.
Another kind of cottage, of a better kind, consisting of a kitchen, pantry and sleeping room on the ground floor, and two sleeping rooms above, is not uncommon. The rents for these cottages range from 8 shillings [40 pence] to 12 shillings [60 pence] and 13 shillings [65 pence] per month. The ratio of these rents to workers’ wages may be estimated from the following rates of pay, the average received at present: Colliers 17 shillings [85 pence] per week: Labourers 12 shillings [60 pence] Bricklayers 14 shilling [70 pence]; Puddlers 20 shillings [100 pence].
So it is not surprising that part of the oral tradition that I inherited told of families sharing a room. A blanket would be drawn across one of the sleeping rooms described in the report, with a many as ten people ‘living’ on one side of the blanket and perhaps 6 living on the other, in houses where the ground floor was indeed the ground - the bare earth: luckier people had stone slabs laid over the bare earth: no one knew anything of damp courses, the need for ventilation, for cleanliness: how Victorian to have coined the proverb ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’.
In 1847 yet another set of English Commissioners descended on
The works are surrounded by houses built by the Company without the slightest attention to comfort, health, decency or any other consideration than that of getting largest amount of rent for the smallest outlay on housing. I went into several houses in the north part of the town and examined them from top to bottom. Men, women and children of all sexes and age are stowed away in the bedrooms without any curtains or partitions, it being no uncommon thing for nine or ten people not belonging to the family to sleep together in this manner in the room.
So the well-clothed Inspector in Merthyr in 1847, as he made his way through ‘streets’ whose names tell their own story: Furnace Row. Limestone Row, Crooked Row, Old Colliers Row, Wesleyan Row and soon on to ‘the very worst conditions in Merthyr, the tenements of ‘China’ at Pont Storehouse, the district between the High Street and the River Taff, where 1,500 people were crammed in almost indescribable conditions, a large proportion of them being criminals, vagrants and prostitutes’. Ah
Chapter 4. No Room For Water In Rainy Merthyr And Dowlais
“The high rates of death among the population of Merthyr are due to the vicious construction of houses, the inadequate supply of water, the absence of drainage, defective ventilation, the accumulation of filth, atmospheric impurity and the extensive and fatal prevalence of all sorts of diseases. “
(Dr Kay’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions of Merthyr, 1853).
The people who migrated to industrial Merthyr from rural
I’ve seen the mud cabin he danced his wild jigs in,
As neat a mud cabin as was ever seen,
Considering ‘twas used to keep poultry and pigs in,
I’m sure it was always kept elegant and clean.
Maybe it was: but the probability was that like the English and Welsh cruck cottages, the Irish ‘mud cabin’ consisted of a one up and one down pair of rooms with a built-on room ‘to keep poultry and pigs in’ - and where other animals - horses, cows, sheep and so on - would be ‘kept’.
There would have been none of the ‘necessary outbuildings’ - as the gentle Commissioners described washhouses and lavatories: nor would there have been any water supply coming into the cottage. Human waste (a polite term for sewage) and household rubbish would have been mixed with animal droppings and straw from animals’ stalls and thrown out to make a dung heap to be used to fertilise the family plot. Water was taken either from a nearby river or stream, or got from a well or spring in the village. Far from idyllic or ideal, but life in the countryside was much healthier than was life in the industrial towns such as Merthyr. In 1842 a Royal Commission compared the average ages of death of people in different area of
Average age of death In
Professional people, gentry and families 38 52
Tradesmen and families 20 41
Mechanics, labourers and families 17 38
We have seen Merthyr described as the ‘unhealthiest town in
However there was little, if any, effort by central government to pass laws about sanitary conditions, housing standards, water supply and the rest of what we might call ‘social infrastructure’: and, when governments did pass such reforming legislation, local voters and councils were slow to implement the law - and, in Merthyr and many other industrial towns, there was simply no local council in place to decide whether or not to try to make the town healthier.
In the rural village each family made its own dung heap: in Merthyr the inhabitants of the crowded workers’ cottages were forced to make one gigantic dung heap as a visitor found when he stayed in Merthyr in 1852:
“In the face of the wall on the road-side (on the top of which a kind of parapet was built in front of the houses) were several openings. In these, mounds of human ordure, and the disgusting aspect of the whole made me marvel that in the neighbourhood of the largest works in the country, perhaps the world - in the broad open day, offensive to the sight and the smell, the apathy of the owners of the works could be so great as to neglect the drainage facilities here opened - such as is rarely seen in any town, village or city in the kingdom.”
So young
“...the Dowlais Iron Co. undertake to carry away the ashes (containing other refuse) from the doors of the inhabitants of Dowlais at the rate of one penny per week for each house. The money is stopped out of the wages paid, the greater part of the population of Dowlais being under control and in the pay of the Company.
However, this remains an ineffective and woefully inappropriate response to the public health question”.
So, when young
No drainage in a land of hills and slopes which made drainage a relatively simple matter. And the ‘inhabitants’ took their water from the River Taff (‘the dirty yellow Taff’) which carried away the waste from works and into which ran the rain-borne flow of street refuse. Some got water from wells, from spouts fed by mountain springs: both wells and spouts harboured the flies and, in warmer weather, the mosquitoes which made the water supply ‘fever-causing’. There were six such spring-fed ‘spouts’ in Merthyr which meant that the majority who wanted to use them to carry the family water supply a mile or so from spout to house. In 1849, following the outbreak of a major cholera epidemic, the government forced Merthyr’s ratepayers to elect a Board of Health. Its Surveyor, James Bennet, drew up a plan for the ‘sewage and drainage’ of the town at a cost of £33,000 (about one-eighth of the cost of
“The continuing high death rate is due to the bad construction of houses, the lack of a water supply, the absence of drainage, defective ventilation, the accumulation of filth, atmospheric impurity....”
A ‘lack of water supply’ in a land of rain! Nor was this absence of water supply due to ignorance as regard reservoir construction or of piping water from reservoirs to where it was needed. When Crawshay built the
And the ironmasters knew that the cost of ensuring a decent water supply would not have been very high. In 1849, while the cholera epidemic was at its height, the newly formed Merthyr Board of Health proposed the formation of a joint-stock company to provide a safe water supply; by November 1849 the better-off people of Merthyr had applied for shares to the value of £20,000 in the proposed Water Company. In June 1852 Parliament passed the Merthyr Waterworks Act - but by then the incidence of cholera had died down and the cost-conscious shareholders decided not to proceed with the construction of the proposed reservoir and the provision of water to Merthyr’s houses.
In October 1853 cholera struck again in the rat-infested, vermin-ridden streets of Merthyr. Once again plans were drawn up for the provision of a water supply, plans which were dropped when cholera died out late in 1854 and the cost conscious ratepayers were no longer as panicky as they had been. To the Lanes and others of families, and the thousands who lived in fly-blown, fever-ridden Merthyr and Dowlais, the debates on the costs and possibilities of a water supply must have seem esoteric and far removed from their own daily concerns for work, wage and friendship. Nor would they have appreciated the significance of the election by Merthyr’s ratepayers of G.T. Clark to the Merthyr Board of Health in April 1857.
Chapter 5. Cholera And Other Epidemics, Circa 1840 - Circa 1870
“I am sorry to say that the accounts of the cholera here are fearfully bad. They are beyond anything I could have imagined, sometimes upwards of twenty people dying in one day, and eight men constantly making coffins.”
Lady Charlotte Guest, Journal, entry for
We have seen that my great grandparents, Patrick Barry and Frances Sullivan were married on
“We have had twenty-one deaths since Saturday and the disease is spreading. The people are so frightened that they are leaving the place in droves, especially the Irish, amongst whom so far it has been most fatal.”
None of the Lanes, Scannells, Barrys and McCarthys were strangers to death. In this small cottage and that, in this street or alley and that, to this relative and that, death was commonplace.
In 1873 Merthyr’s Medical Officer, Dr Dyke, reviewed the history of the town’s sanitary conditions between 1854 and 1873. He noted that “in only one year (1860) was the town free of one or other epidemic. In eleven years there was a typhus epidemic, in six years a smallpox one. In 1864 and 1865 the town was ravaged by simultaneous outbreaks of typhus, smallpox, scarlet fever and measles.” And, of course, “in 1854 and again in 1866 the town suffered outbreaks of cholera. In the latter year, in just fifty eight days (in August and September), the disease killed 115 people.”
Today we associate cholera with the more deprived regions of the
“An impure atmosphere, of small overcrowded and ill-ventilated homes surrounded by collections of filth. The gutters, the filthy dilapidated cottages, the absence of ventilation and the overcrowding of sleeping rooms, all told the old tale - early taken ill, soon died....” wrote Dr Dyke in 1873.
A seventeenth century Anglican Bishop, Jeremy Taylor, wrote:
“As our life is very short, so it is very miserable, and therefore it is well that it is short’!
At least
A major reason for the low life expectancy was the high rate of infant mortality. Between 1843 and 1853, almost half the deaths in Merthyr were of children under five years of age: the young succumbed most easily to the fevers and epidemics caused by the insanitary conditions in which they lived their short lives: they were most easily victims of fly-borne disease caused by the lack of privies so that ‘night soil and slops were thrown into the streets.’
It was repeated and frightening outbreaks of cholera that caused a reluctant set of ratepayers to attempt a modicum of sanitary reform. In 1832, some 600 people were infected in the first cholera outbreak and, although about 160 died, Crawshay and the other Ironmaster ‘rulers’ did not take it very seriously. It was the outbreak of 1849 which was to affect people’s thinking and which was to live on in folk memory for years to come. The disease first appeared in May, and it raged ferociously until December. From The Morning Chronicle we learn that:
“From July to October the pestilence attacked 3,624 people of whom 1,524 died, one in every twenty-eight of the population.”
The effects of the disease were most severely felt among the children, the otherwise sick, the aged, the unemployed and the pauper classes. There were the people most likely to be worse-than-usually poorly housed and to have the least effective diet.
The hot summer and the insanitary conditions combined with the lack of clean water and the open drains in a cholera-favouring cocktail. And nowhere was its effect more than among the Irish, the poorest of the poor, as we shall see. Ministers of religion in general worked hard among the sick and dying: the Mormon elder, John Davis, noted that:
“We baptise nowadays as many as we like. The cholera that rages assists us greatly. Meetings are crowded and no more so than meetings when the half-sick Saints gather in crowds. I have visited many Saints with cholera and, with God’s grace, have been able to restore many.”
Several ministers died from cholera caught while ministering to their people. Catholics in particular knew of the work of Fr James Carroll who became a legend in his own life time, who lived on in oral tradition as one of those beloved priests (‘Sogarth Aroon’) and who inspired John Parker to write a fictionalised accounts of his left, ‘Iron in the Valleys’.
The high number of deaths from cholera forced the Church to acquire a tract of land at Pant so that a new Cemetery could be opened. It serves as a reminder of the nature of those intolerant times that there had to be a seventy feet dividing space between the burial plots of Nonconformists and Roman Catholics; ‘divided even in death’ it seemed.
Although the cholera epidemic died out in the winter of 1849, its effects could still be seen in later years - an increased number of Irish families without a father or a mother or both: the ravaged faces and appearance of those who had caught, but not died from, cholera - but were now to be easy prey for every other illness that ravaged the town: too many sick men forcing themselves back to ill-paid and hard work in ironworks, pits and brickyards: an increased air of poverty among the people crowded into their filthy cottages. On the other hand, once the epidemic had died out, neither the long established Guardians of the Poor nor the newly-created Merthyr Board of Health, took steps to try to eradicate the causes of the epidemic: still no provision of clean water, drainage of streets and houses, collection of refuse, no attempts to force landlords to make the cottages more habitable. With cholera seemingly out of sight, the need for change was out of mind.
And, inevitably the disease came again. In 1853 the works and collieries were affected by the miner’s strike which lasted for several months. With coal production at a standstill, work at the Ironworks had to be curtailed. One obvious effect of this long strike was that miners had no pay while many ironworkers had either no pay if they were laid off, or had only a day or two wages a week. And so the incidence of poverty rose again - even poorer diet, less heating in wintry homes, less chance to spend anything on soap for washing clothes. And so the epidemic of 1854 from which the people were slowly recovering when
In years to come Patrick would tell his son, my father of the attempts by some reformers to get a proper drainage system, and for the old cottages to be pulled down and replaced by new ones with water laid on and drains linking the new homes to a street drainage system. But as he was to teach his son (and, indirectly, his grandchildren):
“The owners argued that they were getting good rents for the old cottages. ‘Who will compensate us for the loss we would suffer?’ And others argued that a system of drains and the provision of a decent water supply would lead to an increase in the rates paid by the prosperous. And so nothing was done...”
The ‘prosperous’ were headed, of course, by the Crawshays, Guests and other ironmasters. The Crawshays could avoid cholera by flying to live in Caversham, the Guests to Canford Manor in
“It would be wrong to conclude that the Guests and the other Ironmasters had been oblivious to the need for reform, though their lack of enthusiasm in the first four decades of the nineteenth century reflected an unyielding attitude towards profit making, the need to be competitive and a refusal to accept responsibility for the health of their employees. It was an uncompromising place where the fittest alone could survive.”
And, as Patrick would say ‘there you have it. Profit and a lack of concern for the rest of us’. And it was not as if they didn’t know of the link between disease and sanitary conditions. For Hill, who owned the Plymouth Ironworks, had built 300 ‘spacious cottages’ for his people with:
“Pumps which supply water, ovens for baking, and covered privies. In 1847 when cholera first appeared, ventilators were put into the cottage ceilings and proper arrangements made for the daily removal of house refuse. The result was seen in 1849 when the epidemic raged. Of the 1,100 workmen who lived in these cottages only 25 died of cholera, while of the 1,700 workmen who lived in the waterless town of
Chadwick, the leading protagonist for sanitary reform had shown the clear and close link between high death rates and insanitary conditions: Hill of Plymouth had shown his fellow Ironmasters how they could break that link. But none of the rest followed his example. They were the advocates of that laisser-faire philosophy which argued that “government should do as little as possible in the social and economic life of the nation.” This helps to explain why there are few, if any, laws governing the way in which landlords built and equipped houses. In fairness it has to be said that, with
One final point: our people had come from rural
Crawshay and the other ironmasters looked after their horses - but no one did it better than Guest of Dowlais. He built the magnificent Dowlais stables in 1820, the stables which, now restored, remain as a monument to not only the importance of the horse but also of the builder’s art. Here, in a classically designed set of buildings were housed the several hundreds of horses and ponies which worked at the ironworks and collieries. It looked, and still looks, more like a building in Georgian Bath than one found in the cesspit which was Dowlais. Here worked dozens of blacksmiths, stablemen and others employed to ensure that the horses were kept well-fed, well-watered and clean. So much care taken in the building of the stables with their hundred yards long front, splendid archways rising about 50 feet above the ground, the whole made of carefully built limestone blocks and overtopped with an eye catching cupola. Why more care for horses than for the employees of works and pits? And again, grandfather Patrick would remind us:
“Horses cost money; if one dies from disease it had to be replaced by the purchase of another in one or other of the many Horse fairs of the district. It made good sense for the profit-seeking ironmasters to care for their animals. But as for the workers; one died only to be replaced by one or other of the unemployed or by yet another of us arriving green from
And so, if you go back to look at your Merthyr roots, go across to Dowlais and look at the Stables, then go down the valley road and look at the few remaining cottages of what had once been the infamous ‘Triangle’. Notice the difference in the construction, size of windows, ventilation, water supply and the rest. Grandfather Patrick would have argued against Orwell’s dictum, ‘All animals are equal’: because he knew, from first-hand experience, that in his Merthyr, the horse was more valued than men.
posted by therealtonylane at 1:06 PM
1 Comments:
Lady Charlotte Guest was from a Lincolnshire family - the Berties - it was her daughter in law Cornelia, wife of Ivor, who was related to the Churchills - her father being Duke of Marlborough.
Post a Comment
<< Home