Chapters 11 - 15

Chapter 11. The Ghetto

It was not surprising that the immigrant Irish should have crowded together in certain parts of deprived Merthyr. We see the same pattern being repeated in modern industrial cities and towns, where immigrants from, say, Bangladesh, have transformed even the physical appearance of certain areas – opening ethnically-based food stores and shops, converting former houses into mosques and so on. ‘Safety in numbers’ may well explain this tendency to create a form of ghetto: more likely, the refugees sought out a relative or former friend when they first arrived in the alien community and, the exercise being continually repeated, within a few years the ‘ghetto’ has been created.

So it was in Merthyr, where certain areas quickly became known as ‘the Irish quarter’: Skipka Pass (with its various courts and alleys), Victoria Street, Erin Street, Brown Street and so on down into Lower Elizabeth Street and on to the Gellifaelog rubbish tip. Here, as Fr Carroll reported to his superiors, were the lodging houses, cellars and crammed cottages where his people lived, where always typhus and other fever flourished, and where, in 1849, cholera was most rampant. Cottage, cellar and lodging house all opened on to unmade roads and were subject to flooding from street sewage and surface water; living conditions were grim in these rows and courts which had no proper water supply or sanitation, where cottages often compromised, as we have seen, merely one room downstairs and, at best, two upstairs, and where ‘fifteen to a room’ was not uncommon.

Yet every street had its own pub or ale-house: indeed, some had as many as five, each indicating by its name that is was ‘an Irish pub’ – as in the case of the Erin Go Bragh Tavern. Because excessive drinking was, unfortunately, all too common among the Irish poor, one official Report claimed that the Irish “spend on drinking everything beyond the sum which enables them to live in their filth”. Even a sympathetic Catholic Times had to admit that, “drink more than poverty, has been the curse of the Irish.”

A Report of 1844, the year before the Great Famine first hit Ireland, claimed that the Irish “arrived with pestilence on their backs, famine in their stomachs”, easy prey for typhus which was often called “the famine disease” or “the Irish fever”. In 1850, the year after the cholera outbreak of 1849, The Morning Chronicle reported:

“My duty is to describe the labouring classes of Merthyr; and the Irish must not be overlooked. What, then can I say of them? They are hard working, patient, and light hearted. On the other hand, I have found them here filthy, sensual, crafty, quarrelsome, and brutish in their habits. Their houses are unfurnished, foul and stinking; their children are uncared for – barefoot, ragged, unwashed, and uneducated. And this is not from necessity, but from natural habits. There is in Penydarren, on the high road, an ‘Irish colony’; in this quarter of the town I have seen Irish children of six or seven years of age rush to the doors of the houses when the omnibus was passing, stark naked; though the frost was severe, they seemed happy in their nudity, equally regardless of decency and the sharpness of the cold.

They are content to live in this abject and loathsome condition from two causes, of which the first and most powerful is habit: they are unused to a better state, and are content to live as they have always lived before. The second cause is that they do not look upon themselves as permanent residents of this country, but hope to save enough to return in comfort to ‘Ould Ireland’, and settle there.”

And in case you might think that this was an anti-Irish bigot’s view, see what a priest wrote in the same year:

“Our people do not live equally well with the Welsh on equal wages. A Welshman earning 18 shillings a week is found to have his children neatly clad, and his house comfortable; whereas the Irishman, on the same wages, has his children ill-clad and his room or cellar filthy”.

In July 1850, there were riots which started on a Friday and went on through the weekend and on until Tuesday night. In large part they were caused by the effect which the large influx of famine-driven Irish had had on wage levels. The riots centred on the Irish quarters and were most savage in ‘The Irish Row’ with its several ale houses. Drink led to confrontation which led to attacks, by both sides, on the homes of the other side. We shall see that such inter-national fighting was all too commonplace. And that wage levels and drink were factors in most outbreaks of ethnic fighting. However, it was also true that the Irish fought amongst themselves, with reports of ‘continual skirmishing between Tipperary and Cork boys in which pokers, tongs and clubs were pretty freely used’. Even sadder are the all too frequent reports of fighting and violence inside families, the result of drink combined with frustration, hopelessness and misery which became too heavy a burden so that men and women sought an outlet in an anarchy of protest: too many unpaid bills, too much worry, too many demands, - and too much drink.

All the criticism made, or implied, in the various Reports and newspaper accounts was undoubtedly true – but of some, maybe admittedly, the majority of the Irish immigrants. But it was certainly not true of all of the Irish. Many of them were well used to saving their money – traditionally sent home to pay the rent on the family plot, now used to help relatives back there or to get the money together for a ticket to America. And some, including an older Patrick Lane, saved their money so that they could buy themselves out of the helotry of wage-slavery and into some better way of life. How else can we explain the slow emergence of a small, but important, group of self-employed Irish building contractors and hauliers, shopkeepers (and ale house keepers, too); how else can we explain the slow growth of a better-educated group among the Irish – so that a second generation saw Irish clerks and college trained teachers? And what are we to make of the boast by one employer: ‘I have one Irish plasterer, a very civil, steady man; you would hardly think he was an Irishman’. How many other ‘very civil, steady’ Irishmen were there? We don’t know, of course, but it is evident from the slow progress of the community over the years that the criticism heaped upon the immigrants may well have been exaggerated.

Chapter 12 The Ghetto – II

“The Irishman was not a man. He was not allowed pride in his race or faith. He met with indifference, contempt or rejection, regarded as less than the horses and cattle.”

On 2^nd June 1982 Pope John Paul II was welcomed to Cardiff by hundreds of thousands of Catholics, given the Freedom of the City by the local Council, and celebrated Mass in the open air. My grandfather should have lived to see such a day, such a welcome! Because life was very different for the Irish community served by Father Millea at Dowlais and, after 1859, by Benedictine priests stationed at Merthyr. That community had grown most rapidly in the immediate post-famine years, but continued to flow into industrialised Merthyr where they looked for refuge with their fellow countrymen. Most of those who came were males, and males of working age helping to maintain that sense of ‘Irishness’. And that sense was developed among the children born to Irish immigrants: these were hardly less Irish than their parents, although born in Merthyr and not in, say, Mayo. The historian E.H. Hunt noted:

“...the same could be said of many born into families several generations removed from Ireland, because the immigrant communities were well defined, and within them Irish nationalism, Irish culture and the Roman Catholic faith were carefully nurtured.”

This ‘well defined’ community, with its Catholicism established as a separate community was not one welcomed by the majority of ‘old Catholics’ who hoped that their church would become absorbed into an English community, part of ‘normal’ society. The Irish, for their part, felt alienated from that native community, and did not want to be absorbed into the dominant culture, whether English or Welsh: indeed, they did not want to settle permanently in this country. As Cardinal Manning wrote in 1890:

“By the sin and persecution of England, a million of people, priests and faithful of Irish blood, faith and civilisation were in England and Wales, but alienated from our laws and legislature”.

They clashed, physically, with the native community, as we shall see, they also kept alive their Irish identity by, for example, their celebration of St Patrick’s Day, March 17^th.

“We used to go to mass on St Patrick’s Day with our green hair ribbon on, although we knew we’d get it pulled off, with some of your hair with it. Because some of the Protestant children would be waiting to stone use and attack us...that was the set up then /1900/.”

They retained their sense of alienation against a people and a government, which had done little to assuage the harm of the famine and which continued to regard Ireland as some from of colony. In their churches, their schools and their folklore, they learned to sharpen their national animosity to what they perceived to be an Ascendancy-supporting Protestant government.

We have seen that the Irish immigrants tended to live in fairly well-defined ‘Irish quarters’ in Merthyr and Dowlais where they were ‘little islands’ within a larger town, islands known collectively as ‘Little Ireland’. In one sense, therefore, the so-called ‘ghetto’ was a physical one: Lanes lived alongside McCarthys, Maddens, Foleys, O’Reilleys, Cronins and so on down the list of Irish names well-known to the Merthyr community. And they not only lived side by side: they played together, they prayed together and they sang together. A modern Israeli pop group won renown with their song, which recalled how the Jews, exiled in Babylon, sang their songs to remember Zion. The Irish, too, sang their warm, sad and moist songs, which invited them to weep for Ireland “the most benighted country the world has ever seen, for they’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.”

Convinced that they alone had ‘the truth’, the Catholics avoided contact with ‘a pagan world’: alarmed at attacks on their priests and churches, they reacted by becoming even more ‘Catholic’ in outlook. Taught that their main task was to save their soul, they paid little attention to the world around them with its concern for the acquisition of worldly goods. They came from a country where, in the main, they spoke only Gaelic; they brought with them the trappings of their own culture – in songs, dances, attitudes et alia. Around their church and within their community they developed their own organisations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, their own political structure (to become the United Irish League), their own choirs, and above all, their own schools where their Irishness was reinforced by successive generations of Foleys, O’Sullivans, Shannons, Callaghans and so on through the list of teachers well known in Merthyr, including, in the 1970s, a Lane headmaster.

In 1839, long before Patrick Lane was born, and well before the huge influx of post-Famine immigrants, the Irish were at odds with their fellow-workers. At the time of the Newport Rising in November 1839, the reaction of the Irish Catholics towards Chartism were summed up in The Merlin:

“All along, the Irish residents have kept completely aloof from the Chartists, and although their lives were threatened, the Irishmen refused to have any connexion [sic] whatever with the insurgents. The inhabitants of Newport have expressed themselves in strong terms of satisfaction as to the conduct if the Irish, declaring that if they had joined the insurrection, Newport and the adjacent towns must inevitably have been destroyed.”

Until the latter years of the nineteenth century, the immigrants’ political interests were fixed on ‘Irish’ or ‘Catholic’ questions. They sang their songs in favour of the ‘Bold Fenian Men’ of 1867, and of ‘The noble hearted three’ Manchester ‘martyrs’: they were roused, by their priests, to oppose Liberal government attacks on the Papal States and its support for anti-Papal leaders such as Garibaldi and Mazzini. They willingly took Parnell as ‘their’ leader in the 1870s and turned out to hear Michael Davitt speak in favour of the Land League in that same decade.

The Irish sense of alienation from the native community was matched, on the other side, by an animosity towards them. Although most of the workers in Merthyr were not members of any church, they shared a Protestant and nationalist antipathy towards the Catholic Irish so that, one historian noted, “patriotism and anti-Catholicism were traditional aspects of working-class culture”. The influx of the clannish and the English-hating Irish was taken as an affront to ‘the nation’ and ‘our liberties’. More immediately, the immigrants were disliked and feared because of their poverty and ignorance, their squalor and dependence on charity, and, of course, because they were seen as a threat to native living standards.

Many such ‘prior images’ tended then, as such ‘images’ do to-day, to colour immediate native reaction to immigrants. It was, largely, the ‘prior images’ that helped explain the violence of the anti-Catholic movement in the valleys and in the coastal strip of South Wales. That reaction was encouraged by the example provided by the national press and by English politicians on, for example, the occasion of the restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy in 1850. The Times attacked the newly named Cardinal Wiseman as “the new-fangled Archbishop of Westminster” sent to “parcel out the spiritual dominions of this country” and “to sow divisions in our political society...” When Wiseman wrote a pastoral letter in, admittedly, triumphalist language, the national press and the Anglican clergy vied with one another in their colourful attacks on “the pretensions of a Hilderbrand” named as “insolent and insidious”. Demonstrations outdid the ‘normal’ Guy Fawkes’ Day celebrations which ‘was celebrated at Bute’s home, Mountstuart’. In 1850 effigies of the Pope and Wiseman were burned, priests attacked in the streets, churches burnt down, so that a generation of Catholics to whom the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780 were freshly ingrained in folk memory, feared the start of another orgy of prolonged and brutal violence. That this did not come about was due, in large part, to the careful wisdom of Wiseman himself, and, more immediately, to the common-sense reaction to the violence of the government’s Ecclesiastical Titles Act which rendered liable to prison and/or a fine anyone claiming an Episcopal see with an English name.

But the anti-Catholic attitude remained. In 1852, the Cardiff MP, a Bute nominee, John Nicholl, faced an electorate angered by the fact that he had spent two years in Rome while convalescing from a serious illness and, more significantly, that his son had become a Catholic. This was described as “a perversion to Catholicism” and was much trumpeted in the anti-Bute press. There was even greater anti-Catholic outrage in 1868 when the new Marquis of Bute announced his conversion (‘perversion’?) to Catholicism: of this more later.

It is, perhaps, not surprising that the native workers, already holding their own biased ‘prior images’, and freshly fed with the outpourings of an anti-Catholic press, should have become even more vigorously anti-Irish. And when the Irish were prepared to act as strike-breakers, and showed willingness to accept lower wages than the Welsh demanded, the latter did not consider “the low expectations of the Irish”: they considered that the Irish were betraying the working class, stealing their jobs and condemning them to lower living standards. So, fierce clashes were common: in May 1834 there had been “serious disturbances following the acceptance by Irish ironworkers of lower wages than the Welsh expected”. The Merlin described how the Irish were driven from the works by rioting Welsh workers who went on to attack “the Irish quarter”. This riot was brought under control through the work of a specially enrolled force of a hundred special constables.

Young Patrick might have heard of this and similar anti-Irish riots from his elders. He was to be an ‘almost’ eye-witness to the disturbances in Treherbert in November 1857, following the colliery owners decision to reduce wage rates by threepence per ton. The owners claimed that trade was slack and they promised that, if the men accepted the cut, it would be restored within three months. However, the majority of workers voted to strike rather than accept the reduction. In January 1858, with the workers still ‘out’, the owners announced that the strikers would be allowed back to work only if they accepted a cut of fourpence per ton. And while, initially, the men refused this further degradation, within two weeks they were forced, by hunger and threats of eviction for non-payment of rent, to go back on the masters’ terms.

Crawshay and the other coal owners had tried to replace the striking workers with Irishmen. This created a bitter feeling towards the Irish and when the Welsh returned to work there were frequent quarrels between them. A local historian of the time wrote:

“No serious rupture took place until one Saturday night when, after a drinking bout, the Irishmen became aggressive and insulting, and this brought about a general fight, which in the end forced the Irish back into their ‘quarters’. On the following Sunday night the fight was renewed, stones freely thrown by both sides and shots were fired. The Welsh decided to bring matters to a head, and at daybreak on Monday, they sent messengers to other valleys for help. Before breakfast some 150 marched in an orderly procession up to Treherbert, all armed with some handy weapon. They crossed the river and, entering the Irish quarters, smashed all the crockery, and drove the Irish out. The Irish, seeing that resistance would be useless, did as they were told. One or two who were inclined to resent the ‘invasion’ were dealt with severely. The Irish were then ordered to march down the valley. The arrival of some policemen on the scene gave them a short respite. But the experience of the morning convinced them that it would not be advisable for them to remain there any longer, and they left the neighbourhood, some making their way over the mountain to Aberdare, others going on to Merthyr while others went to Pontypridd. Few Irish were to be found in any part of this valley for many years after this event.”

And few Irishmen in other valleys were unaware of this violent attack. If there had ever been any doubt as to the need for ‘a ghetto’, for self-protection, for physical as well as social ingathering, such doubts were dispelled by such violence. Father Millea came to Merthyr in 1853. Prior to that he had served the Catholics in Cardiff where, in ‘an Irish Island’ in Newtown, there lived some 4,000 or so immigrants and their families. He suffered from a particularly savage attack while in Cardiff in November 1848 – much more serious than the street brawls that were common between Irish and Welsh, although such conflicts tended to sustain animosity at a high pitch. The immediate cause for that anti-Catholic upsurge was the murder, by an Irish navvy, of a young Welshman late on a Saturday night in Stanley Street, in the heart of ‘Irish Newtown’. The Irishman escaped capture by the police. During the evening service on the Sunday, Father Millea appealed to his people to contact the police if they knew where the culprit was hiding. Early on the Monday afternoon, three wagon-loads of stones were dumped outside Father Millea’s house. By six o’clock in the evening there were about one thousand Welshman outside the priest’s house with its leaders shouting that the murderer was hiding inside the house and threatening to break down the door if they were not allowed to go in and search for him. Father Millea told them that he did not know who the culprit was, and that there was no one hiding in his house: he offered to allow one or two of the mob to search the house, provided that they were accompanied by policemen. Two policemen and three of the mob’s leaders went in and searched the house and the church, but found no sign of the man they were looking for. This did not satisfy the mob which broke two windows in the church before moving off to attack the houses in the ‘the Irish quarter’, breaking down doors, smashing windows, and destroying furniture.

When the mob had finished smashing the Irish homes, it gathered once more outside the church and began to attack both the church and the priest’s house. All the windows in the church were smashed and much of the house was wrecked, the mob using the stones which had been left in the street during the afternoon. Those Irish who could, left the town: Father Millea went to find refuge with the Bishop in Newport – and never returned to Cardiff. Both he and his people understood that the Welsh mob had chosen to attack him and the church building because it saw him as the leader of the community, and saw the building as a physical symbol of the growth of the community.

News of the riot spread throughout Catholic communities in Merthyr and the other valleys which led down to Cardiff: reports in the press, accounts by some of those who had fled from Cardiff, and fellow-priests’ sympathetic recounting of Father Millea’s own story, all helped confirm the Irish community in its sense of isolation from the native people: the ‘ghetto complex’ was deepened not only by such physical attacks but by the evidence that the authorities – police and/or council – would do little, if anything to help them. They needed the community life which would keep them as free as was possible from the hostile outside world.

They could not, of course, avoid contact with ‘the outside world’: the men met Welshmen at work, the women met Welsh women in shops and in the streets: children passed one another on their ways to work or to school. And anti-Irish hostility was ever present. There was no family which did not have its own folk tradition of children being stoned or otherwise attacked while going to school – and that tradition kept being renewed by fresh attacks even in the 1930s: we knew that the world hated us. Few Irish women escaped the scathing comment from passers-by in the streets –”dirty Irish”, “bloody Catholics”, “strike breakers”, “go back to Ireland” were among the politer insults. And the Irishmen were ever prepared to fight, especially after drink had emboldened one side or the other.

While savage fighting of the kind that took place in Cardiff in 1848 never took place in Merthyr (although as we have seen the Welsh did their best to prevent the church being built), the Merthyr Irish were kept aware of its ever present danger. In the autumn of 1882, Patrick was one of those who helped shelter the Irish who had been forced to flee from Tredegar where their men had been accused of strike breaking. The Tredegar Welsh had gathered in a hostile mob, had attacked the ‘Irish quarter’, smashed down the small cottages where the Irish lived and driven them from the town. The majority had fled to Merthyr where they were looked after for three long months. Can you imagine the story telling? The antagonism to the Welsh? The fear that it might happen in Merthyr?

It is more than disingenuous of two local historians to claim, as they did in a booklet published in 1980:

“...we have been not a little fascinated how harmonious life was in Merthyr for most of the last century. There were no seriously violent anti-Irish riots here...The Irish kept themselves to themselves in their own self-designated parts of the town: they knew their place: were aware of their own boundaries with that town...”

Indeed: ‘they knew their own place’ which, if the Welsh had had their way would have been, for evermore, at the bottom of the social pile. Fortunately, the self-sufficient and self-supporting community produced its own leaders, found its own role models, and slowly generated a degree of self-esteem among an admittedly small number of its people. That the numbers affected by such self-confidence were relatively small was not surprising, considering the lack of educational facilities beyond the elementary level and the tradition that sons of the family left school to enter the same occupation as their fathers – a tradition which lasted well into this century.

But the community did generate its own community organisations, often based on Irish nationalism. These organisations provided the community with a social life, gave opportunities to the more ambitious and able members of the community to develop skills of organising and managing – and all within the sheltered bounds of the self-supporting community. One drawback of this ‘interior growth’ was that few Irishmen and women ventured out ‘into the world’ to play an active role in the social or political life of the town. ‘They knew their place’. The growth of a small Catholic middle class was helped by the nature of the immigration which went on through the latter part of the century. Whereas most, if not all, the immediate post-Famine immigrants had been benighted peasants, by about 1870 the immigrants included some of those who had benefited from economic and educational developments in Ireland itself. So we find, for example, an Irish doctor, an Irish solicitor and others of the professional classes who came to Merthyr hoping to make a living ‘among their own’ rather than face ‘the outside world’. Their evident success, in material terms, not only acted as a spur to their own sons and daughters - some of whom went to private Catholic schools in Bath and Bristol: their success also encouraged a small number of working class Irish to hope for better things for their own children.

This was surely the case with my father, the only child of Patrick and Anastasia Lane, who had enough ambition and money to send him to the small private boarding school run by nuns at Bullingham when he was seven years of age and who were bold enough to enter him for the entrance exam for the recently-founded Grammar School sited in Crawshay’s Castle home. That my father did not fully live up to their expectations

may have been due, as we shall see, to his mother’s early death, his father’s retirement when my father was only fourteen years old, and to the outbreak of war which provided my father with an excuse to be allowed to leave school and go to work in the steelworks. But of that more later. What is certain is that the limited ambitions of my grandfather, coupled with the failed ambitions of my father, have to be seen as a major factor in the encouragement which he and my mother gave to all their children to go on and succeed in educational terms. That success, and the even greater successes of their many grandchildren, is, indirectly, a tribute to the generation of self-esteem among a handful of Irish Catholics in nineteenth century Merthyr. “By their fruits you shall know them”.

Ed.s note. Since the typing of this work, in 1995ish, I have contacted the Poor Clare’s, formerly of Bullingham, who have provided snippets of information, the most interesting of which are the following pieces:

The school was part of the grounds of the Poor Clare’s Monastery (not Convent) and the school was run by the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, not the Poor Clare’s.

The annual charge for a boarder was £30.

Further payments were expected for:

Laundry – 5 shillings per term

Soap and polish - 1 shilling and sixpence per term

Mending Material – 2 shillings per term

I has provided the following information to allow us to compare the costs:

£30 in 1907 must be compared with the average household income of 45shillings a week (just over £2). This is 1.5 earners- husband and elder child worker. Average man earned about £1.25 a week.

Taking that household is therefore earning £110 a year - £30 is a huge amount of money.

A write up of the school states:

“the children here are of a better class than those of the ordinary elementary schools, they do not become servants from the Girls’ house, or the boys either, but are expected to be fitted for clerkships, or civil service, and for this purpose the parents pay for their board £30 per annum and wish them to learn Music and French etc.
It is the only school of its kind, except Darlington, (which is a recognised Secondary) although this one is some sort of a secondary one also…....”

The uniform for Junior boys was a sailor’s suit – hence Louis is pictured as he was with his parents.

A visiting Bishop commented on how impressed he was with the quality of former students, 30 priests, many lawyers and doctors. Louis was certainly rubbing shoulders with the uppercrust whilst at Bullingham

Patrick Louis left Bullingham in the July of 1911, and as at end ofOctober 2004 the best we can guess is that he then went back to Dowlais and the ‘prestigious Dowlais Grammar School’ before, in September 1914 starting at Cyfarthfa Castle Merthyr Secondary school. Interestingly, for me, Louis left Cyfarthfa on the 3^rd Dec 1914, the day before the death of his mother (so his Ma would, I assume, have died overnight to be declared dead on the 4^th), and the school completed his registration document – ‘his family have left the district’ – for Aberavon..

In September 2004, I followed in the footsteps of Louis and travelled from Bullingham to Dowlais, about 45 miles. A fantastically scenic journey as the road slowly climbs for 20 miles from Hereford to Abergavenny, two long extinct volcanoe-type mountains towering above all else. Then up again to the less inviting area surrounding Ebbw Vale and finally to Dowlais and home in the Wimborne Arms near the church of St Illtydd’s.

It took me about an hour in my powerful Volvo as I sped along the well-made roads of east Wales. I wondered, as I travelled, how long it would have taken Louis as he travelled as a 7 year old at the beginning and end of each term. I wondered then, how Louis would have travelled to and from home, by train? horse and cart? Bus?

I have to admit to being a little tearful too as I travelled through the beautiful countryside, of the Land of my Father, as I thought of a 7 year old being dropped off in a strange place to be told “we’ll see you at Christmas, at Easter, in the summer (delete as appropriate)”. I wonder if the leaving of home was so traumatic for Louis that he had, like myself, no happy recollections of school and that is the reason why Louis never went back there with his children?

And after chatting, again, with the so-helpful lady who single-handed runs the Merthyr Reference Library and gaining another snippet of ‘interesting’ information, I went in search of the location where Louis’ home, the Wimborne Arms had once stood. “Go out of the library, turn right, up through the town, through Penydarren to Dowlais, to the roundabout. On your left is ‘your St Illtydds’ (not quite mine, but God bless you, Caroline). Go again to the next roundabout and the chocolate factory next to which you’ll find the Engine Rooms, now a storage area for the factory. Opposite that is where the Wimborne Arms once stood”. With thanks and much gratitude, and the afternoon sun on my bank, I set off. Up through the High St, past the monument to Trevithick and the steam train, and as I walked up the steep hill (I know I’m a soft-boy) I again had that warm feeling of walking in the footsteps of my grandfather and his dad too. It was a truly lovely feeling, and selfishly, (how Lane-like), I was glad to have been on my own. I’ll go back with Jan, and I hope others do to. But, be warned, the ‘just up the hill’ is a proper hill and over a mile, and all up hill.

Now, as I looked at the acres of empty space, the old fella standing at the bus stop, called to me, are you a photographer (a natural assumption as I was using the camera many times). “No, I’m looking for the place where the Wimborne Arms once stood. “Oh, go back (oh, what!) down the hill, to the roundabout, turn right towards St Illtydds and the Arms was right next door.

As yet, I don’t know who was right. The old fella had once been a drinker there. Is it possible that there were two Wimborne Arms? I hope to find out sometime. I’ll keep you posted.

My apologies for my impertinent interruption - back the story.

The majority of the community, however, remained firmly in the working class. But even here, a more able, ambitious and willing man might get on, so that, whereas in Crawshay’s Merthyr of 1840 there was ‘never such a thing as an Irish puddler’, by the end of the century there were many examples of Irishmen becoming charge hands, foremen and gangers in various trades and works. And to their credit, when they succeeded, they did their best to ‘help their own’. An Irish gang or foreman would recruit Irishmen and boys to make up his team whenever vacancies occurred. And if, or when, the Irish reached a majority in a gang, they showed their own form of bigotry by doing their best to drive out the Welsh so that more vacancies were created to be filled by more Irishmen and boys. One contractor reported that “a Welshman who tried to work as a bricklayer’s labourer was so annoyed by the anti-Welsh Irish majority that he was forced to give up work. “ Another builder told of Welsh labourers “being driven off by the Irish: sometimes they play malicious tricks on the Welsh, sometimes they work unusually hard for a few days in order to tire out the Welshman who then gives up work”.

The ghetto remained, for the majority, a physical one: even in the 1930s, there were parts of towns which were predominantly Catholic and Irish. It was, moreover, a ghetto which, seemingly paradoxically, was as wide as a dioceses. For example: when my mother, Mary McCarthy of Cardiff, told her priest that a young man, Patrick Aloysius Lane of Port Talbot, had asked for her hand in marriage, the priest suggested that she ask the man, whom he didn’t know, “does he know the Maddens”? My priest-ridden mother-to-be, did as she was told and found that ‘King’ Madden’s son, Jim, was my father’s best friend. “Oh”, said my mother’s priest, “that’s alright then, you can go ahead with my blessing”. What network of inter-ghetto communication existed which allowed a Cardiff priest to know that ‘the Maddens’ were leaders of faraway communities? And have we gained or lost by the seeming disappearance of such relationships between priests and people?

Finally, the church building as a social and cultural centre. Grandfather Patrick and his fellow immigrants used to gather every evening in their small church for evening prayer. And twice a week, on Thursday and Sunday, they would celebrate Solemn Benediction, when the priest would place a consecrated Host in an ornate Monstrance which he placed on a shelf above the altar. The people would sing their Latin hymns to the Blessed Sacrament, recite maybe their Rosaries publicly, sing a hymn or two to Our Lady and then receive the Blessing from the priest as he held the Monstrance above them. Even in the 1930s, when Catholics could walk the streets relatively unmolested, Sunday Benediction remained a major part of most Catholics’ week. Churches would be full, not now because Catholics had to huddle together in fear as in the 1850s, but because they were still conscious that each needed the support of the other members of the community in a still hostile world.

Nowadays few people gather for a Sunday Benediction: there are “other things to do on a Sunday evening” and, if priests change the hour of the celebration, ‘that interferes with my golf, outing, or whatever....’. A Dominican priest, Fr Kerr, noted in the 1970s, that this falling away from attendance at benediction was an outward sign of the loss of the sense of brotherhood and solidarity, “...precisely what was good in the sort of Catholicism with which we were familiar in this country before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s”. In particular he wrote of Solemn Benediction, with its “sense of solidarity in the loud and draughty singing” and of “the presence of the Supernatural in the hush at the Blessing”. He pleaded that:

“we must surely do what we can to retain and develop that old-fashioned sense of community and the supernatural. Because it seems to me that both are threatened, and ... [provide] the greatest dangers in the church today – the danger of schism and of secularism.”

Sadly, a generation has grown up since those words were written which is even less aware of that ‘sense of community and the supernatural’.

And is the assimilated Church and its people any the better for it?

Chapter 13. The Fenians And The Irish In Wales.

The general election of 1868 was, for the working classes in general, their introduction into direct involvement in national politics. While their lot did not change immediately (there is, after all, a time lag between a reform and clear evidence of its effects), their political emancipation, even though partial only, was to lead to reforms in education, housing, health and sanitation, the legal position of trade unions, and all that that reform meant for the enhancement of working class life.

The presence of about one hundred Merthyr Catholics, Irish to a man, at the polling station – as voters and not as mere onlookers – was an outward sign of the slowly changing position, for a small number, of the social and economic status of the Irish in general, and a sign of that social mobility which, in later years, was to allow the generation of the 1920s-30s and, much more so, our children, to emerge in ever greater numbers out of the ghetto and into full participation in the political, social and economic life of the country.

However, the manner of the appearance of these Irish voters at the hustings – led by their priest in a procession down from their church, and surrounded by their non-voting Irish colleagues suitably armed with cudgels and staves – was also an outward sign of the strength of the ghetto mentality and of the justified fear they had of the hostility of the surrounding ‘nation’.

But the development in the history and fortunes of the Bute family in Cardiff Castle were also of supreme importance to the self-esteem in which Catholics enjoyed or didn’t enjoy, and maybe, in the long run, it was this development which was to be the most important outcome of annus mirabilis.

In each volume of his The Second World War Winston Churchill wrote:

“History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct the scenes, to revive the echoes, and kindle with pale gleam the passions of other days.”

Few, if any, people have been as history-minded, so conscious of their past (real and mythical) as the Irish, perhaps because, for them, the politics of national freedom was inextricably mixed with the politics of their religious struggle. And they reconstructed the scenes, revived the echoes and kindled the passions ‘from generation to generation’ in popular songs.

Many such songs were linked to the 1798 rebellion, a rebellion which took place within the memories of my grandfather’s older relatives. They would have told the tale around the cabin fire on many a dark winter evening. My grandfather would have heard the songs of The Boys of Wexford and, along with other Irish immigrants, would have sung these and other ‘rebel’ songs in their beer houses and parties – and handed on the songs to later generations, so keeping alive their sense of Irishness, and their hopes for the future of their native land.

I learned, in the 1930s, The Croppy Boy and other songs recalling 1798 with its Sogarth Aroon in the shape of Father John Murphy, the pike-bearing priest from Wexford. I also sang of Bold Robert Emmet, the darling of Erin, in memory of the romantic rich Protestant member of the leadership of the 1798 rebellion. He had gone to France to discuss Irish independence with Napoleon and Talleyrand, and hoped to gain their aid in a rising. The 1803 rising was quickly suppressed, Emmet arrested and tried. It was part of Irish folklore – even in the 1930s, - that, in the dock, Emmet made a long and eloquent defence of Ireland’s claim to independence and nationhood. The repressions which followed the failures of 1798 and 1803 were remembered in The Wearing of the Green with its mention of yet another Irish Protestant hero, James Napper Tandy:

Oh, Paddy dear, and did ye hear the news that’s going round?

The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.

It’s the most distressful country that you have ever seen,

They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.

I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand,

He asked me how’s old Ireland, and how does she stand.

It’s the most distressful country....

Emmet’s futile rising had been a protest against Pitt’s Act of Union (1801) which made Ireland a part of the United Kingdom, and brought it under the rule of the Westminster Parliament, although none of the Irish Catholics could vote in Parliamentary elections, nor, of course, stand as candidates for election to the Westminster Parliament. My grandfather was born shortly after the death of Daniel O’Connell; he had led the struggle for the rights of Catholics to have a vote on equal terms with their Protestant neighbours, and to stand as candidates in elections in constituencies where, once the votes were granted, the vast majority of the electors would be Catholics. O’Connell, ‘the Liberator’, the lawyer who had had to be educated outside Ireland, had formed a Catholic Association in which his agents, with parish churches as their recruiting stations, enrolled practically the entire Catholic population of Ireland. It was their penny subscriptions which paid for the campaign which he launched in 1823 to force the British government to allow Catholics the right to vote. In 1828 he stood, illegally, as a candidate in a by-election in County Clare and defeated a popular, but Protestant, candidate. The government tried to annul this election result. However, in the end, the government, led by Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, had the stark choice: either O’Connell’s election had to be recognised and the Catholics given their ‘emancipation’, or Ireland would be engulfed in civil war. Wellington, with vivid memories of the horrors of the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon’s forces, chose to climb down and to push through the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829.

Not for nothing was O’Connell known as ‘the Liberator’. It is ironic that there is no popular song associated with the name of O’Connell: like the English with their recollection of disasters such as Dunkirk, the Irish seem to prefer to sing about failure rather than success. Perhaps that is why they sing so much of the 1848 rebellion, yet another led predominantly by Protestant Irishmen campaigning for Home Rule. O’Connell had led such a campaign in the 1840s, but preferred to agitate peacefully rather than use force. His failure to persuade the British to recognise Ireland’s right to national freedom led to the formation of the ‘Young Ireland movement. My grandfather’s generation were brought up on the popular histories produced by its leaders. These series of cheap books, or extracts from them reproduced in magazines and pamphlets, were used in the growing number of schools – set up, ironically, by the British government in the vain hope that there the children would learn to be English in outlook. It was through these schools and those books that many of my grandfather’s generation learned the English language, for the leader of the movement, Thomas Davis, as well as his Catholic colleagues, Dillon and Gavin Duffy, were university graduates, who spoke no Gaelic, the language of the people. However, the Young

Ireland histories told my grandfather and his peers of their links with the pre-Roman Celtic people whose culture flourished seven hundred years before Caesar invaded Britain. It was from this far-away people that the Irish had taken their traditional laws, concepts of tribalism and freedom, of kingship and nobility. My grandfather learned about the Celts’ learned and priestly orders, who retained their prestige in Ireland, long after the coming of Christianity, as poets and ballad makers. He read about St Columba (Columcille in Irish, or ‘Dove of the Church’) who, founder of Iona and father of Irish monasticism, had been brought up in a bardic school and continued to welcome poets, although their magical function under the pagan dispensation was still fresh in living memory. Columcille became the advocate of poets and of native ways, their spokesman and defender: the earliest piece of Irish verse which can be definitely dated is the eulogy composed by the ‘Chief-poet’ of Ireland on Columcille’s death.

His biographer claimed that Columcille was born eligible for the Kingship of Tara, to be ‘High King Of Ireland’. In prehistoric times, the Hill of Tara in County Meath had been an important burial site. By the seventh century, the ‘king’ who possessed Tara claimed the ‘High Kingship’, making him superior to the other kings – of Leinster, Ulster, Connaught and Munster.

The biographer’s association of the religious leader, Columba, with the High Kingship and, by inference, with pre-Christian Tara, is one

Illustration of Irish writers’ and song-makers’ abilities to create links, which depend as much on myth as on reality. In the early nineteenth century, the romantic Tom Moore was to go further and to link Tara with contemporary Irish struggle for nationhood:

The harp that once through Tara’s halls, The soul of music shed;

Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls, As if that soul were fled,

So sleeps the pride of former days, So glory’s thrill is o’er;

And hearts, that once beat high for praise, Now feel that pulse no more.

No more to chiefs and ladies bright, The harp of Tara swells;

The chord alone, that breaks at night, Its tale of ruin tells.

This freedom now so seldom wakes, The only throb she gives,

Is when some heart indignant breaks, to show that still she lives.

My grandfather would have understood the reference to Tara. Perhaps, too, my father’s generation would have been told some of the stories of Celtic Ireland, of High Kingship and of the centuries of Irish freedom. My grandfather and father would have appreciated the various references made by Moore in another song:

Let Erin remember the days of old, Ere her faithless sons betray’d her;

When Malachi wore the collar of gold, Which he won from the proud invader;

When her kings, with standards of green unfurl’d, Led the Red Branch knights to danger;

Ere the em’rald gem of the western world, Was set in the crown of a stranger.

It may seem odd that Moore should express such nationalist feelings. Born in Dublin in 1779, the son of a grocer, he was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, who went to England in 1800 to study law. He quickly became known because of his talents as singer, actor and poet, and was welcomed into ‘society’. In 1807 he began composing his Melodies in which he set his poems to traditional Irish airs. By 1834 he had published ten volumes each of twelve songs – and netted £12,810, a substantial sum for the days when Peel’s policemen were paid 10 shillings (50 p) a week. Many of his songs were devoid of nationalist sentiment, and could be sung by people of any and every race: Beethoven and Berlioz thought highly of some of Moore’s work and provided new settings for them. Thus The Last Rose of Summer or Believe me if all those endearing young charms could be sung by the most fervent supporter of English control of Ireland. Many of his songs appealed to a sentimental idea of Ireland, of an Ireland that could be translated into the homeland of every guilt-ridden voluntary exile. Few, if any, of them cared to note that Moore was a Protestant, a supporter of the Act of Union (1801) against which O’Connell, Parnell, Redmond, O’Brien and most leaders were to campaign.

Many of Moore’s melodies were sung around parlour pianos in the homes of the socially mobile. They were taught to successive generations of Welsh-Irish schoolchildren usually by the teacher-daughters of these upwardly mobile (‘lace curtain’) Irish-in-exile. As one who learned at the feet of the ladies Murphy, O’Callaghan, O’Brien, Doyle and Shannon, it came as a shock to find, when later in Ireland, that the Irish-at-home took a more cynical view of Moore. As one couplet went:

If the Guinness was flowing free down the street,

Tom Moore wouldn’t mind where the bright waters meet

This was an unkind reference to his much-loved song the meeting of the waters in the ‘Vale of Avoca’. However, if the Irish scorned the sentimentality of much of Moore, even they still sang his songs: and if they derided latter-day sentimental ballads such as Galway Bay, they still showed their pleasure at similarly tear jerking products of Tin Pan Alley. The Rose of Tralee, Danny Boy, and, at a later stage in the evening, In Dublin’s Fair City, were sung – as solos or choruses, by Irish the world over. If I was shocked by the cynical attitude towards Moore, I was more pleasantly surprised to find, when I lived in Ireland, that almost always, at every party, pub gathering or social, there was someone who had a ‘fiddle’ which he (almost always a ‘he’) could play whatever was called for, whether a tune for singing or one for dancing. And almost as often there would be another ‘he’ with a melodeon, (or ‘squeeze box’), who could change chords, turn out tunes and join the fiddler. Dylan Thomas claimed that the Welsh were ‘ a musical nation’. So, too, I discovered, were the native Irish. Only later did I discover that Chesterton, the great English Catholic poet had written:

For the great Gaels of Ireland, Are the men that God made mad,

For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad.

Sad, certainly, the many ‘emigrant’ songs with their reminder of leaving, of difficulties in a new country, of yearning to return home, of, sometimes, arriving home only to find that a loved one has died in the meanwhile. Sadness, too, in the discovery of a ruined cabin or cottage, of a walk ‘where the children played games in the heather... whey they sailed their wee boats on the burn,’ and the pathos of

“Why stand I here like a ghost...’tis time I was leaving, ‘tis time I passed on”.

For the memory of the Famine, as we have seen, all too much alive to that generation of immigrants which included my ancestors, and their ‘exile’ helped create its own plethora of emigrant songs. Among those songs were some written by Thomas Davis, leader of the abortive rebellion of 1848. Perhaps the most significant of his songs was A Nation Once Again

When boyhood’s fire was in my blood,

I read of ancient freemen,

For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,

Three hundred men and three men.

And then I prayed that I yet might see,

Our fetters rent in twain,

And Ireland, long a province, be,

A nation once again.

Although he was only thirty-one years old when he died, Davis was the single greatest influence upon his contemporaries. He recalled the 1798 rebellion, the vain hopes that Catholic and Protestant might unite against England, and the failure of the English to respond in any constructive way to Irish demands for recognition of its nationhood. He inspired the nationalism of many who were to become the leaders later on, notably John Mitchell and Gavin Duffy. He inspired the 1848 rising which was led by the chivalrous but incompetent William Smith O’Brien, and so provided a link with the revolutionary chain which stretched from 1798 to 1916 and after.

Tone, Emmet, Tandy, Father Murphy and the Boys of Wexford, as well as Davis and his Histories, were ‘History’ for my grandfather, even if their memories were kept fresh in ballad and verse. The Fenians and Irish Republican Brotherhood, on the other hand, were ‘current affairs’ for granddad and his contemporaries, who kept their memories alive for succeeding generations, including mine. The risings of 1865 and 1867 by men in Limerick and Tipperary had been savagely if quickly repressed. The 1867 rising had a significant English outcome. In September 1867 five Irishmen had tried to rescue two Fenian prisoners from a police van, and a policeman had been killed. The would-be rescuers were captured, tried and found guilty of the murder of the policeman.

They were hanged in Manchester on 23 November: Early in December there appeared T.S. Sullivan’s ‘Hymn to the Manchester Martyrs’ which, to the tune of Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the boys are marching, became a hymn-song to be used at meetings as well as at family gatherings:

High upon the gallows tree, swung the noble hearted three,

By the vengeful tyrant stricken in their bloom:

But they met him face to face, with the courage of their race,

And they went with souls undaunted to their doom.

God save Ireland, said the heroes,

God save Ireland, said they all,

Whether on the scaffold high, or the battlefield we die,

What matter when for Erin dear we fall...

And so on for seemingly endless verses the last of which ran

Never till the latest day shall the memory pass away

Of the gallant lives thus given for our land,

But on the cause must go, amidst joy and weal and woe,

Till we make our Isle a nation free and grand.

In the 1930s, one of the most impressive figures in my Catholic parish was a Mr. O’Brien, held in awe by some of us because he was ‘J.P.’, the only Catholic magistrate in the town. And O’Brien, J.P., was ‘O’Brien, God Save Ireland’. He had won this ‘title’ because of his penchant, in earlier, maybe wilder, days, for singing that rebel song at parties and gatherings. I’d never have guessed it as I watched him stride purposefully to his front seat in church, missal in hand and white hair neatly brushed. Only much later did I come to realise that he had been a boy when the Manchester Martyrs were executed. So, too, had been my Granddad, for whom my ‘history’ was his ‘current affairs’.

Ed.

While visiting Dublin, I visited Kilmainham Gaol, of which I had sung for the past 10 years in the song entitled Grace. For a long time I had doubted the originality of the song as neither Dad nor Chris had heard of the song or referred to Grace (Gifford) whose her husband, James Plunkett, had been imprisoned with many other sympathisers and organisers of the 1916 uprising.

During the escorted visit, I saw the comparatively huge luxurious cell where Parnell ‘stayed’, the smaller cell where Emmett prepared for execution, the cold, dark, damp corridors where offenders, even children of 5, were locked up for minor offences such as stealing a coat, failing to pay a fare, and then we were taken to the prison chapel.

It was here that Grace of whom I had sung was to marry her James, and their ‘honeymoon’ of one hour was spent together with 6 guards in the 6 feet by 10 feet cell before James was prepared for his execution the following day.

Now I understand the lament of Grace, and I wondered at her misery as she listened from the street side of the prison wall as her husband of one day was executed

There were two small black crosses in the yard, one either end. Plunkett and his fellow activists were executed at the eastern end of the yard.

At the other end, 3 days after the others, James Conolly was shot, strapped to a chair, as he was too weak (as a result of injuries sustained fighting for the cause) to stand or sit upright to face the riflemen

The guide then went on, with true emotion, to tell us of the ‘generosity’ of the Brits during the days of The Famine and of Trevelyan exporting the corn while the Irish were dieing in the thousands, and leaving in their hundreds of thousands. She added that if you stole any of the much needed corn you could easily find yourself spending some time in Kilmainham before being shipped out to Botony Bay, Australia.

Within the eight of so of us being shown the prison, a lady of about twenty made it known that she was a descendant of one of the executed. She was openly crying as the guide finished with the final story of the prison ship and the well known song, The Fields of Athenry. The best spent five euro of my stay.

It was a very moving hour. On your next visit to Dublin, take the bus out to the eastern edge of Phoenix Park (where you will find the massive column commemorating the lives of the Irish who fought and died for Wellington, and from there walk south for 5 minutes to the Memorial Gardens where more Irish are remembered for dieing for their ‘masters’ and then on 5 minutes more to the Gaol.

Chapter 14 The First Catholic Voters – 1868

In the cottages, beer-houses and pubs in their Merthyr ghetto, the Irish immigrants may have thought that the world revolved around the Fenians and the 1867 rising. However, there was another, wider, world outside Ireland, and the majority of English and Welsh peoples relegated Irish affairs to a low place in their scale of priorities. Because while the Fenians were organising their rising, the Westminster Parliament was dealing with the question of Parliamentary Reform. The answers to that question were, in the long run, to be of more significance to the immigrants and their descendants than were the success or otherwise of campaigns for Home Rule for Ireland.

In July 1866 Lord Derby formed a Conservative government with Benjamin Disraeli as the Leader of the Commons. Moving ahead of the story; in February 1868 Derby’s illness forced his retirement and Disraeli became, in fact, what he had been in practice, Prime Minister. And it was Disraeli who in 1867 brought in a Reform Bill which, gave the vote to every adult male householder and male lodgers paying more than £10 a year for unfurnished rooms.

This gave the vote to about 1.5 million adult males, almost all living in industrial towns and cities. This had led Disraeli to have a second string to his reforming bow. His Reform Bill also dealt with the nonsense’s whereby industrialised Glamorgan had fewer MPs than did agricultural Radnorshire, and Cornwall more than did populous Lancashire. Disraeli’s Bill proposed that boroughs with less than 10,000 inhabitants should have the right to elect only one MP and not, as some had had, two, and that the resulting 45 vacant seats be given to 15 industrial towns which had never had an MP, while some industrial towns, including Merthyr, should have two MPs instead of the one they had had up until 1867.

This Bill became law in August 1867, a month before the Fenian attacks on the Manchester prison van. The extension of the franchise and the redistribution of seats meant that, logically, there had to be a General Election. But it took time to draw new constituency boundaries, and even longer to draw up fresh electoral registers which would include the names of the newly-franchised. So it was that Disraeli’s government staggered along until the winter of 1868 until it was able to name the date for the election – 17 November 1868.

When the registers were finally drawn up in Merthyr, there were 14,000 men’s names on the list of those eligible to vote: the old middle-class electorate was swamped by the newly-franchised workers. In some senses the unfranchised workers had always played a role in elections – even when a candidate was unopposed as happened in Merthyr in 1852. Agitation over the 1831-32 Reform Bill led to the ‘rising’ when, for several days, the workers of Merthyr and Dowlais controlled the town, having fought off the small force of constabulary, the volunteer force of local Yeomanry and even a small force of constabulary, the volunteer force of local Yeomanry and even a small force of regular soldiers. But, within a week the soldiers from Brecon had restored order and the workers driven to accept their rightful places – as hewers of wood (or iron) and drawers of water (or coal).

In earlier elections, the period of the election campaign allowed workers and their families to enjoy a sort of carnival: there were bands playing tunes associated with one or other of the candidates (when there was more than one); there were public meetings addressed by the candidates which were dominated by the working classes who formed the bulk of the population; there were processions organised by candidates’ agents in which the workers were encouraged (by fear of the ironmasters, or by promises of beer and food), to join.

But the middle-class candidates and the more intelligent members of the working classes understood the pecking order: the workers were allowed a walk-on part only, one which, perhaps, might serve to defuse a crisis at one time or to encourage the myth that workers and masters shared political interests. The intelligent knew that the workers worked while the masters ruled: or as my grandfather told my father and so established one folk story:

“Work can’t be any good really. If it had been, then the masters would have kept it to themselves – as they did the land, the money and political power. They left the work to us.”

For the fact of the matter was that the propertied classes despised their workers. As H.A. Bruce said in 1851 when he was on the eve of becoming Merthyr’s MP,

“Only walk into the nearest street and see the crowds of drunkards assembled about the taverns, singing, shouting, gesticulating, or reeling across your homeward path – or join the knot of colliers or miners; hear them discuss any subject not immediately connected with their employment, and mark their gross ignorance and strange prejudices – and then, be your mind ever so liberal, and your interest in the progress of mankind ever so keen, you cannot but feel that it would be madness to entrust the destiny of this empire to the votes and control of men so unreasoning, so uninstructed.”

This prejudiced coal owner and landowner clearly never asked whether the educational and social system which produced this mass ‘... so unreasonable, so uninstructed’ might be to blame for their condition: nor did he ever approve of any reform which might have fitted, at least, the children of such men to be more equal to the task of controlling ‘...the destiny of this empire’. To their claims that they were not rich enough to share in the vote in 1851 he might well have enjoined, along with French Prime Minister Guizot, “Eh bien, enrichissez-vous” and would have argued that, in keeping with the spirit of laisser-faire it was for each man to make his own individual efforts to claw himself from the mire in which employers put him.

In 1852 when Bruce was nominated to succeed Josiah Guest a Merthyr’s MP (and was returned unopposed), some 8,600 people turned up to stand around the hustings where the election would have been held, and where, in any event, the result would be declared. But of those only about 900 had the right to affect the result. Or as Bruce said to them:

“You may hold up your dirty hands against me, but I’ll still be the MP tomorrow”.

He was assured of the support of the ironmasters and, through their influence, of the support of the majority of the voters.

The 1867 Reform Act changed all that. The number of voters increased from about 1,000 to over 14,000: the old middle class electorate was swamped by the masses of working men who gained the right to vote. The Act also provided that Merthyr would have two MPs, as one of the ‘populous boroughs’ listed in the section of an Act dealing with the redistribution of seats.

The population of the constituency had continued to grow. In 1851 it was about 64,000; by 1861 it was over 86,000 and the census of 1871 showed that there were nearly 100,00 people in the constituency. However, the bulk of this growth had taken place away from Merthyr itself where, between 1851 and 1871 the population grew by less than 10,000. The constituency or ‘parliamentary borough’ included Aberdare as well as Vaynor. And it was in Aberdare that the greatest rate of growth was seen: there the population had been doubling every ten years between 1831 and 1861 and by 1871 its population was three-quarters that of Merthyr. And even in the parish of Merthyr itself, the greatest growth of population was found, not in Crawshay’s ‘old town’, but in Lower Merthyr.

And the growth of Aberdare and Lower Merthyr was the result of the increased volume of coal being mined for export. By the 1860s there were over forty pits in the Aberdare Valley, alone which was becoming known as ‘the Welsh California’. For, by 1871, coal had replaced iron and the main product of even Crawshay’s Merthyr. By 1867 there were only two ironworks left – Crawshay’s Cyfarthfa and Guest’s Dowlais: the others had closed as the seams of iron ore ran out and as steel slowly replaced iron.

And as the iron industry declined in importance, the two major owners were even less inclined to do anything about the dreadful conditions in which the mass of the people lived. As one observer noted in 1867:

“Merthyr is not a place to be lived in; it is a place to leave in search of a healthier spot once you had made enough money.”

And, as we have seen, the Crawshay family had Caversham Park among other healthier spots while the Guests had Canford Manor in leafy Dorset.

For the wage-earning masses there was much less chance of escape. Many did leave – merely to work in the developing coal industry in other valleys or in Lower Merthyr, or in iron and steel industries developing elsewhere; dozens of Middlesbrough families have their origins in the Merthyr valley. The mass remained, living in their small, insanitary cottages, their cramped streets – unpaved and undrained, fouled with the refuse of almost a century.

Because the masters’ lacked any of the civic pride which could be found in some older boroughs which, over the centuries, may have created the organisations of good government. Not so the money-conscious ironmasters who helped create the revolting conditions found in Pont Storehouse, the Cellars, China, and Ynysgau, all of which, even the Guardians of the Poor regarded as refuse-dumps for human, problems easier forgotten or ignored than solved. One continuing problem was that of the pauper children – offspring of, perhaps, two dead parents, or of a widowed mother, or of a sick, injured or otherwise unemployable father. The Guardians farmed them out to whoever would take them – brothel keepers in China included. The Liberal Bruce said:

“It would be more humane to throw such children into the deepest pool in the Taff, or shovel them down the nearest abandoned coal-pit, than feed them to the voracious brothel keepers and thieves of China, or the lodging-house keepers who were prepared to take them, two or three at a time, for 2 shillings and six pence a week”.

Perhaps pauper children suffered the most: perhaps it was the working class women who struggled to make a life for themselves, their men and their children. There are any number of contemporary prints of, for example. Saturday night in the Merthyr Pawnshop and the occasional photograph, in which illustrator or photographer left us vivid real life representations of these women. Massed in the pawnshop we see them shuffling to reclaim (for wear at church) this suit or that dress, this piece of oddment or that ornament, which had been ‘popped’ on the previous Monday to get money for rent, food or whatever – and which would be back in pawn again on the following Monday. Here we see the misshapen women – bringing back childhood memories of women in the 1930s with nicknames like ‘Big Nellie’ and ‘Fat Annie’. These were the unfortunate products of too frequent pregnancies, poor diet, overwork and worry. These were the women who hobbled on bunionned and corned feet, their bodies covered in dirty dresses, shawls (or sacking), their hair scraggy and greasy, their faces being more scarred with worry then merely crumpled by age. It is small wonder that the rich, elegantly-dressed and fastidious Bruce should have despised these dregs of the society which he had helped create. It would take a century of democracy and social reform to change this state of affairs – a century which had its beginnings with the 1868 election.

There were three candidates for the two-member constituency where each voter would have the right to vote for two candidates. The most prominent of the three was H.A. Bruce (or ‘Duffryn Pet’ as the bookies – the unofficial pollsters of the day – called him). It was assumed that he would finish at the head of the poll, because he had almost everything in his apparent favour. He was the senior Trustee of the Dowlais Works; he virtually owned Mountain Ash; he had been a Minister in Russell’s Whig-Liberal government; he was a friend of Gladstone and was tipped to become the next Home Secretary; he was supported by Crawshay and the management of Dowlais Works whose influence seemed to guarantee him the votes of their worker-voters while, as owner of the Aberdare Ironworks and of collieries in both Aberdare and Merthyr, he could expect to influence the votes of his own workers.

The second leading candidate was Richard Fothergill, former ironmaster and now large coal owner in Aberdare and Merthyr, he had the right to expect the support of his workers and those voters who depended, indirectly, on his works. Not for nothing did the bookies nickname him ‘The Ironmaster’.

The third candidate was Henry Richard (‘Nonconformist’ in the bookies’ lists). He was an outsider in every respect. He was well-known in England as a passionate advocate of peace in international affairs, and well-regarded in Wales as the champion of Welsh Nonconformity in articles in the English press. He could hope to gain the Nonconformist vote – but the chapels had never, in the past, been united for political action; rather they tended to hurl abuse at one another for this or that lapse from ‘truth’ as perceived by whichever preacher was uttering the anathemas. Richard had no wealth, no business or industrial connections; he was not a local man. He was, in fine, a man without influence. “He brought nothing to the campaign except himself”.

Each of the candidates spent weeks in October and November addressing public meetings, taking part in demonstrations, helping their agents distribute cards to the voters, and meeting voters in small groups. Crawshay allowed Bruce to use his stable yard to hold a meeting with some of Crawshay’s colliers and went with him from there to a public meeting where, wrote Crawshay’s’ daughter wrote:

“Poor fellow, he seems almost worn out. He said he had written to his friend Lord de Gray to-day saying ‘rather than go through such another election he would be made a peer”.

Crawshay did not make either himself nor ‘the office’ nor ‘the works’ available to Henry Richard, who could, however, depend on the activities of the slowly-emerging ‘respectable’ members of the working classes. He could also call on the old Chartist political tradition which, in Merthyr, was sustained by a political organisation and which had held meetings in support of the Reform proposals of 1866 and 1867. The newly-formed Reform League had a branch in the constituency and many of its older members had been active Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s.

These were the men who, when they went to a Bruce meeting, challenged his right to speak for them: he had little idea of their problems and needs. They questioned him on his attitude to their call for a secret ballot, the attitude he would take to proposals for trade union reforms, and claimed that his “on the one hand...but on the other hand...” method of answering their questions provided evidence of prevarication and class prejudice. On the other hand they saw Richard as one of their own. When he appeared on a public platform, he was accompanied by old and respected Merthyr Chartists who applauded his claim that “only the poor are qualified to speak and legislate for the poor” and “there were too many rich men in Parliament”. His final meeting was held on the mountainside between Merthyr and Aberdare; many thousands came to hear him and his leading supporters – all save one a working man.

As for the Catholic Irish. It is a reminder of their place on the social ladder that only 100 Catholic men were enfranchised. The Catholics formed about 5-6 per cent of the population of the parliamentary borough. However, there were only 100 Catholic voters out of a total of 14,000 – about 0.7 per cent. And these had must less interest in English affairs, or, indeed, in Merthyr’s social conditions, than they did in Irish affairs and, more pertinently, in purely Papal affairs. As to Irish affairs: the recent outbreak of Fenianism and the tragic events of Manchester with the death of a policeman and the hanging of the ‘three Manchester Martyrs’ aroused the interest of the Irish as well as the anger of the surrounding population. Every Irish pub was seen to be a centre of Fenian activities by a Welsh population already deeply hostile to the Irish and their Faith.

But there were also Papal matters to be considered. Until 1859, the Pope had been ruler of the Papal States which stretched across the centre of the un-united peninsula. Cavour, the Prime Minister of Piedmont, was the politician who, after 1856, campaigned for the unification of Italy. Garibaldi, the romantically red shirted leader of a private army, was the soldier-unifier who, having failed to capture Rome in 1848, returned via Naples and Sicily to lead an invasion of the Papal States in 1859. Napoleon III of France, seeking to win French Catholic support, sent a French army to defend Rome itself from a possible attack by Garibaldi. Not to be outdone, Cardinal Cullen of Dublin helped organise an Irish Brigade ‘of St Patrick’ which went to Rome in 1859 to support the French troops. While no one from Merthyr joined that brigade, every Catholic learned to sing the hymn which Cardinal Wiseman composed to rouse support for the beleaguered Pope Pius IX:

“Full in the panting heart of Rome, beneath the apostle’s crowning dome,

From pilgrims’ lips that kiss the ground, breathes in all tongues one only sound:

God bless our Pope, God bless our Pope, God bless our Pope, the great, and the good.

Wiseman died in 1865, but his hymn was sung after nearly every evening service for many years to come by a people whose faith was challenged by the people among whom they lived and who saw in that strong Papacy, a rock of ‘Gibraltarian importance’ to which they could cling.

Clashes between Welsh and Irish – whether in drink or in sobriety – were all too common. Fr Millea’s memory of the riots in Cardiff which drove him from that town, and Dowlais Catholics’ memories of attempts to pull down their small church while it was being built, the bitterness experienced by Catholic women in shop and street, and by Catholic children going to and from the Catholic schools, all these had not only helped cement, if not create, the ghetto complex. They had also made Catholics tread carefully – and never more carefully than on Election Day, 1868.

For there were no polling stations in those days: there was merely ‘the hustings in the square.’ And there were no polling booths there: simply ‘the hustings’ – the raised platform on which sat officials armed with the lists of electors and others empowered to see that these lists were marked correctly. The voter had to climb the ladder to the platform and in full view of the 8-9,000 standing around in more or less boisterous mood, had to declare publicly for whom he wished to cast his vote.

Father Millea feared, or rather he ‘knew’, that if the Catholic voters had gone, one by one, to the hustings they might well have faced at the best verbal abuse from their neighbours or, at the worst, physical attack. So, on the morning of the election, the hundred Catholic voters gathered in the church – now, as ever, the centre of their lives. Dressed as befitted the ‘aristocracy of the Irish in Merthyr’ in dark suits, wearing heavy overcoats against the winter’s cold, and almost all having the bowler hat which, then and later, was the badge of respectability, the men were then marched by their priest down to the Square. Along with them went a motley crew of the non-enfranchised Catholic mass – men more or less (usually less) decently dressed, heavy boots on feet and staves in hand, all acting as ‘outriders’ or guards. There, too, were many of the Catholic women, dressed as decently as was possible to the poor. And along there, too, were many young men and women, including the thirteen year old Patrick Lane, tall, dark haired, strong limbed and eager to take in as much as he could of this political lesson.

The men had taken part in a series of discussion as to how the Catholic vote would be cast. It did not need the full power of Father Millea’s position or eloquence to convince them to vote against Bruce, the friend of Russell who had approved of the Italian invasion of the Papal States, and who had hosted the reception committee which welcomed Garibaldi to London. That by not voting for Bruce they would also be cocking a snook at Crawshay and Guest was an added bonus. That by voting for Henry Richard they would help ensure the development of working class political involvement was an unconscious feature of their voting pattern. But it did mean that, maybe inadvertently, these first Catholic working-class voters had helped begin form the seed bed in which Pope Leo XIII could plant the seeds of new Catholic social thinking which he announced in 1891 in his famous encyclical Rerum Novarum. And in the discussions on that document were formed the socialist beliefs of at least three generations of Lanes. Neither Gladstone nor Disraeli could have known what they had set in train in 1866-67.

As to the election result. First, what does a Crawshay diary have to tell us?

“November 17^th. To-day is a black day for Merthyr. They have turned Mr Bruce out and that mean cringing Fothergrill is 2000 ahead. Richard of course is far beyond either.”

In fact Richard polled almost as many as the other two put together, 11,683 to Fothergill’s 7,139 and Bruce’s 5,776.

Many may have been surprised. Certainly Crawshay was, and this result was to play a fateful part in his behaviour to his men in the 1870s, as we shall see. But the bookies had known, from the start what the outcome was going to be – or almost. They had made Fothergill favourite to head the poll, offering the ridiculous odds of 200 to 1 on (i.e. you’d have to have put down £200 to win £1); they saw Richard as second favourite at odds of 150 to 1 on. They had dismissed Bruce’s chances whose odds were 100 to 1 against (i.e. you’d have won £100 for a £1 bet, if Bruce had won a seat).

So the first working man elected to Parliament and for a seat which would one day be taken by Keir Hardie – but that’s another part of the developing story of Merthyr, the working classes and the Irish.

Chapter 15. A Catholic Marquess Of Bute, 1868

A Catholic in the Castle,

And thousands at his gate

(with apologies to All Things Bright and Beautiful)

On 2^nd June 1982 Pope John Paul was the chief guest at a reception in his honour which was held at Cardiff Castle and during which he was granted the freedom of the City of Cardiff.

Until 1947 the Castle had been one of the homes of the Bute family, Descendants of the Earl of Bute, George III’s favourite Prime Minister. It was the second Marquess of Bute, John Crichton-Stuart (1794-1848) who was largely responsible for the development of Cardiff as a port and commercial centre. Described as “an Anglican in Wales and England and a Presbyterian in Scotland”, the second Marquess was violently anti-Catholic, and is alleged to have expressed, on his death bed, his deep regret for having brought thousands of Irish workers to help in the construction of the Bute Dock in Cardiff.

His anti-Catholicism was in keeping with the spirit of his times: Father Millea’s flight from the marauding anti-Catholic mob was merely one indication of that spirit which Bute did his best to foster. In his Scottish home, Mountstuart, Guy Fawke’s Day was celebrated with special anti-Papal speeches and burnings. His wife played her part in furthering his anti- Catholicism: she was a great granddaughter of Selina, the Countess of Huntingdon, and as befitted her ancestry, she waged almost continual war against the increasing influence of Catholicism in Cardiff and the Valleys.

She employed bands of men to distribute bibles among the Glamorgan Irish in the hope that this might “open their eyes” to what she perceived to be the truth. One can only begin to imagine “the great perturbation which I feel” on hearing that, in 1853, her sister had received an offer of marriage from a papist.

Bute was the owner of most of the land on which the city of Cardiff was to be built, and as such, the recipient of massive annual sums of ground rents from, in earlier days, tenant farmers and, as the city developed, from owners of offices, stores, shops and houses. But he was also the largest landowner in the rest of Glamorgan with large estates in the Cowbridge area to the west and in each of the valleys leading down to Cardiff: both Guest and Crawshay were among his tenants, parts or the whole of their works being built on land leased from the Bute estate. In addition, Bute, like many enterprising landowners, had become a major industrialist, opening several ironworks and many more collieries in each of the valleys.

The second Marquess died in Cardiff on 18 March 1848, when his son and heir was only six months old. As Lady Charlotte Guest wrote: “He was just at the height of his glory at the age of fifty five.

He had brought his long wished for little heir to Cardiff for the first time, he had received deputation’s of congratulations on the event from the authorities, he was in highest apparent health and spirits, visiting day by day his docks and the other institutions of ‘the second Liverpool’”.

The infant third Marquess was brought up by his mother until she died in 1859. In 1860, aged twelve, he went to May Place, an aristocratic prep school in Malvern. In 1862 he went to Harrow where he stayed until 1865 when he went to when he went to Christ Church, Oxford. Here he was befriended by C.S. Murray, a Catholic Scot for whom Pugin had designed a chapel, and by Murray’s personal chaplain, Monsignor T.W. Capel. Murray and Capel fully appreciated young Bute’s long-standing interest in medieval Scottish history, with its tales of saints and monasteries, and the medieval Scottish history. They played major roles in Bute’s decision to become a Catholic. He had wanted to announce his reception into the Church during the dinner held to celebrate his twenty-first birthday in September 1868. However, his advisers, who had done all they could to prevent his conversion, persuaded him to put off the announcement for fear that it would “poison the demonstrations of loyalty to the Bute family at the coming-of-age celebrations in Scotland and Cardiff.” Bute’s political agents also worked to prevent an early announcement of his conversion for fear that it would damage the chances of the Bute nominee in the all important 1868 election which, as we have seen, was called for after the passage of the 1867 Reform Act.

So Bute’s conversion was not made public until 8^th Dec 1868, some two weeks or so after that election. When the news came it caused a great shock. The Rothsay newspaper, Buteman, wrote of “the perversion to Rome” as a public calamity, and claimed that the islanders were turning their portraits of the young Marquess to the wall. There were similar anti-Catholic expressions in newspapers in Cardiff and Merthyr. However, as Bute himself wrote, “There was great rejoicing among the Catholic community here in Cardiff where we have between 9,000 and 10,000 Catholics who are delighted and who gathered in large crowds to see me as I go to Mass in St David’s Church”.

Bute’s political agents had hoped to present him with a client member of Parliament as a twenty-first birthday gift. The sitting tenant was his cousin Colonel J.F. Crichton-Stuart who had been returned unopposed when Coffin retired in 1857, and who had been re-elected, again without opposition in 1859 and 1865. He had become increasingly Liberal in his views, and the news that the young Marquess was an ardent Tory gave the trustees a chance to challenge Stuart. They put forward H.J. Giffard, the future Lord Chancellor Lord Halsbury, as Stuart’s Conservative candidate: they spent upwards of £10,000 during the bitter campaign when, Liberals alleged, there was a

great deal of intimidation against Bute employees. But their efforts were not enough in a Cardiff which had a population of over 60,000, many of whom could not be influenced by the Bute estate. Giffard lost the election by 2,055 votes to 2,501. One outcome of that defeat was the Bute decision to found the Western Mail, the first daily newspaper in Wales, to further the Conservative interest.

Disraeli, the Tory leader, had been in Cardiff for Bute’s coming-of-age celebrations. He himself had his own links with Glamorgan – having married the widow of the Glamorgan lawyer and industrialist Wyndham Lewis. In 1870 the politician-novelist published Lothair in which he used Bute’s character, upbringing and behaviour as the model for the novel’s hero. It was generally agreed that the characterisation was a truthful one: like Lothair, Bute showed an over-intense religiosity, fondness for religious paraphernalia and an unease with his inheritance of so much wealth. As his own Western Mail noted, “He did not have to turn his thoughts to the accumulation of wealth: this flowed in to his coffers unsought and unbidden; during his long minority, a vast income accumulated and, like Lothair, he came into everything ready made.”

In 1872 this most eligible Catholic bachelor married Gwendoline Fitzalan-Howard, whose father was a leading Catholic and a former Liberal MP, the first Baron Howard of Glossop, and whose mother had been a Talbot, a branch of the Shrewsbury family. In this marriage, the convert Bute of the Stuart family forged links between the Scottish and English branches of the Fitzalan family which had been broken in the eleventh century. All this must have pleased his sense of history. It certainly pleased members of the ‘old Catholic’ aristocracy, as well as increasing the self-esteem of the Catholic Irish immigrants. Among these were my maternal grandparents who were to see their children, including my mother, baptised in the new Benedictine Church of St Mary’s which was built in the new Talbot Street in Canton, a name-link with the Castle family. There were, too, my cousins who were to go to the De La Salle Brothers School, St Illtydd’s, Cardiff with its houses named after the Bute family – Ninian, Stuart...: I was always envious of their green and gold blazers, the Papal colours their public badge of their faith.

Bute’s life was dominated by his Catholicism: in private his conversation was often of “altars, ritual and liturgy”; he spent large sums on religious objects, including a cross which he presented to the Pope and which was carried at the head of the opening procession at the Vatican Council in 1870 where Bute was prominent among the lay Catholics. He entertained Cardinal Manning at the Castle and in 1881 gave Bishop Hedley a house in St Andrew’s Crescent when that Bishop made Cardiff the centre of the diocese. Indeed, his Catholicism so coloured all his attitudes and much of his public behaviour that by the 1890s it was being assumed that the family had always been Catholic: one imagines the reaction of his bigoted father to that belief. As his obituary said of him in October 1900,

“It would have been difficult to imagine the Marquess as a Protestant”.

His son, John, was born in 1881, the year in which Bishop Hedley moved his residence from Bullingham to Cardiff and renamed the diocese. He proved to be as ardent a Catholic as his father had been. But during his lifetime the family lost its holdings in collieries, agriculture, docks and urban land, so that, when he died in 1947, the fifth Marquess inherited little more that the Castle and its park. On September 10 1947, the Bute standard was lowered for the last time as the Castle and park were presented by the Butes to the City. However, the good that was done to the psychology of Cardiff Catholics lived on in the descendants of the Irish who had first rejoiced in the conversion of 1868 of the Bute who had shown the hostile world around them that one could be Catholic and successful.