Chapters 21 - 25
Chapter 21. The First Step On The
If you have read this far, you have noticed that there are very few dates attached to my story of my granddad’s life: the Famine, the 1867 Fenian uprising; the 1868 election; 1874 – 75 and the closure of the Crawshay works. Like the vast majority of his peers – English, Irish and Welsh – my granddad left no diaries, boxes of letters or autobiographical sketches. Where would he have kept them, even if he had had time or inclination to gather them?
However, we do know that the early years of the 1890s were of great importance in his life and, because of that, of great significance in the religious, political and social developments that were to take place in the lives of his descendants – that’s you, me and the others.
First in importance was his marriage in 1896 to Anastasia Scannell, the youngest child of a large Catholic family which, in time, has sent its emigrants to
The Port Talbot Scannells included ‘Uncle’ Johnnie, as I have called him, although he was, of course, my Dad’s uncle. I recall his giving me a Boer War bayonet to help fend off attacks from a gang of anti-Catholic boys who lived in
Anastasia Scannell was, before her marriage, housekeeper to Mgr Louis Casartelli, then Rector of St Bede’s Grammar School in
Did the Benedictines of Merthyr and Dowlais have their own way of recommending someone to priests in what was then ‘far distant’
Who knows? But what can be surmised without exaggeration is that Anastasia must have had ‘a bit of shape’ to her before she could have become Casartelli’s housekeeper. For he was an unusual priest – and, later, Bishop. Born in 1852 the son of an Italian living in
And she gave up this prestigious post to marry
Below is a famous family photograph taken when my Dad was about seven-taken before he went away to school, perhaps? As I remember, studio portraits even in the 1930s, were the occasion for much posing before the photographer got everything right and went to hide beneath the large cloak which covered him and his large, clumsy tripod-borne machine. How much more so in 1907 or so. And there they are: my granddad tall, white-haired, moustached, well clothed and proudly erect, his hand on the shoulder of the stiffly dressed Louis. And, seated, my small grandmother, skirt down to her shoes, dark blouse matching the skirt, hair pulled back into a bun. Both she and granddad look old enough to have been Louis’s grandparents – a reminder that granddad was, indeed, over 50 while Gran, aged 50 or so, carried, as did most women of that age, all the outward marks of hardships – lined face, greying hair, bowed shoulders. Maybe one of the greatest changes to have taken place in this century has been in the appearance of older women: certainly my Mum aged 95 looked, dressed, and was, younger in appearance and spirit than was my Gran aged 50.
Both Patrick and Anastasia were, relatively, ‘well-heeled’ and it is possible that, after their Nuptial Mass and hall-centred simple and family provided wedding breakfast, they went via the Great Western Railway and the Fishguard Irish ferry to Rosslare, Killarney and Kerry. Why not? The cost was only 12 shillings with another 10 shillings for coupons covering food on the boat and in Irish hotels. We know, from the records of the Railway Company that hundreds of Irish miners, steelworkers and shopkeepers, went on these week-end excursions in the 1900s. So why not allow Patrick and Anastasia that trip ‘home’?
Back in Dowlais, the newly-weds took a major step on the ladder of social mobility. For they bought – maybe with a loan from the Ancient Order of Hibernian Insurance Society? – that house in
And, another move up the ladder, the Lanes used the front room as an alehouse. You can find the evidence for this in Kelly’s Street Directory for Merthyr, 1901, where,
This tenancy helps to explain why, later, my father was friendly with tenants in many
So there you have Dad’s birthplace – a small alehouse in
“The two photographs reproduced today may, indeed, be described as very mild specimens of what may be seen in Dowlais. One photograph shows the lane locally known as the
The quarters here illustrated, bad as they appear, are superior to many other portions of the town.
I ‘recommend’ a tour of the worst areas of Dowlais – High Street, South Street, through the ‘Skipka Pass’, Victoria Street, North Street, Cross Street, Erin Street into Brown Street, Castle Street, Sand Street Cross Sand Street into Lower Elizabeth Street and on to Gellifaelog rubbish tip. And even then you will not have seen Quarry Row, the notorious Irish ghetto.”
Patrick and
In the 1950s I was to teach Sixth Formers that Joe Chamberlain was perhaps the first ‘socialist’ politician – with his call for Old Age Pensions, subsidised council housing, free schooling and aid for the unemployed – and all that in the 1870s and 1880s, long before Lloyd George came over the welfare horizon. It was, and is, a reminder of how long are Irish memories to note that when I did so, a friendly Doctor Dwyer of
The March defeat of the Home Rule Bill led to a July election which was highlighted, for the Irish, by the anti-Catholic campaign led by the Tory leader, Lord Randolph Churchill. “Home Rule will be Rome Rule”, cried the father of Winston Churchill, who called on Ulster Protestants to rise in armed rebellion against the notion of rule from
The Irish then watched the Tories’ squalid attempts to ‘get Parnell’, the ‘Uncrowned King of Ireland’. In 1887, The Times carried a series of letters, allegedly written by Parnell, showing that he had been responsible for the horrific murders in 1882 of the new Secretary for
In 1890, Chamberlain, now a Liberal Unionist and well on his way to getting high office from
was their leader. This led the Irish Bishops, who had taken no action when the divorce case was being held, to say that the Irish problem could not be solved while Parnell remained head of the Irish Party. This led to a series of fateful meetings of the Irish MPs, with some demanding that Parnell stand down, maybe temporarily, with others calling for loyalty to ‘the chief’. When Parnell claimed that he was “the Master of the Party”, it was waspish Tim Healy from
In fevered meetings in Dowlais – and elsewhere – the Irish were bitterly divided into pro – and anti-Parnell camps. There were the righteous who argued that a “Protestant adulterer was unfit to be leader of the Catholic Party”. Their opponents pointed out that in
But, in the end, as my father would recall (having heard the stories from his father) it was realpolitik which won out. If there were to be Home Rule, it would only come via the Liberals. And they had made it clear that they would not co-operate with Parnell. To the realists – in the House of Commons’ Party, among the electorate in
As if in ‘a thank you’ to the Irish for having rejected Parnell,
Strangely enough, the fall of Parnell and seeming laying aside of Home Rule was accompanied by a major resurgence in the notion of ‘romantic
The GAA organised local cells or branches which, in the rural areas of
Perhaps of greater significance was the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893. Its founders were, in the main, Irish Protestants who wanted to revive the Irish language, an anti-materialist Irish way of life – typified by the barefooted gossoons of the Far West – and to produce literature, music and drama that would help to bring alive a ‘romantic Ireland’. So we had Irish dancing, music and poetry. There were eminent supporters and members of the league – Yeats, O’Casey, Lady Gregory, Synge and many others. And the League had a large following in Dowlais. Membership cost 1 penny a week and meetings were held at the Catholic school on Monday and Thursday evenings. Here for two hours or so there were classes in the Irish language, in Irish dancing, and in piping; there were readings from ancient poets and, as they appeared, from the works of Yeats and others.
Soon the Merthyr and Dowlais Branches of the League were holding Annual Musical Festivals at the Drill Hall, Merthyr – a sign of the growth of the two branches and the success of the attempt to revive a sense of Irishness. Programmes consisted of Irish pipe, dance and song; many of the artistes came across from
But the outward appearance of the League and its members – kilt, pipe, song and dance – disguised the inner reality of what was happening as a result of the fall of Parnell and the emergence of the League and the GAA.
Parnell had been patron of the
For, unintended, the League’s work became increasingly anti-clerical in tone and was used by nationalists to whip up support for ‘the boys with the gun’ as against ‘the men of the ballot box’. And in that process Dowlais, and my grandfather, were bit players. It is from this date – the fall of Parnell and the ensuing anger – that I date that sceptical anti-clericalism which I imbibed, osmotically, from my father who must have learned it from his. I well remember hearing Dad say, on more than one occasion (for, like his son, he liked to use a good story more than once)!
“In so far as a man wears a clerical collar and talks to you of theology and the like, then listen to him respectfully. For that is what he’s trained in and ought to be good at. But in so far as he wears a clerical collar and talks to you of politics, then pay him only the respect you would pay anyone else. For he is not trained in politics or economics, and his views on these topics are no more valuable than any other person’s views.”
Later we will see examples of priests using not only their pastoral visits but also their pulpits to try to play the political game – normally in favour of some well-heeled Tory candidate. But here I reflect that in retrospect I find it peculiar that my father was well-respected by the many priests with whom he came in contact. Young and old, they came to our homes, often to find out ‘diocesan gossip’ from the man whose job took him into many other towns where he ‘popped in’ to chat to the local priests. They stayed, too, to argue with him, normally very gently but without either side giving way. As a boy I was merely a bystander. But I must have picked up the notion that one could talk to, argue with, and disagree with, the priest – and, as I shall show, with the Archbishop, too. And all that without it disturbing adherence to the faith and to religious practices. Indeed, the arguing may well have helped deepen the faith – certainly helped free us from a superstitious blindness.
There was one other important result of the fall of Parnell. My grandfather and many others in Dowlais became increasingly embittered with both political parties. The Liberals had betrayed Parnell: the Tories were violently opposed to Home Rule, and aimed to keep ‘colonial
Chapter 22. How Catholic Socialism Came To Dowlais, 1891 – 93
To-day,
However, almost no one today is surprised if the Pope makes statements which are aimed at the political, economic and social conditions in which his people – and others – find themselves. Indeed, such is the bankrupt nature of much of the political mafia and of most religious leaders, that even ‘liberal’ opinion formers seem to demand that the Pope take a lead in commenting on world affairs.
It was not always so.
And then came Pope Leo X111 (1878-1903). In 1848 Metternich’s comment on the liberal-nationalism of the new Pope, Pius IX, was “We have prepared for everything except a liberal Pope”. Maybe someone said in 1878, “We have prepared for everything except a socialist Pope”. For, in a series of articles, letters and encyclicals, Leo XIII dragged his Church into a world of industry, of demands for social justice and social welfare. Most notable was his epoch-making encyclical Rerum Novarum. Later Popes would date their own social encyclicals from this, the first one: Pius XI would write his and start it with the words of its title, Quadregesimo Anno (1931)/Forty years.../
Since 1891, Catholic social teaching has, naturally, developed, and, with the benefit of fresh studies, new insights have been gained. So it is possible to see Leo’s encyclical as, on the whole, a moderate document. To take that view would be to ignore the fact that it was the first attempts by a Pope to come to terms with the industrial world and the development of socialism as a political force.
Leo accepted the essential socialist principles of class organisation and state intervention in the economy, and called for laws to allow workers the right to form trade unions which could lead the fight for ‘the Just Wage’ (a new concept in modern thought). Leo called for a society in which, on the one hand, individual freedom would be respected – and which would condemn the danger of the over-arching state control called for by Marxist socialists.
This balancing act led to much later debate on the nature of freedom, with many Catholics claiming that Leo spoke for property owners and their rights (as he did) while others claimed that he spoke for workers and their rights (as he also did). My father helped me to see that there were:
1. A freedom from, e.g. taxation, strongly supported by Gladstonian Liberals: said their leader, “Money best fructifies in the pockets of the people”, and not in the hands of politicians or civil servants.
2. A freedom to enjoy the results of low taxation (if you were well-to-do).
He showed me that while poorly paid workers were freed from taxation they were not free to enjoy decent housing, medical care, a comfortable old age or adequate schooling for their children. Somewhere along the line between freedom from and freedom to, said Leo XIII, the well-to-do had to lose some of their freedom from so that the masses might enjoy more freedom to.
When, where, how and from whom did my father gain those insights? It would be facile to say “Leo XIII”. No, he was fortunate in that the historic document was read, re-read, studied and discussed by my grandfather and many of his fellow-Catholics. For granddad was long since a well-read man and politically active. I remember a memorial to his wide reading in the multi-volumed History of Our Times which Justin McCarthy produced in 1877. Maybe granddad bought them because McCarthy had been a member of Young Ireland in 1848, and was Parnell’s trusted lieutenant in the 1880s. Whatever the reason, these long, verbose but easily read histories remained in our family through the 1930s. Where are they now? And where are granddad’s six volumed Early History of the Labour Party, published in the early 1920s? I remember their stiff, red covers, the plates of the first leaders of the Party, the MPs in various succeeding Parliaments, and so on.
I would not have you think that my granddad was somehow an exception in having bought these and other serious books. Indeed, one of my 1930 memories is visiting miners’ homes – to play with their children – and seeing the well-stocked shelves there. I never saw, but I have read of, the large libraries to be found in Miner’s Welfare Halls, and I have read, too, of the destruction of these libraries when valleys lost their pits and the Halls were closed or converted into bingo halls. It was in such Halls, and schoolrooms, and Church Halls, that Universities ran their extension classes in the 1870s and after, and the Workers Educational Association ran their courses after 1903. It was Tawney who spoke of his wonder at the sight of men who had walked from one valley to a meeting in another, and that after a day’s work, to hear him talk on Greek philosophy. Another active worker in this field wrote of “the almost perverse passion of the Welsh for lectures.” And, I would add, of some Irish, too.
Granddad had been there when Michael Davitt, one-armed founder of the Land League (1879) and former Fenian, spoke in Merthyr to an audience of 1500.
It was at this meeting that a young
And the Merthyr Irish were fortunate in that their Bishop was the Benedictine, Hedley, originally of Ampleforth and latterly of
“In the dim morning of society, Labour was up and stirring before Capital was wake....I claim for labour the right to property: I claim for labour (and the kill which is always acquired by labour) the right of capital. It is capital in the truest sense. Whatever rights, then, capital possesses, labour possesses...a right to determine for whom he will work and where he will work, to protect himself and ensure a just wage. That governments have ignored such things - the exploitation of labour, the harsh living conditions - were the scandals of our day. These things cannot go on; these things ought not to go on.”
Strong words, which alienated Manning from many in the governing classes and from many in the bench of Catholic Bishops. But Manning went even further in 1874 when, having contributed to the funds of the infant National Agricultural Labourers’
“Why cannot you do these things for the labourer? Prohibit the labour of children under a certain age. Compel payment of wages in money and not in kind. Regulate the number of dwellings according to the population of parishes. Establish tribunals or arbitration in counties for questions between labour and landowner.”
In 1886 he became a player on the world stage when he condemned the harsh actions of the Cardinal Archbishop of
“Up to the present the world has been governed by dynasties; henceforward the Holy See must treat with the people, and with Bishops who are in close daily and personal relations with the people. The more this is clearly and fully acknowledged, the more firmly will the exercise of spiritual authority be established. This is the opportunity of the present. The Church is the Mother, Friend, and Protectress of the People. As our Divine Saviour lived among persons of the people, so lives His Church.”
Leo XIII’s earliest encyclicals had carried harsh condemnations of socialism and communism. Certainly there was no early suggestion that he would be sympathetic to calls for Papal intervention on the side of the working class. However, as early as 1880, his attitude had changed. In that year he wrote an encyclical condemning slavery - still widespread in
“This last encyclical is Manning’s. It was he who put the idea into my head to do something for the slaves. I have written this Encyclical in consequence of my conversation with him.”
And Manning was willing to do more than merely speak and write in favour of the workers. In August 1889, Ben Tillet led the unskilled and poorly-paid
“On one dark day for the strikers, when some men seemed disposed to drift back to work...Tillett returned to his lodgings in Poplar to be told by his landlady that there was an old priest in the kitchen who had been waiting all the afternoon to speak with him. Tillet found the 81-year-old Cardinal sitting there, reading the latest episode of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine. What could he do to help? Was the message he had brought: and he began his efforts at mediation on the following day.”
As Newsome records, and as many histories have recorded, Manning persuaded the Lord Mayor of London to set up a Committee of Conciliation of which Manning was a member. When the dockers threatened to reject the Committee’s report (and the employers’ agreement to pay them their sixpence per hour), Manning went to address a dockers’ meeting and persuaded the truculent men to accept the offer. They did so and the strike ended.
In tribute to his work, the delegates of the London Trades Council passed a resolution:
“The Cardinal, by his tender sympathy for the poor, and his fearless advocacy of justice, especially for the poor, and by his persistent denunciation of the oppression of the workers, had endeared his memory to the heart of every true friend of Labour.”
And then came, as we have seen, Leo’s Rerum Novarum. Parts of it followed the argument which Manning had used when addressing the Catholic Congress at
“I do not believe that it will ever be possible to establish peaceful relations between employers and worker, until it is publicly acknowledged and established that there must be a just and fitting measure that will regulate profits and wages, a measure that will govern all the free contracts between capital and labour.”
Leo had sent Manning a draft copy of his encyclical Rerum Novarum and asked him to prepare the English translation along with Archbishop Walsh of
“I think I trace your Eminence’s influence in this as in many other things I have noted here during this visit.”
And that brings us to Bishop Hedley, my granddad’s Bishop. Manning had neither the time nor energy to undertake the talks of translating ‘his’ encyclical. Instead, as he himself wrote:
“The Holy Father accepted the offer of the Bishop of Newport (Benedictine, a very good scholar) to translate it”.
Manning knew Hedley well. He knew that, in the ports of the Welsh coastal strip and in the valleys, Hedley’s people were, like his own in
Granddad was fortunate, as regards Leo’s encyclical, since it was Hedley’s fellow-Benedictines who were his priests in Dowlais. Like the scholarly bishop, they, too, sympathised with the poor among whom they laboured. They had seen the Crawshay family leave
Back in 1891-92, the Benedictines set up an offshoot of the existing Catholic Debating Society which ran monthly meetings in the school hall. The new organisation was a forerunner of the branch of the Catholic Social Guild formed some years later. The new Society, later Guild, was formed to study and discuss the encyclical. Of course, not all Catholic workers came to these meetings: too many of them were too deprived, too depressed, to have notions of ‘free discussion’. ‘Talk must have seemed a luxury’ to many of the desperately poor; too many others, pious people, were too detached from ‘the world’ to think that social issues were worth discussing. For these, their religion may well have deserved the Marxist condemnation ‘the opium of the people’. They preferred to sing their death-preparation hymns (‘O teach us, teach us how to die.’) rather than get involved in attempts to improve life here below. Indeed, even my own father suffered from this attitude, his favourite hymn ‘Lord for tomorrow and its needs, I do not pray...keep me, guide me, love me, Lord, Just for to-day.’
But there were enough Scannells, Twomeys, O’Briens and others, including
But trade unions could achieve relatively little, as Tillett had discovered when his dockers got their sixpence an hour. Still lowly-paid, often unemployed, more frequently under-employed, the poor man’s wage would never allow him to get decent housing, medical care, better schooling for his children or savings to give him some comfort in old age. For all of these, and more, he would need government to act - to pass laws aimed at providing health care, subsidised housing, free and full time education, old age pensions and the like.
He would need governments willing to impose taxes on the better-off to provide the money needed to fund these and other social reforms. He would need local councils willing to implement reforming laws, even if this meant increases in local rates.
Neither the Gladstonian Liberals nor
And there, in summary, you have our family’s socialist background. The breaking of Parnell and the disillusion with Irish politics: the Liberal part in Parnell’s fall and the Irish turning away from Liberalism; the link between Leo XIII, Manning, Hedley and Dowlais’s Benedictines: the Social Guild: Hardie’s ILP - all these developments taking place at roughly the same time. A novelist might be accused of exaggeration if he made all these coincide. But they did, and my granddad was an early member of the ILP - as were hundreds of others of the Irish in Dowlais. I am not claiming anything extraordinary for
Chapter 23. The Irish And Keir Hardie’s Election As Merthyr’s M.P., 1900
As I start this section, I have on my desk my dad’s birth and baptismal certificates. But before coming to my desk, I read a piece by Fr. Ronald Rolheiser in to-day’s Catholic Herald (
I regret that I do not have his generosity to other people and willingness to help - how many older people were taken to church in the old van? Nor do I have his ability to weigh up people and events and to take the right action. But then neither do I have his impetuosity which led him to do some admirable things (a gift of 5 shillings in 1940 after Pat O’Connor, a diminutive full back, had brought down the huge Tancock about to score the try which would have cost the Saints the local Rugby cup) and some dreadful things (like removing us from the Port Talbot school because of some, probably imagined, slight by a teacher) and some courageous ones (like tackling the
Archbishop after a priest had attacked, in a sermon, our John, for playing for the YMCA against the Saints in another cup year). All this, and much more, I remember as I begin to write today - and I hope that in succeeding days to say more of this admirable man who gave all seven of us the chances which he had had, but had turned down - out of that impetuosity of which I have written.
What does Wren’s epitaph say? “Si Monumentum requiris, Circumspice - If you want a monument to me, look around” - at
In 1900 his father was forty-five years old and his mother forty-three. So there he was the only surviving child of ageing parents. I leave to amateur Freudians to reflect on the benefits and problems of being an only child and of older parents. Certainly, he always allowed, he had been spoilt and guarded by loving parents. He used to laugh at how his mother would bribe him with a penny to “eat up his egg” for breakfast. He should have been so lucky in Dowlais in 1900 to have had an egg for breakfast. The majority of his Catholic peers were in families where, as we shall see, the average male wage was less than £1 a week: the diet in these families rarely ran to eggs. So, too he and Mum, used to recall Dad’s amazement when he first visited her large family in 1922 in
His baptismal certificate shows that he was christened Patrick Aloysius.
Patrick is readily explained: it was his Dad’s name and that of his godfather, Patrick Scannell, his mother’s brother. But Aloysius? What led his parents to give him this exotic, Italianate, name? Incidentally it was the name I was to choose for myself when I became a De La Salle Brother in the 1940s - my belated tribute to my father. The decision couldn’t have been connected with the Feast of St Aloysius Gonzaga, ‘patron of youth’, for this is celebrated on 21 June each year. Nor did he, and his parents, ever use the full name. For, from birth and throughout life, my Dad was ‘Louis’ - and not ‘Patrick’ because there were already enough Patricks in the immediate family and in the wider extended family into which he was born. And maybe they couldn’t get their tongues around Aloysius - later I would find others (in
Clearly, he was something of an odd one out among the Catholic children with whom he played as a child, and with whom he went to school when he was five years old. Most of the others had brothers and sisters and, often, plenty of them: he was alone at home. Few of the others had the comforts he enjoyed, particularly when shortly after he was born, they went to live in the Wimborne Arms where there was a large ‘above the pub’ living area: large well-furnished living room, three (for heaven’s sake) bedrooms, a large kitchen - and, wonder to behold running water and a lavatory. And, well-dressed and well-fed, he was marked out by his odd name. For the majority of his Catholic school friends were Irish-named - Pats, Tims, Dennis, Josephs, or more prosaically named - John, James and the like. But Louis? A singular name for a singular boy - and man.
However, even though comfortably housed, if he went to play it was, as for all Dowlais children, in the street. For there was no park, no play ground - indeed, no grass and all too few trees to remind children of a natural world. But here, again, he was a lucky boy. For his parents, freed from work on the drink-free Sunday, were able to take him up into the Beacons when the weather was fine. And this was to be reflected in his adult life, for, after we got a car in the 1930s, we would all be crammed into the Baby Austin (later the Wolseley), and hiked off to the Beacons and its reservoirs. Only once do I remember him taking us to Dowlais on our way back to Aberavon: I recall stopping in High Street for him to talk to some people while we stayed in the car. He never took us up
It is at least possible, may be probable, that the people to whom he had spoken on that once-and-for-all stop in Dowlais High Street, were relatives of his. For he grew up as a well-loved young member of a large extended family. The large Scannell family had married into other families in the Catholic ‘tribe’ as well as into some Welsh families. For his godmother, Margaret Jones, was one of his mother’s sisters. Her marriage to a Jones gave the family a fairly loose link to the Welsh community. From that link came Charlie Jones who, as Brother Bernard of the De La Salle Brothers was to be my ‘Uncle’ figure in the 1940s. He was a larger than life twenty stone ex-Changi Prison sufferer from Japanese terror. And from that link too came Christopher Jones whose son, Frank, was one of my classmates in the 1930s.
It was from that Scannell extended family that my Dad must have ‘caught’ a sense of ‘family’ which he might have lacked otherwise. It was a world of which I had some glimpses from my own childhood and youth - and which reflects another debt I owe Dad. For I recall moving easily into homes of Roblins (one of Mum’s sisters) and Welshes (another of Mum’s sisters), O’Neils, Maddens, Twomeys ....almost ad infinitum. My Dad had that same easy movement in Dowlais. In this house or that, he would find, as I was to do in my turn a ready welcome, people to play with, older ones to listen to, churchy’ and ‘tribal’ gossip to be handed on - and all providing that unintended cementation of ‘family’, ‘tribal’, ‘apartness’ which strengthened those members of the ‘ghetto’ who shared the ‘togetherness’. It is a world which has long gone: too much geographic mobility which has taken members of families well away from one another: too much social mobility, which has allowed family members to live in better, but very separate, areas: too much fear, which leads to homes being locked up (where now could you simply .lift up the latch and walk in. as the song rightly noted?) In many ways it is a better world. Who would want to return to narrow streets, crowded housing, son-following-father into sweated jobs, and so on. But, with the gains have come the losses. We were vividly reminded of this at Damien’s wedding, although we must have realised it before: maybe its old age which helps make the reality clearer. For at that wedding, it was good to see Peter’s Sheila chatting to Christopher’s Catherine, and both of them chatting to Clare and Mary, and all their children playing one with the other. But such chatting would have been, at worst a weekly, and at best, a daily happening in the tribal society of the past. Now it was a rare - and enjoyable - experience, but one not to be repeated until the next funeral or wedding. And, in any event, Simon and Sarah and theirs were missing; so too were Paul, Patsy and theirs: both of these families were geographically isolated and could not share even in this rare happening. Cousins will grow without knowing cousins in a way that would have been unimaginable in the past. This, I assume, is one of the effects of those social, economic and cultural changes which I hope to reflect on in the rest of the story.
And those changes have been affected by, or maybe are the effects of, the sweeping political changes of this century.
It is a fact of history that a major stage in those political changes was the General Election which was held in September 1900, two months after Dad’s birthday. Because in that Election, Keir Hardie became MP for Merthyr Boroughs (which then included Dowlais as well as Aberdare), and so gave
There were, too, the small but active Irish electorate. Hardie, a perceptive politician, urged his workers - mainly Welsh and chapel-goers - to make a special effort “among the Irish who will vote for us because the Irish Party is bent on a war of extermination against the Liberals because of their treatment of Parnell and the Home Rule question.” Hardie brought the charismatic ex-Fenian Michael Davitt to speak to “the large Irish vote in Merthyr” which included my granddad now that he was a ratepayer and so entitled to the franchise for the first time.
Granddad and the rest of that ‘large Irish vote’ would never have voted Tory - because of that Party’s anti-Irish traditional policies. In 1900 that anti-Toryism was stronger because of the Boer War which, the Irish claimed, was “a war against another small nation.” In Merthyr and Dowlais, there was an outbreak, in 1900, of ‘Orangeism’ - attacks by pro-Tory, anti-Boer, pro-war, anti-Irish elements, mainly working class in number but largely middle-class in leadership. Such attacks - in press, pamphlets, speeches and election addresses, led to physical attacks on the Irish and confirmed them in their pro-Labour stance.
Hardie was nominated as a candidate on 22 September, but his return was far from certain. Many trade unionists, and particularly, the members of the Miners’ Federation, would have preferred the nomination of an old Lib-Lab union leader. Many workers, enjoying the temporary increase in employment at Cyfarthfa and at the Dowlais Works resulting from war-led demand for steel, supported the Tories and their war policy - as indeed, did the majority of Liberal candidates. Hardie was fortunate in that D.A. Thomas, major coal owner and one of Merthyr’s two sitting Liberal MPs, was against the Boer War. He helped Hardie’s campaign which, in effect, was a campaign against the other Liberal, Pritchard Morgan. That help was reflected in the result of the election for Merthyr’s 2 MPs; Thomas easily headed the poll. Hardie got 5,475 votes, of which 4,437 had also been cast for Thomas. Pritchard Morgan with only 4,004 votes was defeated, and so Hardie became the first Labour MP for Merthyr - and in
Granddad and the other Irish voters - about 1,000 now - had approved of Hardie’s platform which was for social reform but hardly ‘socialist’. It included the abolition of the House of Lords, women’s suffrage, old age pensions, a reduction of spending on arms, Home Rule all round with priority for the Irish cause. He also made a brief mention of the need to take basic industries into public ownership. Apart from that declaration, this platform could have been written by, and was supported by, left-wing radicals - as Lloyd George was to show when in government after 1906. In that year’s election, Hardie was to win again, largely because of D.A. Thomas’s support and his opposition to a second Liberal candidate, Henry Radcliffe, a wealthy
The Irish might well have voted for Hardie in any event: they never voted Tory and their traditional support for Liberalism had been erased by the Parnell issue. But for Granddad and the Irish members of the Catholic Social Guild who knew their Rerum Novarum, to vote for Hardie was to vote for the social platform outlined by Leo XIII. Thus was laid the basis for our family’s tradition of working for, sometimes being members of, the Labour Party. I will come later to my father’s activities: but here to note that I was not exaggerating when I told a group of undergraduate students that, for me and the Welsh-Irish, “to be Catholic was to be Labour, so that I never knew a Catholic Tory when I was growing up.”
That Welsh-Irish affiliation with the Labour Party was not one which was always welcomed by the clergy, although it would have been understandable to Manning with his socio-political involvement with Tillet and the London Irish. His successor at
It is not surprising that the pious among the Welsh-Irish were aware of the
However, they were opposed to
These divisions among the clergy and the mass of Catholic (i.e. Irish) voters were to be reflected in the debate over the 1902 Education Act. It is not part of this family story to go into the reasons for this wide-ranging and definitive Act, the product of the Civil Servant, Robert Morant, and as such a sign of the Service’s growing influence. He saw that the government could not go on dealing with some 2,500 School Boards and all the separate
To achieve this major improvement in the Catholic lot, Vaughan relied on the support of Redmond’s Party in the Commons, although the chairman of the Voluntary Schools group claimed that he did not want his help ‘from traitors to the Queen’. But he faced the strong opposition of the minority Liberal Party and the infant Labour Party with its demand for education free from religious teaching. Throughout the country, including Merthyr and Dowlais, the Nonconformists waged a campaign against ‘
In this later struggle, as in the debates surrounding the 1902 Act, Vaughan and, later, his successor Bourne, welcomed the support given them by the Tories who were responsible for the 1902 Act and who opposed Liberal educational policy after 1906. This may help explain their seeming inability to appreciate the viewpoint of those Catholics who, following the lines of Rerum Novarum, had developed the concept of social justice and who saw in the developing Labour Party a vehicle through which this might be best achieved. Certainly there was a danger that that Party might move too far to the left - as members of the Social Democratic Federation wanted it to do. Certainly there was also the danger of that Party’s adapting a negative stance towards Catholic demands for ‘
At Merthyr, Hardie had hoped that he and the Liberal Radical, D.A. Thomas would run in tandem in the 1906 General Election. But the local Liberal Association, put up a second Liberal, Henry Radcliffe. He had a deal of support from fellow-Methodists and from Liberals angry at Hardie’s attacks on their Party. The result was that Hardie had to fight for his political life - which made life interesting for his supporters, including my Granddad. Once again, Davitt, making his last electoral appearance, (for he was to die later in 1906) worked on the large Irish vote. And this helped ensure that Hardie, while getting some 4,000 fewer votes than Thomas, defeated Radcliffe by 10,187 to 7,776. Hardie might want to claim that this showed that “Merthyr is a hotbed of Labour”: the result proved otherwise. It was still a Liberal stronghold, and Hardie’s success owed as much to Thomas’s support as to Hardie’s call for social reform.
So when Hardie went to the Commons in January 1906, he was head of 24 LRC MPs. In addition there were 13 Miners’ MPs (the Miners Unions not yet affiliating to the LRC), 4 MPs put forward by other non-affiliated unions and 7 other Lib-Lab MPs. I am drawn to reflect on the non-Party membership of the Miners because of the way in which, in the 1970s and 1980s Arthur Scargill used the Miners to try to control not only the TUC and the Labour Party but also the government itself. There is a certain wry satisfaction to be got from the comeuppance he suffered at the 1995 TUC where he rattled on in his semi-Marxist way in favour of some outrageous demand, but found a pathetically small volume of support from the now more realistic and Blair-minded delegates.
By 1910 all 53 MPs had joined the newly-named Labour Party, the organisations which had put forward the 24 non-LRC MPs having now affiliated. As Balfour noted, “We have here to do with something bigger than a Liberal victory,” large though the Liberal majority was. For those Labour MPs had been elected by people who otherwise would have probably voted Liberal. And was there room in British politics for two anti-Tory parties? If not, would the Liberals move further to the left and try to “steal the Labour Party’s clothes”? Or had the Liberals entered merely on an Indian summer of success? Was the election the start of great things for the successful Liberals, or a swansong for an out of date Party? Now, of course, we know the answers to these questions, but in Dowlais, granddad could only hope. I am reminded of my father-in-law’s reaction to Labour’s smashing victory in 1945. I have been told that he cried, happy to “see this day”.” Maybe my granddad and his fellow-Irish Labour supporters felt like that in 1906.
Chapter 24. Reform, Rebellion - And A Family Death
“May you live in interesting times”, says the Chinese goodwill wish. In young Louis’ case, that wish was well fulfilled.
And many of the events and developments which made life interesting between 1908 and 1914, were of major significance in the social development of the working class in general and of the Irish element in particular.
In 1908, the Liberal government, supported by the infant Labour Party, pushed through the first Old Age Pensions Act. People of seventy or over were to receive 5 shillings [25p] a week, payable at the Post Office. Old fashioned Liberals allied with the Tories to denounce this “feckless spending of taxpayers’ money”: they argued that it would destroy “the sturdy independence of the people”, and teach them “to rely, not on their own exertions, but on the State...”. Where have I heard this ‘dependency’ argument recently? Tory Party? Labour Party? Liberal Party? All three? Thus do we return in the 1990s to Edwardian concepts.
For the old, the liberality of the Pension seemed immense. Flora Thompson in Lark Rise from Candleford tells of one pensioner thanking ‘‘Lord George for the gift’: she could not but believe that it had come, noblesse oblige, from a generous aristocrat - and not a small Welsh solicitor’. Five shillings seems measly to modern eyes, but it was one-quarter of the weekly wage of those millions who had to try to exist on Round About a Pound A Week (a best-selling study done in 1902), and almost a third of the wage of 17 shillings which was the average earned in York where Rowntree had produced his famous Poverty: A Study in Town Life (1901).
During the nineteenth century, well-paid skilled workers and others on regular incomes (civil servants, clerks and the like) had learned to use the ever-increasing number of Insurance and Friendly Societies to insure themselves and their families against what someone called “the ordinary contingencies of life: sickness, death, unemployment, old age, widowhood...”. Politicians such as Joe Chamberlain, social investigators such as Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree, Labour Party leaders such as Hardie, were well aware of that fact that most people could not afford to take out the insurance that was called for. Here’s what Lloyd George said:
“Why is it that only a portion of the working classes have insured against sickness and unemployment? Because very few can afford to pay the premiums of about 2 shillings a week. The mass of working people cannot spare that without depriving their children of the very necessities of life. So the vast majority insure against death only - paying a penny or two a week to cover the cost of a funeral (and so avoid the stigma of having a pauper’s funeral). Those who can afford it, have policies against death and sickness: those few who can manage it, have policies against death, sickness and unemployment.
We need a system of National Insurance, involving the State, the employer and the worker, to get the worker insured for sickness and unemployment”.
I don’t apologise for that chunk from Lloyd George. Because I was reminded of it when I read an article (
“Either we ask everyone to insure themselves privately against sickness, unemployment, old age, education costs, death ... OR
we have the State to take the responsibility. In the first case the better-off will do well, but the less well-off will do badly [as they did in Lloyd George’ time]. In the second case, the better-off will pay taxes but we will all enjoy the social benefits”.
Little has changed in thinking between 1911, when Lloyd George spoke, and 1995, with even the Labour Party looking at ways of cutting taxes and lessening the ‘burden’ of social welfare.
The National Insurance Act, 1911, was a major breakthrough as regards help for the sick and unemployed. It was far from an all-embracing Act: we had to wait for later development, and, in particular, the Labour reforms of 1945-50 before we had a real attack on what Beveridge called “The Five Giants - Sickness, Idleness, Want, Squalor and Ignorance”. But 1911 set things in train. And, for the Irish working class, the arguments over that Act were of more than passing interest.
Emotionally they were more stirred by the 1911 Parliament Act. This truncated, indeed almost abolished, the power of the House of Lords to prevent legislation going through. In 1909 the Lords had thrown out the tax-raising Budget of 1908 which proposed to levy super taxes on the very wealthy, and duties on spirits. In 1954 I was doing some research on the history of
Tax - and the world did not come tumbling down.
Given the rejection of the budget, the government had to call an Election in January 1910 to get approval for its proposals. The result was, for the Irish, a vastly interesting one:
Liberals, 275: Tories, 273: Irish Nationalists 82: Labour 40.
Here was what Paddy Ashdown now dreams about: a hung Parliament. For the Irish, it was a Parliament, which they controlled. If the Liberals wanted to get their budget through, they had to get Irish support. And
The politically involved then took a keen interest in the goings on in the Lords when that Bill came before them. Were they to vote for it? And, so for the limiting of their traditional role as ‘the Upper [
The politically concerned were either amazed or horrified or amused by the anti-democratic behaviour of the Lords. And by Bonar Law, leader of the Tories in the Commons, who said, in effect, “It doesn’t matter which Party sits on those [government] benches. We will always govern [through the power of the mainly Tory Lords]”. So much for Tory Democracy.
But even more were the Irish interested in the success of the 1912 Home Rule Bill: rejected in the Lords in 1912 and 1913. This had to become law once it got through the Commons in May 1914. As Martin Luther King might have said if he’d been there: “Free at Last, Free at Last, God Almighty, Free at Last”. But, as we shall see, it wasn’t as simple as that - whether for
However, of even more and immediate interest, to the Irish in Dowlais was the growth of militancy among trade unionists of all descriptions along with the formation of nation-wide Federations or Amalgamations which created very large and now, very militant unions. Miners’ resistance to attempts by owners to cut pay led to strikes: transport works - on railways, road and docks - also struck: clashes between police (trying to get blacklegs to work) and strikers became commonplace. The Home Secretary was Winston Churchill. Until 1904 he had been a Tory MP. But, foreseeing the Tory debacle of 1906, he switched his loyalty in 1905 and stood as a successful Liberal in 1906. In 1922, when he saw that Lloyd George’s star was on the wane, he left the sinking Coalition ship and re-discovered his Tory loyalties. As Leo Amery is alleged to have said, “I never knew that a rat could re-rat”.
Faced with violent strikers, Churchill sent out 50,000 armed troops to back the civil powers, to guard property, and to try to dissuade strikers. Some of the troops were sent to
So, interesting times indeed, with Liberals showing a ‘revolutionary’ social conscience, the Irish getting their Home Rule Bill through, the Lords threatening the Constitution and workers showing that this was, indeed, ‘the Century of the Common Man’. And, to top it all, here were the militant suffragettes throwing themselves under the hooves of the King’s
And then, to cap it all in terms of interest came the outbreak of war in August 1914. Almost impossible now to understand the wild enthusiasm with which the news was greeted - everywhere: Paris and French cities and towns:
“We don’t want to lose you.
But we think you ought to go,
For Your King and your country,
Both need you so...”:
and poetry
“God be thanked who has matched us with this hour...”.
Too few, even in Dowlais, heeded Hardie’s anti-war campaign. Indeed, he was vilified and died in September 1915 aged 59, broken by his failure to persuade British workers not to go and fight against German workers. The majority welcomed the temporary re-opening of the Crawshay and Dowlais works, and the increased employment offered by armaments’ campaigns. Even the Irish preferred to listen to Redmond, ‘the best recruiting sergeant the British had’, who hoped that support for the war would ensure the success of his campaign for Home Rule. Because the Bill had been put on ice once war was declared – ‘for the duration of the struggle’. Once the cry had been “
To fourteen year-old Louis the bands, processions, songs and the rest might have come as welcome relief from the boredom of grammar school, and as adding colour to the drab surroundings of run-down Dowlais. But then in December 1914, his world was turned upside down. For his mother, my grandmother died on December 4th. She was only fifty-seven years of age, although, so high was the death rate, that she had lived a longer-than-average life. I have her death certificate before me as I write. She died, its says, at the Wimborne Arms, of cerebal apoplexy and cardiac exhaustion. Most poignant of all, it says that the ‘signature, description and residence of the informant’ was
My Gran’s death clearly marks a major stage in the family story. For my father it was this - but in spades. For this was the one who had most spoilt him, given him a love for good things - food, clothes, furniture and behaviour, ensured that he grew in a Catholic and Irish home, and provided him with that Scannell nexus which was his extended family. He would have understood John Donne’s claim that “any man’s death diminishes me...”: Later he would appreciate Dylan Thomas’s anger at his father’s death:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
For myself I hope that, in keeping with our belief in The Communion of
Saints, he would have also sympathised with Thomas’s lines:
“And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears I pray”.
I have missed him for thirty or so years. I hope I can begin to see how he must have missed her. Fourteen years of age, my God.
Chapter 25. Louis Lane
First a little culture for us all.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school.
And so on through the Seven Ages. You can read it for yourself in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act 2, Scene vii). I’m not sure whether I’m in ‘the sixth age...the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side...’ but some of it sounds familiar. And heigh ho, there is still to come that seventh age, ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’ Amen.
But for now, to get Louis off to school in 1905. All of us like to think that we know what ‘school’ means, and maybe we do know something of what goes on in to-day’s schools. I say ‘maybe’, because even after a lifetime in teaching, examining and text-book writing, I am now somewhat mystified by the jargon that pervades modern schooling: Key Stages, Attainment Targets: skills of one sort and another.
However, even if we think we know what’s going on in to-day’s schools, and even if we remember what went on in our own schooldays, it would be very wrong to transfer our ideas back to the schools to which my Dad went. Things were different in 1905 - and different to the nth degree and in every respect. But it was from such a different background that this family has emerged, so it is worth looking at Dad’s school. In 1874, with the number of Catholic children continually increasing, funds were found for the building, and opening with great ceremony, of the
When I went to
Why this system? Was it a throwback to the ‘all-in Room’ from which concept we could not escape? Was it to allow some sort of ‘spying’ to take place - so that help could be rushed to a teacher under pressure? And there was pressure. I well recall being terrified at the age of nine when a hulking Harrington aged 13 or so, actually physically fought with my teacher, Micky Callaghan. Maybe there was a need for ‘spying’. More practically, the partitions could be folded back, and were, to form one large all-through ‘room’ for meetings of e.g. the Gaelic League, for whist drives, bazaars, suppers and, as I remember, the Jubilee tea we had in 1935.
And whether Louis went ‘whining...unwillingly to school’ - or not, he and his forty or so classmates did not get the sorts of lessons, nor have the sorts of equipment and materials that my grandchildren have in their modern infant’s schools. For a start, the syllabus was a very restricted one. True, the old ‘payment-by-results’ had been abolished in 1891, and teachers’ salaries no longer depended on their pupils’ successes in the annual Inspection. But the teachers and most educational advisers could not simply shrug off thirty or so years of practice produced by that now defunct system. So, well into the 1930s, children continued to learn things by rote: school timetables continued to be dominated by the 3 Rs - reading, writing and ‘rithmetic - and, in our schools by a fourth R - religion. For the raison d’etre of our separate schools was the need to ensure the transmission of, and learning of, the Faith.
In Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh has an agnostic visitor to the ‘old Catholic’ family complain that Catholics brought religion into everything. There was the well-drilled notion of ‘right and wrong’ - or ‘goodness and sin’: there were everyday phrases which came naturally to people; “God help us,” “God will provide,”: “God willing we’ll do so-and so”. Most homes and all schools had their external reminders of the Faith: statues, crucifixes, holy pictures (did every home have The Angelus framed and hanging on a wall?), and special altars for the months of May (for Our Lady) and June (for the Eucharist and Sacred Heart). In school, the day began with prayer, and prayers were said before and after every break, and at the end of the day. The Religious Instruction (later ‘Education’) lesson was the first of the day - so stressing its importance. That lesson took several forms, but pervading all forms was the rote learning - of the Catechism, hymns, common prayers, and, as I well remember, for older pupils, the learning of the Beatitudes, the Corporal Works of Mercy and many Gospel extracts (the Samaritan was one I can still rattle off). It is ‘modern’ to scoff at such rote learning. But when I see, in my church now (1995) that few people can repeat The Angelus, or say the Hail, Holy Queen, I have my doubts about the wisdom of the scoffers.
While the children no longer had to suffer the annual inspection of their abilities at the 3 Rs, they still had to go through an inspection by a Diocesan Inspector - a senior priest - who came to ensure that they were getting their RE. For older children this might take the form of a written test: in 1935 I won my first ever prize (The Mass For Younger Children) for success in Canon Quigley’s test at
One of the pictures that Louis saw daily in his home was a lithograph of the new Pope, Pius X (now St. Pius X). And he would have seen this in almost every Catholic home to which he went as he played with others in the Scannell-Twomey-Madden nexus. I doubt whether any of my children have a picture of John Paul II in their homes: so have we changed. The point about Pius X (1903-14) was that he was the Pope who taught that Holy Communion should be taken regularly, even, if possible, daily. This was a major change for those who had been taught that they had to take Communion ‘at least one a year, and that at Easter or thereabouts.’ Nor did everyone learn the new lesson, so that a large minority - mainly, perhaps, men - tended not to go to Communion at Sunday Masses even in the 1930s.
Moreover, Pius taught that children, from the time when they came ‘to the use of reason’, should be encouraged to go to Communion. The ‘age of reason’ was laid down: children could go to Communion when they reached the age of seven. So was begun that now traditional ‘First Communion Day’ which we celebrate in our parishes throughout the world.
Linked with Communion was the sacrament of Penance, or Confession, now euphemised as Reconciliation. If we had reached the ‘age of reason’ when seven years old, we had also, it seems reached the age of ‘sin’ or of being capable of sin. So, unfortunately, we learned, wrongly, that before we could go to Communion we had to go to Confession. And so, in 1907, Louis, was drilled into going to Confession so that he could make his First Holy Communion.
To make sure that he made ‘a good Confession’ he had a special booklet which carried ‘an examination of conscience’. Had he broken any of the Ten Commandments? Or any of the Seven Commandments of the Church? Had he failed to carry out deliberately the Corporal Works of Mercy? The mind boggles. And a close friend of mine tells of her preparation by nuns for her First Confession. Having decided that she hadn’t broken Commandments 1 (not having doubted God’s existence) or 2 ( not having worshipped idols) and so on through 3, 4 and 5; she then decided that, since she had sinned (else why was to made to go to Confession?), it must be that she had broken the 6th (“Thou shalt not commit adultery” - a noun she did not understand). I’d love to have met the priest.
To-day we have broken that link between going to Communion (which more people do more often than they did in 1907) and going to Confession (which fewer and fewer people do). Maybe there is something good in that break: I remember the Friday drill of leaving school to go to Church where we sat in fidgety rows waiting until it was our turn to go to Confession. I remember, later, Saturdays, when, having been bathed, I was sent off (“now that you are clean outside, to get clean inside,”) to Church for Confession. The pity of it was that no one tried to provide us with any development of our knowledge of, or awareness of, the Sacrament of Confession. The result is that, in the 1980s, adults would admit - in group discussion - that “I still go to Confession now like I did when I was a child,” rattling off a laundry list of ‘sins’ – mainly small, petty offences. No wonder that, while willing to help prepare children for Communion, many good people shied away from helping to prepare the same children for Confession.
When Louis went to school in 1905, he went to a truly ‘comprehensive’ school. Because almost all the Catholic children of Dowlais and the neighbourhood were there. Here were the children of the Catholic doctor (Brennan) who would sign Louis’ mother’s death certificate in December 1914: here, too, the children of the other successful Catholics - a work’s manager, large shopkeepers, import-merchants, builders, hauliers and foremen in works and on the Taff Vale Railway. Here, too, the children of the many publicans, skilled workers, unskilled workers - and of that mass simply described as ‘the poor’.
In this social mix Louis, unconsciously learned, as we all do, to slot in. The only child of relatively prosperous parents, he imbibed by a process of osmosis, that he was more at ease with this one and that then with ‘tother and his friend. And, as a child, I saw him, in the 1930s and 1940s, keep respectful distance from some families, be on first name terms with others, on drop-in terms with more and very distant from many.
And, spoilt though he may have been at home, he did his rote learning, learned to write on his slate, later, he was taught to write on lined paper with blue lines showing where small letters went and red lines where capital want. Above all, he developed a love for reading which was to last him for life - and is one of the better gifts he left us.
Come 1907 and Louis was due to move from the Infants to ‘the
Why did they send him away to school? We cannot know but we can hazard several guesses. Maybe, like all of us, they simply wanted ‘better’ for the child and hoped that he would get that in the small, more select, nun-run, boarding school. Maybe they had seen that he was drawn to some of the ‘rougher’ elements in the school: he was to have that tendency always so that, while ‘at ease’ with priests, nuns and many ‘decent’ people, he was always associated with bookies, black marketeers, ‘dicey’ characters and many whom Mum would never have welcomed to her home in the 1930s and 1940s.
You can make up your own ‘story’ of the going-away: Tom Brown's Schooldays has a good model: in our own family, we remember Damien going for merely a week to a choir seminar at Westminster Cathedral - and crying over the ‘phone: we remember Simon’s first days at Swansea University and the cry after three days “nobody has written to me”: and I remember leaving home to go to Singapore in 1947 and crying all the way from Port Talbot to Cardiff - and I was twenty-two, for God’s sake. So, make up your own story of the spoilt seven-year old Louis getting sent off to Bullingham.
He never took us there, although the
In 1907, while he was at Bullingham for the first time, the Liberal government rushed through a small, but very significant Education Act which was to affect his future. The Act said that every secondary (really Grammar) school which was rate-aided, had to keep one-quarter of its places as free places available for children who had attended elementary schools - such as the
In 1911, Louis and a friend, Jimmy Walsh, also at Bullingham, went to the Castle to sit the selection test. Louis would later tell of their being late for the first part of the test (probably Mental Arithmetic as I recall) because they’d sloped off to take a boat from the side of the Cyfarthfa lake and go for a row. True? Maybe: but it’s a good story anyhow.
Both Louis and Dowlais-born Jimmy Walsh (later Editor of the Catholic Times) passed the exam and were given free places at the Grammar School to which they went in September 1912. It must have seemed strange for two of the Irish community to walk into the
After R.T.’s death, his son, William (‘the Fourth’) lived there while he tried to re-start the Works which had been closed since 1875. By then, the iron age was over and, if Crawshay was to succeed, it would have to become a steelworks. Large sums were spent on this too-late adaptation in 1890 the family floated a limited liability Company called Crawshay Bros. (Cyfarthfa) Limited. However, it could not compete with larger, modern steelworks elsewhere. In 1902, Guest Keen and Co (which had already bought and closed the Dowlais works) bought Crawshays. However, with more modern GK works in
Many of the people who had worked at Crawshays in the 1880s and 1890s moved to new Guest Keen works in
Ed.
I assume is was Louis who told the story that he went with his friend Jimmy Walsh to take the entrance exam in
The copy of Louis’ Cyfarthfa school attendance record which shows he attended only part of one term and from that record there are more questions still.
That record shows that he was not granted exemption from fees (so did he fail the entrance exam and Patrick and Anastasia fund his attendance?) and at which school was he attending between 1911 (when he left Bullingham,
posted by therealtonylane at 1:41 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home