1839: 'The Way' of the Welsh Back Then

The Road to the Newpost Rising

‘Ambitious, powerful and surprising, The Way taps into the social and political chaos of today’s world by imagining a civil uprising which begins in a small industrial town.’ So goes the producers’ synopsis of the dystopian 3-part BBC drama, The Way: set in Port Talbot, directed by Michael Sheen and Adam Curtis.

In The Way there are several references to past episodes of working class rebellion in Wales, especially the 1984/85 Miners Strike, and its repression by Margaret Thatcher’s police and state apparatus. As Sheen is a native of Newport, he is no doubt knowledgeable of the events in South Wales two hundred years ago which culminated in the Newport Rising of November 1839. Having covered the Rising in a previous post (last week), it seems timely to present here the ‘prequel’, taken from another chapter of 1839: The Chartist Insurrection by David Black and Chris Ford (with a foreword by John McDonnell MP), originally published as a paperback by the late and lamented Unkant Publishing, London in 2012, has now been re-issued by BPC Publishing as an ebook.

To slightly misquote/detourne William Faulkner, Thepast is never dead. It’s not even past. In fact, it hasn’t even passed.

The Welsh Cockpit

The last medieval-style fortress to be built in Britain was completed in 1822, near Brynmawr, by Crawshay and Joseph Bailey, who along with a small number of other English families, controlled a great proportion of the mining and iron-working industries of south Wales. Completion was timely, because in 1822, Joseph Bailey started a near-civil war in the coalfield when he cut the wages of his colliers from two shillings and fourpence to one shilling and threepence per ton. With the help of the army and yeomanry the Baileys won the strike. Today, most of the fortress is still standing, with one its towers half demolished and the other one restored. The fortress and the ruins of the massive Bailey iron works at nearby Nantyglo stand as a monument to the class relations of South Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Nantglo Roundhouse.

During the course of the eighteen-thirties, iron production in the furnaces of south Wales doubled to almost half-a-million tons per year and coal mining expanded to meet the demands of the industry. By 1839 a quarter of a million people in the valleys of South Wales were dependent on these two industries. Between the censuses of 1801 and 1831, the populations of Monmouthshire and Glamorgan increased by 117 per cent and 77 per cent respectively, mainly through migration from neighbouring counties. One sixth of the population however, were Irish, who initially found themselves in conflict with the Welsh, because of their preparedness to work for lower wages.  Women were employed in the iron-works and mines, as were children as young as six, who were carried to work on their fathers’ backs. The death-rate was high; the infant mortality rate a disgrace to any civilisation. Apart from regular outbreaks of typhus, scarlet fever and cholera, the mines claimed a hundred lives a month in ‘accidents’.

The first generation of coal and iron magnates in the Principality had no sense of civic ‘paternalism’. The new company towns were simply rows of shacks and cottages adjoining the mines and works, and were devoid of adequate drainage or sanitation, education for children or medical services. The masters, as good Benthamites, saw no responsibility to their employees beyond paying them wages. As Englishmen, they saw no point in providing schools for people who spoke an archaic Celtic language; as Anglicans they did not want to encourage dissenting chapels in the community; and as entrepreneurs, they did not even want street markets or shops, because they would take business from their company stores, which operated the extortionate ‘truck system’. Because of transportation difficulties in the valleys, employers setting up their own shops took full advantage by charging up to 30 per cent above the market price – or even worse, by paying their workers in vouchers, to be exchanged for goods. The English iron-masters, who also owned the largest mines, lived away from their workers in fortified mansions. Beneath the owners were their agents, managers and contractors, who were mainly brought in from other areas and unlike their workers, tended to be English-speaking and Anglican. In the absence of a professional police force, it was this tiny, ‘foreign’ middle class who made up the special constabulary.

As industrialisation in south Wales took off in the first decades of the century, workers’ self-organisation took the forms of friendly societies which also acted as Union Clubs. In 1831, serious rioting broke out in Merthyr Tydfil, over a reduction of wages at Cyfarthfa ironworks. Twenty-one people were killed in the town when Scottish troops opened fire on a large crowd, and one of the leaders, Dic Penderyn, was executed for his part in the rioting. The Union was effectively crushed after a two month lockout. This led however to the growth of a secret organization known as the ‘Scotch Cattle’, whose night-time escapades were similar to those of a terrorist organisation. The word ‘scotch’ referred not to the nation, but the verb, which means to thwart or to stop. The aim of these societies was not to lead strikes, but to keep out strike-breakers and intimidate managers, and thus scotch the employers’ attempts to undermine conditions of work and reduce wages. The Scotch Cattle enforced a number of rules in the coal and iron industries, such as trade secrecy, solidarity with sacked workers and refusal to work with non-members. To frighten transgressors the “herd” would go about at night in disguise, sometimes in women’s clothes or wearing horns, and making cattle noises. Usually such theatrics and anonymous threatening letters would be sufficient intimidation, but violent action was taken against blacklegs, such as house-burning.

In the 1830s, a tiny proportion of the middle class and better-off workers in the larger towns, such as Newport, were organized into radical reform groups. These radicals had for a long time seen the old ‘Norman’ oligarchy which still effectively ran Wales as the class enemy holding up reform. Parliamentary elections in Monmouthshire were still dominated by the clans of the old feudal order –the Morgans, Somersets and Salisburys - who were more concerned with maintaining their own family influences against rival claimants, rather than with national affairs and public policy. Candidates spent fortunes bribing their electorates with feasts and free beer.

Some of the radicals served on Newport town council, and one of these, Thomas Frost, a prosperous middle class draper, became a magistrate in 1836 and was elected Mayor of Newport the same year. As a magistrate he did his utmost to obstruct the implementation of the New Poor Law. As mayor he became the scourge of the old regime of Thomas Protheroe, the chief agent for the Tredegar estates of the Morgan family, and his partner Thomas Phillips. In 1838 Frost failed to get re-elected as mayor and was replaced by Phillips, his arch-enemy.  By this time Frost had become one the leaders of the new Working Men’s Association in Monmouthshire. Like the London Working Men’s Association that inspired it, the W.M.A. got its own leaders elected as delegates to the Chartist National Convention in late-1838. The three Welsh delegates to the Convention were magistrate Frost (Monmouth), solicitor Hugh Williams (Carmarthen and Merthyr) and former cleric, Charles Jones (Montgomeryshire). With the onset of the People’s Charter campaign in autumn 1838, signatures for the petition were needed and the lecturers of the Working Men’s Association were sent into the valleys, where the preached the ideas of Thomas Paine and set up radical associations. In this they were helped by the young man the Convention had assigned to South Wales as a missionary, Londoner Henry Vincent.

On New Year’s Day 1838 Vincent addressed 7,000 near Pontylpool then went on to Bristol, where he announced to the W.M.A his intention to publish a paper in West Country. In order to avoid the status of a newspaper which would incur stamp duty, Vincent gave it the title, The Western Vindicator; or, memoirs and Correspondence of An Editor. With its feature entitled ‘The Life and Rambles of Henry Vincent’, beginning on 9 March, Vincent was able to effectively report on his activities and speeches on his missionary tours in the West and south Wales. John Frost  contributed a weekly letter right up until a week before the Newport Rising on 3 November 1839, in which he consistently called for an alliance of artisans, tradesmen and farmers to take on the corrupt industrialists and landed families. By August 1839, the Vindicator had sales of 3,400 at two-pence a copy, more than enough to break even. Taking into account that each copy was read by – or read to  - on average, twenty people, the Vindicator may well have reached about 60,000 people each week.

According to an anonymous correspondent in The Welshman, the Working Men’s Association in south Wales had originally consisted of “really intelligent men, overlookers and operatives in the Iron and Coal Works, etc, who thoroughly acquaint themselves with the principles of political economy, are well versed in the history of their country, including its government… they seek a change… but they seek it only by employing the moral powers of evidence, argument, union and perseverance… These we may venture to denominate the original and legitimate Chartists.”

But in the first half of 1839 these moderates were usurped by a new breed of Welsh physical-force supporters,

The Western Vindicator observed:

‘…there is something more in hand with the people at the present time than a mere question of a rise or fall in wages. They feel the degradation of being bound by laws, oppressive and tyrannical in their nature made by persons who know nothing of their condition and their wants. They have felt there is no security for their rights - no respect for their feelings - no hope of any amelioration from a Parliament elected by you — the middle classes. They have been robbed of the fruits of their labour, and their poverty and misery laughed at by worthless and wicked men. They have been slaves, and from all appearances they are determined to be so not much longer.’

There was also a growing understanding of the conflict between labour and capital. The Swansea Working Men’s Association declared: “the wealth procured is made the slave to the possessors of the wealth that he laboured to create; power is transferred from labour to capital, and the producer sinks  into a mere instrument to be used as needed, and thrown aside as soon as a more efficient one is presented.”

By February 1839 there were over twenty Chartist associations in Monthmouthshire alone, with a total of 15,000 to 20,000 signed-up supporters. By March, the Western Vindicator, could claim, ‘there is now more political feeling in this country than ever existed, perhaps, in any nation in the world. It would seem that every man has become a politician.’  

In March 1839, Newport magistrate and Mayor, John Phillips, wrote to the Home Secretary on Chartist agitators, who were telling audiences in the valleys, ‘if their demands are not conceded they will be justified in resorting to force and that they need fear bloodshed because the soldiers will not act.’ The magistrate added,

‘I cannot say to what extent these appeals may influence the conduct of the working classes in this neighbourhood — I am loath to believe that they will be hurried into actual insurrection but it is certain that sullen discontent marks their appearance that they look with aversion and dislike at their employers and that the moral influence which ought to belong to the government and without which the government itself cannot exist is altogether at an end amongst a very numerous class of the community.’

At the end of March, Zephaniah Williams, a former a coal-owner, embraced the movement and put himself forward as a leader. Williams, until bankrupted by a failed colliery in 1833, and had also served as a minerals agent for the Harford Bros. ironmasters at Sirhowy. Vincent, who met Williams at the end of April, described him as ‘one of the most intelligent men it has ever been my fortune to meet with.’  Williams had a similarly high opinion of Vincent. In the coming months, the Welshman’s loyalty to the young Londoner and semi-fanatical devotion to the cause would cost him dearly.