The Home Front

I've probably mentioned this before in passing but it's another incident that deserves a post of its own.  Let's remember the historical context here, just a couple of days after the Somme offensive of 1916 had ended, leaving over one million soldiers dead or wounded.

Meanwhile on the glensides of Radnorshire:

Clearly these bold Radnorians with their dynamite and gaffs were a disgrace to the Empire or Team GB as it is now known.

The River Whey?  Well I guess Hansard's stenographer was bamboozled by the gallant Captain's Old Etonian accent - later ennobled as Viscount Bledisloe he would present a cup still pursued energetically by former colonial egg-chasers.

Nothing in the Papers

It was a summer evening in 1895 when a Cockney tramp, one Charles Rogers, stepped out of a Rhayader hostelry wondering where he would spend the night.  The town's police officers - James Niblett and Thomas Lloyd had recently joined the Radnorshire force from the Shropshire Constabulary, while Arthur Thomas had only been a policeman for a few weeks - were sure that Rogers should not be allowed to disturb the peace of the town.

Two uniformed figures were seen following Rogers as he wandered off in the direction of Builth and a few minutes later shouts and the sound of a beating could be heard.  The next morning Hugh Mason, a postman, discovered the tramp, lying in a pool of blood by the roadside.  Rogers was carried to the nearby workhouse where his condition was described as critical, his back covered in welts, much bruising and suspicions of severe internal injuries.

All very depressing but ........  a few days later the three officers were up before the magistrates.  Lloyd had witnesses who put him in Cwm Elan at the time of the attack but Niblett and Thomas were bailed to the next assizes in Presteigne.  Half a dozen townsfolk had no hesitation in standing up to give evidence against the pair, the jury returned guilty verdicts and Niblett and Thomas received nine months hard labour for the beating administered to the, by then, recovered tramp.

You won't find any mention of this event in Inspector Maddox's History of the Radnorshire Constabulary but then the popular inspector also failed to cover the forced resignation* of the Chief Constable Elystan Lloyd a couple of years later, surely the most momentous event in the history of the county force. Organisations like to keep their dirty washing firmly out of sight, even if, in the Inspector's case, it was some 60 years or more after the event!  How pleased such institutions and their servants must be with the Leveson proposals and how puzzled the commoners of the 1890s would have been with the pathetic clamour to muzzle the press.

* The Home Office refused to hand over the county's £800 policing grant  until the Chief Constable was replaced.

An Anti-Irish Riot in Radnorshire

We're aware of the sometimes violent antagonism between Irish and Welsh workers in 19C  South Wales and even Pennsylvania; but in early May 1863, during the construction of the Mid-Wales railway line, Radnorshire, too, had its very own anti-Irish riot.

The trouble seems to have started at Marteg Bridge with rumours of workers being laid off in favour of the Irish.  A demand was put to the contractors, Watson & Co, insisting that all Irishmen be gone within 24 hours.   This led to fighting between the two groups and the out-numbered Hibernians were soon fleeing in all directions.  Some reached safety in Llanidloes while others were caught and savagely beaten in St Harmon, where one man lost an eye.

The workers marched, some 200 or 300 strong, down the track into Rhayader where they proceeded to drive the Irish from their lodgings. Soon a crowd - the press claimed it was a thousand strong - had assembled in the town.  A Scotsman, mistaken for an Irishman, received a beating, as did a native of Somerset who had refused to answer the mob's queries as to his nationality.  A handful of locals did try to protect the Irish from the depredations of the crowd.  A Mrs Lloyd, who reporters waggishly dubbed the heroine of Cwmteuddwr, set about the rioters with a poker as they sought to eject a lodger from her dwelling. 

The three days of rioting - the local police had decided that intervention was impossible -  culminated with the mob driving the Irish before them into Newbridge where the village was searched.  The rioters finally ending their pursuit at Pontarithon on the Builth road. 

A local clergyman said that the riot had began inside a beer barrel, although the Irish practise of working at below the usual rate for the job seems to have been at the root of the unpleasantness.

They came, they saw, they took photographs

Hippie Nostalgia from Llanbister, Pont-ar-Elan, Rhayader and Clyro Court.  See here

Forgotten Radnorian

This North Korean stamp commemorates the destruction of the General Sherman, a heavily armed American merchant ship, in 1866.  Among those executed after escaping from the burning vessel was a Protestant missionary, Robert Jermain Thomas, who had been engaged as an interpreter.

Mr Thomas, he was born in Rhayader in 1839, is still remembered by Korea's nine million Protestants and many come to Wales to visit sites associated with his life.  This blog has more information.

Daniel Carter - Who He?

I thought my copy of Meic Stephens' Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales was pretty well-thumbed but, somehow or other, one entry of Radnorshire interest managed to escape attention for the last 25 years.

Daniel Carter, it seems, was the author of a book-length descriptive poem published in Llanidloes in 1863 entitled Rhaiadr Gwy. Now this poem, the Radnorshire Museum have a copy, may well be worth reading for its "notes historical and topographical, antiquarian and archaeological." The Oxford Companion also mentions two other works - The Legend of Devil's Bridge and The Rose of Pont Vathew - although these have so far escaped the notice of the internet.

So who was this Daniel Carter, whose "life's work" was as Master of the Foundation Grammar School at Rhayader, an institution which seems to be as obscure as Carter's connection with the town? In 1840 when he wrote Rhaiadr Gwy he was living, by his own account, at Ffynnon Fair Cottage in the town. His full name was Daniel Pepper Carter, born in Lambeth around 1808 with no apparent connection to Wales. I can first spot him in the 1851 Census when he was living in Newtown and described as a teacher of languages. His wife Elizabeth, they had recently married, was from Hay, or more likely Betws Clyro. By 1861 the couple had moved to Ashby de la Zouch and Carter had promoted himself to be a professor of languages. In 1871 he is at Hereford, an author-miscellaneous and blind. Carter died a few weeks later on 30th June 1871.

Does someone know more about the elusive Mr Carter or his Foundation Grammar School at Rhayader?

Till the people will bear it no more.

A journalistic view of the Rhayader district from 1843

I wonder how accurate a description it was? Stuffing rags or turf in a window opening doesn't sound very likely. I know there was something similar in the Blue Books, turf walls, leaking roofs, dung heaps, but I do wonder if there is a degree of culture shock behind these viewpoints. Surely the Radnorshire housewife would have demanded as much comfort as possible in her hovel, a dry roof at least. While the dung/compost heap against the wall sounds like a good source of heat. I'm surprised that the councils haven't made it compulsory.

Hamlet the Dane

The Welsh Land Commission, set up by the government to enquire into the relationship between tenants and landlords, came to Rhayader to take evidence in May 1894. As well as hearing from tenants who had suffered injustices, such as being evicted without compensation for the improvements they had made to their holdings, the commissioners also took evidence from tenants who had nothing but praise for the landowning class. One such claimed that he doubted if many tenants would come forward to complain, "We take pride in believing that we are descended from Hamlet the Dane. We are not exactly Cymro in Radnorshire."

"Then how came you to have the name David Lloyd?" asked commissioner Rhys to laughter from the audience.

"A colony of Danes settled in Radnor from whom I say we are descended" replied the tenant, which was no doubt news to the eminent chair of Celtic at Jesus College, Oxford.

So why did Mr Lloyd claim kinship with the Danes? A hint of something had been reported in Archaeologia Cambrensis in 1881: "I have heard a legend in Radnorshire that the 'Denes' (Danes) ploughed the hills; and if you ask who the 'Denes' were, you will be told simply that the 'Denes' were red men."

So there may well have been some legend or other floating around. The real reason though must lie with the attitudes of the day. The Welsh, for "Radnorshire's most distinguished son" George Cornewall Lewis and his circle of Liberal Old Etonian chums, had been "a miserable race of Celtic savages." Meanwhile scientists obsessed about negrescence and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon to the Celts of Wales and Ireland. Little wonder that the occasional Radnorian might clutch at the straw, however farfetched, of belonging to a Teutonic tribe.

Shebeening

Shebeening isn't a word that you find very often in the popular press nowadays. Back in Victorian times it was common enough and not just in Ireland or the Scottish Gaeldom. Shebeening, the keeping of an unlicensed drinking establishment was also found in Radnorshire during the building of the Elan Valley dams.

Policemen disguised as navvies roamed the hillsides, calling at lonely farmsteads and asking for a glass of ale. Farmers or their wives who obliged and accepted payment were dragged off to court to be fined - £10 plus costs or a month in jail for example- more than £4000 in comparison with today's average earnings.

Did You Ever

Cardiff blogger Babylon Wales has come up with visual proof of Radnorshire songbird Maralene Powell's 1972 musical adventure with Gareth Edwards. I'm guessing Gareth has a better singing voice than current Welsh scrum-half Mike Phillips.

Old News

An ex-soldier must have had quite a shock when his 22 year old girlfriend Emelia turned up on his Rhayader doorstep in the summer of 1946. The enterprising young lady having somehow managed to smuggle herself into the country from her native Italy. Local magistrates took pity on the girl and she avoided a prison sentence, although they did recommend deportation, doubtless to the relief of the ex-soldier's wife.

Welsh in Nantmel Parish

The more one looks at the rapidity of language shift in Radnorshire, the more one is reminded of Ireland. Research there shows that it took around 50 years for Irish districts to move from a situation where 100% of children grew up as Irish speakers to one where the figure had fallen to zero, and perhaps a 100 years for the language to disappear altogether.

Something similar certainly seems to have happened in the large Radnorshire parish of Nantmel. Writing around 1818 Jonathan Willaims remarked that the inhabitants spoke both Welsh and English but that "the use of the aboriginal tongue is rapidly declining." Similarly a letter writer spoke, no doubt exaggeratedly, of a place between Llandrindod and Rhayader where there was no English at the start of a particular cleric's ministry but no Welsh by 1845. According to Ffransis Payne, Dolau Baptist chapel ceased it's Welsh services around 1840 and the denomination's historian John Jones writing in 1895 reported that the majority of chapel goers in Nantmel and Newbridge-on-Wye spoke Welsh in his youth but that now it was "not understood in these places except by a few aged people."

There is some census evidence for this rapid abandonment of the Nantmelians' native tongue. If we look at the languages spoken by folk born and still living in Nantmel parish at the time of the 1891 Census, we find 100% of those aged over 80 speaking both Welsh and English - the sample is very low however. For those in their 70s the figure declines to 21%, while for those in their 60s just 7% and less than 3% for those in their 50s. There is only one person under the age of 50 and born in the parish who can speak Welsh, Gertrude Price, the 16 year old daughter of the Breconshire born Baptist minister at Dolau chapel.

These figures suggest that the anecdotal evidence is correct, parents began speaking English to their children in the first decade or so of the nineteenth century and by the middle of the century the language had all but disappeared from the hearths of the parish. Something similar must surely have happened in parishes further east a little earlier and which subsequently remain untraceable in the 1891 census.

Why did this rapid shift happen? Let us turn to Ireland and the opinion of one John Moylan of Rathkeale who lived through the language shift in West Limerick. He cited a growing public feeling that Irish was a dying language, a mark of a degraded people who were not "decent."

A farmer, Stephen Evans, who died in 1914, might be considered the last Nantmel native to speak the traditional Radnorian Welsh learnt in Nantmel at his mother's knee, although, no doubt, one or two others who had moved away from the parish may have lived on later than this.

Jumbo in Bwgey Wonderland

It's 1848 and a bored elephant goes on the rampage in downtown Rhaeadr Gwy.

Radnorshire Surnames, Part One

Now and again I do some research on the development of surnames in Radnorshire: based on sixteenth century wills - when the traditional patronym system was still widespread; the 1670 Hearth Tax - when English style surnames exist side by side with patronyms and hidden patronyms*; and finally a sample of 3110 individuals who married in Radnorshire between 1813 and 1822 - when the modern surname system was more or less in place.

Looking at the 1813-1822 figures we find that the ten most popular surnames in the county are Jones (10.5%), Davies (7.2%), Price (6.6%), Evans (4.8%), Williams (4.7%), Lewis (3%), Griffiths (2.7%), Morgan(s) (2.5%), Powell (2.2%) and Lloyd (2%). Of course, all these names are derived from the old Welsh patronymic system and if we take the most obvious of these we find that that they account for 83% of the surnames in Rhayader Hundred, 80% in both Colwyn and Painscastle, 75% in Cefnllys Hundred, 70% in Knighton and 62% in Radnor.

The figures highlight some interesting differences between the six Radnorshire Hundreds. These Hundreds, which continued to exist as District Councils until Heath's disastrous local government re-organisation of 1973, were based on the traditional cantrefs and commotes of independent Wales - an organic structure rather than one imposed by dim-witted bureaucrats. The name Watkins, for example is the 4th most common in Painscastle and is also common in Colwyn and Radnor, elsewhere it is found only infrequently. The name Edwards is an exact opposite, common in Rhayader, Knighton and Cefnllys but hardly found in the old Elfael (Colwyn and Painscastle). The name Powell is infrequent in the old Maelienydd (Cefnllys and Knighton) while Prosser is common in Painscastle but absent elsewhere. A final example, Williams is found everywhere, although infrequently in Cefnllys, but in Painscastle Hundred it is far and away the most popular surname of all.

I wonder if these naming traditions reflect an ancient cultural difference between the more South East Wales orientated hundreds of Colwyn, Painscastle and Radnor and the north of the county.

*By hidden patronyms I mean how what appears at first glance to be a settled surname actually changes in each generation, so John Davies might have a son called David Jones etc.

Rhayader Man Wins Sweepstake

Another Radnorian actress was Mary Jones (1915-1990), details of her career can be found here. Mary was born in Rhayader, the daughter of Captain Alban Jones of Dolgerddon Hall and his wife, local chemist's daughter Anne Elizabeth Roberts.

Alban Jones hit headlines around the world in 1921 when he won £69000 on the Calcutta Derby Sweepstake - perhaps £3 million in today's devalued currency. The Captain disapproved of gambling and claimed that he had been pressurised into the purchase by colleagues. He promptly lost the ticket, finding it later clipped to some office papers. Among other achievements, including being High Sheriff of the county in 1927, Alban Jones was the author of that 1906 page turner, Courses (true and Magnetic) Distances and Maritime Positions Round the British Isles, Norwegian Fiords, Baltic, the Continent Mediterranean, and Black Sea

Fine Radnorshire Names

I've already posted about the young gypsy harpist Fred Melenydd Roberts, and of course that name Melenydd derives from the old cantref of Maelienydd that covered what is now Northern Radnorshire.

Anyway young Fred is not the only infant to have been landed with a forename based on the geography of the county. There are a few individuals who've been christened Radnor, one example would be Radnor Morgan born in Hendon in 1913. I wonder if Ithon Jones born in Corwen in 1901 had any Radnorshire connections or did his parents just like rivers? While the opening of the Claerwen reservoir made that particular river name a fairly popular girl's monicker with Claerwen Gibson-Watt, born in 1952, giving a lead.

The best Radnorshire name of all turns up in County Durham in 1982, boy or girl I don't know, but Rhayader Blues is certainly a name that stands out from the crowd.

NOTE: this post was commisioned on behalf of regular reader Mr Maldwyn Beaks, who was getting fed up checking the blog and finding nothing new. Get well soon Maldwyn.

Edward Rice

The bare outline of Edward Rice's life can be sketched from the public records. He was born in Llanwrthwl around 1808 and by the late 1830's he was farming at Dolyfallen in that parish. Rice must have been successful, in 1840 he married Ann Lloyd of Nantmel parish and in the 1841 census they had four servants living in at Dolyfallen.

By the time of the 1851 census Edward and Ann had two sons, Edward and John Lloyd and the family were farming 150 acres at Dolelfa in St Harmon parish. Later that year Ann Rice died and Edward eventually remarried. He died in 1882, aged 74, his two sons continuing to farm Dolelfa into the twentieth century.

Why should Radnorians remember Edward Rice? Well, according to a letter written to Boulogne in France and addressed to local squire Thomas Lewis Lloyd of Nantgwyllt, Edward Rice was the leader of the Rebecca movement in the Rhayader area during the anti-toll gate uprising of the 1840s.

Radnorshire and the 2001 Census

In one of those all too frequent displays of Metropolitan arrogance, the Office of National Statistics went out of its way to make sure that there was no tick box on the 2001 census to indicate Welsh identity. In the event, if Welsh people wanted to identify themselves as such, they had to write-in using the Other box, usually reserved for Azerbaijanis, Zambians and the like.

Of course most people were unaware that they could ignore the British tick box provided and use the write-in section, but the figures for those who did, give an interesting insight into comparative Welsh national feeling in the various Radnorshire communities. Here are the figures:

Abbeycwmhir 6.9%, Aberedw 12.8%, Bugeildy 3.3%, Clyro 7.1%, Diserth 9.6%, Gladestry 9.1%, Glasbury 7.9%, Glascwm 16.3%, Knighton 4.2%, Llanbadarn Fawr 13.5%, Llanbadarn Fynydd 3.8%, Llanbister 10.9%, Llanddewi Ystradenni 7%, Llandrindod 10%, Llanelwedd 10.8%, Llanfihangel Rhydieithon 8.6%, Llangynllo 4%, Llanyre 13.5%, Nantmel 13.7%, New Radnor 4.9%, Old Radnor 3.6%, Painscastle 8.3%, Penybont 10.7%, Presteigne 2.6%, Rhayader 14.7%, St Harmon 9.1%, Whitton 4.2%.

Given that only 19% took the trouble to self identify in a community as "Welsh" as Machynlleth, I think that these Radnorshire figures are quite encouraging for those of us of a patriotic outlook. After all we Radnorians have been in the frontline of the struggle against anglicisation for much more than a thousand years. So well done to Glascwm for topping the league.

A Few More Thoughts on the Welsh Language in Radnorshire

If the decline of the Welsh language in Radnorshire has been addressed at all, it has been done so from the viewpoint of geographers. A typical example is the article The Geography of Cultural Transition: The Welsh Borderland 1750-1830 which appeared in the Winter 1979 edition of the National Library of Wales Journal. The article summarises the geographers viewpoint as follows "the upland mass of the county is located between major avenues of anglicisation, the Severn and the Wye Valleys, and so it was cut off from the major Welsh speaking areas to the west."

Ffransis Payne dismissed this viewpoint as "lol i gyd, cynnyrch breuddwydion uwchben y map." ("a load of nonsense, the result of daydreaming over a map.") The truth of Mr Payne's words are well illustrated by one of the maps accompanying the NLWJ article which shows that Welsh language church services persisted in Wye valley parishes such as Boughrood, LlandeiloGraban and Llansteffan long after the language had been dismissed from parishes in the north of the county. The truth is, that far from being an avenue of anglicisation, the Wye valley was something of a stronghold of Welsh, something that the author of the article might have spotted if he had bothered to look at his own maps.

In reality anglicisation spread from the border towns of Presteigne and Knighton, making early inroads - for reasons we will investigate later - into the parishes of the Ithon valley.

The census of 1891 and 1901 shows Welsh persisting at that date to an extent in Cwmteuddwr, Rhayader, St Harmon and parts of Nantmel. There is precious little evidence for it elsewhere in the county, even amongst those who would have been born early in the nineteenth century in parishes where you would have expected at least a few old folk to be recorded as using Welsh. In part this is because the census was asking about language use rather than language ability. I also believe that there was an element of prejudice in Radnorshire towards the language. As an example I know that my great grandmother from Carmarthenshire spoke Welsh occasionally with her husband born in Diserth in the 1850s. In the Diserth census she is listed as bilingual while my great grandfather is not. I spoke about this once with one of my great uncles born in the 1890s. He was most upset at the suggestion that either of his parents spoke Welsh, I might as well have accused them of being thieves.

In order to gain some insight into the position of the language in the first third of the nineteenth century, I have examined the 1891 census for 263 individuals listed as being born in Radnorshire before 1820 but living outside the county itself. Of course it is quite likely that some of these individuals left the county at an early age, while others might have picked up Welsh in the mines of South Wales. Infact hardly any of these Radnorshire migrants went to the Welsh speaking rural counties and surprisingly few to the more Welsh speaking industrial areas. The great majority went to parishes just across the border in Brecon and Montgomery, to rural English speaking Monmouthshire and the more anglicised towns of the South Wales coalfield such as Tredegar.

Of our 263 Radnorshire born individuals aged 70 or over at the time of the 1891 census 29% were bilingual and 4% spoke only Welsh - 67% were English monoglots. When we look at the birth places of these migrants we find that 60% born in Rhayader Hundred use Welsh - those that can't are mainly from Nantmel or have moved to anglicised areas; from Colwyn Hundred the figure of Welsh speakers is 34%, and from Painscastle Hundred 24%. When we look at the Hundreds of Knighton and Cefnllys the position is quite different with only 10% listed as Welsh speakers and most of those coming from Cefnllys parish itself. The figure for Radnor Hundred is 12% but the number of individuals involved, fourteen, is really too small to be of much use.

I believe that these figures provide a fairly accurate view of the position of Welsh in Radnorshire during the first third of the nineteenth century. Welsh is still widely spoken as a hearth language in Rhayader Hundred with English making rapid inroads into Nantmel. A fair amount of Welsh is still spoken in Colwyn parishes such as Diserth, but English is rapidly gaining the upper hand. there is still some Welsh spoken in parishes lower down the Wye such as Bochrwyd and Glasbury but, as a hearth language, Welsh has already disappeared from the north and the east of the county.

Are Radnorians really Gogs?

In 1897 the great Welsh scholar Sir John Rhys (1840-1915) produced this rough sketch of Welsh dialects in a letter he sent to Sir Edward Anwyl. Rhys believed that dialects could be differentiated by vowel sounds and was hoping to set up, what today would be called a working party, in order to map these vowel changes.

Unfortunately this proposal came to nothing, perhaps because Anwyl believed that there was no method available at the time to gauge the vowel sounds scientifically. Anwyl believed that collecting word lists would be more useful.

This word list approach was followed by Alan R Thomas when he produced his Linguistic Geography of Wales in 1973. Unfortunately, for some reason, that book ignored the Welsh still being spoken at the time in parishes to the east of Llanwrtyd, an unfortunate omission.

For me Rhys's approach seems far more sensible. After all using words originating in rhyming slang doesn't make me a Cockney. What is interesting about the map was that Rhys placed Radnorshire in the same dialect area as Welsh speakers in Meirionydd and South West Montgomeryshire. Rhys came from Ponterwyd and was well acquainted with Welsh speaking natives of the Rhayader area, so here his opinions have great validity. But did the folk of Aberedw speak a different dialect to the folk of Erwood? And while the similarities between the North Radnorshire accent and that of the Welsh speaking areas of Montgomeryshire is plain enough, would Welsh speakers in Clyro have sounded differently from their neighbours in Talgarth? I'm sure that these dialect differences have some bearing on the decline of Welsh in Radnorshire, but what?

These are interesting questions and more than a hundred years after Rhys made his proposal I'm not aware that it has been addressed by our academics. If anyone has any views or comments on this topic I'd be pleased to hear from you!