by Brian John
We passed stretches of canals busy with laden barges carrying pig iron, iron rails and coal to Cardiff and Barry, railway lines with never-ending queues of steam engines and trucks, and coal mines and spoil heaps in profusion. Parts of the valley were still green, but the pervading colour was black, black, black. We travelled through Pontypridd and approached Aberdare Junction, where Lady Charlotte told me of no less than sixteen locks on the Glamorganshire Canal within a distance of one mile. I was duly impressed, not just because of the engineering involved but also because of the thought that there must truly have been great fortunes at stake, for such works to have been contemplated, paid for and built in the first place. We stopped for a splendid lunch in the Swan at Aberdare Junction, which my hostess appeared to own, and spent rather too long there, indulging ourselves. I had to be very careful with the red wine, lest my tongue should be loosened. Then we skirted round the great canal basin where barges assembled and manoeuvred in their hundreds, and pressed on up the Taff Valley, on a road which became worse and worse as we headed north. Here the valley was very steep, but I was amazed to find that canal, railway and road ascended more or less in parallel. Then the cloud base descended and it started to rain, and I felt that an ominous gloom was settling onto the world and all its inhabitants. Lady Charlotte read my expression and picked up on my mood. “Come now, Mrs Ravenhill,” she chortled. “I see that all this blackness is making you miserable. I can assure you that up above, on the high ridges between these valleys, the white grass still blows in the wind and the heather still blooms, and there are still skylarks in the sky. You are looking, down here in the valley, at the colour of money, and it is a colour that attracts both the rich and the poor. It will be the colour of this place for maybe a century, and then it will be gone, and the greenery of grass and trees will return. I guarantee it.”
Then, as we reached the head of the valley at dusk, and the landscape opened out into a sort of undulating plateau, I was confronted by the most amazing sight. The sky was glowing in the far west as the setting sun illuminated the base of the lowering clouds, but this was as nothing compared with the red inferno that revealed itself to the north, maybe five miles away. It was as if the sky and the land had been joined together seamlessly, and that the whole of this vast canvas had been set alight. I could see no actual flames, but the glow was a fearsome one, and I was very afraid that some great disaster was afflicting the area. Again my colleague laughed. “I see that this is all new to you, Madam,”she said. “That crimson glow is also the colour of money. What you are looking at is the glow that comes from the blast furnace slag and the coke oven ash when tipping is in progress out on the mountain side. There is fire everywhere -- in the coke ovens, in the furnaces and forges, in the calcining kilns and boiler house, and in the refineries. There are five or six ironworks in the vicinity of Merthyr Tydfil, some owned by me and others by competitors including Crawshay, and they are here because ironstone, coal and limestone were all, years ago, to be had within a short compass. This is now the greatest concentration of smelting activities anywhere in the world, and it will make Wales great. In the day-time you do not see the glow; but at night, especially if one of the furnaces has recently been in blast, the sparks and the steam and the veritable inferno of the slag heaps are truly magnificent! More thrilling by far than the most vivid sunset! I met a lady once who had seen a great volcano in Italy erupting, and she said that the molten rivers around Dowlais were more spectacular than the rivers of lava that she had seen on the side of that burning mountain.”
As we drew nearer, with Lady Charlotte nodding off on the seat opposite, I was struck not just by the red glow which illuminated everything, but also by the smell of the noxious fumes that rolled down from the iron works into the valley, and the roar of the furnaces as they went into blast. If Dante’s Inferno should be set anywhere on God’s earth, I thought, it should be here. Then I smiled to myself as I realized that here, in this place of fire and brimstone, I was destined to do my penance. Chance, or the hand of destiny? It mattered not -- whatever came next, I would cope to the best of my ability.
Lady Charlotte installed me in a cottage which she owned on the edge of Dowlais, maybe half a mile from Dowlais House. There was even a housekeeper -- a young lady called Maggie who was not as sweet as she looked, having learnt how to survive on the streets of this burgeoning and vibrant town of 30,000 people, built on coal and iron. Free accommodation and food, and a personal servant to boot! I was so pleased with myself that I wrote a brief note to Daisy and Betsi saying I was now near Merthyr Tydfil, living very comfortably indeed. In retrospect, that letter was a mistake.
Over the weeks that followed I became a member of a little group of wealthy ladies whose pet project was the education of the women and girls who had come to this place in the company of their husbands and fathers or who had travelled alone, escaping from rural poverty in Ireland or rural Wales and attracted -- in their naivety and ignorance -- by the prospect of wealth and comfort. Most of the women provided cheap casual labour around the brickworks, mines, furnaces and slag heaps; those who were regularly in work were as tough as the men, working seven 12-hour days in every week, out in the open and in all weathers. They lived a life more suited to savages than to the fair sex, and in truth many of them dressed and looked like men. They earned (if they were lucky) maybe eight shillings a week if they were fit and determined, but with the realities of child bearing, their monthly bleeding times and then the change of life, their capacity for earning was very erratic . Then there were those who were unable to find work even on the iron-ore patches or in the breaking of limestone. There were hundreds of them, and we managed to teach a few of them to read and write, and to rescue even fewer of them from the streets.
Many young girls were sucked into prostitution or petty crime, or into degrading work in the ale-houses which were springing up everywhere and which were dens of vice, seldom if ever visited by the police. Before I saw for myself what was happening in Merthyr, I had assumed that girls as young as sixteen were somehow forced into prostitution by poverty or starvation, and that the whores were at the very bottom of the social scale. But I had to revise that view. The “nymphs” were better off, better dressed, and better fed than those who subsisted on piece work, for they could earn in a day what a respectable piece worker could earn in a month. They were protected by husbands, brothers or “bullies” who took a cut from their incomes for services provided. They were whores by choice, and in the places which they called home, they enjoyed considerable status. The good people of church and chapel did their best to provide safe places, medical help and education for those who wanted to escape, because they were brutalized or ill, but relatively few were attracted by the gospel, and there was a great gulf between those who were devout and seeking salvation for their souls, and those who jeered at the hymn singing and sermonizing of Bethesda, Ebeneser, Tabor and Horeb. My colleagues and I operated in this gulf, sometimes supported and appreciated, and often given abuse by those who stood on the banks on either side.
Lady Charlotte was right -- the deprivation on the back streets of Merthyr Tydfil was far, far worse than anything I had seen in Cardiff. I had not seen anything like it since my visit to Ireland at the height -- or should I say the depth? -- of the Irish Potato Famine, more than a decade before. In some districts there were not even proper streets. In the district officially named Ponty-storehouse, but known to everybody as “China”, between the Cyfartha Works and the iron bridge over the Taff, I found a veritable labyrynth of hovels clustered together more or less randomly, and separated by narrow alleyways. The hovels, called “the cellars”, were mostly in a stinking ditch between the roadway and the mighty piles of slag and cinders from the nearby coke ovens which were prominent features of this landscape of Hell. The places inhabited by human beings were made of rough stone blocks, stolen bricks, pieces of solid slag, broken wooden beams, sheets of tin and old bits of canvas. In many hovels there were no windows. Grubb
y faces peered out at me from the spaces which should have held doors. The stinking pig-sties at the Plas were better built, cleaner and drier. Here and there I glimpsed the interiors of these hovels, and saw broken-down beds and flimsy bits of furniture that passed for tables and chairs. Some hovels, hardly bigger than a ty bach, held extended families of maybe ten or twelve people, waking and sleeping in rotation. The local police sergeant told me that about 1,500 people lived here.
And thinking of excrement, it was everywhere, thick underfoot when the weather was dry, and running in slimy stinking streams when it was wet. In the more organized of the alleyways, it was scraped into piles which also contained food scraps and other domestic detritus. Every time I visited China it covered my boots and soaked the hems of my skirts, and I carried it back with me to my lodgings, much to the disgust of my housekeeper. There was no water to be had anywhere near the hovels, and no sanitation. The river was not far away, but that was filthy too. There were rats everywhere, scuttling about even in broad daylight. It followed that disease was rife, and almost every hovel housed at least one invalid, suffering from a lack of nutrition, or scurvy, or even cholera or typhus. Then there were the casualties of the iron industry -- men and women who had lost limbs or other parts of their bodies, people blinded by splashes of red hot metal or scalded by cinders, or simply scorched by proximity to white-hot flames. Some of the injuries which I saw were quite horrendous, and led to slow and miserable deaths. I tried to minister to those who had fresh injuries, and managed to obtain a modest supply of dressings and ointments through the good offices of Lady Charlotte; but I had no formal medical training, and in truth my efforts at healing met with very limited success. Looking back, I can only feel a limited satisfaction that my loving attention brought some succour to the sufferers and their families, and reminded them that they were not entirely forgotten by the world. I had to arrange for the removal of many bodies from these hovels, and for the visitations of pastors and doctors -- but they were too thin on the ground to cope with the real extent of human misery in China, and in any case they hated going there. But I had some successes, particularly in obtaining compensation of a few shillings a week from Lady Charlotte and the other ironmasters in the form of small pensions for injured workers.
Above the cellars of China, and elsewhere too, there were great cinder tips which gave off acrid fumes and occasionally burst into flames for reasons that I could not fathom. They were fed from the coke ovens and blast furnaces, and they covered more land than the iron works and housing areas combined. One or two of the older and cooler cinder tips held communities of troglodytes; homeless children had excavated tunnels and caves inside them, where they felt warm and safe. Safe from adult robbers and thugs, maybe. But God only knows how many of them were suffocated by fumes or crushed when their tunnels collapsed on top of them. Many of the boys belonged to a class known as “the Rodneys” and they survived on begging and petty thieving, sometimes on their own account and sometimes under the control of older and experienced criminals. They measured their status by the number of times they had been arrested and convicted; and they had no respect either for the police or the magistrates. I saw some of them in court, where they postured and bragged, swore at the magistrates and took pleasure in demonstrating that they were beyond control and beyond redemption. They actually seemed to enjoy their short spells in gaol, for there they were able to luxuriate in clean clothes, dry accommodation, and food in their bellies.
There was smoke in the air all of the time, and at intervals one of the Penydarren or Cyfartha blast furnaces would roar like a dragon and make the ground shake, as if there was some great earth tremor a mile down towards the centre of the earth. There were other sounds in the air which never stopped, day or night -- a rattling of heavy chains, and a ceaseless thudding and tapping of hammers, some driven by great machines with wheels, and others wielded by sweating craftsmen. These skilled men, employed in the puddling, shingling and rolling plants, worked without their shirts in temperatures and fumes from which normal human beings would long since have fled. When a furnace was tapped, molten iron flowed in incandescent streams, flashing and sparking and giving those of us who could look and wonder from a distance the most extraordinary displays of changing lights and colours.
I visited China often, seeking to encourage young girls to join our classes and to learn how to read and write, thereby greatly enhancing their chances of finding reliable work as shop assistants, housemaids or even as servants in the inns and guest houses of Merthyr and Dowlais. I tried to convince those of them who worked as nymphs that their relatively comfortable lifestyle could not be maintained, for they were breaking the law every day, and would inevitably be pulled in by the police, prosecuted and transported. I tried to convince them that they would not always be pretty enough to enjoy the protection of their bullies, or to attract customers wealthy enough to pay a shilling a session. Without seeking to judge them for their immorality, I told them that one of my best friends had been a prostitute, but was now, as a result of her own determination, the wife of a wealthy trader. Sometimes I succeeded in my exhortations, but more often I failed. I counted it as a minor miracle that on my visits I was never physically harmed or robbed. I came to believe that my angels were providing me with their familiar protection, for on many occasions I had to sidle my way through street brawls, dances and processions of drunken labourers, gangs of street urchins and gaggles of abusive beggars. Sometimes I was rescued from dangerous situations by tough old women who saw everything and imposed their own law and order on the community in which they lived -- and it was a community of a sort, for in the depths of the filth and the squalor I saw many acts of kindness, loyalty and self-sacrifice as people sought to overcome their deprivation and to lift themselves into a better life in which they might have food in their bellies and real coins (instead of ironworks tokens) in their pockets.
On one occasion something happened which I do not fully understand to this day. Around dusk, at the end of a difficult afternoon during which I had seen a mother and her newborn baby die, I was walking through China towards the arch which led to the Penydarren Road. This archway was always guarded by Rodneys, in case the police should appear. Most of the urchins knew me, and normally they gave me a cheery greeting and let me through. But on this evening they were accompanied by some older boys who had obviously been drinking, and they started to taunt me and to throw stones at me. I could not understand it, and I became very afraid. I was already exhausted because of the traumas of my afternoon in a miserable hovel, and I did not have the energy either to speed my steps towards safety or to berate the boys for their lack of respect. A stone hit me on the temple. I felt blood running down my cheek. I fear that I became giddy and fell to my knees on the dusty trackway, with the taunts and the jeers of the boys swirling around my head and rising to a climax inside and outside my head. Suddenly I was aware that the boys were transfixed, and silent; and as I looked around me I saw that they were holding their ears as if they were being deafened by some unbearable noise, and at the same time trying to cover their eyes from some intolerably bright light. I could hear nothing, and see nothing untoward. Then they all turned on their heels, and ran away. I climbed to my feet and looked around me, and saw a fair-haired child standing about twenty yards away, beside one of the great brick supports that held up the bridge. He was smiling. It was Merlin -- of that I have no doubt. But as I looked he faded away and then disappeared into thin air. “Merlin?” I asked. “Is that you?” But there was no reply, and no sign of life apart from a few rats on the river bank. I shook myself down and walked on, with my mind racing, and I reached my lodgings without any further incident. I asked Maggie to find some dressings for the cut on my temple. “Cut, Mrs Ravenhill?” said she, examining my skin and looking bemused. “What cut?”
The women of China became the focus of my attentions, but I got to know some of the men too. They were rough characters, but they accorded me a good deal of respect. I
n particular, I helped two fellows called Twm and Ianto, just released after serving a sentence for affray and drunk and disorderly behaviour. They had grizzled chins and cauliflower ears, and they were both built like bulldogs. They were both skilled puddlers, but they had been involved in union activities some years since, and had been blacklisted by all of the ironmasters. Now, unable to work at their trade, they were too old to be Rodneys and too inefficient to be bullies. They returned to China one day when I was there, to find their hovels and their families gone. I never did find out what happened to their nearest and dearest, but assumed that they had had to make way for a new heap of cinders. I saw the sparks of decency in both of these poor men, and found temporary shelter for them. Next day I found work for them too, in the extensive stables where Lady Guest kept her barge horses.
Strangely, although I was angered by what I experienced in this, the most horrid place on earth, I kept my good health and my enthusiasm for the work initiated by Lady Charlotte, and found after a while that I had obtained a reputation as a ministering angel among the members of her social circle. I met them often, in grand parties in Dowlais House (called “Ty Mawr” by the workers), where I suppose I stood out from the crowd because of my sombre and plain dresses and my lack of jewellery. Now and then I managed to reduce these exotic ladies to tears with my “tales of China.” They had never heard of the place, and one elderly lady actually fainted when I described the conditions there in graphic detail. The word “excrement” was not often used in the dining room of that particular mansion. I encouraged these refined and well-protected ladies, while they were in a state of shock, to use their female wiles to obtain from their husbands, the ironmasters and the big squires and the managers and agents, commitments to build more homes and to improve the lot of those on whose sweat and blood their empires were founded. I cannot be sure of it, but I think that my strategem met with some success.