Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  Over the road a woman was leaning against a wall shouting ‘Bollocks!’ over and over again, though she was clearly a social-minded sort, as she wasn’t doing it in the library. Then, after a tour of the bus station and a closed ironworks I stepped into the Wyndham Arms. It consists of two connected rooms, one of them slightly raised, and around the walls are posters for the countless bouts fought by Merthyr’s many champion boxers.

  I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Wow, it looks just like it did on the telly,’ as you might if you visited the Sphinx, except that a woman who looked eighty was in the middle of the room dancing to ‘Dancing Queen’ while a dozen others ignored her. Then ‘Freebird’ came on, and she was replaced by a man of around twenty-five in a denim jacket who howled, ‘I’m as free-ee as a bi-ird now, and this bird you cannot tame,’ then picked up one of his mate’s crutches and used it to mime the guitar solo, getting down on one knee and biting his lip and rolling his head while moving his fingers rapidly up and down the holes in the crutch. No one appeared even to notice he was doing this. The barman carried on arranging boxes of crisps, although his mate did occasionally yell, ‘Give me back my fucking crutch!’

  A few weeks before, the local Hoover factory had shut down. It had employed 5,000 people in 1973, before reducing its workforce to three hundred over the next thirty-five years, each reduction accompanied by an insistence that the town must reluctantly accept the redundancies now, otherwise there could be even more later. Now the factory is the last shut object you pass before arriving in Merthyr, a vast wilderness of scattered washing machines destined to go nowhere, like a high-security prison for electrical appliances.

  One consequence of crippling levels of unemployment is that a lot of people get drunk, but another is a fierce camaraderie amongst those who stay upright. So there’s a popular website called ‘Merthyr’s a Toilet But We Love It’, where you can read comments such as, ‘I’m excited. I’ve heard Merthyr’s getting a Nando’s.’

  And yet it was Merthyr that created modern Wales. From being a hamlet in 1750, it became bigger than Cardiff and Swansea put together, the fourth largest town in Britain. In fact, at the start of the nineteenth century it was growing quicker than anywhere else in the world, because of its iron industry, fed by coal deposits to the south. People moved here from across Britain, and in around 1810 2,000 Spaniards moved over from Bilbao.

  Merthyr’s four huge ironworks were among the earliest monuments of the Industrial Revolution, and the regular wages they promised sucked in a mass of humanity from rural areas across Europe. But the owners of the ironworks, known as the masters, weren’t so keen on providing the facilities that might make the place more like a town than an illegal rock festival, so they rejected the idea of installing luxuries such as toilets. According to one of the major landlords, Josiah Atkins, the reason the houses had no toilets was ‘I do not think the people want toilets.’

  One in five babies didn’t survive; there was a cholera epidemic, then typhoid. One book about the history of the town, Iron Metropolis, has a chapter titled ‘Disease, Debility and Death’, that graphically describes the details of disease, debility and death, and then says, ‘Before moving on, we should first mention some of the darker sides of life.’

  Merthyr’s squalor was something new: it wasn’t the common rural poverty of the past, but a new urban, industrial poverty that wouldn’t reach its peak until 170 years later, when cities such as São Paulo, Mumbai and Mexico City attracted millions who could no longer make a living on the land, and left many of the new arrivals to fester in slums, as if in touching homage to Merthyr.

  Two institutions thrived in this congestion and filth: the pub and the Church. One in six houses became a pub, and among the town’s characters were men such as Thomas Thomas, who was barred from the Farmer’s Arms because, according to the landlord, ‘He has an artificial limb, and if refused beer he smashes the tables with his iron arm.’

  The Church was not so keen on the inhabitants finding the odd moment of pleasure. For example, a choir leader was disciplined for ‘taking his children for a walk on a Sunday’, suggesting that if Osama bin Laden had met the leaders of that Church he’d have said, ‘The trouble with you is you’re too religious.’

  But the Church split, between the official body, which urged acceptance of authority, and a dissenting branch that questioned whether cholera and a refusal to give people toilets was entirely in keeping with the teachings of Jesus. The new Church encouraged its followers to read the writings of the revolutionary Tom Paine, whereas some in the congregations of Merthyr’s established Church had their bootnails arranged in a ‘TP’ shape, so that with every step they would ‘trample the infidel Tom Paine into the dirt’.

  In 1831 one ironmaster, William Crawshay, cut the wages of his employees. The rumbling discontent that erupted was centred around the issue of the truck system, whereby ironworkers had to spend most of their wages buying stuff from the company store. These stores relied on a body called the Court of Requests, which could refer anyone who owed money to the company store to a bailiff, who would take away your furniture, then your watch, then your bed.

  The events that followed should be studied by whoever sends out those letters that arrive if you don’t pay the gas or electric bill or your council tax within forty minutes of it arriving, with a sinister red and black heading in bold capital letters saying ‘DO NOT IGNORE!!! PAY NOW!!!!’ and then informing you that as well as the unpaid bill for £28.76 you must also pay £6,376.89 for bailiffs’ fees and court costs ‘IMMEDIATELY!!!!! DON’T THINK WE’RE JOKING, SHITFACE, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW – RECOGNISE THAT HAMSTER? IT’S OUR BITCH NOW UNLESS YOU PAY UP!!!!!’

  The Merthyr bailiffs went for the property of Lewis Lewis, a miner from Penderyn. His neighbours blockaded his house and the bailiffs could only grab one trunk of his belongings, but the crowd grabbed it back and lifted Lewis Lewis onto it to make a speech. From there they marched to the office of the Court of Requests and threw firebombs through the President’s window.

  The next morning, a crowd met up near the Castle Inn, and set off to visit the town’s bailiffs and get back all the stuff that had been confiscated. They went to a hundred bailiffs and pawnbrokers, and then to the house of an old shoemaker called Phelps, shouting at him to come with them and get back his watch and Bible that had been confiscated. But Phelps, in one of those moments at which individuals refuse to roll with a historic moment, told the crowd he couldn’t come as he was finishing the repairs to a shoe.

  Eventually his wife persuaded him to go. They smashed down the door of the offending bailiff and Mrs Phelps grabbed the bailiff’s wife, screaming, ‘Bring me the watch or the mob will come in!’

  Mrs Bailiff said she didn’t know where the watch was, so the crowd ran in, found it, and the Bible, and everything else that had been confiscated. The magistrates arrived and read the Riot Act, and sent a message to Cardiff appealing for ‘every soldier we can get hold of’. Highland troops were dispatched. By now the crowd was up to 10,000. They elected delegates, who went to the magistrates to put in a series of demands, including an end to the Court of Requests, higher wages and for the price of bread to be reduced by half. They flew a red flag, which became the symbol of the labour movement across the world, and chanted ‘We want cheese with our bread,’ which didn’t catch on quite as much.

  The crowd surged forward and seized the muskets of the front ranks of soldiers. Troops positioned in the Castle Inn started firing, killing over twenty demonstrators. As word got out, the whole of Merthyr formed into mini regiments, raiding shops for guns and ammunition with which to try to take over the town.

  The army sent for the Swansea division of the yeomanry, but as the troops arrived the rebels stood on the hills above the road and rolled huge rocks down on them. The commander of the government troops, Major Penrice, was captured. For four days these battles went on, with the rebels taking control of the town until the army was reinforced by enough troops to win back autho
rity. At the end of it all, maybe there was a knock on the door of Mr Phelps, and someone said, ‘Is my bloody shoe ready yet? You said you’d have it done four days ago.’

  Afterwards the authorities were wary of being too vicious with their retribution, in case they sparked off another uprising, but they did charge one of the crowd’s delegates, Richard Lewis, with bayoneting a soldier, who wasn’t killed and couldn’t identify him. But Lewis, who was also known as Dic Penderyn, was hanged.

  The rebels didn’t feel they’d been crushed, and Dic Penderyn became a local hero, because as the historian Gwyn Alf Williams said, ‘His was not a face above the crowd, his was the face in the crowd.’

  In the weeks that followed the hanging, some of those who had taken part in the battle organised the first secret trade union meetings, and so Merthyr’s uprising played a part in shaping the Britain of the next 170 years. It also created a problem for Wetherspoon’s.

  When the Merthyr Tydfil Wetherspoon’s was opened it was to be called the William Crawshay, after the ironmaster. But a campaign began, launched by the local historical society, demanding that the pub should be named the Dic Penderyn. The company employed the usual arguments dispatched from head offices when their routine is challenged: ‘Dear Sir/Madam, We thank you for your letter regarding something we did that has angered you and everyone you know, but we are unable to change what we did as that is the way we do things. However, we value you as a valuable customer and look forward to ignoring you again in the future.’

  Letters were sent to local papers, protests promised, a campaign of furious messages sent to Wetherspoon’s, and the result is that you can now drink cheap bitter round a shiny table in the Dic Penderyn.

  Since the initial explosion of industry Merthyr has been devastated regularly, like an economic version of one of these places in the South Pacific that’s always getting knocked over by a hurricane. The 1936 Means Test reduced unemployment benefit from fifteen shillings to five shillings for many people. In response, women in Merthyr organised a march of 3,000 unemployed to the unemployment benefit office, Iscoed House. When they got there, according to one marcher’s account, ‘They smashed all the windows. The police came but they were helpless. The demonstrators went inside, pulled the stairs away, and all the records were flung in a heap.’

  Maybe they should have made an advert afterwards that went: ‘Benefit offices – we’re closing in.’

  This led to some of the new rules being scrapped, but it didn’t endear the town to the authorities. So in 1939 a think tank called Political and Economic Planning proposed ‘the evacuation of the whole town to the Glamorgan coast. It does not seem reasonable to ask the rest of Britain to pay taxes to give large numbers of people the doubtful pleasure of living in one of the least habitable districts of England and Wales.’ This, I would imagine, is unique: that plans are drawn up to shut a place down entirely, not as a result of ethnic cleansing or to turn it into a military base or a site for drilling for oil, but because the government considers it a dump.

  Maybe the officials visited the pub I went to, where the landlord told me proudly, ‘See that piano? I found that in the fucking road, I did.’ Three lads were singing ‘We Will Rock You’ on the karaoke, holding each other up the way an old car can be held together by rust. ‘Bigerbeg disgerace waving over perler perlace’, they sang, and then one collapsed, bringing down the rest. From there I went for a curry. The waiter took my order for poppadoms and asked, ‘Is this your first time in Merthyr?’

  ‘I’ve been once before,’ I said, trying to sound familiar.

  ‘This is a terrible place. Please take my advice and don’t stay,’ he said. ‘Starter?’

  The recording for the radio show was in the only place available, a room in one of those further-education colleges built in the 1970s that looks like somewhere you sit all day before claiming invalidity benefit, and has walls you daren’t lean on in case they’re made out of cardboard. The café was an empty white room with one yoghurt, a very old banana and a till. But the audience was from the stoic wing of the town, with boxers and singers and the local history group among them, as this wouldn’t be where someone would come to get smashed and sing a medley from Queen.

  Until I mentioned Tesco. Before I’d said anything about it, just the word itself set off a cry from the middle of one row of ‘Don’t you fucking knock Tescos. That’s saved this town, that place, I love that place, I fucking love Tescos,’ from someone waving a tin of beer in random directions, as if using it to imitate the flight path of a bluebottle.

  ‘Not now, Steve,’ said his friend.

  ‘What? Fucking Tescos, there’s a fucking Tescos,’ was the next cry. This carried on for ten minutes, during which time we were never to return to this level of coherence. Occasionally there’d be a yell of, ‘Saved this town, Tescos has fucking saved this town,’ so in the end I said, ‘I tell you what mate, you’ve convinced me. Tesco has saved this town, and I shan’t mention anything bad about it again.’

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘I fucking hate Tescos.’

  As a punchline it was flawless. ‘Fucking Tescos,’ he went on to explain, ‘didn’t have any fucking beer-battered chips. I wanted beer-battered chips and they didn’t have any beer-battered fucking chips. I fucking hate Tescos,’ he confirmed.

  Eventually his mate persuaded him to leave the room and pursue this line of thought somewhere else.

  But Merthyr can’t just be a shithole, or everyone would have left. Even Dowlais, the bleakest section of the town, with record-breaking levels of poverty, the only place in the world where if you tell them you’re from the centre of Merthyr they’ll say, ‘Ooo, there’s posh. I suppose you spend your evenings at the Wyndham Arms, Mr La-di-da Merthyr,’ has a resilience within. Part of this is expressed through singing: the Dowlais Male Voice Choir displays the vigour and competitive edge of an American football squad. They train and practise almost every day, and perform at international festivals that seem to be the equivalent of the Olympics in the world of male voice choirs. At one point they performed in a concert with Donny Osmond.*

  And there’s the attachment to boxing. There’s Howard Winstone, who became world featherweight champion despite losing the tips of three of his fingers, and poor Johnny Owen who was killed in the ring, and Eddie Thomas, European welter-weight champion, who said, ‘When boys in Merthyr are born they come out with clenched fists.’

  But they all stayed in Merthyr. It seems that the prouder someone is – and few people exude more pride than either a singer in a male voice choir or a champion boxer – the more adamant they are about remaining in the town that was threatened with being shut down, and that seems to have gone downhill from there. Eddie Thomas, who became a boxing manager and earned the description ‘successful businessman’, became mayor of the town rather than move.

  The dominant attitude of Merthyr Tydfil seems to be, ‘How do we pull together through this?’ rather than ‘How do I escape this?’ So the librarian will evict the drunk intruder with firm compassion, rather than yell at him or call the police.

  There are statues of the prominent boxers from the town, and of Dic Penderyn, and there’s always a chuckle of contempt at the word ‘Cardiff’, as if to say, ‘That’s not proper Wales,’ and a sense that Merthyr might be a dump, but it’s our dump.

  When I went to Merthyr for the radio show I stayed at the only hotel, called the Castle, on the site where the worst of the shooting took place in 1831. The smell of chip fat seeped into every corner of every room, and in defiance of the laws of geometry every window looked out onto the ‘Everything a Pound’ shop. Next door was the pub with the found piano, from where the sound of the evening’s entertainment would drift through the hotel, the low rumble punctuated by cries of ‘Yabafuckaragabolloxinbereber!’ as something or someone fell and crashed, leaving you to ponder what or who had fallen over and broken this time.

  But the young women who worked in the hotel were fountains of cheery assistance, perky a
pologies for the place’s failings pouring out of them. ‘Oooo, sorry, I’m afraid we’ve no eggs left. If you like, when I’ve got a minute I can pop up the shops and get some,’ said one of them, displaying the teenage girl’s sympathy face that can also be used when a stranger in a nightclub toilet tells them their boyfriend has run off with their dad. ‘I can try and get someone to fix the TV for you,’ they’d say, and you could see they were thinking, ‘Who do I know who’s ever fixed a TV? What about Gareth, my aunt’s next-door neighbour? He’s a car mechanic, it can’t be that different.’

  Merthyr jolliness is possibly the most hardened jolliness in Britain, a superjoy that an army couldn’t overcome, but instead would scream, ‘We keep firing misery, sergeant, but it bounces straight off them.’

  Edinburgh

  Edinburgh is a city built on two levels, at every level. It’s the city of twee kilty woollenness, of quaintly tiled cafés and Morningside ladies with their catchphrase ‘Ye’ll have had yer tea?’ And it’s the city of Trainspotting, of poverty and the highest rates of drug addiction in Britain, where maybe, on the Muirhouse estate, the dealers stand by the stairwells asking passers-by, ‘Ye’ll have had yer crack?’

  The genteel side has beaten the grubbier side to be the dominant image. So even Burke and Hare, the nineteenth-century grave robbers and murderers who supplied anatomists with corpses are seen as a fun pair, the sort of kindly knockabout grave robbers and murderers you only get in Edinburgh, not like in Glasgow, where the grave robbers and murderers can have quite an unpleasant side.

  Edinburgh has witnessed vast convulsions and great heroes, writers, rebels, warriors and pioneers that transformed the world, so its most celebrated figure is Greyfriars Bobby, a bloody dog that apparently visited his master’s grave every day after he died for fourteen years. Because if Alexander Graham Bell wanted to make a contribution worth remembering, that is what he would have done instead of wanking about with telephones.