Merthyr Tydfil, 1831: A ‘Rising’ Reconsidered (Part One)
The riots which erupted in Merthyr Tydfil in early June 1831 have long attracted the attention of historians, as well as myth makers and remembrancers, and for all sorts of reasons. (Not all of them scholarly.) It is now almost exactly forty-five years since the publication of The Merthyr Rising by Gwyn A. Williams, the most celebrated account of what happened and certainly the most influential. Williams threw off the standard account of riotous unrest and established, in his view definitively, the case for an uprising against capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and the British state. It was in this town and at this time, he argued, that the Welsh working class first gained consciousness of itself as a working class. An attractive and appealing idea, to be sure, one which resonates with the other great events of the period — Peterloo in 1819, Captain Swing, the Luddites, the Plug rioters, or the Tolpuddle Martyrs of 1834 — but is it true?
Was the riot really a rising?
That is the question.
No less a figure than the labour historian G. D. H. Cole bears some of the responsibility for the upgrade in status. He was the first to replace riot with rising and did so in his Chartist Portraits published in 1941. The focus was not on Merthyr, however, but John Frost and the Newport Chartists of 1839, and so we may guess that Cole’s use of rising was more of a throw-away, a reach for the thesaurus to avoid endless repetition of the word riot. In fact, Cole described the events of the 1830s as no more than ‘adventure[s] in rebellion’, a kind of hyper-local opposition to the ‘real rulers of the narrow mining valleys’, namely the ironmasters and coalowners and their middle-class allies. These adventures were not, according to Cole, and contra the subsequent assertion to this effect by Williams, the start of a revolutionary uprising, nor were they moments in which ‘the prehistory of the popular movement ends and its history begins’. Cole was right, Williams was not.
In my view, the latter often engaged in willful exaggeration, not only in The Merthyr Rising and the articles which preceded its publication, but throughout his work. For instance, Williams claims that apart from himself, Cole was the only historian who had properly grasped the meaning of the Merthyr riots/rising of 1831. This is incorrect. Cole made no such reading. There are two reasons for reaching this conclusion. First, Cole’s language was largely ignored by others and he failed to use the phrase anywhere else. Second, with clearer eyes it is clear to see the deployment of a rhetorical flourish, perhaps even a misprint, since the index to Chartist Portraits refers not to the Merthyr Rising or to the Merthyr Riots but rather to the Merthyr Revolt. That is not a phrase used elsewhere either. Victorian writers often preferred insurrection.
The first to coin ‘Merthyr Rising’ was the nationalist poet and librarian, Harri Webb. He used it to shape and propel the narrative of his pamphlet, Dic Penderyn and the Merthyr Rising of 1831, which appeared in 1956. At the time Webb was actively involved in the Welsh Republican Movement, a left-wing groupuscule most famous for burning union flags in the centres of various towns and for handling dynamite on the hillsides. Play-acting at being in the IRA, in other words. Such quixotic political behaviour fed into Webb’s approach to the story of 1831. Dic Penderyn, the martyr, was cast as ‘a tall, powerfully built youngster, fair-haired and lively, popular with the girls and fond of his glass’. Now, before you cast Richard Burton in the role, there is also this next bit. Dic Penderyn was ‘a Welshman who [has] resisted the rape of Wales by alien capitalism’ and whose opponents are ‘English bayonets drinking Welsh blood’. Flights of fancy indeed.
And yet not without its appeal to those of nationalist sympathies, those contemporaneously involved in the Parliament for Wales campaign, for instance, and plenty of others ever since. What Webb had in mind, it seems to me, was the creation of a Welsh tradition that could serve as the equivalent of the Jacobite rebellions in the Highlands of Scotland or, more appropriately, the United Irishmen led by Theobald Wolfe Tone. The latter example-as-inspiration is even more apparent in the Welsh language version of lectures given by Webb in the mid-1950s, and which formed the basis of the published pamphlet. Here he used the term ‘gwrthryfel’ meaning rebellion, revolt, insurrection, or mutiny. One might also add rising to the list. He also employed motifs such as ‘The 31’ and ‘The 39’, an echo of The 15 and The 45, which I suppose makes Dic Penderyn a relation of one or other of the Pretenders.
I should add, before moving on to deal with historiographical approaches to this subject, that Webb was not the only creative voice of the 1940s and 1950s who dealt with the events of 1831. The novelist Alexander Cordell produced his enormously popular The Rape of the Fair Country, for instance; it was published by Victor Gollancz in 1959. Cordell was politically orientated towards Plaid Cymru and the influence of Welsh nationalist thought is apparent throughout his work. During the war, the poet Islwyn ap Nicholas wrote a short biographical pamphlet on Dic Penderyn. It was published by Foyles Welsh Press as part of their yellow book series in 1944. Nicholas was the son of T. E. Nicholas, ‘Y Glais’, and shared his father’s communist instincts, albeit with a growing inclination towards nationalism. The third voice, although almost always forgotten as a student of Merthyr’s industrial unrest, was Gwyn Thomas. His landmark novel of 1949, All Things Betray Thee, originally published by Michael Joseph, took on the mythos and remains the most sober fictional account of the period — heralded by Raymond Williams and Dai Smith, amongst others. Thomas would return to the subject in the early 1960s producing a well-received but short-lived play for the Royal Court Theatre called Jackie the Jumper.
Historians broke into two camps in the 1960s, where they have largely remained. Serious scholars of eighteenth and early nineteenth century unrest, such as David J. V. Jones and George Rudé, have always regarded 1831 as a riot not a rising. Others, such as Joe England, the most recent summariser of what happened, and a plethora of local historians including Penderyn’s recent biographer, Sally Roberts Jones, have followed Gwyn A. Williams all the way to a rising. There is no middle ground. K. O. Morgan, in his review of The Merthyr Rising, tried to find one, but was still moved to point out that ‘it is not easy to relate the wild ferment of Merthyr in 1831, as it emerges in this book, with the more mundane pressure-groups of twenty or thirty years later’. When my own survey, Labour Country, was published in 2018, reviewers often complained that I did not deal with the Merthyr Rising. Why else had I used 1831 as my starting point, they said. Time to provide my answer.
The events of 1831, I have concluded, represent a fusion of the moral economic demands of the eighteenth century — themes which Edward Thompson was right to rescue from the condescension of posterity — with the beginnings of reformist political agitation, agitation consistent with moral force Chartism, co-operation, and ultimately the Labour Party. This gradualism would not excite a communist or a nationalist or a romantic, of course, although it is fundamentally Hobsbawmian. It lacks violence, it is difficult to commemorate, it cannot become a music festival; it is, if you like, quite dull as a historical narrative; and yet it is what happened. The only time in modern Welsh history wherein popular violence was used as a catalyst to accelerate change — Newport in 1839 is something different, I would suggest — was in Tonypandy in 1910, and so the true secular martyr of the industrial working class was John Hopla not Dic Penderyn.
I shall elaborate on how I came to that conclusion in a second blog, but for now I want to concentrate on the mythology of the rising. This is the consequence of a lack of serious challenge to Gwyn A. Williams’ account. Sensible readers will have already noted one association: the links between the ‘Rising’ and Welsh nationalism. Harri Webb wrote in service of postwar Welsh republican nationalism and in the context of demands for a form of home rule. Similarly, The Merthyr Rising appeared approximately six months before the 1979 devolution referendum took place. Williams, a Titoist later turned Welsh nationalist, was an active campaigner in favour of a yes vote. No surprise there. But it is not too blunt to suggest that his political commitments overtook his academic ones — only his book on Medieval London is free of this ‘colour’. From at least the 1960s onwards, he was an activist historian, someone whose scholarship was deployed not as objective analysis but as subjective intent. A guide, if you will. In his view, the Welsh needed to be able to disaggregate their history from that of the English and of the wider British state, even though the industrial revolution, which created Merthyr Tydfil and Dowlais, was fundamentally British.
Without challenge, then, the story told by Williams has become a myth we live by, as Raphael Samuel once called these kinds of things. I prefer invented tradition. Regardless of the name, the myth serves to illustrate the apparently radical nature of the Welsh. It thus proves the Welsh were somehow under the yolk of the English and could be put to the sword if they ever said no. (Albeit by kilted soldiers from a Scottish regiment.) And it supposedly marks the beginning of something revolutionary. The greatest myth contained in The Merthyr Rising is that of the red flag, that symbol of revolution; in particular, the red flag made on Hirwaun Common using the blood of a freshly-killed calf, apparently in a sacrificial ritual. Williams was always drawn to this scene and he became convinced of its symbolism, an indication that the riot must have been something more. As he wrote in 1965:
To the best of my knowledge, the rising at Merthyr was the first occasion on which the red flag was used [as an act of popular rebellion against authority] in Britain.
To reinforce the apparent connection to revolutionary upheaval, especially in France, Williams drew on the cartoon by the artist Hablot Knight Brown, better known as Phiz, which appeared in the New Newgate Calendar in 1841. Here the rioters were shown as quasi sans-culottes complete with Phrygian caps of liberty, their muskets raised in anticipation of mischief. (Sorry, revolution.) The flag bearer wears a cap marked with the words ‘Death or Victory’, a recall of Vince Aut Morire which had been used on flags during the American War of Independence of the 1770s and 1780s and the more recent Greek War of Independence in 1821. The Phiz cartoon has appeared on the cover of every edition of The Merthyr Rising since the original in 1978, more recently with the red flag gorily colourised. But the artist neglected to include the other symbol carried on that bloody pole that day in June 1831: a loaf of bread.
We know all about the red flag, of course, because Richard Lambert, an ironmonger living in Merthyr’s High Street, told the court hearing held in the aftermath of the riots all about it. ‘Several thousands of men passed my house’, he said, ‘having with them a red flag fixed to a pole’. So far, so good. William Rowland, a special constable, added that he had seen ‘a loaf of bread fixed on the pole above the flag’. Crucially, the rioters shouted for reform as they passed, not for revolution. There is good reason for this. Red flags and impaled bread were part of a vocabulary of protest, a custom common to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These symbols were used in Merthyr because that is what was done at the time. Indeed, far from the riots being the first occasion on which the red flag was raised in Britain in a moment of popular protest, it was not even the first time that year. Scarlet banners fluttered over Malton in North Yorkshire in April 1831 and over Liverpool and Stalybridge a few weeks later, all in the name of reform.
As for the loaf of bread, well, that pointed to what the riots were really all about: the moral economy. No prizes for innovation here, either. Bread poles had been seen in Nuneaton during agitation over prices in the 1790s; they had been carried in Cork in 1801, where, as one observer noted, the loaf was ‘dressed in black, in token of their distress’; and they were paraded through the streets of Bristol in 1812, carried by supporters of Henry Hunt’s parliamentary by-election campaign. In the Irish examples of the 1830s, the pole bearer’s hands were stained (or smeared) with fresh blood, as if to suggest that those responsible for the high cost of living were committing what contemporaries — and later Friedrich Engels — called ‘social murder’. There is an argument to made that this was the meaning in Merthyr as well.
What we can observe, then, is the deployment of an existing vocabulary of protest to effect a restoration in the moral economy of the community, one triggered by a revolt against the institutions installed by the ironmasters and their allies to control their new fiefdom. Let us remember that Merthyr did not have a member of parliament in 1831. Britain was not a democracy, working people could not elect new masters, but nor was it prone to revolutionary violence. The more modestly but accurately named riots achieved their aim, namely the demolition of the Court of Requests — more about that next time — and thereby set the working people of Merthyr on the path towards reformist politics of the kind with which we are now familiar. In this sense, 1831 is indeed the starting point of the labour movement, of Labour Country. Hence its use in my book. But it was not a Welsh labour movement that emerged over the decades that followed, it was a British one. And that made all the difference.
