Yuletide

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We went as a family, the other day, to Penrhyn Castle in Llandegai: that grossest of expositions of wealth built by the Barons Penrhyn off the back of fortunes made from slavery, sugar, and most latterly the exploitation of Bethesda slate and off the backs of the working men of this area. Visiting the place is always a slightly bitter-sweet experience but a salutary one: a constant reminder of how far we've come politically and socially in this archipelago, but also of how so very far we still need to travel down that serpentine and rocky road to human equality and fairness. As I've mentioned several times before in these jottings, between 1900 and 1903, there was in Bethesda a Great Strike - Y Streic Fawr - of quarrymen in the employ of Baron Penrhyn of Llandegai over pay and conditions at the Bethesda slate quarry, which employed a great proportion of men in the area.

We live in Rachub, a tiny village in the hills above Bethesda itself; specifically in the upper part formerly known as Caellwyngrydd; Rachub itself then being just the lower part beneath Capel Carmel, at the bottom of what is now Stryd Fawr. Charles Sheridan Jones, in his account of Y Streic Fawr, published in 1903 [What I Saw At Bethesda], collected his chronicles of the suffering and injustice undergone by the strikers and their families and published in the English press of the time into one slender and very valuable volume, now back in print by Gomer Press. The young journalist stayed in the Bethesda area and interviewed many on both sides of the strike's dividing lines, detailing the privations of of the many ordinary folk caught up in this struggle: the longest industrial dispute in trade union history. In Caellwyngrydd, he found families in our village, probably only yards from where we are - maybe even living in the very cottages that now form our house - literally starving for want of food, whilst the Baron himself could afford to have gold sovereigns put into the Christmas puddings he fed his season's guests with. Makes you think...

Comments

  1. Anonymous10 December 2025 at 11:54

    Makes me ANGRY!! The crap goes on with the Pennants!
    ATB
    Joe

    ReplyDelete

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