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Tag Archives: Newtown

Day 199: Can’t Think of Anything I Need

19 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by simon682 in A Cyclist on the Celtic Fringe, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Abermule, Barry Hoban, Cerys Matthews, Colin Montgomery, Cycle tour of Wales, Jane Horrocks, Jim Montgomery, Montgomery Powys, Newtown, Robert Owen, Wenlock Edge

A Journey Around the British Isles … Part 90

I’ve stayed longer than I’d planned. Newtown gets you like that. It wasn’t a town I knew much about, but the longer I stay, the more engaged I become. It’s not every town that has a claim to have pushed along democracy; and it’s not every town that has  a famous son. Newtown played it’s part in extending the vote; and as far as a celebrity, it had one right out of the very top drawer of British history. In the game of famous people top trumps, Robert Owen just about outscores the pack in every category.

But I’m hungry and I’ve got the scent of England in my nostrils.  I like to travel to different places and I’ve found it one of the great pleasures of my life to explore Scotland, Ireland and Wales on this jaunt, but there is no place like home. Those hills I can see in the distance are in Shropshire  and I didn’t expect to be within shouting distance of it today. The weather is brightening and there are still a lot of hours of daylight, a lot of strength in my legs and plenty of determination in my heart. The closer I get to home, the stronger the pull. I’ve been away long enough, I want to see my family, walk my dog and sleep in my own bed.

There don’t seem to be too many places to eat so I plump for the sandwich shop on the main street. Despite it approaching teatime, the shop is still doing a lively trade and the four girls are being kept busy. Two are Welsh and two (sisters) are not. Their accents are a little bit Cerys Matthews veering rapidly in and out of Julie Walters doing a Brummie and Jane Horrocks in Little Voice. They are all under twenty and remind me of many a back row of a disaffected classroom. In my teaching experience such girls don’t care much for being interupted in their discourse on make-up, Vodka Breezers and how high they can pile their hair, to discuss the poetic devices employed by Christina Rossetti in Goblin Market. Here they are freed up from the exigencies of the curriculum but they seem equally bored.

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“Ham salad is it? Do you want anything on that?”

“What salad cream and mustard? You sure of that?”

“Have we got any mustard Kerri? This man wants mustard and salad cream both on the same sandwich.”

“We haven’t got any English mustard.”

“No we haven’t got any French mustard either.”

“No, looks like we haven’t got any mustard at all. You still want salad cream?”

“Yes, we’ve got plenty of that. Now white or wholemeal?”

She continues refining my order in a way that would do Descartes credit. If there is any doubt about any of it, it gets ditched. I ask her what it’s like to live in Newtown.

“I’m not from here see. Me and my sister are English. Dad moved here so we had to come with him.”

“It’s all right I suppose. Bit shite if you want to do any thing. We go to Shrewsbury for a night out. Mind you. That’s a bit shite too. That’ll be two pounds ninety five please.”

I get a polystyrene cup of tea with two sugars and lean against my bicycle. A portly cyclist in full kit, wraparound sun specs and a decent looking bicycle goes past. I wonder if it could be Barry Hoban. I know he lives near here. Nobody pays any attention so maybe it isn’t the man who at that time held the record for the most stage wins by a Briton in the Tour de France. Or maybe superstar sportsmen are ten a penny in Mid Wales.

I buy a map in Smiths and plot some sort of a route. I’m keen to reach England, keen to find some back roads after spending all day on a red route, and keen to be aiming at Shrewsbury in the hope that I’d be able to find somewhere decent to stay. I have the usual dilemma of the cyclist who is trying to get from A to B. Big direct roads or quiet lanes that meander back on themselves for miles. If I stay on the main drag and follow the Severn I come to a place called Abermule. The internet on my phone tells me that it has a canal, was the site of a railway crash in the twenties and was the one time home of composer Peter Warlock. I’ve never heard of him. But if I get there, I’ve got  much quieter roads all the way to Montgomery, and once I’m there I’m practically in England. I’ll be able to say I crossed Wales in a day on a bicycle. Abermule it is.

It’s a pleasant mixture of old and new houses and a three storey hotel imaginatively called The Abermule Hotel. There’s nothing else there to hold me long and the village does prove a gateway to green lanes, quieter roads and a shadow that slowly elongates as it moves round  in front of me. My legs still feel strong and this is some of the pleasantest cycling of the whole journey. The  pastures are green, the harvest is coming in and the trees hang heavy in full summer leaf. The road goes gently up and down and I keep going mile upon mile. On days like today it doesn’t matter when a car cuts you up. I just smile and wave and they double the revs and show me just how much faster their car can go than a fifty two year old cyclist on a thirty year old bicycle laden with panniers. I’m suitably impressed and make a note not to take them on at speed trials again.

Montgomery is every bit as lovely as its name suggests. I’m reminded of Kirby Stephen. A small town packed full of character; a medieval castle and a rather lovely church. Not many towns have a bell museum; Montgomery does. It also has a proper ironmongers with galvanised buckets outside. It doubles as a cycle shop and I’m very tempted to go in but can think of nothing I lack. I am almost completely happy. In the words of the song. “If I could have a wish, I think I’d pass. Can’t think of anything I need.” I wonder if Marion Montgomery (sixties British singer who occasionally appeared on television) ever sang that song. Was it in Jim Montgomery’s (Sunderland FA Cup winning goalkeeper) record collection? I slowly go through all the Montgomery’s I know. When I get to Colin the golfer I change games. Life’s too short for golf.

The hills of Shropshire form a dramatic skyline. They are some of the finest hills in England and have some of the best names; Wenlock Edge, The Long Mynd, The Wrekin, The Stretton Hills. Fortunately for me and my legs, the hills are to the south and will remain my skyline for an hour or two longer. I don’t have to climb them.

Day 198: The People’s Flag is Deepest Red

18 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by simon682 in A Cyclist on the Celtic Fringe, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Anuerin Bevan, Charles Dickens, Chartists, Edmund Burke, Lloyd George, Merthyr Rising, Newport Rising, Newtown, Richard Price, the red flag, tremble ye oppressors

A Journey Around the British Isles … Part 89

Newtown in the late afternoon of an August day in the twenty first century is a relaxed place. Shoppers browse and buy. Two older men finish their cigarettes and disappear back into a betting shop. A woman in a worsted suit comes out of the bank that stands on the site of the house where Robert Owen was born. There is nothing in the air to suggest rebellion and less of the spirit of revolution. And yet, everyone on the streets of Newtown has a vote, a say in the way the town, the county and the country are governed. Everybody I see has a standard of living that affords them the right to some happiness in their lives. They are free to worship or not worship at whatever church or mosque or chapel they desire without being forbidden to hold public office because of it. They enjoy, in short, the human rights of a mature democracy. Rights that were fought for on these very streets by men and women branded as a danger to society.

Wales has produced its share of politicians of substance. And Welsh politicians have made their name in defending or promoting the rights and welfare of the working classes. David Lloyd George is the only Welshman to attain the post of prime minister but it was as Chancellor of the Exchequer that he made his greatest contribution (if you can make such a claim of a man who led his country to victory in a world war). His people’s budget of 1909 was the first serious attempt at a redistribution of wealth the country had ever seen. It aimed “to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness”. Aneurin Bevan was the dogged and determined Welshman who saw through the birth of the National Health Service in the face of determined opposition. Both men made a lasting contribution to the alleviation of suffering of the poor. They came from a great Welsh tradition of dissent and standing up for freedom and dignity.

Newtown had been founded as a place of industry surrounded by thousands of hectares of farmland. Wales, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was home to a few very rich men and a great mass of the sickeningly poor. Newtown had two classes of poor; rural and urban. There was no single event that led to uprisings in the 1830s and 1840s. They were the result of decades of oppression, cruel laws, sickness and disease and a world wide spirit of revolution.

Richard Price is not a well known name in this country yet he has been called Wales’ greatest ever thinker. At his death, France called a day of national mourning, America saluted a great advocate of freedom and so many turned up to his funeral that the cortege eventually reached the cemetery five hours late. He preached of three revolutions that had changed the political landscape; the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that had, in Price’s words,  broken the fetters of despotism, expelled a tyrant and asserted the rights of the people; the American Revolution and the French Revolution that had extended the rights of the people to govern themselves. He warned of the need for these rights to be extended to the people of Britain. From his pulpit in 1789 he sent out a warning with a style of oratory that is typically Welsh.

“Tremble all ye oppressors of the world…You cannot now hold the world in darkness…Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.”

Price’s influence was so great that it led to Edmund Burke writing his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

His words found their political outlet, forty years later, in the Chartist movement. It was strong in Newtown and Llanidloes and was taken up by the people of industrial Wales.

The 1830s had been a time of great unrest and risings against real or perceived oppression in the principality. In the west of the country the Rebecca Riots had seen local tenant farmers, dressed in women’s clothing, attacking toll houses and toll gates in a fight against corruption and malpractice. In industrial towns of the valleys, typhoid, dysentery  and cholera were claiming hundreds of lives every summer and factory lay-offs brought intolerable hardships to the urban slums. In 1831 there was a rising in Merthyr Tydfil. It was a violent climax to many years of simmering unrest. During the month of May the whole area rose up against a lowering of wages, layoffs and general unemployment. It was during this uprising that a flag was soaked in cow’s blood and became the first time a red flag was raised as a symbol of worker’s solidarity anywhere in the world.

The dis-satisfaction of the people of Wales grew in the 1830s with the passing of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. This cruel legislation created workhouses where those unable to look after themselves were sent. Conditions were deliberately worse than the lowest worker could manage, families were split up and very few ever emerged. A new union workhouse was built at Caersws between 1837 and 1840. It was to house 350 “inmates” and caused huge opposition in Newtown and Llanidloes. It wasn’t just the Welsh poor who found the New Poor Law (as it came to be known) offensive to human dignity. Charles Dickens wrote both Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol in direct response to the hardships and inhumanity it caused.

A Chartist branch was set up in Newtown. At a meeting in Llanidloes on April 30th 1839  members of the branch were arrested and charged with a serious attempt to ferment armed revolution. Thomas Powell of Newtown, John Evan and two separate men called John Lewis were imprisoned while James Morris, Abraham Owen and Lewis Humphries were transported. It had been a peaceful demonstration infiltrated by men paid to cause trouble to give the authorities an excuse to clamp down on Chartist activities.

Lest anyone think of the Chartists as desperate men intent on insurrection for the sake of causing trouble it may be worth taking a look at what they stood for. They had seen the dreadful state of the rural and urban poor and saw that they were simply not represented by anyone in positions of power. They felt let down and angry at the 1832 Reform Act, which had promised to extend the vote to the many, but instead kept it to those who held the interests of property. The Chartists had six demands which they felt would bring about freedom and alleviation of suffering. The government of the day dismissed the demands with contempt when they were presented to parliament peaceably. The good people of Newtown and Llanidloes and indeed the entire population of Great Britain today enjoy all but one of these demands as essential rights and guarantees of democratic freedom.

  1. Every man over 21 who was not a criminal or insane should be allowed to vote.
  2. Voting should be done in secret.
  3. Candidates should not need to be rich or own property to become a Member of Parliament.
  4. All Members of Parliament should be paid for doing their job.
  5. All electoral areas should represent the same number of people.
  6. Elections should be held annually.

On the 4th November 1839 a larger Chartist rising took place in Newport, South Wales. Some historians contend that it was only the weather that prevented it from becoming the British Revolution. It is estimated that at least twenty thousand men set off for Newport as part of a carefully orchestrated Chartist demonstration. All around Britain other groups waited to hear news from Monmouthshire. If the rising was successful it was to spark risings all over the country. The weather was atrocious and this played into the hands of government forces. By the time the Chartists reached their goal, of the Westgate Hotel, their numbers were little over one thousand and these men were soaked to the skin and exhausted. Soldiers in the hotel opened fire on the demonstrators (it is believed that the first shot came from the crowd) and after a gun battle lasting twenty five minutes, 22 Chartists lay dead. It was the biggest loss of British life from British government action in modern history.

As I stand on the corner of High Street and Broad Street, Newtown has a holiday feel. It’s quite a place to be. I’ve never been particularly revolutionary in outlook but I enjoy the freedoms that have been so hard fought and at such a cost. I raise  my voice in acknowledgement of the role the people of this town and this country have played in giving me the rights  that I enjoy today. I’m descended from South Wales iron workers. My own family could easily have been in Merthyr or Newport or even here and I salute them.

Day 197: Working Class Hero

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by simon682 in A Cyclist on the Celtic Fringe, Uncategorized

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Bob Crow, Cooperative Movement, New Lanark Mills, Newtown, Richard Arkwright, Robert Owen, Simon Scharma, Tony Benn

A Journey Around the British isles …Part 88

In the week when we’ve said goodbye to two of the last principled men of the left in Britain; Bob Crow and Tony Benn; it seems appropriate to be visiting the birthplace of the first and, perhaps the greatest, of all of those who have stood up for the rights of the working people against the rapacious demands of capital. I’m in Newtown and in 1771 Robert Owen was born here, the son of an ironmonger.

Robert Owen

I feel blessed to have been born in the late 1950s and to have lived a life that has been a living history book. I’m old enough to remember a post war austerity. A Britain of traditional industries. Where education divided managers from workers at the age of eleven but where it was still possible to declare yourself a socialist, to glory in the achievements of the Attlee government and to take an active interest in the politics of the day. I am also young enough to have not only seen the second great industrial revolution, but to take part in it and to draw the benefits as well as seeing the darker side.

1771 was a pretty good year to be born if you wanted to see change and to be someone who wanted to make sure that change was for the better. Robert Owen achieved an enormous amount during his lifetime but his legacy has been much stronger. There is a statue of him in his hometown and a reproduction of this statue outside the Cooperative Bank in Manchester. A plaque in St Anne’s Square and a memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery are the modest way in which he is remembered officially. But we live in a country where education is provided for everyone, where we still have a health service to be proud of and where welfare and human rights have a strong place in society. We owe a great deal to Robert Owen. As I write this, the Cooperative bank and group are going through difficulties, but both have provided models of how to do things correctly and for the benefit of the people. They have been great civilising forces in a world that has often come close to sacrificing everything to the  pursuit of profit and a blind faith in market forces.

Owen left school at the age of ten and was apprenticed to a draper. Once out of his time he moved to  a drapery in Manchester and by the age of twenty one was managing a cotton mill in Chorlton. His great concern was with the health and working conditions of the factory workers. At this time Manchester was rapidly turning from a scattering of farms and villages into a major mill town. Thousands of properties were being built and most of them unplanned. Conditions for the mill workers were dreadful from the very beginning. The newly created Manchester oligarchs “made no bones about the fact that their first, in fact their supreme obligation was to the profitability of their business.” (Simon Scharma: A History of Britain). Owen, along with other members of Manchester Board of Health put human welfare above great wealth for the few.

On a visit to Glasgow he became acquainted with the Dale family who ran New Lanark Mills. New Lanark was started by David Dale and Richard Arkwright and was run on the principle of exploiting labour that all such factories employed. Owen was able to persuade his partners to buy the mills and as manager he organised a revolution in the way such factories were run.

He improved both working and living conditions. He promoted education (in doing so he opened the first infant schools in the world), health and even took on the infamous truck shop system, where workers were paid in currency that could only be used in the factory owner’s shops, where goods were of inferior quality and overpriced. In Owen’s shops,  goods were bought wholesale and in bulk and sold to workers for little more than cost price. These were the fore-runners of the Cooperative movement which was one of the great achievements of British socialism.

After a dozen years of running the huge concern in a way that produced quality goods, turned a profit necessary for wages and re-investment, and providing the best working and living conditions in Britain, he grew tired of the restrictions placed on him by owners who sought nothing other than profit. Instead of giving up or retiring on his successes, he persuaded new investors to buy-out the mills. These included utilitarian philosopher and philanthropist Jeremy Bentham and the Quaker William Allen. Bentham was a hugely influential figure in the nineteenth century and can take as much credit or blame for the victory of market forces as anyone. His concerns were with the poor and the exploited but his philosophy of “the greatest good to the greatest number”, though outwardly caring allows for terrible exploitation of minorities. He is celebrated today by having his dressed skeleton (complete with wax head – the real one was mummified and is kept under lock and key) preserved and sitting in a glass case in University College London.

Allen was one of the first great Quaker industrialists. Many firms of the industrial age were run by quakers and all of them took a greater concern for the welfare of their workers than was common. For reasons I have yet to uncover quaker industrialists were drawn to chocolate and are remembered today by the brand names; Cadbury, Rowntree’s and Terry.

Owen was in many ways a fore-runner of Chartism and of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He abandoned his belief in conventional religion and developed a socialism that essentially sought to gain from each according to his ability and certainly to give to each according to their need. He saw education and health as being inextricably linked. That the future welfare of society is dependent on the present welfare of children. Bring children up to a world of conflict and hate and that is what they will grow up to promote. Bring them up to an awareness of their importance in the world and they will grow up to improve it.

His works attracted attention from all over the world. He inspired experiments in communal living in both Scotland and America. Neither were huge successes but this is as much down to the way they were carried out as as to faults inherent in the ideals. Owen’s son Robert, who became an American congressman describes the make-up of those involved in the schemes as “a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees of principle, honest latitudinarians and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in”.

Owen returned to Newtown and died there in 1858. He is buried in the churchyard. I spend some time here as a pilgrim; one who has lived a life that has been greatly influenced by the man. I sit near his statue and say three quiet cheers for a town in Powys that gave us one of our greatest Welshmen, one of our greatest Britons.

The following is taken from his memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery.

“He organised infants schools. He secured the reduction of the hours of labour for women and children in factories. He was a liberal supporter of the earliest efforts to obtain national education. He laboured to promote international arbitration. He was one of the foremost Britons who taught men to aspire to a higher social state by reconciling the interests of capital and labour. He spent his life and a large fortune in seeking to improve his fellowmen by giving them education, self-reliance, and moral worth. His life was sanctified by human affection and lofty effort”.

Written in loving memory of Robert Owen and Tony Benn. If not working class heroes, then certainly heroes of the working class.

I’m indebted to fellow blogger Calmgrove for pointing out other firms and institutions with a Quaker history. These include:

Amnesty International, Barclays Bank, Bryant and May (matches), Carr’s Biscuits, Clark’s Shoes, Cornell University, Friend’s Provident, Fry’s Chocolate, Greenpeace, Huntley and Palmers (biscuits),  John Hopkin’s University, Lloyds Bank, Oxfam, Sony, Wedgewood (Pottery) and WD & HO Wills (Tobacco)

http://calmgrove.wordpress.com

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