Slate & Slavery

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Penrhyn Castle, East Front, from a postcard by J. Arthur Dixon Ltd.


    The large and now partly water-filled crater that sits beneath Mynydd Llandegai at the other side of our valley - the site of the currently COVID-suspended Zip World attraction - was until recent years the largest open quarry excavation in Europe; it's product roofing half the world with the finest slate.
    Until the early 1960's, it's owners were the Pennant family - latterly, sugar planters from Clarendon in Jamaica, trading through Liverpool. Richard Pennant, later the First Baron Penrhyn, owned six plantations, with over six-hundred slaves held in his service. A firm anti-abolishionist, the fortune he made in exploited land & labour was ploughed into the North Wales quarry that came to bear his name.
    The Second Baron Penrhyn, George Sholto Gordon Douglas-Pennant, presided over Y Streic Fawr, or the Great Strike of 1900-1903, when a bitter dispute over Unionisation and workers' rights resulted in a three-year lockout. Quarrymen who refused to break the strike put cards in the windows of their cottages proclaiming 'Nid Oes Bradwr Yn Y Ty Hwn' - 'There Are No Traitors In This House' - if the cards were removed, it indicated that the resident quarryman had returned to work and broken the strike. A certain village across the valley from our house provided a large number of such men and became marked as the traitors' village. When we first arrived here forty years ago, there was still graffiti daubed on a slate wall on the road up into the village that read 'Bradwr' in large, white letters: seventy-seven years after the strike had ended some families were still split by the event. It was still in living memory at that time.
    The edifice featured in the tourist postcard above was the Penrhyn's home, an enormous neo-Norman confection designed by Thomas Hopper. It cost around £150,000 to build at the time - approximately £50,000,000 in today's money - all off the backs of African slaves & exploited Welshmen - a legacy of pain, hatred and indifference to suffering in support of the entitled. Given the events being played out at the present time, this place serves as a necessary touchstone to remember that history and it's aftermath.

Comments

  1. sideways21 June 2024 at 14:42

    Addendum: my translation of 'Nid Oes...' should of course read: "There is no traitor in this house" Apologies: I tend to write in a hurry some days...

    ReplyDelete

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