Twentieth Century Serfdom

Where now operates the Zip World in Snowdonia - a tourist attraction that brings in people in search of a managed and safe adrenaline rush from all over the world -  also happens to be what was [and is still generally referred to as] Penrhyn Quarry, Y Chwarel Penrhyn in Welsh. The quarry was historically, at least since the village of Bethesda started to form around the Independent chapel of Bethesda, from which it drew its name, the largest employer in the area.

Between 1900 and 1903, quarry workers at Penrhyn were locked out over their protest at the pay and conditions - conditions which held them in thrall to their master's will: he literally owned their lives - abuse and summary dismissal being commonplace there. One of the main issues of contention was the system of 'The Bargain', a practice which involved a gang of workers striking 'a bargain' with the management over working a particular part of the quarry: on the face of it as semi-autonomous 'contractors'.

The reality was very different. The rock was assessed at face value: if it was determined that the bargain would be difficult to work, based on its outward nature, then a good rate per pound of finished slate would be agreed upon. If the 'bargain' looked easy to work, the rate would be lower as more finished slate could be produced with less effort. Seems superficially fair, but very often the underlying substrate would confound the original assessment and an 'easy' bargain would turn out to produce little or nothing for the workers involved, while close by others would be making a decent return from their 'bargain'.

Aside from this and working conditions just basically lethal to life and limb - the quarry had its own hospital - it was outside the place itself that Lord Penrhyn held on to his little slice of Medievalism. He effectively owned the dwellings of the men who toiled for his pittance. Across the valley from us is a small 'suburb' of Bethesda called Mynydd Llandegai, whose two main thoroughfares traverse the hill that forms the hamlet, parallel to the river valley below.

The land on which this community now lives was originally common grazing, but in the 1840s, Baron Penrhyn summarily took possession of Llandegai Mountain and proceeded to 'allow' his workers the grace and favour of a plot of land on which to build their own houses, at their expense and by their own labour; out of works hours of course, which meant after work and if they were not devout enough for it to be forbidden to them, Sundays. The land remained 'Penrhyn's' and the workers were held to short-term, thirty-year leasehold arrangements, which effectively meant that His Lordship owned the very dwellings that those men had built and paid for out of their already meagre stipend from this throwback of a landed family.

Even in those days, the workers' conditions in Bethesda were a cause célèbre in London, which led to the interest and deep involvement of a young reporter for The Daily News, who came to Bethesda during Y Streic Fawr, supported the workers in their struggle and reported to the wider world his findings. The resulting piece that Charles Sheridan Jones published was 'What I Saw At Bethesda' - a truly remarkable account of the time. Having been effectively lost to history over the decades, a former Dyffryn Ogwen headmaster, J. Elwyn Hughes, resurrected the work in an annotated reprint in 2003, a full century after its original publication.

It really should be required reading for all and throws into focus just how the workplace is currently back-pedalling towards those times through the machinations of government and big business in restricting pay, conditions and the rights of those who after all, make the money for the 'masters'. The difference now is communication, or rather the scale and reach of that communication - then: one reporter, one newspaper, one book - now: the internet, but to make that journey back to Bethesda at the turn of the twentieth century is instructive indeed.