Politics
So close and yet so despised
Published 11 December 2000
It took Unesco to recognise the contribution a town in Gwent made to history. Ziauddin Sardar on how the Welsh were the first victims of English racism
Britain has been hit by a major historical tremor. The small Welsh town of Blaenavon has been declared a World Heritage site. The announcement was made by Unesco's World Heritage Convention last week. Hardly anyone has realised the significance of the news, because Blaenavon is part of the historic silence that has enveloped Wales for centuries. Unesco is righting a historic wrong that Britain itself, devolution notwithstanding, has been loath to address.
For the uninitiated, Blaenafon - as it is spelt in Welsh - is situated on the escarpment edge of the South Wales coalfield, north of Newport. The name means "the opening of the valley of the Afon Llwyd". Appropriately, Afon Llwyd means "grey river". This small grey town was once the largest producer of iron and steel in the world. The Blaenafon Ironworks, opened in 1789, spawned 16 collieries in the area; Big Pit, one such colliery, is one of only two mining museums in Britain. According to Unesco, the furnaces and buildings of the works are the best preserved in Europe.
Our obsession with the monuments of the mighty has tended to exclude an appreciation of the lives and experiences of ordinary people. Blaenafon, in contrast, celebrates the history of common folk. It is a memorial to human endurance, a physical record of the experience of the underside of lived history. Above all, it is a testimony to English racism and a living witness to the reality that much of Welsh history has been written out of "British history".
Conventional history, the kind we find in school textbooks, records the industrial revolution as the saga of dark satanic mills on England's green and pleasant land. It is the era of Ironbridge, Coalbrookdale, Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham. There is no mention of Wales, although developments there began earlier and were more fundamental to industrial growth. Blaenafon is just one of the centres in Wales - the others being Rhymney, Tredegar, Ebbw Vale, the copper and tin-plate centres of Neath, Llanelli, Bridgend, Swansea and the Rhondda Valleys - where the heavy lifting of industrial transformation actually took place.
South Wales manufactured the iron and steel that built the bridges and railways of Britain and the world. Indeed, the railways themselves were pioneered in Wales, at Blaenafon and nearby Merthyr Tydfil. And the steam engines, trains and ships of a burgeoning new world order were powered by good Welsh anthracite, the ultimate clean-burning coal.
The human cost of the industrial revolution is recorded in the cemeteries of South Wales. Not including the unmarked mass cholera graves, around 60 per cent of 19th-century burials were of children under five years of age. Foundry towns were described by literary visitors as visions of hell, real infernos: fire-breathing, fume-sodden landscapes.
So why has Blaenafon never rated a mention in British history books? Racism. It was in Wales (and Scotland) that English racism began - before it moved on to Ireland and the rest of the world. The word "Wales" derives from the Saxon term "wealas", meaning stranger. Thus were the Welsh made strangers in their own land, fit only to be pushed westward to the "Celtic fringes".
In British history, England alone matters. So history books record the Tolpuddle martyrs, the putative ancestors of the trade union movement, and the 1819 Peterloo massacre in Manchester, the Chartist demonstration for electoral reform in which 11 people were killed. Yet who has ever heard of Scotch Cattle (the agitation against iron masters and coal owners in the Gwent area in the 1820s and 1830s), the Rebecca riots (the wide-ranging protests against English authority that began in 1839) or the Merthyr rising - which ensured the election of the first Labour MP? He was the Scot James Keir Hardie, elected not in England, but in Merthyr Tydfil in 1900.
This racism spills into language. The history of industrial South Wales was lived in the Welsh language, the lingua franca of the coalfield. So not only were the Welsh troublesome strangers, they also spoke a funny language. Welsh-speaking labourers, like colonised people throughout the British empire, were treated as second-class citizens in the towns they built.
It was the late Gwyn A Williams, an iconoclast professor of Welsh history, who sought to redress the balance. He was a native of Merthyr, and therefore quickly gained a personal knowledge of the dis- tortion of British industrial history. In The Merthyr Rising, published in 1978, Williams documented the events leading to the unjustified hanging of the first working-class martyr in Britain, Dic Penderyn. Merthyr now warrants an occasional mention in history books.
For Blaenafon, however, the silence has lasted until now. The evidence from other World Heritage sites in Wales is not very encouraging. A string of castles, ranging from Caernarfon to Harlech, Beaumaris to Conwy, are also heritage sites. These castles, built by Edward I in the 13th century, were the device by which English domination over the Welsh was first effected. Rather than highlight their colonial nature, British history treats them as exotic antiques.
Only by considering Welsh heritage in its entirety can we see how the industrial revolution followed the pattern of the exploitation of a dependent colonial preserve. When Edward VIII visited Blaenafon in 1936, he was appalled by the human devastation wreaked by the industrial revolution. "Something must be done," he declared. Sixty years on, it is Unesco, not Britain, that has done something. Hopefully, British historians have enough integrity to follow suit.
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