Coal, quays and Caste11 Coch
Kenneth Q. Morgan
Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute John Davies (University of Wales Press pp. 335, £12.95) The Butes were a unique industrial dynasty, robber barons on the Texan scale. High on a hillside beside the sooty river Taff, the fairy-tale conical towers, drawbridge and portcullis of Castel' Coch (1875-81), Burges's mediaevalist creation, provide an extraordinary ruritanian monument to the third Marquess of Bute. It is another Neuschwanstein or San Simeon in the improbable setting of the industrial heartland of South Wales. In its day, 90 years ago, it was surrounded by the Butes' own vineyards which produced an acceptable Welsh hock, marketed as ‘Cocheimer'.
A few miles to the south, in the very centre of the city of Cardiff, rises up an equally bizarre extravaganza, Burges's post-Pugin reconstruction of the Butes' citadel at Cardiff castle, awash with Gothic, Roman and Arabian fantasies, Peacocks roamed in its gardens (perhaps Wales's zoological answer to the Bute estate at Mount Stuart in Scotland, where the grounds were populated by kangaroos). This larger-than-life family has long demanded its historian. Indeed, landlords as a class have too seldom engaged the minds of students of industrial South Wales.
Like the coalowners, landed proprietors Such as the Butes have been securely lodged in popular demonology. But now there are Signs that untouchables like landlords and their agents may be getting the kind of serious study previously (and rightly) accorded to tenant farmers, quarrymen or miners. This new book, which casts a Penetrating light upon the multifarious activities of the Bute dynasty and its impact Upon the growth of Cardiff from the 1770s to the 1940s, is a part of this revisionism. ;Earlier volumes in the `Studies in Welsh History' series published by the University of Wales Press have set a high standard of scholarship and of readability (and, indeed, °f. book production). This is amply sust_ained by John Davies's monograph on the Bute estate, where careful research is P!'esented with extraordinary lucidity in view of the mass of technical detail it Fontains. The arcane minutiae of mineral leases and rent returns become positively le3xciting. Apart from its Welsh interest, this c)uk will be highly instructive to anyone enncerned with the role of landowners in ioneering industrial development. It will csi:Isu engage the attention of urban historians, si.nce nowhere in Britain was the growth of a f".1tY Pore decisively shaped by one landed ,,,arnily than in the case of Cardiff and the a 'rtes. As a local study with a wide general appeal, this is a model of its kind.
The impact of the Bute clan upon the economic take-off of the Welsh coalfield, and of the port of Cardiff in particular, especially between 1815 and 1850, was dramatic indeed. The castle estate, the agricultural estate, the urban estate, the mineral estate, the growth of mighty docks and railways, were all testimony to As South Wales became a pivot of the Atlantic economy, the Bute connection was everywhere. They were dominant landlords and mineral owners. They were city-makers on the grand scale. They built the Bute docks in Cardiff, the world's greatest port trading in coal by the 1880s. They owned the lease to the Dowlais ironworks, once the largest in the world. They pioneered the exploitation of the steam coal of the Rhondda valleys. They started up Taff Vale and other major railways. Upon the political, social and religious life of the east Glamorgan community, their influence was omnipresent. The chief role here was played by the second Marquess (1794— 1848). Venturing from his barren Scottish island, he developed a vast industrial empire in South Wales, with a sophisticated and up-to-date system of central management. It was he, too, who built up the massive enterprise of the Bute docks, the trade of which soared from 8,000 tons in 1839 to well over a million 15 years later.
But heredity, as ever, posed its problems. The Bute patrimony and an income of £150,000 a year were inherited by the half-mad third Marquess (1848 1900), who diverted his vagrant mind towards eastern archaeology and eccentric forms of religion. The model for Disraeli's Lothair, he would silence his companions with such conversation-stoppers as `Isn't it monstrous that St Magnus hasn't an octave?' He loathed Cardiff, with its docks, coal freighters and industrial pollution: `Athens and Assisi have spoilt me for anything else'. His picturesque fplly of Castel' Coch is a symbol of misapplied energy as well as of architectural genius. Under the third Marquess, the Butes slowly went downhill. Like other landlords, they faced a stern challenge from aggressive town councillors and mercantile shippers, usually Liberals and strong opponents of the reactionary Tories immured in Cardiff castle. The creation of Barry Docks in 1885, a direct rival to the supremacy of Cardiff and the Bute Docks in the coal export trade, was a massive psychological defeat for the Butes. The fourth Marquess retreated to Scotland and meditated upon* the Durbar at Delhi. In 1947, the Bute flag was lowered for the last time, and the castle passed to the hands of the people of Cardiff. The larger-than-life quality of the Butes makes a balanced assessment difficult. On the debit side, their monopolistic control of Cardiff docks and much of the eastern coalfield made technical innovation hard to achieve and class friction more certain. Their leasehold housing in central Cardiff was an environmental disaster. Bute Town and Tiger Bay were notorious for their squalor and poverty as well as for their legendary, picaresque world of pubs and brothels. The Butes were slum landlords on a colossal scale. On the other hand, the explosive growth and prosperity of the South Wales coal trade in the first half of the 19th century, the rise of the metropolis of Cardiff in the second, would have been impossible without the enterprise of the Butes, the second Marquess above all. On the urban and entrepreneurial progress of Victorian Britain, on its infrastructure of transport and commercial institutions, the stamp of Bute was all-pervasive. As philanthropists and patrons of local culture, there is something to be said for them, too.
The Bute empire may be as dead as the druids: perhaps the Hodge empire is some kind of dismal successor. Only a rash of street and place-names, and the parks of Bute, Sophia and Ninian remain. But the Victorian high noon is worth recapturing precisely, and this splendid book achieves that.
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