Revival and decay
Antonia Martin
An acquaintance of mine has just spent a small legacy on buying himself a 'second home' in Wales. Thereby he has committed at least three sins against today's received opinion, even if you leave out the one about inherited wealth. First, he is the owner of two houses instead of one: second, he has in theory robbed a poor family of a house they might otherwise have been able to afford if people like him did not push prices up: third, he has risked the wrath of Cymdeithas y'r laith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society, whose members have taken to occupying houses owned by the English in the Welsher parts of Wales as a protest against Saxon dilution of the Fro Cymraeg, the heartland. But in all innocence my friend has managed to avoid these tiger traps for the unwary. To start with, his chief interest in life is industrial archaeology, and he has bought his house not in Snowdonia or Dyfed, but in an industrial village near Merthyr. Far from being a property coveted by the locals, it has stood empty and unloved for more than a decade in an area where Welsh is little used, even though Plaid Cymru, for reasons not necessarily attributable to nationalism, is strong.
My friend has in fact performed a service that the second-home owner is not given sufficient credit for. He has restored a 150year-old stone cottage, installed basic conveniences, cleared the garden and demonstrated how attractive such a house can be. He has reduced the rates loss and also, by one, the tally of blank, boarded-up property whose closed faces meet you at every turn in this part of Wales, where sealing up houses and leaving them to rot is almost a local industry. Far from exciting envy, a lot of the people he is in touch with think my friend is a bit daft, so blind are they to the hidden virtues of their native architecture.
Few councils have been more diligent in destroying old housing stock than those in South Wales. It is an attitude born of history and once there was plenty of justification for it. The rotting slums of the early industrial revolution in places like Merthyr cried out for a wiping of the slate and even the undistinguished buildings that replaced the old lodging houses and rat-ridden courts in the town centre were regarded with a degree of understandable pride because they were clean and new. But the destruction has gone on and on, until a group of local people, as daft as my friend, decided to resist more demolition of perfectly restorable property.
In Merthyr, the affair of the Triangle has rumbled on for the past eight years and now shows some sign of a conclusion. The Triangle is a group of seventy-nine ironworkers' cottages in Merthyr, built in about 1807. They form three terraces facing a triangular green, each with a small front garden, and the iron-master who put them there was a hundred years ahead of his time, two hundred if one considers our contemporary disasters of tower blocks. They are rare examples of enlightened planning at a time when haphazardly flung-up back-toback industrial barracks were all the workers could expect.
In 1968, the council's intention to demolish became known, but opposition, powered by local Plaid Cymru support, kicked up such a dust that two public inquiries and a Grade II listing later, the cottages still stand, though ravaged by planning blight. The findings of the second public inquiry are expected any time now, although Plaid Cymru, swept to power with a landslide majority in the May council elections, has promised to preserve them in any case. How economy cuts will affect that promise has yet to be seen.
But much has been lost and gone forever. A stranger in Merthyr today would not know he is in the cradle of the Industrial Revolution where the cannon that powered our side in that war, whose bicentenary we are all celebrating, was manufactured; where Trevithick constructed and drove his first steam locomotive on its eleven-mile journey in 1804, ten years ahead of Stephenson's first working steam engine: where Lucy Thomas pioneered the Welsh steam coal trade that fuelled the Royal Navy : where Nelson came with Lady Hamilton to thank the people for producing the ordnance for his ships: where thousands of miles of rails were rolled to build railways in Russia, India, America. The place had a dynamic that has been submerged in the memory of its human miseries.
In that folk memory, a man like Robert Thompson Crawshay, one of Merthyr's Victorian iron kings, figures as vividly today as he did a hundred years ago when he chopped wages by twenty per cent to keep his iron works going. Crawshay is buried in a country churchyard five miles outside Merthyr, his grave surmounted by an eleven-ton slab that thirteen powerful horses dragged frorh the outskirts of Cardiff. It bears the humbleepitaph,'God Forgive Me'. God certainly has, but many of the older inhabitants of Merthyr have no intention of doing so.
The huge blast furnaces and coke ovens at Crawshay's Cyfarthfa ironworks, by 1803 the biggest in the world, have been too monumental to demolish totally, but great engine houses and other buildings were dynamited at the start of the Second World War to make room for a munitions factory. It is in more recent years that the destruction has gathered pace and is least forgivable. It has included the dismantling and scrapping of the earliest known iron bridge in the country and the falling into almost irreversible decay of some fine early Victorian stables and coach houses, built by another ironmaster, Sir John Guest, whose name is perpetuated in Guest Keen & Nettlefolds.
The old town fathers did a thorough job in obliterating as many reminders as they could of the town's reign as the world's iron capital. Yet checkmate to the iron king. As a man of marked Sir Jasperish tendencies, Crawshay is reputed to have exercised droit de seigneur over the wives and daughters of his iron-workers to such effect that he ran up a total of three hundred illegitimate offspring, whose mothers collected maintenance for them at the works office each week. His material legacies may have been destroyed but others have proved more resistant. The Crawshay features survive on many a Merthyr face today. Genes, after all, are more permanent than pig iron.
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