The Master of Penrhyn: Lord Penrhyn, the Great Strike, and the War on Welsh Labour (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798251599350)

THE MASTER OF PENRHYN: Lord Penrhyn, the Great Strike, and the War on Welsh Labour D. Humphreys

On the morning of 22 November 1900, nearly 2,800 men descended the terraces of the Penrhyn slate quarry in the mountains of north Wales and walked away from their work. They would not return for three years. The Great Penrhyn Strike - the longest industrial dispute in British history - had begun.

At its centre stood two irreconcilable forces. On one side, George Sholto Douglas-Pennant, the second Baron Penrhyn: inheritor of one of the greatest fortunes in Wales, master of a castle built on the profits of slavery and the labour of quarrymen, a man of absolute conviction that his property was his to manage on terms he alone would set, and that no union, no government conciliator, no Act of Parliament had any right to tell him otherwise. On the other, the quarrying community of the Ogwen valley: Welsh-speaking, chapel-going, politically literate, possessing a culture of extraordinary richness and a sense of collective identity forged over generations in the rock and the rain of Snowdonia - and, in the autumn of 1900, pushed beyond what it would bear.

The Master of Penrhyn tells the full story of the Great Strike for the first time as narrative history: the provocations that made conflict inevitable, the men and women who sustained three winters of collective resistance against the resources of one of Wales's wealthiest landowners, the national figures - Lloyd George among them - drawn into a dispute that came to stand for something far larger than a single quarry. It tells the story of E. A. Young, Lord Penrhyn's calculating, English-born manager, whose systematic dismantling of workers' organisation drove the quarrymen to the point of no return. It tells the story of William John Parry, the union's formidable founder, who fought the dispute in Parliament, the courts and the press, and paid a heavy personal price for doing so. And it tells the story of the women of Bethesda - the women who managed the impossible household arithmetic of three years without wages, who kept the solidarity networks alive, and who placed in their windows the small printed cards that became the dispute's most enduring symbol: Nid Oes Bradwr yn y Tŷ Hwn. There is no traitor in this house.

This is also a book about Wales: about what it meant to conduct a great industrial battle in the Welsh language, in a Nonconformist culture, in a country with no parliament, no institutional voice, and no mechanism through which a community's specific interests could reach the decisions being made about its life in the corridors of London. The quarrymen of Bethesda were citizens of a state that could not hear them in their own language. They made themselves heard anyway.

The dispute ended in defeat. The union went unrecognised. The men returned on Lord Penrhyn's terms, without concessions. But within three years, the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 had established in statute the right to collective bargaining that Penrhyn had refused to acknowledge - and the evidence of what happened in communities where that right was absent was part of the case that made the Act necessary. The quarrymen did not see what their resistance eventually made possible. Their grandchildren did.

Drawing on parliamentary records, contemporary journalism, Welsh-language sources, and the rich oral tradition of the Ogwen valley, The Master of Penrhyn recovers a story that British labour history has too long neglected - a story about power and principle, about the price communities pay to stand for what they believe is right, and about the stubborn, precise, unforgiving memory of a people who decided what was worth keeping and kept it.