Black Country Blues: A Welsh Bard Walking

Mary-Ann Constantine, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies

In May 1802 the radical Welsh stonemason and poet, Edward Williams (often known by his bardic name, Iolo Morganwg), set out to walk home from London. Headed ultimately for Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan, he took a circuitous route, travelling up through Oxford and Stratford to Birmingham, then through the Black Country to Shrewsbury and down the Welsh borders. The main reason for his journey was to observe agricultural practices in the border counties and collect information for the Statistical Accounts of Wales, which would be published a few years later. But his diary, a small, battered book with notes scrawled in pencil, records observations on many more subjects than crops and soil types – it is a scattergun compilation of responses to people, places and landscapes, shot through with Williams’s distinctive brand of angry, opinionated energy.

Anon. pencil sketch, ‘Edward Williams, Bardd Braint a Defod (c. 1800)

In Birmingham, first impressions were not good. The Church and King riots which had targeted Dissenters and destroyed the laboratory of Joseph Priestley a decade earlier still cast long shadows: Williams found ‘what might have been expected in a mere manufacturing Town. low, rude, greatly in want of a little polish. the inhabitants are senseless enough to become the tools of any party that might, as in the year 1791, bribe them handsomely.’ He was also disappointed by poor lodgings and inexplicably high prices: ‘articles manufactured here are retailed at a much higher price than they are at a distance of 300 miles.’ Yet he discovered congenial company in ‘the shop of Mr Swinney Printer and Letterfounder in Highstreet,’ where he ‘had a little business and met with politeness.’ He also visited the recently opened Unitarian chapel in New Meetinghouse Street (‘a fine wellbuilt structure, plain and simple, wellwrought freestone ashlar, pews good oak, large and comfortable, a pretty large room for a Library’).

These islands of civility, places where ideas could be exchanged and where the ‘superlatively fine Types and printing’ of people like Swinney made their wider circulation possible, represented the type of society to which the labouring-class, Unitarian, and anti-Establishment Williams aspired. And although he had spent a painful few years in London in the early 1790s trying to get his own volume of poems through the press, he already looked back with some nostalgia on his connections with the group of thinkers and writers who frequented the shop of the printer Joseph Johnson.

As Williams made his way west towards Wolverhampton, however, his mood darkened: industrial landscapes, and the people who inhabited them, evidently disturbed him. He was briefly shocked to see a ‘pretty young woman working at the anvil very handily,’ before reflecting (heatedly and at length) on what might have happened had she ended up on the streets of London in the clutches of ‘that scum of the earth called gentry.’ At Bilston (‘a populous nasty stragling town where I sheltered from a thunder[storm] over a threepenny not more than halfpint of detestable stuff nicknamed ale’) he was overwhelmed by ‘a cloud of smoke and darkness’ from the iron furnaces and forges: ‘what blackness,’ he wrote grimly, ‘spread over everything.’

And proud though he was of his record as a scourge of the upper classes (‘Rascal. Scoundrel. Villain. Devil. […] by these names I have thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of times called those that held the highest offices, and thus as often or oftener have I term’d their diadem’d masters’) Williams’s encounters with the labouring-class locals, and their distinctive dialect, did not go particularly well:

moin for mine, moid for maid, moy for my etc oi for I, troy, try &c at Bilson ask how far to Wolverhampton, I’ll be angd answered a fellow if I know, ask a second, 3, 4^th, 5^th, or 6^th all answered they would be angd if they knew.

The Black Country is judged and found wanting: ‘to biten instead of to bite used in this country, do not like the manners of the people of this part of the Kingdom.’

Anon., Iron Bridge Coalbrookdale Aug 16 1785 (1785). Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust.

After spending the night in Wolverhampton, Williams decided to ‘quit the direct road for Salop to go by the famous Iron Bridge of Colebrook dale.’ His initial response captures the familiar contradictions of the place, its beautiful setting cradling impressive, but destructive, forms of production:

Arrive at Colebrook Dale it has, on a smaller scale, very much the appearance of one of the mountain vales of Glamorgan, its sides steep broken and woody and must have been pleasingly romantic before it was disgraced by the Ironworks and unelegant buildings that now pollute its secrets and violently tear them from Nature.

That sense of a ‘natural’ place defiled by industry was expressed by other visitors, including the Lichfield poet Anna Seward, who had earlier lamented the ‘violation’ of the valley and its ‘outraged groves.’ But Williams, as a mason, was also interested in structural engineering. His closer observations provide some details about the state of the bridge in the summer of 1802:

View the famous Iron Bridge. One of its abbuttements of the Western [side] gave way some time ago, they are now taking it down to lay it on a sounder foundation. the Bridge itself however stands uninjured and over the shattered abuttement now half taken down, a temporary bridge of wood in continuation of the Iron Bridge.

Further information might, perhaps, have been forthcoming, but once again Williams’s encounters with the locals ended with disconcerting abruptness, and more gloomy contemplation of the effects of industrialization on human behaviour:

I with a studied civility asked a few questions, and received only the rudest answer. I asked the Masons employed on the damaged abuttement how many feet in span the Bridge was “Not quite a moil, said he, I knows not how much less” these kind of answers to the civil questions of a stranger are thought to be very brilliant wit. But such everywhere are the manners of the Man-shaped animals that inhabit places of this description.

Edward Williams made much of his labouring-class credentials. These were entirely bona fide: even in old age he never entirely escaped from the obligation to use his craft, walking long distances and working, even in poor health, in all weathers. An anonymous piece published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1789 introduced him to the literary world as a reliable, industrious and ‘absolutely self-taught’ journeyman mason (‘never seen in liquor’); in his political writings, he gleefully identified with Edmund Burke’s ‘Swinish Multitude’ and claimed to speak for them. Yet his reactions to working people on this journey through the industrial heartlands, and the awkwardness of his dealings with them – even, as here, when they are fellow masons – reveals an intriguing level of discomfort. And ‘Man-shaped animals’ sounds dangerously close to Burke.

Page from notebook belonging to Edward Williams. National Library of Wales MS 13174A.

Williams’s notebook is an atypical travel account for the period, and all the more precious for it. This is private, impressionistic writing; at times it reads like something much more modern, a stream of consciousness moving rapidly and associatively from thought to thought. Like many other parts of his vast unpublished archive the political opinions expressed here could have got him into trouble (a vivid fantasy of kings and bishops hanging like a string of onions from St Pauls, for example); in 1802, friends and acquaintances were serving prison sentences for less. The diary’s messy rawness is its greatest boon for historians: Williams is not, for once, projecting a persona for a particular reader, nor being authorially manipulative. The materiality of travel – prices and quality of food and lodgings, the weather, his headaches – jostles with reaction and reflection. These encounters with one of Britain’s industrial heartlands have not been processed into coherence: they have a quality of immediacy, and they are contingent, and inconsistent.

On balance, Williams decided, he was ‘disappointed in Colebrookdale Iron Bridge it has but little of Grandure and its black colour deprives it of a degree of elegance it would otherwise possess. It has lightness and perhaps this very thing deprives it of Grandeur, however it is certainly a curiosity and a work of great ingenuity’. Feeling hungry after his expedition, but thinking it ‘neither prudent nor safe to venture into a public house’ he made do with ‘two small but tolerable penny tarts of goosbery’ from a local market, and left the ‘brutal village’ to its own devices. ‘This abomination of nature,’ he concluded, ‘of iron work of black smoking furnaces and forges of steam engines coal mines iron mines and the still more abominable animals that work them, has very unfortunately taken place in the most beautiful spot of the Dale.’

Further reading