INTRODUCTION: LANGUAGE AND POLITICAL
ECONOMY IN WALES
In 1959, the Welsh economist Brinley Thomas suggested that
industrialization, far from being the gravedigger of the Welsh language
that Welsh nationalists had been calling it since the 1930s, had in
effect strengthened the Welsh language by allowing a population
released from a declining agricultural sector in Wales to transfer to
the growing industrial sector without leaving Wales: “The Welsh
language was saved by the redistribution of a growing population
brought about by industrialism” (Thomas
1959:189). His article proposed a heretical inversion of
expectations, claiming that industrialization had been a
“cauldron of rebirth” for the language, spurred by a kind
of “internal colonialism” different from that later
proposed by Hechter 1975 – one in which
the rural Welsh, like the Irish leaving the land and fleeing from
agriculture, “colonized” hitherto uninhabited regions of
their own country along the lines of the coalfaces. Thomas
concluded:
Instead of bemoaning the rural exodus, the Welsh patriot
should sing the praises of industrial development…. The
unrighteous Mammon in opening up the coalfields at such a pace
unwittingly gave the Welsh language a new lease of life and Welsh
Nonconformity a glorious high noon. (Thomas
1959:192)
Thomas's thesis received a short and testy response,
suggestively entitled “Industrialization did not save the Welsh
language” (Millward 1960), which
concluded, on the contrary, that the net effect of industrialization on
the Welsh language had been “a catastrophe.”
This debate has simmered unresolved ever since (see the summaries in
Jenkins 1998 and Jones
1998). The focus of the debate has always been on the effects of
the massive industrialization in the coalfields of South Wales, and to
a lesser extent in North East Wales (see Pryce 1975, 1998), the effects
of which were admittedly mixed (see the relevant chapters in Jenkins 1998). This more recent literature has
nuanced Thomas's thesis considerably, showing both considerable
variation across different coal-mining districts, spatially as well as
temporally. While in the anthracite coalfields of South Wales
Thomas's thesis is largely borne out (Matthews
1998), in the coalfields of North East Wales, for example, the
demographic gains induced by industrialization were brief rather than
long-term (Pryce 1998). In the valleys of
Glamorgan, one of the districts most profoundly transformed by
industrialization,
At least until the 1870s the bulk of the rural migrants who
ventured into the industrial communities of Glamorgan hailed from
Welsh-speaking counties…. For the period up to the 1870s,
therefore, few historians would deny the validity of the argument that
large-scale migration from rural Wales into Glamorgan proved a blessing
to the Welsh-language. Thereafter the situation changed
dramatically….[I]n the long term, i.e. progressively
over the period 1861 to 1911, the industrialization of the county
‘did not perform miracles’ for the preservation of the
Welsh language and culture but … it did create a vibrant
bilingual society characterized by stable and unstable linguistic
groups which were increasingly receptive to English-language
acculturation. (Jenkins
1998:8–9)
It can be argued, however, that the same processes described by
Thomas happened on a smaller scale in North Wales between
slate-quarrying districts and their agricultural hinterlands (Jenkins
1998:6, P. E. Jones
1989). The slate-quarrying districts of North Wales have in
general displayed, on a smaller scale, the same sorts of population
dynamics that characterized the early periods of the development of the
South Wales coalfields; that is, the exodus of Welsh-speaking
populations from the agrarian economy was in part absorbed by
Welsh-speaking industrial communities in the nearby slate-quarrying
districts. Certainly census reports indicate that the slate-quarrying
towns of North Wales were (and remain today) exemplary Welsh-speaking
centers. Significantly for my present article, the slate-quarrying town
of Bethesda had the highest proportion of Welsh speakers of any
community, agricultural or urban, in Wales in both 1891 and 1911
(according to the data collected in Jones
1998), and the slate quarriers of North Wales were certainly
aware of their status as paradigmatic Welsh-speaking communities.
The coalfields of South Wales, by contrast, were emerging as very
different kinds of speech communities, varying both spatially and
temporally from monoglot Welsh to bilingual to monoglot English. As a
result, unlike the slate-quarrying communities of North West Wales,
these communities never fit comfortably into a dualistic model of Welsh
favored by some Welsh nationalisms – a Wales riven between the
Welsh Wales of the bro (a term denoting a Welsh-speaking
heartland), and an English-speaking Wales beyond, or alternately, a
Welsh Wales consisting of a classless common people (gwerin)
opposed to an upper-class English Wales consisting of anglicized
aristocratic landlords and Anglican clergy (Morgan
1986). In response to these demographic changes wrought by
industry, some commentators chose to see Wales as divided into three;
among them was Alfred Zimmern, who in 1921 characterized this
industrialized region of South Wales as “American
Wales”:
The Wales of today is not a unity. There is not one Wales;
there are three … There is Welsh Wales; there is industrial, or,
as I sometimes think of it, American Wales; and there is upper class or
English Wales. These three represent different types and different
traditions. They are moving in different directions and, if they all
survive, they are not likely to re-unite. (cited in Smith 1993: ix)
By the late 19th century, as we have seen above, it was already
becoming apparent that, linguistically, the industrial communities of
South Wales (“American Wales”) were emerging as a novel
kind of bilingual speech community, bearing as little in common with
“English Wales” as they did to the rural hinterlands of
“Welsh Wales,” including the slate-quarrying communities.
At the same time, industrialization was producing not only new kinds of
speech communities and speakers, but also new voices: the voice of
“American Wales,” typified by the collier, increasingly
spoke in a political idiom of Laborism and socialism, and he did so in
English. The political economic transformations that gave rise to
“American Wales” produced novel kinds of communities both
linguistically and politically, communities that could not be readily
assimilated to the dualistic model of a classless Welsh Wales of the
common people and an upper-class English Wales. But some Welsh
communities, such as the slate-quarrying districts, industrialized and
yet remained within the pale of Welsh Wales. It was in such communities
that one could find an idealized Welsh speaker, the slate quarrier, who
could respond to both these alternate visions of Welsh modernity. The
question is, then, why did this figure specifically come to assume the
role of the exemplary Welsh speaker?
Part of the answer lies in the very different effects that
industrialization had on speech communities along the coalface and the
slate belt. But equally important, I would suggest, is the way that the
very terms of this debate, which introduces political economy
– industry and market – as an independent variable and
community life and language as dependent variables, replicate the way
that the predicament of the Welsh language has been grasped
since the 19th century. This gives us a clue as to why the slate
quarrier emerged as an exemplary Welsh speaker. I. G. Jones has
perceptively commented on this literature (whose intellectual forebears
begin in the 19th century), which argues that the survival of Welsh
“was a function of migration, that it lasted only as long as the
pump is primed with newcomers,” that it “confuses life with
commodities” (Jones 1987:155).
Sociolinguistic processes like language shift and the enregisterment of
languages in bilingual societies are not merely matters of empirical
head counts of actually existing speakers, countable like so many
commodities, nor are they directly “superstructural”
reflexes of changes in the economic “base” (Gal 1989b:348). They are also fundamentally
ideological matters of the formulation and propagation of images of
exemplary speakers – figures who connect topologies of
linguistic variation to topologies of social variation in an exemplary
fashion, imbuing languages as registers with the social properties of
their imagined exemplary speakers. As the case of the quarriers shows,
depictions of such imagined ideal speakers, disseminated in print or
other media, can take on sociolinguistic importance as exemplars or
figures far beyond their empirical numbers. Moreover, as Inoue 2003 shows for another kind of imagined
speaker, such images of stereotypic speakers can emerge not only as
precipitates of actual embodied speech, but also in disembodied,
print-mediated “forms of metalinguistic practice … citing,
quoting and reporting in the circulation of the modern mass
media” (Inoue 2003:318). Welsh print
culture in the late 19th century was more and more densely populated
with (real or imagined) Welsh-speaking voices of quarriers, and
sparsely populated with those of colliers, in proportion to their
actual relative numbers.1
I use the term
“figure” in a sense indebted broadly to Goffman, as Agha
(2003:243, n.8) defines it: “image of
personhood that is associable with a semiotic display itself –
such as the use of an accent,” or, here, with a language. My
argument in part is that imaginings of exemplary speakers of
languages (figures in this sense, such as the quarrier and the
collier) associated with broader social and political positions and
projects have important roles in the valorization of these semiotic
phenomena as registers (Agha 2003, Inoue 2003).
But some such confusion of “life” and
“commodities,” subjects and objects, persons and things,
was characteristic of 19th-century materialism in general and political
economy in particular.2
Such as
Marx's famous discussion, in vol. 1 of Capital, of the
commodity fetish, in which relations between subjects come to be seen
as relations between objects (commodities), and vice versa (e.g., Pietz 1993; Postone 1996:61–63, 166–71).
What
interests me in this essay is this semiotic ideology of
“materialism” that made the slate quarrier (as opposed to a
Welsh farmer, for example) so central to the existence and future of
the Welsh language, and the set of premises about languages and their
speakers that made the existence of a Welsh industry of slate-quarrying
identical with the possibility of a Welsh(-speaking) modernity. It was
precisely by
imagining the Welsh language in productive
engagement with the material world of industry that these imaginings
became persuasively “real.”
When I speak of an ideology of materialism, I want to draw
attention to the historicity and positionality of this ideology. It is
associated with the 19th-century liberal phase of capitalism, in which
material productivity was increasingly seen as a universal criterion of
social worth (Rabinbach 1990, Postone 1996, Manning 2002, 2004a). Since I am
concerned here with ideologies about languages and their speakers as
well as with other forms of sign use (semiosis), I use the term
“semiotic ideologies” rather than “linguistic”
or “language ideologies” (see, e.g., Gal
& Irvine 1995). Keane 2003 defines
semiotic ideologies as follows:
basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function
in the world. It determines, for instance, what people will consider
the role that intentions play in signification to be, what kinds of
possible agent (humans only? Animals? Spirits?) exist to which acts of
signification might be imputed, whether signs are arbitrary or
necessarily linked to their objects, and so forth….
[S]emiotic ideologies are not just about signs, but about
what kinds of agentive subjects and acted-upon objects might be found
in the world. (Keane 2003:419)
That is, semiotic ideologies are informed by indigenous
ontologies, assumptions about what sorts of entities, things,
forces, and agents populate the cosmos, such as those embodied in the
dominant 19th-century ideology of materialism (Rabinbach 1990).
In keeping with this semiotically grounded research program, I will
speak of different qualitative types of sign relations posited by the
philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce: (i) icons (iconic,
iconicity; also likenesses), sign relations founded on
potential, qualitative, subjectively apprehended resemblances between a
sign and its object (as a picture resembles, and hence stands for, the
person or thing portrayed); (ii) indexes (indexical,
indexicality), founded on actual, purely objective, existentially real
relations of causality or contiguity between sign and object (e.g., a
clue and a crime, a bullet and a bullet hole); and (iii)
symbols, purely stipulative relations founded on
intersubjective law, custom, or habit, in the absence of any other
semiotic relation (e.g., all linguistic signs and their objects). See
Keane 2003 for discussion. I will also speak,
following Gal & Irvine 1995, of certain
typical ways that semiotic ideologies construe or recast existing sign
relations: naturalization (whereby arbitrary signs such as
symbols are treated as being relatively natural icons or
indexes), and its converse, conventionalization;
erasure, in which the semiotic field is simplified by the
elision or removal of some of its relations; and recursion, in
which a semiotic opposition significant at one level is redeployed at
another.
The semiotic ideology of materialism involves its own characteristic
set of oppositions, notably the opposition between a material and a
moral universe, spheres of “commodities” and
“life,” and, almost equivalent, an opposition between
technical and social (or cultural) spheres of activity, and an
asymmetric relation between those spheres such that the former
conditioned, informed, or determined the latter, which served as a
reflection of the former. The material universe, in local
understandings, included what we might call the economy, composed of
industry and the market – a sphere dominated by objective
interests; the moral universe was prototypically located in the home or
the chapel, the sphere dominated by subjective sentimental attachment
and affect. The result was a kind of utilitarian version of
Herzfeld's “disemia” (e.g., Herzfeld 1996), which alternates as an antinomy, or
unresolvable contradiction, between philistinism and sentimentalism, so
to speak.
At times, the opposition between English and Welsh echoed this
antinomic opposition between unresolved contradictory positions, as one
observer pithily summed up the opposition between English and Welsh in
one district in 1847: “If interest pleads for English, affection
leans to Welsh” (Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry
1848, cited in Manning 2003). Here English is
a language of material and technical utility, and therefore of
progress, and Welsh is a language of moral sentiment, and therefore of
tradition. Yet again, English could stand for the corrosive aspects of
modernity, and Welsh as the moral security of tradition (for a similar
“disemic” polarization of culture in another colonial
context, see Chatterjee 1992). In brief, the
linguistic opposition between the functional domains of English and
Welsh was precisely the emerging antinomies of modernity itself. But
only if Welsh could be made to step from its walled garden in the moral
sphere of the chapel and the home into the material sphere of
industrial production could Welsh move from traditional stasis into
progress and modernity. For this semiotic mediating role, the
traditional peasant figure, redolent of a vanishing order, that was
favored in other European nationalisms would not suffice (Hofer 1980, Rogers 1987;
however, see Urla 1993 for a parallel case of
“ethnic modernity”), particularly since peasants were
actually fleeing the agrarian economy in droves. The quarrier, however,
was modern, and he spoke Welsh in both the material and the moral
worlds, mediating the opposition.
As I will show, the quarrier stands initially as an exemplary
resident of Welsh Wales, a member of the mythical common people
(gwerin), as opposed to upper-class English Wales, in a
dualistic model of Welsh modernity. This figure was initially
articulated to contest the hegemonic claims of English as the
positively valorized language par excellence of modernity, and he was
imbued with all those essentialized traits that Welsh Liberalism liked
to believe were characteristic of the Welsh people in general.3
Liberalism, in this context, refers both to
19th-century liberalism in general and to Welsh Nonconformist
(Protestant denominational) Liberalism in particular. For some of the
inconsistencies of this “liberalism” see Merfyn Jones 1992, Sherrington
1992, and Manning 2004b.
However, as we will see below, the figure of the quarrier also serves
to oppose Welsh Wales to the threat presented by a very different form
of Welsh modernity: the “American Wales” whose
stereotypical resident was the collier, who came to represent a very
different vision of Wales's future – one associated with the
political narrative of Labor rather than Liberalism, a narrative
expressed increasingly in English rather than Welsh.
4 Initially the collier was imagined by Welsh Liberalism as a
member of the gwerin, very like the quarrier (Edwards 1996:22), but by the turn of the 20th
century, the colliers with their strikes and combinations and languages
of labor and class conflict were increasingly resistant to assimilation
to the Liberal (or compromise “Lib-Lab”) narrative of the
gwerin: “Welsh literature fashioned a stereotypical
goodly collier, appealingly pathetic, to stand in that defensive line
of worthy working people who were to help to restore the good name of
Wales which the Blue Books had traduced…. But … with the
formation of the FED [colliers' union] in 1898, and
[as] the chapel culture began to retreat in the face of
Socialism, Welsh literature's prototypical collier was a doomed
illusion” (Edwards 1996:27). The
deciding moment, perhaps, was the failure of the Liberal nationalist
Cymru Fydd movement of the 1880s and 1890s to accommodate its vision of
Welsh Wales to include what David Lloyd George derisively called
“Newport Englishmen.”
I will show that English had
two very different values with respect to Welsh, first as the language
of progress and utility (English Wales), and second as the language of
the corrosion of tradition and the rise of a new, unruly industrial
communities inhabited by a restless proletariat – American Wales,
a kind of stain, linguistic, moral, and material, on the map of Wales.
The quarrier could stand as a figure of exemplary Welshness contrasted
with both these alternative visions of a modern Wales. The quarriers,
originally a vanguard of Welsh Nonconformist Liberalism bringing the
Welsh common people into modernity despite the aristocratic landlords
and Anglican clergy of English Wales, also served as a rear guard
against the increasingly “mixed” figure of the collier, a
Welsh people holding the line against a nationless
“American” proletariat.
To meet those challenges, the Welsh Wales of the Liberal imagination
would have to provide itself with an exemplary Welsh speaker who was
also modern, and modernity in this context meant industrial modernity.
If industry stands to agriculture as modernity stands to tradition,
then a Welsh language that was not involved in industry was not part of
modernity, and it was doomed to the death that awaited all tradition.
“For all modern purposes … let the Welshman speak
English,” Matthew Arnold (1906
[1866]:10) pithily summed up the net wisdom of Welsh and
English philistinism. As modernity annihilates tradition, industry
supplants agriculture, so English must supplant Welsh – unless
Welsh traditionalism could secrete itself in some walled garden of
sentimental pursuits away from the modern and utilitarian. Or, better
yet, unless modernity itself could be made to speak Welsh. Enter the
slate quarrier.
The streets of Bethesda
This brings us to a rather late contribution to this debate on
industry and the fate of the Welsh language: a song by the band Celt,
who are slate quarriers themselves and who hail from Bethesda, a
traditional center of the slate-quarrying industry. I reproduce the
text in full:
Celt began their performance with this song when I saw them in 1991.
It produces a paradoxical inversion of linguistic expectations. First,
this opening song is English, while the remainder of Celt's
repertoire is entirely Welsh. While the song itself switches (or
returns) to Welsh in its coda, it must itself be treated as a salient
usage of English within Celt's overall repertoire. This linguistic
code-switch is paralleled by a switch of genre. While this song takes
the form of a traditional ballad (sung to the tune of “Bang the
drum slowly”), the remainder of their songs can readily be
classified as some variation of modern rock. The song's position
within Celt's “set” enacts a reversal of expectations,
associating English with traditionalism of genre, and Welsh with
modernity of genre. This reversal is recapitulated within the song: The
old quarryman addresses his grandson in English, and the young
quarryman, suddenly and surprisingly, replies to him in Welsh.
The generational conversation between the dying old man and the young
one, then, unexpectedly places English and Welsh in counterpoint as
traditionalism and modernity, and, moreover, aligns the end of
slate-quarrying with English, and its continuation with Welsh. The
slate quarries bring the Welsh language into the world of industrial
production, of modernity, but ironically the salvation of the Welsh
language in Welsh industry requires the death of the Welsh-speaking
worker from silicosis, itself a product of the slate dust that
everywhere accompanies production. The slate dust, a vector of
industrial death for the individual quarrier, becomes the metonymic
index of the projected death of the Welsh language. The silicosis that
makes the old quarryman unable to breathe and speak is aligned with his
inability to speak Welsh. The young quarrier, who wears a mask
to protect him from slate dust, can continue to speak Welsh and to
engage in that most Welsh of all industries, slate-quarrying, whose
fate is linked to the fate of Welsh.
THE SLATE QUARRIER IN THE 19TH CENTURY
5 Translations of this and all other passages from Welsh are my
own.
One hundred years before Celt sang, a Welsh poet with the bardic name
Glan Elsi had drawn a similar connection between the fates of Welsh
language and the slate industry. Here again, the Welsh-speaking
quarrier has the last word, in the specific sense of final
word, or last token utterance of the language. Both of these
images depend on a prior linkage of the Welsh language with the
activity of slate quarrying. In the 19th century, Liberal apologists
for the Welsh language found in the quarrier their ideal Welsh speaker.
For liberals and quarriers alike, the figure of the slate quarrier came
to condense the variousness of the relation of Welsh to English, so
that the quarrier became a major ideological exemplar of Welshness, a
suitable replacement for the vanishing peasant and a respectable
antidote to the strike-prone coal miner. Not only was the slate
quarrier linguistically Welsh; he was also culturally
Welsh–Liberal, Nonconformist, cultured, temperate, and
respectable, all traits that were linked together by the hegemonic
Welsh Liberal Nonconformist construct of Welshness in the 19th century
(Merfyn Jones 1982, 1986, 1992, Manning 2001a, 2002). The
following assessment from a period newspaper correspondent is
typical:
On the whole the quarrymen are an intelligent class of
workmen…. Speaking in general terms, they are a very orderly set
of men, not given to heavy drinking and debauchery. They almost all
subscribe to a newspaper each week, and can converse intelligently on
the topics of the day. In politics they are almost without exception
Liberals, and in religion Nonconformists. (Carnarvon
and Denbigh Herald, 15 February 1873, p. 6)
By appearing as a stable term in a series of dichotomous oppositions
indexically linked to language, the slate quarrier was a crucial
mediating link, an exemplary mapping, between topologies of linguistic
and social variation, so that the fate of the slate industry and the
Welsh language became one in his person. The imagined figure of the
quarrier as exemplary Welsh speaker, then, allowed Welsh to be seen as
partaking of all the other social properties associated with this
idealized figure; this established the Welsh language as a suitable
vehicle for the moral and material life of a specifically Liberal
conception of Welsh modernity, rather than a barrier to it.
This canonization of the quarrier as a linguistic exemplar of
Welshness (summed up in Glan Elsi's poem, to which I will return
throughout) was partially a broader cultural precipitate of the
quarriers' own “linguistic” critique of production, a
“private” debate within production that they projected, via
the Welsh press, onto the public canvas of Wales. The quarriers wrote
themselves into the Liberal narrative of modernity by their own
contributions to the Welsh Liberal press. To understand the image of
the quarrier in the broader society, then, we must explore the
quarriers' own contributions and their rhetorical ends.
THE ROCK DOES NOT UNDERSTAND ENGLISH
This broader naturalized imagining of the relation of slate rock and
the Welsh language derives from the slate quarriers' own
ideologies about the relation of language and geology, which they
expressed in an aphorism: The reason the Welsh had to work the rock was
that “the rock did not understand English.” From the
mid-1860s on, many letters to the Welsh press by self-designated
quarriers begin to appear; the writers used noms de plume that
uniformly drew attention to their position in the labor process for
authorization. They articulated a fairly systematic
“productivist” critique of what the quarriers sometimes
called “the English method” of working quarries, part of
which involved naturalizing the relationship between speaking Welsh and
the activity of slate production. This productivist critique, as I have
shown elsewhere (Manning 2001a, 2002, 2003), linked the
Welsh language and ethnicity with activities associated with
“industry” – that is, the use-value dimension of
commodity production – and English with “the market,”
the exchange-value dimension of commodity production.6
By “industry” I mean in general industrial
production, or manufacture, as opposed to agricultural production, and
as opposed to the spheres of distribution and consumption, the
market.
These two aspects internal to commodity production, in
the quarriers' ideology, were externalized and materialized as
being spatio-temporally separated processes in discrete locations,
standing as industry to market, and as Welsh quarrying village to the
markets of the world. The net result of such a semiotic polarization
was that the Welsh language appeared to be the language of human
interaction with nature – industry par excellence – while
English came to be associated with relatively nonproductive forms of
commercial artifice overlaid on this “natural” activity
(
Manning 2002). Productivism, then, led to
naturalization of the relation of knowledge of slate rock to knowledge
of Welsh in the quarriers' imagination: The rock really did not
speak English. These workers, then, succeeded
indirectly in
canonizing themselves as national exemplars.
But what was it that Welsh liberalism found “good to
think” in the slate quarrier? The quarriers' ethnicizing
rhetoric cast their disputes about matters internal to production into
more general terms that made them recognizable as part of the broader
struggles of Welsh Liberalism. At the same time, their ethnic rhetoric,
which emphasized linguistic difference as constitutive of the division
of labor in the quarries, along with their casting their complaints as
instances of relatively undifferentiated ethnic oppression
(gormes), allowed them to be seen as artisanal members of a
classless common people (gwerin), in whose name Welsh
Liberalism fought (Morgan 1986
[1967], Merfyn Jones 1992), rather
than as an anomalous and dangerous proletariat, represented
archetypically by the coal-miner, for whom Laborism would later
speak.
THE LIBERAL QUARRIER
In the Liberal imagination, the quarriers were essentially another
group of the gwerin suffering from undifferentiated oppression
(gormes, gorthrwm) at the hands of Englishmen, as English
landlords and capital encompassed Welsh tenants and labor, and as the
Anglican church encompassed Nonconformist Wales (Merfyn Jones 1992). The category of gwerin
represents an undifferentiated group of the ethnically oppressed Welsh
common people opposed in the aggregate to the English, and their myriad
struggles are grasped in similarly undifferentiated terms. This allowed
the struggles of the Welsh quarriers to become metonyms for the
struggle of Welsh Liberalism writ large. It was this apparent alignment
that allowed Welsh quarriers to find such a ready ally in the Welsh
Nonconformist Liberal press, which could see the quarriers'
struggles in familiar and reassuringly universalizing terms as being
the struggle of a common people for justice (cyfiawnder) and
freedom (rhyddid) against oppression (gormes), rather
than as the narrow struggle of an industrial proletariat against
exploitation. The former interpretation seemed, moreover, to take the
struggle itself and its object out of the material world of production
and economy into the moral political world of freedom and justice. A
newspaper commentator wrote in 1874:
Bringing justice (cyfiawnder) to its place is
always worthy of struggle and sacrifice, and the quarriers of Llanberis
can feel that they have been well strengthened to contribute their part
in common struggle and sacrifice of humanity for the glorious hegemony
of justice…. Their struggle can be looked upon as a moral
contest between oppression (gormes) and freedom
(rhyddid). (Y Goleaud, 1 August 1874, p. 2)
The figure of the slate quarrier served as a particular exemplar of
the general predicament of the Welsh people. The opposition between
labor and capital in most slate quarries was correlated with a
virtually categorical linguistic opposition between Welsh quarriers and
English owners (Merfyn Jones 1988:47).
Moreover, to this linguistic divide there corresponded a broader
cultural and political one: The quarrier was Nonconformist Protestant,
the owner Anglican; the quarrier a Liberal, the owner a Tory; and so
on. The slate quarriers, then, are perhaps the best Welsh exemplars of
Hechter's “cultural division of labor,” and indeed,
his model of “Internal Colonialism” (Hechter 1975) seems in large part to recapitulate
the basic 19th-century liberal thesis of the classless Welsh
gwerin suffering from oppression at the hands of the English
(Lovering 1978:65–6).
The quarrier was associated with all those attributes that the Welsh
Liberal imagination liked to associate with Welsh. The Welsh language
was seen as intrinsically respectable, cultured, temperate, and above
all religious, and the quarriers, at least in principle, were all these
things. Even his battles against his employers could be seen as
enacting the various theses that animated the multiple crusades of
Welsh Liberalism in the period – yet another battle by the
classless Welsh gwerin (variously tenant-farmers,
Nonconformist Protestant worshippers, or slate quarriers) against a
culturally alien, English or anglicizing or Anglican upper estate. The
prior question, then, is how did the Welsh language itself
come to have all of these associations?
OF WHITE AND BROWN BREAD: A UTILITARIAN
DISEMIA
By the second half of the 19th century, in the wake of the infamous
“Blue Books” inquiry into the state of education in Wales
(1847), Welsh and English fell into an uneasy and ill-defined
complementary opposition in Welsh Liberal ideology (Edwards 1980; Jones 1987,
1992; Williams 1988, 1992). In brief,
the general question addressed by the Blue Books was the causes of the
purported general ignorance, backwardness, and immorality of the Welsh
people. The answer was “Welsh.” The conclusions of the
report, whose commissioners were Welsh Anglicans, shocked and outraged
Welsh Nonconformist Liberals, who soon labeled it the “betrayal
of the Blue Books” (brad y Llyfrau Gleision) (Morgan 1991); however, it is equally true that the
publication of the report produced unexpected benefits for this
audience. As Sian Rhiannon Williams has written, “The
‘betrayal of the Blue Books’ gave a basis to the
Nonconformists to claim that they were the guardians of the language
and the nation, and after the publication of the Report of 1847
Welshness and Nonconformism became inseparable” (Williams 1988:50).
The conclusions of the Blue Books implied that Welsh might not be of
any particular value at all, and, indeed, many (Welsh Liberals
included) stopped just short of advocating linguistic euthanasia (Millward 1991b). English, there was no question,
was the language of utility and useful knowledge, the best language for
talking “about money and counting,” as Gwalchmai would have
it. Welsh was condemned by the Blue Books as its antithesis. If we are
to understand what properties the quarrier had in relation to the Welsh
language that made him good to think, we must first understand the way
in which the unchallenged thesis of the “Utility of
English” produced and conditioned the various properties of Welsh
qua antithesis.
First, Welsh became opposed to the utility of English as a
complementary residuum of all that was not utility – thus, the
sphere of the moral, the sentimental, the religious, and the
impractical (see, e.g., Edwards 1980; Jones
1987, 1992; Millward 1991a; Williams 1988, 1992). Second,
English became opposed to Welsh via the derived thesis that set up
Welsh as the language of the moral and respectable and English as that
of the immoral and dangerous, the language of all that Welsh
“scorned or feared to express” (Jones
1987:75). Third, the opposition between English and Welsh was
reproduced recursively within the domain of utility, so that Welsh
stood to English as practical knowledge much as a craftsman's
skill stood to theoretical knowledge (e.g., as quarrying to the science
of geology), or as industry stood to the market within the domain of
production and exchange. I will take up each of these themes again with
respect to the quarrier and his exemplary status.
Complementarity
The thesis of English as the language of utility and progress implied
a complementary position for Welsh as the language of sentimental
attachment and stasis. The quintessential 19th-century Welsh self-made
man, David Davies Llandinam (of the Ocean Coal Company), summed up the
compromise position perfectly:
He said that this was the first Eisteddfod [Bardic
festival] he had ever attended, but he hoped it would not be the
last. He was himself a great admirer of the old Welsh language, and he
had no sympathy with those who reviled their country and language
(applause). Still he had seen enough of the world to know the best
medium to make money by was English; and he would advise every one of
his countrymen to master it perfectly (applause). If they were content
with brown bread, let them of course remain where they were; but if
they wished to enjoy the luxuries of life, with white bread to boot,
the way they would do so would be by the acquisition of English. He
knew what it was to eat both (cheers). (Aberystwyth Observer,
30 September 1865)
Davies presents Welsh here as the language of sentimental attachment,
opposed to the forthright utility of English. The parallel association
of English with white bread and Welsh with brown reiterates this point,
linking the moral order of languages to the material order of objects,
specifically commodities. Not only does white bread oppose brown as the
bread of luxury to the bread of poverty, but white bread was sold
according to market prices, while brown bread (“household
bread”) was sold at regulated or subsidized prices (Thompson
1971:80–1). While nowadays we associate
brown bread with healthy, wholesome goodness, this subsidized brown
bread was often substandard, made with inferior ingredients or fillers.
Indeed, Davies himself was said to have cried when forced to eat it as
a child. White bread could therefore stand to brown bread
“totemically” as the unfettered logic of the triumphant
Liberal political economy stood to the traditional moral economy, an
economy of provisioning subsidized and regulated by the state. The
totemic series that Welsh is “brown bread” to English
“white bread” produces Welsh as a historical residuum, a
social stasis to be replaced by self-evidently superior social
progress.
Following this logic, Welsh Liberal ideologies always accepted the
thesis of the utility of English, simply aligning Welsh with various
sectioned-off domains of non-utility, such as home, chapel, or poetry.
They hoped that in these “walled gardens” the principle of
complementarity would be the salvation of Welsh. Thus, by complementary
contrast with English, Welsh came to represent a language of culture
suitable for literary pursuits, a language of sentiment suitable for
private pursuits, and especially a language of religion. It came to be
seen as the “language of the heavens” in opposition to
English, and the fate of the chapel and the language were linked (Williams 1988). In one of many possible examples,
the publisher Thomas Gee reacted to the prophecies of, and apologias
for, the imminent death of Welsh thus in 1866:
Let English be the language of the market, and Welsh the
language of religion. Let English have the world, and Welsh the sacred
(sanctuary)…. Let us keep our language, our pulpit, and national
religiousness. If we are poor in money, we will be rich in the wealth
of an infinitely higher nature. Let the foreigner work the wealth which
lies in our mountains, we have a wealth a thousand times richer in our
language and our ministry. (Gee, Y Cymraeg a'r Dyfodol
[The Welsh language and the future], cited in Edwards 1980:340–1)
Thus, Welsh became a language of moral sentiment as opposed to
material interests (Manning 2004a), a
language of parlor culture and eisteddfodau as opposed to
public life and the market.
Respectability
Yet again, if Welsh were to play the moral and cultured antithesis to
the material and utilitarian thesis of English, by a second antithesis
English became the language of the immoral as opposed to the moral, the
rough as opposed to the respectable, the politically revolutionary as
opposed to the reformist, the language of labor as opposed to
liberalism. To follow a popular formulation, English became the
language of all that Welsh feared to express (I. G. Jones 1987). In the Welsh imagination, for the
working class at least, respectability was aligned with Welshness and
roughness with English. The status opposition between
“respectables” and “roughs,” “people of
the chapel” and “people of the tavern,”7
In Welsh sociology and sociolinguistics,
these are called buchedd ‘way of life, lifestyle’
groupings, where Buchedd A is the respectable “people of the
chapel” and Buchedd B is the rough “people of the
tavern” (Owen 1986:111–14; Morgan
1986:148–49). Morgan (1986:149) notes that nationalist writers like O. M.
Edwards portrayed the common people (gwerin) of Wales as if
they were all Buchedd A.
within every British working-class
community was recursively projected onto the map of Wales, such that
the slate quarriers of Welsh Wales would stand opposed to the colliers
of American Wales as a respectable working class to a rough one.
8 In reality, of course, the slate quarriers,
skilled or not, were no more uniformly respectable, cultured
chapel-goers than the colliers were uniformly rough, English-speaking
denizens of the public house, nor were collier strikes noted for
violence (on the first point, see e.g. Roberts
1988; on the latter, see the work of H. T. Edwards and I. G.
Jones).
Although earlier Liberal ideologues of Welsh had taken
comfort in the idea that the very word “strike” was English
and the activity it described was a pernicious external influence, as
South Welsh turned toward Laborism and socialism, English came to be
seen as its emblematic language (I. G.
Jones
1987), thus reproducing the same ideological opposition with a
different valuation of the terms.
Practicality
Last, the Blue Books alleged not only that English was the language
of utility, but also that Welsh lacked any utility whatsoever. Whatever
benefit the Welsh language had in imparting essentially useless
knowledge such as poetry or religion, it was the cause of the Welsh
“remain[ing] inferior in every branch of practical
knowledge and skill” (Reports of the Commissioners of
Inquiry 1848:522). But in the image of the quarriers, a
Welsh-speaking working class, the asymmetric complementarity between
English and Welsh could be recursively reproduced within the
domain of utility. Within the domain ruled by utility, the market
clearly belonged to English, but what of industry, in the sense of
productive interaction with the material world, “practical
knowledge and skill”? Here was a domain where the Welsh
participated practically: after all, who would break the rock in Wales
but the Welsh? Perhaps the finished slates spoke English, but the rough
rock from which they were hewn spoke only Welsh. Thus, if English was
incontestably the language of commerce, then Welsh was in not a few
cases the language of industry. The Welsh quarriers could see their
practical skill as mediators between rock in its natural state
(craig) and rock in its cultural state (cerrig), so
that the skill of the quarrier, condensed and displayed in the Welsh
language – which had a referential monopoly both on rock in the
natural state (raw material) and on the industrial process that
converted it into its cultural state as commodity – stood
totemically opposed to the cultural sphere of the market, whose domain
was English, which had a referential monopoly on rock in its cultural
form as commodity (Manning 2001a, 2002). The quarrier's skill turned “the
materials formed by nature in the mountain into slates suitable to send
to all the markets of the world” (Peris 1896 [1875]:70).
A trip to Ffestiniog: The cultured quarrier
By the late 19th century, the quarrier had become as cultured,
religious, literate, and respectable as it was possible for a member of
the Welsh gwerin to become. His culturedness in nonproductive
spheres was contingent on his skill within production, and his
culturedness outside of production was brought into the domain of
production by his distinctive lunchtime canteen practices. When
quarriers spoke in the pages of the Welsh Liberal press, they often
spoke anonymously, but they did so in their own collective name: Most
letters were signed simply chwarelwr ‘quarrier’,
or some more specific craft occupation (always a relatively skilled
one, however). The self-negation of the speaker's private
identity, necessary to allow his stance to seem representative and
general in the public forum of print, required a decentering anonymity
(Warner 1990:42), but at the same time it
dictated a choice of pseudonym that gave some general positive
inflection to his stance (hence the popularity in the Welsh press of
names like carwr x, ‘lover of x’, where
x is something indisputably good, like freedom, order, or
justice), replacing his individual, private appellation (proper name)
with a public, generic pseudonym. For the quarriers, it was their
position in production as skilled workers that lent this generalizable,
typifying authority. Since the term chwarelwr draws attention
to the skill of the craftsman – here, cultural authority –
the authorization to speak in public outside of production derives from
skill, the category within material production that is cognate with
moral culture. At the same time, the insistent use of a broadly generic
term such as chwarelwr allowed individual workers to present
their individual contributions in the press as if these emanated from a
collective voice, a collective authority. The quarriers' own
definitions of the name in which they spoke, chwarelwr,
indicated that it was in use as an occupational “shifter,”
a term whose reference shifts depending on indexical features of
context, denoting now quarriers in general, irrespective of skill, and
now only the most skilled quarriers (see Silverstein 1976 on shifters;
Gal 1991; Herzfeld
1996; Manning 2001b on ethnic or group
shifters; and Quam-Wickham 1999 on the
“slipperiness of skill”). Their attempts to restrict the
“proper” use of this term to skilled quarriers was the key
to their self-construction that equated skill (the culture of the
material world of production) with respectability (the culture of the
moral world outside production). As Knox (1999:103) notes for another British working-class
culture of the same period, respectability in the moral sphere echoes
skill in the material sphere, “reproducing the status hierarchies
of the workplace in the wider society.”
In general, these quarriers were responding to a widespread
19th-century social ontology of a uniform and unidimensional civilizing
process in which material progress and moral progress went hand in
hand, an ontology in which the indigenes of the British colonies stood
to the metropole as the British lower orders stood to the bourgeoisie,
as women to men, children to adults, savages to civilized, past to
present, and so on (Kuklick 1991, chap. 3).
These oppositions constitutive of the social ontology of empire were
recursively reproduced within the working orders, producing an
opposition between unskilled, rough plebeians (often of Irish or
agricultural background) and a skilled, respectable, British
“labor aristocracy,” and, in consequence, a whole series of
recursive invidious distinctions of moral and material status between
these (Kuklick 1991: 94ff.).
But the slate quarrier had not always been the image of cultured
respectability for Welsh Liberalism. In fact, not too long before,
travelers to slate-quarrying towns like Blaenau Ffestiniog and Bethesda
had been horrified by the degraded moral condition of the working
populace. Their lack of thrift, drunkenness, and general boisterousness
presented an image very distant from the respectable Welsh speakers
they would later become. Such images of the quarrying communities were
relatively common in the Welsh press during the period before the
formation of the Union (1874) (see Yr Herald
Cymraeg, 17 July 1858, p. 7). These communities were growing
by leaps and bounds, with their populations doubling in a few years. Some
observers noted that the “rough” and “respectable”
segments of the working class, the “people of the tavern” and
the “people of the chapel,” were beginning to coalesce around a
craft hierarchy, and it is this, perhaps, that provided the immediate
empirical basis for the ideological emergence of the cultured
quarrier:
I asked someone who was sober and close to me, whether those
that were drunk were the quarriers? He said that the majority of them
were miners and labourers, but the youngest of them were
quarriers…. . There were very many of these people (who my
friend called riders), enough to make a stranger think that
the quarriers were the lowest men under the sun. But I was gladdened to
understand that these were a small class in comparison, and that there
was another class of sober, honest, respectable and religious men, and
that this was the largest class amongst them. (Yr Herald
Cymraeg, 17 July 1858, p. 7)
Ironically, then, the cultured respectability of the quarriers begins
to emerge via opposition to a large segment of the working class in
these very towns, who were neither cultured nor respectable. For the
quarriers, and their apologists in the Welsh press, the question of
respectability became one of the referential precision of the term
“quarrier” itself. Miners and other laborers in the quarry
were admittedly drunken and uncouth, but then, they were not
“real quarriers.” The more that travelers criticized the
morals of the slate communities, the more the quarriers themselves
began to answer in print that the real quarriers were not to blame,
based on an explicit ideology of craft control of the proper reference
of the term “quarrier.”9
Such
metapragmatic control of the proper reference of craft terms is one way
that skilled craftsmen created a skill-based hierarchy and constituted
themselves as a “labor aristocracy.” British colliers
similarly insisted that the term “collier” did not refer
merely to “those who worked around a mine or a pit,” but
only to those “who possessed or claimed to possess specialized
skills” (Harrison 1978:15,
n.1).
Thus, one quarrier (signing himself
chwarelwr
‘quarrier’) took a moralizing traveler (a certain Arthur)
to task for mistakenly confusing the quarrier “in the strict
sense” with the quarrier “speaking loosely”; the
former, he wrote, were, among other things, respectable, while the
latter were not, consisting largely of “strangers and
newcomers,” in this case unskilled workers fresh from
agricultural occupations in other Welsh-speaking areas.
10 Skilled quarriers (slate makers) saw
themselves are the antithesis of agricultural laborers. The former were
recruited from quarrying communities via informal apprenticeship
directly into productive slate-making, and the latter were recruited
initially into unskilled laboring positions; the former entered the
status hierarchy “from the top,” the latter “from the
bottom” (Manning 2002). Quarriers
tended to deemphasize any incidental agricultural activities in which
they might engage, emphasizing their own distance from agriculture and
displaying considerable contempt for unskilled workers recruited from
farms, referring to them as “foreigners” or comparing them
to farm animals (Merfyn Jones 1982:21–22). Alongside these occupational
distinctions there were also distinctions of consumption patterns in
diet and dress (Merfyn Jones 1982:31 ff.).
The following is a typical assessment, emphasizing the parallel
opposition between physical strength (a property shared with farm
animals) and skill (cf. Quam-Wickham 1999):
“Herds – well, say gangs if you like it better, of ignorant
labourers used to some to the quarries from Anglesea [sic].
Their ignorance was only equalled by their awkwardness. Compared with
the agile quarryman, they looked exceedingly clumsy and very
slow” (Richards 1876:73).
This
chwarelwr was reflexively constituting the very authority of
the name (
chwarelwr) in which he spoke:
One thing is certain, that the picture that
[Arthur] gives of us as quarriers and as believers is
incorrect and unfair. If Arthur is from Ffestiniog, and as
quick in his understanding that he can perfect his knowledge
about the craft of making slates in a month's time, then he must
know the definition given here, as in other places, to the
word quarrier [chwarelwr], and that not
everyone who works in a quarry is a quarrier. It must be admitted that
there is here dreadful drinking and drunkenness, and that the language
which is heard along the streets is frightful – the curses, oaths
and shrieks of the drunks are extremely painful. But it is not the
quarriers as a class who are those that are guilty of these things
(though there are some exceptions); but the majority are
‘strangers and newcomers,’ as they were called by the Rev.
William Edwards, Aberdâr, when he was here. (Y Faner ac
Amserau Cymru, 7 December 1864)
Following the dominant semiotic ideology of 19th-century materialism,
here again the moral life of the community (culture, respectability,
religiousness) depends on its material position in production (craft
skill). This craft skill is the crucial element in identifying the
“real quarriers,” and therefore the respectable elements of
the community. Skill is the material equivalent of moral culture, and
at the same time stands as a qualitative moral counterpart to purely
material, physical labor, measurable quantitatively in terms of
strength (Quam-Wickham 1999).
Skill makes the quarrier, but what is skill? The stereotypical
intension of the term chwarelwr is closely connected with
notions of skill as a holistic property, including within it the
entirety of the labor process of production. Its shifting referential
applicability to individual workers makes it a “shifter”
based on a gradient participation in this property. For example, all
accounts agree that “at times all of the men who work in a quarry
are quarriers, including the arloeswyr
[‘pioneers', a kind of unskilled worker] and the
labr-greigwyr [lit. ‘labor-rockmen’, whose
job involved removing waste rock covering slate deposits] of all
kinds” (Peris 1896:274). Thus, the
loose sense of the term simply means all workers in a quarry, skilled
or unskilled. The term is also used “at other times, …
restricted to the slate-workers alone [i.e. those that are
involved in producing slates (saleable commodities)]’ (Peris 1896:274). Here a distinction is introduced
between unskilled “laborers” and skilled
“craftsmen,” ultimately depending on productivity. What
unites certain laborers is not their payment system but the nature of
their product: True quarriers are truly “productive,” that
is, involved directly or indirectly in the production of useful
products – commodities – , while laborers are involved only
in the production and removal of waste rock, however necessary this
activity may be to production.11
For
example, the definition of “productive labor” given by Adam
Smith requires that such labor result in a useful material
object – a commodity; see Jean-Baptiste Say's discussion of
“immaterial products” for a criticism of this definition
(Moore 2003:332–34). The subjective
skill of the quarrier was objectified in his product, the quality of
the product becoming an indexical icon of the skill of its maker
(“No one goes to the marker without seeing the quarrier in the
slates; … nor was the slate suitable for the market at all if
the image of the quarrier as a worker was not [visible] on
its form” (Y Faner ac Amserau Cymru, 24 November 1874,
p. 14).
On the other hand, the nature of the payment system
makes
labr-greigwyr ‘bad rockmen’, who have a
bargain contract system like true quarriers, more skilled than
arloeswyr ‘pioneers’, who are paid on a day wage
system.
12 In some definitions,
chwarelwr is identical to barganwr
‘bargain-taker’ (William Ryle Davies, “Dewi
Peris” (obituary), Y Geninen 10, 1892, p. 26). That is,
it is the wage contract type characteristics of skilled workers that
constitute them as skilled workers (here including
labr-greigwyr, who are also ‘bargain-takers’).
However, Huw Menander Jones (1884:307–8) essentially treats
labr-greigwyr as laborers with pretensions: “They are
not quarriers, but common laborers, who have proselytized themselves in
amongst the quarriers”; but the moment they receive a
bargen (of any kind), “that is the moment they are
baptized as a ‘quarrier’, and he is known, from then on, as
a labr-greigwyr” (1884:308).
Thus, they are a
hybrid category, as their hyphenated name implies: “It can be
said that he [
labr-greigiwr] is between the
‘laborer’ [
labrwr] and the
‘rockman’ [
creigiwr]; he has some degree
of experience to be able to blast and free the rock in the most
effective manner” (
Emrys Jones 1964:242).
The pinnacle of skill in all these definitions are slate-makers, but even
specialists within slate-making are not the “true” quarriers.
Dewi Peris opined that
a complete (‘thorough’) quarrier, in the
narrowest sense of the word, is one who can make slates everywhere,
– this, in truth, is the true quarrier – who can get them
from the rock (creigio), thick-split them
(brashollti), split them (hollti) and dress them
(naddu)13
For a general picture
of the process of slate production, see Manning 2001a.
; so that, were he released by
himself into the mountains, he would come back with a load of slates,
ready for the market, completely from his own labor. A quarrier
in
part, more or less, are all the rest; but this one is
a
complete quarrier. (Peris
1896
[1871]:274)
A quarrier in the strict sense is one who refuses the detailed
division of labor entirely, a worker who commands all the skills of
quarrying, and who can take the slate from the rock wall to the shed
and thence to market by himself. All the other types of skilled
laborers in the quarry are merely sundered parts of this complete
quarrier (note the exclusion of the laborers from this holistic unity
of skill). The term “quarrier,” then, is a “group
shifter,” calibrated here to gradient participation in the skill
of quarrying, which is itself calibrated to shifting notions of
productivity (on productivity as a shifter in 19th-century political
economic discourse, see Manning 2004a). It is
thus proximity to the finished commodity and the market that makes a
worker productive, skilled, able to bargain with slate-owners as an
equal, a seller of commodities, and not as an inferior, a seller of
mere undifferentiated, unskilled labor.14
The latter is typified by the “navvy,” a
rootless, mobile, unskilled laborer par excellence, distinguished only
by his strength and menial occupation, associated with the railroad
industry, often from an agrarian background, or Irish ethnicity,
occupying the bottom of the labor hierarchy of 19th-century Britain
(Brooke 1983). Quarriers, like all labor
aristocracies, disliked being portrayed as navvies. In a review of
Melville Richards's (1876) book on slate
quarrying, cast as a caban dialog, quarriers are portrayed as
criticizing the book's picture of quarriers at work; one complains
that the workers in the picture “look more like navvies
than quarriers”; another calls the portrayed workers an
impossible hybrid, a contradiction in terms, a
“navvy-quarrier” (nafi-chwarelwr) (Y
Genedl Gymreig, 8 November 1882, p. 2). See Dot Jones 1995 for the navvy as a figure of linguistic
and moral pollution accompanying the advent of the
railroads.
It is by insisting on precision of reference in the use of this
shifting term that the quarriers could claim that all quarriers were
cultured and respectable, because by insisting that only the most
skilled quarriers were quarriers at all, the proper extension
of the craft term, defined by skill, could be shown to be identical
with the respectable portion of the local working population. Skill
(nominal or real) in the material world of production leads pari
passu to authority and respectability in the moral universe.
Hence, we find that when quarriers chose to speak in the Welsh press in
some name other than chwarelwr, which, as we have seen, is a
shifter implying relative skill, they chose more specific
skilled positions in the labor process. Craftsmen could speak
publicly with the authority of skill; laborers could not.
THE CULTURE OF THE CABAN:
INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY AT WORK
“If you want to understand the quarrier, go to his
caban” (Y Chwarelwr 7, 1876, p. 107). As the
quarriers came to speak in their own name in the Welsh press, as
chwarelwyr, indexing their collective skill in the material
sphere that authorized their entry into the moral world of cultured
respectability, the quarrier's voice entered the Welsh press as an
exemplar of the industrial democracy that seemed to characterize all of
the quarriers' interactions, and most of all the lunchtime
canteen, the caban. In its material definition, the
caban was merely “the building where the quarriers ate
their food during lunchtime,” but in its moral aspect, it was
“the cradle of the quarrier's culture” (E. Jones 1964:38).
It was in these little “parliaments” that the quarriers
brought the moral universe of respectable culture, including debates
and eisteddfodau, into the midst of the material world of
production, and brought the genres of feedom (rhyddid) into
the very lair of gormes and gorthrwm. The folkloric
transformation of the quarrier revolved around the constitution of the
culture of the caban as an emblem of quarriers' thriving
culture. The caban in literary representations as well as in
surviving record books of caban meetings is the exemplary
locus of the culturedness of the quarrier, a lunchtime canteen
“which was also the union office, debating chamber and the scene
of permanent tests of literary skill” (Merfyn Jones 1982:57). The emblematization and
folklorization of the caban culture is a metonym of the way
that the slate quarrier participated in 19th-century Welsh print
culture as both an exemplary object and an active participant.
In the caban, the principal and defining speech genre, at
least as appropriated in the Welsh press, was the caban dialog
(ymddyddanion y caban). From the time we find quarriers
adopting the standard literary genre of letter-writing to register
their voice in the Welsh press, we find writers in the Welsh press in
turn adopting the voice of the quarrier, and in particular the (now
secondary) genre of the caban dialog, to discuss topics of the
day, related to quarrying or not. For example, on 14 May 1864, Yr
Herald Cymraeg ran on its front page a fictive Ymddyddanion y
caban ‘Conversations in the [lunchtime]
caban’ signed by cabanwr ‘one of the
caban’. The contribution (presumably submitted by a
quarrier) was part of a general groundswell during this period of
writing related to quarriers and their attempts at union formation.
This contribution spurred a series of anonymous imitations (possibly
editorial) entitled Ymddiddanion yn marics y chwarelwyr
‘Conversations in the barracks of the quarriers’ (8, 15,
and 22 July 1865); the caban dialog as primary speech genre
had now become part of a repertoire of genres (Bakhtin 1986:61–2) within the complex jumble of
genres characteristic of the Welsh press. The editors adopted this
remarkably “democratic” genre, and the voice of the
literate and cultured quarrier, to cover topics of general cultural
interest, from religion to the relative utility of Welsh and English to
literary meetings and pursuits. The genre reappeared in a column
entitled Caban Rolant Dafydd in Y Chwarelwr in 1876
(after the union is successfully formed). In 1881–1882, Y
Genedl Gymraeg used a long series of Ymddyddanion y caban
to provide a running commentary on an ongoing acrimonious debate in the
same paper between Melville Richards (Morgrugyn Machno), the author of
a well-known work on slate-quarrying (Richards
1876) and a small quarry-owner, and a self-styled Gweithiwr
(‘worker’) on the “sorry state of the slate
market.” This series included, ironically, a summary and review
of Richards's own book cast in the form of a caban
literary conversation, in which the voice of the quarrier is allowed to
retort to Richards's characterizations of quarriers. The voice of
the quarrier had by now become itself a privileged source of
“liberal” speech genres, liberal in form and content alike,
and his caban conversations became emblems of the
authentically Welsh and authentically liberal culture of the
quarries.
RETURN TO FFESTINIOG: THE MODEL STRIKE IN
THE MODEL VILLAGE
Welsh nationalism, in the 19th century or the early 20th, did not
generally find the proletariat as such good to think. Moreover, the
very idea, as well as the accomplished fact, of an industrial
proletariat has always seemed to Welsh nationalism to be a form of
pollution of specifically English derivation. The South Welsh coal
miner has inherited the position of “archetypal
proletarian” (Harrison 1978), as
symbolically central to the Wales of the Labor movement as he is
marginal to Welsh liberalism and nationalism (Metcalfe 1989). But somehow the slate quarrier was
redeemed in Welsh nationalism where the coal miner was not (for a
discussion of literary attempts at his redemption, see Edwards 1994, 1996). O. M.
Edwards, cultural reformer and Welsh nationalist of the 1890s, did not
in general see the future of Wales in its industrial localities; his
was a Volkisch agrarian paradise, Canaan to the Samaria of South Wales
(Smith 1993:66; Sherrington 1992). The only exception he ever made
was the slate quarries of Ffestiniog (and it is striking how much the
image of Ffestiniog has changed since 1858):
Not every industrial district can attract worthless idlers
like myself and my ilk. As a rule, the home of the sons of labor is not
our favored destination. We prefer some bathing spot on the seaside, or
some magical fountain far away in the mountains, … without
anyone remembering the biblical passage which says that it is through
the sweat of his brow that fallen man is to eat his bread. (Edwards 1893:107)
What an exception to this rule the slate quarries prove to be!
Ffestiniog, it is clear, is not like other centers of labor and
industry. Most of all, it differs from them in being clean:
But Ffestiniog is so beautiful, although it is a stronghold
(place, mangre) of labor, that we can be seen idling amongst
the quarriers there, like butterflies amongst bees. There is no dirty
and unclean smoke there to blacken everything, the air is as clear as
crystal, full of clouds newly born from the sea. There is no garbage
and poison disfiguring the rivers, the water is bright and healthy
flowing through Ffestiniog. The place is remote and rainy, but clean
and beautiful and healthy. If I must work, give me the work of the
rockman (creigiwr) or the quarrier. (Edwards 1893:107)
While Edwards paints a picture of the slate quarries of Ffestiniog,
he is always casting a glance over his shoulder at the coal mines of
South Wales. Ffestiniog is a “place of labor,” true, but
without the filth, the pollution of air and water, that is normally
associated with such places (and especially with the coal mines of
South Wales). The slate quarriers of Meirion present no danger to their
supervisors, unlike the coalminers of Glamorgan (Edwards 1893:110). Even strikes in Ffestiniog are
respectable (and cultured) affairs:
There were only a few people along the street, but I could
hear the sound of piano and singing from many houses. Everything was
perfectly peaceful and quiet, and it was hard to believe that 450
people were on strike that day. We didn't see so much as a broken
window. (Edwards 1893:108)
The local guide admits to Edwards and his companions that the
quarrier has a very independent spirit, but is not like the colliers of
Flintshire and Glamorgan, who allegedly “frightened a supervisor
to death”: “‘But,’ he said, ‘quarriers
are not like colliers. They are more civilized, more evangelical; and
they prefer to suffer than do anything wrong’” (Edwards 1893:109). The quarrier carries his
disputes forward in the moral universe, while the coal miner
does so materially (as Glan Elsi puts it, seeking a
“carnal weapon” [cnawdol arf ], where
the quarrier prefers to seek spiritual aid). Moreover, it is worth
emphasizing that material cleanliness echoes moral cultured
respectability.
DUST AND DIRT: THE QUARRIER AND THE COLLIER
This dichotomization of the Welsh proletariat into opposed images
that stand in implicit or explicit contrast, the slate quarrier and the
coal miner, was already well established by the time Edwards belatedly
decided to visit Ffestiniog. In this opposition, nationalism and
internationalism are juxtaposed; the Welsh quarrier becomes a
proletarian image of the national essence, just as the Welsh collier
becomes a national image of the proletarian essence.
But more concrete and material oppositions divide these two images.
Specifically implied by Edwards is the matter of cleanliness and its
opposite. In this set of discourses, the desirable properties of the
quarrier, like the undesirable properties of the coal miner, are a
moral product of the material conditions of work. Here, the image of
“dust,” as a moral precipitate of the material world of
production, plays a crucial mediating role. For example, in a
controversial Welsh novel of the 1960s, a group of children from a
slate-quarrying village, debating the relative merits of coal miners
and slate quarriers as choral singers, conclude that “It must be
that coal dust is better than quarry dust at making people into good
singers” (Caradog Pritchard 1988
[1961]:138).
This macabre image linking dust inhalation causally to something
other than silicosis condenses and parodies a lasting tradition linking
the moral and cultural properties of these two groups to their material
position in production. Here the linkage is indexical and naturalizing,
because it is mediated by a real causal linkage (dust). The linkage can
also be iconic, as in the following example, where the linkage effects
a resemblance between the material and the moral:
There is something in the nature of quarrying itself that is
more favourable to morality than any other sort of work…. Think
of the coal-miner, there is some sort of blackness and filth in
connection to his work in every connection so that nothing can be more
natural than his mind's familiarity with the like…. But as
far as the quarrier is concerned, there is a sort of cleanness and
lightness belonging to all of the branches of his work as are certain
to be a help in putting a superior impression on his mind. There is a
sort of cleanliness in the dust of the quarrier. An
observation like this can seem extreme to the reader, yet there is such
a close connection between the material and the mental, the natural and
the moral, in our world, that they are certain to have influence on one
another. (Y Goleaud, 15 August 1874, p. 2)
Here, the dust, a metonym of the material world of
production, provides an efficacious indexical linkage between the
material and the moral worlds. At the same time, the dust itself is an
icon of the indexical effects it has; that is, the moral
universe comes to resemble the material universe. The heaviness of the
coal dust drags down the mind of the collier, just as its material
filth disposes his mind to like things in the moral sphere. In
contrast, the lightness of quarry dust elevates the mind of the
quarrier. The intrinsically clean quarry dust produces a respectable
and moral quarrier.
What is “dust” for the quarrier is transformed into
“dirt” for the coal miner. Metcalfe
1989 argues powerfully that the image of pollution associated
with the coal miner and his work was an important differentiating
diacritic allowing the coal miner to serve as the symbolic antithesis
of the respectable bourgeois moral order, with emphasis on the
pollution and filthiness of the miner and his community standing in
contrast to the tidiness of the normative bourgeois and his. Their
moral lack of hygiene followed that induced by their work. It is worth
hearing the reply of a New South Wales (Australia) coal miner to the
common motif of the “dirt of the miner” cited by Metcalfe,
which accepts the principle of alignment of moral and material
pollution even as it seeks to reject its particular necessity. The
desire to enact bourgeois separations of work and home, avoiding the
miasmic contact between the filth of the former and the tidiness of the
latter, seeks to undermine the necessity of the correlations by which
the material world of production affects the moral sphere:
[The miner] follows a dirty occupation; but given
the chance he is just as clean and respectable and decent a member of
the community as anybody else…. [He] should have the
opportunity of bathing and leaving the dirt where it belongs to, and
should not be compelled to take it to his home and foul the railway
carriages or other conveyances he may come into contact with on the
way. The fact that he has to travel home black with coal-dust, exposes
him to some ridicule and contempt, and … the impression exists
that he is a freak or animal…..They are entitled to be provided
with the facilities for bathing, and to go home from their work as
decently as other people. (quoted in Metcalfe 1989: 49)
The distinction between the respectable quarrier and the rough coal
miner, if not produced by a natural, material agent like coal dust, was
more likely produced by the polluting influences brought like a cloud
of dust from England, from which the Welsh were protected by the very
respectability of their language, just as the dust inhalation that
causes silicosis can be prevented by wearing a safety mask. In a
curious replay and inversion of the original thesis of the Blue Books,
English came to be seen as a medium of polluting ideas. The quarriers
are pure, then, in a more abstract sense, lacking any harmful miasmic
influence from English foreigners and their notions:
‘Unmixed Welshmen,’ said one perceptive man,
‘are the quarriers, without any English or Irish or anyone else
mixing with them, bringing their harmful books, their polluted customs,
and their ideas with them.’ Among the quarriers, one does not
find even one professed infidel, not one anarchist,
and there is hardly anyone in the whole district who doesn't go to
Church or Chapel…. It is certain that the Welsh character has
not been kept so unmixed in any one of the great works in Wales as it
has in the quarries of Arfon and Meirion. It is true that there are
exceptions, but they are exceptions. (Y Faner ac Amserau
Cymraeg, 19 February 1890, p. 13)
In contrast, the oft-noted “propensity to strike” of the
coal miners (Kerr & Siegel 1954) was
directly connected in the Liberal imagination to the alien anglicizing
influence that brought with it strange concepts with no Welsh
equivalent, such as “strike”:
It is obvious in the first place that had Workers'
Unions never been formed, we would not have been plagued by
strikes. Mercifully there is no concise Welsh word for this
evil thing. And that is for the good and comforting reason that it is
not a Welsh thing to begin with, although it has become something too
customary among the Welsh, but one of the wretched things that have
come to us from the land of the English. And it is the English also who
are now primarily fanning this foreign flame in our dear Principate.
(Y Goleaud, 27 March 1875, p. 8)
For Welsh commentators, the moral and cultural differences between
these two brands of workers in equivalent extractive industries seemed
to have much to do with their relative exposure to alien influences, so
that both the desirable properties of the quarrier and the undesirable
qualities of the collier are indexically linked to their relative
exposure to English.
The slate quarrier in the Welsh Liberal imagination simultaneously
stood as a modern successor, or indeed a proletarian metonym, of the
classless common people, the gwerin, who composed Welsh, as
opposed to “American,” Wales. As we have seen, the liberals
constructed the gwerin as Liberal, religious, cultured, and
respectable. The quarrier condensed within himself in particular all
the features that seemed to characterize the ideal Welsh
gwerin in general. As a perfect depictive representative of
the Welsh nation, the slate quarrier was a specific kind of
gwerin, a proletarian metonym of a classless whole, whose
struggle was a specific aspect of the general political problems
Liberalism addressed. More a craftworker than a proletarian, the slate
quarrier shared and exemplified the oppression (gormes)
suffered by the homogenous Welsh nation at the hands of the English, as
opposed to standing for a class (the proletariat) within a
class-differentiated capitalist modernity.
In sharp contrast, in Wales as in England, the coal miner was
constructed as being an “archetypal proletarian” (Harrison 1978), a figure essentially
proletarian, but accidentally Welsh or English (or neither).
The coal miner, as Metcalfe argues, early on became the symbolic
antipode potentiating the self-definition of the bourgeoisie, but a
fortiori “standing for the class, and culturally defining
working-classness even to workers themselves” (Metcalfe 1989:54). Coal miners have in this sense
become
at once morally marginal and symbolically central, both
despised and held in awe. With the rise of industrial capitalism and in
the course of political struggle to establish bourgeois moral hegemony,
coalminers came to represent the proletarian essence, to embody the
profane against which the bourgeoisie could define and seek the
supremacy of its own moral order. (Metcalfe
1989:53)
The inheritors of the folklorized slate quarrier in the twentieth
century were romanticizing Welsh nationalists, many of them writers.
Their vision of an unspoiled Welsh Wales as the privileged referential
object of the specifically Welsh novel directed them to produce
novelistic accounts almost exclusively of these districts. The
quarrying community and the Welsh novel in the interwar years were
virtually synonymous. Indeed, as industrial coal-mining South Wales
came to be associated not merely with industry and Labourism, but also
with bilingualism, the retreat of the Welsh novel into these
communities became a necessity entailed by the conflicting requirements
of linguistic purism and representational realism implied in the
collocation “Welsh novel.” Thus, the nationalist novelist
Kate Roberts, whose first published novel, Traed Mewn Cyffion,
deals with a traditional slate-quarrying community, eventually
concluded that the life of South Wales could not be portrayed in a
novel for precisely these reasons:
You must have a community before one can write a
story…. If that community is changing its way of life, and
changing its language, can one do fair play to it in Welsh? No, nor in
English either, because that community is neither Welsh nor English.
The life of such a people is not honest, they live in two worlds, their
life is superficial, and it is not a field worthy for a novelist to
take to. Another thing, a prose writer can scarcely be expected from a
community of the sort. (Roberts 1928:214–15)
The dismissal of narrative potential, as both subject and object, is
sweeping. One cannot narrate such a community at all, nor could such a
community produce a narrator, and apparently it wouldn't be
worthwhile anyway. The quarrier, by contrast, offered great
possibilities for portraying the life of the “common man”
(not, one notes, a proletarian) who was also “Welsh.” Like
some latter-day bard, Roberts foresees the topic par
excellence of the twentieth century novel:
If the life of Wales is Welsh then a Welsh novel is
possible. As things are now, if there is hope for a novel at all, it
must come from those places, where Welsh culture is alive….
There is plenty of room for one who wishes to dig. We do not have a
novel at all about the quarriers of Arfon and Meirion….Think
about the amazing possibilities that there are in the life of a
quarrier, and every other common man. (Roberts
1928:215)
This same generation of Welsh nationalists famously saw the only
solution to the industrial problems of South Wales in
“de-industrialization” (the tenth point of the “Ten
Points of Policy” articulated in Y Ddraig Goch in 1933),
with a concomitant return to agriculture as “the main industry of
Wales and the basis of its civilization” (the seventh point).
This was their own modest solution, seeking somehow to turn back the
clock and repatriate the inhabitants of American Wales to the rural
arcadia of Welsh Wales. Thus, the antidote to the intrusive, dangerous,
and linguistically mixed coal miner, for Welsh nationalists of the
interwar period, was essentially the wholesale erasure of
American Wales from the map of Wales, both figuratively and literally
(Smith 1993).
PRACTICALITY: OF DREAMS AND REALITY
Respectability, however, was not in itself sufficient in a
utilitarian age. For Welsh liberalism, the quarrier, more than anything
else, was good to think because he straddled the moral sphere of
culture and religion and the material sphere of production, and his
language in both spheres was Welsh. It was on the lips of the quarrier
that the Welsh language moved from the cultured world of the Eisteddfod
to the practical world of industry. In turn, the moral progress of the
quarrier as Welshman was seen by liberals and quarriers alike as
emanating from his material position in production. Welsh disemia of
the 19th century, as in our own culture (Harvey 1997:8; Ingold
1997:129–30), strongly polarized human activity into
“technical” and “social” aspects, increasingly
assimilating the former to the asocial, material world of technology,
and it increasingly saw technical progress (both in artifice or skill,
‘techne’, and in artifacts or technology) in production as
the mainspring of social progress. “Progress” was the watchword
of the day, and that which was not progressive was backward and consigned
to erasure by progress; such a fate awaited Welsh the moment it fell from
the lips of the quarrier. The figure of the quarrier had a foot firmly
planted in either domain, material and moral, making him a figure of
the ideal Welsh speaker congenial to sentimentalists and utilitarians
alike.
I close with an image that I think best illustrates the kind of
consciousness that corresponds to this “lived
utilitarianism,” or, as Matthew Arnold termed it,
“Philistinism,” which privileged utility over sentiment,
the material over the moral: “On the side of beauty and taste,
vulgarity; on the side of morals and feelings, coarseness; on the side
of mind and spirit, unintelligence, – this is Philistinism”
(Arnold 1906:xi). In 1873, an anonymous
“special correspondent” to the Caernarfon and Denbigh
Herald, doing a multipart survey of the quarrying districts,
paused briefly to survey the romantic beauty of the landscape of
Snowdonia's quarrying districts, celebrated in Wordsworth's
Prelude, among other works:
I almost envied the inhabitants of a little farmhouse built
upon the banks of the river, who daily might feel their hearts thrill
with the grandeur of this ravine, and be hushed to sleep by the dull
roar of the cataract. From the height on which I stood, the little
farmhouse, nestling in the depths of the canyon, looked as though a
tiny dollhouse, and brought with it a host of memories of boyhood. But
the bitter east wind came to remind me that ‘life was
real,’ so I banished dreaming and went on my way to visit other
quarries. (Carnarvon and Denbigh Herald, 15 February 1873, p.
6)
In this aside, the Wordsworthian image of the landscape of Snowdonia
is subordinated to the Gradgrindian fact of the quarry, as an iconic
order of “dreaming” to an indexical order of
“reality.” Such was the Philistinism that consigned Welsh,
but for the quarrier, to dreaming, because reality was English.
