In the shadow of the Great Strike of Penrhyn

Cold on the picket line
no brazier to keep hands warm
though students offer cups of tea

paying twice over.
We smile at colleagues driving in to work
apologetic

almost,
the word scab somehow too violent
too quite what—real?

And when lights go on and someone lectures
to a half empty room
is that murmuring

just the way the wind blows
or the ghosts of those who saved tuppence
and thruppence to build this university

and for whom tuppence,
thruppence became fortune—
enough to keep a family off Traitors’ Row.

Published in Gwrthryfel / Uprising: An anthology of radical poetry from contemporary Wales, Ed. Mike Jenkins, Culture Matters, 2022

Penrhyn slate quarry, near Bethesda, is some seven miles from the university town of Bangor in North Wales.  The university was founded in 1884, in large part as a result of a subscription set up by the families of local quarrymen.  Education, and Welsh language education as a preference, was seen as a way out of the terrible conditions suffered by workers in the quarry.

Twelve years on from paying towards the foundation of the university, the quarrymen were out on strike in defense of the newly formed North Wales Quarrymen’s Union and in the hope of securing minimum payment for their work.  The dispute lasted 11 months.  Three years later, they were out again — for what then was the longest strike in British history.

The Great Strike of Penrhyn (1900-03) began shortly after the quarry owner, Lord Penrhyn, dismissed 26 workers and took them to court.  The quarrymen marched to Bangor in support of their colleagues and were subsequently locked out of work for two weeks by Penrhyn.  When the men returned to the quarry after the lockout, 800 men found themselves without work and in a further display of solidarity those who did have work walked out.  It was late November 1900.  In the mountains, winter.

Penrhyn offered the quarrymen new terms a month into the strike.  Only 77 men accepted.  Six months further on, he again offered new terms — this time, a sovereign to each man and the promise of a five per cent pay increase.  400 men returned, and the community was divided.

Those who returned to work and took the infamous Punt y Gynffon (or Tail Pound) were held as traitors, and to make that point clear, the families of those still on strike displayed notices in their houses — Nid oes bradwr yn y ty hwn (there is no traitor in this house).  Penrhyn softened the blow to the returning workers by building a row of houses in nearby Tregarth for them.  The street is known locally as Stryd y Gynffon (Traitor’s Row).  Left destitute by the strike, many families who refused Penrhyn’s terms moved away to find work elsewhere (mostly to the coalfields of South Wales).  Slowly, the strike lost momentum and in November 1903, three years after the strike had begun, those who remained were forced back to work.

Communities have long memories and to this day many Bethesda folk will not set foot in nearby Penrhyn Castle — the austere, battlemented ’home’ that Penrhyn built for himself and which is now owned by the National Trust.  Its gloomy exterior — complete with massive keep — chokes the mouth of the valley in which his quarry sat.  Circled mile upon mile by high stone walls and a gatehouse, the castle speaks volumes regarding Penrhyn and his attitude to the quarrymen.  Who, after all, would build themselves a castle for a home, in an area where castles mark the subjugation of a language and a people?

Whilst working at Bangor University, I recalled the Great Strike when, in November 2019, the university lecturer’s union, UCU, called a strike in defense of pay and pensions.  Wages had depreciated some 17 per cent over ten years, pensions had been slashed and pension contributions increased, and many staff were forced to work on casual contracts.  It was the first all-out strike in UCU’s history.  However as it turned out, unlike the Great Strike, it wasn’t, even at the outset, all-out.

Britain has a long tradition of rebellion: think the Peasants’ Revolt, the execution of King Charles I, the Chartists, the Rebecca Riots, the Suffragettes, Brixton, Toxteth, Extinction Rebellion.  British government has an equally long history of suppressing rights and those who seek to secure them: think the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Dic Penderyn, the Peterloo massacre, tanks on the Clyde, the ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2022’, and successive rounds of anti-trade union legislation.  When once it was possible to strike in support of a strike, it is now no longer possible.  Moreover, whilst governments are deemed legitimate having been elected only by a minority of those eligible to vote, a union cannot strike unless at least half of its members take part in a lengthy postal ballot (the 50 per cent threshold) and only then if the majority of those who voted also voted to strike.  With unions weakened, many people choose to save their pennies rather than pay to be in a union — albeit whilst continuing to derive benefit from the gains won through collective bargaining by unions (an irony which would not be lost on the Bethesda quarrymen).

Under UK legislation, unions can choose to ballot individual workplaces, or the membership as a whole.  Perhaps fearing that they wouldn’t be able to secure a yes vote across the whole sector, UCU executive decided to ballot individual workplaces.  Roughly half of the universities reached the 50 per cent threshold and came out on strike; the other half didn’t.  They were divided from the start and not all out.

On the picket line we would stand with our placards and watch colleagues driving into work.  Some were not in the union and said so; others were in the union, but maintained that they couldn’t afford to strike — a position which begs the question: who can?  Some staff avoided the strike altogether by quietly working from home and therein drawing the benefit of having neither to cross the picket line, nor lose money through telling the personnel department that they were on strike.

One particularly cold winter day, whilst shuffling my feet to keep warm on the picket line, I looked across the road towards the lecture rooms and saw a light go on.  The place looked empty of students, but someone had turned up to work. Watching them move around the room, I brooded upon the likely success or otherwise of the strike, upon its impact upon students, and the impact upon students if it failed.  The poem came to me then.