Sex, Sects and Society

'Pain and Pleasure': A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1870-1945

Russell Davies

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786832139
• eBook ISBN: 9781786832153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

In an extended account of national identity, this companion volume to People, Places and Passions provides the first detailed study of the sexual and spiritual life of Wales in the period 1870–1945. The author argues that whilst Wales and its people experienced a disenchantment of the spiritual world, a revolution in sexual life was taking place. This innovative study examines how advances in life expectancy and improvements in health were reflected in emotional life. In contrast to the traditional emphasis upon hardship and hardscrabble experiences, this fascinating and beautifully written volume shows that the Welsh were also a free and fun-loving people.

1

‘Dygwyl y Meirwon’ (Festival of the Dead): Death, Transcendence and Transience

Gwell inni anghofio’r rhai a aeth i’w hir hun,
Y rhai hawdd eu cofio
A’r cof amdanynt
Yn wefr ac yn wae.

(We had better forget those who have gone to their long rest,
Those easy to remember
The memory of them
A thrill and woe.)

Gwilym R. Jones, ‘Dygwyl y Meirwon’, in Gwynn ap Gwilym and Alan Llwyd (eds), Blodeugerdd o Farddoniaeth Gymraeg yr Ugeinfed Ganrif (Llandysul, 1987), p. 135.

‘Glyn cysgod angau’: the valleys of the shadow of death

Glyw’ di hi’n canu? Yr un hen gloch Ag a ganai’r bore gwyn Pan ddest i’m cyfarfod â gwrid ar dy foch I’r Eglwys yn ymyl y llyn; Roedd hi’n canu’n bereiddiach bryd hynny, Sian, Fel y cofi’n dda mi wn, Ac ‘roedd mwy o aur yn dy fodrwy, Sian, Nag sydd ynddi’r bore hwn. Y dydd pan ddilynem ni elor Gwen I’w bedd yn y fynwent lwyd, Ti gofi’r offeiriad mewn llaeswysg wen Yn ein cwrddyd yn ymyl y glwyd; Oes, mae deugain mlynedd er hynny, Sian, A bu llawer tro ar fyd, Ond bydd deigryn hiraethus yn gwlychu ‘ngrân Man y cano’r gloch o hyd. Mae’n heinioes, anwylyd, yn dirwyn i ben, Ac awr y noswylio’n nesáu, A’r gloch oedd yn canu ddydd angladd Gwen Fydd yn canu pan gleddir ni’n dau; A phwy fydd ei hunan yn ymyl y tân Yn dlawd a digysur ei fyd? Fe fyddai’n drugaredd – oni fyddai, Sian? – Pe galwai’r hen gloch ni’r un pryd.

Do you hear it ringing? That same old bell That rang the white morn When veiled you came to meet me In the church near the lake; She sang sweeter then, Sian, As you well remember I know, And there was more gold in your ring, Sian, Than there is this morning. The day we followed Gwen’s coffin To her grave in the grey cemetery, You will remember the priest in white Meeting us at the gate; Yes, forty years have passed since then, Sian, And the world has turned several times, Yet still a tear wets my cheek Whenever I hear the bell. Our lives, my dearest, draw to a close, And the hour for sleep encroaches, And the bell that rang on Gwen’s funeral morn Will ring when we both die; And who will be alone at the fireside Poor and uncomforted? It would be a mercy – would it not, Sian? – If the bell rings for us both at the same time.

‘Cloch y Llan’ (The Church Bell),
William Williams (Crwys) (1875–1968),
Cerddi Crwys (Wrexham, 1926).

Crwys’s elegy written in a Welsh country churchyard is a melancholic and mournful musing on life. It is, perhaps, one of the saddest poems written in the period 1870–1945. It is also one of the sweetest love poems. Two souls have shared their joys and sorrows on a single journey. Like Falstaff, the aged narrator ‘has heard the chimes at midnight’, even so, he still sounds calm and controlled. Together the long and winding road has led the couple to the inevitability of death and inescapable separation.

It is impossible to write about death. What we have are the attitudes of the living to death, to dying and to the dead. The historical imagination cannot be sparked for no first-hand testimony except the fraudulent, no artefact, even the humblest, exists from those who have experienced ‘Ynys Afallach’ (The Island of Avalon) as the Celts christened their magical land of the dead.1 Obituaries of Robert Graves appeared in the press when he was reported as having been killed during the First World War.2 Gordon Evans of Llanddewi Brefi had a memorial service when it was reported that he had been lost when his ship was sunk by the Japanese in 1940. Yet both survived.3 The reports of these ‘deaths’ were much exaggerated, neither Evans nor Graves provided any evidence of a journey into Christina Rossetti’s ‘silent land’. Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874–1956), in her capacity as Mrs Willett, was the most prolific spirit medium of the 1920s and 1930s. How reliable a guide to the afterworld she was, we will never know,4 for temporal historians do not have access to the extraterrestrial archives to discover how great an adventure death was, is and will be. We must approach the subject of death therefore with caution, but one striking fact is clear: timor mortis lost much of its terror over the years between 1870 and 1945 as death’s grip on the Welsh loosened.

Proverbs, those pessimistic distillations of peasant and proletarian wisdom still warned ‘rhag angau ni thycia ffo’ (from death flight will not avail), ‘Gaeaf las, mynwent fras’ (a mild winter, a full cemetery), and ‘pob hirnychdod i angau’ (every long affliction leads to death). But the image of death as a sentinel changed. The horror enshrined in the imagery of the apocalyptic horseman, or the all-powerful Dark Destroyer, or the skeletal Grim Reaper who viciously scythed and harvested humanity, was tamed.5 In 1898, in a series of cartoons for the Western Mail, later published as Cartoons of the Welsh Coal Strike April 1st to September 1st, 1898, J. M. Staniforth showed a skeletal death as a character of exquisite patience, gently gathering the children and mothers of south Wales into his embrace.6 The poet Alun Lewis, in the early 1940s, a time when death appeared to be in the ascendant, noted: ‘Death the wild beast is uncaught, untamed... but... our soul withstands the terror’.7 Waldo Williams in ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ portrayed death as ‘yr heliwr distaw yn bwrw ei rwyd amdanom’ (the silent huntsman casting his net over us).8 To Tom Parri Jones in his poem ‘Angau’ (Death), death’s carriage still had about it ‘aroglau’r oesau’ (the scents of the ages), but it was now a Saturday night taxi, whose monosyllabic driver, quietly took his fares to ‘Dim... Dim’ (Nothing... Nothing).9 R. Williams Parry also considered that death was a journey conducted by ‘hen gychwr afon angau’ (the old boatsman of death’s river).10 Edward Jones (1826–1891), Glasfryn, in ‘Dyfodiad Angau’, portrayed death as a stealthy, sudden, gentle killer – ‘ni edwyn neb ei nodau na sŵn ei droed yn nesáu’ (no one recognises his sound or his footstep as he nears).11 Death might still be loath-some, his visage grim, his embrace terminal, but he now trod lightly.

Popular beliefs presented a plethora of portents of death that ranged from the relatively timid to the terrifying. ‘Y Tolaeth’ described both the plaintive wail that was heard before a child’s death, and the knocking heard in a carpenter’s shop before the commission was received to build a coffin. Across Wales, unctions of undertakers received such ghostly commissions. ‘Canhwyllau Cyrff’ were nightly, ghostly lights that preceded a funeral, marking out the route that a cortège would take in a few days. The ‘Toili’ were phantom funerals. ‘Y Cyhyraeth’ were an inhuman, chilling chorus that were encountered at crossroads. Beasts and birds were often death’s messengers. The ‘aderyn corff’, an ashen coloured bird, with ‘eyes like balls of fire’ traumatised the tender souls of Llanddeiniol in Cardiganshire in 1911.12 More terrifying were vicious spirit dogs that assumed many forms and answered to many names – ‘Cŵn Bendith y Mamau’, ‘Helgŵn Cythreulig’, ‘Cŵn Annwn’, ‘Cŵn Cyrff’, ‘Cŵn Uffern’, ‘Y Gwyllgi’, or ‘Ci Mawr Du’.13 These fearful hounds hunted the spirits of wicked people, dragging them to the infernal halls of the lower regions. Such curious incidents of dogs at night-time were relatively common, especially in the early part of our period down to the First World War. But in some places, somewhere around that time, many people’s belief in such supernatural phenomena began to unravel.

The silent statistics tabulated in the annual report of the Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages provide empirical evidence of the poetic domestication of death and the ebbing of belief in a supernatural fauna.14 The ‘crude death rate’ (per 1,000 deaths) in Wales, in 1871, stood at 21.2. By 1914, it had declined to 14.5, and by 1948, it had fallen again to 11.8. There were years, such as 1915, during the Great War, and 1918, when the flu pandemic swept across the world, when the rates rose to 15.4 and 16.5.15 In these grievous years, the Grim Reaper seemed to have resumed his conscientious harvesting, but over time, rates of mortality were reassuringly in decline.

The infant mortality rates, generally considered to be the most accurate reflection of the health of people and populations, were also improving.16 In 1871, the rate of infant mortality in Wales stood at 126.2 per 1,000 births. By 1914 it had declined to 110. In 1948, the rate had fallen further to 39 per 1,000 births. Again there were individual years when, due to various diseases and epidemics, the rate jumped suddenly upwards against the general pattern of decline over time. In 1886–7 it increased to 131.7. In 1891 it suddenly, inexplicably leaped upwards to 150.1. In 1899, following 1898 – that year of depression, distress and discontent in the Welsh coalfields – the massacre of the innocents reassumed its early Victorian levels and reached 174 per 1,000 births.17

It should not be forgotten that the infant mortality rate refers to live births. No one knows the extent of stillbirths, or the horribly named and emotionally traumatic ‘lifeless births’, and the deaths of children in de facto marriages. The latter were, by definition, illegitimate and unregistered, beyond the reach of registrar or historian.18 Illegitimate children were doomed.19 The fate of such infants casts an unhappy light on ‘the age of progress’. Death in childbirth was a pervasive fear, which shadowed a mother’s joy at the possibility of bringing new life into the world and even darkened young women’s prospective views of marriage. Many women never gave birth to a child, but died in the agony of the effort, perhaps the most aggravated of circumstances in which a woman can leave the world. In 1937 the government’s report into the Maternal Mortality in Wales revealed levels of death that were a ‘disgrace to a civilized society.’20 In 1899, when giving birth to her third child, Margaret Lloyd of Llanddewi Brefi contracted septicaemia and died. Aged three weeks and named for her, Margaret Ann Davies was baptised on her mother Margaret’s coffin on the day of her funeral in Bethesda Chapel.21 The artist Christopher Williams was also baptised on his mother’s coffin.

The Registrar General’s tables of statistics reveal that one of the most fundamental transformations that has ever taken place in Welsh history occurred during the period 1870–1945. Over these years, despite all the sorrow and suffering, it is a salient fact that people’s life expectancy almost doubled. In 1871, the average life expectancy for a male who had survived the Herodian years of youth was 39. By 1951, the average male, if there is such a person, now had a far better chance of surviving childhood and could expect to live to 69.5 years of age. Women, society’s survivors, had the expectation of living for at least five years longer. For a significant proportion of the population, the Psalmist’s promise tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Diolchiadau - Acknowledgements
• Introduction: 'To Begin at the Beginning'
• 1: 'Dygwyl y Meirwon' (Festival of the Dead): Death, Transcendence and Transience
• 2: The Citadel: Pain, Anxiety and Wellbeing
• 3: Going Gently into that Good Night: Desolation, Dispiritedness and Melancholy
• 4: Where, When, What Was Wales and who were the Welsh? Contentment, Disappointment and Embarrassment
• 5: 'The Way of all Flesh': Prudery, Passion and Perversion
• 6: Love in a Cold Climate: Fidelity, Friendship and Fellowship
• 7: Religion and Superstition: Fear, Foreboding and Faith
• 8: The Pursuit of Pleasure: Enthrallment, Happiness and Imagination
• Conclusion: A Few Selected Exits
• Notes