BY NIALL MCCRAE
Passing Port Talbot en route to Pembrokeshire for a family holiday, I gazed across the vast complex of furnaces, chimneys and warehouses, all lying silent since the Net Zero axe was wielded by Ed Miliband (until recently Keir Starmer’s minister for energy rationing).
Most of the heavy industry of South Wales has disappeared, leaving rundown towns with high streets occupied by vape shops, tanning salons, messy takeaways, ‘traditional Turkish’ barbers and general degradation (Swansea, which I visited on my way home, is a depressing dump, where foreign students and migrants seem to outnumber the locals). Images in the books by Evening Post photographer David Roberts (e.g. Thank You for the Days, 2005) express the adage that the past was a different country.
Two hundred years ago, before South Wales became one of the most prominent industrial heartlands of imperial Great Britain, the town of Cardiff and much of Glamorgan was owned by the second Marquis of Bute. ‘The Monument’, as now known, is a statue of his lordship in Roman robes, erected outside the town hall and later moved to St Mary Street due to road widening. Few people today appreciate his role in the development of Cardiff and its administrative importance in Wales, but looking back at his endeavour, I wonder if our current political leaders would be fit to lick his boots.
In his Discovering Cardiff’s Past (1995), historian Dennis Morgan tells the story of the town’s transformation into a busy and prosperous city under the rule of John Crichton Stuart (in the portrait below), who succeeded his grandfather as Marquis of Bute in 1814. He was a good lord, who did not secrete the profits from the subterranean fortune of coal, but ploughed them into the social and economic progress of Cardiff and its environs.
He was a man of vision who regarded the proper use of his wealth as almost a sacred trust, and it was this sense of duty that led him to become the most important influence on the development of nineteenth-century Cardiff.
The Marquis suffered from an eye disease, but this did not deter his industriousness, and he was revered in his fiefdom.
Bute could only spare the time to visit his Welsh estates for a few weeks each year in spring and autumn, but his reception at Cardiff was almost like a royal progress. His agent, Edward Priest Richards, prepared for the visit well in advance. Which were the deserving causes the Marquis ought to patronise? Who should be offered leases for the mineral rights on the Bute estates? Which tradesmen ought to be favoured with new contracts? Who deserved one of those eagerly sought invitations to the banquet at the castle?
The Marquis was socially conscious, and he opposed the harsh practices of Merthyr ironmasters, whose dangerous mines had prisons on site to detain disobedient employees. He was the patron of various charitable causes, such as Cardiff’s infirmary, seventeen schools and generous personal grants, such as an annual £10 ‘to Mrs Roberts for the maintenance of her idiot son’.
However, as Morgan notes, ‘the Marquis had little patience with the idle poor and showed scant sympathy for the Irish immigrants who arrived in Cardiff’. Others of the landowning class might have exploited the flood of incomers from across the Irish Sea for cheap labour, but Bute was concerned for social cohesion.
The Marquis was alert to the transportation needs of the rapidly growing mining industry, and his biggest investment was the building of a large dock in 1839, the first in South Wales. This, Morgan notes, ‘gave Cardiff an advantage … just as his Welsh coalfield was about to reveal its treasures to the world’. The coal in the South Wales valleys was not only plentiful but the finest anthracite – a relatively smokeless fuel ideal for heating homes, and a potent energy for firing industrial machinery and driving steamships and locomotives.
With its grand civic architecture, opulent villas for the merchant class, and endless terraced houses for the workers, Cardiff developed rapidly in population and prosperity.
After he died of a heart attack while attending a civic function in Cardiff in 1848, the ‘father of modern Cardiff’ was carried to the dock he had opened nine years earlier, and taken from there across the Bristol Channel and on to his last resting place in Cambridgeshire. The Merthyr Guardian, a newspaper founded by the Marquis, implored: –
Weep, sons of Cambria, weep at the loss of such a benefactor.
Now, contrast the genuine reverence of the people for the Marquis of Bute with the widespread disgust for our current rulers, who seem to do everything opposite to what we want and need. How many citizens would flock to the city centre to greet Andy Burnham or Ed Miliband (or, for balance, Kemi Badenoch)? These politicians are placemen of a parasitical elite, fleecing the people for every pound in their pocket or purse. The Marquis of Bute, like the Earls De la Warr in my Sussex town, were rich beyond the dreams of lesser mortals – but they made it their duty to make ordinary lives better.
Niall McCrae is the author of ‘Green in Tooth and Claw: the Misanthropic Mission of Climate Alarm’ (2024).