The incomers were a network of middle-class British intellectuals and a scattering of attached bohemians. In some ways most of them were linked directly or indirectly with the Williams-Ellises. Most of their connections came through Cambridge, which had also been Clough’s own university, and that of his dead son Kitto, whose friends from King’s became part of the Brondanw scene as regular visitors and (in one case) son-in-law. That is how Robin Gandy had first come to the valley. Each of the initial settlers in turn tended to attract their friends, contemporaries, teachers and students, who also came, saw and were conquered: the Hobsbawms, one by one, plus two children, followed by Marlene’s brother, Walter Schwarz, plus wife and five offspring, the historians E. P. and Dorothy Thompson, from the lower slopes of the Moelwyns, and various sons and daughters of the Bennett family whose parents, both English dons, were pillars of Cambridge academic society. In one way or another a substantial set of Cambridge names was already linked with Clough’s kingdom: the philosopher Bertrand Russell on the Portmeirion peninsula; the Nobel Prize physicist Patrick Blackett, settled in retirement in what had been a holiday cottage just above Brondanw, not far from his daughter’s house in Croesor; Joseph Needham, the great historian of Chinese science, spent regular holidays at Portmeirion with one of his two ladies – his wife presumably remaining at home in Cambridge. John Maddox, for many years the editor of Nature, had a spell as a tenant in one of Clough’s cottages on the Traeth; and my teacher, the economic historian Mounia Postan, and his wife Lady Cynthia (Keppel) had a house, once a school, on the outskirts of Ffestiniog. To talk of a ‘Welsh Bloomsbury set’ – the phrase comes from Rupert Crawshay Williams, a locally resident charming and sad philosopher who brought Bertrand Russell into the area – is pushing it a bit. However, an intensive social life flourished among the Anglophones of the Portmeirion peninsula, the Croesor valley and Ffestiniog. One of the most characteristic sounds of holidays in North Wales was that of guests shaking the rain off their waterproofs and dumping wet wellingtons in lobbies as they got ready to entertain and be entertained under some low-slung rural ceiling. And as so many of them lived by the word, there is at least poetic truth in the joke that in the Croesor valley on windless nights one was never out of earshot of some typewriter.
Though science and Cambridge went together, I suspect that it was Clough’s wife, the writer Amabel Williams-Ellis, who got much the greatest satisfaction out of the accumulation of great brains in the local hinterland. A Strachey from a landed and intellectual family with long Indian links, her family connection (both Oxford and Cambridge) was, if anything, with politics. Her journalist father, St Loe Strachey, had carried considerable political weight, and her brother, John Strachey, broke away, first to follow the (then) hope of radical Labour, the dashing womanizer Sir Oswald (‘Tom’) Mosley, until he became the leader of British fascism, then to become the most widely known Communist Party intellectual of the 1930s. He turned away from communism in 1940 and became a prominent, though not notably successful, minister in the Labour governments after 1945. Amabel herself had joined the Communist Party unofficially, and remained a little homesick for the days when the Party was a semi-conspiratorial embattled band of brothers and sisters. She welcomed me as a reminder of those times, someone with whom she could gossip about the comrades, but perhaps chiefly as a reliable conversationalist on intellectual themes. For this purpose she would drive up to our cottage, full of memories, with the excessive care and dangerous slowness of the very aged motorist. Since few except the locals used the Croesor Road, traffic made the necessary allowances for her. Amabel, far more than Clough, had a passion for the intellect. As a girl she had dreamed of becoming a scientist, but that is not what ‘gels’ in her type of family did. Indeed, she was not sent to school at all. She became a writer, in the end best known as a children’s writer, while as was usual in her generation her considerable contribution to Clough’s own writing and thinking was subsumed under his. Amabel was not the tragic kind – indeed, she enjoyed the sweetnesses of life and the new emancipation of women, including (it would seem) a fairly free-wheeling approach to marital fidelity, but, had she not been brought to keep the stiff upper lip of her class, she might have shown some bitterness. She would have made a very professional scientist and she saw to it that at least one of her daughters became a marine biologist. I grew very fond of the old lady, even though sometimes taking avoiding action against her expeditions in search of intellectual enlightenment. We talked a great deal, especially in her last years, after Clough’s death, when she waited for visitors, wanting to die. She did not complain, but made no secret of wanting an end to lying alone bedridden and in pain behind thick stone walls in a damp old house. She had lived enough. However, even political solidarity could never move her to tell me how to find the entrance of the underground workings, somewhere under Clough’s kingdom, where the treasures of the National Gallery had been stored during the Second World War. A communist past was one thing, state secrets quite another.
Apart from the minority who came to do some serious climbing, what brought the rest of us outsiders to the Welsh mountains? Certainly not the search for comfort. In our Welsh cottages we voluntarily lived under the sort of conditions we condemned capitalism for imposing on its exploited toilers. None of us, even given the spartan middle-class styles of the 1950s, would have dreamed of accepting such standards in our everyday lives in London or Cambridge, not even my brother-in-law Walter Schwarz, with his boundless enthusiasm for primitive discomfort as indicating environmentally sound living close to nature. Even so, the only people we could rely on regularly to share the discomforts and the marvels of life in Parc Farm were close and weather-proof friends such as Dorothy Wedderburn. To guarantee even approximate dryness on our first night, we had to pack all blankets and bedclothes into vast airtight plastic bags every time we left Parc. It took two or three days after arrival to dry the house out enough to make it roughly habitable, and even then it was almost impossible to keep warm except in odd corners, in spite of paraffinheaters – basic equipment, though not much good for outdoor toilets – and the fuel for our fireplaces which metropolitan intellectuals, dressed in the local style like tramps, could be seen chopping in the drizzle outside their back doors. Perhaps the sheer physical discomfort of life in Wales was part of its attraction: it made us feel closer to nature, or at least to that constant struggle against the forces of climate and geology which gives such satisfaction. My most vivid memories of North Wales are of these confrontations: taking our two small children along stony, snow-covered tracks to shelter and giving them chocolate in a mountainside cave, returning from a long hike with Robin in persistent, drenching rain, scrambling along sheep-tracks on steep hillsides – if a sheep could do it, why not a middle-aged historian? – above all, walking, balancing and clambering round the steep rocky sanctuary of the Arddy, west of the ridge of Cnicht, rewarded by the familiar but always unexpected sight of the cold lakes hidden in its folds.
But these were visitors’ pleasures. Our part of North Wales also attracted a curious population of permanent or semi-permanent settlers, or rather refugees, from outside: freelance writers, displaced bohemians from Soho, searchers for spiritual salvation on low or irregular incomes, and the odd anarchist intellectual. The presence of Bertrand Russell, the aged guru of anti-nuclear militancy, in Clough’s kingdom brought a number of them into the area; not counting members of his own dysfunctional family. Ralph Schoenman, the young American militant who acquired such remarkable influence over the ancient philosopher at this time, never became part of the local scene. He was too busy whizzing round claiming to save the world, ostensibly in the name of Russell. However, after retiring from this battle Pat Pottle, secretary of the activist Committee of a Hundred (and co-liberator of the Soviet spy George Blake from Brixton jail), settled down in Croesor, attracted by his fellow anti-nuclear activist and revolutionary, the painter Tom Kinsey (later the only known anarchist master of foxhounds, but, Snowdonia bein
g what it is, on foot rather than horseback). After the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 he had organized a demonstration in Portmeirion of thanks to Russell for saving the peace of the world – for it was in a telegram to Russell (in answer to one which Kinsey claimed he had drafted) that Khrushchev had actually made the official public announcement that the crisis was over.
This community of incomers lived side by side with the indigenous Welsh, but divided from them, not only by language but, perhaps even more, by class, lifestyle and the growing separatism of the locals. Sex apart, there were really very few close friendships across the ‘interracial’ divide, and little of that easy neighbourliness and village spirit that made coming to our present, equally remote and even more agricultural community in (Anglophone) Mid-Wales such a relief, especially to that spontaneous socializer, Marlene, after the growing tensions of Croesor.
Unlike the passionately Welsh but 100 per cent Anglophone native gentry, e.g. the Williams-Ellises, by the 1970s permanent settlers from outside began to learn the language themselves, not to communicate, but in deference to the increasingly obvious nationalistic feeling in the region. By the 1960s all except the very oldest and isolated locals were bilingual, bilinguality being essential to any Welsh person, even in the most Cymric village, who expected to watch television and have dealings with people from outside the neighbourhood, including the 80 per cent of his or her country’s non-Welsh-speaking inhabitants. That, indeed, was the fundamental problem for Welsh-speaking areas like ours, and the basis of their increasingly strident nationalism. Even the full linguistic assimilation of a few score foreigners was as nothing compared to the irresistible Anglophone flood of modern civilization.
For most of the mountain people the Welsh language was chiefly a Noah’s Ark in which they could survive the flood as a community. They did not so much want to convert and converse: people looked down on visiting South Walians with their ‘school Welsh’. Unlike Noah, they did not expect the flood to end. They turned inwards because they felt themselves to be in that most desperate of situations, that of a beleaguered, hopeless and permanent minority. But for some there was a solution: compulsory Cymricization, imposed by nationalist political rule. In the meantime the incoming invaders could be discouraged by burning down their second homes. Those who claimed to know said that some of the activists came from Clough’s kingdom, though it was not a centre of cottage-burning. People distinguished between the neighbouring summer visitors they knew and ‘the English’ in general. And although nothing can be kept secret in the countryside, unlike in the big city, no case of terrorist cottage-burning was ever solved by the police.
In some respects the indigenous inhabitants of Clough’s kingdom, and of the mountains of North Wales in general, were therefore as uprooted as the seasonal or even most of the permanent English immigrants, who moved into the farms and cottages abandoned by the natives. Like a house built on subsiding land, the foundations of their society were breaking; unlike such a house, they could not be shored up. Isolation had kept the society together in the past, along with poetry, puritanism and the general poverty of an essentially rural society. All this was now going. The chapels stood empty. (I cannot recall meeting any ministers of religion in our years in the Croesor valley, except the highly anomalous, because Anglican, R. S. Thomas, who came to bury our neighbour and his fellow-poet, in English, Thomas Blackburn, in a steeply sloped graveyard with an unforgettable view of Snowdon.) Total abstinence from alcohol, which had to be the defining criterion of puritan Protestantism in a population so energetically interested in (officially non-existent) non-marital sex, was in retreat. The locus for the new culture of militant Welsh nationalism was not the chapel but the pub. (Clough had built one, the Brondanw Arms, with a beautifully wrought metal wreath as the inn sign, but this motif meant nothing to the inhabitants of Garreg and Llanfrothen, who called it, and the pub, simply The Ring.) Only a tolerant silence about illegitimate babies remained, even the ones that could not be quietly disguised as unexpected younger siblings of their mothers. The hillsides were abandoned for lowland council housing with central heating. Even money now divided communities more, for within the Welsh language community, wealth had not been decisive in the past, since the really rich and powerful were or became anglicized, that is to say they were outside it.
If anything, the hierarchy of status had been spiritual or intellectual – that of minister of religion (that is to say orator), poet and scholar – who might be anyone, a postman with a gift for improvising the complex metres of Welsh verse or, like the great antiquarian and scholar Bob Owen, the pride of Croesor, whose library now forms part of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwith, a clerk at the quarry. (His son and his family – Tuddwr, Gaynor and their children Bob, Eleri and the baby Deian – were and remained our friends in the village.) A less cultural, but still locally recognized male status also came with distinction as a poacher, a widely practised and universally approved sport. Even in our times, when a Welsh friend from an old quarry village wanted to give us salmon for dinner and asked the weekly itinerant fish-seller for the price, the response naturally was: ‘Are you buying or selling?’ R. S. Thomas’s great poems should not mislead us into thinking of most North Wales hill farmers as unintellectual hulks. A lot of Welsh reading and thinking went on under those low roofs, ancestrally designed to combine a maximum view of approaching strangers with maximum shelter from rain and storm. In many ways our neighbour Edgar from Croesor Ychaf, explaining the regular collective pre-shearing round-up by the local farmers and their dogs of all the sheep running free on the mountain, was as knowledgeable about the ecology of the terrain as the college-trained and sullenly nationalist nature warden who had moved into the former village post office, and at least as articulate.
Whether Clough’s kingdom was typical of mountain Wales, I cannot tell, but it was an unstable and unhappy place full of underlying tension. It found expression in a growing, resentful and sometimes rancorous, anti-English feeling, a withdrawal from personal relations which came more naturally to adults than to children.2 There were also other signs of social malaise. When what were locally called ‘the orange people’ (the ‘sanyasins’ or followers of the Indian guru Shri Bhagwan) came into the valley in the early 1980s, they won converts among the native Welsh as well as, less surprisingly, in the English bohemian diaspora. And clearly not only because their way to salvation encouraged a lot of free sex. Croesor was a marvellous place for family holidays, but it was not a happy valley.
By the time I retired from Birkbeck in 1982 we had spent time in Clough’s kingdom every year for almost two decades. Bryn Hyfryd, and even more Parc Farm, flanked by the old Manor House (Big Parc), with its visitors and the tiny Gatws bursting with Schwarz cousins, was part of our, and even more of our children’s, lives, and friendships. Just because it was not blanketed by the permanent routines of everyday and professional life, the memories associated with North Wales – even the domestic and family rows – stand out with special vividness: the terrible news of the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968, news of the death of my aunt Mimi brought by telegram – there were still such things – to a phone-less cottage, the car-door torn from its hinges by the storm as we got out to make our way to Edward Thompson’s New Year’s Eve party down the torch-lit path, our drive with Dorothy Wedderburn to picnic past Aberdaron on the far point of the Lleyn peninsula on a sunny Christmas Day, the ancient well in Parc that went on supplying us with water even in the great drought of 1976. Except for the landscape, it was not perfect: living in Boy Scout discomfort became less attractive (it had never appealed to Marlene), and the growth of nationalism soured relations with the Welsh. But, though I was now about to spend four months a year in New York, we would probably have stayed in the Croesor valley to the end of our lives.
But after Clough died in 1978 and Amabel in 1984 things changed. Clough’s grandson, who took over the estate – his parents were busy running the factory and the marketing of Portmeirion pott
ery – was a passionate Welsh nationalist, who showed no interest in his grandparents’ collection of Cambridge antiques, occupying houses which ought to be re-echoing to the Welsh language of their restored Cymric families. In short, the leases of the outsiders were not renewed. The official reason was that leases would henceforth be given only for permanent residence. We were allowed to stay on year by year until a suitable Welsh tenant could be found, or the estate could raise the money to make the premises of Parc Farm habitable for anyone except a romantic second-homer. We stayed on those terms for a year or two while we looked for another home in Wales, but no longer in North Wales. In any case our friends were also losing their cottages and, by the time I got into my seventies, clambering up Cnicht was no longer so attractive. We found it in the milder landscape and political climate of Powys, from whose hills I can see Cader Idris on a clear day.
My daughter still goes to the valley from time to time. Neither Marlene nor I have been there since we moved away in 1991. I have not the heart to see the place again. But I cannot forget it.
15
The Sixties
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 30
