Welsh Journals

'A DEAD LOSS TO THE COMMUNITY": THE CRIMINAL VAGRANT IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY WALES 'Every Welshman has prayed, if not for prosperity, at any rate to be spared from becoming a tramp.' D. Parry Jones, Welsh County Characters (1952), p. 139. 'For the future every tramp met by officers must be thoroughly searched. The lodging houses visited and their bundles turned over. Then I feel confident nearly every tramp will stop coming into the county and we shall be almost free of crime.' Order of the chief constable of Radnorshire, 1885. FEW nineteenth-century subjects are more neglected than the vagrant; he did not have the language, influence and organisation to appeal to contemporaries and historians.2 Yet he was a prominent figure in rural and urban life, and a study of his plight raises important questions about community and official morality. The tramp was set alongside the prostitute and the drunken navvy on the nether side of the 'Respectability Divide'. He was the most obvious antithesis of the Victorian trinity of work, respectability and religion. His presence at fairs, wakes, and beerhouses, and his insolent requests for charity from gentry and clergymen, confirmed one view of him as an unwelcome continuation of the eighteenth-century world. Significantly, some Welsh authorities in the mid-Victorian era wished to revive the harsh treatment of the earlier period, with its stocks, public whippings and transportation.3 Nonconformist chapels recoiled from the vagrant, and some of the charity hospitals and asylums excluded him from their care. Poor Law administrators were forced to confront him, but the relationship was an unhappy one, reflecting immovable dogma and officialdom in the face of an ungrateful and all too movable object. In a superficial sense, as we shall see, the 'abject, grovelling, tramp' was as much a rebel as some of his working-class brethren. 1 A term used at a North Wales Poor Law conference, 1905-6. C. Flynn Hughes, 'The Development of the Poor Laws in Caernarvonshire and Anglesey between 1815 and 1914' (University of Wales M.A. Thesis, 1945). 'Attitudes are changing, however. See R. Samuel (ed.), Village Life and Labour (1975). For a fairly sympathetic view, see Red Dragon, January-June 1884, pp. 247-54. see, for instance, the Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, 12 February 1848.