Welsh Journals

THE SOUTH WALES COPPER-SMOKE DISPUTE, 1833-95 THE sayings 'where there's muck there's money' and 'you can't live on a view' are the practical man's answers to the accusations of the aesthete and the environmentalist. They are difficult to refute. In the nineteenth century, when there was little serious questioning of material progress, and concern for environment, with some exceptions, was limited to protection of scenery, the catch phrases were articles of faith. In practice, they amounted to licence to abuse the environment. One of the first challenges to that licence arose in industrial south Wales. Landowners and farmers in the Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot districts, angered by the poisonous effects of copper-smoke and by the indifference of most of the copper-masters, demanded compensation for injuries to land, crops and stock. The confrontations were a dramatic expression of the tensions that develop between town and countryside in small, densely settled countries undergoing industrialization and urban growth. The industrial circumstances that gave rise to the dispute were unusual. By the middle of the nineteenth century, seventeen of the eighteen copper works in Britain were located in the Swansea area, most of them concentrated in the lower Tawe, or Swansea, valley and on the coastlands east of the river. 2 Swansea led the world in copper-smelting and the Swansea metal exchange dominated the copper trade. The town owed its pre-eminence in the copper industry to a fortunate location in relation to raw materials: the south Wales coalfield, which outcrops along the coast between Llanelli and Port Talbot, provided ample supplies of semi- anthracite coal, and the orefields of Cornwall were only a short sea- voyage away. Swansea coals were particularly well-suited to the smelting processes; they produced enough heat to melt the ores and they burned so thoroughly that the residual ash did not clog the grates of the furnaces. Because smelting copper was more prodigal of coal than of ore the early industrialists had found it Notably G. P. Marsh in Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864). In the famous description of Coketown in chapter V of Hard Times ] (1854), Charles Dickens also gave eloquent warning of the disastrous effects that 'severely j workful' attitudes could have upon environment. I 2 W. E. Minchinton (ed.), Industrial South Wales (London, 1969), introd. p. xxvi.