Welsh Journals

CULTURE, POLITICS AND ASSIMILATION: THE WELSH ON TEESSIDE, c. 1850-1940 Many years ago, he (Prof. T. Witton Davies) would not say how many, but many years ago he was a competitor at an eisteddfod in Middlesbrough (Loud applause) he would not say whether he won a prize­(laughter)­but he could say that it was with feelings of very real pleasure that he presided over that gathering, and saw the great development which had taken place during those years in the Society. (Applause) He remembered, too, competing at eisteddfods at Witton park and at Stockton, and it was delightful to him to come again to that portion of Wales, called the North East of England, and meet once more so many of his old friends.' IF the good professor was guilty of some extravagance in his decription of the size and influence of the Welsh communities in the north-east of England, it will, perhaps, be more of a surprise to those readers acquainted with Teesside and the north-east of England today to learn of the very existence of a Welsh exile community in the region large enough to sustain a major eisteddfod in Middlesbrough, and to attract persons of some celebrity in Wales to attend and preside over their proceedings. In fact, the existence of a significant Welsh community in the north-east of England, centred on industrial Teesside in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been noted by Welsh histor- ians. Linked to the very rapid development of the iron-smelting industry from the 1840s, which drew heavily on Welsh business and technical acumen, there was a migration of hundreds of skilled and semi-skilled Welsh ironworkers and their families to the north-east of England. The result was that, in the words of David Williams, Welsh communities, worshipping in their own tongue, came into being by the waters of the Tees.'2 Williams clearly found this isolated outpost of Welshness to be an intriguing but anomalous footnote in Welsh history, but, perhaps surprisingly, no one has subsequently examined the expe- rience of the Teesside Welsh and the extent to which that experience paralleled, or diverged from, other migrant communities, and more particularly how such a community, apparently flourishing at the beginning of the twentieth century, could leave so few traces of its existence by its end. More recently the Teesside Welsh community has excited the attention of historical geographers interested in a migrant community called into existence for occupation-specific reasons, whose development differed from that of Welsh migrant populations in other parts of England. Colin Pooley and John Doherty compared Welsh migrants to Middlesbrough in the 1850s and 1860s Address to Cleveland and Durham Eisteddfod, reported in North Eastern Daily Gazette (hereafter N.E.D.G.), 2 January 1900. 2 David Williams, A History of Modern Wales (London. 1950), p. 220.