Welsh Journals

THE SOUTH WALES STRIKE OF 1816 by D. J. V. JONES T is a matter of history, that whilst the laurels were yet cool on the brows of our victorious soldiers on their second occupation of Paris, the elements of convulsion were at work amongst the masses of our labouring population; Z'1 One of the disturbances to which the famous radical, Samuel Bamford, referred in this passage was the strike in South Wales during the autumn of 1816. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars Wales was plunged into the general industrial depression, with its financial difficulties, low wages and unemployment. There were expressions of discontent throughout the Principality. Lead miners in Cardiganshire struck work early in 1816 later in the year disturbances broke out at Mold, and the cavalry were used to overawe Wrexham colliers.2 There were also food riots involving copper workers and quarrymen at Amlwch and Tremadog.3 Yet nowhere else in Wales, nor, according to the Annual Register, in Britain,4 was there anything to compare with the troubles in South Wales. In their geographical extent at least they were on an even larger scale than the "massacre" of 1831. In the early nineteenth century the coal, copper and tinplate industries of South Wales were dwarfed by the rapidly expanding iron industry. In 181 1 there were fifty-six furnaces on the 1 S. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (2nd edn., 1840), p. 6. The Annual Register, 1816, Chronicle, p. 13 N.L.W. Great Sessions Records, Flint 1817, Gaol Files, Wales 4/1019: L. E. S. Parry and B. F. M. Freeman (compilers), Historical Records of the Denbighshire Hussars Imperial Yeomanry, 1795-1906 (1909), p. 45. A. H. Dodd, The Industrial Revolution in North Wales (Revised edn., 1951), p. 401. The Annual Register, 18 16, General History, p. 95.