Welsh Journals

RHYS DAVIES A Drop of Dew WILLIAM PRICE of Llantrisant BY the middle of the nineteenth century it had become plain that few of the valleys of the Welsh county of Glamorgan would remain tranquil for much longer. The coal and iron which were to transform the district into what the visiting and horrified Carlyle described as a 'vision of Hell' were being discovered everywhere under the feet of surprised farmers and rustic landowners (one of these had leased all the fabulously rich minerals under his land for a term of 99 years for £ 30 per annum and six horse-loads of coal per week). To house the streams of workpeople trekking towards this new cornucopia, blocks of dwellings were built in quick, ruthless uniformity dismally grey 'towns' appeared, public houses and Noncomformist chapels breaking the monotony of those rows stretching from belching pits and ripped fields of iron ore. The 'sooty nose of King Coal,' as a contemporary Welsh poet mourned, was indeed being thrust inquisitively into these green hollows. It seemed to another local man, closely watching these develop- ments, that the race of people-mostly from other parts of Wales- possessing the valleys was in danger of developing wrongly. If the workers were not completely demoralized by this new industrial age (their ill-organized but furious strikes for better pay and conditions kept a rough idealism glowing in their hearts), at least they might rapidly lose their old racial integrity and their heritage of myth, legend, poetic gaiety and personal liberty. This watchful man was Dr. William Price, who, born in 1800, saw the century through to 1893. His astonishing life of rebellion, both physical and visionary, and his obstinate retrogression to what he deemed the true 'pagan' mode of living best suited to man, made him into a celebrity who was derided, feared, clapped into jail, exiled, and also sought as a miraculous healer of bodily ailments and a seer who could bring back into the spirit an old half-forgotten poetry. At the junction of two of the busiest of the valleys, the Rhondda and the Merthyr, stood Pontypridd, an old market town overlooked by a Rocking Stone which tradition connected with the Druids. There on moon-lit evenings, while the grim chapels below preached their puritan