Thomas Stephens – The Melting Pot – Merthyr Tydfil's History and Culture

Work by eminent 19th century Welsh sculptor rediscovered

In 2016 a bust with major Merthyr connections was discovered in Aberystwyth University. Below is the story of the discovery, transcribed with the permission of the University.

A missing marble bust by eminent Welsh sculptor Joseph Edwards (1814-1882) has been rediscovered overlooked in an under-stairs cupboard in the Old College at Aberystwyth University.

The bust, of prolific nineteenth century scholar and historian Thomas Stephens of Merthyr Tydfil (1821-1875), is believed to have reached Aberystwyth along with Stephen’s papers which were donated by his family to the National Library of Wales.

At the time, the National Library of Wales was housed in the Old College.

The bust may have been overlooked when the papers were transferred to the new National Library of Wales building in the late 1930s.

Neil Holland from the School of Art explains: “A great deal of work has taken place since the 1960s to re-catalogue and re-assemble artefacts and collections donated to the University since 1872, and as far as we can recall we have never come across any accession record for the bust of Thomas Stephens in all that time. So it has been hidden away for at least 40 years.”

Joseph Edwards

Joseph Edwards’ love of carving was revealed at an early age. Also from Merthyr Tydfil, and the son of a stone cutter, Edwards left for London in 1835 at the age of 21, after two years apprenticed to a memorial mason in Swansea.

There, after almost succumbing to starvation, he was taken on as a studio assistant by sculptor William Behnes. Two years later, in 1837, Edwards entered the Royal Academy of Arts, where he won several awards for his work.

Numerous commissions followed, and in the ensuing years Edwards created a large number of allegorical works such as The Last Dream, Religion consoling Justice, a monument to Sir Bernard Bosanquet and Religion which was shown at an international exhibition.

In 1838 he was taken on by sculptor Patrick MacDowell, and assisted him in the production of works such as Girl Reading, Triumph of Love and Virginius.

In 1860 Edwards’ began assisting Matthew Noble, and upon Noble’s early death in 1876 Edwards was given responsibility for the considerable task of completing his outstanding commissions and selling original plaster models for the benefit of Noble’s widow and children.

Upon completion of this work Edwards found himself in straitened circumstances and in 1881, sponsored by painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts, Edwards’ was awarded a financial award of £50 per annum under the Turner bequest. He died shortly after receiving the first instalment.

A year after his death The Red Dragon: The National Magazine of Wales wrote, ‘Of Joseph Edwards it may be said that Wales never had a truer or a more gifted son.’

Edwards was also well known for his portrait busts of contemporary figures and funerary monuments, often memorialising fellow Welshmen. Examples of his work can be seen in churches and cemeteries throughout Wales and England.

Thomas Stephens

Despite a lack of formal education, Thomas Stephens, an apothecary by profession, became one of Wales’ most innovative scholars, social reformers and cultural critics. His critical essay on the history of language and literature of medieval Wales, Literature of the Kymry, published in 1849 was met with international acclaim and even appeared in a German translation in 1864.

An important public figure in Merthyr Tydfil, Thomas Stephens led a number of initiatives to improve educational provisions, health and welfare of the town, where living conditions were deplorable and social unrest was prevalent. He co-founded its public library, helped to establish its health board, and advocated state-aided secular education.

Dr Marion Löffler from the University of Wales Centre for Celtic Studies Aberystwyth, who is currently leading a Leverhulme-funded research project focusing on Thomas Stephens, was delighted with the find: “This bust is an important part of Welsh intellectual and art history. Thomas Stephens is one of the best examples of a self-made Welsh Victorian and represents European amateur scholarship at its best.

“The story of the commissioning of the bust speaks volumes itself. When Stephens retired from his post as secretary of Merthyr Library on grounds of severe illness in 1862, a collection was made, but he refused the money. The committee then decided to commission fellow Merthyr man, Joseph Edwards, to create a commemorative artwork.”

In 1878 the Art Journal, the most important Victorian magazine on art, commented on Edwards’ bust of Thomas Stephens: ‘{The Welsh} may well be proud of their countryman, Joseph Edwards. There are artists who will make as good busts, but there is no living sculptor who can produce monumental work so pure, so refined, so essentially holy.’

To see the original story, please follow the link below.

https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/news/archive/2016/03/title-181749-en.html

The Cyfarthfa Philosophical Society – part 2

by Andrew Green

The Society ‘continued to flourish for some considerable time’. Members met in the Dynevor Arms in Georgetown, and listened to and debated lectures on all kinds of scientific and technological subjects, with a decided emphasis on astronomy. Owen Evans lectured on ‘the use of the globe’, while John Jones spoke on astronomy; both were Unitarian ministers.

Dynevor Arms. Courtesy of the Alan George Archive

But the Cyfarthfa Philosophical Society was far from being a usual collection of establishment figures and technocrats absorbed only by science. It was also a crucible of radical political and heterodox theological thinking. Its presiding figure was Rhys Hywel Rhys of Vaynor. He was a stonemason, self-taught astronomer and poet, and also a Jacobin, who subscribed to the radical newspaper The Cambridge Intelligencer. His atheism was overt. When he died in 1817 an englyn was carved on his gravestone that conveys his atomistic philosophy:

‘Rol ing a gwewyr angau
I ddryllio fy mhriddelau
Rhwng awyr, daear, dwr a than,
Mi ymrana’n fân ronynau.

After the pains and pangs of death
Will have shattered my earthly tenement
Between earth, air, fire, and water,
I shall separate into minute particles

Charles Wilkins, who as the son of a Chartist was sympathetic to radical causes, writes this about Rhys Hywel Rhys:

He devoted himself with great energy to the collection of a fund by which most valuable instruments were bought, such as were far beyond the individual means of any one of the members. Then, when these were bought, the members named Rhys as their president, and many an evening was passed in the endeavour to solve the most difficult questions with which their favourite sciences abounded. On the formation of the Society, it was wisely decided to confine the meetings solely to scientific matters, excluding political and religious subjects. This was rendered all the more necessary as the members were great readers of controversial works, and disposed to form opinions of their own, instead of having them formed for them. But it is not to be expected that a Society of thoughtful minds would assemble without occasionally diving below the current, and endeavour to solve to their own satisfaction certain points of science and the Bible, which, in their day, were believed to be sternly conflicting, and in discordance with each other. And this they did at friendly meetings, even if they were rigid enough to exclude the subject at their Society. We can readily believe that such discussion, with gleanings from “Tom Payne,” Mirabeau, Volney, and the Rational School, had a tendency to awaken doubt, and the failure to reconcile the God of the Hebrews with the God of Nature to confirm those doubts, and warp some of them from sect and creed to Deism. A few, we understand, became Unitarians, and some remained Orthodox. We should not be surprised at this, for the ranks of the French doubters were composed of men of high reputation, and the sallies of Gibbon and of Hume against the citadel of the faith had been keen and well sustained. The very intellectual atmosphere, so to speak, was one of doubt, and all this was in natural sequence.

Elsewhere Wilkins outlines the advanced thinking of the Philosophers gathered around Rhys Hywel Rhys:

In the days of its infancy, the members were exposed to considerable sarcasm by the ingenious efforts of Rhys, who, in order to exercise himself in mechanical ingenuity, constructed a duck ‘that did everything but quack.’ Good, but foolish people, inferred from this that the society aimed at rivalling the deity, and condemned them; while others made it a theme for constant raillery. The members were deep thinkers—astute politicians and though debarred from discussing any polemics in their society hours, yet they were only too happy to tread the debateable tracks of religious politics and philosophy; and some even indulged in opinions which led the Cyfarthfa school of philosophers to become rather unjustly associated with positive Atheism. Paine and Voltaire had their admirers; and when it was a punishable offence to read the works of the former, a few, who thought highly of his Rights of man and Age of reason, would assemble in secret places on the mountains, and, taking the works from concealed places under a large boulder or so, read them with great unction. But if Paine had admirers he had also enemies, for at the same time religious men had the nails in their boots arranged to form T. P., that then they might figuratively tread Tom Paine underfoot.

The Society was just one of many institutions in Merthyr that nurtured a spirit of questioning, dissent and protest. The Calvinists were relatively weak in the town, whereas Unitarians and other less rigid, free-thinking churches had many adherents: many of the Society’s early members belonged to the Unitarian chapel in Merthyr or the Hen Dy Cwrdd chapel in Cefn-Coed-y-Cymer. Many ‘friendly societies’ – the precursors of trade unions – were set up in the town around the time of the Society’s beginning. Together these and other local institutions helped to build an autonomous political culture of confident radicalism that would make Merthyr a natural centre for industrial strikes, Chartist reform, trade unions and other workers’ movements later in the nineteenth century.

Wilkins is vague about the subsequent history of the Cyfarthfa Philosophical Society. After the deaths or removals of many founders the Society almost collapsed. It was resuscitated for a while, with a new subscription and set of rules. Further scientific instruments were acquired, and books added to a library. But ‘a few years ago’ the Society was dissolved and it became amalgamated with the Merthyr Subscription Library. Charles Wilkins himself became Librarian of the Library when it was established in 1846; its co-founder and Secretary was Thomas Stephens, the literary historian, reformer and Unitarian.

Reproduced with the kind permission of Andrew Green. To see the original, please click https://gwallter.com/history/the-cyfarthfa-philosophical-society.html

Merthyr’s Historians: Charles Wilkins

Over the years, Merthyr has produced some excellent historians, and I would like to introduce a new feature celebrating some of them. To mark the 110th anniversary of his death, we kick off with Merthyr’s first ‘official’ historian – Charles Wilkins.

Charles Wilkins was born on 16 August 1830 in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, the second of nine children of William Wilkins, a Chartist bookseller, and Anna Maria Wilkins. In 1840 the family moved to Merthyr, with William Wilkins opening a shop on the High Street (opposite the current Lloyd’s Bank), and eventually becoming postmaster at the post office adjoining his business. At the age of fourteen, Charles left school to work with his father as a clerk at the post office.

In 1859, Charles married Lydia Jeans and they settled at Springfield Villa in Thomastown. The (by contemporary accounts) idyllic marriage was shattered in 1867 when Lydia died giving birth to their third child.

The following year, Charles married Mary Skipp in Topsley, Herefordshire, and she would bear him two further children.

In 1871, William Wilkins died, and Charles took over as postmaster.

From 1846 to 1866 he was also librarian of the Merthyr Tydfil Subscription Library of which Thomas Stephens was secretary.

From the age of fourteen, Charles began writing articles for local and national Welsh newspapers, and in 1867, he published ‘The History of Merthyr Tydfil’, the first ‘official history of the town. It was subsequently extended and re-published in 1908.

As well as writing some fiction, he also wrote several other major historical works including:-

Wales, Past and Present (1870) (The History of Wales for Englishmen)
Tales and Sketches of Wales (1879, 1880)
The History of the Literature of Wales from 1300 to 1650 (1884)
The History of Newport (1886)
The South Wales Coal Trade and Its Allied Industries (1888)
The History of the Iron, Steel, Tinplate and Other Trades of Wales (1903)

In 1877, he was “initiated into the mysteries of the Druidic lore”, and at the 1881 National Eisteddfod, held in Merthyr Tydfil, he won a £21 prize (approximately equivalent to £2,100 in 2019) and gold medal for the best “History of the Literature of Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire from the earliest period to the present time.” In 1882 he founded ‘The Red Dragon: The National Magazine of Wales’. That same year, it was reported in the Western Mail (7 December 1882) that, “after careful examination of the various works written by Mr. Wilkins”, he was “unanimously elected to the super graduate Degree of Literature (Lit. D.)” by the Druidic University of America and its affiliate in Maine.

Charles Wilkins retired as postmaster at the end of 1897 after almost 50 years of service. He died at Springfield Villa on 2 August 1913 and was buried at Cefn Cemetery.

Although his history of Merthyr contain some inaccuracies; bearing in mind when it was written, and that a lot of it was based on oral history; it is a remarkable work, being the first of its kind to chronicle Merthyr’s history, and it is an invaluable resource to use as a starting point for further research.

You can download the 1867 version of Wilkins history of Merthyr here:

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_History_of_Merthyr_Tydfil/FWk1AQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

The 1908 revision is available here:

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/_/A_YRnQEACAAJ?hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiBkKbRz7OAAxXvX_EDHX-LDaAQre8FegQIAxAc

Thomas Stephens – part 2

by Dr Marion Löffler

During the 1850s Stephens became one of the two main instigators of a Welsh orthography reform, a subject debated since the misguided efforts of William Owen Pughe. Following a meeting at the 1858 Llangollen Eisteddfod Stephens and Robert John Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys) circulated questionnaires that led to the publication of Orgraph yr Iaith Gymraeg in 1859, a valuable forerunner of articles on the same subject published by Sir John Morris-Jones in Y Geninen in the 1890s. These efforts ultimately led to the standard work on Welsh orthographic principles published in 1929.

A marble bust of Thomas Stephens by eminent sculptor Joseph Edwards.

Competing at eisteddfodau was a major incentive and stage for the learning and creativity of many amateur scholars in Victorian Wales and Stephens was no exception. At most eisteddfodau in which he competed between 1840 and 1858 he won, sometimes up to three prizes. His first success was in the Liverpool Eisteddfod of 1840, where he won a prize for his essay on the ‘History of the life and times of Iestyn ab Gwrgant, the last native lord of Glamorgan’. He made his name with a winning essay on ‘The Literature of Wales during the twelfth and succeeding centuries’ at the Abergavenny Cymreigyddion Society Eisteddfod of 1848, which appeared a year later as The Literature of the Kymry. This first study of medieval Welsh literature conducted on the basis of modern scholarly principles was extremely well-received by international scholars, such as Matthew Arnold, Theodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, Henri Martin, Max Müller and Albert Schulz, and an acclaimed German translation appeared in 1864.

Nevertheless, and although he continued to produce scholarly essays for eisteddfodau, The Literature of the Kymry remained the only book-length study of his to be published during his life time. His five-hundred page essay on a ‘Summary of the History of Wales from the earliest period to the present time’ gained first prize at the Rhuddlan Eisteddfod, but remained unpublished due to a lack of patronage. His winning essay at the last Cymreigyddion y Fenni eisteddfod of 1853, on the ‘Remains of the Welsh Poets from the sixth century to the twelfth’, which was to be part one of ‘a complete history of Welsh literature’, remained unpublished for the same reason.

His ‘English prose translation of the “Gododdin” with explanatory notes’, also submitted in 1853, was published in 1888 as The Gododdin of Aneurin Gwawdrydd: An English Translation with Copious Explanatory Notes; A Life of Aneurin; and Several Lengthy Dissertations Illustrative of the ‘Gododdin’, and the Battle of Cattraeth, edited by Thomas Powel (1845-1922). Stephens’s last major work, ‘Madoc: an essay on the discovery of America by Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd in the twelfth century’, failed to win the competition at the 1858 Grand Eisteddfod of Llangollen, because it disproved the tale that Madoc and his followers had discovered America. The result made Stephens a martyr to truth, and the main judge and druid John Williams (ab Ithel) even more notorious than he had been. This essay was published in 1893, edited by Stephens’s neighbour and pupil Llywarch Reynolds.

Stephens turned to the periodical press as a medium of critically reviewing Welsh history in order to replace Welsh romanticism with a more scientific approach. Among his major series of critical essays are those on the romantic forger Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) in Yr Ymofynnydd (1852-1853), on the fictional ‘Dyfnwal Moelmud’ and early Welsh law in the Cambrian Journal and Archaeologia Cambrensis (from 1854), on ‘The Book of Aberpergwm’ in Archaeologia Cambrensis (1858), and on ‘The Bardic Alphabet called “Coelbren y Beirdd”’ in Archaeologia Cambrensis (1872). Numerous shorter contributions by him appeared in newspapers like The Cambrian , The Merthyr Guardian, The Monmouthshire Merlin , The Silurian and in periodicals, such as Seren Gomer , Yr Ymofynnydd , Y Traethodydd and Y Beirniad .

Weakened by a succession of strokes, Thomas Stephens died on 4 January 1875 and was buried in the Nonconformist part of Cefn-coed-y-cymer cemetery. The funeral sermon held in his honour at Twynyrodyn Unitarian Chapel, Merthyr Tydfil, was published by request of the members, along with a list of the over 180 books in a number of languages he had bequeathed to Merthyr Tydfil Library.

Twynyrodyn Chapel. Photo courtesy of the Alan George archive.

His archive was donated to the National Library of Wales by his widow’s family in 1916 and is to be found at NLW MSS 904-66 .

Transcripts of the main collection of his letters were made available to the public in 2017 and may be viewed at: https://archives.library.wales/index.php/letters-534 and https://archives.library.wales/index.php/letters-889 .

To view the original article, please follow:
https://biography.wales/article/s11-STEP-THO-1821

Thomas Stephens – part 1

by Dr Marion Löffler

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Stephens, the famous historian and social reformer who although not born here, spent the majority of his life in Merthyr. To mark the occasion, I have been given permission to use this article which appears in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Thomas Stephens was born on 21 April 1821 at Tan-y-gyrchen (also known as Tŷ-to-cam, i.e. the house with the crooked roof), in Pontneddfechan, Glamorganshire, the son of Evan Stephens, a well-known boot-maker, and his wife Rachel, the daughter of William Williams (Wil y Gweydd, 1778-1834), a weaver and the Unitarian minister of Blaen-gwrach chapel. Among those who influenced Stephens in his youth were Maria Jane Williams and the Quaker Thomas Redwood (author of The Vale of Glamorgan. Scenes and Tales among the Welsh). Having first attended an elementary school ‘located in a barn’ near Cefn Rhigos, Stephens spent about three years at the Unitarian school founded by David Davis (1745-1827), which during his time there was under the care of John Davies, the former minister of Capelygroes in Ceredigion.

In October 1835, Stephens was apprenticed to David Morgan, a Merthyr Tydfil pharmacist, on whose death in 1841 he took over the business at 113 High Street, which remained his main source of income throughout his life. In 1866, Stephens married Margaret Elizabeth Davies, a descendant of a well-known family of Unitarians from Penrheolgerrig (see Morgan Williams, 1808-1883) in Llangollen Parish Church. Her brother Richard conducted most of the business after Stephens suffered a first stroke in 1868.

Thomas Stephens’s main contributions to the shaping of modern Wales are his efforts as a member of Merthyr Tydfil’s middle class to transform it from an industrial village to an urban community endowed with modern civic institutions; his tireless work on modernizing all aspects of Welsh culture, particularly the eisteddfod, education and Welsh orthography; and his pioneering works of scholarship, especially in history.

As a Unitarian, Thomas Stephens believed in the ability of individuals and society to improve their condition through education and by pursuing rational pastimes. All his work is to be viewed against this religious background. He first put his beliefs into practice by co-founding a public library in Merthyr Tydfil in 1846, for which he acted as secretary until his health failed in 1870, organizing and delivering educational lectures. In this, as in other undertakings, he received the support of Lady Charlotte Guest and Sir John Josiah Guest.

Stephens was one of the campaigners for the desperately needed Board of Health in Merthyr Tydfil in the 1850s, took a leading role in the planning of its Temperance Hall, which would provide rational pastimes for the working classes, and campaigned tirelessly for the Incorporation of the town.

The Temperance Hall. Photo courtesy of the Alan George archive.

He acted as an intermediary between iron masters and workers on more than one occasion. In 1853 it was he who chaired a mass meeting of over 3,000 people, called to achieve an end to long strike action. For the widows and children of the men killed at an explosion at the Crawshay Gethin Pit No. 2 in 1862, he instigated a relief fund, and collected and distributed money until the day before he died. He was a close friend of and political campaigner for H. A. Bruce, Lord Aberdare, Liberal MP for Merthyr Tydfil between 1852 and 1868, and served as High Constable of Merthyr in 1858.

Thomas Stephens’s talent and style as a social critic and reformer with a penchant for acerbic prose first showed itself in a series of letters to The Cambrian in 1842-3, in which he harshly criticized the romantic nature of the eisteddfod. In 1847, and reacting to the publication of the Blue Books , he took a leading part in the controversy over voluntaryism versus the acceptance of governmental grants for educational purposes which was acted out in the Monmouthshire Merlin . He was one of the very few who gave voice to the unpopular view that ‘voluntary exertions would be insufficient to provide education for the very large number of children who now remain uneducated’. For this, he was denounced by representatives of Church and Chapel alike as ‘a maniac and a liar’.

To read the original article, please follow:
https://biography.wales/article/s11-STEP-THO-1821

To be continued……

Merthyr Eisteddfod

160 years ago…….

The Meaning of Cyfarthfa

by Carl Llewellyn

Our Welsh laws refer to the “Tair Helfa Cyfarthfa” or the “Three Barking Hunts. The hunts were so called because the animals could either run fast, climb trees, or find safety in underground burrows, the hunter would bait his prey then send his dogs who would signal the position of the baited prey by barking.

Cyfarthfa has two meanings, either the ‘barking place’ as outlined above, or it could have been so called from the ‘echoes’ the rocky escarpment face of the Cyfarthfa Rocks made. We have been unable so far to trace any reference to the place name Cyfarthfa Rocks before the arrival of Anthony Bacon around 1765.

Another theory of the meaning Cyfarthfa was given by an old inhabitant of the Cyfarthfa district over 200 years ago. He stated that on the site of the Cyfarthfa furnaces there was formally a quarry with a fine echo, if a dog barked in the area it was repeated so strongly that one fancied that a large number of dogs had congregated in the locality.

The etymology of Cyfarthfa, according to Mr. Thomas Stephens, Merthyr poet, bard and chemist is the place of barking dogs – pretty well indicating the character of the place before the days of ironmaking. Game and vermin abounded, and the dogs held high revel there in the dense thickets and impenetrable copses.

Note that cyfar means ‘arable land’; cyfarth means ‘to bark’ or ‘to cough’ as a verb and ‘a barking’ as a noun; cyfarthwr means a ‘barker’ or ‘shouter’; cyfarch means ‘greeting’ or ‘request’ and cyfarchfa means ‘a hailing-place’.

I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.