E.W. Thomas, Bangor University
In amongst the Penrhyn Castle archive collection held at the Archives of Bangor University is a small box with the words Welsh Land Commission Letters written on its side. What I expected to find was correspondence between Lord Penrhyn and his agent, Col. Sackville West, on how they were going to deal with the commission. What I found was over 50 letters, covering the period 1893-1896, between Lord Penrhyn and a correspondent named J.E. Vincent, which were to prove far more interesting.
Firstly, some background context. On 13 September 1892 William Gladstone, the 83-year-old prime minister of Great Britain walked up the side of Mount Snowdon to a spot called Cwmllan where, in front of a large crowd of mainly tenant farmers, he delivered a speech in which he denounced Welsh landlordism. At his side that day was Thomas Edward Ellis the Liberal M.P. for the county of Merioneth who had managed to convince Gladstone to give an address on the Welsh land question. When reported in the Welsh press the speech was heralded by many as Gladstone’s endorsement for setting up a Welsh Land Commission (a similar body had been established in Ireland under the 1881 Land Act). Ellis, the son of a tenant farmer, had been campaigning hard for a Land Commission and, like other Liberals, saw it as the culmination of the struggle against landlordism, and a conduit for the rectification of perceived grievances. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the political power of Welsh landlords had been coming under increased pressure with a dynamic Liberal party winning twenty-nine seats out of thirty-three in the 1880 general election. Gladstone at first had been unwilling to set up a Commission but pressure was building especially from the Welsh language press, which had been attacking the landlords relentlessly: ‘The land is ours and it is foolishness to let strangers rob us of it. It would be a blessing to Wales to get rid of these landlords,’ wrote one correspondent.
Ellis himself was greatly influenced by what Michael Davitt and other agrarianists such as William O’Brien had achieved in Ireland, especially the passing of the 1881 Land Act. He had visited Ireland in September 1887 and at Leinster Hall in Dublin had shared a platform with O’Brien where Ellis was lauded as ‘the Parnell of Wales’. On 9 September, he was at Mitchelstown county Cork and witnessed what became known as the Mitchelstown massacre, where police fired into a crowd of several thousand demonstrators and killed three people. Ellis was wounded in the hand that day. Coupled with intense lobbying by Tom Ellis, and the newly elected M.P. for Caernarfon Boroughs, David Lloyd George, Gladstone relented and agreed for a Land Commission to be set up in Wales, a year or so after his Snowdon speech. In May 1893, a commission of nine members was appointed holding its first session on the 25 May. Travelling around Wales, taking evidence in both Welsh and English, it sat until 5 December 1895 and published a report in 1896. Among 1086 witnesses interviewed, were 106 landowners, 110 land agents, 516 tenant farmers, 82 freeholders, and 21 labourers. The commissioners also heard evidence from people from outside Wales, notably men like Alexander Mackenzie the editor of the Scottish Highlander, and Donald McRae, secretary of the Highland Land Law Reform Association. However, nobody from Ireland was called to give evidence.
For one man the appointment of a commission was seen as a threat to the authority of the landlords. He was George Sholto Douglas-Pennant, 2nd Baron Penrhyn, who owned the Penrhyn estate on the outskirts of Bangor, north Wales. He was the third largest landlord in Wales, with an estate of 41,300 acres with a valuation of £62,000. This included the Penrhyn quarry, which was one of the largest and most profitable slate quarries in the world. The Pennant family had made their initial fortune in the sugar plantations of Jamaica with its accompanying evil of slavery.
The Irish Land and National League campaigns had had an influence on the Welsh landlords, who viewed Davitt’s visit to north Wales in 1886 with consternation, fearing that ‘Irish methods’, as they were called, were being imported into Wales. The attacks on landlords and their agents such as the killing of Lord Leitrim in April 1878 re-enforced these fears. In Wales these fears were further magnified with the Tithe War of 1886-89 characterised by riots and violence, and in Denbighshire where the military had to be called out to restore order. Threats, real and imagined, prompted landlords to retreat more behind their estate walls.
Yet Penrhyn was not one to hide away. In 1886, at a meeting at Chester, the North Wales Property Defence Association was formed under the chairmanship of Penrhyn. This Association was to be the bulwark against the rising tide of radicalism though, at first, other north Wales landlords were slow to join. Even in October 1892 on the eve of the setting up of a Land Commission, Lord Boston a major landowner on Anglesey had to be reminded by Penrhyn what was at stake: ‘
Now that the common enemies of landlords in Wales are beginning to show their teeth more openly, it becomes more than ever important that there should be something like agreement amongst men of property in Wales with a view to enable action for defensive purposes, and I wish I could persuade you to strengthen the hands of the North Wales Property Defence Association by becoming a member of it. Boston ultimately joined the association, though others like Lord Powis refused; in a tetchy letter to Penrhyn, he declared ‘I would prefer not to join the Association and I hope you will not press me to do so’. This lack of support could be due to the fact that Penrhyn was not universally popular amongst his fellow landlords. As was said of him years later: ‘He was uncompromising, easily offended and obsessive. He had many friends and supporters as he had enemies and opponents.’
To make sure that the landlords would have a fair hearing when the Commission started taking evidence, Penrhyn needed somebody who not only would be his eyes and ears in the commission sittings but who also would be as ruthless as himself, somebody of a similar temperament and beliefs and who understood land law. His principal land agent Col. Sackville West, though efficient at his work, was regarded as a quiet, unassuming man. His agent in the quarry, E.A. Young, had the necessary ruthlessness but he had enough on his hands in keeping the quarrymen at bay. The man he ultimately decided upon was John Edmund Vincent.
Born in 1857, the son of an Anglican clergyman, J.E. Vincent could trace his roots to Welsh, Norman, and Irish ancestry. After Oxford University he embarked on a career at the Bar practising on the English North Western Circuit and also the North Wales Circuit. In 1886 he became a correspondent of The Times, and wrote a book on the history of football, the first ever book on the subject. In all, he would write thirteen books, become editor of the National Observer, and one of the founding editors of Country Life magazine in 1890. He was an ardent Tory and a staunch supporter of the Anglican Church, being appointed chancellor of the diocese of Bangor in 1890. Of a similar temperament to Penrhyn, he was a prickly and intolerant character; in a postscript to a letter to Penrhyn on 4 April 1895 he remarked: ‘London is ringing with that man [Oscar] Wilde, whom I have hated ever since I first set eyes on him in Oxford’.
Penrhyn felt that Vincent would be adept at counteracting Liberal propaganda. Vincent was already secretary of the Landowners Association of South Wales and now, through Penrhyn’s influence, was appointed counsel for the North Wales Property Defence Association. Initially he did not share Penrhyn’s fears, viewing the commission as ‘so insignificant we need not greatly be concerned about it’. He relished the prospect of fighting the Commission.
Vincent and his assistant, Owen Slaney Wynne, attended the majority of the commission’s meetings in fifty-nine locations throughout Wales. At the end of each session, Vincent was allowed to cross-examine the witnesses through the chair, and recalled with satisfaction how, ‘I seldom let a day pass without aggravating the secretary of the Welsh Land Commission’. (D. Lleufer Thomas was the secretary to the Commission with a reputation as prickly and quarrelsome as Vincent).
The main fear of the landlords was that the Land Commission would advocate the setting up of a land court to arbitrate on rents and fixture of tenure as had happened in Ireland. Vincent espoused the objections of Penrhyn and other landlords who believed such a body would be ‘prejudicial to the interests of all classes connected with land from landowner to labourer.’ During the sittings of the commission, he continually harassed the witnesses, especially tenants who promoted the setting up of a land court. On 24 January 1895, he gave evidence himself to the commission, concentrating on the dangers of a land court to Welsh agriculture, as he later reported in a letter to Penrhyn. In his view it would prohibit investment in the land by estate owners. Under the present system, he argued, ‘the duty of landlords towards his tenants was wide and obligatory, but if a system of compulsory judicial courts was established his duty would be gone’, and with it any inducement for landlords to spend money on their estates. If there were grievances felt by individual tenants, then these grievances could be resolved between the landlord or his agent and the tenant without recourse to a third party. A land court would be an intolerable interference on the traditional freedom of contract.
It was also at this session that Vincent crossed swords with Lord Carrington, the chair of the commission, regarding his role as secretary to the Landowners Association of South Wales, and as counsel to the North Wales Property Defence Association. Carrington expressed concern that Vincent’s reportage for The Times provided a biased and jaundiced view of the commission. Peeved at this accusation, Vincent replied: ‘I cannot answer that question. No questions are ever answered about The Times newspaper.’ But Carrington had touched a nerve. On 18 April Vincent vented his anger in a letter to Penrhyn, arguing that Carrington had been less than a gentleman in suggesting that ‘my writing as a journalist was traceable to my position as an advocate.’ Vowing revenge, he continued: ‘you may rest assured, my Lord, that an injury done to a journalist is never forgotten. The offender’s name is ignored, his speeches are pooh-poohed; and nothing kills like contempt and laughter.’
In 1896 the commission presented its report, which recommended a sympathetic and efficient system of estate management, with more Welsh-speaking land agents, and an impartial attitude towards the political and religious outlook of the tenants. It also suggested that game laws should be amended. But on the question of setting up a land court, there was no agreement, with a majority report of six commissioners in favour, but the other three dissenting. Although a proposal to set up a Welsh land court later came before parliament in 1897, during Lord Salisbury’s Conservative administration, it received little or no support. In fact, the Land Commission report and its five volumes of evidence were largely ignored due, in part, to the fact that by the end of the century agricultural distress had become less acute.
Vincent considered that the landlords had come out well of the commission’s enquiry and that radical grievances had proved to be exaggerated. Wales was not another Ireland. Even Brynmor Jones, one of the commissioners, was forced to admit that the landlords were well prepared and highly effective in presenting evidence, and this was in part due to the hard work of Vincent.
In December 1896, in one of his last letters, Vincent congratulated Penrhyn on defeating the striking Penrhyn quarrymen, dismissive of the efforts of tenants and workers: ‘Let me congratulate you….You are one employer carrying on upon your own property a business…and you will not permit your servants to control the conduct of your business. Many foolish persons would say you were aiming a blow at combination, the right to combine being legal. They always forget that the right to resist combination is equally legal’. He was Penrhyn’s unofficial agent.
Bibliography
R. A. Jones, The Land Question and a Land Bill with special reference to Wales (Liverpool 1888).
Neville Masterman, The Forerunner, the Dilemmas of Tom Ellis, 1959 – 1900 (Swansea 1972).
J.E. Vincent, The Land Question in North Wales (London 1897).
J.E. Vincent, The Land Question in South Wales – Defence of the Landowners of South Wales and Monmouthshire (London 1897).
Minutes of Evidence of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire, 5 volumes, HMSO, (London 1893-1895).
Report of the Royal Commission on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire, HMSO, (London 1896).
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