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CHAPTER 1
'From the Village of Llanaelhaearn'
The first volume of John Grigg's biography of David Lloyd George claimed that Lloyd George
was a privileged child, born not to rank or riches but to a special historic opportunity. At the time of his birth Wales was experiencing a national revival, and the class to which his family belonged was providing the national movement with most of its leaders.
It is among the Welsh-speaking, Nonconformist, rural class that provided the nineteenth-century national movement with its leaders, a class from whose ranks emerged one of the most mercurial and dynamic political figures of the twentieth century, that we must also search for David Hughes Parry's beginnings. As with Lloyd George, those beginnings are to be found in rural north-west Wales during Queen Victoria's reign. Of course, a generation separated Lloyd George and Hughes Parry, but the antecedents are strikingly similar. These antecedents contain the source of the key elements in Hughes Parry's character. They would also provide the motivation for his later work and achievements.
Hughes Parry's story begins on 8 January 1893 in Uwchlaw'r Ffynnon, a farm in the parish of Llanaelhaearn in the old county of Caernarfon. Llanaelhaearn lies at the foot of the southern slopes of Yr Eifl mountain range on the Llyn Peninsula, facing Cardigan Bay and on the main road from Pwllheli to Caernarfon. It is, as the crow flies, some four or five miles north-west of the village of Llanystumdwy, where Lloyd George was brought up.
A rather shabby, clumsy cluster of houses, a public house, a church and a chapel constituted the architectural heritage of the small village of Llanaelhaearn during Hughes Parry's childhood. The economy could be described as a microcosm of Caernarfonshire's economy in that, although it primarily derived its sustenance from agriculture, the ancient trade of the district, there was also considerable mercantile commerce at the small ports of Nefyn and Porth Dinllaen. There is nowhere in Llyn that is further than 6 miles from the sea. In the course of the nineteenth century came the new economic enterprises in slate and granite quarrying, which had brought some industrialization to the area. It could be said that Llanaelhaearn stood at the junction of the main economies of the region, being a traditional farming community, close to the sea and the small fishing ports, but with significant industrial activity centred upon the granite and slate quarries at the neighbouring villages of Trefor and Llithfaen.
Hughes Parry's father was a tenant farmer who, like many others, struggled to make his living on the land. John Hughes Parry was a son of Penllwyn, a farm of some seventy-two acres in the parish of Llannor, two miles or so northwest of Pwllheli. Born in 1867 to John and Catherine Parry of Penllwyn, John Hughes Parry's ancestors were typical of the tenant farmers of Caernarfonshire who sought to make a meagre living while trying to pay the rent to the landlords, who owned almost all of the land during the late Victorian era.
After marriage to Anne Hughes, John Hughes Parry had taken on the tenancy of Uwchlaw'r Ffynnon (meaning 'above the well'), his wife's family home and a farm of two hundred acres or so in the neighbouring parish of Llanaelhaearn. Uwchlaw'r Ffynnon was situated on a rugged and mountainous terrain, and, as Sir Ben Bowen Thomas later said,
It was a hill farm, rich in rocks and boulders, where nature did not readily dispense her favours. She would only yield them to men and women who were prepared to importune her with all their attentions, all round the clock, and then find time to pray and preach, to read and discuss, to sing and to write poetry.
Anne Hughes, David Hughes Parry's mother, was the daughter of Henry and Catherine Hughes of Cwmcoryn farm in Llanaelhaearn. After a series of somewhat chequered attempts at farming, Anne's parents had emigrated to Columbus, Wisconsin, in the late nineteenth century, taking all but one of the children in tow. The family later moved to Lime Springs, Iowa, after the mother's death. The eldest daughter, Anne, who was married with two children (one of those children being David Hughes Parry), stayed behind in Llanaelhaearn. After a period as a domestic servant at a local farm, she had taken care of her maternal grandfather, Robert Hughes of Uwchlaw'r Ffynnon. We shall return to Robert Hughes shortly. In due course, and upon her grandfather's death, she and her husband, John Hughes Parry, succeeded to the tenancy of the farm of Uwchlaw'r Ffynnon.
Although John Hughes Parry did not demonstrate much evidence that he was a man of genius, he had qualities which ensured that, through hard work and perseverance, the family would enjoy relative prosperity. After returning to take up the tenancy of his ancestral home farm of Penllwyn in 1905, John Hughes Parry went from strength to strength, and would serve as a local councillor and chairman of the Pwllheli bench of magistrates during his later years. In his entry in Who's Who, David Hughes Parry would rather proudly refer to his father as 'John Hughes Parry, JP'.
Despite the hostile terrain and the challenging circumstances, John and Anne Hughes Parry made happy homes at Uwchlaw'r Fynnon and, later, Penllwyn, and their marriage produced three sons and two daughters. Indeed, they were homes that would ultimately be seen as cradles of men of great ability, and in particular the boys David and Robert. In due course, Professor Robert Hughes Parry would enjoy a distinguished career as principal medical officer for the City of Bristol, professor of preventative medicine at Bristol University, and serve as honorary physician to King George VI and his successor, the present queen.
David Hughes Parry had a keen awareness and appreciation of the sacrifices that his parents had made in order to give their children opportunities that were unimaginable to them. For him, they were a generation who had toiled and laboured without reaping their just rewards. This was something which Hughes Parry carried with him, firmly embedded within his conscience, throughout the subsequent years of prosperity and success. It also accounted for the stoicism in his character, and it engrained within him a sense of gratitude and indebtedness to the land and the people who had nurtured him. Indeed, it may even be argued that he was a man burdened with a heavy sense of duty and commitment to the spiritual values and cultural tradition which he had inherited from them.
Hughes Parry's childhood was dominated by the two potent cultural forces of his social environment. The first was the Welsh language and its attendant cultural energies. After all, the Caernarfonshire of this period was a fortress and a bastion for the Welsh language. The 1891 census figures show that more than 65 per cent of the population of Caernarfonshire spoke only Welsh, with 25 per cent speaking both Welsh and English. Only about 10 per cent of the population could not speak Welsh. Even on an all-Wales basis, and despite the changes brought about by industrialization on a grand scale, the majority of the people could and did speak Welsh. Indeed, as many as 30 per cent could speak only Welsh. Moreover, the figures for the registration district of Pwllheli indicate that 83 per cent of the people spoke only Welsh, compared with 4 per cent speaking only English and about 13 per cent being bilingual. The percentage of monoglot Welsh speakers was even greater in rural parishes such as Llanaelhaearn, and it is thought that as late as 1921 there were parishes where the entire population spoke only Welsh.
However, this was the prelude to a dramatic decline in the fortunes of the language, as the vicissitudes of economic decline, two world wars and rapid social change during the course of the twentieth century saw the language retreat into a few pockets of resistance in the rural north and west. By 1971, the year of the last census in Hughes Parry's lifetime, the percentage of Welsh speakers in Wales had gone down to 20 per cent, and even in solid heartlands like Caernarfonshire the figure was down to 60 per cent. In David Hughes Parry's lifetime, the Welsh language had gone from being the language of the majority to the language of the minority. Some of Hughes Parry's most significant work and labours in adult life would, in many ways, be the result of having witnessed this dramatic cultural and linguistic shift. Indeed, many of his actions were motivated by a desire to arrest what he saw as the detrimental effects of this decline.
It was not only in the context of the fortunes of the Welsh language that Hughes Parry would witness deterioration and social recession. The other potent influence on Hughes Parry's childhood was Christian Protestant Nonconformism which manifested itself in the form of Calvinistic Methodism. With its origins in the great revivals of the eighteenth century, this particular form of Protestantism grew into a galvanizing force in the life of Wales in the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was the only authentically Welsh denomination in the sense that it did not have an English equivalent or counterpart.
It had began as a splinter faction within the established Church, a pressure group, led by Daniel Rowland and Howell Harris, who following a powerful spiritual conversion in the years 1730-5 sought to invigorate what they saw as the established Church's failing spirituality. The movement grew in popularity, but was resented by the Church, whose clergy would refuse to administer communion to those attending Methodist meetings. Breaking away from the Church was resisted by the founding fathers, some of whom were ordained clergy. However, by the turn of the nineteenth century, the Calvinistic Methodists had collectively come to the conclusion that they had become a Nonconformist denomination and that, in order to afford their members the benefits and privileges of a recognized denomination, separation from the established Church was unavoidable. In 1811, the first ministers were ordained, and so the connexion was born.
The constitution of the Church was formalized by a deed poll which would be known as the constitutional deed. The instrument, dated 10 August 1826, was executed by 150 persons including ordained ministers, lay preachers, elders and trustees nominated and appointed as representatives of the Church. The Calvinistic Methodist Church (also known as the Presbyterian Church of Wales) thus became a body of communicants who pledge to bear witness to the same religious faith and to practise according to the same doctrinal principles by means of the organization and in the manner set out in the constitutional deed.
The constitutional deed contained powers of amendment, with the exception of matters of faith and doctrine. The denomination's book of rules made detailed provision for the admission of members by local churches, the election of elders by local congregations, the training, examination and ordination of ministers of the Church and the induction of pastors charged with the spiritual welfare of congregations attending local churches. The general supervision of the Church would be vested in the ministers and elders of the church meeting in the general assembly. The Church was also divided geographically into two associations of the north and south of Wales (an eastern association was later established). Each association was subdivided geographically into a number of presbyteries and each presbytery was divided into a number of districts. An association, a presbytery or a district meeting would be comprised of ministers and elders of the Church within the respective administrative boundary.
The Welsh Calvinistic Methodists were theologically orthodox, with a distinctive Calvinistic emphasis on the ideas of divine predestination and on the personal salvation of the elect, through Christ's grace alone. In this regard, they were theologically different from their English Wesleyan counterparts, who found the Welsh appetite for high Calvinism unpalatable. This theological conviction that God had his chosen people predestined for salvation would have an effect beyond the limits of religious practice. It would breed a strong tradition of moral self-discipline, which promoted self-imposed abstinence and seriousness of purpose.
Although later regarded as another Nonconformist denomination, the Calvinistic Methodists were distinct from the other older dissenting denominations, such as the Congregationalists and Baptists, by not only their strict adherence to Calvinistic orthodox theology, but also in their organizational character. Perhaps the clear, definitive and uncompromising theological position was the reason for the nature of the Methodist organizational regime. The Methodists placed great emphasis on order, central leadership and discipline. Although Presbyterian rather than Episcopalian, and thus with a greater democratic personality, authority within the Church came from the collective membership as a whole rather than being devolved locally to individual congregations or chapels.
There was no room for individualism, theologically and, as a consequence, in matters of organization. This promoted a certain form of respectability within the denomination, which placed emphasis on observation of conventional social norms and established order. Observance of spiritual order was later converted into an observance of secular order. Whereas the older dissenting denominations were renowned as promoters of radicalism and political agitation, the Calvinistic Methodists were often establishment figures and upholders of the status quo. Although some degree of political radicalism would infiltrate the denomination as the nineteenth century progressed, the essentially conservative personality of the movement would endure. Whatever else may be said about its pervasive effects, there can be no doubt that Calvinistic Methodism gave its followers a profound sense of self-esteem and personal worth, and energized their cultural life. It inspired a rich literary tradition, particularly in the field of hymnology, exemplified in the work of William Williams of Pantycelyn, who was one of the movement's founding fathers and a hymn writer and poet later to be regarded as one of Wales's greatest literary figures.
Calvinistic Methodism, in Hughes Parry's case, was a force that was channelled through Babell chapel in Llanaelhaearn. The linguistic and religious dimensions were indivisible aspects of his cultural identity, and he would fondly recollect the Welsh-medium ethos of the Sunday school in Babell chapel and its contrast with the English-medium, elementary village school (for which, like so many of his generation, he had very little nice to say). If Hughes Parry was nurtured in the Welsh Nonconformist tradition, it was also arguably an inherent aspect of his nature. In fact, he would boast that one of his ancestors was a signatory to the constitutional deed of 1826. Whether that was the case or not, it is certain that another forebear was a renowned preacher during the early part of the nineteenth century who counted luminaries of the Welsh pulpit, such as Eben Fardd and John Jones, Talysarn, as close acquaintances.
The Reverend Robert Hughes, Uwchlaw'r Fynnon, Hughes Parry's maternal great-grandfather, was by all accounts an extraordinary man. His thirst for education and self-improvement took him to London in the 1830s where he came under the influence of Sir Hugh Owen, the eminent Victorian educationalist, who was at the time a Sunday school teacher at Jewin Crescent Calvinistic Methodist church. Circumstances conspired to thwart Robert Hughes's endeavours and he was forced to return to farm Uwchlaw'r Ffynnon, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was ordained by the Calvinistic Methodists in 1848 and was the founding minister of Babell chapel, the building of which he oversaw in 1857. A cultured man and reputable poet, he read widely, was interested in artistic pursuits and towards the end of his life took up painting in oils. Hughes Parry took great pride in Robert Hughes and his achievements, and was in many ways inspired by him.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "David Hughes Parry"
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Copyright © 2010 R. Gwynedd Parry.
Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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