Beyond Paternalism: The Ironmaster’s Wife in the Industrial Community

Angela V John

Our Mother’s Land

With permission: Cardiff University of Wales Press 1991

When, in 1852, Sir Josiah John Guest, owner of the largest ironworks in the world, died at Dowlais House, Merthyr Tydfil, in the south Wales valleys, the works and the community virtually came to a standstill. At Dowlais Church, built for the ironmaster, its sole incumbent depicted his patron as 'not only the high and nobleminded Master but also the kind friend and tender-hearted father of his people'.' Newspaper obituaries combined this paternalistic image evocative of the feudal lord with the forward-looking entrepreneurial spirit which had transformed the family concern into a major industrial business. The Times compared the Guests to the Arkwrights and Peels, attributing to Sir John's foresight much of the wealth and prosperity of mid nineteenth-century Britain.2 Many of his workers might have pointed instead to their own personal industry and asked where in Dowlais was the evidence of this prosperity. Nevertheless, contemporaries commented on the 'universality of woe' in the district at the death of the ironmaster.

The Times also made another comparison, praising Lady Charlotte, the employer's wife and noting

. . . the moral and social improvement that has taken place in the population connected with the Dowlais works. Identifying herself with the people, she acquired their language, translated and published their national traditions and directed her well-observed influence to the establishment of schools and other instruments for the education of the working classes.

A Memoir to Sir John for the Institute of Civil Engineers also focused on Lady Charlotte, an 'estimable lady whose literary powers are as well appreciated as her general talents and acquirements in branches of knowledge not usually presenting attractive features for ladies'.5 It noted how she also 'administered to the wants of all around her; thus performing her Christian duty she extended the previously acquired influence and power of her husband.' This aspect of her achievements effectively reinserted her into a more familiar and traditional female role. The Memoir (which devoted one-third of its space to Lady Charlotte) described Sir John as being 'ably seconded' by his wife.

This chapter will examine what was meant by being 'ably seconded', that neat phrase denoting both acceptance and dismissal. What influence did- and couldthe wives of ironmasters exert in Victorian south Wales at a time when the cult of domesticity combined so effectively with the power of Nonconformity? Patrick Joyce's pioneering work on the Lancashire cotton industry showed how industrial paternalism helped produce a 'rational' and largely deferential work-force by the mid nineteenth century.6 yet he did not examine the part played by industrialists' wives in this process of ensuring social stability in the wake of social and political upheaval by adapting older paternalistic values to the new society. Neither did David Roberts in his exploration of the persistence and pervasiveness of paternalism in early Victorian England, though he did concede that the idea 'inspired the lady bountiful to organise clothing clubs . . . '7 Studying the early Victorian industrial community of Merthyr Tydfil, which was the heartland of the Welsh iron trade and the largest town in Wales, helps reveal how employers' wives might cement social relations. Their methods may well have been more subtle than those generally (and disparagingly) associated with the 'lady bountiful' image. Moreover, their aims and ways of fulfilling them are likely to have diverged from those of their husbands and to have been perceived and received differently. To put it another way: how important was gender in the exercising of industrial paternalism? The women who spoke (literally) in the name of their husbands and helped define the nature of industrial and class relations were at the same time denied full participation and power in the communities they helped to shape even though they might in their own ways be extremely influential.

I shall concentrate on two women associated with the Merthyr iron oligarchies, Lady Charlotte Guest (nee Bertie) and Rose Mary Crawshay (nee Yeates). These women married into the greatest of the iron dynasties of nineteenth-century Merthyr. Both women were joining ironmaking families which had, over several generations consolidated their influence and wealth. Yet both women were also 'achievers' in their own right. What was the nature of their involvement in securing Merthyr's industrial supremacy and stability? By what means did these two women, both outsiders from privileged English families, insinuate themselves into their adopted communities and at what price to themselves and the local people?

Lady Charlotte (1812-95), eldest child of the ninth Earl and Countess of Lindsey, came to Dowlais in 1833 as a 21-year-old bride.8 Her husband, John Guest, was considerably older, had been widowed and was childless. His grandfather had started one small furnace in 1759. In less than a hundred years the Dowlais works had been transformed into a gigantic industrial venture, its trade vastly stimulated by the international demand for bar iron for the laying of railways.9 John Guest can be seen as a paternalist of the better sort Roberts's claim'¡ that typical paternalists believed in capitai punishment and whipping finds little echo in this industrialist who in his early years as Merthyr's MP, was a 'Whig in party and radicai in opinion', supported the secret ballot and identified himself so closely with his home that his wife nicknamed him Merthyr. He is more recognizable as one of the paternalists who advocated religious dissent but he remained closer in outlook to the model factory owners such as Titus Salt (though Guest's record in provision of amenities such as decent housing lagged far behind). He can also be compared to one of the few 'improving' colliery owners, his friend Sir Francis Egerton at the Worsley collieries in Lancashire, or to the Birmingham manufacturers, Nettlefold and Chamberlain (with whom the Dowlais fortunes would ultimately be linked).

In contrast, Lady Charlotte is probably best remembered for her pioneering and classic three-volume English translation of the medieval Welsh tales she called The Mabinogion. A devoted linguist from an early age, she had taught herself Arabic and Persian as a lonely adolescent in Lincolnshire, and her learning of Welsh when she came to Dowlais helped to endear her to local radicals such as Taliesin Williams, son of lolo Morganwg. Two years later, during the electlon dmner celebrating John Guest's return as Merthyr's MP Taliesin toasted Lady Charlotte. Other English people who had settled locally had viewed 'our national habits and our indefeasible attachment to our ancient language with jealous unkindness'. Not so Lady Charlotte: 'she has adopted our costumesand our language,

from the fi}st day that she honoured Merthyr with her residence, has been the object of her successful study; and beyond all she has visited the widow and the fatherless, and fed the poor and the needy.' The subject of the toast was, of course, absent from the dinner of electors but a letter from her was read out and half of it was in Welsh.

Yet although Lady Charlotte recognized the political expediency of the Welsh language, it seems significant that it was medieval Welsh which secured her attention. Her search for an identity and sphere of influence via the past, distinct from her husband's control over the present, was consistent with her passionate interest in Romance literature and in history and it encouraged her to romanticize Welshness. Steeping herself in a tradition abounding in myths and intrepid heroes led her to view contemporaries somewhat differently from her husband. She described the leader of the Rebecca riots (recently sentenced to twenty-one years' transportation- (Sir John had sat on the Grand Jury) as 'my poor Welsh rebel with all his faults and all his grievances and all his romance'. In the immediate aftermath of the Chartist Newport Rising of 1839 she, unlike many, maintained utter faith in the work-force: 'If anything had happened I should have walked into the forges which were in full work . . . our own men are good and true.' Her upbringing had accustomed her to deferential loyalty whilst her reading supplied her with chivalric deeds defending her sex. Moreover, her personal knowledge of some Chartists, such as the flamboyant Dr William Price whose learning she respected, encouraged her to believe that something must be done for for the people rather than abdicating responsibility and thus making likely the possibility of the people taking action for themselves.

Lady Charlotte had involved herself in the works from the start. Deliberately defying the usual definition of separate spheres with its demarcation of 'he for the public, she for the private', she wrote of the ironworks, 'I always feel here in my proper sphere.' She studied accounts, wrote business letters, made business deals, wrote about the iron trade and, from the mid 1840s, increasingly deputized for her husband as serious illness periodically incapacitated him. Her class and her sex put her in a very different position from him in relation to the work-force. Not only was she at this stage technically not the 'boss' but her aristocratic birth marked her out from both employees and employer. She was thus in a less ambivalent relationship vis-à-vis the workers than her husband who was from a self-made family and

felt the need to distance himself from the work-force. Not only was it customary for coal and ironworkers to make pleas for wages, clemency and so on to employers' wives, but Lady Charlotte also enjoyed the role of 'personnel officer'. It enabled her to intervene effectively and use her own judgement. On a number of occasions it was to her that senior employees appealed in the first instance. She dealt with threats of resignation, not only acting as an intermediary but on occasions sorting out grievances without informing Sir John. The sales agent Thomas Evans went straight to her with his letter of resignation. She persuaded him to remain, finding him prepared to 'quite rely upon me and do as I advised'. By contrast, her husband had known Evans since childhood and had been 'brought up in his ways and

Lady Charlotte's faith in the work-force was bolstered by her belief, shared with her husband, in education as a powerful force for harmony. The progressive Dowlais schools have been praised for their innovatory approach using trained teachers, separate classrooms based on the Prussian system and buildings designed by Sir Charles Barry." They provided a system of education for both sexes starting in infancy and lasting into adulthood. Although John Guest instigated this process in the 1820s it was Lady Charlotte who really developed the system.

In the spring of 1848 she discussed the volatile political situation in Britain and Europe with her archaeologist cousin Henry Layard then in his most radical phase. The day after the Chartist Kennington Common demonstration in London (attended by Henry), Lady Charlotte wrote in her journal: 'Something must be done for our unemployed, the events of yesterday must not lull us into security and make us overlook this duty, this necessity.'

Despite Sir John's efforts as an MP, she understood that 'one cannot make people good and religious by Act of Parliament. The first step is to make them comfortable and happy.' She saw her task as complementing her husband's parliamentary work. Early 1848 was an especially worrying time; the future of the works hung in the balance as the Earl of Bute, who owned the land on which the Dowlais works were built, procrastinated over renewing the lease. Some furnaces had already been blown out and many workers laid off. Just three weeks after the presentation of the third Chartist petition, a settlement was finally made and the future of the works secured. The Guests' return to Dowlais resembled that of triumphant warriors coming home from battle greeted by a mile-long procession.'2 Lady Charlotte wrote in her journal:

May we indeed be enabled to do them good, and under a reviving trade have it in our power to minister to their necessities etc not only bodily but mental. May we by our care and unceasing attention to their improvements in every respect, in some measure, justify the warmth their reception has evinced towards us. It is a heavy responsibility.

Lady Charlotte's interest in educational schemes really developed from this point. Although already involved with infant schools and Sunday schools, she now concentrated especially on adult education. In October 1848 she opened 'my new school for the girls belonging to the works'. These young women were divided into seven classes. They met in the winter months with an average attendance of 150. Lady Charlotte spent many evenings in the schools (rather more than Sir John wished), occasionally teaching, distributing prizes, introducing guest lecturers and generally supervising. It gave her an opportunity to further a cause her husband believed in but, by demarcating her own area of interest in the young women's education, she could develop her particular interest and influence. Not content with success at Dowlais she sought to inspire others in Merthyr. It was she who was largely responsible for the enlargement of the school in Georgetown, the establishment of an infant school in 1852 and the growth of adult schools. Her tactic was to use the small network of local middle-class women. She approached ministers' wives and wrote with satisfaction of a meeting with the wife of Merthyr's Anglican clergyman: 'I think I inspired her with the desire of attempting something.' Through these women she won the support of their husbands. Dining with philistine ironmasters was not her favourite occupation but it could have its uses. Lady Charlotte's journal records dining at Cyfarthfa Castle where,

I had some talk with Mrs Crawshay and have great hopes of her as a co-operator in this work of reform in the social and educational systems of the district. She is young yet and has bad health but she seems to catch anxiously at the sound of anything that is likely to do good.

She persuaded Lady Morgan of Tredegar Park to subscribe to the adult schools and, when ironmasters such as Richard Fothergill came to Dowlais House, she could not resist 'turning his visit to account. So I took him up to see our schools before tea. He was pleased with them and put himself down as a subscriber to the similar ones at Merthyr.' Sir John, however, was less impressed: 'he thought I was putting myself too forward about the evening schools in Merthyr.' Yet the very next day another ironmaster, Alderman Thompson, came to discuss railway business and 'I felt it my duty for the sake of the cause to make the effort, and I did so, and to my great delight I did succeed.' 'Duty' could sometimes be turned to positive use. Now only Anthony Hill remained of the local ironmasters and Lady Charlotte tackled him. 'How frightened I was I cannot tell', she wrote in her journal 'But I summoned all my courage and made my petition for the Merthyr adult schools.' Not only did Hill agree to subscribe but he soon established day and evening schools at his nearby Plymouth works. Her advice and support were also given when middle-class girls' schooling was developed at the Howell Schools at Llandaff and Denbigh.

Recognizing that education was broader than schooling, Lady Charlotte promoted temperance, helped develop a savings bank scheme and supported friendly societies. The poster in the illustration shows her with Rose Crawshay patronizing an Oddfellows' tea-party in 1849. They named a local branch after Lady Charlotte. She accompanied Dowlais ironworkers and tenants from Canford (the Guests' Dorset estate) on a trip to the Great Exhibition in 1851. Although this particular trip was strictly for workmen, she nevertheless firmly believed that women could help promote social harmony by developing educational and welfare schemes.

She sought to turn free time to good purposeand, unlike some did at least set an example through her own study which was combined with having ten children in thirteen years. Like a later ironmaster's wife, Florence Bell in Middlesbrough, Lady Charlotte believed that 'rational recreation' would benefit employees and the employer.'3 A field at Dowlais was converted into a recreation area with a bowling green, quoits, cricket pitch and gymnastic poles. The Dowlais band practised there, seeking to emulate Crawshay's acclaimed band, and refreshments were made available. 'I can only pray that this one other effort to give the people quiet, rational amusement may be blest', wrote Lady Charlotte.

It was she who executed the plans of Henry Bruce and John Guest for ironworks. Music was played, flowers, books, drawings and fossils were exhibited and the school children and a local choir sang. Between three and six hundred workers apparently attended these gatherings. Chartists and other radicals also held 'evenings with the people' but their events were designed to combine politics and poetry.'4 The Guest parties (hosted by Lady Charlotte) and complete with refreshments, replaced politics with culture in the increasingly conciliatory atmosphere of the early 1850s. Lady Charlotte's handwritten invitations were specifically reserved for 'sober and steady people' who had proved themselves over time. There may nevertheless have been those amongst the artisan elite, such as the puddlers, who were not willing to accept the ethos of the Guests but still welcomed the opportunity of hearing people like Henry Layard, one of Britain's mid-century heroes, talk about his discoveries at Nineveh or listen to the brilliant works of the scholar Thomas Stephens. They could recognize Lady Charlotte's efforts to 'humanize' the work-force but they did not necessarily subscribe to her views.

Although the Guests managed to fill the pattern room on a number of occasions, there must have been many others who felt that there were more basic amenities crying out for attention. Housing conditions were deplorable and in 1848 Merthyr's mortality rate was the highest in Wales and the third highest in the kingdom.'5 Under the terms of the new Public Health Act Merthyr qualified for the local authorities (on the security of the rates) to raise the necessary amount to provide an adequate water supply. The Merthyr Board of Guardians signed a petition requesting the adoption of the law and a public inquiry followed. Yet although there was no shortage of water the River Taff ran through the town and the relentless Welsh rain gathered at the foothills of the Brecon Beacons the lack of a sizeable residential middle class to act as a pressure group, the absence of an elected town council (Merthyr was not yet incorporated) and, above all, the oligarchy of powerful ironmasters meant that the local inhabitants were the last to benefit from natural resources. Water from the Taffwas diverted to drive Crawshay's mills and supply his steam engines. Lady Charlotte knew that Crawshay, large ratepayers and local landlords wanted to maintain the status quo but she also recognized that 'there is no place where cleansing and proper regulations are more needed or have been more neglected'. Her response to a draft copy of the public inquiry is interesting as it signals both her interest in the question of a water supply and her deliberate dissociation of the Guests (or, at least, herself) from the views of the other industrialists. She wrote: 'The Ironmasters are averse to every improvement on the score of expense. However I will do my best to promote an amelioration of matters though I fear my influence will not go far.'

The following month saw a severe outbreak of cholera in the district. It reached Dowlais in June 1849 and resulted in 500 deaths there. Yet not until 1850 did a Board of Health come into existence, with Sir John as its first chairman. Plans were mooted for a jointstock company to solve the problem of supplying water to the community but Crawshay and Hill kept changing their minds and it came to nothing. A Merthyr Waterworks bill was passed in June 1852 but the voices of Crawshay, Hill and the Glamorgan Canal Company were soon heard objecting and an umpire (the distinguished I. K. Brunel) was appointed. By this time Lady Charlotte was personally in control at Dowlais having taken over the running of the works after her husband's death in November 1852. Fearing further procrastination she contemplated unilateral action which would at least secure a separate water supply for Dowlais. She sought legal advice but was in an awkward position because a Water Company did now exist in theory and anyway her interests were identified with the Merthyr Board through her late husband. Moreover the Board's consent was needed for any independent action. Anticipating their dilatoriness she tried appealing to members' consciences in a letter:

The threatened approach of cholera, heretofore so fatal in this district, renders the Dowlais Company most anxious to do everything in their power that may tend to avert a recurrence of so fearful a visitation and believing that no precautionary measures that could be adopted would be so efficacious as a plentiful supply of water . . 16

Dowlais therefore proposed to supply its inhabitants with piped water at an estimated outlay of £3,000 to be refunded by the Board.

Her scheme impressed the Cardi.ff and Merthyr Guardian'7 In an effusive editorial it stressed Lady Charlotte's ability to think clearly:her Ladyship steps in, cuts the knot, solves the difficulty, and in the name of the 'Dowlais Company' offers the supplyand on such conditions only as it would be a reproach to those entrusted with power to refuse. For this noble act Lady Charlotte Guest deserves a statue . . . she now adds a cubit to the moral stature by an act which must perpetuate her memory so long as water is essential to a healthy existence.

No statue was forthcoming and the praise was premature. The Board's continued intransigence forced Lady Charlotte to concede defeat.'8 The ironmasters were suspicious, fearing that Dowlais would benefit at their expense. Her request was refused and not until the end of 1860 was water available from stand-pipes for Merthyr's inhabitants. Reservoir construction was finally completed in 1863. The election to the Board of Health of the engineer G. T. Clark, who took over at Dowlais after Lady Charlotte remarried, made a vital difference to the interest and expertise in sanitary matters. Yet all this came too late since, as Lady Charlotte had warned, cholera returned and in 1854 the streets were once more 'black with funerals'.'9

Admittedly Lady Charlotte's proposals on behalf of Dowlais had come rather late in the day but at least she had attempted to resolve the situation. Like Ibsen's symbolic character Dr Stockmann, she was isolated in her concern about the water supply. For once she had failed and, interestingly, this episode is rather less well known than her more successful ventures. Improvement had been sacrificed to the powerful interests of a small group of men who could have ameliorated an insanitary enviromnent which shocked both visitors and government officials.20 Lady Charlotte had, all along, been less hopeful than the local press since, as she put it, 'I am always prepared for these breaches of faith from Ironmasters.' Her desire to cleanse Dowlais both mentally and physically also shows the limits of her actual power. She was not a member of the all-male Board; her requests had to take the form of pleading letters considered in her absence. Moreover, her dealings here and in other instances with her fellow industrialists demonstrate the difficulties she faced as a lone woman at a time when women's direct participation in running industrial affairs was extremely uncommon and she was faced with negotiating with men who were experienced in working in concert (and oppositon).

When, in June 1853, the owners of the Merthyr ironworks got together to decide how best to regulate wage rises, Lady Charlotte, newly widowed, had for the first time to confront directly a group of men who were more used to seeing her as a companion at dinner than as a colleague. She in turn was shocked at their readiness to force the workers into a corner. Her journal entries describe her as 'horrified' at the 'monstrous threats' being held over 'our steady good men'. Although resisting intimidation and methods of hurrying matters 'unduly to an assumed conclusion', she felt uneasy in this arena; the politics of negotiation were new to her, 'a woman and in argument ALONE against the opinion of FIVE experienced men of business . . . ' She reluctantly conceded to their demands, afraid that they might interpret her objections as 'a woman's weakness'. Yet she soon blamed herself for not speaking out more resolutely and during the strike which ensued she sought to prove to herself and to the ironmasters that she could not be dismissed as a weak, indecisive woman. Unfortunately, she abandoned in the process her previously conciliatory attitude towards the work-force whose respect she had gained over the years. Her new determination was summed up in her telling comment, 'I will be their Master'.2'

Yet towards the end of the strike when Merthyr tradesmen met to gain support for a memorial to the ironmasters, they still exculpated Lady Charlotte from blame. One of the major speakers, William Gould a grocer, criticized the employers for not paying wages according to the market price of iron yet carefully singled out Lady Charlotte for praise: her 'claims to their good wishes could scarcely be overstated' . Gould (who had been a prominent Chartist in the 1840s) stressed that he wanted it known 'that the meeting sympathized with her, as did workmen in general'. In part this reflects traditional Victorian attitudes of flattery towards the female sex, not necessarily to be confused with genuine admiration. Furthermore, Lady Charlotte was clearly a 'lady' whilst few saw employers such as Crawshay as 'gentlemen'. Yet the statement may also suggest something beyond a genuflection towards her class and sex. It may refer to a more tangible history and the specific nature of Lady Charlotte's involvement with the community over the years, an involvement which actually concerned questions of gender and class in a more complex dialectic. Ironically, this involvement now effectively came to an end as Lady Charlotte remarried in 1855 and began a second 'career' which took her abroad for much of the year so that only very occasionally did she revisit her erstwhile home at Dowlais.

In contrast Rose Mary Crawshay (1828-1907) never evoked such enthusiasm from the population of Merthyr. In a revealing statement she once observed of the Cyfarthfa work-force: 'on many lines my thoughts and ways were not theirs, still they did not hate me, and I loved them.'22 She did converse with a few shopkeepers, notably Thomas Norbury (who had built an observatory over his oilshop), dubbing him 'our local philosopher', but her intellectual stimulation mainly lay outside Wales. Her grandson obsened that she and her husband had few familiar friends locally though literary and scientific figures visited her at Cyfarthfa Castle. They included Robert Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Irving.

Rose's family had been neighbours of the Crawshays in Berkshire. When she married Robert Thompson Crawshay in 1846, the eighteenyear-old bride was, like Lady Charlotte, marrying an older man (Robert was twenty-nine, John Guest forty-eight) and leaving a rural, wealthy society for the unknown, largely working-class, population of the Welsh valleys. Her new home, Cyfarthfa Castle, had been built in 1825 to demonstrate that the Crawshay family were lords of all they surveyed. Costing £30,000, it boasted seventy-two rooms and fifteen towers and was an incongruous piece of manufactured medievalism in the midst of industrial development. Rose decided to include a sketch of her home in a pamphlet she wrote lest her English readers mistook her description for that of a castle in Spain!23

Lady Charlotte's way of coping with an alien culture had been to try to penetrate it via its language and ancient customs. Rose did not actively seek to identify with Welshness, though she did preside at one meeting in 1872 where a lecture was given in Welsh on 'The Indebtedness of Women to the Bible'.24 One of Rose's daughters wrote in her diary in 1868: 'the country is not the place to hear new things in the literary or scientific way, Mama Thinks, and we get very like our vegetables.'25 Rose certainly promoted literature but it was emphatically English literature, endowing a poetic memorial fund for encouraging the study of poets and awarding annual prizes for the best essays on Byron, Shelley and Keats. In the 1890s she presented prizes for the best oil-paintings by women of subjects connected with these Romantic poets.

The two women differed in their concerns about women's rights. During Lady Charlotte's years at Dowlais there was no organized women's movement. Rather it was the men's struggle for democratic rights which was then to the fore. Nevertheless, although not openly allying herself with women's rights later in her life, Lady Charlotte's journal reveals her awareness of the contradictions inherent in her position. She recognized that she exercised both power and influence through her class and her marriage to one of the leading figures in Welsh industry and politics yet she also understood how she was simultaneously circumscribed by her sex. Particularly aware of her incapacitation through illness during her numerous pregnancies, she wrote about how expectations for the two sexes differed:

I see every day men, even though not encouraged, and though perhaps uneducated. I see men planning and carrying through enterprises their minds have scope and they have field for action. But we are but another name for helplessnessunkindness must utterly crush us and if we venture beyond the prescribed limits and should dare to act then comes scorn, and reproach and cruelty . . .

This was prompted by her reading Mrs Ellis's Wives of England (a gift from her husband!) which advised a woman to accept her position as 'a secondary being in the great business of conducting the general affairs of social life'. After reading Hannah More, Lady Charlotte commented: 'How deeply I have felt this inferiority of sex and how humiliated I am when it is recalled to my mind in allusion to myself!' Yet, though acutely aware, she tended only to consider her personal dilemma. She was also not prepared to be ambitious for her daughters though one of her grandchildren, Mildred Mansel, became an organizer of Bath suffragettes and was imprisoned in Holloway for breaking windows at the War Office.

Unlike Lady Charlotte, Rose Crawshay was demonstrably concerned with other women's rights. She was part of the early feminist movement which witnessed twenty-six signatures by women with Welsh addresses for the first women's Suffrage Petition of 1866 (including 3 from Merthyr,8 from Denbigh and 10 from the Swansea area). She participated in the organized women's movement of the late 1850s and was less torn between duty and ambition than Lady Charlotte. The latter's husband was, by the standards of the time, supportive and appreciative of his wife's skills, though as his fatal kidney disease grew worse so his tolerance lessened. In contrast, Rose Crawshay was married to an autocratic, showy man whose (in)famous three-word epitaph chosen by himself for his gravestone was 'God Forgive Me'. He had a vicious temper, exacerbated after a paralytic stroke in 1860. This left him completely deaf and his family could only communicate with him by writing on a slate. He not only lived in a castle but practised droit de seigneurit was widely believed that he employed a procurer to supply him with daughters of workmen.26 The Crawshays had five children and Robert displayed an obsession with photographing his favourite daughter Rose Harriette, getting her to dress up as a fish seller, as a Swiss girl 'with my hair down in wild disorder, Gorgon fashion', but she dared not disobey his summons with a dog whistle. He was jealous of any suitors and, when she finally married, cut her out of his will. Her diary entry for Christmas Day 1871 seems to encapsulate the domestic atmosphere at Cyfarthfa: 'Papa and Mama were cross, the beef underdone and a squabbling kept up the whole time.'27

Not surprisingly, Rose favoured marriage reform. She was one of the early suffragists, a member of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage in the 1860s and by 1873 Vice-President of the Bristol and West of England National Society for Women's Suffrage.28 She spoke at meetings in Merthyr on the benefits of the vote for women's characters and contributed to a pamphlet called 'Opinions of Women on Women's Suffrage'. Maria Rye and the Garrett sisters were her friends and Elizabeth and Millicent, better known as the doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and suffragist Mrs Fawcett, spoke on women's rights for Rose Crawshay at a meeting in Merthyr. The Woman's Herald called Rose 'one of the most enlightened pioneers of women's emancipation' and, according to The Queen, her name was 'indissolubly linked with nearly every movement for the benefit of women'.29 As early as July 1859, the month that her London friends formed a committee out of which developed the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, she contributed £200 to the cause. Nine years later she was one of about 200 present at a conference of supporters of Emily Davies's women's college. Here the plans for what became Girton College were explained and discussed.30

Perhaps her best-known scheme for women and one which fused metropolitan and local involvement was her controversial promotion of what she called 'Lady Helps'. Conscious of the economic dilemmas facing large numbers of 'distressed gentlewomen' and also aware of the growing scarcity of 'good' servants by the 1870s, she advocated a scheme which would use these women in wealthy homes. She consulted with the Women's Employment Society and her paper on 'Domestic Service for Gentlewomen' was read to the Social Science Congress of 1874 and to a British Association meeting in Bristol the following year. She was a keen publicist, producing (at her own expense) a popular pamphlet explaining the scheme. She opened a 'Lady Help' registry office in the West End of London, employers being registered for five shillings. Prospective 'lady helps' could take cookery lessons as well as find jobs. Rose ran this successful scheme for eight years before turning it over to her superintendent. Although the Pictorial World 3' called her scheme 'one of the most interesting of modern contributions to Social Science and Political Economy', not surprisingly, plenty of cynics asked whether this really improved women's lot.32 Her response was to demonstrate personally how it could operate successfully. Five 'lady helps' were imported into Cyfarthfa Castle and given rooms previously occupied by ordinary domesticsthough only after 'thorough cleansing, whitewashing and painting'! They were expected to work hard and their job included making new house linen, clothes and even carpets. Their separation from ordinary servants such as the local scullery maid must have placed them in an extremely ambivalent position since, for example, they were neither waited upon nor permitted to dine with the family. They existed in a curious indeterminate state where, like their mistress, they both did and did not belong. When Robert complained that Cyfarthfa was becoming known as 'the Refuge for the Destitute', Rose was apparently delighted.

She was also involved in some of the local charitable work, which was an unwritten rule amongst wives of wealthy employers in poor districts, particularly if those employers sought social acceptance and emulated old paternalistic values. Rose was more systematic than many: she set up a soup kitchen for the poor of Cefncoedycymer and other nearby villages. For over thirty years about thirty people received three times weekly the food which was surplus to the requirements of the castle and its entourage. Although she operated a strict policy of admitting only the accredited poor using a system of tickets, her husband's attitude towards soup kitchens was much sterner. In 1864, for example, he stated that as wages had recently been increased and there was 'plenty of employment for every one seeking it I do not see any cause to give soup this year. Those who are not able to work are taken care of by the Parish so it is only the idle and the worthless who would avail themselves of the soup.'33 After a colliery explosion in February 1862 killed forty-nine men employed by Crawshay, Rose personally visited every family.

She established a cutting-out class for young women, encouraging them to make their own clothes by cutting up The Times newspaper as a pattern and using the type to guide the line of the thread. She also held 'penny readings'. Perhaps with one eye on the success of the Guests, Rose established free libraries. By 1872 there were four within a mile radius of Cyfarthfa and eventually seven such libraries, all open on Sundays and, as the Athenaeum commented, started long before the celebrated Sunday openings of the Birmingham Free library. Rose publicized her own achievements in her letters to The Times.34 Here she mentioned that books could be taken home. Her feminism enabled her to recognize that workmen's institutes tended to be, as their names suggested, for men's recreation. Rose wanted men and women to enjoy books (her written language usually mentioned both sexes) and she called her experiments cottage libraries.

Keeping libraries open on Sundays not only encouraged 'mental elevation' in leisure time, it also made a statement about her religious views. Rose's advanced notions worried some of the pious as did her support for cremation. She was one of he first members of the Cremation Society of England (formed in 1874) and a founder member of their Council. She hoped to have her body thrown into a Cyfarthfa furnace until Crawshay, afraid that his men might strike at the prospect, persuaded her to select Dresden. In 1884 CardiffAssizes acquitted 84-year old Dr William Price. He had been accused of illegally cremating the body of his young son called Iesu Grist (Jesus Christ). Thanks therefore to Lady Charlotte's erstwhile acquaintance, the legality of cremation had been established in British law and a Cremation Act was passed in 1902 in time for Rose Crawshay to be cremated in Golders Green, London.

Her eschatological concerns went further. She wrote (and signed) a preface to a pamphlet endorsing euthanasia and her open support for this prompted anonymous criticism in a letter to the Western Mail, particularly deprecating such views from a member of the School Board. She ably defended her position in print and in person. Rose Crawshay, unlike Lady Charlotte, took up a very public stance.

She was made particularly accountable because she was amongst the first people ever to be elected to one of the new School Boards created by the Education Act of 1870. Not only was she also one of the first women to be in such a position but she chaired Vaynor School Board and, it would seem, was the only woman m the nineteenth century who simultaneously sat on two School Boards (and in two different counties, Glamorgan and Breconshire). She was elected to Merthyr Tydfil's Board in April 1871, gaining the second highest number of votes. She was the sole woman representatlve

working with ten men and she remained in this position, occasionally taking the chair, for three years. A month later saw the first of the monthly Vaynor meetings, held at the Temperance Hall in Cefncoedycymer (and, from 1876, at the Cefn Board Schools). There had been thirteen nominations for this Breconshire post. The other twelve were men and included two ministers, a rector, two miners and a gentleman. In the press Rose was described as the wife of Robert Crawshay. She easily polled the highest number of votes481

Apart from the vice-chairman the others all got considerably fewer than half this number. She remained one of the five elected members on the Vaynor

When Rose's friend Elizabeth Garrett had married the chairman of her Marylebone School Board and continued as the elected member she had created a precedent which enabled women like Mrs Crawshay to follow her. In 1874 Rose's picture appeared in The Graphic as one of the pioneer women School Board members.35 Another was Mrs Catherine Buckton, then active in Leeds but originally from Glamorgan. The Englishwoman's Review36 recognized the significance of the election of women'For the first time in this country they have been elected to public positions of trust and importancepositions desired by men of eminence and distinction' and Patricia Hollis's detailed study of women in local government has shown just how influential women might be through this kind of work in their local community.37

Dr Hollis has also demonstrated how demanding the job could be. Rose had two Boards to attend for the first three years. Not only must it have been difficult at that time for her to preside over meetings where she was the lone woman but also the Boards' minutes make it clear that she was quite prepared to dissent from majority views and register her protests. The Vaynor School Board minutes show her high attendance record.38 She did not miss a meeting in the first year and the few she did not attend in following years tended to be at the very beginning of the year when she was in London. In addition to the monthly meetings there were special meetings (one was held at her home). Although the Board covered only a small areain 1871 there were five elementary schools in the parishRose had to steer the Board as it sought to comply with the 1870 and 1876 Education Acts and to develop policies about attendance, corporal punishment, the appointment and salaries of teachers and pupil teachers, hardship cases involving the remission of fees and many other matters. Her efforts here and in Merthyr appear to have been appreciated. In 1872 at a Merthyr meeting of 800 people she spoke of her work on behalf of the Board and argued against various laws which discriminated against women, most notably a mother's inability in law to be the guardian of her child at her husband's death. A vote of confidence in her School Board work was proposed by a local vicar and this was seconded by William Gould who had in the past defended Lady Charlotte and was now one of the supporters of Merthyr's Liberal Nonconformist MP, Henry Richard.39

Unlike some of the members of her Boards, Rose was in a position to disseminate her views way beyond Merthyr. Readers of The Times were told by her that making ratepayers pay for religious teaching of which they did not approve was particularly unjust in an area where most people were Nonconformists.40 She also told of her pleasure in carrying a motion (on Merthyr's Board) which simplified the religious diet meted out to School Board children, endorsing the daily use of the Lord's Prayer and a short designated selection from the Bible. Her proposal along the same lines was accepted by the Vaynor Board and incorporated into its by-laws.4' She was concerned about superimposing a heavy dose of religious instruction which might offend parents.

An independent-minded woman, prepared to voice some disquiet in 1871 about compulsory attendance, she also supported improving opportunities for girls and instigating a rewards system in place of corporal punishment. Some of her ideas have a curiously modern ring, for example suggesting that decimal coinage be adopted as simpler for schoolchildren. She personally communicated with other Boards in Wales and England urging them to address memorials to the government on the subject. Rose also supported reforming the system of spelling. She played a prominent part in supporting the establishment of Swansea Training College which opened in 1872 and which for the first time enabled women to train as teachers within Wales.42 She finally resigned from the Vaynor School Board when Robert was dying in 1879.

After his death (and for much of the time before this) Rose could be found not at Cyfarthfa but at Cathedine, the house he had bought for her near Llangorse Lake. She also spent time in London and in the south of France. Interestingly, as with Lady Charlotte, she was less ambitious for her daughters than her views and actions might suggest. Lady Charlotte's daughters grew up at the height of Victorian domesticity and 'good' marriages were what she sought for them. One of Rose's daughters appears to have resented the fact that her mother advocated higher education for women generally yet failed to provide a decent education for her own child. Yet we are dependent on the diaries of this daughter for such views and, quite apart from the difficult relationship between Rose and Rose Harriette we do not have the mother's own feelings recorded in diary form. This contrasts with Lady Charlotte, who kept an extensive journal throughout her period at Dowlais and thus enables us to consider and perhaps reconcile the disjuncture between her simultaneous public utterances and private sentiments.

Although Lady Charlotte and Rose Crawshay overlapped in their penods at Merthyrboth were there from the mid 1840s for a decade their most active periods did not quite coincide, Rose being slightly younger than the mistress of Dowlais House. Moreover, from the mid 1840s the Guests also owned Canford Manor and therefore spent increasingly lengthy periods in Dorset. Here Lady Charlotte seems to have adopted a more traditional approach to charity and welfare, playing the part of the lady of the manor amongst a rather more deferential and rural labouring class than was found in Merthyr. When she left Canford in the care of her 21-year-old son she described his lavish coming-of-age party and added 'my reign terminated magnificently'.

It would be foolish to suggest that either of these women was typical of the ironmasters' wives of Wales or England. Clearly they were women whose marked intelligence and independence of thought struck contemporaries who met them. Yet, we are increasingly finding that as further studies of women proceed and more strongminded women emerge from the historical woodwork, so the word 'extraordinary' becomes more questionable. Moreover, like all Victorian women Rose and Lady Charlotte lacked the vote and were legally and financially dependent on their husbands. Robert Crawshay gave Rose £50 twice monthly, separately from payment of household and other bills. This was literally described in his cash book as 'pin money'.43 Nevertheless, Lady Charlotte and Rose were also in positions of great influence in what was the largest town in Wales.

Lady Charlotte was at Dowlais at the height of the iron trade and even became the world's leading ironmistress. Her husband had been Merthyr's first MP. The ways in which she actively participated in such a diverse range of interests related to the role of employer (quite apart from carving out her own specialisms) made her particularly influential at a time of social and political turbulence. Sir John's brand of paternalism was not, however, replicated by Lady Charlotte who had her own style, though she could complement and extend his approach. On the one hand her aristocratic background gave substance to his position at a time of industrial and political unrest. On the other hand, her particular 'humanizing' of Dowlais is recalled and singled out even today by the descendants of the Guest workforce. As a woman she was denied some of the same rights as the work-force and, although extending rather than challenging Guest paternalism, in a sense the very term excluded her; maternalism has different connotations from those of fatherly control and power associated with the paternalist. A family model, however, appears to have been crucial to both Sir John's and Lady Charlotte's conceptions of their work-force's duty towards them, with the father indubitably at the head and his wife, whilst dependent on her husband, nevertheless exercising regular control over her children. Perhaps 'familism' might therefore more accurately characterize their aims, though, whilst working towards the same ends, their means of expressing those aims tended to differ in kind and approach and remained essentially linked to class and gender.

Rose Crawshay took a slightly different route. She does not appear to have identified herself with the ironworks or the Welsh in the same way or to the same degree as Lady Charlotte. Her period at Merthyr represented one which was increasingly difficult for the iron trade.

Although both Guest and Crawshay were hostile to trade unions, Robert Crawshay, the fourth of the Crawshay 'dynasty', seems to have lacked the understanding that the Guests had of their workforce and, on top of worries about the plummeting price of iron, his opposition to the growth of union strength within his works led to the closing of the Cyfarthfa ironworks in 1874 5. Not until the end of 1879, after his death, did they reopen. Whereas his brand of paternalism seems to have been (in his later years at least) more akin to that exercised by the Marquess of Londonderry than the sort practiced by Titus Salt at Saltaire, his wife seems adequately to have fulfilled the expectations of her as the wife of a paternalist. Yet in other respects she reached way beyond him, appealing to the rights of the female sex and, through her elected public position, playing a part in shaping the local politics of Merthyr and the future of its children, and in the early development of organized feminismusually associated with middle-class ladies of London campaigning in an environment far removed from ironworks.

In different ways both women helped to maintain social stability in the local community. The kind of work they did has not been sufficiently recognized by historians who have tended, for example, either to see Lady Charlotte's interests as simply reflecting her husband's work or, in the case of her literary efforts, to view her considerable achievements as something totally separate from her other activities. In fact her espousal of Welshness, just like her position as a wife and mother, needs to be seen alongside her other achievements. The work interests of John Guest and Robert Crawshay eventually combined (though after their deaths) as in 1902 Crawshay Brothers became absorbed by Guest, Keen and Company.45 Meanwhile Lady Charlotte's efforts for local education had seen a successor in the form of Rose Crawshay. And, despite Guest's and Crawshay's power as employers and husbands, somehow 'ably seconded' seems, for different reasons, a singularly inadequate way of describing either Lady Charlotte's or Rose Crawshay's 'work' in Merthyr in relation to their respective ironmaster husbands.

Nevertheless, terms such as 'ably seconded' or 'supplementary' are of significance. Deconstructing the word 'supplement', the French theorist Jacques Derrida recognizes it as an independent, disruptive and essentially ambiguous 'marker'.46 Whilst Lady Charlotte and Rose can be represented simply as the wives of the great ironmasters supplementary to their successes, the nature of their individuai interests, their own styles and their complex relationships to authority helped shape and reshape the public images of their families and their historical legacies. At one and the same time they both helped to supplement and reinforce the influence of the iron manufacturers' families in Merthyr and thereby maintain the status quo, and also became achievers in their own right, ('especially in literature and education'), well-known in Wales and England and conscious of their own capabilities and constraints. Finally, Rose Crawshay's efforts on behalf of the early women's movement suggest a fascinating radical edge beyond 'paternalism'.

Bibliographical note

Lady Charlotte's original journals remain in the Guest family's possession though extracts are reproduced in two volumes edited by a descendant, the Earl of Bessborough, The Diaries of Lady Charlotte Guest (London, John Murray, 1950) and Lady Charlotte Schreiber 1853-1891 (London, John Murray, 1952). For her life see Revel Guest and Angela V. John, Lady Charlotte: A Biography of the Nineteenth Century (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). A selection of the Dowlais Iron Company correspondence held in the Glamorgan Record Office appears in M. Elsas (ed.), Iron in the Making: Dowlais Iron Company Letters 1782-1860 (Cardiff, Glamorgan Record Office and Guest Keen Iron and Steel Company Ltd., 1960). See, too, Edgar Jones, A History of GKN. Volume One: Innovation and Enterprise 1759-1918 (London, Macmillan, 1987).

Rose Crawshay has, as yet, no biographer though a family history was written by Margaret Stewart Taylor, The Crawshays of Cyfarthfa Castle (London, Robert Hale,1967). The Cyfarthfa Papers are at the National Library of Wales. A visit to Rose's former home, now Cyfarthfa Castle Museum, Merthyr Tydfil, provides some sense of her position in the community (in 1908 the house was sold to Merthyr Corporation and turned into a school and museum). The museum also contains Eliot Crawshay-Williams's unpublished autobiography, 'I'm the King of the Castle', and a typescript of parts of the diaries of Rose's daughter, Rose Harriette. The bulk of these diaries cannot, however, be read before 2062. Chapter 11 of Ryland Wallace's 'Organise! Organise! Organise!': A Study of Reform Agitations in Wales, 184F1886 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1991), addresses women's rights in Victorian Wales.

For discussion of recent ideas on gender and power (though relating to England rather than Wales), see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780 1850 (London, Hutchinson, 1987); Judy Lown, 'Not so much a factory, more a form of patriarchy: gender and class during industrialisation', in E. Garmarnikow et al. (eds.), Gender, Class and Work (London, Heinemann, 1983), 28 45 and Lown's book cited below. See also the life of the Swansea businesswoman Amy Dillwyn in David Painter, Amy Dillwyn (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1987).