Furnace of Change The Story of Wales

The Welsh, in the early 18th century, are living off the land.

But it's the treasures that lie beneath them

that will take Wales to the dawn of a new age.

One of new discoveries, new inventions and political awakening.

Wales is entering a modern era.

It takes just 100 years for Wales to be profoundly changed,

with vast supplies of natural resources

fuelling an industrial revolution, and the Wales that's about to emerge

is volatile, is explosive and exciting.

We begin in 1750, as the Industrial Revolution turns Wales

into a global economy.

The next century brings great wealth,

it brings terrible poverty

and it brings connections to the slave trade.

We'll see how forgeries help create an extraordinary cultural revival.

This brave new world fuels uprisings and social turmoil.

And ultimately provokes our very first cries for democracy.

It's the early 18th century.

500,000 people live in Wales,

still an overwhelmingly rural country.

The largest towns are Carmarthen in the south and Wrexham in the north.

Each has fewer than 5,000 inhabitants.

Almost all the population speak Welsh.

But all this is about to change for ever

because of the very stuff beneath our feet.

On Anglesey, Parys Mountain, or Mynydd Parys,

is renowned among the locals in the 18th century.

It's a world of strangely coloured rocks

and earth that smells of sulphur.

Parys Mountain is a place of magic and alchemy.

But there's about to be another explanation for its character.

There is a story that a local miner called Rowland Puw

on the 2nd of March 1768 stumbles upon some ancient treasure.

He discovers the remains of a rich vein of copper ore,

an ancient vein that was once worked some 4,000 years ago.

And this is the point.

There's plenty more valuable stuff in the ground

so Myndd Parys and the surrounding area

are being propelled into a new age, an age of industrial revolution

at a speed and on a scale that is unimaginable.

This is what remains of the copper mines of Parys Mountain today.

A scarred, lunar landscape

and testament to the start of a whole new era in the story of Wales.

Now, you might think that the man whose discovery triggers all this,

the miner Rowland Puw, is amply rewarded.

He does get a bottle of whisky

and he gets a cottage rent-free for the rest of his days,

which for him really is a big deal.

But before we get carried away, what about the man who sets up

the Parys Mine Company in 1774, the local lawyer Thomas Williams.

His reward is rather more impressive.

He becomes the Copper King.

Williams is one of Wales' greatest entrepreneurs.

He makes his fortune by selling Parys copper to the British Navy.

They want it to clad their wooden ships

to protect them from damage from timber worms.

Even today we describe anything that's secure and reliable,

as copper-bottomed.

In just 12 years, Williams creates the largest copper mine in Europe,

employing 1,500 men and women.

It's only by coming down to this level that you can

really appreciate the graphic reality of this place,

the sheer size of it, this barren landscape,

and the thing that makes an impact straight away,

the strange vivid colours of these rocks.

Just imagine, an 18th-century farm labourer seeing this place

for the first time.

Wales' new industry becomes a Mecca for artists and travellers

awed by this futuristic vision of toil and labour.

Some record in graphic detail what they see.

Picking the ore from the rock,

hammering the wadding, the roar of the blast.

It's all the more remarkable when you stop and think

that this immense crater was made with nothing more

than picks and shovels and a bit of gunpowder.

I suppose it redefines the concept of hard work.

And Parys Mountain points the way ahead in its brutalised environment

to the future of industrial Wales.

Roland Puw rediscovers Wales' valuable minerals.

And the transformation this starts is the first of many

that will define the next century in the story of Wales.

What's happening here at Parys Mountain

is just a taste of what's to come

because Wales has far more to offer the world than just copper ore.

This is a land rich in resources.

There's lead, iron, there's coal of course.

There's a vast fortune to be made

and these resources will be exploited on a global scale

thanks to one of the biggest advances in human history.

The Industrial Revolution.

It will dominate the next 150 years.

Scientific discoveries and new inventions

are changing every aspect of daily life.

Water power and steam power drive new machines

that increase production.

This combines with Wales' mineral wealth

to make it an industrial powerhouse of global significance.

Here's the challenge.

To make one tonne of unrefined copper in the 18th century

you need three tonnes of coal for the smelting process.

It makes far more sense of course to bring the copper ore

to where the coal is,

which is how this place becomes the copper capital of the world.

They call it Copperopolis, we call it Swansea.

It's ideally located at the heart of a truly global industry.

Swansea is a unique location.

It has a deep navigable river,

the river Tawe, that leads right up to a rich source of coal.

So copper ore is shipped upstream,

unloaded and smelted right here on the river bank.

And the coal from the nearby pits feeds the furnaces

that smelt the ore.

The copper ingots produced here are exported around the world

to be used as an ingredient to make bronze and brass.

Swansea goes from being a small seaside town

to a sprawling centre of industry and a global phenomenon.

The growth of Copperopolis was the first large-scale industry in Wales.

A heavy industry that transformed the landscape,

attracted huge numbers of people from rural Wales to work there.

The river would have been busy with ships and the whole place

would have been shrouded with sulphurous smoke from the ore smelting.

And the overall effect to a newcomer, particularly from a rural area,

would be absolutely shocking.

Many who stay become some of the most skilled

copper smelters of the age.

And part of the most technologically advanced copper plant in the world.

One of the key things that distinguishes Copperopolis

and the story of the growth of the Swansea copper smelting

was that it was the first global industry,

the first industry to export this product truly internationally,

all around the world, both to Asia, the Americas and across Europe,

to Africa, and it's here at Swansea that this process first began.

As business expands, copper ore from as far away as Cuba, Chile

and North America is shipped to Swansea.

By 1820, more than half of the world's copper smelting industry

is focused on Copperopolis.

The Lower Swansea valley is a vision of a new industrial age.

Furnaces glow and chimneys belch fumes and smoke.

Copperopolis is the beating heart of Wales' industrial revolution.

Overgrown and derelict today,

you can still see the remains of Hafod,

once the largest copper works in the world.

But for all the greatness of Copperopolis,

this valley and its people would pay a heavy price.

The copper works pump out sulphurous gases and arsenic by the tonne.

Workers suffer chronic bronchial diseases.

Crops wither in the acid rain and livestock perish.

Farmers lodge court cases against the owners of the works

for ruining their once fertile soil.

By the late 19th century, what Copperopolis leaves behind

is the largest derelict industrial landscape in Western Europe.

There is another dark side to Wales' first global industry.

Copper is an integral part of the slave trade.

One of the few finished products made were manillas.

These were brass and copper bangles made to a tradition African shape.

Around three to four dozen manillas such as this would have purchased

an adult African slave, which would then be transported to

the Caribbean and to the southern part of the USA

where they would then work on sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations,

and of course the products of those slave economies were then consumed

across Western Europe including, of course, here at Swansea.

People dressed in cotton clothes, they smoked tobacco,

they put sugar in their drinks.

So really there was a two-way connection with the slave economies

and the slave trade of West Africa.

The manillas made in Wales would remain a legal currency

in some West African colonies until the start of the Second World War.

By 1790 the Welsh industrial revolution is unstoppable.

Slate from the North West, coal from Flintshire

and textiles from Bala are all sold in Europe.

Despite this transformation

the places we think of as centres of population

are lacking some important things.

There are no libraries, no universities, no civic centres.

So even as industry thrives,

bright young people in Wales who want to explore new ideas

and pursue an intellectual life have to move elsewhere.

London, the largest city in 18th-century Europe

is a cauldron of new ideas

and the Welsh intellectuals flock to it.

A remnant of that history still survives today.

The Honourable Society of the Cymmrodorion is set up in 1751

to debate all things Welsh, from history, arts, science to politics.

If you want to think about what Lloyd George's real attitude was towards Wales,

I think it's very similar to his attitude towards his family.

The Cymmrodorion society was set up by Welshmen,

and they were mainly men, in fact, totally men, who came to London.

Indeed I would imagine it was a coming together of people who had

keen literary interests,

keen to learn know more about the history and traditions of Wales

and people who played a key part in political life as well.

They were all sorts, obviously we had the intelligencia,

people who had been educated out of Wales,

had gone to Oxford and Cambridge and became lawyers, doctors, etc.

But we also had people from the artisan class,

people who were candle makers, things like that.

In the 18th century, the Honourable Society Of The Cymmrodorion

is a club for those who want to assert their identity

by delving deep into their history.

The name Cymmrodorion in Welsh

means aborigines, and it was meant to try to

find a phrase that would describe what the Welsh

in the 18th century wanted to prove about themselves,

that you can't really consider British culture or English culture

unless you go back to the original population of the British Isles,

which was the Welsh.

One enthusiastic member of a London Welsh society

is about to embellish history to great effect

and leave Wales with one of its most defining traditions.

The Gorsedd ceremony is performed by bards

at the annual National Eisteddfod.

Musicians, poets and writers are draped in druidic robes

and perform rituals that hark back to pre-Roman times.

But far from being an ancient Celtic tradition,

the Gorsedd is invented in the 18th century

by Edward Williams, a stonecutter and poet from Glamorgan.

He's better known by his pen name, Iolo Morganwg.

Mary-Ann Constantine has studied his life and works.

Iolo Morganwg is one of the main architects of Welshness if you like.

A lot of the ingredients that he threw into the pot

at around this time have stayed as essential elements

of what it means to be Welsh.

What he does discover is that people are interested in this ancient Welshness

because there's a big revival in all things Celtic.

Iolo is obsessed with Wales,

its language, its beauty and its history.

He wants to create a romanticised mystical Welsh past,

one that never actually existed.

One of the things he does is,

he walks across Salisbury Plain and he sees Stonehenge.

And that's the key moment in his life

because the big stones at Stonehenge which are still deeply mysterious

to people at the time, they set him thinking,

and he does everything he can to find out the ancient British past,

and the part that Wales could have played in that.

With the help of his vivid imagination and some laudanum,

the opium of its day, he falsifies an ancient language.

He carves the script onto sticks, claiming that this wooden book

or Peithynen was used by ancient Welsh poets

descended from druids 2,000 years ago.

One of Iolo's most inspired inventions was an alphabet,

which effectively proved that the ancient British were literate

and learned and educated just as the Greeks and Romans were

way back in the mists of time.

It's a series of little sticks really,

inscribed with various important bardic mottos

in the "ancient" alphabet.

It's almost like a child's invented alphabet, your own secret code.

Having claimed he's the discoverer of an ancient bardic tradition,

Iolo then invents a theatre in which to perform this tradition.

So he makes his own druidic circles with pebbles.

He gathers some literary friends,

re-enacting the supposedly ancient custom of the bards.

THEY SPEAK WELSH

In the 1790s, this little band of Georgian Welshmen

is the first true Gorsedd.

This is the very first place where he can welcome other people

into this fraternity, but once people have bought into the idea,

the thing grows, and you start having Gorseddau around Wales.

The thing takes on a life of its own.

HE SPEAKS WELSH

Iolo's Gorsedd starts to be performed in local Eisteddfods.

Over time the ceremonies grow more elaborate

and new rituals are invented.

By the 19th century it is the centrepiece

of the National Eisteddfod and remains so to this day.

Iolo and his forgeries aren't rumbled until long after his death

in 1826, but during his lifetime the public lap it up.

Iolo has started a cultural reawakening at a crucial time.

As industrialisation takes root and gains ground,

and literally starts to change the landscape and territories of people's homelands,

people start to feel that they're losing something,

Iolo is part and parcel of that big European movement

to retrieve the past before it's too late.

And simultaneously, desperately trying to promote and rescue

Welsh culture from what they felt

was an inevitable ruin and decline as industrialisation took over.

While Iolo Morganwg gives Wales a dignified story of its past,

the wheels of industrialisation thunder on.

And one particular industry will forge a new era for Wales.

It will bring vast wealth, aching poverty and terrible slums.

Iron.

From 1756 onwards, Britain is involved in naval conflicts

around its ever-expanding empire

and its Navy is hungry for iron to manufacture its weapons.

So English ironmasters are on the hunt for coal

to fuel their furnaces.

South Wales has that, and much more than they expect.

What the English ironmasters find in south Wales

is a money-making paradise.

Plenty of coal, fast moving streams for water power.

Limestone, iron ore, all the raw materials for making iron,

in one place.

It's as if the hills around the small village of Merthyr Tydfil

are made for the iron industry.

The iron masters who arrive here in the 18th century

have hit the jackpot

and Merthyr Tydfil is about to feel the impact of their discovery.

Richard Crawshay is an iron merchant who's made his fortune in London.

With an eye for a good investment,

he buys one of ironworks around Merthyr.

Over the next 30 years,

Cyfarthfa becomes the most profitable ironworks in the world.

Today, what remains of it is still impressive.

Historian Chris Evans is going to show me

why Cyfarthfa is so important.

I'm astonished by the scale of this place. It is immense.

It is. But you've got to imagine when the works were in their heyday

this space would have been occupied by a blowing engine,

a really vast piece of machinery

that would have driven air into the furnaces themselves.

When you say furnaces, how many?

Oh there's plenty, we're looking at one here,

one there and further down there would have been

another four in a rank.

A lot of furnaces consuming a lot of air.

So if we go this way we can see how it worked.

Today it's only the access tunnels to the furnaces that remain.

They once drew air into the kilns, 60 feet high.

Back then these passageways could reach temperatures

over 1,000 degrees centigrade.

It's like being in the heart of a giant oven.

Chris, why are these works so important?

These works, at the end of the 18th century,

were the largest in the world by some considerable distance.

The reason why these works are important,

is not just the blast furnaces,

it's the fact that the pig iron that was made in these blast furnaces

was then processed by a revolutionary technique -

puddling and rolling - what became known as the Welsh method.

Puddling, or the Welsh method, is hot, dangerous work,

stirring molten iron to refine it and increase productivity.

But it takes Crawshay and his men three years of experiments

before it is commercially viable.

The Welsh method produces iron that is strong and cheap.

-So Crawshay was a ground-breaking pioneer?

-He was indeed.

He was able to do so because he had money to devote to it.

He was an extremely rich London merchant.

He could afford to throw resources and time

at developing a technique that was hard to crack.

So it's his money made in London,

deployed in Merthyr, that makes the big difference.

He got pots of money.

Loads if it. Once he'd cracked it he made pots more.

Crawshay has perfected the Welsh method. Not bad for an Englishman!

It revolutionises the iron industry in Merthyr and beyond.

In the mid 19th century, if we went to Ruhr in Germany

or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we would find that technique being used there.

It becomes a global technique. The global success story.

By 1802, Cyfarthfa iron is at the forefront

of the Napoleonic War effort.

It attracts a visit from the greatest naval figure of the day,

Admiral Lord Nelson.

Just three years later, with his Welsh-made iron,

he wins one of the most decisive British naval battles in history,

Trafalgar.

This new commercial Wales needs a new transport system

to carry the heavy cargoes of its industries.

Canals replace wagons and horses.

They are the motorways of the 18th century.

Great engineers display their inventive genius in north Wales

completing the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in 1805.

It is a monument to the confidence and wealth of this new era.

But the most revolutionary transport of this time is about to be born,

right here in Wales.

In 1804, the owner of the Penydarren Ironworks, Samuel Homfray,

makes a bet with his fellow ironmaster Richard Crawshay.

The wager is 1,000 guineas, an absolute fortune in today's terms,

and he bets that he can build a steam engine that will take

ten tonnes of iron from Merthyr to Abercynon, that's about nine miles.

True to form, Crawshay can't resist the challenge.

Homfray enlists the help of a Cornish Engineer,

Richard Trevithick.

He builds the world's first working steam engine that runs on rails.

On the 21st of February 1804,

people come from far and wide to witness the great experiment.

Five trams set off, loaded with iron and 70 men.

But it isn't long before disaster strikes.

The chimney of the locomotive collides with a low bridge.

There's a lot of damage.

Well, Trevithick repairs the engine, clears away the rubble,

patches up the chimney, and before long,

he's on his way again at the hair-raising speed

of five miles an hour.

Nine hours later, Trevithick, his engine

and cargo reach Abercynon still intact.

The ironmasters' wager proves that steam locomotion is possible

and that railways are the future.

But the revolutionary changes of this time

are not confined to trade and transport.

This is also a time for revolutionary ideas.

One Welshman, Dr Richard Price, has ideas about liberty and freedom

that will help ordinary people fight for their rights.

His controversial ideas spread not only in Wales, but to England,

to Europe and even to America.

He's been described as the greatest thinker Wales has ever produced.

And he's buried at Bunhill Fields in London,

a resting place of many famous radicals and dissenters.

When Price dies in 1791, the funeral route is so crowded

that the cortege is five hours late

when it arrives here at the burial ground.

In France they declare a day of national mourning.

In America he is held up as a great thinker

who inspires the American Revolution.

And all this because the man laid to rest right here

is recognised as a true libertarian,

someone who spends his life trying to extend

the religious and political freedoms of all people.

Price is a Nonconformist chapel minister from Llangeinor

near Bridgend, and famed for his charismatic sermons.

Politicians, reformers,

even the Founding Fathers of the United States want to hear

what he has to say about the rights of ordinary people.

Price's reputation is established by a book he publishes in 1776.

It's called the Observations On Civil Liberty,

it's basically a manifesto for freedom.

The big idea is that communities everywhere

have the right to govern themselves.

And when it comes to members of parliament,

he sees them as trustees,

people who are there to do the will of the people.

We might think that's quite reasonable today.

In those days it was a revolutionary thought.

Price wants power to be in the hands of the people,

not with self-appointed governments or monarchs.

He has his finger on the pulse because this is a time

when wars against oppression are being waged.

In America, colonists are fighting for their independence

from the English crown.

But it's at the start of the French Revolution in 1789

that Price causes a real stir

with a sermon at his church in north London.

Richard Price steps into this church,

the church he leads for 26 years, and this is where he delivers

an explosive message to the waiting congregation.

The French Revolution is under way, the mob is in control,

and with all of this going on,

Richard Price delivers an apocalyptic warning.

His words are aimed at governments and kings who oppress their people.

"Tremble all ye oppressors of the world!

"You cannot hold the world in darkness.

"Restore to mankind their rights, and consent to

"the correction of abuses,

"before they and you are destroyed together."

Price openly supports the French Revolution.

He says that British people also have the right to fight for liberty.

But at home he is dismissed by the establishment,

lampooned in the press

and accused of stirring up bloodshed and anarchy.

In fact his ideas are a milestone on the road to a modern concept

of civil rights and democracy.

In the midst of the hardships of industrial Wales

these big ideas will eventually lead to big trouble.

Back in the hills around Merthyr Tydfil,

a chain of enormous ironworks stretch along the edge

of the south Wales coalfield.

And with them spring up several new towns.

By far the largest is Merthyr itself.

Once a village of just 40 houses in 1760

it is now the iron capital of the world

with a population of 8,000 and growing.

The iron industry attracts workers from rural Wales,

Ireland, England and Scotland.

This is Chapel Row,

cottages built in the 1820s for the Cyfarthfa ironworkers.

It's the rate of expansion that is astonishing

and it throws together a mass of urban immigrants

who live in terribly over-crowded, filthy, often primitive conditions.

But there are differences.

It depends what kind of job you do

and if you work in the iron industry for example

you might get lucky, you might live in one of these.

The size of the house is a status symbol.

There's nothing new about that.

Unskilled workers would live in just two rooms.

This house is rather different, there are four rooms here,

two upstairs and two downstairs

and what you find is that this little room can be set aside

for lodgers, as many as five of them squeezed into this tiny space.

The lack of housing attracts greedy speculators

who build temporary homes on top of iron slag heaps and waste.

Merthyr's slums are a tumbledown network of hovels

nicknamed Little Hell.

A report from the 1840s describes one home that measures

just 4.5 feet by 7 feet.

Now just imagine living in a room this size, there we go.

Husband, wife, children, cooking, eating, sleeping,

all kinds of other things, in a room as small as this.

And then next door, another family and another family and then another.

In 1841 in Merthyr,

there are 1,500 people living in stone huts this size.

It's one of the biggest slums in Wales

and the conditions are unimaginable.

That doesn't put people off.

Merthyr is a frontier town that promises to fulfil the dreams

of those desperate to be part of an exciting modern age.

But the reality is very different.

For most who arrive here, Merthyr is filthy, crime ridden and dangerous.

The overcrowding in industrial towns like Merthyr

is a public health disaster.

There are no toilets, the roads are open sewers,

people are infested with lice, and in these squalid conditions,

infection and disease can spread at a terrifying speed.

Without sewers or a clean water supply,

typhus, dysentery and cholera torment Wales' industrial towns

to devastating effect.

Between 1800 and 1850, cholera, known as the King of Terrors,

kills several hundred each summer.

Outside the iron town of Tredegar, at the Cefn Golau cemetery

lie the remains of more than 200 victims of cholera.

The bleak isolation of this place tells its own story.

Cholera is a horrifying illness.

Families who appear fit and well in the morning

can all be dead by that evening.

There is no known cause or cure.

The usual burial grounds are out of bounds

so cholera victims are laid to rest in lonely spots like this,

high on mountain tops, far from society.

So weathered are the gravestones, the inscriptions are barely legible.

In the early 19th century it isn't yet known that cholera is

spread by contaminated water.

Those affected suffer vomiting, diarrhoea and cramps.

In severe cases death comes in a matter of hours.

A quarter of those who die are infants.

Those who survive are struck by fear and panic,

they turn to God for their comfort.

When funeral processions pass by, people hide in their homes,

closing doors, terrified that they might become infected.

The homes of the dead are boarded up

and the families of victims will do anything to avoid the stigma.

They bury their dead at night, and if they can afford it they leave town.

For many, life in the industrial towns of Wales

is a struggle for survival.

But for a few, industrialisation brings great fortune

and vast wealth.

As the iron industry expands, the ironmasters establish themselves

in the grandest possible manner.

In 1825, William Crawshay, the third owner

of the biggest ironworks in Britain

decides to outdo all of his rivals and he builds himself a castle.

Cyfarthfa Castle, with its mock battlements and 72 rooms,

cost Crawshay £30,000, that's over £3 million in modern money.

Once a family home, it's now a museum of an extravagant lifestyle.

This is the centre of power.

This is the room from which Crawshay runs his empire

and from these windows he can keep a sharp eye

on his long suffering workers in the iron works below.

He can spot problems and can sort them out.

I suppose you could say he's living above the shop, in some style.

Now somewhere in this room is graphic evidence

of Crawshay's wealth.

Not there.

Ah, here we are.

This is the office safe, it's more like a bank vault.

This is where Crawshay kept all the cash to pay his workers.

I'd love to have a look inside but I'm told they've lost the key

but it does tell you everything you need to know about

the immense fortune that this family made.

And when celebrations are in order, not a penny is spared.

For a family wedding in 1847,

the ironworks are dressed for a grand banquet and ball.

More than 1,000 guests are offered 10,000 quarts of beer

and an array of 29 different dishes.

All over Wales, the vast wealth of industrialisation is on display.

Most extravagant of all is Penrhyn Castle in north Wales,

built on fortunes made from Welsh slate and Jamaican sugar.

But all this is in stark contrast to the lives of the workers.

Even children as young as five work in terrible conditions.

Not only poorly paid,

workers also face the daily risk of industrial accidents.

None more so than in the ironworks.

Actually making wrought iron is one of the hardest things

in the Industrial Revolution. There is nothing harder.

Anybody who saw it said it was the cruellest work that they ever saw.

This stuff, wrought iron was made in hundredweight lumps by teams of men.

It's not mass steel production. It was all hand work.

All by the skill of the operators in the team

handed down from father to son.

The working life of a puddler who stirs the molten iron

is usually over by the age of 40.

You work really hard, you get incredibly sweaty,

you lose a lot of body fluid, then of course you stop

and your body chills out and you got a lot of rheumatic problems.

Also, people looking at the furnace

were staring into effectively a white heat.

You can tell the temperature of the iron just by looking at it.

But if you spend a lifetime looking at it, you quickly go blind.

With all these hardships, people feel powerless and trapped.

These feelings will culminate in one of the bloodiest incidents

in Britain's industrial history.

When wages are cut and workers laid off in May 1831,

the work force erupts in anger.

The ironmasters can only look on

as a crowd of 10,000 seizes Merthyr by force.

Using armed blockades they fight off regiments of troops

for a whole week.

Inspired by a potent symbol of revolution,

the workers take a rag and soak it in cow's blood.

It is during this uprising that a red flag is raised

by British workers for the very first time.

It becomes a symbol of solidarity.

This uprising isn't some spot of local bother, it is organised,

it is connected, and after years of unrest,

the working class of Wales have an appetite for revolution.

When the authorities regain control, 20 are dead.

One protester known as Dic Penderyn is hanged

for allegedly wounding a soldier.

He is long remembered as a working-class martyr and hero.

The industrial revolution is sharply dividing Welsh society,

the rich and the poor.

And the rebellious mood this inspires isn't just confined

to the new iron towns.

Rebellion is also brewing in rural Wales.

On the night of 13th May 1839, a group of men descends

on this small village in Carmarthenshire.

It's called Efailwen.

They're armed with axes and sledgehammers and big sticks

and they destroy the new toll gate that's just been installed.

Then they move on to the tollhouse and burn it down.

The attack at Efailwen is just the beginning

of an underground movement of protest

that sweeps across west Wales.

Poverty-stricken farmers are angry that new private companies,

the turnpike trusts, are charging too much to use the roads.

There will more than 200 attacks on tollgates

over the next five years.

Just imagine the lot of the tenant farmers

here in west Wales in the early 19th century,

paying shockingly high rents to the land owners,

paying a tax to the Church of England,

a church he doesn't even attend as a chapel-goer,

paying more taxes to build workhouses,

which are prisons for the poor.

And then on top of all of that, to get his produce from A to B

he needs to pay a toll to use the roads.

Those toll gates are run by some greedy and unprincipled people.

Is it any surprise that the tenant farmer resorts to violence?

For the second attack,

the farmers adopt what seems to be a bizarre tactic -

they dress up in skirts,

and in aprons...

..and even in bonnets...

..and then they blacken their faces.

After this, they descend on the now rebuilt toll house at Efailwen,

and chant a woman's name, Rebecca.

THEY CHANT

They demolish the toll gate and disappear into the night.

Their distinctive guerrilla-style attacks will come to be known

as the Rebecca Riots.

The costumes the farmers use are a symbol based on local folklore.

There's one ritual which tells us a lot

about local tradition in this part of Wales.

It's a humiliation, a form of punishment for wrong-doers.

For example, men who beat their wives.

They're tied to a wooden chair, sometimes it's a wooden horse,

and then they're paraded in front of the community.

And the men dispensing this justice,

for reasons we don't quite understand,

have blackened faces and they wear women's clothes.

By dressing up,

the rioters attacking the tollgates evoke a sense of local justice

and it becomes a potent symbol in Welsh history.

But who is Rebecca and where does she come from?

It could be that one of the leading protesters has a close relative

or friend called Rebecca, that's always possible.

But I think there's a more likely explanation.

And the clue is here in the Bible.

We are talking about people who know their Bible inside out.

There is a passage in the Old Testament in the book of Genesis

and it says this,

"And they blessed Rebekah and said unto her,

"Thou art our sister,

"be thou the mother of thousands of millions,

"and let thy seed possess the gates of those which hate them."

So could this Rebecca be the one who inspires the rioters?

"May Rebecca's descendants conquer the property of their enemies."

It is the sentiment of an oppressed peasantry.

Over the months a hidden wave of support grows

through the parishes of west Wales.

There are several Rebeccas, riot leaders whose identity is unknown.

For three years they elude the military and the London police.

As the riots spread,

it's believed that even some of the local gentry support the cause.

They target other symbols of oppression,

workhouses where the poor and infirm are badly treated.

On 19th June 1843, the protests reach a bold climax.

And this is the scene of the biggest disturbance of that time.

It involves 2,000 people, it takes place in broad daylight

and they converge on this place.

This is the Penlan workhouse in Carmarthen.

It is full of the most unfortunate members of society.

The protest, which is all about genuine grievances,

is hijacked by some rather unsavoury characters

and suddenly it all turns rather nasty.

It is the violence of this protest

and the clash with the authorities that brings

the plight of the tenant farmers to the attention of the London press.

This is the turning point for the Rebecca Riots.

By the autumn of 1843, there are police and soldiers

roaming the countryside and at last the government acknowledges

that the rioters have legitimate concerns.

A commission is set up to look into these turnpike trusts.

And guess what. They uncover malpractice and corruption.

So those trusts are reformed and roads are improved.

Ultimately, the Rebecca Riots are a victory.

The authorities struggle to track down the riot leaders.

The few that are caught face hanging

or transportation to the other side of the world.

So what does Rebecca represent?

The terror that stalks this countryside is unavoidable.

When you have profound injustice and no lawful means of tackling it

you get an explosion of people power.

And for me the Rebecca Riots are all about self respect.

Welsh people refusing to tolerate blatant abuse

and demanding their share of justice and fair play.

That search for fair play and the people's quest for power

are gathering momentum across Britain.

Industrialisation has created a working class.

People are becoming politicised.

And in the 1830s that means a fight for the right to vote.

This struggle for democracy reaches a violent climax

in the industrial heartlands of Wales, at Newport.

On the evening of Sunday 3rd November 1839,

a cabinetmaker from Pontypool writes a letter.

"Dear Parents."

His name is George Shell and he is 19 years old.

"I shall this night be engaged in a struggle for freedom

"and should it please God to spare my life, I will see you soon."

George doesn't know the significant part he's about to play

in the story of Wales.

The following morning George Shell is one of 5,000 people

walking down this hill into Newport.

They have a common cause - they want the right to vote,

they want better lives and they're part of a much bigger movement,

a movement that's going to transform the battle for democratic rights

in this country.

George is part of a revolutionary struggle called Chartism.

There is huge discontent across Britain

that only those with property have the right to vote.

The Chartists want to change this and they have the support

of thousands of Welsh industrial workers.

But the authorities want to ban Chartist meetings

and stamp out their cause.

The Chartist leaders here in south Wales feel aggrieved.

They petition parliament, it's the right thing to do,

and yet parliament delivers a snub.

But the campaign for the right to vote

and a measure of power over their own lives is unstoppable

so the Chartists are driven to the last resort, the use of force.

Which is why the Chartists on the march are armed.

Their intent is to take over Newport and overthrow the authorities

who have set up headquarters at the Westgate Hotel.

Months of planning and endless hard work lead up to this moment.

Secret identities, secret meetings, secret funding.

Weapons made and kept at home.

Weapons stolen and hidden in caves in the surrounding area.

It is thought that across Britain

other groups of Chartists wait with bated breath.

Victory in Newport might trigger uprisings around the whole country.

All of which drives the employers, the captains of industry,

the leaders of society into a blind panic.

One mine owner hides in his own pit. Landowners flee with their families.

One clergyman even hides in a pond.

And all because the Chartists are coming.

Originally 20,000 Chartists set off from nearby industrial towns

on the overnight march to Newport.

But things go wrong.

Troops are moved into the Westgate Hotel.

That is unexpected

and it's one of things that undermine the Chartists' plans.

The weather is terrible, it's soaking wet

and lots of the marchers are late arriving

and by the time they come to this place in the heart of Newport,

only a quarter of the original marchers are left

and they're exhausted.

On reaching the hotel, they face 30 soldiers

supported by special constables

who are armed and ready for trouble.

Most accounts seem to suggest that the Chartists fire the first shot

but we don't know whether it was accidental or deliberate.

What we do know is that the round of shooting that follows

lasts 25 minutes.

It's a short, bloody battle,

at the end of which, the soldiers manage to defend the Westgate Hotel

and the Chartists throw down their weapons and flee.

20 lie dead and even more are wounded. All of them Chartists.

Some of the bodies are laid out in the hotel stables to await burial.

Among them is George Shell, the youngest victim.

"I shall this night be engaged in a struggle for freedom,

"and should it please God to spare my life, I will see you soon.

"But if not, grieve not for me. I shall fall in a noble cause."

George Shell is now remembered as a Chartist hero.

When troops examine the bodies, they discover

an enormous array of weapons

and the full extent of the Chartists' planning.

Newspaper reports marvel at the level of organisation

of these ordinary working people.

Some of the Chartists from that uprising are buried

at Saint Woolos Cathedral on the route of their final march.

George Shell is one of ten Chartists whose bodies are brought here

to this church yard in the dead of night by the military

and placed in unmarked graves.

The authorities clearly want this campaign to be forgotten.

But these are people prepared to die in a noble cause.

Not only do they want democratic rights,

they want a basic measure of happiness

and dignity in their troubled lives.

And the Newport Rising is all about that irresistible need for change.

The three leaders of the rising are charged with high treason

and transported to Australia for life.

The Newport Rising is a popular protest

by the working classes of Wales,

the beginning of a political awakening that will dominate

the next 100 years in the story of Wales.

It takes one turbulent century to change the face of Wales.

A predominantly rural economy

becomes an overwhelmingly industrial one.

And it brings with it a new class of person.

A spirited working class whose poverty and suffering

will create a new politics.

Our story of Wales is now about rapid change.

The Industrial Revolution, the social turmoil,

they're only just beginning.

The Open University has produced a free booklet

for you to learn more about the history of the people of Wales.

You can call...

Or go to...

Follow the links to the Open University.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd