dcf.cymru stimulus sheet · History · Year 11
These pages imitate the layout of an on-screen enquiry. They are not the WJEC e-assessment platform and not a WJEC task. The strike is real and the narrative, timeline and Source A are accurate. Source B, Interpretation 1 and Interpretation 2 were written for this lesson. They are based on real events and on the kinds of view historians have taken, but the words are invented: never quote them as real.
Enquiry question: How far did the Great Strike of Penrhyn, 1900 to 1903, divide the community of Bethesda?
Concept focus: significance and impact.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Penrhyn Quarry near Bethesda, in Caernarfonshire, was the largest slate quarry in the world. It was worked by nearly 3,000 quarrymen and owned by Lord Penrhyn, who lived at Penrhyn Castle near Bangor. Almost every family in Bethesda depended on the quarry, and most were Welsh-speaking chapel-goers.
The quarrymen wanted better pay and conditions, and the right to be represented by their union, the North Wales Quarrymen’s Union. Lord Penrhyn refused to deal with the union. An earlier dispute in 1896 had lasted eleven months.
On 22 November 1900 the quarrymen stopped work. The dispute lasted three years, the longest in British industrial history. As months passed, some men went back to work while others stayed out. The families who stayed out put cards in their windows reading “Nid oes bradwr yn y tŷ hwn” (“There is no traitor in this house”). W. J. Parry, one of the founders of the union, organised a co-operative to run several smaller local quarries and employ men who were out. Many others left the district to find work elsewhere. The quarry owners also built a street of houses in nearby Tregarth for families of men who chose not to strike.
The dispute ended in 1903 with the men returning to work. It weakened confidence in Welsh slate, and in the longer term orders fell and unemployment rose. Historians have long written about the quarrymen, the owner and the union; more recently they have also studied the experiences of women and the wider community during the strike.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1874 | The North Wales Quarrymen’s Union is founded. |
| 1896 | A dispute at Penrhyn Quarry lasts eleven months. |
| 22 November 1900 | The Great Strike begins. |
| 1901 | W. J. Parry’s co-operative begins working other quarries near Bethesda to employ men who are out. |
| 1901 to 1903 | Some men return to work at Penrhyn. Cards reading “Nid oes bradwr yn y tŷ hwn” appear in the windows of families still out. |
| 1903 | The strike ends and the men go back to work. |
| 2003 | On the centenary, a trade union unveils a plaque in memory of those who took part. |
| 2021 | The slate landscape of north-west Wales, including Penrhyn Quarry, becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site. |
The words on cards placed in the front windows of homes in Bethesda by families who stayed out on strike, 1900 to 1903:
NID OES BRADWR YN Y TŶ HWN
(There is no traitor in this house)
From a letter written in Welsh by the wife of a quarryman who went back to work in 1902, to her sister in Liverpool. Translated.
“You ask why we did it. We had sold the clock and the good chairs, and the children had not had boots since the winter. Dafydd went back in March. Now nobody in the chapel will sit on our bench, and Mrs Roberts next door, who nursed our Wil when he had the fever, crosses the road when she sees me. There is a card in her window. The children are called names in school. I do not know which is worse, the hunger or this.”
From a short history of the quarrymen’s struggle, written by a trade union official in 1953 for union members, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the strike.
“For three long years the men of Bethesda stood together as one against the might of Penrhyn Castle. A handful of weak men, tempted by the owner’s gold, crept back to the quarry, but they were few, and the village knew them for what they were. The true story of Bethesda is not division but loyalty: the loyalty of a people who would rather starve than betray their brothers.”
From a book on Welsh communities in the early twentieth century, written by a social historian in 2021, who used chapel records, court reports and family letters.
“The strike did not simply unite Bethesda against its landlord; it split the town from within. By the end, hundreds of men had gone back or been taken on, and the division ran through chapels, schools and even families. Women, who had to feed children with no wage coming in, felt the pressure most sharply. For many families the bitterness between ‘strikers’ and ‘traitors’ lasted for a generation, long after the quarry itself had moved on.”