AN UNINTENDED IN THE WELSH HINTERLAND

Networks, Lifestyles, Relationships

David Frost

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An Unintended Community in the Welsh Hinterland - Networks, Lifestyles, Relationships

Starting in the late 1970s, not long after I joined the urban exodus that saw significant inward migration to rural , I kept a file of notes and observations on the situation and experiences of those around me who had moved to West Wales. Thirty years on, at the turn of the millennium, I made a summary and in this paper I discuss the main social trends that I identified at the time, adding additional and more recent material. Migration and social networks My earliest observation was that the migrants had come from many different, overwhelmingly urban, places and I pondered the reasons why they had moved to Wales; and whether, having assembled themselves in the hinterlands of Machynlleth, , , and Cardigan, they had become a community, albeit a loose-knit and spatially dispersed one. One reason for their migration seemed to be the persistence of the rural idyll, a romantic yearning for an idealised countryside, which I examined in my article for the Organic Grower Magazine, “Mud on the Tracks” (2016). Part of the rural idyll is the notion of community, and many writers have contrasted the community life of rural society with the supposedly atomised life of urban society. My search of the literature on rural communities led me to the conclusion however, that our 1970s migration to West Wales was a variant of what sociologists call intentional communities, which are also known as utopian communities. According to cultural anthropologist Susan Love Brown, people turn away from their existing communities when they face difficulties in making the human connections necessary to sustain them or when the rules and understandings that once served them well no longer apply. They turn, “toward intentional community with an eye toward setting things right in a more intimate setting.” (Brown, 2002 p. 6). Elements of this description applied to many of the 1970s West Wales migrants as I discussed in ‘New Farmers, New Growers’ (2014) and ‘Mud on the tracks’ (2016) but only a minority of the early members deliberately intended to form a community. In some cases they may have wanted to live and work communally but they knew nothing of those others who were making simultaneous decisions. The West Wales migrants, I decided, would be better described as an unintended community.

Most theories of why migrants moved from urban to rural areas in the 1970s point to the importance of structural reasons. They identify pull factors such as the rural idyll, the dream of self-sufficiency and the lure of inexpensive land and property. They also speak of this counter-urban movement in terms of push factors like the rejection of materialism, careerism and the bourgeois life-styles of urban life and the dissatisfaction with housing costs, traffic congestion and lengthy commutes to work. As well as these structural reasons I wanted to understand how migrants’ individual agency had brought them to West Wales, why urbanites had reacted to these structural forces and what personal reasons and decisions had brought them to this location at this particular time. I struggled with these questions until reflections on my own experience and my personal conjuncture in 1976 (the year I moved from London to West Wales) led 3 to an appreciation of the role of social networks in migrant flows. In social network theory individuals are embedded in a network of social relationships and interactions and to examine the role of social networks in the West Wales case and to supplement my own knowledge and records, this paper draws on Nicholas Ford’s 1982 PhD thesis, “Consciousness and Lifestyle: Alternative Developments in the Culture and Economy of Rural Dyfed” (Ford, 1982) and the 2014 Museum exhibition “Towards the West, a Varied Crowd” curated by Jez Danks (Amgueddfa , 2015).

When, in 2014, I compared the list of respondents interviewed by Ford with the list of contributors interviewed for the Ceredigion Museum exhibition, I found that despite the time interval, 48 of the 57 contributors to the exhibition had been among the 100 migrants to West Wales interviewed by Ford more than 30 years earlier. Ford’s interviewees were selected (primarily though not exclusively) from the membership list supplied by the West Wales Soil Association whereas the contributors to the Ceredigion Museum exhibition were selected members of Danks’ social network. Although the geographical areas covered by the two populations are not coterminous, there is considerable overlap. Ford’s interviewees were primarily from the south Ceredigion area of Tregaron, , Llandyssul and Crymych whereas more of the exhibition contributors were from further north, from Machynlleth and Aberystwyth, from the scattered Ceredigion villages of Mynydd Bach and extending south to Lampeter and Tregaron.

Ford’s overall aim was ‘to explore the human consciousness and lifestyle dimension of the contemporary ecological crisis’ which he defined as a resource crisis and a crisis of environmental degradation. His research consisted of a field study of migrants to Wales who were developing what he called a ‘Back to the Land’ or ‘Self-sufficient Lifestyle’. Ford undertook interviews in south Ceredigion and explored the background and origins of changes in lifestyle, the ideas behind these changes and the ways they were translated into practice. His sample of 100 households comprised relatively young families living on small-holdings, who had arrived in West Wales between 1973 and 1977. Nearly half the households had moved to West Wales from South East England with just under a quarter from London. Nearly a fifth came from the Midlands with the remainder from other areas of England, from Wales, from abroad and from ‘all over the place’. Very few of his interviewees had any prior knowledge of West Wales beyond limited personal experiences. Ford found that the main push factor influencing people to move was disaffection with consumer society. The pull-factors were the appeal of an alternative lifestyle in retirement, positive encounters with alternative ideologies, childhood influences and drug experiences. The particular attraction of West Wales was the cheap price of property and for some, the opportunity to join established alternative life-style projects.

For the 2014 Ceredigion Museum exhibition, Danks asked 57 contributors to the exhibition, all of whom were circa-1970s migrants, to provide short written answers to the questions, “what were you doing before you moved to West Wales?” and, what were the “Reasons/circumstances of your move?” My initial examination of the answers undertaken for the exhibition (Amgueddfa 4

Ceredigion Museum, 2015) showed that the largest group, almost half of all the contributors, moved to West Wales in the 1970s from London and the South- East of England. The remainder moved from other areas of England with a smaller number who had moved from elsewhere in Wales, from Northern Ireland or had been travelling.

Prior to their move, the majority of Ceredigion Museum exhibition contributors (forty percent) had been in education. Of these, half were school leavers or students and the other half had been teachers, lecturers or researchers. The next two largest groups had either been involved in the arts or craftwork (18%) in various retail or catering occupations (12%) or in professional work (11%). Only a small number (7%) had previously been involved in farming or gardening. The most frequently given reasons for moving to West Wales were to farm, to grow vegetables, to be self-sufficient, to move from the city to the countryside and to change their lifestyle. Over sixty percent of the contributors recalled such reasons for their move in the 1970s. Of the rest just over ten percent came to study or to teach (mainly at the two local universities) or moved for work reasons.

My subsequent further analysis of the Ceredigion Museum exhibition contributors’ answers showed that 19 of the respondents (40%) had moved with a group of friends, indicating that many people moved not as individuals but as members of a friendship network. Here it is important to note that at the time when they moved to West Wales, the overwhelming majority of migrants were young adults. Significantly, a large group said that they moved to West Wales intending to become students. This group either dropped out of their studies or stayed in the area after graduation. Other contributors said they had moved back to the area of Wales in which they had been born; or to the area they had visited as a child; or to join relatives who lived locally, some others moved to take up a job, or to buy a farm. The analysis is shown in the Appendix.

The role of universities and colleges in establishing networks is apparent in the comments from Ceredigion Museum exhibition contributors who didn’t move to become students themselves, but rather came to join friends and acquaintances who had already moved to West Wales to study. Although without further investigation there is little evidence to support the hypothesis, it is probable that Lampeter University rather than Aberystwyth, played a role in attracting some of the earliest migrants to West Wales – those who arrived in the very early 1970s and the 1960si. What seems clear is that the earlier in-migrants tended to be those who Ford (1982) labeled as ‘drifters’, and were labeled ‘hippies’ by the local receiving community, as I described in ‘Nobody’s People’ (2018a). Ford also found that a number of his respondents who arrived between 1973 and 1977 had moved to join established groups. My hypothesis is that these groups were attracted to the Lampeter area because of its appeal which in the words of one smallholder interviewed by Ford, related back to “the dream of the hippies in London in the 1960s to go out to Shetland or Wales…” (Ford, 1982 p. 219). Ford suggested that West Wales had the appeal of ‘rusticity and psychological distance’ but my suggestion is that Lampeter University - formerly and primarily a Theological College in a town where you can still find organisations devoted to 5

Hinduism and other Eastern Religions - attracted drifters and hippies who, rejecting the materialism of mid-twentieth century urban life were seeking spiritual meaning. Lampeter students and their wider social networks are likely to have been an initial nucleus around which the larger migrant community of West Wales subsequently grew. It was notably in the Lampeter area that "the orange people", followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, were most visible in the mid 1970s, as I noted in my paper, “Nobody’s People”, (Frost, 2018). In the USA, investigations in a number of communities have shown how such ‘hot spots’ with certain ideas and lifestyles can develop. One particularly relevant example is Lewis’ study of Boulder, Colorado. This showed how businesses associated with the lifestyles of health and sustainability (LOHAS) developed after a Buddhist Ashram was established in the city. This followed the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the out-migration of Buddhist monks, some of whom found sanctuary in Boulder (Lewis, 2000 pp. 18-21).

From my own network, two case examples further illustrate the role of networks in attracting migrants to West Wales. In the first of these an English migrant, Gawain, originally came to the area aged 18. In describing how he became attached to West Wales, Gawain later recalled how after leaving school in 1967 he visited students at who were living in a coastal village cottage. Although he didn’t know them personally, these students were part of Gawain’s school friendship network. Later, in 1974, after spending seven years travelling Europe as a busker, he returned to the area that had made such an impression on him as a teenager. He made a base in West Wales, in a caravan on a mountain farm, to which he returns each summer to spend his time composing songs inspired by what he describes as, “a very strong place”. The second example comes from later in the migrant flow when members of a group of organic farmers in central England moved to West Wales. The reasons for this unlikely group-move can be traced to a study visit of West Wales organic farms organised by the Agricultural Training Boardii. Our farm was among those visited by the central England group whose leader was, like me at the time, part of a network of Soil Association organic farm inspectors. Subsequently, at least four members of the central England group relocated to West Wales: Not together but rather in a sequence, over a period of several years following the initial visit. These stories illustrate ways in which migration to rural West Wales was rarely a random individual choice and how the choice to move to a particular area was influenced by migrants’ social networks. Lifestyles The second of my observations in 2000, was the wide variation in lifestyles among my fellow migrants to West Wales. I realised that in my school and university life and then living and working as a lecturer and social researcher in London, my social network held common values and had broadly similar life experiences. It was a culturally homogenous group. The migrant community by contrast, was heterogeneous in terms of migrants’ backgrounds; geographically but also economically, socially and culturally. Significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, the lifestyles adopted by migrants to West Wales rarely included employment other than self-employment. Migrants did not have PAYE jobs. They worked on their own account, they were organic farmers and growers, and they 6 practiced self-sufficiency or ran small country businesses. Among my network, I identified five broadly separate lifestyles. These were, Agriculturists; Artists and crafts people; Entrepreneurs and artisans; Alternative medics; Users and dealers. The group with agriculturist lifestyle included self-sufficient smallholders, organic farmers and growers. Although just about everyone in the migrant community was committed to organic food and many grew their own fruit and vegetables and kept chickens the ‘Agriculturists’ were those with more land – smallholders, farmers and vegetable growers who grew fields of mixed vegetable crops and erected polytunnels to extend the growing season. Like the couple who had been working in London for charitable organisations who moved to West Wales in 1975, “… (we) were desperate to move out of the city and grow vegetables. We chose Wales, a country we did not know, because the air was clean and pure and the land relatively cheap.” They bought a farm with 22 acres of land to grow vegetables organically and “ in those heady days of the ’70s and the early ‘80s, enthusiasm for organics was high... Our produce was enthusiastically received on the weekly markets of Tregaron and Lampeter… Being part of a thriving organic movement was exciting.”iii The incoming farmers favoured dairy herds though some kept sheep and others experimented with growing milling wheat for organic flour production and/or pioneered field scale organic carrot growing. One farmer who subsequently became Director of the Soil Association recalled that in 1973, “The farm was unbelievably run down with few fences, ramshackle buildings, boggy fields and a road that was impassible in winter. We purchased 30 Ayrshire Cows, and started milking immediately in an extremely antiquated parlour, selling the milk in churns from a stand at the bottom of our impossible farm track.” Most of the agriculturists were members of the West Wales Soil Association. This group of farmers and growers developed many innovations in organic production and they made links with other new farmers and growers in the West Country, Herefordshire, East Anglia and further afield which led to the setting up of the Organic Growers Association (OGA) in 1981 and British Organic Farmers (BOF) in 1982iv.

Among those with a predominantly arts and crafts lifestyle there were potters, clothes and fabric makers, painters and musicians. Some were already established like two artists who had been living, working and exhibiting in London who decided in 1978 to take a sabbatical for three months in Wales. They never went back and recalling those times in 2014 they said that, “It was the best decision we ever made… we were given a grant and were able to live for two years frugally.” Another exhibition contributor had recently completed an art course at Harrow College of Art and worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery before moving to West Wales in 1976. With her husband she, “followed the drift to Wales to find somewhere to practice self sufficiency, fired by John Seymour... We made money from leather craft work, making bags, belts, hats and boxes which we sold at Tregaron market and Llandovery craft market.” And a musician living in a council flat in Camden, London moved to Wales in 1983 “to be in a creative environment among like-minded people, and out of urban surroundings”. In her contribution to the Aberystwyth Exhibition she recalled that, “We were known as musicians in the area, artists. This made our rather off 7 the wall life style acceptable ... There was a fantastic alternative community of artists, healers and creatives of all sorts.”

Music was a significant aspect of the migrant community’s social life and from its earliest days there were visits by musicians such as Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and members of the Rolling Stones. According to Ebenezer (2010), the Stones’ lead guitarist, Keith Richards was interested in buying a mansion near Lampeter until the press found out, and Ebenbezer spoke to residents of Llandewi Brefi who claimed that Bob Dylan stayed there for around four weeks following his appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969. Music has been described as an art form that engenders not only intensely personal feelings but also feelings of social solidarity and community (Hesmondhalgh, 2013; 2014) and among the 1970s migrant community of West Wales tastes in music reflected and reinforced a collective sense of identity. We were the generation that grew up with rock music as the sound track to our lives and local musicians played together at parties at the evening sessions following organic farm walks, and in pubs where impromptu playing and singing sessions could occur on any night of the week. In the 1970s and 1980s, Sony Walkman, let alone IPod had yet to make an impact so music was less solipsistic, less a personal experience, it was part of the glue that held the community together informing its values and pointing us in common directions. Later, EU funding supported a music festival in Tregaron and while the funding lasted, a series of bands from outside of Wales came regularly to play for a mixed audience of hippies, organic growers and local farmers.

The category ‘entrepreneurs and artisans’ included pub landlords and food traders, builders, plumbers, carpenters and car mechanics. This was a broad category in the sense that it ranged from businesses with a clear structure (single trader, partnership, limited company) to those who were ‘on the hobble,’ slang for taking small, cash-in-hand jobsv. Those ‘on the hobble’ could turn their hands to a variety of tasks, working on the land for farmers and growers, rebuilding ‘derries’ or painting and decorating. As one who arrived in 1971 said, it was, “whatever extra work we could get to survive – fencing, roofing, forestry”. For some it fitted well with being a claimant. Regular social security payments provided a basic income that could be topped up whenever casual work was available, foreshadowing the later concept of a Universal Basic Income (Frost, 2018; Pavanelli, 2019). In a community where most survived on low-incomes, hobbling was also a form of mutual support. Working together with small exchanges of cash in return for labour meant people could build, rebuild and maintain their homes. The alternative car mechanics provided a similar and essential function: those with the skills provided a low-cost car repair service which was essential in an area lacking adequate public transport and where most residents relied on older models of cars, vans and tractors. They literally kept the wheels of the community turning. Building work was readily available as, paradoxically, while Welsh Nationalists were burning holiday homes (losgi ty haf) owned by English visitors, migrants were rebuilding cottages that had long fallen into ruin and refurbishing farmhouses more recently abandoned by families who built new houses in a modern style, often close to roads for greater ease of access. In one example, I counted seven properties that a single part-time 8 builder restored and made fit for habitation over a thirty-year period living in Ceredigion but the addition to the West Wales housing stock represented by the rebuilding undertaken by the 1970s migrants is seldom acknowledged. It has been at best, overlooked; for example by Eirian Jones in her book, The War of the Little Englishman vi who writes that, “...a number of unoccupied houses, which fell into ruin in the middle of the last century, have been renovated. This process started in the 1970s, and some of these renovated cottages are now second homes, but most are occupied throughout the year by those who chose to retire to this quiet place. Mynydd Bach certainly did not suffer the wrath of Welsh extremists burning second homes in the 1970s, as happened to other places in rural Wales.” (Jones, 2007 p. 15). The academic and broadcaster Gwyn Williams, writing in the mid 1970s, viewed the impact of new arrivals on the housing market with more concern, arguing that the competition for cottages and small-holdings forced prices up to an ‘artificial height’. Williams (who had retired to Ceredigion after years working overseas) acknowledged with male chauvinism typical of the time, that ‘on the other hand… some young wives prefer the ready-made or custom built-built modernity of a new council house or bungalow to the bother of modernizing an old house in the country.” (Williams, 1977. p. 231). Ironically perhaps, following his death in 1990, Williams’ house, built by his grandfather a century earlier, was bought and extensively refurbished by a migrant couple (one English, one Scot) soon to became embedded in the unintended community of migrants among whom they found themselves.

The 1970s saw a revived interest in alternative medicine as professional knowledges became increasingly contested. With concerns over iatrogenisis, the concept of sickness produced by medical activity introduced by Ivan Illich in Medical Nemesis, 1974 vii, many in the migrant community trained and worked as acupuncturists, homeopaths, reflexologists and herbalists and these followed the lifestyle I described as ‘alternative therapists’. Many others in the community were their patients although some relied on their own remedies for good health. Culinary and medicinal herbs were, for example, widely used by 1970s migrants to West Wales and Juliette de Baïracli Levy’s books Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable (1952) and Herbal Handbook for Everyone (1966) were almost sacred texts. Herbalism has a long tradition in Wales particularly associated with the Doctors of Myddfai, Meddygon Myddfai and, just as Jan Morris (1988 p. 158) noted that the Myddfai became confused with folk-wisdom and magic, so among the migrant community in West Wales the range of ‘New Age’ therapies took many forms. For example, while a former student who moved to West Wales in 1969 listed among her memorable moments simply, “walking the lanes for wild herbs to make tea (and) a diet of brown rice and stock”, a former primary school teacher who moved from Manchester in 1971 took up her “grandmother’s mantle of palm reading”. Typically one of the first acupuncturists practicing among the migrant community was known as ‘Chris Needles’ but there were also NHS doctors who offered acupuncture and were generally sympathetic to alternative medicine; and a pediatric consultant at Bronglais hospital (who was 9 also an organic farmer) used homeopathic remedies and gave talks on the subject to the local branch of the Soil Association.

The importance of the ‘drugs dimension’ was one of the influences reported by Ford’s respondents. According to his research, “A number of those interviewed mentioned drug experiences as helping to bring certain ideas together…” (Ford, 1982 p 214). In my migrant social network, using and dealing was for some a life-style that revolved around ‘scoring’ (obtaining) or supplying and selling drugs. This was a broad category since it covered large scale makers and suppliers of LSD (as in what became known as the Operation Julie case) to those who grew cannabis plants for their own use in their gardens or hidden in nearby Forestry Commission plantations. According to Lyn Ebenezer (2010) Operation Julie was, at the time, ‘the biggest drugs bust in history’. At its centre, was the chemist and LSD evangelist Richard Kemp and his partner, former G.P. Dr. Christine Bott. They had met as medical students at Liverpool University in 1965 and were both committed organic gardeners, goat keepers and members of the West Wales Soil Association. They were friends with others in the migrant community and their arrest and long penal sentences (13 years and 9 years respectively) reinforced a sense of paranoia even among infrequent soft-drug users. This paranoia proved justified as many late-night parties were raided by the police and homes searched, resulting in arrests, trials and fines. One of the most zealous police officers bore an uncanny resemblance to a Monty Python actor and the sudden appearance of ‘John Cleese’ was widely feared.viii

At the time I originally formulated this list of lifestyles I made no attempt to quantify the numbers of my network that could be assigned to each of these categories but an examination of the answers given to Danks’ questionnaire for the 2014 Aberystwyth Exhibition provided some indications. The caveats that these respondents were not a random sample and that they do not include those who subsequently moved away apply to these findings. A further caveat is that none of the respondents in 2014 mentioned any involvement with drugs that might have occurred forty years previously– so that lifestyle category is omitted. My analysis of the information supplied by the contributors to the 2014 Aberystwyth Exhibition, shows that the largest number, 18 (34%) of 1970s migrants who moved to West Wales adopted lifestyles of artists or craft workers. The second largest group 14 (26%) lived an ‘agriculturist’ lifestyle – they worked the land as farmers, small holders, vegetable growers and self-sufficient gardeners. The third of the three major groups (21%) comprised those with lifestyles as entrepreneurs including those running small businesses (other than agriculture) and self-employed artisans such as carpenters. The full list is present in the appendix. Such a list of lifestyles is, however, a typification, a heuristic device to convey the way a group of people lived at a particular conjuncture in their lives. As a typology it is neither exhaustive nor discrete. For example, although drugs defined a lifestyle for a number of migrants, tolerance and moderate use of cannabis was almost universal throughout the migrant networks. Furthermore, many individuals combined lifestyles – one shopkeeper was also a musician, another was also a potter. For a car mechanic, enameling was his life ambition and so on. Lifestyles are, in any case, unlikely to be permanent throughout an individual’s life-cycle and over time considerable 10 sorting occurred. In the initial forming period, the feeling of shared values and attitudes towards the life they had left behind and the life they had chosen, bound the group together. Furthermore they were a group of newcomers - pobl dwad - among a largely Welsh-speaking population who were unable to locate them within their own web of kinship networks (Frost, 2018). As peoples’ habits and outlooks changed with the passing years migrants gravitated towards those with whom they had most in common. This structuring of social relationships, defined by sociologists as homophily ix, was important as it influenced how information was shared, how values and attitudes were formed and how social interactions were experienced.

Social relationships The third issue that became obvious soon after arriving in the migrant community was the churn in social relationships. Many migrants arrived as partners or as married couples and many arrived as members of existing social networks. As new friendships and associations were formed in the unintended community and new lifestyles were adopted, many existing relationships became strained.

I first put together a list of individuals who I recognized as fellow in-migrants in the early 1980s. The initial list included 70 people (myself excluded), 36 males and 34 females. Eleven had degrees or professional qualifications and 22 had become primarily involved in organic growing and farming, smallholding and allied enterprises. At this time, 44 of the sample were in couples or formally married. Although most lived in conventional household relationships, there were four cases of communal living. Each of these was involved with organic farming or growing. By comparison, among Ford’s 100 interviewees, 81 lived in family units with children, 18 were childless couples. There were 8 single person households and 6 communes. Although the number living in communes was small, he noted that, “35% mentioned past involvement in community living situations” (Ford, 1982 p. 185).

According to my calculations, by the year 2000, 32 of the original 44 partners had seen their relationship end - only 6 of the original 22 couples remained intact. Of the 32 whose relationship had ended 11 formed new (more or less permanent) relationships or had remarried. Eight of these found new partners from within the community, 3 found new partners from outside. Some people moved away altogether and a stream of newcomers arrived. Living in communes in particular resulted in considerable churn with people moving out and moving in, relationships forming and breaking and an overall trend which saw the committed organic farmers and growers (usually the founder-members) increasing their influence as the more peripheral and less committed left. One staff member from the Soil Association who had wide ranging knowledge of organic farming in and beyond Wales, observed that those who succeeded in establishing organic enterprises had to be strong-willed but their drive and commitment was, in contrast, associated with rather less success in maintaining social and emotional relationships in the domestic situation.

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Although increased rates of divorce and breakdown of relationships are a feature of society in general, the proportion in this small sample was approximately three quarters, compared to a national average at the time nearer to one quarter. Most of the break-ups occurred in the 1 to 5 year period following arrival in the area. Though this may have reflected national trends – at the time statistics showed that most divorces and breakdowns occurred in the first four years of marriage - it’s also the case that geographical and social change can both put strains on relationships and allow people more easily to break them. In a new geographical situation, with social networks in the establishment phase, the lack of restraining parental forces and the sanctions of kin and neighbours is absent. In Family and Social Network (1957), Elizabeth Bott argued that the nature of conjugal roles is related to the density of their social networks and her work suggests that when people in relationships move away from a close-knit social network to a looser one, “informal social control by relatives and neighbors is much less stringent…and much variation is possible.” (Bott, n.d.). This was the case in the migrant community where couples became separated from their previous social networks and individuals became more autonomous. Women’s groups were part of this process for some - for consciousness raising, working in Women’s Aid projects and gardening together. One contributor to the Aberystwyth Exhibition in 2014, recalled her initial expectations as “communal living with people I valued, (and an) alternative lifestyle replacing the traditional family”. Among her memorable moments she listed “Women’s Aid meetings in the backroom of an Aberystwyth pub”.

Although it might be expected that a breakdown of a relationship would lead to one or both of the (ex) partners returning to their previous home area, in the migrant community of West Wales, both were more likely to stay and to enter into new partnerships. Many of the new relationships formed within the community by ex-partners resulted in a variety of family forms. Some complete and some partial swops of partners occurred. Some individuals in serial relationships ended up having children with three different partners, and two was common. Gay and lesbian couples moved into the area, but some individuals also left heterosexual relationships to form homosexual ones. These were usually women leaving men to form relationships with other women. Some children born to heterosexual couples were subsequently brought up by same sex couples, single parents or by one natural parent plus their new partner. As a result of these changes many children of the community had stepbrothers and sisters, and many found themselves connected to a ‘sibling’ with whom they had no blood relationship. This was widely accepted as a norm among the children and recognized in such comments as, ‘he’s her brother by another mother’. Demographics Communities need to reproduce themselves in order to survive. They are threatened by out-migration and by the death of their members. They are reinforced by in-migration and by the birth of new members. Births, marriages and deaths therefore have a particular meaning, and for migrants the situation differs from one where the community is traditional to a locality and where there are established kinship networks. The migrant community is perhaps more starkly aware of the fragility of its existence. The community may constitute a 12 particular age cohort, and as it grows older the issue arises of whether the generation born to the immigrants will want to stay in the new area, return to their family’s roots, or perhaps to move to a different place altogether.

The arrival of urban migrants to West Wales in the 1970s tended to coincide with the family building stage of their individual life cycles. Though many of the relationships may have been fluid and temporary, individuals were at an age when they were having, or had just had, their first children. Thirty years later in 2000, these original members were approaching the third age. Their children were now mostly in their teens or twenties, so some of the original community were already grandparents. In 2000, it was clear that not all of the children wanted to stay or could stay in West Wales as they became adults. Educational and especially employment possibilities lay outside the area in which they had grown up. None appeared at that time to aspire to work on the land, nor to run smallholdings. A large proportion did however, seem to share their parents’ wider cultural values. At that time none had gone into accountancy, banking, industry or estate agent work. Art courses and music were popular educational and employment choices for both sexes along with catering, computers and information technology, and at least 2 girls had chosen nursery nursing. I calculated that the original 70 people in the sample had produced 80 children by 2000. Of these 47 went on to Higher Education after school. (A further 14 adults from my sample group also returned to Higher or Further Education as mature students, mostly to study computers/IT, though others studied languages and religion.) Although many migrants’ children moved away, during visits they commented on bonds with those they had grown up in West Wales. They had become a dispersed part of the community, a first wave diaspora that still shared certain understandings of the world and commonly held values with each other and those they had left behind.

Births occur regularly in a migrant community, but their celebration tends to be a family affair. Deaths are different, death is a more communal affair. As the oldest members of the migrant community were only reaching 60 in 2000, deaths were premature. Among my group, causes of death prior to 2000 comprised illness (2 brain haemorrhages, 1 tumour), 1 farm accident, and 1 suicide. The community came together at these times and in expressing their grief at the loss of a friend, there was also an acknowledgement of their place in the unintended community. This is clear in the remarks I noted at those early funerals, “It’s such as shock, he was the first of our circle to die”; “Why is it we only realise how special this community is on occasions like this ? - We must get together more often”; “We are so lucky, we take this community for granted.” Similar sentiments were expressed towards the end of the millennium and as members of the original unintended community began to notice its demise. One evening in December 1997 when I had dinner with friends the conversation turned to the reasons why people had moved here and why that had made the community special. I made notes of what had been said. At one point the host said, “We all moved here for a purpose, and after twenty years we have a shared understanding that doesn’t need to be explained. When I meet other groups of people like at the hospital (where the host now worked) I have to explain why I eat what I do...people just don’t understand it”. A guest replied, “It’s very difficult, 13 like where my friends live, near London airport, their neighbours are people who just happened to buy houses in the same street. What do they have in common? Its so different.” A third guest summed up the conversation saying, “Tomorrow, on my birthday, I will be with four women who I have known for twenty years. We will talk in a certain way without this need to explain why we live here, do the things we do, eat the food we eat.” Demise According to Halfacree and Rivera, moving out from rural places often occurs in the longer term because of changing economic factors such as unemployment and to household changes such as divorce, lack of service for young people, empty nesting, or people becoming unable to cope due to old age or illness. (Halfacree, and Rivera, 2012 pp. 92 – 114). Recent research has also shown how social networks in rural areas are weakened by structural changes (Klarner and Knabe, 2019). Selective out-migration and the ageing and shrinking of the population plus business closures and the centralization of public services can lead to quantitative and qualitative declines in social networks. Network ties disappear when people’s affines move away (Klarner and Knabe, p. 467). Already by 2000, I noted that the migrant community of West Wales was showing signs of fragmentation for many of these reasons. Economic and employment changes were fundamental. Over the previous thirty years most of the migrants had not worked for private companies nor in the public sector, they had been self employed or unwaged, working at home or nearby, renovating their houses, rearing children, farming and gardening. A harsher economic environment developed in the 1990s as UK welfare policy moved towards what has been called the mandatory activation model – where universal access is replaced by a system of benefits conditional upon applicants meeting requirements such as providing regular evidence of applying for jobs x. With much more stringent regulations for social security claimants and the re- categorisation of the unemployed as job-seekers, those whose lifestyles had been supported by the ‘Sosh’ (Social Security payments) increasingly found themselves propelled into the labour market. Others opted to become mature students as in the example of the 14 individuals in my network who signed up for Higher or Further Education course to study computers/IT, languages and religion. Considering their years living a self-sufficient rural way of life, the numbers who chose to study and to find employment in the IT sector may appear surprisingly high. The answer to this apparent paradox is that for those who had moved into middle age during their time in the migrant community and who had little or no post-school education, IT represented an open opportunity for employment where prior training and experience was largely unnecessary or irrelevant. With the approach of the millennium, IT was the new growth sector and local, free training courses funded by Ceredigion Council were offered to the unemployed and job-seekers. Whereas dependency on benefits had become a trapdoor into poverty, IT training offered a trampoline boost into employment.xi

The rural idyll, the utopian way of life based on rural self-sufficiency recalled by many of those featured in the 2014 Aberystwyth Museum Exhibition, “Towards the West” was from the golden period of the 1970s and 1980s. No-one in those evocations mentioned the extent to which for many (twenty percent among 14

Ford’s sample in 1982) the universalist welfare system of Unemployment Benefit, Social Security payments, Family Income Supplement, Free School Meals and Child Benefit had provided support when needed and made the idyll possible. In fact, the 1970s marked the end of the post-war UK golden age of capitalism which had seen growth averaging 2.5 percent per year and the economy operating at times close to full (male) employment (Dawson, 2000). With jobs, the health, education and welfare systems all apparently secure, changes in the balance of power in employment had lifted wages to unprecedented levels. Affluence and security created a culture of confidence in which many decided to migrate from the city knowing that the relatively easy availability of unemployment and social security benefits would provide a financial cushion if they arrived in the countryside without employment. Statistics show, however, that in the UK as a whole working hours were increasing in the last quarter of the twentieth century and this was true in West Wales with more and more couples seeing both partners moving into to full time PAYE employment, a trend that accelerated in the 1990s. On the farms too, where once the family was fully employed in agricultural work, increasingly the wife (or sometimes the husband) went out to work and rarely more than one child could remain on the family farm after leaving school, due to the combination of falling market prices for farm produce and falling labour requirements associated with increased mechanization and automation in the agricultural sector. Other children went off the farm to work in the towns or further afield. As Cloke et al’s Rural Wales, community and marginalization study pointed out in the late 1990s, the reversal of rural population decline that had been identified in aggregated population statistics since the 1970s, masked a continuing net out-movement of many younger people from rural areas of Wales (Cloke et al, 1997 p. 4).

Economic decline in rural areas is associated not only with changes in the local employment market but also with such out-migration flows. Early in-migrants to West Wales were part of the counter urbanisation cascade, a series of stages whereby people moved to increasingly more rural locations. West Wales being both highly rural and bordering the sea, it might be thought there was nowhere else to go – maybe it was indeed the hippie’s graveyard. But there was a place further west across just 90 miles of sea, to Ireland where, as early as the 1980s, some of the 1970s migrants to West Wales left to join communities of ‘blow-ins’. Others moved back to urban areas, most notably to Bristol. One example is the couple that moved to West Wales from Kent in 1972, “We left Wales after 13 happy years and are still closely connected to many life-long friends who live there. Our two children are both Welsh-born, and we all now live in Bristol, England.” A further wave, predominantly of the more affluent, moved to rural France establishing a continuing, if sporadic, trend.

The alternative communities established in the 1970s such as the migrant community of West Wales, are examples of how people can live when mutual support thrives and where some form of basic income support provides a safety net. In the West Wales example most community members lived a working life, a chosen creative life, rather than a prescribed conventional one. In an area that by almost any metric scores as extremely rural, they found the space to experiment 15 with lifestyles in ways denied to those in more socially ordered situations where lifestyles tend to be more prescribed. In some cases these life choices led to a degree of financial security, in other cases when the income support became less readily available, they moved into PAYE jobs and others moved out of the area. The unintended community fragmented but it didn’t disappear. After thirty years the networks that bound the 1970s migrants were looser but they still remained and those that left rarely escaped entirely; rather they became members of a diaspora, a network with continuing attachments to rural West Wales and with a consciousness and awareness of being part of a special, albeit unintended, community.

Acknowledgements I’m grateful to Jez Danks and Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum for providing e-copies of the written contributions to the 2014 Summer Exhibition “Towards the West, a Varied Crowd - Stories and images from those who travelled west in the 1970s”. I’m also grateful to Nicholas Ford for providing the list of those interviewed for his 1982 study, “Consciousness and Lifestyle: Alternative Developments in the Culture and Economy of Rural Dyfed”. These were provided on the understanding that the names and details of his respondents would remain confidential.

Notes i In Operation Julie (2010) Ebenezer describes how the Tregaron area, “… like dozens of similar Welsh rural valleys, began attracting incomers in the late sixties”. Ebenezer placed the incomers into three categories: Those who sought the ‘good’ life; Yuppies; and hippies, adding that often there would not be a discernable diving line between them (Ebenezer, 2019 pp.13 - 14). ii The Agricultural Training Board (ATB) – has since been renamed the Lantra National Training Organisation https://www.lantra.co.uk/. It is based at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire. iii Unless otherwise attributed, all direct quotations in this paper are taken from contributions to the 2014 Aberystywth Museum Exhibition (Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum, 2015) iv For more information on the setting up of the Organic Grower’s Association, see “A New Incarnation - The Role of The Organic Growers Association in Changing the Production and Marketing of Organic Produce” (Frost and Wacher, 2003) v On the hobble – “Working without declaring one's income when in receipt of social benefits. [ use]” http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/o.htm (accessed 25/06/19) vi Sais Bach Lit. ‘Little Englishman’, real name, Augustus Brackenbury, an Englishman who, in the early nineteenth century, attempted to establish a country estate in the Mynydd Bach (lit. Little Mountains) in what is now Ceredigion. vii Illich claimed that iatrogenesis outweighed any positive benefits of medicine. He distinguished three major types: Clinical iatrogenesis, Social iatrogenesis and Cultural iatrogenesis. viii In Lyn Ebenezer’s Operation Julie (2010), a photograph among the plates between pp. 96 -97 shows an arresting officer with a resemblance to the actor John Cleese. Free rock festivals also attracted the attention of the police and accounts of the festivals near Pontrhydygroes in 1979 and 1980 are recorded in words and images at http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/Psilocybin-Festival.html ix Homophily, the theory that people tend to form connections with others with similar social characteristics, has been used to explain inequalities in class, race and gender, see Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison (2019) The Class Ceiling – Why it Pays to be Privileged. Bristol. Policy Press 16

x Mandatory activation has been likened by some critics to the English Poor Law, according to which “no able-bodied person was to receive money or other help from the Poor Law authorities except in a workhouse”. See, Matz Dahlberg Kajsa Johansson Eva Mörk (2009) “On Mandatory Activation of Welfare Recipients” p. 2. xi Bernard, et. al (2019) discuss the ‘trapdoors’ and ‘trampolines’ associated with moves into and out of poverty, unemployment or homelessness in their article on poverty and social exclusion in rural areas.

References Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum (2015) Towards the West, a Varied Crowd - Stories and images from those who travelled west in the 1970s. Aberystwyth Baïracli Levy, de, J. (1952) Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable London. Faber and Faber. Baïracli Levy, de, J. (1966) Herbal Handbook for Everyone London. Faber and Faber. Bernard, J., Contzen, S., Decker, A. and Shucksmith, M. (2019) “Poverty and Social Exclusion in Diversified Rural Contexts” Sociological Ruralis. Vol. 59. No. 3. Pp. 353- 368 Bott Spillius, E. Conjugal roles and social networks (Accessed 03/012/14) http://moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/sessvol1/Spilliusp323.opd.pdf Bott. E. [1957] (1971) Family and Social Network (2nd ed.). New York. Free Press. Cloke, P., Goodwin, M. and Milbourne, P. (1997) Rural Wales: Community and Marginalization. Cardiff, University of Wales Press. Dahlberg, M., Johansson, K., Mörk, E. (2009) “On Mandatory Activation of Welfare Recipients” Discussion Paper No. 3947. Institute for the Study of Labour. Bonn Dawson, G. (2000) “Work: from certainty to flexibility?” In: Hughes, G. and Ferguson, R. (eds.) Ordering Lives: family, work and welfare. Routledge/Open University; London. pp. 81-114 Ebenezer, L. (2010) Operation Julie – The world’s greatest LSD Bust. Talybont, YLolfa Cyf Ford, N. J. (1982) Consciousness and Lifestyle: Alternative Developments in the Culture and Economy of Rural Dyfed PhD Thesis Department of Geography, University of Aberystwyth. Also available at National Library of Wales, www.llgc.org.uk Friedman, S. and Laurison, D. (2019) The Class Ceiling – Why it Pays to be Privileged. Bristol. Policy Frost, D. (2018) “Organic and the underfed” The Organic Grower - No 44 Autumn Frost, D. (2018a) “Nobody’s People” www document available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323538122_Nobody's_people_- _Immigrants_and_organic_farmers_in_the_Welsh_Hinterland_Part_1_The_1970s Frost, D. and Wacher, C. (2003) “A New Incarnation -The Role Of The Organic Growers Association In Changing The Production And Marketing Of Organic Produce”. European Society for Rural Sociology, 20th Biennial Conference. Sligo, Ireland, 19-22 August 2003. Frost. D (2014) “New Farmers, New Growers – the organic movement in West Wales”: Towards the West: A closer look Symposium, Amguedda Ceredigion Museum, Aberystwyth. May 2014 Frost. D (2016) “Mud on the tracks - Organic growers in 1970s West Wales” The Organic Grower. No 37 Winter 2016 pp. 8 - 10 Halfacree, K. H. and Rivera, M. J. (2012) “Moving to the Countryside…and Staying: Lives beyond Representations” Sociological Ruralis Vol 52. No.1 . pp 92 - 114 Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013) Why Music Matters John Wiley & Sons Hesmondhalgh, D. (2014) “Why Music Matters” Thinking Allowed BBC Radio 4. 14 January 2014 Illich, I. (1974) Medical Nemesis. London: Calder & Boyars. Jones, E. (2007) The War of the Little Englishman Y Lolfa Cyf. Talybont, Ceredigion. Klarner, A. and Knabe, A. (2019) “Social Networks and Coping with Poverty in Rural Areas” Sociological Ruralis. Vol. 59. No. 3. Pp. 447-473 17

Lewis, P. (2000) LOHAS Hotbeds. LOHAS Journal May/June Morris, J. (1998) [1984] Wales. Epic views of a small country. London. Penguin Books Williams, G. (1977) The Land Remembers. A View of Wales. London. Faber and Faber 18

Appendix

Figure 1 Where they came from

London

Rest of S E England Midlands

Source: Towards the West, A Varied Crowd Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum (2015)

Figure 2 Reasons for moving

To farm/grow vegetables/be self-sufEicient Wanted to move from city to countryside

Source: Towards the West, A Varied Crowd Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum (2015)

Figure 3 Occupations before moving

Student/school

Teaching/ research Retail/catering/ various Arts/crafts

Business/ professional

Source: Towards the West, A Varied Crowd Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum (2015)

19

Table 1 Network group at time of move

No % Friendship group 19 40.0 University or college students 10 21.0 Joined relative already here 2 4.0 N/A 26 35.0 Total 57 100

Source: Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum, 2015

Table 2 Main lifestyles in the migrant community

No % Art/craft 18 34.0 Agriculture/vegetable growing 14 26.4 Entrepreneur/ artisan 11 20.8 Alternative medic 2 3.8 Full time PAYE worker 8 15.0 N/A 4 Total 25 39.6

Source: Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum, 2015

Postscript This paper is one of a series that aims to provide detail from West Wales to the historic record of twentieth century ex-urban movements and to contribute to the history of the organic agriculture movement. Previous publications in the series include, Frost, D. and Wacher, C. (2003) “A New Incarnation -The Role Of The Organic Growers Association In Changing The Production And Marketing Of Organic Produce”. European Society for Rural Sociology, 20th Biennial Conference. Sligo, Ireland, 19-22 August 2003 Frost. D (2014) “New Farmers, New Growers – the organic movement in West Wales”: Towards the West: A closer look Symposium, Amguedda Ceredigion Museum, Aberystwyth. May 2014 Frost. D (2016) “Mud on the tracks - Organic growers in 1970s West Wales” The Organic Grower No 37 Winter 2016 pp. 8 – 10 Frost. D (2016) “Nobody’s people - Immigrants and organic farmers in the Welsh hinterland” available at http://www.tyn-yr-helyg.com/documents

David Frost [email protected] http://www.tyn-yr-helyg.com 11/11/19 20