Fighting Choirs Choral Singing and the Emergence of a Welsh National Tradition, 1860–1914

CHAPTER 5 Fighting Choirs Choral Singing and the Emergence of a Welsh National Tradition, 1860–1914 Gareth Williams In broad terms, the key determinants in the growth of amateur choral singing in Wales between 1860 and the First World War are: Protestant Nonconformity (different from the Anglican Church of England), whose places of worship functioned as concert halls; the eisteddfod (local and regional competitive musical and literary events, culminating in an annual week-long national fes- tival); industrialization (notably the dramatic growth of the south Wales coalfield); and an accelerating demography which saw the population of Wales quadruple in the course of the nineteenth century. These were the critical fac- tors that shaped the musical life of Wales down to the 1920s, when the onset of industrial depression derailed all these engines of growth. Within this framework amateur choral societies were formed in nearly every industrial township. Parallel developments like the temperance choral unions in mid-century and the Tonic Sol-fa movement (doh, ray, mi) from the 1860s instilled discipline and a basic musical literacy among chapel congrega- tions, so that the local choral societies which emerged in the 1860s were based on chapel choirs and adopted a predominantly religious repertoire. These new industrial communities, lacking the benefit of aristocratic patrons, centres of sophisticated taste, cities, princely courts, or (until the late nineteenth century) even universities, literally found their voice and their identity in collective musical articulation in the form of congregational singing festivals, choral con- certs and competitions, and, for the talented, individual vocal and (to a lesser extent, for these were materially poor working-class communities) instrumen- tal expression. This was a competitive society that was based on delivering and being rewarded for productivity, and on beating rivals. The performance culture nurtured by the chapel, Sunday School and eisteddfod esteemed and encouraged an uninhibited vocalism. From the 1870s Wales became known as ‘the Land of Song,’ as choirs from Aberdare in the south to Caernarfon in the north, composed almost entirely of working-class men and women, and conducted for the most part by formally uneducated amateurs from their own number, began to attract the attention of outsiders with their full-blooded, dynamically colourful performances, particularly of oratorio choruses. Choirs became as much the focus of community loyalty as football teams, and down © Gareth Williams, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300859_007 Gareth Williams - 9789004300859 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-NDDownloaded 4.0 license. from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:13:43PM via free access 84 Williams to the early twentieth century their rivalries excited passions that often spilled over into disorder. Although attempts were made to invoke precedent (‘the appeal to the past’) to explain the Welsh fondness for singing, there were in fact no precedents for what happened to Wales in the nineteenth century. Its population doubled in fifty years, and doubled again during the next fifty. The engine of this growth was the sudden and unprecedented industrialization of Wales, as the expan- sion of the coalfield transformed the valleys of the south into one of the great fuel-producing regions of the world, and ports like Cardiff made the channel that lies between south Wales and the southwestern English counties of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall (known as the Bristol Channel) as economi- cally significant as the Persian Gulf is today.1 Into this region, to dig the coal and make the iron and steel, came office workers, railwaymen, shopkeepers and assistants, clerks, schoolteachers, policemen, doctors, surveyors, solicitors, publicans, drinkers, Christians (and others)—they arrived in their thousands. Most ordinary workers were in search of higher wages than they could command in the agricultural counties of the rest of Wales and the west of England. They were often single men seeking employment and lodgings, and were given a room near the front door, through which after work they went in search of company, recreation, and fel- lowship. And they found these in the public house, the workingmen’s club, the lodge meeting, the sports club, the chapel, the band, and the choir. The Methodist religious revival of the eighteenth century had in Wales been noted for its lusty harmonized singing. When rural migrants poured into the valleys in the nineteenth century, they brought with them their traditional culture, their Welsh language, their Nonconformist religion, and their fondness for robust congregational hymns. In their unfamiliar new surround- ings, they found solace and sociability in song, for in a materially poor society the voice was the most democratic of instruments; it cost nothing. Men and women found comfort from the daily industrial grind in their chapels, which were places of song as well as prayer. This was where choirs took shape, rehearsed and performed, for where else was there? In the early industrial years, before welfare halls and workmen’s institutes, let alone concert halls were built, chapel buildings were also the people’s theatres, their venue for entertainment. This had consequences, for even outside the hours of worship one couldn’t sing music-hall ballads and popular songs in a sanctuary; the music had to be suitably respectable. But this didn’t mean it couldn’t be enjoyable, and the 1 Davies (2007), 456. Gareth Williams - 9789004300859 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:13:43PM via free access Fighting Choirs 85 rousing choruses of Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn, whose dramatic nar- ratives of the Israelites fleeing captivity from Egypt and their wars with the Philistines were expressed with thrilling climaxes that fired the passions of their audiences. The Welsh responded enthusiastically to these accessible choruses with their familiar diatonic harmonies, comfortable progressions and lively fugues, and they delivered them with strong vocal projection, rich- ness of tone, rhythmic drive, and emphatic articulation. Also, the phonetic consonants and open vowels of the Welsh language, like Italian and German, encourage an emphatic pronunciation of English as well as Welsh, and clearly articulated expression. The south Wales coalfield is the longest continuous coalfield in Britain, and its choral tradition is just as unbroken. It began in 1855 when the first tram load of the best steam coal in the world trundled out of the Bute Colliery in Treherbert at the top of the Rhondda valley. This heralded the birth of a new society, as south Wales in the late nineteenth century pulled in migrants on a scale second only to the U.S.A. Culture, it has been said, is the steam that comes off the back of a galloping horse, and our galloping horse is the break- neck growth of the Welsh population, which in the course of the nineteenth century reached over two million by 1900. The combined population of the towns of Cardiff, Swansea, Merthyr, and Newport totalled barely 18,000 in 1800 but 530,000 by 1920. Most dramatic of all was the rapid growth of the Rhondda valley, origi- nally tree-lined and secluded, and populated by fewer than a thousand people according to the census of 1851, the valley floor so thickly wooded it was said that a squirrel could travel its ten-mile length without ever touching the ground. By 1920 there were few trees and fewer squirrels but many people: the population of the Rhondda was then over 165,000 and still growing. A horse galloping so fast was bound to draw attention to itself: to change the metaphor from the equine to the industrial, we recall the Welsh socialist Aneurin Bevan’s observation that culture comes off the end of a pick, the miner’s tool for hacking at the coal. There were many picks in south Wales by 1920, wielded by a quarter of a million coal miners; there were fifty-six working collieries in the Rhondda valley alone.2 We could equally well chart the seismic effects of this demographic earth- quake by measuring the rise of religious Nonconformity in Wales, and its dominant cultural influence. Throughout the nineteenth century a Welsh Nonconformist chapel was opening somewhere every eight days, virtually one 2 E.D. Lewis, in Hopkins, ed. (1975), 22 –30, 110–15. Gareth Williams - 9789004300859 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:13:43PM via free access 86 Williams a week: there were five thousand in Wales by 1900, 188 of them in the Rhondda.3 Everything about them was imposing, from their command of the skyline to their influential and often controlling social roles, and from their lusty congregational singing to their massive Sunday Schools, which were attended by adults as well as children. A century ago, according to the Report of the Royal Commission on Religious Bodies in Wales (1910), 730 attended Sunday School in Bethania chapel Dowlais near Merthyr Tydfil, and 835 at Mount Pleasant Swansea; the overall figure for Sunday School attendance in the Rhondda was 48,000, a third of the total population. It can be argued that Nonconformity hijacked Welsh culture, with baleful effects on an appreciation of the fine arts and the theatre; but who needed drama when you had some of the greatest actors of the age giving impassioned histrionic performances every Sunday in the pulpit? It was singing, however, at which the Welsh had always excelled. In the twelfth century, as was gleefully pointed out in the nineteenth, the astute Gerald of Wales had observed that When they come together to make music, the Welsh sing their traditional songs not in unison, as is done elsewhere, but in parts. When a choir gathers to sing, which happens often in this country, you hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers, all joining together in the end to produce a single harmony and melding in the soft sweetness of B-flat (sub B mollis dulcedine blanda).4 This description sounds for all the world as if anticipating the solid four-part harmony found in later congregational hymn books and which marked the sturdy church singing of the Victorian era.

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