Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ ddim, ddu a digon – the Pryce-Jones motto

      I WAS BORN in Meidling on 15 February 1936, in the corner room on the first floor where Poppy had also been born exactly twenty years earlier. Whether my first name acknowledged Jewish or Welsh antecedents was apparently much discussed in the house. What it might mean socially or culturally for me to have a surname that is identifiably Welsh was never raised either at a personal or an abstract level. I was twenty before national service took me to Wales for the first time and then only to practise platoon attacks at Trawsfynnydd, a military training ground with a nuclear power station in the distance. In the village there I wrote a cheque to a man with exactly the same names as myself.

      Marriage brought me to the land of my Welsh fathers. Clarissa’s parents, Harold and Nancy Caccia, lived at Abernant in the Wye Valley, and we acquired Pentwyn, a cottage nearby but much higher on the edge of Eppynt, the open hill with a view of the Black Mountains fifty miles away. Time was when Clarissa had ridden up on her pony and formed a wish that one day she would live here. One room had a bath that had never been plumbed in. The slates were sliding from the roof of a separate building, once a barn. A long time later, we had made a home, and Clarissa’s mother called it Pen-trianon. I was weeding the minute garden when a neighbour telephoned to say that Princess Margaret was staying with her, and she was about to bring her round to show her the barn.

      More incongruous still than the royal party in this isolated retreat was the visit of Svetlana Stalin. Cursed by her parentage, tempestuous by nature, she existed in a perpetual storm that might break in any direction. A circle of friends wished her well, and among them were Laurence and Linda Kelly, both historians with experience of the Soviet Union. During a meal in their house I invited Svetlana to Pentwyn, never thinking she’d accept. My nerve failed when we picked her up as arranged in a hotel in nearby Hay, and I apologized for the cottage’s lack of amenities. Does it have running water, she asked. Having said point blank that she refused to talk about her father, she would come down from her room and talk exclusively about him, tormented that she couldn’t help loving a father whom she knew was a monster. At moments, a tiger gleam in her eyes gave her an uncanny look of Stalin himself. In another mood, she took over the kitchen with a special recipe for chicken. When she had retreated to Wisconsin for her last years, I sent her a novel of mine and got back the title page, torn out without further comment.

      Not long before he died, Alan stayed at Pentwyn. He wanted to pay a last visit to Dolerw, the Pryce-Jones house at Newtown where he had spent childhood holidays. It was raining that day and he refused to put on a coat because, “I don’t get wet, I’m Welsh.” Links had survived. He had been President of the Montgomeryshire Association, and he had promoted R. S. Thomas whose early poems with their angry mourning for a lost Wales had been published locally in Newtown.

      Like Meidling, Dolerw is the monument of a self-made man out to show what he can do and expecting to be admired for it. Welsh gentry lived here in the eighteenth century. Briefly the house came into the possession of Charles Hanbury-Tracy, a local grandee and Liberal Member of Parliament. From the 1870s onwards Pryce Jones, as he was originally called, transformed Dolerw into a large Italianate villa complete with a tower. He and his wife, Eleanor Morris, had four daughters and four sons, the youngest of them all being Harry (1878–1952), father of Alan. Another of the four sons, my great-uncle Victor, sold the lease in 1947 and moved to Norfolk where he and his wife spent the rest of their lives riding to hounds. Since then, Dolerw has been successively a Catholic school, a convent, and a Voluntary Sector Resource Centre, four dissociated words that give away public funding.

      Born in 1834 in Llanllwchaiarn near Newtown, Pryce was the illegitimate son of Mary Goodwin and, according to the parish record, his “reputed father William Jones.” He built a small draper’s shop into the Royal Welsh Warehouse or RWW, a concern primarily based on processing wool, the staple product of that countryside, into flannel, blankets, sleeping bags, extending the range gradually into clothing and household goods. Trading internationally, he pioneered marketing by mail order, using his influence to have a railway track laid where it suited him and organising special trains to and from London for his business. Mr Sears and Mr Roebuck are said to have visited, learnt how he operated, and sold him founder shares in their business. The RWW, a huge lump of red brick, still stands today as he left it, with the family name up on the roofline in outsize white lettering. A stone set into the wall by the main door commemorates a gold medal the RWW was awarded in Vienna in 1873, by coincidence the very year in which Comte Vasili observed Gustav doing himself a favour by buying good stock cheaply. By 1880, the RWW was employing 6,000 workers and had about 250,000 customers worldwide. When Queen Victoria knighted him in 1887 he hyphenated and duplicated his name, to become Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones. He enjoys a nationalist image as a model entrepreneur who proved that the Welsh could succeed through their own endeavors and so dispense with English patronage. His obituary in a local newspaper, the Montgomery Express, concluded that his business acumen amounted to genius and had brought worldwide renown to the Principality.

      The telephone rang one day at Pentwyn and a friendly stranger informed me that great-uncle Victor had left portraits of these forebears of mine to one of the churches at Newtown. The sanctuary where the portraits were hanging was being converted into a badminton court and unless I retrieved them that very afternoon they would be put on a bonfire. Far from flattering the couple, the artist, Arthur Nowell, depicts stiff and forbidding figures against a dark background, he in a morning coat, she holding a teacup with no suggestion that she might offer a cup to anyone else.

      The historical record bears out Arthur Nowell’s characterization of his sitters. At a moment when a general election was in the offing I was in the main street of Builth Wells, the small town closest to Pentwyn. For a long time this part of Wales has been politically volatile. An elderly man came out of his shop to ask me, “Why aren’t you standing for parliament?” I asked if he thought I should. “You should be like Sir Pryce, he used to give us five shillings to go and break the Liberals’ windows.” The Liberals were one or another member of the Hanbury-Tracy family, owners of Gregynog, a grand house, and accustomed to treating the position of Lord Lieutenant of the county or election to parliament as member for the constituency of Montgomery Boroughs as tribute rightfully due to their status. Between 1880 and 1895 Sir Pryce, a Conservative, engaged in a political contest with the Hanbury-Tracys. Sir Pryce won the majority of the elections in this period, and went to Westminster with a dozen Welsh MPs in his pocket. Thanks to this parliamentary machine, it is said, he was able to promote his interests, for instance getting the railway track to Newtown laid right up to the Royal Welsh Warehouse.

      Celebrating victory in the 1892 election, Sir Pryce and Eleanor went by train to Llanidloes, half an hour or so away from Newtown but still in the constituency. This was Liberal territory and a crowd was waiting to greet them with three cheers for Frederick Hanbury-Tracy, the loser, and to boo (“hoot” is the word in the press accounts) the Pryce-Joneses. After taking tea in the one and only hotel, Sir Pryce and his wife retreated to the station, and on the way were jostled and bruised. Losing his temper, he hit out with his stick. When he struck a little girl in the face and drew blood, a police inspector stopped him by taking hold of the stick. By the time that Sir Pryce boarded the train home, he had lost his hat and the angry crowd then burnt it.

      The Liberals then accused him of buying votes. The petition was heard by Baron Pollock and Mr. Justice Wills. One charge was that Lady Pryce-Jones had called on the wife of one John Withers, “a somewhat prominent Liberal,” and promised to get their daughter into Ashford High School for Welsh girls if Mr Withers voted for Sir Pryce. Another charge was that in pubs in Llanidloes one Abel Goldsworthy, in the employment of Sir Pryce but “a person with no money,” offered money or drinks to bribe people to vote Conservative. The local Montgomery Express was delighted by the final verdict that Sir Pryce had nothing to answer for, writing that he had gained “one of the greatest victories that has ever been achieved by any Welshman.” Years later, however, the considered opinion of the left-wing historian Henry Pelling was that this episode almost unseated Sir Pryce and he and his Conservative colleague indeed formed a corrupt political machine. In the 1895 election, Sir СКАЧАТЬ