What is going to happen in British politics post-Budget? For an interesting perspective on how the tectonic plates have been changing in Wales ahead of next year’s Senedd elections and what this might mean for other parts of the United Kingdom, the following event with Guardian columnist Will Hayward will offer some answers.
A New Political Landscape for Wales
Tuesday 9th December 6.30 for 7pm
London Welsh Centre
157-163 Gray’s Inn Road
London, WC1X 8UE
Also Online
For bookings go to:
https://lnkd.in/etChRmCZ
Just over one in ten of the Caerphilly Senedd by-election voters in October supported the two parties that have dominated Welsh politics over the past 100 years.
Will’s talk will look at the forces persuading Welsh voters to abandon long-held loyalties, primarily to Labour, and the chances of a First Minister from Plaid Cymru or Reform taking over in May after next year’s elections. Or, could old allegiances return? What impact will the new voting system have for an expanded Senedd?
Will Hayward is a multi-award-winning journalist based in Cardiff. A regular columnist for The Guardian, he has written two acclaimed books on Welsh politics. His newsletter, The Will Hayward Newsletter, was named Best Politics Newsletter at the publisher awards. Will appears regularly as a commentator on Times Radio, the BBC, and Sky News.
The event will offer you the opportunity to bring your own insights on this crucial phase in Welsh politics.
Book ahead to watch ONLINE or to attend IN PERSON at the London Welsh Centre.
Free but you are invited to give an optional donation to LWC.
For bookings go to:
https://lnkd.in/etChRmCZ
Those joining online will be sent a link before the event.
9th December
Wales Matters is brought to you by the London Welsh Centre, Wales in London and the Cymmrodorion.
Culture in Crisis
The devastating impact of cuts in funding on Welsh arts organisations
Opera chair’s warning
If cuts to arts funding in Wales go too deep, much will be lost that can never be put back, the chair of Welsh National Opera, Yvette Vaughan-Jones warned in the latest Wales Matters talk at the Centre in July.
She urged members of the London Welsh community to join with people in Wales to express their serious concern to local government, Senedd and Westminster decision-makers about the difficulties being faced not just by opera but by local and national museums, libraries, and in access by children to music and the arts.
They should put to their elected representative evidence demonstrating the value of culture per se. Funding over a period of years was needed, and incentives for businesses and individuals to give should be improved. WNO had received a disproportionately large reduction in funding and needed more time to cope.
A deeply worrying picture emerged from the talk, arranged jointly by the Cymmrodorion, LWC and Wales in London. WNO, charged over the decades with a remit to tour in England as well as perform in Wales, and provided with the finance for this purpose by successive Arts Councils, had had to cut back its English touring programme, mount fewer different operas each year, and drop venues, such as Liverpool.
“We have been Europe’s biggest touring opera company, but will we still be able to consider ourselves such? It could now afford only sixteen performances a year in its traditional English touring venues. “Yet, if we don’t tour, our future is bleak,” Ms Vaughan Jones warned.
WNO has a much wider role than simply putting on expensive opera, she stressed. It brings on talent in schools and conservatoires (such as the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama), it has an extensive programme of outreach and has been a big employer across a range of activities for decades.
The direction of travel in arts funding, however, was away from supporting institutions to assisting individuals. Yet, without the established institutions performers lacked a platform and a source of aspiration, and front of stage and other jobs would go, including many in the Welsh capital in support services.
The origins of the crisis had been the 2008 worldwide financial collapse, since which time there had effectively been a standstill in funding across the arts sector. At the same time, the arm’s length principle, whereby Government stayed back from involvement, had been weakened, and the priorities of the funders – the Arts Council of Wales and Arts Council England – had changed, taking a more political direction.
The primary role of both bodies to support the arts had now been joined by a requirement to foster essentially political objectives. This was seen in the criteria for funding, which now included the need for environmental responsibility and inclusivity in England, and the well-being of future generations and climate justice in Wales. Support for arts for art’s sake was not listed.
In challenging times tough choices did indeed need to be made. “There is, however, a lack of clarity in the role of Arts Council of Wales, and a loss internally of specialists for the individual arts,” she said. Adding to the confusion had been the constant shuffling over 25 years of devolution of arts responsibility between ever changing ministerial portfolios and ministers.
WNO has taken a bigger hit than any other Arts Council of England-funded body and experienced severe cuts in its Arts Council of Wales funding, too. “We have had 5-star reviews for our productions of Death in Venice and Il Trittico this season.” she told the audience. The company’s international standing was high, and it represented Wales to the world, “I am suffering anger, disbelief and bafflement at the position we are in.”
Rhys David
July 21st, 2024
______________________
Supermarket Sale! Everything Must Go
Rhys David looks at the wholesale sell-off of Britain’s historic food brands.
Britain may have to rely on a Czech billionaire to keep the letters coming from Royal Mail; we may need the Chinese and French to design and build our nuclear power stations, and the French, Spanish, Swiss, Canadians and Germans to build locomotives for our railways; our big breweries are Danish, Dutch, Japanese or American, we may no longer have a civil airliner industry capable of building a whole aircraft, and our car industry is Indian, Japanese, French, and German. But those familiar every day brands on view when you open the kitchen cupboard, they are all still as proudly British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, are they not?
Wait a moment! The same process that has seen British manufacturing companies in other sectors line up to jump into the sea of foreign ownership has been just as busily at work in food, too. That rich tea biscuit you are dipping into your instant coffee from a well-known Swiss or Dutch-headquartered company, is also gladdening hearts in Turkey where food group, Yildiz, is the owner of the biggest UK maker, United Biscuits. If you are eating Walkers Crisps with your pint of beer in a Greene King pub, then it’s the American (Pepsi-Cola) and Hong Kong owners (CK Asset Holdings) respectively to whom the bottom line is answerable.
The process has been going on for the past few decades as successive Governments have declared Britain open for business, creating in the process what must now be one of the most intensively foreign-owned economies across all sectors among developed nations. Politicians of both parties have long argued that it can be a matter of pride that foreign purchasers so admire the British product portfolio they are willing often to pay over the odds for iconic brands or failing companies with an illustrious history.
Some result in battles with public opinion, such as the take-over of chocolate and confectionery maker, Cadbury, by Kraft in 2009 to bulk up its snacks operations so that these could be spun off into a separate company, Mondelez in 2012. Others pass by unnoticed. The biggest aggregates company in the world is an obscure (to the public at any rate) Irish company, CHP, with Tarmac, the construction materials and roadbuilding group, one of its key components in the UK.
Bizarrely, it has become almost more difficult to think of leading UK brands across the whole economy which are British owned than not so, with many companies in important sectors from public transport to building materials and infrastructure all answering to non-British owners.
Part of the rationale for joining the EEC back in 1973 was that with the decline of Imperial Preference, which in the past had tied Britain to low income New Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia and the relatively small population Old Commonwealth – Australia, New Zealand and Canada – and the ending of the cartel arrangements that had seen British companies, such as ICI, divide the world up with American counterparts, Britain was missing out on the opportunities that the much bigger and closer Continental market of 200 million people offered.
This was a market that had enabled the industrial giants of Germany and, to a lesser extent, France acquire much greater scale than their weaker British counterparts. British companies, such as British Leyland, GEC, and the US and Japanese companies choosing Britain as a launchpad for European sales, would quickly grow on this analysis to match Bayer, Hoechst, BASF, Siemens, Daimler Benz, Volkswagen, Peugeot-Citroen and Renault, enjoying the fruits of restriction-free access to neighbouring markets.
In the 47 years of membership, however, it did not work out this way. British companies continued to be out-competed by their EEC and later EU competitors, and regularly found themselves on the auction block. ICI, for a long time Britain’s biggest manufacturer, was broken up from the 1990s onwards, its sole surviving limb re-emerging as pharmaceuticals business, Zeneca, later Anglo-Swedish Astra-Zeneca, the rest of the company being parcelled off and sold to AkzoNobel, Henkel, Norsk Hydro, DuPont and various other companies.
GEC (itself the product of a 1960s merger between three electrical companies, English Electric, AEI and the old GEC, all deemed at the time of Harold Wilson’s white heat technological revolution to be sub-scale), became a telecommunications-focussed business, Marconi, in the 1990s, after the company’s extensive defence interests had been merged with British Aerospace to form BAeSystems. The company staggered on through crises in the telecommunications business in the 1990s until 2006 when it was acquired by Swedish Ericsson and renamed Telent.
MGRover, the old British Leyland, after interregna with British Aerospace and Honda, was rescued by BMW but became insolvent in 2005. After Oxford-based Mini had been extracted, other parts of the business were acquired by two Chinese companies, one of which, SAIC, originally proposed keeping MG production at Longbridge in Birmingham. This idea was soon dropped and production of MGs, now a leading battery electric model that has begun to take an increasing share of the UK market, was resumed in China. The once-proud Rover name passed first to Ford and is now owned by Tata, the Jaguar Land Rover maker.
But to return to food, a product thought so indelibly tied to national tastes it could with some exceptions never cease to be nationally owned and manufactured. Surely, with distinctive national tastes – such as Marmite – the UK’s food manufacturers would be a less appealing dish than, say, rolling stock and vehicle manufacturers, or electrical equipment makers, the products of which could be sold in global markets?
Evidently, not so. Sometimes overseas owners saw good new initiatives that could be replicated across international markets – for example, Innocent drinks and Costa coffee, and Hotel Chocolat, now parts respectively of the portfolios of Coca Cola and Mars. Many more have simply fallen to hungry international food giants anxious to sweep up products that looked tired or undervalued. Others saw the opportunity to tack on British products with distinct similarities to their own or to introduce what seemed to work in Britain to their portfolios elsewhere.
So just how deep is the penetration that overseas ownership has managed to achieve in the food cupboard? Let’s start with breakfast. Kellogg’s (corn flakes, et al) Quaker Oats, (porridge) and General Mills (Cheerios) are straightforward US companies that entered the UK market decades ago. Kellogg’s soon to be closed factory in Trafford Park was opened 90 years ago. Their one-time British rivals, Weetabix and Shredded Wheat (Slogan: It makes Britons, Britons make it), are now also American, however, owned by Post Holdings of the US (also owner of Alpen) and Nestle, respectively.
The milk you pour on those cereals will probably come from British cows but the intermediaries that bring it to the doorstep may not be British. Mueller of Germany, also famous for its yoghurt dishes, acquired the Scottish dairy company, Wiseman Dairies, in 2012 for £279.5m and through its doorstep delivery arm, Milk & More, supplies around threequarters of a million homes. Today after its acquisition in 2015 of the milk operations of UK group, Dairy Crest, it accounts for one third of the UK’s milk supply through its nationwide chain of processing plants. Just this month it has acquired another British dairy group, Yew Tree Farm of Skelmersdale. There is another even bigger beast, operating Europe’s biggest milk plant in Aylesbury, the Danish company, Arla.
Indeed, the top four spots in milk and milk products are held by overseas-owned companies, Arla and Mueller, followed by cheese and butter makers Ornua of Ireland and Saputo of Canada, the latter owning the Cathedral City, Utterly Butterly, Clover, Country Life and Yorkshire Wensleydale brands. These were acquired with the absorption of the remaining Dairy Crest assets in 2019. The leading British contender is now Yeo Valley Organic, a family firm in Somerset offering a range of organic yoghurts, milk, cheese, and ice cream, with a strong environmental commitment.
There is a good chance the toast that follows will come from Associated British Foods, part of George Weston, the Canadian company that owns Kingsmill, Sunblest, Allinsons, Burgen, plus Ovaltine, Dorset Cereals, Jordans and Ryvita, and the Silver Spoon sugar you are not supposed to heap too liberally on top of your cereals. Britain’s biggest sugar manufacturer, Tate & Lyle, sold its sugar business to US rival, American Sugar Refining, in 2010 to transition into becoming what the UK company describes as “a speciality food and beverage solutions” business.
Wash it down with a cup of tea or coffee and you are again dipping into foreign-owned fare. Typhoo tea, founded in Birmingham more than a century ago, has after a period of Indian ownership been acquired by UK venture capital firm, Zetland Capital, so may eventually be on the block again. PG Tips, Brooke Bond and Lipton are now in the portfolio of European venture capital house, CVC Partners, having been deemed in 2022 to be surplus to Unilever’s requirements. Tetley is one of the brands owned by Indian conglomerate, Tata of India, and Weston is represented again through Twining’s and upmarket Jackson’s of Piccadilly.
But first, what to spread on the toast. Perhaps as English as they come Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade? After several owners it is now in the stable of Hain Celestial of the US, which has taken a particular shine to British jams. It is also owner of Hartley’s, and Keiller’s, (the latter now produced for export only), Roses, Robertsons (of small and controversial metal lapel badge and Golden Shred fame), – and in soups, Yorkshire Provender. Chivers, once Britain’s biggest maker of preserves, is now part of Ireland’s Boyne Valley Group. Rowse Honey perhaps? Also, Irish owned.
British food producers have seen fit to quit jam as dated and declining, with an older clientele. One company has made a success of the UK market, however, thanks to an attractive gingham cover and polygonal jar. Family-owned Bonne Maman, which many British people will have first come across on visits to French supermarkets while on holiday, has swept past the multiplicity of US-owned British jam brands to become within a few decades the UK market leader.
Like jam, both sugar and tea have limited growth prospects, it could be argued, as concern mounts over obesity and as other drinks supplant Britain’s once near universal beverage. This is hardly true of coffee, however, which has enjoyed such explosive growth around the world in recent years that even the Chinese are developing a taste and pushing up world prices as a result. Here, Swiss international food giant, Nestle, is the dominant force in the instant coffee market, and other Continental processors, especially Italian, are the main suppliers in beans and ground coffee. Left carrying the British torch for tea and coffee on the supermarket shelves is family-owned Taylors of Harrogate, also owners of the legendary Bettys tea shops.
As for the biscuits you might want to nibble with that mid-morning coffee then you may have to turn niche to stay British. Turkey’s Yildiz Holdings is the repository where much English and Scottish biscuit history now rests, encompassing the brands which went to make up United Biscuits, namely McVitie’s, Jacobs, Carrs of Carlisle and other brands such as Crawfords and McFarlane Lang. Huntley & Palmers, once the world’s biggest maker with a huge but now closed factory in Reading, survives in Suffolk as an online brand, while the smaller Fox’s Biscuits and Burton’s, of Jammy Dodgers and Wagon Wheels fame, have been owned since 2021 by Ferrero of Italy, proprietor, too, of Thorntons’s.
Setting to one side the spirits-based brands (plus Guinness) within Britain’s Diageo drinks combine, many well-known beverages have become part of overseas owned combines. Pernod Ricard of France, following its acquisition in 2005 of Allied Domecq (itself a merger of Allied Breweries, Lyons and Domecq), has Glenlivet, Ballentine’s, Beefeater and other UK and international brands in its range. Suntory, the Japanese drinks group, owns not just Highland Cream, Teachers, and Laphroaig but Lucozade and Ribena, and Coca Cola is behind Schweppes as well as Innocent.
In the beerage, Greene King, which unusually still combines pub and restaurant operation with brewing, is Hong Kong owned, Bass comes under US Anheuser-Busch/Inbev, and Courage under CarlsbergMarston, a joint venture 60 per cent owned by the Swedish group. Fuller’s is now Tokyo’s pride, its London Pride brewed by Asahi. C&C of Ireland’s portfolio includes Tennents and Bulmers Cider, and in water Perrier owner, Nestle of Switzerland takes in Buxton Water, (the late Queen’s drink), and UAE’s Mahdi al Taj’r is responsible for Highland Spring. In a rare reversal, Brecon Carreg, owned by Belgian Spadel, since the 1980s, reverted to Welsh ownership in 2019.
If you like a nibble with your soft drink, beer, or spirits, that can be supplied by Germany’s Intersnack, with its KP Nuts, and Tyrrells or McCoy’s Crisps. Pepsi-Cola, of course, is the UK’s biggest potato snack maker, courtesy of its long-standing ownership of the Walker’s catalogue of potato-based snacks.
But what about that most basic of foods – meat? Surely still proudly British? Meat coming from farms is mainly sold under supermarket labels these days but must pass through abattoirs. Here ABP Foods of Ireland is one of the main operators, processing large quantities of UK beef and investing heavily in its UK plants, while the biggest processor of Welsh lamb is Dunbia, of Dungannon in Northern Ireland (admittedly, therefore, a UK company). The Northern Irish agricompany acquired the biggest Welsh processor, Oriel Jones a’I Fab, in 2001. Another Northern Ireland-based company, Moy Park, one of the UK’s biggest chicken and other meat processors, (strangely part of the Courtaulds textile group until 1984) is now a subsidiary of Pilgrim’s Pride of the US which also owns Richmond Sausages, which it acquired from Ireland’s Kerry Group.
In fish the former Unilever staple, Bird’s Eye together with Findus, are now owned by Conagra of the US, while Young’s Seafoods, the Grimsby fish processor, is a recent acquisition of Sofina of Canada. In tinned fish, John West is part of the large Asian fisheries group, Thai Union, and in May this year it was announced that Liverpool-headquartered tinned food and drink group, Princes, is to be acquired by Italian based group, Newlat Food, from Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation, of heavy engineering and motor manufacture fame, for £700m.
The British love sauces to spice up their food, which the advocates of other cuisines have often accuse of being too bland. Here again overseas-owned food manufacturers have seen a good opportunity for expansion. HP Sauce, (that melange de haute qualite as the label used to say), was acquired by Heinz (now part of KraftHeinz) and manufacture moved from its historic home in Birmingham to the Netherlands. Even Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, on the surface as quintessentially British as they come, is owned by the 57 varieties specialist. Branstons is Japanese, being part of the Mikzan group.
The days have, of course, long since gone when companies were defined by the products they invented and for decades the big groups have traded and exchanged brands with their competitors for supermarket shelf space to suit changing corporate strategies, often under the influence of new broom management.
Many of the brands released are the unwanted offspring of the big groups, such as Unilever, which are then snapped up by foreign entrepreneurs wanting to gain access to the UK market, or venture capitalists keen to effect a transformation, and re-sell at a significant profit. Unilever’s acquisitions over the years include Knorr, Colman’s, Hellman’s and brewery by-product, Marmite, currently seen as among its core products. Another, the beef drink Bovril, goes back to the days when it owned Brooke Bond Liebig. Since 2017, however, there has been no place in its portfolio not just for Bird’s Eye but for the margarine business which was one of its founding assets when predominantly fats-based Dutch van den Bergh and Jurgens merged with UK household cleaning giant Lever Bros in 1930.
Flora and its siblings Bertolli, I Can’t Believe It’s not Butter!, Pro-Activ and other non-butter spreads and plant-based alternatives have been reclaimed for the Netherlands by Durch company Upfield, itself a subsidiary of American KKR, which bought the Unilever brands. Another core business within the group – Wall’s – which under various brand names in different territories is the world’s biggest maker of ice cream, having started out as a sausage maker, may now be available at the right price.
Since the sale of its oils and margarine division, Unilever, one of the biggest FTSE companies, has become increasingly focused on its household cleaning and health and beauty products, such as heavily-promoted Dove soap, Lux, Comfort, Domestos, Persil and international brand, Omo. Ice cream has been deemed too seasonal to fit well.
So, which British-owned companies are left producing food British brands? With the disposal of many of its food businesses Unilever has dropped down the list and it is now probably Canadian-domiciled Associated British Food owned by George Weston that is the biggest company by value. It also owns Dublin-based, Primark, a leading European clothes retailer.
Premier Foods, a company that has vacuumed up those products which just seemed so quirkily British that Continental or US food manufacturer would be reluctant to take them on, such as Bisto, the gravy browning is defying the trend as a UK standard-bearer. The St. Albans-based company’s brands include, apart from Bisto, Ambrosia rice pudding and custards, Angel Delight, Atora suet, Batchelors soups and dried products, Cadbury cakes (under licence from the brand’s American owner, Bird’s Custard, Homepride, McDougall’s and Be-Ro flour, Loyd Grossman sauces, Lyons Cakes, Marvel milk powder, Mr Kipling cakes, Nissin noodle pots (under licence from Nissin of Japan), Oxo, Paxo, Saxa salt, Sharwoods, Smash instant mash potato and Vesta dried ready meals. It, too, has been an active trader of businesses. Few of these, however, seem likely to storm the world.
Then there are some smaller long-standing businesses, such as Yeo Valley, often in long-standing multi-generational family ownership who insist on their independence. Baxters, the eponymous Scottish soup company, which also takes in Fray Bentos tinned meats, and some Mary Berry branded sauces and chutneys, is another.
There are thousands of food products, and this is only a representative sample of those that sound and feel British but are now in fact brought to our tables by companies all round the world. It might, of course, be asked whether it matters who owns these British favourites (or pet dislikes depending on taste). It is a globalised world and if a food manufacturer in another country is happy to invest in purchasing, equipping, and modernising factories, finding the employees and managing the red tape required to prove their products are fit for the public, or pass the requirements of export markets, well perhaps it is good luck to them.
The problem is that attachment to place is much less likely to be factored into company decisions when investment or modernisation decisions are being made by international groups. Though UK factories have been modernised, some products have been moved out of Britain and promises to keep plants open quickly broken. After complaints about the quality of flakes in their “99” ice creams, a few years ago, it transpired they were being made in Egypt where labour comes much cheaper than in Bournville. Look on the side of a packet of Polos, once one of the main products in Rowntree’s shopwindow – itself the subject of a hotly contested take-over by Nestle in the 1980s and they are now made in France. When there is capacity in other plants and the need to modernise a UK facility, it is often the latter that loses out.
Why, it might be asked, have British companies not managed to extend their reach into international markets and especially the Continent? Why are they so readily absorbed into rival manufacturers’ portfolios? To answer that question, you would also have to ask why the same has been true across all brands of manufacturing. The owners and managers of many of these companies appear to have lost the will for whatever reason to fight for market share with foreign rivals or to go out and acquire comparable assets in other countries. Life, it seems, is easier as a subsidiary of a bigger group elsewhere. The stress of managing is eased when someone else higher up in the organisation can make the key calls and take the blame when matters go wrong.
The transfer out of direct UK ownership of so many of these businesses, however, affects not only jobs and investment in new plant and equipment but can also have less noticeable impacts. Remote ownership, whatever promises are made at the time of purchase, means it is much less likely that research and development will remain in Britain in the long term, and it will produce other candidates for producer services such as consultancy, accountancy, and legal counsel nearer to home base, especially if this is in the US.
Nor can the disappearance of so many British companies into overseas-owned groups be divorced from the current problems of the London stock exchanges. The senior index has become dominated by mining and commodities, many headquartered elsewhere or with few operations in the UK and other companies have been defecting to the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq where valuations are tantalisingly higher.
The junior Aim index has fewer clients than at its peak in 2015 – 747 compared with 1,104. This is hardly surprising when UK businesses instead of growing and graduating to the exchange are taken out either by international groups operating in the same field and seeking to grow by acquisition, or by venture capital houses, spotting good growth prospects or undervaluation.
In the food business and across a whole range of other business activities, and one could mention here building products, Britain is turning itself into an intermediate supplier developing the ideas, building the brands over many decades, and then going on to produce – in this case food items – that are part of the portfolios of wider international groups.
Many British companies, and not just in food, have effectively opted out of developing international businesses requiring high level management skills, and a mastery of production capabilities and distribution. Indeed, one of the latest areas of British abandonment appears to be logistics where several UK distributors, such as Wincanton, have been snapped up by global groups. Soon, we will not just no longer own the companies that supply our food brands – we’ll not even own the distributors that take them to the warehouses of the big supermarkets – another sector seemingly impregnable until recent years but now having to accommodate two aggressive German entrants Aldi and Lidl, the former already having taken US-owned Morrison’s fourth place in the supermarket league.
A share of the proceeds from every supermarket shop is going to the shareholders of the overseas companies that own so many of the food brands, even if they are mostly still manufactured here. There is little evidence that similar returns are coming from British-owned food brands in overseas markets, of which there are sadly very few. Nobody would argue that great things are not being done by artisan food manufacturers struggling to export their products, but they make a tiny contribution to food trade and overseas revenues. A lot of British services – our national specialty – must be sold abroad to balance this mismatch in the UK’s balance of payments.
The impact of the loss of strong regionally headquartered companies is evident in the poorer regions of the UK and in the disparity in wealth with London and the south east where finance and other services fill the gap. The same outcome is on the cards for the UK as a whole if it becomes a medium skill, subsidiary management, branch-economy supplier of goods for overseas-owned businesses not just in food but across other sectors as well. This, however, is happening in the country which invented brands and at one time boasted serious competitors across a range of sectors. No amount of so-called levelling up will avail, as the existing examples of Wales, the north east and other regions suffering from a dearth of local big corporates able to offer a wide range of management and other opportunities, show.
The parties will be paying the usual lip service to industrial strategy in their manifestoes and we will also be told we need to grow more food and import less. The serious reduction in British ownership of British processed food products – a hidden element within the national accounts – should also be looked at and ways devised to ensure UK companies recover some of the ambitions they once held to compete in the ownership and supply of what we eat (and much else).
Rhys David
June 7th, 2024
Dressing the Valleys
Retailing in the 1930s
Ivy Williams may not have been the most successful businessperson in mid-20th century Abercynon. The eponymous owner of Ivy Williams, Hats and Gowns, whose shop in Margaret Street helped to clothe the women and occasionally, men, of Abercynon for nearly 40 years until the 1970s will certainly, however, have been among the most kind-hearted.
Today, anyone buying a High Street chain store coat, skirt or top – or indeed any other items of clothing – would be offered credit, either through a bank or store card, on which, after the various incentives had fallen away, interest would probably be a sizeable 15-20 per cent a year or more. Indeed, the margin on credit often exceeds that earned by the shopkeeper on the goods purchased, which is why retail cards are offered.
It was different in the difficult days of the 1930s. While we may sympathise with today’s hard-pressed retailers, their predecessors running shops and other businesses in the inter-war years often had to take the strain themselves and offer free credit, particularly in areas such as the south Wales mining valleys where the Depression’s effects were still being felt and customers were managing tight budgets.
Abercynon was not wealthy and most residents, dependent on wages earned by men working underground in the local colliery, could afford few necessities and even fewer luxuries. They relied on the good will of fellow-citizens, such as Ivy, to help them through, and she did that by accepting interest-free instalment payments on goods she sold, with many receiving goods for a small down payment and paying the cost of their purchases over a period of months. This credit – payment on tick as it was known – rolled over from year to year. A sizeable proportion was likely forgiven or written off.
We have the details of the town’s purchases from Ivy’s recently discovered account books for 1937-38, providing us with other valuable information on society and business practices in this Welsh mining town at the confluence of the Taff and the Cynon, fifteen miles north of Cardiff and midway between Pontypridd and Aberdare. Deep Navigation colliery had been sunk in the 1890s during the peak of the South Wales coal boom at the lowest point in the south Wales coal basin near the endpoint of Richard Trevithick’s pioneering demonstration in 1804 of the ability of steam power to haul wagons loaded with iron along rail tracks.
Ivy, a single woman then in her thirties had been in sole charge of one of her father’s butcher’s shops before branching out into fashion, and clearly did not employ an accountant or use double-entry book keeping systems. Instead, she kept her records in pen and ink in a Foolscap-sized hard cover account book – with an index at the front for names and one or sometimes two pages for each customer.
Take Mrs Thomas Gertrude Street whose account with Ivy was typical.[1] At the start of January 1937, she had a balance of £2/6/3 (two pounds six shillings and threepence) and three days later, January 4th, managed to pay off 2/6, later settling the bill in full at an unknown date. She returned on June 29th the same year to buy a frock and jumper suit, both for 19/11. The rest of the month she returned weekly to pay 2/6 or 2/- later adding a pinafore for 1/6¾, taking her balance back up to £1/9/5½.[i]
Other purchases followed: frocks, buckles and buttons, cotton, hose, towels, pillow cases and bolsters, bra, vest, flowers, picot (edging material), a [powder] compact, wool, handkerchiefs, and pinafores. By the end of the year despite payments she still owed £2/15/9½. Further purchases and repayments followed, taking her balance down to 19/10 before rising again with the purchase of an expensive swagger coat at £1/17/11.
Another example is Miss Joan Stephens. On September 7th, 1937, Joan bought a blouse for 3/11d (roughly £16 in today’s values). Where Joan worked or whether she even had a job we do not know but at the time she paid one shilling and returned two weeks later and again on October 1st, leaving eleven pence due. [2]
The total sums owed by customers rarely exceeded £5-£10 but repeat purchases often meant the sums reduced only slowly or even increased.[3] The most frequent sums repaid, usually once a week or fortnight, were 2/- or 2/6 but in some cases amounts as small as Joan’s 1/- were made to pay off balances. Sums due were often paid over extensive periods, one customer adding a coat at £1/15/11 to her existing credit of 8/7 in July and finally paying in full the following January.
Many of the garments are now unfamiliar to us or remain as memories of distant fashions and older relatives: smocks, corsets, Liberty bodices, feather boas, cravats, Shirley dresses (in the style of child star Shirley Temple’s little girl full-skirted party dresses). Some of the materials – georgette and crepe-de-chine – would now be only familiar to dressmakers, of whom there will have been many in Abercynon, either making their own or for their children, or offering their services more widely, including for Ivy’s customers.
Many of the entries are for fabrics which the customer would have asked Ivy to have made up into dresses, costumes, night gowns and other apparel, or for materials for making curtains and other household items. The standard charge for a new dress to be made was seven shillings, plus the cost of the material, buttons, buckles, and belts and other accessories.
Some of the purchases suggest forthcoming weddings, the clue being purchase of an expensive outfit complete with hat, gloves, and shoes. Two customers turned to Ivy for their Christmas order, the lucky recipients of Mrs Griffiths’ generosity opening socks, handkerchiefs, gloves, a brooch, slippers, purse, cardigan, ear rings, scarf, shoes, and an unspecified box on December 25th.
The 133 account holders in the accounts book included her five younger sisters and other family members but they will not have been Ivy’s only customers. Many others will have spotted items in the window or gone in for a browse or to make an inquiry, and if they went on to make a purchase, many will have used cash.
(More follows below)
There were some customers who did not need credit for the goods they bought, one being the medical practitioner and one of Ivy’s best customers, Dr. Nora Thomas. Presumably one of the higher earners in Abercynon she paid in full, though we may expect that she, too, took pity on some of her sicker patients, injured in the colliery or penniless for other reasons when she came to sending out her own bills in the pre-NHS era. Dr. Nora settled by cheque, too, possibly one of the few women – or indeed men – in the town at this period owning a bank account. Dr. Nora’s first purchases in 1938 show the sort of items for which she relied on Ivy. Five pinafores totalling 9/5¾, plus another three later, costing 5/1½, possibly for a cleaner or housekeeper she employed, 4/6 for making three nighties, 7s each for making two frocks. Among other goods that went back to the practice were talcum [powder] 2/, two buckles (red and gold), brooch 4/11 and compact 4/11.[4] The total bill for these and other items ready-made and made to order, came to £2/15/2. A later order totalling £2/4/4 and settled with one payment when completed was for a series of similar items, including light floral and navy dresses, navy swagger coat, blue frock, lace, crepe de chine and georgette garments, making a navy linen suit, and buckles and buttons again.
Figure 1. Ivy’s sisters and probably among the best customers of her fashion-conscious shop in Abercynon. From left, Emma Clementine, Flora Novello, Beatrice Ivy, Edith Eleanor (with parasol), Prudence Jessie, and Ena Kate
Only one man, Mr Morgan Meyrick, is listed as holding an account, his first recorded purchases a suit 39/11, hat 6/11, and gloves 6/11 (presumably an expensive leather pair). His other purchases included towels, wool, and pins, suggesting he might have been a widower as Mrs Meyrick’s name is absent. His daughter, (or possibly his sister), Nancy is, however, registered as having an account.
What did Ivy’s customers buy? The top twenty purchases
| Item | What did they cost? |
| Blouses | 3/11– 6/11 |
| Coats | 10/11 – £3/15/- |
| Costumes | 29/11 – £3/3/- |
| Frocks | 5/11 – 24/11 |
| Gloves | 4/11 -8/11 |
| Handkerchiefs | 6¾d |
| Hats | 4/11 – 12/11 |
| Hose | 1/- – 3/11 |
| Jumpers | 5/11 – 12/11 |
| Jumper suits | 8/11 – 24/11 |
| Nightdresses and Nighties | 1/11 – 5/11 |
| Pinafores and Pinnies | 0/6- 2/11¾ |
| Pyjamas | 3/11 – 6/11 |
| Scarves | 1/11¾ -2/6 |
| Shoes | 2/11 – 12/11 |
| Socks | 6¾ – 8¾ |
| Suits | 12/11 – £5/10/11 |
| Towels (per pair) | 2/1½ – 2/6 |
| Umbrellas | 5/11 – 12/11 |
| Vests | 1/11¾ – 2/11 |
Ivy rented a few rooms in the basement of the shop and her benevolence seems to have extended to Mrs James, the tenant. The rent of 10/- a week was carried over in many weeks, arrears in July 1938 totalling £1/10/-, rising gradually to £5/5/- by the end of the year, perhaps after some Christmas expenses Mrs Davies had found more pressing.
The account books show not just the items the women bought from the shop, but the wide range of other household items, including toiletries, bath salts and even men’s suits and collars, and a razor. With plenty to do, busy looking after their colliery husbands and children, few women will have worked in paid jobs outside the home, but they lacked the time to do routine shopping for items not readily available from the town’s shops. It was easier to ask Ivy to find something – such as a pillowcase or a cushion, or a length of material to make a dress – and this she would do on her weekly visits to Cardiff to stock the shop on a Thursday afternoon when retailers in Valley towns closed half-day. Furniture even appears on the list – goods to the value of 17/11, presumably small items, for her brother, Winston.
After getting off the train at Queen Street station or the Red & White bus outside Cardiff City Hall Ivy would have made her way along Queen Street to Frederick Street. Long since buried within Cardiff’s St. David’s Centre, this early Victorian thoroughfare’s houses had by the 1930s been replaced by trade warehouses where retailers from across the region could make their selections of stock for their shops. Her purchases completed she would repair to the Kardomah café in Queen Street, with its stylish wooden frontage.
We can guess Ivy paid many of these suppliers on tick, too, though we do not have accounts for her purchases. She seems to have been regularly in arrears on her £1/6/9 rent per week for the shop to the council, starting end June 1938 with a balance £10/5/0 due, this figure rising to £24/12/19 by the end of September, and by stages mounting to £32/19/3 by the end of January the following year.
Abercynon at this time was a community fewer than fifty years old, its expansion taking it from a hamlet of only fifty-five people in 1811 to a town of just under 9,000 by 1931 with most of this growth coming in the last decade of the 19th century. The wide area from which it had drawn population is illustrated by the surnames of Ivy’s customers. Most are Welsh, drawn like Ivy’s father, butcher William James Williams, from neighbouring counties, in his case Breconshire. Of the 120 customers who had accounts, eight had the surname Thomas, seven were Williams and Jones, five Lewis and Morgan, four Pugh, Griffiths, and Evans, and three Davies, Roberts, and Meyrick. There were also some very English names – Pomeroy, Ewington, Twinborrow, Biggins, Knapton, Penrose, Simmonds, and Nuttall, drawn no doubt like Ivy’s mother, Jessie nee Chambers, from Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and in her case Devon, by the south Wales coal boom.
Given the limited number of Welsh surnames and the confusion this could cause, the Valleys custom of adding an appendage is fully deployed in the accounts, reflecting the way these individuals were identified in speech. Sometimes it is the addition of the street where the customer lived, as in the case of Mrs Radford New Houses, Mrs Smith Sunny Bank, Mrs Morgan Bungalows, Mrs Griffiths Park Street, Mrs Edwards Plantation, (presumably not to be confused with Mrs Edwards Meriona), Mrs Tom Davies Herbert Street, Mrs Thomas Gertrude Street, Mrs Biggins Carnetown, Mrs Hughes, Aberdare Road, Mrs Jones Abercynon Road, Mrs Mumford Ynysboeth, Mrs Pugh Greenfield, Mrs Jenkins New Inn, Mrs Allen Park View, and Mrs Pelland New Houses.
Family relationships were another device as in Mrs Bevan Cardiff Road daughter, Mrs Davies Enid Mother, Mrs Davies Eunice Mother, and Miss Phyllis Thomas Cornelius. Others were identified by occupation or, to be more precise husband’s occupation, Mrs Williams Electric, Mrs Price Director, Mrs Humphreys Baker, Mrs Marsh Bank Manager, Mrs Morris Manager, Mrs Doctor Price, Mrs Smith Savings Bank, and Mrs Wilton Teacher, among others.
Yet, although people were stretched and had to work hard, the town thrived in its own bustling way. Margaret Street near the top of which Ivy’s shop stood, contained a rich variety of retail premises from the Post Office, banks, grocers and greengrocers to cafés, hairdressers, and ironmongers. Commanding a view down the steep street was one of the most spectacular of the mining village workmen’s halls with its own library, reading room, and theatre (sadly demolished in the 1990s), while at the bottom of the street stood the Empress Ballroom where many an Abercynon romance is sure to have started.
Many of the shops in Margaret Street, each filling its own special niche and enabling residents to meet their needs not far from their doorsteps or acquired for them by one of the traders who knew where to get just such a commodity, have now sadly gone, sharing the fate of the Workmen’s Hall and the ballroom. The variety and the hustle-bustle that once characterised High Streets throughout the Valleys is no longer there, as it once was.
Perhaps something else has been lost in the march of progress. The expression a “tight-knit community” is regularly rolled out in the media, usually in the wake of an accident or emergency of some kind. It could much more accurately have applied to places such as Abercynon. Ivy and her fellow retailers in Margaret probably knew most people in Abercynon and their families, some of whom will have bought their meat from her father in Glancynon the other side of the Cynon River or been to school with Ivy or one of her nine siblings. She will have known their circumstances.
That is why she could, even at the expense of her own bottom line, be so generous in accepting sometimes never-to-be-completed part payments, to the certain detriment of Ivy Williams, Hats and Gowns bottom line.
This article first appeared in the Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, Vol. 29, 2023 www.cymmrodorion.org
Rhys David
January 1st, 2024
07754 002 688
What Ivy Sold
| Clothing | Household and general goods | Haberdashery and Materials | |||
| Bathing costumes | Feather (boas) | Pumps | Bangles | Tablecloths | Buttons |
| Bedjackets | Fox furs | Purses | Bath Salts | Tea cosies | Cotton |
| Belts | Frocks | Pyjamas | Bedspreads | Tea Cloths | Cotton Reels |
| Berets | Furs | Rompers | Blankets | Tea towels | Crepe de Chine |
| Blazers | Gloves | Scarfs | Bolsters | Tea sets | Elastic |
| Blouses | Gymslips | Shirleys | Christmas goods | Towels | Georgette |
| Bonnets | Handbags | Shirts | Curtain material | Ticking (for beds) | Lace |
| Bows | Handkerchiefs | Shoes | Cushion covers | Linen | |
| Bras | Hats | Shorts | Cushions | Lining material | |
| Brooches | Hose | Skirts | Flowers | Picot | |
| Buckles | Jumpers | Slacks | Furniture | Silk | |
| Burberry | Jumper suits | Slippers | Handbags | Suit making | |
| Capes | Kilts | Smocks | Pens | Tabs | |
| Cardigans | Knickers | Socks | Pillows | Taffeta | |
| Cloaks | Ladies Compact | Suspender Belts | Pillowcases | Velvet | |
| Coats | Leginettes | Swagger coats | Plaques | Voile | |
| Collars | Liberty Bodice | Talcum powder | Posies | Wool | |
| Compacts | Macintoshes | Ties | Powder | Zips | |
| Corsets | Nightdresses | Tweed coats | Pram Sets | ||
| Costumes | Pants | Umbrellas | Razors | ||
| Cravats | Panties | Underwear | Rugs | ||
| Daps | Patterns | Vests | Quilts | ||
| Dressing Gowns | Petticoats | Waterproofs | Sheets | ||
| Ear rings | Pinafores | Settee sets |
[1] Prices are in shillings and pence except where preceding £ figure is shown. Before decimalisation in 1971 the pound sterling was divided into 20 shillings each of 12 pence, making a total of 240 pence to the pound. This was represented in the form £0/0/0 or £0.0s.0d. The letter ‘s’ represented shillings and pence was followed by ‘d’ for denarius, the Latin for penny.
[2]Historic and contemporary price comparisons are difficult but on some calculations £1 in 1938 would purchase goods to the value of £80 in 2023. This makes one shilling equivalent to £4 and three pence to £1.
[4] The practice of charging just below a more significant price point, as many retailers and petrol forecourts do today, was prevalent in earlier times too. The farthing, halfpenny and three-farthing were, as the prices charged show, still in regular use adding to the complexity of adding up in a duodecimal system already divided into three units, pounds, shillings, and pence.
Wales Matters – Education.
Make a Date in Your Diary!
Wednesday April 10th 6.30 for 7pm Dr Gareth Evans, Director, Centre for Education Policy Review and Analysis, at University of Wales Trinity St Davids
Is Wales maintaining the proud tradition in education that preceding generations have established? Leaders in the arts, science, medicine, and the law as well as in many other fields have emerged from Welsh schools and colleges over the past many decades but can we still boast the same record? Is Wales equipping its young people to succeed and prosper in the modern world or are we slipping behind? The Pisa results measuring attainment in different countries suggests there are some causes for concern, but do they tell the whole story? How is curriculum reform in Wales working out? Do teachers have high enough aspirations for their pupils? How sustainable are the Welsh universities?
These and other issues will be addressed in an evening devoted to the topic at the London Welsh Centre, 157-163 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8UE on Wednesday April 10th organised jointly by the Cymmrodorion and the London Welsh Centre with support from Wales in London and other London Welsh societies. It will be led by Dr Gareth Evans, Director Education Policy, Centre for Education Policy Review and Analysis at University of Wales Trinity St Davids. Under Dr. Evans’ leadership the centre https://cepra.wales offers itself as a critical friend ready to support policymakers and all those with a stake in Welsh education.
Come along on April 10th at 6.30 for 7pm for the debate and to let us know your thinking on this crucially important topic for Wales’s future. There is no charge to attend but please register at 10 April: Education Debate in partnership with the Cymmrodorion – London Welsh Centre
Wales Matters: Can Wales Compete Conference Report
December 6th, 2023 London Welsh Centre
Conference Report
Should the focus of economic development be more on individuals and less on infrastructure? Are teachers’ expectations of their pupils in Wales too low compared with other parts of Britain? Are negative, downbeat attitudes a drag on economic performance? Does Wales suffer from the lack of long-term thinking? Should the Welsh Government have ditched the WDA?
A keen debate followed a presentation by Professor Robert Huggins of Cardiff University at the first event – Can Wales Compete? – in the joint Wales Matters series launched by the Cymmrodorion and the London Welsh Association earlier this month.
A packed hall had gathered to hear Professor Huggins unveil the findings of the latest UK Competitiveness Index, a project he has been developing with colleagues over the past 20 years, the latest iteration of which was published in August 2023. This showed that while Welsh local authorities were still heavily concentrated in the lower reaches of the table of British local government areas, the trend was slowly upwards. Not exactly promotion to the Premier League but a few steps closer to lower league play-off places in some cases. Cardiff turns out to be a solid performer, 11th out of 362, and as a wider core city region, fourth, after Edinburgh, Manchester, and Bristol.
Many of Wales’s problems relate back, the meeting was told, to chronic low productivity, with output per job second from bottom among UK regions and nations – the main reason Wales has lower incomes per head and often props up economic league tables. An entrepreneurial spirit was taking hold, however, with three businesspeople in particular – Terry Matthews, Chris Evans and Drew Nelson, pioneers in telecommunications, biosciences, and Information Technology respectively – pointing the way ahead.
Attitudes among the population were important, too, with those regions such as London and the South East where people were open and extrovert much more likely to be dynamic centres of new business than those where the population was less optimistic and more downbeat. The size of the public sector in Wales was a further problem. Either the public sector needed to be reined in or the private sector had to grow so that public spending did not account for too big a proportion of the Welsh economy.
Those attending expressed a range of concerns, not least the recent disappointing Pisa results which put Wales below England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland in educational attainment, which some saw as resulting from the failure to implement reforms like those that had been put in place in England. Other concerns were the debilitating impact of the brain drain on Welsh society, the dissipation of the strong Welsh brand offered at one time by the Welsh Development Agency and the consequent impact on inward investment, and the apparent absence of any coherent and lasting strategy for the Welsh economy. The improvement in the Welsh environment which had seen the industrial scars of the past disappear was a positive development, but this change had not been related back to coherent and consistent economic or industrial strategies.
Professor Huggins was hopeful, however. Some gains were being made and the process of bedding in devolution – now approaching a quarter century old – was bound to take a generation. “We have gone uphill but have discovered how to govern in doing so.” As was pointed out, however, in the early years there were the funds to make changes. It might be more difficult to govern effectively in the straitened circumstances of modern times.
Professor Huggins talk, complete with charts illustrating the findings of the Competitiveness Index, as they relate to Wales, will appear in a forthcoming edition of the Transactions of the Cymmrodorion. Report (cforic.org).
The second in this series of debates will be held in April 2024. Watch out for details. And if you have any comments on the themes discussed in the first of these talks, do let us have them.
RAD
December 16th, 2023
Sir Julian Hodge – Dictionary of Welsh Biography
Author: Rhys David
Hodge, Sir Julian Stephen Alfred (1904-2004) Financier
Name: Julian Stephen Alfred Hodge
Date of Birth: 1904
Date of death: 2004
Spouse: Moira Hodge (nee Thomas)
Child: Jane Hodge
Child: Robert Hodge
Child: Jonathan Hodge
Parent: Alfred Hodge
Parent: Jane Hodge (nee Simcock)
Gender: Male
Julian Stephen Alfred Hodge, born October 15th, 1904, died July 18th, 2004, was by a distance the most successful Welsh-based financier/entrepreneur of the 20th century that his life spanned. Perhaps remembered now mainly as the man who campaigned for and created Wales’s first national bank, he had before this passion took over already built a large and complex set of businesses stretching through accountancy, insurance, property, cinemas, hire purchase, unit trusts, cake and jam making, caravans, holiday estates, department stores, motor retailing, and even car manufacture. He also developed during his business life strong connections, moving towards the end of his career in elite international business and financial circles and making friends with some of the most prominent figures of the day.
A school leaver at 13 who largely educated himself through a life of constant study, he became president of a university college and founded several university chairs, acquiring the personal wealth that would allow him to occupy in turn two of Wales’s finest houses, White Lodge in Penylan and Ty Gwyn in Lisvane, former home of James Turner, the builder of City Hall and other buildings in Cardiff’s Cathays Park. He gave away large amounts of money, too, to assist favoured charities, many of them supportive of the Roman Catholic Church of which Hodge was a devoted communicant.
He was a man, however, who attracted praise and criticism in almost equal measure. To his great friend, former Speaker of the House of Commons, George Thomas M.P., he was “a man to be honoured and loved” whose “extraordinary flair in financial matters was matched by a splendid integrity and by unfailing compassion for those less fortunate than he, qualities rooted in his rock-like Christian faith”. To the satirical magazine Private Eye, he was “the usurer of the Valleys”, a soubriquet the clever catchiness of which unfairly stuck.
Though passionate about Welsh issues and determined to defend and re-invigorate the Welsh economy – intervening to buy back Cardiff’s James Howell & Co, after the flagship department store had passed into the English ownership of a Bournemouth group – he was born in Camberwell, London to an English plumber and electrician, Alfred Hodge and his wife, Jane Simcock, from a middle-class family of lawyers and journalists with connections to Ireland. Alfred and Jane moved to Wales when Hodge, the second of seven children, was four, at a time when the country was a magnet for people from all over Britain and beyond who were seeking work in rapidly expanding pit towns and villages. Hodge senior reckoned there would be good opportunities for plumbing in the Gwent Valleys and settled in a terraced house in Pontllanfraith.
The resilience, determination and independence Hodge was to show in his business career has its origins in the family circumstances that saw his father move back to London, leaving Julian in the position as a young man of pater familias to his five younger siblings. His mother, later memorialised in the Jane Hodge Trust, the family’s charitable vehicle established in 1962, had provided the early spur to success, encouraging his reading of classic books and poetry. On leaving Lewis School, Pengam he settled into a job as a railway clerk with the Great Western Railway, which he joined in 1920 after working briefly in his uncle’s chemist’s shop in London. His older brother had started in the pits.
His hours off duty were filled with the study of accountancy, much of it conducted in the spare room made available to him by a local Communist and his wife, Tom and Edith Evans, who offered some quiet away from the cramped family home. Qualifying in 1930 with the help of correspondence courses and night classes at Cardiff Technical College, this was the start of a journey that saw him, still a GWR employee, begin to advise local businesses and individuals on tax and other financial matters, subsequently door-knocking to sell life assurance as a means of publicising his freelance accountancy advisory services, all in his spare time.
A spreading circle of activities – rather than a progression from one to another – was to characterise Hodge’s business operations for much of his life, during which time he built a complex array of hundreds of inter-connected companies, all rooted in a master company, Hodge Group, itself the subsidiary of his family master company, Carlyle Trust, the full ramifications known best to one man only, Hodge himself.
The steps building this empire were slow and methodical, Hodge not leaving the GWR’s employ until 1941 when he was already 37 years of age. He had combined increased responsibilities in the running of the railways in Monmouthshire with the development of a substantial practice with several branches, becoming the accountant for the Withers brothers’ local chain of cinemas, auditor for the Cardiff metals company and wartime munitions maker, Currans, and exercising power of attorney for the Cardiff restaurant owning Carpanini family during their internment as aliens in World War Two. It was only in 1941 that he resigned his GWR job and headquartered his activities in Windsor Place, Cardiff.
In the immediate post war years Hodge moved into mortgage agency and insurance before founding his own industrial holding company, Gwent & West of England Enterprises, soon to be used as the vehicle for purchase of local garages, and to be followed by the rescue of a Newport-based hire purchase company, Anglo-Auto Finance. Dealerships for main motor brands, notably Ford – a useful complement to the hire purchase side of his activities – followed. A vertical business empire was in the making, even extending later into motor manufacture when Hodge bought Reliant Motors, maker of the quirky three wheelers once familiar on Britain’s roads. For Hodge, who with this purchase became the second biggest British-owned car maker, the attraction was the dealerships and the hire purchase opportunities that formed part of the package.
With such a busy life it is perhaps not surprising he did not marry, until 1951 at the age of 47, the much younger Moira Thomas, who worked in his Cardiff office. She came from Maes-y-Cwmmer, a community not far from Pontllanfraith and together they had a daughter and two sons, Jane b.1953, Robert b.1955 and Jonathan b.1958.
Though by the 1950s a prominent figure in south Wales business circles, Hodge first came to wider attention, as the defender of small shareholders, through his Investors’ Protection Facilities. In the much less regulated environment of the time Hodge believed company directors were not ensuring the interests of all shareholders were protected during take-overs, often looking to their own instead. With the issue of critical circulars to shareholders Hodge fought and won battles with Ely Breweries and Claymore Shipping in Cardiff, the latter case obliging him to take on prominent docksman and titan of Welsh sport, the former Glamorgan cricket captain and England cap, J.C. Clay.
On the wider British stage, he challenged the directors of Rootes Motors, which was attempting to take over rival Singer Motors; Massey-Harris Ferguson, the Canadian tractor maker bidding for Standard Motors; and Beecham, which was seeking to buy the successful Porth soft drinks manufacturer, Corona. All were forced to revise their offers to ensure the best price for the shares of the target companies was obtained. To small shareholders, whose bank accounts benefitted over the years by £20m from these campaigns, Hodge became a hero, receiving thousands of letters of appreciation from throughout the UK.
The drive to set up Welsh financial institutions had been continuing apace. Merchant banking – Julian S. Hodge & Co. – was added to the portfolio in 1960. Anglo Auto Finance and Gwent & West of England Enterprises were brought to the market in public flotations in 1960 and 1961, with Hodge as the most significant shareholder. The new unit trust movement was the next to catch Hodge’s eye and fitted well with his previous interest in supporting the small investor otherwise unable to access the market in shares. Six trusts, a rarity outside London, were launched in Cardiff starting in 1963 with the Welsh Dragon Trust, followed by others – Education, Motorways, High Income – with enticing names redolent of the new era of modernisation promised by Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour Government of 1964. Loans were advanced to prospective purchasers.
The 1960s with all these developments, however, were the high point of Hodge’s efforts to break the mould in British finance by establishing Cardiff as an alternative financial centre offering a range of services in insurance, merchant banking, hire purchase, unit trusts and other financial products that had hitherto been the prerogative of London and to a much lesser extent Edinburgh. Hodge had had to fight established interests contemptuous of his upstart efforts at every stage and by the 1970s, as the scale of national and international financial operations increased, his go-it-alone approach was no longer working so well. Hodge, too, was now about to enter his later years.
The unit trusts were sold in 1970 to First Finsbury Trust, a subsidiary of Vehicle & General Insurance, which was later to write an ignoble note in UK financial history. Hodge’s adroit timing in quitting unit trusts just as the industry had become overblown and ready for a fall, was exceeded, however, by his disposal of the group’s hire purchase interests. Chartered, the UK overseas bank, had already taken a 22 per cent share in Anglo Auto Finance in 1968 and Standard Chartered, as it had then become, acquired the remainder of the shares in `1973, signing the documents two days before the collapse of London & County Securities triggered the secondary banking crisis. This resulted in more than 30 small finance houses having to climb into the “lifeboat” the Bank of England had to send to rescue them.
In other disposals Howell’s, the transferred ownership of which outside Wales had so aggravated Hodge a few years earlier, was sold in 1972 to House of Fraser. The extensive cinema interests, spread across south Wales and south-west England, were also sold. Reliant was taken over by J.F. Nash Securities
Hodge’s enduring life dream, the creation of a Bank of Wales to address what he saw as a gap in the availability of finance for small businesses in Wales, had begun anyway to loom larger in his thoughts. With his forceful personality and persuasive charm Hodge used examples drawn from his h merchant bank’s experience advancing bridging finance to convince the previously sceptical that mainstream banks were unduly reluctant to extend risk capital. This was a role that a Bank of Wales with better local connections could fulfil, he maintained. His vision had begun after he had been shown bank notes from the Bank of Newport during the war. Visitors to Hodge House, the fourteen-storey headquarters he had built himself in Newport Road, were proudly shown notes from the Aberystwyth’s Bank y Ddafad Ddu and other earlier Welsh note-issuing institutions, as he outlined enthusiastically his idea to anyone who would listen.
Recognising the desirability of outside help he won backing from the First National Bank of Chicago, and the bank was established in 1971, boasting a board replete with the names of some of the leading Welsh grandees of the time, including not just James Callaghan, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and M.P. for the area in which Hodge’s premises were located, and George Thomas a former Secretary of State for Wales in the neighbouring seat, but Sir Goronwy Daniel, Principal of University College Aberystwyth and a former Permanent Secretary, Sir Cennydd Traherne, KG, Lord Lieutenant of Glamorgan, Lord Harlech, former UK ambassador to the United States, Lord Harlech and leading Welsh QC, Alun Talfan Davies.
Its name reflected, however, a continuing London reluctance to accept breakaway ventures in the “provinces” with an insistence from the authorities that the word Commercial be added to the original designation. After the secondary banking crisis which the bank came through unscathed another ultimately successful battle had to be fought to prevent the loss of even the word bank, the regulators deeming it one of a small minority of institutions not worthy of being included in the top group of those entitled to term themselves “bank” but needing to use a less exalted descriptive instead.
After a period of successful and undramatic operation, the bank, like many of Hodge’s other enterprises faded away, taken over first by the National Bank of Chicago, then Bank of Scotland, its name later dropped, and the business quietly wound up. The premiss on which it had been founded – the lack of availability of finance as a restraint on the growth of Welsh businesses – had not been established. No new enthusiasts emerged to sustain Hodge’s interest and passion.
Through his political and City connections Hodge was now moving in elevated circles attending International Monetary fund meetings in Rio de Janeiro and Washington and rubbing shoulders with the world’s financial titans. Hodge’s networking enabled him to bring to Cardiff between 1970 and 1976 to give the Jane Hodge Memorial Lectures in memory of his mother such luminaries as David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, Sir Leslie O’Brien, governor of the Bank of England, Pierre Paul Schweitzer, managing director of the International Monetary fund, Prince Philip, and Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabian oil minister and key player in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, (Opec) at the time of the 1970s energy crisis.
Earlier during his most active period in business in the 1950s and 1960s he had acquired other friendships that were to last, including Lord Marcus Sieff, chairman of Marks & Spencer, who helped Hodge turn around the Avana bakery group with a contract for its cakes, Sir Isaac Wolfson, boss of the retailing, manufacturing and financial group, Great Universal Stores, whose own foundation provided the template for Hodge’s Jane Hodge Trust, and Sir Siegmund Warburg, the merchant banker behind S.G. Warburg.
His other pre-occupation at this later stage was the charity he founded to honour the mother who had encouraged his early studiousness and coped with the upbringing of seven children – his elder brother Donald, and his younger siblings, Leonard, Eileen, John, Gerard, and Teresa – in difficult circumstances far away from her native London. Launched in 1962 16 years after her death with an initial endowment of £2.5m, its remit was to support medical and surgical studies and in particular cancer, polio, tuberculosis, and diseases affecting children, and the advancement of education and of religion. Its ongoing funding has been provided by dividends from the Hodge businesses and in 2022 it owned 79 per cent of the remaining Hodge Group. Separately, the Sir Julian Hodge Charitable Trust was established to manage donations to his and his wife’s charitable causes.
One regret will have been the scepticism with which his proposal for a new Roman Catholic cathedral in Cardiff’s Bute Park, even with his offer of a £3m contribution, was greeted. There was civic opposition to the idea of encroaching on the Bute gift to the city, even though it was suggested the Roman Catholic Bute family had this idea in mind themselves, but there were also doubts in the Roman Catholic hierarchy whether with three large churches already, one of them, St. David’s in Charles Street, already designated the metropolitan cathedral, the city needed a costly to maintain addition. His dedication to his faith won him, however, a papal knighthood.
The evolution of Julian Hodge from local business adviser and protector of the small saver to multimillionaire financier and mixer with the great and good attracted envy and hostility. Whether he deserved the disapproval and even vilification he suffered for his efforts, which has been damaging to his long-term reputation, is, however, moot. The financial authorities and his rivals in the City of London did not like the maverick upstart trying to establish businesses they regarded as their property in provincial Cardiff nor the innovative methods which his agile brain invented. Parts of the press and individual critics chose to focus on what they saw as the high interest rates charged by his hire purchase and other loan-making subsidiaries, his involvement in second mortgages, and the foreclosures that sometimes followed, and the use to which the promoters of pyramid schemes unconnected with Hodge put the funds his companies advanced. The rest of his contribution to Welsh economic life was overlooked.
Julian Hodge had begun his life in relative poverty even having to resort, like many in the Valleys at the time, to scavenging coal tips in the bleak years of World War One. By dint of hard work, constant study, and a dedication to self-improvement he seized the opportunities to enrich himself and others and became one of the best-known and recognised figures in Wales, acquiring honours and degrees from a range of institutions, including in 1970 Knight Bachelor. He served as Treasurer of the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology from 1968-76 before becoming president 1981-85. The University of Wales made him Doctor of Laws (LLD) and other honorary degrees followed his endowment of chairs in banking and finance, accounting and business finance, and international business. He was an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Accountants. He was a member of the Welsh Economic Council (1965-68) and the Welsh Council (1968-79).
Hodge remained throughout his life a supporter of the Labour Party but was never a party member. His long-time deputy and confidant, lawyer Sir Donald Walters, served as chairman of the Conservative Party.
He had started career in business as a tax specialist advising local people in his Gwent valley on their returns and it was perhaps unsurprising that in his final years his own potential tax liabilities – his estimated worth reached £50m – would lead him to leave Wales in 1985 at the age of 81 for exile in Jersey. An opponent of both European integration and devolution, he inveighed against both in letters to the press from his island home and helped fund the No Campaign in 1997. His voice no longer carried the authority it once had, however, and went unheeded by a majority of voters, albeit small. By then he was a figure from the past.
There are still Hodge companies, including the Julian Hodge Bank in Cardiff, but most of his enterprises have been acquired by deeper-pocketed companies over recent decades or have disappeared as trends and lifestyles have changed. The Hodge footprint in south Wales is now much smaller than it was. Yet, the charity he founded is still a resource which many causes turn to in search of funds every year, so his and his mother’s memory live on. He did much good for Wales and made mistakes; it is certain his like will never be seen again.
Sources:
Julian Hodge. Timothy O’Sullivan. Routledge &, Kegan, Paul, London. 1981 0 7100 0592-X
Sir Julian Hodge, Self-made merchant banker who championed the economy of Wales. The Guardian July 21st, 2004. John Cunningham.
Julian Hodge, Daily Telegraph, July 20th, 2004
Man who built his own bank Wales Online July 20th, 2004/revised March 31st, 2013
Rebecca. Spring 1977. Cheque Mates: The Selling of The Commercial Bank of Wales
Personal Recollections
Can Wales Compete?
How well is Wales doing in the highly competitive, integrated world economy and how could it do better? These are questions which will be discussed at the first of a new series of talks the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion and partners in the London Welsh community will be seeking to answer at a special event on December 6th. Key Welsh organisations in London are getting together to discuss some of the issues facing Wales now and into the future. Your views are important. Do come along and take part. The talks are free, and take place at the London Welsh Centre. Full details and how to book your place below
| WALES MATTERS Can Wales Compete? Surviving and Prospering in a Globalised World Wednesday December 6th, 2023. 6.30pm for 7pm London Welsh Centre Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8UE Robert Huggins Professor of Economic Geography, Cardiff University Founder of UK Competitive Index In the chair: Gerald Holtham Visiting Professor, Cardiff Metropolitan University New industries, modern technologies, new ways of working – how are Wales, and its towns and cities faring? Are they levelling up or slipping back? What are the impediments on the path to greater prosperity, and how can they be overcome? This is an opportunity to hear the latest evidence and to join in discussion with other members of the London Welsh community. Free Ticket Here Cyfres newydd o sgyrsiau ar bynciau amserol sy’n peri pryder i bobl Cymru a’i alltudion. Mae sefydliadau Cymreig allweddol yn Llundain yn dod at ei gilydd i drafod rhai o’r materion sy’n wynebu Cymru nawr ac yn y dyfodol. Mae eich barn yn bwysig. Dewch draw i gymryd rhan. Mae’r sgyrsiau am ddim, ac yn cael eu cynnal yng Nghanolfan Cymry Llundain. TOCYN AM DDIM YMA Copyright © 2023 The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, All rights reserved. The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 157-163 Gray’s Inn Road London, WC1X8UE United Kingdom Add us to your address book |
The Forgotten Soldiers
An interesting piece from journalist Neil Prior which appeared on BBC Wales news website pages last weekend to coincide with the 105th anniversary of the Armistice in November 1918.
This weekend people throughout Wales will be contemplating the words of Canadian World War 1 poet John McCrae: “In Flanders fields, the poppies blow”.However, for many commemorating their Welsh fallen, neither poppies nor Flanders hold much resonance.
Up to 40% of Welsh soldiers, particularly in Mid and North Wales, served in other theatres of war, and never even set foot in Belgium or France.
Whilst South Wales is synonymous with the 38th Division who fought valiantly on the Western Front at The Somme and Passchendaele, many from an area stretching from Ceredigion to Denbighshire joined the 53rd Division, who mostly saw action in the Mediterranean and Middle East.
Yet while the 38th are remembered with a sculpture of a Welsh Dragon at Mametz Wood, no such tribute exists for the men of the 53rd.
Llanidloes historian Nia Griffiths covered the phenomenon of what she calls “The Forgotten War” as part of the thesis for her masters degree.
She discovered that of the 114 names on the town’s war memorial, 35 died in action at Gallipoli and Gaza, but also in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Salonika.
“It’s true to say that 68 of the fallen were killed on the Western Front, and they should rightly be honoured, but around 40% died in the Middle East, and surely that’s a high enough percentage for those men’s stories to also be heard?
“I think official commemorations, especially in the media, can be a little bit lazy. Each Remembrance Sunday we say they shall never be forgotten, but for a large chunk of our men, that’s precisely what we are doing.”
Ms Griffiths added that on top of the death toll in sheer numbers alone, often the impact on rural Welsh communities was even more pronounced.
“Across the four parishes of Llanidloes, many of the men volunteered in the early stages of the war.
“They were early and enthusiastic adopters of Kitchener’s ‘Pals Battalions’, maybe because there was a closer sense of community spirit than in the industrialised south, maybe because work wasn’t as plentiful or financially rewarding in Mid and North Wales, but the effect was that often entire generations of rural towns and villages were wiped out.”
She said: “On the Western Front the casualties tended to be spread out across communities and over the duration of the war, but in Llanidloes for example, the majority of the 35 in the Middle East died on just two days of fighting, in August 1915 at Gallipoli and March 1917 in Gaza.”
Prof Sian Nicholas, Professor of Modern British History at Aberystwyth University says the picture was very similar in her town.
As part of a Heritage Lottery Fund programme to mark the WW1 centenary in 2014 she created an interactive map of the 1,000 or so servicemen from Aberystwyth known to have seen action, and where they had fought; she was astonished by the findings.
“Looking just at the army, of the 603 verifiable records we have, over 200 went to theatres other than the Western Front.
“Yet whenever I teach school children, or even students for that matter, and ask them for the first thing which comes into their heads when they think of WW1, almost all of them say mud, trenches, poppies etc; no-one ever mentions sand or camels or flies.
“It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, by remembering the troops in the Middle East we wouldn’t be denigrating the memories of those who fought on the Western Front, merely giving everyone the same respect.”
Writer and journalist Rhys David from Cardiff has written an account of the war in the Near East, based on Dewi’s letters home, entitled “Tell Mum Not to Worry”.
Dewi David was just 17 when he lied about his age to volunteer in 1915.
As a post office worker he was assigned to the Royal Engineers fighting with the 53rd, in order to lay vital telegraphy and field telephone systems.
He spent the agonising winter of 1915 trying to cling on to their almost undefendable toehold at Gallipoli, in an utterly misconceived campaign botched by their commanders.
Eventually evacuated in December after their trenches were deluged by floodwater, he had some brief respite in Egypt on garrison duty defending the Suez Canal, before once again being pressed into action as they were tasked with pushing the Ottoman Empire’s troops over the Sinai Peninsula, to Jerusalem finally succeeding after three attempts to take Gaza with a flanking action at Beersheba.
Rhys David said: “I don’t think we ought to look at it in purely Welsh terms – as a South versus Mid and North Wales thing – Dewi was from Cardiff, and even at the time he felt the injustice of the Forgotten War every bit as bitterly as the troops you mention from Llanidloes. I think the ‘Forgotten War’ is something which the whole of Britain is guilty of, not just us here in Wales.
“Initially his letters were bright and breezy, ending each with the phrase ‘I’m in the pink’, but by 1918 he was increasingly fed up; at first with small things like the troops on the Western Front receiving Christmas puddings in 1917 when they got nothing, but latterly more serious grievances, like when their men were taunted by those in France, saying they should come to the trenches to experience a ‘real war’.”
Dewi said food and water were in very short supply, the fighting was brutal with very little opportunity to dig Western Front-style defences into the desert sand, and yet they were still being mocked, with songs such as that by music hall star Marie Lloyd: “Go to Palestine if you want a rest”.
“It started even before the end of the war. The 38th were volunteers, whilst the 38th were mostly conscripted. But the message of supposed superiority from those who’d fought in France and Belgium was reinforced throughout the 1920s, with the ‘Unknown Warrior’ taken from there, the popularity of Western Front poetry, and through films such as ‘All Quiet on The Western Front.”
Prof Nicholas concurs: “We call it ‘WORLD’ War 1, yet our focus is always on a hundred or so square miles in Northern France.
“If we’re ever going to properly understand the conflict we need to appreciate the truly global aspects, and make sure that’s something which is better reflected in our school syllabuses.”
Congratulations to Gareth Morgan – Australian-Welsh cricketer!
Well, I feel the case has been vindicated with the record-breaking Welsh-Australian cricketer Gareth Roberts achievement https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/67401054 in taking six wickets with the six balls of one over. Who knows the redoutable Mr. Roberts might even be willing to join a Wales world cup team if Wales ever qualified
Here is what I wrote in 2019.
It’s time to be brave and take the natural step towards a Welsh cricket team, argues Rhys David
When a new cricket competition – the European T20 cricket league – was put in place this year by the International Cricket Council, one nation with a long tradition of playing the game was absent.
Cricket in Wales, it would seem, is Glamorgan, or exists to be an “event” that brings people into Cardiff to watch England Test matches or international series. The new competition will feature city-based franchise teams (two each from Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands) and will be broadcast in cricket markets globally.
So why have Welsh cricketers – whose numbers match or even exceed those of the other three countries – not been invited to join this event and make it a four-way tournament? Cricket here is organised into a North Wales Premier Cricket League and a South Wales Cricket League, both of which consist of 12 teams that play each other every season.
Professional cricket in England and Wales is represented by the 18-team County Championship. Glamorgan has been the sole Welsh member since joining in since 1921, winning the competition on three occasions, lastly in 1997. Over this period of nearly 100 years more than a dozen Glamorgan cricketers have represented England.
Financially viable?
It is essentially this status in English cricket that Glamorgan and the Welsh Government are determined to maintain. Glamorgan has consistently opposed the idea of a Welsh team on the grounds that it could compromise its finances and its position within the English County Championship. Cricket Wales, the sport’s official body, has also opposed independent status arguing it is preferable to play a major role within the ECB.
In addition, both Cardiff City Council and the Welsh Government argue inclusion within the ECB is a very useful peg on which to build Cardiff’s reputation as a sporting hub capable of attracting visitors to England matches.
The hold that this thinking has on the Welsh Government was made clear in a response to a question in the Senedd from Plaid Cymru AM, Bethan Sayed, in July by Eluned Morgan, Minister for International Relations and the Welsh Language, in whose brief cricket as an “event” project sits.
“The reduction of funding would undoubtedly have a significant negative impact on both the professional and recreational game in Wales. Both Cricket Wales and Glamorgan County Cricket Club are of the view that the establishment of a Welsh cricket team would not be of long-term benefit for the growth of the game in Wales,” she declared
Cricket Scotland and Cricket Ireland, both of which have grown the game over recent years from a smaller base than existed in Wales appear to take a different view. Here is Malcolm Cannon, Chief Executive of Cricket Scotland: “Cricket Scotland is always looking for more fixtures against high-quality opposition to develop the talent in our national team. The proposal for a six-team European tournament featuring teams from Ireland and Netherlands provides an excellent basis for Scottish cricket to prosper.
Compare and contrast this with Hugh Morris, Glamorgan chief executive. “We would lose our stadium. We would lose our players. I have not seen a business plan to see how it can work. We are very much wedded to the England and Wales Cricket Board in terms of finances,” he said. Wales, he argued, would also be playing in an ICC league with other countries, at the same time as Glamorgan.
So, what is best for Wales? Staying close to nurse (the ECB) for fear of something worse (the ICC), or declaring cricket independence? The number of first-class international sides has been growing. Twelve countries have full membership of the ICC – England, Australia, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, West Indies, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Ireland, and Zimbabwe. Ireland now plays full Test matches, famously out-playing England in the first two innings of their recent match.
In addition, there are 93 associates in countries where cricket is not yet ready for full membership. These include Scotland and the Netherlands, both of which regularly host international sides, though generally only for One Day Internationals. Zimbabwe, for example, is touring the Netherlands and Ireland this year and Scotland has played ODIs at home against Sri Lanka and Afghanistan and Oman.
Ireland and Scotland moved out of the ambit of “English” cricket, in 1993 and 1994 respectively to create separate associations. Before playing England in July this year, Ireland had already graduated to full Test match status with a fixture against Pakistan and is hence on a journey to appearing regularly at the highest level of cricket.
In Wales we can only look back and reflect that cricket has been played since at least the first recorded match in Pembrokeshire in 1763 (several years ahead of Scotland). Yet, the highest level of representation Wales achieves is as “Wales Minor Counties” in the English Minor Counties, Western Division, a sort of second division to the County Championship.
Interestingly, Wales has had international cricket sides at various points throughout the past 100 years and they have had some notable successes. Wales played England three times in 50-over matches between 2002-2004 and even managed to win the first encounter to the amazement of all.
In a Senedd debate in 2013 both Conservatives and Labour members lent their support to the idea of a revived Welsh side, and the case was also made in 2015 by Bethan Sayed. In 2017, First Minister, Carwyn Jones, called for the re-introduction of a Welsh One Day team.
Long-term gain
The question is complicated by Glamorgan’s position as one of the eighteen first class county sides but the idea Glamorgan might drop or be forced out of the county championship sounds like special pleading. Wales has an international football side, and this has not prevented Cardiff City, Swansea City, Newport County and Wrexham from playing in the English football professional system.
Indeed, would Glamorgan necessarily be weakened by the emergence of a Welsh side competing independently? Several decades ago, Glamorgan consisted mainly of Welsh players plus a few overseas stiffeners. Today the side is almost entirely composed of cricketers from outside Wales and a handful of Welsh players, so a Welsh team would hardly be drawing on the same resources. Nor need matches be played in Cardiff in competition with Glamorgan. Swansea has a long tradition of support for cricket and lost out to Cardiff when Glamorgan concentrated most fixtures at Sophia Gardens.
With a Welsh side playing in Wales in fixtures against other nations interest in the game in Wales and participation (by men and women) could only grow? This could benefit Glamorgan and perhaps generate a larger cohort of players who might go on to play for the county.
A Welsh side would also give Welsh-qualified Glamorgan players the opportunity to play international cricket for a Wales team. The very best players might still choose to play for England. After all, England’s One-Day captain, Eoin Morgan is an Irish national with a Welsh surname.
And let’s face it Glamorgan has not been pulling up trees in the English cricket system since it last won the championship more than 20 years ago, finishing bottom of Division Two last year (i.e. eighteenth out of eighteen) with just two wins all season. Perhaps too much time and effort has been put into creating a stadium fit for Test matches and ODIs to the detriment of cricket in Wales generally.
England might stop playing Test matches or ODIs in Cardiff if there were a separate Wales side. But is the role of super-host the best we can hope for? At least some of the revenue that would be turned away if Wales left the England and Wales Cricket Board to set up its own board (and lost the right to host England matches) could be recouped through Welsh international matches.
The recent World Cup which brought together the ten best one day cricket countries, has shown how much pride can be derived by the smaller countries from appearing in tournaments such as these and occasionally outplaying the more senior sides.
It would be good to see Wales attempting over time to appear in events such as the World Cup or to put forward teams for a league competition, as well as regularly playing versions of the game against comparable countries in Europe and some of the aspiring African and Asian nations. This could encourage young people to take up the game and help to raise performance standards throughout the sport in Wales.
rhysdavidblog 