Cylchgronau Cymru

THE MERTHYR ELECTION OF 1835 'IT is with feelings of unspeakable delight that we announce to our readers by far the most auspicious event that could have befallen the country-THE DISMISSAL OF THE WHIG MINISTERS BY HIS MAJESTY!' On 22 November 1834 the Merthyr Guardian blew its blast on a Tory trumpet to herald the first disputed election in the new parliamentary constituency of Merthyr, Aberdare and Vaynor created by the Reform Act. It proved to be the most ferocious election Josiah John Guest ever had to fight and it represents a critical moment in the formation of radicalism in south Wales. In the spring of 1831 when the Reform Bill had been introduced into the Commons, Croker, the leading Tory spokesman, had summarily dismissed the government's embarrassed plea that the multitudinous petitions in its support did not in fact come from 'the dangerous classes' 'Of the many hundreds that I have read, there were only two or three which did not demand infinitely more than the bill conceded. I will select one, because it is well and moderately worded and affords the best specimen of the sort of demands made by the people. It is the petition from Merthyr Tydfil, a large manufacturing place with a numerous and intelligent population.'1 Croker's dangerous classes in Merthyr were the elite of its commercial and professional families who, from 1828, moved to take over its Select Vestry and during the crisis years of 1829-30, in conjunction with William Crawshay, the greatest ironmaster in the kingdom and at that date a fire-eating democrat, riveted on the parish a radical caucus dominated by the small but influential Unitarian connexion.2 Central to that connexion were the James family: Christopher the patriarch, a merchant from Whitchurch who built the Bush Hotel, ran a flourishing business in grocery, drapery and wine, led the carriers on the Glamorgan canal, made a fortune from turnpikes and his Treforest estate and was elected mayor of Swansea on his retirement; his brothers William, land- owner of substance, proprietor of the Globe and the Swan, who married into the radical Herberts of Abergavenny, and Job, a former naval surgeon and bookseller-admirer of William Cobbett. Around this populous and thrusting cousinhood with its Bristol affiliations 1 Annual Register 1831, p. 60; Cambrian, 12 March 1831. See my 'The making of radical Merthyr, 1800-1836', ante, vol. 1, no. 1 (1961), 161-92, for a fuller account.