Betsy Cadwaladyr: A Balaclava Nurse E-Book

Jane Williams

• Herausgeber: Welsh Women's Classics
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Elizabeth Davis - known in Wales as Betsy Cadwaladyr - was a ladies' maid from Meirionnydd who travelled the world and gained fame as a nurse during the Crimean War. She was a dynamic character who broke free of the restrictions placed on women in Victorian times to lead a life of adventure. Journeying to many exotic parts of the globe, she came into contact with international events in the horrors of the field hospital at Balaclava, where she served under Florence Nightingale.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageIntroduction by Deirdre BeddoePrefaceIntroductionPART 1PART 1 Chapter 1PART 1 Chapter 2PART 1 Chapter 3PART 1 Chapter 4PART 1 Chapter 5PART 1 Chapter 6PART 1 Chapter 7PART 1 Chapter 8PART 1 Chapter 9PART 1 Chapter 10PART 1 Chapter 11PART 1 Chapter 12PART 2PART 2 Chapter 1PART 2 Chapter 2PART 2 Chapter 3PART 2 Chapter 4PART 2 Chapter 5PART 2 Chapter 6PART 2 Chapter 7PART 2 Chapter 8PART 2 Chapter 9Appendix AAppendix BAppendix CPostscriptAdditional NotesGlossaryAbout HonnoAdvertisementsCopyright

BETSY CADWALADYR

A BALACLAVA NURSE

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ELIZABETH DAVIS

Edited by Jane Williams (Ysgafell)

With an introduction by Deirdre Beddoe

Revised edition with preface added edited by Gwyneth Roberts

WELSH WOMEN’S CLASSICS

Betsy Cadwaladyr

Introduction

by Deirdre Beddoe

This book is the work of two nineteenth-century Welsh women – Elizabeth Davis (Betsy Cadwaladyr), a domestic servant from rural Meirionnydd who travelled the world and who gained fame as a nurse at Balaclava during the Crimean War; and Jane Williams, writer and scholar, who interviewed Elizabeth Davis and preserved for posterity this account of her fascinating life. Both women broke out of the confines imposed upon them by sex and class – the one through travel and adventure and the other through education and a serious literary career. Through Jane Williams’s appreciation of the significance of Elizabeth Davis’s tale, and through her pioneering pursuit of oral history, we have in this book a unique record – the authentic voice of an early nineteenth-century Welsh working woman recalling the events and experiences of an action-packed life. It is a life which echoes the everyday experience of many Welsh women, in that Elizabeth Davis was in domestic service, and it is a life which was exceptional in that she was a world traveller who came into contact with international events in the horrors of the field hospital at Balaclava, where she served under Florence Nightingale.

In 1856 the paths of these two very different women crossed. They had met before, some five years previously, but the second meeting took place ‘under circumstances which led the writer to appreciate more fully the extraordinary character and history of Elizabeth Davis’. Presumably this meeting took place in London, where both women were living in 1856, and presumably, what led to Jane Williams’s greater appreciation of Elizabeth Davis’s character and life, was the fact that Elizabeth Davis was newly returned from the Crimean War, where she had worked as a nurse under the aegis of the heroine of the day, Florence Nightingale. It is important for the reader of today to appreciate the fury and rage in Britain when the facts of the ‘mismanagement’ of the Crimean War, and particularly the appalling neglect of the sick and wounded in the pest-houses which passed for hospitals, became known. The practical response at home to the full horror of the situation in the Crimea was the setting up of a fund for providing comforts for the sick and wounded and the despatch of a party of nurses, under Florence Nightingale, to the Crimean front. The peace, an unsatisfactory and generally unpopular one, was made only in March of 1856. When Jane Williams met Elizabeth Davis, who had served as a nurse in Miss Stanley’s party and who had worked in the field hospital at Balaclava, she realized the topicality and significance of Elizabeth Davis’s story. The result was a series of lengthy interviews which Jane Williams recorded and edited and which were published in two volumes by Messrs Hurst & Blackett in London in 1857.

In this introduction toAn Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis,I should like first to comment briefly on the life and literary career of Jane Williams and to pay particular attention to the way in which she set about the task of recording Elizabeth Davis’s life-story. Secondly, I should like to draw the reader’s attention to the exciting and in many respects amazing life of the heroine of this work, Elizabeth Davis. Thirdly, this is an important book, which I am delighted to see being reprinted and I should like to point out why and how I think this book contributes to our knowledge of Welsh women’s history.

Jane Williams (Ysgafell) was born in London in 1806, the daughter of Eleanor and David Williams; her father was a clerk in the Navy Office. She was brought up in comfortable circumstances, but the loss of most of her family’s money, apparently when she was in her teens, changed her life and prospects for ever. She lived in the parish of Glasbury (then partly in Radnorshire and partly in Breconshire) for some years before moving to the house Neuadd Felen, in Talgarth, Breconshire, to join her mother and sisters who had moved there several years before. Here she learned Welsh and engaged in scholarly pursuits. Here too she became acquainted with Lady Llanover and became a member of that lady’s literary circle, with its concern for Welsh learning and its romantic pursuit of Welsh tradition. Jane was to become a scholar, a linguist, a poet, a historian and a writer. She had her first volume of poetry published when she was eighteen, in 1824. Her religious devotion and her scholarship led to the publication of a serious devotional work,Twenty Essays on the Practical Improvement of God’s Providential Dispensations as Means to the Moral Discipline to the Christian(1838). In 1848 she was stung to reply to that slur on the morality of the Welsh peopleThe Report on the State of Education in Wales(1847).

This report, better known as ‘The Betrayal of the Blue Books’ depicted the Welsh as irreligious, drunken, immoral and lacking in even the most basic education. The report was particularly scurrilous, by Victorian standards, in its remarks upon the moral laxity of Welsh women, whose indulgence (along, of course, with Welsh men) in the practice of ‘bundling’ (or ‘courting in bed’) was alleged to be responsible for unacceptable levels of illegitimacy in Wales. Jane Williams joined the chorus of condemnation of this report and leapt quickly into print. In the curiously titled,Artegall:orRemarks on the Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales,published by Longman & Co. in London in 1848, she denounced the report as partial, and accused the commissioners of perverting the evidence. The report, she alleged, was not an impartial investigation but a case for the prosecution. Jane Williams made a spirited defence of the Welsh people and of the Welsh language. She produced a clear and reasoned document in which she systematically dismantled the evidence of the commissioners. In her scholarly way she even added an appendix devoted to the shaky grammar and inelegances of style of the commissioners and asserted, ‘A set of exercises upon grammatical errors might indeed be compiled from the writings of the Commissioners, for the cautionary use of Welshmen studying the English language.’ It is more relevant to note here that the biographer of Elizabeth Davis championed Welsh womanhood. Welsh illegitimacy figures, she noted, compared very favourably with those of England – a comparative exercise not included in the report. Welsh women, she maintained, were clean and ‘tidy’. Contrary to the impression given by the Commissioners, they did not regularly keep farm animals indoors: she only knew one household where a chicken resided indoors with its elderly mistress. Jane Williams demonstrated the ignorance of the Commissioners concerning the habits and lifestyle of the rural population. She picked up these two points regarding women. One of the Commissioners wrote, ‘it would appear that household duties of a material nature (whereof several are naturally picked up in the common routine of agricultural employment) were not altogether neglected.’ Jane Williams sharply responded, ‘Any Welsh matron would readily inform him, that practical skill in domestic occupations was never yet “picked up” in the fields.’

Secondly she showed that the Commissioners assumed that boys left school earlier than girls in rural areas – because they did so in mining areas – yet ‘any cottager could have told him that the girls’ home services became first available, that they have not “more leisure”, and cannot “be better spared”.’ In short, Jane Williams’s response to the 1847 Report shows not only a clear and scholarly mind but a familiarity with and an understanding of the life and the people of Wales: she drew on this to defend them from the sneers of the Commissioners.

Jane Williams, though never very strong, continued to pursue a literary career.InThe Literary Remains of the Reverend Thomas Price, Carnhuananawc(1854-55) she gained her first experience of biographical writing. This consisted of one volume of the collected writings of this Celtic scholar, eisteddfod enthusiast and member of the Society of Cymreigyddion – and one volume of his biography written by Jane Williams. She, who had always shown a Victorian disregard for the snappy title, also produced the cryptically namedThe Origin, Rise and Progress of the Paper People(1856): this described a game which she and her siblings had devised and played throughout their childhood and it was illustrated by Lady Llanover.

In 1856 Jane Williams met Elizabeth Davis for the second time. We know little of the circumstances of either meeting but we learn from Jane Williams’s Preface that in this second meeting she came to appreciate fully ‘the extraordinary character and history of Elizabeth Davis’. I have referred above to the newsworthy story which Elizabeth Davis had to tell of events in the Crimea but I think Jane Williams’s interest in Elizabeth Davis goes deeper. She was not only interested in Elizabeth Davis because of the Crimean episode in her life: she did, after all. write her life history in two volumes, only one of which is devoted to her Crimean War Service. The first volume is devoted to the story of her father’s life, the Calvinistic Methodist preacher David Cadwaladyr, to Elizabeth’s early life on a hill farm outside Bala, to her early work experience in domestic service and to her extensive travels as a servant all over the world. The whole life of Elizabeth Davis is full of adventure and is highlighted by her courageous and enterprising character. Jane Williams, the delicate scholar and Welsh culture enthusiast, was clearly captivated by this working woman whose life was brimming with action. But having said that, I think one must realize that Elizabeth Davis had very controversial things to say about the popular heroine of the day, Florence Nightingale, and that her testimony to events in the Crimea would have been of great interest to the Victorian reading public, who were still discussing the war. It was the section on the Crimea which made this book eminently publishable and Jane Williams realized it. Jane Williams herself explains in the preface her working method in interviewing and recording the life of Elizabeth Davis.

She faced difficulties – Elizabeth Davis was old and ill; ‘she possessed no written records of her life, no memoranda, no letters, no tangible and visible helps to memory’; there were gaps in her memory of past events. She told her story in a ‘desultory and digressive manner’. Jane Williams points out to the reader that she did not simply sit and listen and record, but had a considerable job on her hands. In her own words, and using a craftsman’s metaphor, she tells us that she had:

To seize the first floating end of each subject that chanced to present itself, to draw it out, to disentangle it, to piece it, to set the warp straight and firmly in the loom, and to cast the woof aright so as to produce the true and original pattern of such tapestry, has required sedulous application. The winding of silk worms’ cocoons without a reel, is scarcely a task of more difficult manipulation.

Jane Williams undertook what was clearly a lengthy series of interviews with Elizabeth Davis. She had to guide and discipline her respondent’s answers, and to piece together what was not always a coherent narrative. We can measure her great success in this by reading the ‘autobiography’. Then she was faced with the decision whether to transcribe literally Elizabeth Davis’s words. Nowadays the oral historian, with recording equipment, would opt for a word for word transcription. In the middle of the nineteenth century when readers’ expectations were for a more polished prose, Jane Williams chose a free rendition. Yet the language of this book is clear and simple – very different from the biography of Carnhaunawc. Jane Williams opted to convey the ‘genuine sense’ rather than the exact words, though the heroine’s very words were retained when they were ‘apt and striking’. One other problem faced Jane Williams as an interviewer: namely how to verify certain incidents. This became particularly necessary when ElizabethDavis was describing events at Scutari and Balaclava in the Crimean war and it is to the great credit of Jane Williams that she went to considerable lengths to check out Elizabeth Davis’s version. Hence the accounts of Elizabeth Davis’s experiences in the Crimea are interspersed with other evidence from the period and by quite lengthy notes. Jane Williams therefore found herself not only as an interviewer but as an assessor of the accuracy of the accounts of near contemporary events.

In assessing the career of Jane Williams I would undoubtedly recognize herAutobiography of Elizabeth Davisas her most significant contribution to Welsh history. She performed an important rescue operation in recording the life of Elizabeth Davis, a woman whose class would normally have prevented her from leaving such a record of her life. Yet Jane Williams would have very likely valued her later literary works more highly. Apart from translations and from verse, she produced two more large works. The first of these wasThe Literary Women of England(1861) – a survey of British women writers from the ancient Britons down to 1850, which she was inspired to write because of the scant attention hitherto paid to literary women. The second of the major works from her later years was really the culmination of her life’s scholarship,A History of Wales derived from Authentic Sources(1869). The Welsh Dictionary of National Biographynotes that this history was not superseded until the publication of Sir John E, Lloyd’s research on the subject in 1911.

In this edition ofAn Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis,Jane Williams’s original Preface and Introduction have been included. Her Introduction is a paean to Welsh Protestantism and its defence of the religious feeling of the Welsh people (backed up by the numbers of Sunday schools and chapels in Wales as recorded in the 1851 Census) has more relevance to her response to the 1847 Report on the state of education than to the life of Elizabeth Davis.

It is not necessary for me to write at length about the life of Elizabeth Davis or Betsy Cadwaladyr (1789-1860) here: she tells her own story, with Jane Williams’s help. But it is necessary to stress that she was altogether an amazing woman: she was physically striking, with her tall dark looks and she was possessed of a remarkably strong personality, characterized by enterprise, courage, honesty, a great sense of adventure and an enormous capacity for hard work.

She was the daughter of the Calvinistic Methodist preacher, Dafydd Cadwaladyr, and his wife Judith. She spent her early years on the hill farm of Pen-Rhiw near Bala. There, life was meagre and hard and the puritanical Dafydd Cadwaladyr forced a stern regime on his daughter. Although she speaks of him with admiration, resentment comes across during the years when she tells of him hauling her out of a dance when she was a young girl. The death of her mother, who had borne sixteen children, when Elizabeth was only about five years of age, distressed her greatly and since she did not get on with her older sister, who kept house for her father, she left home at the earliest possible opportunity. From the age of nine to fourteen she lived in the house of her father’s landlord at Plâs-yn-Drêf. Here she learned domestic skills, reading, writing and how to speak English. At the age of fourteen she left the protection of Plâs-yn-Drêf. Typically she left because ‘a sudden thought occurred to me not to stay there any longer, and that I must see more of the world’. And so she did. Taking the only work open to a young girl of her station, she began to see the world through entering service. In taking such a job she was in fact part of a large migrant workforce of Welsh women, though her self-confidence and the freer social relations between the classes in her home area, made her disdainful of the more rigid class relations she encountered elsewhere. No mistress ever succeeded in lording it over Betsy Cadwaladyr – a name she changed to Elizabeth Davis for the greater ease of dealing with the English.

Employment in domestic service took her to Liverpool, Chester and London but her desire to see new places, coupled with the vagaries of her employers, was to take her much further afield. She visited the continent in 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo; she sailed as a nanny to the West Indies and visited plantations worked by slaves; she travelled to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land in Australia, when the convict system was at its height – her travels took her to India, China, to South America and to Africa. Her visits to all these places were attended by lurid adventures, which she managed, sometimes barely, to survive. I shall not pre-empt the reader’s pleasure by telling of these but her encounter with a villainous convict in Australia – which resulted in her laying him flat – and her experience in a Chinese opium den, in the presence of the Emperor of China, from which she had to exit backwards, are recounted in a lively style and make memorable reading. Amorous adventures also figure largely in her story: failed suitors were littered from Liverpool to Lima but the most persistent was one Barbosa, who seems to pop up all over the globe and who was even driven to kidnapping her – but Elizabeth Davis remained single.

In 1854 Elizabeth Davis embarked upon a new phase in her career. In that year Britain and France (and later Sardinia) became involved in a war, in support of Turkey, against Russia. It was a war hallmarked by disasters. Even while it was in progress, four Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry investigated the appalling events and conduct of the war. The British public were kept in ignorance of the horrific conditions pertaining there until William Howard Russell, the first war correspondent, published the story of conditions at the barracks hospital at Scutari, on the Black Sea, in the weeks following the Battle of the Alma (1854). The wounded and sick were without food, medicine or beds. They lay in filth and were further subjected to cholera and fever. Russell’s reports burst on a horrified nation and one response was the despatch by the Secretary of War of a party of forty nurses under the supervision of Florence Nightingale. Elizabeth Davis followed the newspaper accounts of the Battle of the Alma and read of Miss Nightingale’s departure. She made a quick decision. ‘I was determined that I would try to go to the Crimea.’ She joined a party of nurses under Miss Stanley – who were not in fact under the command of Florence Nightingale. This was perhaps just as well since from first hearing her name Elizabeth Davis took a dislike to her. ‘I did not like the name of Nightingale. When I first hear a name, I am very apt to know by my feeling whether I shall like the person who bears it.’

Elizabeth Davis travelled with Miss Stanley’s party by land and sea first to Therapia and then to Scutari on the Black Sea. Scutari was the main British war hospital, where the nurses were under Florence Nightingale’s control. This was the hospital where Florence Nightingale wonderfully reformed conditions and gained the affectionate epithet, ‘The Lady with the Lamp’. But Elizabeth Davis chafed at being kept away from the main scene of action – the Crimean peninsular, which lay across the Black Sea and, without Miss Nightingale’s blessing, she left for the hospital at Balaclava in the Crimea. She may well have been anxious to escape from Florence Nightingale’s control. At Balaclava she set to work immediately to bathe the maggot-infested wounds of the wretched soldiers. She was appalled to find that no man had a bed so she demanded, and got, bedding from the army purveyor. She nursed the men for six weeks on the wards and then she was placed in charge of the special diet kitchen. She made sure that food in ample quantities was made available. She made lavish demands upon the stores – on one occasion, ordering ‘six dozen of port wine, six dozen of sherry, six dozen of brandy, a cask of rice, one of arrowroot and one of sago and a box of sugar’. She was an excellent cook and her hard work and liberality was a blessing to many. But overwork and ill health forced her eventually to return home. She left with a recommendation from Miss Nightingale for a government pension.

One of the main points of interest in this autobiography is that Elizabeth Davis heartily disliked Florence Nightingale and levelled some severe accusations against her. She had little good to say about ‘The Lady with the Lamp’. She alleged that at Scutari, ‘Miss Nightingale had a French cook and three courses of the very best of every kind of food were served up everyday at her table…’; whilst Elizabeth Davis and the other nurses lived off filaments of meat boiled down to make the patients’ broth. She was appalled at Florence Nightingale’s strict adherence to the system of requisitions of food and clothing, and she protested when Florence Nightingale tried to extend this regime to her (Elizabeth Davis’s) kitchen at Balaclava. She tells of how Florence Nightingale let the stores of clothing, food and other gifts donated from Britain rot in the stores at Scutari, and says that very little of these actually reached Balaclava. (When she returned to England she found clothing which had been donated for the Crimea for sale in dockside shops and auction houses – though she does not blame Miss Nightingale for that.)

In order to appreciate better what Elizabeth Davis was complaining about it is necessary to explain that the British army was hamstrung by incredibly elaborate procedures in distributing goods to its hospitals. The Commissariat provided food rations for soldiers in hospital if they were well enough to eat normal rations but if they were too ill to eat normal foods their diet was provided by the Purveyor, who provided ‘medical comforts’ such as rice, port-wine, arrowroot. Not only was this complicated enough but there were also the Free Gifts. The Free Gifts were donations from people all over Britain who sent shirts, pots of jam, Christmas puddings, herrings, handkerchiefs, gloves etc. to the soldiers in the Crimea. Queen Victoria herself had sent water beds and she and her daughters had knitted mittens for the troops. Florence Nightingale was appointed as Almoner of the Free Gifts – as well as Superintendent of the Nursing Establishment! Miss Nightingale regarded what she termed ‘these frightful contributions’ as not worth the freight. She was expected to acknowledge and account for them all.

Elizabeth Davis’s opinion of Miss Nightingale’s administration of the stores and free gifts greatly interested Jane Williams, who went to considerable lengths to corroborate Elizabeth Davis’s account and to supplement it with an analysis of contemporary government reports and other sources. Jane Williams, as her work on the 1847 Report on the state of education in Wales shows, was familiar with the language and procedures of government reports or ‘blue books’ as they were popularly known. She concluded that Florence Nightingale was wrong in adhering so rigidly to army procedures (see Appendix B): Florence Nightingale’s practice was only to issue stores upon obtaining a requisition signed by two medical men. Jane Williams attributed this strict adherence to bureaucratic procedures to a ‘self protective principle of rigid observance’. In short, Miss Nightingale could never be accused of breaking regulations. Jane Williams argued that in the emergency conditions of the Crimean war a more liberal interpretation of the rules would have helped the men. Jane Williams believed that she was performing a public service in publishing this material and was anxious to avoid any repetition of the situation. She states:

We are conscious of no bias, no partiality, no prejudice. Our investigations have fairly led to the conviction that the method of administration did not produce the largest amount of benefit which ought to have been communicated by the means at its command; and that the Barrack Hospital at Scutari continued to present the greatest amount of least alleviated misery of any war-hospital belonging to the British Army of the East.

In short Elizabeth Davis with her common sense, her practical skills and her spontaneous generosity towards the wounded appears in great contrast to the bureaucratic Florence Nightingale. It is not my brief to defend Miss Nightingale nor to sift through the many great tomes of contemporary evidence on the conduct of the Crimean war. In fairness to Florence Nightingale, I would point out that she had the absurd double responsibility of being in charge of all the nurses and administering the gifts. She was the standard bearer of British women nurses and in the face of undisguised hostility from the male doctors she probably felt obliged to keep the regulations. It was all a long time ago and Elizabeth Davis’s story is one contribution to what was then an urgent debate. There can, however, be no doubt that both women performed sterling service in the Crimean war.

Finally I should like to draw readers’ attention to the poignant notice at the end of this book. The elderly Elizabeth Davis was appealing for work or public charity. I do not know the outcome of the appeal. Elizabeth Davis died in 1860.

Deirdre Beddoe

Penarth,1986

Preface

by Jane Williams

The writer first became acquainted with the heroine and narrator of these adventures in the year 1851. In the year 1856 they met again, under circumstances which led the writer to appreciate more fully the extraordinary character and history of Elizabeth Davis. Though worn by time, and oppressed by illness, her indomitable energy still shone in her eyes, and bore her fine form erect; still manifested itself in industrious activity, and in buoyant cheerfulness of spirit.

She possessed no written records of her life, no memoranda, no letters, no tangible and visible helps to memory. In a desultory and digressive manner, she gave, to the best of her recollection, an account of the principal facts of her own remarkable history. She knew that lapse of time and intermediate events had cast their shadows over some scenes; she was aware that here and there a link in the chain was bent or broken; but she trusted in her vivid impressions of the past, and in her own sincerity of purpose.

Discrepancies and mistakes may be detected in the details, errors in chronology, errors in geography, and errors in the orthography of names and in the designation of persons; but the writer believes that for all thorough students of human nature, the narrative, as a whole, bears internal evidence of the light of its truth. With the guidance of its heroine, and the light of analogy, the incidents have been arranged in consecutive order.

It has been the writer’s object justly to apprehend the meaning of the narrator, and faithfully to express it.

It is well known that a free translation often renders the sense of an original with more truth than a literal one.

It was impossible in all parts to give the exact language spoken. The writer has therefore aimed at conveying a true reflex of her exact meaning, preferring the genuine sense to literal precision.

Wherever the very words of the heroine were apt and striking, they were retained.

Footnotes have been added in order to identify persons, to verify facts, to correct exaggerations, and to show the probability of some extraordinary statements.

The important matter contained in the Appendix tends both to place the public services of Mrs Davis in a just light, and to prove the worth and weight of her opinion upon a great public question.

The narrative of a pure-minded woman, of thorough integrity and of dauntless resolution, and one to whom the Bible formed the chart of life, cannot be altogether useless to society; although like every other record of real experience, it affords matter for warning as well as for example.

A cursory reader may suppose that the writer had merely to listen and to record, but the task of preparing the narrative has really involved much care and labour. To seize the first floating end of each subject that chanced to present itself, to draw it out, to disentangle it, to piece it, to set the warp straight and firmly in the loom, and to cast the woof aright, so as to produce the true and original pattern of such tapestry, has required sedulous application. The winding of silkworms’ cocoons without a reel, is scarcely a task of more difficult manipulation.

The reader who supposes the text of the narrative to have cost the writer little trouble, may probably expect that all its most remarkable passages should be illustrated or explained by notes. Extensive inquiries have been instituted for this purpose, and some valuable results have been obtained, but the circulation of a whole edition can alone be expected to bring in the contributions of diffused and personal information necessary for the full execution of this desirable object.

It may be necessary here to call attention to the peculiar character of the heroine – a character as different from the ordinary type as are the events of her history.

The extraordinary combination in her of the spirit of enterprize, self-dependence, and mental alacrity, with great bodily strength and activity, a commanding figure, noble aspect and perfect self-possession of manner, never failed to exercise a powerful influence upon her associates; and its uniform effect upon her employers, in levelling the usual barriers which divide the classes, is shown throughout this work. To those who are unacquainted with her, the fact may seem incredible. To those who have experienced the power of her blended dignity and deference, no further evidence is necessary.

In her autobiography, the absence of sentiment and air of unsympathizing indifference, must not be taken for the want of kindness and humanity.

Her nature was undoubtedly peculiar, imaginative, impulsive and adventurous; but the mountain region which produced her, and the state of society which surrounded her in early life, moulded and impressed upon the native metal the form and stamp which it has never lost.

Introduction

by Jane Williams

A story, fruitful of events, attend!

Pope’sOdysseyXV. 423.

The Welsh have been in all ages a religious people.

They were so in Druidic days, and, with the joy of sincere and earnest hearts, they welcomed Christianity as soon as it reached their shores. Its ministers succeeded promptly to the charge of districts which Druids had held before.

Church history records that Wales was one of the last countries in Europe which yielded to Romanism, and among the first to cast it off.

From the Reformation until the beginning of the eighteenth century, a series of devout and diligent native bishops succeeded in dispelling supersitition, in arousing its recent victims from moral torpor, in giving the people good Welsh translations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, in enforcing the use of the native language; also in preaching, and in the administration of all religious ordinances. By these wise and simple means they gained all hearts, and won the whole population to become good and zealous members of the Established Church. The exceptions were few and insignificant; Welsh dissenters bearing much the same proportion, perhaps, in those days to Welsh churchmen, as the churchmen now do to the dissenters.

After more than one hundred and fifty years of Protestant life and prosperity, a deadly change was wrought in the Welsh Church.

Bishops foreign to the Principality, ignorant of the language, the cast of thought, the habits and the feelings of the people, were appointed to the Welsh sees; not casually or occasionally, but systematically and in succession. This is no place for detailing the process by which they wrought the ruin of the Welsh Church. They reproved the active zeal of apostolic men, and rewarded their faithful labours with deprivation and expulsion. They bestowed the best Welsh livings upon strangers to the country, who often held them in plurality; hiring Welsh curates at miserable stipends to visit parishes far distant from each other, to christen, and marry, and bury, and to perform divine service here and there, now and then.

It is touching to observe, in the midst of this withering change, how constantly the people resorted to every means of grace which the Established Church still afforded.

In 1768, the Hon. Daines Barrington estimated, from statistical returns, which he obtained from the local clergy, that the proportion of communicants in the Principality, was as two-fifths to the congregations.

The piety of one or two generations sufficed to keep alive that national attachment to the establishment, which, in the course of time, flickered like a lamp unsupplied with its proper oil.

The earnest, imaginative, and social qualities of the Welsh people, required mental interests and active occupation. The scanty ministrations of the clergy, and their dry ethical dissertations, dropped upon the hearts of the hearers like the chill waters of petrifying springs. Deprived of the advantages of religious occupation and instruction, the people fell back upon the wayward exercise of their national talents, and upon the traditionary lore of their land, accumulated through revolving centuries.

Sundays, being holidays from manual labour, were more especially appropriated to amusement. Then were held the Chwarae gamp, sports for the trial of strength and activity among the young men, to which spectators thronged from distant parishes.

The old town-hall of Bala often – and especially on the seventh day – was used for reverberating tennis-balls.

Dramatic performances, called ‘Coeg Chwarae’ or ‘Interludes’, composed for special occasions by local Welsh poets, were acted on Sundays, in summer time, by the country squires, yeomen and peasants together. Singing to the harp, was a favourite amusement; and dancing parties were frequent; the harp, on such occasions, being usually accompanied by the violin, which is the modern representative of the ancient Welsh ‘crwth’. Not only on Sundays, but after working hours on week-days, the nimble Cymry used to delight themselves by going through country-dances, some of which had no less than four-and-twenty variations.

There were quiet households too, where the sounds of the harp and voice were enjoyed without dissipation, and the old national tunes, the old traditionary tales of wonder, and the poems of the ancient Welsh bards, proved alternate sources of intellectual pleasure to the little circle formed around the hearth.

The revival of religion in Wales was wrought by native preachers, previous to the occurrence of a similar event in England, under the influence of Whitfield and Wesley.

Gruffydd Jones, rector of LIanddowror, William Williams, curate of Pantycelyn, &c.; Daniel Rowlands, curate of LIangeitho, &c.; and Peter Williams, curate of Swansea, &c.; with other men of kindred spirit, would have retained the whole nation in the unity of the church, had they not been prevented by the infatuated dignitaries.

Even Howel Harris, the originator of Welsh Methodism, shrunk from the appellation of ‘Dissenter’, and regularly led his whole ‘family of love’ from Trefecca, to attend public worship, and to receive the sacraments in the parish church of Talgarth.

Discipline was in those days the episcopal idol, and to it were ruthlessly sacrificed all the most zealous members of the Welsh Church, and with them expired its glory.

The eagerness with which the Welsh people of all ranks and ages seized the opportunities of instruction, as soon as they were offered in their native language, is attested by their teachers. The old and the blind came, the vigorous wrestler, and the skilful musician; servants paid other servants for doing their work, in order to gain time to attend the Welsh Circulating Schools, which were originated by the Rev. Gruffydd Jones, rector of LIanddowror, and afterwards revived in North Wales, by the Rev. Thomas Charles, of Bala.

“The Circulating Day-Schools,” said Mr Charles, “have been the principal means of erecting Sunday-schools; for, without the former, the state of the country was such that we could not obtain teachers to carry on the latter; besides, Sunday-schools were set up in every place where the Day-schools had been.”

The distribution of religious books in the native language, personal exhortation, district visiting, and public ordinances, administered with zealous piety, soon changed the social state of Bala, and of the whole Principality.

The ‘avidity’ for learning, which John Wesley afterwards remarked as a characteristic of the Welsh people, was strong, from infancy until death, in Dafydd Cadwaladyr.

His parents kept a farm in the parish of Llangwm, Denbighshire, and he was born there in the year 1752.

When he was a little child of four or five years old, he was awakened from sleep one night, in the midst of a violent thunder-storm, by his mother, who came into the room in an agony of terror, and, falling upon her knees at his bedside, began to pray aloud to God for mercy. In answer to his questions, she told him that she believed the Day of Judgment was come, and God would punish sinners.

This was the first time he had ever witnessed prayer, or heard of religion. With the ready sympathy in strong feeling which is natural to children, he listened to her repetition of the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and petitions from the Litany, and joined with her in saying them over and over again, while the long and dreadful storm lasted.

The mother’s devotion ceased with her terror, but the mind of the child was indelibly impressed with the fear of God. Day after day, and night after night, he continually uttered in Welsh,

“Oh, God the Father of Heaven, have mercy upon us miserable sinners!

Oh, God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy upon us miserable sinners!

Oh, God the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, have mercy upon us miserable sinners!”repeating also the Lord’s Prayer, and the Creed.

His father, weary and irritated, silenced the poor boy at last with a whipping.

His parents attended morning service at the parish church once a month, or as often as service was performed.

Their children had no other stated means of instruction, either religious or secular.

Eagerness for knowledge overcoming all obstacles, Dafydd, at six years old, while watching with an elder brother their father’s sheep upon the mountain, learned a great part of the alphabet from the initial letters marked with tar upon the sheep’s sides to distinguish the flocks of the several owners.

He afterwards was accidentally led, while idly turning over the leaves of the Llyfr Gweddi Gyffredin (Book of Common Prayer), to recognize there the same letters, and finding out their sounds in combination, he taught himself to read in the course of two months by this extraordinary method.

It is a custom among Welsh farmers to give their eldest child the first ewe lamb that is weaned after his birth, and all the produce of that one lamb when it grows into a sheep; so that in a few years the child becomes the owner of a little flock. Dafydd Cadwaladyr’s eldest brother was named Robert, and this was marked at full length upon his sheep. It was consequently the first word which Dafydd learned to spell.

At eleven years of age he became a farm-servant boy to Mr Wynn, of Garthmeilio. There he soon met with the celebrated Welsh poem,Bardd Cwsg, and subsequently with John Bunyan’sTaith y Pererin, and other valuable books. He hoarded every shilling he could save to purchase more, and found himself in two years the happy possessor of a Welsh Bible, and of several religious works.

A pseudo-prophetic rumour reached him soon afterwards, that the papal power would some day be re-established, and that Bibles would be burnt. Alarmed at the thought, he determined to make sure of the contents, and set to work with indefatigable diligence at the task of committing them to memory. He learned the whole of the New Testament, and a great part of the Old Testament. Meanwhile, he never relaxed in his daily labour; and his mistress, pleased with his industry, allowed him, in the winter evenings, as a reward, to attend the social meetings in neighbouring houses, where men and women alike, plying their knitting-pins in the twilight, used to sing Welsh songs and tell legendary tales.

Dafydd distinguished himself at these parties, by repeating select passages from theBardd Cwsg, and thePilgrim’s Progess, working up the feelings of his hearers to terror, softening them to sadness, or soothing them to peace.

Garthmeilio was a favourite resort of the ball-players on Sunday evenings. One evening they accidentally broke a window, and Dafydd, on his way to Bala the next morning to fetch the glazier, fell in with a person who told him that there were preachers about to hold a religious meeting in the neighbourhood. His curiosity was strongly excited, and he went to hear them. He was afraid that his master would be angry with him, for the value of instruction was at that time little known, and the feeling of the people was strongly against dissent. He felt tempted to tell a falsehood to account for his prolonged absence. Conscience, however, gained the victory, and he spoke the plain truth. The struggle strenghtened his principles, and confirmed him in the habit of sincerity, which was his characteristic through life. His master did not punish him, but respected his straightforwardness; and thenceforth attendance at such meetings constituted the greatest enjoyment of his life.

He pondered much on serious subjects, and, like all thoughtful and earnest men, his faith was sometimes overcast. He chanced just then to read theLife of Mahomet. It awoke in his mind sceptical doubts. Perplexed and distressed, he listened, prayed, and read, in agonizing anxiety, to find out whether the New Testament or the Koran was the true revelation, whether Jesus Christ or Mahomet was the true prophet. At last, the patient study of the Bible brought before him Hebrews vii 26, which dispelled his doubts for ever.

He lived six years at Garthmeilio, and being then afflicted with the small-pox, went home to his parents to be nursed. While recovering from the disorder, he made so much use of his eyes in reading,that he was in danger of blindness. When he got well, the Wynns wished him to return to them, but his heart was set upon gaining more frequent opportunities of religious instruction.

His next place was at Nant y Cyrtiau, where he lived two years. His six days’ labour, heartily done, was rewarded by liberty to go where he chose on the seventh, on the condition that he did not come home to take his usual meals. He gladly accepted the privilege, at the cost of the privation.

At nineteen years of age, he became farm-servant to William Evans, of Bedwarian, the first preacher – except the drowsy clergyman of Llangwm – whom Dafydd Cadwaladyr had ever heard. It appears probable that at this period Dafydd acquired the art of penmanship, in which he was entirely self-taught.

Like many of his countrymen, he had a fine poetic mind, and a turn for epigrammatic satire. Fearing to become uncharitable by the exercise of this power, he afterwards confined himself solely to elegiac compositions.

While living at Bedwarian, he appears to have made great progress in the life-long work of self-improvement. He read a great deal; and, having deliberately chosen his lot, became a member of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Connection.

In words much resembling the shorter of the two forms given in that invaluable book – Dr Doddridge’sRise and Progress– he also wrote and signed a private deed of self-dedication to God’s service.

Being attacked by severe illness, he obstinately refused all medicine, and drank great quantities of water to allay his parching thirst. He soon got well, and ever afterwards entertained so high an opinion of the healthful and curative properties of water, that he used it as a daily beverage, and recommended it to others as the most efficacious of all remedies.

When Dafydd was twenty-five years of age, he married an excellent young woman, and took the little farm of Pen Rhiw, near Bala.

His great talents, his consistent piety, his genial temper, and strong, enthusiastic character, had now won for him a high position among his former teachers and masters. At their solicitation he entered upon the ministry, and for fifty-two years he laboriously, zealously, and successfully fulfilled its functions. He continued, meanwhile, carefully to cultivate his farm; giving the most sedulous attention to the guidance of his own house; maintaining his large family in frugal sufficiency of all things; and showing, both at home and abroad, the edifying example of a blameless life, and of unremitting industry. His body was as strong as his mind, and he needed and took no other rest but a short allowance of sleep, and frequent change of occupation. He was the last to leave his scythe on a Saturday night, during the hay-harvest, and, after walking thirty miles on Sunday, and preaching three times, he was the first at his out-door work on Monday morning.

He always walked his journeys, and, in the course of years, he traversed the Principality through and through, and visited the Welsh marches, and many parts of England; preaching three times a day, and going several miles on foot between the services. His walking staff was a cane, given to him by Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. It had a watch in a silver case under the knob at the top of it.

His sermons were eloquent, earnest, and useful. His prayers were the simple outpouring of deep personal devotion and hearty good-will; and they are said to have won more converts than even his preaching.

Instead of reading the chapters of Scripture, as usual, in the meeting-house worship, he used to say them from memory. By the exercise of indomitable energy, he found time for everything. He never broke or infringed upon a promise, and was always strictly punctual. To avoid breaking an engagement, he would, in an emergency, walk all night long, and cross the high and dangerous mountain passes of Merionethshire, through all weathers, snow and storm.

He appears to have assisted Mr Charles in collating various editions of the Welsh Bible.

From one particular copy, Dafydd Cadwaladyr read for many years to his family, and marked his progress, from the beginning to the end of it, twenty-five times.

We have not space for a tenth part of the anecdotes which are on record of his quaintness, his courage, his home virtues, and his ministerial usefulness. He was ready to become all things to all men, as far as his conscience would permit, and would leave higher offices for school-teaching, or to visit the most ignorant and unkind, in order to do real good.

He was consequently beloved by all his neighbours; and by many who disliked religion and all its dissenting professors, he was tolerated and esteemed.

His power of encountering fatigue was marvellous. One day, after having walked from Penrhiw, through Dolgellau, a steep and tedious way, to Abermaw (Barmouth), he climbed the mountainside, where cottages peep down the chimneys of other cottages, and, entering the kitchen of an old acquaintance, sat down to talk with her.

She asked him how he did. He replied that he knew not what was the matter, but he felt a sensation of weariness and sinking which was altogether new to him.

With true Welsh acuteness, she inquired, “Why, Dafydd, how old are you?”

“Well, I am turned seventy.”

“And how far have you walked today?”

“Only twenty-eight miles. I used to think nothing of such a distance as that; but, I suppose, it is no wonder that I am tired with it now!”

He lived in health and vigour far beyond the usual three score years and ten; continuing to walk long distances, and to preach energetically until the last; so that his Welsh biographer declares his loss was felt as heavily at the age of eighty-two, as if he had passed away in the fulness of manly strength.

Not long before the close of his earthly life and labours, he took a walk one day to Bedwarian, and went round once more the fields which, in days gone by, he had mown and tilled, and sown and reaped, to look at his ‘hen allorau’ (old altars) places, where, in his youthful fervour of spirit, he had frequently offered up the sacrifice of prayer – places where he had planned and forecast the life of duty which he had subsequently led. The old man felt hurt at finding overthrown several of these little stone piles, which he had raised in imitation of patriarchal monuments of gratitude. The regret was human, but needless, for many hearts bore the impress of his piety, and his own soul, in its probationary course, had received those divine inscriptions which will glorify God for ever (Heb. x: 15, 17).

Perhaps the soft sorrow, which the Welsh generally experience at the death of friends, may take that mitigated form, not only from the steadfast hope of immortality, but also, in some degree, from the tranquil beauty of their churchyards, where growing flowers are planted and cherished by survivors, as perpetual remembrances of resurrection.

Dafydd Cadwaladyr’s daughter Elizabeth arose upon the yet unsmoothed surges of two periods, before the efflux of the one had subsided into the flowing course of the other, and neutralized its strong contrast of colour.

Such eras ever tend to produce determined characters, as the necessity for resistance to opposing power follows the choice of party, and stimulates the exercise of strength.

Impelled by the conviction of conscience to regard the world as the property of God, Dafydd Cadwaladyr, her father, made it the chief object of his life to win men back to their rightful allegiance, by preaching and teaching the great truths of salvation through Jesus Christ, and the renewal of the human will to holiness by the Divine Spirit. He joined himself with other reformers of his day, living like himself for immortality; and dreading for their converts the social sins from which they had themselves escaped, they surrounded their ground with fences, so high and closely set, as to exclude also many harmless and heaIthful social practices.

Within these strait boundaries, his daughter Elizabeth was trained; but with her, as with Rasselas in the happy valley, the monotonous safety of captivity provoked an irrepressible longing for dangerous adventure. Still anxious to find something new, she broke her boundaries; and, at last, leaving home and friends, moved from place to place, until she had repeatedly compassed the globe, and seen almost every land, and sailed on almost every sea of the south, the east, and the west. Yet, wherever she went, she never forgot that she was Dafydd Cadwaladyr’s daughter.

Good-will, sterling integrity, and perfect rectitude, were evinced in her whole course of conduct. In principle, in moral excellence, and in religious orthodoxy, she was always steadfast. The influence of her home-training was manifested amidst a thousand inconsistencies, and many apparent contrarieties. She always sought her countrymen and her fellow sectarians, with true and faithful affection, wherever she went; and she found in India, in Africa, and in Australasia, that the name of her father was a passport to recognition, hospitality, and kindness.

The people of Bala have, from generation to generation, been famous for their industry. In a single year they have been known to sell no less than 32,000 dozen pairs of stockings, 10,000 dozen pairs of socks, and 5,500 dozen pairs of gloves, besides unnumbered Welsh wigs, muffetees, and other articles of hosiery, all knit by their own pins, from yarn spun on their own wheels, from the wool of their mountain sheep.

Few persons who have chanced to travel through any part of the Principality can forget the pleasant sight of Welshwomen knitting with unremitting industry while walking along the roads carrying burdens upon their heads. On summer evenings, before the husband returned from his work, while the children, released from school, played together out of doors, the Bala housewife would often take her baby and her knitting to enjoy an hour or two of social converse at a neighbour’s cottage; or a group of matrons and maidens would assemble together in some pleasant nook where sunshine and shade softly mingled,

‘And whilst the nimble Cambrian rills

Danced hy-day-gies amongst the hills’1

around them, ply their work with busy fingers, and sing together the sweet national airs of their country, pausing at times to relate to each other some wild legendary tale, connected by tradition either with the place, or with the tune.

On such occasions Cadwaladyr’s daughter was often a listener, though forbidden to attend their regular parties. Her habit of incessant useful occupation may be traced to such early examples. She excels, like a true Bala woman, in the use of her knitting-pins. It is still customary in many parts of the Principality – and in her younger days it was general – that all the materials of clothing for the family, and all the woven fabrics used in the house should be prepared at home.

The sound of spinning-wheels was heard in every cottage – yea, in every dwelling – and busy housewives and their daughters spun the wool of the native sheep into yarn. Reserving what they required for knitting, they dyed some of it bright red for children’s socks, blue or grey for their husband’s stockings, and black for their own.

The chief part of the yarn they took to the village weavers, who, like the Welsh housewives, were skilful in the preparation of vegetable dyes from native plants. At their looms it was woven into cloth, for coats, and cloaks, and riding-skirts; into flannels of various sorts and patterns, for under-clothing and gowns; into blankets, and bed-rugs, and counterpanes.

Flax and hemp, being purchased at the nearest town, were also spun at home, and taken to the village weaver to be made into different sorts of strong linen cloth for all family uses.

Then, also, as now, the village tailor took his seat on the kitchen table of every household in its turn, to shape the home-made materials into clothes for the master and his boys, or to patch their old suits. In Elizabeth Cadwaladyr’s days, he also cut out the petticoats and bobtails, and bedgowns, for the mother and her girls.

Dwellers in mountain lands often notice heavy masses of cloud pausing and settling over the summits, and shaping themselves to imitative forms. They are not equally observant in tracing the effects of those mountains upon their own minds.