Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones
to hounds. Since then, Dolerw has been successively a Catholic school, a convent, and a Voluntary Sector Resource Centre, four dissociated words that give away public funding.
Born in 1834 in Llanllwchaiarn near Newtown, Pryce was the illegitimate son of Mary Goodwin and, according to the parish record, his “reputed father William Jones.” He built a small draper’s shop into the Royal Welsh Warehouse or RWW, a concern primarily based on processing wool, the staple product of that countryside, into flannel, blankets, sleeping bags, extending the range gradually into clothing and household goods. Trading internationally, he pioneered marketing by mail order, using his influence to have a railway track laid where it suited him and organising special trains to and from London for his business. Mr Sears and Mr Roebuck are said to have visited, learnt how he operated, and sold him founder shares in their business. The RWW, a huge lump of red brick, still stands today as he left it, with the family name up on the roofline in outsize white lettering. A stone set into the wall by the main door commemorates a gold medal the RWW was awarded in Vienna in 1873, by coincidence the very year in which Comte Vasili observed Gustav doing himself a favour by buying good stock cheaply. By 1880, the RWW was employing 6,000 workers and had about 250,000 customers worldwide. When Queen Victoria knighted him in 1887 he hyphenated and duplicated his name, to become Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones. He enjoys a nationalist image as a model entrepreneur who proved that the Welsh could succeed through their own endeavors and so dispense with English patronage. His obituary in a local newspaper, the Montgomery Express, concluded that his business acumen amounted to genius and had brought worldwide renown to the Principality.
The telephone rang one day at Pentwyn and a friendly stranger informed me that great-uncle Victor had left portraits of these forebears of mine to one of the churches at Newtown. The sanctuary where the portraits were hanging was being converted into a badminton court and unless I retrieved them that very afternoon they would be put on a bonfire. Far from flattering the couple, the artist, Arthur Nowell, depicts stiff and forbidding figures against a dark background, he in a morning coat, she holding a teacup with no suggestion that she might offer a cup to anyone else.
The historical record bears out Arthur Nowell’s characterization of his sitters. At a moment when a general election was in the offing I was in the main street of Builth Wells, the small town closest to Pentwyn. For a long time this part of Wales has been politically volatile. An elderly man came out of his shop to ask me, “Why aren’t you standing for parliament?” I asked if he thought I should. “You should be like Sir Pryce, he used to give us five shillings to go and break the Liberals’ windows.” The Liberals were one or another member of the Hanbury-Tracy family, owners of Gregynog, a grand house, and accustomed to treating the position of Lord Lieutenant of the county or election to parliament as member for the constituency of Montgomery Boroughs as tribute rightfully due to their status. Between 1880 and 1895 Sir Pryce, a Conservative, engaged in a political contest with the Hanbury-Tracys. Sir Pryce won the majority of the elections in this period, and went to Westminster with a dozen Welsh MPs in his pocket. Thanks to this parliamentary machine, it is said, he was able to promote his interests, for instance getting the railway track to Newtown laid right up to the Royal Welsh Warehouse.
Celebrating victory in the 1892 election, Sir Pryce and Eleanor went by train to Llanidloes, half an hour or so away from Newtown but still in the constituency. This was Liberal territory and a crowd was waiting to greet them with three cheers for Frederick Hanbury-Tracy, the loser, and to boo (“hoot” is the word in the press accounts) the Pryce-Joneses. After taking tea in the one and only hotel, Sir Pryce and his wife retreated to the station, and on the way were jostled and bruised. Losing his temper, he hit out with his stick. When he struck a little girl in the face and drew blood, a police inspector stopped him by taking hold of the stick. By the time that Sir Pryce boarded the train home, he had lost his hat and the angry crowd then burnt it.
The Liberals then accused him of buying votes. The petition was heard by Baron Pollock and Mr. Justice Wills. One charge was that Lady Pryce-Jones had called on the wife of one John Withers, “a somewhat prominent Liberal,” and promised to get their daughter into Ashford High School for Welsh girls if Mr Withers voted for Sir Pryce. Another charge was that in pubs in Llanidloes one Abel Goldsworthy, in the employment of Sir Pryce but “a person with no money,” offered money or drinks to bribe people to vote Conservative. The local Montgomery Express was delighted by the final verdict that Sir Pryce had nothing to answer for, writing that he had gained “one of the greatest victories that has ever been achieved by any Welshman.” Years later, however, the considered opinion of the left-wing historian Henry Pelling was that this episode almost unseated Sir Pryce and he and his Conservative colleague indeed formed a corrupt political machine. In the 1895 election, Sir Edward Pryce-Jones, the eldest son (titled because he had been made a baronet), took over the seat, and the Hanbury-Tracy family retreated to Gregynog and abandoned the constituency.
One of Sir Pryce’s four daughters had married a Powell and lived at Plas-y-Bryn near Newtown. Commissioned by a magazine to interview Dilys Powell, a relation of theirs and the veteran film critic of The Sunday Times, I discovered quite fortuitously that she was a Plas-y-Bryn cousin, and probably the last person alive able to recall visits to Dolerw before the First War. At tea on the lawn one summer day when she was still a child, she recalled, Sir Pryce had sat her on his knee.
My grandfather Harry, the youngest of Sir Pryce’s sons, gave me the present of a toy horse and cart in wood that the estate carpenter at Dolerw had made for him. His nanny had taught him some nursery songs in Welsh, as folklore rather than genuine culture. Unlike his brothers, he played no part in the Royal Welsh Warehouse. Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, thoroughly anglicized him. His social standing changed. Popular, called PJ by his friends, he exemplified the English gentleman of his day. The gaze was firm, the manners polite, the voice reserved. The slope of his shoulders made him appear slight, at a physical disadvantage, but this was misleading. He excelled at all sports with a ball. Decades after the event, he still minded that he had played well all one summer in the Eton cricket eleven only to be dropped to twelfth man for the all-important match against Harrow. Almost every day he wore the tie of a cricket club, either the MCC or I Zingari. If ever he felt socially insecure as the son of a tradesman who furthermore was illegitimate, he gave no sign of it.
A very good shot, he received invitations to grand houses for shooting weekends with grand people. According to his game book, he was regularly invited to shoot with Lord Pembroke at Wilton. Another of the guns there was Guy Dawnay, who further invited him to shoot at Beningbrough in Yorkshire, the house of his parents Colonel Lewis and Lady Victoria Dawnay. Guy had a younger brother Alan, and a sister Vere. At first sight, Harry fell for Vere though too shy to declare it to her. Lewis Dawnay and both his sons were in the Coldstream Guards and seemingly swept a willing Harry away into the regiment. He and Guy reported to Wellington barracks together in October 1899, two weeks after the outbreak of the Boer war.
A short month later, with no preparation and even less training, and aged only twenty-one, he was in action. “We started at 4 A.M. and met the enemy at 6.30 at Modder River,” as he described the battle to his mother at Dolerw, “they were heavily entrenched, in a very strong position, about 5,000…. I personally had a rough day of it, as I swam the river twice with Colonel Codrington and a few others to find we were cut off and the Boers were on us … when it got dark, they suddenly began, they simply poured shots into us … we were simply lying in the open. I really gave up all hopes and only prayed that I should be finished off without pain. We were ordered to cease fire and retire, had the enemy advanced we must have been annihilated, as they were 800 opposite our 100 and only about 300 yards away.” As so often in that war, courage narrowly averted military disaster.
The idiom in which he often writes has since passed into something close to parody, but it served as understatement to those reading his letters. “The line was awfully cut up by Boers…. The Boers gave us a warmish time…. I had a ripping bathe in the dark … fighting really is an awful game.” But already by April 1900 he was complaining, “It is too annoying this war going on as it is. I really don’t see how it is going to end. We seem to be losing instead of gaining ground.” Ten months later he had had enough: “I feel as though I have been out here all my life.” On two pages he lists the novels he has been reading, all long forgotten with the exception