The book will appear by November 4th 2024. Why so precise? 2024 will be 125 years after Maesteg Harlequins was first formed. November 4th being the known date of the first game they played.
If anyone has any information or would like to assit in the publication of the book. Please feel free to contact club Secratary Alan Thomas who will put you in touch with the person responsible for the research.
Hopefully you will enjoy this early extract.
“Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.” – Karl Marx
-oOo-
To tell the story of Maesteg Harlequins RFC or any organisation for that matter, the climate and environment: political, social, cultural, demographical and geographical, must be considered. Merely stating the club played its first game in 1899 simply isn’t enough. What brought about their existence, especially as the Llynfi valley was not what it is today? These have to be understood and the previous decades have to be examined in order to ascertain the establishment of Maesteg Harlequins RFC.
By the late 1800s the Llynfi valley had metamorphosed. At the start of the nineteenth century the area was a sleepy, slow-paced, sparsely populated agricultural valley of scattered farmsteads. The hilltop village of Llangynwyd was the centre of attention, mainly due to the church dedicated to Saint Cynwyd and the graveyard where everyone went at life’s end.
On the cusp of a new century, the area had been transformed into an important, well-established industrial area. As it is today, the new town of Maesteg was the focal point of a valley now heaving with people, set in the middle of a ribbon development of expanding villages.
The previous soft serenity of a pastoral existence, where nature provided the loudest dins was replaced by the harsh banging, clanking, exploding uproar of mass mining and the elemental forging industries.
Industry was all that mattered. A population explosion was the human fuel of the Industrial Revolution. The working classes sought their own ‘El Dorado’ provided by large-scale processing and excavation of the area’s previously hidden ‘mineralogical deposits. First it was iron, then the mass of coal which lay untouched for epochs, deep below the earth’s surface.
No longer were men at the mercy of Mother Nature; her fine weather and good harvests. Men could control the environment through engineering and innovation. They were able to enter the bowels of the earth to extract its riches and produce metals through smelting on a never seen before scale. This allowed wages to be as consistent as the market forces allowed. Maesteg iron was certainly wanted in the early to mid-nineteenth century and its coal for much longer.
Consequently, employment and wages in these new industrial areas were relatively secure, compared to the countryside’s reliance on good weather and bounteous harvests. Subsequently, people were attracted from the rural areas of Wales. Then wider Britain and further afield, to the new conurbations built on iron and coal.
In 1871, for the first time Britain’s urban population outnumbered the nation’s rural residents. Swamping these previously quiet valleys, families squeezed together to amass untold wealth for the major industrialists and landowners. A wealth the working class could only dream of.
Dreams. Never before had so many of the nation’s voiceless been brought so close together in such immense numbers. Ideas of social, cultural and religious significance began to grow among the heaving masses of people. Previously these ideas would be without an audience, taking decades to filter through isolated communities or even forgotten because of the slow pace of disseminating new or innovative philosophies. Now, with greater numbers in close proximity, these ideas quickly mushroomed among the masses. It created a collective political, religious, sociological, ideological and community consciousness. Anger at injustice or enthusiasm over a collective idea, produced a wonderful community spirit at the unfairness or joys of life.
Part of this shared social ‘awareness’ included the sphere of recreation. There were few activities for the masses to enjoy, particularly young men who were a large demographic in industrial centres.
Sporting participation away from the pitch-black pits, iron and tin infernos or in some cases the fields were beginning to burgeon, as Wales, Britain, indeed Europe moved towards a new era, a ‘people’s century’.
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was still being debated. People were by and large still ‘believers’ and great numbers were involved in chapel, choirs and at the other end of the spectrum, the devil drink. Collective sporting activities were rare in Maesteg. That was apart from the summer months when the ordinary man could venture to the cricket field. Cricket was introduced to the valley by societies elite, public school educated landowners, entrepreneurs and industrialists. A team named The Good Templars played cricket in the town from 1826.
A public-school sport did catch on in Wales. Unlike much of England, Scotland and Ireland, it was firmly adopted by the working class. As people migrated west past Offa’s Dyke, the rugby gospel spread like wild-fire throughout the working classes from the south-west of England. In 1891, the South Wales Daily Post observed:
“[rugby] has steadily gained in favour during the last few years, until it has now become the great pastime of the people. For one club that existed ten years ago, there are now twenty and the influence the game has exercised on the youth of the country has been all for the good cannot be gainsaid, occasionally denunciating utterances from the pulpit notwithstanding.”
It appears this wasn’t quite the case for Maesteg in the early 1890s, but the epidemic eventually took hold certainly by the start of the new century.
Politics, education and the press combined to play huge roles in the popular endorsement of rugby.
Wales was fairly well served by the chapels as a medium for education but it wasn’t enough. The 1870 Education Act was the first of a number of acts of parliament passed between 1870 and 1893, which created compulsory education in England and Wales for children aged between five and 13. Known as the Forster Education Act after its main advocate, it followed the path laid out in 1847 and Brad y Llyfrau Gleision [Treachery of the Blue Books which denegrated Wales, its people, religion and culture]. It was linguistic genecide, yet by giving eight years of education, levels of Illiteracy were decreasing as children had an opportunity to learn and at least be able to read.
The 1847 Factory Act started the reduction of weekly working hours. Further campaigns between 1850 and 1870 fought for secured a five and a half days working week. With more free time and an end to the six and a half days working week, no longer would the Welsh believe the somewhat upsetting statement:
“Roedden ni'n meddwl bod y Saes’ o'r enw Dydd Sul ‘Sunday’, oherwydd mai
hwn oedd yr unig ddiwrnod i ni weld yr haul.”
[We thought the English called Sunday ‘Sunday,’ because it was the only day we got to see the sun.]
Sporting journalism became a lucrative business from the 1880s. With literacy levels rising, sporting editions of many newspapers flourished. The enlarged readership would feast on popular opinions, animated match reports, illustrated pen-portraits of leading players, plus respond in writing to contentious published remarks which slighted their precious clubs.
Travelling to some venues could prove too expensive or time consuming, but advancements in communications meant match reports would be out in print by mid evening, thus feeding the need to ‘know the score’. More and more rugby was playing a part in the development of villages, towns, groups and individuals; giving people a purpose outside of the brute coal and smelting environments.
There was opposition. The Church being a most vocal dissenting voice. Some within the Church opposed the rough and tumble of rugby, especially as teams would invariably attach themselves to public houses. Yet there was some ecclesiastical support of rugby, with some members of the clergy seeing the game as confirmation of the Church’s endorsement of: bodily health (Smith and Williams). Many among the clergy were educated at universities which advocated the sport. There were many Reverends who represented the Welsh team, including the first Welsh captain James Bevan. Furthermore the Reverend Alban Davies, 1914 captain of possibly the most brutal Welsh pack ever.
Another consideration was the sabre rattling across close waters and distant lands. Sport was seen as an excellent way of keeping young men fit for any warring duties that may come the nation’s way. Two Boer Wars, a Zulu conflict, wars against the Mahdists (1881-1899), Ekumeku Movement (1883-1914), Semantans, Australian Aborigines, Boxer Rebellion, plus many shorter conflicts were still to come from the 1880s onwards.
Therefore, it is interesting to note that two of Maesteg RFCs first Presidents were Reverend Stephen Jackson and a Captain J.G. Morgan. Reverend Jackson was an alumni of Lampeter College where the wings of rugby were first spread in Wales.
The South Wales Challenge Cup had set south Wales alight with rugby fervour.
The South Wales Cup had stimulated such an interest in competitive rugby Smith and Williams [p.5].
It’s success bringing much civic pride to the big Welsh towns of Cardiff, Newport, Swansea and Llanelli. Smaller towns wanted a ‘crack’ at the cup and clubs were formed and developed. Such was the success of the South wales Cup, regional competitions were established. Additionally so were valley and town leagues.
Maesteg RFC became a WRU member club in 1895. They had the seal of approval and with it they wanted a team worthy of competing against the best in Wales. The bigger the pool of local talent, the better for the Old Parish and it is against this entire backdrop of wider scale innovations that the game of rugby developed. Sport was a by-product of industry. The population of Maesteg exploded as a result of circumstances caused by the Industrial Revolution. Seeking work and an opportunity to exist people came from far and wide, thrown together like clay on a potter’s wheel and formed into something new. That clay was moulded into many different forms to create the rich history of Maesteg, the Llynfi valley and many other towns and valleys across Wales.
In this case, like-minded young men wanted to enjoy themselves through the medium of Rugby Union and in1899, fifteen of them took to the rugby field under the banner - Maesteg Harlequins.
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