Penrhyn Castle.

To be reminded of the 'fungoid region' of our past can be an unsettling experience when visiting an architectural monument of such grandeur as Penrhyn Castle, built in the 1820s and 30s, in its magnificent setting between the Menai Straits and Snowdonia, but there is no building which illustrates so graphically the role which slave plantation profits played in the growth of British economic power.

Little noticed at the time of its publication in 1944, the Trinidadian historian, Eric Williams', Capitalism and Slavery has since become a seminal book on the Industrial Revolution and still rouses fierce controversy as historians debate the effects of slavery and its abolition on British economy and society. Whatever the precise relationship may be, there can be no doubt of the link between West Indian money and the economic take-off of North Wales through the entrepreneurial skill of Richard Pennant (1739-1808), 1st Baron Penrhyn, a Liverpool merchant and owner of five Jamaican sugar plantations. North Wales developed economically in a symbolic relationship with Liverpool much as South Wales did with that other great slaving port, Bristol -- the one symbolised by Penrhyn Castle, the other, more domestic in aspect, by Cyfarthfa Castle at Merthyr Tydfil.

Penrhyn was not only the most visible monument to the power of sugar money but also to the cultural divide between Welsh and English. Slate from the nearby Bethesda quarries, which in the nineteenth century dominated world production and consolidated the Pennant family fortune, was the most Welsh of industries, the workforce divided from its masters by language, custom and religion. By the end of the nineteenth century the early rapport between employer and miner was to break down in the great strike of 1900-1903, one of the longest in British working-class history. Penrhyn Castle, with its huge neo-Norman keep, towers and battlements is the most dramatic expression of the 'Norman Yoke' which was to strew the British countryside with castellated mansions -- Eastnor, Belvoir, Windsor and many others, but what the naturalist and traveller Thomas Pennant observed of Caernavon Castle, could equally well be applied to Penrhyn -- it was a 'magnificent badge of servitude'.

The Pennants could claim Welsh ancestors in Flintshire, one of whom was the Abbot of Basingwerk whose great-grandson Gifford Pennant emigrated to Jamaica in 1658. His family prospered, his son becoming Chief Justice of Jamaica. By the middle of the eighteenth century three sons John, Samuel and Henry had moved to England, becoming anglicised as with so many West Indian absentee landowners. With their wealth and connections the family became important members of the West India interest of absentee proprietors, merchants, commission and political agents. Through intermarriage among themselves and with the English aristocracy West Indians became one of the most formidable pressure groups in eighteenth-century English politics, including such notables as Sir William Codrington, a benefactor of All Souls College, Oxford, and the formidable 'godfather' Sir William Beckford, twice Lord Mayor of London. Their power and influence would continue only so long as the West Indian sugar boom lasted and an unreformed House of Commons enabled them to outbid political rivals.

Of the Pennant family, Samuel was knighted, becoming Lord Mayor of London a year before he died in 1750 and John became a Liverpool merchant as did his son Richard who was MP for Liverpool for nineteen years. The key event in Richard's life was his marriage to the heiress of General Warburton of Winnington Hall, Cheshire (now an ICI club). This was to bring him the income from their Northwich salt mines and the Warburton's half share of the Penrhyn estate at Bangor on the general's death in 1771. In 1783 Richard had been created an Irish peer as Baron Penrhyn of Penrhyn Co. Louth on the recommendation of Charles James Fox (in spite of their opposed views on the abolition of the slave trade). When he acquired the other halfshare in 1785 from the Yonge family in Devon, who were also absentee landlords, the estate, for long fragmented, was reunited, finally anglicising ownership which until the beginning of the eighteenth century had been in Welsh hands.

Richard Pennant was unusual among absentee planters in the close attention he paid to the running of his plantations and the concern he showed for his slaves' material (although not spiritual) well-being. He refers to the folly of treating slaves harshly, although it is difficult to assess if they were treated less harshly because of his instructions to his agent. A contented workforce would enhance profits. He was to remain implacably opposed to the abolition of the slave trade. His instructions to his agent, preserved in the rich Pennant archives in the university library at Bangor are exceptional in their detail, showing an awareness of the possibilities of diversifying out of sugar monoculture, and of close attention to the vagaries of the market, and of production problems. He was not hoodwinked by his agents as was William Beckford (the younger) -- 'England's richest son' in Byron's phrase -- who in spite of his lachrymose concern for animals and sympathy for the working class never showed the slightest interest in either his slaves or plantations, allowing himself to be fleeced by the Wildman brothers thus enabling Colonel Thomas Wildman to buy Newstead Abbey in 1819 from a bankrupt Byron for [pound]90,000 and then to spend a further [pound]100,000 renovating and embellishing it in medieval style.

With his Jamaican income Richard Pennant was able to resuscitate the rundown Penrhyn estate where 'the country was scarcely passable' as Thomas Pennant wrote, 'the roads not better than very bad horse-paths, the cottages wretched, the farmers poor'. In the eighteenth-century tradition of improving landlord Richard introduced new agricultural techniques and crop rotation, planted forests and constructed a road up to Capel Curig where he built a hotel to attract tourists unable to tour the Continent during the Napoleonic war.

As for the slate quarries, they had been neglected, farmed out to quarrymen who produced for a restricted local market. After re-organisation, and expanding Port Penrhyn, some three million slates were annually exported to foreign and domestic markets. In Mirfyn Jones' words 'The Industrial Revolution may have been founded on textiles and powered by steam but it was roofed by slates wrenched from Snowdonia'. Country houses as well as factories were roofed with slate. The entire house at Shugborough (NT) was clad in Penrhyn slate which was also used for shelving, flooring, lavatory seats, tombstones and writing slates for schools of which some 136,000 a year were produced. The huge scale of the Bethesda quarries is caught in Henry Hawkins dramatic painting of 1832. They set the pace for other slate quarries such as those on the nearby Vanyol estate of the Assheton Smiths with Port Dinorwic as their outlet. Price-fixing between the two families avoided conflict.

These innovations were a turning point in the economic development of North Wales. Although industry there remained extractive, in contrast to South Wales' iron and steel works, it transformed the region's infrastructure. Telford's road (now the A5) improved on Richard Pennant's, and his suspension bridge over the Menai Straits, completed in 1828, opened the route to Ireland via Holyhead. West Indian money had originally provided the impetus for this development as it was to do, but with less spectacular results, at Westport in Co. Mayo which the Marquis of Sligo (the governor of Jamaica at the time of slave emancipation in 1838) developed to stimulate prosperity in the west of Ireland.

Although Richard Pennant was the inspiration behind the resurrection of Penrhyn he preferred to spend more time at Winnington, closer to his Liverpool and London interests. Much of the impetus on the ground, therefore, was to come from his land agent, Benjamin Wyatt, one of the astonishing and ubiquitous Wyatt family. James Wyatt the architect ('destroyer' Wyatt of Salisbury Cathedral notoriety) was much patronised by West Indians, as well as by the older aristocracy as in the stable block and the Gothic Hall at Plas Newydd (NT) across the Menai Straits. Beckford's Fonthill Abbey was his masterpiece (of which only a fragment remains). He also built Bowden House at Chippenham for two Bristol West India merchants and Dodington Hall for Sir Christopher Codrington of Barbuda and added a wing to Winnington Hall. But it was yet another brother, Samuel, who modernised the decayed Tudor manor house at Penrhyn, rebuilding it in the Gothic style although none of this now remains having been replaced by the Castle.

When Richard Pennant died childless in 1808, the year after the abolition of the slave trade he had always opposed, 'hoping for the return of better times', which were never to come, he was succeeded by his second cousin George Hay Dawkins-Pennant. He was the son of Henry Dawkins who, on coming to England, bought Standlynch house near Salisbury which he renovated with his Jamaican money in the classical style, under the influence of his archaeologist brother who had re-discovered Baalbeck and Palmyra. On Henry's death in 1814 the house was bought by the nation for the heirs of Nelson who renamed it Trafalgar House.

Far less is known about Dawkins-Pennant than Richard Pennant but, with the sale of Winnington in 1809, the links both with Winnington and Liverpool were broken. This change marks the decline of the family's sugar interests which were replaced by those of slate. Even with two Jamaican fortunes the pre-emancipation decades of the 1820s and 1830s were troubled ones and after receiving [pound]14,684 as compensation for his 764 slaves, the income from Jamaica declined relative to that from the estate and quarries although the family's plantations were not finally sold until 1940. Nevertheless, with three sources of income, money was available for an ambitious building project to consolidate the family's rise to preeminence in North Wales. Richard Pennant's modest Gothic house was now unfashionable and could not compare with the extraordinary Gwyrch Castle completed in 1816 some twenty miles to the east at Abergele, built by a Liverpool architect-historian for the tycoon Bamford Hesketh. With its eighteen towers and against a background of dense forest it was the ultimate picturesque fantasy of Castle Gothic.

Many currents, archaeological, literary and architectural had fed into the Gothic Revival between Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill villa of 1753 and Sir Charles Barry's Houses of Parliament in 1850. Nothing perhaps encapsulates more vividly the change in sensibilities during this period than the way in which the Palladian house, Fonthill Splendens, of William Beckford, built in 1755, was destroyed by his son in 1807, who replaced it by Fonthill Abbey, the most daring, imaginative and preposterous building of the Gothic Revival.

The change in taste which was to alter the direction of nineteenth-century British architecture as well as the appearance of many cities -- for good or ill -- was originally linked with Romanticism, the discovery of Nature, the vogue for the picturesque, the cult of ruins, the yearning for mystery and was a revolt against the predictability of Palladianism. Initially, the revival was a rural phenomenon: the intrusion into towns came later with the explosion of church building after the Church Building Act of 1818 when 214 Anglican churches were built as a consequence of the growth of the urban population as well as the equation of godlessness with revolution. This growth was also aimed at matching the expansion of Dissenters' chapels, especially in Wales, which implied a challenge to the political, as well as the religious, establishment. The Gothic style was an idealisation of the past and part of that traditional conservative, not to say reactionary movement against rationalism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

As far as landowners were concerned 'they built gothic', to quote Kenneth Clark, 'as a parvenu family buys family portraits -- to suggest that their pedigree stretched to remote antiquity'. The vogue for Gothic castles was shared both by old families such as the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel and the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir and by parvenu industrialists and entrepreneurs like Dawkins-Pennant or Francis Crawshay at Cyfarthfa. In either case castellated walls and keeps confirmed the upper classes in their view that they still were the rulers in the aftermath of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and was an expression of a triumphalist nationalism against foreigners and foreign cultural imports like Palladianism.

It is not known why Thomas Hopper was chosen as the architect for Penrhyn. James Wyatt might have been the preferred choice but he had died in 1813. Hopper was not known as a builder of country houses but he had connections, as shown in his work in Westminster Abbey and for the Prince Regent. When commissioned to build Penrhyn he had recently started work on a neo-Norman castle at Gosford, Co. Armagh. This provided a model for the style adopted by the Pennants. Choosing the neo-Norman style rather than that of the neighbouring castles of Edward I would heighten the estate's distinctiveness and might even enhance the family pedigree, much as Beckford claimed descent through his wife, from Edward III. The keep, which is a particular feature at Penrhyn, echoes that at Hedingham Castle in Essex where Hopper was County Surveyor. It has more in common with the stark keep of the Welsh castle at Dolwyddelan than with the squat, concentric complexity of Beaumaris across the water, as well as exuding an air of serious purpose which distinguishes it from the fanciful frivolity of Gwyrch.

Hopper's genius was not confined to the exterior but also to creating a total vision of medievalism by meticulous attention to interior decoration, much of which he designed himself. To achieve authenticity, motifs were culled from illustrations in John Carter's The Ancient Architecture of England (1814) and Joseph Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the English People (1801). 1820 -- the year when building started, coinciding with the publication of Scott's Ivanhoe -- is a seminal date for the rehabilitation of the hitherto despised Middle Ages.

The elaborate plasterwork and intricate stone and wood carving was a tribute to local Welsh craftsmen in marked contrast to thirteenth-century castles which were built by English craftsmen drawn from as far afield as Northumberland and Kent. Unlike at Fonthill, concessions were made to modernity by installing early examples of central heating and piped water. Meanwhile Dawkins-Pennant, driven by a building mania, watched the castle rise from a humble house until its completion a few years before his death in 1840.

Unlike other houses with a West Indian connection, such as Harewood owned by the Lascelles family, socially the most successful of all West Indian merchant dynasties, Penrhyn castle does not ignore its West Indian antecedents. It is true that no family portrait includes a black servant as was common in the eighteenth-century -- as in the Zoffany painting of the family of Sir William Young in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. There is nothing comparable to the portrait in the servant's hall at Erddig (NT) of the black horn player in his red braided jacket with an accompanying poetic commentary. Nor is there any reflection of Richard Pennant's West Indian concerns on his tomb in Llandegai parish church with its toga-clad quarryman. However, interestingly there are six eighteenth-century water colours of the Jamaican countryside and two of the family's plantations painted in 1871, and in the dining room the luxuriance of West Indian foliage is represented in the carvings on the ceiling -- some recognition of the key role which plantation money played in the funding of the family-fortune.

The reason for the absence of a black presence is obvious: there is an understandable reluctance to admit to or come to terms with the slave past. Few were as brazen as Richard Watt, the Liverpool merchant who bought and began to restore Speke Hall (NT) in 1795 and who included three blackamoors in his coat of arms, acknowledging the origin of his wealth derived from Jamaican sugar in the same way as an African head was incorporated in the frieze on the cornice of Liverpool's Town Hall.

Ignorance of African cultures precluded any stimulus to the artistic imagination apart from Egyptian motifs, popular after Nelson's victory over the French fleet at the battle of the Nile in 1798. In the West Indies there were no monuments to admire and imitate, no rajahs to emulate, no martial races against whom colonels could pit their skill on the battlefield. Two hundred years of slave trading had destroyed the ability of Europeans to believe that anything of value beyond commercial profit could come out of Africa and the Caribbean. The contrast with East Indian nabobs could not be more pronounced, especially in their introduction of the fashion for Chinese and Indian furniture and decoration.

Eastern architectural forms found expression in Sir Charles Cochrane's house at Sezincote and less daringly at Warren Hastings' Daylesford, and most spectacularly at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and the Chinese Pagoda at Kew. Even where the West Indies was the source of wealth as in the elder Beckford's Fonthill Splendens it was the Turkish room and the influence of the Arabian Nights which captivated the young Beckford and sowed the seeds for his oriental fantasy Vathek. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's father, returning from Jamaica, embellished his house near Ledbury with oriental motifs where the minaret still incongruously survives. Fashionably at Penrhyn there was an 'India room'.

Although the infusion of West Indian money could be used to foment industrialisation in Wales, more usually it was channelled into other activities such as buying political influence, strengthening ties with the aristocracy through marriage, enabling collectors such as Beckford and the heir to Snowshill (NT) to satisfy their mania endowing charitable institutions like the Bluecoat Chambers in Liverpool and in 'civilising' Cornwall through the foundation of a library at Penzance and the gardens of Trengwainton House (NT).

On balance, it may be that far from stimulating modernisation as with Richard Pennant, West Indian money strengthened the landed aristocracy and the squirearchy, and through a nostalgia for medievalism perpetuated attitudes which contributed to the decline of the industrial spirit. If this was one facet of the West Indian connection there is another, hidden from view like Mr Rochester's mad Creole wife imprisoned in the attic at Thornhill. Lacking positive approbation, African cultures and those of the diaspora have had to emerge from the shadows by self-effort after centuries of ignorance, prejudice and cultural neglect.

The vibrance and creativity of those of African descent in this country today is evidence of the resilience and power of survival by people who have had to live with years of discrimination. The heritage industry should take account of this reality and the recently opened Transatlantic Slavery Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool is attempting to do this by making a much needed contribution to the difficult task of coming to terms with our slaving past and towards a reassessment of the darker side of our 'national heritage'.

FOR FURTHER READING:

Penrhyn Castle (The National Trust, 1994); J. Lindsay, 'The Pennants of jamaica, 1665-1808, I&II, Transactions of the Caernavonshire Historical Society, vols. 43 & 44, 1982 & 83; D. Knight, Gentlemen of fortune -- the men who made their Fortunes in Britain's Slave Colonies, (Frederick Muller, 1978); A.H. Dodd, The Industrial Revolution in North Wales, (University of Wales Press, 1971); R. Merfyn Jones, The North Wales Quarrymen 1874-1922, (University of Wales Press, 1981); K. Clark, The Gothic Revival (Constable, 1950); B.L. Solow and S.L. Engerman, British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: the Legacy of Eric Williams, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Article Details

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Title Annotation:	North Wales, U.K.
Author:	Hennessy, Alistair
Publication:	History Today
Date:	Jan 1, 1995
Words:	3253
Previous Article:	Ham House.
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Topics:	Castles Wales Historic sites Slave trade History