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Pennant Lloyd shuttled between the British elite and the resentful majority in Wales, serving as a diplomat amid class conflict. He was the younger son of an English landowner who owned just enough property to secure a spot in the landed gentry. Lloyd served as a commissioned officer in the British Army in India, but never beyond the rank of ensign. When he inherited Pentrehobyn from his grandmother, he inherited a new name, a coat of arms, and an estate without enough tenants or agricultural output to sustain either its own expenses or Lloyd’s family. So, he took up a position as the agent to Colonel Edward Douglass-Pennant, one of Britain’s most powerful landowners.
As agent, Lloyd oversaw all of his employer’s holdings in Wales. Douglas-Pennant’s 43,000-acre Welsh estate encompassed 800 tenant cottages, one of the largest slate quarries in the world, and whole villages complete with schools and churches. Douglas-Pennant’s family had grown rich off of slave-run sugar plantations in Jamaica, and now he was multiplying the fortune in Wales. Queen Victoria ennobled Douglas-Pennant, making him “Lord Penrhyn” forevermore. But the local population did not welcome the hegemony of a handful of absentee lords like Penrhyn. The hundreds of impoverished tenants who hammered slate in the quarry and worked the land spoke Welsh, worshiped in non-conformist churches, and maintained their own separate culture. Meanwhile, the landowning elite spoke English, worshiped in established Anglican churches, and spent their time in London. Playing up a separate, Welsh identity, liberals called on the majority to reject the gentry, reform the landlord system, and cast off Tory power.
In the second half of the 19th century, Wales rumbled with political discontent, and the landed gentry wasn’t safe. Lloyd had to navigate the divide between the British elite and the Welsh majority, and his employer’s determination to maximize productivity and profit made it a difficult task. Just before Lloyd took up his post, Lord Penrhyn bought up a swath mountainside called the Llanllechid Waste Lands from the crown. For centuries, the land had been a communal resource where locals cut peat for their fires and grazed their sheep. But Lord Penrhyn disregarded Welsh custom, instead enclosing the land and barring the tenants from resources they depended on. A couplet, translated from the Welsh, spread through the resentful tenants: “You will be hung for stealing a sheep from the mountain, but for stealing the mountain you will be made a Lord.” Just a few years later, Lord Penrhyn’s own tenants took advantage of voting reform to shove his son out of Parliament, exchanging a staunch Tory for a radical liberal. The lord took his revenge by firing dozens of quarrymen with liberal views, although he insisted politics had nothing to do with his decision.
Instead of meeting his tenants’ demands for higher wages, Lord Penrhyn preferred doling out grand philanthropic projects, and Lloyd was in no position to change his employer’s mind. Instead, he nurtured his lordship’s projects, which ranged from the paternalistic (a model village with no public house to discourage alcoholism) to the necessary (improvements to decaying cottages) to the modernizing (improved drainage and new breeds of livestock). Although he spoke no Welsh, Lloyd tried to earn the tenants’ trust. He could say with pride that he knew the conditions of each of the 800 cottages on the estate, and that he had only been criticized to his face twice during his 18 years as agent.
In 1874, the quarrymen shook Lord Penrhyn’s grip on the Welsh economy. They demanded a union to canvas on working conditions, wages, and management. They earned little, and their work demanded constant exposure to explosives and injury. Many quarrymen lived in cramped, filthy barracks and earned barely enough to sustain themselves. They had no path out of poverty. But Lord Penrhyn resisted any “interference with the rights of proprietors” and threatened to close the quarry rather than let his workers unionize. The workers trusted Lloyd, and called on him to find some compromise. For seven painful weeks, Lloyd moved between the workers and his employer, trying to convince the stubborn Lord Penrhyn to cede to some of their demands. He was under so much pressure that he had a heart attack; it almost killed him. But after weeks of intolerable stress, the Pennant Lloyd Agreement was signed. It granted the workers rights, including a minimum wage. The quarrymen were so proud of the document that they called it their charter and handed out souvenir prints.
Lloyd retired just a few years later in 1877. At last, he could leave Lord Penrhyn behind and spend his days at Pentrehobyn. Finally home, he was able to express his opinions freely, without tip-toeing around his employer. He became a radical liberal intent on helping the Welsh underclass secure their political and economic freedom.
Thank you to Dr. Shaun Evans of Bangor University for his extensive research.
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