The Peoples King Read Online Free PDF Page B

read, 'Brynmawr Welcomes Your Majesty and We Need Your Help'. 51

    The royal train took the King to Cwmbran. Crowds were waiting at the station, and as the royal train steamed in they sang ' Mae Hen Wlad fy Nhadau' - 'Land of My Fathers' - and then the National Anthem. Here the King met a group of twenty-five workless men, several of whom had taken part in a national march of the unemployed to London the previous month. They had trudged from the valleys to Cardiff, then to Newport, Bristol, Bath, Chippenham and Swindon before reaching Reading, Slough and finally London. Like many of the frequent marches of the unemployed to London, this one had achieved nothing. In despair, the unemployed of Cwmbran presented the King with a petition asking for his help to start a sewerage scheme and a plant for the extraction of oil from coal. 'We believe you can accomplish much for the depressed areas by your influence with these recommendations', declared the petition. The closing of various works in Cwmbran, it added,
    has rendered 2,250 men unemployed. We, the unemployed of Cwmbran, have been looking forward to your Majesty's visit with the hope that some tangible benefit and improvement will be the direct result . . . Our women grow prematurely old and many are broken in the unequal fight against the conse­quences of unending penury . . . The bodies of our children are stunted and frail. 52
    The royal car picked up the King at Cwmbran and took him to Llanfrecha Grange, an old mansion converted into a domestic training centre for boys. It was described in the official programme of the royal tour as an experimental venture to 'meet the demand for house and kitchen boys' that had resulted from 'the continued difficulty in obtaining girl domestic servants. South Wales was selected for such a centre because Welsh boys were regarded as particularly suitable for work of this kind'. 53 All the roads to the Grange were crowded with spectators, and the long drive to the mansion was lined with Girl Guides and Boy Scouts, dressed in uniform. The King joked for a while with the trainees and posed for a photograph with them. Then he was driven up the valley to Blaenavon, on the hillside, where over a third of the men were unemployed. The King was officially received near the Workmen's Hall, and the bells of St Peter's Church rang out a peal of welcome. 'It was more like a family party than a Royal visit', said one spectator. Edward shared some of his thoughts on the condition of the valleys with the people of Blaenavon. To an unemployed shop assistant, he said that, 'Something will be done for Wales in general'. 54
    The sprawling hilly town of Pontypool was the next stop. Here, Edward inspected a rally of Welsh Guards Old Comrades and ambu­lance men. As they chatted, one of them reminded him that they had met previously on the Somme in 1916. As Edward took a salute from the massed groups, he turned and raised his hat, standing to attention. The crowds cheered wildly. It was then time to go with Sir Kingsley Wood to the new Penygarn housing estate, which was part of Ponty­pool Council's slum clearance housing programme. Housing was a particular interest of the King: he had rehoused many of the Duchy of Cornwall's tenants in Kennington, London, and had improved farm workers' houses on Duchy estates in the West Country. 55 Shocked by the grim conditions of the slums he visited during his industrial tours as Prince of Wales, he had organized a dinner in London to address the issue of poor housing. To this meeting he invited not only experts and philanthropists, but also Ramsay MacDonald, who was then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Minister of Health. Edward later observed that this was very likely the first debate on housing that ever took place under the auspices of the Prince of Wales. 56
    'Terrible! Terrible!' exclaimed the King, when he was told that over a third of the tenants on the Penygarn