Treforys: "A Sort of Johannesburg". Really?

A sad reflection of the Welsh heritage industry is that too few people are at the centre of all things historical. When they make mistakes, they tend to be highly resistant to accepting them.

So this is just a placeholder, to prevent backpeddling and rewriting accounts over the very curious case of Treforys, a planned village built for workers of the neighbouring, very short-lived Gorsedda slate quarry in the mid-1850s.

The eerie remains of Treforys and the Gorsedda quarry at which its occupants worked. The quarry proved to have poor, unusable slate and closed after only 20 years after its initial development.

 

What do we know about Treforys that is reliable?  Not very much, seems to be the immediate answer. We don't even have a known, cited reference to the village actually being known by that name, nor does the name appear on any map, though the village - or what was left of it - did.

A report - Louise Barker and Dr David Gwyn, March 2018, Slate Landscape of North-West Wales, World Heritage Bid, Statements of Significance, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Govannon Report GC401b For Gwynedd Archaeological Trust - was recently cleared for making public after languishing in the offices of Gwynedd Archaeological Trust for several years, with no formal agreement ever having been put in place for publication or sharing with the public in other ways.

This contains the oft-repeated claim - the origin is unclear - that Treforys was like "a sort of Johannesburg", this being explained in the report to mean "a wild and lawless place".

For sure, the slate quarrying and mining areas of north Wales could be very wild. Back in 2003, when I was renovating an old quarryman's cottage in Talysarn, adjoining the Dorothea and other Nantlle quarries, I found a newspaper page stuffed between internal wall stones, telling of a shooting in the very same village - in 1903. Frequent wars of the time, combined with the abundance of quarry explosives, meant that means of wounding and killing to settle scores were easily obtained.

And so it may well have been that this remote planned village, almost certainly a great idea on some remote Englishman's draughting table but a very bad idea indeed when transferred onto the real, boggy, windswept mountainside, was wild and lawless. But it was perhaps more likely to have generally been peaceful. The small number of people there - just 9 of the 36 houses are said to have been occupied in 1861 - meant peer pressure, rather than the formal systems of the law, would have held sway over people's conduct. 

But there is a big problem with applying the name Johannesburg and its supposed nature to Treforys: Treforys was built in 1857-8 and abandoned by no later than 1871, when there are apparently - I haven't checked yet - no returns from the village. Johannesburg wasn't founded or named until 1886 - a fact that is very well-documented and relates to political machinations of the time aimed at ultimately overthrowing British rule in South Africa.

Nobody has ever claimed Treforys was occupied after 1871, the last year anyone could have lived there, before the Census enumerators arrived. So it must be that this comparison with Johannesburg was made at least 15 years after it had been abandoned and, quite possibly, a lot later than that. Accordingly, the true nature of Treforys, and whether it could properly be compared to Johannesburg, was, at best, simply a supposition, a guess. 

Once all the evidence is checked, I'll come back to this claim and see what I learned in the process.