Robert Owen ( 14/5/1771 - 17/11/1858) - Pioneering Welsh Social Reformer

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Robert Owen who was born on 14/5/1771 in Newtown, Powys ,was a Welsh manufacturer who turned  into a social reformer, and became one of the most influential advocates and founders of utopian socialism and the co-operative movement.
His father had a small business as  a saddler and iron-monger, his mother came from one of the prosperous farming families. A bright and capable child, Robert was schooled at Newtown and then, at the age of 10, was articled to a draper in the town. In due course he moved to London to continue his trade and establish himself in the world.
This he managed to do with some alacrity. A move to the sprawling, manufacturing metropolis of Manchester saw Robert Owen installed as manager  of a cotton mill employing 500 people. He also became a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which discussed the ideas of reformers and philosophers of the Enlightenment, and it was here that his ideas on social reform began to take shape. 
After a visit to Glasgow he fell in love with Caroline Dales, the daughter of a New Lanark mills proprietor called David Dale who he was friendly with. With the financial support of several businessmen from Manchester, in 1810 Owen purchased Dale's four textile factories in New Lanark for £60,000.After his subsequent marriage with Miss Dale in September 1799, he set up home there. Encouraged by his previous success in the management in Manchester,  he had already formed the idea of conducting New Lanark on higher principles with  an interest in helping the poor and put his profits into a series of radical experiments, having been appalled  by the inhuman working and living conditions of his century. 

New Lanark was the springboard from which Owen’s Socialism was launched, and sweeping changes began to take place in and around the local community. For many years the poor had been living in filthy, cramped conditions, and Owen set about enlarging the houses of his workforce. Up until this time, local residents frequently dumped their waste in the streets, but Owen reorganised refuse collection and even built new streets. To ensure health, he urged his workers to appoint a visiting committee, which maintained the standards of cleanliness and domestic economy.

He set out to  make his new cotton factory,  a cooperative factory community that focused more on the  well- being of the community than on profits. Owen set out to make New Lanark an experiment in philanthropic management from the outset. He believed that a person's character is formed by the effects of their environment. Owen was convinced that if he created the right environment, he could produce rational, good and humane people. He argued that people were naturally good but they were corrupted by the harsh way they were treated For his mill, he set up an infant school, a day care center  for working mothers, providing education and health care to children starting when they were three. Children did not have to work in the mill until they were  10, which was revolutionary at the time. He also set up a cooperative shop that provided high quality goods at  reasonable costs for the mill workers and their families. Owen believed that education and safe cooperative work conditions would promote a happy, healthy and productive community of workers. This would not only be good for the business, but for the entire community. Owen was also a strong opponent of physical punishment in schools and factories and immediately banned its use in New Lanark.The Mill became a successful model that prominent social reformers and industrialists visited.

                                    

                                           New Lanark Mills

He also found time to campaign and lecture on his view of social reform, writing his personal manifesto, A New View of Society in 1812-13. In 1816, he wrote: "I know that society may be formed to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold."

Owen also toured the country making speeches on his experiments at New Lanark. He  published his speeches as pamphlets and sent free copies to influential people in Britain. In one two month period he spent £4,000 publicizing his activities. In his speeches, Owen argued that he was creating a "new moral world, a world from which the bitterness of divisive sectarian religion would be banished"

Owen was also a religious free thinker. He was critical of organised religion, such as the Church of England. He argued that religion tended to create prejudice in men, which was a barrier to peace and harmony.

“I was forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity — not for a sect, or a party, or for a country or a colour — but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do good.” Life of Robert Owen (1857)  his autobiography

Over the next few years Robert Owen developed political views that has resulted in him being described as the "father of socialism". In the Report to the County of Lanark (1821) suggested that in order to avoid fluctuations in the money supply as well as the payment of unjust wages, labour notes representing hours of work might become a superior form of exchange medium. This was the first time that Owen "proclaimed at length his belief that labour was the foundation of all value, a principle of immense importance to later socialist thought".

However in 1824,  he had become so disillusioned with Capitalism that he left for America. For five years, he attempted to establish a Socialist community at New Harmony in Indiana, but his efforts were in vain. He lost a fortune in the process.

When he returned  to England in 1829, Owen was surprised to discover that  a movement had sprung up in his name, the 'Owenites' who were engaged in laying foundations for the Co-operative Movement. "The New Society is to be based," explained the pioneers, " on the free association of producers in guilds and manufacturing societies strong enough to dispense  with employers and with  the exploitation of labour for private profit.

Max Beer, the author of A History of British Socialism (1919) has argued that the word "socialist" was used to describe Owen's followers: "Common to all Owenites was the criticism and disapproval of the capitalist or competitive system, as well as the sentiment that the United Kingdom was on the eve of adopting the new views. A boundless optimism prevaded the whole Owenite school, and it filled its adherents with the unshakable belief that the conversation of the nation to socialism was at hand, or but a question of a few years.

After many disputes with his partners, who were always more interested in profits than in Owen's version of ideal living, he resigned from New Lanark in 1828. Owen turned to the formation of co-operative villages, some of which were already being run on Owenite lines in Scotland, Ireland and Hampshire.Although these communities eventually failed, the communitarian tradition persisted in Victorian England and elsewhere. Following the failure of these co-operative villages he entered into the trade union field, and his road to the New Moral World he now saw through the organisation of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, which within a few weeks of its formation in 1834 had enrolled more than one million members. This too collapsed in 1834, following the deportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and Owen continuously fought for their return to England.

During a visit to his hometown and birthplace  of Newtown, Wales on November 17th, 1858, he was suddenly taken ill. On his deathbed  he said: "I gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded. I have been ahead of my time."

He subsequently died and was buried in a local church yard. The Co-operative Union placed a memorial tablet near his grave in 1902. In 1956 a memorial statue was erected with funds raised by the Labour and Co-operative Movement.
This visionary Welsh man's ideals  who pioneered the prioritisation of welfare over profit,  have continued to inspire many trade and cooperative movements ever since. Friedrich Engels described him as "a man of almost sublime, childlike character," who was, nevertheless, "one of the few born leaders of men." He added: Every social movement and real advance in England on behalf of the workers links with the name of Robert Owen."
Owenism  has since exerted a significant influence on various strands of British socialism, including Christian socialism, ethical socialism, guild socialism, Fabianism and  the socialist labour movement. Co-operative socialism was perceived by these organisations as a replacement for the unjust competitive capitalist system.

                                          Robert Owen, memorial statue, Newport, Powys.

Edward Thomas (2/3/1878 - 9/4/17) - A Celebration of this Anglo Welsh Poet a Century after his Death.

This day marks the 100th anniversary of the death of 39 year old Anglo Welsh poet Edward Thomas at the Battle of Arras, who fell on what was then Easter Monday. He left a body of largely unpublished work that has since earned him a place as  one of Britain's greatest poets. He has since  become one of the most widely read English language poets of the 20th century.Nearly all of his poems were written in the three years between 1914 and his death in 1917. Sixteen of the 60-odd poems that later made up his collected works were produced in an incredible burst of creativity in just 20 days in January 1915.
Born in London to Welsh parents in 1878,his father, Philip Henry Thomas, was a Welsh speaker from Tredegar. Thomas made frequent trips back to Swansea and the Carmarthenshire areas of south Wales to stay with relatives. He had strong friendships with Welsh-language poets  and later attended Lincoln College, Oxford from 1897 to 1900, where he was tutored by Owen M Edwards, one of the most significant figures in nonconformist Welsh culture.
Edwards awakened Thomas’s sense of Welsh national identity, and after graduating he asked his former tutor “to suggest any kind of work … to help you and the Welsh cause”. Three years earlier, Edwards had called for “a literature that will be Engish in language and Welsh in spirit." and it seems that Thomas took up his challenge, declaring that: “in English I might do something by writing of Wales”.
Though he wrote in the English language; and almost  all of his poems were written about the English countryside, but his odes to melancholy, and longing seem to have a Welsh source. Throughout his short life he was inordinately proud of his Welsh heritage, and because of this it led him to doubt whether he could truly be "English". He felt that living in England
was “like a homesickness, but stronger”, and the closest he could feel to belonging was by spending time in nature: “I was home: one nationality/ We had, I and the birds that sang,/ One memory” (Home [3] 4-6)..The scenery of Wales and the legends of the country affected Thomas deeply. He wrote about them in various letters and in prose books such as Beautiful Wales and in his sole attempt at fiction, The Happy Go-Lucky Morgans. He also lamented the lack of a widely circulated collection of Welsh folk tales, something that he himself put right in 1911 when he published Celtic Stories an anthology of Welsh and Irish folk stories..He would often sing to his children and to writer friends such as Eleanor Farjeon, old Welsh folk songs and was deeply conscious of the cadences of Welsh words. As he wrote:

"Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings."

After marrying Helen Noble he found work writing travel books and critical reviews. His need to support his young family and wife resulting in him sacrificing creative writing for this hack work.Thomas took the Welsh connection a stage further by naming his children Mervyn, Myfanwy and Bronwen. Thomas had a troubled life however. A tormented soul with feelings of unfulfillment and self loathing convinced that he was a failure in both his marriage and career. Thomas was prone to periods of deep depression and anxiety and flirted with suicide, aggravated by his repressed creativity and creative frustration. Because of his self pitying he could also be very cruel to his ever loving wife . ' Your sympathy and your love for me are both hateful to me , but for God's sake don't  stand there , pale and suffering.' Thomas evidently felt there was some flaw in his personality that meant he was unable to respond to people as others did. “I don’t and can’t love and haven’t done for something near 20 years,” he told the haplessly doting Helen. When not entrapped by his more melancholic bitter moods he was more than capable of showing a more gentle and caring side, extended walks through the English countryside not only provided him with material for his writing but also represented freedom from his inner demons.
Through his work as a critic he became a champion of the American poet Robert Frost and they became friends. It was Frost who seeing his nature inspired prose and the English countryside, suggested to Thomas that he turn his hand to writing poetry. This unleashed a torrent of words , which at the same time lifted his depression enabling him to  write some of the most subtle and compelling words of the 20th Century. He had thought of moving to America with is family to devote himself to writing poetry, but alas , it was not to be, instead on July 15, 1915 after hiding his diabetes which would have led to his rejection, he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery and posted to France, just as his work was getting recognition and appearing in literary journals .He wrote a series of  haunting poems during his training. All though he is often referred to as a war poet , few of his  poems actually deal with his war experiences.Nevertheless, arguably the war overshadows all of his poetry, even when he is  focusing on an aspect of  nature, such as a bird or a tree. His sense of the fragility of nature, as well as its beauty, is in a sense intensified by the knowledge of the war and exacerbated by a growing knowledge of his own fragility and mortality. I think that acknowledgement of the worst is something that can  still resonate deeply with us today
He was killed after he had left his dugout to fill his pipe, a shell passed so close that the rush of air stopped his heart , and he fell to the ground not a mark on his body.He left the world his poems which  are informed by a distinctly modern vision of doubt, alienation, and human limitation.deep emotion. Beautiful poems about nature but also revealing his willingness to grapple with difficulty and uncertainty, revealing his sensitivity , and bleak honesty,still as poignant, powerful and moving as when they were first written.His great friend Robert Frost wrote " his poetry is so very brave, so unconsciously brave.' Ted Hughes once described this great poet as 'the father of us all.' His work will  always be cherished by me. The following is a selection of some of his fine poems.

Like the touch of Rain - Edward Thomas

Like the touch of rain she was
On a man's flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:

With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her 'Go now'.

Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.

How at Once - Edward Thomas

How at once should I know,
When stretched in the harvest blue
I saw the swift's black bow,
That I would not have that view
Another day
Until next May
Again it is due?

The same year after year --
But with the swift alone.
With other things I but fear
That they will be over and done
Suddenly
And I only see
Them to know them gone.

Beauty - Edward Thomas

 WHAT does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph-
'Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.' Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river
At fall of evening when it seems that never
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file,
This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through a window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale;
Not like a pewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unanswering to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there

The Sorrow of True Love - Edward Thomas

The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow
And true love parting blackens a bright morrow:
Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair
Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear
Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen.
But greater sorrow from less love has been
That can mistake lack of despair for hope
And knows not tempest and the perfect scope
Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual
Of drops that from remorse and pity fall
And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw,
Removed eternally from the sun's law.

The Owl - Edward Thomas

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;

Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof

Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest

Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,

Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.

All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

Words - Edward Thomas

Out of us all
That make rhymes
Will you choose
Sometimes -
As the winds use
A crack in a wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through -
Choose me,
You English words?

I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, -
As our hills are, old, -
Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.

Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings, -
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire, -
And the villages there, -
From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.                         

Out in the Dark - Edward Thomas

Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.

Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when a lamp goes, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned;

And star and I and wind and deer
Are in the dark together, -- near,
Yet far, -- and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

In Memorium ( Easter  1915)  - Edward Thomas

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

Further Reading :-

 Edward Thomas: Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2004.

Now All  Roads lead to France : The Last Years of Edward Thomas   - Mathew Hollis

Edward Thomas : From Adlestrop to Arras - Jean Moorcraft Wlison , Bloomsbury,

2015   

                  

William Seward Burroughs (5/2/14- 2/8/97) - Call me Burroughs,

Was going to write about David Cameron today, but decided against it, goodbye and good riddance to the dodgy ***** to  say he wont be missed is an understatement. I have spent a dreary wet afternoon in West Wales instead immersed  in Call Me Burroughs  a spoken word album by the author William S. Burroughs, that was originally released in June 1965 by The English Bookshop in Paris and later by ESP-Disk' in New York. Call Me Burroughs marks not only the recorded debut of William Burroughs, but also for many the first encounter with his inimitable incredible voice.
Drug addict, gun enthusiast, cat lover, convict, conjurer, queer iconclast, long have I been a huge admirer, I've carried Uncle Bill's writings and the knowledge of his struggles, failings and accomplishments with me for the entirety of my adult life,who I first discovered in my teenage years, this consumnate flouter of  norms and consensus reality who became one of the most enduring icons of the counterculture and our times. He has had an enormous influence on others too,from the Beats to punk rock,  and even hip hop, no other figure today is so widely considered the epitome of cool.
His book Naked Lunch" stands with Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and Allen Ginsburg's "Howl" as the seminal texts of the Beat Generation. With its harrowing scenes of junkie depravity, its view of postwar America was the most extreme of all the Beats. 
Burroughs wrote all of his books under the influence of drugs,principally heroin, alcohol, marijuana and methadone, despite this, his genius for surreal black comedy tempered with hard, practical thought never deserted him. Though he chronicled all its horrors and tried various treatment programs, Burroughs in some real sense chose addiction; it was his entree to the street slang and chronic desperation of the noir lifers who occupied his fiction from “Junkie” (1953) on. When he died at 83 in 1997, his friends reportedly tucked some heroin and marijuana along with his .38 into his coffin.
Call Me Burroughs features the author reading from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Nova Express, three of his best-known works that utilize the cut-up method developed by Burroughs and his artist cohort Brion Gysin. An eerie,haunting, powerful deadpan drawl guides the listener through sci-fi innerscapes, narcotic nightmares, reports from the edge of the apocalypse. Phantasmagoric passages echo real experiences roaming the streets of Mexico, the West Village, Tangiers.
The excerpts which, read as short stories, are independent and do not require listener to be familiar with the novels and follows the exploits of junkies, prostitutes, doctors, and others as they move through grisly underworlds without concern for the borders between reality and hallucination. By turns, they are blackly funny and deeply sinister, often within the same piece.
Burroughs believed that language and image were viral and that the mass-dissemination of information was part of an arch-conspiracy that restricted the full potential of the human mind..With cut-ups, Burroughs found a means of escape; an antidote to the sickness of ‘control’ messages that mutated their original content. If mass media already functioned as an enormous barrage of cut-up material, the cut-up method was a way for the artist to fight back using its same tactics.
Call Me Burroughs came to fruition modestly, reportedly the idea of Gaît Frogé, owner of The English Bookshop in Paris, with Ian Sommerville engineering the readings on a tape machine belonging to  Brion Gysin. Frogé enlisted poet-artists Jean-Jacques Lebel and Emmett Williams for liner notes and in April of ‘65 1,000 copies were pressed.Recorded in his instantly recognizable, craggy and clipped mid-western drawl at the English Bookshop, Paris, France in 1965. 
It's reach was initially limited, though  it fell into famous hands, and it certainly made quite an impression that year. The album would go on to have a wide influence, particularly in England. Barry Miles, in his liner notes for the 1995 Rhino re-release, says, "The Beatles may have been the soundtrack to 1965 for the beautiful people of swinging London, but to the cognoscenti there was something even cooler to listen to." :
"It's in all the best homes, my dear," said Brion Gysin, and he was right. At the height of the '60s, Call Me Burroughs was an essential record. The Beatles all had copies and subsequently Paul McCartney included Burroughs on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Art dealer Robert Fraser bought ten copies to give to friends such as Brian Jones and Mick Jagger. Marianne Faithful and Keith Richards' dealer had copies, as did numerous painters and writers.It remains a personal favourite of mine. If you manage to get yourself an actual copy the CD booklet contains a wealth of information about Burroughs, the manner in which these recordings were made, and about the Beat community in Paris in the 50's and 60's, as well as including the liner notes of original 1965 edition of the album.
For the rest of his life,Burroughs recorded a number of solo projects, in addition to collaborating with everyone from John Cale, Laurie Anderson , Tom Waits, Material, Disposable Hero's of hypocrisy , REM and Kurt Cobain.He remained a spoken-word performer and visual artist until his death in 1997.Call Me Burroughs is also the title of a authoritative new biography from Barry Miles, essential reading if you want a more detailed look at William Burroughs work, I am pleased to say that my own bookcases are already full  with books by and about him, plus his literary friends and acquaintances.
Anyway I include a link to a recording of the LP at the bottom, hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Track listing:

All composition by William S. Burroughs

"Bradley the Buyer" – 6:24
"Meeting of International Conference of Technological Psychiatry" – 4:56
"The Fish Poison Con" – 6:59
"Thing Police Keep All Board Room Reports" – 1:25
"Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin Hear Us Through the Hole in Thin Air" – 4:16
"Where You Belong" – 6:38
"Inflexible Authority" – 10:45
"Uranian Willy" – 1:59
Tracks 1 and 2 from Naked Lunch; 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8 from Nova Express; track 6 from The Soft Machine.


William Seward Burroughs - Call me Burroughs

Some earlier posts of mine on the great man  :-

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/william-s-burroughs-5214-2897-happy.html

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/william-s-burroughs-thanksgiving-prayer_20.html

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/william-s-burroughs-5214-2857-job.html

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/destroy-all-rational-thought.html

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/burroughs-in-tangier-by-paul-bowles.html

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/happy-birthdaywilliam-burroughs-5214.html