We may think globalisation is a modern phenomenon – but the collections in Wales’s museums prove that trade with foreign lands has been going on for thousands of years, as Eddie Butler finds in Wales and the History of the World (Wednesday, March 10, BBC One Wales).
Though there are items across Wales which show ancient trade routes were at work – a lead anchor from the Lleyn Peninsula came from a Roman ship thought to be seeking copper from Anglesey, while the remains of a 15th century ship discovered in Newport showed links with Portugal – it was the 19th century when Wales got rich on its exports.
Coal was a massive driver of wealth, and though the miners themselves complained about the pay, their bosses made enough that they were able to purchase the cream of artistic talent at the time – the grand-daughters of Rhondda’s King of Coal David Davies were able to furnish their walls with Monets.
Tinplate was another driver of wealth to Wales. Lightweight and versatile, tinplate was used for everything from canning food to making pots and pans. Though Wales wasn’t rich in tin deposits, the key ingredients of the process, iron and coal, were in plentiful supply, and the industry, centring on Llanelli – nicknamed Tinopolis – supplied 80 per cent of the world’s tinplate in the 19th century.
But heavy industry wasn’t the only way of making money. Pryce Pryce Jones started working in a drapers business in Newtown when he was just 12, and ended up owning the shop. But his ambitions lay further afield, and he started sending price lists with pictures to customers, first locally, but later to the rest of Britain and even abroad, creating the world’s first mail order catalogue.
And while the people of Europe basked in Pryce Jones’s corsets, in the far reaches of the British Empire they were also drinking Welsh lager, canned in Wrexham for the first time. Though the image we have today is of lager louts, then Wrexham lager was drunk by the finest society at all the best London clubs and even on Cunard liners.
And the legacies of these industries remain today. The huge Amazon distribution centre in Swansea takes the catalogue idea online, creating an industry giant, and the tinplate industry is remembered in Llanelli by the small saucepans placed on top of the rugby posts at the Scarlets’ ground, while every match day, stadiums across Wales fill with the song which remembers those little saucepans, Sospan Fach.
Wednesday, March 10, BBC One Wales, 7.30pm
bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld
