Welsh Journals

In 1880 Parry qualified as an accountant. He was also a brick, timber and oil merchant, as well as the land-agent for the Cefnfaes estate, Bethesda, a money- lender and a journalist. It was during the Penrhyn Dispute from 1900 to 1903 that Parry played his most important role in raising funds for the quarrymen who remained on strike.3 Patagonia had been visited by Lewis Jones and Sir Thomas Love Duncombe Jones-Parry in 1862. Lewis Jones was born in Caernarfon in 1836, and was apprenticed as a printer. Love Jones-Parry, as he was usually known, was a landowner and the squire of Madryn in Llyn. They signed a contract with the Argentine Government for a grant of land to settlers.4 In 1863 the Welsh Emigration Society asked the Argentine Government to found a colony in Chubut, named after the Chubut river, in part of the region known as Patagonia, and Rawson, the Minister of the Interior, supported their request. Congress was less enthusiastic because of fears of Britain's desire to take over the colony, but Rawson managed to persuade them to make concessions of Government land. On 28 May 1865 153 men, women and children sailed from Liverpool in the tea-clipper, the Mimosa. They eventually reached Port Madryn on 28 July 1865. Rawson helped these colonists to survive the rigours of the primitive conditions they encountered.5 Gold fever hit the colony in the 1880s, and in 1890 a party of seven men returned from the Andes with the news that they had struck gold at Caquel, north-west of Tecka. Two mining experts from Wales gave a favourable report of gold in the area of Corcovado, Tecka and Mica.6 In his study of the early life of David Lloyd George, John Grigg states that Lloyd George's need for 'maximum profit' with 'minimum effort' made him eager to invest in gold- mining in Patagonia as proposed by Captain David Richards, a mining-engi- neer from Harlech. Richards professed to have obtained a concession there and needed capital to mine the gold. Richards' rights were in the Corcovado, Tecka and Mica goldfields, and he proposed they should be taken over by a syndicate, with Lloyd George and his brother William acting as legal advisers. The initial capital was £ 10,000. Half of this was the value of Richards's shares, and half was to be raised from other forward summary of his travels in South America, with large sections devoted to the history of Pizarro in Peru and the story of the Spanish Conquest. (I would like to thank Tomos Roberts for showing me the published version). 2 Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, 1880-1980 (Cardiff, 1981), 77. See Jean Lindsay, The Great Strike. A History of the Penrhyn Dispute, 1900-1903 (Newton Abbot, 1987). R. Bryn Williams, Gwladfa Patagonia: The Welsh-Colony in Patagonia 1865- 1 96 J(Cardiff, 1965), 18-19. See also the entries for Lewis Jones and Love Jones-Parry in The Dictionary of Welsh Biography down to 1940 (Oxford, 1959). Geraint D. Owen, Crisis in Chubut: A Chapter in the History of the Welsh Colony in Patagonia (Swansea, 1977), 7-13. Glyn Williams, The Desert and the Dream: A Study of the Colonization in Chubut, 1865-1915 (Cardiff, 1975), 109-110.