Welsh Journals

resting upon a conception of industrial relations independent of the traditional wage system. A similar society was set up in Wigan. In their attempt to tackle the human problems of long-term unemployment at their root, these two societies were the most radical and the most interesting of the many projects for the welfare of the industrial unemployed during the depression. That a Utopian experiment of this nature was heavily subsidised by a Government department surely renders it unique in British social history. Subsistence Production represented the last phase of 'The Brynmawr Experiment' launched by a Quaker, Peter Scott, in the later 1920's. Since 1926 he had served the Society of Friends as Field Officer for the Society's relief work in South Wales, where distress and deprivation had reached proportions which, in the light of today's standards of social security, would have been intolerable. At the end of 1929, Peter Scott severed his connection with the official Quaker undertakings in the area and worked thereafter on his own. He and his wife Lilian had in 1928 made their home in Brynmawr, a little town perched high on the bleak moorland at the north-east extremity of the coalfield, where at that time some 70% of the insured population were unemployed. He was joined there by a few others moved by a like compassion to share the life of a suffering community. Disillusioned as so many were at that period with the existing social and economic order and inspired by a Utopian vision, Scott concluded that it was just in those areas where the breakdown of the old order was most complete that there lay the greatest opportunity for the creation of a better. He directed his 'experiment' to this end. In January 1934 some of the group around him at the time formed themselves into an 'Order', to be known as 'An Order of friends', choosing to dedicate themselves to the new community of their vision. Thereafter all Scott's undertakings were carried on in the name of 'An Order', though in fact its members never had more than nominal responsibility for administration. The welcome which Brynmawr gave to Scott's first activities soon waned, and his group's relationship with the local community deteriorated. The newcomers were never integrated into the town's civic life and came to be known, disparagingly, as 'the bloody Quakers'. His most successful efforts were the two new industries of furniture making and bootmaking. These conformed to the accepted pattern of industrial life and were more readily tolerated on that account. Subsistence Production, the largest, most costly and most visionary of Scott's undertakings, diverged too far from current industrial mores to be readily accepted. From the outset the scales were weighted against it. The theory which lay behind Subsistence Production stemmed from J. W. Scott, Professor of Philosophy at University College, Cardiff, who in the 1920's worked out an elaborate theory for producing and distributing goods as far as possible independently of the monetary system. He envisaged groups of men, each working at his own trade without wages, producing goods for exchange within the group. In addition to initial capital, he envisaged two further requirements; a sufficient supply of cash to cover the purchase of raw materials and to meet overhead expenses, and a just and automatic system of distribution. To meet the first of these, special plant would be set aside to produce goods for sale to the public, plant which members would operate whenever the need for cash income arose. To meet the second requirement, the Professor devised a system of credit tokens so many tokens to be issued per hour worked. All products would be brought to a central store and