Book Lauch: The Middleman at Middleton Hall

As Senior Lecture in Modern History, Dr. Lowri Ann Rees is a key member of the School of History, Law and Social Sciences at Bangor University. Her research is centred on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Wales, and with her particular interest in the landed elite and their country estates, Dr. Rees has been central to the development of ISWE since its establishment. Her latest book was formally launched at the National Botanic Garden of Wales in March, but this second launch brought together Dr. Rees’ colleagues, students and ISWE supporters in Bangor. After a warm introduction by Dr. David Jenkins, Chairman of the South Wales Record Society, the launch took the form of an interview between Dr. Rees and Dr. Shaun Evans, Director of ISWE. It also set a welcome precedent for serving cake at ISWE book launches!

At the core of this work are transcripts of over ninety handwritten letters sent by Thomas Herbert Cooke to his mother Charlotte Cook between 1841 and 1851. A native of Northamptonshire, Cook took up the post of land agent on the Middleton Estate in Carmarthenshire in 1841, working initially for Edward Hamlyn Adams and then for his son Edward Abadam. Cooke’s letters were purchased by the National Library of Wales in 1973, and though there are no records of their whereabouts prior to this date, Dr. Rees presumes that they were preserved by Cooke’s descendants.

Dr. Rees first came across the collection while writing her MA dissertation at Aberystwyth University, and described the challenges of deciphering the crossed letters with two separate sets of writing, one written over the other at right-angles. Now in partnership with the South Wales Record Society, who have published many fantastic editions of primary source material relating to south Wales, Dr. Rees has had the opportunity to publish full transcriptions of the letters for the first time. The audience greatly enjoyed seeing excerpts, many of which were amusing, throughout the talk. 

The early letters provide a fascinating insight into Cooke’s extremely unfavourable first impressions of rural Wales; derogatory remarks about the Welsh people, culture, and language are abundant. Describing a visit to the parish church of Llanddarog – incidentally, the same church that Dr. Rees attended as a child – Cooke wrote that ‘the service was performed in Welsh, which grated on my ears like the filing of a saw’. Despite being the outsider, Cooke made no attempts to assimilate and appears to have regarded the Welsh language as an inconvenience. Dr. Rees and Dr. Evans agreed that his sentiments towards the Welsh language were consistent with those of the government inspectors responsible for the ‘Blue Books’ in the very same decade.

In his private letters to his mother, Cooke was free to voice his true opinions on his employer Abadam, opinions that we are not usually privy to as such letters are seldom found in estate archives. The impression we get is of a clash of characters - the fact that Abadam kept unusual hours, took little interest in the daily management of the estate, and was preoccupied with personal building and decorating projects, frustrated Cooke greatly, and this frustration was no doubt intensified by the fact that Abadam was extremely popular with his tenantry. Cooke seems to have regarded Abadam as a nuisance to the orderly running of the estate, though Dr. Rees did stress that we only have one side of the story here.

Cooke’s tenure as land agent coincided with the Rebecca Riots, the rural protest movement which reached its peak in the summer of 1843. As a representative of the Middleton Estate, Cooke quickly became a target, with guns fired under his window and a letter thrust under the front door of Middleton Hall threatening the ‘fat Steward’. But as the protests took a more violent turn, Cooke’s letters began to express a visceral fear for his own safety and that of his family’s, describing how he slept with weapons to hand and taught his wife and sons how to load and fire a pistol. In one letter he recounts in chilling detail a close encounter with forty veiled Rebeccaites in a narrow lane. As well as his first-hand accounts, Cooke’s letters capture the fear amongst the tenantry and local community, as well as his employers’ response to the attacks, which was to threaten absenteeism. Dr. Rees and Dr. Evans discussed how there is a tendency to romanticise the Rebecca Riots, and how these letters shed a new light on the terrifying experiences of the people who were targeted or inadvertently caught up in the violence, thus providing a more rounded view than is usually presented in the popular narrative.

We heard how after six years of enduring Abadam and suffering at the hands of the Rebeccaites, Cooke endeavoured to find a new post, writing to his mother that he ‘would at once leave Wales and its botherations and troubles’. By 1847 he had secured a position on the Berkely Estate in Gloucestershire, but his health soon took a turn for the worse and he died in 1851. Dr. Rees suggests that his stressful time at Middleton Hall directly contributed to his early death in his fifties.

We offer Dr. Rees our warmest congratulations on the publication of this book. The Middleman at Middleton Hall: The Letters of Thomas Herbert Cooke, Land Agent in Rebecca’s Carmarthenshire, 1841-1847 is available to purchase from the South Wales Record Society website.

(Authored by Bethan Scorey)