Brynmawr Experiment
social relief project against unemployment in Brynmawr between 1928 and 1940
The Brynmawr Experiment was an effort led by Peter Scott to address issues of poverty and unemployment in Brynmawr, South Wales, between 1929 and 1939. Initially a relief project response of the Quakers in South-East England, it grew first into an effort to set up small industries and finally an ambitious utopian subsistence agriculture project for unemployed workers.
Having received large amounts of money from government and private donations, the projects barely made a profit throughout their existence and finally closed in 1939. The official reason for their closure was that unemployment was wiped out due to the opening of local armament factories in the wake of the Second World War, but credit and government loans were also not extended which meant that the projects could not continue.
Background
The 1920s were a decade of economic decline in the South Wales Coalfield as a whole and in particular in the town of Brynmawr.
Geographically, Brynmawr sits at the northern side of the coalfield and had little industry, and so people tended to need to commute to work elsewhere. When these industries slumped, workers in Brynmawr had few alternatives.
When Hilda Jennings arrived in Brynmawr in 1929 to lead a survey that was to take 3 years to complete, she found many problems. Many jobs were dependent on neighbouring coal and ironworks, and traveling workers were often the first to be laid off. The impacts were even worse as there has been an overall migration away from the town between 1921 and 1931.
The public source identifies “Brynmawr Experiment” as social relief project against unemployment in Brynmawr between 1928 and 1940. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Brynmawr, Experiment and social.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brynmawr Experiment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.