John Jones
c July 31st, 1811
Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales is a town that, with all due respect to the fine citizens of Merthyr, would never win any beauty contests. It’s a big splodge of post-industrial messy town planning, crammed into a dramatic ice-age landscape sculpted into flat-topped, hard edged, coal mined shapes by the giant hand of the Industrial Revolution.
Forty years ago, there were towns like Merthyr (everyone drops the last bit) all across South Wales. Dead and dying towns, their industries and lifelines snuffed out by a Thatcherite government intent on ‘breaking the unions’ for no other reason, it seemed, than it was good sport to them.
“There’s no such thing as society”, Thatcher once said and then went about punishing anyone who believed there was. This included towns that had been, in Victorian times, the driving heart of British Imperial expansionism. Society was in the soul of these places, forged in the rows of terraced worker’s houses that still climb reluctantly up the valley sides. Men had jobs for life, families had futures, communities had hearts. The people sang, and played and grew together.
For a period in the 1800s, South Wales was the booming economic center of the world. Nearly all of the world’s slate, copper and iron came out of its ports and behind those ships, a huge industrial landscape darkened the afternoon skies. There are remnants of this booming past all over Merthyr. In the great, grand red-bricked and gothic spoked town hall. In the sprawling decadence of Cyfarthfa Castle, the huge castellated mansion, once home of the masters of the ironworks, where the cellar could hold 15,000 bottles of wine. And not least, in the silent remains of the Dantesque, brooding, magnificent ruins of Cyfarthfa ironworks itself. The landscape is scarred with railways, spreading out from Merthyr’s great web. The place where steam railways were born in 1804 when Trevithick’s steam hammer dragged 10 tons of iron and 70 men across the mountain.
The whole of South Wales was once a reddened sky tableau of fire and iron, clinging to the edge of a glacier scoured fantasy landscape and ringing with the sounds of forges, bellows and progress.
It was terrifying and glorious.
But Thatcher killed it all because that’s what she liked to do. Make someone else’s life worse and then tell other people that you’d done it to save them money. “The problem with socialism,” Thatcher once famously said “Is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” She was wrong, of course. Everything about Thatcherism (which appeared in the US as Reaganomics) was wrong. What Thatcher never said was that eventually they never ran out of other people’s money, you did. What she didn’t say was that rich people never run out of tax payer’s money. There’s always money around to fund whatever they need funding. What they run out of is money to spend on people who don’t vote for them. Government documents, released decades after the mid 80s, revealed that Thatcher and her gang of thugs, having killed communities across Britain like South Wales, drew up plans not to regenerate them, but to simply abandon them to their fate. They killed them and then drew up the gangplank and sailed off.
Boxing has always been at the heart of the town’s sporting history, from the tiny, great, tragic Johnny Owen who died fighting for the world title in Los Angeles in 1980, all the way back to a man who went by the name of John Jones.
John Jones was from China.
Every great industrial town, especially across South Wales had its ‘no go areas’ and Merthyr’s was crammed between the Brecon Road, the canal and the coal tip. It was a warren of streets, houses, alleys, pubs, brothels, gambling dens and sin. And the locals called it China. Quite why it was called that isn’t known. There wasn’t a single Chinese person in China and it wasn’t a Chinatown in the same way places of that name exist today. Records of the day are common with the name, mostly in the court documents where the miscreant locals are lined up for various police infringements. If you went into China and came out with the shirt on your back, you could consider yourself lucky. It was an international hellhole, too. There were Jews from Russia, Germans, Poles, Italians and people from all over Eastern Europe. But it was called China and it had an Emperor and the Emperor was, naturally, the man with the hardest fists.
Bare knuckle boxing was hugely popular and John Jones was good at it. In 1840, to celebrate the arrival of the Taff Valley Railway, he and the Cyfarthfa champion, John Nash put on a show of beating each other senseless for an afternoon before a huge and enthusiastic crowd. Jones won.
As you can probably tell, there were a few people called ‘John’ around and, it being Wales, even more called ‘Jones’. You could walk from the brothel to the pub and fall over ten people called John Jones. So, in a Welsh tradition that still holds today, people were given names according to other identifying features. It might be their height, weight, hair colour, profession or, in the case of John Jones, where he was born.
Although his early police record suggests he was born in Merthyr, his nickname was Sguborfawr, literally ‘big barn’ in Welsh and this was the name of a farm in nearby Penderyn. He’s also recorded as working as a farm labourer in Penderyn, so this is likely where he was born, in 1811. The first name ‘Shoni’ is simply a Welsh version of ‘John’ and so he was known as Shoni Sguborfawr.
His education is uncertain, although he was literate. He went through many jobs; shaft sinker, brass fitter, farm hand and before 1843, he had joined the 98th Regiment of Foot as a common soldier. He also became a special constable in Brecon, which all sounds very public spirited of him, but more than likely he was just looking for more official ways of beating the crap out of people. He wasn’t a soldier or a policeman to serve the public, he was there to keep the peace and in order to keep the peace, that meant he had to punch a lot of people when he was drunk.
And he was drunk often.
In 1843, he was brought before the magistrates in Merthyr for being drunk and fighting in the street. He escaped with a fine, but pretty soon he was in the same predicament before the courts in Swansea.
He then went further west, to the town of Pontyberem where he found a role tailor made for a man who solved every problem by punching it.
Between 1839 and 1843, the Rebecca Riots were a series of protests by farmers and agricultural workers across mid and west Wales against soaring levels of taxation. The rioters took their anger out on the most tangible representations of oppressive taxation in the form of turnpikes and toll-gates. As the taxes grew higher and the tolls with them, the local trusts that operated the toll gates simply spent the money on themselves and they soon grew to be the hated symbol of tax oppression.
Men would gather in large groups to smash the toll gates and they needed men like Shoni to do the smashing. What was unusual about the rioters, and which gave the riots their name, was that the rioters, all men, would dress as women. Being in disguise was a good idea and women’s clothing was readily available to them, but the Merched Beca, Rebecca’s Daughters, as they called themselves, took inspiration from the Bible. Genesis 24.60 has the line:
And they blessed Rebekah and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them
The Rebeccas would recite this line in ‘battle’ as they smashed the toll gates. And what they needed were men like Shoni who were very good at smashing things. What Shoni needed was money.
For a sum of between 2 and 5 shillings a go, Shoni would lead the rioters on attacks against turnpikes across the region. He was known to have attacked several, maybe a dozen or more. But by now he was drunk, had money, and was out of control. Realising that he could exploit his new employers, he blackmailed them under threat of revealing their names to the authorities and spent even more money on drink. On the 25th August 1843, he ran amok in Pontyberem, culminating in drawing a gun and shooting at one William Rees at the New Inn, Pontyberem, with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. He missed because he was drunk, but on 28th September, he was arrested near Swansea. He went to trial in Carmarthen on 22nd December, was found guilty, and was sentenced to be transported for life to Australia. He laughed at the sentence.
In February of the following year, Shoni was taken from Carmarthen jail to the brand-new penitentiary, the world’s first, at Millbank in London, in the company of another infamous Merched Beca, David Davies. From there he was put aboard the Blundell on March 8th and set sail for Norfolk Island, a probationary station for convicts, which he reached on the 6th of July, 1844.
He was there for three years until he was moved to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and placed in the service of a series of masters. Thousands of miles from home, in prison, effectively a slave and with no hope of ever seeing his freedom again, Shoni did the thing he knew best.
He started causing trouble.
He stole food, he refused to work unless he got extra rations, started fights, got drunk and smashed property. Repeated periods of hard labour couldn’t control him. Beatings couldn’t persuade him to behave. He was just as out of control as he had been in China and Pontyberem, only he was someone else’s problem now.
By the 19th of September, 1854, Australia had had enough of him and he was given a ticket of leave to return to Wales. But by December of that year, he was back in solitary confinement for beating up an official. Somehow, something about Shoni could always get him into trouble and then always get him out and he served only a few months of an 18-month sentence before being released again.
And what did he do with this newly won freedom? He went out, got shitfaced and started a fight. On Match 8th 1856, he was given another three months for fighting and drunkenness.
Eventually, they could take no more and they simply let him go. He was given a ticket of leave in December of that year and, in 1858, he was conditionally pardoned.
Shoni Sguborfawr was a terrible human being, who led an awful life of brutality and drunkenness. He was described in Australia as 'a half-witted and inebriate ruffian.’ After his pardon, he continued his ways, fighting and drinking and getting into trouble and then getting out of it again, until he died, probably in Port Arthur, around 1867. He died as he lived, in squalor and brutality and alone.
We still have a strange tendency, particularly among young men, to idolize people like Shoni Sguborfawr. To see them as anti-establishment heroes or hard-drinking ‘real’ men. But Shoni wasn’t a ‘real’ man. He was a monster. People weren’t scared of him; they were sick of him. There’s still, somewhere, a notion of a glimmer that within him was someone who was clever and charming. He could read and write and he could obviously charm his way out of a situation. But any vestiges of a decent man were drowned out by drink and violence.
When I was growing up in Wales in the 1980s, towns like Merthyr were dying. Into the vacuum left by the closing of the ironworks and the coal mines and the working men’s clubs came nothing but drugs, drink and misery.
But Merthyr didn’t die because Thatcher was wrong. There is such a thing as society and no matter how hard you try to beat it out of them, the people of towns like Merthyr across Wales, and across all the working-class areas of the world, are made of stuff that will last.
Merthyr isn’t exactly a boom town now, but it’s much like any other provincial town across the UK. In the centre of town, squint and you could be almost anywhere. But it’s still there.
That towns like Merthyr even survived at all says something about the Welsh. The iron in Merthyr doesn’t just run through the hillsides.
P.S. On pronouncing ‘Sguborfawr’. In Welsh a ‘u’ acts much like an ‘i’ and a single ‘f’ is always hard, like in the English ‘of’ (a double ‘ff’ is always soft, like in ‘off’). A ‘w’ is like the short double ‘oo’ sound in ‘book’.
So ‘Sguborfawr’ is something like ‘Skib-or-vawer’