It's been interesting to hear the views of those to the 3 year strike at Penrhyn. My father was a quarryman before and after the Second World War for a few years. He's still alive at 82, a veteran of the Second World War. His description of the working conditions at Dorothea and Maenofferen and Llechwedd was that they were like slaves. Somebody was killed almost every week. A comparison was made in a local article in the local newspaper fairly recently on the plight of the then quarrymen and the plight of slaves in America. I went to watch a fragment of film about quarrymen 'Men against Death' in Dorothea with my father, that was shown in Neuadd Goffa Penygroes. He knew some of the individuals. The film is being reviewed in a book about the history of Welsh films. I was shocked at what I saw. Men working at the bottom of a deep hole. Men clinging to the sides and blasting, A makeshift corrugated shelter at the bottom. Men looking out for each other with the blasts as lumps of slate were blasted from the sides and railed down on those below. Men running for cover into the corrugated shelter. One or more killed every week. Men walking silently home in respect for the dead. The supervisors still wanting them to work. At the same time Plas Newydd, Plas Penrhyn are models of advanced architecture and design. There was no lack of know how to design safer working conditions. Why this know how was not extended to the introduction of safer working conditions I do not know. A friend of mine who knows the relatives of the quarry owners, was visiting the quarry hospital at Llanberis with them (now a museum), and they, looking at the history and artefacts of the workers' former lives said....'no wonder they hated us'. The discrepancy between the standard of living of the quarry owners and the quarry workers was immense. Prior to the acquisition of the quarries by the 'owners', against the backdrop of industrial revolution, the quarries were small scale concerns, quarried in conjunction with the running of small holdings. The local small scale quarrymen lost control of their own livelihoods through their different approach to land ownership. They were the 'indians' and they lost their land through what has become modern 'law'. Mass, labour intensive, extraction of slate became the order of the day. The intensification and expansion of production led to a dislocation of agriculture and a source of subsidence and an over dependence, for the quarrymen on quarrying as their sole source of income. Seems still to touch a nerve! Wendy