The Royal Commission 1910In my introduction on the project page I made reference to the quotation that first appeared in E.D. Lewis's excellent book 'The Rhondda Valleys' published in 1958 .
The source of the quotation was The Royal Commission On The Church Of England And Other Religious Bodies In Wales And Monmouthshire 1910. Volume Six (Appendix) includes Nonconformist statistics as at 1905.
I have transcribed the section relevant to the Rhondda Urban District which now appear on the following pages omitting the financial statistics. I have kept the original pagination as it appeared in the volume. All appropiate chapels (those that are already listed on this site) have been hyper-linked back to their original entry which now gives the user another method of accessing an individual chapel (use the '[Return]' button to return to this page or simply navigate through each page).
Quite understandably, the report lists chapels that are not currently present. What is not so understandable is that there are also chapels that I would have expected to see quoted but they are not there. In addition, there are some significant variations in the quoted seating capacities when compared to the official yearbooks/handbooks.
One matter that I will mention as it was quoted on the pages was that one chapel was included although its incorporation was later than 1905. So, in this context, the 151 has now become 150.
The statistics:
Page 1 - Welsh Wesleyan Chapels Page 2 - Welsh Baptist Chapels Page 3 - Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Chapels Page 4 - Welsh Congregational Chapels Page 5 - English Primitive Methodist & English Wesleyan Chapels Page 6 - English Baptist & English Calvinistic Methodist Chapels Page 7 - English Congregational Chapels
Whilst the above pages report those chapels within the Rhondda Urban District, when it was formed the village that we now refer to as Trehafod was actually two named communities with only 'Hafod' being included and 'Tre-hafod' included in the Pontypridd Urban District. I have thus now extracted those chapels, which I always have illustrated on the relevant pages, and show them on an additional page :-
Extract from the statistics of The Pontypridd Urban District
If you have followed the review that is discussed here, you could well have come to the same conclusion as mine that the statistics are incomplete and inaccurate. I consider it unforgivable to exclude any denomination from the count however small. Would that have happened to one of the larger ones if they had not been represented at the initial meeting ?. So, apart from the Unitarians, the Salvation Army was also excluded (information of whom would have been invaluable to this researcher).
There are all manner of inconsistencies in the sittings figures when one compares the various sources and I summarise these here. It crossed my mind to present an alternative figure of seating accomodation based on the evidence. However, would that, given implied innacuracies in the denomination publications, be more accurate than what has been handed down over the last 100 years ?. History should only be re-written if the source is indisputable.
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