Beaumaris’s past is at once impossibly remote and strangely proximate. The mannequins and period furniture of the museums and castles suggests a distant, fantastical past, which we can luxuriate in, as if inhabiting – however briefly – an episode of Downton Abbey. Yet it is the commemoration of this past as past that allows its perpetuation in the present. The same family rules Beaumaris, except now it does so by offering up the fossilised traces of a feudal class structure as if they were not still to be found on every street. IV As on land, so at sea. Beaumaris contains two boat worlds. They exist together uneasily. The first is full of yachts that the rich have been sailing since the nineteenth century, though perhaps to say that they sail them is an exaggeration. The other world is full of fishermen, boat builders and mussel farmers. Early in the nineteenth century, the Bulkeley family decided to place a new mansion along the main sea front. To do so they had to move the working boatmen elsewhere and so leased them a piece of land called Gallows Point, which became the centre of the town’s ship-building industry. The two worlds are opposing poles of activity, and people move between them. As fishing stocks fell around Anglesey and the boatbuilding business collapsed, the men of Gallows Point increasingly went into the other world and worked as sailors on the yachts of the rich. Over the last fifty years, with the collapse of artisanal labour in the town, an aristocratic service industry has returned and the boatmen have become Lord Bulkeley’s skippers. All over Beaumaris, conservation crowds out the living. In recent years, some fishermen have started to work ferrying tourists to Puffin Island, which is just off the tip of Anglesey and home to a large colony of cormorants. There are now plans afoot to make the island a human-free zone: nature immunised against man, just as, in Beaumaris’ glorious castle, the past has been immunised from the present.
In Beaumaris’ placards and advertisements, there are hints of a long simmering conflict. I was drinking in the George and Dragon. At the pub’s entrance, there is a wooden sign: St George, his shield emblazoned with the red cross of England, is killing the dragon, the symbol of Wales. This immortal combat takes place in pubs all over town. The George and Dragon is owned by the Bulkeley family. Five hundred years ago, the town’s Welsh inhabitants might have been indentured farmers, or servants on the family estate. Today, they work in gift-shops or give guided tours around Bulkeley properties. Seen from this perspective, the nineteenth century and the promise of non-feudal relations was a temporary blip; Britain has always been a feudal society, except now we call it a service economy. In Beaumaris, it is a service economy that feeds off representations of a feudal past, and a feudal economy sustained by tours and castles.
from the top: The Beaumaris Regatta, mid-twentieth century Ben Williams and his boat The 1885 Beaumaris Regatta
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photographers unknown
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