Evan Roberts and the Revival

Some movements in a nation's life begin in cathedrals, with bishops and processions and the long preparation of liturgy. Others begin in a back room of a chapel on a tidal river, when a young man with no settled standing asks for a quarter of an hour after the closing hymn and is granted it because no one present can think of a reason to refuse.

THE COLLIERY BOY OF LOUGHOR

Evan Roberts was born at Island House, Loughor, on the eighth of June 1878, son of Henry Roberts the colliery sinker and Hannah Edwards of the same parish. He went down the Mountain Colliery at twelve and stayed twelve years; he served two more at the Loughor smithy. He carried a Bible in his jacket and read it at the coalface between shots, and the older men, by long custom, did not interfere with a boy who read. Wales in those years was the most chapel-going country in Europe and one of the most exhausted: ninety per cent of the population Nonconformist by census, the singing at full voice, the membership rolls flat for a decade. The ministers spoke of sychder, the dryness, in their letters to one another, and waited for what every chapel in West Glamorgan had been taught to wait for since the days of Howel Harris, an outpouring not made by men.

In the spring of 1904 Roberts entered the Calvinistic Methodist preparatory school at Newcastle Emlyn to read for the ministry. He told his fellow students, in plain terms, that he had been awakened in his bed at one in the morning every night for some three months and held in communion with the Spirit until five, and that the experience was continuing. The headmaster Evan Phillips, by his own statement, did not know what to do about the boy. On balance he gave him the half-term off and told him to spend it in his own chapel.

THE EVENING OF THE THIRTY-FIRST OF OCTOBER

It was a wet Monday on the Burry Inlet, the wind off the estuary carrying salt up to the chapel door. Moriah stood as it stands now, square, lime-washed, set back from the road. The seven o'clock service was the regular Monday meeting of the young people's society, conducted by the Reverend Daniel Jones, and it had run its accustomed course: the long prayer, the chapter read, the address, two hymns from Llyfr Tonau. Roberts sat at the back through it, his hands on his knees. He had asked the minister, before the service, for permission to speak briefly to the young people once the meeting was closed. The minister had agreed, with the half-reluctance of a man honouring the request of a candidate of the Connexion who is also the local blacksmith's apprentice.

Sixteen stayed back. The rest gathered their coats and went out into the rain. The sixteen were, for the most part, people he had known since school: girls from Casllwchwr, boys from the pit, his own brother Dan among them. They sat in the front pews and waited to see what the colliery boy who had gone away to study would say to them.

A QUARTER OF AN HOUR IN THE BACK ROOM

He stood and did not begin. The lamp on the pulpit shelf hissed gently. The decision pressing on him was not what to say, for he knew what to say; it was whether to spend the only currency he had, which was the trust of sixteen people who had stayed behind out of courtesy, on a request that would embarrass him if it failed. To speak of his own awakening was, he understood as he stood there, to make a fool of himself in front of his sister and the boys he had hewed coal beside; to refuse to speak of it was to have come home for nothing. He thought of the four points he had written down at Newcastle Emlyn in September, copied from no book but compiled from the long reading of his own chapel's catechism, and saw that the four points were not a sermon but a request, and that a request could be refused without humiliation to the asker. He decided that he would put the request and let it stand or fall on its own weight.

He spoke for an hour. He gave them, as he later wrote down for the Western Mail, four conditions: confess all known sin to God; put away every doubtful habit; obey the Spirit promptly; confess Christ publicly. He asked them, at the end, to stand if they would commit to all four. The chapel was very quiet. One girl stood. Then a boy. Then, in a movement that those present afterwards described as taking perhaps two minutes from first to last, the remaining fourteen rose to their feet. Sixteen out of sixteen. He thanked them and asked the Reverend Daniel Jones to close in prayer.

THE FOUR MONTHS OF FIRE

He preached at Moriah the next night, and the next, and was unable to leave Loughor for four months. By mid-November Moriah was full to the doors at six o'clock for a meeting that began at seven. By December he was at Aberavon, Pontypridd, Maesteg; through January and February at the Rhondda chapels, Llanelli, Caerphilly, Aberdare. He arrived after the singing had begun and sat at the side through twenty or thirty minutes of hymns. He stood briefly, often only fifteen minutes, and the meeting dissolved into spontaneous prayer and confession from the pews that ran past midnight. The pattern did not vary. The newspapers sent men: the Western Mail the journalist W. T. Stead, who wrote that he had seen nothing like it in forty years of reporting; the South Wales Daily News a stenographer with instructions to take down every word and bring it back to Cardiff by the first train.

WHAT THE COALFIELD HEARD

The colliery owners of the Rhondda complained, by the late spring of 1905, that absenteeism in the pits was up by a third, the men having been at chapel until two in the morning and unfit for the early shift. The magistrates of Glamorgan reported empty dockets. The publicans of Aberdare petitioned the bench. The local tradition of the Rhondda is that the pit ponies had to be retrained that spring, the colliers having given up swearing, and the ponies, accustomed to the curses as the signals, no longer knowing what was being asked of them. Across the coalfield, by the conservative count of the Calvinistic Methodist Union of June 1905, about one hundred thousand new members were added to the Welsh Nonconformist congregations, against a population of perhaps a million and a half. It was, and remains, the largest spontaneous religious revival in modern British history.

THE COST OF THE FIRE

By August 1905, after ten months of nightly preaching, Roberts collapsed. He was taken into the private care of Mr and Mrs Penn-Lewis at Leicester and from 1906 retreated almost entirely from public life. He preached in Wales only twice again, briefly in 1928 and 1930. He died at his sister's house in Cardiff on the twenty-ninth of January 1951, seventy-two years old, and was buried in the Penn-Lewis family plot at Loughor, ten yards from the chapel door.

THE CHAPEL ON THE INLET

The history of revivals is the history of moments when a small request, made by a person of no standing in a small room, is met by an assent that no one in the room could have predicted and no one outside it would have thought possible. The four conditions Roberts read out at Moriah on the thirty-first of October 1904 had been preached, in one form or another, in every Calvinistic Methodist chapel in Wales for a hundred years; what changed that night was not the words but that sixteen people, asked to stand, stood. Moriah is still standing. It is still in regular Methodist use. On the wall of the vestibule there is a small bronze plaque, put up by the Connexion in 1954 on the fiftieth anniversary, that records the names of the sixteen and the date.