The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-11-26 00:00:00

WEDNESDAY EVENING'S LECTURE

EXPOSURE OF THE PANT GLAS COMMUNITY SWINDLE.
After a few preliminary remarks of an amusing descrip-
tion, with respect to a recent visit to London in search of
the husband of a female missionary, and reading to the audi-
ence some disgustingly abusive and threatening letters re-
cently addressed to himself by the socialists. Mr. Brindley
proceeded to his promised exposure of the swindling nature
of the community established by the Liverpool socialists at
Pant Glas in Wales, which he proved by a public examina-
tion of the wife of one of the victims of the fraud—a poor
woman of the name of Gregory.
The leading movers of this precious affair were a knot of
individuals—Liverpool socialists. The Mr. Westwick,
spoken of in a former lecture, was also a subscriber to its
funds. The place in question, Pant Glas, described to its
poor dupes, and in the pages of the New Moral World, as a
perfect Paradise,—where "nightingales sung on every tree"
—consisted of about 1,000 acres of Welsh mountain, which
is said not in reality to contain as much grass or any other
herbage "as would graze a goose." On their arrival at this
paradise, the misguided individuals, who had paid some £lO
each for the privilege of going into community, found pre-
pared for their residence only a miserable hovel, which had
been in use as a cow-house, and in which the whole—men,
women, and children—eat, drank, lived, and slept together
on beds of straw in true social style—like pigs in a straw-
yard.

Their supplies of food were forwarded them from Liver-
pool, from the parties who had swindled them out of their
money, and fooled them into this wild-goose scheme ; and
were, as might be expected, of the most wretched descrip-
tion. Thick stirabout, oatcake, coffee made of roasted corn,
and sometimes a little tea for the females, constituted their
luxurious breakfast. Potatoes and lard,—once or twice a
fowl amongst 16 of them, with boiled nettles—salt fish,
which, having been packed in the same box with soft soap,
required to be washed before eating, was their ordinary din-
ner; and their only other meal was one of chocolate, sent
from Liverpool, with oatbread and lard.
Fixed in this delightful spot, and luxuriating upon this
delightful fare, the community naturally became restive,
and wrote in savage terms to their defrauders, the Liverpool
socialists ; and they were directed, in order to keep up the
swindle and to get in subscriptions, to write two kinds of
letters—one for the public about nightingales, rural felicity,
appeared in the New Moral World,
and the rest which duly
and the other containing the plain unvarnished truth. After
six months, however, of endurance, in which period they
literally eat up their farming stock, beds, bedding, and all,
the community broke up—one of the party running away
with the only portion of their locomotives remaining—a
donkey and cart—and another swindling his fellow dupes of
the remnant of their pots and pans.
A wretched attempt was made by a wretched being in the
form of humanity during the progress of this exposure and
at its conclusion, to create a diverson in favour of the infa-
mous body with which he is associated ; but it is gratifying
to state that his efforts were rewarded with only the most un-
qualified disgust. Indeed, we believe that but for the inter-
ference of Mr. Brindley, his doom would have been the
nearest pump. A resolution was unanimously passed that
the community was a swindling scheme; and on the sugges-
tion of a person in the pit a subscription was got up on the
spot to relieve the poor woman who having, with her two
children, been reduced to wretchedness by it, and deserted
by her husband who had dragged her into it, had come for-
ward to expose its villany and that of its concoctors. The
amount realised by this spontaneous and creditable effort of
the audience was £3 13s. 6d.