When Ukraine Spoke Welsh
When writing A Tipsy Fairy Tale, I found answers to questions I didn’t know to ask. Among my reasons for writing the memoir was to understand what caused the great sadness that led to my mother’s early death, and in turn, how it screwed up my childhood and adolescence. I didn’t expect to learn that my great grandmother was born in a Welsh city in Ukraine.
In 1850 more Welsh workers labored in mines and factories than in agriculture, making Wales the world’s first industrialized nation. Tzar Alexander II contracted with John Hughes, one of the most successful businessmen in Britain, to build a steel works, coal mine and railroad in the barren eastern part of Russia known as Ukraine.
Born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1814, Hughes made his fortune in mining, manufacturing and armaments. He formed the New Russia Company and in 1870 sailed from Wales with eight shiploads of machinery, supplies and a hundred or so skilled iron workers and miners.
Because of the harsh climate described as a “furnace in summer, a deep freeze in winter,” Hughes knew that his success depended on making his workers’ lives as comfortable and as Welsh as possible. He built “British-style” cottages for them to live in and imported familiar furniture and favorite foods. He built schools, a hospital, an Anglican church, a hotel and pubs. It worked. The new city was named Hughesovka after Hughes. In 1924 Stalin erased Hughes and renamed it Stalino after himself, and later Khrushchev, who grew up in Hughesovka…erm…Stalino, erased Stalin and renamed the city Donetsk, which has been in the news lately, so you probably have heard of it.
As word got back to Wales, many more workers made the journey to Ukraine including nineteen-year-old Thomas Mort who left Merthyr Tydfil in 1875. He married another Welsh emigre, Rachel Thomas, who was sixteen in 1883 when she gave birth to their first child, Katherine, who would become my great grandmother.
By 1900 Hughesovka’s population swelled to about 50,000. Concerned about the increasing social upheaval, the Morts returned to Wales where seventeen-year-old Katherine married Howell Samuel, who happened to be born in Scranton, Pennsylvania during one of his mother’s periodic attempts to escape her abusive husband. How strange! Neither of my Welsh great grandparents was actually born in Wales.
The couple settled in Nantybwch where they raised four children including my grandmother, Dida. Howell, who had twenty siblings, eventually ran off to Canada with his youngest brother’s mother-in-law who used Katherine’s stolen passport to enter the country. After he died in 1942, the faux-Katherine, stranded in Alberta, wrote to her husband begging him to take her back, and, by the way, please send money for the journey to Wales, which he did.
My godfather, Burt Marsh, who told me this story, said to his wife, “Sorry, Wynne, but if you ran off to Canada with another man, I’d have left you there.”
“I’d have left me there too,” she agreed.
I’m not sure what I would have done. How about you?
(An earlier version of this story appeared. in Ninnau, the North American Welsh Newspaper, January-February 2023).
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