"Make Yourself Necessary"
The connection between Huxley's 'Brave New World' and the Welsh city of Swansea
The seaside Welsh city of Swansea, better known for its coal and copper exports, bears an unlikely literary connection with Aldous Huxley’s dystopia Brave New World.
Turns out Aldous Huxley based one of the central characters, Mustapha Mond (the main proponent of World Government in the novel) on one Sir Alfred Mond.
The real Mond was son of a German-Jewish immigrant, Ludwig Mond, who invented the nickel carbonyl process in the 1860s (which later made efficient tanks possible in WWI). His son Alfred Mond was born in Widnes, Cheshire, and had founded a technologically advanced chemical plant at Billingham, near Stockton on Tees, which Huxley visited in 1930 when researching material for his novel and which made a great impression on him. Alfred Mond had also become the founder of chemicals giant ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries, created in 1926 by merging Brunner Mond, Nobel Explosives, the United Alkali Company, and British Dyestuffs Corporation).
And now the Swansea connection. Near Swansea were the Mond Nickel Works (established 1902) at Clydach, which by 1921 were the largest nickel works in the world, and Alfred Mond was managing director of Brunner Mond and Company, with both companies owned by his father Ludwig. Mond certainly held a lot of powers over the economics of the region, and over his workers, in the grand old paternalistic style. The posh western suburbs of Swansea, called the Uplands, were the favourite location for the villas and residences of the wealthy movers and shakers of society. A grand house, Ffynone House, once stood near the junction of Ffynone Drive and Rhianfa Lane, which was owned by the Mond family.
This photograph shows Sir Alfred's wife, Lady Mond, hosting a garden party for members of the Swansea Womens Liberal Association, at Ffynone House on 23rd July 1913. Wealth and politics mix very well. But it gets better.
An ornate Edwardian building still stands today in central Swansea at the corner of Union Street with Park Street, built in 1911 and called the Mond Building.
The architect named it after his mentor, Alfred Mond, who by 1910 had become Liberal MP for Swansea Town (later Swansea West constituency).
The motto above the doors reads: "Make yourself necessary". If that is not a sentiment belonging to Brave New World I don't know what is! To make oneself useful is one thing, to make oneself necessary is a drastic amplification of that exhortation. The implication of being necessary is that those who are not so, the unnecessary, have no place in the world of Mond - or Huxley’s dystopia. Only necessary workers may be employed by Mond’s companies, and the exhortation to prove yourself necessary places the onus on the worker: it is down to you, the individual person, to convince management that you are necessary and therefore deserving of a job. Similarly, in Brave New World the individual has to be necessary for society, and anyone who is not is exiled or eliminated. Being necessary is for the greater good of society.
Interestingly, from producing chemicals Alfred Mond went on the become Minister of Health under Prime Minister Lloyd George between 1918 to 1923. So Swansea West's first MP was an industrialist of the highest order with paternalistic leanings who inspired a central character in one of the most famous dystopian novels. Reality, as so often, surpasses fiction.
[I am still caught up with life outside of Substack, meaning I have not been able to research and write the longer pieces I have been meaning to for a while. Normal service of a more medievalist-historicist comparison will be resumed as soon as possible.]
"Make yourself necessary" or else! Freeze or starve to death? Life under the dome depends on our data flowing like blood to the brain. We are being pushed by the descendants of the like of Mond into the Metaverse through compulsory digital identity.