Rhondda
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
MARGARET HAIG MACKWORTH, VISCOUNTESS, a woman prominent in British enterprises, born in 1883. The daughter of G. A Haig of Penithon, Radnorshire, she married in 1908 Sir Humphrey Mackworth. She is chairman of the Sanatogen Company and director of the Anglo-Argentine Coal Co., Ltd., Cambrian Collieries, Ltd., Globe Shipping Co., Ltd., Solutaris Water Co., Ltd., S. Wales Printing and Publishing Co., Ltd., and is connected with many other industrial undertakings. RHÔNE, a department of France, part of the former Lyonnais; area 1,104 square miles. Pop. about 915,500. It lies almost wholly in the basin of the Rhône and the Saône, its E. boundary being formed by these rivers. The surface is almost entirely hilly, being broken up in all directions by low spurs of the Cévennes. Corn, potatoes, wine, and fruits are the principal products. Nearly one-half the area is cultivated, oneeighth in vineyards, one-ninth under forest, and nearly one-sixth meadows. About 13,000,000 gallons of wine were made annually before the World War. The department is industrially one of the most important in France; all the branches are carried on at LYONS (q. v.), the capital of the department. RHÔNE (Latin, Rhodanus), a river in Europe which rises in Switzerland, near the E. frontiers of the canton of Valais, about 18 miles W. S. W. of the source of the Vorder-Rhein. Its precise origin is the Rhône Glacier, 5,581 feet It passes above the level of the sea. through the Lake of Geneva, and enters France, flowing first S. and then W. to the city of Lyons, where it turns almost due S., and so continues till (after passing Avignon and Arles) A it falls into the Gulf of Lyons by a greater and smaller mouth, forming here an extensive delta. Its principal affluent is the Saône, which enters it at the city of Lyons; other large tributaries are the Isère and Du- Its whole course is about 500 rance. miles; its drainage area is 38,000 miles; and it is navigable for 360 miles. The great obstacles to its navigation are the rapidity of its current, the shifting character of its channel, and the variations that take place in the volume of its water; but these obstacles have to a great extent been removed by a scheme of regularization and canalization, intended to secure everywhere a depth of over five feet. By means of a series of magnificent canals the navigation of the Rhône has been continued, without interruption, to the Rhine (through the Saône), Seine, and Loire, and to the Meuse and the Belgian system.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 lists Lady Rhondda purely as a company chairman and director — Sanatogen, Cambrian Collieries, Globe Shipping — and says nothing of the rest of her life. Margaret Haig Thomas had been a militant suffragette imprisoned for a pillar-box attack, survived the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 with her father (the 1st Viscount Rhondda, whose title passed to her by special remainder), and in 1920 founded the feminist weekly Time and Tide, which she edited until her death in 1958. Her longest fight was for the right of a peeress in her own right to sit in the House of Lords; the Lords refused her claim, and women were not admitted until the Peerage Act 1963, five years after she died. The Rhondda valleys that produced the family's coal fortune have also gone: the last deep mine, Maerdy, closed in 1990.
Written for this edition, 2026.