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Wales felt the effect of the international revolutionary fervour of the late 1960s. In 1969 the investiture at Caernarfon of Queen Elizabeth’s eldest son Charles as Prince of Wales was seen by some as a humiliating display of colonialism. Two members of the Free Wales Army were killed by their own device a day ahead of the investiture; on the day itself a child lost a leg to a bomb in Caernarfon. Another device targeted the royal yacht Britannia. The history of the relationship between Cymru and Cymraeg, between Wales and its language, has most usually been told in the mother tongue. To present the history of the Welsh language during the period covered in this book in English is an act of faith: it is one not entered into lightly.
Today in Wales we are again engaged in an involved conversation about our future. It is a conversation we are finally having on something approaching our own terms. The following books helped me understand how we might distinguish a Welsh form of self-determination. They would all generously oil the wheels of our current national debate.
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Welsh-speaking Labour members in Blaenau Ffestiniog for instance ‘hated everything about Cymdeithas and anything that promoted the Welsh language, even though some of these people couldn’t speak English very well. The North Wales Quarrymen’s Union only operated in Welsh – all their literature and minutes were in Welsh…’ This is exactly what it’s like to read Richard King’s fascinating, deeply important, episodic and discursive oral history of Wales from 1962-97, called, after R.S. Thomas’ poetic jab at his country’s seeming inertia, Brittle With Relics.A curious title, I have to say, as the last thing I felt reading this book was stasis. If nothing else these voices prove that Wales has been in nothing but flux this past half century or so. Three years later the Westminster government passed a Welsh Language Act, which formally recognised that ‘in the course of public business and the administration of justice, so far as is reasonably practicable, the Welsh and English languages are to be treated on the basis of equality’. We then see during the Miners Strike of 1984-85 the destroying of many industrial communities in the south of the country. Even today when one speaks of the coal fields it is today of the economic and public health disadvantages that these areas are forced to face.
This book eloquently rejects the erasure of memory and experience; the result is a work of history whose stories feel as if they are still unfolding.’ John Harris ― Guardian Other histories of this period in Wales will offer more extensive forensic factual analysis. This history takes the reader to the Welsh themselves.During the final four decades of the twentieth century Wales witnessed the simultaneous effects of deindustrialisation and a struggle for its language and identity. There is the drowning of the community at Capel Celyn and we revisit the socially seismic events of the South Wales Miners’ Strike as Margaret Thatcher sought to break the NUM and a chronicle of the still ongoing process of devolution, with one of its principal architects, Ron Davies duly recognised as such by many contributors. Fascinating… for a modern social history of a nation beset by cultural fissures Brittle With Relics covers impressive ground.’ ― Buzz Mag When better than St. David’s Day to announce that our Book of the Month is Richard King’s ‘Brittle With Relics: A History of Wales 1962 —1997’, just-published by Faber. Reading it is much like keeping the company of Wales’s most interesting, erudite people, writes Pamela Petro. This history of Wales begins in 1962, with a radio speech delivered as a warning that Cymraeg, and the identity and way of life it represented, faced extinction. Titled ‘Tynged yr Iaith’ (‘The Fate of the Language’), the speech was given in the form of a radio broadcast by its author, Saunders Lewis, the former leader of Plaid Cymru.
Another theme emerging from King’s multi-voiced epic is almost inadvertently comical: all these divisions. The Wesleyans not talking to the Methodists; Labour not getting on with Plaid Cymru; the innumerable factions within the Free Wales Army and the Welsh Language mob, where rambling speeches were followed by accordion playing. As under Stalin, there were frequent purges if “everyone was enjoying it too much”. Some left the fold to become feminists or homosexuals, or in one instance a nurse. There is an authenticity to the primary accounts here which would be impossible to weave together in a secondary history. Moreover King keeps the reader alongside events with helpful interludes that demonstrate the wider context that these statements concern. One of the best features is that King’s authorial voice is not lost because he is able to sue these interludes to add to the reader’s understanding of past events with contemporary knowledge. This is best demonstrated with the searing indictment of MI5 involvement in Direct Action. Where the primary voices are speculating and supposing, King is able to bring into clarity the degree to which grassroots movements for Wales were undimmed and sabotaged. And of course the wonderful Dafydd Iwan, who wrote the song that has recently been adopted as the battle-cry of Welsh football supporters, Yma o hynd (We are still here), a lot of air time. Definitely one of the greatest anthems of all time. One of Dafydd’s songs, which were all written in Welsh, contains the following lines, roughly translated into English here. My grandmother’s coffin was placed in the dining room as the parlour filled with mourners and a crowd spilled from the doorway down into the street. A minister from the Nonconformist tradition proclaimed and declaimed for twenty minutes in a rich and vivid Cymraeg.
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On the whole, however, King’s Wales was never mine. He dwells, as commentators always do, on the dourness, chapel graveyards, abandoned collieries, struggle, gloomy stuff about job losses and outside lavatories. But the principality is much more than teetotalism and damnation. As Richard Burton’s sister Hilda once said to Ringo Starr: “You know the Welsh. We’re good at singing, we’re good at parties, and we don’t feel shy.”
The first disaster was the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley in North Wales. This was to create a reservoir that would supply water to Liverpool, something that can only ever be described as an arrogant act that destroyed the Welsh-speaking community of Capel Celyn. The other disaster occurred in October 1966 in Aberfan, the south Wales pit village where, despite warnings of danger, a vast spoil tip slid down a hillside behind Pantglas Junior School, killing 144 people, 116 of them children. Both these catastrophises show the arrogance of the English towards their neighbours. I’d concur. For there exists also the convivial Wales of Harry Secombe and goonery, an appreciation of the rural scene, the Welsh National Opera and its stars, Georgian and Victorian architecture, and Ryan and Ronnie, who to my mind were funnier than Morecambe and Wise. If I don’t much like Dylan Thomas’s verbose whimsy, I am an admirer of the works of another Welshman who wrote in English, Gwyn Thomas. On the surface, Richard King has pulled off the task with Brittle with Relics. Subtitled A History of Wales 1962–1997, it comprises sixteen topical chapters (The Welsh Language, Incomers, Cardiff Bay) built mainly from direct quotation, as well as a short introduction and epilogue. The easy way to test the effectiveness of his approach is to open the book at random and see what’s there. I did it five times. I landed on pithy insights from former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on secularisation, poet and former activist Dewi Prysor on protest group the Meibion Glyndŵr Colour Party, former Secretary of State for Wales Peter Hain on the Valleys after the miner’s strike, Super Furry Animals singer-songwriter Gruff Rhys on Richey Manic and SFA bassist Guto Pryce on the 1997 devolution referendum – which marks the book’s cut-off, which is a little frustrating, twenty-four years on. This weekend, Nation.Cymru is honoured to publish two exclusive extracts from the newly published Brittle with Relics by Richard King.This is history with an agenda. There’s a lot about bridge-building and depoliticising Cymraeg, making the language less of a football and even though it charts some dreadful and difficult times the book’s tenor is ultimately hopeful. This is just one example of the ways in which King illuminates a history which I was ignorant of completely. Events of significant magnitude are brought to life by the variety of voices King has interviewed. The flooding of Tryweryn, the catastrophe of Aberfan, the 1979 Referendum, Meibion Glyndŵr and the Miners’ Strike 1984-1985 are all brought to the centre stage and recalled with extraordinary depth. Several themes course through the history, the principal one being the battle for recognition of the Welsh language. King wrestles throughout the history with what Welsh Nationalism means, and every voice has a different answer. Multiple people have different takes on the extent of Welsh nationalism and the role it played in these years, but King leaves these opinions on the table, for the reader to figure out by themselves. It’s very well done. Structurally, this book is a gold standard of how to deliver a chronological history without sacrificing theme or trend. The 35-year period on which Richard King focuses contains near its beginning an event so appalling that it resonated around the world. The disaster at Aberfan on October 21st, 1966, claimed the lives of 144 people, 116 of them children. A colliery spoil tip collapsed on to the village at its foot. Local voices that had forecast such a tragedy went unheard.