“During the final four decades of the twentieth century Wales witnessed the simultaneous effects of deindustrialisation and a struggle for its language and identity. The country’s voice fought to be heard outside its frequently tempestuous borders and was argued over within them, as the people of Wales underwent some of the nation’s most traumatic and volatile episodes … ”
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.
King, however, begins his account with a seismic shift of a different kind, though very much one of voice: a Welsh-language BBC radio lecture broadcast in 1962 called Tynged yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language). Saunders Lewis, a former leader of Plaid Cymru (The Party of Wales), challenged listeners to take seriously the likelihood of the collapse and obliteration of the Welsh language.
Richard King is acutely attuned to the importance of voice and being heard. He has had an award-winning career in independent music as a producer, writer and event programmer. It is through voice that he approaches his chosen time-span; in fact, through 135 voices. This is a strikingly determined amplification of voice by means of oral history.
Eight or so voices appear in each of the book’s 16 sections. Short briefings contextualise an interweaving of interview excerpts that address a key movement of the period. Among these episodes are the 1979 referendum that rejected moves to set up a Welsh assembly; the influence of feminism and growing ecological awareness; the miners’ strike of 1984-85; Cool Cymru; and the 1997 referendum that secured devolution.
Necessarily, King’s platforming of voice brings a subjective element to the fore. Contributors tell us not only what happened but how they felt about it. It is this surfacing of the emotional – from shame to exhilaration – and of internal debate within the individual, which is a key, and positive, feature of the book’s approach.
Choral subtext
The interplay of voices alongside the first-person perspective creates a kind of choral subtext that, for an attentive reader, brings to the surface intriguing, subliminal, potential meanings. It is as though the speakers are sharing one room. They share only the page, yet a sense of dialogue is created, as though they are speaking to each other as well as to the interviewer and the reader. When the same note of memory is struck repeatedly by a variety of contributors, a melody of a kind emerges and compels attention.
This approach is particularly revealing in the discussion of the place of violence in political campaigning. Chapter two, Cofiwch Dryweryn/Remember Tryweryn, deals with the 1965 drowning of Capel Celyn village, on the Tryweryn river in north Wales, to provide a reservoir for Liverpool. The democratic system’s incapacity to represent the people of Wales was cruelly exposed. This intensified a wave of activism. But what kind of activity was justified?
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.
Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC, the Movement for the Defence of Wales) had been planting bombs at civic targets since 1963. Was political violence the best means for Wales to make itself heard? Wales has a track record of principled pacifism; but hadn’t politically motivated violence in Northern Ireland and earlier armed resistance, such as the 1916 Rising, brought results?
Dafydd Iwan, a former president of Plaid Cymru and an influential cultural figure, acknowledges “a kind of difficulty we had, in having a strict non-violent belief in our campaign in Wales, while still applauding the people who had fought for a free Ireland”.
Pressure of idealism
The protagonists’ voices take us deep into the subjective and lay bare the pressure of feeling and idealism. For example, on Christmas Eve 1972, John Jenkins, leader of MAC, was in prison: “I knew … the terrible power of the love which had motivated our fighting ancestors … a long race memory of dungeons and death for the cause, and I was so submerged in the compelling ecstasy of sacrifice that I would have welcomed pain with joy.”
As the hinges of his book on Wales, King chooses post-industrialism and “the struggle for its language” (that is, Welsh) “and identity”. Any history of Wales has to give due weight to the geographical fact that the eastern side of the country is attached to England, with all that this proximity implies.
I suggest that a third pivot emerges: the journey of the English-speaking Welsh into greater confidence in their identity as Welsh people. This is strikingly exemplified by monoglot English-speaking Welsh musicians Manic Street Preachers, who describe their fight-back against the belittling anti-Welsh sentiment they encountered. Their equally ground-breaking Welsh-speaking peers, such as Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, talk of how bands in 1990s Wales inspired each other across the language divide.
As the Preachers’ Nicky Wire says of what he calls “the touch paper” of confidence: “It’s not all about policy … ; sometimes you need the other things that bind people together.”
King’s epilogue characterises today’s Wales, born from these earlier decades. He highlights the imaginative Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015), designed to counteract short-termism, and the Welsh government’s refusal to handle the pandemic at the dictate of Westminster.
Other histories of this period in Wales will offer more extensive forensic factual analysis. This history takes the reader to the Welsh themselves.
Angela Graham was development producer on the landmark BBC series The Story of Wales. Her short story collection, A City Burning (Seren Books), was longlisted for this year’s Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her poetry pamphlet, Sanctuary, is due in April
