somber, grey chapel, or the public house. Above them all loomed the
blackened hillsides and the slag heaps of waste coal or industrial refuse.
And all this brought about by the discovery of coal.
In the southern valleys, an Anglo-Welsh character came into being; one that
came to dominate the political, social and literary life of Wales, and it
was here also that a new and particular kind of Welshness was forged,
symbolized by the cloth-capped, heavy drinking, strike-prone, English-
speaking, rugby fanatic of the Valleys..To such a character, and to a
certain extent, to the majority of the three large urban areas of Cardiff,
Swansea and Newport, the people of the West and North, the Bible-toting,
chapel-going, teetotal, parsimonious, and above all Welsh-speaking were
totally alien beings who might have come from another planet. The
repercussions are felt strongly today as only one in five of the
inhabitants of Wales use Welsh as a language of everyday affairs.
In other areas, the Welsh language had been in decline for over 100 years.
In Flintshire, so near to the large urban areas of Merseyside and Cheshire
there had long been deliberate attempts to stamp out the Welsh language.
Other areas did not suffer the loss of the language.
Some of the letters published in The Cambrian in the mid 19th Century show
an attitude of many Englishmen towards the Welsh language that has
persisted until today. In one of them, the writer was amused by the
proposal to have the infant Prince of Wales (eldest son of Queen Victoria),
instructed in the Welsh language. He wrote that the prince, by trying to
pronounce the Welsh "ll" or "ch" would be perceived as having spasmodic
affections of the bronchial tubes "that would lead to quinsy or some
terrible disease of the lungs and jugulum and would alarm everyone."
Part VI
By the middle of the 19th century, Victoria's views notwithstanding, the
tide was running heavily against Welsh. In 1842, a Royal Commission,
looking into the state of education in Wales, noted that some Welsh boys
employed at mines in Breconshire were learning to read English at Sunday
School, but that they could speak only Welsh. This was intolerable to the
commissioners.
It was demanded in Parliament that an inquiry be conducted into the means
afforded to the laboring classes of Wales to acquire a knowledge of the
English tongue. The report of the Commissioners of Inquiry for South Wales
in 1844 lamented the fact that "The people's ignorance of the English
language practically prevents the working of the laws and institutions and
impedes the administration of justice." It didn't seem to occur to the
commissioners that it was their own ignorance of the language that was
obstructing justice!
The report led to another Royal Commission, conducted in 1847, which was to
have a lasting effect on the cultural and political life of Wales. The
report, in three volumes bound in blue covers, has become known as Brad y
Llyfrau Gleision (The Treachery of the Blue Books, for the three young and
inexperienced lawyers who conducted the report had no understanding of the
Welsh language, nor, it seems, did they understand non-conformity in
religious matters.
Bright, intelligent and well-read Welsh-speaking children were unable to
understand the questions put to them in English, and the surveyors pig-
headedly assumed that this was due to their ignorance. Their report
lamented what they considered to be the sad state of education in Wales,
the too-few schools, their deplorable condition, the unqualified teachers,
the lack of supplies and suitable English texts, and the irregular
attendance of the children. All these were attributed, along with
dirtiness, laziness, ignorance, superstition, promiscuity and immorality:
to Nonconformity, but in particular to the Welsh language.
One result, of course, of the publication of such "facts" led to so many of
its speakers being made to feel ashamed and embarrassed. The effects of the
controversy thus stirred up has lasted up until today; it certainly did
much ot bolster the position of those who agreed with much of the report
and who saw the language as the biggest drawback to the people of Wales.
One drastic remedy, the imposition of English-only Board Schools did much
to further has ten the decline of Welsh over a great part of the country.
In these schools, as in Flintshire a half century earlier, the "Welsh Not"
rule was imposed with severe penalties for speaking Welsh, including the
wearing of a wooden board, the old "Welsh lump" around one's neck.
In Caernarfon, Gwynedd, an area still predominantly Welsh-speaking in the
1990's, there is a high school named after Sir Hugh Owen, a pioneer in
education in Wales. Owen's untiring efforts to secure a university for
Wales led to a commission to promote the idea in 1854, the university
itself to be established through voluntary contributions. Owen's pleas to
the government for financial help were unheeded, and it was public
subscription that brought to fruition the old dream of Owain Glyndwr. In
1872 Aberystwyth University opened its doors to twenty-six students in a
very impressive building on the seafront designed as a hotel, but which was
fortunately vacant at the time. For the first few years of its existence,
the college depended greatly on voluntary contributions from the
nonconformist chapels, but it attracted many who would come to have
profound influence on the culture of their nation. In so many areas it
provided the foundations that led to the national revival of Wales in the
late 1890's.
The work of Owen M. Edwards, in a period of language decline, was crucial
in this renaissance. A native of Llanuwchllyn on the shores of Llyn Tegid
(Bala Lake), Oxford University lecturer and later Chief inspector of
Schools of the newly-created Welsh Board of Education, Edwards did much to
popularize the use of Welsh as an everyday language. Alarmed by the decline
in the language, he published a great number of Welsh books and magazines,
with particular interest in works for children. In 1898 he founded Urdd y
Delyn, a forerunner of Urdd Gobaith Cymru, the largest youth organization
in Wales and one that still conducts its activities through the medium of
Welsh.
Despite the success of organizations such as Urdd, one problem has remained
for the survival of Welsh ever since the Acts of Union in the middle
1500's. The Welsh language has considered to be a great hindrance to one's
feeling of Britishness. Even before the First World War, when British
soldiers from all parts of the kingdom marched off under the Union Jack to
fight the Boers in South Africa, the feeling took hold that "...side by
side with the honourable contribution which the Welsh could make to the
British Empire, the Welsh language could be considered an irrelevance..."
This idea was implanted even more firmly in the Welsh mind by the intention
of the leaders of the Welsh-speaking community to show that the
peculiarities of Welsh culture were not a threat to the unity and
tranquility of the kingdom of Britain. When ideas of a separate government
for the Welsh people began to take hold in the late 19th century, once
again, the idea of a British national identity found itself overwhelming
the purely local, isolated, and all too often ridiculed, aspirations of
those who wished for a Welsh nationhood.
In mainly English-speaking South Wales in particular, feelings on the
matter were sharply expressed. At a crucial meeting in Newport,
Monmouthshire, in January 1898 it was firmly stated (by Robert Byrd) that
there were thousands of true Liberals who would never submit "to the
domination of Welsh ideas." With few exceptions, this seems to sum up the
attitude of most Welsh politicians of the next one hundred years. There
were too many in Wales whose close ties with English interests made the
idea of home rule repugnant and one to be fought against at all costs.
Welsh-speaking Lloyd George, future Prime Minister, who was howled down at
the meeting, questioned if the mass of the Welsh nation was willing to be
dominated by a coalition of English capitalists who had made their fortunes
in Wales. Yet even his motives were held with suspicion as being entirely
self-serving. And, as a fluent Welsh speaker, he was mistrusted by many in
the audience who looked with suspicion upon those who could speak a
language that they could not.
In 1881, the Aberdare Commission's report showed that provisions for
intermediate and higher education in Wales lagged behind those in the other
parts of Britain; it suggested that there should be two new Welsh
universities, Cardiff and Bangor. It was found, however, that there was a
lack of adequately trained students for these new colleges and thus, in
1899 the Welsh Intermediate Act came into being that gave the new county
councils the power to raise a levy (to be matched by the Government) for
the provision of secondary schools.In 1896 came the Central Welsh Board to
oversee these schools.
The result was that thousands of Welsh children from all levels of society
were able to continue their education at a secondary level. Another result,
however, was the continued decline of the status accorded the Welsh
language, for the new secondary schools were thoroughly English, only very
few even bothering to offer Welsh lessons. An educated class of Welsh
