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

people was thus created that fostered the cultural traditions of their

country in the language of England.

Part VII

In the meantime, in an age where radio and movies began to play important

roles in the regular everyday life of the people of Wales, the language

continued its precipitous decline. North Wales got its news from and

followed the events in Liverpool; South Wales was more tied to happenings

in Bristol or even London. Links between the two areas of Wales were

practically non-existent; roads and rails went West to East, not North to

South, and the flow of ideas and language went in the same directions. Any

sense of a national Welsh identity was disappearing rapidly along with the

language.

In an attempt to stop the rot, a new party came into being in 1925, Plaid

Genedlaethol Cymru (The National Party of Wales) that was fiercely devoted

to purely Welsh causes such as preservation of the language and culture. In

1926, Saunders Lewis took over the presidency, but the party received very

little general support and, in some areas of Wales, was the object of

ridicule. It was to take forty years before Plaid Cymru was taken seriously

and gained its first seat in Parliament. Much had been happening until then

to further erode Welsh as a common language and the idea of the Welsh as a

common, united people worthy of their own government as part of a greater

Britain.

The views of Henderson and Lewis, as imaginative and forward-looking as

they were, did not appeal to the majority of the Welsh people' at the time,

those who thought the politician and the poet were those of a very small

minority indeed. In the meantime, the process of anglicization continued

unabated; more people living in Wales considered themselves Anglo-Welsh

than Welsh. Much of the blame (or for some,the praise), can be placed on

the educational system that, even before the outset of the Second World War

was geared to producing loyal Britons.

When World War ll finally arrived, there was much more unanimity of support

throughout Britain than there had been for the First World War. And there

was less trauma inflicted upon the people of Wales, for this was a crusade

against Fascism and Nazism and Hitler that almost everyone could subscribe

to. It was also a fight to preserve the Empire. The heavy bombing meant a

large exodus of children from the targeted larger English cities into the

more rural areas. In Wales, thousands of refugees learned Welsh, but in

many areas their English language overwhelmed the local speech.or tipped

the scales against its survival.

To counter the linguistic threat to the Welsh culture at Aberystwyth, a

private Welsh-medium school was established.by Ifan ab Owen Edwards, the

son of the famous educator. Apart from this little school, however, it

wasn't until Llanelli Welsh School began in 1947 that the idea of teaching

children through the medium of Welsh began to take hold in earnest. Other

schools followed, so that by 1970, even Cardiff had its Ysgol Dewi Sant

(St. David's School) one of the largest primary schools in Wales, teaching

through the medium of Welsh. The increase in the Welsh primary schools was

accompanied by a demand for a Welsh secondary education, and the first such

schools opened in Flintshire, Ysgol Gyfun Glan Clwyd and Ysgol Maes Garmon

in areas in which the great majority of the parents were monolingual

English. The success of these schools were followed by Ysgol Rhydfelen in

Glamorganshire in 1962 and by many others by the 1980's.

It may have taken a long while, and for many, it might have been too late,

but the change in the attitude of the Welsh people toward their language

has been dramatic since 1962. Not only that, but great strides have been

made in convincing immigrants to Wales that their children would not suffer

the loss of their English language if they were to be taught through the

medium of Welsh, and that a bilingual education may well be superior to one

that confines them to a single language. Many a non-Welsh speaking parent

is now anxious to point with pride at the achievement of their children in

the Welsh language. It is no longer fashionable in Wales to refer to the

language as "dying," and the activities of the Eisteddfod as "the kicks of

a dying nation," sentiments the author heard at Swansea in 1964. What

caused the sea-change?

One place we can start to look for the answer is the media, especially

public radio. Beginning in 1922, the BBC broadcasts in Wales were eagerly

awaited. Its voice, however, was one that gave prestige and authority to

its views, the voice of a public-school-educated upper-class Englishman. In

addition, the majority of broadcasts led a majority of British people to

believe that a BBC accent was not only desirable, but was the correct one,

and that their own accent, dialect, or in the case of much of Wales, their

language, was inferior. It was Radio Eireann, the voice of the Irish

Republic, that broadcast the only regular Welsh language material,

beginning in 1927.

At time, and for a long period afterward, incredible as it now seems, the

head of the BBC station in Cardiff ignored protests from devotees of the

Welsh language who wished to hear Welsh language programs. There were then

almost one million speakers of Welsh. But aided by such attitudes of those

in authority, a rapid decline was about to begin. This was not inevitable.

Perhaps the language would have even advanced, given sufficient air time in

the late 1920's and early 30's. The problem was that most Welsh listeners

enjoyed their English language programs; it was only the few who realized

that their enjoyment was coming at the expense of their cherished, native

tongue.

Part VIII

One who did take notice, and one who provided the second place to look for

the answer was Ifan ab Owen Edwards, whose father Owen M. Edwards had

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