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Brittle with Relics: A History of Wales, 1962–97 ('Oral history at its revelatory best' DAVID KYNASTON)

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In each of the anthracite mining villages the neat terraces built to house the labour force remain. Other buildings also provide an echo of the ethos of these communities in their industrial heyday. Though barely a mile apart, every village is represented by a rugby club and is home to a significant number of chapels and churches. But the buildings most laden with history are the now largely deserted miners’ institutes and workmen’s halls. “Hall Y Cwm”, Workingmen’s Hall Garnant by aderixon is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 There are some constant themes weaving though these personal, and often very personal narratives. One of these is the Welsh language as King interviews activists who daubed signs or staged sit ins and sometimes went to prison as they protested on behalf of Cymraeg. Central to this story is Cymdeithas yr Iaith, with its careful embrace of peaceful protest, not that everyone approved. Apparently, hostilities still exist between myself and Germany. The First World War was declared by England, Wales and Monmouthshire (where I was born and bred), and the peace treaty signed only by England and Wales – so owing to an oversight at Versailles, “Monmouthshire is still at war with Germany”, according to one of the voices in Richard King’s vivid oral chronicle of Wales from 1962 to 1997. Next time I’m in Westphalia, I’d best be armed. The heavy industries of steel, oil and mining were all significant employers in the region; the centre of the last of these was the South Wales Coalfield, home to the historic communitarian radicalism fathered by the Miners’ Federation and its welfare institutes and libraries.

Language campaigner Angharad Tomos recalls asking her parents about such things as Dafydd Iwan’s songs and the fire at Penyberth (where an RAF training establishment was set on fire by Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine and D.J. Williams) and being excited to realize that their explanation constituted somehow an ‘undercover,’ unofficial history so different from the boring history she was being taught in school – which ‘was about the Methodist revival – there was nothing current.’For a long time the national movement (especially direct action groups fighting for Welsh language) and local Labour were moving in different directions. Saunders Lewis himself looked like some continental right-wing political activist from 1930s: ‘His image of Plaid Cymru had been of Action Française in Wales, but the uncomfortable fascist resonances of those early days had been, I think, very successfully buried by the sixties’, says Rowan Williams. Lewis’ followers remember themselves in the 1960s as fervent old-school nationalists: ‘I knew beyond doubt at that moment, the terrible power of the love which had motivated our fighting ancestors such as Caradoc, Buddug, Arthur, Glyndŵr, Llywelyn; my blood was singing to me of 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’, says John Barnard Jenkins. Richly humane, viscerally political, generously multi-voiced, Brittle with Relics is oral history at its revelatory best: containing multitudes and powerfully evoking that most remote but also resonant of times, the day before yesterday.’ David Kynaston Opening with the two man-made disasters one that killed so many children and the other which wiped a community from the map so an English city can ‘steal’ its water resources. This is such a beautifully written book that is multi-layered and multi-voiced one cannot help guilty for the crimes committed against the Welsh in the name of ‘progress’. 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’.

Introducing the collection of voices, Richard King reflects on his own place in the social, temporal, and physical landscape, and examines the tensions and arguments within Wales over what constitutes Welsh identity. That’s one of the advantages of a big book like this: you can have the nuance and complexity, the fine detail rather than just the broad-brush approach. You see people’s views change or being changed. It’s a history that’s still going on. 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. 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.

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Today, Nation.Cymru is honoured to publish the second of two exclusive extracts from the newly published Brittle with Relics by Richard King. The first part can be read here. King, being a man who cut his historian’s teeth by chronicling the Bristol indie record shop Revolver, has naturally interviewed a lot of musicians for this book such as the members of Super Furry Animals and Manic Street Preachers: there’s a lovely little moment when the respective lead singers Gruff Rhys and James Dean Bradfield bond over a mutual love of Swansea’s Badfinger. Fascinating… for a modern social history of a nation beset by cultural fissures Brittle With Relics covers impressive ground.’ ― Buzz Mag In a review of the book Brittle with Relics by Richard King , written in the Telegraph, Roger Lewis says of Welsh nationalism that “the psychology and motivation were totalitarian”.

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