Wales: In search of a history

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That did not mean that some people did not try to employ history to promote the idea of Welsh nationhood. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, romantics in and outside Wales had used the Celts and druids to build a picture of the Welsh as a mysterious and poetic people, the true ancient Britons. By the late Victorian period that seemed out of place in an era of modernity, and history was rewritten to stress the devoutness and cultural achievements of the Welsh. As the mock-medieval investiture of the future Edward VIII as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle in 1911 showed, even the symbols of conquest were recast to declare Wales as a partner rather than a subject of England.

What people in 19th- and early 20th-century Wales knew about their collective history was a different matter. There was certainly a strong sense of genealogy in rural areas and many ordinary people were as proud of their roots as any aristocratic family. Matthew Arnold, a Victorian professor of poetry at Oxford, claimed that everywhere in Wales had its own traditions and that the Welsh people knew and clung to this living past.

How this attachment came together to form a sense of national awareness was less certain. Many people, especially in industrial areas, were ambivalent, sometimes even embarrassed, about their Welshness. For every patriotic Welshman or woman there were others who saw their nation as a stigma, an unwanted hangover from the past that should be cast aside.

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Teaching Welsh history

The establishment of compulsory education in the late 19th century could have changed that, but before the Second World War school history lessons more often than not focused on celebrating British rather than Welsh nationhood. Yet, despite later claims that Welsh children were kept ignorant of their history, this was not true everywhere. The poet Dannie Abse, born in 1923, remembers being taught at his Cardiff school that Owain Glyndŵr had rebelled in defence of justice and liberty and was in the heart and soul of every true Welshman.After the Second World War such patriotic teaching gained official support. In 1952 the Welsh department of the Ministry of Education issued a report which called for more teaching of Welsh history in the belief this would contribute to the survival of the Welsh nation.

The teaching of Welsh history may have grown in the 1950s to 1970s but it was not always popular. One Wrexham man remembered being “force-fed” Welsh history at school in the 1940s and early 1950s: “Yet it had seemed so impossible to disentangle, so difficult to absorb, what with all those names of squabbling Welsh princes, [and] long-vanished principalities.” In 1959 in Flintshire the director of education was condemned for promoting Welsh history. “They fear that you are creating in the mind of a child an awareness that there is such a concept as the Welsh nation,” he said of his critics.

Gwynfor Evans, president of Plaid Cymru from 1945 to 1981, wrote his own history of Wales, a tale of English oppression and a glorious linguistic heritage – a story not always too concerned with historical complexities. Such tales of the survival of Wales against the odds may have been more propaganda than pure history but they helped inspire a new generation of activists who were even willing to go to prison in the name of their nation. One such figure was Dafydd Iwan who wrote the popular song Yma o Hyd (Still Here), another questionable account of the past but one that demonstrated the appeal of a simple historical message.

By the 1970s the focus of Welsh history was beginning to look beyond medieval princes and the questions of culture and language that had been deemed central to promoting Welsh identity. The closure of collieries and other industrial works was creating a sense that a certain kind of Welsh community was in retreat. This brought a greater interest in industrial, social and political history and a realisation that it was as much a part of Welsh history as medieval principalities.

Rethinking Welshness

Not everyone welcomed this new turn in Welsh history. To some nationalists, industrialisation was associated with Anglicisation and the undermining rather than the building of a nation. It was, for example, the late 1980s before the Welsh Folk Museum (now St Fagans National History Museum) embraced industrial history by erecting a row of miners’ cottages. Television was quicker to take to this wider understanding of the Welsh past. Two series were particularly important. The BBC’s Wales! Wales? (1984) placed industrial south Wales centre stage and emphasised how Wales meant different things to different people. HTV’s The Dragon has Two Tongues (1985), meanwhile, emphasised not just the plurality of the Welsh experience but how it could be interpreted in conflicting ways. Both shows made significant impacts, and historical debate seemed to be moving out of the classroom and into the pubs and living rooms of Wales.

The reclaiming of the history of the industrial working class as a central element in the Welsh past was an important part of that working class rethinking its Welshness. Being Welsh was losing its associations with a restrictive old-fashioned Nonconformist culture. Its newly stressed plurality allowed a greater part of the Welsh population to see Wales as something to be proud of and maybe even something with a political significance.

This was a slow process but, alongside the alienation many felt with Thatcherism and de-industrialisation, there was enough of a politicisation of Welshness among the working class to transform the resounding ‘No’ vote in the 1979 devolution referendum to a narrow ‘Yes’ in the 1997 re-run.

Quite what role the growing awareness and rewriting of Welsh history played in that process is open to debate but the research of political scientists certainly pointed to the crucial swing coming in the industrial south, precisely the place that had been written into Welsh history.

A new history of Wales on the BBC, The Story of Wales, has ambitions of encouraging debate and kindling interest rather than simply depicting the nation’s past. The internet now means that opportunities for people to engage with, instead of simply consuming, narratives of history are unprecedented. Yet perhaps the sense of urgency Welsh historians once had in wanting to tell their stories to wider audiences has faded. Welsh nationhood no longer seems so controversial and fewer people are denying their nationality. Wales does not seem in any danger of perishing in the near future.

Crucially, since devolution, Welsh nationhood is no longer so dependent on the past. It is no more a nation that has to look backwards to see that it exists. Yet the fact that a political state of sorts has come about at all owes much to the perspectives people have drawn from Wales’s history, even if their reading of that history was sometimes rather selective.

Martin Johnes is head of history at Swansea University and the author of Wales Since 1939 (Manchester University Press, 2012)

This article was first published in the January 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine