Category: books

10 classic novels from the ‘Welsh Century’

Every year on my module The Welsh Century 1847-1947 I encourage students to read fiction from the period. Here are the ones I suggest.

These novels have been selected  because I like them rather than because of any particular literary merit they might have. However, all are vivid illustrations of life during this period, or at least how some people liked to imagine life. Some of the books were published later than the timeframe of the module but they draw on their authors’ own experiences of the period.

  1. Jeremy Brooks, Jampot Smith (1960).

A comic story of teenage English immigrants in Llandudno who are more concerned with girls than the ongoing Second World War. The English middle class may not be a fashionable topic in Welsh history but they are part of the nation’s story.

  1. Islwyn Ffowc Elis, Cysgod y Cryman (1953). Published in English as Shadow of the Sickle

You may want to throttle several of the sanctimonious characters but a great story nonetheless and an important depiction of the tensions within rural Wales just after the Second World War. The book was important in taking Welsh-language novels to a younger audience.

  1. Caradoc Evans, My People (1915)

A collection of short stories that give an unsympathetic view of the people of rural Wales and which made its author rather notorious.  The characters are devious, hypocritical, lustful, greedy and not always very intelligent.  It’s all a little over the top but great fun.

  1. Jack Jones, Rhondda Roundabout (1934)

A disjointed but vivid and entertaining picture of the vitality of life in mining communities. The perfect antidote to any idea of Welsh miners as downtrodden, bored, overly pious or sober.

  1. Lewis Jones, Cwmardy (1937)

Celebrated for its picture of politics and exploitation in the south Wales valleys but it’s ‘Big Jim’ and the other characters that make it such a great read and much more than the Communist propaganda that it was intended as.

  1. Stead Jones, Make Room for the Jester (1964)

Rather obscure and probably the least successful book on the list. But it is full of teenage angst, repressed sexuality and adult alcoholism in 1939 Pwllheli.

  1. Richard Llewellyn, How Green was my Valley (1939)

 Often derided for its Welsh clichés (lots of singing and talking funny) and poor sense of history (the decline of the valleys is all the fault of the unions and immigrants apparently) but it doesn’t deserve to cast aside.  A gripping story, appealing characters and lots of sentimentality made it hugely popular everywhere, including in the south Wales it misrepresents. 

  1. Caradog Pritchard, Un Nos Ola Leuad (1961). Published in English as One Moonlit Night.

Sometimes regarded as the greatest Welsh-language novel ever.  Set in a north Wales quarrying community, it’s more poverty and child abuse than hymns and eisteddfodau.  It’s hard not to be touched by the tragic life of the young narrator. The book dispels the romantic pictures of early twentieth-century Welsh rural society that characterise some autobiographies of Welsh-speaking intellectuals. The book is spoiled only by some surreal passages of biblical visions. 

  1. Kate Roberts, Traed Mewn Cyffion (1936). Published in English as Feet in Chains

Another rather bleak and depressing but vivid depiction of life in a slate quarrying community in early 20th-century Caernarfonshire. Will stop any doubt over which gender had the roughest deal.

  1. Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940).

A collection of short stories that show Wales’ most famous writer at his best. Very funny, slightly surreal and often irreverent. A rather different inter-war Wales to the one found in mining novels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wasn’t she a tyrant ten times worse than Miraz?

While reading my kids a bedtime story tonight I came across this passage. It seems rather apt for recent events.

“They say she ruled for a hundred years: a hundred years of winter. There’s power, if you like. There’s something practical.”

“But, heaven and earth!” said the King, “haven’t we always  been told that she was the worst enemy of all? Wasn’t she a tyrant ten times worse than Miraz?”

“Perhaps,” said Nikabrik in a cold voice. “Perhaps she was for you humans, if there were any of you in those days. Perhaps she was for some of the beasts. She stamped out the Beavers, I dare say; at least there are none of them in Narnia now. But she got on all right with us Dwarfs. I’m a Dwarf and I stand by my own people. We’re not afraid of the Witch.”

C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (1951)

In Narnia there were more beasts than dwarfs.

I Am The Secret Footballer review

I Am The Secret Footballer: Lifting the Lid on the Beautiful Game (2012)

This is both a gripping and a deeply frustrating book.

In terms of its aim of lifting the lid on the hidden world of football it’s very good and better probably than every Premier League autobiography. It’s far most honest and open than is the case with almost everything else written from within football. There’s much here on the shenanigans, the money, the mindset of players, their relationships with people outside football and about the playing of the game itself. Every fan will learn something from it.

But, in terms of trying to understand the secret footballer himself, the book is deeply frustrating. It’s not so much the fact that he’s anonymous but that so much of the detail is left out.

He talks a lot about money and about figures but at the same time is vague enough that you don’t really understand whether he’s very rich from his investments or broke from his tax bill (or both). Understanding the trajectory and nature of his career is impossible because he, understandably, doesn’t give too much away in order to protect his anonymity. This means understanding quite where he’s coming from is very difficult, as is understanding why he suffers from depression.

Indeed, building up some sympathy for the writer is almost impossible. He comes over as rather arrogant but I guess that’s inevitable with any highly-paid, high-profile elite athlete. He seems to see himself as both an insider and an outsider within football culture but how that affects his relationship with his teammates is never as explicit as it might have been. His wife is virtually absent from the book, despite the talk about the impact of home life on performances. You get the sense that while he might not want fans to know who he is, his identity within the game isn’t a secret. For all the discussion of his wages and his depression, he’s holding back.

This is shame because there was the potential here for the best book ever written about football. The writer is clearly intelligent, reflective and insightful. He could have written a very open autobiography that told us about his personality, his life, his career and the game itself. That was never going to happen though because he’s still playing and wants to stay in the game.

What he’s given us is very good but it leaves the reader with as many questions as answers. He’s just had to leave too much out in order to protect his identity and, presumably, his reputation within the game.

Mountains, Welsh Culture and a bit of Science Fiction

I recently finished a 1977 novel called Survivors: Genesis of a Hero. It’s a tale of Britain a few years after a catastrophe that has wiped out of most of the human race. A violent and oppressive government has sprung up to govern what’s left of England.

Wales, however, holds out against this new militaristic regime.  Communities there realize that the English revolution is based on using the guns, food and technology of a civilization that is now over. Instead, they try and build a (Welsh-speaking) society that is not only fairer but more sustainable and self-sufficient. What enables them to do that, and hold off the advances of the English revolution, is retreating to the mountains and fighting a guerrilla war. It’s a military tactic that was familiar to medieval Welsh princes.

The geography of Wales has shaped its history.  Indeed, the opening line of Owen M. Edwards’ influential 1901 history of the nation was ‘Wales is a land of mountains’. The mountains divided north and south, undermining a sense of national unity. But they also kept out not only invaders but migrants too. Only slowly did tourists, industrialists and railways open up north Wales to Anglicizing influences. Mountains were key to why Wales survived into the modern world.

But modern technology and wealth undermined that, as people by the 1950s were only too aware.  In 1961, the nationalist writer Iswlyn Ffowc Elis complained (in Welsh):

Wales is no longer a haven beyond the mountains, but an open playground for hordes of motorists and cyclists and hikers, and an experimental field for the Government’s technology.  The teeth of her defensive mountains have been drawn, her valleys drowned by the English, and the innards of her rural society ripped out.  She now stands naked before the world.

Ironically, mountains are now seen as important to the future of Wales precisely because they bring in the spending power of tourists.

That’s surely a good thing. Wanting to close our border and deny outside influences can only harm Wales, both economically and culturally. Welsh identity survived in the post-war period because it embraced the modern world rather than rejected it. Once ‘the teeth of the defensive mountains’ were drawn, Wales reinvented itself as nation built on the present rather than the past.  Thus while a few opposed the building of the Severn Bridge in the 1960s because it would open Wales up to the world, far more embraced it for exactly the same reason.  Wales was a redefined from a land of hymns and pubs that were shut on a Sunday to one of pop music and personal freedom.

In Survivors the new Welsh society is welcoming of refugees from oppression in England. Those refugees have to agree to live by the ways of the new society but it’s also recognized that the incomers can bring new ideas and news ways of doing things. The best way to protect a culture is to ensure it does not stand still.

Survivors: Genesis of a Hero is out of print but there are pirated pdfs online.  There’s a review of the book here.

Writing Welsh History

This short essay was originally published on a website called WalesHome in 2012. That site is no longer available so I have reproduced the piece here.

Writing history isn’t easy.  It can be like doing a jigsaw when you don’t know what the picture is, half the pieces are missing and those that are left can be put together in a variety of quite different ways. Thus the story told ends up owing as much as to the historian as to what actually happened. This isn’t to say that the history is made up, just that it could have been made to look very different.

I have just published a book called Wales since 1939. At more than 200,000 words, it’s a rather long and it covers a lot of ground. It includes material not just on the expected topics of devolution, miners and rugby but also on themes less commonly found in books on Welsh history such as youth culture, house prices and shopping. It’s a book that features the Beatles, the Queen and Churchill, as well as Gwynfor, Nye and Rhodri.

Even then the picture painted of Wales is only partial. Much has been left out or skimmed over.  People interested in classical music, the theatre or even the Liberal Party may feel their pet topic has been given short thrift. Others, however, may get upset, not so much because their interest has not been given due attention but because they don’t like what’s said about it.

Historians of older periods have the luxury that the people they write about can’t answer back. For those of us who write about more recent times, being told we’ve got it wrong is an occupational hazard.  A member of the audience saying something along the lines of ‘it wasn’t like that’ has been a feature of probably every public contemporary history talk I have ever given.  One woman’s comment was simply to point out that she was actually there. It was unclear whether the implication was that the analysis given was wrong or that history should only be discussed by first-hand witnesses.

Writing about the nature of Wales exacerbates these problems because people hold very deep-held views about what the answer is.  As the comment pages of WalesHome illustrate, questions of nationalism, politics and language are not always debated very calmly or rationally.  Some will disagree with my book not because of the evidence I present but because they don’t like the answers I’ve come up with. I doubt any evidential base or any form of argument would have persuaded them otherwise.

Moreover, I expect I will at times get attacked from all sides because the book is sometimes nice and sometimes critical about both nationalism and the Labour movement. It acknowledges both the importance of the Welsh language and how at times it has alienated people. It even points out that there are many Tories in Wales and some of them have made important contributions to their nation. In the past my writings have led to me being called both a Welsh nationalist and anti-Welsh.

The trick to writing a history of a nation is not so much coming up with one definition of that nation but acknowledging that modern nations are comprised of different peoples, with different ideas, experiences and outlooks.  Many of these are wholly incompatible and very contradictory. The task of the historian is to make sense of them and put them in some form of order that acknowledges the plurality of experiences but does not lose sight of the totality of the parts.

Doing that is easier said than done when the historian has been a witness and participant in some of the events and trends under discussion. No matter how hard we try we can never be neutral but try we must. I have certainly tried to stop my background and my politics from colouring the answers I have come up with but they have shaped the questions I have asked.  That is evident in how themes of national identity are central to my work. Having grown up in an English-speaking family in a Welsh-speaking community, such questions have mattered in my life.

Yet it is far too simple to just say that historians write histories that are coloured by who they are.  Historians change their minds, especially as the optimism and anger of youth gets tempered by the weariness and pragmatism of later years. Moreover, the actual experience of researching and writing history itself impacts on the historian’s views.  It encourages us to see the world in more nuanced, qualified and complex terms.  Having researched contemporaryWalesI better appreciate how resilient Welsh identity has been but also how for the majority it is not quite the issue that it has been in my life.

It is the final chapter that looks at Wales after 1997, that will probably draw the most criticism. For earlier periods I can claim that the interpretations are the basis of reasoned and sustained judgement. But for the very recent past this is more difficult because events are still evolving. I started writing the book at a time when most people considered we were living in a relatively stable economy; I finished writing it at a time of significant problems and only time can tell whether this is the beginning of a long period of austerity or just another cyclical downturn. Similarly, it’s simply too early to make any sound judgement on how devolution had changed the structure of the Welsh economy and society.  It’s probably unfair to even ask the question given how limited the Welsh government’s powers have been.  Moreover, who knows how future events might make my judgements on the last decade look hopelessly naive or outdated.

The Wales I describe in my book is a place divided by class, culture, age, gender, region and ethnicity. But it’s also a place where people felt something in common too, whether that was based on a shared sense of history, national identity, economic experience or even just watching the same television programmes. The Wales I see in the past is a place people have both died for and thought irrelevant, a place that has stirred both passion and apathy.

It is a place with much in common with England but different too.  It is a place that deserves understanding on its own terms but that cannot be understood without acknowledging that the outside world helped shape it.  My history of Wales includes war, racism and the British Empire.

I could have painted a different picture of Wales. I could have told the story of a people oppressed and ignored by foreign rule or greedy capitalists. But the Wales I see is a more complicated and perhaps boring place. It’s a place where many people were more interested in shopping, sport and soap operas than the politics of class and nation. That’s neither a criticism nor a universal truth. And it makes devolution and the rise in a popular Welsh patriotism over the last 70 odd years, no less important but certainly more remarkable.

Wales since 1939 is published by Manchester University Press and retails at £16.99 or less.