A short video I made for a Welsh Government event about history in the Curriculum for Wales.
Category: history
A very brief history of boredom
Historians often puzzle about whether people in the past experienced the same emotions as we do. The consensus is that they probably did but that the meanings of those emotions could be quite different. Long and strenuous working hours made the absence of something to do probably more a relief than anything and it never lasted long, at least for most people. But it’s difficult not to think that those, say, bed bound or imprisoned must have got bored, even if that’s not a word they would have used to describe their condition.
In the pre-modern world, time was viewed as limited and thus precious. Those who wiled it away doing nothing or trivial things could be seen as self-indulgent or sinful. This was a sentiment found in several places in the Bible and encapsulated in the proverb ‘The devil finds work for idle hands’. In contrast, using time for contemplation and prayer was deemed good for the soul. Indeed, the challenges of a monotonous life in an isolated, enclosed monastery was part of what was supposed to make the experience spiritually worthwhile.
Such beliefs probably explain why the word ‘bored’ is relatively modern, seemingly dating back only into the 18th century. Even then, it was used more to describe uninteresting conversation rather than a lack of anything to do.
By the 19th century, public discussion of boredom was more widespread and concentrated on the tedium of polite social gatherings. In 1893, an Anti-Boredom Society was even formed. Its aim was livening up small parties through complicated conversation rules. However, the society’s public launch came across more as someone showing off how they clever were, rather than an indication of a real problem.
This did not mean that Victorians did not worry about boredom but the concern was not the condition itself but what it might lead to. Crime, violence and sexual excess could all sometimes be blamed on people having too much time to themselves.
Having nothing to do became regarded as a particular social problem during the mass unemployment of the interwar years. Discussions of being on the dole were not framed in terms of boredom but there were genuine concerns that ‘idleness’ would damage the mental and physical wellbeing of the unemployed. Schemes to occupy and entertain them were developed and even became a matter of national concern, as the threat of another war emerged and authorities worried about whether the population was capable of fighting it.
Such concerns mixed genuine sympathy with considerable moralising and a belief that the workers were less resilient and capable than the ‘thinking’ classes. The idea that only people without self-discipline, imagination or intelligence got bored did not disappear. In the middle of the twentieth century, the popularity of cinema, television and petty crime were all attributed at times to people bored because they were not clever or creative enough to entertain themselves.
Boredom was thus seen as evidence of declining standards in public and private life. It could be even be seen as a sign that life had got too comfortable. One 1938 newspaper attack on the supposed rise of boredom and the associated popularity of the radio and cinema, complained that people now lived life second-hand rather than ‘adventuring themselves, as was necessary in a sterner age’.
Amidst such moralising, this writer did rightly identify loneliness as a cause of boredom. The sociability of humans is one emotion that clearly stretches back through the ages. It is also something ripped apart for many people by lockdown. ‘Bored to death’ is a throwaway and exaggerated phrase dating back into the 18th century but it also masks a much grimmer reality that being alone can help send people to an early grave.
This piece was first published by Wales Arts Review as part of a feature on the Art of Boredom.
Stories of a Post-industrial Hero: The Death of Johnny Owen
First published as: Martin Johnes (2011) Stories of a Post-industrial Hero: The Death of Johnny Owen, Sport in History, 31:4, 444-463, DOI: 10.1080/17460263.2011.646832
Boxing has a history of attracting the interest of intellectuals and serious writers. The likes of Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway have been fascinated not just by boxing’s brutality but also by its symbolic power. It is easy to see in the sport’s drama and struggle metaphors for wider life. Joyce Carol Oates’s seminal On Boxing claimed that to ‘write about boxing is to be forced to contemplate not only boxing, but the perimeters of civilization – what it is, or should be, to be “human”’. For Oates, boxing’s moments of ‘greatest intensity’ seem ‘to contain so complete and so powerful an image of life – life’s beauty, vulnerability, despair, incalculable and often self-destructive courage – that boxing is life, and hardly a mere game’.1
Perhaps at no time was that symbolism stronger than in 1980 when a skinny Welsh boxer died after being knocked out in an American ring. Johnny Owen’s death brought home the realities of boxing; the sport had cost a likeable, modest young man his life. A biography of Owen noted that boxing ‘is really life whittled away to an ugly, simple truth’.2 But, like life, there was no simple truth. Boxing has a moral ambiguity which makes constructing it into anything simple far from straightforward. That did not mean people did not try, but there were always multiple stories to be told: stories about dignity, fate, luck, values, history and communities.
I
Johnny Owen was born in 1956 in the industrial town of Merthyr Tydfil in the South Wales valleys, a town built on iron and coal with a proud boxing history. It had also been home to Eddie Thomas and Howard Winstone, two boxers who reached the sport’s highest levels in the 1950s and 1960s. Like these fighters, Owen came from a solid working-class background. A shy and quiet boy, he began boxing aged eight and gradually became known as a determined and untiring fighter. After leaving school he worked in a nuts and bolts factory and continued to do so after turning professional in 1976. This gave him a steady income but still allowed him to train, and he developed a reputation for a phenomenal stamina. His commitment to training paid off when he won the Welsh bantamweight championship in 1977. By 1980 he was European champion. His income grew as he rose through the ranks and he was able to buy his own grocery store, which prospered thanks to his personal popularity.3 Yet he still lived on a Merthyr council estate with his parents and younger brothers and sisters. Nor was he motivated by greed. He hoped to have made £100,000 by the time he retired. This would have given him a comfortable future but it was hardly staggering wealth by sport’s highest standards. At the start of 1980 Owen listed his seven goals in his diary: a successful business, a house or houses, plots of land, a pub, a holiday, enough money to retire between 27 and 29, and good luck.4
Owen’s rise had not been straightforward. Nicknamed the ‘matchstick man’, his skinny build meant he had to face the assumptions of others that he was too weak to fight. Even as a schoolboy he had lacked visible muscles; one of his trainers compared him to a sparrow, noting there was ‘more meat in a crisp’.5 When Owen was a fully grown man, his manager was harassed by boxing fans and others for letting him fight.6 Dai Gardiner recalled:
“When people bought a ticket for Johnny’s fight, they’d say, ‘I want one for my wife, one for my daughter and one for my mother-in-law’. Everybody wanted to nurse him. I took some terrible abuse off women telling me I shouldn’t let him box. It got very bad. They said I was starving him.”7
More seriously, in 1975 a doctor expressed doubts about Owen’s health to box because he looked so frail. But, after seeing him fight, the doctor admitted that looks could deceive.8 As The Times‘s boxing correspondent put it, he was the ‘matchstick man with fire in his fists’.9
Owen’s chance of a world title came in 1980 when the Mexican Lupe Pintor agreed to a voluntary defence of his bantamweight title in Los Angeles. The Welshman went into the fight ranked number four in the world, with a professional record of 25 wins, one defeat and one draw, but Pintor had a reputation for being a very powerful puncher. In its pre-fight hype, Boxing News concluded that Owen was genuinely ‘world-class’ and that his stamina meant he could upset the odds against the ‘experienced and sometimes dangerous’ Pintor. But it also acknowledged that the fight would be close and Owen would have to survive the first eight rounds to win.10 Bookmakers had Owen as 6–1 and Pintor as 2–1 but the American press gave him no chance. This was down to his appearance rather than his record. The LA Times remarked he had ‘the skinniest limbs this side of an ostrich farm’. Another Los Angeles paper called him the ‘world’s biggest pipe-cleaner – with ears’.11
It was a hostile atmosphere in Los Angeles’ Olympic Auditorium on the night of the fight. Beer and urine were thrown at Owen’s supporters during the warm-up bouts. One fan recalls that the atmosphere was ‘poisonous’ by the time the main attraction began.12 Owen fought well, crowding Pintor and preventing him from throwing his hooks. But he did not really hurt the Mexican, despite the exchanges being ‘hard and uncompromising’.13 A reporter described these rounds as ‘like something out of one of those old Boys’ Own adventure yarns: brave British sportsman hushes screaming horde by getting stuck in against tough-looking foreigner. Owen was giving as good as he was getting, not hitting with the same authority as Pintor but throwing a lot more punches.’14 In the eighth round Pintor appeared to be now on top but going into the ninth the Boxing News reporter still had the fight level.15 The BBC’s Harry Carpenter had Owen winning.16 However, the ninth round saw Owen put down for the first time in his career. He was back on his feet after a count of three but he was dazed and after that the fight slipped away from him. Owen was still hitting Pintor but he was now taking far more of the damage and he went down again in the 12th. Perhaps the fight should then have been stopped but both fighters were cut and it was not all one way. Stopping fights early was a common source of criticism for referees and most preferred to let world-title bouts continue for as long as both fighters seemed capable of defending themselves. Owen had got back up and assumed a fighting stance. Afterwards, the referee recalled that ‘it was a little like a police officer examining a drunk driver when I looked at Owen, but he said to me “I’m alright, sir, I can carry on” and I let him’.17
Four punches later Owen was knocked down again and this time he went down, not as if he was on the end of hard punch but more like every ounce of energy and strength had been drained right out of him. Boxing News compared to it to someone being shot.18 The referee claimed that Owen was unconscious before he hit the canvas: ‘His pupils were turned up. That’s why I went over and took the mouthpiece out and didn’t bother to count.’19 The fight had been scheduled to be shown afterwards on the BBC but the broadcaster took the decision to only air brief extracts because of how disturbing it was.20
What happened after the fight illustrated the brutal realities of boxing. The Sunday Express noted that while the doctor treated Owen in the ring, ‘his body went into spasmodic contractions. Blood was spewing from his mouth, and his eyes were fixed in a glaze.’21 Pintor’s supporters meanwhile were, according to Ring Magazine, turning into ‘a lynch mob’.22 They threw beer and other objects into the ring. Owen’s cornermen were shoved and pushed and one had his wallet stolen while he was seeing to Owen. A drink was poured over Owen’s unconscious body and the crowd jeered and clapped when he was removed from the ring.23 Owen never regained consciousness and 46 days later he died in a Los Angeles hospital.
II
In the national and international press the story was overshadowed by Ronald Reagan’s victory in the US presidential election, but it was still newsworthy. In Merthyr it was more than that; in Owen’s home town there was genuine grief. Curtains were closed and people huddled in small groups to talk about Owen. A ‘weepy woman’ told the Daily Mirror: ‘He was a lovely boy, so very shy. He was the hero of all local children.’24 The Merthyr Express reported: ‘Johnny’s dead. Those are the words which have been murmured sadly around Merthyr since Tuesday morning, and indeed, will be murmured sadly for a long time to come.’ It noted how he had remained a ‘modest but caring person who won over the people, young and old’ and printed a page of photographs of his community work headlined ‘Johnny the good citizen’.25 Such images dominated people’s thinking and the media coverage. The Mayor of Merthyr noted: ‘He was a gentle person and a gentleman – completely the opposite to the sport he participated in.’ A former mayor of the town claimed ‘People who didn’t like boxing liked Johnny Owen – the townspeople liked him for his personality and character and because he was an outstanding example of the sort of young man we would like to be associated with our community.’26 Moreover, Owen himself was attached to that community and his country. Much was made of his innocence and his commitment to his friends, community and Wales. One paper claimed that ‘Even when parading his talents in England, let alone abroad, he wanted to return home as quickly as possible’.27 Tales were told of celebrations of his victories in a local pub near his training headquarters: ‘There was no champagne, no caviar, no high-living in his hours of glory. For his family and friends it was a pint, pasty and black pudding. For Johnny it was orange juice and a slice of his favourite gateau.’28 Pictures were reprinted of him celebrating becoming European champion with a cup of tea with his mother. None of this was made up or romanticized. It was how Owen was. He really did consider using Sion Rhisart Owain as his boxing name.29 He really did want to go to Disneyland, he had never had a proper girlfriend and he did enjoy cream cakes.30
Owen’s patriotism, modesty, work ethic and ordinariness outside the ring were all qualities that people identified with and his personality added to the sense of tragedy. It was not some hardened thug who had died but a likeable, polite young man. He did not even look like a boxer. It was thus easy for people in Merthyr to see his death as the loss of one of their own. Yet the death of such a man was seen to matter far beyond Merthyr. As an editorial in the South Wales Echo put it, Merthyr, South Wales and the boxing world were all in mourning for this ‘man of great dedication and courage who captured the affection of all who met him because of his quiet modesty …. Johnny Owen was a credit to his family, to his town, and to Wales.’31 Even the Secretary of State for Wales sent a telegram saying ‘All Wales is saddened to hear of Johnny Owen’s death’.32 In the USA too there was a sense that someone unusual had been lost. The referee told the New York Times that when Owen had gone down in the ninth round he had asked him, ‘“John, how do you feel?” In the British tradition, he said, “Yes, sir, I’m OK.” He never lost his politeness, his gentleness.’33
Owen’s funeral was a very public affair. It was held on 11 November, ‘a day on which fallen heroes are remembered’, as his local paper noted. Schools, shops, factories and banks closed and 10,000 people – ‘Mothers and babies, disabled, pensioners, schoolchildren, nurses, garage mechanics, council workmen, brickies, [and] factory workers’ – were said to have turned out to watch the cortège of 160 cars. Many men were in black ties and people remarked it was as if a family member had died. The Merthyr Express reported: “They came in their thousands. They braved the rain and chilling winds. Silent and patient, they awaited their turn to pay their respects to a fallen hero of the town of Tydfil the Martyr. They were the mourners who extended beyond the family, beyond the sporting world, beyond the town itself who were moved to grieve over the death of a brave young boxer.”34 One bystander told the paper ‘he was one of us’.35 The coffin was draped in a Welsh flag and the ceremony finished at the graveside with the singing of the Welsh national anthem and Cwm Rhondda, a traditional Welsh hymn much loved by sporting crowds.36
Such a community affair was an echo of the funerals that followed pit disasters and the parallels between Owen and the town’s industrial history were not lost on onlookers. The Times‘s description of the funeral noted how men in the congregation bore the scars of mining, the harsh life that had made many ‘turn to their fists as a passport out of the valley, or a way of finding a better life in it’.37 The Daily Mirror spoke of Owen’s background in a ‘poor hard working family’.38 The Western Mail called him ‘the latest hero of a town scarred by bitter memories’.39 Insiders saw it too. The minister’s address proclaimed: ‘We know about sorrows and suffering in these valleys. We know about it from the depths of a Rhondda pit to the tip above Aberfan.’40
Tragedy and suffering was an image of the Valleys that people there believed in. It was, after all, something very real. The 1966 Aberfan disaster, where, just four miles from Merthyr, a coal tip collapsed, killing 116 children (including a friend of Johnny Owen) and 28 adults, had shocked the world.41 The innumerable underground mining accidents may not have garnered so much attention but they were just as tragic for those involved.42 The scarred industrial landscape was a constant reminder of the price paid for industrial development and its continued presence after pits closed added to a sense that here was a place that had been used and then abandoned as the wider world moved on. Such ideas dated back to the depression of the 1930s, which in 1980 was still in living memory, and had been perpetuated by Welsh writers, broadcasters and politicians. At the 1966 general election, a Labour address claimed: ‘We Merthyr people, with our memories of broken homes and broken hearts of those terrible days, do find it difficult to forgive the arrogance of those ignorant and pompous creatures who merely visit us to hope that they might fool us to vote for them.’43
Within this difficult history people found pride too. Inequalities had not just been accepted; they had been fought against. From nineteenth-century uprisings to twentieth-century trade unions and Labour politics, Merthyr itself had been at the vanguard of a class struggle. This dated back to 1831, when workers had taken control of the town and raised the red flag for the first time in British history.44 Troops were sent to quell the rebellion and they killed around 24 members of the public in the process. The memory of that event was strong and embodied in Richard Lewis, an innocent miner who was hanged after being wrongly accused of wounding a soldier and who became something of a working-class martyr. In such incidents of fighting enduring injustice Merthyr could take pride in its history.45
For many, it was certainly preferable to the present that they saw around them. At Owen’s funeral the minister had proclaimed that ‘Johnny was a man whose body was as clean as his mind. Let not Merthyr forget his example. He was no unwashed hippie with a syringe in his pocket.’46 Those comments were an example of the popular concerns about young people, not least their drug-taking and violence. In a novel about 1977 Merthyr, one character remarks of the town centre: ‘It’s the bloody Wild West, innit? All them kids out to make a reputation for themselves. It’s got worse too.’ Elsewhere the novel notes: ‘Used to be that if you stayed away from certain pubs, you never had to worry. The fighters knew where to go if they wanted to fight, and decent people stayed in their own pubs. Now, you can’t feel safe even in your own home.’47 A 1980 report on unemployment in south Wales, published in New Society while Owen lay in coma, painted a bleak picture of people despairing at the future. In Merthyr the journalist found angry young unemployed men who detested the clichés of ‘how-green-was-my-valley Max Boyce Welshness’ but liked magic mushrooms and English punk music.48 Owen may have been a similar age to these young men but on the surface he had little in common with them.
Such scenes had their roots in the slow decline of heavy industry that had been going on since the 1950s. Although there were developments in manufacturing, economic growth in south Wales had been focussed along the coast and at the bottom of the Valleys. As a result, the more remote industrial communities increasingly felt isolated and ignored. Studies in the Rhondda at the start of the 1970s found an anomic population that felt a lack of leadership, a nostalgia for the past and a sense of not belonging and anti-authoritarianism. Absenteeism was high, as were occurrences of psychosomatic illness.49 Delegates at a 1973 conference about the future of the Valleys reported that people there felt deeply stigmatized and apathetic. They listed the problems of their communities: “Vandalism, industrial closures, unemployment, poor housing, bad urban planning, large estates with no sense of belonging, withdrawal of locally based essential services, having to travel to register complaints, remote central government, decision-making away from the people, lack of civic pride, pollution, run-down of social amenities.”50 In 1974, Mid Glamorgan County Council’s education director wrote bluntly to the Secretary of State for Wales: ‘The Valleys are dying.’51
By 1980 industrial Wales was in the worst recession since the inter-war years. The coal industry was in its death throes, steel was shedding jobs by the thousand and manufacturing firms were closing on what seemed to be a daily basis. Moreover, the election of Thatcher’s Tories in 1979 meant that fighting unemployment was not even the government’s primary economic priority any more. The jobs that were being created often went to women and the gender balance of the workforce was changing. Underneath the Western Mail‘s reports of Owen’s funeral was an advert for a Youth Opportunities Programme. It claimed: ‘There couldn’t be a worse time for unemployed teenagers. Especially if they have no qualifications or experience. It’s like taking a leap off a trapeze.’52 Earlier in 1980 the Daily Mirror had claimed that among the old in Welsh industrial communities there were tearful fears and memories of the 1930s; among the young was talk of ‘anarchy, civil disobedience, a general strike, [and] violence’.53
In such bewildering times, Owen’s death was a story that could be, subconsciously at least, a metaphor for the community he came from. It was a story that people could tell about themselves. Owen may have lost his life but he never lost his dignity and the respect of others. He may have lost the fight but he gave one hell of a performance. He never forgot where he came from and who he was. Yet some saw a degree of hypocrisy in this celebration of Owen, the patriotic hero who represented his town to the wider world. A character in a play set in Merthyr on the day of Owen’s funeral and first performed in that town in 1983 notes:
You used to say, look at that skinny kid. He got no chance. Nice boy, wears a bobble hat, nice boy, nice boy. He don’t stand a chance, he’s only a valleys’ boy. You give him nothing Luigi. Look at him now. Great hero this, fat hero that, yeah. When he’s dead! Typical of this town. Looking for heroes when they die! You got no guts to believe in them. Not when they were trying, when they had the energy, man!54
III
The wider Merthyr public may not have always celebrated Owen while he was alive but the boxing community in the town had. Despite his appearance, Owen was an excellent boxer and boxing was a man’s game. In a climate of shifting gender roles and fewer traditional manly jobs this mattered. By 1980 boxing was even enjoying something of a renaissance after a long period of slow decline after the Second World War. That decline was rooted in the simple fact that getting hit was not a good way to earn a living unless you were very confident you could win. Getting hit was even less fun if you were not being paid for it. Thus, when affluence came to working-class communities in the 1950s and 1960s, amateur and professional boxing went into decline. When it left again in the 1970s and 1980s boxing was on the up and boxing clubs reported increased numbers.
Owen’s death was not going to change that. Billy Vivian, one of his friends and a pall bearer at the funeral, fought three days after his friend died. He recalled: ‘It wasn’t hard to go on because I wasn’t working at the time and I needed the money to pay for Christmas. Calling it off never entered my mind. My wife didn’t say anything. We were upset, because Johnny and I had been much more than sparring partners, we’d been great friends, but you need to make a living.’55
But it was not always much of a living. Although the World Boxing Council had claimed that Owen’s life was insured for $50,000, the policy was actually limited to $25,000 and that would only be paid if there was anything left after medical expenses had been dealt with. Those expenses came to $94,000, so his parents got nothing from the WBC’s insurance. There was a public appeal for the family which raised £128,000, a testimony to the popularity of Owen. His family chose to donate the money to a local hospital and community projects.56 There was also separate insurance with the British Boxing Board of Control, which paid out £30,000, and Owen left, at least according to press reports, £45,189.57 Nonetheless, his father was only too aware of how little professional fighters often actually took home. After expenses and managerial and promotional cuts had been deducted, his son had got a pre-tax sum of £6,974.42 for a fight that cost him his life.58
In the aftermath of the fight, boxing faced significant public criticism. A Labour MP, for example, called for punching to the head to be outlawed in the sport.59 One critic even suggested that Owen’s record had simply not been good enough for the boxing authorities to have let him fight Pintor.60 At first, the behaviour of the LA crowd allowed some attention to be deflected away from whether boxing was to blame. Ray Clarke, the British Boxing Board of Control (BBBoC) secretary, claimed that the fans were ‘animals’ who had not come to see boxing but to see ‘someone beaten up’.61 He did not want any British fighter to appear there again. Boxing News concluded: ‘The mindless, stomach-churning behaviour of the Mexican crowd will stand as a sickening memory of one of boxing’s blackest hours’.62 But the British sport could not play that card for too long because on 27 September there was something resembling a riot at a world title bout at Wembley Arena, with bottles, cans and racist abuse being thrown at the ring. As Boxing News concluded, no longer could people condemn the Mexican crowd: ‘We have animals of our own to match anything they can produce’.63 Some reassurance for the sport did come from an article published in the British Medical Journal in the week of Owen’s final fight. It was a study of serious head injuries caused by sport and admitted to the neurosurgical unit at Glasgow over the period 1974 to 1978. There were 52 incidents and just two were the result of boxing. In contrast, the most injuries (14) came from golf.64
Yet it was difficult for boxing not to reflect on whether something had gone wrong in the sport itself. Boxing News, despite talking up Owen’s chances before the fight, afterwards reflected: ‘Owen, looking like a frail, sickly child against the swarthy, muscular champion was certainly thrown into the lion’s den.’65 Some boxing fans called for changes such as better medical training for referees and a stop to fights after two knockdowns.66 After Owen died the situation became even more uncomfortable. There were limited acknowledgements within the sport that improvements could be made.67 Boxing News now concluded it would be ‘wrong and hypocritical to look for explanations and excuses for his death. There are none, only the cold fact that boxing is a dangerous activity which sometimes causes the death of a participant.’ Nonetheless, it went on to point out that the match had been fair and that there was nothing in Owen’s record to suggest he was at risk.68 Similarly, a sports journalist in The Sun argued that there was ‘no-one and nothing to blame’. Like a boxing writer in the Merthyr Express, he maintained that people would always risk their lives in sport. The Merthyr writer even suggested that it would be a ‘colourless, duller old world’ if they did not.69
The chairman of the BBBoC asked people to remember that Owen had died doing something he loved.70 But critics of the sport were not going to buy that argument. A Western Mail editorial, which itself called for protective headgear to be allowed, noted of the ongoing debates had while Owen was in coma: ‘Brutal, bloody, demeaning, nauseating, obscene – no adjective is too strong for boxing’s critics.’71 A Daily Express sports writer feared that unemployment might tempt ‘too many good young brains and bodies and eyes’ into ‘this unsavoury sport that makes millions for too many people who risk nothing but a few bob’. He hoped the fierce Methodism of Wales would rise ‘to make sure that we shall no longer see boxing masquerade under its banner of legalised assault and battery’.72 A physician’s letter to The Times spoke for many when it asked ‘How many more fit young men have to join the litany of the dead and grievously injured before this obscene “sport” is outlawed?’73 As public debate intensified, a private member’s bill was introduced at the House of Lords in 1981 to ban the sport and in 1982 the British Medical Association conference narrowly voted to campaign for boxing’s abolition.74 A Guardian editorial commented that ‘boxing belongs to the same historical dustbin as cockfighting’.75
The calls for bans never got anywhere. They were simply not realistic in a liberal democracy, especially when most accepted that a ban would just drive the sport underground, where it would be even less regulated. In later years, Owen’s father claimed that you could not stop people boxing. He noted that boxing had given his son his identity and it turned tearaway youths into better human beings and citizens. He did not blame the sport for what had happened; instead he saw life as uncertain and sometimes tragic.76 Eddie Thomas, then a boxing manager in Merthyr, had played no part in Owen’s career but recalled that after the death: ‘I had to ask myself whether boxing is worth the candle. But boxing is in me as it was in Johnny. That isn’t easy to explain because there is more to it than money or fame, or even the knowledge that people who follow boxing are living out a part of their lives through you. There is something mysterious deep inside that keeps leading you back to the ring.’77
Part of that mystery was how boxing gave men who would otherwise have had ordinary or problematic lives something meaningful and self-affirming. The acclaimed boxing journalist Hugh McIlvanney said of Owen: ‘His personality was a small cloud of reticence until he entered the ambience of boxing, in a gym or an arena. Once there, he was transformed from a 24-year-old virgin whose utterances tended to come in muffled monosyllables into a confident, skilled practitioner of a rough but exciting trade.’78 This was far from unusual. Wacquant’s ethnographic work on the sport argued that the ritualistic and routined life of a boxer invited those who led it ‘to discover himself, better yet to produce himself. And membership in the gym stands as the tangible sign of acceptance in a virile fraternity that allows the boxer to tear himself away from the anonymity of the mass and thereby attract the admiration and approval of the local society.’79 This may sound rather grand and noble but it is essentially what boxing does for the individual. In this light, campaigns for the banning of boxing were never going to succeed. By 1987, there were 600 professional boxers in the UK, more than double the figure for 1974.80
IV
Owen was not forgotten after his death. In 1981 a pub opened in Merthyr named The Matchstick Man. A year later, a memorial plaque was unveiled at Merthyr’s hospital which had benefited from £100,000 from Owen’s appeal fund.81 In the 1990s a film script was written, although it was never made, and his belts were put on display in a Merthyr musuem.82 The tragedy of his story grew to some extent with constant retellings. By the twenty-first century one of his early trainers was calling Owen’s death ‘a tragedy for mankind’.83 Some were speculating he might be Wales’s best ever boxer.84 His story was also being told more often. Biographies of him were published in 2005 and 2006 and both brought renewed media attention. In July 2006 a play about Owen was performed at the Wales Millennium Centre. That year the South Wales Echo called him ‘one of South Wales’ finest sons’.85 The spark for some of this new interest came in 2002 when the BBC broadcast a poignant television documentary about Owen’s father’s trip to Mexico to meet Pintor and Pintor’s subsequent return visit to unveil a statue of Owen in Merthyr town centre.86 Paid for by a public appeal, it was Merthyr’s third statue of a boxer and it added to the depictions of Eddie Thomas and Howard Winstone that had been unveiled in 2000 and 2001.
Owen had joined the legend of how something about the Valleys’ history produced not just boxers but world-class boxers. This legend was nothing new. In 1961 Eddie Thomas had claimed that boxers in his small Dowlais amateur gym had the sport in their blood due to mixed marriages between strong Welsh and Irish people. The ‘instinct to box and fight’, was he felt, passed down through the generations.87 This might sound nonsensical but people saw evidence that something special was going on. A 1973 short story claimed: ‘No less than three world champions of the world had been born within a radius of six miles of where they sat. In a pub down the road, there were signed photographs of all three, Tom Thomas, Freddy Welsh, Jimmy Wilde. And hadn’t they all fought their way over the tips and out of the pit in the first instance? It was a local tradition with which they had all grown up. Weren’t they, after all, rather special people?’88
Journalists and local history projects talked of boxing being embedded in Merthyr’s psyche and made connections between the popularity of boxing in Merthyr and the town’s hard industrial past.89 Owen added to that tale. Owen’s biographies drew on the idea that somehow boxing was innate to Merthyr. One claimed that Owen had ‘the steel of Welsh industrial valleys coursing through his veins’ and that the fatal punch knocked out the dreams of his followers of getting out of Merthyr’s ‘slow-death poverty’. It noted the history of struggle for better social and working conditions and political rights, concluding that Merthyr was ‘born out of fight’. Thus, the writer thought, ‘Fighting, in one guise or another, is in the blood of everyone born in Merthyr Tydfil. It has to be. It’s locked up in the genes, part of the evolutionary process of belonging to this great town. The Owens family go back a long way in Merthyr. They were a family of fighters and survivors. They still are. It’s in their blood.’90
Broadbent’s biography was far less sentimental but he too claimed that ‘this was Merthyr and trouble ran through it like a rip tide. From the mining accidents to the street fights, it was a ragged old place, snagged on its bloody past and in constant danger of coming apart at the seams.’ Elsewhere he proclaimed: ‘These were mean streets for tough people. There was the misery of the mines, of Aberfan, of a lack of choice and dwindling optimism.’91
Such beliefs and traditions may have pre-dated Owen’s death but the deepening effects of post-industrialization intensified their purpose in the decades after he died. At the opening of Owen’s statue, a local minister explicitly spoke of the town needing the ‘disciplines of the ring, the dedication and drive that gave Owen heroic status to counter the scourges of modern culture’.92 There was much talk across the Valleys of a loss of hope, community pride and social breakdown. Crime and drugs were seen as widespread problems and communities were perceived to be caught in a downward spiral. Too often the closure of mines had meant the closure of other amenities such as shops, pubs, taxi services and libraries too, a process exacerbated by the wider trend towards out-of-town retail parks. The town centres that were left behind were often tired and tatty, overloaded with charity shops and fast food joints, and with boarded-up chapels and working-men’s clubs to remind people of better times. By 2001, 30% of the population of Merthyr had some form of limiting long-term illness. Life expectancy there was five years less than the healthiest county in Wales. There was nothing new in any of this – in the mid 1960s mortality rates in the Glamorgan valleys had been nearly 30% higher than the England and Wales average – but the fact that people had to live with the consequences of industrial work long after they stopped being paid for it added to many people’s sense of anger at what was happening.93
Yet there was still a feeling that the Valleys were somehow different and special. For all the economic and social worries that existed, in 2003 one Merthyr resident claimed that as a polite, well brought up man, Owen epitomized the town.94 By the turn of the twenty-first century, a large Valleys survey suggested that 85% of respondents felt that there was an acceptable, good or excellent level of community where they lived, and nearly 60% said this made the Valleys different from the rest of Wales. A closer reading of the survey, however, suggests that what people thought represented a good community was probably very different from their grandparents. Only 54% of respondents said they had at least weekly contact with neighbours and almost half of people over 41 did not feel safe in their neighbourhood after dark.95 As two academics claimed in a commentary on the Valleys, ‘over-romanticised notions of community’ were sometimes obscuring ‘the unpalatable facts of everyday life’.96
There are echoes in the celebrations of Owen of the way the history of the Valleys is presented at heritage sites. The emphasis, often rather nostalgic in tone, is on the strength of community and the injustices endured by people within those communities at the hands of external capitalist forces.97 Heritage sites across Britain have thus been much criticized for promoting myths and selective views of the past.98 In a Welsh context there has also been much criticism that they keep Wales rooted in the past, fascinated by where it has come from but unfocused on where it is going.99 Even in 1980 New Society had claimed that history was south Wales’s biggest growth industry. Yet some were well of aware of the sentimentality of such community histories. In 1980, a New Society reporter was told in Glyncorrwg, where the last pit shut in 1966, that Valleys life was a fallacy: ‘Biggest bloody fallacy going. Biggest bloody bastards going, they are. Cut your throat as soon as look as you.’100
Remembering the past and celebrating its heroes might well have been a selective process but it did give these post-industrial communities a sense of identity and in the absence of a strong economic base that was not to be sneered at. Moreover, there is more than a grain of truth running through the nostalgic picture of tough, suffering and politically-marginalized communities painted by heritage sites and believed in by many within the Valleys themselves. Furthermore, across the world, difficult economic and social conditions did nurture boxers; Pintor, Owen’s last opponent, himself grew up in the poverty of Mexico City. Boxing was not something many people blessed with economic choices chose to do.101 It did, and does, require bravery, courage and discipline. In that sense there was much in it to respect. For all the associated romanticism, boxing was evidence that some people did find strength in adversity.
V
Owen was no different to the pre-Second World War boxers of south Wales that Dai Smith has seen as ‘emblematic’ figures, tied to their communities by ‘umbilical cords’, revered for being slightly outside the realms of socially-acceptable behaviour.102 Like Tommy Farr of the Rhondda before him, Owen had become more emblematic of his community because he lost a world-title fight. He showed courage, fortitude and an unwavering loyalty to home but he had been beaten by forces beyond his control. Pintor’s fists had beaten Owen in the way that capitalism had beaten Merthyr; neither was to blame and neither had tried to deny who they were. It might be easy to label that story as selective or nostalgic but it is a perfectly plausible tale and it was one that people in industrial Wales told and believed.
Stories matter. They are more than just entertainment. They are how we make sense of the world and our own lives. But they can also be told in different ways. This is clear in Owen’s case. It might be constructed as the archetypal boxing story of a boy from a tough town who fought his way to the top. It might be, as one biographer claimed, the story of a lucky and successful man who got to follow his dreams and a ‘true path in life’, doing what he really loved.103 Or it might be the case, as his other biographer noted, that
When the novelty of his physique is removed, Johnny Owen could be seen as just another boxer who died for his sport. He was not an Ali or Chavez or a Wilde. He was just another naked boxer, another statistic on the files. Yet he was much more too. Though he never became rich through his popularity or was fêted globally for his skills, he was a reminder that the sport could wear a dignified, respectable face.104
Or, alternatively, Owen could just be used to demonstrate the futility and danger of boxing. But, however the tale is told, Owen is emblematic, another in a long history of boxers that represented, consciously and subconsciously, in life and in death, something more than a mere sport.
Yet it is perhaps easy to read too much symbolism into such emblematic figures. Historians have tended to concentrate on the representation rather than reception of heroes.105 Outside south Wales there must have been many people who did not know or notice that Owen died or those who simply thought how sad and then got on with their lives, forgetting all about him. In Wales the more prominent media coverage made ignorance less likely, but not everyone can have followed the dominant heroic stories told about Owen and, by extension, about his community and communities like it. Some people in his home town must have seen Owen’s death in a different light. Indeed, a plurality of reactions to Owen is likely because traditional working-class communities such as Merthyr were fragmenting as their occupational structures diversified in the post-industrial economy and leisure and family life became more privatized. Demonstrating this plurality is difficult. Historians tend to assume media texts were read by their audiences in the way that their authors intended. The media certainly set an agenda, but people were free to interpret it or ignore it in their own way.106 There must surely have been some residents of Merthyr who saw the public celebration of Owen as an uncomfortable sign of how the town was rooted in the past. Today, there must be many who walk past his statue who have little idea who he was. Yet, as Owen’s death itself became more distant, it was probably easier for people to accept the idea of him of an emblem of Merthyr because both he and the Merthyr he signified were no longer. Celebrating him had become about the past rather than the present. And for those who do remember, whether first hand or through hearing and reading his story, Owen remains a heroic figure.
Notes
1. Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (London: Bloomsbury, 1997 edn), i, 18.
2. Rick Broadbent, The Big If: The Life and Death of Johnny Owen (London: Macmillan, 2006), 4.
3. Western Mail, 26 June 1980.
4. Broadbent, Big If, 223, 184.
5. Quoted in Broadbent, Big If, 61.
6. Jeff Murphy, Johnny Owen (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2005), 116.
7. Broadbent, Big If, 132.
8. Broadbent, Big If, 79–80.
9. The Times, 28 February 1980.
10. Boxing News, 19 September 1980. Welsh boxing reporters were cautious too. The South Wales Echo (6 September 1980) noted that beyond Owen’s stamina it was Pintor who held most of the aces. Even Howard Winstone tipped Pintor to win: South Wales Echo, 17 September 1980.
11. Quoted in South Wales Echo, 18, 19 September 1980.
12. Desmond Barry, ‘Boxing through the shadows: Howard Winstone, Eddie Thomas and Johnny Owen’, in Wales and its Boxers: The Fighting Tradition, eds. Peter Stead and Gareth Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), 149–61, quotation from 156.
13. Boxing News, 26 September 1980.
14. Boxing News, 3 October 1980.
15. Boxing News, 26 September 1980.
16. Broadbent, Big If, 264.
17. Boxing News, 26 September 1980.
18. Boxing News
19. New York Times, 21 September 1980.
20. Merthyr Express, 25 September 1980.
21. Sunday Express, 21 September 1980.
22. Ring Magazine report reproduced at http://www.johnnyowen.com/Rpts/owen/world_title.html
23. South Wales Echo, 20 September 1980; Merthyr Express, 2 October 1980.
24. Daily Mirror, 5 November 1980.
25. Merthyr Express, 6 November 1980.
26. South Wales Echo, 4 November 1980. For similar stories from the fight’s immediate aftermath see Merthyr Express, 25 September 1980.
27. South Wales Echo, 4 November 1980. Cf. Merthyr Express, 6 November 1980.
28. South Wales Echo, 4 November 1980.
29. Broadbent, The Big If, 119.
30. Western Mail, 5 November 1980.
31. Editorial in South Wales Echo, 4 November 1980.
32. Western Mail, 5 November 1980.
33. New York Times, 5 November 1980.
34. Merthyr Express, 13 November 1980.
35. Merthyr Express, 13 November 1980.
36. South Wales Echo, 12 November 1980; Merthyr Express, 13 November 1980.
37. The Times, 12 November 1980.
38. Daily Mirror, 5 November 1980.
39. Western Mail, 12 November 1980.
40. Merthyr Express, 13 November 1980.
41. Iain McLean and Martin Johnes, Aberfan: Government and Disasters (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2000).
42. Between 1945 and 1974 1,819 workers were killed in colliery accidents in the south Wales coalfield: Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics, available at http://wales.gov.uk/cisd/publications/statspubs/digest1700to1974/ch5.xls?lang=en table 5.11.
43. Quoted in Robert Griffiths, S.O. Davies: A Socialist Faith (Llandysul: Gomer, 1983), 256.
44. Gwyn A. Williams, The Merthyr Rising (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988).
45. See the reports of the 150th anniversary march in Merthyr Express, 11 June 1981.
46. Western Mail, 12 November 1980. Although the minister later wrote to the local paper to say how proud he had been of the town given the respect shown and orderliness of the crowds at the funeral. Merthyr Express, 27 November 1980.
47. Desmond Barry, A Bloody Good Friday (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 95, 145.
48. Ian Walker, ‘The Only Thing that South Wales Manufactures Now is History’, New Society, 20 November 1980, 359–63.
49. D. Reynolds, ‘Planning a Future for Rhondda’s people’, in Rhondda: Past and Future, ed. K.S. Hopkins (Rhondda: Rhondda Borough Council, 1974), 258–9.
50. Call to the Valleys Conference, Aberfan, March 1973, in The Valleys Call, eds. Paul H. Ballard and Erastus Jones (Ferndale: Ron Jones, 1975), 43, 41.
51. In Hopkins, Rhondda, 269. For a full exploration of Wales in this period see Martin Johnes, Wales since 1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
52. Western Mail, 12 November 1980.
53. Daily Mirror, 14 March 1980.
54. Bull, Rock and Nut. In Alan Osborne, The Merthyr Trilogy (Cardiff: Parthian, 1998), 46.
55. Broadbent, Big If, 287.
56. Johnny Owen Appeal Fund, Statement of Income and Expenditure, 22 September 1980 to 9 November 1981 (Merthyr Tydfil Public Library); Merthyr Express, 21 May 1981.
57. Merthyr Express, 21 May 1981; The Times, 4 March 1981.
58. Broadbent, Big If, 321.
59. The Times, 22 September 1980.
60. Denis Leharne, ‘Boxing’s Self-perpetuating Oligarchy’, New Statesman, 3 October 1980, 10–11.
61. Boxing News, 26 September 1980.
62. Boxing News
63. Boxing News, 3 October 1980.
64. Kenneth W. Lindsay, Greig McLatchie and Bryan Jennett, ‘Serious Head Injuries in Sport’, British Medical Journal 281 (20 September 1980), 789–91.
65. Boxing News, 26 September 1980.
66. Letter, Boxing News, 17 October 1980.
67. See, for example, the discussion in Boxing News, 14 December 1980. In contrast, see the defences of the sport made in The Guardian, 5 November 1980.
68. Boxing News, 7 November 1980.
69. The Sun, 22 September 1980; Merthyr Express, 25 September 1980.
70. Boxing News, 14 November 1980.
71. Western Mail, 12 November 1980.
72. Daily Express, 5 November 1980.
73. The Times, 11 November 1980.
74. The Times, 27 November 1981; HL Deb 26 November 1981, vol. 425 cc875–94; British Medical Association, The Boxing Debate (1993), 1. For contemporary medical coverage of Owen’s death see The Lancet, 6 December 1980. For overviews of the medical profession’s view of boxing see K.G. Sheard, ‘“Brutal and Degrading”: The Medical Profession and Boxing, 1838–1984’, International Journal of the History of Sport 15, no. 3 (1998), 74–102, and John Welshman, ‘On the Ropes: Boxing and the Medical Establishment in Britain, 1920–90’, in Loisirs & Societe Britannique au XXe Siecle, ed. S. Kadi (Valenciennes: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2003), 77–90.
75. Quoted in Welshman, ‘On the Ropes’, 87. For further debate see a report headed ‘Making Money out of Brain Damage’, The Times, 1 March 1982.
76. Broadbent, Big If, 330; The Independent, 27 February 1995. Murphy, Johnny, 97–8.
77. The Independent, 28 November 1995.
78. Hugh McIlvanney, McIlvanney on Boxing (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1997), 17.
79. Loïc Wacquant, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15.
80. Stan Shipley, ‘Boxing’, in Sport in Britain: A Social History, ed. Tony Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 96.
81. South Wales Echo, 20 March 1982.
82. Merthyr Express, 4 November 1993; Western Mail, 26 September 1994.
83. Broadbent, Big If, 209.
84. Murphy, Johnny, 19.
85. South Wales Echo, 27 May 2006.
86. Johnny Owen: The Long Journey, BBC Wales TV documentary, first broadcast 29 December 2002; Merthyr Express, 8 November 2002.
87. Western Mail, 1 March 1961.
88. Alun Richards, ‘Dai Canvas’, in Dai Country (London: Michael Joseph, 1973), 65.
89. For example, The Independent, 28 November 1995, 4 November 2002. Also see a National Lottery-funded community history project on boxing in Merthyr, available at http://www.ironmenofmerthyr.org and Peter Rogers and Carolyn Jacob, Boxers and Boxing in the Merthyr Tydfil Valley (Merthyr: Merthyr Tydfil Public Libraries, 1997).
90. Murphy, Johnny, 14, 39, 53–4, 57.
91. Broadbent, Big If, 29, 34.
92. The Independent, 4 November 2002.
93. Mid Glamorgan County Council, Mid Glamorgan: Issues for the 1990s (1992), para. 3.13; Gareth. Rees and Teresa L. Rees, eds., Poverty and Social Inequality in Wales (London: Croom Helm, 1980); 2001 census profiles.
94. Murphy, Johnny, 41.
95. D. Adamson and S. Jones, ‘Continuity and Change in the Valleys: Residents’ Perceptions in 1995 and 2001’, Contemporary Wales 16 (2003), 1–23.
96. Kevin Morgan and Adam Price, Rebuilding our Communities: A New Agenda for the Valleys (Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 1992), 30.
97. For a discussion of this with reference to the Rhondda Heritage Park see Bella Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000).
98. For example, David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Robert Hewison, Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987).
99. For a critique of Welsh heritage see Geraint J. Jenkins, Getting Yesterday Right: Interpreting the Heritage of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992).
100. Walker, ‘The Only Thing that South Wales Manufactures Now is History’.
101. For a discussion of boxing and the ‘ghetto’ see John Sugden, Boxing and Society: An International Analysis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
102. Dai Smith, ‘Focal Heroes: A Welsh Fighting Class’, in Sport and the Working Class in Modern Britain, ed. Richard Holt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). The idea of sports heroes as emblems or symbols of their community and its values has dominated recent academic writing on sports stars. For example, Richard Holt, J.A. Mangan and Pierre Lanfranchi, eds., European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport (London: Frank Cass, 1996); H.F. Moorhouse, ‘Shooting Stars: Footballers and Working-Class Culture in Twentieth-Century Scotland’, in Holt, Sport and the Working Class; and Martin Johnes, ‘Fred Keenor: A Welsh Soccer Hero’, The Sports Historian 18, no. 1 (1998), 105–19.
103. Murphy, Johnny, 19, 12.
104. Broadbent, Big If, 303.
105. Max Jones, ‘What Should Historians Do With Heroes? Reflections on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007), 439–54, 448.
106. For a discussion of audience reception in a sports history context see Martin Johnes, ‘Texts, Audiences and Postmodernism: The Novel as Source in Sport History’, Journal of Sport History 34 (2007), 121–33.
The Curriculum for Wales, Welsh History and Citizenship, and the Threat of Embedding Inequality
Welsh education is heading towards its biggest shake up for two generations. The new Curriculum for Wales is intended to place responsibility for what pupils are taught with their teachers. It does not specify any required content but instead sets out ‘the essence of learning’ that should underpin the topics taught and learning activities employed. At secondary school, many traditional subjects will be merged into new broad areas of learning. The curriculum is intended to produce ‘ambitious and capable learners’ who are ‘enterprising and creative’, ‘ethical and informed citizens’, and ‘healthy and confident’.
Given how radical this change potentially is, there has been very little public debate about it. This is partly rooted in how abstract and difficult to understand the curriculum documentation is. It is dominated by technical language and abstract ideas and there is very little concrete to debate. There also seems to be a belief that in science and maths very little will change because of how those subjects are based on unavoidable core knowledges. Instead, most of the public discussion that has occurred has centred on the position of Welsh history.
The focus on history is rooted in how obsessed much of the Welsh public sphere (including myself) is by questions of identity. History is central to why Wales is a nation and thus has long been promoted by those seeking is develop a Welsh sense of nationhood. Concerns that children are not taught enough Welsh history are longstanding and date back to at least the 1880s. The debates around the teaching of Welsh history are also inherently political. Those who believe in independence often feel their political cause is hamstrung by people being unaware of their own history.
The new curriculum is consciously intended to be ‘Welsh’ in outlook and it requires the Welsh context to be central to whatever subject matter is delivered. This matters most in the Humanities where the Welsh context is intended to be delivered through activities and topics that join together the local, national and global. The intention is that this will instil in them ‘passion and pride in themselves, their communities and their country’. This quote comes from a guidance document for schools and might alarm those who fear a government attempt at Welsh nation building. Other documents are less celebratory but still clearly Welsh in outlook. Thus the goal stated in the main documentation is that learners should ‘develop a strong sense of their own identity and well-being’, ‘an understanding of others’ identities and make connections with people, places and histories elsewhere in Wales and across the world.’
A nearby slate quarry could thus be used to teach about local Welsh-speaking culture, the Welsh and British industrial revolution, and the connections between the profits of the slave trade and the historical local economy. This could bring in not just history, but literature, art, geography and economics too. There is real potential for exciting programmes of study that break down subject boundaries and engage pupils with where they live and make them think and understand their community’s connections with Wales and the wider world.
This is all sensible but there remains a vagueness around the underlying concepts. The Humanities section of the curriculum speaks of the need for ‘consistent exposure to the story of learners’ locality and the story of Wales’. Schools are asked to ‘Explore Welsh businesses, cultures, history, geography, politics, religions and societies’. But this leaves considerable freedom over the balance of focus and what exactly ‘consistent exposure’ means in practice. If schools want to minimize the Welsh angle in favour of the British or the global, they will be able to do so as long as the Welsh context is there. It is not difficult to imagine some schools treating ‘the story of Wales’ as a secondary concern because that is what already sometimes happens.
The existing national curriculum requires local and Welsh history to be ‘a focus of the study’ but, like its forthcoming replacement, it never defines very closely what that means in terms of actual practice. In some schools, it seems that the Welsh perspective is reduced to a tick box exercise where Welsh examples are occasionally employed but never made the heart of the history programme. I say ‘seems’ because there is no data on the proportion of existing pre-GCSE history teaching that is devoted to Welsh history. But all the anecdotal evidence points to Wales often not being at the heart of what history is taught, at least in secondary schools. At key stage 3 (ages 11 to 14) in particular, the Welsh element can feel rather nominal as many children learn about the Battle of Hastings, Henry VIII and the Nazis. GCSEs were reformed in 2017 to ensure Welsh history is not marginalised but at A Level the options schools choose reveal a stark preference in some units away from not just Wales but Britain too.
Why schools chose not to teach more Welsh history is a complex issue. Within a curriculum that is very flexible, teachers deliver what they are confident in, what they have resources for, what interests them and what they think pupils will be interested in. Not all history teachers have been taught Welsh history at school or university and they thus perhaps prefer to lean towards those topics they are familiar with. Resources are probably an issue too. While there are plenty of Welsh history resources out there, they can be scattered around and locating them is not always easy. Some of the best date back to the 1980 and 90s and are not online. There is also amongst both pupils and teachers the not-unreasonable idea that Welsh history is simply not as interesting as themes such as Nazi Germany. This matters because, after key stage 3, different subjects are competing for pupils and thus resources.
The new curriculum does nothing to address any of these issues and it is probable that it will not do much to enhance the volume of Welsh history taught beyond the local level. It replicates the existing curriculum’s flexibility with some loose requirement for a Welsh focus. Within that flexibility, teachers will continue to be guided by their existing knowledge, what resources they already have, what topics and techniques they already know work, and how much time and confidence they have to make changes. Some schools will update what they do but in many there is a very real possibility that not much will change at all, as teachers simply mould the tried and tested existing curricular into the new model. No change is always the easiest policy outcome to follow. Those schools that already teach a lot of Welsh history will continue to do so. Many of those that do not will also probably carry on in that vein.
Of course, a system designed to allow different curricula is also designed to produce different outcomes. The whole point of the reform is for schools to be different to one another but there may be unintended consequences to this. Particularly in areas where schools are essentially in competition with each other for pupils, some might choose to develop a strong sense of Welshness across all subject areas because they feel it will appeal to local parents and local authority funders. Others might go the opposite way for the same reasons, especially in border areas where attracting staff from England is important. Welsh-medium schools are probably more likely to be in the former group and English-medium schools in the latter.
Moreover, the concerns around variability do not just extend to issues of Welsh identity and history. By telling schools they can teach what they feel matters, the Welsh Government is telling them they do not have to teach, say, the histories of racism or the Holocaust. It is unlikely that any school history department would choose not to teach what Hitler inflicted upon the world but they will be perfectly at liberty to do so; indeed, by enshrining their right to do this, the Welsh Government is saying it would be happy for any school to follow such a line. Quite how that fits with the government’s endorsement of Holocaust Memorial Day and Mark Drakeford’s reminder of the importance of remembering such genocides is unclear.
There are other policy disconnects. The right to vote in Senedd elections has been granted to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Yet the government has decided against requiring them to be taught anything specific about that institution, its history and how Welsh democracy works. Instead, faith is placed in a vague requirement for pupils to be made into informed and ethical citizens. By age 16, the ‘guidance’ says learners should be able to ‘compare and evaluate local, national and global governance systems, including the systems of government and democracy in Wales, considering their impact on societies in the past and present, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens in Wales.’ Making Wales an ‘including’ rather than the main focus of this ‘progression step’ seems to me to downplay its importance. Moreover, what this sentence actually means in terms of class time and knowledge is up to schools and teachers. Some pupils will be taught lots about devolved politics, others little. The government is giving young people the responsibility of voting but avoiding its own responsibility to ensure they are taught in any depth what that means in a Welsh context.
The new curriculum will thus not educate everyone in the same elements of political citizenship or history because it is explicitly designed to not do so. Just as they do now, pupils will continue to leave schools with very different understandings of what Wales is, what the Senedd does and how both fit into British, European and global contexts. Perhaps that does not matter if we want pupils to make up their own minds about how they should be governed. But, at the very least, if we are going to give young people the vote, surely it is not too much to want them to be told where it came from, what it means, and what it can do.
But this is not the biggest missed opportunity of the curriculum. Wales already has an educational system that produces very different outcomes for those who go through it. In 2019, 28.4% of pupils eligible for free school meals achieved five A*-C grade GCSEs, compared with 60.5% of those not eligible. In 2018, 75.3% of pupils in Ceredigion hit this level, whereas in Blaenau Gwent only 56.7% did. These are staggering differences that have nothing to do with the curriculum and everything to do with how poverty impacts on pupils’ lives. There is nothing in the new curriculum that looks to eradicate such differences.
Teachers in areas with the highest levels of deprivation face a daily struggle to deal with its consequences. This will also impact on what the new curriculum can achieve in their schools. It will be easier to develop innovative programmes that take advantage of what the new curriculum can enable in schools where teachers are not dealing with the extra demands of pupils who have missed breakfast or who have difficult home lives. Fieldtrips are easiest in schools where parents can afford them. Home learning is most effective in homes with books, computers and internet access. The very real danger of the new curriculum is not what it will or will not do for Welsh citizenship and history but that it will exacerbate the already significant difference between schools in affluent areas and schools that are not. Wales needs less difference between its schools, not more.
Martin Johnes is Professor of History at Swansea University.
This essay was first published in the Welsh Agenda (2020).
For more analysis of history and the Curriculum for Wales see this essay.
A very brief history of recreation in the modern world
Historians have not always treated recreation very seriously as a topic of inquiry but it has always mattered to individuals in the modern world. Work may structure their day but play makes it worthwhile. Whether a song, a film, a game, a drink or even sex, recreation mattered and matters to people. These were not trivial asides; they were integral parts of people’s daily experience and influenced their outlooks on and understandings of the world they lived in. Yet, both the form and meaning of recreation was structured by the wider social and economic contours of life.
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modern recreation was shaped by the experience of industrialization. Efficient production demanded that time be organised and segmented. This meant that recreation too became regimented and bound by time, both hindering and enabling play. Long festivals and festivities went into decline with the coming of industry but new opportunities opened up in the time that was designated for recreation, especially on Saturdays, a day which offered escape from work before the more subdued hiatus of the Sabbath. Furthermore, modern industrial conditions brought rising incomes for the working and middle classes, enabling people to purchase pleasure in their spare time. By the late nineteenth century, people in industrial countries were spending money on tobacco, alcohol, gambling, sport, confectionary, and even holidays.
Of course, the boundaries between work and recreation were never impermeable. People talked, joked and even played while at work, and outside work domestic, family and religious chores and duties could lack the fun that should characterize play. Furthermore, as leisure itself was commercialized to take advantage of the rising demand, one person’s recreation became another’s employment. Similarly, developments like bicycling, which gained huge popularity at the very end of nineteenth century, served as both a means of travel for work and pleasure.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, industrialization may have changed the patterns of play in those communities that underwent it, but there was much continuity in its forms. The pleasures of drink and the escapism of drunkenness were as popular after the industrial revolution as they were before it. Music, dancing and sports were also integral parts of popular culture in both the premodern and the modern worlds. But modernization was bringing rationalization and organization, and it increasingly became the norm for such older collective but informal recreational traditions to be organized into clubs and societies. Competitions and rules became more formalized and the pursuit of pleasure justified by arguments for its moral and physical worth. Nowhere was this is clearer than in the world of sport, where, led by the British and to a lesser extent the French, new rules, competitions, and traditions were established from the late nineteenth century. Sports became part of the building of the character and physique of young men, a tool to ensure national survival in the midst of international tensions and ideas of social Darwinism. The economic and political patterns of a world of empires also took sports across the globe, introducing them to non-industrial territories like India, where they quickly gained a local following, although not always in the spirit or form that their imperial masters had intended.
The rationalization of play was important as recreation increasingly became a contested political and moral space in the industrializing world. Drink had long since attracted religious oppositions but as religion itself was undermined by the spread of education, science and recreation, churches turned their attention to other pastimes that were thought to distract hearts and minds from God. In Catholic countries in particular the influence of the church was strong and this hindered the development of some modern forms of recreation such as formalized gambling. Recreation was also under attack from the growth of rational and scientific thinking that thought time and effort should only be employed on matters that were beneficial to the mind, body and community. Thus while the arts were widely deemed rational recreation, more populist pleasures were not, particularly when there were undertones of violence or debauchery. This was evident in the gradual growth in distaste for pastimes that involved cruelty to animals. However, precise attitudes towards what was socially acceptable obviously varied across cultures, as can be seen in the survival of the bullfight as a popular form of entertainment in Spain nearly two centuries after similar pastimes were outlawed in Britain.
The twentieth century
By the twentieth century technological developments were broadening the range and possibilities of recreation. The most significant invention in the field of recreation was the cinema, an international medium that literally changed the way people saw the world. In the early twentieth century, it opened up horizons and imaginations and had a profound effect on people individually and collectively; lives became less drab, wars and threats overseas seemed more real. It also began the trend of the Americanization of global popular culture and created global stars like Charlie Chaplin. The best films was not all American as, say, the great silent pictures of Weimar Germany or the sound films of 1930s France showed, but, as technologies got bigger and more expensive, it was increasingly difficult for other nations to produce films of the scale, spectacle and sheer impact of Hollywood.
Sport was another global phenomenon. Soccer, in particular, became an obsession that transcended national boundaries, although it was often utilized as a symbol of national and political pride, not least by the totalitarian regimes of left and right. The Olympic Games too became associated with deliberate and incidental exhibitions of national status, despite its initial conception as a celebration of international togetherness. Nonetheless, events like the World Cup and the Olympics did become genuine shared experiences that stretched across the globe.
Of course, not all recreation was communal. The home remained an important site of recreation, especially for women. Reading, embroidery, pets and even sex were things that could be enjoyed in the home of the growing literate masses. The development of the radio after the First World War was especially important in encouraging domestic recreation, although the relative expense of a set meant that it was not until the Second World War, fed by a hunger for news, that it achieved a truly mass audience in Europe. After the 1939-45 conflict, aided by the new rising prosperity, television became the dominant and ubiquitous source of both recreation and information. By the late 1960s it was the norm for homes in Europe, North America and Australasia to have a set. It was simultaneously a private and shared experience: millions of people watched the same programmes but they did so from the comfort of their own homes. The development of satellite broadcasting in the 1960s enabled the live audiences for significant sporting and news events to extend around the globe, while the content of other programming, both educational and trivial, was a mix of the local and the imported.
For all its far-reaching significance in the west, television remained beyond the reach of those in poverty in the developing world. The reach of the globalized popular culture that was at the heart of recreation in the second half of the twentieth century was still limited by the realities of inequalities of wealth. Indeed, even within the west, a lack of access to popular recreation compounded the more fundamental miseries of poverty: poor diet and housing. It is the poorest’s lack of access to modern forms of recreation that undermines Marxist views of leisure as an opiate of the masses, something to distract them from wider political and economic struggles. This is not to suggest that that movies, drugs, alcohol or sport could not have this function but limited access certainly limits recreation’s political influence.
Nor was it just money that constrained modern recreation. Leisure was often highly gendered, reinforcing and reproducing wider female subordinate roles, from simply seeing recreation as the prerogative of only the male wage earner to employing women in brothels as entertainment for men. Racial prejudices too could, officially and unofficially, prevent people from partaking in everything from public dances to world title boxing bouts. Such restrictions eased as the west gradually became more racially tolerant after the Second World War and leisure even became an arena that encouraged such developments. Popular music was key here. Although black musical forms like jazz and the blues were initially widely distrusted because of their racial base, they gradually crossed over into mainstream popular culture, entertaining and influencing white people across the western world. Rock’n’roll in the 1950s and pop in the 1960s were dominated by both white artists and audiences but their roots lay in black musical forms.
Popular music in this era started as part of a new youth culture but, as generations aged, it became part of mainstream recreation. Like much modern recreation, it became a huge global industry in its own right and, even when associated with social and political rebellion, popular music was intensely commercialized. It also encapsulated the nature of global popular culture: strong common threads, structures and forms that absorbed local influences and then transmitted them across national boundaries, a process engendered and driven by the globalized economy and mass media. Recreation was thus not only an integral part of people’s lives across the globe, it was also an arena that made a global culture something more real than simply the abstract flows of economic and political ties.
Why sport is an important topic for historical study
First published in History Review, 40 (September 2001), 26-27.
It is a common refrain that the two dates in English history that everybody schoolboy knows are 1066 and 1966. One event had a profound impact on the course of history in the British Isles while the other was just a football match. Yet soccer, like many sports, can be so much more than simply a game. It may not be more important than life or death, as the Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly once famously claimed, but it can be a window through which we can view society. When England won the World Cup in 1966, the nation as a whole was on a high. The Beatles were revolutionising popular music, the miniskirt was making London the fashion capital of the world, there was a popular and populist Labour government in power and the economy was on the up. England’s triumph at Wembley seemed to confirm a nation that had found its destiny again after the painful transition that followed World War II and the dissolution of the Empire. Since 1966, the World Cup win has become a symbol of a nostalgic nation trapped in past glories and trying to refind itself and its ‘rightful’ place in the world. The memory of the triumph may not last as long as William’s victory at Hastings but it remains a powerful illustration of the symbolic importance of sport and its place within English national identity.
Yet it is only relatively recently that sport has been appreciated as the stuff of serious history and even today it sometimes struggles for recognition in some of the more traditional echelons of the subject. Nonetheless, sport’s contribution to our understanding of history extends beyond both symbolic importance and entertaining, but essentially trivial, footnotes. Nor is sports history a matter of just looking at how sport reflects society. Sport itself is an active agent in the world we live in.
This is clear in sport’s close relationship with class. Definitions of social class are complex and the subject of much historiographical debate. Occupation alone is no longer thought to be an adequate explanation and historians have begun looking at culture’s role in shaping how people defined the class status of themselves and others. By the twentieth century participation in many sports could be demarcated along class lines. Rugby league owed its whole existence to the northern working class’s desire to be free from the amateurist ideals of the southern and middle-class rugby authorities. As such the sport came to represent part of working-class life in the north of England. Thus, like soccer, it helped define the class of those who played and watched it, both in their own eyes and those of onlookers. Other sports played similar roles in directly contributing to people’s understanding and experience eof class cultures. Golf in England, for example, was a sport of the middle class and its clubs were important social and business networks that conferred upon their members privilege and status within the local community.
Yet for the importance of class in society, sport also illustrates its limitations as a lens through which all aspects of history can be judged. As contemporaries were well aware, a successful sports team could bring together the classes in celebration of the achievements of their town or nation. Indeed, sport’s (at least temporary) ability to unite the local classes whilst dividing the wider masses made it the subject of Marxist derision and elite approval. This was clear in the 1920s when, amidst social and political unrest, large well-behaved and socially mixed football crowds were a reassuring sight to many.
It is only through addressing wider historical questions like class that sport can be accepted as part of the academic world. Sports history is now becoming a distinct subject in its own right complete with journals, conferences and even degree courses. Yet studying and writing about sports history is not always easy. It is often the case that learning about the mundane and everyday in history is more difficult that investigating the extraordinary. Sports history does not benefit from the large range of sources available to political or more conventional social historians. This has meant it is, perhaps overly, reliant on newspaper evidence. However much information has also be gleamed from oral evidence, company records of bankrupt clubs and the archives of teams, sports organisations, local schools and councils. Through such research we are now beginning to understand sport’s place in history.
Britain was the cradle of the sporting world. Through her Empire and trading links, British games and sports were taken across the globe. Football thus spread from the English public schools, where its first rules had been drawn up, to become the game of the European and South American working classes. After the English language, soccer is perhaps Britain’s most successful and important cultural export. Cricket became an imperial sport, not through a ruthless process of cultural implantation but the desire of the local elites to adopt the practices of their colonial overlords. The amateurist ideals of the modern Olympics were heavily influenced by the traditions of the British public schools. Even baseball, that most American of sports, has its roots in children’s games taken across the Atlantic by British settlers. Sport can not be ignored if we are to understand the global legacy of Britain’s former economic, political and cultural power and influence. Indeed, British fair play and her love of sport became part of how foreigners traditionally viewed these islands.
Even within Britain, sport has played an important part in shaping national identity. For the Welsh, Scottish and Irish, sport has played an important symbolic role in affirming their nationhood and equality with England. While the Scots and Welsh enjoyed cutting the English down to size at football and rugby, the Irish increasingly rejected these sports in favour of their own indigenous games which could be used to symbolise a separate, and non-British, cultural heritage. Cricket meanwhile encapsulated many of the ideals of English life: a rural, moral and civilised but competitive world where gentlemen (amateurs) and working men (professionals) played together but knew their respective and clearly demarcated places. Thus ‘it’s not cricket’ became a description in everyday speech of anything that was ‘not right’.
For women sport has been both a source of inequality and liberation. This is aptly illustrated by the fortunes of women’s football during and after World War I. The football teams made of factory and munitions girls were just one example of the new social and occupational opportunities that women enjoyed with so many men away at the front. Yet after the war, just as women found themselves encouraged to leave their jobs and return to home and duty, the Football Association grew worried at the popularity of women’s football and banned its playing at professional stadiums. The sport collapsed although its brief flowering had given its participants a brief opportunity for physical liberation.
The historian Jack Williams pointed out that more people may have attended religious services or the pictures but no single church or cinema could boast as many as attendees as a professional football match. As such, sport was an integral element of urban life across Britain. History must strive to capture what was important to the people who lived it. Sport, of course, does not matter to everyone in society either today or in the past. But the fact that it has been an important part of many people’s lives is reason alone to justify its historical study.
A brief history of sport in the UK
First published in D. Levinsen and K. Christensen (eds.), Encyclopaedia of World Sport, Great Barrington, USA: Berkshire Publishing, 2005.
The United Kingdom was the birthplace of modern sport. From the drawing up of rules to the development of sporting philosophies, Britons have played a major role in shaping sport as the world knows it today. This role meant that British sport was overly insular and confident in its early days, while its post-1945 history was marked by doubts and crises as the nation realised that the rest of world had moved on, a situation that mirrored the UK’s wider crisis of confidence in a post-imperial world.
Pre-industrial sports
Pre-industrial sport in Britain resembled those in much of Europe. It was not a clearly demarcated activity but rather part of a communal festive culture that saw people congregate to celebrate high days and eat, drink, gamble and play. The sports of the people reflected their lives: they were rough, proud and highly localized. Rules were unwritten and based on customs and informal agreements that varied from place to place according to local oral traditions. ‘Folk’ football was one of the most common and popular examples of sport. It had existed in different forms across England and Wales since at least medieval times, but it resembled a mêlée more than its modern descendant. Traditional boundaries within rural society were celebrated within such games, with contests between parishes, young and old and married and unmarried. Other sports played at communal festivals included running races and traditional feats of strength such as lifting or throwing rocks.
The physicality of pre- and early-industrial Britain was also reflected and celebrated in bareknuckle prize fighting, although this widespread sport could not always be clearly distinguished from public drunken brawls. The brutality of life was further evident in the popularity of animal sports. Bull baiting and cock fighting were amongst the most popular but such recreations increasingly came under attack in the middle of the nineteenth century from middle-class moralists. The foxhunting of the upper class was not attacked, suggesting that the crusades owed something to concerns about the turbulent behaviour of the workers rather than just the suffering of animals.
The attacks on animal sports were part of a wider process of modernization that saw Britain transformed into the industrial workshop of the world. Urbanization, railways, factories, mills and mines saw Britain transformed, economically, environmentally and psychologically. Modern sport was forged within this heady mix of breakneck change; new ways of working and living brought new ways of playing. As well as the assaults on animal sports, folk football was attacked in towns because it disrupted trade and the general orderliness of the increasingly regimented world that industry was creating. Bareknuckle fighting too was attacked as a threatening symbol of a violent working class that unsettled an establishment already worried by the rise of political demands from the workers.
There was, of course, much continuity between the worlds of pre-industrial sport and the commercialised and codified games that emerged towards the end of the late nineteenth century. Cock fighting and prizefighting, for example, survived the attempts to outlaw them, but left the centres of towns for quiet rural spots or pubs and back streets that were away from the surveillance of middle-class authorities. ‘Folk’ football too lived on, although apparently on a smaller scale that was less orientated around traditional holidays and community celebrations. Its survival in this form surely underpinned the speed with which the codified form that emerged from the public schools was taken up by the masses across Britain.
The emergence of modern sport
Whilst forms of football were on the decline in mid-nineteenth century Britain, they were actually being adopted in the country’s public schools, as a means of controlling the boys and building their character, both as individual leaders and socially-useful team players. Underpinning the values that football was thought to cultivate were ideas of masculinity and religious conviction. Muscular Christianity deemed that men should be chivalrous and champions of the weak but also physically strong and robust. The belief that such qualities would create the right sort of men to lead the British Empire meant that a cult of athleticism, whose importance ran far deeper than mere play, developed within the English public schools.
Such traditions found a natural extension in the universities. It was here, particularly at Cambridge, that much of the impetus for common sets of rules developed in order to allow boys from different public schools to play together. It was from such beginnings that the moves towards codification of rules and the establishment of governing bodies mostly sprang. Most famously, representatives of leading London football clubs, including former public schoolboys, met in London in 1863 to establish a common code of rules for football and form the Football Association to govern the game.
With rules and a governing body behind them, former public schoolboys went out into the world, taking their games with them. Not only did this encourage the diffusion of sport outside British shores but it also led to modern sport being taken to the masses by a paternal elite who partly sought to better the health and morals of the masses, not least because of fears of national decline. Games like soccer and rugby were well-suited to urban, industrial communities, requiring only limited time and space and they very quickly developed in popularity amongst the working classes across Britain during the late nineteenth century. Such developments created an apparent homogenization of sports culture across Britain but there were distinct local variations. Knurr-and-spell and hurling, for example, enjoyed some popularity in the north of England and Scottish highlands respectively. Such traditional games furthered the continuity between pre-industrial and industrial sport but even they had to develop modern organisations and sets of rules to survive.
Modern British sport was not entirely rooted in the public schools and their spheres of influence. In Sheffield, for example, there were independent attempts to draw up sets of rules for football. Even amongst the southern middle classes, there developed popular sports, such as tennis, whose origins lay elsewhere. Golf could trace its written rules back into the eighteenth century Scotland but it was not until the wider sporting revolution and mania of the late nineteenth century that the sport’s popularity exploded amongst the British middle classes. Cricket was another sport whose written rules were drawn up in the eighteenth century and thus predate the public-school cult of athleticism.
Professionalism in cricket also dated back to the eighteenth century but as the phenomenon developed in other sports in the late nineteenth century, it, like other sports, developed an obsession with amateurism that was closely allied to the public-school ethos of fair play and playing for the sake of the game. Above all, amateurism was about projecting social position in a period of social change and mobility. To be an amateur in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain was to not need to be paid to play. Thus in cricket, where amateurs and professionals often played in the same team, social distinction was preserved through the use of different changing rooms, different ways of writing names and initially requiring professionals to labour with bowling and even menial tasks such as cleaning the kit. Yet, despite the snobbery that underpinned amateurism there was a general reluctance in most sports to impose explicit class-based restrictions on participation, though the Amateur Rowing Association was a notable exception. Furthermore, the reality of amateurism did not always match the rhetoric. Nowhere was this clearer than in the case of cricketer W. G. Grace (1848-1915). Undoubtedly the most famous sportsman of the Victorian era, Grace was a doctor and a gentleman but he was also supremely competitive and certainly not above gamesmanship and demanding excessively generous expenses.
It was in rugby and soccer that the issue of professionalism became most controversial. The growth of socially-mixed northern teams led to broken-time payments, where working men were compensated for missing work in order to play. Such payments however not only offended the amateurist principles of some of the elite, but they also threatened to take power away from the middle classes, both on and off the playing field. In soccer, professionalism was sanctioned in 1885 in order to ensure the middle-class Football Association retained control of the game, but it was soon tempered with severe controls on players’ freedom to move clubs and be paid what a free market might allow. Such tensions, fuelled by north-south rivalries, led rugby to split into two codes (which later became known as league and union) in 1895. Rugby league became a sport whose whole existence and identity was closely interwoven with ideas of working-class identity in northern England.
Watching and playing
Clubs could afford to pay players because soccer and rugby had become something that people watched as well as played. This owed much to the establishment of cup competitions, which, fed by civic and regional rivalries, gave some purpose and excitement to matches. In the industrial north of England, the growing crowds began to be charged for the privilege of watching and hosted in purpose-built grounds. Such crowds worried the class prejudices of social onlookers, who complained about the drinking, gambling and partisanship of supporters, as well as the impact on the nation’s health of a population that spent its free time watching rather than playing.
When soccer played on after the outbreak of war in 1914 the reputation of professional sport plummeted amongst the middle classes. Nonetheless, sport was to play an important role in maintaining troop morale at the front. In the aftermath of the Great War spectator sport reached new heights of popularity. The largest league games in soccer could attract as many as 60,000; yet, beyond drinking and gambling, disorder was rare. This led the sport to be celebrated as a symbol of the general orderliness and good nature of the British working class at a time of political and social unrest at home and abroad.
For spectators professional sport offered an exciting communal experience, where the spheres of home and work could be forgotten in the company of one’s peers. As such, crowds at professional soccer and rugby league became overwhelmingly masculine enclaves that fed a shared sense of community, and perhaps even class, identities. Sport’s ability to promote civic identity was underpinned not by the players, who being professional were transient, but by the supporters and the club sharing the name of its town or city.
Yet these crowds were not actually representative of such civic communities. Professional sport was mostly watched by male skilled workers, with only a sprinkling of women and the middle classes. The unemployed and unskilled workers were, by and large, excluded by their own poverty and the relative expense of entry prices. Consequently, as unemployment rocketed in parts of Britain during the inter-war depression, professional sport suffered; some clubs in the hardest hit industrial regions actually went bankrupt. Working-class women meanwhile were excluded from professional sport by the constraints of both time and money. Even the skilled workers did not show an uncritical loyalty to their local teams. Professional sport was ultimately entertainment and people exercised judgement over what was worth spending their limited wages on seeing.
Men played as well as watched and the towns of Britain boasted a plethora of different sports, from waterpolo in the public baths, to pigeon races from allotments, and quoits in fields behind pubs. Darts, dominoes and billiards flourished inside pubs and clubs. Space was, of course, a key requirement of sport but it was at a premium and the land that was available was heavily used. For all the excitement that sport enabled men and women to add to their lives, they were still constrained by the wider structures of economic power.
Working-class sport could not be divorced from the character of working-class culture. Local sport was thus intensely competitive and often very physical. In both football codes, bodies and fists were hurled through the mud, cinders and sawdust of the rough pitches that were built on parks, farmland and even mountainsides. But, win or lose, for many men and boys, playing sport was a source of considerable physical and emotional reward. For many youths, giving and taking such knocks was part of a wider process of socialization: playing sport was an experience that helped teach them what it meant to be a man. Similarly, working-class sporting heroes reflected the values and interests of the audience; they were tough, skilled and attached to their working-class roots.
Cricket was the national sport of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England, in that its following was not limited to one class or region. Matches in urban working-class districts may have lacked the pressed white flannels or neat green wickets of a test match at Lord’s but they shared the same intricacy and subtlety of play. The contest between the skill and speed of the bowler and the technique and bravery of the batsmen was one familiar to both working-class boys and upper-class gentlemen. Cricket’s popularity owed something to the rural image of England that it encapsulated. Cricket on the village green was an evocative and emotive image, employed even by a prime minister at the end of the twentieth century. Yet, from the English elite, cricket spread not only to the masses of the cities but also the four corners of the vast British Empire, where it enabled the colonies to both celebrate imperial links with the motherland and also take considerable pride in putting the English in their place.
Like cricket, horseracing had been organised since the eighteenth century and was followed by all classes from Lords to commoners. Gambling was at the core of its attraction and a flutter on the horses was extremely popular, despite its illegality (until 1963) when the bet was placed in cash and outside the racecourse. As with soccer, the sporting press offered form guides and was studied closely, with elaborate schemes being developed to predict a winner. The racecourse itself was often rather disreputable, with the sporting entertainment on offer to its large crowds being supplemented by beer, sideshows and, in the nineteenth century, prostitutes. It provided the middle classes with an opportunity to (mis)behave in a manner that would be impossible in wider respectable society.
Respectability did matter on the golf course and in the clubhouse. Although it had something of a working-class following, especially in Scotland, golf was a sport of the middle class and its clubs were important social and business networks that conferred privilege and status within the local community upon their mostly male membership. Tennis too had both a middle-class profile and a social importance that often marginalized actually playing the game. Like archery and croquet before it, for the urban middle class of the early twentieth century, the tennis club was an opportunity to meet and flirt with members of the opposite sex of the ‘right sort’. In such ways, sport became an important part of the lives of a middle class that was increasingly otherwise socially isolated in the new suburbs.
As in the rest of Europe, the shadow of war was hanging over the suburbs by the 1930s. In such an atmosphere, sport itself became to be increasingly political. The England soccer team were even told by the appeasing Foreign Office to give the Nazi salute when playing an international in Berlin in 1938. The threat from Germany also led to renewed investment in playing fields, as concerns resurfaced about the fitness of a nation on the brink of war. Unlike in the First World War, sport was fully promoted during the 1939-45 conflict, as an improver of spirits and bodies for civilians and troops alike.
Britain finished the Second World War victorious but physically and economically exhausted. In the austerity that marked the late 1940s, sport was one readily obtainable relief and, encouraged by growing radio coverage, soccer, rugby, cricket and boxing enjoyed huge crowds. There were also large crowds at the 1948 Olympics, which London stepped in to host with the hope that the games would rejuvenate tourism and help put some colour into the post-war austerity. The games were an organisational success and even made a profit, the last Olympics to do so until 1984. After leaning towards isolationalism in both politics and sport during the inter-war years, the post-war period saw a new awareness in Britain of its relationship with the rest of the world. With the Empire being dissolved, international competitions like the Olympics began to matter more as indicators of national vitality. The conquest of Everest in 1953 offered some optimism and confidence for the future but soccer, Britain and the world’s most popular game, was not reassuring for its inventors. England’s first forays into the World Cup were far from successful and indicated that the country’s loss of global power was not confined to the political sphere.
The television era
As economic prosperity returned in the 1950s, spectator sport suffered a downturn in popularity, as it competed against the lure of shopping, cars and increased domestic comforts, of which television was one of the most alluring. Such alternatives were particularly appealing to older men and thus the 1960s seemed to witness crowds, in soccer at least, become younger. One consequence was the rise of a youthful football fan culture that utilised humorous but obscene and aggressive chants and promoted fighting between rival supporters. The media spotlight, increasingly looking for sensational stories from across sport, amplified the hooligan problem but from the late 1960s to 1980s it was a genuine and widespread subculture that drew more upon the thrill of limited violence than any sense of a disempowered youth rebelling against the world.
Initially, there was only limited sport shown on television and many sporting authorities, not least soccer, feared that coverage would kill live audiences. Yet others, like golf and horseracing, saw television as an opportunity to develop their popularity and thus courted its coverage. The growth of televised sport was therefore sporadic; in the 1950s and 60s it was too often limited to edited highlights or live coverage of only the biggest events in the sporting calendar.
Yet televised sport was to become hugely popular and influential. In the 1960s, coverage of the Olympics and the 1966 World Cup won mass audiences and turned the events into shared celebrations of a global sporting culture. Wimbledon became, for most people, a television event rather than a live tennis championship, while rugby league became inextricably linked to the northern tones of commentator Eddie Waring. By the 1970s, television coverage had also helped turn rugby union’s Five Nations Championship into a very popular competition that transcended the sport’s middle-class English foundations.
Television also opened up the opportunities to commercially utilise sport, not least through sponsorship. Athletics was one sport where television and sponsorship increased its profile and popularity, but this also created tensions between the amateurist traditions of the administrators and the commercial demands of the stars. Other sports suffered similar tensions and responded by either slowly becoming explicitly commercial, as in the case of professional golf, or turning a blind eye to transgressions of the amateur code as in the case in athletics and parts of rugby union. Yet, ultimately, money talked and amateurism gave way to commercial pressures across senior sport.
The changes television was starting to bring about could be radical. Cricket proved surprisingly willing to embrace change and even introduced a one-day Sunday League as early as 1967, as it searched for a more accessible and exciting one-day format to supplement the waning four-day county game. After the invention of colour television, snooker was televised from the late 1960s and the sport was transformed from the realm of smoky pubs to something resembling a national craze. The relatively static nature of the game meant that it was cheap to broadcast and conducive to dramatic close ups. Snooker also had the characters and personalities that the media was increasing seeking in its coverage of sport.
The real commercial boost from television came in the 1990s, with the development of satellite television. Soccer was seen as the key to securing an audience for the new medium. Rupert’s Murdoch’s Sky thus spent enormous sums on securing and then keeping the rights to televise the game’s senior division. After the 1980s – when hooliganism and the fatal horrors of disasters at Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough had seen English football sink to its lowest ebbs of popularity and standing – Sky’s millions enabled the game’s upper echelons to reinvent itself in the 1990s. New all-seater stadia (enforced by the government to avoid a repeat of the 96 deaths at Hillsborough in 1989) made watching soccer both safer and more sanitised, an influx of talented foreign players raised standards of play, while a more cynical and overtly commercial edge developed amongst the game’s owners and administrators. Players were the main beneficiaries as their profile, wages and sponsorship opportunities rapidly escalated in the now hugely fashionable and celebrity-conscious game. David Beckham epitomised this transition, with his pop-star wife, countless sponsorship deals and media-frenzied private life. Fans meanwhile could watch more soccer than ever on television but actually attending matches was becoming extortionately expensive. Other sports were keen to follow soccer’s example. Rugby league became Super League, its teams gained American-style epithets and the sport even moved from winter to the less crowded television schedules of summer. Rugby union, fearing being left behind, suddenly abandoned its strongly amateur heritage and turned professional in 1995, a move that was to bring it as many financial headaches as rewards.
Identities and inequalities
In the second half of the twentieth century, spectator sport and television may have become interwoven in a relationship built on money, but participatory sport did not die out, although it too became part of a leisure industry that sold everything from training shoes to personal gyms. As throughout the twentieth century, participation remained skewed by class. The wealthier appeared not only more able to afford to play sport but they also appeared more interested in doing so. The foundations and boundaries of the British class system were becoming increasingly blurred and the diminishing class associations of the most popular sports reflected that. Yet historical legacies and financial requirements still meant that equestrian sport remained beyond the reach and often tastes of the masses, whilst activities such as boxing and darts remained closely allied to working-class culture. Success at such sports could take performers out of their working-class origins but this did not end the cultural resonances of the sports that had been built up over a century.
Nor were the gender biases of sport ended by the equal opportunities ethos of the late twentieth century. Playing and watching sport remained far more popular amongst men, despite the significant advances made in female participation rates and the profile of some leading sportswomen. Olympic athletes like Denise Lewis or Kelly Holmes may have ventured into the celebrity world of sports stardom but, at the start of the twenty-first century, women are still on the margins of sport, in terms of numbers, profile and culture.
Athletes from Britain’s ethnic minorities have, however, broken through into the mainstream of nearly all the country’s most popular sports. In the early twentieth century, there had been occasional black athletes in boxing and soccer in particular, but it was the 1970s that saw British sport become genuinely ethnically-mixed, when the sons of the first generation of large-scale immigration reached adulthood. By the twenty-first century, England’s national teams had even had black and Asian captains in soccer and cricket respectively. Such achievements were not simply symbolic but also encouraged a degree of wider racial integration in national culture. Yet sport has also been, and continues to be, the site of explicit racism (notably in the form of soccer chants) and more subtle preconceptions about the playing abilities of different ethnic groups. Such prejudices partly explain why few professional soccer players have emerged from the UK’s large Asian population.
While little sustained media attention was ever devoted to sporting inequalities based on class, gender or ethnicity, nationhood was a topic of widespread popular interest. When in 1999 Chelsea Football Club fielded a team that did not include a single British player, there were debates about globalization’s potential impact on the future success of British international sides. Sport had always played an important role in shaping national identity within the United Kingdom. For the Welsh, Scottish and Irish, it had an important symbolic role in affirming their nationhood and equality with England. While the Scots and Welsh enjoyed cutting the English down to size at football and rugby, the Irish increasingly rejected these sports in favour of their own indigenous games, such as Gaelic football and hurling, which could be used to symbolise a separate, and non-British, cultural heritage.
Doing a dissertation on modern Welsh history
Some brief advice to help you choose a dissertation topic
Your dissertation needs to be something you find interesting and something which you can practically do. The latter means something not too big and something where the sources are accessible.
One advantage of doing a Welsh subject is that the archives are close to where you are studying. The Richard Burton Archives are in our library. West Glamorgan archives are in the civic centre. Cardiff has the Glamorgan Archives.
There are also a wealth of online sources for modern Wales. You can find a list here.
You need to think about what kind of sources you want to use. Do you want to go to an archive? Do you want to use online newspapers? The latter can mean wading through lots and lots of articles if your topic is thematic. They are more accessible than an archive but can take longer.
Possible approaches:
Pick an event. The dissertation would be along the lines of what happened, why did it happen, why did it matter. You would be telling the story but in an analytical way.
The event needs to be small enough to be told in detail. The Second World War is far too big! Think more something like a specific election, battle, disaster etc. Don’t worry about whether anyone has written about it before. The primary sources will tell you the details. You can get the analytical ideas from looking at similar events or the same event in another place.
For example, the 1945 general election is too big and well known but you could do the 1945 general election in Swansea. The newspapers and local political records give you primary sources. The writing on the election more generally gives you the ideas and framework. The dissertation becomes, essentially, historians have said X about the election, is this true of the election in Swansea?
A big advantage of an event is that you know the date of it and thus it’s easy to find in the newspapers!
Pick a theme and apply it to a place. Again, the more specific the better. Welsh women’s history is too big but marriage in Wales between the wars is not. Pubs is too big but pubs in Victorian Swansea is not. Education in Wales is too big but schools in Swansea during the First World War is a great topic. Again, the general literature will give you the ideas and the primary material give you the examples to test those ideas with. No one needs to have written about your specific theme. In fact, that helps you be original. For example, no one has written about pubs in Victorian Swansea but that means you’re being original. They have written about pubs in Britain so you will have plenty to read to and ideas to test and guide your research.
Some other example dissertation topics to illustrate approaches:
The Welsh language in a street or village. You look at the census returns for a small area for 1891, 1901 and 1911 and work out how spoke Welsh, their jobs, their family circumstances and how this changed over time. Then you think about what this tells us about the changing nature of the language and how it fits with historians’ arguments about this. You would also read about the history of the village, or the town that the street was in.
Motoring in Edwardian Wales. You look through the newspapers for articles that use the terms motoring or motor car. There will be quite a lot! You see that historians have motoring have argued it was seen as a sign of modernity, a nuisance and a legal problem. You find examples of each from Wales and see if you agree with the historians’ arguments. You might have a chapter on each. If other themes jump out at you from your reading of the articles you could have sections on those too. Because councils get involved you might look at their records too. You see court cases so a good student might hunt down police records too.
Digital resources on Welsh history 1847-1947
This probably duplicates info already on Blackboard / Canvas but hopefully it helps with your essays when library access might be reduced. It should be used in conjunction with the guide to online historical sources produced by the library. The list below is more Wales-specific and focuses on what is useful for the Welsh Century module.
There is a review of the academic historiography of modern Wales here. You’ll need to use your Swansea log-in. It’s a bit dated now but does offer an introduction that should give you ideas. There is another version of the same essay here which does not require a log in.
Historical Welsh newspapers
Access to a large number of local newspapers from Wales from the pre 1919 period. https://newspapers.library.wales/
Welsh journals and periodicals
This is full-text versions of journals, magazines and periodical from the eighteenth century until the 21st century. It will thus give you access to primary and secondary sources and can be searched by name, place, word etc. https://journals.library.wales/
Dictionary of Welsh Biography
Short biographies of eminent and sometimes obscure figures in Welsh history. If you want to find out about individuals you should also look at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Swansea log-in required).
Historical statistics
The Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics 1700-1974
Moving Pictures
The British Film Institute has a variety of different films about Wales. The collection includes home movies and factual films.
Newsreels were news fims broadcast at the cinema before the main picture. You can access newsreel reports from between the wars here. Just search for Wales.
Welsh History Review
This is the leading journal for academic work on Welsh history. Digital copies are free from 1967 to 2002. If you are looking for a specific article and volume you can access them here. If you are searching for a theme or key word, then use this search page and enter Welsh History Review into the publication title box.
For issues after 2002, you need to use this database. You will need to sign in using your Swansea login details.
Llafur
Llafur is the other academic journal dedicated to general Welsh history.Digital copies are free from 1972 to 2004. If you are looking for a specific article and volume you can access them here. If you are searching for a theme or key word, then use this search page and enter Llafur into the publication title box Issues after 2002 are not online.
This is an online repository for historical images and some documents. The content is quite eclectic but it is full of rich material and worth searching.
Contains full text versions of many nineteenth-century publications including the infamous Blue Books. Worth playing around.
History of the Welsh language
- An important essay about the early history of the Welsh language question on the census.
- 1891 census report on languages in Wales
- 1901 census report on languages in Wales
- 1911 census report on languages in Wales
- 1921 census report on language in Wales
- Overview of how the census question on Welsh has changed and its accuracy
Wales and War
- Cymru 1914: the Welsh experience of the First World War A digital collection of primary sources on Wales and the First World War
- Historical resources on peace activism in Wales http://www.walesforpeace.org/wfp/index.html
- Green Mountain, Black Mountain (1942). A Second World War propaganda film written by Dylan Thomas that offers a vivid picture of Wales.
- Martin Johnes, Welshness, Welsh Soldiers and the Second World War. Academic chapter.
- Some short online essays by me on Wales and the Second World War
- Daily Life During World War II (BBC Wales)
- Evacuation and Wales in World War II (BBC Wales)
- Bombing raids in Wales (BBC Wales)
- Women in World War II (BBC Wales)
- The coal industry in World War II (BBC Wales)
- Welsh identity during the Second World War (BBC Wales)
- Swansea’s Blitz (Click on Wales)
- You should also, of course, also consider the British historiography since this was a period when there were very clear UK-wide trends. An excellent academic introduction for the Second World War can be found here.
Women’s history
- Resources from the National Museum looking at 1900-1918
- Welsh Women’s Archive Includes material on women in the First World War.
- A BBC podcast where Dr Stephanie Ward discusses gender in modern Welsh history
Politics
- Labour Party manifestos
- A BBC podcast where Dr Daryl Leeworthy discusses the politics of mining communities and what the Labour Party achieved
- Hansard: transcriptions of Parliamentary debates
- Election statistics (1918-)
- British Cartoon Archive (University of Kent) http://library.kent.ac.uk/cartoons/ World’s largest archive of (newspaper) cartoons.
- Plaid Cymru History– lots of phamplets and other resources
- Cabinet papers from the British government. What happened in Wales was shaped by decisions made in Westminster…
Maps
Explore historic maps from Wales and the UK here.
Television documentaries
Episode 2 of Wales: England’s Colony? (2019) Presented by yours truly, it explores the relationship between Wales and England in the modern period.
Episode 4 of The Story of Wales (2012). An overview of the industrial revolution and its impact on Wales.
Episode 5 of The Story of Wales (2012). An overview of industrial and modern Welsh society. Covers much of the ground we have looked at in The Welsh Century.
Saunders Lewis (1992). A documentary about one of the founders of Plaid Cymru.
The Dragon has two Tongues. This was a 1980s documentary that debated Welsh history. ITV have not allowed it to be put online but these extracts offer some sense of its overall debate about the nature of Wales’s past.
Education, the decline of Welsh and why communities matter more than classrooms
This article was first published at https://nation.cymru/opinion/education-the-decline-of-welsh-and-why-communities-matter-more-than-classrooms/
Why Welsh declined is an emotive topic. For more than a hundred years, some have liked to blame the British state, with the Welsh Not offering an apparently convenient symbol of official attitudes. Others prefer to argue that wider state attitudes deliberately created an atmosphere that encouraged people to turn against their own language. Either explanation frees Wales from responsibility for the decline of Welsh (although the former misunderstands how education actually worked and the latter implies that the Welsh of the past were gullible victims of some wider conspiracy).
What is beyond debate is that the history of the Welsh language in the modern period is one of decline. Probably at least 80 percent of the population spoke Welsh at the start of the nineteenth century and most of them could not speak English. At the 1891 census, the first time anyone counted properly, Welsh was only spoken by half the population, with 30% saying they were unable to speak English (although that figure was thought to be exaggerated because of the way the question was worded and some suspicion whether it could really be that high). By the 2011 census, just 19 percent of the population spoke Welsh and that figure was probably an exaggeration of actual fluency levels. Only in Gwynedd and Anglesey were more than half of people able to speak Welsh.
Education is part of this story but it is only part. If education was decisive to people stopping speaking Welsh, it is hard to explain why there were such large regional variations in language patterns. The central purpose of education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was to teach people English but in rural Wales it often failed. In 1891 in Meirionnydd and Cardiganshire, three quarters of people were returned as only speaking Welsh, despite fifty years of growth in the education system. In 1901, 10% of 15-year-olds in Wales were unable to speak English, despite the fact that school attendance had been compulsory for more than 20 years. In rural districts of Meirionnydd more than half of 10 to 15-years-olds were unable to speak English.
Today, the education system is sometimes condemned for teaching English to the Victorian Welsh. But in that period, people damned it for failing to do so. The reasons given by investigations into education were
- Too many schools failed to make use of Welsh in the classroom and thus left children floundering to understand lessons given in what was essentially a foreign language.
- School lessons were not being reinforced by wider culture in communities where Welsh was the language of work, play and prayer and English was very rarely used or even heard.
Thus education did not bring about significant linguistic change in rural communities because it often failed to actually teach people to speak English properly. At schools where teachers refused to use Welsh, children might learn to read and repeat English words but they did not actually know what these words meant because no one ever told them and because they never heard them outside class.
Moreover, even if education had been better there was little to be gained in Victorian rural communities through abandoning Welsh. The language was spoken everywhere and by nearly everyone. Giving it up would have made no sense. It was both natural and useful, whatever the Blue Books said.
In contrast, in the industrial south communities were becoming more diverse. By the end of the 19th century, large-scale migration from England was affecting a shift in community languages. English became something that could be learned not just in the classroom but in the workplace, the pub and the street. Surrounded by an increasing number of workmates and neighbours who could not speak Welsh, the dynamics of language were changing from migrants learning Welsh to the existing population learning English.
Contemporaries noted how the key linguistic shift was among the children. They might speak Welsh at home but, in communities full of migrant children unable to speak Welsh, they played and learned in English and thus English came to be their natural tongue for speaking to anyone who was not their parents. They, in turn, raised their own children in English.
Thus demographics were key to why Welsh remained strong in the countryside but was declining in industrial and urban areas. There were, of course, other factors at play. The public rhetoric that Welsh was old fashioned and unsuited to modern life must have had some influence, although this has to be set alongside the very significant status Welsh gained by being a language of religion. English was also the language of a global mass media and popular culture. It was the language of a growing consumer culture and the army. This meant after the First World War, English made significant inroads into rural communities and in industrial communities the linguistic shifts brought about by demographic changes were reinforced.
It was only once English was well established that some Welsh-speaking parents took the decision to raise their children in English. Here they were influenced by the economic, political and cultural power of English but this trend was concentrated in the areas where English already dominated. Thus in 1926/7, of those children at Anglesey secondary schools who did not speak Welsh at home, only 2% had two Welsh-speaking parents. In Merthyr, 30% of secondary-school pupils who spoke English at home had two Welsh-speaking parents. In wider Glamorgan, the figure was 19%.
It is still instructive that a few families in Welsh-speaking Anglesey were raising their children in English. Yet the 1920s was relatively late and by then better education, military service, the cinema and radio had all boosted people’s ability to speak English. Before the First World War, it was more common for migrants into rural communities to learn Welsh than it was for locals to drop the language. Census records show how the children of English families who had moved to rural Wales could often speak Welsh. Their parents didn’t speak the language and much of their schooling would have been in English. It was in the community and with their friends that they learned Welsh.
Even in the first couple of decades of the post-1945 period, as the inability to speak English started to disappear, rural Wales remained strongly Welsh speaking, despite the allure of English films, tv and pop songs.
What changed this was not education or the status of languages but English migration. Just as migration from England was decisive to the decline of Welsh in industrial communities, it became decisive in the decline of Welsh in rural communities. Children of migrants might still learn Welsh but they do so most effectively in places where Welsh remains the dominant community language. The number of such places is falling as the demography of rural Wales changes.
What happens in schools only really matters if it is reinforced by what happens outside school. That is why today, decades of Welsh-medium education in English-speaking communities have not changed the language of those communities. It is why some children who learn Welsh lose it in later life. It is why Welsh-medium education for all in rural communities is not enough to buttress Welsh there if the everyday language of those communities is changing through migration from England.
If the Welsh Government wants to reach a million speakers then education alone is not the answer. Even if this nominal target is reached through a massive expansion of Welsh-medium education, it will not mean there are a million who do speak Welsh, merely a million who can speak Welsh. The decline of Welsh was rooted not in what happened in classrooms but what happened in communities. The future of Welsh won’t be saved by education either. It relies on ensuring there are still communities where it is natural to start a conversation with a stranger in Welsh. It relies on people elsewhere having other opportunities to use the Welsh they learned at school. It relies on being a living language outside the classroom.
Indeed, it’s probably better, and certainly more sustainable, to have 500,000 people regularly speaking Welsh in their community than a million able to speak it but rarely doing so.
Martin Johnes 