Misleading impression?
If the interview with Simon Jenkins in your March issue (A Welsh Tragedy?) is anything to go by, I suspect his recent Radio 4 documentary – controversially entitled Wales: A Twentieth-Century Tragedy? – was largely based on flimsy anecdotal evidence.
For example, when Mr Jenkins’ father left Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil around 1932, he may have observed that the streets were infinitely nicer to live in than those in northern England, but at the time the unemployment rate in Dowlais was 80 per cent. Many of the houses there were demolished within 40 years of his leaving. On visiting Dowlais in 1936, the Prince of Wales famously said, “Something must be done.” This does not suggest the “classy place” described by Mr Jenkins.
Mr Jenkins states that wealth stayed in Wales, but the unemployed of Dowlais did not have any wealth to tide them over. This is why 27,000 people left Merthyr Tydfil before the Second World War.
One of the themes of the interview is that the Welsh spend a lot of time asking for grants. What they have sought is investment, in the same way that northern England currently looks towards Westminster.
Mr Jenkins has suggested the Welsh language will flourish if it is banned. But Welsh speaking was discouraged in schools in the 19th century – most famously through the use of the ‘Welsh Not’ – and it predictably had the opposite effect.
For a more balanced view one can turn to the work of many eminent Welsh historians, two of them Dowlais men – Professors Gwyn Williams and Glanmor Williams.
John Strand, /GTVJ[T 6[F N