Time our historians knew our true story

PROFESSOR Gwyn Alf Williams was frequently heard to state that there is no such thing as an objective historian.

The teaching of history and the selection of history topics for study have always been to confirm the position of the ruling establishment.

When I was at school in Cardiff in the 1950s, my history teacher told us pupils that “there is no such thing as a written history of Wales” and proceeded to teach us about Alfred the Great, Henry VIII, Nelson and the empire. He almost certainly had not heard of Rhodri the Great or Llywelyn the Great, because he had not been taught about them himself.

Many of our teachers in Wales continue to present the form of history learned in college from professors who still see Wales as a rebellious part of “the empire”. This view refuses to look at the evidence from a Welsh point of view – to ask why were the Welsh always ready to revolt?

We have just had examples of why Welsh people have a reason to revolt.

One is the decision in London to renege on their word to electrify the railway from Cardiff to Swansea and the Valley lines. Another is their prevarication regarding the Swansea Bay lagoon. A third is the erection of the Iron Ring insult at Flint Castle.

These provocations run through our history to when the Saxons first came to these islands in the fifth century – forget the Normans, they were only continuing what the Saxons had been doing for 800 years before they came.

Please let our established historians at least try to understand us as a people instead of an unwashed rabble. John H Davies Llandysul, Ceredigion