MORNING SERIAL
They had not invented a nation but they had recreated one.
Popular Welshness
JUST as in earlier periods, there are questions as to how far this renewed sense of nationhood extended beyond political and intellectual circles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
As before, daily concerns were inevitably dominated by issues of work, food, family and housing. But, unlike in other periods, education, economic integration and the emergence of a mass consumer culture meant more contact with the English language and English people.
This, in turn, must have made people more aware of their distinctive language and its significance. They may have wanted to learn English but many also seemed to have a deep affection for Welsh and a desire to hold on to it, not least because it expressed who they were in a culture and economy that so often denied them any sense of dignity.
This was clearest in rural areas where linguistic change was more about the rise of bilingualism rather than the abandonment of Welsh. In the north-west quarrymen liked to say that the stone they cut and quarried did not understand English. The technical language of their industry was Welsh and in the early 1880s over 90% of Britain’s slate came from north Wales, meaning that workers there had little sense of being part of a wider industrial class. With quarry managers often being English, labour relations and class tensions in the industry became interwoven with linguistic and national feelings.
Elsewhere in Wales, sentiments of nationhood had less tangible bases, but it still ran deeper than the Nonconformist Liberal construction of Wales. Wales may not have been a nation-state, but it had a history, a language, borders and many of the symbols that made nationhood more than just a static idea. This may not have often led to much conscious flag-waving but it was woven into the fabric of life, an often unconscious identity that was accepted without question.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com