MORNING SERIAL
A WELSH-SPEAKING community was being destroyed to provide water for an English city that seemed deeply reluctant to discuss it with the people whose homes it was taking. It was easy to see the project as another piece of the English imperialism that was killing the Welsh language and way of life. Iorwerth Peate, a prominent nationalist and curator of traditional Welsh life, claimed the flooding was part of the ‘gradual murder of the Welsh national personality by various forces from beyond the Dyke.’
The minister responsible for Welsh affairs during the parliamentary bill’s first stages was Gwilym Lloyd George. That Wales was being despoiled by the Welsh-speaking son of perhaps its greatest national figure deepened the anger. One letter he received trusted he would ‘not sell Wales and be a traitor.’ A Wrexham preacher just asked, ‘I wonder what your father would say about it?’
A letter from Swansea summed up the dominant tone of the complaints received by the government: ‘We in Wales are fighting to the last ditch to defend our language and our culture. We dread to think that a power like Liverpool Corporation has the freedom to walk into our country and steal our water and our land in this tyrannical way.’
The natural beauty of the area, the question of human rights and the economic future of Wales were also recurring themes and many of the complainants stressed that they were not nationalists.
In a forgotten dimension to the affair, many trade union branches also voiced their opposition. It took place against a backdrop of rising unemployment and there was much concern that the transfer of water to Liverpool would hamper future industrial development in north Wales, perhaps by attracting companies to Merseyside that might have otherwise come to Wales, had the reservoir’s resources been kept there. But even such fears, though not motivated by concern for the Welsh language or the community being drowned, were still understood within the context of Welsh resources being taken by England.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com