BOMBER ‘REJECTED GROUP’S CALLS TO MURDER PRINCE’
THE mastermind of a Welsh nationalist bombing campaign in the 1960s has claimed that he came under pressure to assassinate Prince Charles on the day 50 years ago when he was named Prince of Wales in a ceremony at Caernarfon Castle.
But John Jenkins says he rejected the calls from other members of the paramilitary group he led while being a non-commissioned officer in the British army at the same time, saying that killing the Prince would have alienated the people of Wales from the cause of Welsh independence.
He said: “What isn’t known is that one of the hardest fights I ever had was with our own people.
“I spent a lot of time in the weeks before the Investiture travelling around in an army civilian car, reining people in. They were becoming more, well, savage as the ceremony approached.
“They would say, ‘ The answer’s simple. There can’t be an Investiture if we kill him’. And I would have to stress, ‘OK, but what the hell will we achieve politically if we do? Nothing.’
“But it [assassinating Charles] was possible. For one thing, I was in the army. I was there. I could have carried a rifle and I could have shot him there and then if I wanted. Furthermore, if I’d said, ‘Right, I want a couple of people who are prepared to do something and not come back from it,’ I know at least two who would have come forward and volunteered. I’m talking about a suicide operation.”
A newly-published biography of Jenkins, the enigmatic leader of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (Movement to Defend Wales – usually known as MAC), reveals more about the organisation and the motivation of its leader than has ever been disclosed before.
Now 86, Jenkins still lives in Wales. The book, John Jenkins: The Reluctant Revolutionary? by the Swansea-based historian Dr Wyn Thomas, is the result of in-depth interviews carried out by the author over a period of 15 years.
Debate in Wales about the significance of the bombing campaign – which caused millions of pounds’ worth of damage to public buildings, the deaths of two MAC members who accidentally blew themselves up and a seriously-injured child – has been muted.
That’s almost certainly because the kind of Welsh nationalism promoted by Plaid Cymru is of a non-violent, constitutional kind. It’s also neither in the interests of the authorities, who don’t want to put ideas into the heads of disaffected extremists, or of Plaid, which doesn’t want to be tainted with guilt by association, to mention it.
But the political narrative that drove Jenkins towards direct action is the same that prompts many to join Plaid to this day – the sense that Wales has been badly treated over the centuries and still is today.
He cites the infamous flooding of the Tryweryn valley to supply Liverpool with water and the gross negligence that led to the Aberfan disaster as recent examples of Wales being treated as an inferior nation.
But he also became shocked by, as he saw it, the indifference of Welsh people to their own inferior position.
In an early passage of the book, when he has been telling the author about reading up Welsh history to make up for what he wasn’t taught at school, Jenkins says: “I began to feel, even at this early age, that there existed a low threshold of understanding of the situation in Wales among Welsh people.
“Now, whether this was a direct consequence of being suppressed and subjugated for so long, I was at this stage unsure. But, for whatever reason, it seemed to me that the Welsh people could no longer appreciate how precarious their position was.
“As I read these books about Welsh history, I couldn’t help but think – especially as I looked around me – that the people of Wales were blind to the fact that their own country, which was uniquely blessed in so many ways, was facing extinction. As the years went by, my feelings intensified, leading me to believe, more and more, that it was up to me to do something about it.”
Jenkins, who was born in Cardiff and brought up in the Valleys, joined the British army as a teenager because he wanted to get away after splitting up with a girlfriend he later said was the love of his life.
He was recruited to the Dental Corps, in due course spending time in Cyprus where he gained a highly-negative impression of Britain’s behaviour as a colonial power. At the time, the army was seeking to contain the Greek Cypriot paramilitary movement EOKA, which wanted Cyprus to unify with Greece.
Jenkins recounted his own personal experience: “We lived in Famagusta, but I worked in Dhekelia, which is 20 miles away. I didn’t have a car, so to get to work I used public transport, which was forbidden.
“But every morning I’d wait in a little café and in there would be all these Cypriots. And as soon as they realised, after a week or two, that I wasn’t going to harm anybody or shout or scream, and I was just coming in and having a cup of lemon juice or whatever, then the bus driver would be sitting there and he was a nice chap. He was friendly and all the rest of it. So, what he used to do was take me up to work, drop me off and then come and wait outside for me when my shift was finished.
“Anyway, one day, I was coming out from work and this army person saw me and he said, ‘Where are you going?’ So I said, ‘I’m getting the bus to go home.’
“He said: ‘You can’t do that! You can’t get on that bus, it’s full of Cypriots’. I said, ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ ‘Oh’, he said, ‘it’s against regulations – and it’s not the done thing.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s the only way I can get home tonight, so tough.’
“But they soon put a bloody stop to it. They didn’t like it at all. ‘Oh, you mustn’t fraternise with the natives!’”
Despite receiving an unofficial warning from the British authorities, Jenkins refused to distance himself from his Cypriot friends.
“I wanted to make my own mind up about these things,” he later said.
Recruited to MAC after his return to Wales by people he knew, Jenkins quickly became its leader. Explaining his approach to the bombing campaign, he said: “The terrorists today are just murderers, as far as I’m concerned. They go out and murder people. That was never the aim of this. It