MORNING SERIAL

Wales: England’s Colony?

The Conquest, Assimilation and Re-creation of Wales by Martin Johnes

THE political impact of all this was to remind the British state that Wales did exist at least. In essence, before the Liberal challenge, the British state had regarded the United Kingdom as being formed of three countries.

The Irish were recent and rather alien members, while the Scots were much older and nicer but still different.

Wales, in contrast, was, to all intents and purposes, a quirky region of England, even though its people spoke a different language. From the 1880s however, Wales’ Liberals had the numbers to make their opinions matter in an era when the two main parties in England were relatively evenly balanced. They drew inspiration from the successes of Ireland in gaining disestablishment and land reform and began to campaign for what they considered as national Welsh causes.

Their first success was the 1881 Sunday Closing (Wales) Act, the first piece of modern legislation to treat Wales differently from England and a move away from the political and legal uniformity brought about by the Acts of Union. This symbolism was significant but it also strengthened the idea that Welsh difference and thus identity was grounded in the narrow realm of religion. There were other Liberal achievements. The 1889 Welsh Intermediate Education Act created county schools that became important sources of social mobility. A University of Wales was formed in 1893 and bound together the existing colleges, which themselves owed much to working-class subscriptions. The creation of a Welsh Board of Education helped dispel the anger at state money being funnelled into Anglican schools. A National Library was created in 1907 and then a National Museum in 1909. The Liberal Party was giving Wales its first modern symbols of nationhood and the imagined community of Wales was coming to life. In Cardiff a civic centre was built to home some of these institutions. It also contained a City Hall with a huge dragon perched on its dome and a gallery of marble statues of heroes from Welsh history, all paid for by a Welsh coal magnate.

> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com