MORNING SERIAL
THE nationalised industries, the unions and the welfare state thus became part of what historian Linda Colley has called the ‘mundane architecture of Britishness’. They symbolised the British nation and people’s popular attachment to it, adding to the popularity of the British media, the memory of the war, and a popular pride in royalty. These were all, by and large, tangible realities in people’s lives.
Moreover, the migration of the inter-war years, where nearly half a million people left Wales, and the continued attraction of England to the socially and economically ambitious after the war, meant that family ties increasingly spread beyond Wales. Thus, as Welsh nationalists were only too aware, the economic and social transformations of British life in the middle of the century were further tying Wales into the British system.
Indeed, Britishness itself was actually intensifying as the Empire gradually dissolved and continental European nations came together without the UK. This meant a reduced sense of the British nations as part of international systems and instead newspapers, politicians and others developed and spoke of the idea of Britain as a place apart. Without an Empire or even a place at the fore of international politics, Britishness became a rather defensive identity to be promoted at almost any opportunity. As a result, ‘Buy British’, for example, was a message heard as often in Wales as in England.
For most people, the wider worlds of Wales, Britain and the globe formed a background to more prosaic concerns and being Welsh, like being British, was a ‘given’, obscured somewhere amid the noise of daily life.
For those who spoke Welsh, this was less true because their daily life often revealed how the language and its associated culture were in decline. But the resulting sense of Welshness was still a diffuse and unfocussed sentiment that found life in a loose sense of difference to England.