MORNING SERIAL
MOST of their action was limited to burning Union Jacks but in 1952 they tried to blow up an aqueduct and a member was convicted of possessing explosives.
Tryweryn caused others to turn to such tactics and explosives were used to attack the construction site in 1962. At the reservoir’s opening was a group of uniformed young men calling themselves the Free Wales Army. Over the course of the 1960s, they not only paraded in public but also made outlandish claims about their numbers, equipment and readiness to wage a violent guerrilla war. It was mostly just bluff but their claims ended up convicting six of them in a politicised trial in 1969.
Far more serious was a small group known as Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru who planted a series of bombs around Wales in the late 1960s.
To try to calm things by awakening people’s sense of Britishness, the Labour government held an investiture for the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon. It was a lavish affair, awash with Welsh and British pageantry and a touch of celebrity culture based around the young prince. The majority of the Welsh people seemed to either enjoy or ignore it but for a minority the flames of resistance were stoked. Young people held sit-ins and demonstrations; they complained that the event was a political stunt, a colonial imposition and a waste of public money.
To offset the criticism, Charles was sent to learn Welsh at university at Aberystwyth, where he turned out to be rather popular and said sympathetic things about the Welsh cause. Indeed, Charles’s determination to recognise the national question worried George Thomas, the Secretary of State for Wales, enough for him to write to the prime minister voicing his fears that the Prince had come under too much nationalist influence at university. He suggested the Queen have a quiet word with her son.
For the day of the investiture, Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru planned four bombs.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW