Bid to save old house of Welsh language activists
ACAMPAIGN has been launched to save the old house of a couple who refused to pay their tax demands as they weren’t bilingual. Menter Cwm Gwendraeth Elli have put in an offer for the former home of Eileen and Trefor Beasley in Llangennech, near Llanelli.
The initiative hopes to use the house to educate the children and young people of the area, as well as highlight the importance of campaigning for the Welsh language. In the 1950s, married couple Eileen and Trefor refused to pay their tax bills as they were all in English, despite the fact that they lived in a strong Welsh-speaking community.
In eight years the couple appeared in court 16 times and even had some of their personal property taken away from them by bailiffs, including their treasured wedding gifts. At one point, the couple was left with little but an empty house to show for their fight to put Welsh on an equal footing with English.
Welsh-language author and campaigner Angharad Tomos once said that the bailiffs “even took the carpets and it was just an empty living room. The only thing they left was some jam her husband had made”. The couple juggled a young family with their fight to advance the language, with their children, Delyth and Elidyr, born in the midst of their struggle for a bilingual form. Rather interestingly, both Eileen and Trefor were elected as local councillors at Llanelli district council in 1955 – the very governing body that had been penalising them for refusing to pay their tax bills.
By 1960, however, the couple eventually won their battle with the local rural district council for a tax demand in Welsh. When Eileen Beasley sadly passed away in March 2013, she was described as the “mother of direct action” in Wales, whose protest led to the creation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society), which continues to campaign for the right of Welsh people to use the language in every aspect of their lives to this day.
With the couple’s former house now up for sale, Menter Cwm Gwendraeth Elli wants to save it and create a space where people can learn about their story. When talking about how they launched the campaign, John Derek Rees, of Menter Cwm Gwendraeth Elli, said: “Simply, we had been doing history projects across primary schools in Llanelli in which we looked at various important figures from the area, one of them was Eileen Beasley and her husband, Trefor.
“The children were particularly interested in their story. During one session at one school, someone came up to me afterwards and asked if I knew that the house had gone up for sale. We went over to see it, we had a lot of discussions and started thinking about what we could do with the house.
“There’s a lot of work to do with the house. We have two parts for the vision, one is to save this historic building for the community and nation, but also to create a language and heritage centre in the Llanelli area. We were looking for a space here in Llanelli anyway, the fact that this house has come up – it feels like the two things have come together quite nicely.”
When talking about the significance of the Beasleys, Mr Rees said that he believed that they were “incredibly important” to the history of Wales as a whole.
He added: “Whenever we would show the children a video clip of the couple years after what they did, they would often think they looked like their own Mam-gu or Tad-cu. In other words, they looked just like a normal couple, but what they did was truly remarkable.
“From 1952 to 1960 they refused to pay their tax bills until a letter was sent in both languages. They had nothing against paying taxes, they didn’t want to break the law – they just wanted a piece of paper in Welsh and in English. At the time, 90% of Llanelli spoke Welsh, everyone in the office spoke Welsh, all the councillors spoke Welsh and they refused to translate it.
“For eight years they refused to pay and the bailiffs would come and take everything, at the end they even took the carpets. We have to remember that two children lived in that house and saw all of this happening.
“The couple are so important because this is where Welsh-language activism, campaigning for the language and the protesting really began. That is what’s so exciting about this house, it’s not just the fact that remarkable people lived here, but all the campaigning actually took place in the house.”
The initiative has launched a GoFundMe page where people can support their campaign, which has so far raised over £6,000. According to Mr Rees, the house is rapidly deteriorating and he says that now is the time to save the historic site. If successful in its attempt, Menter Cwm Gwendraeth Elli hopes to buy the house, renovate it and create a heritage centre on the site, which will “honour the Beasleys’ stance and their sacrifice”.
“I think it’s important we know where we’ve come from,” Mr Rees added. “We can’t understand what is happening now and the future if we don’t understand what has happened in the past. We need to understand and know about the sacrifices that have happened as we move on.”