Roughly the size of Wales: four reflections on Welsh identity in the 21st century
‘Sometimes Welsh – and British – identities are trapped by their pasts’
History helps people feel they belong. This is why people can feel angry when history is reinterpreted or retold in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. And yet that is not always a bad thing, since so many comforting views of the past are deeply flawed. History should not just exist to serve the present, but to challenge it, too.
This has all been particularly evident in Wales. In the 19th century, English observers were often struck by the Welsh obsession with the past. Matthew Arnold, a Victorian professor of poetry at Oxford, claimed that everywhere in Wales had its own traditions, and that the Welsh people knew and clung to this living past. History gave the Welsh dignity. It provided them with tales of times when the Welsh were self-governing or rose up against their chains of servitude. It was a refuge from an economic and political system that rarely favoured them and a challenge to those who belittled them.
But the past was also problematic for the Welsh. Although the tales of medieval princes could inspire, they were, ultimately, tales of defeat. Wales lost its independence. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, its last recognised prince, ended up with his head on a London spike. More than a century later, the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr returned some dignity to the Welsh people and he planned something resembling a Welsh state, with universities and its own parliament. Yet his dreams came to nothing and his rebellion was crushed by English military might. He was never captured, which gave him a romantic halo, but his tale remained one with an unhappy ending.
Such stories from the past complicated relations with the English. In the middle of the 19th century, Henry Richard, who would later become an influential Liberal MP, wrote that in Wales, “a fierce and vindictive patriotism” was “constantly fed by stories, half fact and half fable, transmitted from father to son, of the cruelty and perfidy of their Saxon and Norman oppressors, and of the victories and defeats which had marked their long struggle for independence”.
History became more important as the Welsh language, the most potent symbol of Welsh identity and difference to England, weakened. Wales became a modern industrial nation in the 19th
century, but greater contact with the wider world came at a linguistic cost. The Welsh language slipped into a precarious minority position. In the 20th century, English became more familiar through education, railways and the mass media. The future of Welsh was further imperilled through homes being turned into holiday cottages and the young moving away in search of work. If the language was Wales, as many believed, then the nation itself seemed to be in danger of dying. In this context, history gained a new function. It provided some solace through the idea that the Welsh were, in the words of Dafydd Iwan’s famous song, “yma o hyd, er gwaetha pawb a phopeth” (“still here, despite everyone and everything”).
But new concerns emerged in the 20th century about whether Wales’s history was well known enough. Calls for Welsh history to be taught more in schools date back more than a century, but recently they have become increasingly angry. Despite devolution, Wales is still not at the heart of most pupil’s history education. There is a belief that if people knew more about how Wales had fought for its freedom in the past, they would do so again.
Over the last century, some nationalists have certainly tried to use history to fuel national sentiment. Given how the Welsh have voted for the past century, it is reasonable to argue they have remained part of the United Kingdom through choice rather than through coercion. But, no matter how often historians point to the nuances of the past, popular understandings or tellings of Welsh history have often slipped into an accumulation of wrongs endured.
It is difficult not to wonder sometimes if people actually do want more Welsh history taught, rather than just their narrow version of it. It is difficult not to worry how a history based on grievance shapes the sense of belonging of the hundreds of thousands who have moved from England to Wales, and how it might shape the political decisions we make about our shared future as citizens of this small country.
Nonetheless, there have been times when Wales has been badly treated and let down by rule from England. Perhaps more damaging than dismissive and patronising attitudes to the Welsh language and Welsh people has been central government’s marginalisation of the Welsh economy. As the days of heavy industry drew to an end, little substantive was done to revive the fortunes of communities built around mines, metalworks or quarries that no longer existed. Many in Wales are much happier hearing about these slights than the more nuanced picture of the past painted by historians.
The defensiveness and anxiety that interpretations of the past can generate shows how emotional history can be, and how Welsh and British identity are sometimes trapped by their pasts. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, a magical mist of forgetfulness has been cast on the Britons and Saxons to ensure neither remembers the wrongs and atrocities committed by each against the other. This ensures old grievances do not fester and the two peoples can live side by side. It is a powerful parable about the dangers of remembering, but also people’s desire to do just that.
Whether Wales remains in the UK or not, geography means its most important external relationship will always be with England. It is much easier to accept this if it is remembered that the two nations have not always been at loggerheads. Indeed, Wales has often benefited from its relationship with England, whether through trade, the welfare state, fiscal transfers or international security. Recognising all this might move any campaign for Welsh independence away from the xenophobia that too often marked Brexit. It might also help ensure that any decision on Wales’ status is based on the needs of the future and not whatever did or did not happen in the past.Prof Martin Johnes is a historian of Wales, sport, politics and popular culture at Swansea University
* * * ‘My definition of folk music: music that can, and will, be changed’
I am a Welsh folk musician, and to be a folk musician means to be constantly in collaboration and conflict with your history, or, as it’s more commonly known, “the tradition”. Musicians everywhere face choices as to whether to embrace, subvert or reject the tradition, but they will always be in a relationship with it. As a Welsh folk musician, the tradition within which I exist is defined by melodies, songs and instruments being passed down through the generations, unchanging. The story I am told usually focuses on the things that have stayed the same, the things that will always and forever make Welsh folk music Welsh.
But I believe the story of Welsh folk music could be told the opposite way: as a story of change, of new influences and ideas being brought in by people from other places, and a story of new struggles and challenges that will inevitably enact changes over the centuries. My definition of folk music: music that can, and will, be changed.
I have been playing the harp since I was eight. I started learning on the Celtic harp, before moving on to the triple harp, which has three rather than one row of strings, removing the need for levers or pedals to play chromatic notes. It originated in Italy as a baroque instrument, before arriving in London in the 17th century and being adopted by Welsh Londoners, soon becoming known as the Welsh harp. I’m lucky enough to be one of a tiny group of young people in Wales, and the world, who play this instrument today.
My first harp teacher’s house is a museum that also happens to be a home. It is exactly where you want to go to receive a thorough education in the history of Welsh folk music. You are surrounded by artefacts, manuscripts and instruments that are kept warm and loved, and which in other less careful hands may have found themselves gathering dust. My first harp teacher is a gatherer, a protector, a collector. She takes this job seriously. It is her lifeblood, her passion, but the responsibility weighs heavily on her shoulders.
She can often be found shaking her head and wringing her hands, aghast at the young people today who show no interest in their history or their music. Most of those who have taken on the role of protecting and preserving the tradition have an overwhelmingly pessimistic outlook on the future of Welsh folk music: these young people just don’t get it. They don’t care. They have no respect for history and tradition, no understanding of where they come from, and are changing Welsh folk music beyond recognition.
One of my formative experiences in folk music was attending an annual week-long course for young people at an outdoor education centre in north Wales. Before I arrived the first time, harp in tow, I was very much under the impression that I was the only young Welsh folk musician left in Wales. So what I found came as a bit of a rude awakening. There were about 50 other teenagers filling every corner of the centre with jigs and reels, singing folk songs in improvised four-part harmony until 3am. I spent most of my first visit hiding on the top bunk in my room, but over the years I began to feel more and more at home in this noisy, frenetic community of passionate young musicians.
This other tradition has a very different approach. Tunes are there to be used and abused. The musical points of reference come from far and wide, with jazz perhaps the most obvious external influence. I am now a member of the Youth Folk Ensemble of Wales, a continuation of the course, and though the majority of melodies and songs we use are Welsh, we have arrangements inspired by eastern European turbo folk and Daft Punk.
For a while, at these events, I felt as though I’d found “my people”. It was a breath of fresh air to me, as a young queer person with no friends at school, to be surrounded by such openminded, enthusiastic and welcoming people. And then one night, while a group of us were sitting around playing games, the clock struck midnight and someone gleefully declared: “Right! It’s past midnight, which means we can now be as homophobic and racist as we like!” and proceeded to play a game involving guessing who in the room was most likely to be gay.
One key event in the Welsh folk calendar is the Mari Lwyd – a traditionally south-Walian celebration of the new year which, in short, involves a pub crawl with a horse’s skull on a stick. But the village of Dinas Mawddwy in Snowdonia in north Wales plays host to a Mari Lwyd that, despite being relatively recently established, pays its respects to much more traditional aspects of Welsh folk culture, perhaps most notably folk dancing, which takes place on the street, led by a group of dancers in authentic Welsh costumes. Everyone, regardless of age, nationality and language will come out, wait for the accordions and fiddles to start up, and be organised into pairs by the more seasoned dancers.
It is, however, incredibly important that these pairs are all man and woman. This is often checked a few times before starting a dance, to make sure everyone is following this sacred rule. And every time we change partner, I get asked the same question: “Are you a man or a woman?!” I try to answer with whichever I think I’m supposed to be in the dance, to minimise confusion. This may be a reinvented tradition, and it may involve a horse’s head on a stick and a man in drag, but heteronormativity and the gender binary are apparently two traditions that must be protected and respected at all costs.
I have a theory that the triple harp is seen by many as a symbol of Wales, its plight mirroring that of Wales and the Welsh language in the last century. Many influential players today came to the instrument as adults with a passion for Welsh history, and saw learning it as the ultimate manifestation of their interests. It is viewed as a kind of historical artefact, hailing from a better time when everyone in Wales spoke Welsh (and was born in Wales), when every young person was passionate about their native culture, and when rich landowners made their servants work in national dress in the name of preserving the tradition.
But when people imply that things were better for Wales back then, I can’t help but suspect that what that really means is that things were better for the Wales of rich white men. It’s an erasure of all the things that have changed for the better. And it’s an erasure of all the kinds of people who weren’t around, or weren’t able to participate then, but who have so much to offer now. Where do we draw the line between preserving tradition and excluding people who aren’t considered “traditional”?Cerys Hafana is a triple harpist, pianist and composer from midWales
* * * ‘The first time I saw that sign I remember thinking: who is that boy?’
It’s Saturday 14 October 2017 and I’m back in Swansea. It’s evening and I’m staring up at the sign outside a pub in the Killay area of the city. The pub is very familiar, but the sign is not. It’s nondescript, in stark contrast to the sign that hung there years before. I can still picture the old one: a portrait of a young boy with dark brown skin. His head is turned to the right; his eyes look into the distance. White teeth are visible; he might be smiling. He wears a bright pink shirt with a mandarin collar, and a matching turban. It is large, pleated and decorated with pearls. In the centre of the turban there is an oval jewel set in gold, and a yellow feather. A painted ornate livery surrounds the portrait. Whitbread is painted in white letters above the image. Beneath, The Black Boy.
The first time I saw that sign I was sitting in my dad’s blue Mini in the car park. I remember wondering: who is that boy? Did he used to live here? Was he black in the sense of being African, as the name and his face suggested? Or Indian, as his clothes suggested? What was his connection to the area? The “ugly, lovely town” of Dylan Thomas’s childhood was a city by the time I was born there. Killay, once a mining village, was now a suburb. We moved there from nearby Fforestfach in 1977 and lived there until the summer of 1982. But that sign no longer hangs outside the Black Boy. It was replaced by a different sign, which was soon replaced by the one that hangs there today. Both these later signs depict boys, but neither are black.
What happened to the old sign? And how did it come to be there in the first place? That boy was only the third dark-skinned boy I’d ever seen in Killay. The other two were my older brother and a classmate of his, the son of a Sri Lankan doctor. My brother and I were Indian-South-African-Dutch. The only person in the known history of my family to be born in Wales, I grew up with a definite sense of being Welsh, bolstered by my love of sport, and early aspirations play football for Swansea City and Wales. Having parents who had grown up in two different countries, and who put a great emphasis on fitting in, contributed to my sense of being Welsh.
I can vividly recall the first time I considered the question of whether or not I was black. I was seven years old. We lived on an avenue up the hill from the Black Boy pub, where kids regularly played outside. I was running from my house to the end of the street. As I passed our nextdoor neighbour Mr Thomas’s green Triumph, I “pushed off ” with my right hand. The car pulled alongside me a few moments later. Mr Thomas leaned towards the open window on the passenger side: “Keep your filthy hands off my car you black bastard.”
Things fade from memory – or they don’t. The old pub sign is gone. It was first replaced by a picture of a smiling white boy with coal on his cheeks. This sign gave way to the present one: a white boy in perhaps Victorian garb, including a black jacket and hat, slightly unkempt, looking to his left, his eyes not visible.
I find one explanation at the library. “In Wales during the 18th century it was the height of fashion to employ a black servant. In the popular mindset Africa and the West Indies conjured up images of ivory, Guinea gold, sugar and coffee; in short, a limitless reservoir of wealth and luxury goods. A black domestic servant enables the owner to associate him- or herself with all that was fashionable about the New World. It also brought a touch of African exoticism into the parlours of rural Wales,” writes David Morris in Identifying the Black Presence in Eighteenth Century Wales, published in a 2008 issue of Llafur, the journal of the Welsh people’s history society of the same name.
This might go some way to explaining the name of the pub and the original sign, which was similar to paintings by William Hogarth from the 18th century. But there is more.
Swansea’s growth as a town was largely due to its copper industry. Copper, mined in Cornwall, was brought by boat to Swansea where it was smelted. By 1823, 10,000 of Swansea’s 15,000 residents were supported by the copper industry, earning the town the nickname “Copperopolis”.
This copper had many uses, including “copper bottoming” Nelson’s ships before the battle of Trafalgar. And, as historian Chris Evans explained in 2011, “Copper and brass articles were important as trade goods on the Guinea coast of Africa, either in the form of copper rods, wire or ingots, or as readymade semi-decorative items, such as manillas (bracelets), that eventually acted as an African currency … You could buy human beings with copper.” One such copper manilla can be viewed at Swansea Museum.
Evans nominated the White Rock Copper Works in Swansea to be an entry in the book 100 Places That Made Britain. He noted that the earliest known illustration of the copper works identifies one of its buildings as “Manilla House”. Black boys were bought with copper smelted at White Rock.
I am not the only person who has noticed the changing signs outside the Black Boy in Killay. The artist Daniel Trivedy exhibited a replica sign featuring the original image of the turbaned Black Boy on one side and the image from the current sign on the other. “Occasionally people find it necessary to alter the accounts of history to provide a more palatable version of events,” Trivedy told the South Wales Evening Post. “Perhaps this is the case with the Black Boy pub sign. However, to ignore the black presence in our history (and pub signs) is to deny the roots and heritage of multicultural Britain.”
The Black Boy Inn in Caernarfon, north Wales, which was named “the Welshest pub in the world” in 2016, has been the subject of some controversy over its name. But in 2008, John Evans, the owner, told the North Wales Daily Post: “I would never consider changing it, even if it was bad for business, because we have to hold on to our heritage.” The images of black boys on the signs outside his pub look to me like racist caricatures. Perhaps these, too, are part of “our” heritage?Darren Chetty is a writer, teacher and researcher
* * * ‘Essentially, there is no such thing as a Welsh accent’
One of my closest friends, born and bred in London, has joked for as long as I’ve known her about me not having a Welsh accent. It mirrors a conversation I’ve had hundreds of times. “Really? You don’t sound Welsh,” is about the size of it. Admittedly, I speak very differently to someone with what you might call a stereotypical Welsh accent. I’m not sure what people are expecting. Uncle Bryn from Gavin and Stacey, perhaps? Tom Jones? But I grew up at the other end of the country, more than 100 miles away from Barry and Pontypridd. Why would we sound the same?
The idiosyncratic cultures of Liverpool and Manchester, just 30 miles apart, are so widely understood, I don’t see why it should be so hard to grasp that a country of 8,000 square miles might have some regional variation in accent. Of course, given the common and pointless use of Wales’s landmass as a unit of measurement, I should say, rather than it being a country of 8,000 square miles, that it’s four times the size of Iceberg A-68, formerly of the Larsen C ice shelf, or that it’s equivalent to two million rugby pitches. Ah, rugby. We love rugby, us Welsh. All of us.
I love Wales, but that doesn’t mean I hate or even mildly dislike any other country, particularly England, where
I’ve lived for more than 20 years. The rugby players from Caernarfon who used to refer to me and the rest of the Rhyl Youth team as “the Brookside 15” (after the 1980s TV soap set in Liverpool) as we stepped down from the coach really wound me up. But fair play, that’s what they were trying to do. The newcomer making conversation at a party, however, doesn’t deserve this level of discourse because a) they’re not Henry Higgins and b) I don’t sound like Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood, or Vanessa Shanessa Jenkins ordering a takeaway.
But I am from Rhyl in north Wales, and sound very much as if I am. Beating any wags to the punchline, there’s absolutely no way you’d say you were from Rhyl if you weren’t. Having always spoken the way I do, in an accent many hear as a Lancashire/Cheshire hybrid with Welsh remnants in certain vowels and extended consonants, I just put it down to a bit of basic geography and received local wisdom. The town is 30 miles from the border with England, and there are lots of English residents in Rhyl – a legacy of postwar migration and, ever since, retirees seeking out some fresh seaside air. During nonpandemic summers, there are always plenty of English tourists around on the “Liverpool Riviera”, as it’s sometimes called. During the many summers I worked in the McDonald’s on the high street, had I not been surrounded in the kitchen by friends from school, I could easily have convinced myself I was working on Liverpool’s Lord Street or Oxford Road in Manchester.
“The accent in north Wales today will be pretty similar to what we would have heard after the second world war,” says Prof David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University and a leading authority on accent and dialect. “After the first world war, you would have heard a stronger traditionally Welsh influence, but it still would have been broadly similar. In the late 19th century, however, Rhyl would have been very ‘Welsh’ sounding,” he says, suggesting the accent would have been much more in line with what we hear elsewhere in Denbighshire, a few miles south of Rhyl, and in Conwy, 18 miles west – that is, something more identifiably, stereotypically “Welsh” to outside ears.
In 2005, while presenting the Voices series for the BBC, Crystal travelled all over Wales to sample the accent in every corner of the country. “There’s a real switch around Conwy,” he told me of his findings. During Voices, Crystal and his team interviewed a number of people in my home town, including a family who have, for at least four generations, run the donkey rides on Rhyl beach. “They sounded as Lancashire as anything,” says Crystal. “Not exactly Lancs, but that’s the point. Even so, they felt as Welsh as the hills.”
For an explanation, we must go back to 1858, when Rhyl’s train station was opened. My accent, reasons Crystal, is more likely a result of Victorian tourism than anything else. Now mostly private houses and flats, the streets of the town’s West End were once lined with hotels and B&Bs catering for English visitors. Given Rhyl’s proximity to the north-west of England, tourists from Merseyside, Lancaster, the West Midlands and beyond, keen to see the sea, could visit for the day if they pleased.
As Crystal explains, when two people meet, an accommodation occurs, the shifting of accents towards or away from one another, depending on their relationship. It’s easy to imagine a situation in Victorian Rhyl where, as trainloads of holidaymakers with money to spend arrived in the town, entrepreneurial locals softened their Welsh accents to welcome their guests and make sure they were understood.
“There are always two forces driving language – intelligibility and identity,” says Crystal. “I have to understand you, but I also don’t want to be you. I wonder how much of the dilution in the Rhyl accent came from well-to-do English tourists not understanding the locals, and them modifying to allow for that.”
It’s definitely one in the eye for the old yarn in which the English visitor enters a pub in Wales only for the locals to stop nattering away in English and switch to their mother tongue. It was much more likely the other way around. Along the border with England, accents more traditionally associated with Gloucester and Hereford appear, while in Pembrokeshire – once referred to as Little England Beyond Wales – the English accent is strong, even among those born and raised there.
The Valleys accent – so often the Welsh accent people associate with the whole country – where did that come from? “Somerset,” says Crystal. “People arrived from Somerset to the Valleys, and if you think about it, they really are not that far apart. Essentially, there is no such thing as a Welsh accent. There are many, each as valid as another.”
So I do have a Welsh accent. It’s just not one you may have heard before.Andy Welch is a writer and editor at the Guardian
• This is an edited extract from Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales edited by Darren Chetty, Grug Muse, Hanan Issa, Iestyn Tyne, published by Repeater Books on 8 March and available at guardianbookshop.com
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