While the two disasters helped to reignite the campaign for the Welsh language and reignited Welsh nationalism, it also showed how the English bullied their neighbour and was quite happy to ruin Welsh communities without much thought. Which helps to explain the very long campaign of sabotage and disobedience during the 1970s and 80s, which are vividly written about. In each of the anthracite mining villages the neat terraces built to house the labour force remain. Other buildings also provide an echo of the ethos of these communities in their industrial heyday. Though barely a mile apart, every village is represented by a rugby club and is home to a significant number of chapels and churches. But the buildings most laden with history are the now largely deserted miners’ institutes and workmen’s halls. “Hall Y Cwm”, Workingmen’s Hall Garnant by aderixon is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 King’s account of Wales is not comprehensive, beginning in 1962 and ending in 1997. From the introduction the work on display here is magnificent. King details the history of the Welsh language and explains his reasons for presenting the history in English. It is an act of faith, between him and the reader, that they will understand this is not a choice he took lightly. King is generally a culture historian, with a focus on music, and this plays a large part in the oral history with singers from Super Furry Animals helping to illustrate the changes that happened in Wales during this period. It cannot be emphasised enough how effective King’s oral history is. The majority of what he said was lost to my very basic Welsh. The language was one I was never taught, as it was considered irrelevant in the South Wales of my childhood.

In a review of the book Brittle with Relics by Richard King , written in the Telegraph, Roger Lewis says of Welsh nationalism that “the psychology and motivation were totalitarian”. During the final four decades of the twentieth century Wales witnessed the simultaneous effects of deindustrialisation and a struggle for its language and identity. Other histories of this period in Wales will offer more extensive forensic factual analysis. This history takes the reader to the Welsh themselves. Brittle with Relics really gives you a feel for the period and the key social and economic trends going on at the time through people who were involved in the various different campaigns and events. The discussion of community and the tradition of self education and how community was shattered in the Valleys by pit closures really hits home as does the discussion of the Welsh economy – the collapse of heavy industry and the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to replace it by trying to attract inward investment, doomed by factors such as cheaper labour elsewhere and the advance of technology. The book also looks at the Quango culture in Wales in the 1980s, typified by the Cardiff Bay development. The Oral History Center at the University of California in Berkeley suggests one should ‘not use the interview to show off your knowledge, vocabulary, charm, or other abilities. Good interviewers do not shine; only their interviews do.’It didn’t pass me by that both men do not live in Wales, but I do; over the past 20 years, I have watched young people becoming the lifeblood of the language. This is clear from the rising popularity of Welsh-language schools and in cross-party, non-nationalist independence campaigns such as YesCymru, which is dominated by younger voices, speaking in English and Welsh. Newport, Gwent, the town in which I was born and brought up, was one in which a certain section of the population seemed incapable of accepting it was located in Wales. Other than in my home, the only Cymraeg I heard spoken in Newport was by a neighbour, who commuted for an hour every day to attend the nearest Welsh-speaking school twenty miles away. Brittle with Relics – A History of Wales 1962-1997 published by Faber

However, the author from Monmouthshire adds that “since I left for university and for good in 1978, [Wales has become] a foreign country, its language as comprehensible to outsiders as Igbo or Bulgarian”.My own family, based in Bedwas, in the Rhymney Valley, even held the belief, uncontroversial at the time, that English was altogether the superior culture,” he says. That’s one of the advantages of a big book like this: you can have the nuance and complexity, the fine detail rather than just the broad-brush approach. You see people’s views change or being changed. It’s a history that’s still going on. Thomas’s greatest gift to Wales was this flint-eyed rejection of the self-deprecation with which the Welsh are still caricatured, in favour of an austere stoicism. As he writes in Welsh History: Today, Nation.Cymru is honoured to publish the second of two exclusive extracts from the newly published Brittle with Relics by Richard King. The first part can be read here. For a long time the national movement (especially direct action groups fighting for Welsh language) and local Labour were moving in different directions. Saunders Lewis himself looked like some continental right-wing political activist from 1930s: ‘His image of Plaid Cymru had been of Action Française in Wales, but the uncomfortable fascist resonances of those early days had been, I think, very successfully buried by the sixties’, says Rowan Williams. Lewis’ followers remember themselves in the 1960s as fervent old-school nationalists: ‘I knew beyond doubt at that moment, the terrible power of the love which had motivated our fighting ancestors such as Caradoc, Buddug, Arthur, Glyndŵr, Llywelyn; my blood was singing to me of a long race memory of dungeons and death for the cause, and I was so submerged in the compelling ecstasy of sacrifice that I would have welcomed pain with joy’, says John Barnard Jenkins.

This history of Wales begins in 1962, with a radio speech delivered as a warning that Cymraeg, and the identity and way of life it represented, faced extinction. Titled ‘Tynged yr Iaith’ (‘The Fate of the Language’), the speech was given in the form of a radio broadcast by its author, Saunders Lewis, the former leader of Plaid Cymru. These are the times through which many of us have lived brought to pulsing life so that we can better understand our own. It’s like eavesdropping on the past.

Though barely a mile apart, every village is represented by a rugby club and is home to a significant number of chapels and churches. As Easter is a movable feast and Palm Sunday is celebrated a week before Easter Day, Sul y Blodau may take place on any date in spring between the sharp winds of March and the lengthening daylight of mid-April. Although named as a Sunday, this is an activity that more usually takes place on a Saturday. King’s epilogue characterises today’s Wales, born from these earlier decades. He highlights the imaginative Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015), designed to counteract short-termism, and the Welsh government’s refusal to handle the pandemic at the dictate of Westminster. Throughout this compelling, energetic and revealing book we hear the grain of the interviewees’ voices as they share recollections of recent times, such the influence of Saunders Lewis’ radio lecture Tynged yr Iaith and the terrible landslip at Aberfan – that darkly defining moment in the post-industrial history of Wales which still hurts to read about.

This is exactly what it’s like to read Richard King’s fascinating, deeply important, episodic and discursive oral history of Wales from 1962-97, called, after R.S. Thomas’ poetic jab at his country’s seeming inertia, Brittle With Relics.A curious title, I have to say, as the last thing I felt reading this book was stasis. If nothing else these voices prove that Wales has been in nothing but flux this past half century or so. Interviewing people is not as easy as good writers make it appear. You have to ask the right people the right questions. You have to corral and connive to tease out sentences worthy of a reader, of a quotation. You have to transcribe, trash, edit, collate and curate some kind of narrative from the Babel of um’s and ah’s, waffle and digression. Roger Lewis previously came under fire for calling the Welsh language an “appalling and moribund monkey language” in the Daily Mail in 2011. Opening with the two man-made disasters one that killed so many children and the other which wiped a community from the map so an English city can ‘steal’ its water resources. This is such a beautifully written book that is multi-layered and multi-voiced one cannot help guilty for the crimes committed against the Welsh in the name of ‘progress’. King, being a man who cut his historian’s teeth by chronicling the Bristol indie record shop Revolver, has naturally interviewed a lot of musicians for this book such as the members of Super Furry Animals and Manic Street Preachers: there’s a lovely little moment when the respective lead singers Gruff Rhys and James Dean Bradfield bond over a mutual love of Swansea’s Badfinger.

Project Aim

Richard King, who recorded, collected and edited dozens of interviews with various people from Wales, and then compiled them into this incredible volume, prefers 1962, not 1960 as a beginning of this history of Wales. Fair enough, because this is not a fruit of academic historiography—this is a sort of ‘people’s historiography’, though one executed with austere academic objectiveness and thoroughness. King’s history of Wales starts from one radio lecture recorded and broadcasted by BBC: ‘This history of Wales begins in 1962, with a radio speech delivered as a warning that Cymraeg, and the identity and way of life it represented, faced extinction. Titled ‘Tynged yr Iaith’ (‘The Fate of the Language’), the speech was given in the form of a radio broadcast by its author, Saunders Lewis, the former leader of Plaid Cymru. The impact and influence of the speech have long been debated; what is certain is that Lewis’ polemic contributed to a renewed sense of purpose among those resistant to the language’s increasing marginalisation.’