17
A stronger Welsh in a stronger Wales
Wales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries experienced few of the political and economic traumas of Ireland and Highland Scotland. The reason is that Wales was in the process of becoming one of the most prosperous regions of Britain, with the added security of economic diversity. Its uplands had long favoured the rearing of sheep that could be easily driven to English markets, while the well-watered valleys of the south and the border country were ideal for cattle. Wales was a long-standing source of England’s wool fleeces and dairy products. Hardly an English high street lacked a Welsh dairy well into the twentieth century.
This prosperity was enhanced by minerals, with reserves successively of gold, copper, tin and iron ore. Then from the 1800s Wales delivered the world’s finest coal and roofing slate. A walk almost anywhere in Wales today reveals the remains of this prosperity, of mine workings, quarries, rail tracks, warehouses and cloth mills, even in the most inaccessible places. The old Merioneth capital of Dolgellau boasted, apart from farming, a booming glove-making industry, slate quarrying and 500 people employed in local gold mines. The nearby coastal village of Aberdyfi not only farmed its land and fished its sea but also mined copper and slate and boasted clothing mills on its streams and shipbuilding on the foreshore. By the early twentieth century the village had six places of worship and three schools.
This prosperity produced its own stresses. The Napoleonic Wars sent demand for iron soaring and the Merthyr valley was its cradle, with plentiful adjacent coal, timber and water power. Only transport was lacking, with fifty-two locks needed for the canal to Cardiff. Wages rose to match. John Davies has a Merthyr worker ‘earning three times as much as the shilling a day received by a farm servant … and even a labourer owned a watch’. This in turn bred a ‘valleys’ personality, Welsh-speaking, chapel-going and with a turbulent relationship with employers in the isolated communities.
Thus Merthyr became a focus of a militant uprising in 1831 when an economic downturn led to wages being cut at the Cyfarthfa Ironworks. Highland troops were sent to suppress the riots and some twenty people were killed. An innocent supposed leader was hanged. The south Welsh were prominent in joining the English Chartists in demanding a wider franchise, culminating in a riot in Newport in 1839. Other disturbances were against new road tolls and related agricultural poverty, termed ‘Rebecca’ riots after the participants being disguised as women. But unlike similar protests in Ireland, such militancy was not peculiarly Welsh and was unrelated to the issue of nationalism or self-government.
Emigration certainly occurred, but nothing like on the same scale as in Scotland or Ireland. Early Welsh settlements in the Americas tended to be of religious sects, as in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Patagonia in Argentina. The Wisconsin constitution was even published in Welsh. Some 25,000 American Mormons claim Welsh ancestors from this period. The famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir was reputedly a Welsh inspiration.
Wales displayed few of the aristocratic palaces and great estates of adjacent England, rather a plethora of Georgian and Victorian gentry houses on the more modest scale of Hafod and Nanteos outside Aberystwyth. The tragic demolition of so many of them in the 1950s and 60s was recorded by the historian Thomas Lloyd. On the other hand, villages and market towns such as Ruthin, Meifod, Montgomery and Carmarthen display streets lined with handsome terraces and double-fronted houses, far more spacious than their equivalents in the Irish or Scottish countryside.
The result was that a Wales whose proximity to the English cities of Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool might have made it vulnerable to English cultural assimilation remained socially stable. A merchant and professional class did not desert its roots for the outside world. The twentieth-century Welsh economist Brinley Thomas was unequivocal: ‘It was the ability of industrial Wales to offer a livelihood to a substantial population which provided the basis for a mass culture to flourish in the Welsh language.’ Between 1851 and 1921 – a period of steep agricultural decline across the rest of Britain – the rural population of Wales shrank only from 170,000 to 114,000. The actual number of individual farms stayed remarkably steady at around 40,000.
Religion also served as a communal glue. A lethargic Anglican church was galvanised – or circumvented – by a generation of celebrity preachers such as William Williams, Daniel Rowland and Howell Harris. Thousands came to hear them, often preaching on hillsides in the open air. The Welsh language had a fervour that appealed to all classes of men and women. The singsong hwyl of the sermons offered a foretaste of American hot-gospellers.
In 1811 one clergyman, Thomas Charles, broke with the Anglican church and brought tens of thousands of followers over to Methodism. With them came families, Bible classes, Sunday schools, legacies and donations. Nonconformity also fragmented into a plethora of sects, Baptist, Presbyterian, Calvinist, Wesleyan and Congregationalist. Welsh Dissent was not in itself politically radical. Davies points out that Griffith Jones’s schools, described in Chapter 14, were hotspots of conservatism. To Jones, teaching the Welsh to read and write their native language should create ‘a barrier to prevent the Welsh from adopting dangerous ideas and loose practices’, by implication from the English. Faith and the Welsh language would bind young people to their communities and to the land. The Anglican church in Wales would always be seen, as it was in Ireland, as an alien English import.
The response of the English government was not as hostile to Dissent in Wales as it was to Catholicism in Ireland, but it was still opposed. In 1844 a commission was set up under three English scholars to study the state of Welsh education. Its evidence came largely from Anglican clergymen alarmed at the spread of Welsh language teaching and of Methodism. The commission produced three so-called Blue Books, controversial even in their day for deploring Welsh as ‘a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people’. It issued the bizarre warning that Nonconformist worship had led to ‘Welsh women being almost universally unchaste’.
Such inept language evoked outrage. Reform stalled, and it was not until the 1870s that a series of Welsh education bills initiated a programme of non-denominational national schools and colleges. These were championed by a skilled Welsh civil servant in London, Sir Hugh Owen (1804–81). The establishment of compulsory education in England and Wales in 1870 was followed in 1889 by the devolution of schooling in Wales to local county education committees, out of the hands of the English.
The medium of the teaching remained controversial. In Ireland Daniel O’Connell was outspoken. He saw the Irish language as a bondage ‘imposed on mankind as a curse at the building of Babel’. To him the Irish language shackled his people to their poverty. While it had ‘many recollections that twine the hearts of Irishmen … I am sufficiently utilitarian not to regret its gradual abandonment’. To O’Connell a refusal to teach and learn English was ‘linguistic suicide’.
Likewise in Wales, the prerequisite for children to advance in life, given that they spoke Welsh at home, was to learn English. The objective was seen as not the suppression of Welsh but the achievement of bilingualism. Welsh language and history were taught in the new grammar schools. To have denied any British children access to English in the nineteenth century would have been widely regarded as regressive and handicapping. As it was, by the end of that century the majority of Welsh children emerged from school bilingual and rated among the best taught in Britain.
This issue was hampered by the bizarre reputation of the ‘Welsh not’. This was a punishment token to be worn by children heard speaking Welsh in school, to be passed on to the next child caught doing so. Whoever was holding the ‘not’ at the end of the day would be punished. Such a facile discipline administered by children on each other was actually common in many school systems. Cases are recorded in Japan, Russia and Canada. Robb describes French Breton children made to carry a symbole if heard speaking Breton. The day’s final holder had to clean the toilets. This practice was said to date from the signum used to make medieval seminarians in Paris speak Latin.
A greater threat to Welsh cultural distinctiveness came from a different quarter, the surge in Glamorgan’s mineral wealth. Drawn by tinplate and copper mined in eighteenth-century Swansea, and by the ironworks of Merthyr Tydfil, workers poured into the south Welsh valleys. Initially the inflow was largely Welsh. Merthyr grew to be Wales’s most populous town in 1860. It was said to be 90 per cent Welsh-speaking, and with no fewer than eighty-four churches and chapels. As the boom in coking coal developed later in the century, migration was reinforced by incomers from the Midlands and further afield.
The sheer scale of this immigration led to Welsh-speaking plummeting, such that by the end of the century, the census showed 50 per cent of residents no longer speaking Welsh, albeit these were overwhelmingly in Glamorgan. Outside that county most Welsh people still spoke the language, at a time when fewer than 10 per cent of Irish or Scots were speaking Gaelic. In 1899 there were 136 magazine and newspaper titles printed in Welsh. There were virtually none in Irish, until the Gaelic League’s An Claidheamh Soluis begun that year.
The return of Celtomania
In the mid-nineteenth century the Georgian craze for Celticism returned in a more scholarly vein. It was carried forward by a formidable German linguist, Johann Kaspar Zeuss, whose Grammatica Celtica appeared in 1853, its influence restricted by it being written in Latin. Zeuss broke new ground by embedding the Celtic languages firmly in the newly identified Indo-European tradition. This was enhanced by the discovery in 1846–57 of the Hallstatt and La Tène settlements, tentatively linked to classical references to peoples of pre-Roman Europe. At a time when Prusso-German nationalism was emerging on the European stage, such exotic antecedents acquired a validity of their own. Any discovery that might be pre-classical fed an appetite for all things to which the term ‘Celtic’ might be applied.
This took particular root in what is still termed Celtic art. Its crosses, spirals, knots and curlicues were found in archaeological sites across Europe, lending a coherence to Bronze and Iron Age artefacts. They entered the Victorian revivalist pattern books alongside neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau. The category was later associated with such masterpieces as the Irish Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels – sometimes classified as ‘insular Celtic’.
As for Celtic speech, it at least had the evidence of living languages to work on, but these showed little collaboration. The London Welsh who gathered round Morganwg’s Gorsedd and the Cymmrodorion had no contact with Scotland’s Royal Celtic Society. Scotland’s first professor of Celtic studies, Donald MacKinnon, was not appointed at Edinburgh until 1882. There were closer ties between Wales and Ireland, and indeed between Wales and Brittany. But when in 1876 a Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language was formed in Dublin, it was to the Welsh speakers of Wales rather than the closer related Gaelic speakers of Scotland that it looked for inspiration.
The revival of Welsh eisteddfods in 1861 gave a number of Irish enthusiasts a spur to try their own, but not until 1897 was the first equivalent Feis Ceoil (music festival), held in Dublin. Its secretary, Edith Oldham, nervously remarked that the event was ‘a Dublin cathedral’ compared to the Welsh eisteddfod’s St Peter’s in Rome. None the less, the assiduous Celtic scholar Caoimhín De Barra counted just 143 uses of the word ‘Celtic’ in Irish newspapers in 1820, but by 1890 this had surged to 4,702. The growth in Welsh mentions was almost identical. For the most part the adjective was still used in reference to language and not in any other context.
This posed a new challenge to emerging pan-Celticists. They were custodians of a group of languages – and supposedly peoples – thought to be extensive in western Europe before Roman times and still existing. But what really was their relationship with each other? Trevelyan’s remarks during the Irish potato famine were now echoed by a Frenchman, Ernest Renan, who in 1854 claimed there to be racial distinctions between Celts and other Europeans. He was intrigued by new anthropological theories involving hair colour, height and skull shape. When passing from England into ‘Celtic country’, Renan claimed to detect a change ‘like entering on the subterranean strata of another world, the impression given us by Dante when he leads us from one circle of his Inferno to another’.
Such fantasies were seized on by enthusiasts for the late-nineteenth-century resurgence of national purity. In 1864 a French scholar, Charles de Gaulle (or Celt, uncle of the subsequent president), went further and called for a Celtic Union and a new Celtic language. He sought a pidgin that would unite the Celts under one mutually comprehensible tongue, a sort of Celtic Esperanto. De Gaulle summoned a pan-Celtic congress to Brittany in 1867, though only Bretons and Welsh turned up.
In 1888 a Pan-Celtic Society was formed in Dublin, a largely literary gathering that lasted just three years before disbanding. It was succeeded by a pan-Celtic ‘movement’ and then an ‘association’ backed by two Irish romantics, Edmund Fournier and Lord Castletown. Fournier was a true eccentric, a scientist interested in electromagnetics, parapsychology, spiritualism and psychical research. Castletown was a soldier in the British army and an ardent imperialist. This led to the usual tensions of minority group politics. There were arguments over how far to ape Welsh practice, whether to admit Cornish, whether to have bardic rites or whether to support or oppose the British empire. And what should they speak? The answer was English.
The first fully Pan-Celtic Congress was held in Dublin in 1901. Papers were read (in English) and a parade was held through the streets. The boundary between antiquarianism, scholarship and mysticism was a fine one. There were local costumes, pipes, choirs and much ridicule of the Welsh Druidical robes. A study of ancient Breton history had reported in 1881 that it had been unable to find any trace of a bard or a Druid. Delegates were disappointed at the Irish failing to wear Celtic costume – despite some confusion over Dublin’s mayoral robes.
Mundane debates were held over proposals for a steamer service between Ireland and other Celtic lands, and for heather as the proper flower for a Celtic ‘face’. Should there be further congresses, a Celtic Olympiad and even perhaps a nation called Celtia? Two more congresses were held, in Caernarvon in 1904 and Edinburgh in 1907, both popular as street events and as displays of pageantry. The Welsh were numerically the stars of these demonstrations.
The congresses ground to a halt with Fournier’s retirement in 1908 and with the lack of an able organiser to succeed him. The eventual admission of Cornwall as a ‘sixth nation’ along with the Isle of Man distressed more serious members, to whom pan-Celticism was getting more like a fancy-dress show. To others, Celtic bonding seemed elitist and artificial, a view reflected in the term ‘inter-Celtic’ for ‘pan-Celtic’. The predictable split came in 1961 with the founding of a rival Celtic League. These were, in truth, not ‘one people’ speaking one language, unless it was English. The tart conclusion of one observer was that ‘Celts are primarily about millinery’.
These efforts to unite the supposedly Celtic-speaking peoples of Europe suggested that they were no more united in the present than in the past. The concept of Celticism was, as Tolkien later said, no more than a name into which you dump anything you wanted. While there was a respectable academic study of a group of similar languages and of the peoples who spoke them, any perceived unity was a chimera. Its absurdity became the more patent when discussion turned to imagining a land of Celtia. Should it be a resplendent Ruritania or a communist paradise? Likewise, Lord Castletown demanded that true Celts should start the day by singing ‘God Save the Queen’ while Fournier wanted to establish communion with Celts in the afterlife. The most brutal reality was that, before the First World War, every congress had an elephant in the room. It was that of Ireland’s political aspiration.
How Celtic is a Gael?
Ireland’s ambition was straightforward. It was to achieve independence of England. So keen were the Irish to distance themselves from antiquarian fantasy that they narrowed Celt down to Gael. Though cognate with Celt, the term excluded the Brythonic-speaking Welsh, whom the Irish regarded as feebly subservient to the English. The word Gaelic also referred to the Highland tongue, but a difference was maintained by that being voiced as ‘gallic’, against the Irish ‘gaylic’. After Irish independence, any confusion was resolved by calling the Irish version just ‘Irish’.
A separate nationalist Gaelic League was formed in Dublin in 1893, its central purpose being to preserve and promote the Irish language banned from British government schools. Its first president, Douglas Hyde, was a Protestant nationalist who attracted a range of adherents, including briefly the grand master of Ulster’s Orange Order lodge. The league’s objective was ‘to prevent the assimilation of the Irish nation by the English nation’. Its purpose could hardly be more explicitly anti-English, viewing ‘the Irish language as a political weapon of the first importance against English encroachment’.
Rather than fuse with the pan-Celticists, the Gaelic League was ever more a nursery for a new generation of Irish republican politicians and soldiers. It saw Irish language as the defining badge of nationalism. It dismissed pan-Celticism’s Castletown and Fournier as ‘Protestants playing at pagans’. They should cease their obsession with the past and deal with the present, the ongoing struggle against the English. A crisis occurred at one pan-Celtic meeting when a Welsh archdruid called on Almighty God to bless the cause of the British army ‘against the falsehood, iniquity and error’ of the Boers in South Africa. He unsheathed his sword and called on all present to touch it. The Boers enjoyed wide support in Ireland.
Where the Celtic revival did strike home was among Irish intellectuals, deepest in the Irish expatriate diaspora in London. Its leading figures, such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, John Millington Synge and W. B. Yeats, were to adorn Britain’s culture as much as Ireland’s. Yeats might consort with the literati of Bloomsbury and Bedford Park, but it was the land that he had deserted that seemed to grip his imagination. His poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ evoked the supposed purity of Ireland’s far west. His heart told him he should ‘arise now, and go to Innisfree, / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made … the deep heart’s core’.
When in the 1890s a Celtic Mystical Order was formed, it led Yeats and his colleagues back at least in spirit to the western Aran Islands and the enshrined soul of Celticism. Here were ‘lands tortured by the sea, scourged by the sea wind. A myriad lochs, fjords, inlets, passages serrate its broken frontiers.’ Yet they were kept firmly at a distance. When Yeats and his fellow poet T. W. Rolleston joined with the Anglo-Welsh publisher Ernest Rhys in founding the Rhymers’ Club to advance the cause of Celtic poetry, they did so in the Cheshire Cheese pub in London’s Fleet Street. As Rhys wrote in a confessional note, ‘Wales England wed; so I was bred. ’Twas merry London gave me breath.’ Even Yeats admitted that ‘everything I love has come to me through English’.
It might seem a tenuous Celtic affectation that so bonded in London, but the influence of Yeats’s romanticism over Ireland’s Gaelic revival is hard to exaggerate. It was on a par with Walter Scott’s earlier reinvigoration of Scottishness. Yeats dreamed of an Irishness that would ‘unite the radical truths of Christianity to those of a more ancient world’. He encouraged the young John Millington Synge to leave Paris and live in the Aran Islands, the ‘last fortress of the Celt’, and to do so ‘as if you were one of the people themselves’. Poor Synge felt he had no option but to obey. The western shore duly took on the qualities of a Celtic Mount Olympus, a geographical muse for any writer wishing to see what Synge called ‘the most primitive society left in Europe … where it is only in wild jests and laughter that they can express their loneliness and desolation’. That did not stop him carefully satirising it in The Playboy of the Western World.
This was surely an ersatz Celtic identity. Like that of Walter Scott, it retraced a nation’s evolution from an ancient folk culture to a supposed moral core. As Foster puts it, ‘the barefoot children, turf fires and unrelieved diets of the west were romantically approved by the Gaelicist intelligentsia – who felt accordingly let down by the Connacht people’s propensity to emigrate.’ But then almost every narrator of the Celtic past was an émigré. The nature of Celticism was a detachment from the front line, an existence fabricated in the minds of antiquarians and academics and experienced most fiercely in absentia.
Much the same applied to the role of religion. Conventional Irish history tends to root its troubles in the Catholic/Protestant divide. This divide was undeniable, but it was not unique to Ireland. It tended to reflect deeper divisions both within Ireland’s past and in attitudes to English rule. In the nineteenth century the Catholic church was conservative and mostly supported the unionist status quo. Most of Ireland’s prominent nationalists, from Tone, Grattan and the MP Charles Stewart Parnell, to Yeats and the woman who would become the Dáil’s first female TD, Constance Markievicz, were not Catholic. If Irish Catholics were anti-English it was because English policy was so anti-Catholic. Irish religious fundamentalism vanished, eventually, with independence, prosperity and sexual scandal.
The reality was that, as the nineteenth century progressed and democratic forces emerged within England, London’s policy towards Ireland became untenable. This had nothing to do with Celticism. Caoimhín De Barra is unequivocal. Ireland at the time faced an existential crisis demanding a ‘single-minded insistence on the separate and distinctive nature of Irish nationality’. Celtic identity’s utility was ‘to distinguish [the Irish] from Anglo-Saxon England, not to acknowledge their connection with the rest of Britain’. The issue was Irish home rule. This had nothing to do with Celts.