Archive for the ‘Wales’ Category

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Why I am a Welshman

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Welsh flagWell, surely one is or one isn’t! It’s actually far more complicated than that. Being Welsh isn’t a simple matter of your parents’ nationality, the location of your birth, or even where you live at present. Indeed, many nations of the world give the opportunity for citizens of another country to become naturalised citizens of their land and adopt a new nationality – once they go through a considerable number of hoops.

My passport confirms I am a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As an aside, I have discovered that since 1983 I am no longer a British subject but a British citizen. Concealed in all that complexity is that fact that qualifying people in Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland all have the status of British citizen and there is no mechanism to become a naturalised citizen of just one of those three nations or one province. This is all beginning to get very complicated and I recommend you take five minutes out to watch The United Kingdom Explained. It’s a fun piece but beware of some inaccuracies such as Anglesey, the Isle of Wight and the Scottish islands NOT being part of Great Britain and England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland being “sovereign nations” with their own “Parliaments”. Ah, that it were so!

Anyway, I digress. This is all about me being Welsh. Was I born in Wales? No, sadly. I entered this world six weeks after the creation of the National Health Service (Architect: Aneurin Bevan – a Welshman) so I was free at the point of delivery which was Battle Hospital, Reading. My father? Born in London to English parents (with Irish and French one generation earlier). My mother, however, was born in Cilfynydd, a coal-mining community in the Rhondda Valley, to proud Welsh parents with many generations of North and South Welsh ancestry.

I loved our visits to South Wales as children and our times with our Welsh family and in the 1980s and early 90s I always felt at home when I travelled in Wales in my role of Wales Liaison Manager for the British Tourist Authority. The tipping point came when our elder son Mark moved to Llanberis in 2002. We visited regularly and both fell in love with North Wales and moved here in January 2007.

I realised almost immediately that for the first time in my life, I felt as if I’d truly come home. Some people scoff at the Welsh concept of hiraeth – a deep sense of longing for, and connectedness with, the land of Wales to its people and to its history. Hiraeth is probably the most tangible and real explanation I can give for my Welshness as it’s nothing to do with the more conventional Welsh icons all of which, other than the Red Dragon, are recent inventions. Rigby ball It’s only slightly connected with rugby – that’s only been the national sport since December 1905; it certainly has nothing to do with thick woollen shawls and silly tall hats – an invention of Lady Llanover in the 1830s;  daffodils only became a Welsh emblem in  1911, courtesy of David Lloyd-George, and the Welsh flag was only officially recognised in 1959!

No, I’m a Welshman because I know I am. I cry when I sing Calon Lân or Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. I’m profoundly moved when I hear Katherine Jenkins, Bryn Terfel or Cerys Matthews. I am joyously transported 1400 years into Celtic history when I sit in Penmon Priory and think of St Seriol and St Cybi in their daily meeting at Llanerchymedd after a 20 mile walk. I long for their connectedness with God and with the land.

Welsh £1 coinsIt’s all summed up in a line from our National Anthem (also found on the edge of Welsh £1 coins) – Pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad – True am I to my country. 

Dw i’n Gymro balch.

 

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Step up you Welsh radical politicians and young people

Monday, December 19th, 2011

Aneurin BevanWatching Ed Milliband dance a ballet of indecision and uttering lightweight response to the Euro crisis and our economy has been excruciatingly painful. Similarly listening to Carwyn Jones political statements in the Welsh Assembly and the press were just like being stoned to death with popcorn. Our Welsh politicians have all been dancing together, jockeying for advantage and selling their souls to pass the Budget, but always with an eye on public opinion and a reluctance to put their head above the parapet.

Where are Welsh radicals of history like Anaeurin Bevan who single-mindedly fought to establish the National Health Service in July 1948, ensuring my birth seven weeks later was free to my parents at the point of delivery (literally)? Indeed one of his famous quotes could be his verdict on current politicians.

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.

We sadly miss Welsh radicals like David Lloyd-George, who for all his deep flaws, was the architect of educational reform and social benefits. He got to the heart of the matter when debating in Parliament on the new idea of unemployment benefit:

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics

Our lightweight, self-serving and ineffective politicians seem to have had every drop of radical blood removed and simple don’t or won’t recognise the need for radical solutions to the issues faced by today’s society. Indeed, they would shy from the dictionary definition of radical:

…a person who advocates fundamental political, economic, and social reforms by direct and often uncompromising methods

My passion for justice has been fuelled by many people who were uncompromising in their quests for reform. People like the great Christian reformers such as William, Wilberforce, John Groom, John Newton, Lord Shaftesbury and Elizabeth Fry. Campaigners for equality and social justice like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King.

When I grew up, my teenage years were the 1960s and I drank in every drop of news and information about the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement and shaped my musical taste with the protest songs of Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Donovan and others. Thank goodness we still have Billy Bragg today carrying the torch – his unaccompanied singing of the Internationale always has me in tears.

Students were at the vanguard of reform in the 1960′s and individuals like Daniel Cohn Bendit and Tariq Ali were young focal points for students and others. Today, the Occupy Movement has adopted the view, misguided in my opinion, that everyone is equal and no individual needs to be a leader or spokesman. They need to learn the lessons of history – battles are fought around a leader and a flag. Wider society can then evaluate the arguments in the way they are familiar with.

I’ve given up on today’s politicians. There are young people out there burning with passion, energy and zeal that need to declare themselves, step up to the plate and be the leaders they are and then change Wales, the UK and the wider world for the greater good of the people.

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The Grapes of Wrath and the 99%

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

Cover: The Grapes of WrathThe Guardian carried a piece by Melvyn Bragg titled, John Steinbeck’s bitter fruit that drew chilling parallels between the corporate greed and joblessness of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the situation in Britain today. Steinbeck has always been my favourite author since schooldays. I travelled from the bittersweet Of Mice and Men, via the wonderful Cannery Row and Tortilla Flats to the harrowing East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath, a highly political novel for which Steinbeck received huge criticism. It was banned in schools and libraries, publicly burned, vilified on talk radio and condemned in Congress. Happily, most of all, it was read.

Steinbeck was clear about the guilt of the bankers in the Great Depression. As he prepared to write the novel, he said of them,

“I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects].”

He made a statement in chapter 5 of the novel, published in 1939, which is even more true in 2011:

“The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

Then in chapter 14 a passage could have been written for the “We are the 99%” of the Occupy movement:

“This is the beginning—from “I” to “we”. If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I”, and cuts you off forever from the “we”. “

In 1962, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature despite the New York Times vilifying the award the day before,

“The Swedes have made a serious error by giving the prize to a writer whose limited talent is in his best books watered down by 10th-rate philosophising”

However, the Nobel Prize committee cited Grapes of Wrath as a “great work” and as one of the committee’s main reasons for granting Steinbeck the prize.

The saddest thing for me as I leafed back through my old copy of The Grapes of Wrath was that we never seem to learn the lessons of history. The Second World War that came hard on the heels of the Great Depression prevented social unrest arising from the poverty and anger from finding expression against the privileged few who prospered. We have fought two world wars and are still embroiled in military action overseas. People are finding expression for their anger and frustration through the Occupy movement. Let’s learn the lessons this time.

 

Footnote: Three unrelated Steinbeck facts.

 

  • Despite what most people think, “I know this… a man got to do what he got to do” was not said first by John Wayne, it was a quote from The Grapes of Wrath.
  • John Steinbeck Toured Wales in 1959 whilst researching The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights which was published posthumously in 1976.
  • He used George Borrows’ wonderful book Wild Wales: Its People, Language and scenery for background for his first novel, Cup of Gold, about the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan.

 

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