Gladys and the Pipsqueaks

Now here's an interesting snippet of 20C history to ponder, the visit of the Chilean Communist leader Gladys Marin to East Germany in the aftermath of the Pinochet coup.  At that time Marin was busy organising "Solidarity with Chile" campaigns around the world;  later she would return to Chile to participate in the clandestine struggle against the dictatorship and - a telling point this - become the only woman ever to act as general secretary of a major Communist party.

I wonder what our Welsh socialist bloggers think of this?  No doubt many would have a great deal of sympathy with Gladys, a true working-class hero - as the hundreds of thousands who attended her funeral in Santiago in 2005 clearly testified.  But what about some of the others in the video, the well-groomed Erich Honecker perhaps, or Egon Krenz - so obviously enjoying rubbing shoulders with a revolutionary untainted by power?  Suddenly we see that sympathy draining away.  Socialism yes, but East Germany, heaven forbid.

For most of us East Germany is the Stasi and the Berlin Wall.  The likes of Honecker and Krenz may have been trying to build socialism - full employment, health care, educational opportunities, housing, the equality for women from which the scientist Angela Merkel so obviously benefited.  They also stretched out the hand of solidarity to oppressed peoples, hence the large number of Chilean exiles in the crowd.  These party apparatchiks awarded themselves special privileges, that's true, but hardly on the scale of our present day Western elites.  The Stasi?  It could be argued that East Germany was indeed subject to a great deal of CIA, MI6 and BND inspired sabotage and dirty tricks, not all their enemies were imaginary.  The Berlin Wall?  How do you subsidize basic foodstuffs without preventing cross-border exploitation of that cheap resource?  And if you create a wage structure that narrows the gap between the manual worker and the highly trained specialists, how do you keep those specialists at home?  How do you build a socialism that respects individual liberty in a world with very powerful forces intent on its destruction?

I'll leave that for the socialists to answer, but as the memory of countries like East Germany fades away and a younger generation emerges who never knew that any alternative to capitalism could exist, we need to be careful.  Already in certain EU countries it's a crime to deny that Communist persecutions were qualitatively different from those of the Nazis. You can get five years jail-time for propagating such a viewpoint in Lithuania for example.  Communism is equated with Nazism and demands are made at an EU level that the history taught in schools reflect this new reality.  Will the history of the South Wales Miners or our politicians favourite, the International Brigade fall foul of these diktats?

Honecker and Krenz may have been responsible for their fair share of human misery but surely less than Clinton, Bush and Obama.  Less even than America's little British puppets.  Compared to the likes of the brazen cleptocrats currently destroying both Main Street and democracy, their crimes were smaller-beer, their virtues greater. Compared to them I say Hurrah for the Pipsqueaks!

A Radnorshire Crusade

English and American film-makers regularly revisit the old Robin Hood legend which, I'd say, provides most of us with our initial impression of the crusades.  A bearded chap in chain-mail with a white apron and a red cross - why you can still see them supporting the England team at football matches.  Dig a little deeper and we come across oddities like the children's crusade or the noble Saracen warrior Saladin.

Radnorians who've read Gerald de Barri's Itinerary will be aware of the Archbishop of Canterbury preaching the Third Crusade in New Radnor in 1188.  Two local princes Einion ab Einion Clud of Elfael and Maelgwn ap Cadwallon of Maelienydd initially signed-up for a bit of action, although they eventually had the good sense to keep out of Middle-Eastern politics and concentrate on matters closer to hand.

Being something of a teenage fan of Anglo-Irish poetry and knowing the Young Irelander Thomas Davis's poem The Sack of Baltimore, I was well aware of the Barbary slave raids of the 16C and 17C.  I might even have known that Lundy was occupied by Ottoman pirates for five years in the 1620s.  Being a long way from the coast these depredations would hardly have bothered stay-at-home Radnorians.  What I was totally unaware of, until reading Mr Faraday's book (see previous post), was Henry VIII's proposed crusade of 1543.  No, that had certainly escaped attention.

A benefit of the Act of Union was that Radnorshire was now able to fully engage in England's overseas adventures, one such being fat Henry's proposal to launch a crusade against the Turkish Sultan, Sulieman the Magnificent.  The first priority was to raise cash to finance the war, local clergy were required to preach the crusade for six weeks and encourage their flocks to contribute.  This was a voluntary tax, a bit like those paid nowadays by trendy American companies operating in the UK, the "pay what you can, we won't press too hard" deal.

A total of £8 15s 8d was collected from the thrifty Radnorshire parishioners, ranging from the 6s 5d collected in Presteigne down to Llanelwedd, who managed a parsimonious 4d.  The crusade, of course, never came off, although London probably put the Radnorshire contribution to good use.

Three Books and an Opinion

Anyone interested in Radnorshire history could do worse than pick up a copy of Mr Faraday's Radnorshire Taxes in the Reign of Henry VIII.  A large format, 220 page book, it's a much expanded update of articles originally published in the county's Transactions.  The book includes around 40 pages of explanatory text but in the main consists of transcriptions of over 5000 personal names, arranged by parish, together with assessments of their wealth - all taken from the surviving public records.

I've blogged about this diligent work - the raw meat of history rather than someone's interpretation  - before and produced this map showing how traditional Welsh patronyms reigned supreme in the new county at the time of the Acts of Union.

There's so much to learn from records such as this - the great extent to which traditional Celtic female names survived to give just one example - Gwenllian, Angharad, Tanglust, Goleu, Gwenhwyfar etc. as well as Cymricised versions of French and English names such as Lleucu, Mallt, Dyddgu and so on.

Mr Faraday's formidable index lists over 200 unique names which might be considered English style surnames.  This should be treated with caution.  Around a third are either Welsh adjectival descriptions Tew, Hire, Fain, Bendee etc. or patronyms where the "ap" or "vz" has been omitted.  For example David or John were never adopted as surnames in Radnorshire, as they were in parts of South Wales.  Likewise none of the adjectival names developed into surnames in Radnorshire, although they certainly did over the border in Herefordshire and Shropshire.  Those great modern-day Welsh "tribes" the Joneses and the Davieses had hardly started to emerge in mid 16th century Radnorshire - just three examples of each.  Eventually they would make up a fifth of the county's population.

In his book on Ludlow Mr Faraday has pointed out that occupational surnames often masked a Welshman and this is likely to be the case in Radnorshire as well. The index has 15 Taylors, for example, but the majority have wholly Welsh forenames Llywelyn, Owen, Morgan, Griffith etc.  Turning to the Presteigne area, where English style surnames are common, we also need to be careful on assigning ethnicity - Morgan Elvell for instance is the Welsh language bard Morgan Elfael.  Local farm names also gave rise to surnames, some of which have survived to the present day:  Bilmore, Blackbatch, Hergest, Impton, Hoddall, Stones, Slough, Treyloe etc.

Another book I purchased this week was Richard Wyn Jones's The Fascist Party in Wales?  I'd already managed to read the Welsh language version published last year but got this version for reasons of vanity - I'm mentioned in a footnote!   An excellent refutation of malicious accusations, we still await an academic work on the real fascism in 1930s Wales as opposed to Labour's imaginary version.  One figure such a study should include would be the eisteddfodwr Leigh Vaughan Henry, see here.

The third book on my list has just arrived via the postman, the newly published 800 page paperback version of Mr Charles-Edwards' Wales and the Britons 350-1064.  The latest in the Oxford University Press series The History of Wales,  at £90 the hardback version was too expensive for me.  Having purchased the first in the series, Kenneth Morgan's Rebirth of a Nation,  as long ago as 1982, the wait for this latest paperback to eventually emerge wasn't too arduous.

Lastly an opinion.  We have no idea who, if anyone, shot down MH17. There seem to be three main suspects and, accidents aside, only one of them had the means, motive and opportunity.  Having largely ignored the burnings in Odessa and the killing of numerous civilians by outrageous aerial and ground bombardments of residential areas, our media is now ablaze with self-righteous indignation.  Even more than the people of Gaza the humble folk of Donetsk and Lugansk are "unpeople" in mainstream eyes. We should remember amidst all this clamour that we are dealing with forces which could easily stumble into nuclear conflagration.  We need to think about that.

"She is just a child and yet still you piss yourselves!"

I'm guessing that the US State Department were quite pleased with Brazil's humiliating defeat in the recent football tournament.  They'll kid themselves that it will help hasten the day when a US-friendly government gets back into power.

One of the problems of being old is that things you know to be true - since you were alive at the time - are largely unknown to many of the new generation.  The murderous, CIA backed regimes in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Central America fade into history and the narrative of a maybe naive but essentially decent American liberal interventionism takes its place. 

So here we have a young Dilma Rousseff seemingly pictured before a military court after suffering torture at the hands of the CIA trained junta. Meanwhile her judges hide their faces from posterity.

 

I can't say I know a great deal about the current situation in Brazil and no doubt there are valid criticisms to be made of her government.  At the same time the money-men from the US will be spreading their largess to ensure that Dilma loses the upcoming elections.  There will be concerned pieces in the "liberal" western media about conditions in the favelas and resources wasted on grandiose projects like the World Cup and the Olympics.  What they really mean is that Dilma, along with the other BRICS nations, is challenging the hegemony of the US dollar-racket.

Musical Interlude

With the Washington elite drunk on the idea of American exceptionalism and Brussels trumpeting the supremacy of "european values" - whatever they may be - it's no surprise to find Russian nationalism on the upsurge.  Dangerous times. These Russians, like Gwynfor in the olden days, are much taken with the idea of Romanitas*. For them Moscow is the third Rome.

On some PCs the subtitled captions have to be switched on.

*  For younger readers Romanitas isn't a third sector charity, although it sounds like one.

A 10 minute Stroll through a Village

I remember a television programme, years ago, highlighting the poverty to be found in rural Eastern Europe; poor folk who didn't have electricity or even mains water.  I suppose it was meant to show the failings of "actually existing socialism" although for me it was just a reminder of my Radnorshire childhood.  We certainly had running water - only recently mind and there were still standpipes for those not yet connected, while the old folk still talked with affection about Shinkin's well.  Electricity came later and I was already listening to Bob Dylan by the time we were connected to the sewage system.

So the devastated villages of Eastern Ukraine have something of a nostalgic feel for me, the unadopted roads, the outside toilets, sheds built with no input from planning authorities and gardens full of vegetables - we didn't have lawns or much space for flowerbeds either.  

The BBC and the mainstream media ignore the on-going war.  It doesn't fit their NATO/US State Dept dominated narrative.  Whoever heard of displacing rebels from populated areas with long-range artillery and fighter-bombers?  The familiar American lie "we bombed them to liberate them."  I suppose I could have picked a far more gruesome video to make a point. So many of the victims are old folk, pensioners, obviously lacking the necessary agility to seek shelter when the bombs fall..

In my opinion America is desperate to provoke a large-scale Russian intervention, they will sabotage any attempt to avert a new Cold War, which is the only hope of salvaging their busted economy.  The Kiev regime is still dominated by the blood nationalists and fascists of Western Ukraine, only too happy to ethnically cleanse Ukraine of its Russian speakers.  Europe, especially Germany, must decide if it wants to pursue an independent foreign policy or follow the usual Washington line. Interesting times, although you wouldn't know it if you followed the mainstream.

Fugitive Ireland

When I was a young lad a neighbour gave me a box of magazines,  published during the Second World War, called Hutchinsons Pictorial History of the War.  It was interesting to note how the magazine's appearance changed as paper shortages hit.  The number of pages in each issue diminished and the quality of the paper fell by a few notches.

Since there was not a great deal happening during the Phony War quite a lot of the stories and photographs featured the struggle of the gallant Finns - which I guess they were - against the Red Army.  Of course by the summer of 1941 all that had changed and Finland was an ally of Nazi Germany and an enemy of our equally gallant Soviet allies.  It was an early lesson in the pitfalls of seeing the world in black and white.

Of course shades of grey don't apply to the London media who regularly trot out the fact that De Valera signed a condolence book, at the German Embassy, when Hitler did the decent thing in 1945.  Such viewpoints ignore the close co-operation between Irish and British intelligence - the Americans were less forgiving - and the  50000 or so citizens of the Free State who served with the Allied forces.  At the same time support for Germany was widespread  amongst the population,  both as a result of anti-Britishness and right-wing Catholic prejudices against Communists and Jews.

This is the background against which this book - I picked it up for a song from an Irish bookshop -  was written.  In the main it tells the story of the fugitives from post-War Europe who found a safe haven in Ireland.

Of  course my main interest lay in the story of the support given by Welsh Nationalists to Bretons fleeing from the victors' justice of the French state.   For the Welsh such support was seen as an example of Celtic solidarity.  In Ireland, where many Bretons ended up after being spirited through Wales, such romantic niceties cut little ice.  It's the Australian author's view that Catholic solidarity lay behind the sanctuary given both to the Bretons and some dubious characters from Flanders and Croatia  - in particular the "Butcher of the Balkans" Andrija Artukovic.

All this can still raise passions or in the case of the Welsh government Heritage minister, Huw Lewis, perhaps a better word would be bluster.  At the end of 2011 he attacked the National Library for accepting a £300K legacy from the recently deceased Breton fugitive Louis Feutren.  Feutren was indeed a Nazi collaborator but then the German regime in Brittany had  been more "liberal" towards Breton culture than French governments before or since.  Unlike many in Eastern Europe - for example - the Bretons, even the handful who took up arms, were not eager participants in genocide and the slaughters aimed at the ethnic cleansing of close neighbours.  Never mind the Nazi slur has been a stick with which to beat the Breton separatists ever since.  Feutren's £300K was doubtless earned at the expense of generations of Dublin schoolboys rather than the spoils of war.

For Welsh nationalists to have taken-up such an unpopular cause as aiding these Bretons on-the-run in the aftermath of the Great European War seems to me to have been a laudable page in the history of the movement.  Would such selfless and politically incorrect actions come easily to the present generation and imagine the twitter storm if they did?

Andrija Artukovic

Andrija Artukovic

Songs of the Minorities

Are the Rusyns of the Carpathian mountains a people?  The Slovaks and Hungarians think so, the Ukrainians don't.  That's the problem with a language continuum like East Slavonic, where you draw the line between a dialect and a language is essentially a political decision.  As they say a language is a dialect with an army and likewise if Scotland had remained an independent country, the guid Scots tongue might have developed as a distinct language of government.

According to the Ukrainian census there are 10000 Rusyns in the country, however, like the Welsh in 2001, this census did not make provision for such an identity.  Others claim that there are more like 500000.  No doubt many of these unrecorded Rusyns would identify themselves as Ukrainian, but others don't - they campaign for basic language rights against a disdainful Kiev.

The turnout figures for Transcarpathia in the recent Ukrainian presidential election are interesting. In parts of Transcarpathia this fell below 40% whereas in neighbouring Galicia it was often more than 80%.  This may be due to abstentionism on the part of the Hungarian minority but perhaps Rusyn identity played a part as well.

Foggy Bottom Blues

There's a scene in the recent Coen Brothers film "Inside Llewyn Davies" where the eponymous anti-hero is angered by the refusal of the Seaman's Union to let him ship out.

"Is it because I'm a Communist?" he asks.

"Shachtmanite?" ponders the official.

Being a folksinger not a Communist young Llewyn had no idea what the official was talking about.  I'd expect most of the cinema audience, at least outside America, were equally puzzled, it being something of an in-joke.

Max Shachtman was a leading American Trotskyite who broke with the leader in the late 1930s, more importantly he has been described as the godfather of neoconservatism.  The late Christopher Hitchens even claimed that "a biography of the protean, scintillating revolutionary and Cold War sage Max Shachtman could be an intellectual Rosetta stone for the story of mental and moral combat in the modern American mind."

Trotskyism? Neoconservatism? Well the revolution was never meant to happen in a backward state such as Russia;  American capitalism was seen as the most progressive force in the world and its absolute hegemony

the prelude for the next stage in human history.  Unfettered capitalism at home and an aggressive, nationalist American foreign policy were the watchwords of those Shachtmanites who went on to influence the emerging doctrine of Neoconservatism.

The Neocons also adopted some of the less worthy traits of their old Trotskyite gurus: misplaced intellectual arrogance; a contempt for wishy-washy liberals; the idea that the ends justify the means; shambolic permanent revolution, and in Eastern Europe a nostalgic Russophobia.  Today their cadres - and it seems they love using old Bolshevik terminology - continue to have a good deal of influence within the US State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. 

They're well worth researching and their fruits are on front-pages everywhere.  Oh and I think they could work well with this "liberal" interventionist charmer if she's ever elected president:

     

A Virtual Death

Sometime back in March, I'm not sure of the exact date, Radnorian passed away.  Not, let me hasten to add, the Radnorian of the real world ..... no this was the virtual beast; cause of death, computer malfunction.

At the time there was no great need to get back on line. Here was an opportunity, for example, to read a few books, including some that had remained unopened since purchase a couple of decades ago.  Of course there were drawbacks - following the situation in Ukraine via the mainstream media was a trial, with very few correspondents reporting the news rather than the narrative.

I would also have liked to have had a say on the Euro elections. I'd long ago thought up a snappy blog post heading "Why I'm Voting UKIP." Truthfully there was no chance of that happening and in the end I voted, without enthusiasm, for Plaid Cymru.  I wonder how many, like me, voted Plaid despite rather than because of their policies?  Perhaps Robert Griffiths of No2EU would have been a better choice and I did think of supporting him - in Powys he ended up with just 98 vote.  This for the party of Bob Crow, with a serious and well-qualified candidate.  So much for radical Wales and the idea that Labour can be out-flanked on the left.

Nowadays many of us have two lives.  In the real world we may be anonymous but in the virtual world you're a keyboard warrior.  Others, like Mr Griffiths, may be out addressing public meetings and leading a party but are largely unknown to Twitter.

I did wonder if my death last March might be noticed in the virtual world.  Would there be a few blog comments awaiting moderation regretting my passing, even a couple of tweets noting my demise?  Such vanity.  Radnorian died without so much as a whimper ...... now he's returned, chastened, to have his say.

Damned Statistics

One of my better buys was a very cheap second hand copy of a book called Statistical Evidence relating to the Welsh Language 1801-1911, part of that excellent series Cyfres Hanes Cymdeithasol yr Iaith Gymraeg.

Now the book comes with a health warning that is particularly relevant to Radnorshire and which deserves to be featured more prominently than it is "there are various pitfalls for the unwary."

The chief pitfall is that many of the 19C census figures refer not to the historic counties but to registration counties, a very different kettle of fish.  Radnorshire, more than any other county in Wales is affected by this statistical confusion.and it's surprising just how many authors fall into the trap.

Nineteen parishes containing around a quarter of Radnorshire's 19C population were actually consigned to Breconshire as parts of the districts of Builth and Hay.  The Rhayader district is correctly listed as in Radnorshire although it did contain the Breconshire parish of Llanwrthwl.   The Presteigne registration district, before it was abolished,  was more in England than in Wales - some Radnorshire parishes subsequently ending up in the English district of Kington. A large part of the population of the Knighton registration district was also made up of parishes in Shropshire and Herefordshire.

How did this come about?  Well a future Govenor General of Canada,  Edmund Head - a man who translated Icelandic sagas but considered the Welsh to be a "miserable race of Celtic savages" - was the commissioner responsible for Central Wales and Herefordshire. One of his tasks being to set-up the six Poor Law Unions covering Radnorshire - Rhayader, Builth, Hay, Knighton, Kington and Presteigne.

Head deliberately sought to weaken Radnorian influence over these districts claiming that "the inhabitants of the central part of Radnorshire are exceedingly ill disposed towards the Board ... the only way of enforcing the Act is to unite as many (parishes) as possible with unions in England or on its borders."

By doing so Head wanted to "raise the character of the Radnorshire farmers." elected to serve as Guardians overseeing the work of the Unions with the hope, presumably, that they would learn from the superior - I would suggest he might consider the Germanic - character of their fellow Guardians from east of the Dyke.

A failure to understand that much of the census material relating to 19C Radnorshire actually refers to parishes in the neighbouring English counties and that a good deal of the county was included in the Breconshire figures is certainly a pitfall that needs to be, but frequently isn't, avoided.

Some say that Monmouthshire was included in the English court circuits because of the strength rather than the weakness of its Welsh character.  In the same way I think that Radnorshire should take some pride in the fact that it was considered a problem for the Malthusian and Teutonic claptrap rattling through the brains of the Victorian elite.

Musical Interlude

Ukraine, an apology

In my recent post about the Ukraine I suggested the following in regard to the Kiev killings:.

"the president finally lets the cops off the leash and the inevitable happens.  The inevitable which was the plan all along, the desired outcome."

Now we have the leaked telephone conversation between Commissioner Ashton and the Estonian foreign minister which casts a great deal of doubt on the matter.  What we need is an outside investigation and clearly the US, EU, UN and Russia should not take part, too many axes to grind.  Who can be trusted to carry out such an investigation is a difficult question, perhaps India, Brazil or some other law-based, non-aligned country.

It's a disgrace that the Western media is so far attempting to bury all of this, perhaps they are waiting for the CIA to concoct a plausible denial story.

In the meantime I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that the Ukranian police were involved, albeit under extreme provocation.

The Octoroon

We're all pretty suspicious about the historical accuracy of Hollywood war films or the dream factory's take on the Wild-West, but when it comes to depictions of slavery?  Well all of a sudden  no-one doubts a frame and the Oscar is in the bag.  For myself, I think where are the octoroons?  People like the slave Celeste who Solomon Northup met on a Louisiana plantation: "It required a close inspection to distinguish in her features the slightest trace of African blood."  For Celeste was "far whiter than her owner or any of his offspring."

American slavery and racism may be closely linked but they were not the same thing.  If they had been then there would have been no black slave owners, - over 3700 in 1830 for example - and there would have been no "white" slaves like Northup's Celeste.  The status of a slave in most of the southern states wasn't a matter of race, it was inherited from the mother. If the mother was a slave then so was her child, no matter if it might have, for example, only one black great grandparent - an octoroon.

It was after the Civil War and particularly in the early 20C that race moved centre stage. In the first half of the 19C inter-marriage between free blacks and whites was common enough. In Alabama, for example, census records show nearly 18% of the free blacks and coloureds (classifications based on appearance) had a white spouse - the most common combination being a coloured husband with a white wife.

Starting with Tennessee and Louisiana in 1910, and driven forward by followers of the widely accepted "science" of eugenics, southern states quickly adopted one-drop laws.  One drop of black blood ensured that a family would be classified as black, and fanatics such as Naomi Drake trawled through the public records to ensure that no-one escaped.

One-drop laws appeal to both white racists and black nationalists and it is only in the 21C that the American census has once more allowed for the possibility that mixed-race folk might consider themselves to be, well, mixed.  This American nonsense has been imported into the UK, where public bodies in Wales can easily tell you the supposed racial composition of their employees but will have no accurate figure as to how many of them speak Welsh.

For Hollywood, that great centre of greed and amorality, films about slavery allow the movie world to feel good about itself.  Complex issues are reduced to simple tales of good and evil.  "Why how many slaves are there on this bayou as white as either of us" asks Bass in Northup's book.  It's a question Hollywood won't be confronting anytime soon.

For what?

How many demonstrators do you need to legitimise the overthrow of a democratically elected president - 1000, 20000, a million?  It's clearly not a question that bothers most of our mainstream media, the demonstrators were good, the president was bad and actual votes cast by ignorant folk in far-off cities count for nothing.

It's a familiar playbook: occupy a central square, provoke the authorities, complain loudly about repression, hang-on until something cracks.  The various occupy movements read the same book but what chance did they have, a bunch of hippies, no money, no press support.  What is needed is a sponsor with deep pockets and some guys who are up for a fight.  Maybe you remember that football tournament a couple of years ago, the one where the Western media worried about how black supporters would be treated?  Do you remember the interviews with scary men in training camps and their dreams of "racial purity?"  Those are the type who are needed, ship them off to a neighbouring country, train them in police tactics, they're good soldiers - brave and cruel.

Imagine 13 policemen being killed in Central London or New York or Berlin. Would the media fail to mention it?  Of course not, but let's remember who is pulling the strings here, the ones with the deep pockets.  So instead we hear the most powerful man in the West talking about "peaceful demonstrators" and we disbelieve our lying eyes.  After days of holding a line, of being beaten by the guys with 14 and 88 on their shields, the president finally lets the cops off the leash and the inevitable happens.  The inevitable which was the plan all along, the desired outcome.

Now the suits from Germany and France broker a deal.  The president will bring forward the elections, he'll go back to the old constitution, he'll send the riot-cops back to their barracks.  The political parties sign-up, the EU signs-up, the Russians sign-up .... but not everyone is happy.  The people with deep pockets aren't happy and neither are the street fighters, the ones hired to slug-it-out, not voice an opinion.

The president flees, a new government is formed under the watchful eye of those thugs the liberals thought they could control.  Their crazy dream of "racial purity" is becoming a reality and they ensure the new body passes laws, laws aimed at the national minorities, the folk who don't fit in with the world view of the worst elements now struting through the corridors of power.

Of course the deep-pockets are happy, those billions spent have shown results, regime change, a big step forward.  Why they might soon take over that Black Sea naval base.  Even with that hopeless guy in the Oval Office, the Neo-Cons have still chalked up a victory.

Is Berlin happy?  For sure the thugs who did the fighting really hate the EU, but they'll soon be gone.  This is a long game, Mitteleuropa, and all achieved without a shot being fired .... well just a few.

But there was something they all forgot, big nations have rights too.  Did they think Russia would just sit back and take it?  The proposed looting of the industries in the east, the military threat, the new laws against a population who look to them for protection?  Did the deep-pockets think that a great nation which once drove Nazism from the face of the earth, would tolerate those swaggering goons?

So what now?  The guy in the Oval Office must decide between humiliation and war.  Names you thought were long gone appear on our TV screens, they don't care if it's Putin or Obama who backs off, the old battle lines will have been redrawn, it's win win.

Update: I wish to apologize for the suggestion that the Ukranian police or President Yanukovych had anything to do with the sniper attacks on the crowd in Kiev.  The leaked conversation between Ashton and the Estonian Prime Minister suggests clearly that the killings were the work of elements within the new regime.

Merchin?

No doubt brought up on rhymes for children like this

Maesyfed, yma safwn,

wrth ddwfr Llandrindod lon

Ond wfft i Sir Faesyfed,

un Seisnig remp yw hon! 

A fair proportion of Welsh academia long-ago washed its hands of Radnorshire.  Why they should be so eager to move an already precarious border 25 miles further west is a bit of a puzzle, but there you go.

The accepted viewpoint was that the Welsh language had died out in the county in the 18C and nothing seems to have been done to investigate the dialect of those few locally-born Welsh speakers shown by the 1911 census to have lived-on well into the 20C.  It's a pity, since Radnorshire must have been the transition zone between the Gwenhwyseg of the South East and the dialects of Montgomeryshire.

So we're left to search for scraps of information where ever we can find them, like in this letter to the Gloucester Journal in 1784.  For those too lazy to click the link, it describes the practice of making a small beer called merchin from kernel fruit - which I take to mean crab-apples or something similar. The use of lead-glazed jars in the production of this liquor lead to poisoning, hence the letter.

So what was merchin?  It certainly has the appearance of a Welsh word, although I can't find anything in the online version of Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.  Any ideas?

Welsh Lessons

I suppose it never crossed my mind that people would go to evening classes to learn Welsh before, say, the 1960s.  Certainly clever chaps like Cyril Cule and Ffransis Payne picked up the language and thousands of  unremarked 19C migrants to the coal fields would have learnt a new tongue in the organic way that newcomers to any foreign country might ...... but evening classes?

Now clearly I'd got this all wrong, which was why I was surprised to read, in the latest tranche of newspapers uploaded by our National Library, that the Breconshire authorities were subsidising such classes during the First World War.  In the winter of 1914/15 classes in Llanganten had 24 students, Beulah and Troedrhiwdalar 50 between them and there were 23 in Builth.

The classes seem to have been aimed at teaching the old language to English speakers.  By that time Builth was as anglophone as it is today, as was Llanganten (readers probably know it better as Cilmeri).  There was still a good deal of Welsh spoken in Beulah and Troedrhiwdalar and native speakers as well as learners seem to have been catered for there.  How long did it last?  Well the Beulah teacher, local farmer Daniel Jones of Penrhiwmoch, was appointed for a third winter in 1916.  Coincidentally he was the grandfather of one of my rediscovered Radnorians, the racing driver Liz Jones.

Not everyone was supportive of this enlightened policy though. When Llangammarch applied to the Breconshire Education Committee for support in 1915, voices - well chiefly the Surbiton born manufacturer Arthur Beckwith -  were raised against it.  Like the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone Beckwith's comments are all too familiar:

classes like those for Welsh only are not a real and urgent need at the moment, and it is not one of the subjects on which we ought to spend public money.

It's easy enough to take a pop at Beckwith but at least he was an elected member and was out-voted by other elected members. The majority decided that the courses were popular and deserving of support. The virtue of councillors, you can get rid of them - much harder with the arms length quangocrats, third sector charities and out-of-control local officials you find  today.

At the end of their first winter the Welsh classes of Llanganten and Builth decided to engage in a little friendly competition to celebrate St David's Day 1915.  It was held at Builth's Forester's Hall (where? - Ed.) and the town defeated the village by 383 points to 354.  In addition to examples of our native flair for self-congratulation there were speeches from local bigwigs.  The town's Tory councillor Arthur Gwynne-Vaughan praised Lloyd George and his role in the war - a few months later residents would marvel at the popular solicitor's splendid masonic funeral - and the headmaster of Builth county school, Rees Thomas, made a well-received speech about Welsh nationalism.

Well actually it was also about the war.  Little Wales was part of a great Empire and its way of life was threatened by Germany.  If the enemy won all would have to learn the German language and the eisteddfod would be threatened.  Like the Poles the Welsh might become a minority in their own country (in the parallel universe called the present this nightmare scenario has actually come to pass in much of Mid-Wales ). Mr Thomas was overjoyed that Wales was in front of England, Ireland and Scotland in the matter of recruitment.  The best educated young men in Wales had volunteered to make up the Welsh battalions, which would emulate the valiancy ( is that a word? - Ed.) of Cromwell's Ironsides.

Perhaps Mr Thomas's heart was in the right place - his watchwords were justice, truth, good faith, humanity, mercy and education.  Who could disagree. He was greatly vexed by the suffering of gallant, little Belgium and it led him to head-up the committee charged with canvassing (pressurising?) the young men of the district to join the forces.  It seems that for the good headmaster Welsh nationalism could flourish as part of a great and virtuous Empire - in much the same way as so many of our modern day nationalists see the nation state as a thing of the past and Wales's destiny as part of another larger and supposedly virtuous entity. 

The Home Front

I've probably mentioned this before in passing but it's another incident that deserves a post of its own.  Let's remember the historical context here, just a couple of days after the Somme offensive of 1916 had ended, leaving over one million soldiers dead or wounded.

Meanwhile on the glensides of Radnorshire:

Clearly these bold Radnorians with their dynamite and gaffs were a disgrace to the Empire or Team GB as it is now known.

The River Whey?  Well I guess Hansard's stenographer was bamboozled by the gallant Captain's Old Etonian accent - later ennobled as Viscount Bledisloe he would present a cup still pursued energetically by former colonial egg-chasers.

An Outrage Scarcely Surpassed in Ireland

Although the old Radnorshire folk may be heading for the red-list along with the curlew and the skylark; your blogger is still a bit wary of naming names, even when describing events that occurred more than a hundred years ago.  The farmer responsible for the downfall of poor Miriam Jones remains anonymous in my account - no actual court conviction and too many potential descendants to offend.  Then there is a particular surname which appears far more often than it would be reasonable to expect in the county's criminal records ..... and even amongst those of the clan who migrated to the United States.  Let's leave their progeny in well-deserved peace.

Occasionally of course one makes a mistake, a name is mentioned and across the decades a family member gets in touch.  This was the case recently with a brief reference I made some years ago to the attack on the Llanbadarnfynydd police station in December 1880.  An incident which deserves to be described in greater detail.

Take this reprt from distant Hull where the local newspaper summed up the "murderous attack by the Rebeccaites" as an "outrage (which) has scarcely been surpassed in Ireland."  The Irish comparison was a frequently expressed opinion when the Radnorshire troubles appeared in the Victorian press.  "Death was then cried a score of times and volley after volley was fired, the door and windows being riddled with bullets and shot ... the valley of the Ithon appeared to be alive with armed men."  The opinion of the Hull paper was that "nothing but a strong force of military will restore order in these disturbed districts in Radnorshire."

A more sober report shows that Hull's hyperbole was not far off the mark:

"On the night of 5th Dec 1881, a police officer was badly injured by salmon poachers. This officer, who was stationed at Llanbadarn Fynydd, was patrolling the road between Llanbister and Llanbadarn Fynydd. Lights could be seen on the river and the noise of gun-fire heard.  When near a house called Brook Cottage the officer's attention was drawn by a noise in the hedge close to him. Turning his bullseye in the direction from which the sound came he saw three men about to climb over the hedge. Two of the men carried shotguns and the third a salmon spear. The latter at once struck at the officer with the spear. The policeman attempted to ward off the blow with his left arm but the spear pierced his helmet and cut his nose. The force of the blow fractured his arm. After a shot had been fired at the policeman, which fortunately missed him, the men ran away. The policeman then made his way home as best he could but his ordeal was not over, for shortly afterwards a gang of armed men appeared outside his house. Shots were fired at the window of the constable's house, smashing panes. A stone struck a clock in the living room and a shot passed over the crib in which the officer's baby was lying. Twenty seven slugs were later found in the front door. Fortunately no injury was sustained by the occupants, but this was undoubtedly a night of terror for the police officer and his family."

Now "salmon poachers" is hardly an accurate description of these Victorian activists.  Poachers don't usually draw attention to themselves by firing guns, parading in large numbers, often in daylight and in the centre of villages and towns.  This was an open challenge to the authorities and the Llanbadarn attack was the culmination of a month of  activity by the Rebeccaites on the Ithon and Upper Wye - an official inquiry later reported that a hundred individuals took part in the attack on the police station.  The Rebeccaites were standing-up for the traditional right of the populace to take salmon from the river and against over-netting by big landowners down-stream in Herefordshire.

Violence against the local police was uncommon, that against bailiffs and other outsiders less so. Police-Constable Cairns, the subject of the attack had a bad reputation in the county.  He seems to have been eager to confront the Rebeccaites.  In his 1976 article in the journal Llafur entitled the Second Rebecca Riots the historian David Jones gave some background concerning the victim of the attack:

"From Rhayader, where additional policemen were stoned on arrival came reports of 'foreign' armed policemen making noisy night patrols through the streets and subjecting innocent bystanders to undignified searches. One of the most unpopular constables was Frederick Cairns, who was charged at various times with assaulting people in the countryside near Rhayader."

Constable Cairns identified two of his assailants who were bailed (for a sizeable £400) to appear before the magistrates in Penybont.  Come the day and the village was said to have the appearance of a fair, such were the crowds drawn in support of the defendants.  Still suffering from his injuries Cairns braved a courtroom in which the public noisily greeted the supposed Rebeccaites as heroes.  Of course the defendants had alibis for the night in question and the court adjourned for a week to consider their decision.

To much public rejoicing the Penybont two were found not guilty.  The magistrates concluding that the constable had made an honest mistake in identifying them as his attackers.  Within a few weeks Cairns had been dismissed from the Radnorshire Constabulary.  Enquiries having shown that he had previously been found guilty of misconduct while employed in English police forces, something that he had denied during the court case.

Of course the Rebeccaites were operating in a society where the right to vote was restricted.  It's often forgotten that even after the 1884 Representation of the People Act some 40% of men were still denied a vote in parliamentary elections as well as 100% of women.  By resorting to shows of strength in support of popular causes the activists were able to curb excesses on the part of the local elite - evictions during the enclosures for example were carried out by newcomers to the district, who soon learnt the virtues of discretion when dealing with the commonality.  In the same way the Fishing regulations were a foreign imposition and there was conflict between outsiders determined to enforce the law and local magistrates and squires intent on social harmony.

There is a danger with popular movements which use threats and actual intimidation to achieve their ends, it's probably how the Mafia started out.  There are examples of over-stepping the mark in Radnorshire, for example I understand that this incident is still a cause of controversy amongst some families in the locality concerned.

Will Rebeccaism ever return to rural Wales?  Well you sometimes get the impression that our rulers regard democracy as only a short-lived experiment, so you never know.

Musical Interlude

Turn the map of Europe on it's side and the importance of the ancient Atlantic seaways becomes apparent.  A mare-nostrum of stateless nations, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Bretons, the Basques, the Galicians and in North Africa, the Berber peoples.  Choose your angle carefully and the expansionist polities - the English, the French, the Spanish and the Arabs almost disappear from view.

Here a young girl sings a composition by the Berber poet Lounés Matoub - a secularist, a democrat, and an opponent of the enforced arabisation of his people, he was assassinated in 1998.

I like the normality of the scene, the passers-by, the cat in the background ....

Kenza my daughter
don't weep
we die as a sacrifice
for the Algeria of tomorrow

Grid Walk

Motor sport loves iffy politicians with money to burn, real money.  Wales might qualify on one count but without the moolah you can forget any thoughts of a Welsh Grand Prix.  It's never going to happen.  Like HS2 it's a couple of generations too late.  Maybe back in the 1930s we could have closed a  public highway and done something to rival the great continental road circuits of the period.  Of course we were part of the United Kingdom and parliament didn't approve of that sort of thing, although the Llandrindod Chamber of Trade were still flogging this particular dead horse as late as the 1960s.

Welsh F1 drivers?  It's a funny thing but some of the names that get trotted out as being Welsh, just weren't.  Stuart Lewis Evans, Bernie Eccleston's pal who died as the result of a crash in the 1958 Morocco GP sounds Welsh.  I looked-up his family tree once and he was about as Welsh as Kate Middleton.  Not a trace of any Welsh connection in generations.

In the early 1960s there was an F1 team called Ecurie Gallois run by a very tidy young driver called Jack Lewis.  He had married a Pembrokeshire girl and moved to a farm between Llanwrtyd and Llanymddyfri.   Must have been Welsh?  No, he was Gloucestershire born and bred and so was his father, a Stroud garage owner.  The Welsh thing was really just a marketing exercise - like I said a very fast driver but maybe a bit optimistic in the PR stakes.  Lewis purchased a brand new BRM from the factory in 1962 but they sold him a pup and it was enough to disillusion the lad with the racing game, he quit to raise horses on his Carmarthenshire farm.

Shane Summers and Gary Hocking were two 1960s Welsh F1 drivers who were killed before they troubled the record books - these compendiums seem to believe that GP racing began in 1950 and studiously ignore the prestigious non-Championship races of the 50s and 60s.  Hocking, from Caerleon by way of Rhodesia, was particularly fast and a potential world champion. Here's Gary's complete four-wheel record

The real golden age of Welsh racing drivers was the 1930s.  We tend to forget that the South Wales coalfield was the Persian Gulf of its day and that great fortunes had been made there.  By the 1930s there were plenty of bright young things well-heeled enough to squander those inherited fortunes at Brooklands and the racing circuits of Europe.

Clifton Penn-Hughes was the son of a Llanelli industrialist, the Eccles brothers, Lindsey and Roy were heirs to the Briton Ferry Steel Company, Charles Martin's grandfather was vice-chairman of GKN, Dudley Folland from a Glanaman tinplate family - he played rugby for Swansea and London Welsh and was a Cambridge soccer blue - raced as Tim D Davies. Tim Rose-Richards and Owen Saunders-Davies were third in the 1930 Le Mans race.  These were all well-known names to followers of  motor racing in the 1930s.

One of the most successful Welsh racers of that period is little remembered, perhaps because he raced under so many names:  R.Wilson, J. Taylor, S. Bird, J. Sinclair, J. Philip.  He retired in second place in the big Brooklands 500 race of 1931, finished second as J Philip in 1932, and third, under his real name of Philip Turner in 1933.  As a matter of fact he'd been born Joshua Tanchan, a member of a Jewish family who migrated to Wales in the 19C.  The bankruptcy courts soon put an end to his motoring exploits, which had been pursued with other people's money.

Two of the Bentley boys had mid-Wales connections, Glen Kidston, who won Le Mans in 1930 was brought-up in Glasbury  - his widow remarried and is Samantha Cameron's grandmother.  Beris Harcourt-Wood's forename gives a clue to his birthplace - Caerberis in Builth Wells, which was also later the home of the Rose-Richards family.

Verdun Edwards from Brynna took part in the 1957 Aintree F1 race in one of the cars sold off to a certain B C Eccleston by the troubled Connaught F1 team.  Tony David - a well-heeled Cardi bought a Lotus 22 and was soon killed in the 1965 Formula Libre race at Dunboyne.

Wales also had it's manufacturers, Swansea's Cyril Kieft could have had an F1 world beater in the 1950s, until Coventry-Climax abandoned their FPE-V8 engine.  The company believed that it was under-powered compared to the Continental manufacturers - in reality the published performance figures for the European engines were a load of hooey.  Kieft sold his motor sport interests to sports-car racer Berwyn Baxter who many think was a Welshman - he wasn't.  Before the war the Margam born fascist and all-round bad guy Donald Marendaz built and raced some well-regarded sports cars.  Jack Turner from Abergavenney was building racing and sports cars in the early 50s, but like all our manufacturers found workers with the necessary engineering skills in England rather than back home in Wales.

Innes Ireland was living at Downton House, New Radnor when he won the United States Grand Prix in 1961, indeed he lived there throughout his frontline career, but the leading Radnorshire-born racer was the 1960s Mini-Cooper driver and rallyist Liz Jones from Newbridge-on-Wye.

The greats,  Tom Pryce and Parry Thomas, are too well-known to describe in our little grid walk, so let's finish on the very first circuit race of all, the 1902 Circuit des Ardennes (before this races were town to town) won by Charles Jarrott.  The records say Jarrott was born in London, but his mother was Welsh and the family lived for a long-time in Newbridge, Monmouthshire.  The best thing about Jarrott - he was born the son of a blacksmith's labourer and he married the wife of an earl.

No change here

A few weeks ago an insider was asking on twitter (which by the way I've decided is not for me) what would be a suitable name for a Ceredigion/Radnor/Montgomeryshire local authority.  Seems they were having a brain-storming session down in Cardiff.  I suggested Elenid but, thankfully, that particular re-organisation must have missed the cut.  It seems that Powys, yet again, has survived to manage the population transfers in this particular corner of paradise.

In Radnorshire you get used to small mercies and at least no-one has suggested that we should link up with Herefordshire.  That was certainly the Boundary Commission's first option in the immediate post-war years.  So things could be worse and we are allowed some continuity; while officialdom will have to work pretty hard to justify the Friday pay-offs/Monday re-appointments associated with previous re-organisations.

Some, who clearly find variety unappealing, complain that Powys is too small to have a council. Heaven knows how Radnorshire survived in the 1960s with a population of less than 20K.  Yet it did.  We had schools, roads, old folks homes, social services, smallholdings, libraries, even the occasional policeman.  The Council's Barber Green travelled around the county laying asphalt on the highway and roadmen kept the ditches clear.  Nowadays you spend your time avoiding potholes and floods, although no doubt there is a small army of white-collar workers brain-storming the problem as I write.  Our even smaller Rural and Urban District Councils somehow managed to build council houses in nearly every village in the county, they even had electric light and flushing toilets.

One North Wales blogger describes Independent councillors as gombeen men.  I know what he means and there was a time when I would have said thank heavens for that.  At least those old stalwarts had the economic interests of the county and its communities at heart and if they over-stepped the mark might even find themselves opposed at election time.  The present generation don't measure-up of course and perhaps their demise is to be welcomed, although the artificial tribalism of British party politics doesn't appeal.

Emily Hobhouse - a Great Nuisance

Let's be honest all sides in the Syrian conflict are capable of starving, torturing and killing their opponents.  It's also no surprise to find a big atrocity story surfacing on the eve of the Geneva conference - a conference that, with the exclusion of the Iranians, the West must think are negotiations aimed at Syrian government surrender rather than finding a lasting peace.

Listening to this lunchtime's BBC reporting of the Syrian atrocity photographs the casual observer might be impressed with the Corporations's impartiality.  Seemingly hard questions were asked - were the photographs photo-shopped or faked, did the fact that the project was funded by the Qatari government mean that the forensic experts had been bought off?  Of course these were meaningless questions, no doubt the pictures are genuine and the experts completely professional and unbiased in their work.  The most important questions weren't asked though  - who were the victims shown in the photographs and who abused them?

It's the type of question the Cornishwoman Emily Hobhouse would probably have asked.  Largely remembered for exposing the British Boer War concentration camps - responsible for the death of 24000 Boer children -  her Wikipedia entry doesn't really do Hobhouse justice.  For example it doesn't mention her role in the creation of the Save the Children charity (neither does the charity's website) and it ignores her journey to occupied Belgium in the First World War to ascertain the truth of the atrocity stories being used to rally young men to the colours.

Today Emily Hobhouse is something of a hero in South Africa with streets and even a town named after her.  Anglophone historians criticise Hobhouse because she only visited Boer camps and not the black concentration camps also established by the British.  In reality she was only allowed to visit a handful of camps and that was curtailed as soon as the authorities realised what a great nuisance she had become.  Revisionists, relying on British government reports, even claim that the deaths of the Boer women and children were the result of their inate ignorance and lack of hygiene rather than the scorched earth policies of an Empire humiliated by the successes of the Boer fighters.  It smacks of the Blue Books familiar to us in Wales.

Unlike those Malthusian ancestors of today's politically correct elite Hobhouse spoke plainly of the need for black rights.  Her speech at the dedication of the memorial to the Boer women and children victims of the British Empire was recalled by Thablo Mbeki in a 2004 speech:

"At an earlier time, 90 years ago, the speech of an English woman, Emily Hobhouse, who opposed the cruel war waged by her country against the people of South Africa was read at the ceremony to unveil the Women's Monument in Bloemfontein. On that occasion, she said: 

'The old watchword 'Liberty, Fraternity, Equality' cries from the tomb; what these women, so simple that they did not know they were heroines, valued and died for, all other human beings desire with equal fervour. Should not the justice and liberties you love so well, extend to all within your borders?'

She went on to say: 'We too, the great civilised nations of the world, are still but barbarians in our degree, so long as we continue to spend vast sums in killing or planning to kill each other for greed of land and gold. Does not justice bid us remember today how many thousands of the dark race perished also in Concentration Camps in a quarrel that was not theirs? Did they not redeem their past? Was it not an instance of that community of interest, which bonding all in one, roots out racial animosity? And may it not come about that the associations linked with this day will change, merging into nobler thoughts as year by year you celebrate the more inspiring Vrouewen-Dag we now inaugurate?'

It is a tragedy for the Afrikaner people - for a majority of those speaking the language as a mother tongue are not categorised as white - that her plea was ignored.

It seems to me that unlike so many present-day human rights activists Hobhouse was not motivated by support for one side against another.  She campaigned against the concentration camps because of the disgraceful conditions pertaining there, not because she supported the Boer war effort.  In 1916 Hobhouse crossed the Swiss border into Germany and went on to visit the Belgian city of Louvain and the German camp for British internees at Ruhleben even meeting with the German foreign minister. Again not because she supported Germany but because she wanted to see for herself if the atrocity stories in the British press were true and investigate avenues for peace.  Hobhouse reported what she saw while making clear the restrictions placed upon her visit by the German authorities.  Like Gareth Jones in 1930s Ukraine she was that rare thing, an honest reporter.

For her troubles Hobhouse was condemned as a traitor and the law quickly changed to make such future visits illegal.  Emily replied to her critics in a letter to the Times:

"I went to Germany quite simply and openly, contravening no law: I went under my own name with a 'humanitarian pass' in the interests of truth, peace and humanity; and I am proud and thankful to have done so."

The British state has seen fit to celebrate Kitchener - architect of the scorched-earth policy that saw some 30000 Boer farms destroyed, the women and children placed in concentration camps and the men shipped off to the more remote corners of the Empire - by placing his portrait on the £2 coin.  It's said that a new coin will be produced each year to commemorate the centenary of the Great War, perhaps Hobhouse might be a suitable candidate for 2016?

After all as one historian states "in the entire course of the deadliest conflict the world had ever seen, she was the sole person from any of the warring countries who actually journeyed to the other side in search of peace."  It's worth remembering.

As we do call it

I recently had to admit that I know next to nothing about the history of the Welsh language in the Shropshire Hundred of Clun, other than that the bard Hywel ap Syr Mathew, who died in 1581, was a native of the district.

Help seems to be at hand though as some Aberystwyth academics are beavering away to produce a book on the Welsh place names of Shropshire.  The book - we'll have to wait until the end of 2016 - promises:

" ..... an an introductory chapter, examining the history of the Welsh language in Shropshire (and its neighbours)"

Reading about the project I discovered that one post-graduate has been examining field-names in north eastern Radnorshire from the period 1600 to 1900, in the hope that it will  "reveal information about the linguistic geography of the Welsh language in the border area."  Fascinating stuff.  I guess this may be along the lines of how placenames like llwyn, llyn and llain ended-up as llan as everyday knowledge of Welsh died out.

Anyway that's the Christmas present for 2016 sorted .....  hopefully.

Update:  Interesting comments about identity from some young Clun people at around the 59 minute mark here.  Seemingly they are considered to be Welsh by other YFC clubs in Shropshire and suffer from some low-level ethnic prejudice as a result.  They don't think of themselves as Welsh though, the Welsh consider them to be English while the English consider them to be Welsh, they're happy to be Clun people.

Go West

Like any right-thinking Cymro I'm sure that America was named after the Bristol merchant Richard Amerike, a descendant of Hywel ap Meurig - who may have been a quisling, but at least was our very own Radnorian quisling.

  

Another early explorer of the North Atlantic was the Bristol customs officer Thomas Croft, whose ships sailed in 1481 - reportedly in search of the mythical Isle of Brasil.   Since his two vessels contained a cargo of salt it's more likely they intended to exploit the rich, and secret, Newfoundland fishing banks.  Whatever his intentions Croft could boast of a far more illustrious Welsh pedigree than Amerike since his great grandfather was none other than Owain Glyndwr.  As we know Glyndwr married-off his daughters to the leading lights in the strategic Central March - a Mortimer, a Scudamore and a Croft.  Thomas Croft's grandmother was Glyndwr's daughter Sioned.

It's sometimes said that in the aftermath of Glyndwr's war no-one in Wales wanted to be reminded of the great patriot.  This is clearly not the case in respect of his daughter Gwenllian of Cenarth, St Harmon - all the bardic poetry to her family boasts of the connection.  It's not even true of the Herefordshire Crofts.  When Thomas's great niece Margaret married Ieuan Gwyn of Llangynllo and Clun, a bard was on hand to remind the audience of the bride's ancestry:

Crofft, Glyndwr, milwr moliant

Of course an earlier Atlantic sea-farer was Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, whose story and subsequent myth are told in a marvellous book by Gwyn Alf Williams.  Although Gwyn mentions the reference to Madoc in the poetry of the 15C bard Maredudd ap Rhys, even he - and most everyone else - miss another reference to the seafarer in the work of another 15C bard Deio ab Ieuan Du:

Fal Madog, marchog medd

Baun gwyn, ab Owain Gwynedd.

Y gwr, siwrneio a gai

Ar foroedd, yr arferai.

Clearly Madoc's exploits were common knowledge to the bards of the 15C and, no doubt, to the patrons they rubbed shoulders with.  Who knows if men like Croft and the Welsh captain John Lloyd ("the most expert shipmaster in all England") were inspired by such tales.  Certainly Wales - and Radnorshire for that matter - has never been a backwater.

Camp Bastion ar Ieithon

When Sir Richard Hoare visited Radnorshire in the early 1800s a local named John Williams informed him that the extensive Roman remains in Llanfihangel Helygen parish went by the name of Castell Collen.  This may have been news to some locals who, it's said and in common with folk up and down Wales, called such sites Y Gaer, but Castell Collen ended up in print and that was that.  What the unfortunate Roman auxiliaries sent to such a remote outpost of empire called the place is not recorded, although another John Williams, the county's 19C historian, believed it was Magos.

So you're a Sarmatian cavalryman newly drafted into the Roman army and where do they post you - with an entire empire to choose from, Camp Bastion ar Ieithon.  Not a small place, it had room for a 1000 troops, it must still have felt like drawing the short straw. OK there was a bath house and some fancy latrines, but the weather was miserable and the neighbourhood was troublesome.  That's the thing, away from the legion towns of Chester and Caerleon, the only places in third century Wales where you were likely to find the military were Cardiff, Caernarfon, Caersws, Forden, Castell Collen and, just over the modern border, Leintwardine.

If Cardiff and Caernarfon can be explained by the need to combat Irish pirates, what were the military bases in East Central Wales all about?  Well the archaeologists tell us they were to combat the Ordovices -  a tribe who just couldn't be trusted to behave in polite society.  Certainly those military forts did a fine job of encircling the later-day kingdom of Maelienydd - like we said troublesome neighbours.

The archaeologists seem pretty convinced that the Ordovices were a tribe of Central Wales while the historians tend to favour Gwynedd*.  T M Charles-Edwards, for example, plumps for Gwynedd because a tribe based on the upper Severn valley "would hardly have been so formidable a people as they appear in Tacitus's narrative."   Maybe so, although Central Wales would play a fairly pivotal role in resisting the later Saxon and Norman power.  I tend to think that Meirionnydd was the centre of Ordovician power and  there are certainly historic and linguistic ties between it and Arwystli, Gwerthrynion and Maelienydd.  Southern Radnorshire, especially Elfael Is Mynydd, may well have been part of Silurian territory.

I've been reading some informative online stuff from Cadw about developing a visitor experience package for, amongst other sites,  Castell Collen - yes I know - it seemingly appeals to cultural explorers.  I guess this means improving access and maybe putting up a few information boards.  The report also reminds us that some Welsh people might actually sympathise with the natives rather than the Romans and that this needs to be borne in mind when developing those visitor experience packages.

Well I'm certainly rather proud of the fact that our Radnorian forebears proved a bit of a handful for the Roman invader, so too later generations and their resistance to the Normans and their role in supporting Glyndwr at Bryn Glas.  Reading of how the 19C squirearchy stretched the law for fear of the Rebeccaites also makes me smile - the magistrate who dismissed a case against some locals engaged in midnight fisticuffs with the river bailiffs because the officials had failed to show their letters of appointment was a highlight.  As the franchise expanded Radnorians gradually took control of their own local governance - seeking to oppose the excesses of the Malthusian workhouses and trying to keep local lads away for the trenches of the Great War.  Of course it all came to an end with the ever increasing power of the centralised state and its bureaucracy, typified locally by the establishment of Powys and bodies like the DBRW.

I've also been reading a paper from that very county council, it's basically a justification for high pay for top officials - "large complex bodies with multi-million pound budgets."  All that 1970s talk about halting rural depopulation is summed up by a comment that the county has a low birth rate - Malthusians again - and a large outward migration of young people with a large inward migration of old people.  Depopulation solved by methods that might appeal to folk in the Balkans.

Never mind that Powys might "employ very few young people under the age of 21" the high pay for top officials will have "a beneficial impact on the quality of life in the community as well as on the local economy."  Oh and of course recruitment to those senior grades "will ideally include people from the private sector as well as the public sector and from outside as well as inside Wales."  Well of course it will.

Where are the Ordovices when you need them?

* Some, the BBC are an example,  mention that a mosaic map in the Forum at Rome does not include Gwynedd as part of the Empire, what they fail to tell us is that the mosaic was the work of Mussolini!

Patriots and Pacifists

Llandrindod's Baptist Tabernacle would hardly seem a likely setting for a mini-riot; but such was the case in the summer of 1917 when the Welsh branches of the Fellowship of Reconciliation - who had been holding a conference in the town - organised a public meeting entitled "The Church and the World after the War."

Word got about that the meeting might be of a pacifist nature, which soon attracted the interest of a sizeable party of "patriots" also visiting the town for a bowling tournament.  They were not disappointed because the first speaker - John Davies, the Dowlais miner's agent and a former Labour mayor of Merthyr Tydfil - was soon ranting about profiteers and "other gamblers in the lives and blood of their fellow men."

These sentiments naturally outraged the patriotic section of the audience who were soon singing Rule Britannia and God Save the King.  Faced with disorder the Llandrindod deacons hurriedly ran up the white flag and abandoned the meeting.  The mob, by now some hundreds strong, repaired to South Crescent to pass resolutions in favour of the war while Mr Davies and his friends were forced to beat a hasty retreat.

Handily the newspapers have left us the names of some of the more strident patriots, and with the help of the 1911 census we find:

Goodfellow, solicitor, born Devon, age 49, from Caerphilly

Errington, commercial traveller, born Durham, age 56, from Cardiff

Atkinson, agent, born Lancashire, age 53, from Swansea

Am I spotting something of a pattern here?

Of course this had little to do with Radnorshire, with both patriots and pacifists being mainly summer visitors to the town. What I think you can find in local attitudes to the war is the age-old Radnorian search for a modus vivendi, a means of quietly getting on with life alongside far more powerful outside forces.

We can see this in the frustrated work of that angel of death Captain Shrimpton, the county's  military recruiter.  Shrimpton had worked out that there were 2173 unstarred men in the county - males between the ages of 18 and 41, eligible for military service and not working in reserved occupations.  His job was to get these fellows into khaki.  It must have seemed to him that the job of the local appeals tribunal was to keep them safe at home.

Out of 1035 appeals heard in the summer months of 1916 only 35 had been disallowed (3.4%). Since the county tribunal system - it's members in the main were local councillors - had been set up in Radnorshire just 33% of appeals from those in urban districts had been disallowed, while in the rural districts only 13% had failed to get an exemption or a delay.

How long this reluctance to send local men to the colours was kept-up I'm not sure and most of the appeals allowed were in respect of perceived work and family commitments. There were a few Radnorshire conscientious objectors though - the three Jenkins boys from Penybont, who served with the Friends Ambulance Unit, for example.

"My name is Manoa"

Wales may have some of the dullest children politicians in Europe but at least it has decent online-history resources - this one covering Wales and the First World War is a recent example.  Maybe the search could do with some tweaking but all is forgiven when you come across headlines like this, from the Brecon County Times of 25th February 1915:

The unfortunate individual imprisoned under the Defence of the Realm Act was a Bugeildy labourer, one Manoah Davies.  His employer - a local farmer - had passed on a recruiting card, which Davies then handed back, but not before adding the following pencilled comments:

Why should I serve in the Army?  I have no country - Germany for ever!

Let England be a German republic and not pay £1000 a week to King.

Soon Sergeant Bufton of the Radnorshire Constabulary was on Manoah's trail and his admission that "I can't disown my own writing" saw him up before the Knighton beaks.  Coltman Rogers, the chairman of the Court pointed out that Davies could easily have been court-martialed for his display of disaffection towards the king and that in Germany he would most certainly have been executed.  After a suitable amount of huffing and puffing Davies was imprisoned for a month.

I doubt if Manoah was a man of principle, after all he apologised to the court for his actions.  More likely he was a bit of a smart-aleck.  Just three months later Manoah was summoned by the Knighton Guardians, accused of being the father of an illegitimate child.  Davies did not attend the hearing but sent a note saying he would "pay nine pence a week, or as an alternative if the registrar will put up the banns free will take the lot."  Unimpressed by this unromantic proposal of marriage the Guardians ordered that he pay 3/6 a week until the child was fourteen.

The Patriot Game

So who led Plaid Cymru's official delegation to Berlin in 1940?  J E Daniel?  Saunders Lewis perhaps?  And wasn't that young Gwynfor booking into the Hotel Kaiserhof; right next door to the mighty Reichskanzlei itself?  Soon our gallant band would be sitting down with Adolf and discussing the imminent downfall of the British Empire.

You might think my scenario is tripe, nonsense, poppycock, claptrap, balderdash?   No doubt you'd be right, but don't tell me, tell the readers of the well-regarded book Patriots, National Identity in Britain 1940-2000.  Here are some reviews:

Wide ranging, intelligent, sensible, and important - Sunday Telegraph
A major work - The Independent

A treasure trove - Daily Mail

Many perceptive thoughts - The Guardian
Marvellously rich - Financial Times

His research is formidable - Sunday Times

So the book went down well in the Metropolis then.  The Guardian did complain about a lack of footnotes but no reviewer thought to query one rather astounding claim:

"Plaid Cymru was less circumspect, sending an official delegation to Berlin in the summer of 1940 to convince Hitler that in return for some measure of Welsh independence they would support a Nazi regime elsewhere on the island."

You have to wonder how such a tall-tale ever got into the mainstream.  Perhaps it stems back to MI5's fantasy Welsh-nationalist Arthur Jenkins (Snow) and his imaginary pals.  Certainly one of their number, the British agent "Jack Brown" visited Germany in 1940 as a guest of the Abwehr.  The eisteddfodwr Leigh Vaughan Henry is also said to have had links with German Intelligence, but he was a member of the British Union of Fascists  and by the summer of 1940 was safely interned in one of His Majesty's establishments.

In an email the author of Patriots told me that the "official delegation" story came from a Welsh historical monograph on the early history of the party.  It's a monograph, unreferenced in the book, which is unknown to other academics versed in the history of Plaid Cymru.  The author's other Welsh researches do not inspire much confidence - for example he confuses MAC and the FWA, who seemingly sent a letter-bomb responsible for "blowing the hands off a small girl."  Once out into the mainstream, like black propaganda, such accusations fester and are reprinted in other books and taken-up by bloggers and tweeters. It soon becomes, as one English author of a subsequent re-telling informed me, "fairly well documented."  A documentation built on sand.

It says a lot about the relationship between England and Wales that none of the distinguished reviewers of the book thought a Plaid "official delegation" to Berlin in 1940 at all shocking or unbelievable.  It's also telling that such a visit was not worth the bother of any subsequent follow-up or investigation.  The Welsh are clearly untrustworthy but also unimportant.  Yes, they would have scuttled-off to Berlin - presumably in one of those mythical U-boats that used to call into Cardigan Bay for fresh eggs and a sing-song in the local pub - but who cares.

Radnorshire From Above - Review

Let's get the praise out of the way first; this is a beautifully produced book - in Aberystwyth - containing more than a hundred aerial photographs illustrating the archaeology and landscape of the old county of Radnorshire.  The colour photographs are accompanied by an informative text describing the background to aerial archaeology and what each of the often stunning images tells us about the past.

Anyone with the slightest interest in our Radnorian heimat should snap up a copy without delay.  Published by the Radnorshire Society and the Clwyd Powys Archaeological Trust, it costs just £9 from the Society and a still great value £12.99 from local bookshops.  Congratulations to all involved in its production.

Here you'll find snowscapes, landscapes, the complexities of the Walton basin, hill forts, castles plundered of every last stone by the perspicacious Radnorshire folk and the churchyard of Newbridge-on-Wye with the graves of the local toffs shielded from the hoi polloi by a neat hedge.  Innes Ireland's old home at Downton merits a page, there are splendid shots of the Elan Valley including nostalgic shots of dried-out 2003, Roman marching camps, tai un nos and traces of the Glasbury church which ended up on the wrong side of the Wye after one 17C flood.

Any complaints I have may seem trivial to those who view the world through anglocentric spectacles, but here you go:

First off the text does recognize that the Anglo-Norman hold on Radnorshire castles was pretty precarious.  For long periods they were back home in Herefordshire and at others, a bit like the British army in Basra, confined to barracks.  So where were successful local rulers like Cadwallon ap Madog hanging out, since they tended to despoil the Norman castles rather than move in?   In Welsh castles more than likely, places like Buddugre - I would have liked to have seen some discussion about that.

Castell Cwm Aran?  This monstrosity may be perpetrated by the Ordnance Survey and the local High School but it's just wrong.  I'm far from being a language purist, I'm not vexed by the use Rhayader instead of Rhaeadr and I positively welcome the use of a localism like Noyadd instead of Neuadd.  But there is no river Aran in Radnorshire - the river and the castle are properly called Cymaron.  It was good enough for the bards and it should be good enough for the Radnorshire Society.

Likewise the use of placenames like Crug Erydd (Crug Eryr) and Penarth Mount (Bryn Pennardd).  Indeed the names used by the bards for these supposedly Norman sites might offer a big clue that they were in use by the local uchelwyr in the 15C.  None of them have been - so perhaps it's time CPAT dug one of them up?  I guess archaeologists don't like documentary evidence much, but Lewis Glyn Cothi describes Cefnllys Castle being rebuilt and occupied in the 15C - he even names the builder!

To me it illustrates the fact that in order to get a fuller picture of medieval and early modern Radnorshire history you really have to get to grips with the bards and their work.

Mistakes?   Well no-one was transported for  Rebeccaite attacks on toll gates in and around Rhayader, p87.