Rojava

The Empire rather lost control of the narrative last week.  The western media had a grandstand view of the fighting in Kobane and, for once, perhaps inspired by the woman fighters of the YPJ, they actually reported what they saw rather than what they were told.

This forced Washington's hand and, despite the objections of its Turkish ally, the United States engaged in some PR bombing of the ISIS forces massed in and around the town.  At first this was half-hearted but for the last few days it has been carried out successfully because of co-ordination with the forces on the ground defending the Kobane.

It's said that the western media's attention span doesn't extend much beyond ten days and already the Kobane grandstand is emptying.  So what happens next?  The United States has so far failed to arm the Syrian Kurds, indeed they still regard them as a terrorist group.  With the media gone will they accede to Turkey's demand that a buffer zone be set up in northern Syria - a zone which coincidentally would see the suppression of the secular and democratic cantons of Rojava.  Cantons based on the confederalist theories of the imprisoned PKK leader Öcalan -  an experiment in decency and common-sense that the Islamist Turkish government is determined to snuff out. 

While the Iraqi army and even the Peshmerga fled when confronted by the Islamic State's 7C terrorist playbook, it was the armed forces of Rojava - the YPG and the YPJ - who were largely responsible for rescuing the Yazidi Kurds from Singal mountain. Alone among the forces confronting ISIS these Rojavans - they also include some local Arabs and Assyrians - have a record for fighting rather than capitulating and are the least likely group to indulge in murderous sectarianism.

Meanwhile the US and EU are allied with the sponsors of Islamic terrorism - the Turks, the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs.  You can tell an empire by the company it keeps, whether it is East European neo-Nazis, Central American death squads or the godfathers of the headchoppers. The life loving girl fighters of the YPJ must be like garlic to sour old vampires like McCain and Hillary.

Musical Interlude

Paul Gubarev is currently hospitalized following an assassination attempt, a few weeks ago he and his family were enjoying this cheerful ditty celebrating the Russian lands from Alaska to Odessa.

We're All Fascists Now

The IWA site Click on Wales currently hosts articles on fascism from three of the country's more interesting pensmen Tim Williams, David Melding and Robert Stradling - oh and some of the comments are quite thought-provoking as well.

Now these articles do not discuss the current resurgence of murderous far-right nationalism in Eastern Europe - nurtured and sponsored in the main by the United States and the governments of the EU - nothing so controversial.  No, these articles are concerned with the Wales of 70 and 80 years ago and, you've guessed it, our old pal Saunders Lewis.

Tim Williams has a special talent for getting up people's noses even when he is right.  Surely he is correct when he says that Wales is "wending its inexorable way towards a monoglot English-speaking status." It's not the statement so much as the relish which we imagine he feels at the prospect.  I doubt that even a 1930s Catholic would disagree with his statement that Catholicism was "not on the side of human freedom and progress."  In pre-liberation theology times wasn't that rather the point?  But in any case this plain speaking is hardly likely to endear him to two of the country's larger population segments.

David Melding ably demolishes Williams' attempt to equate fascism with right-wing Catholicism.  Fascism for example worshipped the modern in a way which was anathema to the likes of  a "crank" such as Saunders Lewis.  In a way is Tim Williams something of a crank himself?  While Saunders Lewis wanted to turn the clock back to a rural, Catholic, monoglot elitist past, Williams' sympathies lie with the despised people he sees as having created modern Wales "and the political tool of the majority - industrial Wales and the Labour party."  A valley Wales which to all intents and purposes is as dead as perchentyaeth* and the itinerant bard tramping the countryside between the halls of his patrons.

Robert Stradling contrasts the Wales of the 1930s, proletarian and socialist, with an Ireland largely sympathetic to the right-wing Catholic dictatorships, and possessing the largest fascist party in Europe not in power.  Thinking perhaps of Lewis and his allies Stradling quotes Gwyn Alf Williams "it was as well for Wales that there was an English channel in 1940."  This is a common viewpoint that seems to think that a Nazi victory would have led to a Welsh puppet regime. I doubt this would have been the case - many in the English elite would have been eager to co-operate with a victorious Germany and the anglophile Hitler would have been happy enough to indulge them.  More likely Wales would have been the scene of some violent resistance in the Valleys, bloodily suppressed by London's quislings.  Where would Saunders Lewis have stood?  Well we have his own words, as reported in the Western Mail, to help us decide:  "It is possible, he added, that there would be bloodshed in South Wales if there was a Fascist Government. In such a case the Nationalist Party must take sides with the popular masses of Wales against Fascist dictatorship."

Is there a purpose, beyond entertaining history buffs such as myself, in this continuing discussion of the minutiae of Welsh history.  It's doubtful, although I would love to read a work about real Welsh fascists, rather than the imaginary ones puffed-up for shabby political advantage.   I've blogged about some here and here.  This is quite interesting as an illustration of current academic standards east of the Dyke.

Far better to discuss the present-day, the way in which Communism and Nazism are now treated as two sides of the same coin for example.  What in the 1980s were considered to be the viewpoints of over-the-top cold-war ideologues and emigres with unsavory backstories are now the mainstream. It won't be long before Hitler and Nazism are declared the lesser evil, all of which suits those elites who see the now disorganised working class as a latent threat to their hegemony.

Today the Ukraine is like some 1940s re-enactment park, except the refugees, the shelled working-class districts and the tortured bodies are real enough.  All this hushed-up by a neo-conservative mass media and given the green-light by the likes of Merkel.  Meanwhile the European and Anglo-American elites plan their Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a perfect recipe for the corporate state.

The question we should be discussing isn't whether Saunders Lewis was fascist but are we?

*  To those unfamiliar with this term I don't believe it to mean home ownership which seems to be the wikipedia version of the word.  Rather it is the obligation towards wider society placed upon those privileged to enjoy wealth.

That Scottish Vote

I'd been hoping to read some of my favourite Welsh bloggers' analysis of the Scottish vote - not much so far, perhaps they're disappointed?  If so they're surely wrong, as that 45% was a deathblow to the glorious Union.  Here's what I think:

1. If the Scottish pattern for English-born voters was reflected in Wales, the Welsh-born would have to vote 57-43% Yes in order to scrape a victory.  We shouldn't allow political correctness to block-out this reality.

2. The 65-and-overs voted No by a 3 to 1 margin and won the referendum for the Union.  They are the luckiest generation in history - of course they were going to stick with a status quo that has served them well.

3. Ah but what about all those folk who lost their jobs in heavy industry? Well they probably didn't live long enough to vote last Thursday - life expectancy for Glasgow men, for example, being 68 years compared with 76 years in solidly pro-Union East Renfrewshire.

4. One thing is certain, everyday some elderly No-voter kicks the bucket and a young Yes-voter becomes eligible to join the register.

5.  You can't just blame the OAPs, the Yes side were weak on their exit strategy.  Plan B?  Just print your own fiat currency like everyone else and let it find its own exchange rate - it's not as if Brown and Darling have much of a record on financial matters.

6.  The EU?  If they don't want you then just go it alone,  oil-rich Norway isn't doing too badly is it?  In any case a truly independent Scotland would have a far stronger voice in the UNECE, the body that really draws up the economic rulebook.

7.  Don't assume the British government would have honoured a Yes vote.  There would have been hardball negotiations followed by an insistence on a second referendum - Operation Fear on steroids.

8.  Jack Straw thinks it perfectly reasonable to pass a law that makes any vote for the break-up of the UK illegal without the go-ahead of the English MPs.  The only fly in the ointment for this cunning plan is the American Irish lobby who will insist it doesn't apply to the Six Counties.

9.  In the Ukraine the British government and media show their true colours when it comes to democracy, ethnic cleansing and the killing of ordinary folk.  Don't think it couldn't happen here - the times they are a-changin' and Scotland has it's very own Right Sector, ripe for exploitation by the London government, in the form of the Britannia singing unionist thugs attacking the Yes supporters in Glasgow's George Square.

10.  One benefit of the No vote - we're not stuck in a room with just England and the Ulster Orangemen for company.

Musical Interlude

They spilt your blood yesterday
They put your head on an oaken post
A little way from your corpse.

Radnorshire, some Scottish connections

Britishness died with the British Empire and the vote in Scotland is more about sorting out the estate of a recently departed and somewhat unloved relative.  While we await the long-delayed funeral arrangements of this increasingly putrid corpse, let's spare a thought for some of Radnorshire's Scottish connections.

When the racing driver Innes Ireland moved to Downton House near New Radnor in 1960 he claimed that it was the nearest place to London that reminded him of the Scottish Highlands and perhaps that has been the motivation for other Scots who made Radnorshire their home.  Despite his Caledonian baronetage there was precious little Scottish about a previous occupant of Downton, Sir William Cockburn of that Ilk.  Cockburn helpfully informed the authors of the Blue Books that "New Radnor was planted as a Saxon colony by Harold, after his victory here over the Britons, two years before his death at Hastings. This people have never since had any sympathies with the Welsh in language, nor many in habits." Hogwash of course but given the prejudices of the time perhaps he thought he was doing his neighbours a favour.  The current occupant of Downton, Sir Andrew Duff Gordon, might well be the last of the Lewises of Harpton, a family that once patronised the bards but which long ago declined into Britishness.

The most famous Scot to find a home in Radnorshire was, of course, James Watt - so famous that he graces the £50 note.  In 1801 he purchased Doldowlod, then a local farmhouse, to enjoy as his summer retreat. We cannot blame the elder Watt for the enmity his family subsequently engendered by their attempts to extract rent from the occupants of the tai un nos on their recently purchased crown manors.  It all led to a court case that had to be retried in Hereford, the local jury having "perversely" found in favour of the squatters.  A minor land war ensued with bailiffs battling the populace and the destruction of the Watt's property by Rebeccaite gangs.

Who knew that Walter Scott's novel The Betrothed had a Radnorshire setting.  It was based on the story of Moll Walbee and the disastrous Welsh attempt to lay siege to Painscastle in 1198.  Don't all rush out to get a copy though, it's been described as a work that "would score high marks in a competition to decide which was the dreariest and stupidest book ever produced by a writer of genius."

A few years ago Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote a tome called the Invention of Scotland, one of those "look what I've discovered works" that excite the metropolitan elites.  Much of what passed for a Scottish identity, the author claimed - including the Osian poems - was made-up. Of course Roper discovered nothing that wasn't well-know to anyone with even a cursory interest in Scotland.  The poems having long ago been exposed, not least by Radnorshire's Edward Davies (1756-1831) - he was born at Hendre Einion in Llanfaredd parish. You can read his book, published in 1825, demolishing the Ossian forgery here.

Scottish bailiffs and gamekeepers could always find employment with local landowners suspicious of devolving responsibility to the untrustworthy locals.  Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame - beloved by arch-snobs everywhere - is descended from one such bailiff called Mackintosh employed by Lord Ormathwaite.  The bailiff's daughter, Fellowes' grandmother, regailed the youngster with tales of life at Penybont Hall where she worked as a maid.  Perhaps Radnorshire should claim a share of the export earnings?

Scottish shepherds also found employment on the Radnorshire hills, one such family by the name of Scott arrived in Cwmteuddwr in the early 1800s from Roxburghshire.  Look at a list of the last Radnorshire natives clinging on to a knowledge of Welsh well into the 20C and the surname Scott is one of the most striking.

Welsh patronyms in Herefordshire c1540

To do a proper job on patronyms in 16C Herefordshire you'd have to use the Lay Subsidy but with second hand copies of Mr Faraday's transcription selling for over £60 I've used his Muster Rolls instead.  These are lists of men aged over 16 liable for military service - against a French invasion in 1539 (it never happened) and a war against the Scots in 1542 which did.

I have counted all names containing an ap and also triple or quadruple names which don't, but which are obvious patronyms eg Davyd John Gwylym Gryffyth.  I could have counted adjectival names such as John Vaure and patronymicals where the ap had disappeared but the apparent 'surname' probably changed in each generation, I chose not to do so.  The map therefore underestimates the amount of Welshness in 16C Herefordshire, where even occupational surnames may hide a Welshman.

Three new hundreds had been formed by the Act of Union from lordships transferred to the county from the March of Wales.  Ewias Lacy was very Welsh as was most of the new hundred of Huntington, Wigmore however was very English with only a handful of small Welsh districts around Presteigne. 

A puzzle is the rarity of patronyms in that part of the old cantref of Ergyng covered by Wormilow hundred.  There are many Welsh placenames in the area and Welsh surnames were common.  Perhaps language shift had already occurred or there was some other cultural factor at work.

The isolated parishes in the east of the county surely shows the impact of recent or even temporary settlers rather than any long term survival.  The same must be true of the road into Hereford from the west and lying north of the Wye.  In Hereford City itself the muster roll for 1539 had 11% Welsh patronyms rising to 14% in 1542. Clearly the city was a magnet for Welsh people in a way that other towns, Leominster for example, were not.

My base map shows modern parish boundaries and these were sometimes different from the townships used in the 16C.  For example there were parts of Eardisley and Vowchurch which were quite Welsh and others which were more English, my map doesn't show these minor variations.

It's easy to spot that the Teme and Lugg valleys were open to the influence of very English areas in North Herefordshire, the Wye valley less so. This would have had an impact on subsequent language shift in Radnorshire.

It's not possible to be a decent person and vote no?

I expect most readers will have already seen former British ambassador Craig Murray's description of the United Kingdom as a rogue state - if not then it's well worth a listen.  Now I don't usually have much time for the tribal nonsense that sees, for example, a Carwyn Jones, or heaven forbid a Tony Blair, as being somehow morally superior to their Tory opponents, so can a 'no voter' be a decent person?  Well I suppose you could argue that as the SNP hopes to remain a  member of both NATO and the increasingly aggressive EU, then plus ça change.

What a yes vote will do is pose an existentialist threat to one of the cornerstones of the rogue alliance currently headed-up by America's out-of-control neocons - both the New York Times and the Washington Post carried frankly insane, pro-war opinion pieces this last weekend.  At least the SNP want to kick the nuclear missiles out of Scotland, there are those in Washington and London who sound all-to-eager to use them.

If I was a Scot I would certainly vote Yes, despite the timorous attitude of their leaders towards real independence - a currency and a foreign policy of their own.  I wouldn't think a Yes vote would lead to independence though, the rogue state has a lot more tricks up its sleeve before it would allow that to happen.

The County Radnor

As well as being one of the more familiar Irish premiers to those of us this side of the water Garret Fitzgerald also took time out from his official duties to research  the decline of the Irish Language.  Somehow I can't see Carwyn or Cameron doing something similarly esoteric in their spare hours, but you never know.  Fitzgerald's method was to look at the census figures for the 60 plus age group in order to deduce the linguistic situation in a particular district half a century or more earlier.  You can find his work on the 1911 census here - although without the all important maps.

It says something about the relative strengths of Welsh and Irish at the beginning of the 20th century that if thoroughly "anglicised" Radnorshire had been treated as if it belonged in the list of Irish counties, then it would have been 12th in a list of 32 (11.5% of the oldest cohort speaking Welsh) just ahead of Tipperary (11.4% speaking Irish).  In the Rhayader District Council area - roughly the A470 north of Newbridge-on-Wye and the A44 west of Crossgates - the figure was 28.2%, the majority locally born.  Of course this meant little to the Welsh speaking intelligensia of the day; for them every Radnorshire lass in trouble was further evidence of the moral decay they associated with the English language.

Why Ireland should have suffered such a severe language shift - in Carlow, Dublin, Kildare, Laois, Longford, Offaly, West Meath, Wexford, Wicklow, Antrim, Belfast, Down and Fermanagh Irish speakers were even rarer than Welsh speakers in the Knighton-Presteigne-New Radnor area - has never been that successfully explained.  Clearly a good many had ditched Irish long before the famine. Plantations played a part, a similar 16C plantation in the Llanidloes-Trefeglwys-Llanbrynmair area is remembered now only in surnames like Wigley, Jarman and Peate.  It had no long-term effect on the local language situation, probably because both natives and newcomers were protestants and thus easily assimilated.

Language shift in Radnorshire is similar to that in Ireland, with the language retreating 20 miles in a generation. As for explanations, firstly this from the county's historian Jonathan Williams writing in the early 1800s and speaking of the border parish of Bugeildy:

"An increased intercourse with England, a more general interchange of the commodities and produce of these two countries respectively, and, above all, the introduction of that jurisprudence with which the inhabitants of Wales found it necessary to be familiarized, as well as the diction in which all legal pleadings, deeds, conveyances, processes, &c., are executed, soon undermined that predilection for their mother tongue which was before their distinguishing character, and rendered the study and acquisition of the English language necessary, not only as an accomplishment, but also as a matter of indispensable interest."

Secondly a 19C Irish explanation for language shift in Limerick:

"the growing public feeling that Irish was a dying language, a mark of a degraded people who were not 'decent' - all this combined to produce a new people who from youth were pledged to speak no Irish. And so in West Limerick you had many who persisted in trying to speak a broken English and never again uttered a word in the old tongue they knew so well."

What's in a name

I had hoped to post some impressions - not a review, that would be presumptuous - of this, the latest volume in the Oxford History of Wales, but the truth is I haven't been able to get to grips with the book at all.  Perhaps that's down to ageing brain cells or the sheer density of information contained, but it's certainly not as reader-friendly as some of the earlier volumes in the series.  Perhaps there will be a better chance later on in the winter.

A couple of things are already apparent though - although covering a period with only limited documentary sources archaeology doesn't get much of a look in. Then, while the book treats with all the British lands: Wales, Cumbria, Cornwall and Brittany, as well as their relationships with the Irish, Northumbrians etc., interesting British survivals like that in Lincolnshire or in the pedigrees of  Wessex and Mercia don't get considered.

Of course the biggest omission, although completely expected, is the sparsity of references to East Central Wales.  I wonder if those whose cynefin encompasses Gwynedd or Powys or Gwent or Deheubarth  have any idea of how deprived the patriotic Radnorian is of any historical treatment of their gwlad.  Book after book is published with barely a word.

It's not as if East Central Wales wasn't an important strategic region, geographical imperatives rarely change as anyone following the fighting in the Donbas will know.  There's a reason why Llywelyn's last campaign was along the banks of the Wye, why Glyndwr's great victory was at Bryn Glas and why Gwerthrynion and Buellt are associated with Vortigern.  A few decades after the period covered by this book men like Madoc ab Idnerth and his sons are amongst the most important battle leaders in Wales - if you read the source material that is, rather than the history books.

Why the lack of coverage?  Well Gwynedd, Powys, Gwent and even Deuheubarth or Dyfed are pretty catchy names.  Whereas East Central Wales has to make do with a treasure-hunt clue of a name - Rhwng Gwy a Hafren.  Not even a very precise clue, it could be referring to Ledbury or Ludlow, and one cantref, Buellt, isn't even twixt Wye and Severn at all.  Well-meaning souls have come-up with other obscure names from ancient documents to describe this fifth part of Wales more succinctly: Cynllibiwg, Fferyllwg, Fferegs.  I can't see any of them catching on.  I doubt if Madoc ab Idnerth and his sons thought in terms of a unified Rhwng Gwy a Hafren at all.  There were the more local names: Maelienydd, Elfael, Gwerthrynion, Buellt, Ceri - to be defended by the descendants of Elystan Glodrydd and through him to Iorwerth Hirflawdd, progenitor of the Iorwerthiawn one of the gwelygorddau of Powys - and perhaps that's a clue, but don't expect anyone to follow it up any time soon.

Reds

This coming weekend the European Parliament would like us all to wear black ribbons, having voted in 2008 to designate the 23rd of August a European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. A vote supported by three of the four Welsh members of that institution: Jonathan Evans, Glenys Kinnock and Eluned Morgan.  This is part and parcel of the Prague Declaration which amongst other things envisages the "adjustment and overhaul of European history textbooks so that children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes..."

I wonder how much progress has been made in overhauling the textbooks used in Welsh schools?  Surely pupils need to be warned about Communists like the half-Radnorian Arthur Horner, Will Paynter and Dai Francis, men who led the Welsh miners in their misguided struggle against our benevolent coal owners.

The work of Welsh writers tainted with Communism like Gwyn Alf Williams, Raymond Williams and Lewis Jones needs to be closely vetted and all those monuments to the Stalinists of the International Brigades should be demolished.  Instead we could perhaps erect a monument of shame to the 15000+ misguided souls in Rhondda East, who came within 900 votes of ousting the Labour candidate in the 1945 election.  Particular attention should also be paid to re-educating Welsh politicians who make occasional glowing references to half-remembered troublemakers like Paul Robeson or Annie Powell.

Enough of the sarcasm.  What we have here is an attempt to enforce a particular and contentious view of 20C history on the younger generation.  While many authors claim 20-40-90 million fell victim to the purges, less sensationally others say that the archives in Moscow suggest that the figure was less than 2 million.  Still shocking but in the same ball park or even less than the victims of the British Empire and America and its allies - who seemingly don't merit a black ribbon day.

It was once generally accepted that the famine associated with collectivisation was nothing to do with genocide or Great Russian chauvinism, It was even admitted that it made possible the rapid industrialisation which eventually saved Europe from Hitler.  The genocide theory was just a fringe idea cultivated in emigre circles in North America.  Today it's mainstream and academics with opposing ideas are shunned.  And so it goes on, with a re-writing of history regarding the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact and culminating in the Doctors' plot - a genocide which never actually happened, but something of a clincher for those who want to demonstrate the moral equivalence of  Stalinism and Nazism.

I wonder how those proposed revised textbooks will go about explaining to Welsh schoolchildren the Red Army's overwhelming contribution to the defeat of Nazism and how Generalplan Ost, today a footnote in history, was once a blueprint for the elimination of the very nations which are loudest in their condemnation of Communism?  What they must do, of course, is convince the hoi polloi that only Wall Street and the City of London can protect democracy, free speech and a law based society.  Any truck with socialism will inevitably lead to a Stalinist dystopia.

Note1

Funnily enough while Communism is roundly condemned, with laws being passed in some EU countries to jail those who argue that its crimes have been exaggerated, all over Eastern Europe pro-Nazis are being rehabilitated and public monuments erected in their honour.  If you want to learn more see this website for example.

Note2

As the wartime generation kicks the bucket, the history of those times becomes, more and more, the preserve of the public-school-academics, right-wing nationalists and American neo-conservative and neo-liberal warmongers.  Those with an opposing viewpoint are hardly likely to be invited to make documentaries for BBC2 - certainly not the likes of one Grover Furr, who holds that the Old Bolsheviks were guilty as charged and that Khrushchev's 1956 speech attacking Stalin was a tissue of lies. His website is here for anyone interest in such controversial viewpoints.

Unpeople

I can sympathise with those who say I should stick to my usual Radnorian related material and not bother with Ukraine, I feel the same way myself a lot of the time.  If our mass media, in particular the BBC, were actually reporting the facts on the ground then I could happily ignore this bloody war at the other end of Europe.  People would have the facts to make-up their own mind about the company our government keeps. Instead we are being fed a load of tripe.  In Lugansk there seems, at the moment, to be just one Western freelancer.  In Donetsk you have a handful of Western photographers and a young Asian backpacker/blogger.  The BBC are too busy rehashing fanciful Kiev press releases or chasing after humanitarian convoys inside Russia to ever venture anywhere near the killing fields.

What is not reported are the civilian deaths, the SS-21 missiles being launched at cities, the 700,000 who have fled across the border into Russia - the largest ethnic-cleansing in Europe since the Second World War.  In particular many folk in the West are unaware of the enormous losses suffered by the largely conscript and barely trained Ukrainian army.  At least 11000 killed so far.  Like the civilians, mainly from working class districts, slaughtered by their hopeless shelling, these press-ganged Ukrainians are unpeople as far as the western media is concerned.

Their wives, mothers and surviving comrades are not unpeople however and in this subtitled youtube video you get a sense of the anger welling-up against the oligarchs who sold-out their country in the interests of American and European meddlers.  Facing such losses, a winter approaching without heating and an economy already in ruins, even before the IMF get to work, maybe the Ukrainian soldiers will follow George Bernard Shaw's advice to the British soldiery of a century ago - shoot your officers and go home.

Please turn-on the subtitles

Arabella

So Powys County Councillor Myfanwy Alexander has caused a stink by using the N word in a cabinet debate.  As expected in these politically-correct times retribution was swift.  Ms Alexander will be sent on an equalities training course and has already apologised for her use of the word - why does this all remind me of Maoist China?  She has also been referred to the unelected Public Service Ombudsman for Wales, which will doubtless lead to more abject apologies and severe reprimands in due course.

Ms Alexander used the unfortunate term during a discussion on the cross-border health arrangements which see many Powys residents treated in English hospitals.  The councillor complained that she and other patients were being mocked for having Welsh forenames.  Some Shropshire based public-servant had told Myfanwy that her name was just "a meaningless jumble of letters."  Furthermore when she had asked if a Welsh-speaking nurse could speak to her father she had been told "that's fine as long as you don't mind your father being considered a racist."

Ms Alexander rightly complained that an Indian patient would not be mocked for having an unfamiliar name.  I'm reminded of a recent BBC "comedy" where a Welsh teacher was humiliated by having his pupils make sheep noises.  Everyone in the show thought this very droll and I was left wondering what the reaction would have been had an African teacher - to use another degrading stereotype - been greeted by monkey sounds.  The councillor viewed such double standards as Welsh people "being treated like n*****s over the border."  What she clearly meant was that Welsh people are now the only minority who can be treated in such a disrespectful way by polite society.  Of course the councillor's substantive complaints are ignored in the hullabaloo and she has become the villain of the piece for transgressing a taboo.

It seems to me that these taboos have become a way for the neo-liberal elite to avoid any suggestion that they are exploiters.  They may not pay their fair share of taxes, they may be economically and socially corrupt but at least they never break politically-correct codes of behaviour.  Why should they, none of them damage the financial bottom line.

So where do we go from here?  A hundred years ago our Radnorshire village had a rather good mixed choir and I've inherited a couple of examples of sheet music from their repertoire.  One piece is an English-language version of Myfanwy by Thomas Walter Price entitled Arabella - some even claim that Price's lyrics predate the Welsh version?  Perhaps Ms Alexander should consider adopting this forename.  It should have sufficient vowels to satisfy even the dimmest English public servant.

Meet the Readers

Minding my own business in Builth High Street , a reader sidles up and tells me the blog has got too political, too much Wcrain.

"You need more Radnorshire stuff" I'm advised. 

"What do you suggest?"

"How about the Radnorshire Cobdens?"

The friendly critic soon filled-me-in on the exploits of one Frank Cobden in the 1870 Varsity cricket match.  Oxford needed three runs to win with three wickets in hand when Cobden stepped-up and took his famous hat-trick.  If it happened today you'd suspect the involvement of far-eastern bookmakers.  Instead they  called it Cobden's match and although he was an Englishman there was said to be some Radnorshire connection along the way.

Cobden turned up in Knighton at the end of the 1870s. Heir to a small fortune and with a much older wife he rented The Cottage and took an interest in the market town's sporting activities, football and cricket.  An early initiative was to restart the county cricket side, something that came to pass in 1884 - partial records of the team which flourished until 1889, when Cobden moved away, can be found here.

Playing its games at Bryn-y-Castell in Knighton - the town organised an annual August Cricket week  - this reformed Radnorshire side was clearly dominated by a county elite educated in the virtues of the English public school.  The Evelyn brothers of Kinsham Court, one an Oxford cricket blue, another a Welsh soccer international, were prominent in the batting line-up.  We also find a host of Green-Prices from Norton Manor and the inevitable Cobden dominating the bowling.

With Cobden's departure from Radnorshire the county side folded.  The cricketer moved to Capel Curig, where he is remembered in the name of the Cobden Hotel, formerly Tan-y-Bwlch.  There's a photograph of him here.

Frank Carroll Cobden 1849-1932

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