A Half-Opened Door

It’s said that if a publisher wants to guarantee good sales for a Welsh historical book they’ll include the name Owain Glyndwr in the title.  Maybe this is why one or two decidedly eccentric publications have seen the light of day; an accusation that certainly can’t be levelled at Lolfa’s latest effort Dyddiau Olaf Owain Glyndwr.

This is an investigation of the various stories surrounding the death and burial of our National Hero from the pen of Professor Gruffydd Aled Williams.  As befit’s the author’s academic background it is a work that comes complete with footnotes and an extensive bibliography.  At the same time the prose is clear and readable, for which anyone with as shaky second language skills as myself will be grateful.

The author examines the various stories associated with the death and burial of Owain in Herefordshire.  A new candidate being Kimbolton or Capel Kimbell.  Unlike some of the candidates south of the Wye this was in a thoroughly English-speaking district and might be thought an unsuitable location for a Welsh rebel on the run.  But then who would have thought that Bin Laden would turn up in Abbottabad rather than the caves of Tora Bora?

It says something that this is the first book I’ve read about Glyndwr which makes as much of his Radnorshire based (and base) daughter Gwenllian - she lived in the parish of St Harmon - as it does of her half-sisters married into the Herefordshire families, the Mortimers, Crofts, Monningtons and Scudamores.  Unlike them Gwenllian left no castle or fine house or any privileged descendants, yet for the bards of the 15C she and her family were of far greater importance: a source of patronage, a centre of resistance and a house of learning.

Gwenllian’s husband Philip ap Rhys was a nephew of Rhydderch ab Ieuan Llwyd - owner of one of the treasures of world literature, the White Book of Rhydderch.  Philip was also a first-cousin of such leading supporters of the rebellion such as Rhys Ddu and Rhys ap Gruffudd ap Llywelyn Foethus.  Like them he was also a kinsman of the great Rhys Gethin himself.  There is some evidence to suggest that Philip continued to fight on after the collapse of the main rebellion, certainly it was to him that Owain’s youngest son Siancyn y Glyn turned for a sword.

The author believes that Gwenllian and Philip have the strongest Welsh claim to have protected Owain in his old age, with nearby Cwm Hir as a possible burial site.  Mr Williams also turns to the prophetic literature of the 15C to show how the myth of Owain’s return was linked to the cantref of Maelienydd, his possible burial site.  On one aspect of this excursion into vaticination we can help the author to make a better case than he does in the book.  Mr Williams quotes Lewis Glyn Cothi’s prophetic poem to Dafydd Goch ap Maredudd, who he describes as being from Presteigne, which the author believes to be part of the commote of Llwythyfnwg and hence linked to Maelienydd:

Fo gyfyd i’r byd o’r bedd
Cnawd Owain cyn y diwedd.

(The flesh of Owain will rise up from the grave into the world before the day of judgement.)

In reality Dafydd Goch was only briefly Lord of Stapleton Castle in the Lordship of Lugharness rather than nearby Presteigne.  It’s doubtful if Presteigne itself was in Llwythyfnwg which in any case was connected with the cantref of Elfael rather than Maelienydd.

Dafydd Goch’s links with Maelienydd were far stronger than this attempt to link him with the cantref. His home, apart from the brief sojourn at Stapleton in the aftermath of the battle of Mortimer’s Criss, was in the parish of Llanbadarn Fawr in the heart of the cantref, hardly a mile from another location famed in the prophetic poetry, the red ford on the Ieithon.

Of course there is hardly a place in Wales without some legend connecting the locality with Owain Glyndwr.  In this sense the authors of the prophetic poetry were correct in saying that he did not die.  Attempts to tie Owain down to a single burial place deprive him of his last unassailable power, the power of myth. For the early 20C poet A G Prys-Jones the hero’s resting place was on Radnor Forest.  It’s as good a location as any:

And here men say he vanished in the dawn
Leaving no sign save a half-opened door,
His baldric and his naked sword forlorn
In some lone shepherd’s hut below the moor.
And so he passed, but Radnor Forest still
Hides in her wind swept acres, secret lore
Of him whose heart beat one with moor and ghyll,
The hero-heart of Wales that beats no more.

Funny Joanna from Poland

Back in the late 1950s gentlemen in our Radnorshire village would retire to a private lounge in the local pub to watch one of the first television sets in the district, its aerial directed towards, I believe, far-off Wenvoe.  A favourite programme was Grandstand, which in the very early 60s would transmit Fight of the Week supplied by America’s NBC channel.  Here Radnorians came face to face with the likes of Hurricane Carter and Davey Moore - both later subjects of Bob Dylan songs - and numerous other black fighters of varying degrees of formidableness.

The viewers would also talk of how in their younger days they’d set up a boxing ring in the village’s old mill.  Did Rocky Marciano - allegedly stationed with the American troops on Penybont common - really spar with Glyn Evans?  Another favourite story was how a sparring partner of the well-known Merthyr boxer Cuthbert Taylor had once visited, only to have his face cut to ribbons by the cracked-leather blood-caked gloves of his opponent.  Perhaps this would have been around the time in April 1937 when Taylor headlined a boxing card at Llandrindod’s Grand Pavilion.

Every now and again I would sneak into this all-male club room, my uncle being the pub’s landlord, to devour the various reading matter available; not just Parade but especially the US fight magazines Boxing Illustrated and Ring.  These provided one with a social, historical and geographical education not available in the local schools.

Ring magazine, especially, was a revelation.  The publisher stroke editor Nat Fleischer was a legendary journalist who had seen every great fighter since before the war - the First World War.  When he compared the likes of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis and Cassius Clay, he’d actually seen them fight in the flesh. Ring was a magazine that covered the past as much as the present, so old Welsh fighters were often featured.  Fleischer produced an annual list of the greatest ever boxers in the eight traditional weight categories - none of this junior or super nonsense.  High in these lists were the famous Welsh pugilists of the early 20C: Jimmy Wilde at flyweight, Freddie Welsh at lightweight and Jem - it was never Jim - Driscoll at featherweight.  It all added to my sense of patriotism; so that within a few years Ring, Boxing News and Welsh Nation were finding their way through my letterbox along with (another obsession) Motor Sport and Motoring News.  

Working in London in the early 70s I discovered that television gave no sense of the explosive power of a live fight.  The boxers often came across as witty, intelligent and decent, which was more than could be said for some in the crowd or the press seats.  Gradually I took less and less of an interest in the fight game, even feeling somewhat repulsed by the lack of respect for its practioners on the part of the gate.

Nowadays even the women fight, with Nicola Adams proving one of the more interesting characters to emerge from the last Olympic Games.  Women’s professional boxing is largely moribund with the real interest being focused on the cage-fighting practioners of mixed martial arts.  A November card in Melbourne headlined by two female title bouts is expected to draw a crowd of 70000, with millions tuning-in worldwide on pay-per-view.

Should women even fight? Well if that’s what they want, who is to stop them.  If women’s fighting is a brutal spectacle so too is that involving the men; redeemed to an extent by the heart exhibited by both sexes.  All you can hope for is that the new business is governed by rules that offer some protection to the fighters.  This seems to be the case, although there should be more female weight categories to prevent the dangers of ridiculous weight loss.  This aside I would be more worried about rugby than cage fighting.

In the old days boxers often ended-up punch drunk.  Cuthbert Taylor’s online record shows he competed in at least 250 professional contests.  In the six months leading up to his Llandrindod bout he fought 9 times, losing on 6 occasions.  Nowadays it is the professional rugby player who receives far too many hits to the head.  We are already seeing the results of the long-term damage received in a professional sport which needs some serious rule changes in order to limit the number of head-on tackles that players are expected to make week in week out - 13-a-side might help.

One of the champions involved in the Melbourne card is the Pole Joanna Jedrzejczyk whose outstanding skills and infectious bravado remind me of the young Ali.  Another is a former Olympic judo medallist Ronda Rousey and here is a problem that the MMA world will have to solve.  If the undefeated Rousey can grapple her opponents to the floor she will apply an armbar and win the contest by submission.  The fighter best equipped to defeat Rousey will likely be a fellow judoka and how many people would actually pay to watch a judo bout?

A Tale of Two Days

It seems that yesterday was Battle of Britain Day, an occasion to celebrate the Few - that happy crew of public school boys, Tories to a man - who saved Britain from Hitler's tyranny.  The new Labour leader, it's widely reported, committed sacrilege by attending the cathedral service in a scruffy shirt collar and by failing to sing God Save the Queen, sacrilege in cathedrals only being permissible if carried out in Moscow by feminist punks attacking Putin.

I suppose I should be more supportive of Battle of Britain Day since the 15th of September 1940 would have found my late mother, a few days past her 20th birthday and already a one year veteran in the WAAF.  Faced, as a regular, with signing on for a further seven years, she left the airforce in 1942 to work in a factory at Cox's Corner near Watford.  Who is to say which service was the more valuable, the mythologised Few - the majority of whom were not public schoolboys by the way - or the Many, including the millions of factory workers who actually won the war.  As one expert claims, more people were killed building Spitfires than flying them, although the uniforms were certainly much smarter in the WAAF.

What started out as Civil Defence Day in 1942 was soon hijacked by the RAF and the Beaverbrook press and abandoned in favour of a day that celebrated the elitist Few rather than the proletarian Many:

Which brings us to Owain Glyndwr Day, again not an occasion that is going to get me pumped up with national pride, it being increasingly doubtful if the Welsh will ever get to celebrate a success rather than a glorious failure.  Perhaps it would be useful though to mention some Radnorshire connections with the great prince.

Foremost among them was the battle of Bryn Glas when the men of Maelienydd switched sides to win a  victory for the Welsh.  Our last?

Less well known is the fact that Owain's daughter Gwenllian was the wife of Philip ap Rhys of Cenarth, St Harmon.   The couple were the subject of many praise poems by the likes of Lewis Glyn Cothi (some of his finest), Llawdden and one by Ieuan Gyfannedd, which Ffransis Payne considered the best of those composed to the family.

I think it's beyond argument that, Owain's general, Rhys Gethin was from Buellt - a cantref that fits a lot better with those of Radnorshire than half-French Brycheiniog - but less accepted is the claim that his kinsman Philip ap Rhys of Cenarth continued the fight after Owain's son Maredudd called it a day and begged forgiveness from the English king.  This reminds me that I should attempt a translation of Llawdden's poem to Philip requesting a sword on behalf of Siancyn y Glyn, another of Owain's sons.

Just the Ticket

I thought that the Celts had been abolished by order of the archaeologists and geneticists, but seemingly not, since next week sees the opening of a great exhibition at the British Museum, see here.

The exhibition promises to dwell not only on the iron age past but also to cover the Celts up to the present day.  I wonder if it will be as bold as to reference the claims to Celtic kinship by pro-Confederacy supporters in the US and the use of Celtic crosses by Neo-Nazis in Eastern Europe? Was I wrong to think that the Slavonic interest in Irish music was purely innocent?

I'm also wondering if the exhibition will make as much use of the Welsh language as a similar exhibition in Austria in 1980? There the exhibition catalogue had a Welsh foreword and even the ticket had some Cymraeg, yes really.

A Radnorshire Pageant

I've seen pictures of the Builth Pageant before and not taken much notice of this Edwardian extravaganza (1909) performed by a cast of 1000.  An album covering the event is available online, see here, and it seems I was wrong to dismiss the event as an example of Breconian eccentricity.  Actually it seems to have been more of a Radnorshire effort, performed at Llanelwedd Hall with the local vicar as pageant director and the Reverend and Mrs J L Herbert of Diserth receiving second billing in the pageant programme.  It says something that when I was a young lad Jimmy Herbert was still spoken of with fondness by the older residents of Howey village.

It seems that pageants were all the rage in the 1900s, there's even a website covering their history and a recent article on the four nations history site outlines Welsh and Scottish variations on the theme.

The Builth pageant tells us little we didn't already know about Edwardian views of Welsh history - Ancient Britons in animal skins, Romans, Normans etc etc.  There were certainly plenty of Welsh references and songs - Druids, Saint Cewydd, Lord and Lady Llechryd (an interesting recognition of a barely recognized local  historical site - perhaps it was included since it was said to be the original home of the local Vaughan clans and the Chairman of the Finance Committee was a Vaughan)

Like old copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica Welsh history seems to have ended in 1282 but the real ommision were the common folk, just a couple of labourers in agricultural smocks who naturally ended up in the stocks. 

One highlight was a recreation of the old Diserth feast with dancing, a Mari Llwyd and Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.  No wonder Jimmy Herbert was still remembered fondly in the parish some sixty years later and, of course, we were hardly past the era when the Society for the Suppression of Parish Feasts and Wakes rooted out such human excesses.

A World Apart

I recently watched the excellent 1988 film A World Apart, the directing debut of Radnorshire based cinematographer Chris Menges.  The film covers a few months in the life of a character, based on the South African Communist Ruth First, as seen through the eyes of her 12 year old daughter played by Jodhi May.  As I say a fine film and readily available to view from the usual sites.

Could such a film be made today, given the total victory of neoliberalism and its neoconservative twin in the mainstream Western media?  I remember how shocked some commentators were at the sight of communist flags at Mandela's funeral - the younger ones being perhaps unaware of the West's support for the most reactionary regimes in South Africa and Latin America in the late 20C.  A time when, for all its internal sclerosis, the Soviet world did support progressive forces from Chile to Afghanistan.

The fall of the Soviet Union now means that we are expected to regard heroes like Ruth First as no better, or even worse, than Nazis.  The most ridiculous Cold War propaganda, which would have been laughed at in the 1980s, is nowadays treated as fact by readers who have been exposed to nothing else; opposing viewpoints going unanswered and exiled to the obscurer corners of the net.

Nuclear Option

I'm currently reading the book Treachery by the indefatigable journalist and ancient - it was written in his 90s - cold war warrior Chapman Pincher.  One thing which is clear from the book is the author's grudging admiration for the Soviet agent code named Sonia, who he describes as the most successful female agent in the history of espionage.

One of Sonia's greatest known achievements was to obtain and transmit to Moscow the above top secret Quebec Agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt in 1943.  The agreement pooled UK and US research efforts into producing a nuclear bomb, described euphemistically as Tube Alloys, and laid down the following conditions for its use:

First, that we will never use this agency against each other.

Secondly, that we will not use it against third parties without each others consent.

Thirdly, that we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.

Now when we read that the United States is the only country to have used a nuclear bomb we should remember that second clause.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki could only have been destroyed with British consent and I suppose that means the consent of Britain's Labour government.

The United States should not stand in the dock/ receive the plaudits* alone, it was a joint venture of the two great Anglo-Saxon regimes, never mind who flew the planes.

* delete as appropriate - my own view is that the bombing was more about thwarting the Soviets after their stunning victories in Manchuria rather than about saving allied lives, and that the Japanese surrender was motivated by that defeat more than anything else.

Matters Arising

I was expecting more online interest in Simon Brooks' new book Pam Na Fu Cymru; perhaps there was some confusion as to whether the book should be treated as an academic essay or a political polemic, or perhaps like me some readers just struggled with the vocabulary.

Mr Brooks poses the question why isn't Wales a Welsh speaking country and why isn't it independent.  Looking back to 1850 he points out that we were then in a stronger position, linguistically and culturally, than some present day independent European states, especially those in Central and Eastern Europe.  The failure to develop a successful national movement is laid at the door of 19C Welsh liberalism and the subsequent 20C radical movements in particular the Labour Party - a radicalism that puts wider interests ahead of those of its own community.  I suppose you could say that Wales is a conservative country whose intelligentsia pretend to be radical and that pretence holds us back.

I don't disagree with this analysis, indeed it was true of the Civil War and the earlier stripping of the altars.  The English are the radical iconoclasts and the Welsh are the conservative traditionalists and the failure to recognize this fact accounts for the present day failure of our national movement to make an impact.

I'm not going to comment directly about the book but rather note down some points that crossed my mind, especially regarding Radnorshire, which arose from an initial reading.

Borderlands

There's a trend in modern history which sees the study of the borderland or periphery as being particularly useful in understanding processes affecting the heartland, I was reminded of this frequently while reading SB's book.  Radnorshire history receives little attention and yet it surely has something to offer in understanding the broader picture.

SB points out that in 1850 Welsh was the language of some 90% of the people, with English monoglotism found mainly in the long established "Englishries" of Gower and South Pembrokeshire; the more recent advance of Welsh into the Vale of Glamorgan being a reminder that language shift doesn't have to be all one way.   In Radnorshire however the language was already in retreat.  In 1827 a report discusing the dialect of the Llandrindod district stated that the language had retreated 20 miles in living memory, this ties in with reports that in New Radnor there was nothing but Welsh in 1742 or that in 1744 there was little English between Bleddfa and Llanfihangel Rhydieithon.

Here's Jonathan Williams writing in the early 19C to explain the process of language shift in Bugeildy, a border parish on the river Teme - the 17th longest river in the UK which flows 81 miles into the heart of England to join the Severn below Worcester:

"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." 

This statement suggests two important facts, firstly that bilingualism and subsequently language shift are made possible by everyday contact with the English language.  This was possible in eastern Radnorshire in a way that was impossible for the common folk in counties further west.  Language shift was not then a matter of national sentiment but of opportunity.  Secondly the adoption of English was seen as a legal necessity.  Obviously this had been the case for the gentry class but why lower down the social scale? The support for Welsh that Mr Brooks notes amongst conservative landed circles surely had much to do with the language being seen as a barrier to the hoi polloi getting above themselves.  Yet in Radnorshire there was a tradition of the generality using the law, as here for example.  I put this down to a not unsizeable class of small landowners, descendants perhaps of the querulous manwyr noted in the 16C bardic poetry.

Physical Force

Another stick to beat 19C Radnorians, especially those in the west of the county was it's physical force tradition, exemplified by the open flouting of the fishery laws - here's an example - but also participation in the Toll gate riots, resistance to squatter evictions and action against landlords and shopkeepers, especially those newcomers who stepped on people's toes.  Even Ireland took note of the Radnorian example. It's interesting that these actions occurred in districts where language shift was proceeding apace with bilingualism allowing young couples to abandon the teaching Welsh to their children.  The more monoglot districts on the Irfon, by contrast, were far more peaceful.

Radnorshire was often slandered by Welsh non-conformity for its immorality and English tongue, so there is some satisfaction in SB's unmasking of this class as the sell-outs they appear to have been.

The relative success of UKIP in seats like Merthyr, Blaenau Gwent etc has revived something a prejudice against the inhabitants of what was once known as the  Black Domain.  The rural traditions of violent community action transplanted to the area in the form of the Scotch Cattle, the anti-Irish riots of the 19C and the Tredegar riots of the early 20C are condemned as, perhaps, proto-fascist in nature, harbingers of the 21C UKIP vote - oh well it's a theory.

Looking back to the 1960s you sometimes wonder if Cayo Evans was responsible for more advances than Gwynfor?  Certainly the threat of MAC - whose activists seem to have often been English speakers from the South East - must have been partly responsible for the abandonment of Labour's plan to build a new town of 60000 souls in Mid Wales.

So here we have another long-standing contradiction, a "radical" national intelligensia who wouldn't say boo to a goose - does no-one in Cardiff currently own a spade for example -  and who seek the approval of their betters across the border, contrasting with a more rough and ready tradition of essentially conservative reaction to unwelcome and unasked for change.

Landespatriotismus

Now here's a term I'd never heard before, seemingly the first stage in building a national movement.  Radnorshire had its fair share of such folk: William Probert of Painscastle - a translator of the Gododdin and Edward "Celtic" Davies* of Llanfaredd come to mind as does Ffransis Paine in more recent times.

I've never been a member of the Radnorshire Society but how its membership must have had their Anglo prejudices shaken in the years before and after the Second War by the articles of Mr Cole, detailing local wills with their numerous APs and VCHs.

Iorwerth Peate decribed Radnorshire as ""a deracine society, a people fallen between two stools, a community of half-things."  Perhaps that has been a common prejudice amongst Welsh speaking intellectuals, who have sometimes given the impression that this great chunk of  Central Wales should be handed over to the West Midlands.

Radnorshire's Welsh history has largely been recovered by Radnorians themselves, which is as it should be.  Does Wales consist of two indigenous communities - the English speaking Welsh and the bilingual Welsh?  Perhaps it does, although I like to think that it is one community, although at different stages of a single historical process.  If only that bilingual community were a little more aggressively Cymraeg in its outlook.

* It's interesting that the Dictionary of Welsh Biography says that Celtic Davies had an imperfect knowledge of Welsh, yet he grew-up on a farm just five miles from, and a generation before, the childhood home of  Carnhuanawc, although  on the opposite side of the Wye.

Hillbilly Nationalists*

"Simpering, self-serving, holier-than-thou bullshit" so says the heading of a sidebar on Jac's blog.  A pretty controversial statement in a Wales that seems to have more than its fair share of simpering, self-servers.

It was a very clever move for the elite to take over the original rainbow coalition idea in order to isolate those who might actually pose a threat to their hegemony - like poor southern whites for example.  Obama is OK because he's black, Hillary Clinton will make a fine president because she's a woman and in 2020 we'll probably be due a gay president and anyone who opposes will be branded a homophobe.  Let's forget about their actual policies, identification with a right-on minority is all that matters - they may be warmongers, neo-liberal thieves, perverters of the constitution and servants of the 1%, but, hey, they're the new radicals.

This confederate flag business seems to fit right-in, you can tweet your outrage and tick-a-box.  You might think you're a rebel but really you're a pussy, you salivate when someone rings the bell.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a young woman shinning-up a flagpole to pull down a version of St Andrew's cross, but not as an attack on the flag itself but rather as a stunt to embarrass those who use it to divide ordinary folks.

It wasn't always like this.

Here's a snap from Chicago in the late 1960s featuring a Black Panther and an activist of the Young Patriots Organisation, a group of white working class youth of mainly Appalachian origin who allied themselves to the Panthers and to the Puerto Rican Young Lords.  You'll note that the Young Patriots used the Confederate flag as their symbol and this caused no friction between them and the Panthers.  Of course the Panthers were a real threat to the interests of the ruling-class, which is why so many of them ended-up on a mortuary slab.

Together these Chicago groups opposed Mayor Daley's corrupt political machine, they failed, indeed the Daley machine's most recent graduate now occupy's the Oval Office.

*Hillbilly Nationalists @amazon.com

Party Poopers

The 150th anniversary of the Welsh settlement of Patagonia is not, we are told, an occasion for celebration.  Indeed it something to be regretted, an example of Welsh colonialism.

I agree that the Patagonian enterprise deserves serious historical attention -  rather than sentimentalism -  as does Welsh participation in the British Empire.  For example this Radnorian well wisher of the Welsh language was able to pursue his philanthropic endeavours because of a fortune earned in India and the Windward Islands.

The Welsh Colony does not fit well with the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine, rather it should be seen as part of the 10000 year old process whereby farmers occupy land previously the preserve of hunter/gatherer societies.  Herzl may have considered Patagonia a suitable location for a Jewish state, but as he wasn't born until 1860 it was hardly contemporaneous with the Welsh project.  Indeed the remarkable thing about YWladfa was its early date and its absolute remoteness from any other settlement.

Revisionists dismiss the good relations between the Tehuelche and the Welsh but present little evidence to the contrary.  One author cannot believe that only three settlers were killed by natives, he cannot believe it so it can't be true.  Others claim that because of the similarity to familiar tales of "good injuns" then it must be another such tale.  Yet another author will report the views of present-day Mapuche speakers without reference to their history.

At the time of the establishment of the Welsh colony the Chubut river was something of a border between the nomadic northern Tehuelche who had recently adopted the language of the more technologically advanced Mapuche.  The southern Tehuelche still spoke their own Aonikenk tongue, a language which is now virtually extinct.  It's worth reading about the Mapuche who were certainly not the helpless natives of the contemporary imagination. If Calfucura, the Napoleon of the Pampas, had not been operating hundreds of miles to the north then Y Wladfa would not have survived for long.

Of course the friendly relationship between early settlers and original inhabitants does not usually long survive population influx and a thirst for land.  The Welsh in Patagonia, as a de facto independent state power, lasted only a decade or so before Argentina asserted its rule over the colony.  From that time on the Welsh in Patagonia, like the Welsh in North America and Australia, were just one immigrant community among many.  Unlike them the Patagonians are of great significance to contemporary Wales, a proof that - even at the height of its power - some at least were able to resist Britishness.  Little wonder that others might seek to undermine their naive but heroic adventure.

On July 27th the president of Argentina along with other state dignitaries will be in the Chubut province to celebrate the arrival of the Mimosa in Patagonia.  Ms Kirchner will be representing a state that is mainly comprised of the descendants of European immigrants, although with a substantial admixture of native American genes.  Should she apologise for the existence of her state and its people because it offends the recently acquired sensibilities of US and European intellectuals? 

The question radical Wales - if it ever existed - needs to answer is not to apologise for the past but to decide where it stands on the great questions of today. Even something as banal as the recent Fifa vote illustrates the battlelines being drawn up in the modern world.  On one side we have the anglosphere (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) together with their European Union and Pacific Rim allies; on the other the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) together with most of South America, Africa and much of Asia

The self-styled "international community" sees these opponents of their unipolar worldview as essentially murderous and corrupt, savages who need to be colonised by Western values.  The West itself is obviously a white hat committed to freedom, democracy and the virtues of neo-liberalism.  Conveniently the millions of victims of the West have been flushed down the memory hole.  There's little evidence of radical Wales being willing to question these "western values."

Localism, the Left, UKIP and B&R

Localism

The new localist parties didn't have much of an election, for example Yorkshire First, a party which was able to field some well-qualified candidates, only managed to top a thousand votes in just one constituency.  This was predictable given the tight nature of the campaign and the lack of coverage for these regional parties in the mainstream media.  

The county council route would seem to be the way ahead for the new parties, the Lincolnshire Independents, for example, winning 8 seats and 10.3% of the vote last Thursday.  Most successful of all was the Herefordshire party It's Our County who ignored the general election and fought 41 of the 53 Hereford seats, winning 12.  They ended up as the second largest party gathering close to 25000 votes.

Next year's Assembly election would seem tailor-made for a localist party to undermine both Labour and UKIP on the South Wales regional lists.

The Left

There was a time when the Left wanted to win power for the working class.  Nowadays as far as the mainstream left-wing parties are concerned, and I include Plaid Cymru in this, its more like charity for the poor.  A handful of far-left parties still battle on and around half the voters in Wales had an opportunity to support them.  The Scargillite Socialist Labour Party's best performance was 697 votes in Torfaen while the late Bob Crow's TUSC fought 12 seats and averaged a measly 148 votes per lost deposit.  Trade Union, Socialist you'd think it would ring a bell with voters in a country whose intellectuals claim it to be inherently radical?  Finally what about the successor to the old CPGB, it even has the backing of a daily newspaper, well  Rob Griffiths gained just 186 votes in Merthyr Tydfil.

UKIP

Paul Mason hit the nail on the head in his Channel 4 blog  where he acknowledged that working class voters in Wales and the English north are unconvinced by the benefits of the free movement of labour.  I'd throw in globalisation and global warming. 

While tweeters generally blamed elderly English incomers for the UKIP vote or said they were ashamed to be Welsh, few seemed to bother with the facts - not many retired blimps in Blaenau Gwent (17.9% UKIP vote), or Merthyr (18.7%) or Caerphilly (19.3%) or Islwyn (19.6%).  These voters weren't racists they were more likely to be concerned with the economic realities affecting their lives.  Even here in rural Radnorshire we've seen low-paid factory jobs move to Eastern Europe, local care work wages depressed by a ready supply of immigrant labour and middle-class home after middle-class home sporting solar panels.  Panels which advertise to the poor that although you can't afford to install them yourself, you're still going to have to pay-out to subsidise the energy bills of those who can.

Who were these disaffected voters going to vote for?  Plaid Cymru, which continually boasts its pro-EU, pro-free movement, pro-wind farm sentiments?  Now as it happens I can't see UKIP surviving for long, by the next election it will be as forgotten as the Referendum party of 1997. The question is who will step-up to address these working-class concerns and pick-up their votes.  The neo-liberal answer which many in Plaid and Labour support - even if they don't know it - is essentially to get on your bike and find a job in London.

Brecon and Radnor

One tweeter, no doubt annoyed by the Tory victory in B&R, suggested that Powys be sold off to England.  While enjoying this faint echo of the anti-Radnorshire feeling which was once so apparent in Welsh-speaking circles let's look at Plaid's performance in the two counties.

Plaid first stood in Brecon and Radnor in 1964, achieving its highest vote to date in 1966 when the candidate Trefor Morgan, garnered 2410 votes (6.05%).  Morgan was a type which seems to have disappeared from Wales, a successful businessman who, if the rumours are true, wasn't averse to a little direct action.  In those days the Liberals didn't stand in B&R, so the best ever performance was in 1970 when W G Jenkins gained 2349 votes despite the fact that it was a four-cornered fight with Geraint Howells representing the Liberal cause.  

Youthful chwysgi entrepreneur Dafydd Gittins maintained the share of the vote in the two 1974 elections before Jan Power stood in 1979 and saw her vote more than halved.  I continued to vote for the party, without any enthusiasm, well it was the only Welsh based choice, throughout the 80s and 90s, when the vote never touched 2%.

Freddie Greaves managed a respectable 4.4% in this year's tight general election, hopefully he'll hang around to stand again and not end-up in the Tory party like the last Assembly candidate.  Meanwhile a party official complained of folk who criticised while never stuffing an envelope on the party's behalf.  It's certainly a problem for those of us who support an independent Wales while not going along with a good many of the party's policies.  Perhaps we need a national movement rather than a national party?

So the Tories won the seat, as they do on occasions, and, truth to tell, Plaid Cymru were as far away from making a breakthrough as they were in 1964.

And make no mistake, a significant section of working class labour voters are still not convinced on freedom of movement. That – not Euroscepticism – is what is driving the Ukip vote in the north and in Wales. - See more at: http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/labour-failed-win-worse/3671#more-3671

And make no mistake, a significant section of working class labour voters are still not convinced on freedom of movement. That – not Euroscepticism – is what is driving the Ukip vote in the north and in Wales. - See more at: http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/labour-failed-win-worse/3671#more-3671

And make no mistake, a significant section of working class labour voters are still not convinced on freedom of movement. That – not Euroscepticism – is what is driving the Ukip vote in the north and in Wales. - See more at: http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/labour-failed-win-worse/3671#more-3671

American Exceptionalism

It's one of those ironies of history that the phrase "American Exceptionalism" was coined by Joe Stalin.  Similarly the concept's cleverest disciples are the neoconservatives whose intellectual roots can be traced back to the Trotskyite Max Schachtman. For permanent revolution read the endless chaos of America's wars, oh and throw in a little Gramsci - the capturing of newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian for the war party.  With the neocon approved Hillary Clinton - her granny was from Merthyr* - a shoo-in for the Presidency, a $2.5 billion war chest should see to that, the world can look forward to interesting times.

Meanwhile  let's enjoy some real American Exceptionalism:

* The family had actually arrived in the US a few months before mam-gu's birth.

England was on red alert

Having a bit of difficulty finding a picture of Idi Amin, her man in Kampala, meeting Betty Battenburg on one of his state visits to Engerland.  Surely HM hasn't taken advantage of those new European data protection laws to get them flushed down the memory hole?

Anyway will have to make-do with this fine piece of 20th century poetry from the Mighty Sparrow.

Army Tweeters

One thing you're not going to hear very much about during the election campaign is foreign affairs.  After all the main parties are broadly in agreement on membership of NATO and the EU and the necessity for British nuclear weapons.  Even the SNP wants an independent Scotland to be part of NATO and while Trident is said to be a redline would that matter given Tory support for any Miliband government vote on renewal.

Of course foreign affairs do matter and it's not as if we are living in uninteresting times.  The US seeks to destabilise Russia as a first step to destabilising China.  A lesser understood imperative being perhaps to isolate Germany from the Eurasian landmass - see the neo-con George Friedman's recent press conference in Chicago.  Meanwhile the UK takes the lead in dispatching troops to Mykolaiv, a strategic southern Ukrainian city with a large Russian speaking minority.  Who knows how this will end?  At best a frozen conflict, at worst a nuclear war?

Listen to the American journalist Robert Parry discussing the near total journalistic groupthink about Ukraine in the US: 

In the UK things are even worse, with only one or two mainstream journalists not caught up in a black hat/white hat narrative, much of it based on downright lies and distortions.

How naive we are to think that this corruption of journalism doesn't affect us?  Do we really think that the UK will go down before Nicola Sturgeon without putting up a dirty fight?  Already we've had that weird story about a battalion of British soldiers being recruited to fight on the social media front. Politicians who can't be bought or intimidated will be smeared, incidents will occur, ballots will be mislaid, a public that thinks Putin is the new Hitler will swallow something similar about Salmond.

What about Ffred Fflintstone?

The Welsh according to the Financial Times are stone age.  It's hard to disagree until you realise the paper isn't referring to the Assembly or local government or the state of our national media.  Instead it's a response to the latest scientific offering regarding British DNA, albeit research that's a step-up from the Dafydd Iwan is descended from an old Welsh King of England hooey currently entertaining the public on S4C.

Meanwhile according to the Guardian the Oxford University study reveals that "30% of white British DNA has German Ancestry" (No it doesn't, it merely shows that in the dim and distant past many present day Germans and Britons shared common ancestors.) The Daily Mail says something similar about the French while the BBC gleefully trumpets the fact that the "Celts are not a unique genetic group."

Let's take a layman's look at the sample that allowed the researchers to conclude that the UK's population could be divided into 17 distinct groups, while recognizing that genetic variety in Western Europe is both very homogeneous and very recent.   Here's a large scale map.

It looks to me that some of the sampling was designed to prove a point.  The large number of samples in Devon and Cornwall, in Pembrokeshire and in North East Scotland (Picts) for example.  At the same time other interesting possibilities are ignored.  Mid Wales, Carmarthenshire and the South are hardly covered at all, a large area north of London - which stood out in Victorian examinations of negrescence - is empty of samples, as are large areas of Scotland and significant areas of the Welsh border (West Herefordshire and all of Shropshire).

What does the map say about Wales?  Well the North Wales grouping is certainly distinct but how far south does it spread?  This might have told us something about the extent of the Ordovici lands and there are also no samples from Lleyn (possible Gangani).  Blood groups long ago told us something about the differences within Pembrokeshire and no doubt the current study will revive the Little England meme, but is it true?  In reality the S Pembrokeshire cluster doesn't appear to coincide with S Pembrokeshire at all, it spreads north and west.  There is no obvious link with Devon or Flanders, the usual suspects in the populating of the area and I wouldn't be surprised if the two groupings ie North and South Pembrokeshire both predate the Roman never mind the Norman invasion.  If a wider sample had been taken in North Ceredigion, Carmarthen, Glamorgan and Gwent we might have a better understanding of the actual demographic history.

The Welsh border grouping seems heavily weighted to the Forest of Dean while excluding sampling in West Herefordshire and Shropshire. It's a puzzle why the southern (Dobunni?) area should then reappear in Cheshire.  Again Wales has been somewhat short-changed by limited sampling in a survey which has been described as perhaps the richest genetic survey of any country to date.

I'm surprised that anyone is surprised that there is no single Celtic grouping.  The Anglo-Saxon invasion lasted no more than a few decades yet it has left a distinct 10-40% trace - according to the survey - amongst the central and southern English.  The period from the re-populating of Britain following the Ice Age to the Belgae arriving just ahead of the Romans was around 9000 years, for sure there would have been many other population movements during this timespan and subsequently various groupings waiting to be discovered -  a single "Celtic" grouping would be highly unlikely.

A large part of the sampling was carried out in Continental Europe, see map, but again there seem to be some omissions.  Why nothing from Friesland, after all Frisian is the language most closely related to English?  Why no testing in southern Ireland, population movements are not all one way, see the Deisi.  There was also limited testing from much of Denmark.  Still the absence of what the survey calls FRA17 from all three Welsh groupings, and only the Welsh groupings, does indeed seem significant and nails the South Pembrokeshire is Little England meme - the absence of FRA17 and GER3 suggesting that all three observed Welsh groupings were amongst the earliest inhabitants of post-Ice Age Britain.

As far as Wales and the Welsh are concerned there is still much to learn about historical demographic events and this large survey is far from being the last word.

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying.

Morrissey is playing Cardiff on the 18th of this month but never mind that, one of the support acts is supposedly Buffy Sainte Marie - well if Bob Dylan can release an album of Sinatra covers then I guess Buffy can support Morrissey.   She's 74 now but here she is nearly half a century ago with her memorable curse against the exceptional, indispensable, inexcusable nation.  The Kinzua mud she mentions is a reference to a reservoir in Pennsylvania which saw the Seneca people dispossessed from lands granted to them by another broken treaty.  It was built during the period 1960-65.

Now that your big eyes have finally opened
Now that you're wondering how must they feel
Meaning them that you've chased across America's movie screens
Now that you're wondering "how can it be real?"
That the ones you've called colourful, noble and proud
In your school propaganda
They starve in their splendor?
You've asked for my comment I simply will render

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying.

Now that the longhouses breed superstition
You force us to send our toddlers away
To your schools where they're taught to despise their traditions.
Forbid them their languages, then further say
That American history really began
When Columbus set sail out of Europe, and stress
That the nation of leeches that conquered this land
Are the biggest and bravest and boldest and best.
And yet where in your history books is the tale
Of the genocide basic to this country's birth,
Of the preachers who lied, how the Bill of Rights failed,
How a nation of patriots returned to their earth?
And where will it tell of the Liberty Bell
As it rang with a thud
Over Kinzua mud
And of brave Uncle Sam in Alaska this year?

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Hear how the bargain was made for the West:
With her shivering children in zero degrees,
Blankets for your land, so the treaties attest,
Oh well, blankets for land is a bargain indeed,
And the blankets were those Uncle Sam had collected
From smallpox-diseased dying soldiers that day.
And the tribes were wiped out and the history books censored,
A hundred years of your statesmen have felt it's better this way.
And yet a few of the conquered have somehow survived,
Their blood runs the redder though genes have been paled.
From the Grand Canyon's caverns to craven sad hills
The wounded, the losers, the robbed sing their tale.
From Los Angeles County to upstate New York
The white nation fattens while others grow lean;
Ah the tricked and evicted they know what I mean.

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying.

The past it just crumbled, the future just threatens;
Our life blood shut up in your chemical tanks.
And now here you come, bill of sale in your hands
And surprise in your eyes that we're lacking in thanks
For the blessings of civilization you've brought us,
The lessons you've taught us, the ruin you've wrought us
Oh see what our trust in America's bought us.

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying.

Now that the pride of the sires receives charity,
Now that we're harmless and safe behind laws,
Now that my life's to be known as your heritage,
Now that even the graves have been robbed,
Now that our own chosen way is a novelty
Hands on our hearts we salute you your victory,
Choke on your blue white and scarlet hypocrisy
Pitying the blindness for you've never seen
That the eagles of war whose wings lent you glory
They were never no more than carrion crows,
Pushed the wrens from their nest, stole their eggs, changed their story;
The mockingbird sings it, it's all that she knows.
"Ah what can I do?" say a powerless few
With a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye
Can't you see that their poverty's profiting you.

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Abbey Cwmhir History, Homes and People

According to the 2011 census the community of Abbeycwmhir consists of 96 households with a total population of 235.  Of these, 48 individuals regard themselves as English-only, 109 chose a Welsh-only identity, 15 claimed to be both Welsh and British and 59 British-only.  126 inhabitants were born in Wales and 101 in England.  Of the working population 39% were still engaged in agriculture while around 13% claimed to  have some knowledge of Welsh.

Given these figures it comes as something of a surprise to discover that these 96 households have managed to produce a 320 page book, size 9¾" x 7½" illustrated throughout and mainly in colour.  If Cwmhir can do it, so can any community in Wales.

The first half of the book is largely historical, with the second half given over to pieces submitted by the inhabitants of the households themselves - autobiographies, house and family histories in the main with the occasional mild rant against modernity.  Most were provided as part of a millennium project, although some were updated in 2008.  Here, for example, we come across the 12 year-old Dan Lydiate of Tynyberth, who was rather good at Rugby.  The book costs £18, which given the profusion of illustrations is fair value for money.

The history is a little bit too Gwynedd orientated for my taste but does at least recognize that the Abbey was founded in 1176 by the princes of Maelienydd.  In places the story gets confusing, I could have done with a tree to sort out the comings and goings of the various 19C and 20C Phillipses - the local squires.  The family kept a tight rein on the local community, most of whom were their tenants.  Children were provided with a school but in return were expected to curtsy and bow to their betters. Perhaps this paternalism is why the parish doesn't figure greatly in the rebellious annals of the West Radnorshire Rebeccaites.  Incidentally an uncle of mine was painting at the hall sometime after the Second World War.  Perhaps unfairly he felt the lady of the house was trying to overawe the workmen with her knowledge of a foreign tongue. Unfortunately she wasn't making much progress in getting her message across to a recently arrived maid with little English.  My uncle stepped forward and explained things in Eighth-Army Italian.  He wasn't thanked.

Reading this history is like panning for gold, luckily there are plenty of nuggets to be found.  A major gripe are the doubts cast on the Abbey being the burial place of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd.  Certainly Archbishop Peckham and a contemporary chronicler believed this to be the case.   The doubts cast on the story are opinions rather than facts - for example why should the English fear that the Abbey might become a shrine?  Llywelyn wasn't being returned to Gwynedd, rather to his cousin Mortimer's lands - who might well have feared for his own soul if he denied the prince a Christian burial.  The Americans may have feared to bury Bin Laden but perhaps he was more in touch with the medieval mind when he said that people prefer a strong horse.  Llywelyn had proved himself a weak horse, the English may have feared his bloodline but not his memory.

I could find nothing about the decline of the Welsh language in the parish, no-one was on hand to record the demise of the community's last Ned Maddrell.  In the 1901 census I once found three elderly Welsh speakers, born in the parish to parents who themselves had been born in the parish and who never appeared to have lived away from home.  They may well have been the last native speakers of the traditional dialect of the cantref of Maelienydd.

Getting on for 90 households have provided material for the second half of the book, which will certainly be of interest to social historians and, perhaps, gossips.  I can't claim to have any connection to the parish so I searched for the names of folk who I'd known from secondary school days.  Like nearly all my contemporaries they'd mostly left Wales, some barely remembered, others long forgotten.

Dai Hawkins' meanings of local farm names is a useful appendix, although he doesn't say why his explanations of Cefn Pawl and Hirddywel differ from those in Richard Morgan's little book on Radnorshire Place-Names.  There are sections on geology, pre-history, and the pub with the most annoying name in Wales - for some of us anyway -The Happy Union.

I'd say a must buy for anyone with Cwmhir connections and a worthwhile read for those interested in a rather atypical - it had no council houses - community in rural, English-speaking Radnorshire.

In a Vale of Windows

Bryndraenog is only two fields away from England, although as Mr Payne pointed out the Teme hereabouts is no real border, either geographically or historically.

Around the time Bryndraenog was built - the timbers were felled in 1436 -  the bard Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal came to sing a praise poem to the new building and it's owner Llywelyn Fychan.  Llywelyn Fychan did not trace his ancestry to the main descent group in Maelienydd, that of Elystan Glodrydd, but rather to  one Hywel Athro.  Perhaps Llywelyn was rhingyll or reeve to the local estates of Richard of York who had inherited the Mortimer lands in 1425 - Bryndraenog is at the entrance of a small valley called Cwmyrhingyll.  This is all discussed in the RCAHM volume Houses & History in the March of Wales Radnorshire 1400-1800, a book that really should be in every Radnorian's library. The volume also includes a partial translation of Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal's poem, but as there seems to be no translation of the entire poem readily available here's my rough translation:

The night the generous Son of Grace was born a star appeared as a sign to drag a thousand from the fiery pit and the blind from their darkness.  And a second time after Jesus, the journeying star of Owain: it was brighter than, woe for many, a myriad of smaller stars.  There is a star in Maelienydd, a proud maid of lime and wood, daughter of the king of sunshine, this court is the countess of summer.  Bright daylight, all praise to her, is seen at night in our land.  The duke has many houses, none of them surpass this, many do not know whether this is the moon or daylight?

Llywelyn Fychan, my draught of mead, the son of Ieuan owns it, the stout, generous line of Ieuan of our land, in the eighth degree from the line of Hywel Athro.  Great is his praise on the top strings, the line of Meurig, miracle of the bards.  There's no praise of the privileged ranks without the topstring of Bugeildy.  How pleasant, by St Chad, to come to him through yonder Teme.  He'll win words of greeting, a famous man with a pleasant office; he'll know amusement, joking tales, he'll know the refined words of wise men. I'll study when I alight, eyeing the shining white lime and see, between me and home, a looking-glass from heaven's goldsmith.  There's patronage here for me, in a vale of windows.  Like the city of Rome, a countless number of patterned glass and stone.  None who comes could swear, was it a man or an angel who built his house?  If it was a man he built well.  Joints, trusses, a knot of Tristan, packed crossbeams, a virtuous Christian, the good craftsmanship of the new hall's sanctuary. a chapel amidst great bays, a court like the houses of Cheap, its face covered in lime.  A holy framework, by the rood, a young man's ancient fortress; the sun's candle, chieftain of the close, the wise son of Ieuan's Celliwig; heaven's kinswoman, white-smocked, a stone cloister, St David's glebe;  allow the lord, a collared hart, the life of Noah in his new hall.

Nothing Special

A bit of autobiography

Growing-up in Radnorshire in the early 1950s you wouldn't have heard much Welsh.  Indeed I can actually remember the occasion when I became aware of  the existence of the language.  Travelling on a Crosville bus between Llandrindod and Crossgates, my mother plonked me down beside another little lad in order to gossip with the boy's mother on the opposite seat.  Being a friendly sort I tried to make conversation, without any success, prompting the mother to explain that her offspring didn't speak English - which she then proved by launching into an incomprehensible stream of sound to which the previously mute boy happily responded.

A little while after this incident I discovered  that I, too, was a Welsh child of sorts.  Our cottage might not have had electricity or even running water, except for a near-by council standpipe, but we did have a splendid battery powered Ever Ready radio - my family's first step on the road of consumerism.  Wikipedia tells me that the date was 22 October 1955 and my father went crazy when Derek Tapscott scored a goal.  The radio confirmed that Wales had beaten England 2-1 and as a suddenly aware young Welshman I was over the moon.

 Simple Faithful Folk

My mother was born in Abertysswg but moved to Radnorshire, where her mother had relatives, during the swift disaster of 1926.  Later the family moved-on to Harrow - described in 1932 as "largely Cymric" where she and her siblings joined the YCL - for the socials she told me.  The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact didn't prevent her joining the WAAFs, aged just 19, in the summer of 1939 and by 1940 she was serving at RAF Uxbridge.  Churchill and his wife were frequented visitors.  Her opinion of Winston - a drunk, and Clemmie - too interested in the younger officers.  I wish I'd talked to her more about her early life but isn't that always the case.

It's fascinating how as the older generation kick-the-bucket the elites, who now control so much of academia as well as the main stream media, feel able to rewrite the history of the Second World War.  Stalin is painted as worse than Hitler, the role of the Soviet Union diminished to the point where you would think their only contribution was the post-victory rape of every female in Berlin.  Just look at the comments on any Second World War You Tube video for a taster of how these views have entered the mainstream..  Let's forget Anglo-American bombing aimed primarily at the German working class - the main group who actually opposed the rise of Nazidom - and the callous nuclear weapons dropped on an already defeated Japan.

This is a picture of the Ford plant in wartime Cologne.  The factory - at the centre of the snap - remained undamaged while the slave-labour barracks (below it) had been thoroughly bombed.

We're told that this was as the result of the fortunes of war rather than any deliberate plan to preserve the Ford company's property.

Radical Wales seems to be particularly proud of the film Pride, based on a London based lesbian and gay group who raised funds for the mining families of Onllwyn during the great strike of 1984-85.  How safe, how cosy, but then we've always been partial to a pat on the back from our betters.  The main character is an American, which can't have hurt sales to the USA.  Wisely no mention was made of the fact that said hero was General Secretary of the YCL - which even in its revisionist 1980s guise wouldn't have been much of a selling point.

I seem to remember that the miners of Donbas collected millions of pounds for the striking miners, all forgotten now by a radical Wales that can't even be bothered to find out what is happening in present day Ukraine.  Please let's never again mention that Donetsk was founded by a Welshman, it will only serve to remind us of the parochialism and irrelevance of our modern day national movement.  Heaven knows what Gwyn Alf would have made of it all.

Welsh Jokes

I can't remember the Welsh being objects of ridicule in the past, although that certainly seems to be the case today.  Disliked perhaps, but never a joke.  Perhaps it was the influence of Lloyd George and Nye Bevan, seen as being responsible for two of the great social reforms of the 20C - pensions and free health care.  I think it is something different though, and I'm talking about the disregard of the nobs rather than some UKIP bloke from Wolverhampton.  No, I think the old-school-tie brigade have lost their fear of the Welsh working class.  Up until the last great miner's strike there was still a possibility that the established order might topple.  Nowadays that's - perhaps foolishly - not seen as being the case and the Welsh have suffered more than most from Hooray Henry disdain.

The Kurds

When the siege of Kobani started I thought the Americans were engaged in PR bombing to impress the media gathered on the Turkish border overlooking the town. In reality the American action was far more subtle, an average seven bombing runs a day was just enough not to dissuade ISIS reinforcements from reaching the town.  Like wasps attracted to a jam jar they were being lured to their death, pehaps as many as 2000.  Of course this meant that the YPG/YPJ fighters were also being used.  Still treated as terrorists by the US and the EU, they fought the war mainly with AK47s, being largely denied supplies of even anti-tank weapons and night-vision equipment.  Perhaps 500 Kurds died in Kobani, many of them the young women who temporarily became objects of media attention in the West.   Take a look at some of their faces here, they deserve that at least.

Writing the Welsh Out of Popular History

The other night's moon halo occurred exactly 554 years after the battle of Mortimer's Cross, an event marked by the appearance of a similar atmospheric phenomenon, a parhelion.

That battle resulted in the defeat of the Lancastrians and the subsequent execution of their commander Owain Tudur. The majority from what would later became Radnorshire fought on the victorious Yorkist side and their leaders benefited greatly as a result: Ieuan ap Philip was constable of Cefnllys, a fortress which he rebuilt and ruled with the help of a still existing copy of Hywel's laws.  Llywelyn ap Rhys was constable of New Radnor castle and Dafydd Goch - he was from Y Fron close to modern day Crossgates - was granted the small Marcher lordship of Stapleton by Presteigne. In this way the descendants of the old princes of Maelienydd continued to rule their ancestral lands, at least at the local level, maintaining the language, literature, law and traditions of the Welsh.

Check out popular English histories of the War of the Roses and you'll find little about the Welsh just as books on Tudor times rarely mention Wales; and this reminds me of something published the other day on the Daily Wales blogsite.  The article, see here, entertained its readers by including nearly every smidgen of historical balderdash ever dreamt-up about/by the Welsh.  Welsh Israelites - tick; Welsh Indians - tick; the Old British church - tick; Coelbren y Beirdd - tick.

Now what is interesting about this flummery - and  there's nothing new about any of it - is why these legends came about and what effect they had on reality.  Gwyn Alf Williams, for example, wrote a marvellous book about the Welsh Indians, see here although he certainly didn't belive that such a tribe ever existed outside the minds of men.  The Daily Wales article, however, sees the dismissal of these myths as part of some English plot to write the Welsh out of history - their fire may be wildly off target but their heart is in the right place.

Anyone who watches Time Team should play a game and count-up the number of occasions that great leveller Tony Robinson (sorry Sir Tony Robinson) mentions the Anglo-Saxons.  British survivals in Lindsey, Elmet, amongst the Magonsaete and as ancestors of the royal houses of Wessex and Mercia etc. are ignored.  Even when the programme makes a rare foray into Wales you'll more likely hear Baldrick droning-on about Anglo-Saxons.  It's a very one dimensional view of post-Roman Britain.

Then what about King Arthur?  The Matter of Britain is one of the foundation stones of vernacular literature from Germany to Portugal, yet despite obvious Welsh characters and backgrounds any Welsh transmission is downplayed, perhaps the result of lowly tavern minstrels. Never mind that a princess of Deheubarth was rolling around in the bed of the King of England, who by the way was really a Frenchman.

And so it goes on with the BBC the worst offender.  Here's a revealing factoid I've mentioned before in connection with Janina Ramirez' series on the Hundred Years War: Kent was the English shire asked to raise the most men - 280 - for the army that went to Crecy, for many English counties the number was less than 60.  The figure for the cantrefi that went to make up the future county of Radnorshire was 430.  Did the Welsh get a mention, did they hell.  As for Dimbleby's Seven Age's of Britain, who can forget his statement that Britain was pagan until a few Irish monks turned up in Scotland in the mid 500s.  Heaven knows where he thought St Patrick came from.

Fergal Keane's Story of Ireland was little better, the conquest of Ireland being achieved by the English or, at best, the Anglo-Normans. A better term for these half-Welsh conquerors, few of whom would have even been able to speak English, is Cambro-Normans. Frustrated by their failure to make progress in Wales these descendants of Princess Nest turned to a more profitable field of conquest. I suppose Irish pride is better served by blaming the English rather than admitting the role of men like Robert Fitz Stephen who boasted of his Trojan, that is his Welsh blood:

"We derive our descent, originally, in part from the blood of the Trojans, and partly we are of the French race. From the one we have our native courage, from the other the use of armour. Since, then, inheriting such generous blood on both sides, we are not only brave, but well armed."

And so it goes, Ieuan Brydydd Hir got it right some 240 years ago:

The false historians of a polished age
Show that the Saxon has not lost his rage,
Though tamed by arts his rancour still remains:
Beware of Saxons still, ye Cambrian swains.