Arriva Tazio

A pity this song wasn't soundtracking some film of the great Nuvolari at the wheel. Maybe the Pussycat Dolls will do a song about Lewis Hamilton. Who knows, perhaps they already have, wouldn't be the same though. Trio Lescano were three Jewish sisters from the Netherlands who made it big in Italy before the war. In the end the fascists took them off the radio but at least they survived.

Don't Panic!

Back in the Sixties the joke was that when the Free Wales Army talked about a round, they meant Double Diamond and certainly not ballistics. On one occasion, however, the brave lads in forage caps did step out of the tabloid spotlight for a night of genuine armed rebellion. John Humphries tells the tale in Freedom Fighters.

The serious bombmakers of MAC decided to use the FWA to launch an attack on the Elan Valley pipeline in Radnorshire. A bomb consisting of 40 sticks of gelignite attached to a car tyre was to be placed in the pipe itself and exploded. Everything went according to plan, the FWA found the aqueduct manhole cover, broke in and lowered the bomb into the waterway. However in their haste the FWA had forgotten to attach the detonator.

There the bomb remained until discovered by a local farmer Mr Powell of Cefn Penarth, Crossgates. The bomb disposal experts were called and the good citizens of Birmingham continued to enjoy the luxury of running water.

Book of the Month

Although published by the University of Wales Press, this book is not really a history of the post-war physical force element in Wales. In some ways it is autobiographical, tracing the story of the author from his anglicised, somewhat anti-Welsh background, to highly successful editor of the Western Mail, to Secretary of the nationalist Independent Wales Party.

The book starts in 1963, thus largely ignoring the activities of the Welsh Republican Party in the 1950s, even though many of the leading characters in that movement re-emerged as backers of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC) in the 1960s. The book also suggests links between MAC and the holiday home fire-bombings of Meibion Glyndwr in the period 1979-1992. No real evidence is presented for this connection, which is hardly surprising given the fact that no-one was ever convicted for any of the 200 or so attacks during the period.

Despite these reservations this is a highly readable and well-researched account of the time. The author, an insider, places meat on the bones of the anti-Welsh attitudes of the Western Mail. The book is somewhat sympathetic to MAC activists such as Owen Williams and John Jenkins, while at the same time painting the Free Wales Army as the clowns they no doubt were. The Stasi-like attitudes of the Special Branch Shrewsbury Unit and, in particular, its successors are detailed, a reminder that the English human rights industry did precious little to protest against some of the disgraceful infringements of basic rights occurring in Wales. The book also has its fair share of controversial revelations . Did Owen Williams actually convince the IRA of the virtue of the "cell system" of insurgency and was John Summers really a police informer?

This is a worthwhile book, casting light on an important aspect of Welsh history that is too often ignored by historians. It is also interesting that so many of the characters in the physical force movement were English speakers. Mainstream nationalism's inability, understandable as it may be, to fully engage with the English speaking Welsh majority, is surely the great failure of the independence movement to date.

Crimewatch

It seems Enzo Ferrari presented Innes Ireland with a watch which has now been stolen. See here.


Update: An amateur sleuth asks "how come" I have a photo of the missing watch. Well Sherlock, I found it here.

Oh and now the BBC are on the case.

Musical Interlude

A regular reader complains that I'm stuck in the Fifteenth Century! While I ponder this point here's a musical interlude. It's 1964, it's Paris and the pride of Pontlottyn, Miss Petula Clark is flirting with the traffic. Fantastique!

Radnorshire and the Far Right

Just two BNP members in dear old Radnorshire then, according to the recently leaked membership list published on the web.

Radnorshire Bardic Poems, 46

This is a translation of the bard Llawdden's elergy to Elen Gethin, presumably he composed it for one of her daughters. The tomb which Elen had made for her and her husband can still be seen in Kington parish church. At the end of the poem Llawdden compares Elen to, amongst others, the Helena - mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine - who recovered the true cross from Jerusalem; the Seven Wise Sages of Rome, and the biblical Susanna.

Llawdden's Elergy for Elen Gethin

Since Monday, for me,
The planet is without light.
Monday the fair one was dark,
A day of weeping, Elen’s demise.
Snatched, like a saint’s ascension,
She was of no great age.
A blessed wife, faith’s vision,
Sought the temple of Tomas’s bed.
The fair one who brought his body home
From the pain of the battlefield of Banbury.
And now he, in Kington church,
Cannot sleep because of his Lady.
She was loved, she and her chieftain,
Let them find heaven from the bed she made.
A great white wall, made of marble,
Like the cloak of Mwrog and Mariaith.
The image of a man and his lover in the church,
In the clay before the Son of God.
A stone curtain, a white mantle
Closed for eternity.

A psalm for Elen Gethin, she shared wine,
I bring for her daughter.
The moon is faint to hold court
After Elen and her two courts.
Teams ploughed her lands,
A fair estate, she wasn’t poor.
Her hall never lacked wines for
The world, anymore than Bath.
There was no wall without light
With candlesticks about her corpse.
Gold and coral on her fingers,
Fair lass, to count the saints.
Pointless in her day to
Rebuke her kinsfolk,
She allowed no perjury
Or poverty amongst her people.

A good woman, with Susanna’s sense,
And wine and candles in her court.
A sister to that woman who fetched the Cross,
Until the end of her life,
Lear’s daughter before the goodmen,
Coel’s daughter, great hearted;
Fair Marsia, many mention
Her law and works of old.
Every word from her was strong,
Elen’s learning was expected.
Seven were next to her in speech,
The eighth, her learned tongue.
She was a Sybil, her language was good,
A second Solomon to her breast.
If David had two sons,
From her two sons will spring goodmen:
Master Watcyn, a pure and pleasant lad,
Is there any more powerful? Master Rhosier!
If holy Mary calls Tomas and Elen
To heaven on high,
We expect, God, without doubt,
A golden halo above their heads.

Mike Hawthorn

I can't say I'm a great fan of Mike Hawthorn, doubtless unfairly, he seems to typify, for me, some of the worst aspects of the Fifties. Of course Mike never had the opportunity of moving on from that decade, dying as he did in 1959. Anyway a lot of people do admire Britain's first World Champion and some of them have created this rather wonderful website. There are details there of a splendid book about Hawthorn which has just come out, today infact.

Some film here of Innes Ireland's widow Jean unveiling a plaque commemorating Hawthorn in his birthplace, Mexborough in Yorkshire.

Skating on Thin Ice

Carmarthen's town guide - who appears to be a human being rather than a pamphlet - has written to the Western Mail pointing out a few inaccuracies in a recent article in the paper about Knucklas Castle. Read it here. Well I'm all for historical accuracy, but then the guide spoils it somewhat by bragging up Carmarthen's Arthurian connections at the expense of, well, Knucklas.

The Welsh name for Carmarthen is Caerfyrddin - Myrddin's fortress - or Merlin the Magician as our English friends like to call him. It's also well known that this is etymological nonsense. The name actually derives from the Roman civitas Moridunum (meaning sea fort) - good heavens, there's a wikipedia article explaining the whole process. Well good luck to Carmathen and it's town guide.

Meanwhile that Carmarthenshire bard Lewis Glyn Cothi - and the bard's really are the experts when it comes to this Arthurian business - was quite certain that one of the most note worthy facts about Maelienydd (the district that later made up North East Radnorshire) was that "Yndi'r oedd, hyn adroddir, neithior yr hen Arthur hir." - Herein was, this is reported, the wedding feast of tall Arthur of old.

At the end of the sixteenth century Morgan Meredith of Bryndraenog provided board and lodging to the scholar Sion Dafydd Rhys, who recorded some interesting folk tales linking Arthur and Knucklas Castle. Some giants had captured Gwenhwyfar's brothers and were holding them, north of the River Teme (Tyfediad in Welsh) at Bron Wrgan in the parish of Llanfair Waterdine. Arthur killed the giants and brought the brothers back to Knucklas. In order to cross the Teme he used a giant's skull as a stepping stone, declaring "tyfed yr iad yn yr afon yn lle maen" - meaning that the skull had taken the place of a stepping-stone. Henceforth the river was known as Tyfediad. Complete nonsense of course, just like Carmarthen meaning Merlin's town!

A Welshman in New York

Fingers crossed that Joe Calzaghe's career closing fight at the Garden this Saturday will prove more successful than Jimmy Wilde's defeat by Pancho Villa at the Polo Grounds some 85 years ago. Wilde had come out of a nearly three year retirement to take on the Filipino boxer and was a shadow of his former self. Nat Fleischer, who was, of course, at ringside, wrote "Never ... did a champion pass more gloriously than did Wilde that night." By common consent the greatest flyweight of all time, Ring magazine ranked the tiny Welshman pound for pound the third best puncher in boxing history, behind Joe Louis and Sam Langford.

Now it's a fact that most Welsh families with the surname Wilde have their roots in Radnorshire and a little investigation found Wilde's family in the 1901 census, where they were all recorded as speaking no English. An exaggeration no doubt, but interesting light on the strength of the Welsh language in East Glamorgan before the First World War. Unfortunately I could trace the Wilde family no further back than the 1891 census where Jimmy's father was a guest at Treharris police station. In the cells! So the search for a Radnorian connection will have to wait for another day.

UPDATE: Duffy was a no show but Joe Calzaghe got off the canvas in the first round to win the next eleven and the contest. Career ending? Maybe not. Oh and why did the hopeless Western Mail choose to lead its Saturday front page with a no-account Rugby match?

Musical Interlude

It's 1965 and Welsh girl Tawny Reed is pulling some Duffyesque dance moves to her cover of the Velvelettes' Needle in a Haystack.

The Attack on the Police Station at Llanbadarn Fynydd

Although Victorian Radnorshire had a deserved reputation for being a district where common criminality was rare, at the same time the activities of the Rebeccaites saw the county being compared to the most rebellious parts of Ireland. Rebecca deliberately challenged the authority of the state with her open displays of law-breaking, her public ridicule of an impotent police force and her disdain for a court system that rarely brought any of her unruly children to book.

The month of November 1880 had seen large numbers of Rebeccaites openly taking salmon on the Wye, the Ithon and their tributaries. This activity culminated on the evening of December 6th 1880, when a blackened faced party of one hundred armed men took salmon from the Ithon in the North Radnorshire village of Llanbadarn Fynydd. The local police officer Frederick Cairns, a man with a reputation for brutality, was observing the activity from a distance when he heard a noise beside him. Swinging his torch he claimed to identify a local farmer William Davies, before being struck down with a spear that burst the policeman's nose and left him with a broken arm. Later in the evening, having left the river, the Rebeccaites launched a volley of stones and gunshots at the door and windows of Cairns' police station before disappearing into the night.

William Davies and another local man. John Williams, a farm servant at Llinwent, were brought to court in Penybont, but, as was so often the case in a county where sympathy for Rebecca and her daughters was so strong, both men were discharged.

Guinevere Came From Knucklas

Not having a television and with only sporadic reception available on my crystal ball, I haven't been able to watch the BBC's new Sunday series Merlin. I wonder how many Radnorians are aware that Gwenhwyfar, or Guinevere as our English neighbours call her, actually hailed from Cnwclas. Before anyone gets too excited I don't mean actress Angel Coulby (pictured) but Gwenhwyfar herself, King Arthur's queen.

This fact was well known to the bards and scholars of medieval Wales. Gwenhwyfar was the daughter of Cogfran Gawr of Caer Ochren - that's the hill which later became the site of Knucklas Castle. A fifteenth century local descent group even claimed this Cogfran as their founder, although they probably made it up.

Rebeccaism in Radnorshire

The anti-toll gate campaign of the 1840s was not the last Radnorshire saw of Rebecca and her daughters. Whenever the community felt a sense of injustice she seemed to reappear from the shadows, whether the concern were the game laws, the price of food or some other issue troubling the locality.

Rebeccaism flourished because Radnorians did not feel that they could get justice in the courts. The Rebeccaites openly challenged English law by breaking it in public and in such large numbers that the authorities could do nothing. They wore disguises so that individuals could not be prosecuted when the established order had been reasserted.

The photograph shows a party of Rebeccaites taking salmon on the Edw as late as December 1932. The fishery laws were a particular bone of contention in Radnorshire whose populace had long ago paid the English Crown for the right to fish and hunt in perpetuity, it was a bargain that the Crown had decided to forget. The picture was not grabbed by some intrepid photojournalist, it was posed deliberately and was later displayed in public and sent to the newspapers. It was an open challenge to the authority of the state, which infact failed to convict any of those involved.

It is a pity that the Assembly sponsored Gathering the Jewels website tries to diminish this political act with some half cocked story that attempts to portray these men as dim-wits.

Lead Kindly Light

Good heavens, Powys County Council's decision to switch off some of its plethora of street lights has caused a furore. Never mind that the lights did very little to prevent the regular smashing of shop windows in our main streets, suddenly the citizenry - or at least some of them - are exercised by the prospects of vandalism. According to correspondents to the local papers, potential rapists now lurk around every corner and old aged pensioners have been forced to go out and buy torches.

Faced with such a cacophony of complaint our councillors are rapidly backtracking and blaming everything on their luckless officials, although hopefully a few thousand pounds of taxpayers money will have been saved before common sense finally throws in the towel. My favourite comment comes from Council Chairperson Margaret Morris who complained that the village of Boughrood had been left without a single light. "On Saturday night when people were leaving the pub they were almost falling into the River Wye", the councillor reported. Well yes, no doubt they were.

Book of the Month

Ruth Bidgood's Parishes of the Buzzard was originally published in 2000, although I'm told that the book has recently been reprinted. Ostensibly a history of the two Abergwesyn parishes, in many ways it is a history of a much wider swathe of Builth Hundred.

The book is an example of the very best kind of local history, wide ranging, well-written and full of fascinating detail and insights into life in this, nowadays, remote part of Mid Wales. There is much in this book to hold the reader, I was particularly taken with the contrast between the village schoolmistress Esther Morgan - stoically teaching her Welsh speaking pupils God Save the Queen and the virtues of English nationalism - and a later supply teacher, the brusque but patriotic Annie James.

The appointment of Owen M Edwards as Chief Inspector of Schools for Wales in 1907 led to a far more sympathetic attitude to the use of Welsh in the classroom. It is no surprise to find Miss Bidgood recording an HMI's report of 1911 critical of Miss Morgan's exclusion of the language. Edwards himself visited the school and complimented Miss Morgan on having kept up her own knowledge of Welsh. A quick search of the on-line records shows Miss Morgan being born in 1856 in Llanddetty in the east of Breconshire and having taught for many years in West Bromwich. The change in culture from one that wanted the Welsh language Englished out of Wales must have been difficult for the head teacher.

At £10 this book is a bargain and should be snapped up by everyone interested in the history of Mid Wales.

The Dark Ages

When in the 1440s the folk of Bugeildy saw the newly built Bryndraenog, they asked Ai lleuad yw ai lliw dydd? - Is it the moon or the light of day? At least that's what the bard Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal reported, for the light that shone through it's new fangled windows brought: Golau dydd, mae'n glod iddi, i'w gweled nos i'n gwlad ni - Daylight, praise to it, seen at night in our land. Of course that was then. Today the good Radnorians are up in arms about Powys County Council's street light switch-off and the subsequent return to the dark ages.

According to Mr Howse gas street lights arrived in Knighton in 1852 with Presteigne following in 1859, while electricity came to Llandrindod in 1897. So the irate ratepayers do have a point. If the provision of street lighting was possible in the century before last, well ...... oh and of course the County Council's first reaction to any financial shortfall is cut services, rather than cut senior staff.

At the same time the Radnorian blog supports this return to the dark. The urbanisation of our county has surely gone too far and the return of so many stars to our night sky is to be welcomed. No doubt a little common sense could have been displayed as to which lights were switched off, but the principle is right. As to the pensioners complaining that they've had to buy a torch, is that such a hardship? The question of anti-social behaviour is more serious, but surely this is one that our police and courts should be addressing robustly and as a matter of urgency rather than relying on a few lights.

Ms Evans de Lopez

A few years ago I seem to remember that S4C produced a drama documentary that suggested that Carrera Panamericana racer and Mexican film star Jacqueline Evans de Lopez was Welsh. Infact she was born in London, although there did remain the possibility that she belonged to the London Welsh community. Now some members of her family have been in touch with the blog to confirm that Miss Evans had no Welsh connections.

So Jacqueline is yet another "Welsh" racing driver who, together with Stuart Lewis-Evans and Jack Lewis, have been consigned to the ranks of the Englishry by this blog. Where will it end? Wales has had precious few four-wheel stars as it is!

Anyone Got A Time Machine

Not much time for blogging at the moment.

Magic

Oh dear, I've already nominated a book of the month and along comes this offering, which really is a contender for book of the year. There's not a lot of Radnorshire interest here, but we can forgive author Richard Suggett, who has not only devoted an entire book to Radnorshire houses, but has also provided fresh insights into the county's history, with his pioneering work on slander cases in the Court of Great Sessions.

The Witch hunting madness which possessed much of England, Scotland and continental Europe largely passed Wales by. Interestingly the same is true of the other Celtic speaking regions including Brittany. Despite the fact that only five Welsh witches were condemned to death between 1594 and 1655, Suggett pulls off quite a coup by revealing the close link between the authors of two anti-witchcraft books and the first of these judicial victims, Gwen vz Elis. If any Welsh film-maker is looking for a plot, well look no further.

There is a great deal more in this book of course: folk beliefs, Catholic survivals, cursing wells and conjurers, as well as the wider historical context. The book is the product of what must surely be years of diligent and inspired research, and it is written in a thoroughly enjoyable and readable way. An outstanding contribution to Welsh history.