The 1921 Census

At £3.50 for every household downloaded only the most well-heeled genealogist will be making much use of the recently released 1921 Census.  Never mind in two or three years it will be free, if the government allows us to live that long.

Despite the cost it is possible to dig out some information for free, especially if you are dealing with unusual names and known locations, for example I dug out a great great uncle of 70 who had recently married a 28 year old, and no, his name wasn't Sion White.

More usefully the site has a search facility that allows you to bring up all manner of sociological information without the need to cough up for cash.  For example you can search Welsh speakers by any number of criteria - age, sex, birthplace, occupation, current location etc. The search will give you the numbers and even the names.

Here are a few random results:

Wales had 1374 Welsh speakers born in Radnorshire, although only 141 of them were living in the county.  At this point we should remember that the Radnorshire of the registration districts did not coincide with the historic county borders.  Large chunks were included with Hay and Builth in neighbouring Breconshire, while other parishes were included with Kington in Herefordshire.  The Knighton sub-district included many English parishes, all this the result of a deliberate Victorian policy to tame the wild Radnorians by including them with more civilized folk.

Cwmteuddwr was still 25% welsh speaking in 1921, with Rhayader at just under 10% and St Harmon at 7.6% still exhibiting some vestige of the old native tongue. Nearby Llangurig was still 67% welsh speaking at this time and of course Welsh still dominated in the western parishes of Builth hundred. 

Most of the Radnorshire born Welsh speakers lived in the coalfield, 517 in Glamorgan, 52 in Monmouthshire - including my Gwystre born grandmother and 286 in Carmarthenshire. This last being a surprisingly high figure perhaps related to the opening of new pits?

Amongst the usual Joneses, Evanses, Davieses and the like, we find familiar local surnames such as Bywater, Bufton, Hamer etc.   It's a reminder that the process of language shift in Radnorshire was part and parcel of a general shift occuring in those parts of rural Wales open to the border.  Radnorshire wasn't different just further along the line.

An Irish Patriot in Radnorshire

The Irish War of Independence saw Cork born Sheila Browne commanding Liverpool's Cumman na mBan.  As such she engaged in various revolutionary activities: an arms raid, obtaining paraffin for arson attacks and transporting money to Dublin. Finally arrested she spent three months in jail before she was released through lack of evidence.

This was enough to obtain her a small military pension from the Free State government, although it might have alarmed the good folk of Radnorshire, where she was evacuated along with a class of Liverpool schoolchildren in 1941. Billeted in the wilds of Rhiwlen, Miss Brown now encountered some difficulties with the Dublin bureaucrats.  They wanted a person of sufficient stature to confirm her existence, but where, she complained, was she to find such a person when her only neighbours were mountains and her companions children?  Eventually she moved closer to civilization in Hundred House.

Miss Browne was clearly able through education and connections to cope with the red tape.  Sadly this was not true of Kate Evans, a miner's wife from the Irish community of Dowlais.  We've met Mrs Evans before, she was the leading light of a group who were obtaining explosives from the mines and transporting it to Ireland.  Eventually she was caught and jailed for 7 years.  The bureaucrats were unimpressed and wondered about her maiden name, some of her comrades could not be traced, the evidence of others was ignored while they engaged in an ill-tempered correspondence with an official who had had enough of their enquiries in other cases.  Mrs Evans, a widow in ill-health had her pension application rejected.

Mrs Evans wrote to De Valera complaining of being forgotten after suffering much for Ireland, her letter was passed back to the pensions office and ignored. It's ever thus for the working class.  Here's a song about Cumann na mBan:

Nothing on the Telly

One of the depressing features of present day Wales is how anglocentric professed adherents  of its national movement have become.  Oh sure they generally claim to be Europeans, whatever that means, but anything outside the Atlanticist bubble doesn't get a look in, they are good little followers of the BBC and the Guardian.

Personally I dumped my TV more than 20 years ago, disgusted by the one-sided reporting on the Balkan wars, a few years later I stopped buying the London papers.  I don't think I've missed very much.

There is plenty to see on YouTube, great Russian war films like 72 Hours, Come and See, and The Dawns Here Are Quiet ..... all with English subtitles; and popular shows like the superb Detective Anna - 98 episodes for anyone missing endless re-runs of Poirot and Miss Marple.

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Wales Today

The Covid era is dominated by agendas: big pharma - which has far too much influence over the medical profession - wants to make money; environmentalists want to shut down industry; eugenists want to rid the planet of useless eaters; comic-book billionaires dream of transhumanism and outer space.  Oh and the media remember who butters their bread and have mutated into mere propaganda machines.

If all that wasn't bad enough the real driving force are the West's deep states.  They see the pandemic as an opportunity to implement measures that would be impossible in normal circumstances - vaccine passports will quickly form the basis of digital identity cards and the disappearance of cash is just  around the corner.  Imagine what power, for good, but more likely evil, those two measures would give the state. When conspiracy theorists talk of chipping they are just a couple of years ahead of the curve.

Where does Wales stand in all this?  Let's be honest Wales is finished.  When the main nationalist party is just an echo chamber for globalist talking points what chance does Wales have?  They can't even do anything to stem the ethnic cleansing via cheque book that is happening in all the rural areas, worse than that they don't even want to.  There is an historic shift happening towards a multi-polar world, the West is rotting from the head, all of which escapes the notice of nationalists, fixated as they are on the Anglo values of the BBC and the blue check media.

Thank you.

Some more music from Ireland

The very talented Dea  Matrona.

The American Election

Of course the news media don't certify the result of the American election, that's the job of the electoral college and perhaps ultimately the Supreme Court.  The drama still has a few more scenes left to play

Let's assume though that Biden has won, there are quite a few positives to take away.  No more Pompeo or Pence for starters, although their replacements will be equally as satanic.  The white working class support for Trump dropped a little, no doubt disillusioned with the failure to drain the swamp.  Meanwhile black and Latino support rose, showing that men, especially, reject identity politics and are attracted to the idea of unity based on common economic interests, call it class if you like. 

Then you have 70 million voters who must be thoroughly disillusioned with crooked mainstream politics, that's a great engine for real change.  And finally some of the most obnoxious people on the planet think they've won a great victory, they'll be emboldened - really they can't help themselves - and will no doubt hasten a day of reckoning with their stupidity.

So what has any of this to do with Wales?  At least there is some interest in the US Election amongst the Welsh political class, although none of it advances much beyond echoing woke mainstream media talking points.  The world beyond the EU and the Anglosphere elicits little interest, and this at a time when global power is shifting away from the West.  Nationalists make the perfectly valid point that Wales is rich enough to be independent, whether it has the necessary leadership to bring that about is doubtful.

What's Happening

How many realise that the architect of the lockdown Neil Ferguson is an old boy of Llanidloes High School?  He's the same age as another OB, the actor who plays Ian Beale in the BBC soap Eastenders, perhaps they were contemporaries. Anyway, as in any mediocre soap, a blonde proved the downfall of Ferguson, while perhaps the country would have been better served if Mr Beale had been its chief advisor on matters pandemic.

The one reliable statistic amidst a deluge of facts and nonsense are excess deaths, the weekly comparison with this year's totals and those of previous years provided every Tuesday by the ONS. These show that up until week 13 of 2020 things were proceeding much as usual, there was a big jump in week 14 - but that was only marginally worse than the figure for week 2 of 2015.  For the last three weeks the figures have steamed ahead, peaking in week 16 (April 17) with a slight fall in week 17.  I'd expect them to fall again next week.

Of course these figures are time delayed by a week or so and the excess deaths  may also include victims of other diseases who avoided seeking prompt treatment for fear of contracting the virus. That said they do give an idea of the severity of the outbreak, serious but not overwhelmingly so, especially for the majority of the economically active.

COVID-19

The virus, while serious, is not so dangerous that it has replaced the old normal in the minds of many.

Remainers hope that it will derail brexit, Labour see the possibility of escaping what seemed like an inevitable decade of Tory rule and Nationalists dream that it might prove a wedge between Wales and Westminster.   For the climate crisis crowd empty skies and travel restrictions are a glimpse of utopia while authoritarians revel in the new rules and limitations on freedom. You feel that the "old normal" would be far from their minds if they were truly worried about their own imminent mortality.

The real danger for the majority is not severe acute respiratory syndrome or even the economic consequences of a prolonged lockdown, rather it is the opportunity the pandemic affords the West's kleptocracy - let's call them the deep state - to progress a wishlist that makes a reality of what was previously the preserve of science fiction novels, from the cashless society to chipping.

Americana 2

Americana

The Past is a Foreign Country

Spot the Welsh language poster in these film snippets of the Irish fascist party Ailtiri na hAiseirghe. There's an interesting book entitled Architects of the Resurrection detailing the activities of this group. Their policy basically saw the establishment of a Catholic, wholly Gaelic Ireland somewhat along the lines of Salazar's Portugal and the military conquest of the North. 

Music of the Russian Federation, 1

A Mari folk song. An ethnic group of 600k living on the banks of the Volga.

Musical Interlude

This is a great song.  Perhaps there should be something similar for elderly Welsh nationalists completely at odds with the current direction of the movement.

Post Referendum Blues

Class - do you remember the 20th century when class and/or nationalism dominated the discourse.  No wonder the elites encouraged us to concentrate on less dangerous causes such as gender or race. War was still fine of course, as long as the slaughter was aimed at the unpeople, those countries that didn't fall in with the globalist world view. Yet in the homelands, the US and the EU, "progressives" became obsessed with minorities of one kind or another, to ideas that posed no threat whatsoever to the elites.

This is why the Leave vote is a bit of a turn up, because suddenly those 20th century issues are back on the agenda. Look at this piece from the Spectator highlighting the class nature of the vote:

"The Brexiteer/Remainer divide splits almost perfectly, and beautifully, along class lines. Of local authorities that have a high number of manufacturing jobs, a whopping 86 per cent voted Leave. Of those bits of Britain with low manufacturing, only 42 per cent did so. Of local authorities with average house prices of less than £282,000, 79 per cent voted Leave; where house prices are above that figure, just 28 per cent did so. Of the 240 local authorities that have low education levels — i.e. more than a quarter of adults do not have five A to Cs at GCSE — 83 per cent voted Leave. Then there’s pay, the basic gauge of one’s place in the pecking order: 77 per cent of local authorities in which lots of people earn a low wage (of less than £23,000) voted Leave, compared with only 35 per cent of areas with decent pay packets."

How the "progressives" hate it.  People who haven't been to university deciding their future!

Wales - another 20th century discourse making something of a comeback after the Brexit vote is Welsh independence.  Not independence as might be understood by Americans or Icelanders or most other free peoples but "independence in Europe" by which is meant a desire to be on board the EU train, destination unknown.

Five local authorities in Wales voted to Remain, three following the British pattern (yes British not English vide East Renfrew etc.) of wealthier areas voting for the status quo - the Vale, Monmouth and Cardiff.  In Gwynedd and Ceredigion the Welsh language is said to have played a part, although I  do wonder about the influence of the university vote.

What is clear is that a segment of Welsh society we might characterise as the clerks voted strongly for Remain.  By this I mean people who work, directly or indirectly, for the state in non-manual occupations.  In their pique at being outvoted by the great unwashed we see elements of this clerkish class rallying to the cause of  Welsh independence, not as a worthwhile aim in itself but as a means of remaining inside a club which they see as protective of their economic interests.  I can't see this enthusiasm lasting very long.

Meanwhile the Leave majority are told they are stupid or racist or ungrateful for all that EU largese.  Seriously the clerks need to go on some sort of refresher course on engaging with folk who don't share their enthusiasms.

Scotland - according to the polls around a third of SNP voters opted for Leave.  Here's an interesting fact, the most pro-Remain councils were hardly hotbeds of separatism.  Edinburgh 74% Remain, 39% Indy; East Renfrew 74% Remain, 37% Indy and East Dunbarton 71% Remain, 39% Indy.

Now perhaps there will be enough Remainers who are so enamoured of the EU that they'll dump their unionism and help win a second Indy referendum. Maybe.  What then?  An independent Scotland will have to negotiate its membership of the club.  It will have to adopt the Euro and some of those Operation Fear scares might actually become real - tariffs on trade with the English market, a real border with customs and passport control.  Oh and its doubtful if Scotland would be allowed membership if it dumped Nato - so forget about closing Holy Loch as well.  Would an SNP government put EU membership to the vote?  Would they win?

My own view is if Brexit happens, still a big if of course, then both Scotland and Ireland would have to forget the EU and enter a free trade area with Wales and England, that's the economic and geographic reality.

The Lads in their Hundreds

When my father had his stroke he would wonder why I couldn't smell the pine oil being extracted from the trees at Holly Barn, his childhood home. We would talk about his father's visit on leave from the Great War and how his older brother had run away rather than face saying goodbye. For him it had happened just the other day.  I try to imagine what it must have been like to have to return to the trenches after a brief spell at home.

There was no home leave in my father's war, he sailed from Glasgow in the Queen Mary to eventually arrive in Egypt and on to Italy. He didn't make it back until 1946. Before he left his grandfather, who lost three sons in the Great War, had shook his hand and said they'd likely not meet again.

There was no great European war for my generation and for that we are asked to thank the EU and show our gratitude by voting to remain inside the community. I'm not so sure. How do the people of Serbia or Libya or the Donbas feel about that? Why do so few see the dangers of war with Russia, provoked in part by the EU and especially by what might be termed its military wing - Nato?

I voted to leave in 1975 and will do so again. This means sharing a bed with Empire loyalists, British nationalists, 1950s nostalgists etc. but so what. Look at the company the decent folk on the pro side have to keep, the warmongers and neoliberal elites, it's a wonder the stench doesn't overpower them.

Of course Plaid Cymru think that they can reform the EU from inside, well good luck with that. I believe that there is a very faint chance of the Welsh nation surviving outside the EU and none at all within, although this may be moot given the West's eagerness for confrontation with the East.

The Irish Slave Myth

In 1968, presumably in a spirit of revolutionary fervour, I bought a hardback book entitled Celtic Nationalism.  It hardly lived up to the times, consisting of two pedestrian contributions from Gwynfor Evans and Hugh Macdiarmid while more than half the book was taken up with an academic essay on, mainly, 19C Irish nationalism by Owen Dudley Edwards.  One thing I did gather from the book was that there had been an element of pro-slavery, anti-black racism within Irish nationalism, especially in the writings of John Mitchel and Arthur Griffith. 

Fast forward  half a century and we find a Limerick historian, Liam Hogan, valiantly attempting to stem the myth of Irish slavery - a popular and growing meme, especially in the United States.  This meme, either through ignorance, me-too-victimhood or out and out dishonesty and anti-black racism, equates chattel slavery with indentured servitude.  You can read Hogan's ongoing debunking of the myth - in 5 parts, starting here or here.

The Growth in Social Media Mentions of the Irish Slave Myth - from Hogan

Not the least disservice performed by this pervasive myth is to cast a shadow over the very real historical sufferings of the Irish people while providing ammunition for her enemies.  Only last week there was a small example of a Scottish writer's reasonable comment on the Highland Clearances being equated by anti-SNP voices as if it were a Scottish appropriation of the slave myth.

Goodbye Wales

Can oblivious Wales please never again mention its historic links to Hughesovka, a city - nowadays called Donetsk - frequently shelled by what purports to be its own government and whose president boasts that its children must cower in cellars instead of going to school.

 

Off My Chest

It seems I haven't blogged for a month.  Not sure why, perhaps a sense of impending doom - certainly I'm not looking forward to the Assembly elections or the Euro vote.  What a choice we have with the Euro vote. Brexit means more Nato, more TTIP but then so does staying in EU.  My preference would be an independent Wales outside both of these organisations, but no-one's campaigning for that.  On balance Brexit at least allows the possibility of extracting Wales from the union.  After all Scotland was allowed a referendum.  If you think that Brussels would ever permit the emergence of new states then you're deluded.  I think Plaid supporters are also deluding themselves if they think that this year's Assembly election will prove be a breakthrough.

Foyles on the Wye

It shows how out of touch I am with local affairs that I only recently learnt - from Jacothenorth's admirable blog - that the Maesllwch Arms has, with the help of public money, been rebranded as Foyles of Glasbury.  The old pub took its name from the nearby gentry house, originally occupied by a branch of the Vaughan family but which passed through many hands before being purchased in 1772 by Walter Wilkins of Brecon; a man who had made his fortune in India where he was governor of Chittagong.  In the 19C the house was rebuilt as Maesllwch Castle and the Wilkins family itself adopted the surname De Winton - they never felt the need to rename their seat though.

I can't say I'm much vexed by this rebranding, the Welsh Government's investment might even prove worthwhile in terms of local employment.  It's interesting that of the 19 living-in servants at the Castle in 1871 only 4 were locals, so any improvement on that would be a bonus.  These minor symptoms of anglicisation mask a deeper malaise - a national party that's afraid to offend the liberal wing of imperialism springs to for example.

Back in the early 70s I would occasionally frequent a then cluttered Foyles bookshop, a look at my book case shows some slim volumes of Anglo-Welsh poetry purchased there along with a Soviet book on the National Question.  I never purchased an expensive and heavy four volume facsimile set of the Poor Man's Guardian although I was sorely tempted on each visit.  Interestingly radicalism is so out of fashion nowadays those four books are relatively cheap on the second-hand market, certainly my Welsh language rock albums seem to have proved a far better investment.

I can never say I felt comfortable at Foyles, much the same feeling as I experience in the bookshops of Hay - it's all far too foreign.  Foyles of Glasbury should do well if it attracts the same clientele.

The Markets

There was a time when a poor man could make a small living by playing the markets.  You bought Investors Chronicle and checked out the expected results for the week ahead.  Then you got up at the crack of dawn, looked for a company that had exceeded expectations and instructed your broker to buy.  Later in the day the big boys would move in and the following day's papers would drag in smaller buyers.  This was the sign to sell and the beauty of the settlement date in those days meant you didn't even have to touch your bank account - instead your broker would send you a cheque.

You could even reassure yourself that you were performing a  socially useful function by providing liquidity to the market. The stock market itself resolved the contradiction between the borrower who wanted long term funds at the lowest possible cost and the investor who desired immediate access to their money combined with historically high returns.  In the same way the options and futures markets provided a degree of certainty to the real economy with the help of speculators.  That was then.  Today the speculators have taken over at the expense of the real economy and the tax-payer who foots the bill for their gambles.  These people should have been burnt a decade ago (another argument in favour of capitalism was that the stupid should go to the wall) but instead they were bailed out.

Eleanor Bull

While checking out that Foyles of Glasbury nonsense I came across Eleanor Bull, in whose house the playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe was killed.  Of course Wikipedia describes her as an English woman although Clifford where she was born was a Welsh speaking parish in the 16C.  Was she the niece or great niece of Queen Elizabeth's confidante Blanche Parry?  If her mother was Sybil Parry as the article says then she was a niece.  Eleanor's family background, the Whitneys, the Parrys, the Vaughans were all bardic patrons.  Her grandmother/great grandmother Alice Milbourne was an exception being described by the bard Hywel Dafi as a tall, aging girl of Rowena's seed, advising her future husband to chose a slim 20 year old Welsh girl rather than the daughter of the Englishman of the Shire.  The late John Davies described the Herefordshire borderlands as being a Welsh irredenta, it deserves more attention.
 

Matters Arising

I read this in the introduction to the Penybont book mentioned in the last post:

"King Harold Godwin's territorial interests near our area ensured that the Norman power which replaced him was soon active nearby.  There followed a period of nearly 500 years during which the largely unrestrained authority of the Marcher Lords, and our area especially the Mortimer family, was matched by successive waves of resurgence led by Welsh leaders from other parts of Wales.."

Now this suggests that the 1500 or so households that made up the cantref of Maelienydd had no agency of their own in resisting the Norman incursions.  Of course this isn't true as a browse through Brut y Tywysogion would soon make clear.  Some examples: in 1136 Madog ab Idnerth and his sons were among the leaders in the battle of Crug Mawr in Ceredigion; in 1165 the sons of Madog ab Idnerth and their host were present at the victory over King Henry at the battle of Crogen; in 1262 the men of Maelienydd seized the castle of Cefnllys - they did so again in 1295 - and, of course, the men of Maelienydd were central to the victory at Bryn Glas in 1402.

The sad truth is that Rhwng Gwy a Hafren is largely ignored or misrepresented by Welsh historians, indeed I'd say that you have to turn to an Englishman -  and a UKIP parliamentary candidate to boot - for anything more than a very superficial view of the history of this strategically important part of Wales.

DNA CYMRU

I've only seen a few minutes of this programme but I was interested to read the claim that 18% of Welsh men were descended from just ten men, probably chieftains, born more than a thousand years ago.  Of course that has quite fairly been met with a degree of scepticism although I wouldn't be surprised if it were true.  Some of the scepticism took the form of denying the accuracy of the older Welsh genealogies.  The 15C genealogies were in reality Welsh legal records and it smacks of a colonial mentality to dismiss them while accepting English records without question.  Later on the genealogies did indeed become more corrupted, one of my favourite Welsh couplets is this from Sion Tudur (d1602):

Ar frys arfau a roesom,
Arfau ei dad fu raw dom

How speedily we bestow coats of arms, his father's coat of arms was a shovel of shit.

No Mug For Me 

The Penybont book also covers Llandegley and to a lesser extent Crossgates.  According to the powers that be the Welsh language versions of these two names are Llandeglau and Y Groes.  Since Llandegle was good enough for Lewis Glyn Cothi shouldn't we resist the imposition of that North Wales AU ending.  As for Y Groes, that's a very recent invention and perhaps we'd be better going back to calling the village Llanbadarn Fawr.  It seems that Crossgates was itself an invention of the 19C Post Office, fed-up with confusion with the Aberystwyth suburb of the same name.

The first four or five terms of my education were actually spent in Llanbadarn Fawr school, not the modern building in the village, but the old school nearer Penybont.  How did I get there from the Gravel Road?  I've no memory of walking along the A44 and we certainly didn't have a car.  Perhaps approaching senility will unlock such lost childhood memories.  I'm not sure if I've actually recovered from the trauma of not receiving a Coronation mug from the good folk of Crossgates in 1953.  Gravel Road is in Nantmel parish the organisers of the celebration explained, meanwhile the Nantmel committee insisted it was located in Llanbadarn Fawr.  Years later, poring over an old map, I discovered that my old home was actually in an outlier of distant Llanddewi Ystradenni.

Radnorshire in Print

Spotted a couple of Radnorshire related books on sale this Christmastide

and this colourful and well-illustrated publication.