Lost for words

“When was Wales?” asks the celebrated Welsh historian, Gwyn A Williams. Eagerly you turn the pages, 300 or so, and the answer: never and forever. It has only for brief periods in its long history functioned as a separate state under a single indigenous ruler; it has never had independent institutional life of the type enjoyed by Scotland; it has been overrun by the Romans, Normans and, most insidiously, the English. And yet, always on the brink of extinction, Wales has somehow survived, to the point where John Davies, in his monumental A History of Wales, says that “it is more stimulating to be a member of the Welsh nation in the last decade of the 20th century than it has ever been before”.

The world that lives within the M25 would laugh at such a claim. Those London-loving cynics would say, misquoting Harry Lime, that 2,000 years of Welsh culture had ended up with Harry Secombe and Max Boyce. Welsh culture, unlike that of Northern Ireland and Scotland, is not cool, not media-sexy, all harps and choirs and people with a taste for bursting into song and reciting verse in pointy hats, flowing robes and an incomprehensible language.

Wales’s cultural profile is not so much low as subterranean. Paul Turner, director of the Oscar-nominated Hedd Wyn, is still angry that Channel 4 would only show his film after recognition from the Academy. Previously, having been offered it as part of a series of Welsh films, they had said it wasn’t up to scratch. That prejudice was expressed last year in an extreme form by the Evening Standard’s in-house eccentric and controversialist A N Wilson, who provoked a storm of controversy with an article (wittily headlined Never Say Dai) which argued that Wales had achieved nothing culturally or artistically. “The Welsh”, he wrote, “have never made any significant contribution to any branch of knowledge, culture or entertainment. Choral singing – usually flat – seems to be their only artistic achievement. They have no architecture, no gastronomic tradition and, since the Middle Ages, no literature worthy of the name. Even their religion, Calvinistic Methodism, is boring.”

The same stigmatism is apparent in politics. Labour leader Neil Kinnock was kebabbed by the English press because he was Welsh. His Welshness – and of course consequent windbaggery – was sufficient reason to lambast him. As a Welshman, he was fair game: had the same attacks been made, say the Welsh, on a black or Jewish leader, the Commission for Racial Equality would have taken a keen interest.

Wales’s history is one of oppression and denial, of accommodations with the demands of more powerful outsiders. The Act of Union of 1536 decreed that English was to be the official language and that “sinister usages and customs” were to be stamped out. For the next four centuries the Welsh were told their language was second rate, and in the 19th century “Welsh Not” signs were hung around children’s necks as a punishment for speaking their own language. That the language didn’t go the way of Manx or Cornish is a miracle. Monolingualism died, but Welsh has survived, to underpin Welsh culture – and to complicate the political and social life of modern Wales enormously.

Before attempting to answer what is Wales, we must first establish where it is. On the surface, a ridiculous question: it’s the bumpy bit that sticks out into the Irish Sea. Well, yes, that is Wales as geographical expression, but culturally Wales is a series of dualities: Welsh-speaking and English-speaking; rural and urban; agricultural and industrial; north and south. Nor do they neatly dovetail: Welsh speakers are spread across north and south, rural and urban Wales.

Those dualities cloud the notion of nationhood. England’s success as a state was derived in part from its cultural homogeneity and geographical unity. Wales, with its tiny population of 2.8 million, is far more divided. South Walians rarely make the trek to the north, and if they do so will probably go via England. Many non-Welsh speakers, swallowing the English propaganda that Welsh is about as useful as Sanskrit, don’t understand the commitment Welsh speakers feel for their language.

“He’s proper Welshey” was a phrase I often heard as a child, growing up in Newport, that peculiar part of Wales that can’t quite believe it isn’t England, where real men don’t vote Plaid. It was usually applied to people from the Valleys, with their more pronounced Welsh accents and “old-fashioned” way of life. Yet how much more “Welshey” would the Welsh-speaking communities of the north-west have seemed, if we had managed to scale the mountains in the middle of Wales and make contact with them? In some eyes, coming from Newport – a product of a hybrid Anglo-Welsh culture – disqualifies me from writing about Wales. I bring, as one Welsh speaker told me indignantly, a lot of excess baggage to the task, a tendency to underplay the centrality of the language to the maintenance of an independent identity. To which I reply – but I am one of many.

Wales’s main centres of population happen to be close to England, hopelessly susceptible to that Anglo-Americanisation which in the 1950s seemed almost certain to kill off Welsh once and for all. Nor was it only Newport that denied its Welshness. “I’m not Welsh, I’m from Cardiff” was a not uncommon attitude – hardly a great vote of confidence from the country’s capital.

Growing up in that grey and unlovely, but in the 1960s – thanks to the opening of the massive Llanwern steelworks – relatively prosperous town, I was scarcely aware of Welsh-language culture. My school taught French and German, even Russian, at A-level, but certainly not Welsh. Welsh-language programmes on TV were scheduled apologetically at off-peak times and could, in any case, be avoided by tuning in to stations transmitting from the other side of the Severn Estuary. Welshness was simply a matter of learning the Welsh national anthem phonetically, to sing it on St David’s Day and, more importantly, on those glorious occasions when the England rugby team were ritually thrashed at Cardiff Arms Park.

I am one of that confused breed, the “Anglo-Welsh” – a term that the politically correct in Wales would now like to expunge. “We are not sure who we are,” wrote the poet John Tripp in Welcome To Wales, “but the search goes on.” In his case the search took him from Cardiff to London and back again, though from his bathetic description it is far from clear why he went home: “The roads are quite modern, and the beer/is warm and generally flat./ The clocks keep the same time as Surbiton.” Yet, happily, it was not Surbiton, and despite anglicisation South Welsh culture had a strength and coherence that made it distinctive. The foundation was the economic homogeneity of life in the area: it was an egalitarian working-class culture with a strong belief in collective action and a tradition of protest. South Wales from the 1830s on was the cockpit of radicalism, trade unionism and, later, socialism. From the Merthyr Riots of 1831 and the Newport Rising of 1839, to the number of men who enlisted to fight for the Spanish Republic, and the solidarity of the miners in the strike of 1984-85, the Welsh working class made common cause.

In post-industrial Wales that culture is dying, indeed may already be dead, and in once very stable communities crime and drugs are rife because the cement that held them together has been removed. As the men of the Mardy pit marched proudly, tearfully, back to work on that bleak March morning after the collapse of the miners’ strike in 1985, their colliery band was playing a lament for the loss of a way of life. Industrial culture has, across much of South Wales, been replaced by dependency culture. Wales once had 250,000 miners; now it has the Big Pit in Blaenafon, where tourists can enjoy a “colliery experience” with former miners acting as guides. Welcome to theme park Wales: it may be significant that you pay a toll at the Severn Bridge to enter Wales but not to leave.

Culturally, the people of the mining and steel towns, the heavy industrial heartland of Wales, are dispossessed. The norms once set by a common industrial experience are now derived from lifestyle-obsessed English newspapers and satellite TV. Kim Howells, Labour MP for Pontypridd, believes there is a “crisis of community”, a loss of the old certainties and sense of collective discipline. “On the council estates such as the one I grew up on,” he says, “there is a terrible drugs problem and with that has come a huge increase in crime, especially theft. A great deal of the sense of optimism that I experienced as a teenager in the 1960s has evaporated.”

The irony is that this dispossession – I want to use the term alienation but that sounds too positive – has occurred during a decade when Welsh-language Wales has staged a remarkable fightback. Where once the language seemed doomed, it now has fresh life. The 1991 census showed that for the first time in generations the number of Welsh speakers was rising. This reflects the success of Welsh speakers in education and the media in fighting their linguistic corner – and the curious willingness of the Conservative government, at a time of cutbacks, to plough money into sustaining the language, for many the symbol of separatism. Above all, it financed the setting up of S4C – Wales’s version of Channel 4 – which commissions and shows programmes in Welsh, and backed a huge expansion of Welsh teaching in schools. Centuries of what Welsh-language enthusiasts deemed to be cultural genocide has been supplanted by state sponsorship of the language.

Since guilt is unlikely to have been the motive, why has the government shown such a commitment? In the case of S4C, political pressure was the key factor. In 1980, the then Plaid Cymru president Gwynfor Evans pledged to fast himself to death unless the Conservatives honoured their 1979 manifesto pledge and established a Welsh television channel. The government, recognising that Evans’s martyrdom could ignite elements within Welsh nationalism which throughout the 1960s and 70s had shown themselves to be capable of direct action and violence, quickly acceded.

The extent to which the government has been buying off Welsh nationalism is hard to gauge, but there is no doubt that the establishment of S4C and the setting up of a network of quangos has brought many nationalists and language enthusiasts into the system. Welsh republicanism has been marginalised and the arson attacks that punctuated the 70s and 80s, the work of small, shadowy extremist groups such as Meibion Glyndwr, have been extinguished.

Whatever its political impact, S4C has been a key agent of cultural change and a critical factor in revitalising Welsh. Welsh-language programmes dominate its peak-time schedules; its news and current affairs broadcasts are in Welsh; in Pobol y Cwm it has a successful soap in Welsh; it broadcasts sport in Welsh, creating in the process a terminology in rugby that previously did not exist in the language; it has created a healthy Welsh animation industry, and some of the films it has financed – notably Hedd Wyn and Endaf Emlyn’s Gadael Lenin – have won international recognition.

It has also proved something at a more profound, emotional level – that Welsh can be made to work in the modern world. It has allowed Welsh speakers to come off the defensive. The channel has no truck with the comfortable bilingualism now used on signs throughout Wales. Even in strongly Anglo-Welsh areas like Cardiff, its posters and bus-sides are only in Welsh. Commercial suicide perhaps, but you have to admire the chutzpah. It has money, confidence and an evangelical commitment to the language – Welsh is de rigueur in its designer offices on the outskirts of Cardiff – and during the 1980s that helped to change the attitude of the Welsh-speaking community from being protective of its heritage to being positive about its potential. Welsh speakers were once curators; now they believe they can be creators. Add in the changes in education – Welsh is now part of the national curriculum in Wales and the number of Welsh-medium schools, which teach the entire curriculum in Welsh, is growing rapidly – and there is a quiet revolution under way. Welsh, the sickly patient of the 1960s occasionally lashing out in its death throes, is not just back on its feet it has been restored to rude health.

All this leaves many of the Anglo-Welsh at best bemused, at worst angry. The former just ignore S4C or watch the rugby with the sound off; the latter remonstrate with the education authorities about their children having to learn Welsh, and get steamed up about the hijacking of the media by a well-organised Welsh-speaking minority, often dubbed (or more likely subtitled) the Taffia.

Welsh film-makers working in English, such as Karl Francis, believe that their voice is rarely heard. They cannot work for S4C unless they are prepared to make programmes in Welsh, and London on the whole doesn’t want to back Welsh projects. “The English-speaking Welsh person is faced with an anti-Welsh prejudice in England and an anti-English-speaking prejudice in Wales,” argues Francis. “They really are the most hard-done-by literary class in Britain. Finding English-language writers is very difficult because they’ve basically given up.” As a result, he and others believe, the Anglo-Welsh rarely see representations of themselves on television, which further weakens a culture already having to come to terms with de-industrialisation. There is, for example, no Anglo-Welsh soap, so their models of working-class life will be drawn from Manchester, Liverpool, the East End or even Australia.

Critics also argue that the emphasis on Welsh programme-making, the sheer need for product in Welsh, lowers standards and leads to pointless copying of English-language shows – even the most ardent language enthusiast would be pushed to find any cultural significance in producing Blind Date in Welsh. Like Francis, writer and producer Adrian Mourby believes that S4C’s remit to commission programmes only in Welsh imposes artistic restrictions on the channel: “It limits the number of actors, writers and directors who can work in the medium – they can’t use 80% of the talent in Wales.” Mourby is ambivalent about the role of the language. “To anyone who criticises Welsh, I would say that it is culturally destructive not to support it. But to people who champion it, I would say that it is taking too much of the money that could be used for English-language broadcasting.”

Clearly, there is substance in such claims. Welsh speakers number only a fifth of the population but get a far higher proportion of the arts and broadcasting budget lavished on them. Emyr Jenkins, chief executive of the Arts Council of Wales and former director of the National Eisteddfod, made it clear to me that he believes the council should give equal support to the arts in English and Welsh. The language is at the heart of Welsh culture – it is, in Gwynfor Evans’s resounding phrase, “the badge of nationhood” – but its impact is double-edged. Is it sustaining the separateness of Welsh life and giving renewed vigour to its artistic output, or is it dividing the population and fencing in its culture, making it possible for the English to ignore it because it uses a language they don’t understand? Class further complicates the issue: Welsh-language enthusiasts vigorously deny it, but Welsh learners, parents who want their children to speak Welsh and, of course, the media-folk of Cardiff and Caernarfon tend to be middle class; the Anglo-Welsh are predominantly working class.

As Emyr Jenkins says, for Welsh speakers cultural identity is a straightforward matter – their language separates them, sustains their individuality, drives their art. For the Anglo-Welsh, it is less clear-cut. Some, like the poet and novelist Glyn Jones, have no difficulty filtering a Welsh sensibility through English. “While using cheerfully enough the English language,” he said, “I have never written in it a word about any country other than Wales, or any people other than Welsh people.”

Others seem less relaxed and write sardonically of the constraints of language and subject matter. “To live in Wales, / Is to be mumbled at/ by reincarnations of Dylan Thomas / in numerous diverse disguises,” complains Peter Finch. While John Davies, in his poem How To Write Anglo-Welsh Poetry, seems to consign just about everything to the cultural dustbin:

First, apologise for not being able
to speak Welsh. Go on: apologise.
Being Anglo-anything is really tough
any gaps you can fill with sighs.

Spray place-names around. Caernarfon.
Cwmtwrch. Have, perhaps, a Swansea
sun marooned in Glamorgan’s troubled
skies; even the weather’s Welsh, see.

But a mining town is best, of course,
for impact, and you’ll know what to say
about Valley Characters, the heart’s dust
and the rest. Read it all up anyway.

A quick reference to cynghanedd
always goes down well; girls are cariad;
myth is in; exile, defeat, hills …
almost anything Welsh and sad.

Who needs Kingsley Amis to mock Wales when the Welsh are so good at it themselves? Comparisons with Scotland are instructive. Scotland has virtually lost its language – only 2% of the population can speak Gaelic – but has a confident, assertive culture, a more broadly based nationalism, a willingness to contemplate independence, and a powerful artistic impact on England. Wales has the language, but a weaker sense of itself, less cultural self-confidence, a less well-supported and more gradualist nationalist movement, and little artistic impact on the rest of the UK.

Literature illustrates the difference. The Scottish novel captivates literary London; contemporary Welsh novelists, in either Welsh or English, have far less currency. Welsh fiction cannot compete with the power and range of Irish or Scottish writing, and even its successes are ignored in England. As a small consumer test, I phoned Waterstones’ flagship store in Kensington and asked if they had any novels by Emyr Humphreys or Glyn Jones – two of Wales’s best recent novelists – in stock. No on both counts. England is happy to condemn Welsh fiction without even unearthing the facts.

Similarly in drama. The quality of Scottish theatre companies like the Citizens’ and the Traverse is recognised throughout the UK. Wales, with no tradition of professional theatre, is struggling to catch up, a process complicated by the fact that its best-known company, Theatr Clwyd, based in Mold, is so close to the English border that it has only the haziest of Welsh profiles and draws its audience primarily from north-west England.

Welsh National Opera, which gets a hefty slice of the Arts Council of Wales’s budget, is highly regarded – it is the only artistic institution in Wales guaranteed attention from the metropolitan press – but opera is such an international medium that it says very little about Wales. WNO plans to premiere an opera with a Welsh theme, The Doctor of Myddfai, in 1995. But the score will be written by Scottish-based composer Peter Maxwell Davies.

Christina Macaulay, the Scottish-born producer of The Slate, BBC Wales’s answer to The Late Show, is intrigued by the different degrees of cultural confidence in the two countries: “If you went into a bookshop in Scotland and it had Anglo-Scottish written on it, it just wouldn’t mean anything. People from Scotland have a secure sense of their identity. They don’t need the language. They know they’re Scottish and there is no question about it.” To put it crudely, Wales has the language; now all it needs is the culture.

As film-makers like Endaf Emlyn recognise, the use of Welsh is the starting point – not the reason for doing it. It must be good art, not part of a language course. ‘We are not just rattling the old skeletons and blowing the dust off the past,” he says. “We are very much involved with the present and feel that we have a contribution to make to the diversity of world cinema. The new writing in Wales is very much European and not so preoccupied with the kinds of issues we have been preoccupied with in the past.”

Welsh-language culture is attempting to make itself contemporary, and the wind of change has even ruffled the robes of the National Eisteddfod, the annual celebration of Welsh-language culture which begins in Neath today. The Eisteddfod – one of those traditions that was manufactured in the 19th century – manages to be both bizarre and inspiring. With its crowns and chairs and colour-coded bards, it is usually caricatured as a sort of druidic anachronism. But it embraces far more than verse in traditional poetic forms and time-honoured ceremonies, and has taken its message into English-speaking areas, including Newport with some success in 1988.

Progress has been made in exchanging ritual for relevance, but there is a long way to go. It still attracts a predominantly middle-aged audience, and though it pays lip service to youth interests like rock music – Welsh-language bands are remarkably numerous and nihilist lyrics surprisingly effective in Welsh – they have not yet been successfully integrated with the rest of the festival. The official festival and the fringe have a commitment to Welsh in common, but not much else.

The film industry remains the more obvious route to energising the language. Hedd Wyn and Gadael Lenin have shown what is possible. A Welsh Film Council has been established and there is confident talk of a Welsh Film School being set up next year. Those films have also demonstrated that Welsh artists can forge connections elsewhere in Europe, that winning favour in England isn’t everything.

Turner and Emlyn talk of the reception their films received at festivals in Spain, Slovenia and Czechoslovakia, about the empathy other small countries and minority language groups have with Wales. Time and again the Basque country and Catalonia are invoked – by artists of all types and by nationalist politicians. That resonantly vacuous phrase, a “Europe of the regions”, is on many lips. In dance and performance art too, cross-cultural links are being strengthened. Leading Welsh dance companies Earthfall and Volcano have worked with performers in Slovenia and Catalonia, and Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre prides itself on showcasing the results of those collaborations. Who needs London when you can wow them in Lithuania?

Chapter’s director, David Clarke, offers a way out of the stasis of two traditions – Welsh v English, nationalist v labourist. He is far more interested in whether Wales will remain rooted in its past or claim its future. “The interesting creative tension,” he says, “is between Wales as the land of myth and magic, beloved of the tourist board, and the idea of Welsh culture as being critical, contemporary and modern – and coming to terms with post-industrialism. Artists at Chapter are trying to build a Welsh culture that isn’t museum-ised. We don’t want to be part of theme park Wales, and are trying to build a sense of Wales that is contemporary and innovative.” Clarke also offers an intriguing take on the language divide, pointing out that youngsters in Cardiff speak a fusion of English, Welsh and earthier street patois which he christens “Nintendo”.

Significantly, perhaps, Clarke is not Welsh. Like Paul Turner, who has lived in Wales for 20 years and now speaks Welsh fluently, he is an Englishman who has found his adopted country liberating. They are liberated and in turn they liberate – by reimagining Wales, by refusing to see it exclusively in terms of bardic ritual, cultural oppression or class struggle.

Wales’s greatest contemporary poet, R S Thomas, wrote that: “You cannot live in the present,/ At least not in Wales.” But that is the counsel of despair. If it were true, it would condemn Welsh-language culture forever to produce its elaborately structured epic poems, unheard, unread by the world outside. It would also condemn the dispossessed industrial class to go on living on their memories of a dead culture. And it would condemn the two cultures to go on ignoring each other, sniping at each other’s claims to represent the true Wales. As the playwright Edward Thomas says, Wales must now find a new mythology with which to sustain itself.

← Thoroughly modern Mr Islam
Soft cell? →