A HISTORY OF WALES
John Davies
New 2007 Edition, Penguin Books, £16.99

Review by Geoff Jones

A new edition of John Davies’ ‘History of Wales’ is to be welcomed. More humorous than Kenneth O. Morgan, less given to flights of Celtic fantasy than Gwyn Alf Williams, and less addicted to convoluted sentence constructions than Dai Smith, Davies provides the perfect introduction and handbook for socialists wishing to learn about the history of Wales.

Many modern history books seem thinly veiled eulogies of imperialism in general and the British Empire in particular but Davies’ book is the reverse, and well worth reading for a view of the development of Britain over two millennia, quite different from that of ‘England-centred’ writers. Davies makes clear the central importance of Wales and the Welsh working class in the industrial revolution of the 18th-19th century. This tends to get overlooked in English histories, partly, Davies suggests, because Welsh industry was based on the production of capital goods such as lead, copper, iron and coal, rather than ‘consumer goods’ such as cotton cloth or machinery.

Davies brings a cool wit to the subject, with insights on society in general and imperialism in particular far wider than Wales. For example, in his first pages he demolishes those who disregard ‘prehistory’ before written records exist.

“ …to ignore ‘prehistory’ is to lose sight of the basic fact that when the people of Wales first appeared upon the stage of history almost every development of importance had already taken place. That people could create and control fire, cook food, cultivate the land, rear stock, build dwellings, make metals, brew beer, theorise about the world to come, produce fine art, cure sickness, practise literature, maintain political structures and kill and oppress their fellow creatures. That is they had all the cultural, spiritual, and social attributes of humanity.”

Discussing the Roman occupation of Britain:

“The cities of Britannia were bilingual communities, although doubtless Latin was more audible for in every age the imperial language has its own particular pitch and its own peculiar stridency.”
You immediately hear Victorian ‘sahibs’ strolling through an Indian bazaar, Condoleeza Rice haranguing Iraqis, or Margaret Thatcher.

Or take this comment on the English burgesses imported to Caernarfon by Edward I

“For almost a quarter of a millennium they gave expression to that mixture of arrogance and paranoia which is characteristic of privileged ethnic minorities.” Ian Paisley exactly.

And he has a clear understanding of the way in which the propertied classes build up their own histories. Writing about John Penry, a Welsh cleric who railed against English bishops in Wales and was sentenced to death on dubious grounds in 1593.

“Penry was ignored for centuries. He was elevated just over a hundred years ago to the position of Wales’ leading martyr, a notable example of the ability of that age like all other ages to produce the heroes it needs.”

In this case he was referring to the attempts by the elevate an ideology of the ‘gwerin’ based on religion and a rural economy.

There are also amusing asides on the 19th century working class. Speaking of the setting up of Temperance Societies to counteract drunkenness amongst workers:

“ ….the members….were allowed to drink two pints of beer a day. (Consternation arose when the Ebbw Vale temperance advocates saved up their weekly allowance -fourteen pints - for Saturday nights)”

HISTORICAL TRIADS

To organise a story of two millennia, covering invasions, occupations, civil wars, industrial revolutions and the emergence of the working class, the only workers uprising on mainland Britain (so far), religious and cultural upheavals, the rise and fall of political parties is difficult. Most historians split their work into chapters such as “The Age of the Tudors” etc. Davies takes a different path, following the mediaeval Welsh bardic tradition of using ‘triads’ such as ‘Three great betrayals’ as an aide-memoir for a complex story. Each chapter is headed by a ‘triad’ of place names encapsulating the important axes of developments in that chapter.
For example, the chapter on the first phase of the Industrial Revolution is headed ‘Holywell, Dowlais and Llanover.’ In the late 18th century Thomas Williams’ works in Holywell in Flintshire were the epicentre of the copper and lead refining industries (at this time the centre of half the world’s copper production) As industry developed, iron took centre stage and the huge works along the edge of the South Wales coalfield with Dowlais at the centre became the world’s centre for iron production. Welsh iron rails spread across the globe from America to Russia. Davies notes ‘..it was probably on a rail bearing the letters GL (Guest Lewis the trademark of Dowlais) that poor Anna Karenina met her end.’
The new and combative working class fought bitter battles including the 1831 uprising which put Merthyr Tydfil under workers control for a week and which was only put down by military invasion. That rising produced the first Welsh working class martyr Richard Lewis (Dic Penderyn), falsely accused of wounding a Scottisg soldier and hanged.
Working class consciousness developed in many forms; the urban terrorism of the ‘Scotch Cattle’ in the South East valleys dispensed rough justice against employers’ property ;Robert Owen from Newtown preached a form of idealistic socialism with his grand National Trade Union; Chartism The Welsh Chartists took on a much more militant programme than those of England, with some talking of an insurrection to set up a working class fortress in South East Wales from which to spread revolution.
.At the same time, the propertied class looked towards the revival of an idealised mediaeval Welsh culture. Thomas Phillips, who ordered the shooting down of Chartists in Newport in 1839, established Llandovery College for the study of Welsh language and literature, while at her Llanover mansion, Lady Guest, wife of an ironmaster, preserved and translated the superb mediaeval poetry of Wales and invented what is now taken as “traditional” Welsh dress.

Similarly, chapters “The Rhondda, Aberystwyth, Bethesda” cover the 2nd industrial revolution, when Wales became a world centre of coal exports, the development of a Welsh intelligentsia and working class struggles in the slate industry.

“The Somme, Brynmawr and Penyberth” deals with World War I, the 1930 depression (where Brynmawr at the heads of the Valleys had the dubious distinction of recording 90% unemployment among insured males) and the beginnings of modern political nationalism with the symbolic burning by three members of Plaid Cymru of a hut on a bombing range in the Lleyn peninsula.

UPDATE – THATCHER AND BEYOND

In this new edition Davies has added a final chapter “Shotton, Brussels and Carmarthen” on the quarter century following the 1979 referendum on Welsh devolution and the election of Thatcher’s Tories. After the referendum, where only 20% voted ‘yes’, the reactionary but perceptive nationalist Saunders Lewis commented:
”May I point out the probable consequences of a No majority….There may be a change of government. The first task of the Westminster Parliament will be to reduce and master inflation. In Wales there are coalmines that work at a loss, there are steelworks that are judged to be superfluous, there are valleys convenient for submersion. And there will be no Welsh defense.”
Davies details the working out of that prophesy through the Thatcher years: the Britain-wide political processes and electoral ups and downs which will be familiar to most socialists over the age of 30, the social consequences of the miners defeat in 1985, the systematic destruction of Wales’ heavy industries and their partial replacement by new engineering and electronics plants. In 1997 a new referendum produced a majority for a Welsh Assembly. Davies sees this as the partial realisation of the need for a ‘Welsh defence’, expressed by Ron Davies MP as ‘virtually everybody he knew had consistently voted against the Conservatives and equally consistently had been ruled by them’. He describes cultural shifts over the last twenty years and sees these shifts as signs of a developing Welsh nation diverging from English patterns. Socialists may not agree with his upbeat conclusions. but his book is the best available and most easily readable history of Wales.