Welsh History

Lesson 8: Modern Wales

In this lesson you will see how Wales has struggled to hang on to its Celtic language, how a change in attitude has helped this attempt, how the people finally came to vote for Devolution, and the dispersion and achievements of the Welsh overseas.

Recommended reading: Struggle pp. 160-197; Wales A to Y relevant entries; Intro to Lit pp. 96-106

The Language Dilemma

In 1925, to further the aims of self-government, and in an attempt to stop the decline of the language and culture, Saunders Lewis helped form the new political party, Plaid Cymru (the Party of Wales). In the face of complete apathy from the mainstream political parties centered in London, the few founding members of Plaid were fiercely devoted to purely Welsh causes. It was to take forty years before Plaid was taken seriously enough to gain its first seat in Parliament.

In the meantime, the process of Anglicization continued apace. More inhabitants of Wales considered themselves as Anglo-Welsh than Welsh, and for this we can put the blame squarely on the educational system that was geared to producing loyal Britons.

The Welsh language continued its precipitous decline. Effective road and rail links between the two parts of Wales were practically non-existent; road and rails went west to east, not north to south, and the general flow of ideas flowed in the same direction. The idea of the Welsh as a common, united people worthy of their own government as part of a greater Britain hardly existed outside the minds of a dedicated few.

In 1926, the Hadow Report recommended that every child in Britain attend secondary school. All the secondary schools in Wales taught their subjects through the medium of English.

To counter the linguistic threat, a private Welsh-medium school was established at Aberystwyth by Ifan ab Owen Edwards, son of the famous educator. Apart from this little school, however, it wasn’t until Llanelli Welsh School opened its doors in 1947 that the idea of teaching Welsh primary children through the medium of the Welsh language began to take hold.

In the 1960's, a rush of other schools followed so that by 1970, even Cardiff (the Welsh capital, but most English of cities) had its Ysgol Dewi Sant (St David’s School), one of the largest in Wales. The huge increase in the number of Welsh primary schools was accompanied by a demand for Welsh secondary education.

All these schools meant that for the first time in history Welsh children could receive secondary education through the medium of the Welsh language, through methods adopted from Israel -- a country that teaches all its immigrants Hebrew solely through the medium of Hebrew.

The change in the attitude of the people of Wales towards their language has been dramatic since 1962. A bi-lingual education was trumpeted as superior to one that confined the children of Wales to a single language.

In 1971, as a response to heavy demand, the Welsh Nursery School Movement (Sefydlu Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin) came into being in many parts of Wales. In many totally English speaking areas, parents sent their children to such nursery schools, but also enrolled themselves in evening classes to learn the necessary phrases to continue the use of Welsh at home.

BBC broadcasts began in Britain in 1922. At the time, there were almost one million speakers of Welsh. Yet even the head of the BBC station in Cardiff ignored protests from those who wished to hear Welsh language programs. Radio Eireann, the voice of the Irish Republic, broadcast the only regular Welsh-language material, beginning in 1927.

Eventually, reluctantly, the BBC studio at Bangor, in Gwynedd, began broadcasting Welsh language programs in 1935, and in July of 1937 the Welsh Region of the BBC finally began to broadcast on a separate wavelength. Radio Cymru, however, had to wait until 1977, much too late to enjoy the support of the majority of Welsh people, who now spoke English as their first language.

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