Civil Protest

by Wyn Evans

I have been arrested twice. The first time I was seventeen years old. A group of us from school had travelled to an Eisteddfod in Cardigan and had taken out a lease on a rental property in Aberporth for the week. On the first evening, we took umbrage at the high street being parcelled-up in union jack bunting. Drink had been taken. Back then we were knee-jerk nationalists and did not have any worked-through and consistent political philosophy. We dismantled a few yards worth of the decorations and ran away with it, hoping to avoid the police who were hot on our heels. Needless to say a couple of us were caught redhanded and arrested. My parents were telephoned and soon my dad was taking custody of me from the police cell.

I thought he would be furious with me but he was surprisingly measured in his response. We sat in the car and he asked me to explain what had been my thinking. It has stayed with me to this day that he wasn’t mad at me for being arrested. Nor was he disappointed because I had gotten caught. He explained to me how impressed he had been with campaigners for bilingual road-signs in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s hard today to remember that this was an issue back then. But it was very much a part of the sea-change in public policy which led to the Welsh Language Acts of 1967 and 1993 and the successful campaign for the creation of a Welsh-language television channel in the 1980s.

The Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542 had made English the only language of the law courts and other aspects of public administration in Wales, even though most of the population spoke Welsh and few spoke English. The 1967 Act was the first alteration to this situation, but the Welsh Language Act 1993 was the first to put Welsh on an equal basis with English in public life(1). This stuff mattered. For example, when Plaid Cymru’s first MP was elected, in 1966, he was the first to attempt to take the oath in one of the United Kingdom’s native languages. (Permission was not granted until 1974.)

Dad told me about campaigners like Dafydd Iwan who used to let it be known what action they were intending to take and effectively issuing a challenge to the police to attend and arrest them. He told me that I needed to put together a political philosophy and to think about where and how my actions fit into that. Then he told me about Saunders Lewis, Rev Lewis Valentine and D J Williams, who on September 8, 1936 carried out what is recognised as one of the defining moments in modern Welsh history(2). The university lecturer, Baptist minister and school teacher set fire to a partly built RAF aerodrome, then calmly reported their actions to the police at nearby Pwllheli. They handed a letter to an Inspector acknowledging their responsibility for the damage done to the buildings at Penyberth. They were tried twice and were sentenced to nine months imprisonment. On their release they were greeted as heroes by 15,000 people at a rally in Caernarfon.

Dad did something else that surprised me: he asked me if I’d like him to drop me off back at the rental house in Aberporth and see out the week with my mates. I said “yes, thanks”, agreeing that no more drink would be taken that week. Dad then tore a strip off my mates that none of them had gone to the police station to wait for my release. And then he went home, leaving me with a lot to think about.

The second time I was arrested was at a ‘Peace vigil’ at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall on Ash Wednesday. I was by then a member of a Pacifist organisation, the FoR (Fellowship of Reconciliation). This was primarily a Christian organisation. (I was inclined towards that at the time. Today, I am an evangelical atheist and no longer a pacifist.) Prior to Ash Wednesday we had all come together in groups across the UK and burned objects that mattered to us. Then the officiants gathered together the ashes and used them to mark the sign of the cross on our foreheads at the start of the vigil. Branded in this way, a couple of hundred nuns, monks, various other religious, along with lay people like me, walked around and around the MoD building with, I can’t recall accurately, black chalk I think. The police had

been told to expect a peaceful demonstration and they formed a ‘ring of steel’ around the MoD, a policeman every ten yards. The demonstrators’ job was to get to the pristine walls of the building and write something meaningful and pacifist. So there we were like a giant game of tag; dodging and side-stepping the police, getting to the wall and writing our messages. I got as far as writing “P E A”... before I was arrested, the aim being to spell PEACE of course. The arresting officer, not entirely seriously I think, asked me what other vegetables I intended to write about.

I was bundled into one of the waiting ‘Black Marias’ and taken to, I think it was, Paddington Green station. Finger-printed and processed I was put in a cell with scores of others, many of whom were nuns. A couple of hundred were arrested and charged with, I think – memories fade over time – criminal damage. It took a couple of hours before they started releasing us. There were members of FoR waiting for each of us and most of us waited outside until the last of our number was released.

Evidently, I had learned lessons from my first brush with the law: I did now have a worked-through philosophy; I took ownership and responsibility for my actions; and was prepared for the possible consequences (a fine or gaol time). Since the aim was to end up in court and make a statement it was subsequently no surprise that charges were never taken any further and we protesters were denied the ‘oxygen of publicity’. I think we all got conditional discharges but I won’t swear to that nor guess what that condition was. As I say, memories fade, and I had a lot of other stuff going on too: divorcing Not-The Boss, finishing my degree, falling in love with The Boss, and preparing to get back to the world of paid employment.

But I took away from it all the frightening feeling of what it was like to be locked up and having little say in my own options. I remember also how glad I was that we live in a country and at a time when it was unlikely we’d be treated abominably by our gaolers; and how good it is that our friends and colleagues could wait outside for us without fear.

With the Metropolitan Police now in special measures I wonder can the same thing be said today.

Footnotes: 1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Language_Act_1967 2.https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/dayactivists-torched-raf-bombing-15083548