Cambria Magazine Winter 2011

CONTENTS volume 12 number 6

EDITOR’S LETTER

LETTERS

9 11 14 18

The Future for Plaid clive betts assesses the Welsh political scene

Once were Princes siôn jobbins on the legacy of the historical society Cofiwn

Riot! john edwards on the Llanelli railway strike and riots of 1911

Upland Pilgrimage ed buck takes a walk in the hills and holy places of upland Ceredigion

ARCHAEOLOGY

HISTORY

HEROES

EISTEDDFOD

DIARY

HERITAGE

ENVIRONMENT

MUSIC

SPORT

LITERARY

NATURE

ART

GARDENS

MOTORING

FOOD

WHAT’S HOT

17 michael harris visits a villa at the very edge of the Roman world 22 peter n williams on the Trades’ Unions’ early Welsh connections 24 louis von zeil on his study of heroic Welshman Owen Rhoscomyl 26 frances davies on the highlights of the Wrexham Eisteddfod 30 tom davies is a proud Taff in the Land of the Gogs 32 gwyn griffiths on the iconic role of shepherds in Wales’s story 36 david n thomas on the women in Dylan Thomas’s life 34 jerry fonge on the enduring role of wool in our lives 40 norma lord on the life and phenomenal work of Phyllis Kinney 42 norma lord on Wales’s new national conservatoire 60 norma lord on Gwynne Evans’s newly released cd 44 byron kalies visits Aberdovey - one of Wales’s finest golf courses 46 Sense of Place: gerald morgan on the Celtic hill fort of Carn Goch 52 Reviews 56 meic stephens on new books published in Wales 57 phylip brake on Celticism 42 mererid hopwood on Y Llyfr Gwyn Gaerfyrddin 61 chris kinsey’s Nature Diary 62 adam salkeld on the work of artist Andrew Douglas-Forbes 66 caroline palmer on a new chapter for Trawsgoed 68 john a edwards on the inimitable style of the Lotus Elan 70 elisabeth luard on Beef Carbonnade and Lamb in Cider 71 dorothy davies on Food Rage and Welsh sparkling wine 74 cambria’s guide to events and exhibitions across Wales

Y CLAWR / THE COVER: Carn Goch,Ystrad Tywi © John Keates 2011

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C O N T R I B U TO R S meic stephens is a journalist and poet and has written, edited and translated some 150 books about our country’s culture.

volume 12 number 6 tachwedd/november 2011

siôn jobbins is a regular and valued contributor to Welsh periodicals

founder editor Henry Jones-Davies Frances Jones-Davies

gwyn griffiths is a journalist, author and renowned authority on Breton history, art and culture. john a. edwards is a Welsh motoring journalist of many years’ experience. norma lord is a lifelong opera lover and music journalist. carl ryan is a professional photographer specialising in extreme sports photography. john keates is an award-winning photographer and contributor to international news magazines.

patrons & friends Jan Morris D. Huw John Alan Jobbins D.W. Bevan Berwyn & Martha Jones Howard Potter Aneurin Jones Helga Martin Meredydd & Phyllis Evans Peter N. Williams Sam Adams Professor Meic Stephens Wil Aaron

chris kinsey is a poet and winner of he 2008 bbc Wildlife Poet of the Year Competition. mari owen is a professional photographer specialising in the landscape of Wales. tom davies is an adventurer, journalist, travel writer, diarist and novelist.

cambriatm - the national magazine of wales © 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced by any means without the prior permission of the publisher in writing. cambria is published bi-monthly by Cyhoeddwyr Cambria Cyfyngedig, po box 22, caerfyrddin/carmarthen, SA32 7YH, Cymru/Wales. issn: 2046-2409. All material submitted must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher will not be held responsible for loss, damage or any other injury to unsolicited manuscripts or artwork (including drawings, photographs, and transparencies). We cannot guarantee a response to unsolicited matter. cambria magazine has made every effort to ensure that proper permission has been obtained for the reproduction of all illustrations in this issue, and we apologise unreservedly for any errors or oversights. Views and opinions expressed by individual writers in this magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the editor or the publisher. All information in this publication has been verified to the best of the authors’ and publishers’ ability; however Cyhoeddwyr Cambria Cyfyngedig does not accept responsibility for any loss arising from reliance on it. Subscriptions for 6 issues: British Isles £18 - All other countries £28. Single copies: £3.50 plus 70p postage. The first copy of a new subscription application will be mailed by second class post for addresses in the British Isles, and by surface mail for the rest of the world. Please allow 6 weeks for overseas delivery. Argraffwyd gan: HSW Print, Tonypandy.

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political editor Clive Betts associate editor Jeremy Fonge literary editor Meic Stephens editor-at-large Siôn T. Jobbins motoring editor John A. Edwards art direction Simon Wigley photography David Williams, Carl Ryan, Mari Owen, John Keates webmaster Chris Jones

cambria is

distributed throughout Wales, and is available at all good newsagents, Siopau Lleol Cymraeg, Waitrose and selected Asda, Co-operative, Morrisons, and Tesco stores.

Should you experience any difficulty obtaining supplies of cambria , please call 01267 290188.

subscriptions - accounts - administration british isles: 0845 166 2147 (24hrs - local rate) all other countries: +44 (0)1267 290188 admin@cambriamagazine.com advertising Dawn Northcroft 01267 290188 sales@cambriamagazine.com

WEDI EI GREU A’I GYHOEDDI GYDA BALCHDER GAN Y CYMRY YNG NGHYMRU PROUDLY PRODUCED AND PUBLISHED BY THE WELSH IN WALES

F RO M T H E E D I TO R

H

ow refreshing it has been lately to see in the media such positive editorial regarding the Welsh nation and a general dredging around for some sort of familial connection to the land of the morally triumphant, disciplined and well- behaved Welsh rugby team. So many congratulations to our splendid rugby team for a brave and noble effort in New Zealand. Greater things are to come.

Recently I saw a copy of The Scottish Daily Mail, knowing that there isn’t a Welsh edition I wondered if there is an Irish one. Indeed there is, first published in 2006, and the Scottish version dates back to 1947. The Sun, the largest selling paper in all constituent parts of the United Kingdom, also brings out Scottish and Irish editions. The newspapers temper the content to the local feeling; in Scotland The Sun has been pro-devolution since the early 1990s. When visiting Scotland I am always impressed by the strength of and pride they have in their national identity, and this perception strongly enforced by large companies such as newpaper publishers, Tesco and the other supermarkets and many high street chains. Does the Scottish government and local councils insist on incoming businesses emphasising Scottishness, and give precedence to Scottish brands and branding? Is it the belief of businesses themselves that they will do better by flying the Scottish flag?

This is an interesting perception as it is not always the case here in Wales.

A couple of years ago I was talking to somebody from Cardiff Council and they expressed surprise at the success of the St. David’s Day Parade; their belief was that people in Cardiff weren’t really interested in things Welsh. A shocking statement, on several levels, I thought, but one I have heard repeated by people in other organisations. I often feel that here the Welsh Government and our councils are missing a trick in not insisting on such concessions when they give planning permission to large incoming companies. Cardiff Airport, for instance, could do a lot more work by on the maes with meic petersen and bishop edwin regan recognising Welsh culture and identity.

The greatest accolade possible in Wales is reception into the Gorsedd, and until we can persuade the Assembly to institute some form of Welsh honours system there is no other. So, I was very sad to hear on the Maes that this year was the last when anybody could qualify for a White Robe. From now on only those who have won the National and Urdd Eisteddfod’s main competitions will be eligible. The news is not as bleak as it first seemed, however. The Gorsedd is discussing introducing new colours to represent differing spheres of excellence as part of a wider programme of changes.

Thank you, as always, for your support; I hope you enjoy this issue, and remember, a subscription to cambria is a Christmas present which not only lasts all year, a warm reminder of the donor, but also provides food for thought and conversation. If you would like to be more involved with cambria or become a shareholder please see the information on page 8.

‘

MYFYRDOD

‘

frances jones-davies

“By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission the sad choice of a variety of evils” Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

Intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America

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Letters correction

editor Could I please make the following amendments to the article entitled: A Warning from History, which was published over two recent editions (winter 2010 and spring 2011) of Cambria. Contrary to my claim that only one Welsh MP voted in support of Liverpool Corporation’s Tryweryn Reservoir Bill, could I amend that by stating that twenty-four of the thirty-six Welsh MPs voted in opposition. The rest, either abstained, or were not present. Those absent included the Conservative member for Cardiff North, David Llywellyn, who was the only Welsh MP vocal in his support for the measure.

Moreover, contrary to my earlier claim that since the campaign of so-called direct action ended in 1969 that no Welsh valleys have been flooded, could I correct that by stating that while a small number of Welsh valleys have been flooded, none have involved the ‘drowning’ of a community. For instance, the reservoir at Llys-y-fran was completed in 1972 and those at Brianne and Alaw in 1973. They had planned before 1969, but that at Brenig was not planned until 1972.

Dr. Wyn Thomas.

dr wyn thomas commended

editor At last, a Welsh historian who writes without one eye on the Honours List. Dr Wyn Thomas (A Warning from History - cambria, Spring 2011) clearly believes that in order to move on, we should be aware of

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where we have been, and how we have got from where we were to where we are. He doesn’t subscribe to the ‘Venerable Bede’ approach to historical analysis and obviously does not believe that ivory towers should have red, white and blue windows.

The result is an extremely impressive and well-balanced piece of objective research, which I gather has been on-going for some ten years and which I feel amply demonstrates and justifies the hard work put into it. Dr Thomas expresses his reservations regarding the cherrypicking approach of ‘reputable’ historians and his thesis is clearly his well-reasoned response. Writers are perfectly entitled to ‘cherry-pick’ historical facts, but by so doing they lose their entitlement to be called reputable historians; they are, in fact, propagandists. Not only does Dr Thomas dig out and prove the historical facts, he also provides a sound and deeply psychological background to any conclusion he arrives at; this is satisfying and not usual in a work of this nature.

The piece of work (soon to be available in book form) has been a long time coming, but the result is well worth the wait. It deals with a period of great unrest and turbulence, which has been neglected and ignored for 40 years, but unless it is recognised and analysed the general public’s understanding of the ’60s is incomplete and doesn’t make sense.

It may not be totally palatable in some quarters, but the events in this thesis did happen and should be acknowledged as such. This work is destined to be the definitive historical analysis of the events leading up to the Welsh devolution and Dr Thomas is to be commended for his sound methodology, erudition and courage.

John Jenkins Wrecsam

an alternative to ‘labour’s dead hand’

editor Having been an active member of Plaid Cymru for 40 years and more, and having witnessed the growth of the Party and its sister SNP from a teenager to the present day, I never believed any unionist party members would accept the concept of developing devolution and the recognition of our Welsh/Scottish political national identities. Credit, therefore, to Murdo Fraser Conservative MSP who is moving his party towards an independent agenda by calling for a name change and re branding of the party which would have a fully autonomous existence within Scotland.

In Wales I applaud both David Melding AM and Councillor Rene Kinzett, Conservative group leader on Swansea Council, for ‘thinking outside the box’.

Both appear to recognise that the Conservatives’ and Thatcher’s destruction of our communities will never be forgotten in Wales - as with Scotland - and the need for a Welsh centre-right party. In my view this would in no way compare to the Tory Party which runs England, and is the only way to form a coalition Welsh Government as an alternative to the dead hand of Labour. I believe an innovative development such as is proposed by these senior conservatives would be attractive to many who, like myself and other Plaid colleagues, who, whilst supporting a gradual democratic progress towards a fully autonomous Wales within the EU, cannot cope with the orbital left within Plaid Cymru.

Clayton Jones Ynysybwl, Pontypridd,

Canolfan Rhiannon Centre Tregaron SY25 6JL 01974 298415 post@rhiannon.co.uk

Gwneuthurwyr gemwaith byd enwog yn Arian, Aur, ac Aur Cymru Creators of World famous jewellery in Silver, Gold, and Welsh Gold Hoffem ddymuno Nadolig Llawen i holl ddarllenwyr Cambria We would like to wish all Cambria readers a very Merry Christmas fed

Yn dathlu ein 40 Nadolig yn Nhregaron th Celebrating our 40 Christmas in Tregaron

www.rhiannon.co.uk caring for the elderly

editor While local services for older people are being cut, Contact the Elderly - a charity which tackles acute loneliness among elderly people by organising free, monthly tea parties - is seeking to expand in Wales.

Founded in Wales 30 years ago, Contact the Elderly recruits volunteers to help arrange Sunday afternoon tea parties for small groups of older people, aged 75 and above who have no family and friends nearby. Wales currently has over 374 volunteers supporting 375 older people.

Each elderly guest is collected from their home by a volunteer driver, and is taken to a volunteer host’s home, where they join a small group for tea, talk and companionship.

The group is warmly welcomed by a different host each month, but the charity’s drivers and older guests remain the same. This ensures that over the months and years, acquaintances turn into friends and loneliness is replaced by companionship.

Recent research among the older people Contact the Elderly supports demonstrates the worth of the service, with 85% having befriended other elderly in their groups, 95% making friends with the volunteers and 86% feeling less lonely.

It is extremely important that while maintaining our existing Wales groups, we recruit additional volunteers to open up new groups, so we can help many more isolated, older people. Over the next 12 months, we aim to recruit a 100 plus new volunteers to help expand our service.

If you would like to become a volunteer, please do get in touch with my colleagues or me.

Jane Carey-Evans, North Wales Development Officer: Tel - 01766 522146 or jane.carey-evans@contact-the-elderly. org.uk Liz Morgan, Mid Wales Development Officer: Tel - 01938 810635 or liz.morgan@contact-the-elderly.org. uk Marion Lowther, South Wales Development Officer: Tel - 01792 862 702 or marion.lowther@contact-the-elderly. org.uk

Jane Carey Evans Contact the Elderly in Wales

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TO ALL READERS OF CAMBRIA

W

e should like you to know that our magazine has gone through choppy waters in the last year or so but that we have weathered the storm and are now working hard to put the boat back on an even keel. A new group of professional people has agreed to oversee the magazine’s affairs and I have the honour to be its Chairman.

We, the Friends of CAMBRIA, are determined to maintain the magazine’s high quality in both content and production standards so that Wales can go on being proud of its national magazine.

We are grateful for the continuing support of our editorial team led by Frances Jones Davies, our readers who are counted in their thousands, our growing list of subscribers, our advertisers and our patrons who have given generously to keep the magazine afloat. We also gratefully acknowledge grants from the Welsh Books Council for our literary section and from the Harri Webb Fund for our poetry page. Otherwise, unlike most other periodicals in Wales today, we are not subsidised.

We are now making strenuous efforts to put some new wind into CAMBRIA’s sails so that it can face the future with more confidence and fly the flag for Wales.

Each number costs about £8,000 to design, print and distribute. We can pay our way only if enough people buy the magazine and advertise in its pages. We also need more readers, more subscribers, more advertisers and more people willing to spread the word about how excellent CAMBRIA is and how crucial in the struggle to create an informed readership at a time when Wales is badly served in this respect.

Better still, you can make a really substantial financial contribution which will help secure the magazine¹s future.

We therefore invite you to become a Friend of CAMBRIA by becoming a shareholder. Our aim is to raise a sum in the region of £50,000.

By making a financial contribution you can lend practical support for a magazine that has made a lively contribution to the cultural and political life of our country since 1997 and will continue to do so at a time when Wales is facing immense changes and challenges to its social life.

We appeal, in particular, to the patriots of Wales, and our friends abroad, who want to see an independent magazine willing and able to speak up for our country and which, in so doing, helps to create a new, more confident Wales.

You can support our initiative in one of two ways: ● by subscribing for shares in Friends of CAMBRIA, in multiples of £500; or ● by committing to ten hours a month as a volunteer in a capacity to be agreed Will you please help us in this work? Please email me via admin@cambriamagazine.com Er mwyn Cymru! - For the sake of Wales! Llawer o ddiolch - many thanks.

DAVID PETERSEN Chairman, FRIENDS OF CAMBRIA

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POLITICS

Clive Betts Plaid’s future

I

n little more than six months’ time, the May local elections will tell us whether Plaid Cymru has slid below the current lowly rankings of the Liberal Democrats - or will once again be aspiring to occupy the first division of Welsh politics.

In the wake of disastrous Assembly election results (which, we must recall, saw Plaid retreating almost everywhere and ceding the position of official opposition to the Tories) the signs are certainly not too good.

Indeed, the Tories are on such a high at present that they are convinced they will come second to Labour in terms of council seats held. And belief can be more important than the truth - in particular among the party volunteers who do most of the local authority foot-slogging.

Andrew RT Davies, the Tories’ Assembly leader, talks proudly of controlling the same number of councils as Labour (two out of 22). But in reality, that tells us only how far Labour has sunk - no doubt to rise again under the leadership of Carwyn Jones.

The truth is, out of 1,263 seats, Plaid currently holds 207, Labour 351, the Tories 172; and the ‘Independents’ and others, 378. Of the parties, Plaid controls Caerffili and Gwynedd, and the Tories run Monmouth and Vale of Glamorgan.

Admittedly, working out who else runs or controls our other authorities then becomes difficult. Certainly Labour remain top-dog, with an absolute majority on Rhondda Cynon Tâf and Neath Port Talbot; while Bridgend and Torfaen are run with the benefit of a few ‘winks-and-nods’ from other parties, particularly in the case of Plaid in Torfaen.

Tory leader Andrew Davies is very cautious about making a forecast for May. After all, it was Margaret Thatcher who boasted (after her party’ gains in 1983) that she would, next time, field an entire rugby team of Welsh MPs. “Next time”, of course, saw her party start on its slide into near oblivion within Wales.

For Plaid, this year’s council by-elections added to May’s Assembly disaster, with the party vote down 3% to only 19%, while the Tories rose 3% to 25%, thus indicating that yet another potential disaster beckons next Spring..

In May, Plaid lost two seats, one of them (in Uwchaled, Conwy) simply because no candidate was fielded. However, in Gwynedd, the party held one (so it should, in an authority it is supposed to dominate) and gained another from the Lib Dems.

The acceptable news was that all other by-elections were fought - even in Torfaen, where the party risked voting ridicule in an area where the late-lamented Labour ‘backroomer’,

John Vaughan Jones once crowed that a Plaid candidate had managed to achieve the lowest-vote ever in a poll.

One of the councils which Plaid considers to be theirs by right - because they are the largest party or group - is Ceredigion. Unfortunately, there have been no by-elections in the county to help us assess their current standings in this bastion of Plaid support. But a warning of a tough fight ahead in this area might be heeded from AM Elin Jones’s experiences last May. Both the Conservatives and Labour gained support, while the Lib Dems (who hold the Parliamentary seat) slipped slightly. But - more to the point for Plaid - Elin’s backing fell 8% per cent to 41%.

The only unalloyed good news was to be found in Carmarthenshire. There Plaid soared brilliantly to gain Llanegwad - is this an augury for winning control of County Hall, where the party is currently the largest?

Unfortunately, some at the top of Plaid too easily believe in the ‘swings-and-roundabouts’ theory: that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but it all works out OK in the end.

Plaid reckons it won the battle of the Cabinet in the Assembly by forcing Labour to work rather than rest on its laurels, and to deliver policies that are good for Wales rather than purely for Labour. Plaid even forced the government to find the money to activate policies that, under Labour, were heading for delay - such as trains to Ebbw Vale; even though the promised link to Newport remains missing.

If Plaid were in government, the badger cull (aimed at curbing bovine TB in cattle) would already be under way - rather than delayed endlessly, either because Labour lack the experience of standing up and taking a lead, or they are devotedly following the London line.

Unfortunately, the Tories seem better prepared for next May. They are certainly giving local government minister Carl Sargeant a hard time of the shambles of a ‘reorganisation’ that the Cabinet is inching towards.

Moreover, the Tories are not scared to air their thoughts, yet when Plaid comes up with some positive ideas, it almost keeps the results under wraps. For example, the party conference debated the need for a local government manifesto based on a Valleys jobs-creation programme which would be implemented by Plaid-run councils throughout Wales. But who knows that? There was not a word about it on the party’s website: it is as if Plaid is scared of revealing its bright ideas to anyone else.

It will be a tough fight for Plaid next May. The party will sorely need leadership from the front, to make up for a lack of members on the ground in some regions.

Elin Jones argues that Plaid needs a leader who will be “ambitious for Wales”: one who, while mindful of the Welsh-language activists, is also concerned for “the Swansea plumber and the retired couple from Wigan living in Pwllheli”. As she said, the party has indeed “stagnated of late”, yet with nominations for the new leader not opening

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until nearly Christmas, little time remains for the new leader to raise spirits and enthuse the party into believing that come May - Plaid is no longer in retreat.

The new Welsh Tories

D

uring the falklands war, a BBC reporter famously remarked that he had “counted” Fleet Air Arm planes in and had “counted them back”. Perhaps we should start doing the same with the significantly-enhanced group of 13 Conservative AMs. Not that there is a fear that some might be lost in combat in a plenary session, or that they might fly off to political pastures new. That’s not a risk, particularly with Plaid (very well known to some of them) in its present state.

But the party now possesses a new group leader, Vale of Glamorgan farmer Andrew RT (initials to distinguish him from the former Labour minister) Davies. And Mr Davies, regional AM for South Central, is a person who will listen carefully before deciding. Which is as a politician should do.

The difference, of course, is that his predecessor Nick Bourne (Mid & West) was a man with beliefs. Beliefs so strong that he managed to rebuild the group totally from the days it was led by the lively right-winger Rod Richards, who headed an extremely strong campaign for a No vote to an Assembly, and didn’t seem to have changed his opinions much after he had won election.

Nick Bourne is the most obvious casualty of the Labour Party gerrymandering which changed the rules so that a politician could stand for either a constituency or a regional seat - not both. He was unseated when Russell George won Montgomery from the Lib Dems on Mick Bates’s retirement. Labour, of course, didn’t like the idea of dual-candidacy because it could help other parties (When Labour changed the law they didn’t need to win any regional seats; currently, they have two, because they have won no constituency seats in Mid & West).

No-one doubts the new leader’s Welshness. He has better claims than his predecessor, who was from Worcestershire, although he had been in Wales since student days in Aberystwyth. Mr Davies’s family roots are in Newbridgeon-Wye in Powys. His father moved to the Vale to start farming with a 70-acre smallholding until he became a tenant near St. Hilary, Cowbridge, before buying the farm and expanding. (Into how many acres - on two holdings, the other next door to former First Minister Rhodri Morgan at Michaelston-le-Pit - he won’t say. It’s not a done-question, apparently in the Vale!)

The real difference between the pair could be over political stance. Mr Bourne was a leader in the left-wing Tory Reform Group, a grouping which fails to line up precisely with the political direction favoured by the Daily Mail and

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its numerous friends.

Leading members of the TRG include Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine, former Welsh Secretary and current Foreign Secretary William Hague, a predecessor in Cathays Park, Peter Walker, David Davis (who quit as MP and then fought the subsequent by-election in protest at erosion of civil liberties), the Llanelli-born MP Robert Buckland (you might remember him from the Islwyn by-election after Neil Kinnock moved on), and Rene Kinzett, Tory group leader of Swansea council.

This is the group which hoists aloft the once-discarded banner of one-nation Toryism. Prime Minister David Cameron may not be a member, but he’s certainly a supporter. Mr Bourne never trumpeted his membership, and Mr Davies is careful not to pick sides on the issue. He talks of his need to represent a group with members from David Melding (South Central) who talks of the need for federalism, to Darren Millar (Clwyd West), who uses language Margaret Thatcher would have favoured.

Mr Melding, in contrast, believes Thatcher’s name cripples the party in Wales. But then Mr Millar is a fellowfederalist (though, no doubt, they don’t agree completely on that topic!). New in the post, and shadowed extremely closely in the leadership contest by party Leftist Nick Ramsay (despite claims, no recount was needed - there weren’t that many votes), it is perhaps no surprise that Mr Davies is cautious in his views. He is certainly going to be cautious about the possibility of distancing his group from the Tories at Westminster. Even talking about such issues as the Assembly’s controversial voting system.

Cheryl Gillan has already opened her mind to some sort of change to the constituency/regional system. But at present the Welsh Tory leader refuses to take the chance of forging something really radical and democratic, such as the single transferable vote - a system which could produce five-seat constituencies, with all members elected, Irish-style, by PR. Mr Davies would rather see how the political-land lies.

That’s why we’ve got to count his members in and out.

How many of his group of 14 lean somewhat left-wards?

It’s much easier to count those who don’t: just William George (South East) and Darren Millar, surely.

The Rights are easily outnumbered by the Lefties, ranging from the shadow minister (but then they’ve all got that position) whose ancestor faced the slashing sword blades of the 15th Hussars at Manchester in 1819 in a demonstration for Parliamentary reform, to the former Pleidwr.

I fancy the rest are in the middle. And middle-of-theroad Tories always want to make whatever it is they are a member of work, in the hope that the electorate will eventually give them their votes in gratitude. Which is why, of course, the (non-Thatcherite) Tories are the habitual governing party of much of Britain.

OPINION

Siôn Jobbins Once were Princes

O

n July 30th 1983 the peasants took over the colonial castle. Some 600 sans culottes ‘historians’ managed to lock the gates of Caernarfon castle thereby stopping tourists getting in or out of Edward the Conqueror’s garrison.

The protest was part of their ‘Sarhâd ‘83’ (Insult ’83) campaign against the Tourist Board’s ‘Wales Festival of Castles’, a festival they saw as a celebration of the conquest of Wales.

The protesters in their jeans and jumpers were the foot soldiers of Cofiwn - a radical historical society almost forgotten today but one Wales would do well to revive.

Radical historical society? Wait a minute! Wouldn’t that be like a radical campanology society? Why would you have a radical historical society?

Cofiwn, the wonderfully concise way of saying in Welsh, ‘we will remember’, was a nationalist historical society founded in 1972 by Gethin ap Gruffydd of Bridgend and the late Tony Lewis of Cwmbrân. Another leading member was Siân Ifan, a small, determined, chatty woman who still wears the long flowing, untidy hair of a 1970s radical.

As you may have guessed, Cofiwn wasn’t a cozy, dozy tweedjacketed historical society. The fact that both Gethin ap Gruffydd (Keith Griffiths) and Tony Lewis had been jailed on charges of being part of the organisation of the Free Wales Army may give a clue to its ethos and politics. Inspired by Irish republicanism they had founded many patriotic movements in the 1960s, including the Patriotic Front. However, Cofiwn was the most successful, most mainstream and least fractious.

The political dimension of Cofiwn was confirmed by the mass arrests on Palm Sunday 1980. Sixty five nationalists were arrested across Wales, including the 20 members of Cofiwn’s governing body.

Gethin ap Gruffydd chose ivy as the movement’s symbol in commemoration of the crown of ivy which Edward I troops placed on the beheaded Llywelyn the Last on a pike on the Tower of London. In the meantime, working from a shed at her home in Ystumtuen on the ‘bad lands’ behind Aberystwyth, Siân churned out posters, T-shirts, flags and badges for the movement.

Branches were established across Wales and although

eminent historians such as Dr John Davies and Prof. Hywel Teifi Edwards gave talks for Cofiwn, its activities were not confined to lectures for duffle-coated members in underheated halls.

Most notably, Cofiwn raised money to lay commemorative stones to Glyndw ˆ r’s battle at Hyddgen above Aberystwyth, for Llywelyn the Last at Abbey Cw ˆm Hir, and Llywelyn the Great in Aberffraw in Anglesey. In Merthyr Tydfil it held annual processions to remember Dic Penderyn and Lewsyn yr Heliwr, the first martyrs of the Welsh working class.

Its most successful event was to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s death. Events were also held every month throughout 1982 to commemorate particular dates in Llywelyn’s life, until - on a bright, snowcapped Radnorshire day on 11 December 1982 - some 2,000 people attended the anniversary procession, including a republican marching band from Scotland. A wreath of ivy was placed at the foot of the majestic maen-hir which was placed there by a previous nationalist group in 1956.

Following the ‘No’ vote the 1979 Devolution Referendum, Cofiwn understood that parades were needed to raise the spirit of the bedraggled troops, But despite its impressive achievements in 1984, a year following the successful closure of Caernarfon Castle, Cofiwn came to an end. So, why was that?

‘There were many reasons,’ explained Siân, who now lives in Swansea and is active in another historical agitprop movement, Embassy Glyndw ˆ r. ‘From infiltration or fear of infiltration by the Special Branch, to people prioritising their careers over politics. There was also the strain.

The movement never had enough money and there’s a limit to the amount one can fund events from your own pocket.’ Siân is now writing a book about the history of the movement.

Maybe, like fragile eco-systems, the life spans for radical political movements are inevitably limited. Maybe we should just accept that for radical cultural movements like Cofiwn a dozen years or so is the life span for such heightened intellectual and emotional activity.

But does a legacy exist of this historical society?

Certainly the banners of the Welsh Princes which Cofiwn did so much to propagate - the four lions of Llywelyn and Glyndw ˆ r, so exotic and unexpected in the 1980s - are now commonplace. The modern version of the Glyndw ˆ r banner, incidentally, was designed by Tony Lewis, an accomplished

The political dimension of Cofiwn was confirmed by the mass arrests on Palm Sunday 1980. Sixty five nationalists were arrested across Wales, including the 20 members of Cofiwn’s governing body.

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vexillologist and Celtic jeweller, and promoted by this themselves.’ magazine. Some also still sport the ivy on their lapels on Cofiwn wanted to prove that Wales wasn’t ‘one wasteland December 11th, Llywelyn’s Day. Welsh history is also now of non-achievement’. It wanted to prove that we once wrote more widely taught and understood, though there’s no place laws, made treaties, won battles, built castles and ports and for complacency. sponsored the arts. That we once were a nation and it was As Siân notes, it’s interesting that Cadw - the Welsh only through again becoming a nation state could Wales Historical Agency - was formed in 1984. Of course, Cadw, defend itself politically, economically and culturally. That was unlike Cofiwn (from ‘cofio’ to remember) didn’t use the the point of history. Everything else is an anorak full of facts concise, active version of the verb ‘to keep’ - that would be for a pub quiz.

‘Cadwn’ (we shall keep): a little too close, too active and too Cofiwn’s genius was to understand the psychology of political maybe? individuals and the psychology of belonging.

Cofiwn’s experience and legacy also raises the deeper Any self-help book will tell the reader that if they wish question, ‘what’s the point of history?’ to be a successful business person they first have to think of Cofiwn’s appeal was that it was honest. It argued that themselves as a successful business person and act like one, history existed to promote a political agenda. That was the Cofiwn did the same for Wales. point of it - though you’re If Wales was to not meant to say so in become an independent polite ‘apolitical’ circles nation it first had to of course. Cofiwn also think and act like one. understood which history To do that it had to to promote - the history put on its psychological of our princes. This suite of armour. To was tut-tutted by some paraphrase the seminal sophisticated academics 1994 Maori film, Once or politicians, for, after all, were Warriors - Cofiwn’s to celebrate the history slogan would be ‘Once of Welsh princes seemed were Princes’. too uncouth and, well, I have no doubt that I (The Prince - Chapter V) positively medieval. come from an unbroken In Chapter V of The Prince, ‘Concerning the way to line of damp-footed peasants who’ve toiled the bare hills of Govern Cities or Principalities which lived under their Brycheiniog and the windy vales of Llyˆn since the last Ice own Laws before they were Annexed’, Niccolo Machiavelli Age. So why would I not be for promoting the history of outlines three ways to govern: our downtrodden, of the working class, my family’s history?

Why not build a movement for our nation-state around ‘The first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the glorious battles and struggles of the nineteenth century the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, ‘gwerin’? Why did Cofiwn seem mostly to promote the drawing a tribute and establishing within it an oligarchy which history of princes and the ‘crachach’? will keep it friendly to you.’

It’s because promoting the history of the downtrodden, the dominant Welsh historiography and political narrative, Cofiwn’s mission was to undermine the intellectual power hasn’t worked and doesn’t work for Wales. It doesn’t armour which gave this ‘oligarchy’ legitimacy. us with the psychology, with the confidence to be a nationThey understood that they had to do this because state and without being a nation-state we can’t defend our of what this intellectual oligarchy, the ‘deep state’ as it interests as Welsh people - what ever our class. As Saunders is called in Turkey, had achieved. In the words of the Lewis wrote in his famous letter to the Western Mail on 26 Kenyan anti-colonialist, Nguni Wa Thiong’o in his seminal February, on the eve of the 1979 Referendum; book Decolonising the Mind, the process of colonial education ‘annihilates a people’s belief in their names, in ‘May I point out the probable consequence of a No majority.

There will follow a general election. There may be a change of their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of government. The first task of the Westminster Parliament will struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in be to reduce and master inflation. In Wales there are coalmines themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland that work at a loss; there are steelworks that are judged to be of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance superfluous; there are valleys convenient for submersion. And themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want there will be no Welsh defence.’ to identify with that which is furthest removed from

“The first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you.” niccolo machiavelli

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A nation which wishes to exercise power itself can’t always wear the hair-coat of the powerless. To take the route of the downtrodden is constantly to take the contrary view where being poor or weak is, by virtue, good. It’s to share in the optimism of the defeated which afflicts Wales - the quarter glass is half full, where, as long as we’re not physically certified stone-cold, marble-dead in the morgue, then, ‘well boys, it could be worse’.

Likewise in the current economic quagmire it’s not the socialist ‘down-trodden’ historical narrative which will defend Wales. Commemorating the history of Rebecca, of Tryweryn, of 1926, of 1984 is all very well and good … and cosy because it only reinforces the narrative that we as a nation can’t take power. It doesn’t breed rebels, it breeds conservatives. In contrast, the ‘conservative’ historiography of Welsh princes does breed rebels. Why? Because it challenges the legitimacy of the British state and British capitalism.

It’s all very well for British left wingers to sneer at a Welsh historiography which celebrates our princes. They’ll call it the history of the ‘crachach’ which ignores the ‘ordinary Welsh people’. But they’re like those radical-chic Trotskyists who preach revolution knowing full well that if push comes to shove daddy will bail them out. Likewise, if political push comes to shove the British left will go running to the

British establishment - military, monarchy and mother tongue - to shore up they state they wish to defend against the nationalists.

It’s not that the history of Princes should be the only history studied or promoted - far from it. But it should be frame of our house - as it is in all free countries.

For, as Cofiwn and Saunders understood, it’s the exceptionalism of civic nationalism - with its history as ballast - which gives strength to a polity and people to stand among nations and stand up to international capital.

It was the very so-called ‘internationalism’ of socialism which partly created the cultural muzack which allowed international capital to fleece the defenceless. It is civic nationalism which gives a people legitimacy to be different.

It is civic nationalism which arms politicians not to herded into ‘being international’ and be cowered by capital like stumbling somnambulists. Civic nationalism gives strength not to follow the crowd in an economic rerun of the famous 1963 ‘Obedience to Authority’ Milgram test where people did as their peers did.

In 2011 it’s good that we thank Gethin ap Gruffydd, Tony Lewis, Siân Ifan and remember the jeans-andjumpers historians of Cofiwn.

Oriel awen teifi 13

HISTORY

Llanelli 1911: Railway strike and riot john edwards

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egotiations between the railway unions and their employers came to an end at the Board of Trade offices in London on Thursday, August 17th, 1911 and a strike call was sent out to all union members at 4pm on the same day. The railway companies promised to run a skeleton service while the strike continued and the Liberal government pledged their support to the employers. The unions were fighting for more pay when at least 30% of their members were earning less than ÂŁ1 a week at a time when the owners were paying out handsome dividends to their shareholders.

There were about 500 railwaymen working in the Llanelli area but on Thursday evening a crowd of between 3,000 and 5,000 gathered around the level crossing at the bottom of Station Road and saw to it that the gates were firmly closed to railway traffic. The crowd was made up

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mainly of tinplaters and others working in heavy industry who supported the claims of the railwaymen. They stayed there all through the warm August night listening to speeches from strike leaders , singing songs and enjoying humorous exchanges with the police. Two trains travelling West were held up all night but the strikers allowed the mail train to pass through to London as well as a freight train from Ireland so that the cattle on board should not suffer unduly.

At about 7.30 on Friday morning, the crowd were surprised to see 127 soldiers of the North Lancashire Regiment arriving just outside the gates. During the night one of the Llanelli magistrates had requested these troops from an army pool set up in Cardiff. The soldiers made a vain attempt to open the gates before setting up camp beside the railway nearby. Subsequently, more troops were sent for and these arrived at about 4.30 in the afternoon; they were soldiers mainly of the Worcester Regiment under the command of Major Brownlow Stuart who made it clear that the gates were to be opened immediately. The Riot Act was read by Frank Nevill, J.P. and the strike leaders urged the crowd to give way otherwise blood would be spilt.

They retreated defiantly singing Sosban Fach as the gates were opened at bayonet point. The mood of the crowd had changed, however, and trains were stoned as they passed.

Saturday morning passed fairly quietly but at 2pm a train was held up on the down platform while the strike committee was holding a meeting at nearby Copperworks school. By this time, a crowd of about 250 people had gathered around the gates of the western crossing because this train was the cause of some concern. Suddenly, the train pulled out and the crowd ran after it as did the strike committee. The train travelled only half a mile and stopped just before Union Bridge while the guard walked ahead to open the Old Castle gates which were closed.

Railwaymen climbed on board the engine and took out the fire thereby ensuring it would travel no further.

Within minutes, 80 soldiers of the Worcester Regiment arrived on the scene under the command of Major Stuart.

The crowd dispersed before the soldiers’ bayonets and scrambled up the steep embankments to the backs of Bryn Road and High Street. Stones were thrown at the engine and, following a warning from Major Stuart, Henry Wilkins, J.P., mumbled his way through the Riot Act before a firing squad was assembled. The major directed his fire towards the low garden wall of No.6 High Street which resulted in the killing of two men, Jack John and Leonard Worsell. Stuart immediately marched his men back to the station without bothering to inquire into the consequences of the shooting.

News of the shooting soon spread around the town.

At a meeting in Town Hall Square it was announced that cold-blooded murder had been committed and that there would be a heavy reckoning. By tea-time every window in the station had been smashed with the soldiers and police lying low inside. On the nearby sidings, a goods van was found to contain army provisions and these were strewn around the tracks. It was in this way that the looting began. The Goods Shed was looted and 96 trucks would later be damaged. Loads of hay were set on fire and coal trucks burned and flames could be seen from as far away as Burry Port. Sustained attacks were also made on Thomas Jones’s provision warehouse in Market Street where every window in the three-storey building was smashed, goods looted and accounts ledgers torn up. All this mayhem was allowed to continue while police and soldiers looked on from the Police Station no more than 200 yards away.

It was widely believed that Thomas Jones was the man responsible for sending for the military in the first place.

He was a magistrate and a landowner as well as being a Great Western Railway shareholder.

At 11.30 in the night a tremendous explosion rocked the siding. A truck containing carbide had exploded, killing four people. The irony was that half an hour earlier, Lloyd George had succeeded in bringing the two sides together in London and the strike was over. In the meantime Colonel Montressor and 350 troops of the Sussex Regiment had arrived in Llanelli on their way home from service in

At 11.30 in the night a tremendous explosion rocked the siding. A truck containing carbide had exploded, killing four people.

Ireland. He was appalled at the inactive attitude of the authorities and, as senior officer on the scene, that the crowd should be cleared and the riot brought to an end.

There were now at least 700 troops in the town and the sidings were cleared at bayonet point. In the town, there were severe clashes involving troops and police and severe injuries were inflicted by truncheons , rifle butts and bayonets. Calm was restored by 2 a.m. on Sunday morning.

The two young men who were shot were buried on the following Tuesday when most of the works were closed and the procession of mourners was a mile long. On the following Tuesday, an inquest was held into their deaths at

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which the coroner bent over backwards to save the skin of Major Stuart. On the coroner’s direction, the jury brought in a verdict of Justifiable Homicide but insisted on adding a rider to the effect that it would have been better if other means than giving the order to fire had been adopted to disperse the crowd. Keir Hardie, at the time, stated that the rider flatly contradicted the verdict. Petitions were signed demanding a public inquiry were these were all to no avail.

One petition, in fact, contained the signatures of no fewer that nine of the twelve persons who sat on the inquest jury.

What did that say about the safety of the verdict?

Local papers were all agreed that it was the importation of soldiers which caused all the trouble in Llanelli. Though agreeing with the just demands of the railway workers and sympathizing with the relatives of the two young men shot by the military, there was universal condemnation of the looting. The Free Church Council passed a resolution which stated ‘In no way can we justify the riotous behaviour which brought a cloud of shame on the good name of our town.’ The implanting of this of this judgement on the minds of the people of Llanelli brought about a state of corporate amnesia and a veil was drawn over the riots as if they had never existed. No-one talked about them and the story was never passed on.

Incredibly, this conspiracy of silence lasted for the best part of seventy years and it was not until the eighties of the last century that the subject was regarded as worthy of

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serious historical examination.

The first public commemoration of the riots was held on the 70th anniversary in 1981 and the second on the 75th in 1986. This year saw the centenary of the event and the 1911 Strike Committee organized just over a week of activities to mark the occasion. On Friday, August 12th, the Performing Arts department of Coleg Sir Gar put on a dramatic portrayal of the riots before an appreciative audience. Saturday saw a successful Jazz Night with Wyn Lodwick and his Band topping the bill.

On Monday night there was a Poems and Pints session followed by a Folk Night on Wednesday. The Llanelli Multicultural Network put on a performance based on the riots on Thursday afternoon and this was followed by a Forum comprising distinguished historians in the evening. Friday saw the unveiling of a commemorative plaque to the victims of the shooting on Union Bridge arranged by the Llanelli Heritage Trust and on Saturday there was a well-attended March and Rally ending up at a wreath-laying ceremony at the Public Cemetery.

The week was brought to a close by a truly wonderful concert version of a new musical drama based on the riots performed before a packed audience at Hall Street Methodist Church where Leonard Worsell had worshipped. Appropriately, the final number was entitled “They will remember” which holds out the promise that 1911 in Llanelli will never, ever be forgotten again.

The Villa At The Edge Of The World michael harris

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hen I first heard that a Roman villa (Mac Cuilleanain) had been discovered in Abermagwr

by Aberystwyth, almost in my back yard, my first thought was “It’s in the wrong place”. The villa itself has been well described the military was certainly deployed to the west coast

by Aberystwyth University archaeologists, so I won’t go to resist Irish piracy in the third century. Interestingly, further into it. Instead I will speculate that its location Abermagwr shows evidence of third-century occupation, “in the wrong place” sheds light on a deeply mysterious perhaps a bit earlier than the main English villas. It is episode in history - the relations between Rome and only about 10 miles from the sea, communicating with pagan Celtic Ireland. several small ports such as Aberystwyth and Newquay.

What was a villa? Functionally a villa was a farm or Did Rome go further, and base an expeditionary estate which produced for a cash market rather than the force to Ireland on the Ceredigion ports? This has been farmer’s own subsistence. One of the biggest markets a controversial suggestion, since no such expedition is in the Roman empire was the imperial army. In Britain mentioned in Roman records, and Ireland certainly never the great days of the villas were became a regular province. But Did Rome go further and the fourth century ad, when Irish legends do report that the Roman army massed on the High King Tu’ athal in the base an expeditionary force to the Rhine against the German first century, and the Roman Ireland on the Ceredigion ports? governor (“king”) Benignus barbarian threat. Villas are This has been a controversial therefore generally concentrated in the third, were installed by in the lowlands of Southern Roman intervention in Ireland. suggestion, since no such England as far west as the Severn Two Roman settlements are expedition is mentioned in valley, with access to Germany known from southern Ireland, Roman records via the Thames. There are outliers Stonyford (a dwelling-place as far north as Yorkshire which with its own temple inland from would have fed the garrison of Hadrian’s Wall. So what Waterford) and Drumanagh (apparently a trading post is a villa doing in remotest mid-Wales, on the edge of the on an island near Dublin). Both were in the kingdom of Roman world?

Leinster, and neither was a military site. Since Leinster is Roman Wales was a significant source of metals, the most probable source of alluvial gold and since finds including gold. Now gold was theoretically a monopoly of of Roman pottery are most common in the south east, the Emperor, and mining was therefore supervised by the this hints at a Roman presence and possibly a Roman army. So perhaps the Abermagwr villa supplied the cohort protectorate. which guarded the only gold mine known in Roman The third century was also the golden age of Irish Britain, Dolaucothi by Pumpsaint in Carmarthenshire. mythology. After Benignus the next great High King was This was a relatively small unit. A second possibility is Cormac mac Airt, with his heroic warrior leader Finn that other gold ores nearby, which were exploited in MacCool. Cormac is indeed said to have raided Britain. modern times near Tywyn and Dolgellau, were also The owners of Abermagwr must have been a powerful mined in antiquity and guarded by the army. force in the local politics of Roman Dyfed, under the A more intriguing possibility is that the villa supplied governor. Who knows? I like to think that one of them Roman troops involved in operations against Ireland. met the legendary Cormac, either in Britain or on a visit Gold may also be implicated here - throughout antiquity to his military customers in Ireland, beyond the edge of Ireland exported far more gold than Wales. Alternatively, the world.

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EXPLORING WALES

Upland Pilgrimage a walk in the hills ed buck

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dward Thomas loved roads…not highways but byways that ‘avoid the dust, the smell, the noise, the insolence of the new traffic’. They were for him not just a means to an end but places in their own right with their own gods, their protective genii loci. In a similar vein his contemporary Hilaire Belloc wrote of ‘the spirit of the road’. I am with him when he argues that the road is the most important of the primal thing that moves us and to tread it connects us to our earliest ancestors for whom it was ‘the most imperative and first of [their] necessities’ And so it was that, with pack on back, I arrived in Aberystwyth on a Monday morning last spring. To use the word wet does not do the day justice. Waterfalls to rival the best in Wales were cascading off the station roof and its streets were awash and deserted. The positive spin to this was that it was so foul there was no reason to ‘wait

and see if this passes’. To anyone looking out of the rain smeared windows of the houses on the Devils Bridge road I must have cut a miserable figure as I climbed out of town, but in truth I didn’t have dampened one jot that which Robert Louis Stevenson describes as ‘the hope and spirit with which the march begins’. I was on my way.

In his essay ‘Walking Tours’ Stevenson calls the counterpoint to the excitement of the departure ‘the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening’s rest’. George Borrow enjoyed this before a good fire at the Hafod Hotel Devils Bridge on his tour of 1854. Like him, with him, I experienced the warmth of this inn while ‘a fierce storm of rain and wind’ raged without. I felt a new affinity with my old friend as I got out my copy of Wild Wales, and read and re-read his description of his time here. I propped my window open to sleep to the roar of the Mynach Falls and awoke to the sight of that of the Rheidol, glistening white in the grey of the morning.

Borrow was my companion that day as I took the road south to Tregaron. That our paths converged for two days was no chance. I wanted to sleep where he had slept and go to places he had described. I am not certain why but perhaps Belloc has the answer. He argues that we have an innate appetite which renders history a necessity: ‘By

Cors Caron / Tregaron Bog

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Abaty Ystrad Fflur / Strata Florida Abbey

of the Ford of the Cross). To go on foot to this ancient the recovery of the past, stuff and being are added to us; resort of pilgrimage seemed fitting and to take much of our lives which, if lived in the present only are a film or a day to do so prepared me and made me realize that a surface, take on body. They are lifted to one dimension casual visit is just that. The physical remains here may be more. The soul is fed.’ And so, but for Borrow, I would scant but this venerable place is so much more than the that morning have crossed the little Marchnant river sum of its stones and, situated as it is high in the upper without a second thought, as it was, while the cottage reaches of the Teifi, here with the word it is a fittingly cwrw painted on its shutter may That this was a Cistercian House of great importance serene one too. As I rested here the sun have gone, the poor is evidenced by the names of the villages I passed briefly shone. widow woman And so to who brewed her ale through, such as Pontrhydfendigaid (the Bridge of Tregaron. The old there and sold him the Blessed Ford) and Pontrhydygroes (the Bridge of drover Borrow a pint for a groat lives on and gives the Ford of the Cross). To go on foot to this ancient fell in step with approaching the this lonely place resort of pilgrimage seemed fitting town recommended humanity. “‘Have The Talbot where you a husband?’ ‘I ‘they are always had but he is dead’. glad to see English gentlemans’. I arrived here mid ‘Have to any children?’ ‘I had three but they are dead too, afternoon, mid week, mid March and yet it was open, and buried with my husband at the Monastery’”. had a bustle and a good fire blazed in the bar and I did They lie, presumably, at Strata Florida which was indeed get a warm welcome. This fine old house which on my route a few miles to the south. That this was a dominates the town’s square is in the best tradition of Cistercian House of great importance in the Middle Ages the country inn and it has a landlord squarely in that is evidenced by the names of the villages I passed through tradition who sparred cheerfully with his customers in a on my way there, such as Pontrhydfendigaid (the Bridge robust mix of Welsh, English and Anglo Saxon. Here I of the Blessed Ford) and Pontrhydygroes (the Bridge

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firing earlier but it had been the ‘distant rumblings of enjoyed what William Hazlitt describes as ‘the incognito another war’; this was intense and in its immediacy and of an inn’. Hazlitt loved travelling alone and becoming sheer violence something I had never experienced before. ‘the creature of the moment, clear of all ties’, giving away And yet I could see nothing. about himself only that which he chose to and being With the staccato of machine guns in my ears and known simply as ‘the gentleman in the parlour’. Borrow’s Thomas’ lines ‘Now all roads lead to France/ and heavy is words describe exactly my stay here: ‘I experienced very the tread of the living’ in my head I pressed on. I could good entertainment at the Tregaron Inn, had an excellent see on the horizon the familiar shapes of the Brecon supper and a very comfortable bed. I arose at about eight Beacons which dominate the landscape of home and in the morning’. everyday thoughts started to crowd in and push out the But now we had to part. My route was to Llanwrtyd more fanciful ones that had fuelled my imagination over Wells over what has been described as, ‘the desert of the past few days. But if I had lost a little of the spring Wales’, The drovers heading out of Tregaron for England in my step as I walked down to Brecon my arrival there had, of course, to cross the Cambrian Mountains. Their happily brought Hazlitt to mind again and what had legacy is a single track road which provides a way across brought me on this journey. “How fine it is”, he writes, some twenty miles of empty landscape. Having driven “to enter some old town, walled and turreted, just at the this road many times thought I knew it but by spending approach of nightfall and then after inquiring for the best a day on it I realized I hadn’t understood how it fits into entertainment the landscape. It the place affords, utilizes the valley It is a long climb out of the Irfon valley on to the to ‘take one’s of Tregaron’s ease at one’s inn!’ river the Afon wide expanses of the Mynydd’s desolate top, where These eventful Berwyn to climb opposing armies of regimented conifers face each moments in our a thousand lives’ history are feet onto the other in a lifeless landscape. At the highest point of too precious, Cambrian’s too full of plateau. This the road, on the watershed between the Wye and solid, heartfelt upland is the Usk, is the requisitioned Drovers Arms, a shell, a happiness to be dissected by three frittered and south flowing lonely ghost, shuttered and grim. dribbled away rivers. The in imperfect track, following sympathy. I would have them to myself and drain them where it can their tributaries, drops to the first river, to the last drop”. Georgian Brecon and its comfortable the Camddwr, crosses it and then climbs to the saddle Wellington Hotel fitted this bill perfectly. which is the watershed with the next, the Tywi, and, after My last day was along the canal to Crickhowell descending to it and crossing it, climbs again, up and over where I picked up the mazy lanes which follow the Usk’s into the valley of the third, the Irfon, which provides the tributaries the Grwyne Fawr and Grwyne Fechan to home way down and out of the hills to Llanwrtyd. This descent, high above the Llanthony Valley. As I did so I reflected on through the celebrated Abergwesyn Pass, is strikingly my walk and one particular aspect struck me. In his poem beautiful and throws into stark relief the wilderness that ‘Roads’ Edward Thomas describes them keeping him precedes it. company with their ‘pattering’. I had been glad of this My way from Llanwrtyd, and the friendly Neuadd company too because I hadn’t seen another soul on the Arms where the wry landlord placed me in a window open road from the moment I set out. The itinerant is no seat for breakfast so I could ‘see the town awake’ (It more. It is perhaps unduly sentimental to lament that one didn’t), was up and over the high wasteland which is will never meet a reddleman crossing Egdon Heath again the Mynydd Eppynt and down to Brecon by the Upper but the fact is that because of the motor vehicle we have Chapel road. It is a long climb out of the Irfon valley lost the society of the road. From when the first track was on to the wide expanses of the Mynydd’s desolate top trod man engaged with his fellow traveller, but no longer. where opposing armies of regimented conifers face each But at least the road endures. If we skim its surface it is other in a lifeless landscape. At the highest point of the silent but if we have the time and inclination to connect road, on the watershed between the Wye and the Usk, is to it, and listen, it will always have a voice, if only an echo the requisitioned Drovers Arms, a shell, a lonely ghost, of the past. ‘Often footsore, never yet of the road I weary’ shuttered and grim. As I sheltered here from the wind an Thomas wrote. Amen to that. engagement broke out on the ranges close by. I had heard

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HISTORY

The Growth of the Trade Union (1799-1909): The Welsh Connection peter n williams

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uring my summer holidays from University College, Swansea in the 1950s, I worked on the buses in my native Flint. My route on ‘the Crosville’ took me past some derelict buildings by the roadside at Bagillt which stood as a poignant reminder of the area’s former importance as a coal mining area. With the old winding house still standing proud, they were all that was left of Bettisfield colliery, which had ceased working in 1934, the year of my birth. What I didn’t know at the time was that the village of Bagillt, part of Flint Borough, had seen the founding of one of the very first trade unions in Britain during the early part of the nineteenth century.

Following the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the British Government had been fearful of public gatherings that were to be later known as “trade unions” - to the extent that in 1799, Prime Minister William Pitt and his government passed an Act to Prevent Unlawful

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Combinations of Workmen. This Act prohibited the formation of trade unions and the use of collective bargaining for fear workers would resort to strikes in order to force the government into acceding to their demands.

An additional Act was passed in 1800 to reinforce the first, and both were hotly opposed by the English radical leader Francis Place, who led a strike of leather-breeches makers in 1793. It was he who, in 1824, successfully lobbied for the repeal of the Combination Act, so setting the stage for the growth of early Trade Unionism.

But his victory was short-lived, for an outbreak of strikes resulted in a new Combination Act of 1825, in which the rights of trade unions were defined as “meeting to bargain over wages and conditions.” Anything outside these limits (such as a strike) could be prosecuted as “a criminal conspiracy in restraint of trade.” In addition, trade unionists were not allowed to “molest, obstruct or intimidate others.” Despite these draconian measures, colliers throughout Britain still attempted to form unions.

However, since the pit owners refused point-blank to negotiate with these organizations, the miners resorted to a novel tactic to overcome the restraints of the Combination Acts - by disguising their unions as “friendly societies.” In Bagillt, the Friendly Associated Coal Miners’ Union was recorded as early as 1830. The following year, the coal miners of South Wales swiftly followed suite, as branches of the Friendly Society of Coal

Mining popped up throughout the coalfields.

In the meantime, the growing market for coal improved the bargaining position of the colliers, and in 1831 and 1832 miners in Northumberland and Durham joined together to gain a reduction in hours and the abolition of the truck system - so encouraging miners from other parts of the country to form district associations.

Although the union movement was soon to suffer two severe blows, first the deportation of the English unionists known as The Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, and then the consequent transfer of union energies to the Chartist movement in the 1840’s.

Unionism, it seemed, was all but dead. However, it was to resurface under the dynamic Welshborn Robert Owen, whose Grand National Consolidated Trade Union (which began life in 1834) was an attempt to organise labour by providing a peaceable outlet for the aspirations of the workers. It became a major influence on the future development of the trades unions in Britain, the Empire and the United States In the meantime, The Amalgamated Association of Miners (which was formed in Lancashire in 1869) had built up a membership of 42,000 miners in South Wales by 1872. It fought for better working conditions and a decent wage - and came up against some determined opposition - to the extent that, in resisting a strike in 1875, the pit owners managed to bankrupt the union and cause its dissolution, Emboldened by this, they then formed the Monmouthshire and South Wales Coal Owners’ Association (involving 85 companies and 200 mines) which created the “sliding scale” payment system, whereby wage levels were tied to the selling price of coal.

This effectively nullified any hope of collective bargaining over wages.

Attempts to form unions continued: in the Rhondda Valley, the Cambrian Miners Association was formed in 1877 under the inspired leadership of Mabon (William Abraham). He was elected M.P. for Rhondda in 1885, and believed that the interests of capital and labour were identical, and vigorously supported the adoption of the sliding scale as a way to avoid conflict and retain jobs for the miners.

However, The Miner’s Federation of Great Britain

(which met in Newport in 1889) argued for the sliding scale to be replaced by a ‘Board of Arbitration’ and for the workday to be restricted to eight hours. Ten years later, a bitter strike in the South Wales coalfield (which began as an attempt to remove the sliding scale quickly turned into a lockout which would last for six months and result in a complete failure for the colliers: the sliding scale stayed in place.

Yet the strike was to prove an important landmark in Welsh history, for it at last resulted in the true adoption of trade unionism in the southern coalfield when the South Wales Miners’ Federation came into being in October, 1898. Mabon was its first president, having been persuaded to advocate the total abolition of the sliding scale. In adopting a more militant stance toward the coal owners, the Federation (“the Fed”) attracted a quarter of a million members, and dominated the lives of the people of the five great Welsh valleys, The sliding scale was eventually abolished in 1903.

However, in an era of unprecedented population growth, inflation had caused the real value of the miners’ wages to decline drastically. Resentment at what was generally perceived as the owners’ disregard for the welfare of their men served to increase the agitation for social and political change. Men such as Noah Ablett were not satisfied with the slow progress of either the Independent Labour Party or the South Wales Miners’ Federation.

When judgment was given against the striking workers in the Taff Vale Railway Company dispute of 1900, the unions realized they needed legislation to guarantee their rights, and thus they needed representation in Parliament.

The formation of the Labour Representative Committee (later the Labour Party) proved the answer: visits by James Keir Hardie and other leading socialists to South Wales during ‘The Great Unrest’ had a powerful impact on the morale and determination of the miners within the coalfield.

In the meantime, the newly-formed Central Labour College in London became well patronized by the South Wales Miners Federation, whose members were to experience a new intellectual dimension to their work within the pits - not least the likes of James (Jim) Griffiths, Aneurin Bevan and Ness Edwards, all of whom were to became pivotal figures in the struggles of the miners as their industry entered a new century.

Unionism resurfaced under the dynamic Welsh-born Robert Owen, whose Grand National Consolidated Trade Union was an attempt to organise labour by providing a peaceable outlet for the aspirations of the workers.

23

HEROES

Forebears the legacy of arthur owen vaughan owen rhoscomyl louis von zeil

I

always wanted to visit Wales and so at the behest of my wife - and to delay any boredom in retirement after a very active career - I filled in idle moments on a Welsh holiday by researching her family history. I discovered that my wife’s grandfather was a brother of the famed Welsh musician, Richard Samuel Hughes whose birthplace is commemorated by a plaque opposite the refurbished Clock tower. Little did I know then that, having offered to help my son research some medals he had acquired, I would soon be back in Aberystwyth on a quest to solve a longstanding family mystery of my own.

History immediately took on a new meaning for me when I discovered that the supposed assailant of a nurse in a hospital tragedy during the Anglo-Boer War of 18991922 was a larger-than-life character of Welsh origin. So an intended, short tribute to a gracious South African lady with ideals long ahead of her time, turned into a book

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entitled Battle Scars & Dragon Tracks and became more of a tribute to her flawed, but brilliant and hyperactive assailant. The nurse was my grandmother Louisa Susanna Boshoff (nee Rautenbach); the supposed assailant was Captain Arthur Owen Vaughan and the hospital tragedy was the shooting and wounding of nurse Rautenbach during an attack on Bezuidenhoutsdrift Hospital by the Canadian Scouts under Vaughan’s leadership.

The first half of the book describes the background to the attack and looks at the lives of some of the people involved. The second half of the book is an attempt at penning a biography of Arthur Owen Vaughan. Born Robert Scourfield Mills, his literary pseudonym was Owen Rhoscomyl, but he also went by the names Robert Glendower and Robert Scourfield Milne as well as several other aliases. Different names are engraved on the two stones on his grave in the Old Cemetery in Rhyl, but neither stone acknowledges his original family name.

The book, while not a comprehensive biography of Vaughan’s life, is thorough enough to add considerably to his memory and would be both of interest to fellow countrymen and an aid to further study.

Arthur Owen Vaughan was the creation of a fertile mind, partly as a result of becoming caught up in the class struggle at the height of the British Empire. By failing

to correct some of the myths which developed around him, he perpetuated them as a way of overcoming the effects on his life of his social origins. Perhaps this was not deliberate, since many of the myths surrounding his life were the result of confusing his exploits with those of other well-known celebrities of his time. These confusions were perpetuated by his niece and self-appointed family historian, Dorothy Stott. Unfortunately, this only exacerbated the problems he experienced with a military establishment which granted officer ranks on the basis of title and property rather than competence.

Yet Vaughan was a real hero and lived a full life as an adventurer, cowboy, decorated military scout and soldier, author, and producer of Welsh pageants. Significantly, the inner conflict between his loyalty to the Empire and his Welsh nationalism is represented in his death by his two gravestones; one a large, granite Celtic Cross (honouring Owen Rhoscomyl) which is leaning at such an angle that it is threatening to smash the other, a regulation British military tombstone of pristine, white marble (honouring the British soldier).

Reading his writings, it is clear that his personality is reflected in the characters in his own novels.

The more I became immersed in Vaughan’s legacy - his papers are available in the National Library of Wales - the more I realized that the main character of my book was a forgotten hero of Wales, and a proponent of Welsh nationalism. Moreover, I realized that, as an outsider, I was increasingly singing the praises of a Welshman, who had been largely ignored by his countrymen - and all this as the result of trying to discover who had shot an innocent Boer nurse.

Interestingly, it was Janet Lourens - a Welsh historian, married to a South African - who provided me with an essential lead to Vaughan’s literary achievements. Janet lives not far from where the infamous hospital shooting incident took place, and mentioned the fact that Vaughan had published some short stories in the now defunct Longman’s Magazine. I followed this up and obtained transcripts from the National Library in Cape Town. The library also had a copy of his semi-autobiographical novel called Old Fireproof. I found the short stories fascinating, well written and with an ageless charm. Most were repeated to some extent in Old Fireproof, and since these are today hidden away on dusty shelves, I have done my best to summarise his stories and quote sections in his own words in my book.

While he was clearly writing about himself, it is difficult to call Old Fireproof an autobiography, because Vaughan included a lot of fiction - a shame as a true

account would have been of considerably more value for historians. Fortunately I was able to locate other publications (some written by his colleagues) which threw a little more light on the man. In particular, the letters from fellow scout Lisle March-Phillips to his wife which speak with a keen and eloquent observation of the times.

How they passed the war censor I can only speculate!

Possibly the Boers were keeping British security too busy for them to waste time checking every letter home.

The March-Phillips letters were published in book form after the Boer War, and stand as a tribute to a thinking scout and soldier, which probably did not win him many friends in the military hierarchy at the time. His honest comments on the follies of Britain’s top brass are underscored by other authors, especially Thomas Pakenham in his books on The Boer War. In my book, I have quoted directly from this now obscure set of letters. March-Phillips was a master diarist and the changing of a single word would have introduced bias. I am a scientist and not a historian, so I try to keep to the facts and stay out of the quagmire of personal impressions.

But the biggest surprise was yet to come, when I found a rare book of so-called Khoi stories - South African children’s stories - which Vaughan and his wife had published in Dutch and English once they were back in Wales. Vaughan had married a Boer girl during the war and some elements of how this came about emerged from the yarns he had spun in Old Fireproof. In his stories he claims he married her surreptitiously in the bush in order to prevent her from being incarcerated by the British in a camp for women and children. If true, then in this he failed.

Fortunately, the archives of the National Library of Wales and a newly-discovered granddaughter of Vaughan’s, living in Helston, Cornwall, provided a wealth of material at the last moment in the form of a full set of letters written by Vaughan to his sister when he was aged between 16 and 21. During this period he was living the life of a cowboy in the far west of the USA. These letters are on record and quoted from extensively in my book.

I feel that I share a kinship with Arthur Owen Vaughan as my first project after retiring was to delve into genealogy which I found, like Vaughan’s research into Welsh genealogies, provided vital clues to link myth and history. Dare I suggest that myths are, after all, verbal history retold many times.

Vaughan was a real hero and lived a full life as an adventurer, cowboy, decorated military scout and soldier, author, and producer of Welsh pageants

Battle Scars and Dragon Tracks by Anthony Louis von Zeil can be ordered via cambria Magazine, cost £14.00 plus £8 P&P.

25

YR IAITH

Go out and use it! frances davies

T

he camaraderie of the maes is a great part of the pleasure of the Eisteddfod, we all have something in common, and even I with my pitifully small knowledge of Welsh feel warmly included. It seems that not everybody is drawn by this.

I am always surprised to hear people complain ‘Every year it is the same, you meet the same people year in year out, and it is so narrow minded.’

Firstly and most importantly, it is not narrow minded, if anything, I think, it would be fairer to accuse them of bending back a bit too far, after all it is one of the last bastions and preserves of Welsh language and culture.

Secondly, I know that there will be many who I am bound to see there, they are there every year come hell or high water. This is where we catch up.

Some are friends and colleagues I see fairly often, but many I only see there: other stall holders, eisteddfodwyr, they all have busy lives that take them in other directions but over the years and brought together on the maes I feel a kinship with them.

Talking to Kay Holder, this year’s Welsh Learner of the Year, I was surprised to find that she had only been attending for three years. Tall and slim; her unmistakeable easy, graceful figure has become a familiar part of the traditional fabric gliding about the maes handing out vegan chocolate, cake, pate and other samples. Becoming a vegetarian at sixteen on the basis that eating meat was hypocritical if you weren’t prepared yourself to actually kill and a fully fledged vegan at 26 after learning more of the cruelties of animal factory farming she has campaigned ever since on the moral, health and

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environmental benefits of veganism.

A friend was looking for cover for the vegan stand at the Eisteddfod in Cardiff, which happened to coincide with a family visit, life was about to change.

Cardiff was a shock, not least the size; Kay had been expecting just a field, one or two activities and a competition. This was also the first time she had actually ‘heard Welsh spoken and it was a complete shock to hear it spoken so naturally’. Although born and schooled in Penarth her family weren’t Welsh speaking and it had never been offered at school, perhaps she had ‘heard a bit as a child’ but she can’t really remember ever coming across it.

Kay left Wales for university where she studied Spanish, Russian and Chinese. She then joined a translation agency specialising in these and French, German and Latin also. She found she was working on up to thirty languages, once you can speak four or five they act like a key opening up others. Work was extremely varied, one day she was handed a Welsh telex, another time the BBC rang needing some Welsh translation, she was given the work she was given the work as it was known that she was from Wales.

When asked about Welsh she would explain that it was a dying language only spoken in the north. Nonetheless guilt twinged occasionally that her own language was one she of those she knew least about.

Languages might not make money but they add interest, provide opportunities, and personality changes with the language’.

Attended solely with the thought of spreading the vegan word and its benefits, the experience of Cardiff, not just the discovery of the language but all the attendant culture, ‘incredible music, and not just in the pavilion but all over the maes, of the highest quality’ gave birth to a determination to learn and return. The wonder of hearing her

own language in her own country has still not abated. On her way back home to Kent after Ebbw Vale, sitting on the train watching the passing countryside she realised that the hiraeth which had been growing with each visit could no longer be ignored.

Last Winter she moved back to Dinas Powys.

‘Bore da’, she recollects, was her first phrase in Welsh. ‘People were so welcoming, so warm and encouraging, lovely, being here feels like being part of a family. What you expect is what you will get. If people could be persuaded onto the maes just once their attitude to Wales, the language, would be transformed’.

Normally fairly retiring, her drive to evangelise pushed her out of the stand but it was her urge to learn that created her ‘Eisteddfod persona’ and actually helped her to speak to people.

‘If I had to give one piece of advice to learners? Most importantly - Go out and use it. Don’t hide in a classroom, bury yourself with the computer, one word used in a shop is better than anything else. There has been a sea change in the attitude of Welsh speakers over the last few years, there is much more acceptance of learners. Look up your local Cymdeithas Cymraeg, most areas have a Welsh society, the joining fee is very small and they need young blood! Join a Welsh choir, singing is a fantastic way to learn a language and the social practise is useful too.’

Kay Holder is available for private tuition in French, Spanish, German and Welsh: 029 2051 2904

Eisteddfod 2011

photographs by david williams

clockwise from top: Sitting Bull/Manon Rhys, winner of the Prose Medal; The Hywel Teifi Edwards Memorial lecture sponsored by Academi - Professor M. Wynn Thomas and Gwenno Francon; Mererid Hopwood in the Pabell Llen; Fflur Dafydd.

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clockwise from top: Induction of the White Robes;

Leanne

Wood;

Nia, Ann Hughes of Seld Interiors and silversmith and jeweler Susie Horan; Kay Holder, Welsh Learner of the Year.

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clockwise from top: The Welsh Books Council Stand; Rhiain Bebb and The Three Tenors at the cambria stand: Eira Bowen with Robat and Enid Gruffudd ,Y Lolfa, at the reception celebrating 150 years of the Eisteddfod; University of Wales lecture - Culture which Travels the World.

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A Taff in the land of the Gogs ne of the few perils of living in North Wales is the distance you sometimes have to travel to get to hospital. I have a malfunctioning aorta valve and was recently sent to the Heart Hospital in Liverpool, the so-called capital of North Wales.

Somehow or other we got lost in Toxteth. I spotted a group of people sitting around a bus shelter so I went over to them to ask the way and immediately realised I had made a huge mistake.

They were all barking mad winos out on some kind of Scouser Whitsun Treat and, as one directed me to Knotty Ash where, believe it or nor, we had to get to, another tried to pick my back pocket.

This started a fight with a woman who, I think, was trying to protect me while yet another, who only had one eye, began trying to tell me the way to Knotty Ash in a sort of drunken Scouse, of which I didn’t understand one word. Then another joined in and it was a little like being surrounded by a tribe of Red Indians who, instead of tomahawks, were all waving plastic flagons of rough cider in the air. I had to run for my life in the end.

When we got to the hospital I was keen to get the answer to one big troubling question. My mate Colin in Bala had to have a new aorta valve and they gave him a metal one which ticks so loudly it keeps him awake at night. Colin told me about his friend, also with a metal aorta valve, who used to like to play poker but, every time he had a good hand his little valve went off like an alarm clock and all those he was playing with folded their hands.

This was terrible. I have never

O

Diary by Tom Davies played poker in my life but I certainly didn’t want my heart to betray me if I did happen to encounter any new excitements.

What if Cardiff ever got into the FA Cup Final? The whole of Wembley would be in uproar and I’d be standing there with my heart sounding like an air raid siren.

But the consultant assured me I was too old for metal so they would fix me up with a bit of pig, which doesn’t last as long as metal, but at

house (which would publish big, ambitious books), found a sort of federal national theatre for Wales (much like the one that later emerged) and build a fully equipped film studio. I leafleted the homes of Cardiff South and there was a fiery debate with Rhodri Morgan in the Sherman.

My vague plan of action was that I would make a scorching speech to the Assembly once a week about our arts and sport. I would have been expelled regularly no doubt but at least everyone would have been fully aware of the rubbish we have and the quality we need. Of course I lost by a landslide.

I often think of the speeches I would have made and just about now I would have been thundering about the current disaster which is issuing out of BBC Wales in Llandaff by which I mean the meaningless rubbish which is Torchwood and Dr Who. We have just had the Eisteddfod up here in Wrexham which, as usual, was a brilliant celebration of the heart and spirit of Wales. We need a lot more of this in English and yet BBC Wales, at enormous expense, is producing this horror comic nonsense which says precisely nothing to anyone about anything.

Emperor Russell T. Davies has no clothes and unless we get away from his baleful influence we are all going to end up as daft as John Barrowman. None of the writers of these programmes even seem to understand the basics of storytelling. Why have we got mixed up with these munchkins and, what is

Emperor Russell T. Davies has no clothes and unless we get away from his baleful influence we are all going to end up as daft as John Barrowman.

None of the writers of these programmes even seem to understand the basics of storytelling

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least won’t click, tick or roar if I ever do get excited again. If …

In the first election for the Assembly in 1999 I decided to start my own political party, the Celtic Alliance, with the specific aim of reinvigorating Welsh arts and sport.

My campaign didn’t start too well since as soon as I announced My Big Idea in my weekly column in the Western Mail, they fired me. But I pressed on with my new plan which, amongst other key policies, was going to take all our football clubs to the top of the Premiership (we were going to stop wasting money on roads), set up a national publishing

far worse than that, why does BBC Wales seem so pleased with itself about it all?

I am tormented that our children are being “entertained” by the psychological terror and slavering monsters that these people keep churning out.

My wife and I have recently been greatly enjoying re-runs of ER, the medical drama on Sky Atlantic which, in my book, is the greatest series television has ever produced. It is well-written with attractive characters, thoughtful and challenging storylines. It brings me close to tears at least twice an episode. We are total fans.

If actor Noah Wyle ever turned up here in Bala and displayed an interest in my wife I doubt my marriage, which seems to have gone on for ever, would last two minutes. But I have to admit that, if Noah happened to dance on the other side of the

ballroom and hit on me, I’m not at all sure my marriage would last one minute. It’s really as bad as that.

My favourite scene ever on television was when, at the end of one episode, there had been a huge disaster and ambulances were screaming through the streets of Chicago hurrying the dead and dying to the ER. The doctors and nurses came filing out into the forecourt in ones and twos, all in their gowns with stethoscopes dangling around their necks. They all just stood there silently for a minute or so, watching and waiting for their new patients to arrive and you just knew that, as soon as those ambulance doors opened, they would step forward and fight furiously for their health and lives.

The one thing about ER is the characters always seem to take their work very seriously. They care.

When I think of this scene I

also, perhaps bizarrely, think of the writers of Wales and wish they would step up to the plate like this and put up some sort of fight for the lives of us ailing Welsh. Why aren’t they all urging us to stop guzzling the national swill? Why don’t they start telling us what wonders we could achieve as a nation if we started saying “No”.

Irish writers saved Ireland by setting up a dynamic inter-reaction between their slumbering country and the overweening power of the English. They turned Ireland free.

Just one James Joyce would be a good start for us in Wales - if only we could find him, if only he wasn’t actually strangled at birth by the arts council or a nervous, politically correct publishing industry.

I could go on about this for pages but, perhaps fortunately for everyone concerned, I’ve run out of space.

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Sheep, dogs and shepherds gwyn griffiths

A

ugust Bank Holiday and a chance call from a friend enticed me to the hills above Ynysybwl and the Llanwynno Sheepdog Trials. Half a century has elapsed since I was last at sheepdog trials but I remember the thrill of watching a dog, close to the ground sweeping in wide circles teasing and cajoling three or four sheep between gates and into pens in response to the whistling shepherd. Play rugby for Wales or cricket for Glamorgan? Forget it. My childhood dream was to represent Wales in sheep dog trials. The only problem was Bob. Bob was a useful dog, but a one-man dog and that man was my father. And the only sheep we had were those we wintered for William Owen, Tynddôl, way up above Ffair Rhos. My ambitions had no chance.

Up in the Glamorgan hills with a view extending across to Somerset I watched entranced by the beauty of those dogs - fit, fast and eager. Even when not competing they sat and watched intently, critical or appreciative of their opponents. Or so they seemed.

Healthy, handsome women dispensed tea, cakes and banter while stocky, powerful men with shepherds’ crooks arrived in 4X4s. Children ran among the tents tripping over the ropes. It was a day out for the hill families farming the uplands around Llanwynno, up above Pontypridd, Ynysybwl, Rhondda Fach and Mountain Ash. Urban South Wales could have been a thousand miles away.

Hill farms are cleaner, fresher than those of the lowlands with their mucky farm-yards. Of course I never experienced the hill farms exceptt at shearing time, but for a youngster looking for sheep after a winter snow storm was an adventure. My twice a day chore in winter, once I learnt to count up to 51, was to check the sheep were all present and correct. That’s what i tell my grandchildren, and it’s - almost - true.

Also my uncle, David John Griffiths, was the shepherd on the Ministry of Agriculture farm at Trawscoed and every August I spent a week with him and my Auntie Sally and older cousins at their cottage in Llanafan. The nicest and gentlest of men, he had been shot in Mametz Woods in the First World War, survived, and died aged 92.

But, to return to Ynysybwl. I picked up, just off the press, Shepherd of the Hills, a delightful biography of Tom Jones (1901-1984) by one of his daughters, Diana Wilson.

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COURTESY OF ERWYD HOWELLS

Tom had spent his life as a shepherd on hill farms from Ynysybwl to Blaenllechau to Treorchy. He had even been employed as a shepherd by the National Coal Board looking after sheep on a vast swathe of mountains among the toughest terrain in Wales. His skills as a dog trainer and handler were legendary and brought him international fame. Sheep Dog - a short film about Tom and his dogs was made by British Screen Services and premiered at the Odeon, Leicester Square, in 1939. It was shown all over the world and selected from hundreds of nature films to be shown that year in the New York World Fair.

The stories of the dogs are even more incredible than those about their owner. Scott, his most famous dog, would be left with a pony which was being shoed at the smithy. When the blacksmith finished he would hand the reins to Scott who would lead the pony home. On one occasion a thick mist descended on the mountain when Tom had found a sick ewe. He put the sheep across the pony’s back, mounted the pony, and having lost all sense of direction gave the reins to Scott who led them down the mountain to safety.

On another occasion, Tom found a new-born lamb trying to suckle its dead mother. He placed the lamb in a make-shift pen, told the dog to remember the spot, and when they got home he filled a baby bottle with milk which the dog then took to the orphaned lamb and fed it.

This amazing episode was captured on the film. All Tom’s

dogs were taught to hold bottles to feed lambs that had lost their mothers.

Co-incidentally, I took with me on holiday Erwyd Howells’s Good Men and True, a splendidly comprehensive history by a shepherd writing about the shepherds of mid-Wales. The breadth and depth of his research is immense. Friends in Brittany from time to time ask me why, in Wales, where we have so many sheep, do we not milk them and produce cheese - like the traditional feta cheese of Greece. Erwyd writes that sheep were once milked in Wales and mentions a Mary Jones from Ystumtuen, milking sheep in 1848, and that there is a record of sheep being milked in the Pontrhydfendigaid area around 1750. His book has a photograph of a tiny fold on Nant-llyn, Ponterwyd, of the type used for milking sheep - perhaps dating back to the time of the Hafod and Hendre system, when the animals and shepherds would summer in the upland pastures, and come back to the Hendre for the winter. There is in Cwmerfin, he writes, a smallholding called Llety-caws (cheese house) which suggests that making cheese from sheep milk was once common in those parts.

Shepherds who practice transhumance in Provence taking sheep up from the area around the Gulf of St Tropez and west as far as the Crau to the summer high pastures of the Luberon and the Basse Alpes - milk sheep in the COURTESY OF DIANA WILSON

uplands and use the milk to make cheese. Today most of them take the sheep up in lorries but The Provencal Tales

by Michael de Larrabeiti offers a glimpse of the old ways.

Larrabeiti made the 120 mile trek with the shepherds in 1958, worked with them and wrote down the stories which the men told at the end of each day’s trek - like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Their legends had been handed down by word of mouth within the shepherding community over centuries; some were about events and incidents from the time when the Saracens ruled Spain and southern France. Usually the story would relate to a ruin passed on their journey. Provence writers, like Henri Bosco whose grave in Lourmarin lies opposite that of Albert Camus; Jean Gioni whose little book on the man who planted trees has endeared him to environmentalists the world over; and Frederick Mistral have all been inspired by the mysterious, sinister shepherds.

In Provence the shepherd has a reputation for sorcery, the repository of much dangerous learning. He had seen many things and garnered and kept his knowledge. He was also a troubadour, the guardian of stories of times past. Giono, after a period of illness in childhood was sent by his parents to convalesce with a shepherd in the mountains beyond Manosque.

At the end of Larrabeiti’s journey, Lucien, one of the shepherds, gives him a sheep bell he had made himself, a wooden collar, steamed and bent to shape over his knee, and a clanger made of a piece of bone from a sheep’s leg. I have one, bought at a vide grenier, without knowing that the clanger was made of bone.

Whether the descriptions of Provence shepherds as mysterious and sinister applies to Welsh shepherds I would not care to comment. Larrabeiti suggests that the reputation comes from their deep understanding of nature and their knowledge of medicinal herbs for themselves and their animals - vital when you spend months alone in the mountains. He also describes how another shepherd, Jules, counted his sheep, cutting a notch in a stick for every 20 sheep. Erwyd Howells describes a similar method, where a tally stick was used at shearing time with an X cut for every 10 sheep. From what I have seen in Provence, their dogs were pretty good, too, if not quite in the class of Tom Jones’s dogs.

Shepherd of the Hills by Diana Wilson, price £10, was published privately. Copies can be obtained from Pontypridd Museum. Please include £2 for post and packaging.

Good Men and True by Erwyd Howells, price £17.95, also published privately is available from the author, Capel Madog, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion.

The Provençal Tales by Michael de Larrabeiti was published by Pavilion Books, London

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ENVIRONMENT

And wool to keep them warm... jerry fonge

S

heep created the spacious upland landscapes which we treasure so much today. As the Cistercian monks of the twelfth century settled amid our hills and mountains, they drove forward a wool-fuelled economy which created so many of our ancient towns, and yet laid bare the land of trees.

And still today sheep remain a potent symbol of the wild open spaces that are Snowdonia, the Brecon Beacons, the Cambrian Mountains and the lonely hills of Powys.

Yet for 25 years, the wool that created the riches of Britain so many centuries ago, has been a loss-making by-product of a meat-based sheep economy - almost ironically so, for it was Elizabeth I who became so worried about the impact of mutton consumption on the wool economy that she decreed that all sheep meat must be eaten with ‘bitter herbs’ in order to reduce its culinary appeal!

But today there is new hope for the wool producers: farmers are making a profit on their clip for the first time in a quarter of a century, and great strides are being made to promote wool as an alternative to manmade and imported clothing fibres - as well as in the ‘industrial field’, for it is in Wales that a small Denbigh company is flourishing on the back of wool as a home insulation product.

Welsh Black by Sally Matthews - an alternative use for wool

CARL STRINGER (COURTESY NATIONAL BOTANIC GARDEN OF WALES)

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As the Cistercian monks of the twelfth century settled amid our hills and mountains, they drove forward a wool-fuelled economy which created so many of our ancient towns and yet laid bare the land of trees Taking up an idea which first saw the light of day in New Zealand in the early 1990s, three years ago Black Mountain Insulation put its own wool insulation process into action - and has thrived ever since, with up to 20 people now working in the company.

Despite a price disadvantage of £7 per square metre against £3 for mineral-wool, the market for the sheep wool product “has really opened up,” according to product manager Anna Conrad Smith. She is cagey about revealing hard figures, but reports “record sales” for this year on a “reactive” market. “A lot of customers come from the self-build sector,” she explains, “and through online sales, but we must be more pro-active in marketing the product.”

For the producers of traditional upland sheep the Welsh Mountain in particular - this progress in developing and selling wool insulation is particularly good news, for BMI takes the lower-grade wools which are generally unwanted by the textile industry: “We effectively take the by-products of the fibre industry,” Anna Conrad Smith remarks.

Andrew Evans, the man behind BMI, was in the plumbing business when he realised the potential benefits of wool insulation. And although he is keenly aware of the much higher end-product cost, he argues that wool insulation is 60% more effective, and that making the equivalent product from glass or rock uses a lot more energy than shearing a sheep. Indeed, he adds, if you factor in the grass growth that goes into feeding sheep, wool insulation has a negative carbon footprint.

Most interestingly, the proponents of wool insulation also argue that it can regulate moisture levels in the home, by behaving just as it did when protecting the sheep.

Absorbed moisture heats it up and, as it dries, it cools down - effectively acting as a natural air conditioner.

Moving away from the ‘industrial’ side of the newly-buoyant wool market, it received

Wool as a highly-effective natural insulation COURTESY OF BLACK MOUNTAIN INSULATION LTD

a particularly important boost 18 months ago with the launch of the Prince of Wales’ ‘Wool Project’, which has brought diverse groups from across the wool sector to work together on improving the public’s awareness of the product’s sustainability benefits.

Prince Charles has long been concerned about the low fleece prices received by farmers, and developed the ‘Wool Project’ out of a multi-party meeting at Clarence House in February 2009. It now involves wool grower organisations from the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

At the launch of the project the average price for per kilo for wool had fallen from 97p in 1997 to 68p, prompting the Prince to warn that the future for the fibre was “bleak”, adding: “The sad truth is that around the world farmers are leaving sheep production, because the price they get for their wool is below the cost of actually shearing it.”

Prince Charles not only called for wool to be championed because of its sustainability, but also because sheep farmers are the “life blood of the rural economy -they keep the countryside alive, not just in this country but in many parts of the world.”

Perhaps the greatest champions of wool in Wales today, however, are two snall-scale producers from Powys: Olwen Veevers and Chrissie Menzies.

Five years ago, they were involved in the launch of Wonderwool Wales at the Royal Welsh Showground, Llanelwedd - a weekend event funded by a Leader + grant

from the EU and managed by Powys County Council, via Glasu. When this funding came to an end after three years, Olwen and Chrissie (along with Sarah Stacey) took up the challenge to create a not-for-profit company which has kept the show on the road ever since - to the extent that it attracted 160 exhibitors last year and 3,500 visitors at the gate. The aim is for 4,000 in 2012, while a lot of potential new exhibitors are also showing an interest, Chrissie reports.

“The exciting thing is, we didn’t just have visitors from Wales and the rest of the UK - they also came from Ireland, Alaska, Finland and Germany,” she added.

Chrissie hopes the success of the event over the past six years will attract increased funding support for the Wool Board and an input from the Wool Project. But the overriding aim is to promote the benefits of wool to the public - and the facilities at Llanelwedd provide a superb base for the growth of the event.

For Wales’s 14,300 sheep producers, the current buoyancy in wool prices is to be welcomed: latest wool price forecasts from the British Wool Marketing Board put Welsh hill wool at 76p per kilo and £1.30 for Radnor/Beulah and Texel/Llyn fleeces - a significant step forward (even at the lower end) from the 68p average of a year ago. So perhaps the fibre which created such vast wealth so many centuries ago is poised once again to become a potent symbol of the Welsh rural economy, and the wild beauty of its sheep-created uplands.

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HERITAGE

Dylan and his aunties: the other women in the poet’s life DAVID N. THOMAS

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s the centenary of Dylan Thomas’ birth approaches, it’s timely to wonder about his childhood and teenage years. After all, he was an early-onset poet. Most of his published poetry was written before he was twenty. So the more we know about his early years, the better we might understand his poems, as well other aspects of his life, including his difficulties with drink and women.

Dylan was born in October 1914. He was the first boy in his mother Florence’s close family for over sixteen years, so the spoiling must have started young and been very easy. He was brought up by a nurse, an indulgent mother and a doting older sister. All but one of his first cousins were girls, all very much older than him: “Everybody mothered Dylan; everybody, even my family mothered Dylan.”

The real spoilers were his aunts. Some of them were very important in his upbringing, so much so that a girlfriend once observed that he “had a thing about aunts.” She could remember nothing more about it,

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except that he used to say “Uncle Dylan is coming to bed with his auntie Pam.” His aunts included not just Florence’s sisters but some of her Carmarthenshire cousins as well. Dylan was a lot more Welsh than Swansea, and these various aunts had much to do with it. Caitlin has said of them that “They were the background from which he had sprung, and he needed that background all his life, like a tree needs roots.”

Dylan’s four maternal aunts were an interesting group of women. With one exception, they did well for themselves, either through marriage or inheritance. They all spoke Welsh: Anne Williams, Florence’s half-sister. She married into local gentry and later settled in Llansteffan. Dylan and his parents holidayed with her when he was a young boy.

Annie Fernhill left what might possibly have been an incestuous relationship with a Llangain uncle, but only to marry an incompetent farmer. She lived in poverty for the rest of her life. “She loved me quite inordinately,” wrote Dylan, “…petted, patted & spoiled me.”

Polly was a music teacher. She never married, and was another responsible for a good deal of the spoiling of Dylan, both in Swansea and at her cottage, Blaencwm, outside Llangain.

Theodosia married the scholarly Minister of Paraclete chapel in Newton, Swansea. They moved to the second Blaencwm cottage in 1933. They had no children.

Their most striking characteristic is their age: the oldest, Annie Fernhill, was in her sixties, and the youngest, Theodosia, in her fifties, when Dylan, a schoolboy, went to stay with them. When, as a teenager, he stayed with Polly at Blaencwm she, too, was in her sixties. To the young Dylan, his aunts must have seemed more like grandmothers. Even his first cousins would have seemed “old”, for they were already in their twenties and thirties when he was a boy. This greying family profile might help explain why he was so absorbed, as a teenage poet, with decay and mortality.

Ferryside Lifeboat Crew His absorption was also fed by family events. Having aunties as old as grannies meant that deaths were a recurring element of Dylan’s growing up. One of the first was his aunt Anne Llansteffan, whose twentyyear old daughter then moved into Cwmdonkin Drive - Dylan had lost an aunt but had gained yet another mother. In 1933, his favourite aunt, Annie Fernhill, died and there was a surge of death poetry for the rest of the year. Then his father was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue;

a few months later, a baby cousin died in Ferryside. The maggotand-worm poems continued through 1934. That October, he reached his twentieth birthday, singing like the sea but feeling the weight of his mortal chains.

As he wandered around the graveyard in Llanybri, the poetic stimulus would also have come from the family headstones: Robert, six months; Sarah Anne, eight months; Sarah Jane, seven years; David, seventeen years, and several more besides. The family graves in the Llangain churchyard told the same story. The message would have been very clear to a young poet: birth can be a doublecross, that green fuse could blow at any time.

Dylan’s equally intense concern with fertility and birth was also rooted in family experience. His mother’s side was in crisis, at risk of failing to renew itself. From 1870 onwards, Florence’s many Llangain relatives had produced just a handful of children, with none at all being born in the thirty years to 1933. In September that year, Dylan was staying with Polly at Blaencwm. He worked on a group of poems about life and death, at a time of great happiness in the family.

In Llwyngwyn farm just up the road, one of his mother’s cousins was pregnant. “Here a mild baby speaks his first word/ In the Bethlehem under the skin./Under the ribs sail the moon and the sun;” wrote Dylan at the cottage. The following March, the sun broke free of its cage, the first child for over thirty years, and they named her Heulwen (“sunshine”).

In his poem, Dylan had called the baby a saviour, and she proved to be just that.

The long drought was broken, and the family tree now had a chance of renewal. But if he shared his relatives’ happiness, Dylan might also have remembered how the baby-shortage had once affected his days at Fernhill.

When he had stayed there in the 1920s, the family farms had been empty of children of his own age. To make

Ferryside Lifeboat Station

matters worse, most of the other farms around Fernhill were also without children. It had been, he said, a very lonely place and in his poem Fern Hill he tells us exactly why, describing it as a “childless land”. It is a lyrical poem about childhood but the worm at its core is the poet’s painful memory of being alone.

Yet “the farm was home”, as he puts it in the poem.

He visited for the whole of each summer holiday, usually without his parents or sister. He also stayed with his auntie Rachel, who lived a few fields away. He shared a bed with the young servant girl, an intimacy that must have cradled his adult need for sleeping with women, not so much for sex, but for warmth and a protective cuddle.

By the time he was five, Dylan was also going for month-long stays in the childless Manse at Newton with his aunt Theodosia. Here again it was rather different to life at Cwmdonkin Drive; not just in the religious tone of the Manse, or the presence of a servant, but Theodosia and her husband were sociable souls who liked entertaining Swansea’s big business people.

And then, finally, in this child-empty circle of aunts who looked after Dylan, there was Florence’s first cousin, Sal, who lived in Ferryside. Another aunt kept the Dorothy Café there. These were holidays of cockles for supper and scary stories at bedtime about the local hatchet men, and he enjoyed it enough to keep on returning to the village whenever he had the chance.

Dylan’s Ferryside background helps us understand why the sea and its victims were such recurring elements of

Dylan’s equally intense concern with fertility and birth was also rooted in family experience. His mother’s side was in crisis, at risk of failing to renew itself.

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Glanyfferi / Ferryside

his teenage poetry. Sal’s father, David Jones, was a local celebrity. He had been the coxswain of the lifeboat for almost forty years. Just three days after Dylan’s eleventh birthday, Jones saved the crew, the cook and the captain’s canary from the SV Paul. Imagine how the young poet would have relished the idea that his great-uncle had spent his life rescuing sailors from his namesake’s locker.

Not surprisingly, the wreck of the Paul was a story that Dylan continued to embellish for the rest of his life.

Knowing that the young Dylan was shared out amongst his aunts helps us understand the scale of the spoiling he enjoyed and why he developed into an adult who could do virtually nothing for himself. Staying with his aunties would also have given him an early taste of Welsh Wales, opening his mind to a different way of living, a different culture and language. And it was through his aunts that the young Dylan gained his entry to the worlds of the chapel and nonconformity.

Time spent with his aunts ensured that Dylan, as a child, came close to communities that, in terms of class and occupation, was more varied than the settlement around Cwmdonkin Drive. His uncles included farmers, shopkeepers, railway workers, sailors and dockworkers.

He saw rural hardship, as well as the sweat and grime of the industrial towns that he passed through on his way from Swansea to Carmarthenshire.

Dylan’s time with his aunts could also have given him a certain robustness and flexibility. Caitlin herself has drawn attention to his singular gift for adapting himself to every kind of different person and place. He seems to have had an extraordinary capacity both for change and for roughing it, neither seeming to have much effect on his creative output. His experiences with his aunts seem also to have been an excellent preparation for the rigours of creative life. It is certainly reasonable to ask

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whether the origins of his self-discipline as a writer can be found in the child-empty quarters of his boyhood.

Dylan’s decision to live by his writing also meant a nomadic life, as he and the family moved house in search of cheap accommodation. Between 1940 and his death in 1953, they lived in twelve different places, as well as at several addresses in London. Here again, the adaptability that Dylan had learnt in his own farmed-out childhood stood him in good stead.

We might also consider how the solitude he experienced when living with his aunts led to his compulsion in later life for socialising. This need for company might have been a response to a powerful fear of being left on his own that stemmed from his childhood days. We can only wonder about such matters but they should at least bring us to a more sympathetic approach to his later behaviour and lifestyle.

Dylan was back in Blaencwm for the summer of 1945, and there he completed Fern Hill. It is a nephew’s poem, one that celebrates the Llangain family farms, and the aunts who helped in the poet’s upbringing. But the spectre of death that haunts the poem also haunted the cottage.

Dylan’s aunt Dosie had died in Blaencwm a few years earlier, and his sickly parents were living there now. Next door, Polly, his last surviving aunt, was in slow decline and she died a month after the poem was published. The great spoiling days were now finally over but the nephew would not have another chance to grow up.

In his last years, Dylan returned frequently to the childless land of his aunties. A month before he left on his final journey to New York, he and his mother toured the family graves, before calling in at Llwyngwyn. Here they met Heulwen, now aged nineteen, and soon to be married. She inherited the farm and, with eight children to come, the future was all sunshine. Not so at Fernhill, where Florence and Dylan also called. There were no children here, and nor would there ever be, even to the present day. The house that inspired a wonderful poem about childhood has still not seen the birth of a child since the days of Queen Victoria.

A fuller version of the paper with source notes and photos is at: https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandhisaunties/

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39

MUSIC

Leading Lady of Song phyllis kinney’s oeuvre norma lord

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his very handsomely produced volume was conceived and written by American singer Phyllis Kinney “because”, she says “no one else did”. By which she means, of course, that there has not been, since W.S. Gwynn Williams’s 1932 review, a definitive history of Welsh “folk” music written, or satisfactorily translated, in the English language. The significance of this vacuum would make, in itself, the subject of another book, but, for those of us with an interest in the definition and evolution of Welsh music, Miss Kinney has done a great service. It was only in the last decade or so that Edward Huws Jones who published a series of hugely successful arrangements of folk music from all over Europe and America, was told by Boosey and Hawkes that there was no market for a volume of similarly treated Welsh tunes, and merely eight years ago that the Celtic music Tutor at Birmingham University (not, after all so very far from the border) expressed surprise that there was “Welsh Dance”.

That this task had to be undertaken by a woman of Welsh adoption may not be as curious as it first appears, since a reticence to share (or maybe one should use the word expose?) their culture and language seems inbuilt into the Welsh psyche. Miss Kinney claims that her husband, Meredydd Evans, iconic professor, defender and exponent of Welsh traditional music, was “too busy” to write the book, but she acknowledges him as the fount of her inspiration. One can imagine that he, and others in his position, might feel it inappropriate to write on the subject in English, perhaps?

Phyllis Kinney was born and raised in Michigan, USA and went to the State University to study music. There she was taught by Professor Gomer Llywelyn Jones whose name, she remarked upon introduction, was “funny”. His reply that his name was not funny, but Welsh, sparked the beginning of her lifelong involvement in Welsh music and culture.

From Michigan Miss Kinney was awarded a place at the Juilliard School in New York to study singing.

Through Professor Jones she was “adopted” by a Welsh family and was taken regularly by them to Welsh chapel services and other cultural events. At Michigan she had learned Welsh songs in English, but her new “family”

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encouraged her to sing them in their native tongue and, so fascinated by the hwyl of the culture, she learned to do so.

Graduating from Juilliard as an aspiring opera singer Miss Kinney was advised to travel to Britain, where musical life was beginning to blossom after the privations of World War Two. This she did, and eventually found work with the Carl Rosa Opera Company. At a concert in North Wales she met its leading singer, a young baritone called Meredydd Evans, and “the rest”, as she says with a flirtatious twinkle, “is history!”

Given that “traditional” music derives almost universally from oral/aural transfer, a written history will always be, at best, the result of inference and extrapolation - a bit like guessing personal histories through peeling layers of differently patterned wallpaper - but this book makes a rigorous effort to deduce history through the notes and rhythms of genuine musical examples. Readers whose sight reading is not Phyllis in opera at Juillard in 1945

Phyllis and Merêd in Cambridge USA

sufficiently developed would benefit enormously from a handy instrument or an accompanying cd of the quoted examples (please!).

Miss Kinney is refreshingly honest about the dearth of “evidence” much before the eighteenth century, and the subsequent peregrinations of Europe’s most favoured songs and dance tunes, sometimes with astonishingly little re-arrangement, but she still manages to pinpoint certain characteristics which suggest that some tunes are intrinsically Welsh whilst others have been adopted.

Conversely, she points out, fashionable features from non-Welsh composition, from Handel’s baroque forms to the traditional “Scotch” snap, are incorporated into Welsh tradition as the decades proceed. She frets regularly about the tendency of tune collectors to replace the words Phyllis at Eisteddfod Abertawe 1982

of songs, and I understand her frustration here, but the words in themselves reveal much of the songs’ place in society at any one time. Even the florid, anglicised Victorian arrangements (and their words) of John Owen (Owain Alaw), John Thomas (Pencerdd Gwalia) and subsequently W.S. Gwynn Williams, reveal a patronage wider than Welsh “folk”, although, of course, the loss of the originals is tragic.

The University of Wales Press and Cymdeithas Alawon Gwerin Cymru have done this work proud; the volume is lavishly presented and handsomely bound. It is, however, much, much more than the “coffee-table” book it might appear, and should support interest and enquiry in the lifeblood of Welsh culture for many years to come.

Welsh Traditional Music by Phyllis Kinney is published by the University of Wales Press, price £24.99.

GWASG PRIFYSGOL CYMRU UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS Free P&P for orders placed for Welsh Traditional Music via the shop, with the reference: WTMCambria11 Fifty Years in Politics and the Law Rt. Hon. Lord Morris £24.99 | HB| 9780708324189 | September 2011 From Ship’s Cook to Baronet: Sir William Reardon Smith’s life in shipping,1856-1935 David Jenkins £14.99 | PB| 9780708324233 | September 2011 Fleeing Franco Hywel Davies £14.99 | PB| 9780708323366 | February 2011 Geoffrey of Monmouth Karen Jankulak £16.99 | PB | 9780708321515 | October 2010

Shop at: www.wales.ac.uk/mailcontacts/shop or Telephone: +44 (0)29 2022 8205 or visit us at 12 High Street, Cardiff CF10 1AX

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MUSIC

Wales’s new national conservatoire The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama norma lord

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he beginning of this new academic year at Wales’s own, prestigious national conservatoire, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, has the added excitement of a stunning new building on Cardiff’s North Road. This latest symbol of the city’s physical and cultural regeneration opened amid a flurry of well-deserved publicity and celebration performances in June this year, but it is the students of the future who will revel in its benefits.

The College began life as The Cardiff School of Music in Cardiff Castle at the end of the second world war, offering part-time tuition and ensemble membership to local musicians and youngsters wishing to learn to play or sing, and this aspect of its work is still thriving within its multi-faceted junior and access programme which is open to anyone prepared to work at his musical studies.

Since 1949 however, the College, as The National School of Music (and subsequently Drama), has functioned as a full-time conservatoire offering degrees and diplomas in most branches of music and theatre skills. From 1959 until 1984, under Principal Raymond Edwards (Raymond y Castell), after whom the original College building was named, and whose influence is still felt and spoken of today, the College prospered and expanded, and it was granted Royal status in 2002 in recognition of its achievements at international level. Its reputation for stage management, for example, is reflected in the fact that the entire staff of London’s National Theatre are Cardiff-trained. There are, indeed, well-known alumni in most walks of musical and theatrical life worldwide; Anthony Hopkins is a longstanding ambassador, and Rob Brydon and Ruth Jones have intensified the media spotlight on the College in recent years.

The College currently teaches some 600 students at any one time, about one third of whom are from Wales. Many of the rest are from overseas. There are five undergraduate courses, two in music and three in theatre disciplines, offering almost limitless choice of areas of study, from jazz and music technology to theatre design. There is even a whisper that there might soon be on offer a course in traditional Welsh music. Cardiff was one of the first conservatoires to offer, since the 1960s, professional study

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of music technology, now a growth area across the UK. The 15 Masters degrees are even more varied, ranging from Arts Management through Historical Performance to Stage, Screen and Radio Acting and Choral Conducting, and there are post-graduate “conversion” courses for students from other disciplines. Principal Hilary Boulding is convinced that the limited size of each student cohort plays a major part in the College’s success, as it allows each student to be recognized as having unique individual needs which are then addressed as such. In practice, however, the fact that there are, for example on the acting course, 1500 applicants for twenty places means that the “raw material” is of the highest standard. Much emphasis is placed on two aspects of Arts training frequently overlooked elsewhere: integration and ultimate employment, and the College is proud of its record in this respect, with most alumnae being employed soon after completing their studies. Ms. Boulding is keen to acknowledge that some post-graduate study is essential for singing students, in particular, to allow voices to mature and strengthen. She says that, while some Cardiff students pursue post-grad courses at the College, others go elsewhere to broaden their experience, and others move to RWCMD from first degrees at other conservatoires. This encourages much “cross-pollination” of skills and talent. RWCMD students do not study in a technical vacuum, but with regular exchanges and co-operation between the different disciplines as well as “placements” with professional arts organizations such as the National Orchestra of Wales, Welsh National Opera and Music Theatre Wales.

A novel feature of the College’s programme is RepCo, the student-led repertory company formed in 2010 with Wales Assembly government backing and encouragement, allowing students to learn the necessary business skills to “market” themselves as performing groups such as Opera’r Draig, Sinfonia Newydd and the Student Orchestra.

Profits are returned to RepCo with the aim of creating more, similar projects to expand the performing business experience throughout the College. This, together with the junior weekend schools in music and, since 2008, drama,

completes what might be called a “wraparound” package of musical and theatre training unique at least in the UK. The new building itself, designed by Jason Flanagan of London architects Bogle Flanagan Lawrence Silver, is actually three new buildings under one stunning, sweeping expanse of floating steel roof which also incorporates the rather undistinguished original construction. Flanagan proudly explained that the concept was approached from the inside out, taking function as the foremost consideration (something architects elsewhere might be prudent to emulate!), with the result that both the Dora Stoutzker Hall (Wales’ first purpose-built recital venue) and the Richard Burton Theatre are acoustically and aesthetically sumptuous in spite of being constructed of concrete “shoeboxes” (Flanagan’s own word). These three separate units are joined by the three-storey-high Linbury Gallery, allowing display space for students’ design and costume projects, which may be viewed to advantage at ground level and from the staircases leading to airily spacious rehearsal studios on the upper floors. The name of the Theatre needs no explanation, but readers may be less familiar with that of Dora Stoutzker, whose work teaching piano in and around Aberdare during the 1920’s funded the musical education of her son Ian, business tycoon

Christmas at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama Nadolig yn y Coleg

who, amid much else, co-founded Live Music Now with Yehudi Menuhin, and who contributed substantially to RWCMD’s new building. The Linbury Gallery shares its name with the prestigious, London-based theatre-design prize whose list of winners so often includes RWCMD students!

Another major consideration in the design of the new building was the position of the College between Cardiff’s civic centre on the other side of North Road, and Bute Park behind the College itself. Blending into both these posed somewhat of a challenge which the Portland stone and cedar-wood cladding of the building answers to perfection. Between the Theatre and the Recital Hall is a large foyer, containing a concert grand piano (a Steinway, of course, as all the College’s pianos have been since a deal with the Company was struck in 2009) on one side and the more usual reception desk and café on the other. The Principal is determined to seduce the Cardiff public into the premises to enjoy impromptu performance with coffee or lunch. And, if this is not enough, the far side of the foyer looks out through plate-glass on to a sweeping vista of Bute Park’s grass and trees, whilst a canal off the River Taff trills under the loggia beyond. Do call in: you will be rewarded and amazed!

Saturday 26 Nov 7.30pm

Make We Merry – A Baroque Christmas

Saturday 3 Dec 6pm Sunday 4 Dec 3pm

The Snowman

Throughout history, the greatest composers have reserved some of their finest music for the celebration of Christmas.

Tickets | Tocynnau £7 (£5) Dora Stoutzker Hall

The soundtrack to Howard Blake’s timeless Christmas classic will be performed live with the animated film on the big screen.

Tickets | Tocynnau £8 (£6) Dora Stoutzker Hall

Saturday 3 Dec 4.30pm Sunday 4 Dec 1.30pm

Friday 9 Dec 5.30pm

Christmas Snow Songs Well known favourites sung by our talented young vocalists around the Christmas tree in our stunning foyer overlooking Bute Park.

Admission Free Saturday 3 Dec 3pm Sunday 4 Dec 12pm

Carols & Fanfares!

Our young brass and vocal artists will lead you on a sparkling journey where you can sing along to your favourite festive flourishes!

Tickets | Tocynnau £8 (£6) Dora Stoutzker Hall

Jazz Carols in the Foyer Contemporary reworkings of the traditional Christmas repertoire.

Admission Free 30 Nov – 10 Dec

Arabian Nights This magical production features original music, dance, puppetry and vibrant costumes.

Tickets | Tocynnau £10 (£8) Bute Theatre

Tickets | Tocynnau 029 2039 1391 www.rwcmd.ac.uk

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SPORT

-GOLF

Vintage Golf byron kalies

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berdovey is a gloriously old-fashioned links course lying at the mouth of the Dyfi Estuary on the coast of Cardigan Bay. To the East and North lie the mountains of the Snowdonia National Park, which make for one of the most spectacular backdrops to any golf course in the UK. Aberdovey’s vintage feel lies in the fact that it has a great deal in common with the early Scottish courses - especially Prestwick, which was designed by ‘Old’ Tom Morris. The original course was, in fact, laid out

by Colonel Arthur Ruck, a founder member of the Aberdovey Club, but was later developed by possibly the three most influential course designers of the time: Harry Colt, Herbert Fowler and James Braid.

In 1910 Harry Colt, legendary architect at Muirfield and Sunningdale made his amendments and then in 1920 it was the turn of Herbert Fowler, architect at Walton Heath and Cruden Bay, followed by James Braid (who had developed Carnoustie and Gleneagles) in 1931.

However, the best and most radical designer of course has been nature. Strong winds, shifting sand dunes and relentless weathering have continually moved

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and changed the course. Throughout the decades the greenkeepers have fought a constant battle against the elements: there is a fine line to be drawn between ‘rugged’ and ‘unruly’ and the course seems to be constantly winning. It’s hardly surprising that many of its members and visitors talk about it as the pinnacle of golfing courses.

The Club’s most famous member was probably the best golf writer that ever lived - certainly the most prolific.

Bernard Darwin - grandson of the famous naturalist Charles Darwin - was the nephew of Colonel Arthur Ruck, who introduced golf to his friends and neighbours at Aberdovey in 1882 by creating a nine-hole course on common land using flower pots as the holes.

Bernard Darwin was about six at the time, so was well set - 13 years later - to take full advantage of the 18-hole course created by Dicky Ruck, Arthur’s brother and a member of the Royal Engineers - and although golf may have been played at Tenby and Cwmbran before then, as far as Bernard was concerned it was from his Uncle Arthur’s flowerpots that Welsh golf grew.

By the turn of the century Bernard was playing off a handicap of plus 4 and competing in the Amateur Championship. In 1907 he became the first professional golf correspondent and wrote for ‘The Times’ and ‘Country Life’ for over 50 years. He also produced a vast number of books on golf.

The Aberdovey course However there are occasions where one great grandson of Colonel Arthur Ruck describes it follows the traditional wants to take a step back in time and perfectly: Scottish plans of ‘out and back’, with the first nine experience a course that plays pretty “The 3rd is the infamous holes generally heading Cader, a hit-and-hope short away from the clubhouse. much as it did over a century ago. hole where in the early days The tees are situated close to only a fool or a millionaire the previous greens in the old style, although originally took a new ball. While the golfer went through his nervous waggles players teed off next to the hole. One of the great on the tee, the caddies took up their station atop a mountainous similarities with ‘Old’ Tom Morris’s Prestwick course sandhill, ready to pronounce their verdict, shrill as a seagull’s cry: - apart from the railway forming one boundary - are ‘On the green!’ or ‘In the soup!’” the blind shots, including the infamous par 3 ‘Cader’ Aberdovey’s equivalent to Prestwick’s ‘Himalayas’, The variety of shots needed to play a links course - the Blind shots - where players can’t see exactly where their chip, ‘the bump and run’, the 6 iron under the wind ball will land, are generally frowned upon by modern course makes the experience memorable and unique. Moreover, architects. They do, however, create a different ‘feel’ to a each of the par 3 holes face a different direction, so game of golf. Modern courses tend to be carefully trimmed, ruining any rhythm one’s built up on the preceding holes. with a long, pretty series of holes which allow players to see The course at Aberdovey is a superb step back to all the trouble ahead of them. Such courses are lovely to look traditional, ‘proper’ golf. It is a course you will certainly at and beautiful to photograph. However there are occasions remember for a long, long time. Maintaining a traditional where one wants to take a step back in time and experience a course takes a great deal of skill, resource, ingenuity course that plays pretty much as it did over a century ago. and constant attention, although recently new tees Certainly playing links courses ensures that one can appropriately called the Darwin Tees - have been laid count on very little from day to day: the 160 yard par 3 that out to enhance the playing experience - and brought the needed a 7 iron yesterday as the wind blew directly from Welsh Amateur championship to the course last year. We behind needs a 3 wood today as the wind whistles around can only hope that Aberdovey remains - in the words of one’s face. The famous, or infamous, 3rd hole at Aberdovey, the great man himself: “…. the course that my soul loves ‘Cader’ epitomises this constant conundrum. Adam Ruck, best of all the courses in the world.”

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Sense of Place

gerald morgan PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN KEATES

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arn goch is a little-known wonder of Wales. This mighty ridge, an outlier of the Mynydd Du, rises south of the Tywi above the little village of Bethlehem. Come with me then, this fine May morning, from the car-park to the rough path upwards.

It leads past a massive stone commemorating Gwynfor Evans (1912-2005), the prophet-politician who lived nearby for so long, and who sought to influence power in

a much wider landscape than this valley.

Already sprouting through the thin turf are shoots of bracken, whose death every autumn contributed the adjective coch, ‘red’, to the hill’s name. Scattered rowan trees have defied the ponies that graze here. Heath bedstraw is sprinkled like snowflakes through the grass. Either side of the path is a meaningless jumble of rocks and turf, but there are obscure lines of stones running athwart the slope, with at least one hut circle.

People thousands of years ago were struggling to survive on this rugged hillside, caring for their livestock.

These trails of rocks are their obscure memorial.

More riddles reveal themselves as we climb. A wall of loose stones appears. It circles the summit of an outlying spur of the great ridge itself; this is Y Gaer Fach, a small hillfort

It leads past a massive stone commemorating Gwynfor Evans, the prophet-politician who lived nearby for so long, and who sought to influence power in a much wider landscape than this valley. of no great distinction. But above us rises the ridge itself, crowned with a massive rampart of stones. This is Y Gaer Fawr, the largest hillfort in south Wales, though not, as so many sources claim, the largest in Wales; it is dwarfed by Llanymynech in Powys. The relationship between

Llandeilo from Carn Goch

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The Gwynfor Evans Memorial - created by Ieuan Rees

the two forts is a mystery. Were they built at the same time, serving some joint purpose we cannot comprehend? If not, why was the smaller one built at all, vulnerable to anyone occupying the ridge?

The western rampart of Y Gaer Fawr is titanic, eleven metres high and twenty-five metres thick. Two thousand years after its erection it is still as impressive as the builders intended. The interior of the fort is a huge 11.7 hectares (28 acres), measuring 680m north-east to south-west by 130-190m across.

The lesser ramparts are pierced at intervals by narrow postern entries which could have easily been defended against attack, but the size of the place would have demanded hundreds of defenders against any serious assault.

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The tomb was clearly that of a powerful figure or family, probably buried two thousand years even before the fortifications were raised. Clearly the ridge offered such a splendid prospect that the fort-builders occupied it, leaving the tomb (giant? hero? king?) unmolested.

The views from Garn Goch are magnificent. To the west, Dinefwr and Llandeilo; to the north, the green vale of Tywi and the hills beyond, to east and south the Brecon Beacons, particularly Trichrug, crowned by three Bronze Age tombs. Whoever commanded the building of Y Gaer Fawr held power the length of the vale and beyond. He could call on the labour of hundreds of toiling men and women, and had the resources to feed them. Yet there are virtually no signs of occupation within the ramparts, unlike the numerous hut-circles in Tre’r Ceiri, the North Wales equivalent of Y Gaer Fawr.

The most remarkable feature

of all is a truly colossal mound of stones dominating the centre of the fort, although not quite on the ridge’s summit. It is over fifty metres long, twenty metres broad and at least three metres high. Even the briefest examination shows that it cannot be natural in origin, nor can it be medieval or modern..

This gigantic heap must surely be a burial cairn of the Neolithic or early Bronze Age, and is certainly the carn for which Garn Goch is named.

What is even more impressive than its bulk is that the fort-builders respected this enormous monument, though it could have provided a vast quantity of stones for the ramparts.

They recognised a tomb, clearly

that of a powerful figure or family, probably buried two thousand years even before the fortifications were raised. Clearly the ridge offered such a splendid prospect that the fort-builders occupied it, leaving the tomb (giant? hero? king?) unmolested. The nearest Welsh parallel is Trigarn in Pembrokeshire, where three massive cairns dominate the centre of a ramparted hillfort.

It was on this great ridge, one of his favourite places in Wales, that Gwynfor Evans’s ashes were scattered following his unforgettable funeral in Aberystwyth. His memorial stone, placed at a respectful distance below the ridge, is now a regular song-post for a summer blackbird.

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Books - Reviews Kisses Sweeter Than Wine Boyd Clack (Parthian, £14.99)

Operation Julie Lyn Ebenezer (Y Lolfa £9.95)

sam adams

gwyn griffiths

I

T

f you admire an author who has no inhibitions in telling you about a youth misspent and full of incident, one who, in modern parlance, lets it all hang out; if you enjoy, albeit vicariously, the dangerous thrills of sex and drugs and rock and roll, then you will not go wrong with actor and TV script writer Boyd Clack(‘Satellite City’ and ‘High Hopes’), whose autobiography is all that and more.

He was brought up at Tonyrefail, in a family he lovingly describes as misfits and eccentrics, and in rough company, ready for anything.

Perhaps they were all like that in Tonyrefail in the late 1950s and 1960s, though it doesn’t correspond to the image I have of the place.

I attended Tonyrefail Grammar School ten years before Boyd Clack arrived there and have similar memories, of Thursday evening Urdd meetings, for instance, which ended with dancing - what is now called the ballroom kind - though it did not seem in any way special to us. What a blessing co-educational schools are!

Ton always seemed a cut above Gilfach Goch, though you would never have got me to admit it.

There were roughs in Gilfach as I well knew, but my boyhood there did not seem as infected with roughness as Boyd Clack’s Tonyrefail. Did the closure of the mines and the sudden whipping away of the security of knowing, if all else failed, you could still go down the pit like your father precipitate changes out of all recognition to those who were growing up in that area a mere decade before? I was perfectly

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familiar with the hereditary drinking culture of the valleys, my sister and her husband, and an aunt and uncle, kept pubs in Gilfach, but there was never, never ever, any mention of drugs while I still lived there, and I left in 1958. All down hill then after that.

Boyd Clack’s journey through young manhood is constantly shrouded in a miasma of alcohol and drugs. Employment is not difficult to find, but he is without ambition beyond scraping together enough cash to get stoned. His acquaintance, male and female, is similarly inclined. At 20 he emigrates to Australia, falls in with a New Age sect battening upon the vulnerable, has bad experiences with hallucinogenics, marries, forms a rock group. From time to time mental illness casts a sombre shadow across this rackety lifestyle, is perhaps a consequence of it. His picaresque adventures continue in Amsterdam and London, Australia again, and Canada - and back to Wales, where a chance sighting of the Welsh College of Music and Drama is an epiphany. He wins a place at the college and his experiences there conclude the book.

It is for the most part an unedifying story, but the character that emerges is funny and warm: he loves family and friends, animals and pretty women. A bloke like that can’t be bad. And the book is written with tremendous verve and skill.

he weekly newspaper reporter’s dream is to be caught up in something really big. For Lyn Ebenezer, based at Aberystwyth and working for Y Cymro, it could not have been much bigger or better.

He worked the patch where he had grown up, knew it as well as anyone and with the contacts to supplement what he calls his “meagre wage”. Not that meagre, really, compared to what weekly journalists with their media studies degrees earn today. Be that as it may.

Producing LSD in remote farmhouses from Llanddewi Brefi to Carno must rank as the greatest cottage industry in history.

Cottage industry or not, the scale of the clandestine production was industrial. When Operation Julie finally smashed the drugs production and distribution process it was the culmination of three years search and surveillance.

Little Britain has given Llanddewi Brefi a certain notoriety, but it’s nothing compared to this tale of adventure and enterprise.

Lyn Ebenezer has done a fine job revisiting this story and keeping the reader hooked to a story with its cast of hundreds.

The detail, the names of those involved

- the police and the drug makers and takers.

Two drugs rings operated independently and unaware of each other’s existence. And a mouth-watering galaxy of celebrities dropped in for the best quality LSD on the planet members of the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and perhaps Bob Dylan. John Lennon and Yoko Ono are said to have stayed at Pontrhydfendigaid.

I am not sure how much new material there is in the book .

A number of books have been published about Operation Julie, including two by policemen who spent months, years even, on the case. It has certainly caught the spirit of the area and brought the characters to life.

Lyn Ebenezer questions the veracity of much of what is claimed by the police. Was the drugs haul really as big as they claimed? They would milk it for all it was worth, for political purposes.

Was LSD as dangerous as the authorities claimed it to be?

Ebenezer thinks it probably was not. The tablets produced by Richard Kemp were 99.07 per cent pure. “Only a sense of scientific modesty forbade him from claiming it was 100 per cent pure”.

The danger, as we know, is when these drugs are mixed with other substances to enhance the profits. Alcohol and tobacco are both more dangerous and addictive, but the police would never admit to that.

There are some great one-liners to savour. The police had smashed every door and window to get access to Henry Todd’s London home. The telephone had been torn off the wall. Handcuffed, he turned to the senior police officer and said. “I suppose you’ve come about the television licence.”

Life with Birds - a story of mutual exploitation, Malcolm Smith, (Whittles Publishing £18.99.) sam??????

T

he back cover blurbs for this book are no exaggeration: Life with Birds uncovers the fascinating story of our interdependence with birds.

A compilation of amazing international stories.

Dr. Malcolm Smith is a biologist and former chief scientist at the Countryside Council for Wales. His considerable wide-ranging erudition about historical and current relationships with birds makes for a very interesting book. It is possible to open this book anywhere and find fascinating self-contained stories about bird and human behaviour from an account of a banquet for the enthronement of the Archbishop of York in 1466, “when 60 cooks prepared 400 swans, the same number of plovers, a hundred dozen quail, thousands of ducks, 400 woodcock, a hundred curlews, even 200 bitterns amongst a surfeit of fish, deer and much else.” to the fact that “Both James 1 (1603) and Charles 1 (1625) of England employed a Master of Cormorants who...travelled far and wide to display fishing skills.” The Japanese still practise fishing with cormorants whilst modern British fishermen revile them as an enemy.

Other stories I found of particular interest were: accounts of the Icelandic eider down industry; why swallows often build near osprey nests, explanations for the decline of the house sparrow and the even sharper decline of vultures in India, an even steeper decline than that of the now extinct dodo.

The lack of vultures impacts on people of the Parsi faith who have

traditionally relied on them for the hygienic disposal of their dead.

There are explanations of how ‘feather-fletched arrows’ gave Britain early military might; what happened to bird flu and the part ‘pin’ feathers of woodcocks have played in the creation of Rolls Royce cars.

Malcolm Smith certainly knows his pigeons and appraises human ambivalence towards them. Modern urban pigeons are somewhat unfairly perceived as a public enemy and threat. At other times they’ve been heroes, carrying messages and saving lives. I didn’t know, until I read this book, that, “With training, pigeons can carry up to 75 g on their backs.” The NHS in Plymouth designed soft leather pouches and trained the birds to carry blood samples from outlying hospitals to a central laboratory. Guards at a Brazilian prison ignored the comings and goings of pigeons. When they noticed some birds struggling they investigated and found that they were smuggling drugs and phones.

Something I particularly like about this book is the author’s ability to appreciate complexities and conflicts, for example, those of the grouse shooting industry. He is sensitive rather than judgemental about cultural differences and the behaviour of under-nourished humans. He avoids rants and righteousness.

Buy this book - it would be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of a serious ornithologist or the coffee table of a more dabbling birder and is also of interest to

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anyone intrigued by human behaviour.

Life in the Countryside Gwyn Jenkins (Y Lolfa, £14.95) russell thomas

G

wyn Jenkins has used the experience he gained as Director of Collection Services at the National Library of Wales to put together a striking collection of 160 photographs of life in rural Wales from 1850 onwards.

The photographs were taken by some of Wales’s most prominent photographers, including John Thomas, D. C. Harries, P. B. Abery, Geoff Charles and Marion Delyth.The captions to many of the photographs identify the locations in which they were taken and name the individuals who appear in them.

All the narrative in the book is presented bilingually.

An introduction explains how photographers in Wales developed their craft ,and traces the developments in rural life which are depicted in the book.

Communities throughout rural Wales are represented by a wide variety of photographs which are grouped in various categories.The chapter on ‘The Farmer’s World’

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shows how agriculture has developed from back - breaking manual labour to the mechanised state of modern farming.The section on ‘Buying, Selling and Exhibiting’ catches the atmosphere of cattle markets, horse fairs and agricultural shows, while ‘Living in the Countryside’ illustrates aspects of village life.

‘Hunting, Leisure and Events’ demonstrates how common pursuits fostered community spirit, and ‘Travelling and Visitors’ shows how rural Wales has absorbed and reacted to outside influences.

The author has created additional interest by juxtaposing pairs of photographs here and there to bring out the contrast between old and new practices and traditions.

Each photograph is accompanied by a commentary explaining the significance or historical context of the event which is taking place, so that each combination of photograph and commentary provides a little history lesson in itself.

The quality of the photographs is what you’d expect from practitioners of such high repute.

My abiding impression is of their ability to capture the mood and character of their subjects, and to convey the atmosphere of the occasions they depict.

The weather-beaten old farmers mowing or ploughing with their teams of horses; the land girls planting fields of potatoes; the teams of neighbours dipping and shearing sheep or threshing corn; the coopers, blacksmiths, cobblers, carpenters - and the tailor crosslegged on his table - are all here, together with the Sunday School classes; the Eisteddfod competitors and the choirs; the hunting parties; the protest marchers ; the road and railway construction workers and many others. Altogether an invaluable and hiraeth–inducing visual record of life in rural Wales.

Fairground Music: The World of Porthcawl Funfair Robert Minhinnick and Eamon Bourke (Gomer, £14.99) tom anderson

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he concept of beauty being in the eye of the beholder is, for most serious writers or artists of any medium, a vast over-simplification of truth. Robert Minhinnick and Eamon Bourke’s Fairground Music stands as evidence that beauty may well lie in the way we choose to see something - or the choices we make when observing.

This ‘celebration of Porthcawl funfair’ is in many ways a study of decline, but a gorgeous decline that needs to be documented, preserved, beheld and eulogised. Indeed, this is the contribution that Fairground Music will make to Welsh literature.

Combining sections of prose and verse by the acclaimed Porthcawl poet, this hardback book’s narrative runs in a loosely parallel direction to a series of rich, intriguing and often haunting photographs. Eamon Bourke’s eye is drawn to emotion - whether in the human subjects visiting the iconic fairground, or in the landscape itself.

Initially through the persona of a metal detector searching the coastline, the frequent and fluid transition of prose to verse is something Minhinnick has almost trademarked to where it’s as if the central persona’s quest is ultimately one for meaning among this obscure coming-together of eras and generations, coast and industry. And ultimately, of course, as with most of Minhinnick’s most masterful works, it is the voice of the sea that is heard loudest of all - for this is the one persona that remains permanent, transcending time, in a world that is otherwise portrayed

Fairground Music’s complex study of the unusual and the overlooked is a reminder of one of poetry’s most famous ideas: Namely that beauty is truth; truth beauty. It’s all we needed to know.

as fleeting and ephemeral: ‘At high tide Rhych is a perilous place. So I won’t stay long…The sea ploughs this peninsula. Gouges it, grooves its groves of wreck and wrack. Raw Rhych’s no place for the fainthearted.’ The writing is always alive with the sounds and rhythms that have kept Minhinnick’s voice at the fore. Even tourists are exalted with the most lavish lexis: ‘They come on the sharrie. But daunted by dunes, they put up a stockade, turn their backs on the great Out There. What’s to see anyway? Coal in the coves and the cold corals, those insomniac pools. Instead, they wait where the wheatear wags its cuttle-white cwt.’

The adjoining photo essay begins and ends with the ocean, which sits in the background of the most profound images. Other pictures, meanwhile, document its corrosive abilities. But there is an irony here that the photographer has managed to pick up - the fact that very few of this fairground’s customers ever go in the sea. These subjects forget the shore is there, or even why it’s there.

Funfairs are traditionally associated with the seaside - but Minhinnick and Bourke’s sea is rarely pretty or warm, and yet its beauty, regardless of mood, has still been captured. A series of faces appear that will likely never engage with the adjacent briny.

These portraits have been chosen by accident, no doubt - but the point is still made as you flick through.

If beauty being in the eye of the beholder is a simplification, then

Noble Ways Roy Noble (Accent Press, £14.99) sam adams

F

ew Welsh people of a certain age can be unaware of Roy Noble. He has cornered the market in the brand of quiet humour and nostalgia that goes with a cup of tea and a biscuit between domestic chores, at least for those not yet addicted to daytime television. As presenter of record programmes interspersed with interviews, reminiscences and amusing observations on life somewhat after the manner of Terry Wogan, he has become a pillar of Radio Wales, and from that base has extended his range to TV travelogues and programmes in Welsh and English on a variety of subjects. He has become a loved personality and an award-winning broadcaster.

This, surprisingly, is his second career. His first was in teaching. As a

primary headteacher he attracted the interest of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate and might have become an HMI if someone at County Hall Llandrindod hadn’t queered the pitch. There would have been no second career outside education in that case and broadcasting would have been the poorer. Readers of Noble Ways learn how what seemed a blow to self-esteem was actually a slap on the back from the goddess Fortune.

A biographical thread runs through the book: a boy from Brynaman goes via grammar school to Cardiff Training College (the future UWIC), where election as Student President identifies him as someone with what we now call charisma, and chalks up an impressive career in teaching. The story of his prolonged and crafty campaign to attract the attention of a BBC Wales producer then on the look out for a new presenter is instructive. Modest he may be and wonderfully easy company, but he is also ambitious and determined.

Who is to say there won’t be the third career the gypsy promised him at the Royal Welsh Show?

The book is a fragmentary memoir, a collection of chats, sociable small talk of the kind that amuses his radio audience, owing much to shared familiarity with south Wales valleys’ culture in the era of coal, interspersed here and there with more serious discourse, notably about the decline and death of loved ones. The tone is conversational throughout (pages bristle with inverted commas denoting vocal inflections), but as you read you can hear a good, round Welsh voice, often rather slow, slightly bumbling, repetitive: a little more editorial help would have been useful. Roy Noble offers nothing alarming or controversial - ‘Show me a fence and I’ll sit on it’. Just relax and be comfortable with him.

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Books

MEIC STEPHENS

I

t’s difficult to write an autobiography, as I know full well having just completed mine, but to do it with elegance and wit, as Byron Rogers has in Three Journeys (Gomer, £16.99), is quite rare. It’s about a man born in the Carmarthenshire countryside, brought up in the anglicised county town, and content to have lived the rest of his life in England, from which he looks back with tenderness and humour, but not maudlin sentiment, on the people and places that went to his making.

His strength is in his eye for human character, especially the quiddities of ‘ordinary’ lives and the poignancy they generate. He is the best of company as he takes the reader around the people he has known, telling just enough about them to inform, fascinate and amuse without becoming a bore. Some of these pieces first saw the light of day in Sunday newspaper supplements but the writing is urbane, warm-hearted and altogether charming.

Readers looking for something meatier will find it in Alan Sandry’s Plaid Cymru; an ideological analysis (Welsh Academic Press, £48), a study of the party’s political philosophy.

After a good deal of theory, he comes to the conclusion that Plaid is not, in fact, a nationalist party but owes more to the Greens, or decentalist Liberalism or even the social welfare of Labour. The book is useful in that it challenges some of the perceptions of Plaid and takes sides with those who believe it to be a left-wing party, albeit influenced by other ideologies. I am not sure that is anything new but the author has some pertinent points to make.

If you would prefer to read straight fiction, Love Child (Y Lolfa, £8.95) by Herbert Williams is an entertaining yarn about a news reporter who covers a sex scandal involving a university principal and a film star in Glanaber, which is not a million miles from the seaside town where the author was born and was once a journalist. Set in the ’sixties, when Cymdeithas yr Iaith was whooping it up, the novel is an affectionate portrait of life in west Wales but laced with the ironies and tensions that make all Herbert’s writing so gripping.

Three very different books from Seren. First, What Did You Do in the War, Mummy? (Seren, £9.99), is a

collection of interviews in which women talk to Mavis Nicholson about their lives during the second world war.

Second, Noteworthy (Seren, £14.99) by Bruce Cardwell, an elegantly-produced selection of black-and-white photographs and reportage inspired by the musicians of Wales; they include harpists, pipers, hurdy-gurdy players, fiddlers, guitarists, drummers and singers, and among the styles represented are folk, jazz, blue grass, classical, silver and steel bands, klezmer and early English. Another substantial volume is Grahame Davies’s The Dragon and the Crescent (Seren, £12.99), a study of nine centuries of contact between the Welsh and Islam; I was amazed to discover just how much there has been.

An excellent account of the old county is to be found in Pembrokeshire: journeys and stories (Gomer, £19.99)

by Trevor Fishlock with superb photographs by Jeremy Moore.

If you are able to read Welsh, I recommend John Gower’s novel, Y Storïwr (Gomer, £8.99), a sophisticated tale about a lad who gets into trouble on account of his ability ‘to tell stories’. It is beautifully written in an elegant style that savours the magical power of words when handled by a master-craftsman.

Meic Stevens claims to have ‘scribbled notes on trains, in bars, in hotels in Brittany, in the small hours after gigs and on ferries. Indeed, Mas o ’Ma (Y Lolfa, £9.95) is more like a diary than an autobiography.’

Even so, Annes Gruffydd has done a good job turning this rough material into a readable narrative. The many fans of my near-namesake’s songs (and I’m one) will enjoy hearing more about the, ahem, let us say more colourful episodes in his life, especially those associated with his several lovers and the children of whom he is so obviously fond. I still don’t believe he’ll be in Canada for long, though!

Lastly, a finely-produced edition of T.H.ParryWilliams’s book, Cerddi (Gomer, £7.99), his first volume of poems when it appeared in 1931 but containing ‘rhymes and sonnets’ as daisy-fresh as the day they first saw the light of day. Introduced by Angharad Price, they include all-time favourites like the spinechilling ‘Yr Esgyrn Hyn’, the poems Parry Bach wrote during his trip to South America such as the haunting ‘Y Ferch ar y Cei yn Rio’ and the unforgettable ‘Tyˆ’r Ysgol’, ‘Moelni’ and ‘Dychwelyd’.

Byron Rogers is the best of company as he takes the reader around the people he has known, telling just enough about them to inform, fascinate and amuse without becoming a bore.

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CELTIC STUDIES

Celtic from the West - Alternative Perspectives from Archaeology, Genetics, Language and literature Barry Cunliffe & John Koch (Editors), Oxford Books, 384 pp. (£40) phylip brake

C

eltic from the West is collection of academic papers presented at a multidisciplinary conference held at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth in December 2008.

Although it is aimed primarily at the academic community it would be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about early Celtic history.

In Celtic from the West, the term ‘Celtic’ is used to describe the language family represented by the four surviving members of that family, Welsh, Breton, Irish and Scots Gaelic rather than ‘tribes’.

The ancient Celtic languages were Goidelic (primitive Irish), Brythonic (British), Gaulish in France, Galatian in central Turkey, Celtiberian in east central Spain and Lepontic in northern Italy.

However, in Celtic from the West it is argued that Tartessian (a language known from early seventh century bc inscriptions in southern Portugal

MEIC STEPHENS

and south-west Spain) should be added to the list. These languages are sufficiently different to one another to place their common ancestor, Proto-Celtic, further back in time.

Such a shift would place ProtoCeltic in the Bronze Age, that is before 750 bc, a stable period which saw the onset of the maintenance of extensive exchange networks through which complex beliefs and values were transmitted together with new materials and standardised artefacts of increasing sophistication.

The main hypothesis proposed in Celtic from the West is that Celtic probably evolved in the Atlantic Zone, consisting of Britain and Ireland through Brittany to the north and west of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), during the Bronze Age. This theory contradicts the more familiar accounts that the Celtic languages sprung from the famous Halsttatt and La Téne cultures of Iron Age Central Europe. It is argued that the Halstatt-La Téne scenario can no longer account satisfactorily for how the Celtic Languages became established in Ireland and on the Iberian Peninsula.

There are long-established ideas, based on shared vocabulary, placing Celtic together with Germanic and Italic in a western European subgroup. However, Celtic from

the West supports the alternative theory based on syntax (the rules that govern the ways in which words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences), that identifies affinities with Greek, Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Slavic and Albanian.

Barry Cunliffe asks some very important questions: first, is it possible that the Indo-European language reached the Atlantic Zone about 5000 bc as the result of enclave colonisation bringing the Neolithic (New Stone Age) culture from the Mediterranean? And second, could Celtic have developed in the Atlantic Zone between 5000 to 3000 bc?

The remaining papers pose many more questions. Some argue in favour of the hypothesis and others against it.

The eleven chapters in Celtic from the West are divided into three parts according to academic discipline. The first part of the book discusses the archaeological evidence, whilst Part two is concerned with genetics. The five papers in Part three discuss the evidence that

also recommends

● Gareth Jones, The Boxers of Wales: Merthyr (St David’s Press, £14.99) ● Tony Bianchi, Cyffesion Geordie Oddi Cartref (Gomer, £7.99) ● Bethan Gwanas, Yn Ol i Gbara (Carreg Gwalch, £7.50) ● Tony Curtis, Real South Pembrokeshire (Seren, £9.99) ● Meinir Wyn Edwards (gol.), 100 o Ganeuon Pop (Y Lolfa, £14.95) ● Nia Williams, The Colour of Grass (Seren, £8.99) ● Goronwy Jones, Nefar in Ewrop (Y Lolfa, £7.95) ● Non Evans, Non (Y Lolfa, £9.95) ● Gwen Awbery, Tracing Family History in Wales: how to read the inscriptions on Welsh Gravestones (Carreg Gwalch, £7.50) ● Thomas Corum Caldas, The Hangman, the Hound and Other Hauntings (Carreg Gwalch, £7.50) ● Owain Llyˆr, Bois y Loris (Y Lolfa, £9.95) ● Steve Griffiths, Dafydd ap Llywelyn, The Shield of Wales (£5.95)

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can be gleaned from language and literature. Each chapter lists an exhaustive bibliography, and most include maps and pictures illustrating their points of view.

Chapter one, by Barry Cunliffe, examines the archaeological evidence for the hypothesis that Celtic spread to the British Isles from the west of the Iberian Peninsula rather than from central Europe.

To strengthen his theory, he draws on varied sources including work on ‘Celtic-looking’ place-names by Aberystwyth-based academic Patrick Sims-Williams, which reveals a preponderance of such place-names in the west of the Iberian Peninsula and northeast France, radiocarbon dating which has placed the distribution of the Maritime Bell Beakers in the third millennium bc with significant concentrations around the Tagus estuary in Portugal and the Mor-Bihan (Little Sea) in Brittany. By asking a torrent of questions, the author hopes to open a new debate about the origins of Celtic and of the Celts themselves.

Chapter two, by Raimund Karl, re-evaluates the meaning of Celticity. It begins with the traditional model that assumes that the Celts originated in central Europe, between eastern France, southern Germany, western Czech Republic, parts of Austria and Switzerland. Dates vary between the late Bronze Age and the beginning of the late Iron Age. By drawing upon linguistic evidence, the author warns against accepting Celticity by association, and concludes that it might never be possible to answer when the ‘Celts’ came into being, and that such a question is ultimately meaningless. To Karl, the adjective ‘Celtic’ is an arbitrary classification in our attempt to interpret demographic and archaeological trends.

In Chapter three, Amílcar Guerra, discusses the most recent

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By asking a torrent of questions, the author hopes to open a new debate about the origins of Celtic and of the Celts themselves. finds of Tartessian stone inscriptions from the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. Particular emphasis is placed on the discovery of an important inscription recently discovered in southern Alentejo, Portugal, an area with a significant concentration of Tartessian inscribed stones or stelas. This particular stela was discovered during the excavation at the site of Mesas de Castelinho, and found as part of a pavement dating to the end of the second century bc. It is expected that ongoing projects aimed at a systematic explanation in areas with the greatest potential, will continue to provide results in several key areas, including language, archaeology and its chronological and cultural associations.

In chapter four, Ellen Røyrvick attempts to ascertain whether a genetic connection exists between the populations of the British Isles and the Atlantic Zone. She admits however that it is impossible to connect genetics to prehistoric language, but it can at least shed light on prehistoric population movements. Various disciplines, including phylogeography (the study of the historical processes that may be responsible for the contemporary population distributions), are employed to attempt to establish a genetic connection between the populations of the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula, and to speculate on the origins of the Celtic-speaking peoples. Again the main thrust of the argument is to pour cold water on the traditional theory that the Celts and their languages emerged from their ‘core’ area in central Europe, to dominate

the Atlantic Zone.

Chapter five, by Brian McEvoy and Daniel Bradley, concentrates on Irish-derived genetics. It appears that Ireland carries a remarkable series of world frequency maxima for alleles (genetic variants) that cause or predispose important genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria and hemochromatosis, which suggests that the Irish genetic legacy has more in common with south-western Europe than with the continent’s interior.

Chapter six re-analyses the multiple prehistoric immigrations to Great Britain and Ireland with the aim of identifying Celtic contributions. The author, Stephen Oppenheimer, insists that three nineteenth century preconceptions of migration to the British Isles are in urgent need of review before attempting to define the Celts genetically: Were the Celts British aboriginals? Did the Anglo-Saxons commit a genocide of the Celts leaving a Celtic fringe to the west? and was the Celtic homeland in central Europe?

The author examines prehistoric European population movements through genetics. Research suggests that the bulk of ancestors of modern Britons and Irish people arrived during the Neolithic period - before the arrival of the first farmers - and came from the north of the Iberian Peninsula. If so, then the Celts could not be regarded as aboriginals, nor could they be genetically identified as the bulk of those present today in the western fringes of the British Isles. A similar pattern is observed with the Y chromosome haplogroup 1 whose lowest rates are in the Near East and whose highest rates are in western Europe, particularly in the Basque Country, with haplogroup 1 rising to 98.3% in Gaelic-surnamed men of Connacht in western Ireland.

This implies that Basque and Celtic-

speaking populations derive from common paternal ancestors, and that subsequent cultural revolutions had little effect on the paternal makeup of Celtic speaking populations; there has been continuity from the Upper Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) - from over 10,000 years ago - to the present.

The author concludes that, as genes do not carry ethnic and linguistic labels, the present study cannot shed light on Celtic and the ‘Celts’. It does however throw light on population movements in prehistoric times. On present evidence, it is possible to say that the Celts did not arrive in Britain and Ireland before the first farmers, and like other Neolithic and post-Neolithic invaders, they would have represented a minority intrusion to the gene pool, overall perhaps less than 10%. In other words, their descendants would not qualify as aboriginal especially in Ireland and the Atlantic side of Great Britain.

Part three of Celtic in the West examines language and literary evidence for and against the hypothesis. In chapter seven, Graham Isaac explores the relationship between Celtic and other Indo-European language families through comparativehistorical linguistics. This allows us to trace prehistoric relations between languages, and therefore between the prehistoric communities speaking those languages, independently of modern cultural and geographical politics. The author concludes that, despite the western location of Celtic in historical times, it shares no significant innovative features with other prominent languages of the Indo-European west, namely Italic and Germanic. Whilst there are many words that Celtic shares exclusively with Germanic and Italic, the sharing of words with

neighbours has no significance for prehistoric geographical configurations. For the comparativehistorical linguist interested in the prehistoric relations and the configurations of languages ancestral to present ones, it is grammatical innovations that carry weight, as revealed in the phonological and morphological systems of the language, namely how sounds are organised and combined into intelligible linguistic units. For example, Celtic shares the ProtoIndo-European relative pronoun with Greek, Slavic and Indo-Iranian to the exclusion of the western

The book explores the possibility that the origin of Celtic lies in the south-west of the Iberian Peninsula rather than in central Europe, where we traditionally associate the Celts with the glorious Hallstatt and La Tène cultures languages, Italic and Germanic.

Chapter nine, by John Koch, deals with the question of whether, on the latest evidence still being gathered and examined, Tartessian should be re-classified as Celtic.

The evidence consists of a growing corpus of inscriptions dating to the mid 1st millennium bc. In light of the rapid pace of discovery and interpretation, the author sees Celtic from the West as an opportunity to re-present texts and linguistic notes already discussed. In a nutshell, the author believes that Tartessian can be interpreted as Indo-European and specifically as Celtic.

The author goes on to mention the references to Tartessos in classical and Semitic sources, including the Old Testament. We know of Semitic-speaking Carthaginian colonies in southern Portugal which would have had close contact with

the Tartessians. The fact that the Tartessians developed a semitic script in order to write their language down is testament to this close relationship. It could also hold the key to the similarity in syntax between Celtic and Semitic - especially between Welsh and Hebrew - a fact which has fascinated philologists (people who study written historical sources to discover how languages have developed over time) over the years.

The last two chapters are ancillary studies, namely ‘Ancient References to Tartessos’ by Philip Freeman and ‘The Problem of Lusitanian’ by Dagmar Wodtko.

Celtic from the West is a well-organised, beautifully illustrated collection of academic papers exploring the possibility that the origin of Celtic lies in the south-west of the Iberian Peninsula rather than in central Europe, where we traditionally associate the Celts with the glorious Hallstatt and La Tène Iron Age cultures. Evidence to support this hypothesis is sought from various academic and scientific disciplines such as archaeology, genetics and linguistics. The driving force behind this change of heart is the current re-interpretation and re-evaluation of Tartessian as a result of recent discoveries of inscriptions in language in southern Portugal and neighbouring Spain.

The papers which form part of Celtic in the West rely heavily on academic studies carried out by acknowledged experts in their respective field. More often than not, the contributors themselves are the experts. The book is a most valuable contribution to the field of Celtology in its own right, and is bound to lead to further research into a fascinating field that should be of interest to all those who through language and/or culture are proud to call themselves Celts.

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Music

A Song in my Heart Wynne Evans Warner Music 5249844562 norma lord

I

approached this review with trepidation; I have been a fan of Wynne Evans for such a long time that I feared his first recording, with no physical presence to support it, might not live up to my expectations, and I so did not want to have to give him a “Miss”. Readers must judge for themselves whether I am so smitten that my objectivity has fled, or whether Evans really is one of those very special singers whose voice “refreshes the parts that others don’t reach”.

Evans is indeed fortunate to make his first cd with the full backing of the mighty Warner Music, with all the expensive talent and artistry at its

disposal, while many other singers might have to be content with a single accompanist and less lavish recording facilities. His programme notes touchingly acknowledge that this level of operation is merely a dream for most repertoire singers at his stage of their careers. “Ah yes!” I hear you cry, “just because he made a television advert......” But that, I feel, is probably the point; he “made” the advert, just as much as it “made” him. I strongly suspect that the ‘Go Compare’ campaign would be dead and buried by now had it been started with a different singer.

However irritating people claim the ad. is (and plenty do) it has a strangely compelling quality that no

one can ignore.

So now I know that Wynne Evans does not need physical clowning or personal charm to woo his audience; this sliver of plastic evinces the same visceral response as his presence on stage or in film. He simply opens his mouth and instantly engages one’s solar plexus, soon followed by the limbs and ultimately heart and soul.

The disc has something for everyone, though the road from The Loveliest Night of the Year to Lucevan le Stelle travels the conceptual industrial valleys as well as the aonb’s of the lofty mountain peaks, and it is almost inevitable that those listeners who relish the one will jib slightly at the other. I loved them all, although I’m not sure that Malotte’s setting of The Lord’s Prayer justifies a performance in each of two languages, and an original Welsh song might have made an attractive alternative. I particularly enjoyed the Neapolitan medleys, for which Wynne Evans was surely created? It was fun, too to hear Over There, the American wwi song, from which the infamous advertisement jingle comes, in its original form.

Of course, the lush orchestral arrangements, mainly by Nicholas Dodd, and the thick coating of melted-chocolate that is the sound of the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra both contribute much to the effect, and Côr Caerdydd makes an extravagant backing group, but the voice and charisma of Wynne Evans soars above all. Get it - and ‘Go Compare’.

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NATURE

Nature Diary Otters, Burnets, Melilots and Medicks.... chris kinsey

4

th September - at last the river is vigorous. There’s a thickening of turbulent waters - too much noise for the volume of flow. A brown snub nose breaks the surface, rears up and plunges back. It happens again and again, faster and faster. I’m looking at two otters, no three; rolling, looping-the-loop, plaiting the currents.

They flip and dip constantly and chomp something they’ve found in the waving beds of water crowfoot. I’m no wannabe ‘Water Baby’ but I’m thrilled to watch their aquabatics from a very dry bank.

The Powys section of the A483 is placarded with pylon protests. In late July we returned to Plas Power Colliery near Wrexham. It’s a perfect site to contemplate the way land is used for energy: pits, wind power, pylons; the nuclear power stations at Wylfa and Trawsfynydd as they retire from the National Grid - the complex cycles of prospecting, policy, investment, production, decline and the riddles of regeneration and reclamation. Surface land is inclined to re-growth and amnesia. Seventy three years after Plas Power’s closure there is soil from spoil; meadow from muck. Banks were yellow as the sun with tall melilot, squat medicks, bird’s foot trefoils, ragwort,

my favourite tight-lipped toadflax. The five year old with us has no idea that we’re on a man-made hill and little knowledge of coal.

His older sister chases butterflies and day-flying moths and is first to spot the white silk cocoons of flown burnet moths. Metallic green and crimson - these moths signal that they’re distasteful and toxic to birds. They contain hydrogen cyanide from feeding on trefoils. As they whir and parachute they remind me of incendiary devices then furnace sparks.

We scamper freely. A lone mushroom makes us track whites: wild carrot and dumbstruck convolvulus; then we switch to purples: knapweeds, crowns of cotton thistles, a few smaller paler creeping thistles. Then we spot reds: rashes of red bent, rusty dock spires. Round at the south side there are pinks: crane’s-bills, storksbills, centaury. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such flourishing diversity. Many of these flowers favour low nutrient soils. Will the variety of plants change as, say, the legumes fix more nitrogen into the soil?

It occurs to me that what’s growing here is far from ‘natural’, there are clues to this ‘super-natural’ site being managed: rabbit-proof fences enclosing the top meadows, young trees carefully confined: goat willows, alders and birches - all trees I’d expect to see succeeding but not in such an orderly way. A golden banded dragonfly zips over a small pool and my mind glides back to the early carboniferous when this landscape would have been awave with giant tree ferns. They were so successful at extracting carbon from the atmosphere (and creating coal) that oxygen levels were higher and dragonflies the size of seagulls flourished.

The others go to the climbing wall inside the former generator house. The dogs and I chris kinsey go back to the top of the stack.

My head’s with the swallows and the swifts. I look south to Bersham Bonc hunkered and fissured beside the A483. Fifty metres high, it’s a monument to my comings and goings in Wales and the nostalgia I feel for the West Yorkshire I knew in the late ’70s. Bersham was the last pit to close in the Wrexham area in 1986 and now the company which owns it have won a battle with CADW and Wrexham Council and will soon start removing six million tons of shale. I’ve enjoyed its colonisation by willows and don’t relish its Burnet Moth transformation into a retail park.

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Art

Magician at Work adam salkeld meets one of Wales’ most collected artists, Andrew Douglas-Forbes

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here is something rather Harry Potter about going to visit Andrew Douglas-Forbes in his studio.

Having braved the traffic on Llandeilo’s main street, I slip into a narrow alley between two shops. It is a bit like going onto the secret Hogwarts platform 9¾ at Kings Cross station. Once in, the alley opens out and I am already in a different world. An eclectic collection of ceramic heads line the walls. I am standing by the grand entrance to what was once the town’s Wesleyan Chapel. Now snooker hall downstairs and studio above, the building’s mixture of styles, faded grandeur and rich history add to the sense of magic.

Magic may not be the first association we make with the work of Andrew Douglas-Forbes. He is widely collected both in and out of Wales, but often pigeonholed as a painter of cottages and domestic interiors. In fact he is a ranging versatile artist with strong bodies of work covering people, townscapes, landscapes and semiabstract work. The magic comes into play in the unique processes Douglas-Forbes employs to create his work and this alchemy seems inextricably linked to his studio in Llandeilo. © CARL RYAN 2011

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The first thing you notice entering the studio space, after climbing an imposing flight of oak arts and crafts stairs, is the spread of works in progress, at least fifty on the go at any time. Next the clutter of sketches, jugs, dressers, vases of flowers and pieces of ancient china.

Finally the gentle music, Radio 3, in the background.

When he isn’t painting, Douglas-Forbes is an accomplished operatic tenor. He is clearly a man who can create an environment whether on canvas or in real life.

Talking, Douglas-Forbes fizzes with enthusiasm. He spots inspiration in everything around him. He has a love of the mundane as well as the eccentric. He is intrigued by the people he sees on the street and builds up little stories around them: “Here’s a little group of ladies in Gowerton waiting for a coach,” he gestures to a finished canvas, “I think they were going on an annual outing. I am often drawn to older people, their proportions are more interesting.

Big heads little bodies.” Looking at some of the sketched studies pinned to his walls there are indeed a lot of older subjects. “They wear old jumpers, tweeds, heavy shoes.

The sort of clothes people don’t buy any more. They are so much more fun to draw and paint,” he continues, “And you know what, I think old people have a better sense of humour and I want humour in my work.”

Before we delve too much further into the work in progress around him, I ask Douglas Forbes to take us back to the beginning, how he started. He describes a childhood in the Gower drawing and painting at the kitchen table. The acclaim, it seems, came early. At the age of thirteen he won a Western Mail art competition and not long after he was selling work. Then at seventeen he persuaded the influential Swansea based artist, Gordon Stuart, to tutor him. He worked with Stuart for five years, learning to combine the physical processes of painting with the thought processes of creating pictures.

“Gordon taught me to love paint, the physicality of it, for a painter actual paint is the exciting bit,” he tells me, “he also taught me about texture, tone values and allowed me to develop a level of sensitivity which is so important.” Douglas-Forbes

went on to Swansea School of Art where he was spotted

by Patricia Briggs, a lecturer there and an associate of David Hockney. She worked with Douglas-Forbes for a number of years on his drawing. That too was an important influence and still marks the starting point for all his work.

“Everything I do is drawn from life. Endless, constant drawing, I am out in all weathers. I always have a rucksack full of paper and pencils. For me drawing has to be immediate, catching a fleeting moment, rather than an academic exercise in composition.” He adds notes to the sketches, “I have terrible spelling, but I want to build a narrative for the picture, so I jot down notes. Who are the people? Why are they there? What is the weather like? A story makes for a better picture.”

With sketches done the process of building a picture is well underway. The stages he now follows, a sequence from which Douglas Forbes rarely deviates, is the key to his art. He explores, he experiments, he nurtures and gradually his picture emerges. After sketches, he goes through a stage he calls storyboarding. Still drawing he mixes and matches images and notes, teasing out a story.

The result is another pile of sketches, notes and diagrams and a clearer idea of choices for colour and composition.

Next he goes straight to the easel and putting to one side what has gone before: “I start painting. I make marks, gestures or shapes, as abstract as possible, without the constraints of representation. It is not a fully conscious process.” These abstract boards surround the studio. “I have to have work at all stages around me.

Unless I am surrounded by the process I can’t work”.

Now the part of the work sequence that the artist himself finds the most creative, he calls it making a connection. He contemplates the half painted abstracts alongside the sketches and storyboards, “I wait for a spark, a connection. Maybe it is a window, a chimney, some feet or some other detail that links the two. Once I have got it, the adrenalin rush is incredible. I can build the picture from there.” Painting on top of the abstracts more recognisable images emerge. From there on he might have a finished painting in a day, in other cases he may not complete the work for a year.

His pictures are full of depth, a testament to all the stages in his process. The mundane details spotted, sketched and incorporated create a richness and sense of place that excite many of his buyers. Whatever the subject, the Welsh weather is never far away. Interiors are softly executed in austere winter light; mist and cloud hang over land and townscapes prompting softer lines and deeper colours; figures are wrapped up mackintoshes and boots. The Douglas-Forbes palette is particularly rich in micro-shades of blue and a thousand greys. He loves the frequently inclement weather of Wales, so much more

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Andrew Douglas-Forbes - ‘Blue Note’ - 22’x16’ Acrylic

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interesting, than a sunny day.

Despite a cosmopolitan and well-travelled life Douglas-Forbes finds all his inspiration in Wales these days.

Having moved around he can appreciate his home country. He loves the little eccentricities of daily life, the faces, the old fashioned shops and the age of so many buildings: “I need to reflect a sense of time passing and I find that here in Wales, you only have to look. It’s there in the buildings growing out of the landscape. It’s there in old furniture. Every time I open a door I walk into the past”.

It s a formula that has gained a following. Mary Yapp, owner of Cardiff’s Albany Gallery says: “Andrew has successfully exhibited with us for more than two decades and many of our customers are keen collectors of his work. He has a hectic lifestyle, combining his love of opera singing in Britain and Italy with his passion for painting. We always look forward to his work arriving in the gallery.”

Sir Jon Shortridge, former Permanent Secretary of the Welsh Assembly Government, is an enthusiastic collector.

“Andrew Douglas-Forbes is the best of the new generation of Welsh artists”, he tells me, “his work is accessible, varied and always of interest. I cannot resist his sturdy Welsh cottages that seem to grow out of the ground, his bowls of flowers, and the everyday objects that he paints with such verve and style.”

Douglas-Forbes is modest in the face of such praise. As I get ready to leave the studio he is remembering the “monumental quality and bandy legs of the Penclawdd ladies collecting cockles, almost Victorian”. He giggles. And that is the other magic in Douglas-Forbes - in the paintings we can all share his joy in everyday objects, or snippets of life, or characters. Glimpses that we may pass without note, but grab the artist’s eye.

Y Llyfr Gwyn A New Historical Book mererid hopwood

O

ne of Wales’ greatest treasures is the 750 year old Black Book of Carmarthen, it contains fragments of our earliest literature, with poems and prayers carefully composed or copied in intriguing script. The citizens of the oldest town in Wales have now invested in a brand new book: The White Book of Carmarthen, Y Llyfr Gwyn. Commissioned by the Carmarthen branch of Cymdeithas y Cymod (International Fellowship of Reconciliation), craftsman and artist Julian Thomas has created a leather bound work of art of the finest materials, housed in a beautiful, bespoke case, hand-crafted by J Elgar Pugh which bears a simple, yet striking englyn by Chaired poet Tudur Dylan Jones Rhag rhyfel, rhag creu gelyn, yn annwyl daw’r enwau’n ddiderfyn, yn ddi-oed fe ddaw wedyn yfory gwell drwy’r Llyfr Gwyn

This poem explains the book’s purpose: to invite the people of Wales to sign its hitherto blank pages and thus turn it into a testimony of the wish of the Welsh to commit ourselves to bring about a world of peace On Wednesday, September 21, as part of Carmarthen Town Council’s annual celebrations of World Peace Day, the Llyfr Gwyn was opened in a dignified ceremony.

It already contains thousands of signatures, with calls flooding in for it to be brought to meetings all over Wales Everybody who has seen the Llyfr Gwyn is taken aback by its simple beauty, and, with each signature, its beauty grows, as it marks the fact that more and more people in Wales wish to work

towards peace This is a particularly significant message today, as the Rev. Guto Prys ap Gwynfor, President of Cymdeithas y Cymod, said in the opening ceremony: ‘In a world where increasing attention is given to war, and in a country where various experiments, such as the flying of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are carried out from Aberporth over a large part of West Wales, it’s essential that we, as Welsh people, continue to work for peace and reconciliation.’

Drones are aircraft that fly without a pilot.

Controlled remotely and sometimes pre-programmed, they are used for spying, but some also carry bombs and missiles. Armed drones were first used in 2002, since when their use has increased continuously. A relatively cheap and convenient weapon - there is no danger to your own pilots, who are sitting safely in an office which can be thousands of miles away.

According to the manufacturers of drones and the forces using them, their cameras and sensors are so refined that they can target soldiers or military sites with perfect precision, it is claimed. In contradiction, however, , two US soldiers were killed by one of their own forces’ drones in Afghanistan in April 2011, and conservative figures from Pakistan suggest that at least a third of those killed are innocent civilians.

Currently there are only two areas in Europe where it is permitted to test drones, the area between Epynt Mountain in Powys and Aberporth on the Cardigan coast is one. It is a

dangerous practice, and this became obvious in September 2009 and again in August 2010, when two drones that had set off from the Aberporth airfield crashed. Luckily nobody was injured at the time It’s high time that we, as the peace-loving people of Wales, state clearly that we do not want to depend any more on luck, and that we do not want to squander public money on creating a few jobs in an aerospace industry that devours resources and propagates militarism In Welsh we have two words for peace - ‘heddwch’ and ‘tangnefedd’. From the latter, ‘tangnefedd’, comes the compound noun: ‘tangnefeddwyr’, so famously used by Waldo Williams in his eponymous poem ‘Y Tangnefeddwyr’. This word might be translated into English as ‘Peacemakers’. It’s a good active word reminding us that if we want peace, we have to make it The White Book of Carmarthen invites us to think seriously about how we, as individuals and as a collective nation, can make peace.

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GARDENS

Trawsgoed - a new chapter Story and photographs: caroline

W

palmer

hen Trawsgoed mansion, seat of the Earls of Lisburne, came on the market in 2005 there were many who predicted its irrevocable doom. Great houses can reach a point where their chances of resurrection are slim indeed, and its fortunes since the Government (Ministry of Agriculture & Food, then the Welsh Office Agriculture Department ) relinquished their use of it in 1995 had not been auspicious. Under company ownership, the ugly Victorian wing had been divided into flats which resolutely failed to sell, and outbuilding conversions and new-build detached houses created a patchwork of freeholds and divided gardens in the walled garden and on the back drive west of the house.

The historically important elements, meanwhile were severely neglected, the old mansion roof leaking, the famous painted library ceiling collapsing, and rampant dry rot spreading its tendrils through the neglected house.

The Grade II listed garden was equally forlorn, the lawns had reverted to meadow, the koi carp long dead in the empty fountain pool, the paths overgrown with brambles, and the choice Victorian arboretum a tangle of dead and fallen trees. Iron gates lay off their hinges, an invitation to vandalism were there anything left to vandalise.

Someone had had a bonfire under the fine Cut Leaved Beech, scorching and killing its lower braches. It was this portion, the old house and its garden, which was now up for sale.

A bloom of an April flowering Rhododendron hybrid first registered in 1847 and probably planted at Trawsgoed soon after.

Salvation came unexpectedly, with the arrival of new owners Stephen and Susana Edwards, in love with the house and eager to tackle a serious restoration project.

Not satisfied with the parts offered for sale, they also purchased, as far as they were able, the converted Victorian wing, thus re-establishing the possibility of a large, self-contained home. And while they occupied one of the flats, the old house became a hive of highly skilled restoration craftsmen, banishing the rot, painstakingly repairing the 18th century drawing room plaster ceiling, and the lavish 19th century library, rewiring the whole edifice. And while they waited for the byzantine process of planning permission, Stephen’s energies found another outlet: the garden.

Welsh Historic Gardens Trust members enjoyed some fascinating insights into the work on visits in 2008 and in 2010 when Suzana hosted a generous champagne fundraiser. Over five years, £150,000 went into the gardens. The lawns were mowed and tended and the arboretum was cleared of saplings and undergrowth.

Painstaking clearance revealed and restored the original network of gravelled footpaths in the 10 acre pleasure grounds. Neglected and overgrown cupressus hedging near the tennis court was removed and great lengths of new box hedge planted in its place, clipped carefully to admit light to the woodland floor. The bones of the rose garden were rediscovered in long grass, and the Japanese garden, a 1920’s conceit devised by the 7th Earl’s wife, Regina, Countess of Lisburne, was cleared to reveal its bridge and waterfall, and the remains of animal statuary. In May 2010 the Chairman of WHGT, Gwyneth Hayward cut the ribbon on the newly restored corrugated iron summerhouse on the edge of the Victorian garden.

Behind it we visited some rare and exceptionally old rhododendrons dating from the 1850s, and the splendid avenue of great oaks, their feet in a sea of bluebells and deciduous The avenue of mature oaks running SE of the mansion and pristine lawns and Victorian conifers in the arboretum

66

azaleas.

Life moves on, and with the arrival of their first grandchild, Stephen and Suzana have reassessed their priorities and plan to move back to England. Ceredigion is remote, and there is no escaping the fact that it’s a long journey to travel here. Their plans for the interior decoration, a lavish family kitchen overlooking the lawns, and a swimming pool on the site of the Edwardian orchid house are in abeyance. But as Suzana says: This is the time to stop. For a private owner with similar ambitions, the permissions are now all in place, while an institutional user such as a hotel might wish to deploy the Victorian rooms quite differently. The Edwardses can take pride in the fact that the house is saved and secure, the daunting specialist restorations and refurbishments completed, and the Grade II* Listed mansion is now poised to be personalised according to the next owner’s desires.

Trawsgoed is on the market with English Rose Properties 01737 222233

Aberglasney’s Traditional Winter Fair Gifts, crafts and decorations - Welsh food and drink Entertainment from dancers and choirs

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MOTORING

LOTUS Lots Of Trouble..... usually Serious john a. edwards

A

t one time it was generally accepted by owners of Lotus cars that the name stood for ‘Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious’. As a former owner of a Lotus Elan I can fully endorse that sentiment while adding that on halcyon days the name could also stand for ‘Lots Of Thrills Uniquely Sublime’.

The Elan was the creation of the instinctive genius Colin Chapman who was always known by his rival manufacturer Charles Cooper as ‘Flash Harry’ which to some extent was perhaps justified. The Elan was a brilliant concept well ahead of contemporary sixties sports car design with its comfortable ride, superb handling and simple yet elegant lines. However it was a pity that unlike the similarly mercurial Charles Rolls, Chapman didn’t have a down-to-earth engineer like Henry Royce at his elbow to ensure that reliability was given more prominence in his designs.

To give an example - the Elan had pop-up headlights actuated by flimsy wire links which were always breaking. This sometimes meant suddenly driving a one-eyed car on a darkened road - not recommended!

My answer was to make some replacement units using strong fence wire bent with pliers - a crude but effective cure.

Another Achilles heel was the handbrake which became inoperative after a few miles following even miniscule brake pad wear. On one occasion, I remember lying under the Elan on a wet jetty at Le Havre carrying out adjustments before boarding a ferry

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and another time sticking an old broom under the rear wheels after stopping on a steep hill in Criccieth!

One of my first long drives in GBW 393 C was from Wrexham to Llantwit Fardre in the Rhondda Valley with colleague Terry Davies to visit Gilbern generally regarded as the most successful indigenous Welsh car manufacturer. On the way we passed through the village of Edwardsville which I’m sure was named after a far more august Edwards than I but nevertheless found it impossible to resist taking the gimmicky picture .

When we arrived at Llantwit Fardre I stopped to ask a local for directions and he said: “Gilbern is down by there, next to the pickle factory”. I stopped by two wooden buildings and after wading ankledeep through mud looked through the windows of the larger shed to see tables covered in jars of pickle.

I quickly deduced that the car manufacturing took place next door.

However despite the backwoods scenario I found the Gilbern cars themselves surprisingly sophisticated and had a chance to drive a Genie, then the current model, down to the The Lotus Elan - an object lesson in elegant simplicity.

coast at Llantwit Major.

After my drive to the Gilbern works in the Elan I realised that an open top sports car like this with a 1558cc 105bhp engine - potent for its day - deserved a broader canvas and warmer climes so a Continental tour with my wife Patricia was planned. Into this distinctly compact car went a two-person tent and full camping equipment - yes even in a Lotus Elan its surprising what you can squeeze in when you are young and foolish!

But true to character, the Elan’s wayward nature surfaced before we’d even booked the ferry crossing.

Sinister noises came from the clutch race bearings which meant the awkward job of taking the engine/ gearbox unit out in my narrow garage with eventually most of the neighbours lending a hand. But eventually the repair work was completed and a few days later we headed for Southampton with a degree of what turned out to be misplaced confidence.

This holiday was also notable for a quite unbelievable sequence of coincidences. To begin with it turned out that my wife’s parents

Back in the sixties, the Elan and I stop to pay homage to Edwardsville.

accompanied by her mother’s parents were booked on exactly the same ferry crossing - but they were heading for Portugal while our destination was southern Spain.

After saying our goodbyes at Le Havre, we had a pleasant drive down to the French Riviera but found it so hot that we ended up driving with the hood up but minus sidescreens rather than being fried in an open car especially when stationary in traffic.

We then crossed into Spain and travelled along the coast weighing up the myriad of camp sites available. Eventually, with darkness falling, we pulled into a campsite at Salou near Tarragona and started looking for a suitable spot to erect our tent. We turned a corner and there astonishingly was my in-law’s white Austin A60 Countryman with them all sitting out enjoying pre-dinner drinks.

They had changed their minds over their Portuguese destination and the odds on us choosing the same campsite as them in a different country was nothing short of astronomical.

After spending a couple of days with them we headed home and all was well until we crossed the

border into France when the Elan decided we were enjoying our holiday too much. We camped at Sète and the next morning loaded all the tent paraphernalia into the car ready for a quick getaway but it just wouldn’t start. We lost so much time that everything had to be unloaded and thinking it was only damp on the plug leads spent another night at the site. Pleasant surprise, next morning the engine started first time and we headed home. But later driving north through France there were periods of the engine miss-firing and one lorry-load of workers seemed bemused at the fact that this 112mph sports car was incapable of overtaking them.

Eventually we reached Le Havre and being last on to the ferry the car was allocated the end position on the parking gantry and then hoisted sky high, hardly the ideal spot in view of the dodgy handbrake! Had it fallen onto the cars below the insurance bill would have been truly horrendous.

Back on British soil the Elan seemed happier and we reached home without incidence but a couple of days later when visiting friends in Wrexham the engine

decided to finally expire. Not being in any motoring association (too expensive) I rang my next door neighbour who kindly turned up with a tow rope. But for some reason he assumed that sports cars even when towed should not suffer the indignity of travelling slowly so we bowled along at ridiculous speeds overtaking every vehicle in our path.

Eventually the Elan’s engine trouble was traced to the carbon high tension leads breaking down.

At the time they were often used to reduce radio interference but a change to good old fashioned copper conductors finally solved the problem.

After that the Elan was fairly reliable and a joy to drive especially home from work in the summer with the top down after spending a sweltering day in a hot office.

But all good things must come to an end and the arrival of our first baby meant that the Elan’s days were inevitably numbered although we did manage for a time with my daughter in a carrycot wedged behind the front seats. What’s all that about health and safety ?

The replacement vehicle was a Ford Capri GT-R with Rostyle wheels and matt black bonnet, which could perhaps be called a token sports car to assuage my fragile ego as a new family man, but would hopefully prove far less ‘capricious’ than the Elan!

The Elan was undoubtedly the most enjoyable car I have ever owned but its funny the way reliability assumes greater importance with the advancing years!

But oh to drive the Elan again on a warm summer’s evening with the top down and Frank Sinatra evocatively singing ‘Strangers in the Night’ on the radio - the hit tune at the time.

Trouble with the car? I don’t remember any trouble!

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FOOD

Elisabeth Luard

The Welsh Kitchen

T

he Abergavenny Food Festival, now in its 18th year, has grown into a stupendous celebration of all the good things Wales has to offer and plenty from elsewhere. But what makes it different from all other food-festivals is the chance to listen to talk which stimulates the mind, a necessary adjunct to the pleasures of the table.

This year, Sheila Dillon of Radio 4’s Food Programme hosted a lively discussion on whether the food we put in our mouths is trustworthy, and whether we should, as a nation, stop being frightened of food. The subject is timely, with the abolition of sell-by dates coming our way and obesity in both children and adults never out of news. Food scandals - remember Edwina Curry? - remain in the collective subconscious long after any danger, real or perceived, has passed. It’s been 20 years since BSE hit the headlines, and just in case any of us have forgotten, a recent visit to Moscow by the current Prime Minister brought the news that the Russians are prepared to contemplate importing British beef.

Worrying about whether the food we eat is safe or not may not be the primary purpose of a food festival. To the contrary, said Roger Mortlock of the Soil Association as he put the case for organics.

Nutritionist Zoe Harcombe skipped all other

questions and settled the blame for all our diet-related problems - allergies as well as obesity - on the switch to carbohydrates in the form of processed foods, a move away from the traditional diet of our great-grandparents, which started in the US and transferred to Britain in the 1970’s. What we should all be eating, she says, is protein and fat - mainly meat - to the exclusion of everything farinaceous or high-carb, which cuts out bread, pasta, rice, potatoes and most things which make up a vegetarian diet. If it’s a healthy breakfast you’re after, says Zoe, fry up a plateful of bacon and eggs but hold the baked-beans; for a healthy lunch, eat steak and a salad but certainly no potatoes. Our particular branch of homo erectus, she says, is designed to take as little exercise as possible: those flint-chipping ancestors would have wet their loin-cloths with laughter at the notion of wasting all that protein by running around in the gym.

Steven Hook sells raw milk on the internet and makes the case for the flavour and safety of a foodstuff which, in its natural state, is amply supplied with enough good bacteria to give any bad bacteria a run for its money.

His clients, mostly, are members of ethnic groups who dislike the cooked-up taste of pasturised dairy-products which, when included in traditional recipes, behave in unpredictable ways.

All this bodes well for what our green valleys do best meat and milk, the superfoods of the future.

Beef Carbonnade Use chuck or skirt or a combination of both for Belgium’s national dish, and spend a few extra pennies on organic carrots (with root veg, you can really taste the difference).

To prepare your own lard, dice a chunk of beef-fat and set it to cook in a roasting tin with a splash of water in a low oven for 40-60 minutes till the water has completely evaporated. Save the dripping and strain out the crisp little scratchings and salt lightly to serve as a nibble with a pint.

Ingredients (Serves 4) 1k/2lbs stewing steak, diced 2 tablespoons dripping or rendered beef-lard 500g/1lb pickling onions, skinned 500g mature carrots, scraped and chunked

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1-2 bayleaves small sprig thyme 500ml/1 pint strong dark beer Salt and pepper Method Pepper the meat generously. Melt the dripping or lard in a heavy casserole. Add the onions and carrot-chunks and turn them over the heat until they take a little colour. Push them to one side (or remove and reserve), add the meat to the drippings and fry till the meat is well-browned. Add the herbs and beer, salt lightly, bring to the boil, turn down the heat and cover tightly. Cook either on a low heat on top of the stove or in a moderate oven, 325F for 2 hours.

Remove the lid and bubble up to reduce the juices to a thick sauce. Eat it from a bowl with a spoon.

Lamb in cider with leeks and soured cream This is comfort-food, a dish for a cold winter evening to eat from a bowl with a spoon while you’re snuggled up warm and cosy by the fire. And afterwards to settle the digestion, a little nip of apple brandy - you can’t call it calvados unless it’s French - would not come amiss.

Ingredients (Serves 4) 2 lb/1 kg lamb off the bone 6 large leeks, trimmed and chunked 500ml/1 pint dry cider 2-3 cloves Large handful parsley 1/4 pint/150ml soured cream Method Cube the meat and trim off the fat. Put the fat-trimmings to render in a heavy casserole. Take out the scratchings (the little brown solids - drain them, salt them and hand them round for nibbling while the stew cooks), and add the meat and fry until well-browned. Add the leeks (save a handful of the green tops for finishing) and turn them over the heat. Season with salt and pepper and add the cider.

Bring to the boil, lid tightly, turn down the heat and leave to simmer for 1 1/2 hours. Take the lid off towards the end to allow the gravy to thicken by evaporation, then stir in the finely-chopped leek green, parsley and cream. Reheat but don’t let it boil. Serve with lightly-cooked shredded cabbage to mop up the creamy juices.

Dorothy Davies Food rage

E

lisabeth Luard is a wonderful companion to have on the food pages and we have great fun tasting and testing. Her books will leave you in no doubt as to her passion and enthusiasm for local and good quality produce. Sitting at the kitchen table the other day, chatting about where we are going to go with the food pages and plans for expanding them, we came up with the concept of ‘food rage’. Not, I gather, after googling the phrase, a new idea at all! However, our rage was not so much to do with slow service or the wrong order but food that sells itself on the back of being Welsh and isn’t very good. It was also in reality more disappointment than rage, since we get terribly excited when we see a new product and we want to like it. This is especially so as there are some really fabulous foodstuffs around that just don’t seem to get the same attention.

These are all products that not one of our panel of tasters liked; yes, they are a fairly discerning bunch but that is no bad thing, They all have one thing in common, they are not cottage industry products:

Welsh Gold Clotted Cream Fudge: Fantastic label design, we loved it, elegant and classy. The fudge is excellent in texture and looks good, it is made in Newtown by M & D Supplies, but please get rid of the disappointing artificial clotted cream flavouring.

The above was a salutary lesson in reading the ingredients, it would have stood us in good stead with the ones below too!

Daffodil oatcakes: a lovely concept, pretty packaging, but horrid product! It is not only a matter of the texture, claggy, it sticks to the palate and the whole mouth feels as if it is coated with non melting lard. Then there is the flour, why, because they are easier to make when they contain some? Many people who are wheat intolerant turn to oatcakes, other oatcakes don’t have flour, they don’t need flour. And the laverbread variety just tastes horribly fishy. Please rethink your recipe.

Pemberton’s chocolate: horribly sweet, and a disconcerting use of colouring and shiny stuff.

Welsh Speciality Foods Double Dragon mustard, sadly a horrible car crash of flavours: the honey and leek jangle at the taste buds.

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Celtic Pride Pork Years ago talking to two very good butchers I know well, I asked them why they highlighted Aberdeen Angus and gave it pride of place rather than Welsh Black. The answer was consistency. The Celtic Pride brand for beef was a response to that requirement.

Several years on, pork is now being produced under the same branding. Riding on the strength of the name built on the quality of its beef, it hopes to compete and take some of the market away from imported foreign pork. The quality of the meat is consistent and whilst shed reared, strict welfare standards are adhered to.

Indigenous pork simply cannot match the price of cheap imported meat, and the welfare laws in this country are happily some of the most stringent in the world, but they do add to the production costs.

Whilst the beef is for the main part only available to the public via restaurants and pubs, the pork will be sold through some butchers. At present it comes from one farm just outside Brecon, from there it goes to an abbatoir in Merthyr and then to Carmarthen to be turned into joints, sausages and burgers by Castell Howell. The burgers have made it through to the True Taste finals.

I was given a joint to try. I queried the lack of fat and was assured that intramuscular fat would keep it succulent, but I did worry about the crackling. However, it crackled pretty well and the meat was indeed juicy and the flavour good. So good, that we almost enjoyed it more cold; the left overs were delicious in sandwiches the next day, and none made it any further - so make sure you get a good sized joint!

Stockists of Celtic Pride pork can be found via a web link on the Castell Howell website: www.chfoods.co.uk

Croffta Sparkling Christmas Wine Offer Three cases for the price of two! £12.50 per bottle, £150 a case - buy two cases and Croffta will give cambria readers a third.

W

ine production is not new in Wales. There is evidence that the first vines were planted in AD75 under the orders of the Roman military leader Suetonius.

Upheaval, invasions, the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1500s all played their part in destroying the art of viticulture in Wales. At the tail end of the nineteenth century the Marquess of Bute planted vineyards, and within a few years he was producing 12,000 per annum but his winemaker was killed in the First World War and since his son had no interest in the business, the vineyards were uprooted.

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However, after the Second World War interest in winemaking grew afresh. In the 1970s John and Barbara Bevan planted three acres of vines on the edge of Groes Faen at Croffta. Their sparkling wine, a mix of Seyval Blanc, Muller Thurgau and Madeleine Angevin is wonderfully quaffable.

At the moment they are selling 2003 and 2005 vintages; the wine is produced by “La Méthode Traditionnelle” and aged in bottles with a temporary cap for three years. The bottles are then allowed to rest upside down and the necks frozen. The frozen plug which results is carefully removed and with it all sediment and impurities. The finished wine is then rebottled and corked.

On Owain Glyndwˆr Day we sampled both years. It was very interesting to note - and added fun - as the wines were markedly different. It’s well worth trying both. All in all, there was no clear favourite: preference was fairly evenly divided.

Croffta also do gift boxes of three bottles. These too are on offer at £25.00 a set.

To order or for more information call James Bevan on 01443 231441 or see www.croffta-wine.co.uk

Y TALBOT TREGARON

In the words of the great George Borrow: “I experienced very good entertainment at the Tregaron inn, had an excellent supper and a very comfortable bed.”

Times have changed but The Talbot, an historic Grade II listed inn dating back to the mid 17th century, beautifully restored by its new owners, still offers warm hospitality, comfort and fine food using the wealth of superb local produce. Its striking location in the market town of Tregaron is within a short distance of many historic sites, and provides much scope for the many activities available in the area.

Y Talbot Tregaron Ceredigion SY25 6JL

tel: +44 (0)1974 298208 fax: +44 (0)1974 299059

info@ytalbot.com

www.ytalbot.com FOR SALE Full set of cambria Magazines - in binders - up to volume 11/6. Some no longer available from publisher.

Sale due to move and lack of space. Price on application.

K Bunford: 01239 842092

CAMBRIA ADVERTISE IN WALES’S ONLY NATIONAL MAGAZINE!

01267 290188

Antiques I AM CURIOUS YELLOW RWI’N CHWILFRYDIG MELYN 35 years’ experience, discretion assured, probates handled Houses Attics Garages sheds Cleared

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Tel: 01982 551179 or call at:

THE CHURCH, SMITHFIELD ROAD, LLANFAIR YM MUALLT/BUITH WELLS, POWYS.

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WHAT’S HOT

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