| A Look-back and Guide: "All History is Contemporary History" |
History Book |
| Histories , Wales and the United Kingdom , August 15, 2023 |
The summer production at Aberystwyth in 2022 brought audiences at Theatr y Werin to their feet nightly in acclaim. The drugs trade, in which Wales for a while held a pole position, featured coincidentally in a book of oral history published that year. “Brittle with Relics” is reviewed below. The history of Wales courses through its theatre. The Chartist uprising, the voyage of the Mimosa, the Ohio migrations, the Welsh Revival, the Meirionnydd internment camp for Irish Republicans, the three-year-long Penrhyn strike, the “collar the lot!” internment of the Italian Welsh, the sinking of the Arandora Star, Lloyd George, Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee, Tommy Farr, Cuthbert Taylor, Julian Cayo Evans, the flooding of Capel Celyn, the Falklands War have all been dramatised. The reviews of books of history have been occasional, less than one a year. Some were responses to events of the moment. 2014 hosted a plethora of events to remember the First World War. Christopher Clark found himself to his surprise a best-seller. 2014 was also year of Scotland's referendum which prompted the reading of Norman Davies. The trials within Labour prompted a look back in history a hundred years to the time of Clynes. Linda Colley is the lead anatomist of the Union. Wyn Thomas is unsurpassed on Wales' time of violence. Martin Johnes has the most clear-sighted view of Wales, past and present. Books of history below: 20 April 2022: Richard King “Brittle with Relics” "Cardiff didn't like the Welsh community in Whitchurch and Rhiwbina." When lemonade was poured down the back of Government computers their value was £50,000, a very large sum. The fire-bombings were not just against properties in Wales but extended to estate agents in Bristol, West Kirby, Neston, Worcester and Chipping Campden." * * * * 3 April 2022: Vivienne Sanders- "Wales, the Welsh and the Making of America" "The first arrivals from Wales were Baptists in 1662, their leader John Myles from Swansea. From 1682-1700 Welsh were the largest grouping in Pennsylvania, leaving their mark in the naming of Merion, Gwynedd, Radnor. Thomas Lloyd, from a Montgomeryshire family, became a political leader. His family member David Lloyd was, writes Sanders, "a rabble-rouser, a superb writer and an intelligent and devious politician." * * * * 1 March 2022: J Lewis, Madeleine Gray, David Ceri Jones, D Densil Morgan "A History of Christianity in Wales" "St Paul made the claim- revolutionary for its era- that God chose the weak and foolish things of the world to shame the strong. The chapels in 2022 may be over-abundant in number; the values they held for their packed congregations have merged deep into the civic fabric." * * * * 04 April 2019: Martin Johnes“Wales: England's Colony?” "Victimology is pervasive. It is the foundation stone for the dullest art of Wales. Mike Parker in interview with Misha Glenny on Radio 4 in March characterised the economic relationship with England as essentially exploitative and passive. Not so, contests Johnes. Trade was powered, like all trade, by mutuality of interest. The flow of goods occurred “not because the state was extracting what it needed but because the Welsh were looking for places to sell what they had.” The book rejects the status of victimhood. “As long as we see ourselves as powerless victims of the past, it will be very difficult to stop seeing ourselves as powerless victims in the present and future. Taking control of the future of Wales means that we had power in the past too.” * * * * 1st December 2016: Svetlana Alexeivich “Second Hand Time” "Voices on Russia are a regular at Hay; Kasparov from within, Oliver Bullough and Tim Judah, extensive travellers, from without. They have reported on the facts of geography, the twenty thousand abandoned villages, the thirty-five thousand with fewer than ten inhabitants, the plummeting population, the life expectancy lower than many African countries. The Alexeivich voice is the inner geography, a woman with a tape recorder catching the voices of authenticity." * * * * 09 September 2015: J R Clynes “Memoirs 1869-1924” "The Labour Party held an election for its Leader on 21st November 1922. The triumph of Ramsay MacDonald, who was to leave his party in a condition of decade-long trauma, was witnessed by MP David Kirkwood who left a vivid account. “MacDonald’s men sat on the right-hand side of the room. On the left side sat the men who supported Mr Clynes of the General Workers’ Union, Food Controller in 1918 and Chairman of the Labour Party in the House of Commons 1921-1922… nature had dealt unevenly with these men. She had endowed MacDonald with a magnificent presence, a full, resonant voice, and a splendid dignity. Clynes was small, unassuming, of uneven features, and voice without colour. There they sat: Clynes at ease and indifferent; MacDonald with his head in his hands, looking, drawn, anxious and ill.” * * * * 8 May 2015: Linda Colley “Acts of Union and Disunion” "Colley homes in on the fictionalising of the United Kingdom that started long before its actual political realisation. The twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a history that declared that Britain had once been a political unity. Colley credits the Welsh polymath John Dee, occasional adviser to the court of the first Elizabeth, as a possible inventor of the phrase “British Empire.” His notions, including the landing of Madoc on the shores of America, were widely circulated in print and manuscript." * * * * 04 March 2014: Norman Davies “Vanished Kingdoms” "Davies’ stance is particular on two counts. He knows Europe’s eastern side in depth. In Minsk he notes the ‘grandiose public buildings for officialdom, and shoddy, decaying tower blocks for the populace’. The birthplace of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the murderous creator of Lenin’s indispensable CHEKA, has been lovingly renovated and ‘says much about Lukashenko’s views and tastes’. Belarus, Davies adds, features at number one hundred and fifty in the Corruption Index. Its place in the Quality of Life Index makes it a few rungs better than Zimbabwe." * * * * 16 July 2013: Christopher Clark “The Sleepwalkers” ‘The Crisis of 1914 was so tangled’ says the author of ‘the Sleepwalkers’ ‘that there is always enough complexity to keep the argument going.’ But facts remain. On 28th July 1914 Clark depicts Emperor Franz Joseph in residence at the imperial villa at Bad Ischl. With a quill pen, made of an ostrich feather, he signs a declaration of war against Serbia. Clark, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, gets the numbers down in his very first paragraph: sixty-five million troops mobilised, three empires demolished, twenty million military and civilian deaths, twenty-one million wounded." * * * * 26 April 2013 Wyn Thomas “Hands Off Wales” "A part of the art in history’s writing is literary prowess, the authorial ability to evoke a scene. It is the feature that distinguishes book from journal article. Wyn Thomas describes a Free Wales Army march through Machynlleth, Dennis Coslett in the lead with stave and Alsatian. Media interest is high, but the event attracts just thirty participants, later in the day heckled by the town’s Saturday drinkers. At an earlier march, a footnote reveals, Liverpudlians threw rotten tomatoes at the protesting Welsh. Veteran Liverpool politician Bessie Braddock is remembered as ‘vile, really nasty’ saying ‘some horrible things’ to the protestors." * * * * 10 October 2012: Martin Johnes “Wales since 1939” "The governors of the National Museum of Wales write an article declaring that Welsh is used to degrade scholarship, worsen public sector performance and ‘worst of all, to create enmity where none existed.’ Leo Abse speaks of ‘a packed gravy train’ with its ‘first class carriages marked ‘For Welsh speakers only.’ Even so official attitudes as well as popular are ambivalent. In 1972 a Cardiff court gives absolute discharges to two protesting non-payers of television licences. The 1969 Investiture prompts sit-ins and demonstrations but, come the Silver Jubilee, Wales hosts more street parties than anywhere outside London. It is too topical for Johnes’ book but the reception of the royal visits after the floods of this spring would break the heart of aspirant republicans.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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