Revolution to Devolution

Reflections on Welsh Democracy

Kenneth O. Morgan

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781783160877, 9781783160884
• eBook ISBN: 9781783160907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is an integrated range of studies focusing on Wales by a long-established and internationally-recognised academic authority and member of the House of Lords on the advance of democracy and the evolving idea of national identity in modern Britain. It casts back to the impact of change in Europe and the wider world from the 1789 Revolution in France onwards, covering key personalities such as Lloyd George and the impact of the First World War in Wales, and relates to contemporary debates on Scottish independence and the connections with Europe to open up wider issues of open government, foreign policy, the rule of law and cultural diversity.

1

Consensus and Conflict in Modern Welsh History

David J. V. Jones, in his brief but brilliant career, played a pivotal role in Welsh history’s coming of age. When he graduated at Aberystwyth as a young man of twenty-one in 1962, there was scant awareness in the British historical world that Wales in the modern period had a history of its own. Most of the major literature, after all, focused either on early medieval Wales, prior to the English conquest in 1282, or else on the rule of the Tudors. Debates on the significance of the Act of Union loomed large. David Williams’s pioneering studies of Welsh Chartism (1939) and the Rebecca Riots (1955) were isolated achievements which stood almost alone. A journal called the Welsh History Review had come into being at Swansea only two years earlier; the seminal, if greatly contrasting, work of Gwyn A. Williams and Ieuan Gwynedd Jones was just beginning to appear. The building blocks of Oxford University’s history syllabus were three compulsory papers on English (certainly not British) history, heavily political and constitutional in emphasis. The ghosts of Stubbs and Tout stalked the land. Continental novelties like the French Annales school need never have been. At that time, British history like British government was centralist and metropolitan in emphasis. There was in 1962 no Welsh Office, no S4C, certainly no vision of devolution. Plaid Cymru was a small minority which lost nearly all its deposits with monotonous regularity. The impact of Saunders Lewis’s BBC lecture Tynged yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language) that February had still to be measured. The Welsh appeared to be relatively marginalised in British public and political life. To adapt the title of a famous stage review of the day, these Celts seemed almost beyond the fringe. Their modern history was similarly disregarded.

By the late 1980s, when David Jones was in full flow as an author, an extraordinary transformation had taken place. In the previous twenty-five years, history had become one of Wales’s major growth industries. In particular, Welsh history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, since the era of industrialisation, had been done justice at last. David himself had been a dominant figure in this process. Between 1964 and 1989 he had written five major monographs, along with a score or more of learned articles, almost all of them concerned with Welsh popular protest in the early nineteenth century. But indeed the sixties, seventies and eighties were a time of extraordinary vitality for almost all aspects of the writing of the history of Wales, from the age of Hywel Dda to that of David Lloyd George and well beyond. It was one of the great success stories of British historiography in the post-war period. An array of imposing and acclaimed books and articles had poured forth in a mighty torrent. By 1987, four volumes of a six-volume Oxford History of Wales had been published. The Welsh History Review was striding confidently towards its fourth decade. It had been joined by innovative newer journals, notably Llafur, which aimed successfully, as a journal of labour history, to create links between the academic community and the world of work. It straddled the great divide between scholarly writing and a wider social memory. All the Welsh university colleges had schools of graduate students; the staid gatherings of the Board of Celtic Studies in Gregynog were humming with life. Journals and scholars in England, Ireland, North America and the Commonwealth were also showing a new awareness of the centrality of the experience of the Welsh and their history; indeed, the fact that Wales, a classic ‘unhistoric nation’, had emerged as a community and as a nation but not as a nation state, made its history all the more fashionable. The historians’ concern with regionalism and nationalism, with comparative cultural and linguistic pluralism, with the nature of mentalité, with ‘history from below’ penetrating beneath the formal veneer of the public archives and the records of government, made modern Welsh history appear fresh and relevant in quite new ways.

It was an intellectual development that interacted with the public in Wales, aware of massive processes of historical change with the closure of coal, new processes of secularization and the growing awareness of national identity. Movements of social and political protest loomed especially large in historical writing, perhaps reflecting the ideological preferences of most Welsh historians. Television and radio series in both English and Welsh, popular journals and magazines, well-attended day schools, the impact of the Open University, all spread the word amongst the general public. The history of Wales was entrenched, after a struggle admittedly, on the schools’ core curriculum. Welsh history books, indeed, sold remarkably well (many of the volumes in the Board of Celtic Studies’ monograph series, Studies in Welsh History, went rapidly into paperback) perhaps because so many of them were attractively written in that extraordinary pungent literacy typical of so much Anglo-Welsh writing. Welsh history was, supremely, a branch of literature, not an arcane scholastic discipline for a limited group of specialists, still less an offshoot of computer science. A remarkable breakthrough had been made, and David Jones was one of the towering figures in its achievement.

This extraordinary renaissance, however, was the product of a remarkably small group of scholars. Welsh historians were a thin red line of a few dozen at most; their very productivity masked their meagreness of numbers. Cuts into higher education in the Thatcher and post-Thatcher periods had their impact. They greatly reduced the number of graduate students in the humanities, cutting back almost to zero the researchers working for the Board of Celtic Studies, reducing severely the budgets of the university and school libraries which purchased the new books and journals, delaying technical electronic advances even in the National Library of Wales. The range of active scholars became smaller still. They were also growing old together. Diminishing human resources had been masked, in part, by the continuing industriousness and zeal of active Welsh historians who kept on producing major work into their seventies or even eighties. Welsh history had no real ‘schools’ since it was so much a minority interest.

Now this situation certainly has had its distinct advantages. Limited numbers have given historians of Wales a rare sense of fraternity, of intellectual and other comradeship. They have been a convivial (overwhelmingly male) group, enjoying each other’s company in the National Library or the University, or in colloquia at Gregynog. Their attitude towards each other, informally and in the formality of book reviews, has always been supportive and encouraging; feuds of the Taylor vs Trevor-Roper type appear in Wales to be unknown. But the downside is that Welsh history has the problem sometimes of appearing too cosy and inbred. The scholars at work know and like each other almost too well, and perhaps review each other too often. When apparent disparities in interpretation appear – for instance between Gwyn A. Williams’s depiction of south Wales as a revolutionary pressure cooker with the lid about to blow off, and Ieuan Gwynedd Jones’s account of that same society twenty years later as stable and secure in reconstructing the basis of its institutional and religious life – there has been no open disagreement. It is very likely that both may be right, but at least the disparity is worth examination. A sign of the maturity of Welsh history, therefore, may be the emergence of argument, of dissent. The present writer is a peaceful man, as harmonious as his fellow members of the guild, with no wish to make war, even cold war, amongst his colleagues. But it appears not an inappropriate tribute to as creative a friend and as galvanising a scholar as David Jones to suggest at least one area where the contours of argument might begin.

A major theme of David Jones’s work is that of conflict and consensus in modern Wales. It chimes in with the main features of all mature societies – the balance between change and continuity, between upheaval and stability. Historians of Britain since 1945 have especially been caught up in it, in considering whether post-war Britain was marked by an overall consensus about public priorities. Political scientists like Dennis Kavanagh have been well to the fore here.1 The theme has especially attracted the attention of American historians, ever fascinated by present-day resonances or the usability of their nation’s past. In the early years of this century, US historians tended to see their history in terms of sectional and class conflict. Quite apart from the momentous disjuncture of the Civil War and the gulf over slavery, American historians were heavily influenced by the Progressive movement and its positivist impact upon the humanities and the emerging social sciences. Thus men like Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner saw the key to American history as lying in conflict – the struggle between creditor/mercantile elements in the north-east and a producer society, between an industrialising east and a debtor south and west. Perhaps one of the last studies of this kind was Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Age of Jackson (1945), the work of a young man who saw in Jacksonian Democracy of the 1830s a farmer–labour coalition that anticipated Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal a hundred years later. Indeed, Schlesinger’s multi-volume Age of Roosevelt (1957–60) deliberately replayed some of the old tunes. It was American academia’s inverted version of a Whiggish interpretation of history.

But from the 1950s onwards, this well-established view came to be seriously challenged. Scholars like Louis Hartz or perhaps a more conservative figure like Dan Boorstin saw their nation’s history as one of broad consensus. Hartz saw the key in an abiding liberal ideology reflecting the fact that America had no tradition of feudalism. Boorstin preferred the view that Americans were a pragmatic breed who had no real ideology at all.2 By the sixties, some American historians, well aware of current tensions relating to black, gender and youth issues, and the war in Vietnam, were deeply alarmed at an anti-ideological brand of conservatism that seemed to be capturing their discipline – seeing America, in John Roche’s words, as ‘a Quaker meeting moving through time’. It was, many feared, a backlash from the sterilities of the Cold War and the threat of McCarthyism.

Richard Hofstadter, my old mentor and perhaps the most intellectually dynamic of them all, somewhat hovered between the conflict and consensus scenarios. His American Political Tradition (1948) suggested long-term continuities, perhaps of an unattractive variety. His Age of Reform (1955) propounded conflict, at least between the rural Populists and the urban Progressives, a view shaped by Hofstadter’s own reaction to racist, paranoid, rural McCarthyism. In his last major book, Anti-Intellectualism in American History (1963), Hofstadter focused on the topic more obliquely, namely the philosophical and political elements in American history that kept challenging radical intellectuals and placing them on the defensive. In an important essay published in 1968 shortly before his dreadfully premature death, Hofstadter reviewed the argument and tried to create a bridge between the two approaches.3 He did, however, observe that a society marked by four years of terrible civil war and a fundamental ongoing rupture on the role of black Americans could hardly be deemed consensual in any firm sense.

American historians, then, reached a variety of conclusions. Not surprisingly, a consensus about consensus in their history was almost impossible to achieve. But at least they were debating and arguing amongst themselves. Now the history of Wales, in fact, implicitly raises many of the same themes. As noted, it is embedded in the very divergent view of early nineteenth-century Wales taken by Gwyn A. Williams and Ieuan Gwynedd Jones, a difference of temperament perhaps but also of scholarship. It has, however, been given spectacular public prominence. Again Gwyn A. Williams is the central exhibit. Indeed his writing throughout his career has been the embodiment of the conflict thesis. In When was Wales? (1985), as in many previous monographs and later television series, he saw Welsh history as the product of schizoid turbulence, social fractures and (a favoured phrase) ‘brutal ruptures’. It was specifically put forward as an alternative, non-establishment interpretation. Welsh history for him was full of revolutionary moments, led invariably by unsuccessful revolutionaries, marginal men from Macsen Wledig through Owain Glyndŵr and Iolo Morganwg to Noah Ablett and David Irfon Jones in the last century. His thesis came out most vividly in The Dragon has Two Tongues, a series of memorable television confrontations (rather than programmes) with Wynford Vaughan Thomas.4 They were to embody conflict and consensus in exaggerated form. Revolutionary turbulence and consensual inertia were personalised in the tiny, voluble valleys Marxist who argued with (or shouted at) the gentle elder pillar of the establishment. It reached almost absurd lengths of visual imagery. In the first programme, Williams physically embodied revolutionary movement as he was alternately thrust down the main shaft of Blaenavon’s Big Pit and then hurtled aloft in a helicopter a few minutes later above the Uffington horse on the Berkshire Downs. Meanwhile, Thomas was to be observed chugging gently along the Neath canal on a sunny afternoon, apparently settling down over a gin and tonic.

It was in many ways a contrived study in joint exaggeration, and also unreal. Gwyn A. Williams, after all, was a distinguished and learned creative academic scholar; Wynford Vaughan Thomas was by trade a very distinguished radio outside broadcaster, but not a serious historian at all. The series was designed to entertain, provoke – perhaps shock – and it succeeded. It surely helped persuade a generation of Welsh schoolchildren to find the history of Wales challenging, dramatic, intensely exciting; videos of the programmes were used for university recruitment by history departments. Williams, the marvellous illuminator of Madoc and other myths, found himself hailed as the source of a new myth, the diminutive apostle of ‘impossible revolutions’, lauded by radicals and nationalists as a ‘people’s remembrancer’ in a way that other middle-class Welsh historians who appeared on television were somehow not. But, clearly, the series also opened up a wider theme of consensual and conflict images of Welsh history which are of great importance.

As it happens, David Jones himself embodies these two viewpoints throughout his work. He was a superb analyst of Welsh history as social protest. His work for most of his career concerned popular upheavals in both rural and industrial Wales – corn riots, enclosure protests, the Scotch Cattle and their ‘black domain’, the Merthyr rising and the martyrdom of Dic Penderyn, the bloody suppression of Chartism, the Rebecca Riots. All of them he studied with impeccable scholarship, but also a quiet passion. He was aware always of the social and human roots of the movements he described. His study of the Rebecca disturbances and the attacks on the toll-gates was more emotionally and politically committed by far than that of his old Aberystwyth mentor, David Williams. The latter had indeed seen the riots as the product of a rural society in crisis, but his account of the troubles was detached, the work of a disenchanted...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Consensus and Conflict in Modern Welsh History
• 2 Welsh Democracy, Revolution to Devolution
• 3 Kentucky’s cottage-bred man: Abraham Lincoln and Wales
• 4 The Relevance of Henry Richard
• 5 Lloyd George as a Parliamentarian
• 6 Liberalism’s Flintshire Loyalist: The Political Achievement of John Herbert Lewis
• 7 Wales and the First World War
• 8 Alfred Zimmern’s Brave New World: Liberalism and the League in 1919 and after
• 9 England, Wales, Britain and  the Audit of War
• 10 Power and Glory: Labour in War and Reconstruction, 1939–1951
• 11 Welsh Devolution: The Past and the Future
• 12 Wales and Europe: From Revolutionary Convention to Welsh Assembly, 1789–2014
• Postscript: A Tale of Two Unions