Brittle with Relics: A History of Wales, 1962–97 ('Oral history at its revelatory best' DAVID KYNASTON)

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Brittle with Relics really gives you a feel for the period and the key social and economic trends going on at the time through people who were involved in the various different campaigns and events. The discussion of community and the tradition of self education and how community was shattered in the Valleys by pit closures really hits home as does the discussion of the Welsh economy – the collapse of heavy industry and the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to replace it by trying to attract inward investment, doomed by factors such as cheaper labour elsewhere and the advance of technology. The book also looks at the Quango culture in Wales in the 1980s, typified by the Cardiff Bay development. Faber’s publicists have secured an endorsement from a heavy hitter from outside Wales. David Kynaston calls this book: “oral history at its revelatory best; containing multitudes.” Its climax, the referendum of 1997, has a thrill to it with its cross-cutting narrative, even when the outcome is known. For a new reader on Wales’ recent history it makes for a roller-coaster of vivid evocation. For this 30-year-plus resident it is known history with a wealth of reinforcing detail and insight. It’s certainly not objective history but then again King doesn’t hide his intentions. Indeed, his introduction concludes with the hope that ‘Wales will one day thrive on its own terms.’ It’s as if he’s looking for lessons in our recent past to help us chart a better future. Brittle With Relics is nuanced, passionate and reflective, conveying a very Welsh blend of fatalism and hope.’ Rhian E. Jones ― History Today

Opening with the two man-made disasters one that killed so many children and the other which wiped a community from the map so an English city can ‘steal’ its water resources. This is such a beautifully written book that is multi-layered and multi-voiced one cannot help guilty for the crimes committed against the Welsh in the name of ‘progress’. These proud spaces were the physical manifestation of the urge for communal self-improvement and the egalitarian spirit of working towards the shared purpose of better conditions and livelihoods characteristic of the mining industry. This impetus thrived until the middle of the twentieth century and endured still, in the decades that followed. But the most important thing about the problem of ‘industrialisation versus Welsh identity’ is that the latter in its 1960s—1970s form had been defined by the former. ‘In these close-knit communities, employment was ingrained with identity, an attribute that grew in significance during the increasing secularisation of Wales that had gained momentum by the 1960s.’ So when industrial employment was eliminated by neoliberal reforms of 1980s, it meant that local Welsh identity had suffered a sledgehammer blow as a result. Communities tried to resist of course, and their resistance afforded ground for a previously impossible coalition of Welsh nationalists and Welsh Labour (and not only them): as King explains, ‘several hitherto unlikely alliances had been formed by the conclusion of the Miners’ Strike. Cymdeithas yr Iaith, which had organised food parcels, holidays and other supportive measures in solidarity with mining communities during the strike, continued to be a spirited campaigning presence. In tandem with their Cymraeg-centred activities the society was active in the women’s, Nicaragua and LGBT movements, and was also on occasion in dialogue with Sinn Féin throughout the 1980s, the decade in which the society elected its first female chairperson.’ My own family, based in Bedwas, in the Rhymney Valley, even held the belief, uncontroversial at the time, that English was altogether the superior culture,” he says. It is rare not to be engaged by strangers in warm, if occasionally vague, conversations regarding ancestry, local connections, and historical neighbourly relations.Then there’s the pantomimic ‘Operation Tân,’ being the police dragnet in the in the middle of the Meibion Glyndŵr arson campaign, a period of history where documentation is obviously scant and an abiding mystery at its heart. King’s epilogue characterises today’s Wales, born from these earlier decades. He highlights the imaginative Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015), designed to counteract short-termism, and the Welsh government’s refusal to handle the pandemic at the dictate of Westminster.

The book has a surface vivacity but a teleological momentum runs beneath. Early on Carl Iwan Clowes cites “cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon”, translated as “a nation without a language is a nation without a heart.” Ffred Ffransis recalls the Brewer Spinks episode where an investor banned the speaking of Welsh inside his Blaenau Ffestiniog factory. The arc of language activism begins with Saunders Lewis and reaches a part-fruition in the Welsh Language Act of 1993. In 2022, the two languages flow freely across the floor of the Siambr. In a review of the book Brittle with Relics by Richard King , written in the Telegraph, Roger Lewis says of Welsh nationalism that “the psychology and motivation were totalitarian”.Thomas’s greatest gift to Wales was this flint-eyed rejection of the self-deprecation with which the Welsh are still caricatured, in favour of an austere stoicism. As he writes in Welsh History:

The heavy industries of steel, oil and mining were all significant employers in the region; the centre of the last of these was the South Wales Coalfield, home to the historic communitarian radicalism fathered by the Miners’ Federation and its welfare institutes and libraries.Brittle with Relics is a highly readable and engaging book, an organised, historical mash-up if you like, with brisk and clear context pieces by King interpolating the illuminating oral accounts and thus offering necessary info. The impact and influence of the speech have long been debated; what is certain is that Lewis’ polemic contributed to a renewed sense of purpose among those resistant to the language’s increasing marginalisation. The Oral History Center at the University of California in Berkeley suggests one should ‘not use the interview to show off your knowledge, vocabulary, charm, or other abilities. Good interviewers do not shine; only their interviews do.’

On the surface, Richard King has pulled off the task with Brittle with Relics. Subtitled A History of Wales 1962–1997, it comprises sixteen topical chapters (The Welsh Language, Incomers, Cardiff Bay) built mainly from direct quotation, as well as a short introduction and epilogue. The easy way to test the effectiveness of his approach is to open the book at random and see what’s there. I did it five times. I landed on pithy insights from former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on secularisation, poet and former activist Dewi Prysor on protest group the Meibion Glyndŵr Colour Party, former Secretary of State for Wales Peter Hain on the Valleys after the miner’s strike, Super Furry Animals singer-songwriter Gruff Rhys on Richey Manic and SFA bassist Guto Pryce on the 1997 devolution referendum – which marks the book’s cut-off, which is a little frustrating, twenty-four years on. Brittle with Relics is a landmark history of the people of Wales during a period of great national change A great number of these voices will be familiar to the reader; others may not be. Many of those present are speaking in their second language. And there are voices missing from this history that belong to people now departed, or to people who, despite their willingness to share them, no longer trust in the accuracy or function of their memories. As the decline in the language was gradually halted, the industrial centre of South Wales – the area in which over half of the country’s population lived and worked and where the Welsh language was heard less frequently than English – entered into a moderate then accelerated decline of its own. R. S. Thomas, like many prominent literary figures of the twentieth century, was a fierce reactionary, a Welsh nationalist obsessed with the past. As a public figure and an Anglican priest, he was famous for his harsh criticism of a ‘machine civilisation’. R. S. Thomas’ son recalls his father’s sermons in which he fulminated against the evil of refrigerators, washing machines, television, and other modern things. The poet was thinking about himself as belonging to the ‘previous times’, a pre-industrial era. But in reality, he lived in his time—the time of High Modernity—and belonged to it even if he hated modern life. So Richard King rethinks the poetic line which became the title of his book. The relics which Wales is brittle with are not fragments of some fabled bygone days, they are the relics of modernity. And we recognise them as something which is intertwined into the social texture of today’s life. About the Author

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Another theme emerging from King’s multi-voiced epic is almost inadvertently comical: all these divisions. The Wesleyans not talking to the Methodists; Labour not getting on with Plaid Cymru; the innumerable factions within the Free Wales Army and the Welsh Language mob, where rambling speeches were followed by accordion playing. As under Stalin, there were frequent purges if “everyone was enjoying it too much”. Some left the fold to become feminists or homosexuals, or in one instance a nurse.