The Plaid Cymru History Society lecture, Pontypridd National Eisteddfod 2024
From Cymru Fydd to Plaid Cymru
Richard Wyn Jones[1]
Director of the Wales Governance Centre, Cardiff University.
Firstly, may I thank the Plaid Cymru History Society for its invitation to deliver this lecture; Eluned Bush for organising everything so efficiently; and of course you the audience as well, for having decided to come by the Societies Tent today!
***
I was advised some time ago now that no-one should ever start a lecture or a speech with an apology or an excuse. Better to go confidently straight into the content, however thin the material which is about to be covered…! I’m certain that that is sound advice. In spite of that however, given my current position, I feel it would be right of me to ignore it just this once.
You see, my original intention was to spend most of the months of June and July researching and then writing this lecture, that would represent the first step in the process of my writing a new book. Unfortunately, Mr Sunak decided that it was not going to be like that. And to be honest, Mr Gething did not really help matters either, did he!?
So the truth is that I have spent far less time reading and thinking about and writing what follows than I had intended. Consequently, this will be a taste of the argument I wish to develop, rather than the argument in its entirety. Despite all that, I hope there will be something here of interest and enough, indeed, to whet your appetite for more…
***
Let me start by setting out some of the context… As I explained, this lecture will be a stepping stone to the writing of a chapter in my new book. That book will complete a trilogy of works which discuss different aspects of Plaid Cymru’s ideology. (By the way, the trilogy will have been published by the University of Wales Press, and as someone who has had works published by highly respected academic publishers in England and the United States, I would like to underline how fortunate we are to have a publisher here in Wales which is better than all those others…).
The first of the three volumes, Rhoi Cymru’n Gyntaf: Syniadaeth Plaid Cymru, Cyfrol 1, was published back in 2007, and an English translation of it will appear from the presses in October this year – at last!!! The second tome, Y Blaid Ffasgaidd yng Nghymru: Plaid Cymru a’r Cyhuddiad o Ffasgaeth appeared in 2013 with an English translation, The Fascist party in Wales? Plaid Cymru, Welsh nationalism and the accusation of Fascism, published the following year. And now at last I am working diligently on the third and final book, namely Rhoi Cymru’n Gyntaf: Syniadaeth Plaid Cymru, Cyfrol 2.
My intention is to start that third book in the trilogy – Volume 2! – with a comparison between Plaid Cymru and the nearest thing it had as a predecessor, which is the Cymru Fydd movement; that political movement which was a true force in the life of Wales for a period towards the end of the nineteenth century. A movement which is associated with names which remain famous – sometimes infamous – like Tom Ellis, David Lloyd George and O.M. Edwards, along with others who are rather forgotten these days such as Beriah Gwynfe Evans, Ellis Jones Griffith and that fascinating couple, Herbert and Ruth Lewis.
There are a number of reasons why I believe that setting out a comparison of this kind is worthwhile. I want to note three of those reasons, even though there will not be an opportunity to discuss them in full this afternoon.
- The least important of these reasons in terms of the book itself, which is ultimately a study of Plaid Cymru not Cymru Fydd, is that I feel that the phenomenon of Cymru Fydd (and boy, what a phenomenon!) has not received its just deserts in the history books. As we shall see in a minute, that partly reflects the fact that interpretations and understanding of the second wave of Welsh nationalism – the wave which formed and then was in turn nurtured by Plaid Cymru – have to an extent damaged our understanding of the first wave of nationalism embodied in the Cymru Fydd movement. Cymru Fydd merits rather more rounded consideration than it has tended to receive in the past. Luckily, recent works by academics such as Dewi Rowland Hughes and Hazel Walford Davies have started to provide such consideration. And I vouch that there is yet more to say on that subject.
- On top of all that, as part of the wider study of Plaid Cymru’s ideology, Cymru Fydd and the first wave of Welsh nationalism demands attention because understanding the reasons why Cymru Fydd and the whole movement’s inheritance was rejected by the founders and earliest supporters of Plaid Cymru enables us to understand better their political beliefs – and crucially, I imagine, the origins of those beliefs.
- Lastly – and here my thoughts are at their most nascent and uncertain – I have a feeling that understanding the differences and the similarities between Cymru Fydd and Plaid Cymru is also a means of shedding light on aspects of contemporary Welsh politics. Specifically, it is a means of us understanding better the relationship between the Plaid Cymru of our day and the Welsh nationalist wing of the Labour Party in Wales.
I hardly need to remind you how central this relationship has been to the development of Welsh politics over the past 25 years and more. Since the new voting system for our national Senedd to be introduced by 2026 will make coalitions pretty much an inevitability, that relationship is likely to continue. And is there a better comparator for the pro-Welsh wing of the Labour Party than Cymru Fydd?
As is the case with Cymru Fydd historically, the supporters of that wing of the Labour Party believe that the institutional and economic foundations of the Welsh nation are better set through the British state, and that Welsh and British national identities can not only live side-by-side comfortably but also mutually strengthen and elevate each other.
As with Cymru Fydd, they also believe that it is by yoking the Welsh national cause to the success of a big British party that such benefits can be achieved. In their estimation, the danger of distancing yourself from the British party set-up is irrelevance and losing the chance to influence matters.
It can hardly be denied that they have been supremely successful in their efforts in all of this, too.
Yet still, as with the example of Cymru Fydd’s torch-bearers, the small ‘n’ nationalists in the Labour Party have also discovered time after time that the big British parties are ‘broad churches’, and that some of their most uncompromising and effective enemies are to be found co-existing in the same party as them. And then, even should they win the internal battles in their own party, the state itself proves that it is not always as flexible as they have imagined it to be.
What then are the implications for Plaid Cymru of imagining their ‘enemies’ but, also, their unavoidable allies on the Welsh wing of the Labour Party, as being the latest revelation of Cymru Fydd in the very different political situation which now exists, a hundred and thirty years since that movement was at its peak?
So there you have some of the reasons for believing that it is worth comparing Cymru Fydd with Plaid Cymru – and specifically the ideas that were associated with them – more systematically than has been done in the past.
***
Clearly, we have time to do no more than lift the corner of the curtain on all of that in this lecture. As a starting point let us look at Cymru Fydd’s existence and its ideas before considering how the founders and some of the later supporters of Plaid Cymru went about interpreting their predecessors’ story.
- Understanding Cymru Fydd
An Eisteddfod audience tends to be a particularly knowledgeable one and I’m pretty sure that there will be people in this tent who know a great deal (a great deal more than me!) about Cymru Fydd’s history. But beyond those well-informed individuals, to the extent that many who are interested in Welsh politics are at all aware of that history, I suppose that the meeting which is considereed to have led to the ending of Cymru Fydd is the only part of the story that will be generally known. That was the infamous meeting of the South Wales Liberal Federation held in Newport in January 1896, when Robert Bird – President of the Cardiff Liberal Association – stood up and declared ‘There are from Swansea to Newport, thousands upon thousands of Englishmen, as true Liberals as yourselves…who will never submit to the domination of Welsh ideas’.
Some may also be aware of the response of the Member of Parliament for Carnarvon Boroughs, David Lloyd George, to what happened in Newport. ‘Are the multitudes of the Welsh nation’, he thundered, ‘going to accept being lorded over by a coalition of English capitalists who come to Wales, not to raise up the common people, but to make their fortune?’. I’ll let John Davies (Bwlchllan) complete the anecdote in his own incomparable way:
‘Yes they are’ was the answer to his rhetorical question, because although examples of attacks on capitalism could be found in Wales, it was not in the nation’s name that it was being challenged. The Newport meeting proved the death knell for Cymru Fydd. More meetings were convened in 1897 and 1898, but there was little conviction to be found at them; by the turn of the century the movement had disappeared.
Like the storied comet, Cymru Fydd happened and then was gone.
But if that is the most familiar part of the movement’s story by far, let me add a few vignettes which might show Cymru Fydd and the first wave of Welsh nationalism in a slightly less well-known light:
- A public meeting was held in Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1886, organised by Michael D Jones and Pan Jones, with Michael Davitt speaking on the issue of land rights. Davitt was an Irish revolutionary – a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood – who had already been imprisoned on various occasions by the British state and, at the time, was one of the leading lights of the Irish Land League. Amongst the other speakers was the young lawyer David Lloyd George. The story goes that Davitt strongly encouraged Lloyd George after the meeting to pursue a career in politics. And so it came to pass …
This was not the only time that Welsh nationalists of the period came into contact with the most militant wing within Irish nationalism – a minority wing at the time, of course. There is another tale of T.E. Ellis travelling to a public meeting in Ireland where some of those present were killed by members of the crown’s armed forces.
- Exactly one hundred and thirty years ago – in 1894 – four of Wales’s most nationalistic Liberal Members of Parliament went ‘on strike’ as part of what was called at the time the ‘Welsh Insurrection’. The four were:
- David Lloyd George;
- Herbert Lewis, Member of Parliament for Flint Boroughs;
- A. Thomas, Member of Parliament for Merthyr Tydfil and later Viscount Rhondda, and one of those who contributed to emasculating Cymru Fydd as a political force partly because of personal animosity towards David Lloyd George (though the two of them made it up later); and,
- Frank Edwards, Member of Parliament for Radnorshire and later a Member of the House of Lords.
Their main gripe was that the Liberal Government of the day, under the leadership of arch-imperialist Earl Rosebery, had decided to postpone acting on disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales. For a period the four ‘rebels’ spoke at public meetings throughout Wales and it would appear received strong support. That was before the rebellion came to an end, and that at least partly (as might be expected) because of T.E. Ellis’s efforts, who was by then a Liberal whip.
It cannot be denied that ‘disestablishment’ was the main Welsh-specific matter on the political agenda in Wales in the mid-1890s. As we live in an age which is not only wholly secular but one in which dealing with Wales as an administrative entity has become a routine matter, it is easy to underestimate how far-reaching were the implications of this call. And that not merely from a spiritual standpoint but also in terms of its constitutional significance; through ensuring disestablishing the state church, this was a sign that Wales, seemingly so fully assimilated, was yet a separate unit to England after all. But it is worth noting the fact that this was not the only reform that the first wave of Welsh nationalists were requesting….
A sense of the broader agenda can be gleaned from one of the cartoons included in the novel Dafydd Dafis – a novel written by Cymru Fydd’s General Secretary, Beriah Gwynfe Evans, and published in 1898; a novel which reveals a lot in terms of the politics of the period, even if it is frankly unreadable.
Along with Disestablishment and Disendowment, it notes the following as aspirations:
- Reform of burial laws
- A Welsh Education Office
- Reforming land laws
- Local choice (right to veto), and
- Self-government for Wales
One could add to this list.
In a famous speech in Bala in 1890 the Member of Parliament for Merionethshire, T.E. (Tom) Ellis, had argued that the last of these, self-government – establishing a ‘Law-making Assembly’ for Wales – was (or should be) the intellectual link connecting the different elements of the Welsh national policy programme. And indeed, when the first list of goals for Cymru Fydd was drawn up in a meeting in London three years earlier (NB: as with so many other national movements in Europe in the nineteenth century, exiles were central to the development of the first wave of Welsh nationalism), it was noted very clearly:
That the main objective of the association will be ensuring creation of a Legislative Assembly, to discuss Welsh matters.
Whilst reading Thomas Jones’s autobiographical writings in his volume Leeks and Daffodils, we see how normal it was to debate and support self-government for Wales in the decade that came after Ellis’s speech. It is enlightening too to see how important was the influence of Irish nationalism among nationalistic circles in the Wales of the 1890s. According to Jones, ‘Home Rule for Ireland was constantly under discussion…I bought and read the essays and poems of Thomas Davis.’. The discussion on Welsh home rule – self-government – was literally happening side-by-side with discussions on Irish home rule.
The significance of these comments is underlined when we remember Jones’s role – as Lloyd George’s right-hand man – in the process of dividing Ireland through the Government of Ireland Act 1920 and then the Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921. It is worth remembering too that, at precisely the same time that Leeks and Daffodils was published – 1942 – Jones was central to the efforts to blacken Plaid Cymru’s name as a party which had fascist sympathies.
- Lastly, let us tarry a little to look more closely at Herbert Lewis. The first wave of Welsh nationalism had no more constant or effective a champion than him. He was the first chairman of Flint County Council in 1889 before becoming Member of Parliament for Flint Boroughs in 1892, then Flintshire itself in 1906, and ultimately holder of the University of Wales’s seat in the House of Commons from 1918. He was one of the architects of the intermediate school structure in Wales, and through his role as parliamentary secretary for the Education Board he played a central part in shaping the famous Education Act of 1918 – ‘the Fisher Act’. Alongside his characteristic emphasis on educational matters, it is worth noting that Lewis played a central part – perhaps the central part – in the process of making sure that the British state shouldered the financial burden for maintaining the Welsh national institutions that were successfully created in this period, in particular the National Library and National Museum. As part of that, he was the one who ensured that the Library in Aberystwyth would become a copyright library.
His second wife, Ruth Herbert Lewis, was one of the main benefactors of Cymdeithas Alawon Gwerin Cymru (the Welsh Folk Song Society) and a collector of folk songs. I must admit that I was not aware that it was she who collected ‘Hwp, ha wen! / Cadi ha, Morus stowt / Dros yr uchle’n neidio / Hwp, dyna fo! / A chynffon buwch a chynffon llo / A chynffon Richard Parri go / Hwp, dyna fo!’, a lovely nonsense song I often sang with my children a few years ago, as well as the splendid plygain carol ‘O! Deued pob Cristion / i Fethlehem yr awron’. Somebody will have won the Lady Ruth Herbert Lewis Memorial Prize this week at the Rhondda Cynon Taf National Eisteddfod.
T.E. Ellis’s widow, Annie Jane, was another of the benefactors of Cymdeithas Alawon Gwerin Cymru. As Annie Jane Hughes Griffiths, she became President of the Welsh League of Nations Union and led the deputation that would take the Welsh Women’s Peace Appeal to the USA in 1924. As another indicator of the commitment of this first wave of Welsh nationalists to high brow Welsh culture – as well as to more populist culture – it is worth reminding ourselves that T.E. Ellis himself was editing the works of the mystic Morgan Llwyd for publication at the time of his premature death.
There is a whole lot more that could be said about the activities, the personalities, and the various ideas connected to Cymru Fydd. But there are three particular points I wish to draw attention to in relation to the current discussion.
Firstly, it is essential to emphasise time and again that the evidence points to the fact that the vast majority of Cymru Fydd members and supporters considered the British state and Britishness not as enemies to Wales and Welshness, but rather – given appropriate revision – as the means to ensure and promote Welsh national aspirations. Note that that was true even before the great imperialist fever of the 1890s took hold of Wales, as it did the rest of these islands.
The reforms that they desired were (i) establishing a legislative parliament for Wales, and for that to be (ii) part of a broader process of ensuring acknowledgement that Wales had a place as one of the nations which composed Great Britain. One aspect of this acknowledgement – the negative aspect, in a way – was to make sure that the state acknowledged the realities of Welsh spiritual life by disestablishing and disendowing the state church of England in Wales. The more affirmative action taken was to create Welsh civic institutions to mirror the pattern of such institutions which already existed in the three other constituent parts of the state and transferring the costs of running them to the British Treasury.
Secondly, when contemplating the reality of the British party system, this in its turn meant that Welsh nationalist desires were closely bound to the Liberal Party’s prospects. That would have still been true even if Alderman Bird – under D.A. Thomas’s influence – had failed in his efforts to stop the unification of the liberal federations of north and south Wales desired by Cymru Fydd in that infamous Newport meeting. Even if the proposed political unity had succeeded in becoming a Welsh and more prominent version of the Irish Parliamentary Party – which, no doubt, was Lloyd George’s wish – the fact that English politics (from 1886 onwards, at least) was thoroughly unionist, and its elected representatives withstood every effort to make Welsh national desires real, meant that it was only in those periods when the Liberals were in power that meaningful reforms could hope to be won.
Even though the fact is acknowledged very rarely, this is one of the main reasons why the decade between 1895 and 1905 was such an unprofitable one for Welsh nationalists. With the unionists – the Tories – in an alliance with the unionist wing of the Liberals – in power in London throughout that period, the opportunities for the first wave of Welsh nationalists to influence things were few and far between. For the same reason, it was a thin time for Irish nationalists and that despite their complete domination of electoral politics in Ireland. Indeed, things remained difficult even after the huge Liberal victory in the 1906 election. In that parliament the Liberals’ majority was so large that the Celtic fringe nationalists lost any bargaining power – quite simply, they were not needed. It is a non-Conservative government in London with a small majority which is perfect for those outside England who wish to win concessions for the fringe nations (a lesson for us all in 2024, perhaps?!)
And so to my third point, and maybe my most controversial one, which is to note how similar the first wave of Welsh nationalism was to mainstream Irish nationalism in the same period. They were alike not only in their dependence on the success (and as seen above, the extent of that success) of the Liberal Party. By the time Cymru Fydd was formed, they were also far more similar ideologically than we tend to acknowledge these days. Welsh people of the period understood that clearly enough – remember Thomas Jones’s memoirs which I referred to earlier. But since we now look at Irish nationalism through the prism of the Easter Rising 1916 and all that came in its wake, we have tended to forget, or mis-remember, what came before.
Take John Redmond as an example. He was one of the main leaders of Irish nationalism after Parnell’s death in 1891 and, as leader of the united Irish Parliamentary Party, he was without doubt the main man between 1900 and 1918. Redmond believed one could and should satisfy the wishes of Irish nationalists through the British state; moreover, he wanted full status for Ireland within the British Empire. With the Liberals dependent on his party’s votes after the 1910 election, Redmond succeeded to get the Government of Ireland Act passed, which received royal approval in 1914. As is now known, it proved to be a pyrrhic victory since the Act was not implemented in the end because of – amongst other things – the Great War, the solidarity between parts of the British army and the Conservative Party, and the Easter Rising. In the same year of 1914, and under exactly the same conditions, the law which would disestablish the Anglican Church in Wales also received its royal assent.
Deliverance through the British state; ensuring that the existing national identity took its place honourably as part of the national inheritance of a broader Britishness: these were the foundations of the nationalist credo and constitutional ideas of both John Redmond and of T.E. Ellis – and David Lloyd George too, for that matter. Whatever their other differences, here was the common ground between mainstream Irish nationalism at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, and the beliefs of the first wave of Welsh nationalists.
- Plaid Cymru’s interpretation of Cymru Fydd
As I suggested, historians have not been kind to Cymru Fydd. There are perhaps a range of reasons for this. For one thing, there has been a tendency to deal with the movement’s history as if it was a sort of first dish to taste quite quickly before moving on to the main course. On the part of historians of contemporary Wales, that main course – quite naturally – is the growth and then the dominance of the Labour movement and party. In the case of those many historians who have concentrated on David Lloyd George’s story, the main course is the central role that the ‘Welsh Wizard’ had in the massacres of the Great War or in cementing the basis of the welfare state in Britain or in the story of dividing the island of Ireland and creating the Irish Free State or…or… You get my point!
If you turn to those types of work with an eye on what they have to say specifically about Cymru Fydd, you can often sense the authors’ keenness to leap ahead to the other matters which they are really interested in. It is also unfortunate that the only (?) book published in the twentieth century which focussed especially on Cymru Fydd’s history – William George’s book of the same title, published in 1945 – is confused in parts while also coming across as an attempt to save the reputation of the author’s big brother, namely David Lloyd George of course.
But this in turn raises a significant question: why in the world would the younger brother who had been a great support to his elder brother feel there was a need to do such a thing as to save face, when the boy from Llanystumdwy had gone on to lead the largest and most powerful empire in the history of humanity? This brings us neatly to another factor which has had a great impact on the historical memory of Cymru Fydd and that, very simply, is the contempt that the second wave of Welsh nationalists showed towards it – and especially their utter disdain towards David Lloyd George.
In his biography of Lewis Valentine, Arwel Vittle depicts the rift between the older generation of Welsh nationalists and the younger generation who would go on to set up Plaid Cymru, including its first President:
Cymru Fydd’s failure was seared into the minds of many young patriots, seen as being based on the betrayal of its leaders who pursued the advancement of their own careers in Westminster at the expense of their nationalism. This was personified most strongly in the person of Lloyd George himself, who had been such an idol for Samuel Valentine’s generation, but who was now seen as an arch-imperialist by his son.
One could make a long list of examples where second wave Welsh nationalists were scathing in their criticism of the first wave, and that – by now – for over a century. It is clear that such an attitude has also influenced many of those who have written about the main figures connected to Plaid Cymru. As one instance, Arwel Vittle himself states that what Cymru Fydd represented was ‘Loyal Britishness wrapped up in the dress of tearful Welshness’.
Saunders Lewis was withering in his judgement. He ascribes the movement’s failure to the purported fact that ‘Cymru was what was missing from the Cymru Fydd movement’.[2] And again, ‘To speak in rough terms… Cymru Fydd’s liberals neither knew nor understood Cymru’s past.’[3] When considering some of the names associated with the movement, including J.E. Lloyd, this was very rough speaking! Yet according to one of Saunders Lewis’s biographers, D. Tecwyn Lloyd, if one set aside self-governance, there was nothing Welsh-specific among the reforms supported by Cymru Fydd’s members. Rather, they were nothing more alternative than ‘means by which to improve and increase and make more effective the contribution of Wales to Britain and its world-wide Empire’.[4] More than this, by the first decade of the twentieth century, ‘the talk and discussion about Wales’s exceptionality’ by politicians like Lloyd George ‘was no more than a playful excuse for seeking personal promotion’.
But perhaps it is the following anecdote which best reflects the attitudes of the second wave of nationalists towards their predecessors. In the September 1929 edition of The Scots Independent newspaper there is an article by Lewis Spence, Vice-Chairman of the National Party of Scotland – the SNP’s forerunner – recording the story of his visit to Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru’s Summer School, held that year in Pwllheli. He relates the tale of the bus journey organised for attendees to see a bit of the environs, noting that the passengers booed and hooted as the charabanc went past Lloyd George’s birthplace! Scarcely believed that one of Plaid Cymru’s own publications would have included such a childish – if amusing – tale, as it would have caused more of a fuss and trouble than it was worth. But it does offer an interesting and quite significant insight into the world view of members of the still young Plaid Cymru.
Of course the older generation knew full well about the attitude of the younger generation, and – as you might expect – did not take kindly to such a lack of respect towards their elders. A rather plaintive take on this came from Beriah Gwynfe Evans in the South Wales Daily News when he complained of the manner in which one heard ‘De Valera compared and contrasted with Lloyd George, to the latter’s disadvantage’. Now it is important to recognise that Evans’s decision to personalise Irish nationalism of that era into the form of Éamon de Valera was intentionally controversial. At the time – September 1923 – ‘Dev’ had just lost an ugly civil war against the majority faction in Sinn Fein and that part of the Free State’s population which was in favour of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In fact, he had just been incarcerated in Kilmainham – a location that will be familiar to many of you. It would be a further 18 months before he set about forming Fianna Faíl and finally turned his back on the most uncompromising and militant views among those that he had espoused during the civil war.
But by depersonalising the comment made by Cymru Fydd’s former Secretary, the point remains a fair one. Members of the second wave of Welsh nationalism did judge the first wave through comparing them with those Irish nationalists who incited the Easter Rising and who succeeded in bringing freedom to the greater part of Ireland. And verily they thought that a comparison of that sort favoured the Irish version over the Welsh version. Which brings us to the third part of my lecture, on the influence of Ireland – and specifically, the influence of Sinn Feín – on the early Plaid Genedlaethol.
- Sinn Féin’s influence on the second wave of Welsh nationalism
There is nothing new or original in highlighting the influence that events in Ireland post-1916 had on the early Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru. I will not try to go after those various aspects, either. There is far too much to cover to do justice to the whole issue – from the brave stance taken by Lewis Valentine and his fellow students in Bangor, to personal meetings in Ireland between, for example, D.J. Williams and Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins (in 1919) and, later, between Saunders Lewis and De Valera (1925). By the way, Saunders was memorably contemptuous of Dev – ‘He’s one of those types with a drunken mind, bombastic, unsystematic…’ – but that should not surprise us because Plaid’s leader was strongly supportive of the Treatyites in the Irish Civil War. On that basis, we should not expect him to have any fellow feeling with Dev in the summer of 1925. By 1938, however, with De Valera by then well respected and an uncompromising enemy of the republican ‘extremists’, Lewis had changed his tune and acknowledged Dev to be one of the world’s greatest leaders…
Rather than overusing quotations and examples, let me note the words of J.E. Jones, General Secretary and Organiser of Plaid Cymru between 1930 and 1962(!). ‘There is no doubt,’ he said
that Ireland was the greatest stimulus and inspiration for nationalism in Wales in our time… After the 1914-18 war,…there were a number of Welsh soldiers in the English army in Ireland who saw and understood the oppression there; sympathy grew towards Ireland, and that despite Lloyd George’s propaganda. Then Ireland won its freedom in 1921: the very first country in the whole empire to win it… It was through books that the Irish heroes became known and an encouragement for many of us in Wales… Thomas Davis’s ballads from the middle of the last century were familiar to a number of us…and the romantic hero Michael Collins… It was in Ireland too that H.R. Jones [Plaid Cymru’s first Secretary] got his greatest encouragement: he went there many times…. Ireland continued to be the shining light for very many in Plaid Cymru until the 1939-45 War even. A proof of that was the constant demand for books on the Irish struggles and their heroes in that time, and we used to sell such books by the hundred from Plaid Cymru’s Caernarfon office.
To avoid any uncertainty, it should be pointed out that part of Lloyd George’s cardinal sin in the eyes of the second wave of nationalists was the part he played firstly in standing against – and then diluting – Ireland’s ‘freedom’.
The point I wish to add to this familiar picture is that it was not only the actions and the ‘spirit’ of the Sinn Feiners which were inspirations in Wales. We have rather lost sight of the fact that the main ideas of the preppy Plaid Genedlaethol were also orthodoxly Sinn Fein-ist. The influence of Sinn Fein’s ideology could be seen not only among the grass roots membership, but also on its most important leader, namely Saunders Lewis.
A lot of ink has been spilt on efforts to prove the impact of various thinkers on Saunders Lewis’s beliefs. You have the deservedly well-known essay by Dafydd Glyn Jones on Lewis’s politics which discusses the influences of different French thinkers on his thoughts, or the efforts of D. Tecwyn Lloyd to prove the input of Hilaire Belloc, the Anglo-French Catholic philosopher. More recently, Robin Chapman has concentrated attention on the claimed influence of ‘two English social critics whose names have since been forgotten’ – Arthur Joseph Penty and Montague Edward Fordham.
But in terms of his political ideas at least, I surmise that the reality was a little more prosaic. Put simply, Saunders Lewis was a pupil of Arthur Griffith. Or to express it in slightly less provocative terms – Arthur Griffith’s main political views which he had popularised through the Sinn Fein movement tallied so closely with the views which were cherished later by Saunders Lewis that one can but conclude that the former had hugely influenced the latter, whether directly or indirectly. This can be seen by close reading of the political programme of Arthur Griffith and Sinn Fein and comparing it with the political programme adopted by the early Plaid Genedlaethol under Saunders Lewis’s influence.
Griffith believed that there would be no lifeline for Ireland’s predicament through the British state – neither from its political parties nor its other political institutions. It was instead essential to divest oneself of them and concentrate on acting at the level of the island of Ireland only. That meant that no-one elected in Sinn Fein’s name to the House of Commons should take their seat there (absentionism). Instead, the local governmental infrastructure in Ireland itself should be used as a platform for building up Irish politics and, indeed, the alternative Irish state inside the shell of the British state.
This was precisely the vision and policy followed by the cub Plaid Genedlaethol too. Only after the failure of Plaid Cymru’s campaign in the Arfon constituency at the 1929 general election was its policy of engaging with Westminster changed. (We should note that, at the time, 609 votes was considered a dreadful failure, even if Dafydd Iwan has charmed contemporary nationalists into thinking differently about it!) And the unstinting efforts of Saunders Lewis’s closest allies were required to force it to accept the change in policy. There is in fact plenty of evidence to suggest that his instincts remained absentionist throughout his lifetime.
Economic arguments were central to the political creed of Arthur Griffith, and economic self-sufficiency one of his big ideas. Let us be clear that this was not the economic credo of the the first wave of Welsh nationalists, but that had changed by the time the second wave had crested. There was without doubt more than one influence at work in ensuring this change. But the beliefs of Irish nationalists – the advanced nationalists influenced by Griffith – were key to it. One can in fact read the notorious ‘10 policy points’ set out by Saunders Lewis as an orthodox re-stating of the economic and social ideas embraced across the rift caused by the Irish civil war.
The constitutional ideas held by Saunders Lewis and the early Plaid Genedlaethol were also remarkably similar to those of Arthur Griffith – someone who was, of course, one of the supporters of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. So when Plaid Cymru published its plan for for the constitutional future of Wales at the turn of the 1930s, it was made perfectly clear that the Irish Free State was the model that Wales should try to emulate. And it was therefore ‘dominion status’ rather than full independence that was to be pursued. By remembering the stand (controversial, to some) Saunders Lewis made about royalty, it is worth remembering that Arthur Griffith himself backed continuation of the link between the Free State and royalty, on the basis of the type of ‘double monarchy’ found in the Austro-Hungarian empire.
But at the same time as desiring continuing links with the the British state and Crown, it is important to underline that Arthur Griffith and Sinn Fein on one hand, and Saunders Lewis and Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru on the other, were all uncompromising anti-imperialists. This was in fact one of the fundamental differences between – in Ireland – the main stream of nationalism embodied in the Irish Parliamentary Party and the ‘advanced nationalists’ of Sinn Féin. In Wales as well this was perhaps the most striking difference between the first wave of Welsh nationalists – all charmed in the end by British imperialism – and the second wave of Welsh nationalists, which has consistently been highly critical of the pomp and presumption of British imperialism and all other forms of imperialism for that matter. Once more, Ireland’s example, as J.E. Jones had pointed out, in being the first nation to free itself of Westminster’s clutches, was key in setting the tone.
And as we come to a close it is perhaps worth contemplating the following.
Over time the majority of Sinn Fein’s influence which formed so much of the world view and policy programme of the early Plaid Genedlaethol was by-passed. Welsh nationalists turned their backs on absentionism; on economic self-sufficiency; the party became content enough with working alongside British parties – the ‘English parties’, as the founders’ generation would have called them – in order to win concessions for Wales; and in 2003 the party decided to adopt ‘independence’ as its constitutional goal. One thing which however remains and it would be true to say has grown stronger than ever (almost) a century later is its objection to imperialism and, linked to that, its very different approach to international politics. One could in fact argue that this is the greatest and most fundamental difference nowadays in attitudes between the contemporary Plaid Cymru and the inheritors of the first wave of Welsh nationalism in the pro-Welsh wing of the Labour party. But you will have to wait for the book to hear more about that…
Thank you very much for your attention.
[1] Director of the Wales Governance Centre, Cardiff University.
[2] Saunders Lewis, ‘O.M. Edwards,’ in Gwynedd Pierce (ed) Triwyr Penllyn (Cardiff: Plaid Cymru, undated), p. 31
[3] Saunders Lewis, ‘O.M. Edwards,’ in Gwynedd Pierce (ed) Triwyr Penllyn (Cardiff: Plaid Cymru, undated), p. 31
[4] D. Tecwyn Lloyd, John Saunders Lewis: Y Gyfrol Gyntaf (Denbigh: Gwasg Gee, 1988), p. 185
