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. While the two disasters helped to reignite the campaign for the Welsh language and reignited Welsh nationalism, it also showed how the English bullied their neighbour and was quite happy to ruin Welsh communities without much thought. Which helps to explain the very long campaign of sabotage and disobedience during the 1970s and 80s, which are vividly written about. Pungent language too is expressed on the quality of government. Andrew Davies again: “Local government corruption was quite endemic.” Rosemary Butler remembers: “It was an era when people who you wouldn’t have automatically assumed to be of the highest ability emerged as head teachers at local schools and then, lo and behold, they were members of the Labour Party.” Kim Howells: “all those Valleys Initiatives were rubbish, bloody rubbish.”

This weekend, Nation.Cymru is honoured to publish two exclusive extracts from the newly published Brittle with Relics by Richard King. 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’. When better than St. David’s Day to announce that our Book of the Month is Richard King’s ‘Brittle With Relics: A History of Wales 1962 —1997’, just-published by Faber. Reading it is much like keeping the company of Wales’s most interesting, erudite people, writes Pamela Petro. We then see during the Miners Strike of 1984-85 the destroying of many industrial communities in the south of the country. Even today when one speaks of the coal fields it is today of the economic and public health disadvantages that these areas are forced to face. By Christ – or Iesu Grist! – this isn’t how things stand today, the principality having become, since I left for university and for good in 1978, a foreign country, its language as comprehensible to outsiders as Igbo or Bulgarian. That Monmouthshire and most of Glamorganshire persist in being English-speaking, despite Welsh being a compulsory subject in schools since 1990, is something that makes for “a schizophrenia”, as one of King’s witnesses terms it.For a long time the national movement (especially direct action groups fighting for Welsh language) and local Labour were moving in different directions. Saunders Lewis himself looked like some continental right-wing political activist from 1930s: ‘His image of Plaid Cymru had been of Action Française in Wales, but the uncomfortable fascist resonances of those early days had been, I think, very successfully buried by the sixties’, says Rowan Williams. Lewis’ followers remember themselves in the 1960s as fervent old-school nationalists: ‘I knew beyond doubt at that moment, the terrible power of the love which had motivated our fighting ancestors such as Caradoc, Buddug, Arthur, Glyndŵr, Llywelyn; my blood was singing to me of a long race memory of dungeons and death for the cause, and I was so submerged in the compelling ecstasy of sacrifice that I would have welcomed pain with joy’, says John Barnard Jenkins. 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.

This is a wonderful book built on the oral history of the Welsh from the 1960s to the formation of the Welsh referendum which brought them an elected Assembly and a semblance of some freedom for London. This book really is about the history of the people of Wales and how they have had to overcome some brutal circumstances which bonded the many communities of the Principality.Brittle with Relics is a collective story of this historical period told by almost 100 voices, from the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury and a former leader of the Labour Party to Welsh language campaigners, record producers, schoolteachers, firemen, and poets. There are 16 milestones/chapters on the way from 1962 to 1997; every chapter can be read as a distinct story. The compiler-author of the book is a music writer and journalist. The fact that King was born into a bilingual family in South Wales and for the last twenty years has lived in the rural county of Powys explains a lot about his personal intention. He made a book on the history of his country which formed him as he is. However, the author from Monmouthshire adds that “since I left for university and for good in 1978, [Wales has become] a foreign country, its language as comprehensible to outsiders as Igbo or Bulgarian”.

Brittle with Relics is a vital history of Wales undergoing some of the country’s most seismic and traumatic events: the disasters of Aberfan and Tryweryn; the rise of the Welsh language movement; the Miners’ Strike and its aftermath; and the narrow vote in favour of partial devolution. Brittle With Relics is nuanced, passionate and reflective, conveying a very Welsh blend of fatalism and hope.’ Rhian E. Jones, History TodayR. 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 Wales felt the effect of the international revolutionary fervour of the late 1960s. In 1969 the investiture at Caernarfon of Queen Elizabeth’s eldest son Charles as Prince of Wales was seen by some as a humiliating display of colonialism. Two members of the Free Wales Army were killed by their own device a day ahead of the investiture; on the day itself a child lost a leg to a bomb in Caernarfon. Another device targeted the royal yacht Britannia. Brittle with Relics is a landmark history of the people of Wales during a period of great national change .