How red was my valley?

Alan Watkins

The story goes that in the days of the old South Wales Miners' Federation (before it became part of the National Union of Mineworkers) there was a discus- sion about the respective qualities of two colliers — let us call them Will and Dai conducted with a view to the preferment of one or other within the union. Will, it was generally agreed, was a solid citizen, kind- hearted, a bit unimaginative perhaps, but active in the St John's Ambulance. Dai, on the other hand, was a little wayward, rumoured to be something of a boozer on the quiet. Nevertheless it was agreed that advancement should go to Dai because `when you come down to it, Dai has got the dialectic'.

I once told this story to the late George Hutchinson in some connection or other, undoubtedly in some pub or other. Dear old George quite missed the point. 1 thought it uncivil to try to put him right. He took the story to mean that Dai was being commended for his dialectical skills, his readiness in committee or debate. He may have possessed these abilities too, but the reason for preferring him in the union was his apparent command of dialectical materialism (doubtless more apparent than real, which is why the story is funny).

Professor Williams likewise has got the dialectic. He is a Marxist. Twenty or so years ago people might have written 'a self- confessed Marxist', as if Marxism were something to be confessed, like foot- fetishism. No longer. Marxist history is now a respectable activity, and Professor Williams one of its most respected practi- tioners. Perhaps 'respected' is the wrong word. It is the adjective people in England would always attach to Jim Griffiths in his declining years. Professor Williams is not at all like Jim (though he too started life as a Marxist, at the pioneering adult education centre, the White House, Ammanford).

Nor, I suspect, are Professor Williams's views or his method of expressing them wholly to the taste of his more orthodox colleagues. Though he has some of the jargon, having a particular fondness for `stasis', he is not only a very good but a very funny writer and, as we pass through this vale of tears, we should be grateful for all the laughs we can get. As with Dr John- son's friend who wanted to be a philo- sopher, cheerfulness will keep breaking through. In one of his essays — from a col- lection of eight, with a Preface of essay length — he writes that 'it is quite literally true that, as a youth, I had met a fascist before I ever met anyone who was shame- less enough, indeed anarchically un- disciplined enough, publicly to proclaim that he or she was a Conservative'. Mr Richard West has an addition to this sentence: 'an experience rendered all the more disturbing by its coincidence with the onset of adolescence'; but, alas, it is apocryphal. Professor Williams did not ut- ter it; or, if he did, he has chosen to delete

it.

Professor Williams has several other un- Marxist qualities. One is a liking for, even an obsession with, what might generically be called queer fish, magicians, wizards, alchemists and necromancers, exemplified by Elizabeth I's learned old fraud, Dr John Dee: a most Welsh preoccupation, this, even though Professor Williams is mostly admirably sceptical about Welsh roman- ticism, at any rate in its more recent manifestations. And another un-Marxist quality he possesses is a large sump of com- mon sense. Thus, in his essay 'The Primitive Rebel and the History of the Welsh': It has become necessary to reaffirm that 90 per cent of bandits are plain common or garden bandits, that the social protest

expressed, for example, by a gang clob- bering an old woman for her handbag 15 directed primarily against old women with handbags. It can, of course, be in- terpreted as a sub-political revolt by depraved elements (depraved on account of they're deprived) demanding equality in the distribution of handbags. That way madness lies.

Inevitably there are repetitions in the essays, no bad thing in itself, partly because if a point is worth making it is worth repeating (in moderation of course) and partly because the repetitions establish Pro- fessor Williams's point of view. For this Is what I should call a proper book not only in that it has Acknowledgements, a Preface and the rest of the paraphernalia but in that it tries to say something.

In a review of Dr Kenneth Morgan's re- cent book on modern Welsh history, Dr David Smith (another Welsh Marxist historian) took Dr Morgan to task for men- tioning Bleddyn Williams, the Cardiff Rugby player, but not Trevor Ford, the Swansea Soccer player. This omission, Dr Smith opined — he gave other examples — demonstrated Dr Morgan's thralldom to a certain view of Welsh history which em- phasised Rugby, Nonconformity (especiallY Calvinistic Methodism), Liberalism (belated- ly supplanted by Labourism), the Welsh language and farming, and chose to disregard the lives of the people as they were actually led in Glamorgan and Mon- mouthshire. Professor Williams does not deal with Dr Morgan's book, except to refer to it with admiration in passing. But his attitude does not differ markedly from Dr Smith's though, with space at his dis- posal, he expresses it with greater subtlety- Welsh history is, or was, out of focus: so much is agreed. But was it out of focus because the historians themselves made it so, were dominated by myths of one kind or another; or because the myths were the history? Professor Williams continually ad- dresses himself to questions of this nature. It is one of the merits of his book that he does not pretend to answer them, because they cannot be answered, only talked about. For example, Rugby, appropriated late in the day by the Welsh Nationalists (or some of them), was originally brought to Wales by the often public school-educated clergy of the Church of England, then still established. The game was denounced from the chapel pulpits, and teams were decimated by the periodic religious revivals which engulfed the emotions of the in- dustrial population and led one noted per- former to declare: `I used to play full-back for the Devil, but now I'm forward for God.'

Similarly, Calvinistic Methodism came via the established church, as Wesleyan Methodism had come in England. Howell Harris, an 18th-century vicar, was an, acolyte both of George Whitefield and 01 the American Jonathan Edwards. The greatest Welsh hymnologist — probably the greatest Welsh poet — was William Williams, a Calvinist vicar at Pantycelyn

just outside Llandovery in Carmarthen- shire, as it used to be called.

Religion is always a difficult topic for

1 Marxists to accommodate satisfactorily: cf. Poland today. It is another of Professor Williams's merits that he does not try to ex- Plain it away. As he correctly writes, many Welshmen in the 18th and 19th centuries, some even later, lived their entire lives — in- deed defined their personalities — through the interpretation of certain scriptural texts. I am reminded of the Welshman who was shipwrecked on a desert island. A resourceful fellow, he made himself as com- fortable as he could. Eventually he was rescued by a passing ship. The ship's cap- tain, impressed by the buildings the Welshman had created, pointed to two par- ticularly impressive ones, and asked what they were.

'Those are my chapels,' the Welshman explained.

'I can see you wanted one chapel, but why two?'

'Well, you see, that one over there is my chapel, and the other is the one I don't go to.'

But Professor Williams does permit himself a bit of history of the 'if only ...' variety. If only, he implies, enlightened Dis- sent, democratic, radical, even vaguely scientific Dissent had taken a firmer hold on the population in the 19th century, then history might have been different. Instead of which the other dissenting churches, notably the larger sects of Independents and Baptists, were hardly distinguishable from the Calvinists, though there were cer- tain exceptions such as the Unitarians. There here was even a sect of Calvinistic Baptists based just' outside Carmarthen.

Professor Williams entitled one of his essays 'When Was Wales?' and perhaps needed much demonstrating — was at its Pogee in roughly 1880-1920. The place was Civilised one perhaps, but neither brutish nor lacking in reward. He is equally clear that, at this period, capitalism as a system answers it in another, 'Imperial Wales'. South Wales, he demonstrates — not that it like the Klondyke, and he pays tribute to tile people who lived there and organised some kind of existence for themselves, not a deserves more praise than blame. He hazards that, without the industrialisation un- of the late 19th century, Wales might have become like the Irish Republic. This, Pro- fessor Williams assumes, would not have been a good thing, indeed a distinctly bad thing. Afterwards capitalism gets all the blame. tYPically tumid passage, that Wales cannot survive as a nation unless capitalism is first destroyed. I believe that, in regard to the inter-war period, he places too much weight on capitalism and the Depression and not In fact Professor Williams asserts, in an enough on technical progress in other coun- tries and the Navy's decision to go over to oil. But we agree that Wales is changing and that a crucial year was 1979, with the over- whelming vote against devolution and the election of 11 Conservative MPs, compared

to 21 Labour, one Liberal and two Na- tionalist. The old myths will clearly no longer serve. But why, I wonder, do we need new ones?