A History of Wales by John Davies

Holding all Wales in one's hand.

While I loved this book, a revised English translation of Hanes Cymru first published in 1993 (the Welsh version came out in 1990) and now including stuff on devolution and the fledgling - as it was at the time - Welsh Government, I encountered the same issues I have had, since time immemorial, when it comes to history and its central pillars of dates and names.

I just can’t take it in.

Sitting as I am at the desk in my parents’ office-cum-grandson’s-bedroom in July 2024, a mere 19 months since picking this book up, one might expect a degree of slippage in the memory department. However, I couldn’t tell you by simple recall ANY of the major dates in Welsh history, nor any of the major players outside of Owain Glyndwr and Llywelyn the Great (I even had to Google Llywelyn to reassure myself I hadn’t made him up). When I say recall I mean drawing from memory a date or name that I once read and memorised for future reference. They just slip away into the fog of time. And don’t get me started on centuries – what century are we in now? I have to look at a calendar and work it out. Names are even worse, but some of that I put down to the limited and patriarchal naming conventions of ancient-to-post-medieval Wales – it is hard to keep track of all the Dafydds, Owains, Madogs, Mabons, Iorwerths, Gruffydds, Rhyss, Maredydds et al whose names appear not only as forenames, but surnames as well – Llywelyn was ab (or son of) Iorwerth, and his uncle was Dafydd ab Owain Gwynedd. I mean, come on! And yes, I looked that up too.

I never thought I’d be grateful for Victorian English bureaucracy.

Anyway, this means that without the book to hand – my brother has made off with it and I no longer know its whereabouts or condition – I would find it hard to talk with any authority on the superb and scholarly work it contains*, the wealth of amazing information about this hilly little principality I love and in which I live, or the fact that free prescriptions in Wales are all thanks to Mark Drakeford, so stick that up your pipes, motoring libertarians! If you think driving 10 miles an hour faster is worth killing a child for you’re a complete and utter cunt and should have voted for Reform UK in yesterday’s general election. Oh, I see, you did. Well, that just proves my point doesn’t it.

Incidentally, or rather tangentially, Wales returned no Tory (or Reform UK!) members of parliament yesterday, not one - another reason I rather like Wales. 40% of people in the UK might be cunts (largely clustered it seems around the estuarine hamlets of Southern England) but in Wales they are so thinly spread that they don’t negatively affect life too much. You might run into one in a pub but he or she won’t be ushering in a new age of Tory austerity.

On with the story!

So, back to the book and the many features which recommend its reading, the one I can confidently recall** is the author himself. I met John Davies in 2007 when the revised issue was published and at my bookshop we ran a relaunch event. He was a lovely, silver-haired gentleman with a firm but fair handshake and a ready smile, and he read beautifully. I didn’t know much about him then, but as the S4C programme Gwirionedd y Galon would later show his was a very interesting life indeed.

John Davies was born in 1938 in Llwynypia Hospital, and was named after a trade-unionist uncle. His family was generally English-speaking but he learned fluent Welsh at Tregarron Grammar School, and his childhood took in both the industrial terraced houses of the South Wales Valleys and the rural hinterland of Cardiganshire, a background which must have surely fired his love of land and language. A graduate of Cardiff University and Trinity College Cambridge, he took some time to tour Europe before his first degree, and joined Plaid Cymru in the 60s. He championed the culture and language of Wales, helped set up the Welsh Language Society and was behind the push, incomprehensible to our noisy neighbours, to include Welsh place names and directions on our road signs. He and his wife very nearly emigrated after the failure of the first Welsh devolution vote and the advent of the Age of Maggie T in 1979, but thankfully for everyone he didn’t. Eventually settling in my old stamping ground of Grangetown in Cardiff, he worked for the BBC as their official historian of Wales as well as completing the Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales (not all on his own, but he did write many of the entries himself) and appearing on TV panels on historical and political issues. And he was a great guest!

Very definitely worth noting was the fact that despite being seemingly happily married – he and his wife did eventually split up but they lived until his death only a few doors from each other and remained very close - he was (eventually) openly bisexual***, ‘coming out’ in 1998 in an era when the papers were full of extremely primitive attitudes to homosexuality – MP Ron Davies was prominently featured in their disapproving nonsense at the time. John Davies said, many years later:

There is only one community and we are all members of it, but within that one community there should be a myriad of multiple identities: that is the way ahead.

In any event, he was instrumental in making Wales interesting again, and his work no doubt led directly or indirectly to the successful referendum on devolved powers. It certainly helped ground the Cool Cymru movement of the 1990s with some historical and mythological context, without which I wouldn’t have anywhere near as many odd Welsh band t-shirts.

All of which should have convinced you by now that if you read only one comprehensive history of a Western European principality this decade, you should make it this one.

 

*For a more content-driven review you could do worse than visit fionnchu.blogspot.com where someone with a background in history and intelligent debate has done all the hard work for you.

**Fuck off, yes, I Googled that too, and am indebted to Meic Birtwistle’s entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography for lots of the details which I had forgotten and had to look up again.

***There’s a lovely and short post about Davies’s work in the LGBTQ+ community, and the quote mentioned above, here: https://queerwelsh.tumblr.com/post/182509821145/john-davies-lgbt-history-month-cymru-2012.     

(Paid link)