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The Welsh Renaissance: Boer War to World War, 1899-1914

La Renaissance galloise : De la Guerre des Boers à la Première Guerre mondiale. 1899-1914
Kenneth O. Morgan

Abstracts

This article proposes to study the rebirth of a nation, Wales, during the Edwardian years, by first considering the deep changes affecting the country, be they economic, social and cultural, giving it a new lease of life. Such changes led to a new prominence of the symbols and institutions of Welsh nationhood, and successes, especially in sport. All these areas of dominance owed their essence to politics, notably the Liberal domination, that came to be questioned.

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Introduction

  • 1 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol.1, (1766-1788), Everyman edition, 1994 (...)

1In the history of modern Wales, the Edwardian years just before the First World War appear in retrospect to be a time of hope and glory. Their influence on the experiences of contemporary Wales later appeared in the advent of devolution in 1999, which was not in fact a major theme in the period before 1914. In those halcyon years the Welsh nation, previously regarded as a poorer and marginal fringe of England and its empire, saw unprecedented growth; from literary and musical creativity to dramatic events in the world of sport, the nation acquired a fame and distinction unknown since the Act of Union in 1536. Edward Gibbon, writing his epic history of the Roman Empire, wrote of the period of the Antonine empire in the second century AD as one when the citizens of Rome were “most happy, cultivated and prosperous”.1 In the more parochial but increasingly influential history of the Welsh people, the dynamic years up to 1914 may be regarded as their Antonine Age. In the early twenty-first century, for instance, in celebrating a hundred years of Welsh and Welsh-language broadcasting in the principality in 2023, the legacy of the Edwardian era for the daily lives of Welsh citizens can still be felt.

A new lease of life for Wales: political, social, and cultural changes

  • 2 Report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the Church and other religious bodies (2 v (...)
  • 3 Among them were my own parents, the offspring of a village blacksmith and a fisherman who attended (...)

2The Edwardian renaissance began at home. It was founded on local democracy, reflected in the general election of 1868, in national politics and social leadership as well. It stemmed from Wales, rural, urban, and industrial, located in the local authorities set up by the Local Government Act 1888, which galvanized Wales as it did England. This meant that local leadership came, not from the largely Anglican, anglicised, hierarchical elite – who were often absentee landlords who had imposed their authority on largely Welsh-speaking, chapel-going middle-class and working-class people since Tudor times. Rather, it came from the Liberal-voting majority of citizens. From 1888, these local county councils, with the occasional exceptions of rural Breconshire and Radnorshire along the rural borders with England, stayed firmly and irrevocably in the hands of Liberal councillors down to the First World War, when the rise of Labour provided a new and unfamiliar challenge. In 1904, every local Welsh county council fell into Liberal hands, and imposed that ethos on the local population.2 Furthermore, these Liberal councils were highly active, especially in developing a new system of secondary education, an area where Wales had long been felt to be deficient (though this was wrongly attributed to the prevalence of the Welsh language). Lord Aberdare’s report of 1881, which created new university institutions in Bangor in North Wales, Cardiff in the South and eventually confirmed the future life of the “college by the sea” at Aberystwyth, created a new demand for higher education. This resulted in the new Intermediate Schools (in effect a Welsh equivalent of English grammar schools) throughout Wales. In their first years over a hundred of these schools were created, and provided a start in professional life for tens of thousands of young Welsh working-class people.3 These pupils created a new educational elite, which contributed much to Wales, from its local social services to the nation’s rugby team. The county councils and the county schools together were responsible for much of the growth of modern Wales.

  • 4 Eric Wyn Evans, The Miners of South Wales (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1961); Roy Church et (...)

3In other areas of life, this new Wales reflected many important areas of growth. First, there was a huge surge of economic growth of worldwide importance. This was most marked in the expansion of the coal industry especially from the growth of mines in the Rhondda valleys in the 1880s, but which was equally powerful in the anthracite coalfield of west Wales and the central and eastern steam and bituminous coalfields of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, which by 1914 had become the greatest coal exporting coalfield in the entire world, providing a third of world trade and four fifths of the world coal-carrying trade.4 From the Cynon valley in the west to the Rhymney in the east, the whole of south Wales was pulsating with growth while the ports of Cardiff, Newport, and Swansea, along with the new town of Barry shipped their mineral products across the planet.

  • 5 A common joke in Welsh chapels was that irreverent Sunday school pupils would identify the Holy Tri (...)

4If coal became especially identified with south Wales (as well as the coalfield around Wrexham in the north-east) for many decades down to the 1870s, there were other industries, which were booming. The Welsh steel industry was also surging ahead, from East Moors in Cardiff to Shotton in the north-east industrial belt. In 1909, the firm John Summers expanded their Shotton works with a vast new plant for the making of steel bars.5 The Welsh tinplate industry in Carmarthenshire and the Swansea valley also showed signs of resurgence after the cruel impact of the American McKinley import tariff in the 1890s. A great deal of the territory of Wales, of course, was agricultural, much of it consisting of marginal sheep and cattle farming. But even here were signs of recovery after the harsh world depression years of the 1890s. One hopeful sign was that the negligible tenant farming of the nineteenth century was beginning to give way to a more sustainable ‘green revolution’ of farm ownership where farmers owned their own tools and stock and were beginning to respond to the new opportunities of mechanization to develop the cultivation of their tenure. Blacksmiths were being replaced by garage mechanics. Welsh lamb began to sell widely in North Africa.

  • 6 Arthur James Cook, 1883-1931, trade unionist.
  • 7 Published in 1912, calling on miners to adopt a new kind of 'scientific' trade unionism.

5This all brought such immense hopefulness for the Welsh nation. It meant that south Wales especially was particularly vigorous, offering new opportunities to surplus labour from the Welsh countryside and to very many migrants from across the English border. Some of these migrants were of socially radical outlook like A.J. Cook6 and the mining authors of the Miners’ Next Step.7 What was most important, though, was that the dramatic growth of the southern coalfield and its attendant urban centres offered new opportunities for employment and life chances for young, otherwise impoverished Welsh men (women came well afterwards, as will be discussed later) – unlike the depression and mass poverty of the Irish countryside (in large measure the result of the ignorance and deindustrialisation wrought by English absentee landowners). Wales did not suffer this fate at all before 1914. It was no longer the sick man of the Celtic fringe.

  • 8 M.J. Daunton, Coal Metropolis, Cardiff 1870-1914 (University of Leicester Press, Leicester, 1977).

6Edwardian Wales also displayed a new urban and civic dynamism. Wales, with its symbolism based on small face-to-face gwerinol (popular) villages was starting to become a country of cities. There was the rapid urban and suburban growth of Cardiff, Swansea, and Newport in the south, while far smaller towns like Tenby in Pembrokeshire, Aberdyfi in Merionieth and Llandudno in Caernarfonshire benefited as tourist resorts, much assisted by the spread of railways from England and much better roads in north, mid- and west Wales which brought visitors in large numbers. In the depths of Wales, the small spa town of Llandrindod in Radnorshire became a stylish vacation centre for young men and women; with its hotels, tea-dances, croquet and precious chalybeate water, it was a Welsh Harrogate or Cheltenham, even an insular Vichy or Marienbad. Cardiff was especially a beneficiary of this new urban growth and was designated as a city in 1905 and as capital of Wales in 1955. It attracted not only many migrants from down the valleys but also from overseas. Tiger Bay and Bute Town, especially the Bute docks and Roath basin, were a magnet for Indians, Chinese, Somalis, Maltese and others, while chambers of commerce, with battalions of self-confident ship-owners and other businessmen directed operations in the dockyards.8 For others, Cardiff was a Mecca for patrons of large stores like Howells, a large array of nonconformist chapels and sporting stadiums. In the city centre, Cardiff’s Cathays Park was also by 1914 ringed with civic and national monuments such as the National Museum and Cardiff University College, built in the Edwardian baroque style fashionable at the time, along with Lanchester and Rickards’s city hall, crowned by an enormous Welsh dragon to remind the Cardiff public of their city’s new status. Cardiff also displayed its own suburban developments, like Rhiwbina and Radyr in the north, intended to emulate the cross-class garden cities of London like ‘Hampstead Garden Suburb’. The Welsh Housing Association included trade union socialists like Edgar Chappell. Nevertheless, like their London counterparts, Rhiwbina and other suburban strongholds were destined to become a middle-class refuge for bankers, accountants, university teachers and such like. They, like Brynmill in Swansea, and Penarth adjacent to Cardiff, were catering for the newish phenomenon of a Welsh middle class.

  • 9 The Royal Commission Report gave the figures for 1905 for Church members at 193,081 and Nonconformi (...)

7Another distinctive feature of the Edwardian renaissance was the emphatic dominance of the nonconformist chapels, Calvinist Methodists, Independents, Baptists and Wesleyans, with small sprinklings of Unitarians and Quakers. For Protestant Wales, the Edwardian years were truly a high noon, a period of social ascendancy facilitated by the rise of greater political democracy. This was confirmed in a religious census taken in 1905, as a preliminary to the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, which showed that the religious population of Wales revealed a majority of over three to one for the nonconformist chapels (less attention was paid to the other revelation that a quarter or more of the Welsh population were apparently not identified with any place of worship at all). The numbers of Welsh nonconformists had expanded massively as a result of the unforeseen religious revival of 1904 – of which the main evangelist leader was a charismatic if unstable minister, the Reverend Evan Roberts. The membership of the four main nonconformist bodies rose to a record total of over half a million in 1906, on the eve of the general election of that year.9 Their influence extended to all areas of social life the growing temperance movement, and the growth of the university colleges (the Anglican Lampeter college refused to join the chapel-dominated University of Wales when it was formed in 1893 and stayed aloof until the 1950s). The local Welsh-language press, the annual national cultural festival, the eisteddfod, and the literary and musical flourishing of the Edwardian years, and above all the fierce campaign for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, which reached a new climax, social and parliamentary, after 1906. Famous popular preachers such as the blind minister, Puleston Jones, and the Rev. John Williams, Brynsiencyn, became great national heroes.

8The dominance of the chapels had its limitations. It encouraged the stern and often unfeeling moral puritanism which challenged personal lives. The Sabbatarianism of the bleak and austere Welsh Sundays greatly diminished the quality of life, especially for the young, and often discouraged or censored the arts, such as the writing of plays or novels. As noted earlier, the chapels tended to ignore the growing numbers of agnostics and other unbelievers, in the intensity of their fight against the largely Tory Anglican Church. For all that, the creative power of nonconformity and its ethos could not be doubted. Even the growing labour movement showed its influence, with many young socialist men like the youthful Arthur Horner, Noah Ablett and Ness Edwards, finding a new impetus for their passion for social change, and some even looking to start new careers as ministers of religion, inspired by theologians who preached the New Theology, Y Diwynyddiaeth Newydd, anxious to build a new heaven on earth. Some even became socialists.

  • 10 Robert Gerallt Jones, T.H.Parry Williams (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1978).
  • 11 Hazel Walford Davies, Llythyrau Syr Owen M. Edwards (Gomer Press, Llandyssul, 1991) [in Welsh].

9A closely related feature of the Edwardian renaissance was the remarkable creativity in the arts, linguistic, literary and to a degree musical. There was a growing readership for the poems of authors such as Thomas Gwynn Jones (a private socialist), Silyn Roberts and Professor W. J. Gruffydd, now at the height of their powers along with much younger poets such as R. Williams Parry and Thomas Parry Williams. Their writings were suffused with the rural nostalgia common at the time. Parry Williams’s poem Y Ddinas (the City) was an Edwardian onslaught on the cruelty and immorality of the modern city (Paris being a particular target).10 Both in its literary standards and its popular appeal, the annual national eisteddfod, a unique festival of the creative arts, was thriving. There was an intense emotional fascination with the young Merioneth shepherd boy, known by his bardic name of Hedd Wyn who won the eisteddfodic chair at the festival at Birkenhead in 1917. There it was announced that he had just lost his life at the battle of Passchendaele; the chair was then draped in black. A major cultural pioneer was the Oxford history don, Owen M. Edwards, Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, who saw it as his life’s task to introduce children to the new Welsh-language poetry and prose through a journal for young people, Cymru Coch.11 His son, Ifan ab Owen Edwards was to carry on the same message by forming the Welsh youth movement, Urdd Gobaith Cym, and his grandson, Owen Edwards, was to continue, devoting his career to Welsh television. Each generation found its own form of cultural transmission. It was also a heyday for Welsh choirs, their fame extended by the eisteddfod. Such choirs as those of Pendyrus and the Morriston Orpheus in south Wales and Rhosllanerchrugog in the north-east coalfield acquired great eminence with oratorios, and their competitions with English choirs from the north like that of Huddersfield were keenly contested. A different theme came from a famous Cardiff women’s choir, conducted by Clara Novello Davies, the mother of a later Welsh popular composer of West End musicals, Ivor Novello.

  • 12 My own grandfather, a village blacksmith, who had very little formal education, left after his deat (...)
  • 13 Trevor L. Williams, Caradoc Evans, (University of Wales, Cardiff, 1971).
  • 14  Dylan Thomas, in John Ackerman, Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work, (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, (...)

10The Welsh language underwent further refinement and extension as with many vernacular tongues in central and Eastern Europe, such as Finnish and Slovak. Work began on a new Welsh dictionary under Sir John Morris-Jones who continued this, alongside pioneering research on Welsh grammar and syntax. In 1909, he launched a new academic journal Y Beiniiad which sold surprisingly well. The established Welsh language journals, the quarterly Tratethodydd and the Genhinen, also sold widely.12 The linguistic census of 1911 showed that around fifty per cent of the Welsh people (the highest proportion ever recorded) were native language speakers, so the readership for these publications clearly existed. There was some complacency on this point and future years were to show the vulnerability of the language in the face of English migrants through the growth of industrialisation in the southern valleys and the dominance of English literacy in Welsh schools, an essential part of English colonialism. After the First World War, a new creative art form emerged, Anglo-Welsh literature in poetry and prose. Interestingly an early pioneer of it was Caradoc Evans, a satirical commentator on the Welsh culture of the pre-war Edwardian years, and a highly controversial figure for this reason.13 He was to be followed, in a more affectionate way, by Dylan Thomas, who satirised “the Welsh sea whose fish are great Liberals, fond of laver brad and broth, and on Sundays attend their green and watery chapels”.14

Symbols of nationhood and elements of pride

  • 15 This comes from the 1888 entry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

11The impact of all these social and cultural changes led to a new prominence of the symbols and institutions of Welsh nationhood. The Edwardian years witnessed many of these. The creation of the federal University of Wales, consisting of the colleges of Bangor, Aberystwyth and Cardiff was a crucially important factor, increasingly producing graduate recruits for the emerging administrative and bureaucratic life of Wales. Another was the National Museum of Wales in Cathays Park, Cardiff, founded in 1905 to proclaim national traditions in art, anthropology, and ethnology. It was linked to a national Art Gallery, later to be greatly embellished by an important bequest of French Impressionist paintings, donated by the two philanthropic Davies sisters of Gregynog Hall. If the Museum went to the south of Wales, after a fierce argument, the National Library, established in 1907, had to be located somewhere else, and it was thus set up beside the sea on the hillside of Aberystwyth in mid-Wales. It was the nation’s first copyright library and a world-famous treasure-house of literature and learning closely linked to the nearby university college of Wales. Scholarship in Wales now had a resource never experienced before. In a broad sense the status and identity of Wales was increasingly recognised throughout the United Kingdom: it was no longer a case of “For Wales, see England”.15

  • 16 National sports stadium of Wales, in Cardiff city centre, demolished in 1997 to make way for the Mi (...)
  • 17 Theodore Watts Dunton’s introduction to the 1906 edition of George Borrow’s Wild Wales, pp. xxii – (...)

12A sense of national pride and identity emerged in these years in far more popular and populist areas of mass interest, namely in the world of sport. The nationwide renaissance was as evident on the rugby field as on the eisteddfod field. In December 1905, just before the general election, the Welsh rugby team defeated the hitherto unbeaten touring New Zealand, the “All Blacks” in an historic encounter at Cardiff Arms Park16 by one try, giving a score of 3-0. So far, Wales has only defeated visiting New Zealanders on two subsequent occasions, in 1935 and 1953, so the triumph in the Edwardian years has acquired a mythic quality all of its own. Journalists shamelessly drew on Darwinian terminology to point out, contrary to Matthew Arnold’s famous one-time distinction, the racial superiority of the Celt over the Saxon.17 It gave Wales a special reputation for its qualities of rugby football, with a forward pack of workers drawn from heavy industry being accompanied by backs increasingly drawn from the professional classes and the public schools. Welsh rugby matches became a kind of folk festival, especially attached to the Welsh-speaking population, and especially popular when Wales defeated its English neighbour... More controversial was the other area where Wales gained eminence in sport – professional boxing. The coalfield, docks and heavy industry of south Wales proved to be an excellent training ground for ambitious, physically powerful young men. Frederick Hall Thomas, known in the ring as Freddie Welsh, became British feather-weight champion in 1909 and beat an American to become world champion in 1913. His contemporary and rival, Jim Driscoll, a Cardiffian of Irish background, won the British bantamweight championship in this period and retired undefeated as world champion in 1913. Perhaps the most remarkable was Jimmy Wilde, (1892-1969), a Welsh miner from Tylorstown in the Rhondda valley who became a professional boxer and subsequently world fly-weight champion in 1916. In his career he lost a mere four contests out of over 900. In the popular press at the time, such men outstripped the preachers, poets and professors of the cultural renaissance of the day. The other side of this activity was shown by his winning a fortune of £70,000, which his advisers very soon lost for him. It was a cruel form of national celebrity.

The impact of Wales in politics

  • 18 A popular title for Wales, named for the Prince of Wales.

13All these areas of eminence except the last owed their essence to politics, to the triumph of mass democracy shown in the almost total dominance of the Liberal Party dating from the South African war of 1899-1902, then with the increasing influence of their electoral allies, the new Labour Party from 1906 onwards. This was as pronounced, as we have seen, in local elections as in parliamentary ballots. The newly vibrant democracy threw up new leaders, new programmes, almost a new vocabulary. The Liberal ascendancy, which can be dated from William Gladstone’s leadership of the party from 1868 onwards, was intimately linked with many of the developments mentioned above, the new industries and free trade, the civic growth and the local press, the stimulus of nonconformist religious life especially after the religious revival of 1904-5, the Sunday school and the temperance movement, the Band of Hope, and the upsurge in both popular and academic literary and musical couture. The Reform Act of 1884 and the accompanying redistribution of constituencies in 1885 had a huge impact on Welsh democratic politics. A range of new working-class constituencies came into being. From 1868 until well into the next century, Liberals were in total control in Wales) and in the 1906 general election, they captured all thirty-four seats in the principality,18 save for Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party, elected in the two-member constituency of Merthyr Tydfil. Even the great Hardie came second to a mediocre local Liberal junior MP.

  • 19 Eric Wyn Evans, Mabon (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1959).
  • 20 Lord Rosebury was the UK Prime Minister, from March 1894 to June 1895.
  • 21 T.I. Ellis, Cofiant T.E. Ellis (Gwasg y Brython, Liverpool, 2 vols. 1944-1948) [in Welsh]; and Nevi (...)
  • 22 Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism, An Ideology of Social Reform (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987).

14The new type of MP was notable for being younger, mostly Welsh speaking, nonconformist by religion and broadly of the middle class. They were socially inclusive, embracing coal owners and ship-owners as well as miners’ agents. Even some early Labour MPs, like William Abraham, “Mabon”, president of the South Wales Miners Federation, was a solid Liberal of the so-called ‘Lib-Lab’ persuasion.19 He silenced the House by reciting the words of the Lord’s Prayer in Welsh in a House of Commons debate. They included some gifted politicians, like Ellis Griffith who served at the Home Office, Herbert Lewis junior minister at the Education Department, Samuel Evans, the Attorney General. The brilliant Tom Ellis, a farmer’s son from near Bala in Merioneth, and a nationalist disciple of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy and Lajos Kossuth in Hungary, served as Liberal chief whip under Lord Rosebery20 in the 1890s before his early death.21 Above all others, far beyond the boundaries of eminence was the young David Lloyd George, born in 1863, brought up in a small Caernarfonshire village by his shoe-maker uncle, who became President of the Board Trade in 1905, until 1908, then Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908 to 1915, and was ultimately to become the first (and so far only) Welsh prime minister in December 1916 during the supreme crisis of the First World War. He became the epitome of the self-confident Welshness of the new politics, and the most charismatic and transformative political figure of his day, embodying the public personality of his fellow-countrymen. To the public, Lloyd George simply was Wales. He was a magnet for journalists, the idol of the cartoonists. His eloquent speeches were well known on the new discs and gramophones. His opposition to the Boer War and leadership of the revolt of the Welsh County Councils against the 1902 Education Act made him famous. His Old Age Pensions Act (1908), his People’s Budget (1909) and National Insurance Act (1911) formed a legendary programme of pioneering social welfare, the most important in British history before the Attlee Labour government of 1945-51.22 Before Lloyd George, Welsh politics had not been prominent in social reform. That was no longer so.

  • 23 In 1908 the federal NUI consisted of four colleges: Dublin, Cork and Galway and Maynooth.
  • 24 Kenneth O. Morgan, Freedom or Sacrilege? (Church in Wales, Cardiff, 1966).

15The programme championed by Welsh Liberal politicians was also highly distinctive with many specific Welsh themes, apart from the new emphasis on social welfare. There was land reform, to improve the lot of Welsh tenant farmers – though not of farm labourers, who owned their farms and stock. There was the partial reform of tithe, as noted earlier and there was a dramatic upsurge of intermediate (secondary) and higher education. The University of Wales was a more integrated body than the National University of Ireland (NUI).23 There was temperance reform, shown in the Welsh Sunday Act of 1881, the first distinctive legislation to treat Wales as a separate entity. Above all, there was the disestablishment and disendowment of the Welsh Church, the Anglican Church in Wales. This was the major priority of the broadly unionist Welsh, in contrast to the southern Irish campaign for home rule or even a republic and was a prolonged and often bitter movement for civic and social equality for nonconformists.24 The struggle lasted from the period of the Reform Act of 1832, remained immensely powerful even in 1906 and finally became law in 1919, diverting Lloyd George’s attention away from the negotiating of the terms at the Paris peace conference in that year. There is evidence that, by this stage, Lloyd George was distinctly bored with Welsh disestablishment, an ancient cause that blocked the way towards more contemporary progressive purposes.

  • 25 Parl. Deb., 5th ser., Vol. xxxvii, 801 ff. (speech of 17 May 1912).

16Yet even Lloyd George, the hero of his adoring countrymen, had to take care in handling the disestablishment of the Anglican church. In 1907, he came under pressure from Welsh nonconformists because the government was delaying in giving the Welsh Church a pre-eminent place in its legislative programme, well behind Home Rule for Ireland for example. In the end, the government did press on with Welsh disestablishment in 1912, a measure to be suspended during the First World War. Lloyd George, engaged in setting up huge historic schemes for National Health Insurance, had to involve himself in the debates on the Welsh Church. In 1912 he made a memorable speech on the Church position on disendowment by reminding the Commons of the disendowment within Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Funds were then diverted to reward supportive Tudor families like the Cecils whose “hands were dripping with the fat of sacrilege.”25 This flamboyance satisfied the angry nonconformists of Wales, including his shoemaker uncle. Furthermore, Lloyd George’s version of Tudor history was stoutly defended in the press by Professor A.F. Pollard, a distinguished Liberal historian of Henry VIII’s Tudor Reformation.

  • 26 See Ryland Wallace, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1866-1928 (University of Wales Press, C (...)
  • 27 A traditional name for the north-south boundary between England and Wales.

17There was one great gap in the Liberals’ objectives. They dealt with social religious and cultural themes with passion. However, it was a male world, which they addressed. The contemporary movement for women’s suffrage attracted relatively little enthusiasm in Wales. Indeed, suffragette supporters received rough treatment when they heckled Lloyd George at a meeting in his own Caernarfonshire constituency (even though he was personally a well-known supporter of women’s suffrage). Politics in Wales, though having some scattered local groups of suffragettes (some of whom like Lady Rhondda went to prison) was a man’s world. The chapels, with their platoons of male deacons, were notably slow to try to elevate the role and status of women. Much the same could be said of the patriarchal nature of Welsh family and domestic life. Welsh women seldom entered into formal employment contracts until after the First World War when they became schoolteachers or secretaries. Institutions opened up to train female teachers such as Bangor Normal College beside the Menai Straits, despite social restrictions placed there by the authorities on the lives of women students. No Emmeline or Sylvia Pankhurst26 beyond Offa’s Dyke.27

The end of the Welsh Renaissance

  • 28 Kenneth O. Morgan, “Cardiganshire Politics”, Modern Wales, Politics, Places and People (University (...)
  • 29 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Politics of Hope (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963).

18However, it was not the campaign of Welsh women that undermined the hegemony of the Liberal Party. That was an astonishingly rapid process. From a position of overwhelming political dominance, in four years the Liberal ascendancy was on the point of collapsing. After the excitement of the Armistice in 1918 and celebration of Lloyd George as “the man who won the war”, the domination of the Liberals, now divided between supporters of Lloyd George and those who followed Asquith into opposition, was to rapidly fall away. The rot set in at the by-elections held during the Lloyd George coalition government in 1919-22. There were heavy defeats of Coalition Liberals by Labour in Caerphilly and Pontypridd, and a particularly damaging contest between two Liberals in rural Cardiganshire, where Llewellyn Williams, a combative Independent Liberal barrister, polled strongly against Lloyd George’s Coalition candidate.28 By 1924 Labour had replaced the Liberals as the ascendant party in Wales, not only in industrial south Wales but in an increasing number of rural Welsh-speaking constituencies, starting with Anglesey and Caernarfonshire in the 1920s. This continued inexorably in the years after 1945 when the remaining Liberal seats, other than Montgomeryshire, fell away. In addition, the party lost control of the county councils to mostly right-wing Independents bent mainly on keeping down the rates, whatever the level of unemployment. After the advent of devolution in 1997, in the first Welsh elections held in 1999, the Liberal Democrats (as they were now renamed) won only six seats in the Welsh Senedd (parliament), but in the Welsh elections of 2021 they obtained only one. It was a startling collapse. The Liberal/Liberal Democrat party gained a prolonged series of remarkable by-election victories in England, after 1945 in places like Orpington and Amersham, appealing successfully to commuter citizens on narrowly local issues such as the quality of roads, pavements, and train services to nearby cities. But there was no Orpington in Wales where the party’s diminishing supporters clung to memories of the Gladstonian and Lloyd Georgian ascendancy many decades earlier. In American terms, with due deference to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,29 they looked like a party or memory, not one of hope.

  • 30 Kenneth O. Morgan, Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1976), pp. (...)

19There were two major reasons for the continuous collapse of the Welsh Renaissance from earlier in the century, one external and the other more internal. The major external factor was, obviously, the impact of the First World War, which transformed the entire world. The South African War with its methods of barbarism, and virtual genocide towards Boer women and children, had seen the Liberals bitterly divided between imperialists and so-called Little Englanders. What occurred between 1914 and 1918 showed that war as such was deeply damaging for Liberalism as a creed. The Napoleonic and Crimean wars had confirmed the same point. The First World War was deeply divisive in many ways with Lloyd George becoming a highly controversial figure as he rose to the summit of power. The coup which ousted Asquith in December 1916 left deep and bitter memories. At the start of the war, there was a massive wave of ‘patriotic’ recruitment to the armed services, perhaps stronger even than in England. Even in industrial south Wales, there was heavy enlistment well before conscription was implemented in the summer of 1916. The by-election in Merthyr Tydfil in 1915 that followed the death of Keir Hardie, saw the official Labour candidate heavily defeated.30 Lloyd George and other Welsh political figures attempted to appeal to vague historical memories of the deeds of Welsh archers at Crecy and Agincourt to whip up enthusiasm for war service. For the first time, the Welsh Guards mounted guard at Buckingham Palace. Lloyd George himself, surrounded by Welsh staff at 10 Downing Street, tried to link war with the glories of the recent Welsh Renaissance, portraying it as a Liberal crusade to offer protection for the “little five foot five nations” – gallant little Belgium, gallant little Serbia and Montenegro, and, by extension gallant little Wales. He spoke emotionally in these terms to an audience of London Welshmen in the Queen’s Hall in London in September 1914. He was reinforced by leading Welsh scholars and litterateurs who devoted their scholarly talents to denouncing the German as a people in racial terms – even Sir Owen Edwards who had once written a volume on the cultural glories of Heidelberg and Gottingen, Tro yn y Almaen (a trip to Germany). But these nationalist rantings were only partially successful.

  • 31 David Lloyd George, “Wales and War. The fighting reputation of the Welshman”, speech in London, nic (...)
  • 32 Herbert, 1st Earl Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, from 5 August 1914 to 5 June 1916.
  • 33 See Colin Hughes, Mametz: Lloyd George’s Welsh Army at the Battle of the Somme (Orion Press, Gerard (...)
  • 34 Cymru Fydd (Wales to Come), a London-based nationalist movement, 1886-1896.

20The rationale for the war as one of national liberation seemed obscure now, while the piling up of casualties on the Western Front and the spread of British territorial acquisitions soon increased disillusionment. There was limited enthusiasm for “the race that fought for a generation under Glendower against the greatest captains in Europe” in Lloyd George’s words.31 Attempts to whip up national fervour for patriotic Welsh enlistment into the Welsh regiments, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, the Welsh Regiment, and the South Wales Borderers were only partially successful. Lloyd George spoke fancifully of “his Welsh Army”, consisting of two army corps, also making Wales a special administrative area for recruitment, and defeating Kitchener32 in Cabinet in the process. When the “Welsh division” suffered fearful casualties in the battle for Mametz Wood, just prior to the battle of the Somme in June-July 1916, partly a result of poor generalship,33 there was horrified revulsion amongst more pacifist inclined Welsh Liberals, some of whom like the Prime Minister’s old Welsh friend, D.R. Daniel, an old nationalist from the Cymru Fydd34 movement, twenty years earlier, joined Labour.

  • 35 Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Peace Movements in Wales’, Modern Wales: Politics, Places and People, op. cit., (...)

21By the last year of the war, Wales was increasingly seen more as a pacifist land of protest rather than a militarist one. There was a multitude of anti-war groups throughout the land. This was especially true of the mining valleys in the south, based in such Independent Labour Party and socialist strongholds as Merthyr Tydfil and Briton Ferry. There were many future young left-wing firebrands, pushed by the wartime experiences, conscription and wartime strikes into far-left positions, including men like A.J. Cook, Ness Edwards and Arthur Horner who were to loom large in the Labour and Communist Parties in future years. Amongst the Liberals, there were radical anti-war journals focussing on the British government’s attack on civil liberties and human rights; the critics included inspirational young poets like Thomas Parry-Williams, who published extensively in the anti-war press. Something else more subtle was going on. The war years meant that Liberals were losing their sense of purpose. Old issues like the disestablishment of the Church and temperance seemed dated and irrelevant; at the same time, the landed gentry, the ancient antagonists of Welsh Liberals for a hundred years, were themselves being disestablished. The values that had sustained Welsh Liberalism in the pre-war years were being further undermined. Young Welsh soldiers serving in France, Gallipoli or Palestine were becoming secularised, less bonded to the old world of the chapel, while the inevitable decline of the Welsh language, confirmed in the linguistic census, weakened nonconformity at its foundations. Exposure to the pressures of wartime appeared to be making Wales less Welsh – and less Liberal – at the same time. One sign of the change of attitude among the young was that in the general election of 1923, in the newly formed University of Wales constituency, the graduate voters were to collectively turn all the parties down and return George Maitland Lloyd Davies, a Christian pacifist minister to Westminster.35

22The internal factor that undermined the Welsh renaissance had been under way long before the outbreak of war in 1914. This was the breakaway of much of the Welsh working class from their bourgeois allies in the Liberal Party. The general election of 1906 had indicated the growing power of Labour and the founding of the Labour Party in February 1900 as an independent party confirmed the fundamental change that was happening. It began with the politicisation of the trade unions, most powerfully in the industrial valleys and villages of the south. The older Lib-Lab miners’ leaders, of the pattern of William Abraham, “Mabon”, became more and more peripheral, increasingly edged aside by the regular members at the coalface. Many of the key crises in the labour movement now took place in parts of Wales. There had already been the precedent of the massive six-month strike by the Welsh Miners Federation in 1898, a historic industrial conflict. In the far north, the strike of the Penrhyn quarry workers in Snowdonia lasted three years, from 1900 to 1903, and saw the military called in to support capitalist slate owners like Lord Penrhyn. Very damagingly the Taff Vale strike on the South Wales railways, 1900-1901, saw a crucial case in the House of Lords decided against the workers. In fact, the unions were told to meet the costs of industrial action, which would make the basic act of going on strike financially impossible and undermine human rights.

  • 36 Jane Morgan, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900-1939 (Th (...)
  • 37 For The Miners’ Next Step, see Bob Holton, British Syndicalism, 1900-1914: myths and realities (Plu (...)

23In the years down to 1914, the 225,000 members of the South Wales Miners were formally affiliated to the nationwide Miners’ Federation. This had the effect of sharply radicalising the politics of the mining community in Britain as a whole. A new spirit of revolt, frequently marked by violence from the police and the military, took hold with angry disputes over wage levels in the geologically difficult Welsh pits. Troops from Lancashire patrolled the mining villages of the Rhondda with fixed bayonets. The troubles at Tonypandy in November 1910 and the railway dispute at Llanelli in 1912 both saw extreme conflict and loss of life. Winston Churchill previously thought of as a radical social reformer in the Cabinet close to Lloyd George, now became a hated figure in south Wales and this continued down to the 1951 general election for his class-war opposition to the Welsh working class and their demands. A similar mood of hatred coloured attitudes to a prominent coalmine owner like D.A. Thomas of the Cambrian Collieries, and a Liberal MP at the time. Similarly, the Chief Constable of Glamorgan, a former military figure in Egypt, Colonel Lionel Lindsay was regarded as a particular class enemy.36 Even the new Labour Party came under fire for its constitutional moderation. There were new movements and militant groups in the coalfield, younger far-left socialists like the miners’ agent, Noah Ablett, and later an English immigrant into the Welsh coalfield, A.J. Cook. They were associated with the Marxist doctrines of the Plebs League and the Central Workers’ College, which educated still younger socialists like Aneurin Bevan. Their revolutionary document, The Miners’ Next Step, published in Tonypandy (and written in an Italian café there) in 1912 rejected centralised state socialism or nationalisation in favour of workers’ control, based on syndicalist doctrines proposed by George Sorel in France and industrial radicals like ‘Big Bill’ Heywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, based in the west of the United States. The Welsh workers, ideologically, had gone global.37

24The election of Labour MPs to Westminster left even Keir Hardie behind as a voice for constitutional advance. It left the Liberals of pre-1914 even further behind, irrelevantly preaching issues such as disestablishment, land reform and temperance to a new younger society which no longer recognised their appeal and took up new vices such as smoking. It marked a vast transition from community-based liberalism to class-bred socialism. It was an abrupt, angry end to the old years of Liberal glory and greatness.

Conclusion

  • 38 See Elizabeth Gibson Morgan, “The Welsh quest for a different model of governance”, in this issue.
  • 39 James Bryce, 1838-1922, academic, jurist, historian, and Liberal politician.

25What, then, was the ultimate significance of the Welsh Liberal renaissance of 1899-1914? Its brutal finale should not mask its extraordinary and lasting impact. The main point to realise is that, despite the many conflicts that it threw up, it was not a movement for separatism. Scottish nationalism in recent years has been heavily political, a movement for independence like Catalonia. Welsh nationalist campaigns were social and cultural, even linguistic. They were unionist in ethos. They were a demand for national equality not for national exclusion. Wales, a marginalised and even despised part of the country, wished to enjoy a recognition and identity comparable to the other nations of the country, but devolution was not prominent in the national debates of the Edwardian years. Elizabeth Gibson Morgan has shown the liveliness of Welsh politics in generating new ideas of community-based democratic politics.38 There was little such innovative thought in the years before 1914. There was, however, some administrative devolution in this period. While there was no Welsh James Bryce39 to advocate a new Celtic Commonwealth, a Welsh department of the Board of Education was set up in 1907, and another in the Board of Agriculture in 1919. Periodicals wrote of a new ‘bureaucratic Wales’, a process much extended by Lloyd George’s period in high office between 1905 and 1922.

  • 40 See Alan Butt Philip, The Welsh Question: Nationalism in Welsh Politics, 1945-1970 (University of W (...)

26But Welsh Home Rule was never an issue on the lines of Ireland, or even of Scotland, and the Celtic nations maintained their distinct characteristics. The Welsh National Party, Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru (Plaid) was always heavily involved with the promotion of the Welsh language, in such matters as road signs and car taxation forms.40 It polled poorly in Cardiff and other major urban centres, and the election victory of Gwynfor Evans, the leader of the party, as MP in Carmarthenshire in 1966 was a direct consequence of the Welsh language movement, inspired not so much by social and economic objectives as by linguistic equality. The first vote on devolution was humiliatingly defeated in 1979; the victory in 1997 was won by the tiniest of margins (0.3 per cent). Unlike other nationalist movements, Plaid operated in the traditional mode, through external pressure on Parliament and the party system. It was not particularly innovative, save perhaps for adopting the list system in voting for the national Senedd, the latter a remarkably small body of no more than sixty members.

  • 41 Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) was an Irish nationalist, MP from 1875 to 1891, and the leader (...)
  • 42 “John Brown’s Body” is a United States marching song about the abolitionist John Brown.

27But its influence over modern Wales – and therefore Great Britain – has none the less been immense. Contemporary Wales is the heir to earlier achievements. Wales today is led by the kind of figures dominant in Edwardian Wales like the Liberal Talfan Davies family, and in the Cymru Fydd movement for national equality that Lloyd George and Tom Ellis led in the 1890s. Wales has perhaps lacked the heroic quality of the movement for Irish Home Rule: there has been no Easter Rising here and violence and bloodshed have been avoided. In the early years of the past century, there was no Welsh civil war nor a Welsh Ulster to plague and divide the nation. Frequent attempts to discover one never managed to detect a ‘Parnell of Wales’.41 When Lloyd George met the Sinn Fein leader Eamon de Valera at 10 Downing Street in the summer of 1921 to discuss the broad principles of Irish statehood, there was a marked gulf between distinct nationalities, the Goidelic Celt and the Brythonic Celt and the Irish Sea was a major barrier. The Edwardian renaissance was a phase of remarkable, peaceful dynamism in modern Wales. Every institution in the principality today bears its imprint. A hundred years later, like John Brown’s body,42 its soul goes marching on.

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Bibliography

This article is based on MSS, newspapers and reports of the time. Here, however, are some secondary works, which may be of help.

Philip, Alan Butt, The Welsh Question: Nationalism in Welsh Politics, 1945-1970 (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1974).

Church, Roy et al., The History of the British Coal Industry Vol. III (1830-1913) (Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, New York, 1986).

W.W. Craik, The Central Labour College 1909-1929 (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1964).

Daunton, M.J., Coal Metropolis: Cardiff, 1870-1914 (University of Leicester Press, 1977).

Davies, John, Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979).

Davies, Hazel Walford, Llythyrau Syr Owen M. Edwards (Gomer Press, Llandyssul, 1991) [in Welsh].

Ellis, Thomas Iorwerth, Cofiant T.E. Ellis (Gwasg y Brython, Liverpool, 2 vols. 1944-1948) [in Welsh].

Evans, Eric Wyn, Mabon (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1959).

Evans, Eric Wyn, The Miners of South Wales (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1961).

Freeden, Michael, The New Liberalism, An Ideology of Social Reform (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987).

Holton, Bob, British Syndicalism, 1900-1914: Myths and Realities (Pluto Press, London, 1977).

Hughes, Colin, Mametz. Lloyd George’ s ‘Welsh Army’ at the Battle of the Somme (Orion Press, Gerards Cross, 1977).

Jones, Robert Gerallt, T.H.Parry Williams (University of Wales Press, Cardiff. 1978).

Lloyd George, David, “Wales and War. The fighting reputation of the Welshman”, speech in London, nicknamed “Lloyd George’s great speech”, 19-09-1914. See http://walesatwar.org/en/theatresofwar/welsh_call_to_arms, accessed in June 2023.

Masterman, Neville, The Forerunner (Christopher Davies, Llandybie, 1972).

Morgan, Jane, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900-1939 (The Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, New York, 1987).

Morgan, Kenneth O., Wales in British Politics 1868-1922 (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1963; new updated edition, 1992).

Morgan, Kenneth O., Freedom or Sacrilege? (Church in Wales Press, Cardiff, 1966).

Morgan, Kenneth O., Lloyd George (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1973).

Morgan, Kenneth O., Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1976).

Morgan, Kenneth O., Consensus and Disunity (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979).

Morgan, Kenneth O., Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983 and many subsequent editions).

Morgan, Kenneth O., Modern Wales: Politics, Places and People (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1995).

Morgan, Kenneth O., Ages of Reform (I.B. Taurus, London, 2006).

Morgan, Kenneth O., Revolution to Devolution (I.B. Taurus, London, 2016).

Royal Commission, Report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the Church and other Religious Bodies (2 vols.) (Cd. 54330, 1910).

Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M., The Politics of Hope (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963).

Wallace, Ryland, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009).

Williams, Trevor L., Caradoc Evans, (University of Wales, Cardiff, 1971).

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Notes

1 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol.1, (1766-1788), Everyman edition, 1994, p. 78.

2 Report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the Church and other religious bodies (2 vols.) (Cd. 54330).

3 Among them were my own parents, the offspring of a village blacksmith and a fisherman who attended the county schools at Aberystwyth and Tywyn respectively, and later recruited to Welsh training colleges such as Bangor Normal College. I myself attended a state elementary school (partly Welsh in its teaching) which later got me into Oxford.

4 Eric Wyn Evans, The Miners of South Wales (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1961); Roy Church et al., The History of the British Coal Industry Vol. III (1830-1913) (Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, New York, 1986).

5 A common joke in Welsh chapels was that irreverent Sunday school pupils would identify the Holy Trinity as Richard, Thomas, and Baldwin.

6 Arthur James Cook, 1883-1931, trade unionist.

7 Published in 1912, calling on miners to adopt a new kind of 'scientific' trade unionism.

8 M.J. Daunton, Coal Metropolis, Cardiff 1870-1914 (University of Leicester Press, Leicester, 1977).

9 The Royal Commission Report gave the figures for 1905 for Church members at 193,081 and Nonconformists at 551,669, out of a population of 2,012, 917.

10 Robert Gerallt Jones, T.H.Parry Williams (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1978).

11 Hazel Walford Davies, Llythyrau Syr Owen M. Edwards (Gomer Press, Llandyssul, 1991) [in Welsh].

12 My own grandfather, a village blacksmith, who had very little formal education, left after his death, to my astonishment, a large array of periodicals, covering historical, literary, theological, and political issues, which he would have read after his morning’s manual labours were over.

13 Trevor L. Williams, Caradoc Evans, (University of Wales, Cardiff, 1971).

14  Dylan Thomas, in John Ackerman, Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work, (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1996 (3rd edition)), p. xxxiii.

15 This comes from the 1888 entry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

16 National sports stadium of Wales, in Cardiff city centre, demolished in 1997 to make way for the Millennium Stadium.

17 Theodore Watts Dunton’s introduction to the 1906 edition of George Borrow’s Wild Wales, pp. xxii – xxiii.

18 A popular title for Wales, named for the Prince of Wales.

19 Eric Wyn Evans, Mabon (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1959).

20 Lord Rosebury was the UK Prime Minister, from March 1894 to June 1895.

21 T.I. Ellis, Cofiant T.E. Ellis (Gwasg y Brython, Liverpool, 2 vols. 1944-1948) [in Welsh]; and Neville Masterman, The Forerunner (Christopher Davies, Llandybie, 1972).

22 Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism, An Ideology of Social Reform (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987).

23 In 1908 the federal NUI consisted of four colleges: Dublin, Cork and Galway and Maynooth.

24 Kenneth O. Morgan, Freedom or Sacrilege? (Church in Wales, Cardiff, 1966).

25 Parl. Deb., 5th ser., Vol. xxxvii, 801 ff. (speech of 17 May 1912).

26 See Ryland Wallace, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1866-1928 (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2009).

27 A traditional name for the north-south boundary between England and Wales.

28 Kenneth O. Morgan, “Cardiganshire Politics”, Modern Wales, Politics, Places and People (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1995), pp. 241-247.

29 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Politics of Hope (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963).

30 Kenneth O. Morgan, Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1976), pp. 273-274.

31 David Lloyd George, “Wales and War. The fighting reputation of the Welshman”, speech in London, nicknamed “Lloyd George’s great speech”, 19-09-1914. See http://walesatwar.org/en/theatresofwar/welsh_call_to_arms, consulted in June 2023.

32 Herbert, 1st Earl Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, from 5 August 1914 to 5 June 1916.

33 See Colin Hughes, Mametz: Lloyd George’s Welsh Army at the Battle of the Somme (Orion Press, Gerards Cross, 1977) which particularly condemns the command of the former Liberal MP, Sir Ivor Philipps.

34 Cymru Fydd (Wales to Come), a London-based nationalist movement, 1886-1896.

35 Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Peace Movements in Wales’, Modern Wales: Politics, Places and People, op. cit., pp. 193-194.

36 Jane Morgan, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900-1939 (The Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, New York, 1987), esp. pp.84-86.

37 For The Miners’ Next Step, see Bob Holton, British Syndicalism, 1900-1914: myths and realities (Pluto Press, London, 1977), pp. 78 ff. and W.W. Craik, The Central Labour College 1909-1929 (Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1964), p. 73.

38 See Elizabeth Gibson Morgan, “The Welsh quest for a different model of governance”, in this issue.

39 James Bryce, 1838-1922, academic, jurist, historian, and Liberal politician.

40 See Alan Butt Philip, The Welsh Question: Nationalism in Welsh Politics, 1945-1970 (University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1974).

41 Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) was an Irish nationalist, MP from 1875 to 1891, and the leader of the struggle for Irish Home Rule in the late 19th century.

42 “John Brown’s Body” is a United States marching song about the abolitionist John Brown.

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References

Electronic reference

Kenneth O. Morgan, “The Welsh Renaissance: Boer War to World War, 1899-1914”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXVIII-3 | 2023, Online since 22 December 2023, connection on 15 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/11183; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.11183

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About the author

Kenneth O. Morgan

Kenneth O. Morgan is a Welsh historian and author, known especially for his writings on modern British history and politics and on Welsh history. He is a regular reviewer and broadcaster on radio and television. He has been an influential intellectual resource in the Labour Party. A Labour Party member, Morgan was made a life peer as Baron Morgan in 2000 and served on the Lords Select Committee on the Constitution. Morgan is an accomplished author, with works like The People's Peace and biographies of various politicians. He was the editor of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain and the Welsh History Review.

By this author

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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