Where’s Wales’s Bonfire Night?
Reflection — By Adam Higgitt on November 5, 2009 9:34 pm
Remember, remember...what?
Bonfire Night has lost much of its original meaning (when did you last see children towing a Guy?) but November 5th is still a culturally important date. As a commemoration of civic Britishness it is probably now unique. The wonder is that Gordon Brown hasn’t proposed to make effigy construction part of the national curriculum.
For so long as pyrotechnics continue to impress us, Bonfire Night will live on. But as a Welsh civic consciousness emerges from under the aegis of Britishness, what is to be its equivalent? Indeed, where is Wales to look even for her Burns Night; an event to summon the diaspora and buttress a distinct and cohesive cultural identity?
Wales faces a two-pronged problem in developing such an event. On the one hand, any examination of Welsh culture almost immediately diverts into the perennial topic of “the language”, thus serving to remind us that distinctiveness may be an attainable quality, but cohesion is more elusive.
On the other, the only truly meaningful Welsh civic consciousness is being born before us right now. There is no tradition to call forth and embellish. When Wales looks to her heroes (or at least those defined by their Welshness) they are far back and few between. Owain Glyn Dwr is the most recent, but we seem afraid to probe too deeply there, lest we unearth a frustrated aristocrat rather than a proto-national leader.
Little wonder that when Crickhowell House was renamed, the person commemorated was a 1,000-year dead King, albeit one whose codification of Welsh folk law made him apt. There were few more modern figures to celebrate, and no distinctively Welsh achievements to mark. Civic Welshness appears like some giant temporal doughnut, with substance and flavour on each side of a void.
It may not be possible to construct a modern narrative of civic Wales at ease with her English annexation, her near-subsumption into Britishness, and her infatuation with pan-national class politics, but it is surely important to try. A Welshness that draws its nourishment solely from the unfulfilled promise of the Early Middle Ages, or awaits traditions not yet minted will be a shallow one. Traditions, and how we interpret them, are important in sustaining the new Welsh polity. Deheubarth is too distant a country to provide that sustenance. We need a bit of Merthyr, too.
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8 Comments
We always had bonfires this time of year – for Halloween (they still do in Eire). We had them long before Englishmen with a Frenchish name decided to blow up his own Parliament building. “Bonfire night” is YET ANOTHER of our cultural insitutions and customs that has been taken from us, repackaged in English guise and then sold back to us.
A Wales comfortable with it’s own colonisation? Over my dead one…
Hi Al
I don’t say that colonisation should be celebrated. All I suggest is that modern Welshness is as much a product of the 500+ years that Wales and England have been in union/Wales has been annexed* as any time before it. We should be able to find a way to draw from that era as well as from those medieval heroes.
* delete according to ideology
surely we do? Rebecca, Chartists, old Dic Penderyn? oh wait, they are all radical fight-the-system heroes. To my mind, the only difference between those, post-medieval Welsh heroes and the medieval ones is that the post-medieval ones fought WITHIN the Union system, as if there was no alternative.. If they had any sense they would have completely rejected the system and set up their own. But I digress…
I don’t understand what you’re looking for here. Wales, post medieval, has heroes we can be proud of. Great men and women doing great things, working their collective wills on Westminster. People like Bevan were game-changers, no question. But they were still playing Westminsters game. Whereas the “traditional” heroes that Wales looks to, the Glyndwrs and Llewellyns and Hywel Dda’s and Arthurs, weren’t playing England’s game, they were playing their own. The Welsh one. And until we get modern heroes who play the Welsh game (Adam Price??) then we will continue to look back and hold up to those stubborn, complex people from yesteryear, because for all their faults they are still people to be celebrated. Still “ours”.
I’m not sure, either. Just a slightly inchoate throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater fear about how we come to regard and describe Welsh history from the time of annexation onwards. Wales’s political and civic ethos now emphasises her distinctiveness and autonomy. I’m not for a moment saying that’s a bad thing – far from it, in fact. But the trouble is that, as we search for ways to mark and celebrate that we end up looking past the years when Wales’s political and civic ethos was bound in with that of England and Britain. In other words we come to regard “distinctively Welsh” only as that period before annexation. Actually, it was distinctively Welsh to be part of a union with England and then Scotland and Ireland.
Dafydd El once famously said that “English is a Welsh language”. In that vein, I suppose you could say Britishness is a Welsh tradition. You don’t have to approve of it, just recognise that it’s an important part of Welsh history. We can’t pretend that nothing happened from 1536 to 1966.
oh gods yeah, I’m not ignoring any part of Welsh history or suggesting that anyone else does either. We do that at our peril.
Problem with “the years when Wales’s political and civic ethos was bound in with that of England and Britain” is that there is little to inspire us, is there? Afterall, that’s the only period of history I was taught in school. I’m sure the same is true of the majority of people in Wales. So why aren’t we over-run with Welsh heros and inspirational figures from the period? Why do we look to people we WERE NOT (generally) taught about? Is it about celebration, or about reclaiming our own history, sense of self?
Of course, what has happened since is also as relevant and inspirational, but not in the same way. The Tudors. Henry Tudor leads a Welsh army and becomes king of England. Do we celebrate that? Well no, because the scumbag sold his country down the river. Do we forget it? Certainly not, there is a lesson there that is relevant for our times – don’t follow leaders who promise Wales the world, but in reality are just using “Wales” to further their own political ambitions.
Britishness isn’t really A Welsh Tradition, unless you mean the Romano-tribal version of it
No, “Britishness” is purely an invention, a pact between the Scottish and English governments. Like “The United Kingdom”, it is a construct, an ultimately meaningless phrase. And since Wales didn’t exist at the time of Union, and we certainly didn’t have a say in it (and neither did the Irish afaik), then how can we possibly claim it?
No, I think the reason we look back to the distant past rather than the recent one is that there is little to be proud of, little to inspire. Plenty to inform, plenty to learn the lessons from. But an increasinly self-confident and independent country doesn’t need petty politicians and aristocrats – it needs figureheads. Leaders. We just forgot that, it became all about the Union. It’s time we remembered, you are right. But if you can find people from the recent past who inspire the same passion, patriotism and energy as those medieval figures then I’ll gladly shout them from the rooftops too. (from your post, I have the feeling you can’t either… they don’t exist)
gah, that was a babbling mess, sorry. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, for our modern times, and modern politics, we need both the figures from the recent past (to inform us) and from the distant past (to inspire us).
Isn’t St David’s Day our Burns Night?
And no mention of organised sport! Footballers, rugby players and boxers – aren’t they are modern Welsh heroes?
Interestedly enough Jan Sibelius in his classic piece The Kalevala Suite brought back to life characters of Finland’s heroic past. Young Wales did reawaken Welsh traditions and history that had been sleeping (like King Arthur) for hundreds of years.