The party at the once-Welsh Folk Museum to celebrate the 70th birthday of literary giant Meic Stephens and his decades of achievements raised some interesting issues about the way in which Welsh needs have been forcible subjugated to ensure they didn’t cut across English interests.
Meic really put Welsh literature on the world map through his time as literature director of the then-Welsh Arts Council.
In those days, the council carried a rather higher profile than today. Principally, that was through its possession of subject directors, served by subject committees.
Some fine fellows held those posts – Meic himself, Peter Jones for art, and Roy Bohana for music. Have some of Peter’s art exhibitions, supported by illustrious catalogues, ever been bettered ? Roy ensured publication of records of great Welsh performances.
And there was the host of material which flowed from the fertile mind of Meic himself.
Some – particularly allied professionals – would say the committees were too powerful, but the professionals generally shut up when they became members.
But then the system suddenly ended. Surely at the behest of London, the council was slimmed down; the subject directors and perhaps their committees went. We generally now get a high-powered chairman – Geraint Talfan Davies, the former BBC Controller, until he annoyed Labour culture minister Alun Pugh too much, and currently Prof Dai Smith.
But otherwise, it’s penpushers – and not particularly competent ones, either, if the audit general report and committee findings on the Millennium Centre financial scandal are to be believed.
The reference books I hold at home don’t give the date of the change-over, but it smells like around the end of the years of Tory government from Westminster.
No real reason was given from throwing out the quality specialists. Perhaps someone mentioned cost.
More likely, though, was Tory opposition to the socialist artistic republic being established in Wales. It was never that clever for those involved on occasion to sing the praises of eastern European successes – particularly when those successes frequently were a result of Communism.
The English would wonder what on earth the Welsh were up to.
But then Wales was so different; the artistic strength of Wales was so much weaker, so much was done as a thoughtless reflection of England; so much basic material was missing.
One example was the establishment of the arts council’s truly grand bookshop in Cardiff. Here was to be found every single item (well, almost) published from Wales, plus lots more.
HMSO eventually took over – and eventually closed. Waterstones arrived in Cardiff but Borders now supplies a much superior service (based on Icelandic financial loans ?) .
But the Tory argument that the private sector easily can best provide was both answered and refuted in the presence of a Meic Stephens, etc bookstand at the folk museum which was not supplied by any of the Cardiff booksellers, but by the shop from Chepstow. I just hope they sold enough books to justify the miles !
On culture in its various varieties, Wales is still suffering badly., whatever the Welsh are liable to say.
A ideal Wales would boast a much stronger arts council – headed by a descendant of Emyr Jenkins rather than a penpusher, with a descendant of Meic leading on literature; plus a heritage department which gave significant space to Cadw-heretics, to those who realised that the past is rapidly vanishing before us, and that the government department must be proactive rather than civil-service-style reactive.
The private, as opposed to the public, sector is crucial. The old WAC gave us a hint of how to deal with it. New minster Alun Ffred Jones needs to find a way of breaking past time-servers with pension concerns to seek out the heretics (living in addesses such as Garth Newydd, Merthyr) – perhaps the problem is greater in heritage than it is in artistic endeavour…
Heritage bothers me. It seems far too much money is thrown at saving new stuff, 100 year old buildings, mine wheels etc. Of course that is part of our shared history, but the rest of our history is sold off for Barrett homes and golf courses. Not only does “Heritage” need a shake up, it also needs balancing. Wales didn’t start with the pits, so I wish they would stop acting like it did.
I’ve been reading much about the Welsh Assembly-funded film featuring the story of former Northern Irish MP the late Bobby Sands – “Hunger”.
Sands, it will be remembered, died on hunger-strike in an effort to defend his dignity and the dignity of other prisoners held on ridiculously long sentences without proper trial in1981.
David Davies, the maverick hang’em’n'flog’em MP for Monmouth, mastermind of the neo-fascist anti-Welsh “True Wales” movement, was up on his hind legs about this in the self-styled ‘national newspaper’ “Wasting Mule” yesterday complaining that the film insulted members of “the Armed forces”. What on earth were his friends the British armed forces doing in Ireland in the first place? And what, indeed, are they doing in Wales? And even more to the point, what the hell are they doing in Iraq or Afghanistan?
The gormless Davies – who, astonishingly, ‘claims descent’ from Owain Glyndwr! – is a quisling and traitor par excellence (God how Owain must be turning in his grave). Just mentioning the two in the same sentence is a gross insult to THE greatest Welshman of all time.
The result of the millennium “Greatest Welshman” poll, incidentally, was personally fudged by fellow arch-traitor and quisling Leighton “Piggy the Pig” Andrews, in favour of Welsh MP (and English landowner and bon viveur) Aneurin Bevan on orders from Labour’s London HQ. Piggy was squeelingly delighted to obey, as he saw it as an opportunity to bolster his ’socialist credentials’ with those who still associate him with the Lib Dems, from whose domen dail he originally emerged.
God rot them all!