BBC foreign correspondent Jeremy Bowen has spent almost three decades reporting on the Middle East. He is no stranger to division and disputation. But his recent assignment – a three-part series on Radio 4 in which he made “a personal journey through Wales”, the country of his birth – must still have left him a little shellshocked. Bowen, born in Cardiff but domiciled in England and a non-Welsh speaker, did that most dangerous thing – he attacked what he saw as the way the Welsh-speaking minority in Wales dominates the cultural conversation. This argument has not gone down well in the land of his fathers.
The Welsh online media has suggested this is the view from Camberwell, where Bowen lives, rather than Criccieth – a journalist’s whistlestop tour of a country he last resided in more than 40 years ago. Fellow BBC journalist and evangelical Welsh speaker Huw Edwards echoed that criticism: “We are all products of upbringing – this take is 1970s Cardiff.” Edwards was even ruder about a parallel attack on Welsh, headlined “Tacsi for a moribund language”, by Jonathan Meades in the current issue of The Critic. “So long as it’s a hobby language it is as harmless as a Sunday painter,” wrote Meades. “But in pockets of Snowdonia and mid-Wales it is a tool not only of communication but of identity and exclusivity, thus of self-harm and curtailment.” To which Edwards curtly responded: “Meades is a brilliant writer and I have enjoyed his work over many years. I can only assume he’s skint. Nothing else can explain this bilge.”
Bowen’s argument is that because bilingualism has become essential for many jobs in Welsh government and media, the English-speaking majority has been disadvantaged and marginalised. Meades is more concerned with what he calls a “totalitarian project” to create a million Welsh speakers (a third of the population) by 2050. At present, only a fifth of the population speaks Welsh regularly. Such views are, however, either outdated or exaggerated. Bowen grew up in an industrial south Wales – English-speaking, male-dominated, culturally monolithic – that no longer exists, and he seems to some extent to be in mourning for that lost communitarian world. Deindustrialisation in the 1980s robbed the south Wales working class of their identity, based on coal, iron and steel. Poorly paid supermarket jobs did not provide an alternative mythology: there is no shelf-stacking equivalent of How Green Was My Valley.
As industrial English-speaking Wales was losing its sense of purpose, largely rural Welsh-speaking Wales was discovering a new confidence, thanks to the start of the Welsh-language channel S4C in 1982, the growth of Welsh-medium education and all the jobs requiring bilingualism that came with the devolution referendum in 1997. Westminster was taken aback when Guto Harri, Boris Johnson’s new press chief, gave an exclusive interview to a Welsh language news site Golwg360. But Welsh-speaking Wales is not responsible for the travails of English-speaking Wales, and the two have to find a way to coexist. The survival of Welsh – after centuries of attempted suppression by the English since the Act of Union of 1536 – is a miracle, and every Welsh person, whether or not they speak it, should celebrate that fact. It does not solely define Welshness, but it contributes to its many-sidedness and unquenchable hwyl.
