In the West Wales Chapel tradition Sul y Blodau, ‘flowering Sunday’, falls on the day more popularly known as Palm Sunday and is the occasion relatives dedicate to tidying the ground and foliage around the gravestones of the departed, before supplying the monuments with fresh flowers. Brittle with Relics is a landmark history of the people of Wales during a period of great national change

Written in English, The Welsh Extremist examines the social energy animating the Cymraeg-speaking areas of Wales during the late 1960s and early 1970s that coalesced into a dynamic and committed protest movement. In 1971, Ned Thomas surveyed “a society that is drained of its own best talent (and) begins to resent every incursion … the land bought for the sake of the trout stream by the fishing syndicate from the Midland city, the buyers of holiday cottages who price the local young couples out.” Half a century later, Wales remains blighted by similar conditions, ill-informed opinions about Cymraeg and ever more powerful market forces. My own family, based in Bedwas, in the Rhymney Valley, even held the belief, uncontroversial at the time, that English was altogether the superior culture,” he says. This isn’t the desiccated history of official document, sifted record, film footage and newsprint but rather of vivid recall and recollection.

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Roger Lewis previously came under fire for calling the Welsh language an “appalling and moribund monkey language” in the Daily Mail in 2011. Such concerns were at best dismissed as student politics. For much of this period, in the eyes of South Wales Labourism, a self-governing Wales was a cause proposed by dangerous nationalists, or ‘Nats’. The country was accordingly often forced to navigate its way through a period of great change in a state of internal contradiction and frequent animosity. Brittle With Relics is nuanced, passionate and reflective, conveying a very Welsh blend of fatalism and hope.’ Rhian E. Jones, History Today The race that was hated was the English. Apart from the construction of reservoirs to boost the water supply of Liverpool, it’s nevertheless hard to find much evidence of “a blatant colonialist action”, and the way some characters in the 20th-century affected to cry their eyes out over the fates of Caradoc, Arthur, Llywelyn and Owen Glendower (“No Owain Glyndwr crap thank you very much,” as Kingsley Amis said in The Old Devils) is surely very silly. How can you still bear a grudge from Medieval days?

On the whole, however, King’s Wales was never mine. He dwells, as commentators always do, on the dourness, chapel graveyards, abandoned collieries, struggle, gloomy stuff about job losses and outside lavatories. But the principality is much more than teetotalism and damnation. As Richard Burton’s sister Hilda once said to Ringo Starr: “You know the Welsh. We’re good at singing, we’re good at parties, and we don’t feel shy.” Richly humane, viscerally political, generously multi-voiced, Brittle with Relics is oral history at its revelatory best.’ Other histories of this period in Wales will offer more extensive forensic factual analysis. This history takes the reader to the Welsh themselves.

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The procession of visitors to and from the tap in the corner of the churchyard is distinguished by the stoic looks on their faces, as the winds suddenly swell around this lower mountainside and ice-cold water flows over their hands from the newly watered vases and containers. Such places were also a locus of an altruism that ensured families affected by industrial accidents would not be abandoned without support and resources. In addition, the halls and institutes provided every member of the community with access to a library and, through initiatives such as the Workers’ Educational Association, founded in 1903, an opportunity to learn, study and discuss. Andrew Davies has emerged as an insightful critic of Cardiff Bay and is a strong presence. When the second devolution referendum is mooted “Ron [Davies] could see,” says Andrew Davies, “that, unless you had a form of PR, it would be full of superannuated Labour councillors from the valleys; it would be very conservative with a small c… proportional representation in the Labour group was hated, absolutely hated”.