The summer of 1946, the first since the end of World War Two, was a chance to appreciate the benefits of peace alongside the work of rebuilding the battered nation. Swansea had suffered catastrophically at the hands of the Luftwaffe, especially in a three night blitz in February 1942 in which over half of its town centre was destroyed . It was a time to at last look forward to the future. However, the tranquility of the nearby village of Penllergaer was disturbed in that hopeful June by a sadistic crime that remains unsolved and remembered to this day.

On the cold and rainy 27th afternoon of that month, 12 year old Muriel Drinkwater began to walk the last mile of her journey home from where the school bus had left her off, singing as she went. At the railway bridge, she met 13 year old Hubert Hoyles who was going in the opposite direction as he had visited her parents’ remote farm, Tyle Du, to buy black market eggs and butter. It was a rough path that meandered in and out of woodland and her mother caught a glimpse of her as she emerged onto a lane about 400 yards away only to disappear into the trees. She put the kettle on but would never see her again. When her daughter did not return home, she and her husband went to the village to search for her, assisted by a policeman and a dozen men as glowworms sparkled in the gathering gloom and mounting panic of the twilight forest.

The next morning, PC David Lloyd George found the red glove in the undergrowth that led him to Muriel’s body, her eyes open and one hand raised in a final, pleading and defensive action. She had beaten about her head, raped, and shot twice in her chest. Two days later, the police discovered the murder weapon close to where it had been used, a 1911 Colt .45 pistol that was found to have been manufactured in 1942 and issued to US forces in Europe. It was distinctive in that it had modified perspex grips. American troops had been billeted in a local mansion during the war and the police theorised that one of them may have been the source of the firearm. Food remains in the vicinity of the gun were evidence that the killer had lain in wait for his victim.

Scotland Yard detectives were brought in to support the investigation which was not uncommon in those days. Hubert Hoyles recounted seeing someone in the woods the week before the attack who was:- "30 years of age. Thick fluffy hair, stern looking and appeared agitated, had a menace about him...a wickedness. He was smart looking, wearing a brown corduroy trousers and a light brown sports jacket". The police visited every house in a 150 square mile area and interviewed 20,000 men. More than 3,000 mourners attended the schoolgirl’s funeral. The numbers are large but so far have added up to nothing as far as identifying the killer is concerned.

Strategic bombing had created an air of fatalism and a relaxation of inhibitions among some who existed in targeted, rearranged cities. There was a glut of guns available to those who wanted to further their criminal careers, whatever their objectives, whatever their needs. In February, George Orwell’s essay “Decline of The English Murder” had appeared in which he bemoaned the scarcity of the “perfect murder” to read about in one’s News of The World i.e. one committed by a solicitor or dentist whose outward respectability masked his decision to enlist poison to conceal his adultery and illicit financial affairs. Homicide was changing.

The author Neil Milkins suggests that the murderer could have been Harold Jones who killed two young girls in sexually motivated acts in Abertillery in 1921. He had been found not guilty of the murder of Freda Burnell, aged 8, and had been given a hero’s welcome on his return from his acquittal. Fifteen days later, he murdered Florence Little, aged 11. He pleaded guilty to both murders, most probably to save his neck as his 16th birthday and the gallows were fast approaching. He was released from Wandsworth Prison in 1941.

A team of retired detectives led by Paul Bethell, a former Detective Chief Inspector with South Wales Police, was set up to re-examine unsolved murders and decided to consider this case despite it being well outside its period of interest. As a result, a DNA profile was obtained from semen on the victim’s mackintosh in 2008 and it is believed that this is the oldest case in the world in which such a profile has been secured. To date, there has been no match in the UK National DNA Database, or to members of the murderer’s family in that database, but a link was established to the killing of 11 year old Sheila Martin who was raped and strangled with her own hair ribbon in woodland near the Brands Hatch Motor Racing Circuit in Kent on 7 July 1946, less than a fortnight after the death at Penllergaer.

In 2010, a decision was made by the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council on National Records and Archives to remove the Muriel Drinkwater files from public view until 2032, to prevent the murderer, if still alive, finding out what the police knew 64 years after his crimes had been committed.

The point blank execution of a girl by an unknown assassin with a powerful handgun in a secluded place long ago was an act of brutal excess that still resonates in our own age of murder, regrettably accustomed as we have become to regular news of predation on children.

Muriel’s family left the area and their isolated smallholding has become subsumed by a modern housing development. This coldest of cold cases maintains a troubled presence in the minds of the elder inhabitants of the village while the mute witness of Penllergaer Forest continues to keep its secrets.

Like many men, I have always been fascinated by tales of courage especially in the theatre of war. I was thrilled when, at an early age, my father gave me the barest bones of a story concerning a member of his Treherbert family who was apparently executed in the Spanish Civil War. My father didn’t know how this man had been related to us, didn’t even know his name, and believed this unlucky ancestor to have been a journalist. When I began to become interested in my family history, my research, in the main, was to corroborate this tale but was to uncover a much more intriguing account.

Thomas Isaac Picton was born in Treherbert in 1896 and came from a family of Pembrokeshire miners. His father, also called Thomas, shows up, aged 18, in the 1881 census living at 8 Tynewydd Huts in the Rhondda Valley, with his uncle John Coles who had been born in Landshipping, Pembrokeshire. Landshipping was a heart-breaking landmark in the journey of the Picton family for on Valentine’s Day 1844, forty miners including women and boys died there in the Garden Pit Colliery when the eastern Cleddau river (Cleddau Ddu or Black Cleddau) burst into the shaft 67 yards below. Included on the monument to the dead erected by local people are the names of six Pictons and five Coles. Four of the Picton dead were a father and his three sons. Such bad luck doesn’t always encourage you to stick around.

Thomas Isaac Picton was also a miner. When The Great War broke out, he enlisted and stayed working with coal, becoming a stoker on the mighty battleships. He was twice decorated for his bravery including during the Battle of Jutland where he spent some time in the water. His Royal Navy service record measured him at 5 feet 4 and a half inches with blue eyes and dark brown hair and swarthy complexion. It noted that he had a tattoo commemorating his mother in a cross on his right arm. He was discharged with “defective teeth” and had spent 24 days in cells during his war years and 14 days in detention. The crammed calligraphy of a busy war observes in brackets that he “broke out” of the latter.

He was an avid boxer who was Wales amateur middleweight champion and he had also been the Navy light heavyweight champion. He managed to get a small number of professional bouts but was primarily a bare knuckle mountain fighter. At least one of his confrontations led him to prison. On one occasion, he left Cardiff jail after serving a short sentence for assaulting a police officer, wearing the boots of a prisoner who had recently been hanged.

As was the case with large numbers of working class people of the inter war years, he became radicalised and was a close friend of Communist Councillor George Thomas of Treherbert. In his early forties, Tom joined the International Brigade, older than the typical volunteers, most of whom were also swapping the uncertainty of their blighted industrial zones for the uncertainty of the Spanish Civil War. In common with hundreds of his fellow miners of the South Wales coalfield, he made the choice to illegally leave his country to fight the rising tide of Fascism in a country he had never previously visited. For entertainment on the journey through France, he was put into a ring to wrestle a bear. This seems an almost cartoon-like scene to the modern mind, a form of larger-than-life existence we have almost forgotten.

On their arrival at the barracks of the International Brigade, they were issued with ill-fitting uniforms and ancient firearms with ill-fitting ammunition. Some would go on to fight Fascists in another war, facing opponents who had honed their skills in killing machines above Guernica and other memorable places. Tom, due to his First World War experiences and his prowess as a boxer, may have been better equipped for the fight than many of his comrades.

He fought in the Battle of Teruel and was captured soon after and imprisoned in Bilbao. He was murdered by his jailers in April 1938 after he had punched to the floor a guard who was beating a fellow prisoner with his rifle butt. The Rhondda Leader newspaper of 29 October 1938 reported that he had been “put up against a wall and shot”. His body was never found.

These warriors are still remembered, still commemorated. Their sacrifice and their willingness to enrol in “the march of History” are still revered by those on the Left and their selflessness continues to haunt our unconfident, cynical age. I am proud that a member of my family was among them. Before I fully knew Tom’s story, I wrote a short poem, “Icons”, whose third line seemed to aptly describe his stance :

Not game footage

but I’ve outlived Stanley Baker

as non-pacifist fist anti-fascist

in humidity following Biblical rainfall

we all rust

Following the seven million pound investigation into Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC) and its attempts to prevent the investiture of Prince Charles in 1969, two of its bombers were martyred, two, including the leader John Jenkins, were in prison, and two cells out of five or six were put out of action.

After the marching and explosions of the previous decade, the 1970s found Welsh nationalists focussing on Y Fro Gymraeg-the Welsh-speaking heartlands. Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg and Adfer fought language campaigns including paint-daubing and advocating that stocks of affordable homes be made available for local people. Tensions between Welsh speakers and monoglot English speakers influenced the result of the compromised devolution referendum of 1 March 1979. Welsh Labour MPs were especially vocal in opposition to an outcome that, in their view, would lead to domination by the minority, native language and hamper their party’s efforts to further culturally assimilate the Welsh into the British way of life. Many nationalists were daunted by the 4 to 1 vote against devolution. Gwynfor Evans, the leader of Plaid Cymru, even contemplated suicide. What ensued was a return by some to violent methods that were this time carried out on a more personal level.

The first fire attack on a holiday home occurred at Nefyn in the Lleyn peninsula on 13 December 1979. Initially, wax fire bombs were used that were filled with sulphuric acid and placed within condoms. Later incendiary devices incorporated timing devices and chemical explosives but most were unstable and the damage was not always extensive. A group calling itself Meibion Glyndŵr (Sons of Glyndŵr) claimed responsibility for the arson attacks. There was a theory that some of the new insurgents had been formerly connected to MAC and the police guessed that there were three cells of arsonists in operation.

Most of the attacks on holiday properties took place in North and West Wales in the winter months when it is was more likely that they would be unoccupied. The aims of the arsonists were to enable local people to afford to buy houses which were currently being snapped up by wealthier English incomers for second homes, and to resist the impact of inward migration on the Welsh language and culture. 16% of houses in Meirionnydd and Dwyfor were holiday homes. There were 20,000 such properties in Wales and 50,000 people on council house waiting lists. Meibion Glyndŵr believed that what was happening in rural Wales was ethnic cleansing and “cultural genocide”.

Operation Tân (Fire), a massive roundup of known Welsh nationalists on Palm Sunday, 30 March 1980, was the first use of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1976 in Wales. This law started life in 1974 as a temporary measure, a year of the worst violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Suspects were picked up in dawn raids but no evidence was found and no one was charged in connection with the arson attacks as a result of this activity which led to allegations of a “police state”. Papers obtained recently by Radio Cymru contained the following observation from a Home Office civil servant on the police view of patriots:

"As a result of my attendance at the last meeting of the committee of chief constables, I was left with some anxiety that the police generally and Mr. [name redacted] in particular, does not understand fully the….distinctions involved in studying subversive and criminal elements within a wide, legitimate political movement. Mr [...] seemed to think that the presence of law-abiding Welsh nationalists in influential positions in, for example, education and broadcasting was a matter worthy of notice by the police."

This operation, however, would eventually lead to the arrest of Dafydd Ladd who was found guilty of unrelated bomb attacks in the period from 1980 to 1982. British Steel offices and three Conservative clubs in Cardiff, another in Shotton and an Army Recruitment Office in Pontypridd were attacked. More chillingly, an explosive device was slipped through a window at the home of Nicholas Edwards, the Welsh Secretary. The Welsh Office building in Cardiff, a Severn Trent Water Authority building in Birmingham and National Coal Board offices in Stratford-upon-Avon and London were also bombed with a resumption in the use of gelignite in these attacks. Ladd was sentenced to nine years in prison and was connected to the Workers Army of The Welsh Republic.

In 1988, Meibion Glyndŵr changed their tactics. On 3 October, they attacked on a 250 mile long front, firebombing seven estate agents over the border with England-in Wellington, West Kirby, Chipping Camden, Neston, Worcester and Bristol. They associated these offices with the marketing of holiday homes in Wales and of course brought more police constabularies into the investigation.

On 26 November 1988, six estate agents in London’s West End were firebombed and a fireman was injured trying to tackle one of the blazes. Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Squad was recruited to the effort to detect the arsonists as were MI5 who provided 38 agents to assist the Welsh police. Taking their campaign of destruction to the English capital ensured publicity for the Meibion Glyndŵr cause that any number of attacks in the media ghetto backwater of Welsh-speaking North and West Wales would not have excited.

Letters signed “Rhys Gethin” (Owain Glyndŵr’s standard bearer and general) were received, stating that “English incomers and their businesses were in the firing line”. At this time, 57% of respondents in a HTV poll said they supported the aims of the arsonists.

In 1990, a letter bomb was sent to Land and Sea, a centre connected with yachting in Abersoch in the Lleyn peninsula. Sion Roberts, a known nationalist from Llangefni aged 21, was suspected and his flat was bugged by MI5 who also found bomb-making equipment. Further letter bombs were intercepted by a postal worker-the addressees were the head of North Wales CID, Detective Chief Superintendent Gwyn Williams, Detective Chief Inspector Maldwyn Roberts, the senior detective leading the hunt for Meibion Glyndŵr, and Conservative Party agent Elwyn Jones. Sion Roberts, who denied the accusations, was jailed on 26 March 1993 for 12 years. His co-defendants, Dewi Prysor Williams and David Gareth Davies, were acquitted of all charges. MI5 agents gave evidence from behind screens.

The arsons continued during the fifteen months the three accused were awaiting trial. In 1992 and early 1993, letters signed by Meibion Glyndŵr were sent to nineteen English families living in the Lleyn peninsula ordering them to leave Wales by 1 March 1993 or be burned out. These threats were written in Welsh and had to be translated as most of the recipients were unable to speak that language.

In 2017, the Welsh heartland has shrunk and changed shape, maybe ceased to exist. In the decade to 2013, it is estimated that more than 5,000 Welsh speakers left their country for England each year. In 2011, 21% of Wales’ population had been born in the neighbouring country. According to the Big Issue, more than 15,000 people become homeless each year in Wales. At the same time, Gwynedd is the county with the highest number of second homes in Wales-5,626.

There were 197 acts of arson attributed to Meibion Glyndŵr between 1979 and 1992-134 in North Wales, 43 in Dyfed-Powys police area and 20 in England but, to date, no one has been convicted of these offences. Like Owain Glyndŵr himself who disappeared into the mists of history, his “sons” seem to have adopted the same response to the end of their particular rebellion.

Dare we dream of independence for our country? Have we the courage to go it alone? King Arthur has not been resurrected. Neither has Owain Glyndwr. We are tired of waiting for Y Mab Darogan, the Son of Prophecy, first predicted many years ago as the saviour of our country in its hour of need. It’s time to realise in fact that we are all the Children of Prophecy and that we need to dare to wake up to our own potential. Confidence is a requisite ingredient to a successful life. Wales has endured over seven centuries of being governed by another country and hamstrung by an inferiority complex which still weighs us down at key times. Following on from the establishment of the devolved Welsh Government in 1999, we must now learn the assuredness of nation builders and the statesmanship of just governance.

The current political situation in Britain forces us to ask why we would actually want to still be associated with this shambles. Article 50 has been triggered and we face almost two more years of wranglings, bitterness and deceit as a grudging member of the European Union.

This presents yet more possibility for the atmosphere to become ever more heated, for the United Kingdom to become even more Disunited. I believe the present state of affairs affords a renewed and urgent opportunity for distinct countries within the Union to plan to begin the walk away from it.

Of course, at the time of writing, nothing is certain about Brexit but the signs are that we are in the process of returning to a time when tolerance and understanding of people who appeared to be different in some way were in short supply. The racism that has always lurked in the background is at large, emboldened by the scaremongering of the conniving amateur operators of UKIP and their sleeping partners. Added to disability hate crime that is encouraged by Government austerity measures, it will help to turn a post-Brexit U.K. into a kind of scruffy, backward, civil warring, bigoted, frontier fiefdom. Let us not forget that an M.P. who appeared to be a decent human being was assassinated by a right wing thug inspired by the pernicious propaganda of Brexiteers. I for one do not wish to live in a country which is a breeding ground for such hatred and lack of culture. “Taking back control” has a number of applications and the U.K. does not enjoy exclusive rights to acts of leaving.

The neurosis of no longer having an overseas empire creates in some citizens a kind of nostalgia for lording it over people they consider inferior, a readiness for violent action and an unwarranted feeling of supremacy. The British Empire still exists-just ask the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. It’s time to finally dismantle it.

Do we want to be dependent on what is effectively a 4th rate funding mechanism? The batting order of wealth distribution is England (mainly London and the Home Counties), then Scotland, followed by Northern Ireland with us at the bottom of the barrel while England is fast becoming a de facto adjunct as London’s corrupt financial centre dominates the rest of that country. It is not unlikely for the North of England (“ the Northern Powerhouse”), Cornwall and other areas far from the capital to also harbour notions of breaking free from the rest of the U.K.

Independence would allow the Welsh to scrutinise anew the democratic process which has become compromised and almost meaningless in much of the Western world thanks to cynical lobbyists, the psychological warfare and algorithms of companies like Cambridge Analytica and the bias of the media. Additionally, learning from recent money manoeuvres that caused misery to millions of people, any newly created state would benefit from a robust set of financial standards from the outset.

The Scots are interested in attaining independence and one of the arguments the doubters throw in their faces is that they can’t afford it now that North Sea oil revenues are in decline.

They will of course raise similar or even greater objections to the idea of a working, financially fluid, independent Wales. The Bank of England abandoned the Gold Standard in 1931 and governments don’t run the economy in the same way we finance our lives. They rely on a never-ending series of IOUs and they print money. We could do that especially with our own currency. Please see an attached link to tax expert Richard Murphy’s website which gives further information on how British finances actually operate

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2017/05/04/how-are- you-going- to-pay- for-it/

We could also sue the British Government for reparations for coal and other materials taken from our land, for the territory occupied by military bases and the unallocated money and interest from public donations following mining disasters. The fiscal policies of the Tory Government mean that we exist in a decade with the lowest growth in wages in 200 years, with fat cats at one end and the gig economy at the other. We could do better.

Iceland has a population of 333,980 and Luxembourg 583,995 while Wales has around 3.16 million people within its borders, many times more than these tiny, autonomous states.

The Royal Family would have to cease to have any connection or rights to Wales. The non-Welsh Prince of Wales, an imposition of ancient conquest, would be no more. The aristocracy would be dissolved in an attempt to create an egalitarian state. We don’t need them. We never did. Change happens. This time we have to ensure that we are driving it, not having it imposed upon us as we are so used to.

The terrain of Wales is mostly mountainous and lends itself towards being protected by a compact and mobile self-defence force armed with conventional weaponry supported by morally instructed alliances. There are already a number of military bases we could take over and our deep water harbours are valuable assets.

An independent Wales would not need, in my opinion, to be called “Wales” for this is not how we described ourselves in our formative years but rather the suspicious name conferred on us by our Saxon enemies (Old English wealh:foreigner, stranger or slave). Cymru Newydd would be a hopeful, positive title for a forward-looking, tolerant, multi-racial, multi-lingual, creative and free space: a modern, productive and prosperous new country. I look forward to meeting you there some day...

Son of Pillgwenlly

in the former domain of

Gwynllyw Farfog

on the loquacious Usk

and the tongue-twisting old tongue

you sacked conventional work

unless to pay for your passage

eschewing the teeming path

of the Empire’s Christian soldiers

to sleep under the forever stars

in a vastness with railway arteries

and waning bison heart

you were

transatlantic

transamerican

transhuman

you wondered at Nature

the great outdoors

as you wandered

the Great Dominion

and the Great Plains

that reverence for

the unmanufactured world

always walked with you

the lines in a weathered face

telling so many histories

the detail in the hedgerow dazzling

that moment’s contemplation

of the search for

the next coin

the next smile

the next shelter

the next stanza

from you tramping and your courage

in living with physical trauma

to your single-minded campaign

to become a man of letters

the story of you is a lesson

to us in our hours of doubt

and cruel but needless isolation

Far from London’s Swinging Sixties but feeling the full force of the gravitational pull of its lawmakers, financiers and Armed Forces, Wales endured a number of traumas in that epochal decade that led the country down an unfamiliar path. The insensitive way in which our people and resources were being treated by the British Government had caused a feeling among many that their country was being oppressed and in danger of losing its defining identity. In the vacuum left by non-representation by a toothless and treacherous political mainstream, many young people felt they needed a different approach to creating an independent Wales. Precursed by White Eagle of Snowdon graffiti on walls, road signs and rocks, units of the Free Wales Army seemed to emerge spontaneously in all parts of the land, an important component in awakening the population’s sense of the nation’s destiny and of the resistance against encroachment of its land, water, people and language.

They adopted the White Eagle as their emblem and wore their homemade uniforms in public. They had a sense of internationalism and met representatives of the I.R.A., the Brittany Liberation Front, the Scottish Liberation Army, and other groups fighting to defeat occupying powers. They marched in Dublin with like-minded activists to commemorate the 1916 Rising. They also marched in Machynlleth, the site of the first Welsh parliament.

Away from the gaze of Special Branch, this group conducted armed training manoeuvres and bomb-making instruction in remote moorland areas. However, its armament was largely antique or the weaponry of the countryside. They claimed that they had “7,000 men” and were “ready for war”. Much of the energy of the F.W.A. was expended in propaganda including claiming responsibility for acts of violence which it did not commit. Their main objective was to achieve independence for their country.

Its commandant was Julian Cayo Evans, a product of the English public school system, who had fought Communist guerrillas in Malaya with the South Wales Borderers. He bred horses at his farm near Lampeter and his father was a former High Sheriff of Cardiganshire.

For an army, its paramilitary actions were few and, in the confusion of having a number of different groups and individuals planting bombs in the same period, difficult to definitively attribute. They were involved in the failed bombing in March 1967 of an Elan Valley water pipeline supplying Birmingham. Ironically, another type of warfare, the bouncing bombs of the Dam Busters, had also been practised in these same reservoirs. It is possible that the F.W.A carried out the bomb attack on the main administrative centre of the Welsh Office of the Secretary of State for Wales in Cardiff on 25 May 1968 in a joint operation with Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (Movement for the Defence of Wales).

They made their public debut at the vociferous protest at the official opening of the controversial Llyn Celyn reservoir in 1965 but arguably their greatest victory was during the aftermath of the Aberfan tragedy. The large sum of money that had been raised by voluntary donations to assist the devastated families had been become mired with sloth-like bureaucrats, showing little inclination, and even less sensitivity, in allocating the money to those for whom it was collected. With tensions mounting and the establishment acting in its usual cavalier manner, a journalist, John Summers, asked the F.W.A. to intervene and to exert pressure on the fund committee. In September 1967, 50 uniformed F.W.A. men marched through Merthyr Tudful with banners flowing, drums beating and singing battle hymns. At the post-march press conference, Dennis Coslett, a senior commander, issued an ultimatum that, if £5,000 was not paid to each affected family within the week, Merthyr Town Hall, the offices of the Disaster Fund and those of the solicitor acting as treasurer and secretary of the Fund would be bombed. The money was paid on time.

The F.W.A. and another nationalist group, the Patriotic Front, were invited to appear on David Frost’s TV programme. Coslett, who had lost an eye in a mining accident, wore an eye patch due to an infection. This led the celebrated broadcaster to refer to Coslett as “Dai Dayan” as he believed he resembled the Israeli general Moshe Dayan, an indication of how they were regarded by the media. However, despite their penchant for uniforms and self-publicity, the authorities were beginning to increasingly take them seriously.

The F.W.A. had plans for an uprising in Caernarfon to prevent the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales. To support this rebellion, they planned to take over the Welsh Office building they may have previously bombed and try to hold out for as long as possible. This campaign never got off the ground as 9 members including Cayo Evans and Dennis Coslett were arrested and charged with Public Order Act offences in the authorities’ drive to suppress protest ahead of the investiture. The trial in Swansea lasted 58 days and ended, with uncanny coincidence, on Prince Charles’ big day in Caernarfon Castle. Coslett refused throughout to speak English. He and Cayo Evans were sentenced to 15 months imprisonment mainly on the “evidence” of the interviews they had given journalists and regarded the experience as a show trial.

This was effectively the end of the F.W.A. and the drive for greater self-determination took on alternative tactics as a new decade dawned. Much of the story of the Welsh radicals and their confrontations of the 1960s has been airbrushed from the record and from the minds of those whom they sought to serve. It is important to acknowledge the struggles of those who precede us, to listen to the beat of our history, and to be curious enough to want to follow rivers from their sources to the ocean.

Those who of us who live in Wales in these first decades of the 21st century can count ourselves lucky not to have witnessed terror attacks or heard the terrifying sounds of bomb explosions in our homeland. I don’t know what that says about us as a people: it’s true that we have our tensions, our divisions, our differences, but we have not succumbed to the tactics of the terrorist or experienced such retribution in our peaceful land as a result of the cynical foreign policy of the Kingdom that rules us.

It was not always this way. In the 1960s there were bomb attacks at the following sites among others: the construction site of the Clywedog dam (1963 and 1966); a pipe carrying water from Lake Vyrnwy to Liverpool (1967); the Temple of Peace and Health, Cardiff (1967); a tax office and the Welsh Office building, also in Cardiff (1968); a water pipe at Helsby, Cheshire; a tax office in Chester (1969).

These attacks were attributed to Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (M.A.C.)-Movement for The Defence of Wales-a paramilitary nationalist unit that was created in response to the drowning of the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley in order to create a reservoir to supply water to Liverpool. One of the group’s founding members, Aberystwyth University student Emyr Llywelyn Jones, was convicted of blowing up a transformer at the dam construction site on 10 February 1963. He refused to name his accomplices who, on the day of his conviction, retaliated by blowing up an electricity pylon at Gellillydan near Blaenau Ffestiniog. This in turn led to the arrest and imprisonment of Owain Williams and John Albert Jones, the two other originators of the organisation.

One would have thought that M.A.C. would have ceased to exist at that time but a new leader, John Barnard Jenkins, a serving Non-Commissioned Officer in the British Army, moved into that position in the shadows to take their fight to different battlefields and potentially more spectacular targets.

The investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in Caernarfon Castle on 1 July 1969 caused M.A.C. to plan to detonate a number of bombs in Gwynedd, in an attempt to disrupt the event and to promote its agenda of Welsh independence. The night before, two of its members, Alwyn Jones and George Taylor, were killed when their weapon prematurely exploded near government buildings in Abergele. These were the only fatalities of a 6 year armed campaign. On the day itself, a bomb exploded in a Caernarfon policeman’s garden providing some competition for the 21 gun salute. A device that was planted near the castle failed to go off as did another that had been placed at Llandudno Pier with the objective of preventing the Royal Yacht Britannia docking.

Charles was invested as the 21st Prince of Wales on that fateful day, cementing centuries of royal charades, unjust power and unwanted connections, an outsider unaware, in the pomp and euphoria of ceremony, of the actions he was inspiring.

John Jenkins was arrested in November of that year and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in April 1970 after being found guilty of 8 explosives offences. His Prison Letters was published by Y Lolfa in 1981.

Liverpool City Council issued a formal apology for the flooding on 19 October 2005.

Wales is a much different place than it was in the 1960s. We have a devolved assembly government serving a much-changed population, a Welsh language TV channel, and the Welsh Language Act 1993 put that language on an equal footing with the English language as far as the public sector is concerned. The treatment of our country by the British state in that decade in such dark incidents as the Capel Celyn flooding and the Aberfan disaster must never be allowed to be repeated as it could once again provide ammunition to desperate and motivated citizens to plan violent acts against the buildings, infrastructure and symbols of the ruling system.