Wales, History and Britishness

At the 2005 British Social Attitudes survey the proportion of people in England who said

that British was the ‘best or only’ way to describe their national identity stood at 48

percent. In 1992 the figure was 63 percent.1 One explanation for this apparent decline in

Britishness is the rise of Englishness as people’s first loyalty, the most obvious

manifestation of which appears to be the multitude of St George’s crosses that now appear

around England during major football tournaments. Given that England and Britain were

traditionally synonymous for many English people, a rise in Englishness since Welsh and

Scottish devolution was perhaps inevitable and it has led many to ponder the fate of

Britain, and even proclaim its death.

Historians have been closely involved in that process, scanning the past to either

support or refute the end of Britain. But these debates have had narrow horizons. They

have been too shaped by the perspectives of the present rather than the past and have paid

insufficient attention to Wales. Welsh historians themselves have made little contribution

to the debates over what happened to Britishness after the Second World War. By instead

concentrating on the peculiarly Welsh dimensions to Wales’s past, Welsh historians have

perhaps even become unwitting accomplices in the idea that modern Britain is no different

from modern England. This article thus addresses the issue of Britishness in Wales and

Welsh history. First, it gives an overview of what historians have said about the decline of

Britishness since the Second World War. It then explores Wales’s minimal contribution to

that debate. Finally, it argues that by shifting our gaze from the political sphere and into

the realm of everyday life, a different picture emerges, one where Britishness is neither

synonymous with England nor dead. Instead, Britishness is alive, maybe not kicking but

still at the base of a shared experience that extends across the border with England. The

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article is neither an empirical account nor a comprehensive survey of every source of this

shared experience. Instead, it is a call for a more nuanced understanding of recent British

history.

Historiography and the decline of Britain

The 1950s and 1960s saw the idea of British national decline become popular currency in

the UK as the country lost its global role and influence. Nonetheless, relative economic

prosperity was more than compensation and the changes Britain was experiencing were

widely regarded as inevitable in the new post-war climate. In the 1970s, however,

economic crises, party political instabilities, the suffocating power of the unions and the

rise of nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales all took their toll on people’s faith in the

British State and nation. In 1977, Tom Nairn, a Scottish nationalist and Marxist, published

an influential book called The Break-Up of Britain.2 That same year, the Queen’s silver

jubilee did provide an opportunity to celebrate Britain but it was not just the Sex Pistols

that scorned the Royalist waving of the Union Jack. The 1980s and early 1990s were not

much better, for the British State at least. Whilst advocating a populist British patriotism,

Thatcherism reeled back the frontiers of the State, selling off its assets and emphasizing

private enterprise over public assistance. Though the Tory administrations won significant

support across all sectors of British society, the longer they remained in power the more

economic inequalities led to a growing dissatisfaction in traditional industrial heartlands

with the existing British state of affairs. In Scotland, demand for devolution became both

widespread and populist. In Wales and the north of England, the Labour party regrouped

and clawed back popular support after the debacles and internal divisions of the early

1980s. The development of the European Union, meanwhile, presented a new threat to the

British State and the Maastricht treaty turned us all into European citizens in 1993. But it

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was in Northern Ireland that the most fundamental challenge to the British State emerged;

bloody and violent insurrection was not the hallmark of a stable nation state. If in Wales

and Scotland there were murmurings of the end of Britain, in Northern Ireland the whole

thing seemed in danger of literally being blown apart. When New Labour swept to power

in 1997, there was a renewed sense of optimism for the future. The new government set

about redefining and rebranding Britishness but at the same time it began to unravel the

historic British constitutional settlement by giving devolution to Wales and Scotland. In

1999 Tom Nairn wrote another book that encapsulated, in title at least, what many were

thought or feared was happening. He called it After Britain.3

Paul Ward has argued that it was the ‘apparent stability of the United Kingdom

across much of the twentieth century’ that made this ‘“crisis” of Britishness appear

profound’.4 But the changes Britain underwent from the 1970s also led historians to

question the stability, unity and base of past Britishness. To demonstrate that the

contemporary shift away from a single British identity was nothing new, histories emerged

that tried to move beyond an Anglocentricism and stress the plurality and diversity of the

British experience.5 The Scots, Welsh and Irish were brought back from the obscurity of

their own national histories and into the mainstream history of the UK. While some

criticized such accounts for suggesting an integrity to Britain that was stronger than

anything that had existed in reality and for downplaying England’s dominance of the UK,6

others began to draw connections between this plural British past and the dilemmas of

Britain in the late twentieth century. Some wrote and read into such histories the idea that

because Britain had survived in the past with multiple internal identities it could thus do so

in the future too.7 In contrast, and more common, was the idea that because the UK had

been constructed in specific historical conditions with specific forces underpinning it, once

those forces were gone then disintegration would become inevitable. The end of Empire

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and Commonwealth immigration were generally deemed to be the central causes of a crisis

in British identity but European integration, the decline of Protestantism, nationalism in

Wales, Scotland and Ireland, Americanization, globalization and English insensitivities to

other national identities within the UK all also came under scrutiny as likely causes of a

British crisis.8 Others went further. Britishness was not only in decline, it had only had a

brief moment in the first place.9

Within the pluralist accounts of the UK there was a tendency was to portray

Britishness as a political identity based on the State, rather than as a popular and cultural

sentiment. The emphasis was on Britishness as the interaction between different peoples

rather than on the common bonds that bound them.10 Thus for some British national

identity was not a national identity at all but a state identity imposed by the colonial

English on the rest of Britain.11 Colls’ Identity of England also argued that there was no

real collective British identity and regarded a future crisis as the inevitable outcome of

forthcoming constitutional disputes between the Scottish and British parliaments.12

Robbins, meanwhile, has criticized McLean and McMillan’s book on unionism for not

mentioning Britishness at all.13 Within the historiography, the Second World War is

conceded as a moment of genuine British sympathies but one that took place under the

temporary conditions of an external and evil threat and the fully-mobilized powers of a

state that controlled nearly all aspects of people’s lives and bombarded them with

propaganda.14 Where cultural dimensions to Britishness are considered there is a tendency

to switch between Englishness and Britishness, sometimes consciously, sometimes

unconsciously.15 For the post-1939 period, historians have either sidestepped the issue of

Britishness outside England or stressed the otherness of Wales and Scotland, portraying

Britishness there as conditional and economic.16 Thus the whole concept of what

Britishness meant beyond the realms of the State after 1939 is fumbled with or just

4
ignored. Sociologists criticize the lack of theory applied to the idea by historians but, even

for those who shudder at the straightjacket sociological theory can place on the diversity of

the past, too much British history has little conception of what Britishness meant beyond

the spheres of State and government.

The problems of this literature are evident in Richard Weight’s Patriots: National

Identity in Britain, 1940-2000. Weight quite rightly looks beyond the State for a sense of

Britishness and into the realms of popular culture and the economy. He paints a picture of

a Britishness based on economic need, a common Protestantism and the prestige of the

British Empire. Once these pillars began to subside, the whole British project was in

danger of collapsing. The problem with this argument, as Ward points out, is that it

assumes that Britishness was imposed from the outside, whereas ‘Celtic’ identities were

more organic and real. The populism of Britishness and the connections between Welsh

and Scottish identities and the pillars of Britishness - capitalism, Protestantism and empire

- are thus overlooked.17 McCrone, meanwhile, sees the book as lacking a clear idea of

what Britishness is, and calls it ‘England-plus. The non-English get walk on parts as and

when they are deemed to matter to the core’.18 In other words, Weight says what made and

unmade Britain but he does not get to grips with what Britishness actually was outside

England. For all the book’s focus on popular culture, its role in creating a popular sense of

Britishness is overlooked.

Such problems are unsurprising given the vagueness of the British identity and its

conflation with Englishness. Even official definitions remain unclear. British citizenship

was an invention of the 1948 British Nationality Act (and included colonial British

subjects) and there have been no subsequent attempts to offer an official definition. Cohen

has thus suggested that there is no ‘essential Britishness’. Instead, there is what he calls

the ‘incredible vagueness of being British’.19 But an identity’s vagueness is no indicator of

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its popular appeal or strength and, at one level, all identities are vague in the sense that

they lack a universally agreed upon set of core values or criteria of belonging. Paul Ward

thus suggests that Britishness is simply ‘what people mean when they identify themselves

individually and collectively as ‘being British’. This identification relates to the political,

economic, social, cultural and personal surroundings they find themselves in at the time

they choose to think about their Britishness.’20 Such interpretations are very loose and, to

social-science eyes, untheoretical and simplistic, but they allow for the different, shifting

and competing meanings and conceptions of Britishness that people in Britain have

developed and held over the last three hundred years.

Ward’s Britishness since 1870 is a rare exploration of those conceptions of

Britishness. He accepts tensions within Britishness, but points to its continuing but

shifting influence on political figures and ordinary people. For Ward, Britishness was one

of a multitude of identities people possessed and its meaning varied from person to person.

He argues that rather than being something imposed on the masses, ordinary people have

been involved in the construction of Britishness. The identity’s ability to co-exist with

other identities and to change with conditions has made it resilient. The vagueness of

Britishness was thus not a crisis of identity but simply the outcome of its complex and

diverse history. Ward concludes, ‘between the 1870s and the beginning of the twenty-first

century the majority of people in the United Kingdom came through such discussions of

their national identities with a belief that they shared more in common, as Britons, than

they had differences. Certainly the nature of Britishness had changed and in many ways

had been weakened, but Britishness was alive and well.’21 Of course, proving such

assertions is very difficult but they suggest a more nuanced thesis than a picture of simple

decline.

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Britain and Wales

None of these accounts of the shifting nature of Britishness have been written by either a

Welsh person or from a Welsh perspective. This is not to argue that they have ignored

Wales -although in most of the sociology on Britishness Wales is relegated to the odd side

comment22 - but there has been a very narrow investigation of the Welsh dimension. Plaid

Cymru, the language and the (lack of) support for devolution are all noted but the popular

culture and identities of the English-speaking Welsh are marginalized or merged into the

English experience. If a plural identity like Britishness is to be fully understood then it has

to be studied from all its peripheries and not just the core and the most obvious margins.

Wales was qualitatively different from Scotland and Ireland and cannot simply be

consistently relegated to the ‘and to a lesser extent Wales’ comments that characterize

writing on devolution and the sociology of identities.23 Legally and administratively Wales

was closer to England than Northern Ireland or Scotland. Politically it had much in

common with the north of England. It thus offers a different dimension to Britishness, a

place different to England but similar, the kind of place where if Britishness was in decline

then it might be less obvious but more significant.

Welsh academics writing about modern Wales have taken different approaches to

Wales’s Britishness. Some have followed the colonial route, seeing Wales’ British past in

terms of English exploitation and domination. This has even led to talk of post-devolution

Wales as a post-colonial nation.24 Such ideas have encouraged Tanner to argue that too

much Welsh history has been ‘the history of a nation in the making and the makers of a

nation’. Wales’ ties with Britain and Britishness are marginalized and it ‘is a remarkably

unbalanced historical record’.25 In fact, most nineteenth and early twentieth-century

historians stress Wales’s role in British ventures from industrialization to empire to war.26

In particular, Dai Smith points to how the ties of class bound the Welsh and English.27

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Such accounts have not always made comfortable reading for contemporary Wales but

they form an integral part of Welsh history. Gwyn Alf Williams was one historian who

saw unequivocally a British dimension to Welsh history. He argued ‘What is immediately

clear, from even a cursory survey of our broken-backed history, is that the tiny Welsh

people, for we were always very thin on the ground, have survived by being British.

Welsh identity has constantly renewed itself by anchoring itself in variant forms of

Britishness.’28 His analysis is based on a close reading of how the Welsh made and remade

Wales over the centuries. Their nationality survived precisely because they allied it to

rather than against the might of the British state. Only the most vehement nationalists

would disagree but the picture becomes much less clear once we turn our eyes to the years

after 1945.

Writing about the post-war history of Wales has been dominated by the domestic

political sphere. This has inevitably put debates regarding political identity, the rise of

Plaid Cymru and the stuttering march towards devolution at the fore. Tanner, for example,

argues for the need for Wales to be examined within a British context, highlighting, for

example, how devolution policies in the 1960s have to be understood in light of

contemporary concerns about modernizing British government rather than just as a

response to the rise of nationalist parties.29 Others meanwhile stress Labour’s historic

commitment to Welsh issues.30 More nationalist historians in contrast have examined at

the campaigning of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg and the history of Plaid Cymru and its

leading figures.31 Thus the emphasis in both the Labour and nationalist historical traditions

is on political struggles for the welfare of the working class or the Welsh nation, whereas

virtually nothing has been said, for example, about political apathy, anti-nuclear

campaigns or support for the Conservatives. This is not to argue that the existing work is

misguided in its analysis; rather what it is significant is the topics chosen for analysis.

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Beyond the political sphere, post-1945 Welsh history is even more underdeveloped and is

firmly skewed away from ordinary life. Morgan discusses small-circulation intellectual

Welsh language publications but not the mass audiences received in Wales by popular

English romances.32 Too often, where attention has been turned to the popularity of the

London media, it has been to decry its lack of attention to Welsh issues or its impact on a

limited Welsh civil society rather than analyse its role in people’s lives. The ordinary but

important aspects of post-1945 Welsh life - things that were no different to elsewhere in

the UK such as the taste for a Hollywood movie, an English soap opera, a comfortable

pub, an Indian takeaway and a cheery Beatles tune – await their historical champion.

With a limited base of published research to draw on, academic’s views of national

identity itself in post-1945 Welsh history are complex and shaped by their own politics and

where they stand in time. Kenneth Morgan’s British history has stressed how the majority

of Welsh people, and socialists in particular, were committed to Britain and the British

State, rejecting nationalism as ‘inward-looking parochialism’.33 Nonetheless, his seminal

account of twentieth-century Wales, published in 1981, finishes on a high point, regarding

Wales as stronger than ever because of the multitude of Welsh institutions that now existed

and the book does not emphasize Wales’s Britishness in the way his political history

does.34 John Davies’s more implicitly nationalist A History of Wales (1993), also ends on a

positive note, sensing signs of a rebirth of Wales and that the ‘the nation in its fullness is

yet to be’ and he sidesteps any direct consideration of Britishness and its relationship with

Welshness.35 R. Merfyn Jones’s influential 1992 essay on Welsh identity noted the crisis

in Wales caused by economic and social changes since the Second World War but also

ended on a high note, sensing that the emerging proto-state and, most importantly, a

Europe of the Regions, offered an opportunity for a Wales based on shared citizenship

rather political and cultural causes.36 Others were less optimistic. Gwyn Alf Williams’

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When Was Wales? ends in an apocalyptic tone, forecasting the end of Wales as its people

remained wedded to the British state. In making this judgement on the period he was

writing in, he seems to be overlooking the rest of his work which argued that the Welsh

working class was always tied to a sense of Britishness.37

Since 1997 devolution has encouraged different perspectives. There is now a sense

in Wales, amongst the minority who think about these things at least, that a nation state is

being constructed. Graham Day’s Making Sense of Wales (2002), an impressive survey of

the sociology of Wales, virtually ignores the issue of Britishness in its chapter on national

identity.38 The 2007 edition of Davies’ History of Wales ends by expressing satisfaction

that the 1993 edition’s prediction that Wales was coming into its fullness was correct.39

Similar sentiments in Scotland have led to the writing of more Scottish-centred histories,40

and Geraint H. Jenkins has recently called for less British-centred histories of Wales.41

Suddenly, Welsh commentators (though still not historians) are beginning to address the

explicitly the question of the decline of Britain. Although only one in four of the

electorate voted for devolution in 1997, the number of ‘yes’ votes was still double what it

had been in 1979 and a decline in Britishness is being employed as an explanation. The

influential pro-nationalist political commentator Osmond, emphasizing generational

change, argues that between the 1970s and the 1990s the Welsh ‘became palpably and self-

confidently, indeed patriotically, more Welsh. They were still British, though this was felt

less strongly.’ Like Scottish commentators, in explanation he points to the death of British

institutions like British Rail, British Steel and the National Coal Board and the decline in

respect for the British monarchy and the BBC. In a further parallel of explanations of the

Scottish vote, he maintains that Europe began to offer a framework that could replace the

British state and support a small country like Wales in uncertain economic times. Osmond

argues that in post-devolution Wales, the ‘key reference point’ for national identity is the

10
National Assembly of Wales. He maintains ‘Britain has changed and continues to change.

It no longer provides the essential lens through which Wales and what it means to be

Welsh has to be viewed. … Welsh identity is no longer to be nationalized within Britain.’42

At one level this is all very appealing and it fits in with much of the wider received

historical wisdom. But it requires probing. In the wake of the decline of some British

institutions, Osmond noted that Westminster, the armed forces, and the BBC ‘may be the

only public sector bodies holding Britain together – alongside, perhaps, the monarchy’.43

Even if that’s true, it is still a very substantial ‘only’. But it also overlooks the social

security system, which though diminished is still British and its payments keep thousands

of Welsh men, women and children alive. And then there’s education and the NHS.

Despite control shifting from London to Cardiff, bringing with it a beginning in policy

divergence, there is little qualitative difference between the experience of working in or

attending a school, university or hospital in Wales and doing the same in England. The

National in the NHS continues to be British, even if it is sometimes thought to be Welsh in

origin and values. Different governance structures, weekly lessons in Welsh, an absence

of league tables and small university grants have done very little to make the Welsh lived

experience different. Furthermore, there is the legal system, the courts and the prisons.

Post-devolution, much of the public sector in Wales remains essentially British.

Even the political institutions that many argue are now defining Welshness offer a

less than convincing account of a dying Britain. The EU might offer a political and

economic framework that could replace the British State but for that to impact on how

people think of themselves then it needs to have popular relevancy. The popular attitude

to the EU in Wales is highly ambiguous and more likely to be indifference than anything.

Even on the continent, the reactions to the European constitution suggests that people are

unenthusiastic about the notion that the EU might supersede the political power of the

11
traditional nation state. The turnout in Wales at the 2004 European election was 41.4

percent which hardly suggests a popular European identity. Similarly, the problem with

emphasizing the Welsh citizenship that the Assembly bestows is that most people are not

particularly interested or knowledgeable about it. The 2007 Assembly election saw a

turnout of just 43.7 percent (compared to a 62.4 percent turnout in Wales at the 2005 UK

general election). Surveys suggest general support for the principle of devolution but

significant ignorance about how it works and a strong sense that the Assembly does look

after the whole of Wales equally.44 Nor does the Assembly shape the lives of Welsh

people outside Wales or account for those ‘citizens’ of Wales who do not think of

themselves as Welsh.

Scottish sociology has benefited from significant survey research into how people

conceive their own national identity. These surveys show that the majority of Scots

prioritize their Scottishness but half the population still also regard themselves as British.45

This British figure maybe falling but decline is not the same as death and, most

importantly, these surveys do not tell us what people mean by Britishness. In Wales the

survey evidence is even muddier. When forced to choose between Britishness and

Welshness, 33 percent of people chose Britain as their primary identity in a 1979 survey

and 27 percent did so in a 2003 survey. Wales thus clearly has primacy but the figures are

perhaps more remarkable for their relative continuity than any significant change.46 When

people are allowed a more sophisticated choice over their national identity the largest

group seems to be those who see themselves as equally Welsh and British.

Self-description of national identity in Wales (%)47

1992 1997 1999 2001 2003 2007
Welsh not British 28 13 17 24 21 22
More Welsh than British 20 29 19 23 27 21
Equally Welsh and British 30 26 36 28 29 31
More British than Welsh 7 10 7 11 8 10
British not Welsh 14 15 14 11 9 10
None of these 1 7 7 3 6 5

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Thus hard evidence from across the UK suggests a different view of Britishness to the

picture of decline painted by some historians and sociologists. Surveys might suggest that

people are less proud of their Britishness but they also clearly indicate that Britishness still

exists.48 At the 1999 Welsh election survey a mere 17 percent of the electorate rejected

their Britishness in favour of Welshness and 23 percent of this group still voted ‘No’ in the

referendum. Thus, even if Britishness has declined, this will not necessarily have

straightforward political ramifications for the British State.49 Furthermore, to concentrate

only on the change rather than the continuity in Britishness is to misrepresent how the

Welsh see themselves. The growth of a Welsh state has taken the academic gaze away

from this continuity. To refocus it we need to look beyond the political realm and into the

popular.

McCrone argues that ‘Identity is largely a matter of taken-for-granted practice

which people make use of in their everyday lives, rather than simply a matter of sentiment

or social values.’50 Thus where the real insights into national identities in Wales will come

from is not the political but the ordinary. Cohen suggests, ‘the fuzzy edges of an identity

are where the action is and where the answers lie’ and it is in the popular that the

differences between Wales and Britain are most fuzzy.51 Here there is difference and

sameness, making it an ideal location to question the fortunes of Britishness. The key

theorist of national identity and the everyday is Michael Billig. He argued that national

identity should be understood in terms of common-sense assumptions and the way people

talk about their nationhood. Their self-perceptions are affirmed in the daily iconography

of life, where nationality is continually ‘flagged’ through stories, symbols, signs and

language. This reminding and flagging, he maintains, ‘is so familiar, so continual, that it is

not consciously registered as reminding. The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not

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a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging

unnoticed on the public building.’ Thus, for Billig, nationalism is not about political

movements but the ‘habits of social life’. It is constructed by and contained by the media,

by sport, by our social relations, by our experiences and understanding of everyday life. It

is omnipresent but not always expressed.52

Exploring what Billig calls banal nationalism shows that national identities in

Wales have always been complex and interrelated. If we extend our view of Welsh culture

we can begin to penetrate popular conceptions of Welshness and Britishness. The

everyday flagging and communication of nationality in Wales points to a good degree of

continuity across the post-war period, a continuity of the co-existence of Welsh and British

identities. The rest of this paper explores how a consideration of banal nationalism

challenges current conceptions of both Welsh and British national identities in other

realms of Welsh life. In doing so, it draws upon a selective range of illustrative examples

from popular culture and everyday life and argues that there is a complex but continuing

interrelationship between Welsh and British identities.

Banal Welshness, Banal Britishness

The Second World War is the one event in recent Welsh history where Britishness is

stressed. As John Davies puts it, the war ‘did much to strengthen Britishness. At the same

time, it seemed to be a death blow to Welshness’.53 This Britishness did not just end in

1945. The memories of the horrors and deprivations lived on with individuals and were

passed on to younger men and women via word of mouth, national service, war films and

Dad’s Army. But a step into the everyday flagging of nationality during the war shows a

more complex picture. On 26 June 1944 two separate notices in The Times, that bastion of

Englishness, remembering Welshmen killed in action ended with the words ‘Cymru am

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Byth’ (Wales forever). Red dragons were hung alongside Union Jacks, the Stars and

Stripes and the Hammer and Sickle on VE Day, while the Western Mail celebrated the

victory by publishing a page that looked proudly at the Welsh contribution to the victory at

home and abroad. To readers, it was evident that the Welsh had fought, worked and died

for a greater cause, and many had sung while doing it.54 A north Wales housewife wrote in

her local paper, ‘I was proud of our small Welsh nation too. The B.B.C. do not always

give us full credit, but yesterday and the previous day, Wales came forward in its true

colours. What was more befitting for the Welshman than to sing the hymns of his

forefathers in his days of exultation and rejoicing.’55 One reporter at the Western Mail

claimed he must have sung the national anthem Hen Wlad fy Nhadau a hundred times over

the VE holidays.56 The flags of Wales and Britain were flown at memorial services and

prayers said in both languages. Megan Lloyd George, in an echo of her father in the

previous world war, told the Anglesey Eisteddfod that the Welshmen who had fought in

the war were ‘worthy successors of the heroes of Wales, such as Llewelyn and Owain

Glyndwr, and others who fought not only for the independence of Wales, but of other

nations as well’.57 When she drove to the first Welsh Day at the House of Commons in

1944, itself the result of Labour demands for a Welsh Secretary of State, she had three

flags on her car: two Union Jacks on either side of a Welsh dragon. Intentional or not, this

was symbolic; Britishness was predominant but Welshness remained central to how people

conceived of themselves. Concentrating on the political dimensions of identity might

suggest a suppression of Welshness in favour of Britain but, at this kaleidoscope of images

shows, the Britishness extolled and demanded by the state was not detrimental to the

continuation of other identities. As Angus Calder suggests, when the media spoke of ‘us’

or ‘the people’, the people themselves conjured up different images.58 The ‘People’s War’

was not the war of a homogenous people.

15
 Eight years after the end of the war, Britain came together again, this time to

celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II. In Caernarfon most shops displayed special

coronation displays in their windows and nearly every street had a children’s party. There

was also a 21 gun salute, open air dances, fireworks and a public bonfire in the town. The

council ran a competition for the best decorated street and gave out souvenir mugs and

bibles to children, who were allowed to choose which language they wanted to theirs to be

in. There were special services in churches and chapels and the town vicar gave a public

address saying that Caernarfon had always been loyal and was tied to the Royal House by

kinship and history. Families with televisions held parties and invited the neighbours in to

watch. A television was installed in the local drill hall for pensioners. If Britishness was

simply a matter of economic expediency, pulling together in the face of external threats or

a byproduct of class solidarity and the security of the welfare state, then such popular

enthusiasm is hard to explain.

But this was not just an uncomplicated demonstration of Britishness. It was also an

event where Wales celebrated its own identity. Two letter writers complained to the

Caernarvon and Denbigh Herald that there was no Welsh emblem on their coronation

mugs. The editorial of that paper gushed, ‘Wales has ever been loyal to those who have

ascended to the throne, and has contributed to its majestic greatness since the ascension of

the Tudors and the first Elizabethan era, and has during this festive week joined with as

much enthusiasm as any other nation in the Commonwealth’. In other words celebrating

the Coronation no more diminished Welsh nationhood than it did Canadian or Australian

nationhood. In case people did not realize how important the British nation was, one

correspondent on the paper who was bemoaning the fact that many of the Union Jacks in

Caernarfon had been flown upside down, told his readers that this was no less insulting

than flying the Red Dragon the wrong way up.59 Just as Welshness existed and was

16
celebrated in daily life within the context of a popular Britishness, the reverse was true too.

In the popular imagination Britishness and Welshness sat alongside each other, entwined

and inseparable.

Thus even a short but close reading of events from the height of Britishness shows

that that identity was interwoven with Welshness. Similarly, if we jump forward to the

period when Britishness was supposed to have declined we also see that the confident

Welshness that many noted in Wales was both misleading and entwined with Britishness.

One early symbol of a resurgent Welshness was the 1998 Catatonia song International

Velvet whose chorus proclaimed ‘Everyday when I wake up I thank the Lord I’m Welsh’.

The song was at the heart of a popular mood that the media perceived in Welsh culture and

consequently christened ‘Cool Cymru’. The song was quoted by academics, heralded by

the media and used by the BBC in patriotic sports broadcasts but few noticed the rest of

the lyrics which reveal a different picture. The song’s verse bemoans (in Welsh) ‘Wake up

sleepy Wales, land of song, deep is the weakness, tiny is the flame’.60 This was hardly a

confident statement of nationality and the chorus’ sense of irony was simply lost on many

who wished to champion Wales. Too much of youth culture is read literally and employed

as an example for overly simplistic ideas. Even nationalist movements like Cymdeithas yr

Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society) were not just about the political cause.

Protesting offered an opportunity to be cool, to drink, to meet girls. This is aptly

illustrated in John Williams’ novel Cardiff Dead, where a valleys boy chooses to live in

Cardiff because of the girls there and decides to supports the IRA hunger strikers and

Welsh nationalism in order to boost his sex life.61 That same character also shows how

popular culture is not always interpreted the way it might read on the surface. Here is his

description of the opening of the National Assembly:

17
 The next couple of hours Mazz just couldn’t stop laughing, watching this absurdist

panoply of Welsh cultural life unfolding in front of him. Tom Jones of course.

Well, at least big Tom knows he’s funny these days. But still, ‘The Green, Green,

Grass of Home’ – if the sight of Wales welcoming the brave new world to the

sound of ‘Green, Green Grass’ didn’t make you laugh, your kitsch bullshit detector

had to be well out of order. And the rest of stuff – well, it was hard to choose

between the ghastly reading of Under Milk Wood by some terrible old ham and the

bunch of, ahem, hip Welsh actors making complete tits of themselves doing some

kind of rock poetry, until the outright winner came along in the shape of the bloke

with the big hair from the Alarm doing some kind of cod folk song with a male-

voice backing choir him. And then came the grand finale, the whole bloody lot of

them singing ‘Every day I Thank the Lord I’m Welsh’, which Mazz had kind of

assumed was meant to be funny more or less but was here being done in deadly

earnest.

‘Fuckin’ hell, butt,’ said Mazz once he recovered himself. ‘Glad to be

Welsh then?’62

Such was ‘Cool Cymru’: deeply patriotic for some, quite the opposite for others.

Exploring and emphasising youth culture shows devolved Wales to be still firmly

part of a wider British, even global cultural experience. It provides young people with a

cultural experience and identity that look beyond the borders of Wales and perhaps even

makes Wales seem parochial, something evident in the most famous recent Welsh films

which are about escaping Wales rather than celebrating it.63 It is no surprise then that the

most popular televisions shows in Wales are those that are British or American, not Welsh.

Similarly, only 15 percent of the morning newspapers sold in Wales are produced there.64

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The media is probably the key player in sustaining a popular Britishness. Television

assumes and develops a common identity; it speaks to the audience as fellow Britons and

situates them within a national calendar, even if those on the margins of mainstream

culture can sometimes feel left out of the narratives.65 It helps generate shared hopes and

fears, interests and outlooks. Thus the media flags up and sustains Wales’s place in a

culture beyond Wales. When the BBC promoted EastEnders with the tagline

‘Everybody’s Talking about it’, the Welsh were told that they were part of a wider

‘everybody’. When Radio Wales gave extensive coverage of England’s progress in the

2006 World Cup, it was a flagging a relationship between Wales and England. John

Corner called television a ‘national cultural stage’,66 but that national stage has many

different faces, like the British nation itself. As well as Britishness, the BBC’s

programming also helps sustain regional identities in England and national identities in

Wales and Scotland. This is not just the assumption of a Welsh community in the

language and style employed in Welsh broadcasting but also the promotion of a Welsh

identity to an English audience. From the authority of Huw Edwards as a newsreader, the

buffoonery of sitcom actors like Ruth Madog in Hi Di Hi or Windsor Davies in It ain’t

half hot mum, to Welsh being spoken on Big Brother 2006, television has reminded the

English of Britain’s plural character.

Of course, just because the media flags the existence of a British nation does not

mean that audiences receive it that way. Roger Chartier talks of ‘appropriation’, the power

of audiences to receive messages in their own way.67 An audience might reject the notion

of belonging to the ‘we’ assumed in television’s dialogue but still watch for entertainment

or information. What Billig calls the flagging of a nation thus does not necessarily create

the straightforward sense of nationhood that he claimed but it does create a shared

experience that can connect individuals with a wider community. This becomes clear

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when looking at the farming community of Wales, a community overwhelmingly

concentrated in parts of Wales where the Welsh language dominates. The language

creates a sense of difference to England but the wider shared experience creates a common

bond. Welsh farmers have been hit by British crises like Foot and Mouth and the EU ban

on British beef. The National Farmers Union Cymru takes part in ‘Buy British’

campaigns. Despite the different traditions and language of rural Wales, the British crises

flag up to Welsh farmers that they belong to wider community and there is a clear sense of

being part of a British farming and rural movement. In 2006 the Western Mail reported

cooperation in the Welsh countryside between farmers of different nationalities in dealing

with foxes in the wake of the hunting ban. One observer told the paper, ‘there’s a feeling

that it doesn’t matter where you are from, we are in this together’.68

Thus, in youth culture, in farming and in the media, the sense of being part of a

wider British culture and experience has not diminished Welshness, just as it has not

destroyed or undermined regional cultures in England. In a study of northern English

identity Dave Russell suggests that British identity is ‘something constructed in and

experienced through the locality’. The north, he suggests, was ‘far better sensed through

attachment to a specific place’ than through an ‘abstract concept’.69 Similarly, Edensor

argues that national identity is ‘scaled’; it is experienced and located at the local, even

domestic level.70 Britishness and Welshness are interwoven precisely because in everyday

life the local experience is part of both. Welshness and Britishness are simultaneously

flagged in our experiences of work, play, family, the media, the shops. Some of these

British flaggings – say paying tax – might be connected to the political sphere but their

impact is felt and experienced in the domestic. It is this localized everyday experience that

makes us feel we belong to two nations, it reminds us of that fact, and constructs that fact.

It creates the situation described by novelist John Williams as: ‘to come from Wales is to

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be at once part of the mainstream British culture and yet at the same time significantly

other’.71 This subtle dichotomy is at once crucial but fleeting. Looking in from the

outside, blink and you could miss it. But from the inside, it is so ingrained that we do not

register it but we still know it is there. It is the difference between Tesco in Merthyr Tydfil

and Tesco in Milton Keynes. They are essentially the same, but the different accents of

staff and shoppers and the bilingual signages make Merthyr symbolically and

psychologically different: part of Britain but other.

Because the experience of daily life in Britain is diverse then Britishness itself

becomes pluralistic in meaning. Regional cultural variations and experiences create

different meanings to Britishness for different groups and different individuals. British

identity is as heterogeneous as Britain is. There is nothing surprising about this – it is

clearly true of Welsh identity too – but Britain, as a multinational state, is a more diverse

country than most. Disentangling the meanings of the British national and more localized

identities is impossible because the two are intimately related. Which identity comes to

the fore depends on context and personal circumstances, but even then it can be a

confusing issue as this extract from an interview conducted for a 2002 study of Welsh

identity in Swansea illustrates:

I’m Welsh-Scottish. Half and half blood, born in Wales, I’m Welsh. Yeah it’s, you

know, to fill in forms or anything, nationality, I usually, British. Yeah British I’d

say first. I see all of us as British not just separate, but saying that, British, but if I

go to Spain or somewhere, and usually you know they say, ‘You’re English’, and I

say, ‘No, I’m not English, I’m Welsh’. Yeah. They just see everyone from Britain

as English, but British really, yeah. (Female, forties).72

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Britishness thus consists of a parallel sense of unity and diversity. It is highly pluralized

and highly localized, with no uniform expression. Throughout modern history, localized

identities - rural and urban, ‘Celtic’ and English - have been integral to what Britishness

meant.73 Even the British Empire aligned Welsh and Scottish identities to a British identity

rather than replaced them. As Weight has suggested of England, though he should have

said of Britain, regional cultures became ‘an exemplar of national culture and not an

alternative to it’.74 It is precisely this ability to integrate a variety of identities into a

multinational state that explains the enduring strength of Britishness.75

Conclusion

While Welsh historians of the post-1945 period have marginalized the issue of Britishness

in Wales as a non-political identity, historians and sociologists in England and Scotland

have been talking of the decline or even end of Britain. Their arguments have

concentrated on political dimensions and marginalized the more everyday experiences. I

have contended that by looking at popular culture and daily life we can discern that

Britishness lives on Wales in two ways: in terms of a shared and common experience that

unites the different parts of the British peoples and through the routine flagging of a British

nation, notably in the media. Furthermore, the picture of a simple decline of Britishness is

undermined by the way that dimensions that have been used to argue for the earlier

prevalence of Britishness, such as war and royalty, actually show a far more pluralistic

picture of identity when examined from the bottom up.

This is not to argue that Britishness has not changed or declined but simply that to

declare its death is premature. Like the Welsh, the British have continually made remade

Britain and it still has popular resonances. Contrary to what McCrone claims, Britishness

is not simply ‘a political identity, roughly equated with citizenship’.76 The surveys of

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Scots that McCrone bases this assertion on only tell us what people see as their national

identity. They do not penetrate what people think that identity means. But what those

surveys do show is that in Scotland and to a lesser extent in Wales people are increasingly

giving primacy to their Welsh and Scottish identities over their Britishness. In

contemplating the significance of this we run into a fundamental question about the nature

of history and the past: what matters most, material and structural realities or the

discourses that people formulate and articulate? In other words, does it matter that Wales

and England are structurally very similar, that the experience of life in both nations has

much in common, when people increasingly articulate those nations differently? Is the

nation material fact or is it discourse? Postmodernists would argue that what matters is

how people conceive themselves. Not all would agree. Dai Smith has argued that Gwyn

Alf Williams’ arguments that the Welsh make and remake Wales if they want to has been

used ‘as if only the agency mattered, and to hell with the context. The great historian

would never have been so naïve as to believe … that you could ‘invent Wales’, any old

Wales it seems, whenever and wherever you wished.’77 In this light, as long as a common

British experience persists, as it does at both a cultural and political level, then Britishness

will remain integral to understanding Wales, no matter how the Welsh try to define

themselves. To ignore or sideline the British dimension is to misrepresent life in Wales

today. This is not to deny or dismiss in any way the power, emotion and depth of people’s

Welsh identities; nor is it to suggest that Wales is simply another English region. Instead,

it is to maintain that culture is ordinary, it is everyday life, and, apart from the important

issue of language, there is little that distinguishes everyday life in Wales from everyday

life in England beyond the feeling that it is different. Once this is acknowledged the

survival of a popular Welsh identity actually becomes more not less significant.78

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 If historians and sociologist are to understand the decline of Britain they need to

look beyond England and Scotland. If Welsh history is to come closer to the realities of

the lives of its subjects it needs to look not just at the world of political parties and

institutions but at more mundane topics too. Twentieth-century Welsh history needs the

kind of people-centred accounts that Russell Davies has given Welsh history of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.79 Such a history needs to address the diversity of the

Welsh people, to acknowledge the English immigrants, the Tory voters, the racists. It

needs to look at events like the end of Empire or the atomic bomb that had no specifically

Welsh dimensions but impacted on Wales nonetheless; it needs to explore the Welsh

reception of great canons of Britishness from the armed forces to Coronation Street. If we

start to look at such issues then we will find that Britishness in Wales is everywhere but

nowhere. The common British experience is strong but infrequently articulated or

reflected upon. Welshness exists within a British state and a British culture, making

Britishness not something external to Wales but part of Wales.

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