The Welsh Way of Life

A visitor to rural Wales before the Second World War

would have found themselves in a land that belonged to another age.

It was world of small isolated communities.

People lived and died in the space of a few square miles.

I read a lot on travel. China, Australia and New Zealand.

I like to hear how other people live.

-Have you been abroad?

-Never in my life.

It is a world now lost to us.

The changes in rural Wales

and in rural areas over most of Europe over the last 50 years

have been greater than in the previous 500 years.

In this programme, we take a look at the stories and characters

of that lost world,

and we trace the revolution that changed it forever.

Somebody living in upland Wales, at least, in the 1940s, 1950s,

would not have been surprised at what was happening in 1500.

They'd feel very much at home.

Nowadays, when you describe to people in their teens

what it was like in rural Wales in the 1940s

it feels like a foreign country to them.

When I talk about things when I was a child,

these children of mine think I'm speaking about the times

when people were living in a cave, nearly.

The area I knew well was mid Cardiganshire.

Upland Wales was a society

depending upon small scale agriculture.

There was no electricity.

Very few people had running water.

Virtually nobody had an inside lavatory with a flush.

Everybody kept a pig, chickens, a few ducks and so on.

When we used to kill a pig, we'd do that twice a year,

the pieces of pork that wouldn't keep that we didn't salt

we used to share with other farmers.

The brawn and the faggots... Of course, it was nice

because when they killed a pig, we used to have those back as well.

We used to be quite self-sufficient.

We used to grow all our own vegetables

and make butter and bake bread as well.

I grew up here on the farm, in Henblas,

on the outskirts of Llwyngwril.

Llwyngwril is a small village between Dolgellau and Tywyn.

Very little English was spoken in Llwyngwril as I grew up.

All the shopkeepers were Welsh speaking.

And the policeman would be Welsh speaking.

The only person I can think of was the station master

who didn't speak Welsh.

The period between the wars had been a difficult time for farming.

Things were fairly desperate, there can be no doubt about that.

Hard times breed hard people.

And the hardiness of Cardiganshire folk was the stuff of myth.

'Dafydd, farmer and gentleman,

'gives a hint of what gave the Cardi his reputation for meanness.'

Life was so hard in these parts and it paid better to go to London

than to sell and handle milk and produce it here.

People from here went there.

There is a story about an old fellow who went out there.

They were selling the milk direct to the customers.

Someone's relatives were up so we took them to see the cows

and after showing the cows to the people over here,

he took them to the water pump

and said, "This is the best cow I have,"

and took hold of the handle of the water pump and said,

"I only see the tail of this cow and she's the best cow I have."

He was adding water to the milk in London at that time.

'The jokes about the meanness of the Cardi lose a lot of edge

'when in cemetery after cemetery in the north of the county

'a high proportion of the gravestones

'tell of people who died in youth and middle age.

'They died mostly because they had to work too hard

'on too little nourishment.'

What was striking then is the way in which people cooperated.

They didn't have tractors, they did have a threshing machine,

worked by steam, which visited once a year.

Everybody would bring their corn to be threshed on that day.

You had to cooperate when it came to shearing.

There'd be a day for this farm to shear and everybody came together.

We used to have a hay harvest and carry that all by cart.

Horses in those days, of course.

We were very lucky being near the village

and people always came to help.

We used to have quite a nice big supper after finishing.

At the end of the harvest, there would be jollification.

This was a tee-total area, chapel people, not all that much drink,

but in some areas, I gather they could be riotous affairs.

All this has changed.

That element of cooperation has become, in a sense, redundant.

That's been replaced now by a much more self-contained family life.

People watch their television, rather than...

Well, one can be sentimental.

There was a great deal of boredom in old rural societies as well.

Rural Wales may have seemed like a relic of an earlier age,

but events were about to catapult it into the 20th century.

During the Second World War,

U-boat activity made it difficult to import from the rest of the world.

Britain had to be much more self-sufficient.

The Government immediately grasped the importance

of farming to the war effort.

All available land was put under the plough.

In Wales, for example, the hectares covered by wheat growing doubled.

Potato growing grew massive.

I think in the last ten years

people have forgotten what farmers did during the war.

Food was very, very short. We were on rations.

The pressure was on to feed the country.

Once the war had been won,

it assured the status of farmers as almost heroes.

They had contributed a great deal

to the effort that was required to achieve victory.

Welsh farmers were rewarded for their hard work.

Rationing had provided guaranteed prices for produce

and farmers' incomes doubled in four years.

This was the start of a new age of government support for agriculture.

The War brought not only prosperity,

but a new wave of people to the Welsh countryside.

'Two refugees from Poland, victims of Nazism,

'have farmed and made a living out of 20 acres of stony soil.'

The Welsh around here are like the Jews in Europe.

They all keep together. They like very much the family life.

They help each other always. They help every neighbour.

For instance, three years ago,

I was sick in bed and she occupied herself on the farm.

The neighbours, without asking,

have come and they spread the muck on the field, planted potatoes.

They planted seeds for vegetables.

Could I get more help from another people? I just can't.

The spirit of mutual cooperation had survived the war intact.

But now Welsh farmers could afford to buy machinery

that would make them less dependent on each other.

In about 1949, we had our first tractor.

My father did away with the two shire horses he had then

straight away when the tractor came.

It changed everything.

There was very little need for so much labour then on the farm.

I think a lot of the farm labourers left or moved away.

It did make a lot of difference to the local community.

New technology was changing not only farming but also village life.

I remember one family buying a generator,

producing electricity, and therefore watching television.

It wasn't surprising on a night, say, when there was a boxing match

for something like 100 people to come to their houses.

We happened to have a bath with taps and hot and cold water.

I think at least a dozen young women came to have a bath there

the night before their wedding.

It was the first time they'd had a bath in a bath with taps.

So that was a development which added, you might say, to sociability

but once everybody had a telephone a bath with taps, and a television

that tradition of cooperation disappeared.

However, some people were never in a position

to share this new technology in the first place.

On Welsh hill farms,

life went on, undisturbed by developments elsewhere.

'Robert's progress across the wild landscape

'takes us back across the centuries.

'There's something biblical about it.

'It's a happy self-sufficient family.

'There isn't a lot of contact with other people.

'The neighbours don't drop in casually when the mood takes them.

'At about 11.00, mid morning, the main meal of the day.

'Never anything elaborate, even though it's the main meal.

'Most of the time, it's bacon and egg.

'About twice a week, there's fresh meat.

'It's remarkable how little they eat.

'It looks like a hard, tough life,

'but it hasn't in any way diminished the great charm of these children.

'Maybe it's added to it.'

The character of upland Wales had been preserved

by the fact its terrain made communications difficult.

I remember my father taking stock to be sold.

It was either walking them or taking them by train.

Tywyn was the nearest market and he used to sell sheep and cattle,

taking them to the station and ordering a truck

and walking them from the station to where the market was.

In our village, you'd have to walk two or three miles to catch a bus.

The bus, once a day to Aberystwyth, twice a day to Lampeter.

And that was about the lot.

There was a railway, within three miles, that took you to Carmarthen,

and then it would go on to the rest of the world.

A man from Llangeitho was going to Hong Kong,

he reached Carmarthen and said, "The worst of the journey is over."

This isolation would come as a shock to one early visitor.

'Alfred Rimmer, a London, at the start of a visit to Caio,

'a village in the heart of Carmarthenshire.

'He'd always been a bit suspicious of Wales and the Welsh,

'but somehow, a friend persuaded him to spend a week in Wales.

'We met him off the bus that dropped him a few miles from the village.

'It was the nearest point served by public transport.

'At the time, Alf Rimmer refused to believe it.'

-Hello. The bus for Caio.

-There are no buses to Caio.

-How do you get there?

-Walk.

-Walk?!

-Yes.

What a God forsaken place!

I wonder if this is a place for a holiday?

Caio, the world has certainly passed it by.

If Queen Victoria walked down these streets now,

she wouldn't be in the least bit put out.

She'd think it was just as she left it.

The mini skirt has not arrived in Caio yet.

The women, they are big women.

Not the petite "bird" of my walk of life.

Statuesque, more the Amazon type.

But they're nice.

We knew very little about the rest of the world, especially me,

because we didn't have a car in those days.

Wales was about to break out of its seclusion

and connect with the modern world.

What the tractor had done for farming,

the motor car would do for village life.

With the coming of the car, you could go for entertainment.

People would drive to dances, or even go to the sea for an afternoon.

For the first time, people from inland Wales learned to swim.

Most people had cars by about 1970.

That brought far more people here, even day trippers.

As the 60s brought new prosperity and mobility,

Wales was marketed to tourists as a land of mystery and beauty.

'The sea surrounds us on three sides.

'Lying west of England and south of Scotland,

'Wales is a country on its own.

'We have preserved our history and our language.

'We are the Cymry, the comrades, the Welsh people.

'Come, stranger, invade this mountain fortress

'whose royal emblem is the red dragon.

'Fishing is a contemplative pursuit.

'Think now perhaps of the Welsh people themselves,

'with their warm hearted, Celtic friendliness.

'Talk to them in English,

'but listen to the music of their ancient tongue.'

My mother kept visitors when I was quite a small child.

That was the first time I was able to learn a little bit of English

before I went to school.

My parents used to move out to one of the buildings outside to sleep

in order to keep more visitors in the house.

Tourism brought much needed money into rural Wales.

But there was a price to be paid for it.

Because of the fragile nature of the communities themselves

the effect of tourism is often to destroy the original appeal.

'The basic values of this rural community

'have lasted through generations of change.

'Yet problems face its people which seem to menace their way of life.'

This is a very close community,

very wary of strangers and wary of change.

When you live in a beautiful place, it's hard to keep visitors away.

So we try our best to welcome them.

And, of course, make a bit of money at the same time.

Tourism is now our second industry.

We're beginning to get to grips with it.

I would like to make a case that this area around Bala Lake

deserves this preservation.

It's the bastion of the Welsh way of life.

When everyone here speaks Welsh together,

even the couple of English families we have welcomed into our midst

very soon come to learn Welsh and respect the Welsh way of life.

That way of life was threatened not only by those coming in,

but also by those desperate to get out.

I'm very proud to think that 30% of our youngsters from this area

go to college or university.

But there's nothing for them to do when they come back.

In consequence, there is that drain.

The best young people do not come back to marry and raise families.

Rural depopulation made community structure that much more fragile

and because of that there was a dynamic effect,

as communities offered less and less to people who were left behind.

There was less incentive to stay.

'It's not just the lack of work that has caused people to leave.

'Life in a country village can be too quiet.

'Many young people complain that there's not enough for them to do.

'The cinema is only showing films they've seen before

'and there's no choice of another cinema in the town.

'They end up walking the streets again, or going for a coffee.

'For them, there's nothing else to do.'

In north Breconshire, we lost 50% of the population in 50 years.

The present average is about 1% per annum.

If you go on like that, you finish up with nothing.

While people were leaving to find work in towns,

there were plenty of townspeople who were happy to take their place.

I think tourism was the precursor of immigration.

The tourists were wealthy as a result of the post War boom.

At one time, it would be possible to sell an ordinary house

somewhere in England, buy something fairly simple, improvable,

with a rural setting and have lots of money left over in the bank.

'Here, in the yard of the village school

'is the whole population of Cwmbach in Carmarthenshire.

'As the locals who attended Cwmbach school move to one side,

'the large group of newcomers

'includes wives and husbands who've married into local families,

'and farmers, mainly from England, who've taken over local farms.

'Cwmcoch is one of a cluster of small farms

'at the head of the valley.

'Another of these small farms is Llwyn Garreg,

'where Twm Morgan used to farm before he sold it, surprisingly,

'to a young English couple.

'Twm Morgan is no lover of the English newcomers.'

I'm a son of an old Welsh farmer.

I've been living in this neighbourhood for nearly 60 years.

And I regret very, very much

that the English people has ever come to the parish of Llanwinio.

For an instance, they don't seem to fit in here at all.

They are keeping apart.

I should like very much to see them communicate with us,

to live among us, as we Welsh gentlemen do.

Much as Twm Morgan may have resented it,

the movement to the Welsh countryside

only increased during the 1970s as the ethos of self-sufficiency

inspired town dwellers to get back to the earth.

This seemed like an escape for people.

To get away from urban decline, fear of crime and so on,

to come to what, on the face of it, looked like a rural idyll.

Below the surface, life in the Welsh countryside was less than rosy.

Welsh language culture was being eroded by immigration.

Holiday cottages were robbing villages of their vitality

and property prices were being pushed beyond the reach of locals.

These issues exploded into the headlines at the end of the 70s.

'Two of the holiday cottages burnt have been in isolated positions,

'like this one, overlooking Nefyn in the Lleyn Peninsula.

'The other two are near St David's.

'Those cottages were within 200 yards of each other.

'At first, there was no evidence of arson,

'but when the fourth cottage caught fire today near Pwllheli,

'there were signs of forced entry.

'There have been rumours of an escalation in the campaign

'against Anglicisation of Welsh rural areas.'

But rural Wales also received a boost during the 70s,

with Britain's entry into the EEC.

With European grant aid, Welsh farmers had never had it so good.

There's an old saying in mid Cardiganshire

that the farmers of the Aeron Valley were getting married in English

because they wanted to hear the word "grant" in the ceremony.

You had a bit of a paradox. Farming became wealthy,

but at the expense of getting on a technological treadmill,

expanding increasingly the level of production,

and to do that, intensifying and extending the size of the farm.

The more you produce the milk, wheat and potatoes,

the more surpluses arise

and by the 1980s, what you have is quotas.

This is particularly harmful to, say, South West Wales,

which was the primary dairy producing area of Britain.

The Vale of Tywi, "prosperously lactic", as Rhys Davies calls it.

For the typical small farmer in an area like West Wales,

the good times have gone

and there's more at risk than the individual farmer's bank balance.

The very fabric of rural life in Wales is being threatened,

and that's why the complaining farmer has become the angry farmer.

This happened when the Government announced milk quotas.

Quotas meant dairy farmers would have to cut production by 9%

and some by much more,

even though they'd been encouraged by the Government to expand.

This is a great hardship.

Suicides, for example, among farmers

hit by banks who'd encouraged them to borrow and borrow,

to expand their milking parlours and so on and then a sudden closure.

People were in desperate straits.

I think we can use that as the marker

for when farming prosperity really began to stop.

Of course, the more intense farming gets,

the more likelihood there is

of diseases among animals.

You had the dreadful scares in the 1990s, and the early 21st century,

BSC, swine fever,

salmonella in eggs, and foot and mouth,

bringing agriculture into increasing crisis.

Over a million sheep, cattle and pigs were slaughtered in Wales

during the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001.

To prevent the spread of the disease,

the countryside was effectively closed down.

The economic consequences were felt more

in industries that are not at all related to farming,

or indirectly draw on the landscape that farming creates.

This isn't in any way to try to diminish

the very profound and devastating effects

of the families that had a cull on their farms,

but the hospitality industries that have been based on

the development of the tourism sector suffered very, very badly.

Up to that point, everybody had assumed, more or less,

that farming was the backbone of the rural economy.

There is now no doubt that tourism

is a more important industry in the countryside than agriculture.

As tourism draws people into Wales,

more and more of them are staying for good.

Immigration, and the effect it can have, is on a scale twice as large

as the migration into England from outside its borders,

and much larger again, probably four times as large,

into specifically Welsh-speaking areas.

What we may have, and do have already in places like Anglesey,

where the towns are more Welsh in language

than the surrounding countryside.

This influx affects more than the language.

It also makes it difficult for those born in rural Wales to remain there.

The time is coming when only well-heeled people

can afford to live in the countryside,

particularly as rural housing is more expensive than urban housing,

a very strange development, but certainly true.

At the start of our story, the land was not just where people lived.

It was also their livelihood.

All this has changed.

People live in the country to have access to landscape, to open space.

They can live in the countryside and work in a wide range of places.

That change in the social composition,

and the economic underpinning of rural society

has brought about, virtually, a revolution.

Life in rural Wales today

would be unrecognisable to those living there half a century ago.

Well, we're in a different age now.

The young people don't value things as we were taught to value them.

Well, take the young farm wives, if you like.

They don't value things.

They burn and destroy everything.

Well, I, I, perhaps I'm on the other side,

too much inclined to keep everything.

As a matter of fact to you,

I keep every number of the Cymro,

for 35 years, I've got them all here.

I've been a subscriber to the Farmers Weekly

since number one, produced in 1932.

I've got them every copy, here now.

What for, I don't know, but they are.

All my implements are old.

I'm old-fashioned. I still use the horse and cart, and everything.

Of course, I realise someday there will be a big change,

and there will be a heavy bonfire here too after my days,

after I've gone. Nobody will treasure the things I treasure here.