Gwyn Alf Williams Welsh Greats

Gwyn Alf Williams experienced history at first-hand,

from the industrial melting pot of Merthyr, to the beaches of Normandy.

His passion, his wit and his radical politics

made him one of the most exciting historians of his time.

He didn't want simplicities.

He wanted to understand ourselves as a subtle people,

a complex people, as he also put it, a naked people, under an acid rain.

Gwyn's vision of history was as uncompromising as the man himself.

A very famous English historian said to me about Gwyn, "The problem

"with Gwyn is, he's got the Muhammad Ali complex - 'I am the greatest.'"

He knew his stuff, so he would argue until the cows came home.

The more troubled aspects of his character

led him to the brink of despair.

I drank a lot. My marriage broke up. I was in a bad state.

His salvation would lie in re-inventing himself,

as a modern historian for the masses.

# Then, comrades, come rally And the last fight, let us face. #

Dewch nawr.

THEY SING IN RUSSIAN

Gwyn Alfred Williams was born in the Dowlais area

of Merthyr Tydfil in 1925. Growing up in the industrial heart of Wales

at a time of great social change,

was the perfect upbringing for a historian.

He had a very strong sense of Dowlais.

"The Samaria of South Wales," he called it.

He always rooted himself in that background

and he was extraordinarily proud of that industrial environment,

but also,

the interplay between rural and urban,

between north and south, Welsh speaking, English speaking.

It was all part

of that great mix, which Gwyn appreciated so much.

But despite Dowlais' rich heritage its glory days had long faded.

It had become dismal Dowlais, at the time when Gwyn was born, in 1925 -

a byword, really, for deprivation and poverty and unemployment

and this left its mark on him, there's no doubt about that.

I remember when I was a kid,

standing either on South Street

or Hall Street - I can't remember which now -

watching them blow up the last of the stacks

of the old iron works.

There was a small bang, then a big bang and then the stack settled,

like a cripple, settling himself into a wheelchair.

Then it was all over, the dust blew into the cracks in our faces

and we turned around and walked back into Dowlais. And it was ghastly -

closed-up shops, crumbling town, beaten people.

Dowlais dying on its feet, during the Depression.

Gwyn's family was better off than most in Dowlais.

His parents were both Welsh-speaking school teachers,

though Gwyn's own use of Welsh was largely confined to Sunday school.

Growing up in the 1930s,

he and the other lads of the Gwernllwyn Chapel gang

were bewitched by a cult more sinister than non-conformism.

We were hypnotised by the Hitler Youth.

We didn't know anything about their ideas,

but, nevertheless, their gorgeous uniforms, their armbands,

their rallies, their songs, their marches captivated us.

So, we ended all our meetings with the Hitler's salute and words like,

"Iber sturmbannfuhrer" and "Reichsarbeits commando",

whatever on our lips. The one thing we liked was armbands,

but otherwise, the Gwernllwyn Chapel gang

came to operate as extramural branch of the Hitler Youth.

But Gwyn was about to undergo a radical, political conversion.

I wanted to see what made my father tick

and so when they were out at the pictures,

I went into what we called his middle room and he called his study...

Masonic gear, Labour Party books, a tyst and there was

these red and yellow covers of the Left Book Club

and I took one down and it was on Spain.

The Spanish Civil War was in its last stages, then.

Very big with us. Volunteers and everything.

And I was absolutely bowled over by this

and so I took the whole gang with me and we read and read and read...

CANNON BLASTS

Gwyn and his friends were captivated by the stories of ordinary men,

who'd left towns like Dowlais, to fight fascism in Spain,

as members of the International Brigades.

So we became quite passionate members of the International.

That's what got us - the idea of an international army of people,

all aiming at the same end.

I saw a funeral of a man who'd come back from Spain.

He had no religion,

so obviously, they gave him a Church of England funeral.

There were Dowlais Spaniards there.

You could tell they were Spaniards. They wore red ties,

brown boots and wouldn't speak to the curate and they gave him

a communist funeral, with a red flag and The Internationale.

I was inspired!

I rushed down to the office, "Give me a gun, send me to Spain!"

I remember there was a huge, high counter and a man's head

came over the top. "Son", he said,

"Son, come back when we're desperate!"

The International Brigade might not have had a place for Gwyn,

but the British Army did.

Having completed his studies at Cyfarthfa Castle Grammar School,

he was conscripted at the age of 18.

During his army training,

he came across the writings of the Welsh nationalist, Saunders Lewis.

This is where I first read it, Catterick Camp, Yorkshire.

I was a soldier in the British Army. I was 18, a passionate

young communist and a passionate Welsh patriot.

To me, then, the two were identical.

One wintry day in 1944,

I read a poem of Saunders Lewis, Y Dilyw - The Deluge.

Y Dilyw 1939, was a vitriolic attack on the industrial communities

of South Wales.

It drove me into such a fury that I rushed to my commanding officer

and demanded compassionate leave, so that I could go home and shoot him.

Gwyn would soon be doing plenty of shooting, but not at Saunders Lewis.

In June 1944, he became part of the invasion force,

sailing for Gold Beach in Normandy.

I must have looked like a Christmas tree -

great mountain of equipment, with two little feet sticking out

and the boots were one size too big, anyway.

So, in the morning, we went up on check

and queued up for Gold Beach, near Arromanches.

I remember tossing and turning in that bunk,

pitching all over the place, full of premonitions.

Gwyn landed on Gold Beach shortly after D-Day.

Attached to the 43rd Wessex Division,

he took on German Tiger tanks...

..and survived driving over a mine in a jeep.

He made it to Paris in time for General de Gaulle's

triumphant return and the celebration of VE Day.

A friend of mine, called Sion ab Emrys, and I stole -

borrowed - a Union Jack from the British Embassy

and started to march up the Champs-Elysees.

A great crowd formed around us.

Some of them sang Tipperary -

FRENCH ACCENT: # He's a long way to Tipperary. # and so on.

They fell silent when a bus came through,

carrying back prisoners liberated from Hitler's concentration camps.

They were still in their striped pyjamas.

All around them, we sang and shouted and drank Champagne

and waved flags. They just stared at us.

They seemed completely bewildered.

They were grey, they looked alien. They never smiled.

Having witnessed some of the defining events

of the 20th century at first-hand, Gwyn returned to Wales.

There, he married Maria Fernandez, an old friend from Dowlais,

whose family came from Spain.

The couple moved to Aberystwyth,

when Gwyn got a scholarship to study history at the university.

When War Minister, Emanuel Shinwell, visited the town,

to recruit students for the army,

Gwyn joined a demonstration against him.

We swept into the square,

led by communists and Welsh republicans,

with all these banners, and it was chaos,

because they reached the front line, Shinwell came and began to make

a stupid speech about, "All of you..." He said,

"You'll have to see army service, whether you like it or not."

Well, of course, most of us had seen four years and had come out

and there was a terrible row and they pushed forward

and these mothers with handbags were clobbering these students,

who were disrupting their beloveds.

Things like that were an absolute bitch.

I remember a friend of mine carrying a banner, saying,

"Peace, peace", with which he was clobbering

the head of another friend, still shouting, "Peace, peace"

and bashing his brains out.

And there was a terrible explosion of rage

and they were all milling round and beating each other up,

when somebody went up

the lamp post and began to sing Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau

and then everybody fell quiet,

stood to attention, even Shinwell.

And we all sung Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.

And that was the end of it.

CONGREGATIONAL SINGING OF WELSH NATIONAL ANTHEM

Gwyn graduated from Aberystwyth with Outstanding First Class Honours

in 1950. He then completed a masters degree,

before being appointed as a history lecturer at the university.

Gwyn was my tutor for Welsh history and I have to say,

it was a mind-blowing experience.

First of all, he was a lecturer par excellence.

He was telling jokes during his lectures,

I mean, this was in stuffy, puritanical Aberystwyth.

He'd start lectures by saying something like,

"It was June on Dowlais top.

"I know it was June because it was snowing."

Gwyn took the big picture. He was very keen on understanding

the relationships between things like geography and history.

Not as a theoretician, not in a, kind of, scientific way,

but a, kind of, complete way.

Culture, politics, economy, society - they were seamless.

This holistic approach to history

was appreciated in Britain's youngest university, York.

When it opened in 1963,

Gwyn accepted an invitation to teach there.

One of his first students was Jim Walvin.

You had this extraordinary creative energy going on,

because people were re-thinking,

"How do you teach history?" or "How do you teach English or chemistry?"

People re-thinking the basics of undergraduate

education and right in the middle of all this,

amongst the historians, was Gwyn Alfred Williams,

this extraordinary, little fella.

An absolute ball of fire, whizzing around the place,

firing off ideas, left and right.

I mean, he was an unmissable person.

Gwyn's charismatic performances

were soon attracting students from beyond the history department.

Wherever he lectured, and it didn't matter what he was lecturing on,

the only problem was finding a room big enough to house the audience.

It would be packed.

Now, there are not many academics who can do that,

who can actually fill a lecture hall with non-specialist people,

who just want to listen to what you have to say.

To hear Gwyn lecture was to be confronted by a great actor.

What you had was stage presence.

I mean, the passion of his lectures is something I will never forget.

They inspired us. He was like a firework on the lecture stage.

He burned himself up. He was almost Dickensian.

I mean, he could be screaming and shouting, ranting and raving

and then go into cold, lucid, forensic finger pointing

and, "How dare you disagree."

You know, there would be this madness in him.

In May, 1968,

when student protestors took to the barricades in Paris,

it started a wave of unrest that swept the Western world,

reverberating even in Yorkshire.

It was tremendous, you know. I could lecture on anything

and the French May of '68 happened then and it was a tremendous moment.

And I wrote a book on it and lectured on it

and it was all packed with people. Absolutely packed.

Lecture after lecture, they all packed in.

I was a particular hero of the anarchists.

I've got these badges here, turned out by York Anarchist Group.

Viva Gwyn. We are all Welsh history professors.

I think ultimately, one of his difficulties was that he...

he liked to have followers.

He wanted to be part of this little sect that he belonged to.

He was very seductive.

Huge numbers of students wanted to be on his courses

and, of course, that then itself became an end in itself.

He wanted to have more students sign on for his courses,

as a confirmation that, indeed, he was the greatest.

Gwyn's reputation as a rising star of academic history

spread beyond York when he published his first book.

He began as a medieval historian

and some people still think that his best book was his first,

Medieval London, which is a wonderful survey of a few centuries

of medieval London life. And then he

begins to look at early 19th century radicalism,

English artisans of 1790s, early trade unions.

He's looking at the French Revolution, he writes works on that.

He spreads himself very rapidly to envelop a European history.

He wrote about the Welsh in America, he wrote about the Merthyr Rising,

he wrote about Gramsci, the Italian socialist.

He was not a narrow historian, by any means.

Gwyn was as passionate on the page as he was in person,

but his enthusiasm could sometimes run away with him.

There's a wonderful bit in one of the books he wrote

about a pub in North Wales where

they unfurled the tricolour during the French Revolution and says,

"Liberte, fraternite, egalite!"

I'm not sure that ever happened in Trawsfynydd or Machynlleth, frankly,

but it's a great story and I think, in a sense,

he was a great storyteller.

Now, whether that makes for great scholarly history

is another matter altogether.

What he did do was inspire people to be more imaginative

about their writing -

to use language as he did, more creatively.

Gwyn's work was part of a wider academic movement,

reclaiming and retelling the neglected history of the masses.

It inspired a new generation of Welsh historians.

It was following on from the ways in which American, French

and English historians, actually, were writing history from below.

History from below, for Gwyn,

was bringing the lower orders into public prominence.

Bringing the Welsh working class, in particular,

into prominence, for the first time, so he believed.

And suddenly, a Welsh history, that didn't have, of course,

kings or queens or diplomacy since the Middle Ages,

became as central as anything else.

And Gwyn, I think, rapidly became the acknowledged head of that

band of historians, because of the power of his insights

and, straightforwardly, that he was politically committed.

This was a very, very left wing historian, we were a very,

very left wing generation.

So, Gwyn was the one that we, kind of, looked up to,

that we wanted to be our chieftain.

With young Welsh historians looking to Gwyn for leadership,

he was beginning to feel the weight of his exile in Yorkshire.

Here is a Welshman in a very, very English institution,

shaped by cultural factors that most of his colleagues had no idea about.

South Wales, it was a chapel, it was left wing politics -

all of those things that were alien to almost all of his colleagues.

He could have been talking about the far side of the Milky Way

for many of them.

I think he felt the oppressiveness, really, of middle class England.

So, a job went in Cardiff, professorship in Cardiff.

I tried for that and I got it.

When he first comes back into Wales,

he wants to come because he does see this intellectual sea change

that's happening within the teaching and writing of Welsh history

and he wants to be part of that.

And I was under the illusion I was coming home

and I found Cardiff was not home at all,

particularly not Cardiff history department,

but that's a personal thing. I won't go into that.

He reckoned that if he came back to Cardiff in 1974, he'd be welcomed

with a fanfare of trumpets, but it didn't happen in the department.

The problem with Cardiff at the time was the-then history department

was full of people who were extraordinarily slow,

stolid, orthodox and, in some instances, bitterly resented

precisely the flamboyance of a Gwyn Alf. They didn't think

that's what a professor of history should be about.

Having been feted as a star lecturer at York, Gwyn felt isolated

and frustrated in Cardiff. He had neither the temperament

nor the desire to play at academic politics.

He was not one for slow, ardent committee work, for, you know,

actually listening to people, tolerating their views.

I mean, either you understood, b-b-boy, or you d-d-didn't.

And if you didn't, then you must be stupid.

And you know, that's the way Gwyn was

and he was somebody whose enthusiasms could spill over,

sometimes into brutality against people.

I mean, there was a sharp edge to his tongue.

In 1979, Gwyn campaigned fervently for devolution.

The Welsh people's rejection of it in that year's referendum

was a blow he took personally.

I felt the whole of Welsh history had been rendered meaningless

by that vote. We'd have to re-write the whole thing.

And in a state of utter despair, I rejoined the Communist Party.

But Gwyn discovered that the Communist Party

had changed beyond recognition.

Meanwhile, his position in Cardiff University

was becoming increasingly difficult.

The darker sides of his personality, I think, came to the fore.

I mean, Gwyn could get depressed

about lots of things, very, very quickly.

He'd always been showing the traits of a manic depressive

but there were many more downs than ups, by the late 1970s

and the early 1980s, and he reckoned that he was racing

with the undertaker, by that time.

Conflicts in Gwyn's professional,

personal and political lives multiplied,

until he could no longer deal with them.

I went to pieces. I drank a lot. My marriage broke up.

I was in a bad state.

In 1983, at the age of 58, Gwyn retired from Cardiff University,

ending his professional career as an academic.

Still haunted by the devolution referendum,

he continued to wrestle with the meaning of Welshness.

So, I went back and I tried to rewrite all of Welsh history

without any suppositions - socialist or nationalist or any of them.

I failed, I presume, but I wrote When Was Wales?

His view of Wales was that it was a constant series of fractures,

from the Bronze Age through industrialisation, onwards.

In other words, you don't have the continuity, the notion that we

have always been Wales, there have always been the Welsh people.

You know, Gwyn just thought that was rubbish.

It was rubbish in terms of the languages that were spoken,

it was rubbish in terms of the people who came in,

migrations out, migrations, it wasn't history.

It was ideology, it was mythology.

So, his view of Wales was that we were always rediscovering Wales,

re-inventing Welshness and that Wales would always be what

we wanted it to be.

So, he embraced Wales, as a landscape,

as a geographical peninsula, in which some historical people,

some humanity at various times,

decided and discovered how it is that they wish to be Welsh.

The publication of When Was Wales? in 1985 coincided with

a renewed interest in Welsh history by the mass media.

That year, an explosive history series burst onto Welsh screens

that would enthral a generation of viewers.

Drawing a line between past and present,

it embraced 2,000 years of struggle, survival and faith.

The Dragon Has Two Tongues was big budget, big-name television.

Wynford Vaughan Thomas was, initially, the presenter

and I, pretty early on, realised that his perception of Welsh history

and mine were not altogether compatible

and I'd already felt that we needed another presenter

and then I saw Gwyn speaking in this wonderful speech. He was a superb

public speaker, and I thought, "He should be the other voice."

Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, elder statesman

of Welsh broadcasting, faced off against Gwyn Alf,

historian of the people, in a fight for the meaning of Welsh history.

For Gwyn, this was also a personal struggle to reclaim

his career as a historian,

but he would need to shape up for the contest.

While used to holding court in the lecture hall,

he had yet to master the brevity of the television soundbite.

I said, "Action" and Gwyn was off, you know,

and it was like a lecture delivered with great skill and pace

and speed, but, you know, I just remember thinking,

"God, we've got a problem here."

And actually the camera man took me to one side and said,

"Do you realise you've got a presenter with a stammer?"

The stammer, sometimes, worked to his advantage,

because as he was forcing the words out and he was spitting them out,

they made such an impact, you know,

"The rupture of Wales," and you could actually...

Because he was so into the story and he wanted to get his message across.

Gwyn used his passionate staccato delivery to full effect,

when he filmed his piece on the drowning of the village

of Capel Celyn.

Every Welsh Labour MP in the House of Commons,

including those most opposed to Welsh nationalism,

voted against this project, to no avail.

There were two kinds of democracy at stake here.

Within the Parliamentary democracy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain

and about a half of Northern Ireland, the Welsh, if need be,

could be drowned by a democratic vote.

I don't think Wales had come up with a historian who could make pieces

to camera in such an effective and colourful way as Gwyn did.

Gwyn was a master of the monologue, but it was his head-to-head debates

with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas that set the screen alight.

Instead of saying, like most television history,

"This is what happened in the past", it was a way of saying,

"Here is a debate about what happened in the past."

I do not judge the actions of the people in the past,

I do not accept any inevitability. There is no such word.

I am looking at what happened. That was a joke.

I'm looking at what has happened. Where are the gentry?

Do you want a kind word for the gentry, I'll give you one - farewell.

Gwyn actually used to tell him, "You think Welsh history is cosy."

And Gwyn always used to see history from the viewpoint

of the ordinary person and, of course, that wasn't cosy, at all.

The closer we got to the present, the more real the disputes became.

I would report back what Wynford had said to Gwyn and Gwyn would say,

"He can't get away with that!

"I've got to do another piece, in response to it."

And then I'd tell Wynford what Gwyn said and Wynford would say,

"What? That's outrageous!"

I think that Wales is going to come through and for why?

Because we have this inner secret survival. My theme about continuity.

You are the optimist and if the Welsh people think like you,

they will die.

I am the pessimist. If they think like me, they will live.

In Aberystwyth, tensions were getting worse and worse

and Gwyn was in a rage and he actually stormed out

and he said, "That's it, I'm quitting.

"I'm not carrying on with the programme.

"That is it!"

He called me a Marxist nagbag and I called him a marshmallow historian.

He said he wasn't going to work any more and I got furious

and stormed out of the hotel and went round to an old pub

where I used to go, as a student, and I marched in and I said,

"Give me a pint!"

And the barman said, "Excuse me, are you Freddy Starr?"

So, I blew up again and went back to the devil I knew.

He loved moving from university to television.

He was totally fed up with administration, with teaching

and marking and examining.

You know, he'd done all that and, you know, he loved admiration.

He loved to be loved. Nothing pleased Gwyn better.

It was a huge success and this is when Gwyn

became a television celebrity and a national celebrity.

Being involved in that series gave him a new sense

of purpose and direction.

Welcome to today's Camelot.

Over the next decade, Gwyn brought the talents that made him

a sensational lecturer to a string of history programmes.

What is Lenin doing 05in a Welsh non-conformist chapel?

One of these took him to the Ukraine,

where his experiences in the mining town of Donetsk

confirmed his disillusionment with Soviet-style communism.

This place is a tissue of contradictions.

The pits have spotless clinics

and the city hospital doesn't even have hypodermic needles.

It is somehow characteristic that all those roses bloom

so magnificently because disease-bearing spores

cannot live in the polluted air.

Back in Wales, Gwyn was enjoying the fresh air

and rural tranquillity of Carmarthenshire,

where he'd made a home for himself, with his new partner, Sian.

Following a struggle with lung cancer, Gwyn Alfred Williams,

died on 16 November, 1995, aged 70.

I miss him now, you know, when I'm reading history, I think,

"Oh, I wonder what Gwyn would think of this?"

I still long for those moments when we could discuss and debate

and argue it all out.

A man of infuriating contradictions.

A man that most of us would have followed anywhere

and I can't think of anyone else I'd say that of.

He was a complete one off and fantastic that Wales had him

in the 20th century and that so many of us learned from him

and, indeed, loved him.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd