Rhondda - Culture and Recreation - Culture and Nationality

Culture and Nationality

Language
For the majority of its history the area now recognised as the Rhondda Valley was an exclusively Welsh speaking area. It was only in the early 20th century that English began to supplant Welsh as the first language of social intercourse. In 1803, English historian Benjamin Heath Malkin mentioned while travelling through Ystradyfodwg, that he had only met one person with whom he could talk, and then with the help of an interpreter. This situation was repeated with John George Wood, who on his visit to the area complained of the awkwardness of understanding the particular dialects and idioms used by the native speakers, which were on times difficult for other Welsh speakers to understand. This dialect was once called 'tafodiaith gwŷr y Gloran' ('the dialect of the men of Gloran').

As the industrialisation of the valleys began there was little shift in the use of Welsh as a first language. Initial immigrants were Welsh and it was not until the 1900s that English workers began settling in any great numbers, but it wasn't these new workers who changed the language; the erosion of Welsh had already begun in the 1860s in the school classrooms. The educational philosophy accepted by schoolmasters and governmental administrators was that English was the language of scholars, and that Welsh was a barrier to moral and commercial prosperity. In 1901 35.4% of Rhondda workers spoke only English but by 1911 this had risen to 43.1%, while Welsh speaking monoglots had dropped from 11.4% to 4.4% in the same period.

The true Anglicization of the Rhondda Valleys took place from 1900 to 1950. Improved transport and communications facilitated the spread of new cultural influences, along with dealings with outside companies with no understanding of Welsh, trade union meetings held in English, the coming of radio, cinema and then television and cheap English newspapers and paperback books; all were factors in the absorption of the English language.

Cadwgan Circle
Though the population of the Rhondda was embracing English as its first language, during the 1940s a literary and intellectual movement formed in the Rhondda that would produce an influential group of Welsh language writers. Formed during the Second World War by Egyptologist J. Gwyn Griffiths and his German wife Käte Bosse-Griffiths, the group was known as the Cadwgan Circle (Cylch Cadwgan), and met at the Griffiths' house in Pentre. The Welsh writers who made up the movement included Pennar Davies, Rhydwen Williams, James Kitchener Davies and Gareth Alban Davies.

National Eisteddfod
The Rhondda has hosted the National Eisteddfod on only one occasion, in 1928 at Treorchy. The Gorsedd stones that were placed to commemorate the event still stand on the Maindy hillside overlooking Treorchy and Cwmparc. In 1947 Treorchy held the Urdd National Eisteddfod, the Eisteddfod for children and young adults.

Communal activity
Rhondda had a strong tradition of communal activity, exemplified by workmen's halls, miners' institutes and trade unions. Miners began to contribute to the building and running of institutes - such as the Parc and Dare Hall in Treorchy - from the 1890s onwards, and they were centres of both entertainment and self-improvement with billiards halls, libraries and reading rooms.

Read more about this topic:  Rhondda, Culture and Recreation

Famous quotes containing the words culture and/or nationality:

    The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.
    Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881)