'Mothers of Wales, speak Welsh to your children . . . It is from you, and not from their fathers, that they will leam to love God in their own language'.  
Lady Llanover, in Y Gymraes, vol. I, I850.   Wales in Quotations. Meic Stephens.

'Lady Llanover while talking to an aged retainer, discovered her quite distressed by the fact that the Welsh National Dress was dying out. She immediately resolved that it would never be altered while she was head of the Llanofer Estate: She decreed that all in her employment must wear Welsh dress.'  
From an article entitled 'Gems from the Past'.  Welsh Folk Dance Society.

'September 20th: In the evening after supper, Lady Llanover kindly allowed Mr Griffiths, her harper, to play in the hall.  When I went into the room, standing near Mr Griffiths, who was playing the harp, was a young girl in a close cap and scarlet handkerchief singing Welsh airs and, Oh, how sweet and natural she sang'.
Margaret Davies, from her diary.  Edited by David Thomas.  Country Quest July 1967.

'....... about tea time Lady Llanover sent for me.   ............... She spoke to me very kind, but still with a strong determination not to deviate from any of her accustomed rules. ........... Her dress was rather peculiar on the whole. She had on a stuff skirt tucked up all around, a black velvet jacket, a puce bow attached to her collar, no cap as I had anticipated, black silk stockings and little shoes with ribbon bows'.
Margaret Davies, from her diary.  Edited by David Thomas. Country Quest July 1967.

'....... A bulldozer of a woman, years ahead of her time, who fearlessly and fiercely promoted the Welsh language at the time of the ' Welsh Not' . A  brilliant exception to the Anglicised outlook of her class'.
Eiry Hunter. Welsh Folk Dance Society.

The following excerpts, translated from the original Welsh, are taken from 'Gwenynen Gwent' by  L. M. Owen,  (‘Cymru’ Vol. 35 1908.)  

Although her parents were descendants of Hengest, they showed great respect to Wales, Welsh people and the Welsh language.  Many Welsh literary people, poets, musicians were accommodated by them and received of their welcome and kindness in their house at Llanofer.  

The company and society of these people had a great influence on the mind of the young heiress. Her sympathy regarding the history of Wales and its people was broadened, and her understanding enlightened, nor was her heart hardened to make her unable to perceive excellence in anybody but her own nation.  Her perception was sharp enough to recognise talent and her heart impartial enough to appreciate that talent wherever it was to be found.

Although she had an Englishwoman's stiff tongue, she succeeded, to be able to speak the Welsh language clearly, her writing was correct and she read with enjoyment.  Welsh newspapers and publications were read regularly by the family.  When a young girl, she went out every day on the back of her little pony, in the company of one of the servants.  They stopped one day on the top of a mountain and the beautiful valley of the River Usk unfolded before them.  The servant pointed to the valley and with the self-confidence and arrogance worthy of an English servant said -
'Forty years hence the Welsh language will have disappeared from this country'.
The Arglwyddes [the Lady] answered him -
'If I am living forty years hence, the Welsh language will be here too'.

She liked the title [Gwenynen Gwent - the Bee of Gwent] very much.  It suited her to the ground because Gwenynen was for the most part diligent throughout her long life.  As has been mentioned already, she used her influence on the part of Wales, she placed her abilities and her influence on behalf of the contemptible little country of her choice.  She had studied the history of Wales, and failed to find in it anything that Welshmen and women should be ashamed of ..........  She knew much about Welsh literature, and she dared to be of the opinion that that literature should be read and appreciated by the young Welsh people of that present day.

12th August 2001
How My Ancestor Invented Wales.
There was another ugly eruption of Welsh Nationalism at last week's Eisteddfod.  Susannah Herbert knows why.

"Wales has three languages; English, Welsh and hate.  Right now, the loudest of them all is hate. English speaking 'outsiders' who move to rural Wales are carriers of 'human foot and mouth' disease, cries the chairman of the Welsh Language Board, John Elred Jones.  Wales has become a 'dumping ground' for England's 'oddballs, social misfits and society drop-outs' declares a senior Plaid Cymru politician, complaining that 'our voice will be drowned out forever along with our language and culture'. A third voice, a local councillor, demands limits on the numbers of English allowed to buy homes in Wales.
It's an old song, this - older than any heard at the National Eisteddfod and a great deal uglier.  Just as a thought experiment, substitute the words 'Jewish' or 'black for 'incomer' and 'outsider'.  Or try a Balkan translation.  Any advance on Serbs and Muslims?  Tutsis and Hutus, perhaps?  The appalling bloodshed of Rwanda, a green and hilly country the size of Wales, began with fighting talk about saving 'language and culture' from alien intruders.  
If such comparisons seem absurd, so much the better.  For, however inflammatory the rhetoric used by its more reckless power-brokers, mercifully Wales has a long way to go yet before collapsing into civil war.  The rumbling you hear from its hillsides is indigestion, not distant artillery fire.
Yes, there are serious problems: foot and mouth has exacerbated a long-drawn-out crisis in the Welsh-speaking corners of Wales, where the lives of the inhabitants still revolve around farming.  The disease could scarcely have come at a worse time: in the past two years, the number of agricultural workers in Wales has fallen by 10% to 55,000, while the average net farm income is down to £4,100 this year.  The implications, both economic and social, are sobering: with little hope of making a living off the land, the next generation of hill-farmers is overwhelmingly selling up and moving away.  Over the next 15 years, their numbers will halve.  For anyone who cares about cares about traditional ways of life, this is a tragedy even greater than any of the individuals involved.  Hill-farming is one of the last occupations in which Welsh is used naturally and unselfconsciously every day, so the language will inevitably suffer - and the damage will not stop there.
As a north Wales squire explained to me last week:  'It's the knowledge of the ways of a Welsh village, of willingness to participate in the Eisteddfod, of singing, recitations, sheep-dog trials, chapel - the traditions of a whole culture that are at risk'.  The squire is typically Welsh in that he speaks only a smattering of 'the old language' himself but sympathises with those who fear for its survival.
Yet what can be done?  You can increase subsidies, maintain a costly Welsh language television channel which virtually no one watches, make road signs bilingual and enforce the teaching of Welsh in schools but you cannot keep people on the land against all reason in the name of 'tradition'.  Even the squire admits that there is no simple answer.
All over the world, ancient peasant cultures are falling victim to change, as education and commerce persist in offering alternatives to 'the old ways'.  This is not a uniquely Welsh problem although it suits some to pretend that it is.  No, what is uniquely Welsh about all this is the sleight of mind which contrives to blame the problem on England and English 'incomers', subtly recasting the crisis to make it seem as if innocent Welsh speakers are being forcibly chased from their cottages by a colonising horde of holiday home owners.
For all the fiery talk about prices being forced up beyond the pockets of the locals, a recent study shows that house prices  have risen more slowly in Wales than anywhere in the rest of Britain.  The problem isn't simply 'in-migration', it is exodus.  If Welsh-speaking Wales could only offer more to its children - not just sheep-dog trials, singing and subsidies - maybe more would stay.  Years of trying to solve this problem internally have yielded no solutions - which is why it might be wiser now to stop condemning 'incomers' and start trying to harness their energy instead.

Here I must declare an interest.  I was born and schooled in Wales and in the Monmouthshire house where I grew up hangs a Victorian portrait of my great-great-great-grandmother, a severe-looking figure in a witch's hat with the top sliced off.  This is Lady Llanover, a passionate crusader for Welshness who did more than any woman then or since to make the Welsh aware of their culture - including inventing what is now known as the Welsh national costume.  And she was English.  She was born Augusta Waddington in 1802, the daughter of a wealthy Lincolnshire businessman who uprooted his household to move to Wales.  Today, presumably, the Waddingtons would be all-too-obvious targets for any loose-lipped attacks on 'human foot and mouth' but at the dawn of the 19th century, Welsh national consciousness had not yet taken this dispiriting turn.

Augusta - whose portrait bears an alarming resemblance to Margaret Thatcher - was an energetic bulldozer of a woman who developed a crusading passion for all things Welsh, from cooking, music and dancing to literature and costume.  With her husband - Sir Benjamin Hall, later Lord Llanover - she turned her home into a hothouse for all that she felt was under threat in Wales, compelling her baffled visitors to exchange their silk evening gowns for hairy Welsh tweed woven on her estate and to listen to endless recitals of Welsh verse, often set to the harp by the household harpist.  Although Monmouthshire felt far more English than Welsh, she gave her servants Welsh names, requiring them to dress in traditional costume and speak Welsh at all times.
Her crusade took off after 1834, when she won a prize at the Cardiff Eisteddfod for an essay, in Welsh, 'On The Advantages Resulting from the Preservation of the Welsh Language and the National Costumes of Wales'.  Encouraged by her success, she assumed the bardic title of Gwenynen Gwent or 'The Bee of Monmouthshire', and devoted herself wholeheartedly to reviving old Welsh customs.

I write 'reviving' but in truth, Augusta's real skill lay in inventing and promoting: her harpist wore a fanciful 'traditional' costume of her own devising, half-minstrel, half-Scottish highlander.  Her 'typical' Welshwoman's costume - a red cloak worn with a fichu and capacious skirt and topped by a tall black hat - became typical only after she had declared it to be so as part of her strategy to make the impoverished Welsh more picturesque for artists and tourists.  Even the triple harp she promoted so assiduously as the 'traditional' national instrument of Wales was based on a misunderstanding: she did not realise that its true origins were Italian.

Still, not all her efforts were purely fanciful.  Her campaign to get the Welsh to buy local tweed instead of expensive imported calicoes was based on sound economic good sense, while under her patronage, Welsh schools and churches were built, a Welsh dictionary compiled, a Welsh magazine for women founded, manuscript archives established, folk tunes collected - and occasionally 'improved'. She had her detractors - indeed whenever I go home I suffer from her decision to invent a tradition of Welsh 'teetotalism' and turn every pub in the neighbourhood into a tea-house - but her boundless creative energy helped give her adopted country the courage to dream up and eventually to claim an identity of its own after centuries in the shadow of England.

Augusta died in 1896, but each time I cross the Severn Bridge I wonder what she would make of these current rows.  Somehow, I can't see her wringing her hands and blaming the Welsh predicament on 'incomers', still less singing the song of hatred.  No, she would be out with her hat and her harpist minting new 'traditions' as fast as the old ones fell from use: a magnificent English oddball on a mission to save the Welsh, not just from outsiders, but from themselves."

The Sunday Telegraph.  August 19 2001
Letters to The Editor

Is it surprising that we in Wales should resent the stampede of affluent English urbanites snapping up ancestral farms whose occupants are being bankrupted by the Government's gross mismanagement of the agricultural sector, of which the foot and mouth crisis is merely the coup de grâce?  Susannah Herbert's appallingly insensitive article (Comment, August 12) perhaps goes some way to explaining why this should be so.
In her great-great-great grandmother's time, Gwent, of which Monmouthshire was a part, was one of the most intensely Welsh-speaking parts of Wales, however 'impoverished'.  Unlike today's semi-educated, culture-blind 'incomers', Lady Llanover was a splendid figure whose legacy is still greatly revered here.
The Welsh nation, with its unbroken heritage of more than two millennia is, mercifully, highly resilient. We came here before the Romans came, and we'll be here when the English are gone.
Henry Jones-Davies
Editor, Cambria, Carmarthen

How well does Susannah Herbert know Wales?  Not well, surely, or she would know that Welsh anglophobia looks mild and almost benign besides the Scottish (let alone the Irish) variety.  Anyone who doubts this should visit the battlefield museum at Bannockburn.
And, it is not unprovoked - many English people in Wales, and many monoglot English-speaking Welsh people, take it as an affront when Welsh is spoken in their presence.  Most of them, I guess, would not dream of criticising Asians for conversing publicly in Urdu or Gujerati.
Four years ago a rugby fan from Carmarthen was stabbed to death by a stranger, a mile and a half from where I live, for singing in Welsh on the street.  I have never heard of anyone being murdered for singing an English song, even in Carmarthen.
David Watkins
Cardiff

The Welsh will outlast the English

Lady Llanover no more invented 'Wales' and the Welsh national costume than Sir Walter Scott invented 'Scotland' or Scottish Highland dress.  They took existing fashions, refined them and grafted on to them a suitable national identity.
As for Welsh (Scots and Irish too?) resenting the influx of English 'oddballs, social misfits, drop-outs and pensioners' - if all these were to behave like Lady Llanover there would be no problem.
Catherine Timms
Edinburgh

Lady Llanover was a founder trustee if Llandovery College, where I have been teaching for the last 20 years and her memory here is still fresh.  Her portrait, presented to the College by her husband in 1861, hangs proudly in the dining hall, and when a new girls' boarding house was opened in 1989, it was fittingly named Ty Llanover, or Llanover House, in tribute to her.
Glyn Rhys Evans
Head of French, Llandovery  College,
Llandovery, Dyfed

The Sunday Telegraph.   26th August, 2001
Letters to the Editor

The myth of Welsh speakers
May I, as a member of a family which was already farming in Monmouthshire in the 16th century, comment on the letters (August 19), provoked by Susannah Herbert's article under the headline 'How my ancestor invented Wales' - an obvious exaggeration.  (Comment August 12)?
Your correspondent Henry Jones-Davies equally exaggerates when he claims that in Lady Llanover's time 'Gwent, of which Monmouthshire was a part, was one of the most intensely Welsh-speaking parts of Wales'.  Monmouthshire did not exist until it was set up as an English country [sic] by Henry VIII.  Before that it was ruled by Marcher Lords.  When the industrial revolution came, enterprising families from purely English counties such as Staffordshire poured into it to provide  the workforce required for the coal mines, iron and tin-plate works.
Already when Archdeacon Coxe toured the county (1810) it was only in the remote western valleys such as Ebbw Vale, still rural, that he found people who spoke only Welsh.  Lady Llanover's romantic passion for Welsh culture, admirable in many ways, meant that to boast of servants who spoke only Welsh she had to punish those caught speaking English.
By the 1920s, when as a child, I travelled to farms and cottages all over the county with my father, who was the agent for the Pontypool Park Estate, I never heard Welsh - except at the National Eisteddfod, held in Pontypool in 1924.
David Watkins writes that Welsh Anglophobia can look almost mild, but what can be more arbitrary than the imposition of Welsh as a compulsory subject in Monmouthshire primary schools even in areas where only English has been spoken for centuries.
(Mrs) A E Armstrong
Oxford