The Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalist’s Award 2023: Winner of the Column Category
Yesterday’s Past, Tomorrow’s Future
By Gwenno Robinson
I remember it well. It’s the 23rd of April 2019 and I’m running up the cliff path in trainers that are too small for me. News has just hit. The monument overlooking Port Eynon Bay has been defaced, spray-painted bright red with bold white lettering: “Cofiwch Dryweryn”. The sight of it makes my heart beat faster.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen a mural like this one. I’ve grown up driving past the same graffiti on a wall on the A487. In my mother tongue, it demands those who pass it to Cofiwch Dryweryn. Remember Tryweryn.
Tryweryn is the name of a Welsh valley that was drowned in 1965 to supply water to Liverpool. Remarkably, 35 out of 36 Welsh MPs opposed the bill, but the measure still passed. A total of 48 people from the Welsh-speaking community of Capel Celyn were evicted. Their homes, a school, a chapel, and its graveyard were all submerged under 140 feet of water. That year, Meic Stephens, a Welsh writer, painted the original graffiti in protest. Ever since, the Cofiwch Dryweryn mural holds a very particular place in Welsh memory.
Over the years, generations have dipped their paintbrushes in red paint, taking on the ritualistic task of conserving the mural. In 2019, a movement replicating the graffiti swept across Wales and beyond. A total of 115 examples of Cofiwch Dryweryn murals were recorded, stretching as far as Chicago. One of which came to be on the clifftop of Port Eynon Bay, where I was raised, and is home to only a handful of Welsh speakers. Perhaps, one of the most unlikely places for a Welsh-language protest movement to reach.
R.S Thomas famously wrote of how “There is no present in Wales, and no future; there is only the past, brittle with relics”. In 2008, the mural was altered to spell ‘Anghofiwch Dryweryn’ (Forget Tryweryn). It was swiftly restored to its original state, but the vandalism speaks a wider truth about the role of memory in Welsh identity.
Welsh identity seems to be entirely based on ancient grievances. The year 1282 is a date I grew up reciting. It’s the date Llywelyn ein Llyw Olaf, one of Wales’s last independent princes was killed. The English put his head on a spike. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, a ceremony is held where he fell. For £19.30, you could even have your own ‘Cofiwch 1282’ t-shirt. Recently, a Welsh protest song, ‘Yma o Hyd’, made headlines after topping the iTunes chart nearly 40 years after it was first released. It’s now the unofficial anthem of Wales. The chorus goes: “despite everyone and everything, we’re still here”.
Wales has much more to celebrate than simply surviving. Since the Government of Wales Act in 1998 granted devolved powers to Wales, the Senedd has been doing things differently to its English neighbour. Since 2007, prescription medication has been free. The Future Generations Act requires public bodies to consider the long-term impact of their decisions to prevent problems like poverty, inequality, and climate change in the future. It’s one of the only policies of its kind.
In 2019, the Welsh Government launched its plans to become the world’s first ‘Nation of Sanctuary’, recognizing its ambition to welcome refugees to the country. It’s since welcomed 200 Afghans and over 3,000 Ukrainians. It doesn’t stop there. Two years ago, Plaid Cymru and Welsh Labour signed a Co-operation Agreement, a joint policy programme covering an impressive 46 areas. The two parties demonstrate a collaborative form of doing politics that Westminster can only dream of.
Wales is leading the way, prioritising values like co-operation, social equality, and sustainability. Yet, these achievements are too often overshadowed by memories of its troubled past. Wales is no longer struggling to survive, but fighting to be an ambitious, innovative, and inclusive nation. Clinging to the “brittle relics” of the past will only prevent it from achieving those aims.
The graffiti that appeared in Port Eynon lasted just short of a week. After a day or two, the local council had already tried removing it with paint stripper, but it wouldn’t budge. Before long, black paint covered the mural. A part of me couldn’t help but feel it was for the best.
Reflection on how the piece is informed by Orwell’s influence:
The past and who controls it is a central question in Orwell’s work. In ‘My Country Right or Left’, Orwell wrote of how “very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin”. Orwell was reflecting on his own recollections of the First World War and his intense feelings of patriotism. Upon reading it, I began considering my own childhood memories and how they had been shaped in the first place. This was the starting point behind my piece: why was I so happy to see to the Cofiwch Dryweryn mural appear in my own village?
My first contact with Orwell’s work was with ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. In the novel, the power of the Party is vested in its power over the past. The concept of ‘memory hole’ and the ‘Ministry of Truth’ made me interrogate my own memories and why they hold so clearly in my mind. It led me to question why the Tryweryn drowning and other examples of loss hold such a sensitive place in Welsh memory.
Orwell’s ‘Notes on Nationalism’ is a text that has forced me to grapple with my own political identity. Orwell writes of how nationalists obsess over the “victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations” of the past. In applying his ideas to my own nation of Wales, I reckoned with how Welsh identity seemed to only mourn defeats rather than celebrate triumphs.
Around the same time the Cofiwch Dryweryn movement was taking off, Wales became the world’s first ‘Nation of Sanctuary’, recognizing its ambition to welcome refugees from Afghanistan and later, Ukraine. The inspiration behind this piece, was questioning how inclusive a Welsh identity could be for refugees settling in Wales if it was so heavily based on the past. Is a collective memory as unifying as it seems?