The meeting of the advisory committee of the Welsh Political Archive and the annual lecture had returned to their traditional slot this year, which on the first Friday of November but the lecture’s subject was the radical split in Welsh politics a century ago which reset the discussion about Welshness and Britishness and the place of Wales in the British state.
The Drwm was full and a good audience online watched Professor Richard Wyn Jones' lecture "Pam y Sefydlwyd Plaid Cymru (Why was Plaid Cymru founded)?" as part of the activities of the Welsh Political Archive to mark the centenary of the founding of Plaid Cymru in 1925.
Richard argued that a number of groups around Wales believed that it was necessary to establish something similar to Plaid Cymru in the 1920s and although the success of the then styled Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru was not certain, the likelihood is that something resembling it would have eventually been founded.
There was a feeling that the kind of Welsh nationalism that saw the development and prosperity of Wales and its language and culture within the British Empire - the Cymru Fydd mentality that had led to the establishment of a National Library and National Museum and the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales - had failed. Ireland had moved on from this style of nationalism with Sinn Fein thinking completely rejecting Britishness with elected members of the Party meeting in Dáil Éireann instead of taking their seats in London. Richard argued that this strategy had struck a chord with Welsh nationalists with Saunders Lewis stating in his letter to H. R Jones in 1925 that it was necessary to completely renounce the British system and cut all links with the English Parliament and the English parties.
But despite Sinn Fein's great influence early in the Party's life, the believers in Cymru Fydd continued in the British parties, and working together on common cause between the two tendencies led to a number of constitutional developments. Indeed, with Plaid Cymru members in Westminster - in both chambers - in the long term the party has adopted the methods of the old Irish Parliamentary Party.
As part of the day’s events we held a pop-up exhibition of some of the treasures of the Plaid Cymru Archive, including early minute books and election speeches from 1929 and the Caerphilly by-election in the Summers Room and now the text of the lecture is now available to view on the Welsh Political Archive pages on the National Library’s website.
Category: Article