Welsh Journals

PEACE MOVEMENTS IN WALES, 1899-1945* ACCOUNTS of Welsh radical politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are usually essays in introspection. They have invariably focused on domestic themes-on the campaigns against political and social privilege, on the struggles for religious and civic equality, educational advance and a more emphatic national status for Wales. But publicists and propagandists for Welsh radical causes, down to the first world war and beyond, frequently chose to interpret their native political traditions in external terms as well, as a crusade against war. Peace was located alongside retrenchment and reform in the Welsh radical pantheon, from the era of Gwilym Hiraethog to that of Lloyd George. Certainly anti-war journalists during 1914-18 were able to point to the elements of a coherent peace movement during the evolution of radicalism in Wales in the century that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and it remains surprising that later historians have not made more of this theme.1 Welshmen such as the Neath Quaker industri- alist, Joseph Tregelles Price, and his fellow Quaker, Evan Rees, were prominent in the formation of the Peace Society in London as early as 1816, and in the local Peace Society formed in the Swansea and Neath district a year later.^The virtues of Christian pacifism or non-resistance, and the inhumanity and obscenity of war were topics frequently echoed in Welsh local newspapers and noncon- formist periodicals such as Yr Amserau and Y Traethodydd in the 1840s and 1850s. Two of the most celebrated of radical figures in their generation, William Rees ('Gwilym Hiraethog') and Samuel Roberts of Llanbrynmair ('S.R.'), editors respectively of Yr Amserau and Y Cronicl, were prominent in leading the campaign for inter- national peace in the years that followed the revolutionary turmoil of 1848. Both fought hard against British involvement in the Crimean War despite much local unpopularity. 'S.R.' even urged a peaceful resolution of the differences between North and South in the United States in 1861, for all his opposition to slavery. Later in the century, the popular agitation against 'Beacons- fieldism' saw large sections of Liberal and nonconformist opinion in Wales vehement in denouncing the threat of war with Russia I am grateful to Professor Glanmor Williams for some very helpful suggestions on this article. 1 For an excellent general survey, see Goronwy J. Jones, Wales and the Quest for Peace (Cardiff, 1969).