Welsh Journals

prisoner and all the witnesses were Welsh-speaking. His suggestion, however, was at once thwarted as the official shorthand writer, who was required by an act of 1907 (which had established a Court of Criminal Appeal) to note the evidence and the summing up at each trial, was a monoglot Englishman.2 By the mid-1930s, the issue was commanding considerable public interest in Wales; as a leading article in the Western Mail stated indignantly, 'Some of the judges who come into Wales persist in believing that Welsh in no longer a living language, and treat witnesses who prefer to speak in their native tongue with scant courtesy, sometimes even with gross rudeness.'3 The idea of a national petition to Parliament was to some extent stimulated by the striking outcome of the Peace Ballot of June 1935 when 1,025,040 Welsh people (62.3 per cent of the total Welsh electorate of 1,643,318) cast their votes, a percentage 24.4 higher than the average for the whole of Britain.4 Moreover, the exercise had been undertaken without causing financial problems. At about the same time, the Welsh national newspaper Y Cymro organized a petition to be presented to the Royal Commission on the Dispatch of Business at Common Law. The movement sought, among other demands, that the Welsh and English languages be granted parity in the law courts of Wales, that high court and county court judges, the chairmen of courts and quarter sessions, court officials and shorthand writers should all be fully bilingual, and that competent translators be appointed and adequately remunerated. Some 9,000 signatures were rapidly collected, and the movement soon won the support of nineteen local authorities, thirty-four Welsh societies, and 169 churches and chapels. The petition was indeed presented to the Royal Commission, to which evidence had already been given by the distinguished high court judge, Sir Thomas Artemus Jones, and H.W Samuel, since 1930 the recorder of Merthyr Tydfil, who had served for two short periods as Labour MP for Swansea West. Both men depicted the petition as a true reflection of Welsh sentiment, while an array of figures prominent in Welsh cultural and political life among them Ithel Davies, Ifan ab Owen Edwards, William George, 2T. A. Jones, The Union of England and Wales (London, 1937), pp. 24-5; H. Morris-Jones, Doctor in theWhips' Room (London, 1955), p. 123. 3 Western Mad, 29 June 1935. 4 See G. J. Jones, Wales and the Quest for Peace (Cardiff, 1969), p. 140.