Welsh Journals

Inside the Jaffa Orange TUDOR DAVID you HAVE TO BE careful what you say about the annual St David's jamboree at the Albert Hall. By this time-the eighth-it has become a sacred cow. Some very v I p's have been to see it, like Mr Henry Brooke and the Queen Mother, and every year if you mingle among the six or seven thousand other pilgrims you will see the occasional flash of diamond ear-ring, the sleek mink wrap, and dotted among the acres of home perms, theTeazy-Weazy coiffures. Yes, it is an 0 K occasion for crachach, though they are the kind, I suspect, that linger longer over the city than the arts page of The Times. Some of this mecca's glory even attaches to its mosque. A year ago, writing in the periodical of the London Welsh-Y Ddtnas­Keidrych Rhys described the Albert Hall as 'like the inside of a Jaffa orange'. It was one of those innocent similes that poets and Sunday newspaper journalists throw off without think- ing. Little did he know how some London Welsh blimps would bristle; they thought it a harsher indecency than any that had bruised the pages of The People. So let me say at once that as a singing circus I always enjoy the Albert Hall do, though I am not at all sure why. Whether it is that I like bellowing the bass of Cwm Rhondda, especially to Ann Griffiths's sacrilegious words, or that I just like to watch the Welsh jib in every conceivable aspect, I don't know. I only know that it isn't the pro- gramme that attracts me. It seems to me, as it does to many, many others, to be little more than band of hope stuff inflated to the dimen- sions of the Albert Hall. So what ? If seven thousand taffies like it year after year there can't be much wrong with it. After all, what most of us want on such an occasion are bucketsful of hiraeth and hwyl, and the old band of hope formula is not a bad way of getting it. This year we even had a substitute for those faded prints of famous preachers on the vestry walls. Above the organ was a cheap enlargement of young Prince Charles, which suddenly lit up in a garish glow whenever the massed band and choirs got up steam.