Welsh Journals

A CAULDRON OF REBIRTH: POPULATION AND THE WELSH LANGUAGE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY* In an article, 'Wales and the Atlantic Economy', published in 1959,1 the present writer argued that the population explosion in Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century was a blessing to the Welsh language. Welsh people who had to leave the countryside did not have to emigrate to England or overseas: they were able to migrate to the rapidly expanding industrial areas of south and north Wales, where they raised large families who were Welsh-speaking. The 1891 census recorded nearly 900,000 people speaking Welsh in Wales (excluding Monmouthshire), while 70 per cent of them were living in five counties most affected by industrialization-Glamorgan, Carmarthenshire, Denbighshire, Flintshire and Caernarfonshire. I ventured to conclude as follows: Instead of bemoaning the rural exodus, the Welsh patriot should sing the praises of industrial development. In that tremendous half century before the First World War, economic growth in Wales was so vigorous that her net loss of people through emigration was a mere four per cent of her bountiful natural increase over that period. Few countries in Europe came anywhere near to that. The unrighteous Mammon in opening up the coalfields at such a pace unwittingly gave the Welsh language a new lease of life and Welsh Nonconformity a glorious high noon.2 This doctrine did not go down very well; it departed too abruptly from the orthodox view enshrined in the Welsh history textbooks. Had we not all been brought up to believe that industrialization and capitalism were a powerful anglicizing force which swept over most of Wales in the nineteenth century, leaving the rural counties of the north and west as the strongholds of the Welsh tradition? The countryside-y cefn gwlad-was regarded as the heartland of all that is enduring in our national culture, and the flight from the land had been a paralysing disease. David Williams, a leading Welsh historian, in his authoritative A 'History of Modem Wales, published in 1950,3 put the matter as follows: *This article is a revised version of the O'Donnell lecture delivered in the University of Wales in 1985-86. Brinley Thomas, 'Wales and the Atlantic Economy', Scottish Journal of Political Economy, VI (November 1959), 169-192, reprinted in Brinley Thomas (ed.), The Welsh Economy: Studies in Expansion (Cardiff, 1962), pp. 1-29. 2 ibid., p. 192. 3 David Williams, A History of Modern Wales (London, 1950).