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IMMIGRANTS AND MINORITIES IN WALES, 1840-1990: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE I Neil Evans Vaclav Havel believes that a nation can be judged by the way it treats minorities. By this standard, Wales has often measured itself favourably and outsiders have also applied the same rule. In Pen Tennyson's film The Proud Valley (1940) some of the miners of 'Blaendy' doubt the wisdom of employing a black man underground. They get a swift come uppance from one of the central characters in the film who asks 'Aren't we all black underground?' Opposition immediately collapses and David Goliath is integrated into the community he will later die for. Tennyson has portrayed Wales as tolerant and welcoming, after only a brief moment of awkwardness. Whether a black man who lacked Paul Robeson's singing voice might be acceptable is a more open question! This scene is an encapsulation of one of the sub themes of the Welsh idea of the gwerin the Welsh people were the most upright, God-fearing, radical, moral, philosophical, cultured and tolerant in the world. In recent years the celebration of this Welsh hospitality has become a minor theme of Alan Watkins' contributions to The Observer3 and with more specific reference the absence of hostility to immigrants in Cardiff s multi-racial community is often lauded. In 1967 a senior medical officer of the City of Cardiff informed a conference in the city that she had 'been told by many people that the battle of integration had been won in Cardiff fifty years ago'.4 The principled internationalism of the gwerin receives strong academic support from one of the major studies in modem Welsh social history- Hywel Francis and David Smith's The Fed: The South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century. Here the proletarian solidarity of the miners, most marked in their support for Irish independence and the Spanish Republic, is seen as being rooted in the plural experience of the coalfield. Minorities are so well integrated that they contribute more than their mite to the radical tradition.5 Yet more recently a dissenting tradition has arisen. It comes from historians who have excavated the tangled history of ethnic conflict in Wales. Paul O'Leary has charted the violent reactions to the Irish in nineteenth-century Wales and unearthed ten major violent incidents between 1826 and 1882.6 Even before this Martin Daunton had doubted that Cardiff's reputation for good race relations was well-founded, on the basis of a host of affrays in the nineteenth century.7 Some of my own earlier research emphasised the violent ethnic conflict in the ports of south-east Wales in the wake of the First World War.8 Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes have atomised the Tredegar anti-Jewish riots of 191 1,9 while Jon Parry has taken us back further into the violent past of this community and after examining its anti-Irish disturbances of 1882, he eloquently understates the conclusion of the new line: 'The Welsh have never been immune to prejudice.'10 This is a relatively rare thing in modem Welsh historiography, a debate in which there are clearly opposed positions. If we accept Havel's dictum, it is an issue which goes to the heart of the understanding of the nature of Wales and of Welshness. How does the more recent research affect our overall views of Wales? Were the riots, so painstakingly chronicled, simply aberrations, or symptoms of adjustment? How does Wales weigh in the scales of comparison with cities and regions such as Belfast, Glasgow and Liverpool, that have stronger images of violent and structured conflict? We can confront the wider ramifications of the issue by discussing the unfolding of Welsh reactions