Tag: Nonconformity
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The Decline of Liberalism in Wales, and the Fracturing of Its Inheritance
For more than a century, Liberalism in Wales was not merely a party label, it was the organising language of public life. It fused chapel morality, civic ambition, land reform, and a distinctly Welsh insistence on dignity into a durable political culture. (source 1) (source 2). Its decline, therefore, is not simply an electoral story,…
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Voices from the Uplands, why I wrote it, and why it matters now
Voices from the Uplands: The Davies Family and the Soul of Rural Wales is, in the simplest sense, a book about my own ancestors, the Davies family of Caeadda, Llanwrin. But I did not write it to produce another neatly ordered pedigree, nor to add one more family tree to the growing pile of genealogical summaries…
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The Treachery of 1847: How the “Blue Books” Colonised the Welsh Mind
In 1847 three substantial parliamentary reports were laid before Westminster under the unromantic title Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. Their blue covers gave them their enduring popular name, the “Blue Books”, and their conclusions, or at least the spirit in which those conclusions were delivered, detonated across…
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My Political Heritage, Wales in My Blood, and the Quiet Lessons of Ancestry
Most people assume that political identity is something acquired, a set of opinions formed by the news cycle, public argument, and the shifting pressures of the present. In Wales, that assumption seldom survives contact with history. Welsh political culture was not born yesterday. Nor did it begin with devolution, or with the institutions of modern…
Antony David Davies FRSA FRAS AFRHistS FIoL MCMI 