GREAT BRITAIN: Wales, the Nation

The dark, taciturn Welsh — distant Celtic cousins of the Irish and Scots—were only partly appeased when the English, after the forced union of 1284, agreed that the first-born son and heir-apparent of the British King should be styled Prince of Wales. More recently, what the Welsh have been demanding is the creation of a Secretary of State for Wales and a “Welsh Office” in the Government, as Scotland now has.

Last week 36 Welsh M.P.s tried to get an audience with Winston Churchill. Increasingly willing to discuss larger postwar problems (see below), the Prime Minister brushed the Welsh question off as something palpably unrelated to the war effort. Much annoyed, the Welsh M.P.s assembled to draft a letter of protest. What followed was Celtic enough to have happened in Dublin: a tearing row over the wording of the letter. Fiery Clement Davies, Member for Montgomery, stormed out to tell the press what he wanted to tell Churchill —the Prime Minister’s action was an insult “to Wales as a nation.”