GREAT BRITAIN: Melodies for Miners

The faces of the stodgy, soot-laden houses of the little mining town of Mountain Ash were ugly and dirty as ever. But the faces of the miners, and their families, were scrubbed clean and the mines were idle. From the town rose loved Welsh songs like Jenny Jones, Men of Harlech and the Welsh anthem, Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau—meaning Land of My Fathers.

As in every year since the modern Eisteddfod (pronounced eye-steth-vud, means “get together”) began in the 18th Century, men & women from all Wales and Welshmen from all parts of the world came to sing around the Druids’ Circle, marked out last week by old moss-covered stones in a cool oak-shaded glade just outside Mountain Ash. They heard the venerable Arch Druid (Congregationalist Minister Crwys Williams) open the six-day festival with the traditional words, “A oes heddwch—Is it peace?” The voices of 11,000 Welsh miners and farmers cried an answering “Heddwch!” The Arch Druid smiled, murmured “I think they heard that even in Paris.”

As always, the Eisteddfod’s main attraction was the solemn Parliament of the Bards (Gorsedd). Here, in colorful array (musicians in blue robes, poets in white, honorary bards in green), the bards met to honor this year’s prizewinning poets with their wild applause and with Wales’s most coveted trophies: the traditional silver crown and pulpit chair. Last week the applause rose even higher to honor royalty: pretty, bareheaded Princess Elizabeth, clad in a green Druidic robe.

Elizabeth had come from London to give royal blessings to Eisteddfod—and to deliver a thinly veiled message from Britain’s coal-hungry Ministry of Mines. Graciously she paid tribute to the Welsh miner, but gently, plainly prodded him: “His name is . . . a symbol of tenacity and achievement. Never before have so many looked to him for those qualities as today. . . .”

Neither these words of the Princess nor the cheers of the bards carried beyond the cool forest glade. With striking unanimity, the whole Welsh press snubbed the Princess by publishing not a line of her plea. The Welsh were convinced that a Government program to improve working conditions in the pits will get miners back to work faster than a pep talk from a princess.

Last week, after the festival, scores of the unemployed in Mountain Ash milled around on the sidewalks before their grimy, gloomy houses. There they listened to a four-piece band of disabled miners playing no fine old Welsh airs, but Money Is the Root of All Evil.