Burning cottages
Francesca Reece on throwing stones in Wales — a long history of protest
As any Celt will tell you, moving to the dominant nation of this island is an exercise in being misunderstood. To attempt to assert Welsh identity outside of Wales is more often than not to be met with bemusement: ‘Isn’t Wales basically a suburb of England?’ a fellow fresher asked me at a toga party back in Bloomsbury Antica circa 2010. Arrival in the English capital was to prove a jarring experience on several levels; I’d known this would be the case — the trope of the hick arriving in the big city was one with which I was well-acquainted — but I hadn’t been expecting the surreal experience of having to inform several of my peers that Welsh was in fact a separate language, not a dialect of English, and that no, the Welsh were not docile, and in fact just like their Celtic brethren in nations with better PR, they weren’t too fond of the Saxons either. Nationalism has existed in Wales for as long as the English have been attempting domination. Even the dragon depicted on the flag is emblematic of horn-locking with our neighbours; according to the Mabinogion, deep under Dinas Emrys, the red dragon is engaged in eternal battle with an invading white one — no points for guessing from whence he came.
As per the old adage, to write is an attempt to be understood, and I suppose it was thus inevitable that I would write a novel set in rural North Wales. Glass Houses is the story of Gethin, a forestry worker who is being slowly automated out of much work, and his first love, Olwen, a filmmaker who is back in town after more than a decade in London — charming, bourgeois (and English) husband in tow. Steamy and inevitably adulterous plot aside, it’s a novel about class, about landscape, and about history, as, in the words of RS Thomas, Wales is a place where you cannot live in the present. The particular history dealt with in the book is one that our neighbours across the border seem to have largely forgotten. When the novel was very much in its embryonic stage, I knew that if I was going to write about incomers, about second homes, and about rural-urban tensions, I couldn’t avoid writing about the 1980s.
Welsh nationalism gained unsurprising momentum in Thatcher’s Britain. In the latter part of the 20th century, Wales was dealing with the effects of deindustrialisation on the one hand, and the threat posed to its cultural identity and language on the other. For centuries, the English had engaged in a campaign to eradicate the Welsh language. Historically, in schools, children were beaten for using it and encouraged to denounce their peers for doing the same to avoid further brutalisation. Legislatively, it was all but erased, and an insidious culture of shame was created around the language; to speak Welsh was to be backwards, parochial or even sly — in an old TV interview I found from 1980, an Englishman living in Wales infers that Welsh speakers were being both rude and conspiratorial by having the nerve to speak their mother tongue in his presence. He calls the endurance of the language divisive.
And yet, endure it did. But by the late 1970s, the increasing number of English people buying second homes in Y Fro Cymraeg, the Welsh-speaking heartlands of north and west Wales, was beginning to pose an existential threat to the communities that were being usurped, and consequently to the language that was in their custody. By 1980, one in four properties on the Llŷn Peninsula were holiday cottages, and the resulting rising house prices were pushing locals out. Peaceful and legal protests had had little effect on legislation, and on the night of December 13 1979, four empty holiday homes were set alight in what appeared to be a coordinated attack, marking the beginning of a shadowy nocturnal arson campaign that would last 14 years, claim around 225 properties, and remain shrouded in tenebrous mystery — ripe material for any novelist worth their salt.
It was only when I embarked on research for Glass Houses that I realised the extent to which the whole period remains obscured — not only because of the silence upheld within communities who generally agreed with the grievances of the arsonists, but furthermore because of the dubious actions of the British state, who were especially wary of escalation in light of the situation in Northern Ireland. Early on, I came across a contemporary report published by the Welsh Campaign for Civil and Political Liberties called Political Policing in Wales. The report detailed a unique public enquiry held in the South Glamorgan County Council offices in 1984, during which the more ominous actions of the police were exposed.
The content was both damning, and a goldmine for a writer of fiction, revealing phone tapping, undercover cops infiltrating political groups, illegal detainment, snitches who were turned with blackmail or with the promise of cash, and — most disturbingly of all — a kind of chaotic and clumsy attempt on the part of the police and the state to pin the arsons on various nationalist groups (most of whom were notably on the left) on the basis of very little evidence. In reality, only one group ever claimed responsibility for the attacks. They were known as Meibion Glyndŵr, meibion being the Welsh for sons, and Glyndŵr referring to Owain Glyndŵr, the Welsh military commander who led a fifteen-year revolt against the English at the beginning of the 15th century. To this day, only one person has ever been prosecuted for participating in the arson campaign; but given Sîon Aubrey Roberts was only 20 years old when he was sentenced in 1993, it’s unlikely that he was much more than a cog in a significantly bigger machine. Over 30 years have passed since the campaign fizzled out, but the omertà endures — as I was to discover when I foolishly asked a contact about a guy my father worked with in the 80s who was rumoured to be involved in some capacity (my father was a forestry worker, much like my protagonist). I realised my embarrassing faux-pas when the contact ghosted me entirely.
From my research, an entire subplot emerged involving a bent policeman, members of the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement, a young farmer who gets in over his head, and a pair of posh English hippies who have come to Wales to take magic mushrooms and make half-hearted attempts at finding their inner druid. The repercussions of what happens in the 1980s reverberate through the contemporary strand of the story in spite of all attempts to keep the past hidden. So too do real life events in rural Wales today.
In Abersoch, the town on the Llŷn Peninsula wincingly dubbed Cheshire-on-Sea, 46% of properties are currently second homes. Throughout Britain, both Covid and Brexit have made the prospect of buying a second home in the UK increasingly enticing for those with means. Whilst many of the struggles of 20th century Welsh nationalism have yielded positive results (for example, the status enjoyed by the Welsh language both legislatively and culturally today, not to mention the increasing mainstream enthusiasm for annibyniaeth, or independence), anger in communities is still very much tangible, if not growing. In spite of measures taken by councils throughout Wales, the housing crisis is being especially felt by communities in Y Fro Cymraeg, and has mutated into something even more slippery in the tech age. We live in a time of increasing societal unrest; it wouldn’t be hugely surprising if the unstoppable rise of Airbnb restoked the flames of Meibion Glyndŵr 30 years after they appeared to peter out.
Francesca Reece's Glass Houses was published by Headline in May 2024. Francesca also joined Patrick Galbraith on the latest episode of the Boundless podcast to chat all things forestry, second homes, and the Gavin and Stacey effect. Listen on Spotify / Apple Podcasts