make me a rainbow

“My whole life, I don’t know what this song means. I mean, ‘should old acquaintance be forgot.’ Does that mean that we should forget old acquaintances? It doesn’t mean that if we happen to forget them, we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them.” “Well, maybe it just means that we should remember that we forgot them, or something. Anyway, it’s about old friends.”

Llyn Celyn is the name of the reservoir - the village was Capel Celyn, which is in the Tryweryn Valley. So in 1956, Liverpool County Council wanted more water; but, naturally, they didn’t want to flood an English valley. Problem was, there was no way to apply for drowning Tryweryn and getting it approved by literally any Welsh authority at all, ‘cause you know, fuck that.

So, they sponsored a private bill and pushed that through parliament. This allowed them to just do exactly as they pleased without Welsh consent. Capel Celyn was also, in a time of huge legislative and social oppression of the Welsh language, one of the last Welsh-only communities we had.

Needless to say, 35 of the 36 Welsh MPs voted against it (the last abstained), and the villagers fought the flooding for 8 years. So did the rest of Wales. Huge numbers of Welsh people marched to London to protest. It was one of the biggest unifying protests we’d had in centuries. There was an English reporter from the BBC who went there to cover all the “fuss”, and he asked a local man (who was clearly the only guy who could speak English) why he cared about the village, since it wasn’t the most important or the most beautiful village in Wales.

“Listen,” the Welshman hissed. “My wife may not be the most important woman in Wales, nor the most beautiful. But I love her! And I certainly wouldn’t drown her.”

In 1965, they drowned it anyway.

In all, there were in fact two chapels and graveyards drowned, one being Quaker; also a school, post office, multiple farms, and the village itself.

You now see a lot of these on abandoned walls in mid and north Wales:

It means “Remember Tryweryn.” Tryweryn became a galvanising force in Welsh devolution, which began its steady march in 1957, since England had pretty effectively just proven to us that they were literally never going to listen to us, even with the “representation” they’d given us.

Anyway, in 2005 Liverpool City Council formally apologised for drowning Tryweryn. While I’m glad they did - Birmingham still has yet to apologise for the Elan and Claerwen Valleys - it’s the emptiest fucking gesture on the planet. But, it’s a rare admission of guilt from an English institution towards Wales, so you know. Baby steps.

HOWEVER.

Here’s what’s interesting about the graveyard picture above:

We were told that they would cover over the cemetery. Families could have the bodies relocated, and 8 were disinterred, but the rest were to have their headstones removed, a layer of gravel put over, and then the whole lot encased in concrete.