The Treachery of the Blue Books

There was widespread unrest in Wales during the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. Fanned by the Chartists and the Daughters of Rebecca but ignited by extreme poverty, social injustice and the oppression of landowners, the flame of protest erupted into riots that were brutally extinguished by the army. In the most extreme incident, around 20,000 people, some armed, marched on Newport in November 1840, where fighting erupted outside the Westgate Hotel. More than 20 protesters were killed and many more were injured when soldiers fired on the crowd.

These events were reported in the newspapers and caused alarm in England where The Times maintained that ignorance was the cause of the social problems that led to unrest and sedition. In 1847, under pressure from reformers, the government commissioned an enquiry into the state of education in Wales.

The enquiry was conducted by three English commissioners who, fair play to them, made a thorough job of reporting the appalling state of the education system in the country. The commissioners spoke no Welsh and many of their conclusions were based upon hearsay gleaned from interviews with Anglican ministers, whose ministry was largely confined to the upper classes, while the Welsh working classes were largely non-conformist.

It should be remembered that English Victorian morality espoused sexual repression, dignity and restraint, a low tolerance of crime and a strong social ethic. This might explain why the commissioners felt the need to stray outside their brief to comment on what they thought of Welsh morality. They seem to have been profoundly shocked by what they found.

“The morals of the people are of a very low standard. In fact, immorality prevails from the want of a sense of moral obligation rather than from a forgetfulness or violation of recognised duties.”

“Petty thefts, lying, cozening, every species of chicanery, drunkenness (where the means exist), and idleness prevail to a great extent among the least educated part of the community, who scarcely regard them in the light of sins. There is another painful feature in the laxity of morals, voluntarily attested by some of those who have given evidence. I refer to the alleged want of chastity in the women.”

Presumably a want of chastity in the women would also suggest a want of chastity in the men, but the report, being written by men, doesn’t make this distinction.

What the commissioners actually found in Wales was abject poverty. Families often had no option other than to have both sexes share a bedroom, something prudish middle class Anglicans obviously considered degenerate. The landowners and employers merely exploited their workers, feeling no obligation to take responsibility for their welfare.

The commissioners caused controversy by proclaiming the Welsh language to be a barrier to improvement.

“The Welsh language thus maintained in its ground, and the peculiar moral atmosphere which, under the shadow of it, surrounds the population, appear to be so far correlative conditions, that all attempts to employ the former as the vehicle of other conceptions than those which accord with the latter seem doomed to failure.”

The crux of their argument seems to be that Welsh language speakers were not equipped to manage and were thus restricted to simple menial toil.

“Whether in the country, or among the furnaces, the Welsh element is never found at the top of the social scale, not in its own body does it exhibit much variety of gradation. In the country, the farmers are very small holders, in intelligence and capital nowise distinguished from labourers. In the works, the Welshman never finds his way into the office. He never becomes either clerk or agent. He may become an overseer or sub-contractor, but this does not take him out of the labouring and put him into the administering class.”

“His language keeps him under the hatches, being one in which he can neither acquire nor communicate the necessary information. It is a language of old-fashioned agriculture, of theology, and of simple rustic life, while all the world about him is English.”

The report did highlight the fact that the level of crime was significantly lower in parts of Wales that it was in England and it should be mentioned that the commissioners were also highly critical of the establishment for not making better provision for education.

“Nothing but liberal education, based on the principles of reason and religion, can reform the profane and seditious character to which the negligence and apathy of the higher classes has reduced the manufacturing population.”

The commissioners were also circumspect in apportioning blame to the Welsh people.

“Their want of morality is, however, entirely owing to their total want of mental cultivation, and the very great deficiency of moral training. They are not taught better, and have at present little means of improvement.

Unsurprisingly, the Welsh were not particularly enamoured by the portrait the commissioners painted of them and the Report came to be known as 'Brad y Llyfrau Gleision', or 'Treachery of the Blue Books', from the colour of the covers in which the three volume were bound.

The Report caused a furore and it had a profound impact on the nation’s psyche. Welsh people thereafter tended to believe that they could only improve their social standing through an ability to communicate in English. The education system was swayed by the notion that knowledge of English would allow the lowliest amongst the Welsh to improve their lot.

At some schools, children were forced to wear a wooden board carrying the carved letters ‘WN’, meaning ‘Welsh Not’, around their necks if they spoke Welsh. The offender was expected to pass the Welsh Not to the next child that spoke Welsh and so on until the child left wearing it at the end of the day was beaten.

Most significantly for modern-day Wales, the conclusions of the Blue Books caused the Welsh to harbour a profound complex about their image in the face of the world, which to some extent still persists. The Red Dragonhood exists, in part, to counter this perception with the message that, actually, it’s really very cool to be Welsh.

Yet even now, 160 years after the Treachery of the Blue Books, some parts of Wales are amongst the poorest and deprived in Western Europe. An employer such as Burberry, for example, in search of ever-greater profits with which to appease its short-termist shareholders, is free to show contempt for the loyalty of its workers in the Rhondda by removing the sole opportunity for their employment without having to take proper responsibility for the social problems left behind.