Identities in Flux

Hetty Jane Owen

It is a matter of some debate to this day as to whether there was some kind of ethnic cleansing of the Brittonic peoples, or whether there was a slower process of absorption of the peoples and their culture by the Anglo-Saxons. In either case, the Welsh succeeded in keeping the old Brittonic flame burning, despite the efforts of the English, then as now, not just to colonise but to re-mould the identities and practices of the people whose lands they invaded.

Winston Churchill once famously remarked that history would be kind to him – for he intended to write it himself! He did exactly that, and in 1953, the year of Hetty Jane Owen’s death, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Olwen Eldridge, Hetty's daughter, kept his collected works on her shelves.

But Churchill was only doing what the English had always done, and what all conquering peoples have tended to do, which was to co-opt history into political service. It is ironic indeed how the tales of King Arthur were elaborated into a legend of such romance and popularity that few of the younger generations soaking up these tales realised that Arthur was not fighting for the English, but against them, and was a Brittonic King striving in vain to hold off the Anglo-Saxon onslaught. And that Boadicea even earlier was no great English Queen, but  a Celtic Briton fighting against Roman occupation.

The development of a distinctly British identity has exercised the British Isles ever since. The majority of the Irish rejected it flatly, and the Welsh and Scots continued to hold on to their Brittonic and Celtic roots, respectively. To a large extent, what they observed was that to the governing classes being British really meant being English - as demonstrated in the exhortations of the likes of Horatio Nelson. Since the majority of the population of the British Isles by far consider themselves English, a dilemma emerged that has not been solved to this day, regarding the rights of the smaller nations to determine their own future. This has not been solved by devolution and power-sharing and least of all by the troubled relationship of the United Kingdom with the European Union in which the English with their greater voting power were finally, when the matter was put to a referendum, able to over-ride the wishes of the Scots and Northern Irish, and then declare conveniently that the decision made was a ‘British’ one. Just like Sir Roger Casement years before, when he decided to assert his Irishness ahead of his Britishness, the likes of the Scottish Nationalists tended to the view that such matters should be decided by the Scots on behalf of themselves.

At the end of the day, it is a question of how such multiple identities coalesce into a hierarchy, and which elements are to be superordinate, and which elements subordinate. The English were never content to allow such complexities to evolve naturally through time however. Starting with the pan-European identity that the umbrella of the Catholic Church provided, they commenced their process of social engineering by nationalizing the church, and making God an Anglican. A powerful non-conformist movement was one result. They tried with partial but by no means complete success to bring the old Celtic and Brittonic peoples of the British Isles to heel by denying them political, civil and linguistic freedoms. The independence of Ireland, and devolved parliaments and assemblies in Scotland and Wales as well as Northern Ireland were among the ultimate outcomes. And despite themselves being migrants from Northern Europe and speakers of a Germanic language, they proved themselves eventually to be unwilling to participate in a European project that was intended to some degree at least to create a common sense of identity and purpose that would ensure that the tragedies of the First and Second World Wars should never be repeated.