Owen Edwards

While writing an obituary of the first chief executive of S4C in Wales, Owen Edwards, for the Guardian this week, (read it here at www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/08/owen-edwards-obituary)I was reminded of the turmoil and the division that existed not only between the English and Welsh speakers but of the Welsh and the English generally that existed in the 1970s and 1980s in particular, in the land of the daffodil and dragon.
When Willie Whitelaw reneged on a Tory manifesto pleadge to establish a Welsh language TV channel it provoked sit-ins, sabotage and even the threat of hunger strikes. Eventually he agreed on a three-year experiment that Owen Edwards carefully negotiated, and as a result, the channel is now part of the Welsh national fabric.
In the meantime, Welsh nationalist extremists had been setting fire to second homes belonging to English people whom they believed were guilty of freezing out locals in a kind of modern-day imperialism. "Come home to a real fire", went a coal TV advert that was satirised in the Welsh nationalist context by Not The Nine O'clock News.
Yet, it took many years before the Welsh Assembly was eventually established and the successful demands of the Welsh language lobby added to the factors that prevented a serious demand for a Welsh republic on anything similar to their Celtic cousins north of the border.
I have a very distant connection with Welsh nationalism. I recently discovered that a possible relative of mine, a William Chaundy, served alongside Owain Glyndwr in the Battle of Otterburn fought against the Scots in 1388. Glyndwr later staged a rebellion against his English masters and declared himself Prince of Wales. I don't know if William joined his rebellion or not. I wonder what Owen Edwards would have thought of him.