Two words on a wall, and the village underneath them

Cofiwch Dryweryn is one of the most recognised phrases in Wales. Almost nobody can tell you the names of the farms it is about.

There is a ruined cottage on the A487 near Llanrhystud, in Ceredigion, and on its gable end somebody painted two words in the early 1960s.

Cofiwch Dryweryn [KOV-yookh drih-WEH-rin]. Remember Tryweryn.

The man with the paint was Meic Stephens, later one of the more consequential figures in Welsh letters, then a young man with an argument to make. The wall has been photographed several million times since. It is on tea towels. It has been copied onto gable ends and bridges and bus shelters the length of the country. When somebody defaced it in 2019, painting over the words with "Elvis", the response was not a repair but a proliferation. Versions of it went up everywhere, and they are still going up. There has been a long campaign to have the original declared a national monument.

It works. It has worked for sixty years, which is longer than most arguments last.

This is about what it cannot carry.

Hafod Fadog, Y Garnedd Lwyd, Cae Fadog, Y Gelli, Pen y Bryn Mawr

Those are five of the farms.

They are not in the slogan. They are not on the tea towel. They come from a speech made in Westminster Hall on 14 October 2015 by Liz Saville Roberts, the MP for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, in whose constituency the valley sits, marking the fiftieth anniversary. She read the names out into the parliamentary record, and then said this:

"To Welsh men and women however, their very names ring like bells. But those bells now ring underwater and are heard by no one."

Capel Celyn sat in the Tryweryn valley, upriver from Y Bala. A chapel, a school, a post office, a cemetery, twelve houses and farms, and around eight hundred acres of workable land. Of the sixty-seven people living in the valley, forty-eight lost their homes.

Those two numbers get quoted interchangeably, which is how the confusion starts. They measure different things. Both are in the parliamentary record.

What is beyond dispute is the language. Capel Celyn was among the last communities in Wales where Welsh was not the preferred language or the majority language but simply the only one in daily use. Not a place where the language was being defended. A place where it had not yet occurred to anybody that it needed defending.

How it was done

Liverpool wanted water, principally for industry, with the surplus available to sell.

A private Bill sponsored by Liverpool Corporation came before Parliament in 1956. Going through Parliament this way meant Liverpool City Council avoided any requirement to obtain consent from the Welsh planning authorities. It did not need Welsh permission, so it did not ask for it.

Thirty-five of the thirty-six Welsh MPs voted against. The thirty-sixth abstained. Not one voted in favour.

It passed in 1957.

That arithmetic is the part worth sitting with, because this is not really a story about water. Wales objected as close to unanimously as a nation can manage through its elected representatives, and the objection had nowhere to go. There was no Assembly. There was no Senedd. There was no Secretary of State for Wales. There was no mechanism through which a unanimous Welsh no could become an outcome.

Gwynfor Evans, who would later become Plaid Cymru's first MP, described it while the Bill was still passing as "part of the crippling penalty paid by a nation without a government."

A locked door

The people facing eviction found out from the newspapers. Nobody told them.

They organised anyway. A defence fund, a defence committee, representatives elected from the county councils and the river board. One of the committee's first acts was to ask Liverpool City Council to receive a deputation from Wales so the Welsh case could be put in person.

The request was refused. The town clerk explained that while the water committee might be willing to meet them, the council itself dealt only with important local matters.

So they went to Liverpool instead. Women and children marched through the city carrying banners that read Your homes are safe. Do not drown our homes, to the council offices, and found the door locked.

In February 1963 three young men decided marching had been tried. Emyr Llywelyn Jones, a student at Aberystwyth, Owain Williams, a farmer's son, and John Albert Jones, formerly of the RAF police, calling themselves Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru [MID-yad am-THIFF-in KUM-ree], the Movement for the Defence of Wales, planted a bomb at an electricity transformer on the dam construction site.

Llywelyn was jailed for twelve months and refused to name the other two. On the day he was sentenced, Williams and Jones blew up an electricity pylon at Gellilydan, near Trawsfynydd. Williams got a year. Jones got three years' probation.

None of it stopped anything. Families watched the coffins of their parents and grandparents dug up and reburied at Llanycil and Trawsfynydd. The valley filled.

21 October 1965

The opening ceremony reads worst in Liverpool's own newspaper.

Around five hundred invited guests came for the formal opening of Llyn Celyn. More protesters than that came to meet them. Guests were booed as their cars arrived. Placards read Stop Robbing Wales and Liverpool steals Welsh water. A good number of invitations had been refused, including by people whose homes were now under the reservoir.

Protesters cut the microphone cables. The ceremony lasted under three minutes. The Lord Mayor's remarks were inaudible and were abandoned. The Liverpool Echo's own headline the next day read "Welsh Nationalists' Big Demonstration: Reservoir Opening Ceremony Cut Short".

Alderman Frank Cain, chairman of the Liverpool Water Committee, got through this much:

"There is nothing we have done which we are ashamed of. We put our case to the Welsh people and to Parliament and we were given the authority to go ahead with this work. As your one object is to be obstructive, I will say no more only that it is my privilege to declare the Llyn Celyn Reservoir open."

Then he pressed the switch. And here is the Echo, reporting on its own city's ceremony, in a sentence nobody appears to have thought twice about at the time:

"Alderman Cain then pressed a switch to release a jet of water for the lake representing the maximum discharge of 250,000,000 gallons a day. Such was its roar as it erupted from beneath the dam that it drowned even the singing of 'Land of My Fathers' by the demonstrators."

Drowned even the singing.

You could not invent it. A Welsh valley is flooded to supply an English city, and at the ceremony to mark it the water is turned on hard enough to drown out the Welsh national anthem, and the detail appears in the newspaper of the city that did it, as a note about water pressure.

The apology, and what it could not do

On 19 October 2005, forty years on, Liverpool City Council issued a formal apology. The council leader, Mike Storey, said that what happened to the people in the valleys was wrong and that it was the right time to say sorry.

Reception in Wales was mixed, which is putting it politely.

An apology is a strange instrument at that distance. Everyone who made the decision was gone. Most of the people owed it were gone. It cost the people issuing it nothing and returned nothing to anybody, and it was still, probably, better than silence. All of those can be true at once.

In 2015 a Wales Office minister told the House that the whole thing had been a shameful chapter in Welsh history and that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to defend it today. Nobody in the chamber disagreed. That is roughly where the argument now rests, which is a strange place for an argument to rest given that it was won by the side that lost.

What a slogan can hold

Here is the uncomfortable part, and the reason for writing this rather than retelling it.

Cofiwch Dryweryn worked so completely that the phrase escaped the place. It is now a general-purpose emblem, deployed in arguments about second homes, about Westminster, about the language, about football. It does real work, and nobody should want it gone.

But a slogan is a compression, and whatever will not fit gets left outside it. What fits is the injustice.

What does not fit is the post office. The school. The eight hundred acres. The chapel. The language nobody had thought to name. The forty-eight people who had to go and live somewhere else and then get on with the rest of their lives in a country that would later put their valley on a tea towel. The coffins reburied at Llanycil. The locked door in Liverpool. Hafod Fadog, Y Garnedd Lwyd, Cae Fadog, Y Gelli, Pen y Bryn Mawr.

Remembering Tryweryn has become something you can do in two words while knowing almost none of it.

That is not a failure of the wall. The wall did what a wall can do. It is a description of what happens to any place that survives only as a symbol, and it is worth naming plainly by anyone who claims to care about Welsh memory, because this is the more common way things go.

Not drowned. Summarised.

If you go

Llyn Celyn is on the A4212 between Y Bala and Trawsfynydd. There is a memorial chapel above the waterline and a memorial garden, and the gravestones that were moved are there.

In a dry summer the water drops and some of the walls come back, which is the kind of detail that sounds invented and is not.

The names are on the memorial. Go and read them. They are the part the slogan cannot hold, and reading them takes about as long as saying the slogan does.

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Sources: Capel Celyn Reservoir (50th Anniversary), House of Commons Westminster Hall debate, Hansard, 14 October 2015, for the farm names, the voting figures, the deputation and the town clerk's reply, the figures of forty-eight of sixty-seven, and the reburials at Llanycil and Trawsfynydd. Liverpool Echo, 21 October 1965, p. 22, via the British Newspaper Archive, for the opening ceremony, the Frank Cain quotation and the report of the water drowning the singing, as cited in "Rubbing salt in the wounds: The opening ceremony of Tryweryn reservoir", Wales since 1945, Swansea University, 2019. BBC Wales and North Wales Live for the 1963 sentences and for the 2005 apology. People's Collection Wales and the National Library of Wales for the Tryweryn archive. Further reading: Watcyn L. Jones, Cofio Capel Celyn (Y Lolfa, 2007); Martin Johnes, Wales since 1939 (Manchester University Press, 2012).

Image: an illustrative photograph of a drowned drystone wall. It is not a photograph of Capel Celyn, and no picture on this page should be taken as one. Real photographs of the village, its people and the protests are held by People's Collection Wales and the National Library of Wales, and are worth your time.