Capel Celyn Reservoir (50th Anniversary)

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the 50th anniversary of Capel Celyn reservoir.

This October marks the 50th anniversary of the official opening of the reservoir that flooded Capel Celyn, a rural community in the Tryweryn valley in my constituency. The village, along with other parts of the valley, was razed and then flooded to supply Liverpool and the Wirral with water, primarily for industry.

A private Bill sponsored by Liverpool Corporation was brought before Parliament in 1956. By obtaining authority through an Act of Parliament, Liverpool City Council avoided any requirement to gain consent from the Welsh planning authorities. Despite 35 out of the 36 Welsh MPs voting against the Bill, in 1957 it was passed by Parliament.

The village of Capel Celyn was one of the few remaining Welsh-only speaking communities in existence. It had a school, a post office, a chapel, a cemetery—the usual things—along with a number of farms and homesteads. The culture and life of the people of Capel Celyn might not mean much to those who neither know nor love Wales. To members of the Liverpool Corporation, the farms that they were drowning were no more than convenient stretches of land along a remote valley floor, so the region as a whole—a convenient 800 acres—could thus be put to a more convenient and productive use. To Welsh men and women however, their very names ring like bells—Hafod Fadog, Y Garnedd Lwyd, Cae Fadog, Y Gelli, Pen y Bryn Mawr. But those bells now ring underwater and are heard by no one. It is an evocative image in Wales, which remembers the bells of Cantre’r Gwaelod, and the loss associated with inundation.

To understand the strength of feeling in Wales about the event, one must first know something, not of the agricultural potential or the landscape of the Tryweryn valley, but of the character of the community it supported and its place in Welsh life. The people of Capel Celyn were an integral part of the pattern of one of the richest folk cultures in Europe. Cynghanedd poetry was not an academic affectation, but the flower of a robust tradition with a sophisticated metrical discipline that was passed from generation to generation. It was a community with one of the oldest living languages in Europe. It is a language with an unbroken literary tradition, exceeded only by Latin and classical Greek, which was and remains under threat.

No civilised person would wish to see a community of such significance and such high artistic and intellectual attainment invaded and destroyed by an alien institution. Far greater schemes have been rejected by Government to protect wildlife or sites of antiquarian value. The Tryweryn valley was a living community of men and women, young and old, whose continued existence was of far greater moment to Wales, and indeed to Europe, than any ruins or wildfowl, important though those may be.

The value of what was at stake 50 years ago was described in a letter to the Liverpool Daily Post from Mrs Gertrude Armfield, an English woman resident in Wales:

“The way of life nurtured in these small villages which serve, with their chapel and school, as focal points for a widespread population—this way of life has a quality almost entirely lost in England and almost unique in the world.

It is one where a love of poetry and song, the spoken and written word, still exists, and where recreation has not to be sought after and paid for, but is organised locally in home, chapel and school.”

It was not a stretch of land that was flooded against the will of the people of Wales, but a community of people, a culture and a language. People saw the coffins of their parents and grandparents dug up and reburied at Llanycil and Trawsfynydd.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and on the incredibly passionate speech she is making this afternoon. Does she agree that Tryweryn had a traumatic impact on the Welsh psyche? It is immortalised in the words of Meic Stevens, that great Welsh folk singer, when he says:

“Dwr oer sy’n cysgu yn Nhreweryn”—

it is cold water that sleeps in Tryweryn. Does that not say it all about the impact of Tryweryn on the Welsh psyche?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

It does indeed. Another poet, Twm Morys, says of people who drive past the lake, which is of course strikingly beautiful:

“Be’ weli di heblaw dwr?”

There is more to the place than just the water that we now see and appreciate. The water was for industry in Liverpool, and, indeed, excess water for the Liverpool Corporation to sell at a profit.

But why Wales? Wales is a small country, whose language and way of life was, and is, threatened with extinction—inundation. England on the other hand was a country with 10 times Wales’s area, whose language and life were in no peril. It is safe to say that the English language was then, and remains, the most politically powerful and richly resourced language in the world. There were untapped resources in Cumberland and Westmoreland, where the water of many natural lakes was not being used by any authority. Why insist on flooding a Welsh community for its water? The answer has been given quite openly by those behind the project: they came to Wales, not because water was unavailable elsewhere, but because they could get it at a lower cost. It was purely a matter of business—profits. The issue was not whether Liverpool was to get more water, but how cheaply it could get it.

Another reflection of Liverpool’s attitude towards Wales was its lack of candour. Neither the people of Capel Celyn, nor the people of Wales as a whole, were informed by the council of its intentions. They were left to infer from reports of engineers that the work afoot in the Tryweryn valley would mean something significant to their lives. Those who lived in Capel Celyn facing eviction learned of their fate for the first time from the press. Their reaction was predictable. They put their names to a statement expressing uncompromising opposition. They established a defence fund, contributed liberally to it and, in the best Welsh tradition, set up a Tryweryn defence committee, to which representatives were elected by the public bodies directly concerned, such as the county councils, national park authorities and the Dee and Clwyd river board.

One of the committee’s first actions was to ask Liverpool City Council to accept a strong and representative deputation from Wales, which would put the Welsh case. The request was refused. The town clerk stated that though the water committee would be willing to meet the deputation, the council itself dealt only with important local matters. The rebuff captured clearly the mentality of those behind the scheme—that Welsh opinion was of small importance in comparison with local Liverpool needs.