Gwynfor Evans

FOR several generations in Wales, and for political observers outside it, Gwynfor Evans embodied the soul of Welsh nationalism. His 1966 by-election victory in Carmarthenshire, which made him Plaid Cymru’s first MP, persuaded many that Wales had found a new political messiah.

If that elusive crown was to prove unattainable, he was at least to become his party’s guiding spirit. Plaid Cymru’s progress from beyond the fringe of mainstream politics towards a position of respectability at Westminster, with enough clout to frighten Labour in its Welsh heartlands, must be attributed in no small measure to his influence.

A lifelong pacifist who declined to fight in the Second World War, he turned his back on the politics of protest and confrontation, insisting that the way forward for his party lay through the ballot box.

The Welsh-language television channel S4C and the growth of his own party, both in Westminster and Wales, were among his triumphs. But his inspirational leadership and the impetus he gave to the Welsh movement might also be seen in the Welsh Assembly and the greater use of the language in official documents.

Yet Gwynfor (he was known throughout Wales simply by his first name) spoke only English when he was young and once took part in a debate opposing use of the Welsh language in his chapel.

He had been born in Barry, the son of an ironmonger who developed his shop into a department store. His cousins now run it, still trading under his father’s name Dan Evans. Although his parents both spoke Welsh, the lingua franca of the home was English, and it was not until he went to Barry County School that Gwynfor started to learn Welsh. Faced with a choice of that or French, he chose the former because he disliked the French master.

He immediately fell in love with it, however. At University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he read law, he was surrounded by Welsh speakers who had not the time or the patience to talk to this struggling monoglot. But at St John’s College, Oxford, where he belonged to a coterie of Anglo-Welshmen like himself, he gradually become fluent in Welsh.

Gwynfor Evans qualified as a solicitor in 1939 and seemed set for a lucrative career in the law. But the outbreak of war was a turning point in his life. A pacifist who, even in his youth, had sometimes embarrassed his father by preaching the cause on street corners in Barry, he registered as a conscientious objector and appeared before a tribunal in Cardiff. Convinced that he would be sent to jail, he even started learning exercises to keep himself fit while in a prison cell.

Although these fears proved unfounded, he was concerned that he should not be seen to be making money as a lawyer while his contemporaries were risking their lives at the front. He therefore borrowed money from his family to invest in a market garden in rural Carmarthenshire and earned himself a living by growing tomatoes.

Although he always insisted that his pacifism came before his nationalism, there could not have been much in it. A radical in the 19th-century mould, he first attracted attention as a young man by taking part in demonstrations against the takeover of land in Wales for military ranges. But he soon began to concentrate on helping to establish Plaid Cymru, founded only in 1925, as a serious political force with a constructive platform. After two years as vice-president he was elected its president in 1945, and led it for the next 36 years.

By no means everyone in Wales shared his enthusiasm. Seven times he stood for Carmarthenshire before his election on Bastille Day in 1966, after the death of the sitting Labour member Megan Lloyd-George, and the jubilation which greeted his victory did not stretch far beyond Welsh Wales.

On his first day in the Commons he was given a conducted tour by Emrys Hughes, Keir Hardie’s son-in-law, who showed him the Welsh table in the tea room. “But you’d better not sit down there,” Hughes warned. “Your name’s mud among that lot.”

Isolated but undeterred, Gwynfor set about making full use of his parliamentary time, tabling 1,200 questions in the next two years at the rate of four a day. At £14 a question it made him the most expensive MP in Britain. He lost the seat in 1970, failed to win it back by only three votes in February 1974 — but triumphed again six months later in the October general election of that year. He lost it once more, in 1979 — which was in all respects a bad year for nationalism.

Wales voted “no” in the referendum on a national assembly, and the new Thatcher Government, despite a pre-election promise to set up a Welsh-language TV channel, instantly reneged on it upon coming to power.

Outraged, Gwynfor announced from his rural retreat that he would fast until his death unless Margaret Thatcher changed her mind again. He would start in six month’s time — thus giving time for her to reconsider. He was not hopeful, given the Prime Minister’s stated principle that “the lady’s not for turning”.

But his grim determination, and the serious preparations that were made for his ordeal, so seriously worried Whitehall that before he needed to carry out his threat, the Home Secretary William Whitelaw gave S4C the go-ahead.

Gwynfor failed to win back his seat in 1983 and, by then in his seventies, acknowledged that he should make way for a younger man, so he concentrated his energies on working for Wales outside Parliament.

Although he resigned from the presidency of Plaid Cvmru in 1981, he was made honorary president in the following year and remained a father figure in the Welsh nationalist movement for the rest of his life.

He was a prolific writer, whose many publications, on Wales and pacifism, included a volume of Welsh history, which gave him particular satisfaction. He also attended a daunting number of meetings, accepting speaking engagements throughout the Principality and sometimes travelling thousands of miles in a month.

He was not without his critics. A tall, courteous, softly-spoken man, he lacked the fiery eloquence of Lloyd George, and young activists in Wales were sometimes impatient with his Fabian approach to deeply felt issues. Others saw Plaid Cymru as a narrowly based pressure group for rural Wales and its own language.

But while Evans sympathised with their objectives (one of his daughters was jailed for her activities with the Welsh Language Society), he had a clear vision of where the party was going. He saw it as a party for all Wales, including the English-speaking Marches and industrial south-east.

His uncompromising idealism could make him a stubborn man to deal with. It was said that those who met him felt that they were addressing a public monument. But none seriously disputed his right to lead.

Evans counterbalanced his political preoccupations by indulging in his love of cricket, a game in which he was knowledgeable. (He had once played for Glamorgan schoolboys.) He also delighted in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse.

He married his wife Rhiannon on St David’s Day, 1941, after meeting her while on holiday, on the slopes of Cader Idris in North Wales. They had four sons and three daughters.

Gwynfor Evans, president of Plaid Cymru, 1945-81, and MP for Carmarthen, July 1966-70 and October 1974-79, was born on September 1, 1912. He died on April 21, 2005, aged 92.