Peace Profile: Waldo Williams

This is not the place for a full account of the peace movement in modern Wales, but a brief description is necessary if readers from outside the country are to understand the social, cultural, and political context of Waldo Williams’ life and work, as a Christian, as a poet, and as a pacifist. Although supported only by a minority, peace movements, stimulated by the First World War, have been a feature of modern Wales. The Welsh, or Cymry as we call ourselves, are an ancient Celtic nation, located politically within the modern United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which until just after the Second World War was itself at the heart of the British Empire. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Welsh were predominantly Christian non-conformists, although of various denominations; and such congregations, lead by the well-known minister and preacher George M. LL. Davies, were prominent in the Fellowship of Reconciliation founded in 1914. The monthly Welsh-language magazine Y Deyrnas (The Kingdom), launched in 1916 when the mounting casualties of the First World War were affecting public morale and consciousness, was a platform for antiwar sentiment in Wales. This spread through public meetings, including by 1917 in the socialist militant south Wales coalfield, where non-conformity and the Welsh language were still influential socially and culturally.