Unit 2 Popular culture in post-war Wales (1945–1995)

Preface (Gareth Elwyn Jones)

‘Popular culture’ by Peter Stead is an essay commissioned for the volume in the ‘Welsh History and its Sources’ series which considered aspects of Welsh history in the period between 1945 and the mid-1990s. Had the book been planned two decades earlier, it is unlikely that the theme of popular culture would have been included. Unlike political or economic history, it would not have been deemed sufficiently significant. Popular culture, particularly such aspects as sport and popular music, if they were mentioned at all, would have been subsumed in a wider treatment of Welsh society. Such history, where it existed, tended to be the preserve of amateur historians and journalists who wrote, for example, histories of individual cricket clubs or rugby tours, such as sports correspondent J.B.G. Thomas’s excellent account of the British Lions rugby team touring South Africa, The Lions on Trek (1956).

A change occurred with the publication of Fields of Praise by Dai Smith and Gareth Williams (1980), the official history of the Welsh Rugby Union. Two of Wales’s foremost social historians placed the history of the game in its social and economic setting to produce a seminal work of social history. Since that time, the popular culture of Wales, its sport, its music, its film, its literature and its media, have attracted the attention of academic historians so that no one would now deny that this subject is central to Welsh social history. Historians in universities across Wales now specialise in the history of sport and of community music in its social context.

Peter Stead has played an important part in raising the profile of aspects of popular culture as subjects worthy of study by serious historians. He is an academic historian, who worked in the history department at Swansea University and later took an external professorship at the University of Glamorgan. He is in the fortunate position of being able to blend his professional concerns as a historian with his avid interest in sport, film and theatre. He makes regular contributions on these topics to radio and television.

He has written or jointly edited books on film, including Richard Burton: So Much, So Little (1995), and music, including Hymns and Arias: Great Welsh Voices (Herbert and Stead, 2001). Reflecting his own passionate interest in sport his publications have taken in rugby, association football and famous Welsh boxers. But it is his approach, as well as the subject, which is significant. He does not give us mere surveys of Welsh films or the careers of Welsh sporting greats. In (2002), for example, Stead is concerned with the sociology of Welsh acting, evaluating the way in which the distinctively Welsh aspects and characteristics of such greats as Stanley Baker, Anthony Hopkins and Siân Phillips have been reflected in their work. Such an approach has enriched the historiography of popular culture immensely.

Nevertheless, however eminent Stead is in his field, his is not the last word on cultural history in the period. Other historians would almost certainly have different emphases and different interests. For example, although Stead ranges widely in his essay over many aspects of popular culture, it might be argued that there are certain themes he does not deal with, or that he gives too great an emphasis to some constituents of popular culture as opposed to others. It is worth bearing in mind also that he is not a Welsh speaker and has always lived in south Wales. His essay might not therefore highlight sufficiently the dichotomy which arguably exists between cultural interests in, for example, Welsh-speaking rural Wales and urban areas.

A unique feature of this essay – and it can be seen as either a strength or a weakness – is that Stead has lived throughout the whole of the period about which he is writing and has first-hand experience of some of the events he mentions. Like all sources, his memories are invaluable in that they provide a unique perspective not so much on the facts as on the experience, atmosphere and sense of excitement of some of the events he describes. At the same time, memory can be fallible, and Stead’s should be put alongside those of his contemporaries.

Popular culture (Peter Stead)