Introduction
At first glance, it might seem like the 1951 Festival of Britain was a largely urban affair, and certainly that historical geographers, rural historians, and agricultural historians have had very little to say on the subject.Footnote 1 The Festival was initially proposed to celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and Britain’s ‘contribution to civilisation, past, present, and future, in the arts, in science, in technology, and in industrial design’.Footnote 2 While the 1851 exhibition was an international exhibition based in London, the postwar Labour government insisted that the 1951 Festival must be a geographically decentralised national Festival involving all four nations (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) and including locally organised events across the country.Footnote 3 The ‘Festival centre-piece’ was a strikingly modern ‘combined exhibition of science and industrial design’ on a former bombsite on the South Bank of the River Thames in London which attracted over 8.4 million visitors between May and September 1951.Footnote 4 The majority of the other official national exhibitions were also staged in large urban centres. There were specialist themed exhibitions in Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London, a large and popular ‘Festival Pleasure Gardens’ in Battersea Park (London), and two touring versions of the South Bank exhibition – a ‘Land Travelling’ Exhibition and a ‘Sea Travelling’ Exhibition – which reached 14 cities and large towns. The vast majority of the twenty-three official Arts festivals were also staged in towns and cities, but to ensure a truly nationwide Festival the organisers established ‘devolved’ national committees in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, as well as encouraging local authorities (including county, urban district, and rural district councils) to organise smaller events and provide ‘tangible and enduring amenities’ in their areas.Footnote 5 The end result was that ‘over 2000 places in the United Kingdom organised some Festival event on their own initiative’.Footnote 6 This included many rural villages and market towns.
In this paper, I draw upon extensive archival research undertaken as part of a larger project on the Festival of Britain and Wales in order to examine the histories and geographies of the Dolhendre experimental hill farm rehabilitation scheme in the county of Meirionnydd (now part of Gwynedd) in Wales.Footnote 7 This Scheme was important not just because it was the only ‘official exhibition’ staged in Wales in 1951 or the most costly event funded by the Festival’s Welsh Committee.Footnote 8 Dolhendre is also important because it was a ‘live demonstration’ of Welsh rural life that presented ‘alternative’ or ‘counter’ narratives of the nation that challenge many conventional accounts of the Festival of Britain, both then and now. As such, it contributes to a ‘four nations’ approach to ‘“British” ceremonials’ like the 1951 Festival of Britain and 1953 Coronation,Footnote 9 in which opposition, disinterest, and criticism often occurred alongside moments of celebration, as the national resonances of the festivities affected individuals in very different ways.Footnote 10 At a time when many Welsh nationalists and republicans opposed the Festival, as well as criticising the British government’s retention of land for military and other purposes, the Dolhendre Scheme was planned not from London or Cardiff but by a committee of ‘agriculturists’ known as the ‘Aberystwyth Group’, working under the auspices of the Welsh Agricultural Land Sub-Commission, and reporting to the Welsh Festival Committee. The Group and resulting ‘live exhibition’ paid little attention to the overarching narratives of Britishness which clearly preoccupied many in London, including the Festival’s Director General Gerald Barry.Footnote 11 While Dolhendre was clearly badged or flagged as part of the Festival of Britain – and as being funded through its Welsh Committee – the Scheme was consistently framed as an ‘exhibition’ or ‘live demonstration’ of a distinctive Welsh hill farming community.Footnote 12 As such, it is important to consider the Scheme in the context of the cultural politics of land and landscape in mid-20th century Wales, in which the Welsh landscape, Welsh language, and community cohesion were seen as under threat from forces of anglicisation, whether by government agencies, private industry, tourism, or in-migration.Footnote 13
In section two of the article, I start by providing a critical overview of representations of rural life and agriculture in the Festival of Britain in 1951, discussing the displays on the South Bank and at the Ulster Farm and Factory Exhibition in Belfast. In section three, I then turn my attention to the Festival of Britain in Wales, examining how the idea for a ‘live exhibition’ of Welsh rural life came about. The article looks at why it was decided to rehabilitate farms on the state-owned Glanllyn Estate in Meirionnydd; a decision which was criticised by Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party. The article looks at how the involvement of key preservationists and agriculturists informed the decision to sympathetically rehabilitate the farms by incorporating modern amenities into the traditional farm buildings. It examines how the associated afforestation schemes, which were considered to be important for the economic sustainability of upland Wales, drew criticisms from Welsh nationalists who feared that new forestry housing schemes would attract English-speaking incomers into largely Welsh-speaking communities. In the final section, the article examines how journalists and BBC broadcasters portrayed the scheme in the summer of 1951, projecting Wales and the Welsh community of Dolhendre to a national and global audience.
A festival of rural Britain?
Rural settings and themes were central to the Festival of Britain, both in terms of the stories of Britain (and occasionally the empire and Commonwealth) which were narrated in the official exhibitions and arts festivals, and in the locations where events were held and permanent amenities provided.Footnote 14 Centrally organised, rural-themed exhibitions conveyed a narrative in which, as David Matless has stated, rural tradition and modernity were often closely aligned, providing ‘a national vision aligning the modern and traditional, city and country, reconstruction and citizenship, history, and the future’.Footnote 15 Festival of Britain events and displays often looked both forwards to the future and back to past traditions, whether in prehistory, 1851, or the years leading up to ‘the present’, including World War Two. I would, however, challenge any suggestion that a singular ‘national vision’ was presented or maintained, and a detailed study of the many events of 1951 quickly reveals a plurality of ‘national visions’ articulated by a broad range of individuals, national bodies, and local agencies with different political leanings, producing narratives of Britain and Britishness (not to mention Englishness, Scottishness, Welshness, and many regional and local identities) which often differed in tone and style.Footnote 16
Rural life and agricultural practices showed up in the Festival in many ways. On the South Bank, agriculture and rural life featured in pavilions on ‘The Land of Britain’, ‘The Natural Scene’, ‘Minerals of the Island’, and ‘The People of Britain’, with the latter – ‘convened’ by archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes – including sections on the impact of Celtic incomers on Bronze Age and Iron Age agriculture.Footnote 17 Displays on agriculture, pest control, and biological science were included in the futuristic, space-age-looking ‘Dome of discovery’, which narrated British scientific progress.Footnote 18 The largest displays, however, were in the ‘Country’ pavilion, which contained sections on British farming, agricultural research, country life, rural crafts, agricultural machinery, livestock, land use, and forestry.Footnote 19 The exhibition designers received scripts commissioned from a vast range of experts, as well as advice from agricultural, horticultural, and zoological advisory panels populated with senior academics and representatives of professional societies.Footnote 20
Frequent comparisons were made between farming practices in 1851 and 1951, echoing the origins of the Festival as a Centenary Exhibition of the Great Exhibition. The Field published pieces on both the 1851 Exhibition and 1951 Festival, including an article on ‘Changes on the land’ by D.H. Robinson which charted advances in ‘farming with machines’, and the emergence of ‘farming with chemicals’ and ‘farming by science’ by 1951.Footnote 21 In a similar vein, Farmers Weekly discussed the scientific methods, modern farming practices, and ‘new-age power’ on display in the South Bank’s ‘Country’ pavilion, which featured steam-powered farming machines that had been displayed in 1851.Footnote 22
Agriculture and farming were also on display at other exhibitions in 1951. While the Festival’s ‘Exhibition of Science’, staged in the new Centre Block of the Science Museum in South Kensington, did not include agricultural or rural science as part of its remit,Footnote 23 a new Agricultural Gallery was opened in the same block of the Museum on 25th July 1951,Footnote 24 conveying a similar narrative about farming to that presented on the South Bank. Modern machinery, scale models, and cycloramas were shown alongside farming exhibits from the 1851 exhibition, and the Science Museum presented a vision of efficient farming practices underpinned by modern machinery and scientific research which, as Matless has put it, clearly aligned ‘science, landscape, and modernity’, echoing displays elsewhere in the Festival.Footnote 25
In suburban Belfast, a five-acre ‘Ulster farm and Factory’ exhibition on the Castlereagh Industrial Estate – organised by Northern Ireland’s Ministries of Commerce and Agriculture – provided the largest agriculture display of all Festival exhibitions. It also served as the province’s only official exhibition, and the designers received advice – as with the South Bank – from expert committees.Footnote 26 The main displays – in a new factory building that was repurposed after the Festival – included sections on ‘Industry’ and ‘Agriculture’, with the latter covering the past, present and future of farming, with displays on eggs and poultry, oats, potatoes, milk, fruit, food processing, machinery, livestock, country life, and distribution.Footnote 27 Behind the main building were two contrasting farms. One was a reconstructed ‘1851 Ulster Farmstead’ with ‘authentic furniture and equipment’, that was inspired by the work of geographer and Irish heritage expert E. Estyn Evans, who was a member of the Northern Ireland Festival of Britain Committee.Footnote 28 The other was a futuristic modern ‘Farm of the future’ designed to make ‘an architectural declaration as you approach it’ and demonstrate a ‘complete break with tradition’.Footnote 29
The ‘Farm of the future’ was fully electric and included a farmhouse of ‘fine, clean, modern lines’, with a balcony, futuristic stilts, and living accommodation on the first floor, showcasing a layout which the organisers acknowledged was ‘more common to flat dwellers in the city’.Footnote 30 In a review of the exhibition in April 1951, well before its opening, a Belfast Telegraph reporter noted how the Farm of the Future was ‘the exhibition’s most controversial feature’, designed by a ‘young Belfast architect, Henry Lynch-Robinson, with the express intention of making farmers think and argue’.Footnote 31 Farming journalists were less forgiving, with Ursula Dacombe writing in Farmers Weekly that ‘the farmhouse of a hundred years hence… had obviously been designed on the entirely false assumption that what is suitable in a town is necessarily equally suitable in the country’.Footnote 32 This was, she stated, ‘the most disappointing part of the whole Exhibition’, and far too costly for the modern farmer:
‘it was, in short, so full of glaring impracticalities that the only way to treat it was as a joke – a good joke or a bad joke according to the mood in which you saw it’.Footnote 33
‘The Farm of the Future’ was not a modern farm tempered by the financial constraints and building restrictions which prevailed in an era of postwar austerity, but displayed an unrestrained modernity which shattered conventions. The model farm was too futuristic and too impractical for many journalists.
Agricultural societies embraced the Festival, with many large shows – such as the Royal Welsh Show, Royal Ulster Show, Royal Highland Show, Royal Show (Cambridge), Dairy Show, and Smithfield Stock Show – listed as ‘special events’ or ‘scientific events’ in Festival year,Footnote 34 and a vast number of smaller agricultural and horticultural shows being organised at a local level – many of which were annual events that had a pre-existing audience and were simply re-badged in Festival year. Other rural Festival events included sheepdog trials, young farmers’ rallies, angling competitions, church services, historical pageants, horse shows, folk festivals, sports matches, and the provision of such permanent amenities as benches, bus shelters, village signs, and trees.Footnote 35 The Nottinghamshire village of ‘Trowell’ was named as the official ‘Festival Village’, although it was widely criticised, with the Festival’s official Story from 1952 stating that it possessed ‘no natural beauties and few amenities, being a rather bleak, semi-industrialised village on the fringe of a coal field’.Footnote 36 Rural areas were also central to the ambitions of the Festival of Britain Office and British Holidays and Tourist Board to encourage international visitors to Britain in 1951.Footnote 37
The festival in Wales
Staging a live ‘demonstration of Welsh rural life’ Footnote 38
By the time the Festival of Britain’s Welsh Committee met for the fifth time in May 1949, the pattern of official Welsh exhibitions, Festivals and other events was starting to become clear. It was confirmed that several important annual events would be included in the schedule of official ‘national’ (UK-level) Arts festivals, notably the Welsh-language National Eisteddfod (projected to be in Llanrwst), the Swansea Festival of Music (established in 1948), and International Eisteddfod in Llangollen (first held in 1947). One of the travelling exhibitions would visit Cardiff, and a Festival of Music and Worship would be staged by the Church in Wales at St Davids Cathedral. It was also reported that the Keeper of the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans – the prominent folklorist and nationalist Iorwerth Peate – had proposed a wide range of events focussing on Welsh folk life, including folk dancing, concerts, Welsh plays, lectures, and exhibitions on Welsh quilting and Welsh rural crafts.Footnote 39 By March 1950, the Director of the Museum had also requested funding to re-erect two historic buildings at St Fagans as ‘permanent memorials’ of the Festival – the Esgair Moel Woollen Mill from Llanwrtyd (Breconshire) and a Cruck Barn from Penley (Flintshire) – and this proposal received enthusiastic support from the architect and preservationist Clough Williams-Ellis and National Library of Wales’ Vice-President, Sir Leonard Twiston-Davies (who happened to serve on the Welsh Folk Museum Committee at the National Museum).Footnote 40
These events were spread across North and South Wales, but at their fifth meeting, the Welsh Committee’s Chairman, Sir Wynn Wheldon, highlighted something of a geographic gap, with ‘a large area in West and Mid Wales which would not be closely concerned with… Festival events’.Footnote 41 In the ‘centre of that area’ was the mid-Wales university town and administrative hub of Aberystwyth, and it was there, in June 1949, that Sir Wynn met with a newly assembled group to discuss both the role of mid-Wales in the Festival, and the need to ‘represent the rural life of Wales’.Footnote 42 The ‘exploratory meeting’ of what became known as the ‘Aberystwyth Group’ was held under the Chairmanship of the local Liberal Member of Parliament Roderic Bowen, and included representatives of the Festival of Britain’s Welsh Committee and a range of Welsh and British institutions based in the town of Aberystwyth. While the Festival’s Welsh Committee included two leading figures in the Council for the Preservation of Rural Wales (CPRW), it included no agriculturists or forestry experts.Footnote 43 In contrast, the ‘Aberystwyth Group’ included representatives of the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, Welsh region of the Forestry Commission, Royal Welsh Agricultural Society, Welsh Plant Breeding Station, University College of Wales, Welsh Agricultural Organisation Society, and National Library of Wales. The hope of many was that the 1951 Royal Welsh Show could be held in Aberystwyth – with other rural-themed exhibitions held in and around the town – but when it soon became clear that it would be staged in Llanelwedd in 1951, Sir Wynn Wheldon appears to have landed on the idea of creating a functional ‘model’ show-farm for 1951. As he wrote to J. Morgan Jones, Welsh Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture and former registrar of the University College in Aberystwyth, on 9th July 1949:
‘The Festival has a pivotal architectural side – & a bit of the East End in London is going to be ideally planned and actually built. Has any sound work been done on a hillside farm house in Wales. [?] If not would it be worthwhile challenging architects to think about, and do, something actual (not on paper) – say two or three actual farm houses which will continue to be used for that purpose after 1951.[?] We have I know plenty which could… be replaced – but the replacement might… be practical not utopian – with a clear view to needs – especially of the farmer’s wife. Decent light – hot water – easy cleanliness, etc. This is all much in the air – but it may be worth pursuing – but if you consider it fantastic and absurd – let me know’.Footnote 44
The ‘East End’ scheme mentioned was the 30-acre ‘Live Architecture’ exhibition forming part of the Lansbury Estate in Poplar, East London, which was being planned and built for the Festival by the newly established Council for Architecture, Town Planning, and Building Research. In addition to a series of themed pavilions, the Poplar exhibition included a ‘circulation route’ through a ‘cross-section of a neighbourhood’, where the Council had commissioned prominent British architects to plan and design a range of modern buildings in what would later be termed, somewhat critically, ‘the Festival style’,Footnote 45 including primary and secondary schools, a shopping centre and market place, churches, and a range of different housing types, including flats, maisonettes, and terrace housing.Footnote 46
The idea of a ‘model’ hillside farm scheme quickly gathered pace. In mid-September 1949, Sir Wynn informed the Festival’s Welsh Committee that he had ‘discussed with Sir Bryner Jones [Chair of the Welsh Agricultural Land Sub-Commission (WALSC)] the possibility of combining with the 1951 [Royal Welsh Agricultural] Show a scheme for erecting good modern hillside farms in a suitable locality’. The Committee agreed that the Aberystwyth Group of experts might be asked to identify appropriate areas, and they confirmed that the eventual scheme would become a ‘main project’ sponsored by the Welsh Committee.Footnote 47 The ‘Sub-Committee on Hillside Farm Rehabilitation’ discussed possible locations for the scheme on 15th October. They concluded that the scheme ‘would be practicable only if one landlord was concerned’ and suggested that the rehabilitated farms should not be ‘too scattered’.Footnote 48 The WALSC’s Land Agent, Duncan Cameron, suggested that the scheme might be situated at one of two sites on the Glanllyn Estate, either the hamlet of Lôn where six estate houses were already being erected or his preferred option ‘in the vicinity of Dolhendre… a locality which has the characteristics of a small hamlet settlement, several cottages, a chapel, and the meeting place of two roads’.Footnote 49
Glanllyn, land nationalisation, and public stewardship
On 6th December 1949, the Festival’s Welsh Committee confirmed that Dolhendre – on the Glanllyn Estate, close to Llanuwchllyn – would become the main site of their experimental ‘hillside farm scheme’, with £10,000 allocated for the project and a further £10,000 reserved for contingencies.Footnote 50 Sir Bryner Jones later reported that Dolhendre was chosen because it was an accessible ‘site of natural beauty with a Welsh community and a group of farms in one ownership with Hill Farming improvement schemes in an advanced state of preparation’.Footnote 51 What Sir Bryner didn’t mention (or need to mention) was that this one owner was the government and that the Estate came under direct control of the sub-commission he chaired, the WALSC. This was because the cluster of farms identified formed part of the 39,000-acre Glanllyn Estate – the first estate in Britain to be handed over to the government in lieu of death duties following Labour’s budget speech of April 1946, in which Chancellor Hugh Dalton proposed to make ‘more use’ of their ‘power to accept land in payment of Death Duties’, in order to further Labour’s ‘declared policy’ of enabling land to pass ‘from private into public ownership’.Footnote 52 British government ownership and stewardship of the Estate would ensure full control of their vision for these ‘model’ rehabilitated farms, but state ownership was not uncontroversial. While the Labour government frequently voiced their desire to nationalise land, key economic, political, and legislative challenges presented themselves, and they would not say when it could be achieved, settling for legislation – including a new Agriculture Act in 1947 – which rural historian Malcolm Chase has suggested really amounted to ‘a refinement of the status quo’.Footnote 53 What’s more, land dispossession in both England and Wales remained a contentious subject, not least because the military still controlled substantial areas of requisitioned land. Opposition to military ‘occupation’ was a key focus of many Welsh nationalists and just ten miles from the ‘live demonstrations’ at Dolhendre in September 1951, Plaid Cymru’s President Gwynfor Evans led protestors in using what one newspaper called ‘Gandhi tactics’ in a sit-down protest at the Trawsfynydd army camp in Meirionnydd, which the government proposed to extend by 10,000 acres.Footnote 54
Plaid Cymru voiced scathing criticisms of Labour’s state-centric policies, not simply because they opposed British government control over Welsh land but also because Atlee’s Labour government had rejected proposals by tenants to purchase Glanllyn Estate farms under ‘the first large-scale co-operative farm project in Wales’.Footnote 55 The Labour leadership’s unrelenting centralism and perceived insensitivity to Welsh concerns was coming under increasing criticism from within their own party as well as from opposing Liberal and nationalist politicians in the late 1940s.Footnote 56 This was a time when Plaid Cymru’s leading economic strategist Dr D.J. Davies was continuing to propose a decentralised, co-operative economic policy for Wales that was inspired by his experiences of the Danish co-operative movement in the 1920s, and in his 1949 Plaid pamphlet Towards an Economic Policy Davies refers directly to the Glanllyn tenants’ proposal for a farming co-operative as ‘an experiment of great interest’ that was ‘prevented by the intervention of the English government’.Footnote 57 British government action was framed, here, as ‘English government’ control, and a year later the President of Plaid Cymru, Gwynfor Evans, drew directly upon Davies’ text, to describe how this ‘socialist government which stands for centralised responsibility and control’ had ‘destroyed the promise of one of the most interesting experiments in co-operative control yet seen in Wales or anywhere else’.Footnote 58
Aware of the likely criticism of British/English government insensitivity, the Glanllyn Estate was placed under the stewardship of the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Welsh Agricultural Land Sub-Commission (both headquartered in Aberystwyth), with further advice from a Glanllyn Tenants’ Committee, and a Glanllyn Advisory Committee focussing on ‘the aesthetic and cultural aspects of amenities’ on the Estate.Footnote 59 The Glanllyn Advisory Committee would have been well-aware of discussions in the Festival’s Welsh Committee. Its membership included key figures in Welsh political, cultural and economic life, being chaired by Sir Ifan ab Owen Edwards (founder of Urdd Gobaith Cymru – the Welsh League of Youth – who had grown up in Llanuwchllyn), and including architect and preservationist Clough Williams-Ellis, Huw Wheldon of the Arts Council, and Welsh civil servant and novelist Wyn Griffith. Williams-Ellis also served on the Festival’s Welsh Committee from July 1948; Griffith was Chairman of the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council (an official Festival organising body), while Huw Wheldon was Sir Wynn’s son and was the Welsh Committee’s secretary from June 1948 to February 1949.Footnote 60 Griffith had been brought up in North Wales but lived in Hertfordshire and moved in the same London-Welsh circles as Sir Wynn,Footnote 61 and this may explain how and why Griffith came to propose that a ‘Rural unit of Construction’ be built on the Glanllyn Estate for the ‘Festival of Britain’ at the fifth meeting of the Glanllyn Advisory Committee in September 1949, recommending that they approve ‘the following resolution’ urging:
‘the Land Sub-Commission to select a suitable farmstead on the nationally owned Glanllyn Estate and to modernise the house and farm buildings. In addition to this, two or three cottages for agricultural workers should be erected close by, to serve the needs of a group of farms, the whole forming an example of a unit of rural construction and repopulation in a manner which will meet the demands of utility and amenity’.Footnote 62
‘The state, as Landlord’, was seen to have ‘an especial responsibility’ in enabling ‘Welsh rural communities’ to ‘flourish’, and Griffith felt that they had an opportunity to revitalise a ‘rural unit of reconstruction’ in Wales by modernising farm buildings and preventing isolation through the planning of ‘clusters of cottages, so that families could flourish in companionship’.Footnote 63 Griffith, like Sir Wynn, made direct reference to the Festival’s experiment in rebuilding ‘an urban “unit of reconstruction”’ in East London, but in reality there was very little in common between the two ‘live demonstrations’. While the ‘neighbourhood units’ in Poplar were planned to have between 5000 and 11,000 inhabitants, the ‘small unit of reconstruction’ envisaged at Glanllyn was tiny by comparison.Footnote 64 What’s more, the farms at Dolhendre would not be architect-designed ‘model’ farm houses, but rehabilitated and modernised traditional farm buildings with new functional outbuildings.
Rehabilitation and renewal: modernity in moderation at Dolhendre
Social and economic concerns underpinned the legislation which kick-started the rehabilitation works at Dolhendre and other farms on the Glanllyn Estate, before the involvement of the Festival’s Welsh Committee.Footnote 65 In the Hill Farming Act of 1946, the Labour government had introduced a system of grants designed to ‘rehabilitate’ upland hill farms that were only really suited to grazing sheep and cattle (or forestry planting), and it was these grants which were originally planned to fund the improvements on the three Dolhendre hamlet farms, demonstrating ‘what could be done in a typical Welsh area to improve rural communities generally’.Footnote 66 The Hill Farming Act was intended to help rehabilitate and modernise farms using the latest materials and most economic means, which meant standard bricks, asbestos sheet roofing, and corrugated iron, as had become common practice across the country. Festival of Britain funding rules also meant that works should be ‘temporary’ and that those of a ‘permanent value’ should be funded by local authorities, presenting major obstacles for the Welsh Committee and Glanllyn Advisory Committee who expressed their desire to leave a lasting legacy and achieve a high aesthetic standard, stating that it was ‘essential’ to use traditional materials such as ‘stone and slate’.Footnote 67
A key Committee member pushing for the use of traditional materials was Clough Williams-Ellis, who had campaigned against the inappropriate use of concrete, brick, and asbestos sheeting in his work for the CPRW and in his 1928 book England and the Octopus.Footnote 68 It was also one of Williams-Ellis’ own housing schemes – in Beddgelert in the late 1930s – which was directly referred to as a precedent for the use of traditional materials by J. Morgan Thomas and Sir Wynn Wheldon. The Festival office eventually agreed, funding the scheme through what one civil servant stated ‘can only be described as a dodge’, allocating Treasury money directly to the WALSC, thus enabling them to use stone and slate, incorporate decorative features, and install amenity planting.Footnote 69 As Wyn Griffith stated in the official commemorative booklet on Dolhendre, the result was a Scheme he felt would:
‘impose new strength, with the promise of growth, into this piece of country. The land will be improved, the farm buildings modernised, a group of four houses for forestry workers erected, some of the land prepared and afforested, and with the co-operation of the Merioneth County Council, the road from Dolhendre to the main Bala-Dolgelley road will be improved. In addition to this, the old gamekeeper’s cottage, Glanrafon, will be restored and modernised so that it can be let to a tenant on the estate who wishes to retire to make room for a younger farmer’.Footnote 70
This was ‘an experiment in rural reconstruction’ that was designed to set a standard for future schemes, with a sympathetic rehabilitation of the exterior structures using stone and slate, and a more wholesale modernisation of the interiors through the provision of internal bathrooms, piped water supplies and drainage, a modern cooking range, and an electricity supply. It was these improvements which Sir Wynn Wheldon saw as making a huge difference to farming families, with a clearly gendered socio-spatial demarcation of improvements, which were ‘a boon to each housewife… within the home’ and ‘for the farmer and his stock’ in the outbuildings.Footnote 71
While traditional materials were used to rehabilitate the houses at Dolhendre Isaf, Deildre Isaf, Glanrafon and Wern, modern materials (including granite chip bricks, experimental slate-waste blocks, and asbestos sheet roofing) were used to build new outbuildings such as the ‘cattle shed’ and ‘implement shed’ at Wern (Figure 1). In 1951, the functional bright modern outbuildings appeared in stark contrast to the rehabilitated stone farmhouse and outbuildings, and at least one commentator remarked that the ‘corrugated asbestos sheets’ and ‘bilious yellow colourwash’ at Dolhendre Isaf and Wern were ‘in complete discord with the surrounding countryside’.Footnote 72 Another agricultural journalist, writing for Farmers Weekly, was more hopeful about the experimental use at Deildre Isaf of ‘blocks made of slate waste from the Ffestiniog quarries’, stating that ‘if it wears well, this may prove a useful material for farm buildings, fitting in well with the traditional stone buildings and being much cheaper than… granite chip blocks’.Footnote 73
Wern Farm, 2026, with the new cattle shed on the left and new implement shed second from the right. The pre-existing cowshed (second from left) and farmhouse (right) were both refurbished, with a new kitchen, bathroom, drainage, piped water and electricity for the farmhouse. Source: Author’s photograph.
A more harmonious blend of traditional materials and modern design principles appears to have been achieved in the four new houses constructed for forestry workers at Ffridd Helyg (about 300 metres from Dolhendre Isaf) (Figure 2) and the six new houses built for Glanllyn Estate workers at Lȏn (close to Glanllyn mansion, and about 3km from Dolhendre) (Figure 3). Both schemes were designed by the well-known North Wales architect Sidney Colwyn Foulkes in what architectural historians have since referred to as ‘an appealing modern-Georgian style’,Footnote 74 exemplifying what Foulkes’ biographer Adam Voelcker has referred to as ‘the architecture of a reluctant modernist’.Footnote 75 This was a style that was to the liking of Clough Williams-Ellis and others involved with the CPRW,Footnote 76 with Williams-Ellis praising the ‘small displays of hill farm and forestry housing’ for having been ‘carried out with unusual care and discretion as a special “Festival Effort”… demonstrating how happily even new and up-to-date buildings can be harmonised with their particular natural setting’.Footnote 77 The main problems encountered seemed to relate to practicalities of construction, with a shortage of skilled stonemasons in Meirionnydd and a general shortage of labour across the country.Footnote 78
Sketch of the four new houses at Ffridd Helyg by architect S. Colwyn Foulkes, from The Dolhendre Scheme booklet, 1951. Crown Copyright expired, author’s booklet. Sketch reproduced by permission of Innes Mathieson (née Foulkes).
The Gwern y Lôn Cottages, Llanuwchllyn, 2026. Source: Author’s photograph.
In preparation for Festival of Britain visitors, the Welsh Committee and WALSC provided a small car park and reconstructed a bridge over the Afon Lliw close to Dolhendre Isaf, while the access lane was itself widened by Meirionnydd County Council to enable it to be ‘in a state to take buses by the summer of 1951’.Footnote 79 While the Council’s factual minutes record their approval of the scheme subject to £800 being received from the Festival organisers and £1150 from the Ministry of Transport (matching the Council’s £1150 contribution),Footnote 80 newspaper reports highlight some dissent amongst members of the Council’s Roads Committee, where:
‘it was suggested that taking hordes of visitors out in charabancs to see some posh model farms will be so much eyewash when hillmen up and down North Wales are living in antediluvian conditions, and when farm roads up and down the North, deep in mud, will not have a tithe of the money expended on them as will be spent on a road at Glanllyn. One critic I spoke to this week went so far as to say that if this kind of thing is what is planned for 1951, it will rival Moscow by way of being a series of conducted tours of “only what we want you to see”’.Footnote 81
The suggestion, here, is that if the Dolhendre Scheme was designed to serve as a ‘live’ ‘demonstration of Welsh rural life’, it was unlikely to provide a realistic demonstration of conditions on the average farm or country lane. These ‘posh model farms’ may present a socialist government’s idealistic and hopeful visions of what reconstructed farms could look like, but more Conservative journalists and publishers criticised the expense of this vision, with the Daily Express referring to ‘thousands of pounds… being spent on bait for the Festival trippers… down on Treasury Farm’, in what ‘at worst’ may ‘only be another money-losing memorial’.Footnote 82
Afforestation, the rural economy, and Welsh nationalist fears of anglicisation
While the rehabilitation of three hill farms formed the core of the Dolhendre scheme, the WALSC and Glanllyn Advisory Committee also used it to demonstrate the role of forestry in rural reconstruction. Over 430 acres of forestry were planted in the vicinity of Dolhendre by the Forestry Commission,Footnote 83 providing what the Secretary of the Glanllyn Tenants’ Committee referred to as ‘a practical example of the way in which agriculture and afforestation could prosper side by side to the advantage of both’.Footnote 84 Since as far back as the 1930s, there had been considerable criticism of the Forestry Commission for both their insensitive planting designs and their acquisition of agricultural land, but in their postwar planning they positioned afforestation as a key driver of rural resettlement and as a solution to rural unemployment, as well as providing valuable shelter for upland farm animals.Footnote 85 At the time of the Dolhendre Scheme, the CPRW were particularly concerned about the impact any afforestation might have on the proposed new Snowdonia national park in North Wales, given that Llanuwchllyn was within the boundaries proposed by the Hobhouse Committee in 1947.Footnote 86 As a member of both the Glanllyn Advisory Committee and Festival’s Welsh Committee, Clough Williams-Ellis scrutinised the Commission’s plans, and on 9th March 1951 he talked through the amenity aspects of planting with the Forestry Commission’s Director for Wales (Mr. A.P. Long) and viewed various sites on the Glanllyn Estate close to Dolhendre where both new plantings and the removal of unsightly trees were proposed.Footnote 87 In a letter to the Acting Secretary of the CPRW (H. Griffin), Williams-Ellis concluded that ‘at Glanllyn at any rate, the Forestry Commission is playing along with us, in my view quite satisfactorily’.Footnote 88 Not surprisingly, the official commemorative booklet on the Dolhendre Scheme, penned by civil servant and Glanllyn Advisory Committee member Wyn Griffith, was also complementary of the afforestation plans. Griffith argued that afforestation schemes were key to ‘stemming the tide of rural depopulation’, arguing that they would generate new jobs and bring ‘newcomers, who in all probability will be Welsh people from nearby areas’ and could ‘be absorbed into the community without harming its cultural tradition’:
‘Communal life, good roads, piped water supplies, electricity and all the modern conveniences that make life easier, cannot be economically provided unless the people are there in sufficient numbers. Agriculture alone cannot maintain these numbers, but with a fair amount of land under trees it is possible to support a sufficient number of people to bring these services into the heart of the countryside’.Footnote 89
Afforestation would help to sustain the rural economy, maintain the Welsh-speaking community and justify the provision of modern services, with the four new houses built for forestry workers at Ffridd Helyg being intended to support this aim.
Nationalist commentators were not convinced, with some positioning the Forestry Commission alongside the War Office as key agents of an English government who were ‘destroying the land’, exacerbating national food shortages, and displacing Welsh-speaking farmers.Footnote 90 Writing in Plaid Cymru’s monthly newspaper Welsh Nation in October 1950, the poet Islwyn Ffowc Elis warned of the danger that Wales simply ‘becomes a forest, interspersed with military and holiday camps and power stations manned by Englishmen’. The Festival of Britain might be an English festival that problematically portrays Wales ‘as a loyal and contented region and principality’, but it might also ‘be our last opportunity of showing the world that Wales exists’.Footnote 91 Ffowc Elis’ dystopian vision of a Wales under threat and in decline was later developed in his book-length novel Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd [A Week in Future Wales] published by Plaid Cymru in 1957.Footnote 92 In the book, the main character Ifan Powell travels forward in time to 2033, at first experiencing a utopian, peaceful and independent Wales where Welsh is widely spoken, before travelling in time again to a very different Wales of 2033. There, Wales is known as ‘Western England’, Welsh is no longer spoken, the region is heavily militarised and politically divided, over half of the country is given over to forests of fir and pine, Llanuwchllyn (‘the village of the giants of Welsh culture’) is merely a ruin, and mid-Wales towns like Aberystwyth have become seedy playgrounds for drunken forestry workers who are ‘descendants of English town-dwellers’, populating its ‘saloons and pubs and chip shops and gambling and dance halls’.Footnote 93 Afforestation schemes and new housing for forestry workers were most definitely not seen by Ffowc Elis as positive agents of rural reconstruction in the way that Griffith presented them, serving as one possible agent in the demise of Wales and the Welsh language.
Discovering and projecting Dolhendre
‘What part of Merioneth is Dolhendre? No gazetteer appears to give it’.Footnote 94
When the BBC broadcaster Geoffrey Boumphrey started preparing for a visit to Dolhendre, he struggled to find the hamlet in his gazetteer. As Dolhendre was not a town, village, or formally recognised hamlet, it would have appeared on very few maps. This may explain why it was the only official national exhibition not to appear on Festival of Britain maps, and it is generally believed to have been the least attended of the official exhibitions and Arts Festivals, with numbers estimated to be up to two thousand.Footnote 95 Unlike many major Festival centres, Dolhendre received no Royal visit, although as J. Morgan Jones believed it to be the ‘only agricultural venture associated with the Festival outside London’, and ‘the only substantial rural effort in Wales’, he argued that it was important that the Minister of Agriculture Tom Williams should ‘open’ the Scheme, which he did on 9 June 1951.Footnote 96 The opening ceremony was attended by many key figures involved with the Festival in Wales and Welsh agriculture and forestry, including Sir Wynn Wheldon, Huw T. Edwards, Sir Bryner Jones, and Sir Ifan ab Owen Edwards, alongside local politicians and journalists. However, it is notable that the Festival’s Director General, Gerald Barry, did not visit the Scheme, despite undertaking official trips (often accompanying Royalty) to Festival events in St Davids, Cardiff, and a number of key sites in Scotland and Northern Ireland.Footnote 97
Newspaper journalists were generally positive about the Scheme, although the accounts of some appear to be almost entirely based upon official information briefings, suggesting that they had not ventured to Meirionnydd to actually visit the farms. A number of farming correspondents were critical of the rather untypical, tidy, posh or prettified versions of hill farming presented at Dolhendre, with a few reporting that neighbouring farmers were ‘jealous’ of the ‘favouritism’ which appeared to be shown to these three farms,Footnote 98 and one local farmer, P. Du Paver, writing to Farmers’ Weekly to complain that ‘the project…, with its extras, will give a false picture of hill farm conditions’.Footnote 99
A few journalists were more critical of the scheme. The Wrexham Leader’s Glyn Griffiths remarked that while Dolhendre was going on show for ‘thousands of foreigners’, a few miles away at Trawsfynydd ‘there is going on at this moment a piece of shamefulness which isn’t mentioned at all in the Festival booklets’:
‘I was thinking of all this when I went footslogging wearily through the colourful boastfulness of the Dome of Discovery on Saturday. But I didn’t see among the exhibits anything that illustrated how a small and somewhat foolish nation was being sacrificed to the demands of political and economic expediency’.
Welsh voices were seen to be silent at the South Bank, being muffled under British and specifically English narratives of progress, science and unity in diversity, while foreign tourists were shown nothing of the scenes of military occupation which were ‘more typical of Welsh life today than a hill farm nestling cosily in a fold of the mountains’.Footnote 100
English journalists and broadcasters pictured a more romantic, depoliticised scene for their readers, frequently portraying the farms at Dolhendre as rather exotic, unfamiliar, marginal, and wild places populated by somewhat ‘other’ folk from a past era. In a double-page feature on the ‘Festival farm’ in Farmers’ Weekly, E.J. Smith explained how:
‘Festival visitors will see what Britain is doing to bring back a way of farming and living which was for a long dark period kept alive only by the endurance and faith of a brave people. … [T]he Dolhendre scheme… tells straightforwardly… the story of the revival in the hills and of the work and hopes of the plain-living and industrious people who farm them. The non-farming visitor cannot but fail to be impressed by the struggles and the achievements of these typical hill-farming folk’.Footnote 101
BBC broadcasters visiting from England struck a similar tone, with William Holt praising this ‘simple but fundamental way of celebrating the Festival of Britain’, which was ‘not showy, or spectacular in any way’, and provided ‘a strange contrast with the pageantry and sophistication of London’.Footnote 102 Accompanied by the BBC’s Welsh-speaking Controller in Wales, Alun Oldfield Davies, Holt spoke to the farming families at Dolhendre Isaf, Deildre Isaf and Wern, persuading these Welsh-speakers ‘to say a few words for you [the listener] in English’ about the impact of the scheme on their daily lives – including the expected benefits of piped water, electricity, a new cooking range, and new outbuildings. Contrary to Harriet Atkinson’s suggestion that ‘BBC broadcasts from Festival sites were characterised by a standard [received pronunciation] voice… contrasting with voices of local interviewees’, Yorkshireman Holt was one of a number of regular Festival broadcasters with non-RP accents, with others including Herbert Hodge (a famous Cockney taxi-driver, author and narrator) and Wynford Vaughan Thomas (with a hint of a Swansea accent). Nevertheless, the Welsh language was clearly both an exotic presence and was seen as a potential barrier to communication for this Yorkshireman and his global audience, hence his accompaniment by Davies, and their request to record the interview in English.
Geoffrey Boumphrey also covered the Dolhendre Scheme for one episode of his twelve-part ‘Festival notebook’ on the BBC Home Service, although almost half of his fifteen minute programme details his drive from Berkshire to Bala. The quiet upland valley of Dolhendre is placed in sharp contrast with the urban landscapes of the South Bank in London, illustrating ‘the wide variety of Festival activities’ he was visiting across Britain:
‘Last week the sophistication and crowds of the South Bank; this week an isolated valley in the heart of the Welsh mountains – and, besides myself, just four people having a look around’.Footnote 103
Boumphrey experienced Meirionnydd as a county of ‘ruined and deserted houses’ that had ‘gone downhill sadly in the two hundred years since the Industrial Revolution’, but the Festival presented an important opportunity for rehabilitation and reconstruction, providing:
‘a permanent scheme of rural reconstruction in Wales… very much as in London Poplar was chosen as a demonstration of the rebuilding of part of the East End’.Footnote 104
The Festival of Britain is pictured as a pioneering showcase of urban and rural postwar reconstruction, and Boumphrey suggested that while ‘Poplar and Dolhendre… may not draw the crowds… their benefits will continue long after the last turnstile has clicked, and the last fairy light has been switched off’.Footnote 105
For those that made the journey to Dolhendre, the ‘tourist’ facilities were rather basic. A turning space by the new bridge was created for coaches, while an adjacent car park could only accommodate 2–3 cars. Slightly further afield, close to the Bala to Dolgellau road and the Lôn Cottages, was Glanllyn Mansion, where a small exhibition ‘of books and prints dealing with agriculture’ was displayed by the National Library of Wales.Footnote 106 While a maximum of 2000 people are thought to have visited the scheme in the summer of 1951, we know that people came from across Britain and the world, including the Premier of New Brunswick in Canada (John B. McNair),Footnote 107 and the Paramount Chieftainess Regent of Basutoland (Lesotho), ‘Mantšebo Amelia ‘Matšaba, who visited Dolhendre as part of a tour of agricultural projects in Wales.Footnote 108 Dolhendre also reached a national and international stage through newspaper reports and BBC broadcasts, with radio programmes about Dolhendre broadcast on the General Overseas Service and Home Service, and a partial transcript of William Holt’s broadcast being reprinted as an article in London Calling, ‘the overseas journal’ of the BBC on 16th August 1951.Footnote 109
Conclusion
‘The visitor to Dolhendre in the coming months will see nothing spectacular. The homesteads continue to stand as demurely as ever, surrounded by the everlasting hills, and though most of the farm buildings will wear a new look, they will not be arrogantly conspicuous in any way’.Footnote 110
In his Foreword to The Dolhendre Scheme commemorative booklet, Wynn Wheldon associated the rehabilitation works with a restraint and modesty which reflected a focus on functional improvements for convenience, comfort, and efficiency. The new buildings at Poplar, Belfast, and on the South Bank might exude a distinctively modern aesthetic which could inspire urban futures elsewhere, but Wheldon insisted that while serving as ‘a pattern’ the sympathetic modernisation of the Dolhendre farms should not be taken as a ‘model to be slavishly followed’.Footnote 111 Dolhendre was the only official Festival of Britain exhibition located in a rural area, and it was appropriate for its location, given that it was situated within the boundaries of what was proposed to be a new national park. Incomes were low, and traditions were well-established. As such, futuristic and showy urban architectural visions of modern farming were deemed to be inappropriate, potentially unsightly, unattainable for the average hill farmer, and too showy or posh. With their in-depth knowledge of the Llanuwchllyn area, key figures involved in the scheme – including Sir Ifan ab Owen Edwards and members of the Glanllyn Advisory Committee – emphasised the distinctive geographies and histories of what was characterised as a typical Welsh-speaking upland hill farming community. With the staging of a ‘live exhibition’ with no information boards or tour guides (beyond the Scheme’s booklet and the resident tenant farmers), the Dolhendre Scheme was diametrically opposed to the heavily narrated and ordered ‘stories’ of Britain presented on the South Bank. Throughout the planning of the scheme, and in official accounts, issues of Britishness were neither explicitly flagged nor as enthusiastically celebrated as they were in other official Festival of Britain exhibitions, and the focus was on merely presenting an improved Welsh way of life in a specific Welsh community. The British ‘setting’ of the exhibition was highlighted in more incidental and banal ways, most notably with the inclusion of Abram Games’ ubiquitous Festival of Britain logo – featuring the head of Britannia atop a star, surrounded by bunting – on the cover of the Scheme’s official booklet (Figure 4), and on small metal plaques affixed to the farm buildings. In the latter case, neither the words ‘Festival of Britain’ nor its Welsh translation (‘Gⓦyl Cymru’) appeared on the plaque, and Games’ logo was accompanied by a crown, the year 1951, and the words ‘Is Comisiwn Tir Cymru’ (Welsh Land Sub-Commission), grounding Britannia firmly on Welsh soil (Figure 5). The Welsh Agricultural Land Sub-Commission was clearly aware of the sensitivities surrounding British state ownership of this Welsh landed estate and the Labour government’s refusal to sell it to a Welsh farming co-operative. Their plaque not only reflected their role as guardians of the Estate, but the tenancy of the farms by Welsh-speaking farmers, living in a Welsh-speaking community, not simply in Britain, but resolutely in the rural community of Llanuwchllyn, in Wales.
Cover to The Dolhendre Scheme booklet, 1951. Crown Copyright expired, author’s booklet.
The Welsh Agricultural Land Sub-Commission’s Festival of Britain plaque placed on farm buildings at Dolhendre. Source: Author’s photograph.
After the Festival formally ended on 30 September 1951, minor works continued on the new and refurbished buildings in Llanuwchllyn, but the Festival appears to have been largely forgotten, except for significant anniversaries. In February 1961, the Conservative Minister of Agriculture Christopher Soames announced the government’s intention to sell the Glanllyn Estate, with first choice being to offer it to any consortium of tenants in view of their ‘earlier expressed desires… to act collectively in the purchase of the holdings’.Footnote 112
Acknowledgements
This article has been supported by the award of a Leverhulme Fellowship by The Leverhulme Trust. I would like to thank Gwyn and Lowri Roberts for their help and hospitality, and Innes Mathieson for permission to reproduce her grandfather’s drawing of the Ffridd Helyg cottages. Thank you to Louise North at the BBC Written Archives Centre for permission to quote from unpublished scripts: ‘BBC copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved’.
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