A right royal coup

There has been a typically muted reaction in Wales to the news that the Duke of Cornwall has asserted his rights over the Three Feather’s symbol and that the Lord Chamberlain, on his behalf, has instructed a handful of companies producing tacky crap for tourists to stop using it.

There have been no demonstrations in the streets and virtually no comment from politicians. Maybe nobody cares? Or maybe we’re so used to losing what we once thought of as rights that we simply don’t react any more. The Three Feathers emblem belongs not to the people of Wales but to the Duchy of Cornwall, so what? A few tat merchants bleat a little in the media and the Duchy pretends to back down having tested the temperature of the obviously tepid water. It’s possible Charles' marketing people were valuing unexploited assets, exploring ways of monetarising a well-known piece of his intellectual property. If this is so, you can be sure they’ll find a way to do it, eventually.

Like just about everything in life nowadays, the monarchy is more than anything a business, and The Duchy of Cornwall branch is Charles’ private firm. He is its sole beneficiary, meaning that he pockets all of its profits. What he can no longer milk from our taxes through the civil list, he extracts from us in exchange for biscuits.

Unlike my business or your business or even BP Amoco’s, The Duchy has some very powerful players on its side to lean on little people, like the Lord Chamberlain, for instance.

This begs the question: Can anyone tell me why we need these people? Please don’t suggest they benefit Welsh tourism because they obviously don’t. I can see how it might be argued that they’re of benefit to London but I suspect people would still visit Buckingham Palace whether the Royals were there or not. Don’t tell me they do a lot for charity either, unless you can quantify it. I suppose they might be good for opening things or visiting cheese factories but you’d probably get more people along if you asked Charlotte Church to do it instead.

The Duchy of Cornwell obviously cares nothing for the people of Wales. It’s just a money making machine. But it has inadvertently given us a golden opportunity to be rid of an ancient symbol of oppression. Let’s get together and hand it back, eh?

Then, why don’t we begin creating new emblems for the 21st Century, emblems that represent Wales while belonging to all the Welsh people?

Click here to see the Red Dragonhood Three Feathers T-shirt
Click here to see the full Three Feathers, Two Fingers article

Newsnight Tonight

It being St David’s Day tomorrow, I’ve agreed to be interviewed by the BBC about the ‘Hendrix’ recording of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. The interview will be broadcast during Newsnight on BBC2, tonight at 10.30pm.

Tomorrow being a day of daffodils and leeks and women (but not men) in ‘traditional national dress’ and Charles Windsor’s Three Feathers and the rest of the supposed paraphernalia of Welshness, I thought it might be an appropriate moment to do something they’ve been badgering me about since the story first broke.

I suppose the BBC might accuse me of cultural vandalism, if not cultural terrorism, but I’m going to try to make a point about the myths of Welshness we’ve been saddled with, and how these myths were created.

I don’t want you to think I’m a killjoy; I think it’s really important to celebrate pride in our origins. But what makes us Welsh is our true heritage not the iconography, both political and religious, that’s been used to control us down the centuries. What’s important to me is belonging to a community of human beings who share my ancestry, my sense of ‘home’ and my struggles with life.

Also appearing on Newsnight will be my great friend and creative collaborator, the brilliant guitarist John Ellis. John founded Bazooka Joe and The Vibrators and was a member of The Stranglers. More recently he played with Peter Gabriel. John is English through and through. We’ve known each other since we were at Hornsey College of Art together in the early 1970’s when we used to perform at the Stapleton Hall Tavern in Stroud Green.

Armed with this knowledge, the gist of the Newsnight interview should come as no surprise to you.

Welsh National Costume or English straightjacket?

THE MORE I delve into Welsh iconography the more I feel like an extra in The Truman Show (a movie about a man who, without realising it, has lived all his life from birth as the subject of a reality television show).

It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that the Welsh National Costume was invented by a wealthy English lady in the early-19th century to encourage Welsh women to wear wool produced in mills owned by her friends?

Influenced by fashion, comfort, cost and availability, women - not just in Wales but throughout the British Isles - were wearing garments made of cotton, milled in Britain but imported from the colonies, in place of traditional woollen clothing. As a result, the Welsh wool business was suffering and prices, both at market and at the mill door, were depressed.

Her motives probably weren't entirely as bad as it seems, and I wish I could feel more charitable towards Augusta Hall, also known as Lady Llanofer. She learnt to speak Welsh, which is more than can be said of me, and she even helped to found the first Welsh-language periodical for women. But she was an ultra-conservative hypocrite who believed that "false respectability encourages forms of dress incompatible with active employments".

My guess is that Lady Llanofer's 'Welsh' thing was, as much as anything else, motivated by a romantic fantasy of the rural idyll, a fashionable interest indulged in by the landowning gentry of the time.

Fortunately, she didn't feel the need to design a Welsh national costume for men because the extraordinary outfit in which she dressed her harpist, Thomas Gruffydd, would definitely get you bottled down the pub on a Friday evening.

Click here to buy the t-shirt

The humble daffodil: proper Welsh emblem or a cheap bit of tat

The daffodil, it seems, originated in Portugal, Spain and the southern coast of France, not in Wales. But the daffodil is cheap and cheerful and only lasts for a couple of weeks, which makes it eminently suitable as our national emblem.

The name for daffodil in Welsh (cenhinen Bedr) translates as Peter's Leek. The word for leek is ‘cenhinen’. This allows plenty of scope for conjecture and confusion. I might as well add to it.

Daffodils are also known as Lent Lilies, Easter Lilies, Daffys, Narcissus and by the Latin name Narcissus Pseudonarcissus. The Greek Theophrastus first wrote about narcissi around 300BC in his Enquiry into Plants. In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and was turned into a flower by the gods.

Medieval Arabs apparently used the juice of wild daffodils as a cure for baldness. I have no idea if it works. It is said that Roman soldiers carried daffodils with them to eat if they should be mortally wounded in battle, in order to hasten their journey to the underworld.

Mohammed wrote: "He that has two cakes of bread, let him sell one of them for some flowers of the Narcissus, for bread is food for the body, but Narcissus is food of the soul."

Mercifully, the Welsh are only encouraged to wear daffodils in their buttonholes on 1st March of year, and the kind of Welshmen who possess buttonholes do actually wear them. But why?

The daffodil became a popular Welsh symbol in the 19th century. Lloyd George, no doubt feeling that leeks were a bit dull and unattractive, used the daffodil to symbolise Wales at the 1911 Investiture of Edward Windsor, the soon-to-be Nazi sympathiser who, having been crowned Edward VIII of England, got sacked for marrying an American divorcee.

I have no idea why you need a plant as a symbol for a country. Is it any wonder some nationalists prefer the rather more powerful and evocative symbol of the white eagle of Snowdonia?

What else do you need to know? There are about 50 species of daffodils, and many thousands of named cultivars and hybrids of garden origin. The Royal Horticultural Society International Daffodil Register lists more than 26,400 named daffodils. They're common as muck!

Click here to buy the t-shirt