Shakespeare and the Welsh Part I.

The death of Margaret Thatcher and Shakespeare’s Richard II?

For me, this whole month of April 2013 has carried the theme of representation: the way people are represented in the media can make such a huge difference!

It was the death of Margaret Thatcher that primarily got me thinking about this. As the summary line about her ‘dividing the British nation’ became a media-borne meme, and the recaps of her life and history-changing decisions replayed on New Zealand breakfast TV and news programs, the realisations of the sizable impact this woman had had on my life began to enter my awareness like a shower of crap-wrapped pebbles. 

"In the pantomime of Welsh politics, Thatcher is the witch, and the cry is always, 'look behind you!'" (Unattributable quote). 

I was shocked at first to hear that Thatcher had died. It was as if another familiar scrap of home had suddenly been yanked from the beggarly hand of my eager nostalgia, and, to make this sentence even longer, and break yet further clumsy metaphor o’er the shore of thy impatient ear, dear reader, ‘twas as if my longing were a taught harp-string, plucked as rich men looked sad and ruffians danced and leapt on the TV screen. With the costly funeral, well assured were they, my former countrymen, that Thatcher our former leader was indeed most dead.

Dead. In Britain it’s traditionally not-the-done-thing to speak ill of the dead (although Ding Dong the Witch is Dead reportedly became the UK’s number-one best-selling songon i-tunes that week, so maybe decency isn’t what it used to be over there since the noble ideals of fairness and dignity and community in that land of such dear souls, that dear dear land, dear for her reputation through the world, those noble ideals of hers I say were so efficiently made nonsensical by the realities of rampant capitalism). Even if said dead person happened to contain more evil than Iago fully zealed on Nazism, it would still be deemed rather off to slag them off.

Richard Crawshay: "God Forgive Me."

But I don’t think of the Iron Lady when I say that. I randomly think instead of the most insanely wealthy and indifferent ironmaster who ever helped bring hell to the South Wales Valleys during the heydays of the Industrial Revolution, Richard Crawshay – especially as the novelist Alexander Cordell represented him in his brilliant novel, Rape of the Fair Country. In real life, they gave Crawshay a decent Christian burial in Merthyr, but the stone they put on top of him, which allegedly weighs several tons (so he can’t get out again), speaks volumes, as does the three-word epitaph, ‘God Forgive Me.’

Thatcher wasn’t quite that bad; at least her funeral sermon didn’t give the impression that she was. But while the Bishop of London recounted fond memories of dinner parties and the P.M. advising him to refrain from the fattening duck paté, miners from the South Wales valleys will no doubt recall very different things. As Paul Vallely writes in The Church Times (the world’s leading Anglican newspaper), for those people blasted by her policies of mass destruction – those “eggs” deliberately smashed in order to serve a privileged, entrepreneurial elite their tasty “Thatcherite omelette” – Maggie was a monster.

Simply put, the Iron Lady did more damage to the communities of South Wales than Hitler’s Luftwaffe.  This is what I mean about the way a person gets represented, or misrepresented, depending on which angle you’re looking at it from. It was safer for the upper-class – and more decent, perhaps – to extoll Thatcher’s virtues in the wake of her death, provided words like ‘polarising’ and ‘contraversial’ were used to acknowledge the horrendous and long-lasting consequences of her actions. Her actions continue to have an effect not only in Britain but for the world as a whole.

Thatcher's Britain and The Conservative Party.

Margaret Thatcher meets Bob Hope, who's Welsh mother was from Barry, South Wales.

[other famous 'Barrains' here] 

Maggie visited factories in my hometown of Barry, South Wales, in May, 1987. I was thirteen at the time. She wasn’t all that popular there back then of course, but the consequences for me came five years later. On St. David’s day, 1993, my career in the Merchant Navy was very nearly over before it had even begun. I was made redundant without any prior warning and immediately replaced by a Latvian sailor who would do the same job for less than a quarter the wage. Thatcherism enabled and encouraged exactly this sort of treachery and exploitation.

Nonetheless, I cartwheeled down the gangway at Southampton filled with a newfound, joyful optimism. I signed on at the dole office back in Wales with my former schoolmates and former workmates, bursting with national pride as unemployment continued to bob at about six million under the grey-flannelled indifference of John Major. I did not despair, for I knew in my heart as I opened that first foaming can of cheap, commiserating Co-op lager that sacrifices must necessarily be made on behalf of the envisioned, glorious non-society of atomised, self-interested individuals to come.

Thatcher and Falklands War Fervour.

We had successfully retained the jewel of Britain’s Overseas Territories, the Falkland Islands, at the expense of only 255 human lives, six ships (ten others having suffered varying degrees of battle damage), 34 aircraft and 2.778 billion pounds. Phewf! That knowledge alone was enough to get me through those leaner times which were to follow. The future seemed so bright that I took to the streets daily in my wooly pully, jubilantly shouting, “Hoozah! The economy and our grip on the South Atlantic Ocean’s sheep monopoly are saved! Oh, God bless you, Margaret Thatcher!”

But not really. Had I been brought up in a well-off, upper-middle-class home in, say, Surrey, my outlook might have been different, my sarcasm and gen-X whiney-ness scoring a less fatal amount of sardonicums on the Garofalometer.


via GIPHY
As it was, having been raised by a solo mother in a former council flat at the edge of the Gibbonsdown estate, and having experienced first-hand what it was to be conveniently disposed of for the sake of corporate profit margins, at the age of just eighteen, it was hard to hold any sympathy whatsoever for the Conservative world-view.

Anyway, I agree with the Bishop of London when he quotes T.S. Eliot. “Every end is a beginning.” I was lucky enough to begin a new life in a new land. My sardonicum count has slowly decreased over the years and hopefully I see things from a new angle again – a more forgiving angle, seeing, as the Bishop suggests, the human muddle and not the monster. God Forgive Us All. I won’t be joining the Communist Party or guillotining anyone. But I won’t ever be voting for the National Party either.

So what does all of this have to do with Shakespeare and Richard II?

That is what I hope to explain in a series of weekly posts throughout the coming month of May.