Raising an Echo - The Autobiography of Glyn Mathias

By Glyn Mathias

The autobiography of Glyn Mathias, the political editor of ITN News (1981-86) and of BBC Wales (1994-99) in the run-up to the referendum in 1997.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Y Lolfa
• Release date: May 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781847718945

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Cover.jpg

To my children, Mathew, Megan and Hannah

so they can hear the echoes from the past

First impression: 2014

© Copyright Glyn Mathias and Y Lolfa Cyf., 2014

The contents of this book are subject to copyright, and may not be reproduced by any means, mechanical or electronic, without the prior, written consent of the publishers.

Cover design: Y Lolfa

Cover photograph: Emyr Young

ISBN: 978 184771 820 4

E-ISBN: 978-1-84771-894-5

Published and printed in Wales

on paper from well-maintained forests by

Y Lolfa Cyf., Talybont, Ceredigion SY24 5HE

website www.ylolfa.com

e-mail [e-mail]

tel [phone]

fax 832 782

I will pick up my boots and run around the shire

To raise an echo louder than my fear.

‘The Flooded Valley’, Roland Mathias

Preface

It was a routine walk from the House of Commons to Downing Street. It was a walk which political journalists did most days to attend the briefing at No. 10 given by the Prime Minister’s press secretary. Those briefings varied from the lively to the tedious, depending on how much information was being given out and how much the lobby journalists thought was being withheld.

It was always best to sup with a long spoon.

But this time it was far from routine. It was five o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, 5 April 1982. An international crisis had blown up out of nowhere with the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina three days earlier. Parliament was in turmoil, the Foreign Secretary had resigned, the invasion had been condemned by the UN Security Council and the first ships of a task force ordered by the Prime Minister had left for the South Atlantic.

I was walking up Downing Street rehearsing to myself the questions I planned to ask Mrs Thatcher in the interview I was about to do for ITN. At that stage, it was still the hope of most people that the Argentines would leave the Falklands without resort to force. But the Prime Minister had set the wheels of war in motion. I was trying to settle on the wording of some of the key questions I wanted to ask. Was the country now at war – and, if Britain failed to expel the Argentine force from the Falklands, would she resign as Prime Minister?

A broadcast journalist should always try and put any personal opinions to one side, however difficult that might be. But I walked up Downing Street with some ghosts on my back. In my family there had been a disputatious difference of opinion about whether war was ever justified. My grandfather, Evan Mathias, had been in the army for most of his career, serving as a Nonconformist chaplain and rising to the rank of colonel. He had joined at the outset of the First World War, serving in the Dardanelles and on the Western Front. He was mentioned in despatches.

My grandfather never had any trouble reconciling his Nonconformism with his belief that military intervention could be and had been justified, as he made clear in his letters while serving with the British Defence Force in Shanghai. He was never remotely apologetic about his army career. My father, Roland Mathias, took a completely contrary view. For him, his religious conscience could not permit him to take any part in any military activity. His form of pacifism meant that nothing could justify the taking of human life, however great the provocation.

Both founded their views on war in their Christian belief. In my father’s case, a refusal to undertake even non-combatant duties during the Second World War led to two spells in prison as a conscientous objector. He would not be associated with any form of work which might assist the war effort, however indirectly. It is difficult to imagine such a contrasting set of beliefs between a father and son.

My own views on the issue were far less determinate. To me, the war against Nazi Germany was a war which had to be fought, for moral as well as other reasons, and I could never imagine that I would have opted out of it. I would, however, have made a terrible soldier, and was always grateful that I was young enough to have escaped National Service.

To me, there was a line to be drawn between a just and an unjust war, and Britain has taken part in both. I always admired an old friend who had refused to respond to his call-up for the invasion of Suez in 1956 and wondered whether I would also have had the courage to refuse to serve in a war of such unjustified aggression. Blair’s war in Iraq nearly fifty years later was another case of a war which lacked any adequate justification. Even if all the allegations about weapons of mass destruction had turned out to be true, it would still not have amounted to an adequate casus belli.

On that April afternoon in 1982, the arguments were less clear-cut. A British overseas territory had been invaded, and under international law Britain had every right to use force to regain it. On the other hand, it was a group of islands 8,000 miles away – about which the British had never seemed to care very much before – and there had been no time to prepare the public for what might lie ahead. The interview was therefore a vital platform for Mrs Thatcher to explain to the British people her justification for dispatching a task force to the South Atlantic.

I like to think that the ghosts on my back helped me formulate the right questions. We are all, in varying degrees, the product of our backgrounds. And the issues of war and peace, writ large on the battlefield, were also played out between the generations of my family.

GM

Chapter 1

Sennybridge,

via Siberia

It was the envelope which first caught my attention. It was a small, discoloured envelope, with a red three-halfpenny stamp in one corner with the head of George V, and in the other top corner, the words ‘Via Siberia’ underlined twice. Then, in bold copperplate handwriting, the address:

Mr D. Mathias,

Emporium,

Senny Bridge,

Breconshire,

South Wales,

England.

It was a letter from my grandfather to his brother David, written from Shanghai in 1927 and was one of several letters from Evan Mathias discovered by my cousin Gareth in the attic of his house after his mother’s death.

My grandfather was serving as a Nonconformist chaplain to the Shanghai Defence Force which had been dispatched by the Imperial War Committee to defend the city against a Communist takeover. Consisting of three brigades, it was the largest British force sent to the Far East up to that time. Chiang Kai-Shek, at that stage in alliance with the Chinese Communists, was marching his Nationalist army north from Canton, and had already overrun the British concession at Hankow.

Shanghai was the richest city in China, and the biggest prize in the struggle between the Nationalists, Communists and competing warlords. A large section of the city was controlled by foreign powers, who had created an international settlement outside Chinese jurisdiction. The primary fear for the British, the French and the Americans was that the valuable port of Shanghai would fall into Communist hands.

The city had become a revolutionary melting pot. For the Chinese Communist party, this was their main target, and they were already showing their strength through strikes, protests and street fighting. A number of foreign revolutionaries, such as Stalin’s ally Borodin, had arrived on the scene. The foreign troops had turned the international settlement into an armed camp with barbed-wire barricades around it, and the tension was high.

Shortly after arriving in Shanghai, my grandfather wrote to his brother describing the scene. There were many more Chinese living in the settlement than ‘white men’ – dynion gwyn.

Yr oedd yn wybyddus fod nifer o gunmen mewn dillad cyffredin yn y Settlement, a phe bae cyfle yn dod ni fuasent yn brin o gymeryd eu rhan trwy saethu yn yr ystrydoedd (fel y gwnaethpwyd yn yr Iwerddon). Yr oedd y Labour Union hefyd wedi ychwanegu at anhawsderau’r awdurdodau trwy alw streic. Dychmygwch felly, weled strydoedd y Settlement yn ddu gan Chinese – ac yn eu mysg gunmen a hooligans yn disgwyl eu cyfle – tra yr oedd y Cantonese a’r Northerners y tu allan i’r ffin yn ymladd am yr oruchafiaeth.

[It was common knowledge that there were a number of gunmen in ordinary clothes in the Settlement, and if the chance came they would shoot in the streets as they did in Ireland. The Labour Union had added to the difficulties of the authorities by calling a strike. Imagine then, seeing the streets of the Settlement black with Chinese, and in their midst gunmen and hooligans waiting for their opportunity – while the Cantonese and the Northerners were outside the perimeter fighting for supremacy.]

By this time, Chiang Kai-Shek’s army had reached Shanghai and had, with the help of the local Communists, captured all of the city outside the International Settlement. An assault on the Defence Force and the settlement itself seemed imminent.

Cerddais i fyny trwy Nanking Rd (y brif heol) y prynhawn dydd Mawrth hwnnw, a theimlais fod yr awyr yn wefreiddiol gan excitement. Onibae fod y police yn cadw’r tyrfaoedd i fynd, a’r milwyr ni yn cerdded fel patrols trwy bob ystryd, buasai’r gwaethaf wedi cymeryd lle. Nid oes gronyn o amheuaeth yn fy meddwl fod danfoniad prydlon y Shanghai Defence Force wedi achub y ddinas hon.

[I walked up Nanking Road (the main street) on that Tuesday afternoon, and I could feel the excitement in the air. If it was not for the police keeping the crowds moving, and our soldiers patrolling every street, the worst would have happened. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the prompt arrival of the Shanghai Defence Force has saved this city.]

The foreign residents of Shanghai had little reason to distinguish between the forces of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Communists. Both seemed to threaten their comfortable and profitable expatriate life. But it turned out that Chiang Kai-Shek was more concerned to defeat the Communists, whom he saw as a threat to his power, than to take on the Western Defence Force. In April, Nationalist troops rounded up and murdered hundreds of Communist and union activists in Shanghai. And despite Chiang Kai-Shek’s propaganda against the Western powers, he was content to strike a deal with them which left the International Settlement intact.

In his correspondence with friends and family, my grandfather was quick to rebut any suggestion that the British forces should not be there. The British soldiers were defending life and trade, and what he called the terrorists and Bolsheviks had left China in a wretched condition. Those whom he witnessed as prisoners in Shanghai looked like ‘a bunch of highwaymen’, he said. He was particularly concerned about the fate of the Christian missionaries, who had been warned to leave northern China for their own safety. Many were sheltering in Shanghai at the time, and my grandfather gave away the bride at one missionary wedding, representing her father who was back in Wales.

By August, my grandfather’s main complaint was about the heat.

Y mae’r chwys yn byrbynnu allan ohono wrth ysgrifennu, a minnau yn eistedd yn llewys fy nghrys mewn ystafell gysgodol, a phob ffenestr a drws yn agored led y pen! Clywais rai dyddiau yn ôl fod Dean Symons (pen yr Eglwys Esgobol yn y ddinas) wedi danfon 24 o grysiau i’r golch yr wythnos ddiweddaf… Nid oes gennyf fi hanner cymaint a’r Dean o grysiau yn fy wardrobe; ond, pe bae, buasai eu heisiau bob un!

[The sweat is pouring out of me as I write and I am sitting in my shirtsleeves in a sheltered room with every window and door open wide. I heard a few days ago that Dean Symons, head of the Episcopal Church in the city, had sent 24 shirts to be washed last week. I haven’t got half as many shirts as the Dean in my wardrobe, but if I had, I would have used every one!]

Initially, until he was joined by a Wesleyan chaplain from Hong Kong and a missionary, he was the only Nonconformist chaplain with the Defence Force. He was based with the 14th Infantry Brigade, but he was not attached to any one unit and his job was to minister to all the soldiers who had registered as Nonconformists – ‘ac y mae gennyf gylch eang i fynd drosto’ [and I have a wide area to get around]. With the help of a schoolfriend from Llanelli, who was working as a ship’s engineer in China, he bought a small car for £25, which ‘was most useful to me in running about on my duties in that sweltering city’.

Apart from a few shots fired across the barricades, the Shanghai Defence Force saw no real action. And, in truth, life was not unpleasant for the visiting forces. My grandfather was lodged with the secretary to the British Chamber of Commerce, and receptions and dinner parties were the norm as the wealthy residents of Shanghai did their best to entertain the officers of the army which had come to protect them. Goods were cheap and plentiful, and my grandfather brought trunkloads back with him, including Chinese textiles, silks, brassware, pictures, ornaments and a large six-panel screen decorated with exotic oriental birds.

He returned home in 1928, and the Shanghai expedition became little more than a footnote in the history books.

*

Evan Mathias was born in 1885 in Rhos Llangeler, a village in Carmarthenshire. He was the eighth of nine children who survived early childhood, living in a small roadside cottage at Gât Bwlch y Clawdd. The cottage had one link to historical fame: the toll house which the name commemorates was twice destroyed by Rebecca rioters some forty years previously. My great-grandfather David came from a family who had lived in the area for several generations – impoverished people living hand-to-mouth. Described as ‘a bear of a man’, he was a carpenter by trade, as many of his forefathers had been. He married Mary, known as Mali, a determined woman who seemed to run the family.

Evan was a sickly child at first, with a weak digestion which was to plague him all his life. He was, by all accounts, slow to develop the usual skills of walking and talking. But when he was only five years old the family had an upturn in their fortunes. David Mathias got a job as a carpenter to the Stepney estate at thirty shillings per week, and he moved his family to Llanelli.

But with such a large family, life was still hard. My great-grandmother would sit at the table and work out how my great-grandfather’s earnings would be spent – money for food, for school, for new books and so on. Such was her careful management that she could lend money to neighbours. One story had it that a family of steelworkers whose income was several times greater than theirs fell into temporary difficulties during a stoppage at the works. By the second week of the stoppage, the woman of the house asked to borrow money from my great-grandmother, and she had it to lend. But money was never plentiful. When my grandfather eventually went to university in Cardiff, family legend has it that his older brothers clubbed together to help pay his way.

The family were all Annibynwyr – Welsh Independents – and attended the Lloyd Street chapel in Llanelli. Every Sunday morning, my great-grandmother put the joint in the oven, timing it to perfection so that she could put it out ready for the table when she returned from chapel. No excuses from any of the family for non-attendance were ever offered. All who were at home attended every morning and every evening, an impressive witness to the solidity of Welsh Nonconformity at that time.

It was a tradition which my grandfather inherited and built on. After university in Cardiff, where it was whispered that he might have been enjoying himself a little too much, he studied for the ministry at the Memorial College, Brecon (in Welsh, Coleg Coffa), the training college for the Congregational Church. In 1909, he was appointed to his first ministry at the English Congregational Church, Edwardsville, Treharris. A report of the event said:

Mr B.T. Evans, secretary of the church, gave the history of the call, and he showed that the call was a hearty and unanimous one. Following this, the Rev. Morgan Jenkins, Abercynon, put the usual questions to the young minister, and Mr Mathias replied in a clear and pithy statement. The ordination prayer was offered by the Rev. John Morris, Star Street, Cardiff, after which the congregation expressed their welcome to the newly ordained pastor by a show of hands.

It is a mystery as to why, as a Welsh-speaker, my grandfather chose to go to an English-speaking church. But gradually through his life, Welsh was overtaken by English as the principal language he used, to the extent that he eventually became reluctant to preach in Welsh because he felt he was too rusty.

Only two years later, he moved to take up a ministry in New Inn, Pontypool. It is not clear why he moved so soon, but it seems he was briefly engaged to the daughter of a minister at a neighbouring chapel to Edwardsville, an engagement which was broken off.

My father, who had his suspicions, wrote:

A certain element of the risible may have turned the romance into farce. My father, after all, was a keen-eyed, lively, laughing and sociable man, but he was no more than five foot three and a half inches in his shoes. His lady love was probably five feet nine or ten at the very least.

As he entered the ministry, my grandfather came under some pressure to move to the United States. His uncle, Rhys Saron Jones (his mother’s brother), had become a successful and prosperous minister in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the centre of a coal-mining and steel-manufacturing area which at one time had the largest Welsh immigrant population of any city in America. Rhys Jones repeatedly pressed my grandfather to join him there, but he decided against it. It would have established something of a preaching dynasty, and my father’s generation sometimes speculated about what it would have been like to be brought up as Americans.

The advent of the Great War proved a turning point. Although he was about to get married, he applied for, and was granted, release from his church at Pontypool Road, New Inn, for the period of the war to take up duties as an army chaplain. It is difficult to understand at this distance what drove him to make that decision, but one event may have been a factor.

Nonconformist ministers had not hitherto been admitted to the ranks of army chaplains, and in the early days of the war the issue came to a head. There was an argument at a meeting of the cabinet in London in September 1914 between David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lord Kitchener, Secretary for War. Lloyd George pressed for Nonconformist ministers to be sent to the front as army chaplains alongside their Anglican counterparts. When Kitchener expressed his doubts, Lloyd George was reported as saying: ‘If you intend to send a Church of England army to the front, say so, but you cannot fight with half a nation.’

Lloyd George’s victory meant that my grandfather was among the first Nonconformist chaplains to serve in the army. By the end of 1914, he was at St Leonards-on-Sea with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He told his New Inn congregation:

I entered into my new world with all the bewilderment of a tyro. The metamorphosis was sudden and complete, for I went into one door of Messrs Harrods’ stores a civilian, and came out the other a full-fledged chaplain; and the very ordinary man who an hour before had scarcely attracted notice from anyone now found himself an object of interest, and the recipient of numberless salutes from the soldiers who throng the streets of London. Such is the marvellous influence of a khaki tunic with big side-pockets and bestarred shoulder straps!

For my grandfather was now an army captain. Appointment as Chaplain to the Forces, 4th Class, gave him that rank. His job was to look after the spiritual welfare of those denominations which came under the United Board, which included Congregationalists and Baptists. He admitted that it was difficult to define exactly what constituted the duties of a chaplain.

At the camp on the south coast of England, he said that about 700 to 800 avowed Congregationalists and Baptists attended his Sunday parade, never mind the many Nonconformists who, through ignorance, had registered themselves as Anglicans. There were brief services on weekday evenings, and entertainments were organised for the men, usually in conjunction with the YMCA.

When the men are free from the labours of the day, the chaplain has an opportunity of moving among them and chatting with them in their huts. But he will be wise to rigidly abstain from the button-holing methods of the American Revival evangelist, for they are often productive of resentment. The chaplain who is ever ready with a genial smile, friendly word and willing service is more likely to do good in this way than by any other method.

He frequently found himself writing to the families of soldiers who were unable to write themselves, and the chaplain of course visited the hospital.

His presence is greatly welcomed by the soldiers who are lying there. I find it especially so in my case, for there are among them many Welshmen, and they are delighted with a visit from a fellow countryman and a chat in the language of Paradise.

By 1915, my grandfather was in the Dardanelles, serving with the South Wales Borderers. But the following year, he was shipped home suffering from dysentery. He was mentioned in despatches for his tending of the sick and dying on the hospital ship. On his recovery he was sent to the Western Front where he spent the remainder of the war.

There is, ironically, little record of his experiences there. He did not talk much about them, at least to his grandchildren. But apparently, like most who fought in the trenches, he saw death frequently and came close to it himself. He was marching with a replacement unit up to the front when he stopped to talk to a fellow chaplain who was accompanying a unit heading the other way. An incoming shell landed among them, and my grandfather was blown into the nearby ditch. When he got back to his feet, he could see the body of the man to whom he had been talking smashed into several different pieces on the ground.

He only talked about the war to me on one occasion that I can recall. A neighbour had come round to visit and, on spying me, said: ‘My, he’s a bit small, isn’t he?’

My grandfather afterwards took me by the arm and said: ‘Don’t you worry, boy. In the trenches they used to say, The taller they are, the further they fall.’

*

In 1919, my grandfather was stationed in Germany, working in the Chaplain-General’s office. He was persuaded by his immediate superior, a fellow Welshman, to stay in the army despite the end of the war. He was said never to be fully at ease in the peacetime army, but having made his promise to stay, he kept it. He was stationed with the London Division of the Army of the Rhine at Marienburg, a suburb of Cologne. He had never seen such a beautiful city, and he wrote to his brother in some wonderment at the fine buildings, the tramcars and the boats on the Rhine.

Yma, mae’r ystrydoedd yn llydain bob un, a choed wedi eu planu ar ochrau’r ffyrdd, a bron pob tŷ yn balas yn sefyll ar ei ben ei hun. Mae gennyf fi letty mewn tŷ braf a gallwch farnu beth yw ei faintioli pan y dywedaf fod y teulu yn gallu fforddio rhoi suite o ystafelloedd – bedroom, sitting room, a bathroom, un yn