Men of Harlech

Two teen-age girls peeped out from a darkened front parlor late one night last week in the coal-grimed Rhondda Valley of South Wales. They held their breath as a policeman paused outside, rejoiced when he tramped on past the bleak rows of miners' houses. From a lighted window opposite, a man nodded curtly to signal that BBC television was closing the day's transmission with God Save the Queen.

The girls dashed into the heavily curtained back kitchen, cried: "Now!" A grinning, red-haired schoolmaster called Glyn ducked between lines of drying laundry, flicked a wall switch, punched the playback button on a battered tape recorder, and darted back, screwdriver in hand, to his homemade 80-watt transmitter. And out into the night, on BBC-TV's Channel 5, went the Freedom Station's call signal: the sound of a pencil tapped three times on a saucepan.

On the Run. A sonorous voice boomed: "This is Radio Wales!" and was followed by a male chorus singing the blood-quickening March of the Men of Harlech, the war song recalling the last great uprising of the Welsh against the English in the middle of the 15th century. After 18 minutes of "Freedom" news, interviews, oratory and song, Men of Harlech roared out again, and the announcer said in Cymric,* "Nos da [good night]."

Operating like a resistance group in an occupied country, which they argue Wales is, Glyn and his friends have put "The Voice of Free Wales" on the air at least three times a week for the past month. Dodging from house to house, from town to town, the broadcasters have spread their illicit message through South Wales. Unlike the Scottish nationalist movement, which is more intellectual and romantic, the Welsh nationalists appeal to 2,500,000 cohesive people with an intense pride in their native songs and in their literature, which dates back to the 6th century poets, Taliesin and Aneurin. Welsh is one of the oldest of all living languages in Europe. Welsh nationalism may be no great threat to the government in London, but it is more than a prank, and it appeals to some felt grievances among its people.

Cultural Genocide. The illegal radio strongly backs the program of eloquent, poetry-spouting Gwynfor Evans, 43, president of the Plaid Cymru (Free Wales) movement. Plaid Cymru gets about 10% of the total Welsh vote, but has never yet elected a Member of Parliament. Among its grievances is the fact that the British government allows free campaigning privileges on the government-owned BBC radio and TV only to parties putting up at least 50 candidates; and there are only 36 Welsh seats in the House of Commons to contest. Hammering away at England's "colonialist" attempts at "cultural genocide" for Wales, the nationalists demand recognition of the Cymric language in the schools, faster industrialization in Wales to compensate hardscrabble valley settlements for closed-down mines, and commonwealth status.

British officials, leary of creating any nationalist Welsh martyrs, have been desultory in trying to track down the illegal broadcasters. At week's end, the Freedom Station popped up in West Wales for the first time, and boasted two new transmitters. Said the man named Glyn: "This is just the beginning."

-The Celtic language of Wales, related to the Gaelic of Scotland and Ireland.

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