Oh What A Time... - #156 Gwyn ‘Alf’ Williams (Part 2)

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!We’re back for 2026! And our first subject is the life story of one of the most prominent Welsh historians of the 20th century; Gwyn “Alf” Williams. We’ll trace his life from beginnings in South Wales to the beaches of Normandy in WWII, right through to his time at York University and rise to national prominence on TV.Elsewhere, what are your great sleep walking or talking escapades? Can you beat anything we’ve shared in this episode? If yes, you know what to do: [e-mail] THIS THURSDAY 15TH JANUARY! The comedy history podcast that has spent as much time talking about the invention of custard as it has the industrial revolution is here with its first ever live show! The subject will be: the history of London. We’d love to see you there.It’s Thursday 15th January at the Underbelly Boulevard in London’s Soho. 🎟 Tickets are on sale now and there’s only a few left: https://underbellyboulevard.com/tickets/oh-what-a-time/And if you want more from the show, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, What a Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else, add free, plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets, and access to the Oh Water Time group chat. Plus, if you become an Oh Water Time All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis will riff on your name to postulate where else in history you might have popped up.

For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash oh, what a time. Welcome back to part two of our Gwyn Alph special. This is a special suggested by the wonderful Ellis James. Gwynalph is one of the most important historians to you, Elle, you think that's a fair thing of describing you from your life and your studies. He's a very significant sort of historian on the left in British history in general, but yeah, yeah, absolutely, certainly in Wales. And we found out already about his remarkable life on the beaches of Northern.

The start of his career as a historian, and he's now gone to York to study at uni. And Chris is going to tell us more about that. Yes, so it's now 1963. Gwyn Alph Williams has landed what looks like the perfect job. A senior lectureship at the brand new University of York. Within three years of being there. Great city, York. Great city.

Oh, amazing. Yeah. Great pubs. Yeah. Great brewer. Everything seems to be arranged around breweries. Yeah. It's also so pretty.

Yeah, yeah. It's incredible. Yeah, yeah. No, I did a gig in York in September and the pubs are fantastic and it's an amazing place to be. Have you been to the Yorvik Museum? Many, many times. Yeah, yeah, which smells like the Viking times basically. That's the idea of, isn't it?

Yeah, you head in and they have all these little figures and scenes that represent the past. And I just remember them pumping in the smells of the past. Yeah, yeah. Well, what they needed was deodorant. I went to the V&A museum yesterday for the Marie-Antoinette exhibition that's currently on, which is fantastic. And they've got a section of the Marie Antoinette exhibition,

which is dedicated to her obsession with the smells. So she was known to, like, perfume different rooms of her house and perfume, like Palace of Versailles. And they've got, they know roughly what those smells would have smelled like. So there's about five different. like smelling hairy as you can go to and like the first four all quite okay quite floral you know a bit oaky whatever and then the last one is you can smell what it smelled like in the prison she was kept in at the end of her life and it describes what the smell is and it's like sewage

sick like mold it's getting pumped out it's getting pumped out I was like well I can't smell the first four and not this one. So I smelt it and it was absolutely horrific. Sue is just. It's like, it's such a handbraked. It's the last smell. It was such a handbraked down. I did not see it coming.

Oh, my. And you know, it's a museum, some of there's a queue of people behind you. I was like, I didn't want to, I didn't want to wimp out of the last one. You're like, well, if Marianne E could have out with this smell, I've got to go in there. I've got a question about the Marianne Twinnett exhibition. Did they have a cafe and were they serving cake? A bit of fun. Oh, very good.

There you go. Because you remember what she said? Do you remember her famous quote? I love a cake. That was it, wasn't it? But Tom, she never said that. Eat a lovely cake. That's what it was.

That's her favourite quote. You've bought into the revolutionary propaganda there. Have I? Yeah, you have. Oh, dear. What a pity? What did she say, then? Let them eat toast?

What was it? Let them eat granola balls. Let them eat something healthy of them cake. Just aside, it's a great exhibition They've got, they've got from Madam to Swords, they've got the actual, what they suspect is the guillotine blade that took her head off. They've got her final note she left to,

I think it was one of her best friends. And they've also got the chemise she was wearing in prison. Wow. It's an amazing. And her shoes as well, you see her shoes. Just a nice little idea. If I was running this exhibition, I had a cafe there.

I would serve Kate. and the cake would be sliced by a tiny guillotine at the end as you've got your slice. That's a nice little tactic. That is good. Lovely. All right. We're going back to York in 1966. So Gwyn Alph has been promoted twice.

He's first a reader. And by 1960s, he's a professor. He's still in his 30s, which is mad. All the lecturers I had when I went to university were at least 50. York wasn't just another university. It was part of a new post-war academic experiment, modern, forward. thinking. It was shaped by the Cold War nuclear anxiety and a growing belief that history needed to ask different questions about power class and ideology, which is Gwynn all over

from what I know about the man. Yeah. It's funny as well in the 60s. We think, I was having this conversation recently. We think like this moment right now is a terrifying moment in history. But actually, if you look at the 80s, the 60s, the Cold War, it's basically it's all terrifying, isn't it? Yeah. And Good Elf was there in the 60s. But at least no, it doesn't spell of sewage and sick. Small blessings. I think that's the difference between now and then is that we're manufacturing this smell for people to enjoy out of curiosity.

Whereas back then, that's what it smelled like. So the history department at York was headed by a man called Gerald Aylma. He was a 17th century specialist who had himself been trained by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill. And Gwynn found himself among colleagues who were intellectually adventurous and politically curious, medievalists working on Spain and Catalonia and a new generation of postgraduate students

interested in empire, labour and slavery. For Gwynn, this is like a hotbed of intellectual, you know, heavyweights. He's right at home here. One of his students was a guy called James Walvin who would go on to become a leading historian of Britain slave trade. And York in the 1960s felt nothing.

something like Aberystwyth had in the 1950s. Don't criticise Abaristwif, carry on. Take it easy. Favorite town in the world, but never mind, carry on. The York campus is alive with protest, left-wing politics, debate. And Gwynn arrived early enough to shape the curriculum. For the first time, he was free to teach what genuinely interested him. So as a result, he starts teaching working-class politics in Britain,

Italian communism, Spanish radical movements and increasingly the French Revolution. This, Gwynn, is right up my street. I would have loved all this. Yeah, yeah. Does sound like an exciting place, isn't it? Yeah. Exciting time.

It reminded me of like, when you see watch documentaries about American universities during the Vietnam War, they seem like so vibrant and alive with ideas and debate and protest. It feels, I never realized that was happening in York. Yes.

It's almost absurd to me that it would be happening in York. in the 60s. I hadn't considered it. In 1965, Gwyn published a slim pamphlet called Roland de Trossier, a working class infidel. It was about a self-taught 19th century radical, an autodidact who had risen from obscurity through education and activism. And for every student in York's first intake, they got a signed copy of this pamphlet that Gwyn had produced. So it wasn't just reading material, it was kind of a statement of intent. It was the kind of history that Gwynthorpe mattered.

Wow. It seems mad to me now because it feels like that kind of act would rile up a lot of right-wing politicians to say, you know, our students are being indoctrinated. I don't think you could do that now. You couldn't at all. Oh, yeah, yeah. You've been the Daily Mail, though. You couldn't, could you? No, absolutely not. That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah, because I think, because you have to remain, you're supposed to be unpolitical, aren't you really, or your politics are supposed to be your own to some extent, aren't they?

Yes. I mean, this is a big conversation. I get, today, I'm talking about today. Yeah, yeah. But that's not what I feel, but I think that's the reality probably of being in a head of a department at university. It's unlikely today you'd be able to push your own politicised leaflets to your incoming students, surely. I don't think you probably would be able to. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

I love this next bit about Quinn. So he hands out these leaflets and the students just adore him. They're like, God, these guys have so many ideas and, you know. Amazing. Particularly those students on the far left, they loved him. But there was the members of a group called the York anarchist group who really treated him as something close to a guru. I just so love the York anarchist group.

Yeah. The York anarchists feel different to any kind of anarchists. Yeah. But I can't quite imagine them. Yeah, I'm imagining sort of smoking jackets, meeting in quite a nice old pub to have a good chatter. anarchy. Yeah.

But not actually doing anything, particularly anarchic. No, it's the 60s. So very, very long hair, corduroy jacket. Is that what you're saying? Okay, right. Beards, massive beards. You can't be as parochial as York and an anarchist. Those two things just don't work.

So the York anarchists group walk around with badges that declared, we are all Welsh history professors. Right. And move over, Marcuse. And sometimes, with full revolutionary sincerity, they would chance. Viva Gwynn. That's incredible, isn't it? I consistently did not know the name of my lecturers,

let alone wearing a badge, supporting them. Viver Ellis, if I was a lecturer, I wouldn't mind a bit of that. You two will actually know one of my lecturers when I went to university. Iva Badele, David Badele's brother, who's a lovely man. TV comedy rides, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lovely man, yeah. By the mid-1960s, Gwynn wasn't just a campus figure. He was now a national intellectual presence,

reviewing for major newspapers involved in the history workshop movement and increasingly well-known in Canada and the United States. When I watch old YouTube black-and-white clips of like, there seems to be like on the BBC, BBC 1, I don't know if BBC 2 is around there, but a lot of the programmes seem to be late-night intellectual debates in black and white. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's so many.

It feels like it died out in the 90s. These kind of late night shows were just really clever people just sit around talking. Yeah. Gwynne feels like a big part of that movie. I could well imagine him there. Also, for those people, this is prior to the VHS recorder. So you couldn't record it and watch it back.

So if you wanted to watch that sort of stuff, you had to stay up until like you're watching the Super Bowl. Of course, yeah. So these intellectuals had to stay up till half two in the morning to watch it. I've not thought of that, yeah. When I see those programmes, do you think anyone ever actually stayed up to watch the debate? Or is it people coming back from the pub? It's people coming back from the pub.

And people who were sitting on the sofa who just could not be asked to brush their teeth and go to bed. Yeah, this is the age before the remote control. So you end up watching three intellectuals talking about the Labour movement in California. South Wales begins to pull Gwyn back emotionally and intellectually, as it does for so many who seem to come from South Wales. I listened to Michael Sheen's Desert Island Discs over Christmas and the pull of Port Talbot has pulled him back emotionally and intellectually. Yeah, yeah.

And it did for Gwynne. So his father died, Gwyn's father died in 1971. And at the same time, a younger generation of historians in Wales began to organise around Labour history. Gwyn had spent years researching the mirthor events of 1831, which he increasingly saw not as a riot, but an insurrection, a kind of working class rising. So when a chair in history opened up at University College Carlin,

Cardiff in 1974, he grabbed at the chance. And it would turn out to be, in our historian Darrell's words, his greatest professional mistake. So he arrives at Cardiff and he soon realizes that Cardiff is not York. It's not particularly youthful or radical. It wasn't experimental or noisy. No one is shouting Viva Gwyn. The campus felt old-fashioned.

Yeah, and that's why I decided 20 years later to study there. Same here. Yeah, fair review. And that is my greatest educational mistake. Yeah, Cardiff University, old-fashioned cautious, deeply unexciting, like many of its alumni. Gwyn quickly became restless and he travelled as much as he could, giving lectures abroad, visiting North America and doing anything that allowed him to escape. What he saw as a stifling environment, it sounds rubbish.

There was one last burst of York era energy in the mid-19th. 1970s when Gwynn collaborated with figures like Asa Briggs, George Rudey, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams on Charles Parker's landmark BBC radio series, The Long March of Every Man. And after that, the York chapter was closed. In Cardiff, Gwyn finally turned his full attention to the labour and social history of South Wales. Work he'd pursued on the side. And in 1978, he published The Murtha Rising.

It appeared at exactly the right moment on the eve of the 1979 devolution. referendum. The book captured the Welsh imagination and made Gwynne a public intellectual in Wales. Ever since, students of Welsh history have been assigned it, often absorbing it as gospel truth. I don't know much about the 1979 devolution referendum. From what I remember, it was roundly sort of turned down and rejected in Wales. In Scotland, more than 50% wanted devolution, I think, but you had to get over a certain proportion for it to go through, and they didn't reach that proportion. So it's two quite different. The 79 Devolution Referendum,

that was one of the things that David I wrote Amarheda about because he found it very depressing because it was rummedly rejected. The phrase from what I remember makes it sound like you're trying to remember from when you were a baby. No, no. Just sat in the cop.

Yeah, exactly. What do I remember from when I was in my mother's arms? Yeah, because I was a public intellectual. Because I was a world's brightest baby. The world's brightest baby sounds like a funny TV. show. It's a great ITV show that, isn't it? Yeah. So the devolution referendum fails, and later in

1979, Margaret Thatcher comes to power, and Gwynne delivered a BBC radio lecture titled When Was Wales? The pamphlet sold out immediately, and I believe you've got a copy oh, haven't you? Oh yeah, it's a great book. I've read it several times. I read it at school, I read it at university, I read it for fun a couple years ago.

It's brilliant, yeah. It marked a turning point, pulling Quinn closer to Welsh nationalism and what was often called the national question. As he put it in 1980, do not eliminate the valleys, eliminate the society which can treat the valleys only as a folk museum. I love that. Love that. Al, can you come and look after the kids? I can't, sorry, I'm reading a pamphlet about that show. Why do you keep reading this pamphlet? It's a really important times when we're trying to get stuff done as a family.

Yeah. I suppose you put your family ahead of intellectual pursuits, do you? I see looking after my family as an intellectual critique. I probably wouldn't do that myself. I'd probably just reading a pamphlet about being a great dad. Yeah, you do you. Yeah, well, I'm reading pamphlets about the national question. Gwyn's radicalism wasn't just academic. As early as 1974, he was a founding member of the communist organisation, the British Isles.

A tiny Marxist-Leninist group committed to theory, practice and revolutionary disson. The group took seriously the problems of Ireland and Wales, and unusually for the British left at the time, supported membership of the European Common Market. Corbyn turning in his grave. That's mad to me. In later years, when Gwynne described himself as a Welsh European, this background mattered.

Cardiff only became more bearable when Di Smith arrived from Swansea. Together they created a pioneering course in Welsh history, which proved hugely popular and influential, but even then Gwyn often seemed to be chasing something he'd lost. What he wanted really was the sound of a radical campus behind him. And just once more, he wanted to hear the faint echo of students shouting, Viva Gwynne. Wow, what a guy. Exciting life.

Let's find out what happened to him. So, to wrap up the story of this incredible life of Gwyn Alph, I'm going to tell you about the 10 end of his career and discuss his legacy. Very briefly, what do you want your legacy to be? What are you thinking? Greatest podcaster of my age. I'd just say a man noted for his commercial and critical success. Okay, nice.

Well, I'm sure both are hugely achievable. So handsome he would turn heads. You can tell yourself that as they're turning. Yeah. Yes, because I'm so handsome. Exactly. So it's now in 1980. Gwyn is 55 years old and he's still somewhere off retirement.

He's desperate to get out of Cardiff and he's feeling sort of very, depressed about his situation. And on top of that, to sort of deal with this stress, unfortunately, he's drinking more and more. I don't know if you know about this, Al. But towards the end of his life, he's just not looking after himself. His marriage is failing. His mother dies at this time. And it sort of started to affect his work. I mean, brilliant mind, brilliant guy, brilliant man. But it's fair to say that during this period, he wasn't taking the care with his work that he had previously. He's starting to take shortcuts in his writing. He's starting to lift stuff from others, whenever he needed to, or simply borrowing from his own past when that

was not possible. And what had been a glittering career, in many ways, were sort of teetering on the edge of implosion. Are you aware of that, sort of this difficult period in his life? Not really, but I do know that he was very close to Dye Smith, and I did, I used to love Dye's books as well. I've read lots of Dyes books. I've met Dye once or twice, and he's a lovely bloke. Well, it's interesting you bring up Dye Smith, because Dye is one of the people that basically saves Gwynn from this point of implosion. There's three things that really save him at this difficult point in his life. The kindness of his colleagues, most notably Dye Smith,

who rescued him from pubs around Cardiff when booze and despair took hold. It's interesting this sort of this intellectual, so many of these intellectuals are also troubled by, you know, ups and downs and drink. It's often a story that you see through a lot of these sort of people. It's why I don't have a problem with drink. I'm just not clever enough. You're too thick to be troubled. 100%.

Exactly. The other thing that saved him were the shifting political sand at the moment, which gave previously peripheral ideas more of a voice than they had, and also the arrival of a television documentary in search of a star as their centrepiece. And that documentary was called The Dragon Has Two Tongues. Now, Elle, have you heard of this? Oh, my God. This was huge.

My dad is still talking about it. Really? And it was on in the mid-80s. And the funny thing with it, it's somebody has created its legacy is, or has helped its legacy, it's never been repeated. Yes.

So it was shown on the TV in the 1980s. People absolutely loved it, but it's never been shown again. Yes, it's interesting. The discussion of it has almost become myth. A lot of the people who love this show actually haven't seen this show. Yeah, absolutely.

Because it's not easy to get hold of and it hasn't been repeated. Yeah, yeah. Someone sent me like a really, really, really, terrible copy of it online. Yeah, but it's completely played in the mythology of Gwynn Alf, and it was vitally important for the sort of road the final part of his career took. For some context, at this point, Gwynn considered the Welsh a defeated people. That's how he described them, famously describing them as naked under an acid rain.

What a sentence that is. But in his view, what was important was how you tackle the consequences of that defeat. So he pointed to the wave of revolutions, which broke across Europe in 1848. which inspired Karl Marx and Engels to write their famous manifesto, Gwynne referenced how defeat can bring a clear sightedness in how you should march forward. So 1848 had Marx and Engels. Mussolini's reaction in Italy in the 1920s had Gramski.

And basically the question was, would Gwynne be the one for Thatcher? Because he definitely felt he could be. This is what he said. It has rarely been in the celebration of victory, but rather in the re-evaluation, forced by defeat that Marxist political discourse has most enriched itself. This offers some consolation as we move forward to what may prove to be the 18 Brumere of Margaret Thatcher. The idea being that in defeat you can learn a lot.

Yeah. And that can inform how you go forward from that point. The audience for such thoughts was small, but crucially, the producers of the Dragon has two tongues were desperate for a counterfoil to their already booked and liberal presenter. at Winford Vaughn Thomas. And here was the Marxist Gwyn Alph Williams right on cue. And so the documentary series

kicks off and to begin with they butt horns. In the prolog, Thomas is shown in a college common room telling his audience that history is divine gossip. It's a beautiful language here.

Williams has seen on a protest in Mertha Tidfield declaring history is like the sweat that gets into your eyes. Incredible, isn't it? I know, that's class, isn't it? It's quite different to our show where we discuss

my love of custard and stuff like that. It was an argument on telly because Thomas, Winford Vaughn Thomas was liberal and Winf Williams was a Marxist. So they just argued on screen. However, they actually believed in the same thing, which was Welsh nationhood. And it was of huge benefit to Gwynalph's career. He went on, because of the success of this documentary,

to make several more documentaries in the 80s and 90s in English and Welsh. There were one-offs, there were short series. He took in topics such as, the poet Saunders Lewis, the King Arthur legend, the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the Welsh role in the creation of Donnesque in Ukraine. Interestingly, that last experience filmed on location in Ukraine sort of shattered what remained of Gwyn's communism.

There's a scene where he squeezed into a coal mine in atrocious conditions and he says to the camera, good God, this is meant to be a workers' state. So he made this huge range of programs off the success of, of this key documentary. And then sadly, Gwyn died of cancer in 1995, a few short weeks after his 70th birthday, by which time I think he's probably arguable he was better known as a TV historian by that point

more than his career as an academic. Obviously, as an academic, that's how you know him. But for most people, by that point, he was known as a TV historian. And so the question, I suppose, at the end of all this is, what is Gwynn House legacy? as a scholar, some would say it's relatively slight, as he was more influential for his persona

than for his strength of argument. But he was the first celebrity academic to emerge in the 20th century in Wales and someone with an incredible skill for holding people's attention. And 30 years ago, Gwynne was christened by his admirers as a people's remembrancer, someone who is able to break down the barriers

between academia's ivory towers and the great majority of ordinary people, which of course is what we're trying to do here, isn't it, guys. That's what we're trying to do. Oh, yeah. We're trying to break down the barriers between academia. The general public. And while the true excavation of the past,

the work of history was done by others, his ability to capture people's interests was unmatched, and boy, could he write. Listen to this, this is a beautiful description of how he saw history, and it references a little line I read earlier. He said, history is more than a page of a book. History is the,

buckle that bites your back. History is the sweat that you can't keep out of your eyes. History is the fear crawling in your belly. Isn't that just amazing? The fear crawling in your belly is such a lap. It's just beautiful. What amazing writing. He had an amazing voice.

And so when he was on, I think, programs like The Dragon Has Two Tongues, a slight stammer from what I remember. He used to use that to great effect. Oh, interesting. And he was just a very, very, very powerful orator. So he was a really, really compelling presence on telly. Yeah. But yeah, fascinating life. Fascinating chat. So if any of our listeners were to read something, L, by Gwynalph that you think people might enjoy, what would you point them towards?

This person you've loved, and the reason we've done this show is because you love him. What should people be pointed towards? When was Wales from 1985 and the Murther Rising from 1978 and I read a really interesting pamphlet he wrote on the Silurian Republic but I think that would be very very hard to get but when those wheels you'd be able to get that on you know in any bookshop and the dragon has two tongues you can find somewhere as Elle said but it's now in bad quality looks like you filmed on a potato the quality will be terrible yeah yeah but a fascinating guy incredible life and it's interesting all the things he's been through and also the times that he lived through.

I thought it was very interesting that he denounced communism. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Oh, the Saludian Republic, if you want to read that. Oh, sorry, it's in Welsh. I've forgotten about that. Well, if you speak Welsh, I mean, if you're a Welsh speaker,

it's very, very interesting. But I had forgotten that isn't much. Oh, no, no, no, no, it's translated. It's being translated and it's online. So you just got to scroll through the Welsh bit, which is first, and then I'm just looking at it now. Southern Republic on Gwynoffwilliams.co.uk. So there we go.

He's got a website. Yeah, I mean, there would have been nothing to do it in. But anyway, thank you very much for downloading. We'll be back with you next week. If you've got a topic you'd like to suggest to us, send it to hello at ohwatertime.com. So that wraps up our episode on Gwyn Alth. Thank you, Elle, for suggesting that.

What a fascinating guy. And if you are an O Watertime All-Timer, which is the top tier for our Patreon fans. Once a month, we are doing an episode suggested by you. So if you have an idea for someone you're fascinated by, a period of history, you wanted to hear more about anything really, and you're in that band, send us a suggestion. And once a month, we will do an episode related to those suggestions.

And then also, don't forget this Thursday, the 15th of January Underbelly Boulevard, oh, what a time live for the first time. A history of London. You're going to want to be there. We've written the show. It's going to be a really fun night. Medieval London.

Roman London. Victorian London. It's all going to be there. You can get tickets via the link in the description to this episode or via ohwattertime.com or just go on the Underbelly Boulevard website. And we'll see you on Thursday. See you soon. Until then.

Bye-bye. Bye. Oh, Water Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else. Add free. plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the Oh What a Time group chat. Plus if you become an O Water Time All-Timer, myself Tom and Ellis will riff on your name to postulate where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash oh what a time.