Treachery of the Blue Books

The public inquiry was carried out as a result of pressure from William Williams, Radical MP for Coventry, who was himself a Welshman by birth and was concerned about the state of education in Wales. It was carried out by three English commissioners, Ralph Lingen, 1st Baron Lingen, Jellynger C. Symons and H. R. Vaughan Johnson. The commissioners visited every part of Wales during 1846, collecting evidence and statistics. However, they spoke no Welsh and relied on information from witnesses, many of them Anglican clergymen at a time when Wales was a stronghold of nonconformism.

The work was completed in 1847 and printed in November of that year in three large blue-covered volumes ("blue books" being a widely used term for all kinds of parliamentary reports). The report was detailed. It concluded that schools in Wales were extremely inadequate, often with teachers speaking only English and using only English textbooks in areas where the children spoke only Welsh, and that Welsh-speakers had to rely on the Nonconformist Sunday Schools to acquire literacy. But it also concluded that the Welsh were ignorant, lazy and immoral, and that among the causes of this were the use of the Welsh language and nonconformity.

The commissioners often simply reported verbatim the prejudiced opinions of landowners and local Anglican clergy. The more bilious editorial attacks on Welsh culture mostly emanated from Commissioner Lingen and others who worked with him.

The report's publication resulted in a furious reaction in Wales, led by the bard Robert Jones Derfel. Derfel's book-length response, Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, was published in 1854 by I. Clarke in Ruthin; it had no immediate political consequences, but was instrumental in the birth of the modern Welsh self-government movement. A measure of the anger aroused by the report in Wales is the subtitle Brad y Llyfrau Gleision. It is a reference to the infamous "Treachery of the Long Knives" when, according to Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Saxons began their campaign of conquest against the native Britons.

The Books remain an invaluable, although slanted, source of information on mid-19th century Welsh society.

Saunders Lewis, in Tynged yr Iaith, maintained that the Blue Books were for Welsh history "the most important nineteenth-century historical documents we possess".[2] Such a judgement also reflects the fact that the publication of the reports, and the controversy that followed, was the catalyst for a much greater level of nonconformist involvement in the politics of Wales than hitherto. Critics such as the Reverend Evan Jones (Ieuan Gwynedd), Rev William Rees (Gwilym Hiraethog), Henry Richard, the Rev Thomas Price and Sir Thomas Phillips[3] gained wide publicity for their trenchant criticisms of the reports. Over time these criticisms evolved into an organised political action, which culminated at the General Election of 1868.

Although much discussion of the Blue Books has centered on the essentialist criticism of the Welsh as a people, in his book Pam na fu Cymru (2015: published in English in 2017 as Why Wales Never Was), Simon Brooks argued that the Blue Books were a fundamentally liberal project in that the authors were sincerely concerned with the material wellbeing of the Welsh, as individuals. The argument that the Blue Books put forward, suggests Brooks, was that embracing the English language would allow the Welsh to achieve their potential and take full part in British civic society.[4]

Digital scans of the Blue Books (amounting to 1,252 pages) were published online by the National Library of Wales in 2005.[1]

• Welsh Not
• Elen Egryn
• Evan Jones (Ieuan Gwynedd)
• Education (Scotland) Act 1872

• John Davies, Hanes Cymru (1993) (also in English translation as A History of Wales, Penguin, 1994, ISBN 0-14-014581-8)

• The Blue Books at the National Library of Wales: introduction and historical context
  • Part 1: Carmarthen, Glamorgan and Pembroke
  • Part 2: Brecknock, Cardigan, Radnor and Monmouth
  • Part 3: North Wales, comprising Anglesey, Carnarvon, Denbigh, Flint, Meirioneth and Montgomery