The walls of the
Disgwylfa Chapel in Merthyr Vale slowly crumble.
Cement and render peel away revealing the stone foundation underneath.
This Chapel was built one hundred years ago.
On this the Centenary year since it was built it seems to be ‘giving up the ghost’.
There is an eerie, ghost-like quality to this grimey old Valleys Chapel.
The Chapel is situated adjacent to the small village post office.
It is not difficult to imagine the former glories of this Chapel or what contribution it made to this village.
Climb the embankment a few feet from the Chapel and you can see the familiar site of a cemetery.
Therein lie the children’s graves in the nearby village of Aberfan.
Thousands of these Chapel buildings were built in Wales during the past two to three hundred years.
Merthyr Vale is not unique in having a Chapel crumble on its doorstep.
The same story is repeated the length and breadth of this country.
Thus day by day we are losing part of our national architectural heritage.
The Welsh word “disgwylfa” translates as “watch tower”.
It is painful to witness the Welsh Chapel walls crumble in our communities.
This photo (and others) of one the world’s oldest surviving railway bridges located near Aberdare uploaded to
Flickr and released under a Creative Commons license.
Peter Clarke Wales’ first Children’s Commissioner died early on Sunday, 21st January 2007. He was a good man who has contributed much towards the well being of children in Wales and beyond.
We choose to remember Peter Clarke in the words of John Holt, from his book “How Children Fail”, which travelled through Ysgol Rhydfelen in the eighties, as well as many other schools in Wales in the nineties and beyond :
“School tends to be a dishonest as well as a nervous place. We adults are not often honest with children, least of all in school. We tell them, not what we think, but what we feel they ought to think; or what other people feel or tell us they ought to think. Pressure groups find it easy to weed out of our classrooms, texts, and libaries, whatever facts, truths, and ideas they happen to find unpleasant or inconvenient. And we are not even as truthful with children as we could safely be. Even in the most non-controversial areas our teaching, the books, and the textbooks we give children present a dishonest and distorted picture of the world.
The fact is that we do not feel an obligation to be truthful to children. We are like the managers and manipulators of news in Washington, Moscow, London, Peking, Paris and Cardiff, and all the other capitals of the world. We think it our right and our duty, not to tell the truth, but to say whatever will best serve our cause - in this case, the cause of making children grow up into the kind of people we want them to be, thinking whatever we want them to think. We have only to convince ourselves (and we are very easily convinced) that a lie will be “better” for the children than the truth, and we will lie. We don’t always need even that excuse; we often life only for our own convenience.”
- John Holt, ‘How Children Fail’ (Pitman, 1964)
* Celebrating the life of Peter Clarke http://www.celebratingpeter.org/
Rhondda’s dynamic duo Chris Bryant MP and Leighton Andrews AM attempt to bully Burberry at a press conference held at the Welsh Assembly this week. They are photographed looking steely faced and determined whilst holding a Burberry poster alongside their own “Made in China” poster. They aim below the belt, hitting Burberry hardest where it hurts : the Burberry brand name.
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Fifteen years ago the Labour Party boldly claimed “New Year - New Government” in their member magazine. They printed a photograph of a confident-looking Neil Kinnock, the would-be Prime Minister.
The Commentary in that magazine exuded promise of better things :
This New Year is Special.
It is the year in which the Tories run out of time. They can dither and delay no longer. 1992 is the year of the General Election. 1992 will be the year in which Britain elects a Labour Government.
The New Year is a time for new ideas.
Time for new people, the energy, the vision, the policies to strengthen and modernise the British economy. Time for a new team with commitment to the values of social justice needed to raise standards of care and opportunity.
Time for a new government.
Three months later and Neil Kinnock would be standing in front of a rally of Labour Party members in Sheffield claiming triumphantly “We’re alright! We’re alright”. A week after that Labour lost the General Election. Kinnock resigned immediately.
As the Welsh Assembly elections approach, Labour First Minister Rhodri Morgan provides a predictably punchy New Year message :
The start of a new year is always a time for reflection, as well as for scanning the horizon. 2006 was a remarkable year for the Welsh economy. There are now 130.000 more jobs than there were when the Assembly came into existence seven and a half years ago.
On behalf of the Labour Party, I make this promise: whatever the results of May’s elections, we will not go into a government with the Tories - only a vote for Labour will keep the Tories out of Welsh Government
My challenge to the other parties is to make the same commitment but I do so knowing that they cannot deliver. A vote for Plaid Cymru or a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote to return Wales to the dark days of Tory misrule. Only Labour offers a future of hope, confidence and social justice.
The people of Blaenau Gwent rejected Rhodri Morgan’s Labour Party a few months ago because they were, in the words of Trish Law AM, “more Tory than the Tories”. Rhodri Morgan has little to be confident about.
