Meg Elis I’r Gad (1975), Carchar (1978) and Cyn Daw’r Gaeaf (1985)

Abstract

Meg Elis was sent to HMP Moor Court, an open prison for women located at Oakamoor, Staffordshire, for 6 months in 1975. This was the result of her part in an exercise in direct action taken by Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg against the television transmitter at Holme Moss, south Pennines in England in 1973. In the subsequent court case she was given a six month suspended sentence. This was re-imposed when she took part in further similar such direct action event at Aberystwyth Post Office in 1974. During 1973 and 1974 Elis was a full-time secretary of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg and, as such, political activism was not an emphereal venture but a job, a professional occupation and perhaps a way of life too. In many ways Elis was typical of the generation of Welsh language activists whose version of radicalism was at least partly informed by the dramatic social and protest movements of the 1960s. The linguistic and performative alterity of her personal name (she is also known as Marged Dafydd, Marged Elis, Meg Ellis) signals the influence of Owain Owain, a foundational activist of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg who advertised in ‘Tafod y Ddraig’ the fact of his Cymricising his name in changing it from /Owen Owen/ and encouraged others to do the same.1 Elis’s use of the notion of Wales as a prison concides with the development of the concept of the carceral state in French philosophical literature while at the same time echoing Owain’s novel Y Dydd Olaf (1976) [The Last Day] that situates the gradual development of a totalitarian state in the Welsh context.KeywordsSocial MovementActivist SensibilityCreative WritingNuclear DisarmamentPeace MovementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.