Penybryn is crammed into a thin strip of land overlooking the undulating hills of the South Wales Valleys. The village only exists because of the nearby Penallta colliery, but that closed in 1991, with the last shift led out by brass band. The village has never been the same since, and today only a solitary pub and a community centre that never quite looks open give the place a semblance of life.
I was here to hunt down one particular life: John Barnard Jenkins. “I think he works down Blackwood,” said one man, referring to a neighbouring town. One woman was sure Jenkins lived at the far end of the village. A group of teenagers shouted “cachau bant!” when I asked them. I’ll leave you to translate. Most people had never heard of him. The fact is that John Barnard Jenkins died in 2020, aged 87, in Wrexham. But he grew up in Penybryn, where he moved with his family aged seven during the Second World War. It was a comfortable and “an idyllic childhood” he later wrote, with his “modern” home complete with back garden and indoor toilet.
That life would soon transform into something less savoury. During his teenage years, Jenkins began reading books on Welsh history, concluding that his nation had been “downtrodden”. Within a few decades, he would become for a brief period the UK’s most wanted and well-organised terrorist, as leader of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (Movement for the Defence of Wales). The flooding of Tryweryn Valley in 1965, to make way for a private reservoir in Liverpool, and the Aberfan disaster a year later both pushed him into action. In 1969, when the then Prince Charles came to Wales for his investiture, Jenkins tried to kill him with a homemade bomb.
As I discovered at Penybryn, all that is ancient history now, as is the fervency with which nationalist sentiment exploded in Wales in the last century. You won’t find many people willing to kill for Cymru today. But you will find a growing nationalism which is finding ever-greater resonance among young Welshmen and women. Together with a rise of Welsh political identity, it could yet burst out from behind the Severn and leave Westminster reeling.
Nationalism always begins with history. But before 2022, Welsh history wasn’t a mandatory subject in the nation’s schools. Instead, students learned about King Charles I and the Battle of Hastings, of The Canterbury Tales and Henry VIII (with only a murmur of his Welsh heritage). Many here say that’s a legacy of English colonialism, deployed to prevent the formation of Welsh identity outside the community. To explain what they mean, some mention the so-called “Welsh Not”. The wooden tokens hung around the necks of students who dared speak their native tongue in class remained common into the 20th century.
Today, generations of Welsh men and women have been left bereft of any stories onto which they can fix themselves. In the south of the country, especially, the most discerning embodiment of Welshness I found was rooted in the fact that people weren’t English. But now, social media is changing that. There has been an explosion of accounts promoting the splendours of Welsh culture: Roseanne Garcia explores the country’s natural hidden beauty; Doctor Cymraeg details the origins of the Welsh language; Diwydiant Bythynnod reimagines ancient Welsh tales through stunning paintings.
Samuel Talbot, the 27-year-old creator of TheSilureAdventurer (“Silure” refers to an ancient Welsh tribe), only got thinking about the past after his teacher told him that Welsh and English history were identical. “I remember thinking: I don’t like that,” he tells me. Talbot combines photographs of natural and historic sites with myths, legends, and folklore to create a digital window into Wales’s forgotten past, emphasising that his is indeed a country with its own identity.
“Wales is the forgotten nation of the British Isles,” Talbot says, his voice so urgent you feel his life depends on it. He speaks in sharp, fierce bursts. “We’ve been persecuted for the longest, but we’ve the widest history. I want to honour our people, the heroes in our history that people don’t know about. I want to change our country’s course.”
Much of what Talbot talks about happened centuries ago, but he’s not alone in looking back. Many here remember fondly Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last native prince of an independent Wales. Drive through many parts of Wales, meanwhile, and you’ll increasingly see the red and yellow coat of arms of Owain Glyndŵr’s, the 14th-century Welsh nobleman who defied English rule. Michael Sheen, for his part, will play Glyndŵr in the Welsh National Theatre’s first production in 2026, while the medieval soldier regularly comes out second only to Aneurin Bevan in polls on Wales’s national heroes.
Some suggest the long march of devolution has triggered this increased fervour about identity, and with it a meditation on the past. Others look to an awakening in pride through sport, particularly after Wales’s outsized performance at the 2016 European Football Championship, when The Dragons reached the semi-finals. Adam Price, the former leader of Plaid Cymru, believes this sense of feeling is bound in Wales’s tradition of storytelling. “These figures,” he says, “give people a way to make sense and meaning of their present-day situation.”
Yet whatever the truth, it’s also clear that, amid the romantic wallowing, social media allows an increasing number of Welshmen and women to see their history in far starker hues. Dale Hughes runs the King_chrxn Instagram page, which has almost 20,000 followers. The 29-year-old’s feed is mired in disgust at the nation’s recent past. From Tryweryn to Aberfan, Hughes creates close-to-the-bone videos of the events combined with unsettling archive footage. The strategy’s clearly popular. One look at King_chrxn’s comment section finds a deluge of supportive messages.
Hughes doesn’t speak Welsh, like 74% of people in Wales. Yet, like Talbot, he feels an urgency in spreading Wales’s history to the masses. “Before I knew it, I’d fallen into a rabbit hole,” he says, after learning about Tryweryn. “I couldn’t believe what I hadn’t been taught about. I just thought: how has this been hidden from us?” He’s not alone: Hughes receives messages everyday from people furious with what they call “Westminster colonialism”. To his delight, he also says his videos have inspired many to take direct action in their own ways. “People send me photos of their nationalist graffiti all the time. Whereas before they would write, ‘David sucks dick’, now there’s cultural symbols. It hit me as, ‘Yes, this is working.’”
I wonder at what point these small acts might turn into bigger things. “Let’s just say, if Meibion Glwndŵr was recruiting, and I didn’t have kids, I’d probably take it into consideration,” Hughes tells me, referencing the paramilitary group that carried out arson attacks against English-owned second homes in the Eighties and Nineties.
Perhaps John Barnard Jenkins shared similar initial reservations before sliding into terrorism. He did, after all, join the British Army and later the Territorials to serve the UK abroad. But there’s a fine line between anger and action. Talking about his Welsh history books, Jenkins himself conceded: “As the years went by, my feelings intensified, leading me to believe, more and more, that it was up to me to do something about it.”
“There’s a fine line between anger and action”
Still, despite the tub-thumping of people like Hughes, there’s little sign the Welsh are planning to reach for their longbows. In the long term, a more ominous development for the Westminster establishment is the rising popularity of Welsh culture. Music is undergoing something of a revolution here. Over the past decade, there’s been no end of singers, bands, and even rappers keen to pick Welsh over English in distilling meaning into their art. Welsh crime novels are thriving and TV shows such as Game of Thrones have drawn deeply on Celtic mythology.
And where culture leads, politics has followed. According to one recent poll, a full 72% of Welsh people aged 25-35 back independence. Soon enough, that could bring a political earthquake. For if Wales is still passionate about its working-class roots — it’s still the only UK nation to have voted Labour at every general election since 1922 — Plaid Cymru is waiting in the wings. It comfortably leads Labour in polls for next year’s Senedd vote, and Rhun ap Iorwerth, the party’s leader, is already talking about potential independence referendums.
But if Hughes’s flirtation with arson tells us anything, it’s that nationalism can easily tip from pride into violence — just ask John Barnard Jenkins. The likes of Iorwerth say the work of Jenkins and others in the 20th century didn’t reflect the Welsh nationalist mainstream, hence why their groups no longer exist. But people still look to them for inspiration, and still see Gruffydd and Glyndŵr as heroes.
The reality, of course, is that all these people did bad things. Jenkins blew things up and wasn’t afraid to kill. Gruffyd and Glyndŵr slaughtered their own, with the latter’s efforts leading to widespread famine. What’s indisputable, meanwhile, is that even peaceful nationalists such as Iorwerth are increasingly resentful about Wales’s place in the UK’s political pecking order. Wales, he says, isn’t working, pointing to the estimated £3.9 billion of Welsh money going on HS2 — a railway project that doesn’t have a single track west of the Severn. There are other things, too, from an NHS starved of central government funding to the recent defunding of Welsh language radio stations.
Then there’s the broader economic malaise, accelerated by Thatcherism and the dismantling of the country’s industrial economy. Today, one in five people in Wales lives in relative income poverty. The overall poverty rate is 23%, higher than anywhere else in the UK. While England boasts a GDP per capita of £34,241, the average Welshmen brings home just £24,443. That’s even as Wales remains the hardest part of the UK for first-time buyers to get onto the property ladder.
In other words, there are plenty of more abrasive causes Welsh nationalists could yet latch on to. But there’s another possibility too — one where Welsh emotions are fired not towards the red dragon but to the Union Jack. Wales has been tied to England and Britain for hundreds of years, and its people share many of the same grievances felt by their English, Scottish, and Northern Irish kin. In recent years, much of that anger has come because of immigration. And though Wales has largely escaped the sorts of numbers settling in England, annual arrivals did rise by almost 50,000 in the decade to 2022. It should come as no surprise, then, that Reform is on the rise here too — polling at 25% for next year’s Senedd elections. And if John Barnard Jenkins has now passed into history, imprisoned in 1970 for treason before dying in obscurity, the valleys have long hosted other forms of extremism too.
In 2001, sociologist Marie Gillespie undertook a fieldwork study in South Wales exploring the rise of racism in former industrial communities. Noting the presence of far-Right graffiti, she wrote: “A subtle racism bubbles in the dark underbelly of these communities. The strength of feeling is difficult to assess, unpredictable, but potentially explosive.”
Though there was an influx of English and Italians migrant workers in the early 20th century, Gillespie’s words arrived at a time when immigration into Wales was almost non-existent. Walk through somewhere like Ystrad Mynach today — a town just 10 minutes from John Barnard Jenkins’s old stomping-ground of Penybryn — and you’ll find Vietnamese nail bars, Kurdish barbers, Iraqi mini marts. All have appeared in just the last decade.
If there was a dark underbelly in 2001, what will become of these communities when they are faced with a tangible presence of immigrants? While Iorwerth is confident that “this kind of nationalism has never been Wales”, I can’t help but think back to Jenkins, and how his history books ultimately led to homemade bombs. Yes, it is a different kind of angst. But fed up with rising costs, and grappling with the highest unemployment rate in Britain, might some young Welshmen look to a radical form of British nationalism?
Just beyond Penybryn sits Gelligaer, another former mining town, and home to a sprawling council estate. As I approach its worn, green sign, I see graffiti scrawled across a nearby wall. The words become clearer as I get closer: “No dinghy divers!” It’s a stark, sour reference to migrants arriving here on small boats — and one that could foreshadow the kind of action that propelled John Barnard Jenkins to infamy.
