Treachery of the Blue Books
[2]: 881–2 According to the author and business academic,[3][4] Simon Brooks, the Blue Books are regarded today as "colonial diktat", and are "the most important ideological intervention by the British state in Wales in the 19th century.
[5]: 96 In 1833 the government had started to contribute towards the cost of erecting both National Society and British Schools; at the same time, the Church of England wanted to control education.
In 1843, after strong protests against it, Robert Peel's Conservative government abandoned a bill that would have established schools for the poor, and ensured that they were run by Anglicans.
[2]: 881–2 The report exaggerated the weaknesses of the Welsh education system, according to historian John Davies in A History of Wales (Penguin 1994) 'because of the ignorance and the prejudice of the Commissioners.
[11]: 391 According to academic and author Brooks, who is a member of Plaid Cymru,[3] "the Welsh-language community was so bereft of rights that it was used by politicians in central Europe as an example of linguistic subjugation.
[13] The commissioners appointed by the Privy Council's committee on education, were three young English law graduates; Ralph Lingen, Jelinger C. Symons, and Henry R. Vaughan Johnson [cy].
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).
[citation needed] Society It is rarely observed that the commissioners complimented the Welsh on their hunger for education, and noted the sacrifices many were prepared to make to acquire it, the intelligence they brought to bear on theological matters, bred in Sunday schools, and their quickness in mathematics.The report was damning of the Welsh people, and "mildly pornographic in parts" (Brooks),[1]: 76 characterising them as dirty, ignorant, lazy, and immoral.
[citation needed] They often asked complicated questions, according to the historian John Davies, and relied on bad translations, and misinterpreted the pupils' answers.
[11]: 391 Staunch Anglicans refuted the report,[11]: 391 next came the satirical attacks and statistically-based analytical challenge of the facts from Evan Jones (Ieuan Gwynedd), a Nonconformist journalist.
[12]: 100 "Eloquent speeches" by Nonconformists such as Henry Richard and the essays of Ieuan Gwynedd[11]: 391 as well as angry nationalistic responses came from editors of the Welsh journals, particularly the 'incisive articles' by Lewis Edwards in Y Traethodydd and David Rees in Y Diwygiwr.
[11]: 392 [12]: 100 In an apparent attempt to turn the attacks to the advantage of the Nonconformists, Jones (Ieuan Gwynedd) suggested that the Welsh nation had been unjustly condemned on religious rather than nationalistic grounds.
The play's title referenced the reports' blue covers and evoked a much earlier Welsh myth, Brad y Cyllyll Hirion (The Treason of the Long Knives), a story of the Anglo-Saxons settling in Britain by trickery,[20] when, according to Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Saxons began their campaign of conquest against the native Britons.
