occupying new territory team of the recently established Welsh Region. In September 1939 he was relocated
toLondon as part of the corporation’s centralized news service: as radio announcer,
he faced the pressing creative challenge of satisfying the demands put on the
Welsh language by a modern-day broadcasting organization.^9 Around 2,920 people
registered as conscientious objectors in Wales during the Second World War, and
the Welsh Nationalist Party advocated a neutral stance for Wales.^10 The nationalist
opposition to war had in fact been galvanized by the events surrounding the burning
in 1936 of a proposed bombing school in the Llˆyn Peninsula by three prominent
Welshmen, amongst them Saunders Lewis. This event seems to have had a greater
impact and influence upon Welsh-language writers than the Second World War.^11
Neither neutralism nor pacifism were viable options for Llywelyn-Williams; he
increasingly felt a moral duty to join the military fight against fascism and Nazism.
As a Welshman he could not regard himself divorced from the immediate threat
facing civilization on an international plane. Together with fellow broadcasters
and writers like Elwyn Evans and Geraint Dyfnallt Owen, as well as 300,000 other
Welshmen, and in contrast to the dramatist John Gwilym Jones and the poet Waldo
Williams, who represented the nationalist and pacifist minority opposition to war,
Llywelyn-Williams joined the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in November 1940. By July
1942 he was a lieutenant stationed at Brecon, in charge of training new recruits, but
such was the obligation he felt to take part in active combat against the enemy that
he volunteered to serve abroad, and therefore experienced the War in Germany
and Belgium from November 1944 onwards.
Civilian
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Llywelyn-Williams was never a prolific poet: his collected poems, published in 1979
inYGolauynyGwyll(‘The Light in the Gloom’), total eighty-five; three-quarters
of them belong to the period 1934–56. Although most of Llywelyn-Williams’s
poetic responses to the Second World War are included within the section entitled
‘War’ inPont y Caniedydd(‘The Songster’s Bridge’, 1956), his first volume—Cerddi
(^9) Llywelyn-Williams refers to some of the challenges he faced inGwanwyn yn y Ddinas, 162–3. See
also John Davies,Broadcasting and the BBC in Wales(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), 128:
‘The bulletins gave Llywelyn-Williams the opportunity to put into practice his ideas about the dignity
of broadcast Welsh, and many of his coinages, particularly those for war terms—the wordawyren
(aeroplane), for example—became incorporated into the language.’ 10
See D. Hywel Davies, ‘The War Years’, inThe Welsh Nationalist Party 1925–1945: A Call to
Nationhood(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1983), 223–59.
(^11) This is certainly Gwyn Thomas’ssuggestion in ‘Cofio Alun Llywelyn-Williams’,Barn, 307 (Aug.
1988), 45: ‘Welsh poetry has on the whole confined her attention to this side of the War as it were, and
Penyberth and what happened there is the major experience in Welsh literature.’ See also ‘Penyberth’,
in Stephens (ed.),The New Companion to the Literature of Wales, 581.