Malcolm Bebb <bebb(a)embetech.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>As a Yorkshireman he would not have spoken Welsh, and it has been
suggested
>to me that the reason he went back to Yorkshire was that Welsh
language
>teaching was to be introduced, and he would have been unable to do this.
Can
>anyone tell me, please, when elementary schools would have
started to use
>Welsh?
I'm not totally sure on this, but...
It was (British = English) policy for a long time that the Welsh language
should be suppressed, or at best not encouraged. Even in the 1940s,
children were punished (in Monmouthshire, at least) for speaking Welsh in
school and the existence of the language was but grudgingly tolerated.
The re-introduction of Welsh would be (guessing here!) around the 1970s.
On
that basis, I think your ancestor would have missed it.
Thanks for those thoughts. However, I have read in several places that the
use of Welsh in schools was officially sanctioned from the 1870s. What I was
wondering was whether local school managers might have introduced it
unofficially in the early 1860s, thus putting pressure on a non-Welsh
speaker to resign.
I haven't looked into the 20th century use of Welsh: might it have fallen
into disuse earlier in the century, so that it needed to be reintroduced?
Maybe it varied according to county/region.
Arthur Kennedy