Dyfnallt Morgan

Dyfnallt Morgan came to know Merfyn Turner when they were students in Aberystwyth in 1935. In his memoirs of the period, Dyfnallt emphasises that it was not an easy decision for young men to refuse the call to war when it came in 1939. He describes the heated atmosphere in Aberystwyth the following summer and the opposition that young pacifists pic4faced from College staff and townspeople ‘I saw a middle-aged respectable member of the College Staff (who by the way was also an assistant preacher)’ he said, ‘hitting a pacifist student across the face outside the college for trying to sell copies of Peace News’. His heroes – like many other young Welshmen of this period – were ‘people like Gandhi and Schweitzer’ (Schweitzer gave a lecture at Aberystwyth in 1935), and he became aware of the tenets of George M. Ll. Davies through the work of the great pacifists with the Quakers in the area where he was brought up in Dowlais. Another major influence on young Welsh pacifists of this period was T. E. Nicholas, who was wrongfully imprisoned, along with his son Islwyn, in 1940 due to a dislike of the Chief Constable in Aberystwyth towards him and his revolutionary beliefs. Two members of the town’s police came all the way to the reforestation camp near the village of Halfway in Carmarthenshire – where Dyfnallt started working on the orders of the tribunal that summer – to try to get information from him about Niclas y Glais, but the constables returned to the station empty handed

Hard Labour:

Gwynfor Evans organised branches of the Christian Pacifist Forestry and Land Units in Wales, and young conscientious objectors like Dyfnallt became accustomed to hard, exhausting physical work whilst labouring in them. He used to get up at 5.30am in order to arrive at Crychan forest by 7:00am in the summer (8:15am) in the winter, and he would work unitl 5.30pm with a break of only 45 minutes: ‘I soon threw myself eagerly into all aspects of the work’ said Dyfnallt, ‘planting trees, weeding, digging ditches, clearing glades, and making bonfires of large piles of twigs.’ After working for more than a year in the forest, he moved to work with other conscientious volunteers as an orderly in a surgical ward in Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham.

Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU):

pic 5In 1944, he decided to join the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), as one of its training camps was nearby. The history of the Unit was chronicled by another member who was a Welsh speaker, Arfor Tegla Davies (the son of E. Tegla Davies). In his interesting book, he notes that over a thousand pacifists worked for the Unit during the Second World War on three continents. Dyfnallt started on his work for the unit in a refugee camp in the south of Italy and later in Austria. The war in Europe had just finished and the camp was full to the brim with refugees from many nations. Dyfnallt’s role in the camp in Klagenfurt was receiving and distributing goods of all kinds. With his special talent as a linguist and his natural charm, he developed a good relationship with the Russians who were responsible for transporting goods across the border from Hungary. Another sign of his noble and kind character was his decision not to return to Wales at the end of the war, because he didn’t’ want to compete for jobs with veterans.

He travelled to China with the Ambulance Unit in 1946, where the civil war between the Communist forces of Mao Tse Tung and the Chiang Kai-shek nationalists had recently began. He worked in the province of Honan, near the Yellow River – the border between the two enemies – as around five million people had returned t

here after fleeing from the Japanese forces. Most of his work involved helping to transport goods and equipment along the railways and assist returnees to re-settle in Honan. In the pic 6summer of 1946, he had direct experience of the guerrilla war in China when a train to Honan on which he was carrying goods, was forced to end its journey after a group of Communists destroyed sections of the railway. He was confronted by the dire poverty in China during this time as cholera and other infections swept through the rural areas. But he experienced the kindness and generosity of the common people there also, before having to return to Britain in 1948 after having malaria and tuberculosis itself.

So this is the end of the story of two young Welshmen in the Second World War who made the difficult and courageous decision to refuse to join the fighting. Their contrasting stories demonstrate the diversity and rich experiences of conscientious objectors during the conflict, and the lasting impact that those experiences had on their lives. Merfyn Turner pledged to work with prisoners and former prisoners of war from the end of the war onwards, and Dyfnallt Morgan made various and important contributions to the Welsh culture as a poet, literary critic and a pacifist of conviction until the end of his life. It is appropriate to conclude with the powerful closing lines of his poem ‘Y Milwr Gwyn’ about a memorial to the Great War in Llanddewi Brefi – a village very close to his heart – that he wrote in 1939 on the eve of another horrific war:

   A mynnaf gredu y daw oes

O ffeinach greddf, tynerach hin,

caiff plant y ddaear hedd Y Groes

tu yma i’r ffin.

Ceir gweled heddwch dros y byd,

y barrau heyrn i lawr,

y milwr gwyn yn llon ei bryd –

ei wyneb tua’r wawr.

(‘And I believe an age will come

Of a kinder disposition and gentler temperament,

The children of this Earth will experience the peace of the Cross

This side of the grave.

We will see peace rule over the world

The iron bars torn down

Happy the blessed soldiers then

Turned to face the dawn.’)

Llion Wigley