‘Iron Curtain’ is a term well understood today, but long I before that had ever been heard of, I had learnt the meaning of the Wall of Brass. It was in the course of a, conversation with a friend—a Welshman and a countryman. He was speaking of the squire of a certain neighbourhood not far from his own home. A man who had been popular with his tenants at a time when certain others of his class in Wales decidedly had not. But he had never mastered the Welsh tongue although he was of Welsh stock and it had been the language of his forbears. ‘And do you know’, said my informant, ‘the language was like a wall of brass between him and his neighbours ‘.

Mr Saunders Lewis, in one of his collected essays, ‘Tragedy’, refers to a similar instance and one having peculiar pathos. It concerns George Powell of Nanteos, the scion of an old Welsh family that had become anglicised by the middle of last century as had so many others. This young man’s natural tastes were literary and artistic and all round him there grew and throve a living culture, soon to break forth into the Welsh literary renaissance initiated by Sir John Morris Jones and carried forward into our own day. Yet of that life and that culture he knew nothing.