The horrendous mass-murder (over 40,000 dead so far) being inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza by the brutal far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu has brought to mind my very small but somehow still significant connection to Gaza.

The Middle-East is one of the forgotten battlegrounds of World War One even though ferocious fighting occurred across the region throughout that appalling conflict. Put simply, on one side was the Ottoman Empire and on the other the British Empire – an extension of the territorial struggle between imperialist powers going on in Europe. It began in Egypt, seized by Britain in 1914 along with the Sinai Peninsula (ostensibly to protect the Suez Canal trade route) and remorselessly spread eastwards from there to Palestine.

Fighting intensified throughout 1915 and, following humiliating defeat by the Turks in the Battle of Gallipoli, Britain responded by forming the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) in 1916 and hurling over 400,000 men into the Sinai and Palestine offensive. Regiments from all over the UK and the wider Empire were utilised in a vast operation across barren deserts, rocky terrain, precipitous mountains, olive groves, forests of palm trees and legendary biblical locations.

Enter Trevor James (1897-1917), the eldest child of William James (1864-1927) and Elizabeth ‘Annie’ James (1868-1946) of Roath, Cardiff. William and Annie (nee Stead) had moved from rural Gwent to boomtown Cardiff to find better-paid work shortly after Trevor’s birth in Pontypool 1, at the time Monmouthshire’s centre of heavy industry, a polluted bedlam of iron works, collieries and tinplate, boilerplate and rail manufacturing. Both the James and the Stead families had deep roots in Gwent. William grew up at Clytha 2, a farming community set in beautiful countryside off the old road to Abergavenny 3, while Annie was born at her maternal grandmother’s home in Mitchel Troy 4, a village cradled by woods and hills six miles further east, and grew up in the exquisite arcadia of historic Penhow 5 Castle Farm, halfway between Newport 6 and Chepstow 7 on the ancient Roman Road, where her father Samuel Stead (c1845-1905) was the tenant farmer. After getting married in Penhow parish church in 1894 they first lived in Commercial Road, Pontypool, where William worked as a dairyman, until Trevor’s arrival in 1897 prompted the upwardly-mobile couple to make the big relocation to Cardiff 25 miles away after William got a job there as a grocer’s foreman.

They rented number 11 Monthermer Road, newly-built leasehold housing on the very outskirts of built-up Cardiff in northern Roath (today just another trashed slum in the Cathays student ghetto). Their second child Evelyn James (1899-1978) was born in 1899, also in Pontypool so that Annie could be close to her friends and family, and three years later a third child, Aubrey James (1902-1988), followed. Now a family of five, the James’s moved to Albany Road in 1904 after Trevor started school at Roath Park Primary. But then things started to go wrong.

Samuel Stead of Penhow Castle Farm suddenly died in 1905, leaving his widow Winifred the sole tenant with responsibility for the mixed arable/pastoral operation and a substantial herd of cattle and fields of crops to look after. In 1906 Trevor, only 9 years-old, was sent to Penhow to help his grandmother and he enrolled in the village’s Pike Council School. Trevor’s education was suffering, so this arrangement didn’t last long and he had returned to Roath by 1907, joining Albany Road Board School, by which time the family had moved to nearby Strathnairn Street. But he was a real country boy who always preferred the rural life to the urban, and as soon as it was legally possible, once he reached the minimum school-leaving age of 12 in December 1909 and completed one full year at Howard Gardens Secondary School for Boys in June 1910, he was off. He went back to Penhow, to working on the Farm in the shadow of the evocative derelict Castle, to milking and to harvesting, to exploring the deep forest of Wentwood 8, to riding his horse along the green bridleways, to gazing at the distant views across the shimmering Severn…he went home.

Meanwhile William and Annie James along with young Evelyn and Aubrey continued their meanderings around Roath, moving to Amesbury Road in 1911. Every year, Trevor’s sister and brother spent idyllic summer holidays with him and their grandmother at Penhow. Trevor rarely came to Cardiff. Nobody took much notice of the outbreak of WW1 in the late summer of 1914. Anyway, it would all be over by Christmas…

The British State’s propaganda onslaught persuaded millions of young men to enlist in this most futile of imperialistic wars which achieved nothing except sowing the seeds of even worse wars in the future and nurturing unresolved disputes that plague the world and toxify international relations to this day. Across four years of shocking slaughter more than 22 million pointlessly died, including at least 1 million British. One of those was Trevor James.

In October 1916, aged 18, Trevor joined up at a recruitment centre in Newport. Trained on Salisbury Plain, he was placed in the C Squadron (Monmouth 9 & Chepstow Troops) of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars (RGH) as a cavalryman trooper, but this Squadron was soon disbanded as casualties mounted in the Middle-East theatre of war where the RGH was mobilised and Trevor became an infantryman. Early in 1917 he found himself participating in the Battle of Rafa that saw the EEF re-capture Sinai. Then in March the RGH took part in the failed First Battle of Gaza, a classic example of the famous description of the British Army as “lions led by donkeys” in which “incompetent, cantankerous, timid and quite useless” General Archibald Murray (1860-1945) “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory”. Murray made further terrible blunders in April in the Second Battle of Gaza, during which horseman Trevor might have been slightly more comfortable since the RGH was deployed as mounted infantry on the flank of the main infantry – supposedly to “distract” the Ottoman armies. On the 19th April, in searing heat alongside the dried-out Wadi-Esh-Sharia south of Gaza, the RGH came under heavy fire. Captains of the various companies called for artillery support but none arrived. Trevor’s regiment attempted to retreat but were ordered to stay in position because the wounded couldn’t be evacuated. In the fearsome onslaught he was fatally wounded and died the following day as the RGH retraced its steps back to the Mediterranean Coast. As an Australian soldier in the ANZAC Division remarked, it was a case of “country bumpkins led by privileged toffs”. Murray was relieved of command and replaced by Edward Allenby (1861-1936). Under Allenby the EEF had conquered Palestine and much of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria by the end of the War.

Over a century later, the historical consequences of the Palestine campaign are quite clear: the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917 and the ‘British Mandate’ over seized Palestine between 1920 and 1948 led directly to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 and all the brazen flouting of International Law, violations of the Geneva Convention and breaches of United Nations resolutions that followed. It’s like this: blood-soaked Britain, the ultimate rogue state, is to blame. Trevor James died for nothing.

He was buried (grave XX.D.12) in the Gaza War Cemetery, created in 1918 and consolidated after the armistice. At his parents’ request, his grave was inscribed with the words ‘Sleep on Beloved’. The cemetery is located in the heart of today’s Gaza city – whether it will survive the city’s perpetual bombing by the US-funded, UK-backed Israeli state is another matter. Trevor is also commemorated within St John’s Church at Penhow, on the War Memorial at Newport suburb Langstone and on the RGH Memorial at Gloucester Cathedral.

Trevor’s bereaved grandmother gave up the tenancy of Penhow Castle Farm and died soon afterwards. The James family moved again within Roath, to 85 Angus Street, and William James continued to work as a dairyman but he never really got over the loss of his boy and was dead by age 62. Annie endured, seeing both her two surviving children marry in Cardiff – Evelyn in 1925 to William Griffiths (1897-1946) and Aubrey in 1929 to Audrey Hawkins (1905-1981) – before dying in 1946 and joining William James in his Cathays Cemetery grave.

What has all this got to do with me? Well, Evelyn James was my darling Nan. The first of her two daughters, Shirley Griffiths (1927-2006), was my mother. Therefore Trevor, had he lived, would have been my Great Uncle.

I don’t buy any of the ‘discover your backstory’ bullshit peddled by the parasitic ancestry industry that profits from the scandalous privatisation of public records like censuses, births, marriages and deaths; I don’t give any credibility to the breathtakingly insincere crocodile tears shed by ‘celebrities’ on unctuous TV genealogy programmes like the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?; and I don’t have any time for the Family Tree fad popular amongst hollowed-out nobodies who want to feel ‘special’. The reality that these sickening manifestations of hyper-individualised, ahistorical self-aggrandisement try so hard to avoid is that you’ve only got to go back 10 generations (300 years) and you have 20,000 relatives! Guess what? None of us are special.

Since Trevor was dead nearly 40 years before I was born, he never knew me and I never knew him. Thus, there is no relationship, no personal loss and no shared experience that can be vicariously claimed second-hand. Any effect he had on my life was far more indirect and subtle, only occasionally apparent like the faint ripples of a pebble thrown in a pond. The childhood Sunday outings to the Gwent countryside, when Nan always wanted to stop briefly in homage at Penhow Castle. The rare glimpses of a long-suppressed grief for her adored big brother when her younger brother Aubrey visited Cardiff from Swansea where he and his wife had settled. The rarer moments when her front of sassy Cardiffian confidence crumbled and all the accumulated tragedies that had befallen her hit home: Trevor, her father’s untimely death, and her mother’s death in the same year that her husband William Griffiths died following years of ill-health caused by being gassed in the WW1 Battle of Loos in 1915. The vital centrality of her consoling crutches: nicotine addiction, ostentatious Cardiff shopping, the church, the natural world, her garden, Roath Park, voracious reading, and the six very different grandchildren produced by her two daughters – particularly me, the first boy. And, finally, her last days in Cefn Mabli Hospital after a major stroke, curled up in her bed like a tiny, frail bird with a broken wing, recognising nobody but still calling out for Trevor.

*NOTES
The James family were very typical examples of the decline of the Welsh language in Gwent/Monmouthshire. Although Gwent was the first part of Wales to be conquered by the Anglo-Norman invaders in the 12th century, contrary to persistent anti-Welsh attempts to portray the county as ‘English’ Welsh was the dominant language among the ordinary people right through to the mid 19th century. In fact the highest percentage of monoglot Welsh speakers in all Wales was found in Monmouthshire as late as 1801. In the 1820s even supposedly thoroughly Anglicised towns like Monmouth and Newport had a majority of Welsh speakers, half the population of Blaenafon, for instance, spoke no English at all and throughout the county Welsh was ‘doggedly clung to by the lower class of inhabitants’, as the English proprietors of the Monmouthshire Merlin newspaper put it. The Newport Rising of 1839 was hugely influenced by the defence of the Welsh language, there was a flowering of Welsh poetry, music and literature in the western valleys from around 1830 to 1870, and periodicals and eisteddfodau thrived throughout the century. But all this was not enough to counter the irresistible tide of English immigrants moving into industrial Gwent that would swamp the language with sheer numbers, or to resist the Cymruphobic assault by the Anglican church imposed on Wales, or to mitigate the nakedly anti-Welsh policies of the London government which banned the teaching of Welsh in schools in the 1870 Education Act and accepted the disgraceful Report into Welsh Education by English Commissioners. Known as ‘Brad y Llyfrau Gleision’ – ‘The Treachery of the Blue Books’, the three Commissioners, with no knowledge of the Welsh language whatsoever, stated that “there is no Welsh literature worthy of the name”, “it is not easy to overestimate the evil effects of Welsh” and “the sooner Welsh becomes dead the better”. Add the constant negative associations of Welsh with poverty and even savagery, and it can be seen why the language was overwhelmed in Monmouthshire by the start of the 20th century. Today the % of people who speak Welsh in Gwent/Monmouthshire is around 10%.

Welsh was spoken in the James family up until the second half of the 19th century, but then they succumbed to the pressures and Anglicised completely. A strand of social-climbing ‘respectability’ and British Toryism became prevalent, and like so many others their minds became colonised and they sub-consciously rejected the very concept of Welshness. Nanny and her brother Aubrey never spoke one syllable of Welsh, and in fact I never heard the word ‘Wales’ ever uttered. They, their spouses and their children (Shirley and Hazel Griffiths; Alan and Michael James) were deeply Conservative instinctively. Despite being Anglican, Nan sent both her daughters to the Catholic private school Our Ladies Convent (The Walk, Roath) rather than a state school – the better to learn how to be a Tory ‘lady’ and how to bag a hubby in the white-collar professions and breed children. She read the Daily Express, then as now a newspaper of the far-right, she dressed in hats and animal furs (fox, mink etc), and she relentlessly pursued bourgeois poshness. As Cardiff expanded she kept leap-frogging eastwards to avoid the hoi-polloi, and via Rumney (where my mother grew up) she ended up in St Mellons in what today is still one of Cardiff’s most expensive roads (the area was renamed ‘Old St Mellons’ when a huge council estate was built on the sea-level fenlands south of St Mellons village in the 1980s – Nan would have spun in her grave). As a young woman she worked in Mount Stuart Square as a shorthand typist for John Cory & Sons (the Tory Corys, not to be confused with the Liberal Cory Brothers in Bute Place) and there met her husband shipping clerk William Griffiths and thus his friend and her future second husband Clifford Munn (1897-1975), my adored ‘Poppa’, an avid freemason who worked for Summers Funeral Directors at Roath Court and who she married after William’s death. I understand the Toryism, simply because it is deeply embedded in both sides of my family, but I can never accept it, especially knowing what I now know about the dreadfulness of rightwing ideology. To this day I am the only member of my extended family across four generations (grandparents, parents, aunties, uncles, in-laws, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, grandchildren etc) who has had the brains and the balls to reject those values. Despite all this, I will always love Nanny and Poppa and my dear Mother. Why? Because they loved me.

So the Monmouthshire the James branch knew so well is the utterly Anglicised Monmouthshire. Nowhere in Wales were ancient place-names mutilated in such numbers and with such ignorance, arrogance, philistinism and glee. For the purposes of the above article I have stuck to the place-names the James’s would have used, but I reject both the vicious English cultural hooliganism and the strangely self-hating anti-Welsh bigotry that remains very much alive and kicking today, for instance among the ‘Welsh Conservative Party’ in the Senedd. Here then are the Welsh versions of those English-imposed place-names referred to above:
1 Pont-y-Pŵl
2 Cleidda
3 Y Fenni
4 Llanfihangel Troddi
5 Penhŵ
6 Casnewydd
7 Cas-gwent
8 Coed Gwent
9 Trefynwy