New novel charts Wales’ long road to a parliament
John Osmond’s documentary novel Soul on Fire traces the 1979 defeat to the 1997 Yes vote, shedding light on the miners’ strike and S4C campaign.
John Osmond, former Western Mail reporter and director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs, has launched a documentary novel that maps the turbulent road to a Welsh Parliament.
The book, titled Soul on Fire, opens with the crushing defeat of the 1979 Welsh Assembly referendum and closes on the narrow Yes victory in the 1997 vote that finally created the Senedd.
The launch took place in the Senedd’s historic Pierhead building, where Osmond was interviewed by former BBC Wales political editor Betsan Powys at an event organised by Cardiff University’s Wales Governance Centre.
“I spent weeks in the National Library.” It’s a wonderful institution – a marvellous place.
One of the places I love most of all in the world is the National Library in Aberystwyth. I looked at newspapers, I looked at archives.
A lot of the characters whose papers are lodged at the library are major characters who appear in this book. And not just the National Library, but the South Wales Miners’ Library in Swansea, a huge resource, particularly for me and for this book, because its fundamental purpose is to understand and explain why the referendum of 1979 turned into the referendum of 1997.
The 1979 referendum was a complete disaster for those of us who were pursuing the devolution cause. It was an extraordinarily overwhelming vote of four to one against.
Yet within a very short time, less than 20 years, we had a majority, a very slim majority but nonetheless a majority. Why did that happen and how could it happen in such a short time?
The purpose, the motivation of the book is to explain and understand that. The central reason, I believe, and I try to demonstrate this, was the miners’ strike and how that was experienced, felt and understood in Wales.
And for that, you have to go to the Miners’ Library in Swansea, because it’s all there in extraordinary detail – all the main characters and personalities who were involved in that strike, who led the strike. There were interviews with them by a man called Hywel Francis, who himself was central to the events of that time and is a major figure in my second volume.
Osmond, who also authored the 2018 novel Ten Million Stars Are Burning covering 1973‑1979, said the new work required a different creative approach.
“I’ve written quite a lot of books, but they’re all semi‑journalistic, academic types of books.” This is very different.
I was dealing with the inner lives and personal lives of people. And I was having to write dialogue.
So it was completely new. I was frightened of it, to be honest.
The narrative delves into the dramatic 1980s campaign for S4C, the Welsh‑language television channel, and recounts Plaid Cymru’s first MP Gwynfor Evans threatening a hunger strike to force the government’s promise.
“One of the things I chanced upon when I was researching this was that Gwynfor was very concerned about the moral dilemma surrounding going on hunger strike.” It was a form of violence at one level, and Gwynfor was a pacifist.
He would be accused of inciting people to react and to then commit violent acts themselves, which undoubtedly actually would have happened. So he was conflicted about this.
I discovered that he went to see a great friend of his, Pennar Davies, who was a poet and a minister. He was in charge of a theological college in Swansea, and Gwynfor went to see Pennar secretly to talk this dilemma through, and the moral issues around it.
Was he justified in taking this action from a moral point of view? I discovered that he did this, but there’s no record of their conversation when they met.
And so I had to make it up. I had to imagine what that conversation would have entailed.
So there are certain episodes in the book of that kind where I know something happened, but there’s no record you can go to which tells you what they actually said.
Professor Kevin Morgan, who chaired the Yes for Wales campaign in 1997, praised the endeavour at the launch.
Both Soul on Fire and the reissued Ten Million Stars Are Burning are published by H’mm Publishing and are priced at £17.50 each.
The novels arrive at a time when the Senedd is grappling with questions of further powers and the legacy of devolution, offering readers a richly researched, dramatised account of the political battles that reshaped Wales.