Audio clip from an oral history interview with Heini Gruffudd: Kate Bosse-Griffiths's, identity, Swansea, 23 September 2021

Description

This audio clip is from an oral history interview with Heini Gruffudd, recorded by Centre for the Movement of People, Aberystwyth University, on 23 September 2021. In the clip, Heini talks about his mother’s, Kate Bosse-Griffiths's, identity.

Kate Bosse-Griffiths – a short biography.

Kate Bosse-Griffiths was a Jewish refugee who fled to Britain from Germany in 1937. She married Welshman John Gwyn Griffiths in September 1939 and moved to Pentre in the Rhondda. She learned Welsh and became a passionate advocate for the Welsh language, even publishing poetry and books in Welsh. The family moved to Swansea after the war, where she continued to write for the Welsh-language press, supporting the creation of the Cymdeithas yr Iaith (Welsh Language Society) in 1962. She died in Swansea in 1998.

Transcript

And, in a way, you can relate that to an anti-establishment view. I mean, she, she’d lived under the National Socialist system in Germany—well, I mean, that could be regarded as how an establishment can rule immorally etc. etc. So, she was quite willing here, if, if she saw injustice by the establishment, ‘Well dear me, I’m not going to give into that kind of immoral establishment’. So, you can link it, then, to her experiences; I mean, her positivity for gaining basic rights for the Welsh language would be compatible to her opposition to the regime in Germany. You sometimes see refugees or...becoming more English than English, you know, in order to fit in. Well, I don’t know with her if she became more Welsh than Welsh, you know.

Source.

Centre for the Movement of People, Aberystwyth University, Oral history interview with Heini Gruffudd (23 September 2021)