A letter from a Dutch competitor to their host family dated November 9th 1951
Format: document
“The World Still Sings” is a documentary film of the 1964 International Eisteddfod, directed by Oscar-winning director Jack Howells. More…..
1953 was a truly memorable year for the Eisteddfod, captured by Pathé News.
From 1949 local youngsters presented a peace message from the Llangollen Eisteddfod stage, an initiative of the chairman Jack Rhys Roberts. Llangollen adopted and adapted the Urdd text each year.
The eight minutes and twenty seconds of this film are a unique audiovisual record of the first festival in 1947. You’ll see and hear the winning choirs. You’ll share the excitement with the audience packed into the marquee, made from war surplus canvas with 6000 seats borrowed from schoolrooms, chapels and elsewhere round the area…
Read the programme from June 1947, the first ever International Eisteddfod.
Prof Chris Adams, Archive Committee, writes:
There are few stories from the 75 years of the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod which excite supporters more than the visit of Dylan Thomas in July 1953. He described his visit a few weeks later in a 15 minute broadcast for the BBC Home Service, and generated verbal images of the early Eisteddfod whose power resonates to this day. There are no known recordings of the broadcast, and so we have had to make do with the text, which was printed in the 1953 compilation “Quite Early One Morning”, though several television programmes about the festival have used Thomas’s words, voiced by a Welsh actor.
