The Eisteddfod Archive
Before the festival ended, the President Clayton Russon and Chairman George Northing announced to the press that Llangollen would hold a second international eisteddfod in 1948. This triggered an unexpected row, and a leadership crisis. Harold Tudor wanted the International Eisteddfod he conceived to move around like the National, and tried to enlist public support through the press, generating immense protest in Llangollen.
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.
