33 Facts About Saunders Lewis

Saunders Lewis rediscovered the importance of both his heritage language and cultural roots while serving as a junior officer in the British Army during the trenches of the First World War.

Saunders Lewis accordingly became a co-founder of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru, now the Welsh nationalist political party known as Plaid Cymru, at a covert meeting with fellow nationalists during the 1925 National Eisteddfod of Wales.

Saunders Lewis is widely credited, through his 1962 radio address Tynged yr Iaith, with almost singlehandedly bringing Welsh back from the brink of language death.

In 1970, Saunders Lewis was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature and was appointed as a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory by Pope Paul VI.

John Saunders Lewis was born into a Welsh-speaking family in Wallasey in the Wirral, Cheshire, in the north-west of England, on 15 October 1893.

Saunders Lewis was the second of three sons of Lodwig Lewis, a Calvinistic Methodist minister, and his wife Mary Margaret.

When he was only six years old, Saunders Lewis's mother died and his unmarried maternal "Aunt Ellen" moved into the manse and helped to raise him.

Furthermore, according to Jelle Krol, Saunders Lewis, was amazed to see how his own father's recent words of advice were echoed by Barres, who wrote, "the only way to cultivate your personality as an artist and to develop your own resources, is to go back to your roots".

Saunders Lewis continued in this post until his dismissal for a political act of arson at Penyberth, Gwynedd, in 1936.

In 1924, Saunders Lewis founded with a small group of fellow nationalists.

At around the same time as Saunders Lewis formed, another group of nationalists formed in Caernarfon.

Saunders Lewis insisted on these principles before he would agree to the Pwllheli conference.

Saunders Lewis wished to demonstrate how Welsh heritage was linked as one of the 'founders' of European civilization.

Saunders Lewis's assiduous campaigning over the years was to succeed in cementing an ongoing Plaid Cymru influence within the BBC.

In 1939 Saunders Lewis resigned as president, saying that Wales was not ready to accept the leadership of a Roman Catholic.

Saunders Lewis maintained a strict neutrality in his writings through his column in.

Saunders Lewis was selected to contest the seat for Plaid Cymru in the ensuing 1943 University of Wales by-election.

Saunders Lewis's opponent was former Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru Deputy Vice-president William John Gruffydd.

In 1962 Saunders Lewis gave a radio speech entitled in which he predicted the complete extinction of the Welsh language by 2000 unless immediate action was taken.

In 1970, Saunders Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In March 1983, at the age of 89, Saunders Lewis was made an honorary Doctor of Letters of the University of Wales at a ceremony specially conducted at his home in Penarth.

The Catholic Herald, reporting the honour, noted that in the previous year Saunders Lewis had made a plea for the restoration to the Catholic Church in Wales of the Tridentine Mass in Ecclesiastical Latin, rather than the Mass of Paul VI in the "foreign language of English", which he pointed out was "a later arrival".

Saunders Lewis died at St Winifred's Hospital in Cardiff, on 1 September 1985.

Saunders Lewis wrote mostly in Welsh, but he wrote some works in English.

Saunders Lewis's plays drew upon a wide range of material and covered a range of subject matter including Welsh mythology and history, as well as the Christian Bible, although he wrote plays set in contemporary Wales.

Saunders Lewis wrote the libretto for Arwel Hughes's opera, based on Moliere's.

Saunders Lewis published two novels, Monica and and two collections of poems as well as numerous articles and essays in various newspapers, magazines and journals.

Saunders Lewis's legacy remains a controversial one and his simultaneously anti-Marxist and anti-colonialist interpretation of Welsh history and distributist vision for the nation's future have often been the target of attacks from both the Far Left and the Far Right.

Saunders Lewis always insisted that his conversion to Catholicism did not keep him from understanding the sensibilities or appreciating the role played in Welsh culture by the Nonconformists.

Davies denounced Saunders Lewis' calls for Welsh language revival and cultural nationalism.

Saunders Lewis saved more than most people though possible by his stirring radio address back in 1962.

Saunders Lewis' legacy is further reflected by the fact that, even in decaying and traditionally English-speaking Welsh colliery and industrial towns and cities, Welsh-medium education is increasingly used as a means of both heritage language learning and reasserting national identity.

Saunders Lewis contested the University of Wales Constituency on two occasions, once in the general election of 1931;.