03/28/2024

Wales News Online

Local & National News for Wales

Investiture stirs Welsh emotions 50 years on

THE 50th anniversary of the Investiture of HRH The Prince of Wales will be celebrated on Monday (Jul 1).

The ceremony which marked the formal acknowledgement of a newly-created Prince of Wales took place at Caernarfon Castle amid much pomp and ceremony. So much so that a year long tourism campaign ‘Croeso 69’ was launched to encourage visitors to Wales.

500 million people reputedly watched the event on television. Almost 100,000 people lined the streets of Caernarvon with 4,000 guests invited insideto watch the events unfold.

Prince Charles had been proclaimed Prince of Wales at the Empire Games  at Cardiff in 1958 when he was nine-years-old. He spent time at Aberystwyth University learning Welsh in preparation for the investiture.

The event was not popular with everyone, specifically the Welsh Nationalists. Some of their activity spilled over onto the streets of Wales and landed a number of them in prison, where they maintained they had become ‘political prisoners’.

Here the former MP for Carmarthen Gwynoro Jones recalls his memories of the investiture and some of the troubled political and civil unrest over what some believed to be an imposition of imperialism on the Nation of Wales and its people.

 

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