Patrick Jones, Paul Sng and James Brown on their cine-poem collaboration Ghosts of ’39

“I wrote a musical (The Forgotten) which was a little bit more hard-hitting in 2009. I had this idea of a project walking [the route of] the Chartist march [in Newport in 1839] and just writing about it.”

Around the same time he came across Edinburgh-based Sng’s documentary Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle. “I thought, ‘why not chuck him an idea?’ I sent him the poem and he appeared on a rainy day with his camera and we did the walk – in the car. That was the inception.”

“I’d only ever driven through the Valleys and not really stopped off, so it was my first time there,” says Sng. “I was really struck by how stunning the landscape was, and Patrick as a guide was wonderful. He’s known about this story most of his life. To be witness to it many years later with someone who is Welsh and whose work touches on themes about working-class history and explores all of this was great.”

The larger-scale project they originally envisaged might be still up in the air due to funding issues, but Sng decided to use footage he’d shot on their recce to accompany Jones’ poem Ghosts of ’39. “I thought, can we use these images and create a cine-poem?’ I got in touch with James who wrote a brilliant soundtrack, then James got Huw involved who gave voice to the words. We put it together over lockdown but I wouldn’t call it a lockdown project. There are lockdown projects out there that have been made in isolation and they’re very insular; I wouldn’t have been interested in making something that was looking in. This was made in the outdoors and it came together under those circumstances but we’d started it beforehand. The idea is there to do something more but right now it’s a three-minute cine-poem.”

Jones, who is the older brother of Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers, says there are remarkably few memorials to the Chartists in South Wales. The one mural to them in Newport was “smashed up” two years ago to make way for a shopping centre. “It’s quite tragic to think that they didn’t value it enough. They replaced it with a miniature version further away from Newport, up the Valleys. There’s a statue up in Blackwood which me and Paul passed. I think is more awareness now but we could do a lot more around this culturally and educationally. There’s an event called the Newport Rising, which is a festival they have every year where they have lectures and readings.”

His own interest in the Chartists was sparked by his late father, Allen, who Jones describes as “an inspiration in living history, that lived voice, he gathered all these books and maps and stories”.

“I like to think he was a self-taught historian,” he explains. “He left school at 14, he couldn’t read and write but he taught himself the history of the Chartists and the Merthyr Rising and a bit of the violence, I think he liked a sense of riot, people standing up and saying ‘no’.

“My parents have both passed away now and I brought back a couple of his books – one is called The Last Rising by David Jones and the other is The Merthyr Rising. My dad never made a big thing of these books, they were just around the house growing up. It just infiltrated into my learning and my own thinking about the world. Then I thought when we were making (Ghosts of ’39), looking back 181 years, just the sense of where are we now? The first thing I wrote was a bit clunky, trying to connect everything up, so I just tried to make it a bit more ethereal, a bit more open-ended.”

“I think that’s a much better way to pass on history and knowledge,” says Sng. “I remember doing history at school, in GCSE we did the Chartists and the way it was taught in the classroom was the opposite of how it should be taught. And I think gathering these anecdotal stories as well as things that are taught on syllabuses, for your dad to pass that on to you and teach you it’s a much better way of learning.”

For Brown, who plays guitar in the band Pulled Apart By Horses, the idea of making historical events relevant was a key attraction. He says: “I think that’s why this film is important because I wasn’t aware of it. I was aware of Patrick’s work and I worked with Paul previously on another project that didn’t see the light of day, but I had no awareness of [the Chartist march in which 22 people died in clashes with troops sent to quell the protest]. Since it came out I’ve had so many messages going ‘I didn’t know about this’. That’s perfect, that’s exactly what art should be, teaching people about stuff they are not aware of.”

Sng says the film was distilled from around 20 images shot on their walk. “What I really wanted to avoid was having too many quick cuts. I think the words really needed to come through because the most powerful thing about the piece are the words. Cutting every ten seconds would’ve been too much. The main thing we wanted to get through was I suppose the landscape and then the buildings.

“There are two stunning shots of the monument to the miners (The Guardian), one was a wide establishing shot and then a mid-shot, and then Patrick’s dedication at the end of the film to his dad – ‘We are all wrapped in the arms of ghosts’... When I saw that (the monument) was about a mining disaster and people lost lives, when you think about mining in the UK, whether you’re in Wales or Yorkshire or Nottingham you think of the Miners’ Strike (of 1984-85), it’s a defining point in modern history in terms of British politics where if the miners had won society would be very different now, so I was kind of aware of links between more recent history and what the Chartists were fighting for. I wanted to get across that although the Chartists happened at a particular moment in time, and that’s what the film is about, Patrick’s words are also echoing things that have gone on since then and the situation we find ourselves in now, where everybody does have the right to vote but what is the choice?

“The choice isn’t as wide as people think. Talking about lockdown, this is the chance to re-set society and to change things and to realise that capitalism hasn’t worked really for the majority of people but we’re going to go back to that. There’s a tragedy there that we’ve had a glimpse of the world during lockdown where we’ve seen how something like universal basic income, instead of furlough they could have introduced that, ideas like that, that have been tested, and where people have been consuming and buying less that’s panicked businesses, that’s panicked the system, because they’ve seen we can get along without these things.

“One of the most powerful moments really came after we’d finished the walk and we drove back into Newport and the light was going but before that we went to the museum and there was a permanent exhibition there about Chartism. Reading the actual records, the ethnography and the oral testimonies of people that had been taken. Before that we’d been to see some original records as well. History when you’re younger at school can seem quite sterile but history isn’t in books, it’s everywhere around us and it’s about our reactions to it, not seeing as purely things in the past but things you can interact with, being in physical spaces where things have happened and making a piece of work that, as Patrick said, we’d didn’t have to fulfil a certain criteria, we didn’t have a producer putting their beak into it telling us what to do. It was nice to just make something without those constraints.”

It was Brown to brought the BBC Radio 1 and 6 Music presenter Huw Stephens into the project, via his musical connections. “Paul asked me if I’d like to do some music for it and I said, ‘Of course’ and put a little score together, and then the edit changed,” he says. “Patrick had someone in mind to narrate it but she couldn’t do it, so we thought we’d branch it out. Huw is a big part of Wales and Wales is a big part of Huw, and it just appeared in my head that we should ask him, and he was well up for it.

“Huw recorded his narration and it was edited and put together, his performance of the piece is really moving, he’s done an amazing job of it. It was at that point when it came back that it found its legs, I think. When Huw performed Patrick’s poem I went back to the score and went ‘This needs violins’ and spoke to Jamie Lockhart and he put together a little violin arrangement. I gave him a ring and said, ‘Can you please play some live strings for me?’ He was like ‘yeah’, but Huw didn’t need any arms, fingers, toes or legs bending or anything. As soon as I told him what it was, and told him about Patrick and Paul, he just said ‘I’ll do it’ – and he didn’t want £10,000.”

For Jones, this project is a way of linking up history with the present day. “Around the time I was working on it the Extinction Rebellion marches came out and the tail-end of #MeToo and then we’ve had Black Lives Matter, those three arcs of protest have challenged the structure of society a lot, which has been really exciting and really tragic where it’s come from. I didn’t consciously (have them in mind), Extinction Rebellion, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter have come on with their own waves, their own voices, but at that time me and Paul were looking at that resonance 180 years ago.”

“In the poem, one of Patrick’s lines that’s repeated is ‘Where is everyone? Does anyone care any more?’” says Sng. “Some of the areas we were filming were deserted and that was prophetic. The streets were deserted for a while during lockdown, so Patrick was like Nostradamus there. But one of the things we were also talking about was why aren’t people protesting so much? They are beginning to now but when you think back the government at the time were terrified of the Chartists and that’s why those people lost their lives, they sent people in to kill them, and I think they should be terrified again. All through this whole thing I’ve been thinking when are there going to be riots again? No one wants to see that but it’s how change sometimes comes about.

“The Government and the system and the elite are not going to give us what we want, and you have to think what set of circumstances would it take for people to get up and do that? Great suffering and poverty and people are starving you don’t want to see that, but how do we get the fundamental changes in society that we need?”

“I think a lot of people have forgotten that they have a voice,” says Brown. “In fact they don’t even realise they have a voice, and I think that’s a massive thing at the moment, but it’s just what it takes. You need a lot of people to get together and go, ‘We have to change, something has to be different’, but how does that start, that’s the question. At the beginning of lockdown, when things were getting slightly hairy and then things got worse and (Dominic) Cummings, were people going to turn round and say ‘F*** this’, which they nearly did.

“But I don’t think people realise they have a voice and they have a platform with social media, Facebook, Twitter and stuff, but people just sit back and wait to see what happens.”

“I think when the furlough scheme ends and we’re going to see mass unemployment again, higher than the 80s, there are some brutal times ahead,” says Sng. “The next few years ahead are going to be very telling. People say Keir Starmer and Labour will win in 2024 or whenever, and obviously he’s very different to Boris Johnson, he’s a different prospect, but I don’t see them bringing about the fundamental change we need.

“I think the Westminster system of government is not fit for purpose, it doesn’t represent most people. The highest turnout at elections has probably been 68 per cent – that’s about a third of the electorate that feel disenfranchised and they have the vote, the Chartists didn’t even have that, but the illusion of democracy... There’s that famous cartoon of a cow with one way going left and one way going right and they both lead to the slaughterhouse. For working class people and for people on the fringes of society, the choice between Tories and Labour is it minimal, is it the long-term change they need do? Do things just get a bit better with the lesser of two evils? I don’t know, but I think it’s a tragedy in our lifetime that we can glimpse what could be not a Utopian society but a much fairer society, we have the means to do it, but I don’t see us getting there. That’s the tragedy for me.”