ABSTRACT
Historians are generally distrustful of simplistic generalizations such as that ‘the modern age was born in 1900’; and rightly so since it happened in 1905. That year a 25-year-old clerk in a Swiss patent office published three scientific papers which dislodged the two corner-stones of classical physics, the absolute nature of space and time. It was a Wales ideally respectable, orderly, clean-living, educated, democratic, that was being moulded in its own image by a thrusting middle-class intelligentsia and élite. Their modernization programme involved the reshaping of popular culture, a process which is covered by the umbrella-term ‘social control’ for the nineteenth century, but which it has become fashionable for early modernists to call ‘acculturation’. The self-creating Wales which in turn created these rugby heroes had been looking to the outside world since at least the 1880s.
