“An Ancient Celtic world had filled the air”: the Celtic turn in Louis MacNeice’s mid-century radio writing

This article focuses on the specific meanings and figurations of Celtic identity, myth and history in three works by Louis MacNeice: his long poem Autumn Sequel (1954), written for broadcast on the BBC, and his two late radio plays They Met on Good Friday (1959) and The Mad Islands (1961). It will demonstrate that the poet moves from expressing an archaic and insipidly romanticised form of Celticity in Autumn Sequel, to depicting a significantly more sophisticated Celtic character and identity in They Met on Good Friday and The Mad Islands; both dramas, it will be argued, are informed by a more thoroughly archipelagic conception of cultural formation and identity in the British and Irish isles. In all three texts, MacNeice’s radiogenic engagement with Celtic material functions as a means of interrogating, though not always successfully, the forms and potentialities of human agency, community, and artistic activity within a post-war climate of political disenchantment, social fragmentation and perceived cultural vacuity. The essay will also demonstrate that MacNeice’s Celtic themed radio writing is an important aspect of the poet’s lifelong exploration of his psycho-cultural genealogy and a means of further clarifying his complex maternal and paternal inheritance.     

The ‘Linchpin for Success’? The problematic establishment of the 1965 Race Relations Act and its Conciliation Board

The 1965 Race Relations Act was the first legislation directed towards outlawing racial discrimination and racial incitement in Britain; but it has been almost universally criticised as weak, narrow and ineffectual. This article focuses on an area not adequately discussed in the existing literature—the debate about, and impact of, replacing initial criminal sanctions with American-styled conciliation and civil remedies, and subsequent creation of conciliation machinery. It argues that the protracted process of forming this Board had a greater impact upon the Act’s success than has been previously acknowledged, as it demonstrated the bipartite lack of desire to address the politically unpopular issue of race and immigration, thus creating further disillusionment towards the British state. Rather than being the ‘last step’ in such legislation, as desired by many at the time, its weaknesses and limitations stimulated criticism and increased political action, leading to subsequent broader legislation in future years.