Lewis Valentine

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Lewis Valentine (1893-1986) was a Baptist pastor, author, editor and political activist.

Born in Llanddulas, Denbighshire, he began studying to go into the ministry of the Baptist church at the University College of North Wales, Bangor but his studies were curtailed due to the First World War.

His experience as a medical orderly during the First World War made him a Welsh nationalist and a pacifist. He became the first president of Plaid Cymru and its first parliamentary candidate in the 1929 General Election, when he stood in the Caernarfonshire constituency. In 1936, along with Saunders Lewis and D. J. Williams, Valentine took part in the symbolic burning of a bombing school at Penyberth in north-west Wales. He was sentenced to nine months in prison for this action.

As a pastor he served church in north Wales and edited the Baptist quarterly magazine, Seren Gomer, from 1951 to 1975. He also wrote of his experience in the war in Dyddiadur milwr (=A soldier's diary), 1988.

He is also famed as the writer of the hymn Gweddi dros Gymru (=A prayer for Wales), usually sung to the tune of Jean Sibelius's Finlandia Hymn, and generally thought of as the second Welsh national anthem.

He died in 1986.

[edit] References

• Valentine, Lewis (1893-1986). In Meic Stephens (Ed.) (1998), The new companion to the literature of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ISBN 0-7083-1383-3.