A Fleeting Look of Contempt

How I spotted a dead poet on a packet of crisps

Colonialism

is a lost cause. Yet the Welsh

are here, picnicking among ruins

on their Corona and potato

crisps, speaking their language without pride

R.S. Thomas, “Plas Difancoll”

I forget now which of the motorway service stations in the South of England it was, with their unlikely, Agatha-Christie-crime-scene names: South Mimms, Clacket Lane, Pease Pottage. Whichever it was, I was not expecting to see a dead Welsh poet.

Newspapers sometimes run silly stories about people who see the face of Christ on a piece of toast. My claim to fame — which, ten years ago, also made the national news — is that I saw the face of R.S. Thomas (1913—2000) on a packet of potato crisps.

I wasn’t hallucinating, although I must at least have done a double take. I was visiting relatives over Christmas with my family. When we got home, friends were expected for New Year’s Eve. So we decided to stock up on posh crisps at the motorway services.

Here is the bag of Tyrrell’s Sweet Chilli and Red Pepper flavour that I bought:

The pillar-box red packet with white lettering feels very much of its time. A decade ago, during the Conservative-Liberal-Democrat coalition government, with its ruinous rhetoric of “austerity”, contemporary English culture was at a peak of self-soothing nostalgia for the middle of the twentieth century. This was distilled by the ubiquitous KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON poster — a Second World War morale-boosting campaign that was pulped because it was considered too patronising. A rare copy of the original poster was found in a box of auctioned books in 2000. Commercial reproductions then steadily grew in popularity, until, by 2011, a company called Keep Calm and Carry On Ltd had trademarked it in the EU and US.

I mention all this because, looking back, the popularity of this crown-wearing poster as a cute shorthand for Englishness embodies the socio-political moment that led to R.S. Thomas — who in 1964 won the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry, and in 1996 was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature — appearing, unnamed, on a packet of “Hand Cooked English Crisps” in the centenary year of his birth.