Laying the Temple’s Foundation Stone – 8th April 1937

The foundation stone for Wales’ Temple of Peace was laid by Viscount Halifax, Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Foreign Secretary, on Thursday, 8th April 1937. He had been widely regarded as a leading light among interwar peace advocates and champion of the League of Nations; and would go on to play a key role in Churchill’s WW2 cabinet, developing British plans for post-war ‘international institutional architecture’ – his signature featuring prominently on the founding Charter of the United Nations.

View the Foundation Stone Ceremony Archive Collections (People’s Collection Wales)
View photos and memorial brochure from the Foundation Stone Ceremony (on Flickr)

In the background of pictures are huts in which sandbags were being produced for air raid shelters – war preparations under way, a sign of the troubled times. His speech that day stated that:

“the new building would be symbolic of the dedication of thought to two great purposes – national health and international peace, both of which had become vital landmarks in the life of the people during the last twenty or thirty years. Nothing had been more remarkable than the way in which our common civic and national thought had come to rank physical health high because of the degree with which we recognised how important was the place that public health occupied in the capacity of our people to discharge worthily the duties of citizenship.

Twenty years previously anybody who tried to think internationally was in danger of being voted a theorist, a sentimentalist, and a crank. Now everybody knew that, whatever their political party and policy, it was imperative to appreciate the importance of international relations, because civilisation itself directly depended up the adjustments they might be able to make.

In a world where anxiety about security was leading everywhere to re-armament, those who loved peace needed to be strong if they were to make their voice heard. They must recognise that no final solution was going to be found by the determined removal of the causes of conflict that kept the world uneasy and unquiet. The basis of all true peace, and the only basis of true peace, mist be international good will and conciliation of the conflicting interests of nations.”