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This year marks five decades since the Welsh village of Capel Celyn was flooded to create a reservoir to provide a water supply to Liverpool.

Furious villagers took to the streets of Liverpool in protest and three Welsh nationalists set off a bomb near the reservoir construction site on the River Tryweryn.

One of the Welsh demonstrators and Lord Peter Brooke, whose politician father took the controversial plans through Parliament in the 1950s, will share their memories of the saga in a new BBC documentary next week.

Eurgain Prysor was only three years old when the inhabitants of Capel Celyn took to the streets of Liverpool prior to a meeting of the city council.

Hoping to draw attention to their plight, they held banners bearing slogans such as ‘Your homes are safe, save ours’ and ‘Do not drown our homes’.

Eurgain said: “The reception we had was awful. People were spitting at us and throwing rotten tomatoes at us and it was an awful disappointment.

“People came to see the village before it was drowned and they used to say ‘oh, isn’t it traumatic, isn’t it awful, you’re going to lose your home, what’s going to happen, where are you going to live?’

“Well, to us as children, it was a very unsettling time. We didn’t quite realise what was happening but we knew our home would be gone, our chapel would be gone, our school would be gone, our friends would be moved to different parts.

“It was a very, very sad and traumatic time and I think if it happened today we would have counselling for trauma.”

The House of Commons voted by 166 votes to 117 to press ahead with the plans in July 1957.

The valley was eventually flooded in 1965 and the post office, school, chapel, cemetery and 12 farms were all submerged – 800 acres of land were lost.

But there was fierce opposition and even civil disobedience ahead of the project.

David Pritchard and David Walters, both from Gwent, took matters into their own hands and vandalised equipment at the construction site in September 1962. They were fined £50 each.

The following year Emyr Llewelyn Jones, Owain Williams and John Albert Jones placed an explosive device at the base of an electrical transformer at the construction site and the resulting explosion caused serious damage.

Llewelyn and Williams were both jailed for 12 months and Jones was placed on three years’ probation.

Lord Peter Brooke, whose father Henry Brooke was minister for Welsh affairs when the Bill that approved the plans went through Parliament, said: “Of course I can see that the beneficiaries of the Tryweryn Bill were in fact going to be outside Wales.

“But it was also clear that somehow the problem of the water supply of Liverpool had to be resolved.

“What can be and probably should be revisited is whether the manner in which it was done was unduly imperious.”

Tryweryn: 50 Years On will be shown on BBC One Wales at 10.35pm on October 19.