By the end of the nineteenth century, many Liberals called for the Anglican Church in Wales to be disestablished. What had once been fondly known as ‘Yr Hen Fam Eglwys’ (the Old Mother Church) was now more commonly seen as a foreign institution. Churchmen like Thomas Tudno Jones, who vigorously opposed disestablishment, fought back with the argument the Church was one of the foundations of the Welsh nation and had done much to foster the Welsh language. This argument had a number of strands, but St David offered a convenient way of demonstrating how the Church was linked to the ancient Celtic Church. It was noted how efforts to remember the saint’s day at Manchester in 1892 had taken ‘a religious turn’ with a service at St Anne’s Church.[7] That year, calls for disestablishment had led to a motion being brought before the House of Commons. Welsh Conservatives had a similar image problem. Holding a dinner on St David’s Day, as the Tories did at Rhyl and Cardigan in 1884 and 1895 respectively, was one way of aligning the party with the Welsh nation, if only until the plates were cleared away.[8]