 However, UK Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin refused to hear the case against building this 'bombing school' in Wales, despite a deputation representing 500,000 Welsh protesters.Protest against the project was summed up by Lewis when he wrote that the UK Government was intent upon turning one of the "essential homes of Welsh culture, idiom, and literature" into a place for promoting a barbaric method of warfare.Construction of this military academy began exactly 400 years after the first Act of Union annexing Wales into England.