Morgan’s work was initially contested or treated cautiously. The established account, based on Montagu’s book, had created certain assumptions about the identity of the man, and some of those assumptions were hard to dislodge. But the documentary evidence was clear enough that the British government confirmed the identification when pressed to respond to Morgan’s findings.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which had assumed responsibility for William Martin’s grave in Huelva in 1977, added the second line to the headstone. The inscription that now reads “Glyndwr Michael served as Major William Martin RM” is the product of this fifty-year-delayed reckoning with the real man’s identity.
The grave in Huelva is maintained as a Commonwealth war grave. The town of Huelva has its own relationship to the story, and the cemetery where Martin/Michael is buried has become a site of pilgrimage for people interested in the history of Operation Mincemeat. The grave receives visitors.
In Aberbargoed, the town in South Wales where Glyndwr Michael was born, there is a plaque commemorating him. The plaque, installed decades after his death, is a belated acknowledgment of the man who was born there, lived in poverty, died in a London hospital, and was buried in Spanish soil under a name that was not his own.
The Welsh cultural dimension of this story is worth noting. Glyndŵr is a Welsh name, the name of a medieval Welsh prince who led a major rebellion against English rule in the early fifteenth century. The name was not uncommon in early twentieth-century Wales, where Welsh cultural nationalism gave Welsh names a continued presence in everyday life. The man who bore it in 1909 was a coal miner’s son from a valley town, living a life that had no connection to medieval princes and very little connection to the institutions of British power that would ultimately make use of him.