London primary school performs impressive rendition of Wales' World Cup anthem ‘Yma o Hyd’

A school in South London have performed an impressive rendition of 'Yma O Hyd'.

Griffin Primary School in Wandsworth learnt the song as part of their preparations for the Urdd's Jambori on November 10.

The Year 4 teacher who entered his class in the singalong said "it's crazy" how fast his pupils learnt the words to the anthem.

The Jambori event will see schools across Wales join together with Dafydd Iwan to sing Wales' official World Cup song.

Griffin Primary School is one of only two schools outside of Wales to be participating in the event.

It's expected that 230,000 school children in Wales could participate in sending off the team to the first World Cup in 64 years.

Many may wonder how a Year 4 class from a primary school in south-west London will end up singing alongside hundreds of Welsh schools come November 10.

The answer is "passionate Welshman" Mike Downey, a teacher at Griffin Primary School. He's in charge of the Jaguar class who are seen performing Dafydd Iwan's anthem in the video.

"A couple of my friends sent me a link saying that Dafydd Iwan wanted thousands of Welsh primary schools to join up and sing a long," the teacher explained.

"I'm a passionate Welshman, the flag is up in the class and I go on about Wales with the children quite often so I thought go on, I'll give it a go with them."

Mike, or Mr Downey as he's known to his pupils, was born and raised in Caernarfon but has been teaching in London for the past three years.

The 29-year-old told ITV Wales that since living in London he's realised that people don't understand that "we've got our own language and a lot of our education is in Welsh."

Many of the children in his class come from different backgrounds and speak other languages at home such as Arabic, Urdu and French.

"I speak Welsh at home and then when we come into school we all speak English. So it was strange because we all had that in common" he said.

Dafydd Iwan's 'Yma O Hyd' is Wales' official World Cup song and Mr Downey said his class instantly loved the anthem.

He said: "I was really surprised at how quickly they started memorising it, they were really into it.

"I wrote the Welsh lyrics phonetically to suit their reading. One lunchtime I asked one of the students to read it out and it sounded as if he was a Welsh student."

The teacher from Caernarfon admits that even some of the teachers at Griffin are now asking him to teach them Welsh.