The Melting Pot

by Daryl Leeworthy

In March 1955, on assignment with the Welsh Empire News, the novelist, playwright and television personality, Gwyn Thomas, turned his unique gaze to postwar Merthyr Tydfil. It was a rare outing for a writer more commonly associated with the Rhondda or with Barry, but Merthyr Tydfil had been the byword for poverty and neglect in the 1930s and so he was keen to see what, if anything, had changed. From the perspective of historians, the mid-1950s were a time of relative affluence, when the worst that could be said of Britain was that it was a bit damp, drab, and dismally grey. In place of mass unemployment, there were new factories – signature installations like Hoover at Pentrebach – and the population was rising again, albeit slowly, after three decades of decline. But, warned Gwyn, ‘South Wales is full of things that people forgot to sweep up’. Places, as well.

A few years after that Empire News article was published, Gwyn was called back to the area. This time the request came from the BBC, who wanted him to give a piece to camera about the impending demolition of Pantywaun. The experience in 1962 formed the basis of a memorable passage in A Welsh Eye, in which Gwyn described the ‘liquidation’ of the village, the transfer of the remaining residents to council houses closer to Merthyr town, and the belated installation of a public call box ‘just in time for the villagers to tell their friends that they were leaving’.

Pantywaun was being sacrificed for the expansion of the ‘Royal Arms’ open cast site. This, it was said, was progress. In the view of older generations, it was the likely fate of all pit villages once their economic root had gone. As the slogan of the 1984-5 miners’ strike put it, ‘close a pit, kill a community’.

These visits were all part and parcel of broadcasting, of being an eminent public voice. Gwyn’s relationship with Merthyr Tydfil was older still, of course. His most important novel, the acknowledged masterpiece All Things Betray Thee published by Michael Joseph in 1949, was set in a fictionalised Merthyr. Christened in fiction as Moonlea, this was the Merthyr of the 1830s; the Merthyr of the unrest focused on the Court of Requests, of Dic Penderyn and Lewis the Huntsman, of Chartism and the campaign for a democratic voice. It was a place in which artists could sit and talk through grand political ideas, through the very tenets of philosophy that ought to have governed society but did not. Similar themes would emerge from Gwyn’s more anarchic play, Jackie the Jumper, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1963.

Raymond Williams, the eminent writer and scholar, believed All Things Betray Thee to be the most important novel of the Welsh industrial tradition, capable of standing tall alongside its English or American or European counterparts but distinctively Welsh at the same time. During the Cold War, the novel was widely translated, notably into Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Romanian, bringing knowledge of Merthyr and its history to new audiences abroad.  Those very same audiences, of course, who understood the old joke, apparently invented by Gwyn A. Williams, that had Anna Karenina looked down from the train she would have seen ‘Made in Dowlais’ marked on the rails; or who understood the lineage connecting Stalino (now Donetsk) in Ukraine with Hughesovka and, of course, with Merthyr Tydfil itself.

We may ask what Gwyn Thomas knew of the 1830s, and how that knowledge had been acquired. In the 1930s, having graduated from Oxford University and unable to find stable, permanent work, Gwyn taught classes in industrial history for the Workers’ Educational Association in the Rhondda. This was the period when working-class history – the history of the coal valleys of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire – was first being written down and taught; when it was turned into self-styled pageants with input from national figures like Benjamin Britten and Montagu Slater; when it was made into literature by A. J. Cronin and Rhys Davies, at one level, and Lewis Jones and Richard Llewellyn at another, or turned into drama for production by companies like the Aberdare Little Theatre. But this history was not yet in the form of professional historiography of the sort we have come to expect from university-trained boffins, it was still framed by a social and political purpose. Ness Edwards, the leading local historian of the period, later the Labour MP for Caerphilly, wrote his small books and pamphlets above all to ignite passions. The same was true of poet Islwyn ap Nicholas.

But Gwyn Thomas stands out from this crowd and from those mythologisers who came after him, men like Harri Webb, because he did not fall for the romantic illusions contained in terms like ‘Merthyr Rising’. Instead, Gwyn’s act of rebellion was one of ideas, of art, of a people conscious of themselves and aware of their capacity for creative invention. He was using literature to write history – as the novel’s working title My Root on Earth suggested – encouraging the use of culture to define who weare as a people, and the use of historical truth to lend weight and veracity to it all. You see, in Gwyn’s mind Merthyr Tydfil was the root of industrial experience, the origins of an ‘American Wales’, as it might legitimately be called, and the Rhondda its great flowering. The two were indelibly linked: the Cain and Abel of our unique story.

There is an epilogue to all this aspect of Gwyn’s career involving the screenwriter Alan Plater who found in the Welshman an ebullient model, the man placed at the top of the Hullensian’s fantasy league of writers. In gratitude, Plater set about bringing two of Gwyn’s works onto radio and television. The first was the memoir, A Few Selected Exits, which aired on BBC television in 1993 with Anthony Hopkins in the title role. It won a Welsh BAFTA. The second was All Things Betray Thee which went out on Radio 4 in the spring of 1996. Plater tried for years to translate Gwyn’s writing for a contemporary broadcast audience. He succeeded, if only briefly, in the mid-1990s. Writing in the Independent newspaper in 1994, he lamented ‘the neglect of Gwyn Thomas since his death in 1981’ adding that ‘perhaps rough justice will be done, if we hang around long enough’. Now is the time to bring Gwyn Thomas to the heart of Welsh literature, I suggest, to understand at last the Fury of Past Time. We have waited far too long.

If you want to find out more about Gwyn Thomas, Daryl’s new biography of him has just been published and is available in all good bookshops, direct from Parthian, or an independent such as Storyville in Pontypridd.