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CHAPTER 1

The Cradle of Belief 1939–1963

In some ways I had a very Welsh childhood. I was brought up in a Welsh-speaking family, albeit in the English-speaking village of Radyr in the Taff Valley, five miles north of Cardiff. Cardiff was not the capital city of Wales until I was fifteen, and it was also overwhelmingly English-speaking. Mine was also a very British childhood too. I was a war baby, born in September 1939. My early life was utterly dominated by the war, with John Snagge intoning the news in that plummy voice on the BBC Home Service giving updates on how we were doing in El Alamein, D-Day, Burma, and how the Red Army was marching westward after Stalingrad and so on. September 1939 must have been a hell of a time to bring a new child into the world. On the whole, though, I'm glad I was born.

There were bits and bobs of a European childhood too, with our Czech refugee neighbours, the Sussemilchs, in and out of our house all the time. You could say it was a British Empire-influenced childhood as well. By the time I was in secondary school, I found myself growing up while the sun was setting on the British Empire. The coincidence of the Suez crisis of 1956 coming along while I was in the Lower Sixth Form in Whitchurch Grammar School, which served the northern fringes of Cardiff, just at the time when you were encouraged to start to think for yourself cannot be underestimated.

My parents, Thomas John Morgan and Huana Rees, met when they were studying their honours degrees in Welsh at the newly opened university in Swansea in the 1920s. They came from the almost adjoining villages of Glais and Ynystawe in the Lower Swansea Valley. They had never met each other before university, because my mother lived in Port Talbot from the age of ten until she was twenty-four. No one can be objective about their parents, but I have the impression that they were a bit of a golden couple around the campus.

Although my father won a state scholarship, it was a minor miracle that he reached the giddy heights of higher education. He was born in 1907. His father, William, was a coal miner but had long periods without any work, especially after 1920. When my father passed with some ease his School Certificate (today's GCSE equivalent) in 1922, he told the headmaster at Pontardawe County School that he was leaving school to get a job in a bank. He wanted to contribute to the family's meagre income. Most of his friends were leaving anyway, so peer group pressure must have come into it.

In those days, to get a job in a bank your parents had to post a bond of £100 in case you stole the petty cash. Some chance of getting a £100 bond from an unemployed miner's household. But my father's pride told him that work and not the Sixth Form was his destiny. At fifteen years of age, you know it all!

Wasting his life was what my father proceeded to do over the next few months. None of his friends had jobs or apprenticeships. The sympathetic caretaker of the Institute in Clydach let my father play billiards all day – until his old headmaster nabbed him on the way home for tea. The head had dreamt up a ruse. He asked my father if he still had his rugby boots. My father said yes, and the head then explained that the First XV were a few players short for Saturday. Would my father like to play? 'Yes', he said. 'Well, there you are. You're in the team. Just one little detail – you'll have to come back to school. Don't worry about that job in the bank. Any time you get a job, you can leave straight away.' 'No problem, okay, I'll see you Saturday' (and Monday and Tuesday etc., of course!). I think my father must have been getting bored with non-stop billiards by then, and he willingly fell for the headmaster's little trick.

He flew through his Highers, as A levels were known back then, despite the missing months. That's how he earned his state scholarship and entrance into Swansea to study his honours degree in Welsh and play rugby for the college team. Had it not been for that amazing pastoral care by the grammar school headmaster, my father would never have met my mother.

Her route to the same university campus at Singleton Park was different but equally tortuous. By the time she was sitting her A level equivalent exams, the Rees family were living in Port Talbot. They came from Ynystawe in the Swansea Valley, but had moved after my grandfather's grocery business had collapsed. He then became the company secretary of a small coal-mining company in the Afan Valley.

When my mother was revising for her examinations, alone in the house one evening, there was a thunderous knock on the door. My mother opened the door to four men in heavy overcoats and black-brimmed hats, with just a touch of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse about them. One asked, 'Is John Rees at home?' 'No', my mother answered quite truthfully, 'he's at a prayer meeting'. 'And well he might be', was the riposte, as the four turned on their heels. They were bailiffs of some kind, come to serve a notice on my grandfather.

He must have managed to get out of this financial crisis somehow. He returned to Ynystawe, where he was a long-standing deacon of Moreia Baptist Chapel. He got hold of a coal lorry, and established the coal delivery business that served the family well until he retired at seventy-two. He was known as 'Rees y Glo' to the Welsh speakers in the area – 'Rees the Coal' to the English speakers. The effect of the coal-mining company's problems on my mother, given the timing, could have been quite severe. She was so sick with worry that she seriously underperformed in the examinations, but got into university on her teacher's recommendation.

If my grandfather had been made bankrupt, I don't suppose she would have been able to go to Swansea, but she did. So my parents were studying Welsh within a year of each other, and met. My father asked my mother to go with him to listen to the violin competition in the Patti Pavilion at the Inter-College Eisteddfod. It was a piece by César Franck. There were six competitors, and my future parents sat through it all.

My mother must have been a bit impressed by this rugby-obsessed miner's son from the other side of the Swansea Valley. He must have been very culturally clued up too to listen to hour after hour of César Franck.

When my mother finally took him home to meet her parents in Ynystawe, the four of them sat through a rather nervous tea. After my father left, my mother asked her parents what they thought of him. 'Siarad gormod', was my grandfather's terse reply – 'Talks too much'. My grandfather was a man of religion. He left the speaking to the preacher in any communal gathering. As the senior deacon in the chapel, he was the only one allowed to fill the gaps in the sermon with 'Amen' or 'Hallelujah'. I used to be terribly impressed by this obvious sign of status.

My parents didn't get married until 1935. They must have been courting for ten years. They both had masters degrees in Welsh by then. My mother's was on poetry appreciation. My father was more into linguistics and the parallels between Middle Welsh and Middle Irish. This had involved him spending a year at University College Dublin in 1928. He told me he almost had a nervous breakdown doing his MA – it was a combination of overwork and a huge row with his professor and supervisor, Henry Lewis, who thought my father's theories were plain wrong. There might have been some added stress from his immersion in the Irish language, seen as essential to his academic work – he lived in Dublin in a 'No English Spoken Here' lodging house, run by a redoubtable Republican landlady called Miss Coyle, who had apparently been a gun-runner for the IRA in the civil war a few years previously.

I think giving up rugby far too early was a big loss to him. If you're studying hard, you need some physical recreation to balance body and mind, and my father had always played rugby. He was carrying an annoying shoulder injury, but his lifestyle in Dublin did not abide by the dictum of 'Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body'. It was all work and no play.

These days, a row or two with your supervisor over a key part of your PhD thesis is par for the course, but in the much narrower field of Welsh linguistics back in the late 1920s it would have felt far more threatening. My father must have been close to panic that all his hard work in earning his state scholarship and First Class Honours in Welsh was not going to lead to a job in academia after all.

My father did get his MA (PhDs were little known back then), despite his professor's criticisms, and was appointed to the staff of the Welsh Department of the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, in 1930.

In 1929, my mother had got her first job teaching Welsh in Rhymney at the county secondary school known as 'The Lawns'. That makes it sound quite plush, but in 1929 it was anything but. The Rhymney Coal & Iron Company had closed the iron works in 1928, and the unemployment rate had soared to 75 per cent in the town. Rhymney sits at the top of the valley of the same name, and was known as the last Welsh-speaking town in Monmouthshire. Rhymney was the western part of the Ebbw Vale constituency, and 1929 was also the year in which the area first elected its firebrand new MP Aneurin Bevan. He was from Tredegar, just three miles (and one mountain) east of Rhymney. Tredegar had changed from Welshto English-speaking around the turn of the century, but Rhymney had not.

Tom Price, the headmaster at 'The Lawns', met my mother at the station. They walked together up the main street to the school. Most of the shops were boarded up. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see my mother becoming gradually dispirited at the dismal appearance of the place. He may have worried that she was going to turn round and get on the next train home. 'It may look pretty depressed now, Miss Rees, but don't forget – Tom Jones the Cabinet comes from here!' Tom Jones wasn't a Cabinet Minister. He was much more important than that. He was the Deputy Cabinet Secretary and the great fixer behind every government decision throughout the interwar years.

At her first staffroom tea break on her first Monday, my mother was totally disconcerted by a question from one of her new colleagues. 'Which councillor did you have to buy the three-piece suite for?' Out of left field doesn't come close. It turned out that every one of the other teachers, all appointed in happier but more crooked times, had had to buy a three-piece suite from the Roath Furnishing Company in Cardiff for one of the councillors, all in order to secure their jobs.

They must have omitted to make that arrangement in my mother's case, either because Rhymney County School was the only school in Monmouthshire where Welsh was taught, or because they anticipated a real recruitment problem in depression-hit Rhymney. Whatever the reason, my mother never had to pay anyone to get her first (or second and last) teaching appointment. That was the only good thing about the job. In every other way it was a searing experience. The kids were starving. They had no change of clothing. They couldn't concentrate – except on Fridays.

Eastbourne had apparently adopted Rhymney. A van containing food parcels would arrive from the south coast and distribute the contents around the town. Each family would have enough for a square meal on Thursday nights and a breakfast on Friday morning and, as a result of full bellies, they'd be all brighteyed and bushy-tailed on Friday. That was Teaching Day. Mondays through to Thursdays were survival days.

My mother did two years in Rhymney and then, courtesy of a wonderful reference from Tom Price, no doubt grateful that my mother had lasted two years, got a job at Glan-y-Môr Secondary School in Swansea. That meant she could live at home. She never forgot the dreadful experience of being interviewed by the full Swansea council – 'Sixty old men', as she recalled it throughout her life. It wasn't an interview for a headship or even a departmental head. Just a normal teaching job. 'What did any of those old men know about the teaching of Welsh?' she would rail when the family took her for birthday meals in the old Swansea Guildhall, which was by then the Dylan Thomas Centre. It was where the dreadful interview had taken place, and the experience would come flooding back to her.

My mother never spoke as much about the four years she taught in Glan-y-Môr as about the two years in Rhymney. It wasn't as dramatic. She'd mastered the art of teaching. 'Never smile before Easter' was one of her guiding principles. Living in Ynystawe and working five miles away in Swansea made courtship just a bit more practical. My parents eventually got married in 1935 in Moreia Chapel, Ynystawe, where my grandfather was a deacon. Just six people present, and they didn't include my father's brother and sister or his parents. That caused a bit of upset in Glais, but my parents always did things their own way. Whether it was to save money or a certain diffidence towards any form of display, I'm not sure. I used to ask my mother and father about this when a small boy. I always asked them separately and I never got a satisfactory answer.

All I do know from family legend is that my Uncle Aylwin, the best man, was only asked to be best man on the night before. When asked, he first said he couldn't possibly do it because he didn't have a clean collar. Whatever the reason for going economy class for the wedding, Julie and I followed suit when we got married more than thirty years later (on my father's birthday) in April 1967, as also did my daughter and son-in-law when they were married in 1998.

My mother's teaching career ended in 1935. Married women were not allowed to teach in state schools, not since an edict of the National Government in 1931, I believe, to help spread the jobs around. It was a terrible waste of my mother's teaching talents, but she never complained about it. She thought the rule was tough but fair in the Hungry Thirties. Why should some families have two bread-winners when other families didn't have one?

My father had a permanent safe job in Wales in the 1930s. Not many people could say that. Almost all of my father's graduating class and his pals in the Swansea university college rugby team had had to leave Wales to get teaching jobs. Claude Davey, my father's centre partner went to teach in the Manchester area, played for Sale rugby club and went on to captain Wales to victory over the All Blacks in 1935. Idwal Rees, later head of Cowbridge Grammar School, had to start off teaching in Fettes in Edinburgh, Tony Blair's alma mater; he also played in that victorious 1935 team, at which time he was a player for Edinburgh Wanderers. Watcyn Thomas was another Swansea teammate, and briefly a rival for my mother's attentions until shooed off firmly by my father; he became a star player for Moseley, and Wales while teaching at King Edward VII School in Birmingham, and then captained Wales to its first ever victory at Twickenham in 1933. All of them had to leave Wales. My father did not.

Now they were married, my father could move out of digs and my mother could leave home. The newly-wed Morgan family rented a house in Radyr, a suburban village in the Lower Taff Valley on the railway line from Cardiff to Merthyr and the Rhondda Valleys. The house was bang in the centre of the village next door to the Wesleyan Methodist English language chapel. 'Bang' is the operative word as well, because all road accidents in Radyr took place on the crossroads outside our house, and the wounded were always brought into our front room to wait for the ambulance, dripping blood on our carpet.

I'm still puzzled as to how my parents chose the house in Radyr. Many young academics, especially those with radical leanings, chose the Rhiwbina Garden Village. That was the Hampstead of Cardiff. But I think it was the same reason as the six person wedding – a fear of public display and a loss of privacy, and the compulsion to join in things. My father wanted the freedom to get on with his studies with minimum distractions.

With a ten minute railway commute to the university and the no. 33 bus to central Cardiff stopping outside the house, the location was undoubtedly convenient. It was no. 32 Heol Isaf. Radyr might have appealed to them as the ideal place to raise children because it was surrounded by fields and forests. My brother Prys arrived on 7 August 1937, and I followed on 29 September 1939, twenty-six days after Britain declared war on Germany.

Being on the banks of the Taff, Radyr is built on quite a steep slope; the bottom part of the village was totally dominated by the railway marshalling yards. We were all brought up with our mother's milk in the belief that Radyr Sidings were the largest in the UK after Clapham Junction. The sidings needed to be that big because the railway wagons coming down from the Valleys, full of coal to be exported to all the bunkering stations to refuel Royal Navy and Merchant Navy vessels all around the world, had to have a holding pond somewhere until a ship was available in Cardiff Docks. By the time my brother and I came along, the glory days of Cardiff Docks had gone. In the 1880s Cardiff competed with New York as the largest port in the world on tonnage; by the 1940s, New York had edged slightly ahead of Cardiff!

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Rhodri"
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Copyright © 2017 The Estate of Rhodri Morgan.
Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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