Idris Davies 1905 - 1953 The bard of Abertyswg colliery By John Cunningham (Dinnington NUM)

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...Do you remember 1926? The great dream and swift disaster 'Ay, Ay, we remember 1926', said Dai and Shinkin, As they stood on the kerb in Charing Cross Road, 'And we shall remember 1926 until our blood is dry'. But Pearse and Macdonagh, and the Countess of the drums, The dreamers and the fighters who fought to save their dreams, They strode out from their shadowy echoing churches, And they redeemed their land from many shames And left the name of Dublin splendid among cities, And made this white Glasnevin a garden of glory. Iaris Davies, poet and one time miner, was born in Rhymney, South Wales on 6 January 1905. At the age of 14, like so many before him, he went to work in the local pit, first at Abertyswg and then Rhymney-Mardy.

For almost seven years he worked underground, sharing the hardships and dangers of the miners' work.

Looking back on his work underground, Davies wrote in an unpublished notebook of an accident he received:

"I looked at my hand and saw a piece of white bone shining like snow, and the flesh of the little finger all limp. The men supported me, and one ran for an ambulance box down the heading, and there I was fainting away like a little baby girl."

He also wrote a novel about his earlier days, which he titled "Collier Boy" •.. a plain story in straightforward English, of a boy who did not want to be a miner but who had to be one."

Unfortunately this novel is still unpublished. The memories of those days stayed with him all his life. The '20s and '30s were periods of great hardship and suffering in the South Wales valleys and in his poetry Davies was to rile against the injustices and indignities inflicted on the working class, his was not a poetry written in quiet contemplation but one in which his anger at the ravages of a brutal capitalism, his passionate and partisan feelings for his people, were to remain a constant theme throughout his writings.

After 1926 and the General Strike, Idris Davies never returned to the pit. Like thousands of others he could not find work and it was during this period that Davies first becomes acquainted with the world of literature.

At school, he says in his autobiographical poem "I was born in Rhymney" ', he detested poetry.

Idleness

Through his enforced idleness Davies begins to read voraciously and widely Wordsworth, Shelley, Milton, Shakespeare, the Shropshire poet A.E. Houseman and many others As well as his literature, The bravery of the faithful, simple folk? These are your children begging for bread 'You foolish miners!' the newspaper said 'Look at the pictures that all may see _ Victims of your stupidity!

O you stubborn callous men, Starving your wives and your kids again, Striking because the weather is fair, And leaving your collieries out of repair, And drinking as if you had the right To share in the joys of a summer night. Once you were heroes you rescued your kind Out of the galleries left blazing behind, And we praised you in eloquent journalese And chatted about you at parlour teas And now you won't work for your daily bread You lazy miners! the newspaper said.

They strode out and fought and died which he often read while walking in the mountains around Rhymney, he studied by correspondance course and towards the end of the '30s he was taken on as a student teacher at Middle Rhymney junior school.

He wasn't there for long, in 1930 came his first big break when he won a place at Loughborough Training College, later going on to Nottingham University and it is from this period on that his poetry can be dated.

Between 1932 and 1947 Idris Davies was employed as a school teacher by the London County Council mainly in Bow in the East End but with a number of periods in the country teaching to evacuee children and returning to his beloved Rhymney whenever holidays came round.

The time in London was an important one for Davies, he made the acquaintance of other writers and on a Friday evening he would go drihking with Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies, the short (Gwalia Deserta (The Angry Summı (Glasnevin Cemetery)

story writer and other Welsh writers and journalists.

They would meet in a bookshop off Charing Cross Road and then move on to the 'Pillars of Hercules' . where it is said, Davies, to the delight of his drinking partners would quote Shakespeare "by the yard"

Davies' poetry began to be noticed and in the '30s he had some poems published. "Wales" magazine published a few and the socialist "Left Review" published two more. In 1938 Dent published "Gwalia Deserta" which although well received did not sell very well.

•'The Angry Summer" Davies' bitter and moving recol lection of the 1926 strike was published in 1943; it sold only 896 copies. "Tonypandy and other poems" followed in 1945, this time selling 1427.

After the war, Davies, not without some difficulty, returned to South Wales and • took up teaching at Cwmsyfiog Junior School, very near to his native Rhymney. His last years sadly and the ravages inflicted upon the Welsh valleys by a rapacious capitalism.

There are other themes as well: the honesty, determination, solidarity and the humour of the working class, but particularly the Welsh miners - all these qualities, so desperately needed, he personified in his invented figure - Dai, "Dai -the great of heart" as he called him, symbol of all miners.

For all miners, and Idris Davies was no exception, the year 1926 was etched indelibly into the memory and for him personally it was a watershed. In his poem "The Angry Summer" he recollects the pain, suffering and heroism of the Welsh miners as they struggled through those difficult and stormy months. Like so many, Davies never forgot or forgave.

Humbug

Much of what Davies wrote about is still with us today. He detested lies and humbug and he more than once poured his scorn on the press of the time for the slanders they threw around about the miners and their leaders:

So you have come down from London O young man in plus-fours, To write about our trouble in slick and popular prose?

Say, are you a slave from London Who write what you are told By a brazen man of millions Whose only creed is gold?

Or have you come for knowledge Solid and plain and bare And have you a love for honesty To teach you how to dare?

Do you value the code of comrades And the decency of life And the pride that spurns the traitor In the soaring hour of strife?

But if you come here to slander And trade in yellow lies Go back, young man to London With shame between your eyes.

(The Angry Summer 9)

The 'Angry Summer' dragged on. A.J. Cook, the miners' leader comes to the valleys ... arousing his people ... almost burning his way to victory." More peaceful days are spent on the mountains reading Shakespeare and dreaming of a better future.

A day trip to Barry Island provides a welcome break from queuing at the soup kitchens. Finally, however, the strike is lost and the miners are starved into submission, evoking bitter judgement:

And this Friday goes down in history Yellow and edged with black.

Idris Davies To that dream that guided the broken feet And roused to beauty and to pride Toiler and toiler, side by side, Whose faith and courage shall be told In blaze of scarlet and of gold.

(Angry Summer 50)

In his poem, "Gwalia Deserta", published five years before "The Angry Summer"' ", Idris Davies, as well as writing about aspects of 1926 and the miners' life, sets out a much broader theme - the destruction and blighting of the South Wales Valleys he loved so much (similar in some respects to Richard Llewellyn's 'How Green was my Valley"):

In Gwalia, in my Gwalia, The vandals out of Hell ransacked forever The wooded hill and dell.

They grabbed and bruised and plundered Becaus their greed was great, And slunk away and purchased The medals of the State.

(Gwalia Deserta XXIII)

Idris Davies' outrage at the 'vandalism' of the coal owners and the sufferings of the working class were often mixed with a distinct pride and sense of identity as a Welshman - yet he wasn't a nationalist.

He writes of the rich Welsh heritage and of heroes such as Owen Glendower, yet he is a socialist, although there is little in his poetry, or the other fragments of his writings which are available, to indicate that this was ever developed politically.

His socialism rather than deriving from a study of the political world seems to arise almost out of the earth on which he was born.

Hardly surprising - South Wales and the South Wales Miners Federation have long been one of the foremost cradles of socialism in the against British domination and that of his native people against British capital and the defilement by the coalowners of the Valleys. Certainly the rebels of 1916, that strange mixture of revolutionaries, poets and nationalists, fused together in a glorious struggle against overwhelming odds, appealed to the veteran of the 1926 strike Important though the trips to Ireland were and however great Davies' love of Yeats they were temporary departures from his main themes - " ... the colourless streets and long black hills" of South Wales, the ... slag heaps and hovels and little bowler-hatted deacons" and that moment, by the fireside, of painful reflection, when " • •• you know in your heart how your life has been botched."

For the unemployed life was grim and for those lucky enough to work there was little reward for a life of arduous and dangerous toil in the 'local hell' ''Tonypandy", , published in 1945, is possibly Idris Davies' nost retlective poem, in it he ponders on the fate of Dai and his miserable lot in life, something which, despite the distance of the years Davies could not and would not forget: So much you have given, so little received • Dai you miner of Tonypandy! And 'blessed it is to give' the bible says you ought to be an angel." (Tonypandy IV)

Idris Davies ends 'Tonypandy" with a call from the heart to Dai, asking him to never let people forget the debt they owe to him and the tens of thousands of other Dais who have and still "toil in the galleries of grime", to those whose unseen blood and sweat, and sometimes death itself have allowed others to live in