Carwyn: A Personal Memoir

By Alun Richards

Carwyn James treated rugby football as if it was an art form and aesthetics part of the coaching manual. He was the first man to coach any British Lions side to overseas victory, and still the only one to beat the All Blacks in a series in New Zealand. That was in 1971, and it was followed in 1972 by the triumph of his beloved Llanelli against the touring All Blacks at Stradey Park. His subsequent and successful career as broadcaster and journalist and then a return to the game as a coach in Italy never quite settled his restless nature. After his sudden death, his close friend Alun Richards set out to write what he called “A Personal Memoir” to reflect on the enigma that had been Carwyn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parthian Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781910409916

Alun Richards

Alun Morgan Richards was born in Pontypridd in 1929. He wrote six novels from 1962 to 1979 and two scintillating collections of short stories, Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1976). Plays for stage and radio were complemented by original screenplays and adaptations for television, including BBC's Onedin Line. As an editor, he produced best-selling editions of Welsh short stories and tales of the sea for Penguin. His sensitive biography of his close friend, Carwyn James, appeared in 1984 and his own entrancing memoir Days of Absence in 1986.

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Copyright

ALUN RICHARDS was born in 1929 in Pontypridd. After spells as a schoolteacher, probation officer and as an instructor in the Royal Navy, from the 1960s he was, and successfully so, a full-time writer. He lived near the Mumbles, close to the sea which, coupled with the hills of the South Wales Valleys, was the landscape of his fiction. Alongside plays for stage and radio, screenplays and adaptations for television, a biography and a memoir, he wrote six novels and two collections of short stories, Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1976). As editor, he produced bestselling editions of Welsh short stories and tales of the sea for Penguin. In 1980, his illustrated Essay, A Touch of Glory:100 Years of Welsh Rugby appeared to accompany the official WRU/BBC Wales film he had been commisioned to write. Carwyn James contributed the afterword. Alun Richards died in 2004.

CARWYN

ALUN RICHARDS

LIBRARY OF WALES

FOREWORD

The appointment to meet had been made for five-thirty in the lounge bar of the Beverley Hotel, half way up the leafy Cardiff Victorian boulevard of Cathedral Road. His office, some said, one sufficiently far from and sufficiently near to BBC Wales’ headquarters in Llandaff where the Great Man plied his trade as supreme rugby analyst on air, as he had once so recently done on the fields of play as Coach of the all-conquering Scarlets. And before that of the Lions. But, after his letter, which was in truth a Declaration of War, to the Welsh Rugby Union in 1974, not as Coach of Wales. Ever. Now, in the summer of 1977 he was set to go to Italy to coach Rovigo, who would inevitably soon be his latest championship team. His own country, Wales, or Cymru as he would always prefer it said, was afloat all that decade on the euphoria of rugby glory. The 1970s was, paradoxically, a time when the more substantive aspects of Welsh identity, from language and culture to industry and politics, were so severely in question that the common cause of rugby football was almost taken as an ethereal substitute for Wales itself. If so, it would not have seemed an adequate replacement to a man whose patriotism had far deeper roots than the game he so espoused, and loved.

I arrived, on foot and slightly late, blinking out of the late afternoon’s sunshine into the smoky half-light of a clubbily-upholstered lounge at whose bar Carwyn James was holding conversational court. In one hand he cradled a large G and T and in the other a smouldering, un-tipped cigarette which he waved like a firefly wand to emphasise one point or another to a circle of admiring acolytes. You could tell they were acolytes by their silence, and their admiration by a cranial choreography of nods in agreement. He was, as he had been for over five years now, the centre of all attention. That centre, as he must already have known though the rest of us did not as yet, would not hold. That afternoon, however, his mood was genial to the point of mischievousness. When he glimpsed me hovering at the edge of his group, though we had not met to that point, he beckoned me closer and said, Be with you in a minute, and indicated a far corner of the room.

I had told him, by phone, that I was researching for the officially commissioned centenary history of Welsh rugby, due in 1980. That I wanted to ask questions, gain insights, gather information, seek opinion, value reminiscence, treasure his knowledge and wisdom, and generally bow down low before his graven image. Now, as he slid onto the leatherette seat beside me I was nervous and mumbled about the topics – his playing career, other players, the selectors and administrators, the nature of the 1960s coaching revolution – I had been rehearsing in my mind beforehand. He appeared to be listening hard. He was indeed a very good listener, as I was to discover. He was also, as I should have known, a man of immaculate preparation. He tilted his head, the hair plastered smooth and combed in a side parting, he blew smoke in my direction and gave me a smile that could disarm a whole pack of marauders.

‘You’re a student of Anglo-Welsh literature, I hear,’ he said, and paused as I bridled at the term. ‘So, tell me what you think, truthfully mind, of the short stories of Alun Richards.’

I had been wrong-footed, sent sprawling, put, so unexpectedly onto my intellectual arse. Mentally, I tried to stumble back to my feet. Instead I gaped as he smiled beatifically at my bewilderment. Carwyn Rees James of Cefneithin and West Wales, Plaid Cymru’s candidate in the 1970 by-election in Llanelli and ardent standard bearer for all things Cymraeg, had asked for my (honest) opinion of Alun Morgan Richards of Pontypridd and East Wales, self-appointed scourge of the Taffia and of their cultural hegemony in the media, and the supreme fictional satirist of ‘Welshy-Welsh’ sentimentality and hypocrisy in the short stories of his two collections, Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1976).

How far could this interview go, I thought, if I told him truthfully of my opinion of this writer? Did he want to hear what I thought he would want to hear? Dismissal and a snort of derision against a writer I had also, to that point, never met? Or did he want, as a test, to see if I would be honest with him? At last, I’d want to say, there is a cutting-edge of comedy and scorn to dissect a self-promoting, self-regarding Welsh world, and one shamefully intent on its own removal from the working-class dynamics that were the origin of modern Wales. Or, hang on a minute, could he possibly have read the piece I had contributed to the Times Literary Supplement that March where, in a frenzied survey of contemporary Welshness I had mentioned Alun Richards, with a backhanded compliment meant for praise, as having ‘the eye of a baleful outsider’? For James the scholar, it was entirely possible. So was there, in fact, an authentic interest in my views on the scalpel wielder, the no-holds-barred moralist, the anglophone champion from Ponty? No, there wasn’t. He was not being at all sincere in his enquiry. He knew the answer already, and it was his friend Alun Richards, as it turned out later, who had told him.

Anyway, I replied truthfully,and combatively I seem to remember, and he gave a nod, or two, of non-committal acknowledgment before we took up, again, the rugby cudgels of research for which I had come. Quite soon thereafter I met Alun for the first time and told him, as he chortled, the story of my encounter with Italy-bound Carwyn. Alun would go out to stay sporadically, to keep him company in Rovigo, to keep him amused, until he relinquished the post in 1979. By then that odd couple were firm friends, so much so that when Carwyn died in 1983, only Alun was close enough, and equipped enough, to give full and proper consideration to the enigma that was, apparently, Carwyn James. It would take a writer to do that,for only a writer could find the right form to convey the intricate complexity of this subject. Alun began to write an essay as a personal memoir but his research, after his friend’s death and with Carwyn’s own written words whispering to him, became a book that is a unique piece of sports literature and amongst one of the very best things Alun Richards ever wrote. A book was, indeed, the only field of play on which Alun could begin to approach the mysteriousness of his friend if he was not to be sidestepped into unknowing oblivion by sleight of the hand, foot and mind of the slippery Jamesian persona. He needed the heft of a book if he was to be enabled to confront head on, by his own chosen form and structure, his elusive friend and literary quarry. Alun went straight for the only possible gap open to him: the relationships they had shared. Between themselves, and to their own distinctive versions of their common country.

There was, of course, an underlying commonality all along. It would take the innate sensibility of the writer to highlight its significance. It is there in their common year of birth, 1929, and in the parallel generational experiences of education in a Welsh Grammar school,in higher education in Welsh colleges, followed by teacher training, by subsequent careers as school teachers, and by that combined wrapper of growing up in wartime and of both serving, post-war, in the Royal Navy. They knew, then, of the same things, from rugby fever to popular culture and of the vital importance of both to the South Wales of their youth. It was, too, for both of them a cossetted upbringing. For Carwyn because, despite his father being a coalminer through the Depression years of the 1930s, the work was done in the relatively prosperous, western anthracite coalfield not in the more populous steam coalfield to the urban east where the links to the land and an agrarian way of life had ceased almost as much as the Welsh language had dwindled as a social force. Materially Carwyn wanted for nothing, and neither did Alun whose grandparents as he recounts in his brilliant autobiography, Days of Absence (1986), prospered as shopkeepers in the proletarian wreckage of Pontypridd on the Taff, in the central wound of interwar South Wales.

Yet Alun Richards was ill at ease as a child, fatherless and not quite one and the same as them amongst his school friends, whose own poverty was real, and palpable. Not for him the depth and security of the James family’s sense of rootedness, living on the fringe of the coalfield in the Gwendraeth Valley, but profoundly too from rural Rhydlewis, Carwyn’s designated spiritual home. There was an almost surreal perfection to Carwyn James’s early life. There was its personal completeness for him as a gifted athlete and scholar but also the natural and wider confidence of a whole culture that was a unique compound of industrial work and rural mores, all imbued with a Welshness of spirit and of outlook made buoyant by the Welsh language and, for him, its literature. Carwyn assumed all these gifts as his right. There were no distracting challenges to them so far as he was concerned, and what might later pass for an undeniably different Welsh world was also, undeniably, lesser so far as he was concerned. His mantra on the rugby pitch would be, ‘Think! Think! Think!’, but off the field he rarely seemed to question or quiz his fate, or that of others.

The mode of Alun Richards was altogether different. The writer was the eternal questioner, sceptical and savagely so if required to expose any self-appointed authority. Faced with the humility and the conjoined arrogance of Carwyn James, met by his charm and his indifference, by his charisma and his desire to be ordinary, by his capacity to be singularly not-at-all-tribal and his absolute sense of being a Welshman and nothing else, the writer held his unlikely friend in fascinated awe. In public, and in private, he calculatedly mispronounced his name as ‘Caah-wyn’ and railed in exasperation as to how this son of a coalminer could be so ignorant of, say, the importance and stature of such as Will Paynter, Rhondda Communist and General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers – whom he summoned me to bring to meet Carwyn one Sunday in a Mumbles pub where, predictably, the only hero-worship on show was from a 75-year old Paynter to the fifty-year-old rugby genius who gave the International Brigader his requested autograph – or how the socialist James could conceivably spurn Aneurin Bevan for Gwynfor Evans. And so on, and on, as East met West. Or rather, how the social and historical divisions of Wales had bred and separated such different, if related, cultures.

It became Alun’s task to unravel these relationships by placing himself, his own culture and consciousness, at the heart of a book intent on explaining Carwyn James. To himself as well as to his readers. And, perhaps, if Carwyn had lived, to Carwyn himself. For in the final analysis, there was no enigma, no mystery, only the complexity of character which was, perhaps, ingrained in Carwyn’s psychological being and the diversity of experience which was undergone in their generation from east to west, and, of course, together.

With consummate skill and considerable, if understated, research Alun Richards put all the pieces back together again. He entered Carwyn’s world imaginatively and empathetically. Where he could he gave us Carwyn, through diamond-etched vignettes of childhood, in his own words and, unflinchingly honest, he assessed their concerns, their quarrels and their joy as if he was remembering a marriage of twinned souls. This masterpiece of enquiry is not, in the end, about sport at all, or not in any reductionist or descriptive sense, rather it is a unique concatenation of what it was to be articulate, fully human, in their chosen fields of endeavour within the fragmented cultures of Wales they represented. Without Alun, the Welshman who without Welsh could yet be nothing other than a denizen of South Wales, there was no Carwyn, the Welsh-speaking patriot who could, in other guises, be as Other – even English, certainly British, utterly Global – as he chose.Without Carwyn, confident of and content with his own Welsh place in the world, there could be no Alun, chippily from his very own patch of Wales and cosmopolitan in his intent for his life and art. Together they, if improbably to the historically myopic, were more alike than differentiated. Turning the coin of their place and time over and over in this book was how Alun Richards managed to create a picture of Carwyn that is as compelling as it is profound, though it is not a portrait, solidly conventional or even daringly experimental, it is a suite of watercolours in which the subject swims into view and dissolves in the same instance, inextricable from the art he once performed and the artistry which conjures him up here, and now forever.

That is the ‘How’ of it, as to the ‘Why’, the last words on that must be those of Carwyn’s friend and admirer, though never his acolyte, Alun Richards:

‘Carwyn the friend was a unique and beloved man of greater consequence than all his public achievements (and) what also needs to be said is that he was a Welshman who made you feel glad you were a member of the human race.’

Dai Smith

ONE

The Flat on the Via I Monti

‘Come to Italy?’

I was not very keen.

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t fancy it.’

‘Come on! I’ll have a flat. You can work in the morn­ings. Rovigo’s in the North.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Just like Llanelli!’

‘That rules it out then. If it was like Pontypridd, I might be tempted.’ Where Welshmen are concerned, a blade of grass can form the frontier making foreign territory.

‘Come on! You’ll like it when you get there. They’re very friendly people.’

‘I’ll see,’ I said. ‘Drop me a line when you arrive.’

‘That’ll be the day,’ a mutual friend said.

Carwyn James was notorious for his unanswered letters. At this time in 1977, although I had met him previously and known of him for most of my adult life, I did not really know him. He was a West Walian and I am an East Walian, and, as I was fond of telling him, we were as different as chalk and cheese. We had some things in common apart from a lifelong interest in rugby football. We had both been teachers, had both given up teaching – he, quite recently for journalism and broadcasting, where­as I had long since become a professional writer and, if I was known for anything in Wales, it was for my critical views of the Welsh Establishment. He, on the other hand, apart from his differences with the Welsh Rugby Union, was one of the most confident Welshmen of his generation and moved easily in those Welsh-speaking areas of Establishment Wales which, in my view, stubbornly refuse to admit that there is no greater dividing line than that formed by a language. It is a difficult thing to explain to an outsider, how a man can feel a stranger in his own country, and the indifference of many Welshmen to their nation springs from the feeling, often justified, of being excluded, especially from those organisations in broadcasting and education where execu­tive positions and a good many others are reserved for those with bilingual qualifications. It is an old com­plaint, and a lost battle as far as many Welshmen are concerned, but Carwyn (who would not accept this view) was not only the epitome of Welsh-speaking Wales, a Welsh scholar, a chapel deacon and Plaid Cymru can­di­date, but an ex-Welsh-inter­national fly-half, the triumphant coach of the 1971 British Lions in New Zealand and a regular broad­caster who brought wit and intelligence to bear on what­ever subject he spoke about. He was a man always in demand, who crossed dividing lines with ease, and