Alun Richards

Prolific and unsentimental writer about the valleys of post-industrial South Wales

Alun Richards, short-story writer, novelist and dramatist: born Pontypridd, Glamorgan 27 November 1929; married (three sons, one daughter); died Swansea 2 June 2004.

Alun Richards was the most talented and prolific of that generation of Welsh prose-writers who came to prominence in the 1960s, just as the industrial communities of the South Wales valleys were beginning to lose the cultural cohesion that had depended on coal and steel and as the Nonconformist chapels started to be turned into bingo halls and supermarts.

Whereas writers of the inter-war generation such as Rhys Davies, Glyn Jones and Gwyn Thomas had been able to write about the life of pit, steelworks, miners' lodge and Sunday School, Richards took as his material a society which was more prosperous, hedonistic and socially mobile, less concerned with religion, politics and working conditions, but still with enough fierce pride in community to distinguish it from the rootless, middle-class suburbia of Cardiff and the leafy villages of the Vale of Glamorgan, some 12 miles to the south. In one of his short stories, "The Scandalous Thoughts of Elmyra Mouth", the pulchritudinous heroine, whose ambitious husband wants them to move down the valley to be near his job as an assistant cameraman with BBC Wales, refuses to do so with the ultimatum, "Travel, you bugger. You'll not move me an inch!"

The view of South Wales in the novels, plays and short stories of Alun Richards, of which there are a great many, is comic, unsentimental, affectionate but scathing in its observation of social pretension and flawed relationships. If many of his stories are set in the male world of rugby club and the roughest of pubs, he is also good at depicting the lot of women involved in failed marriages, adultery and emotional crises arising from their role as homemakers, mothers and often sole breadwinners at a time when male unemployment was casting its shadow in places like Ebbw Vale, Merthyr Tydfil, Aberdare and the Rhondda.

At the heart of his writing is the former mining and railway town of Pontypridd; at the confluence of Taff and Rhondda, where Richards was born in 1929. In his fine autobiography, Days of Absence (1986), he described with engaging candour how he was brought up in a strict but loving, comfortable, English-speaking home by his Welsh-speaking matemal grandparents, his mother and father having separated three days after he was born. The identity of his father was kept from him and he glimpsed him only once, his trilby hat silhouetted behind the frosted glass of the front door on the sole occasion he called at the house.

This experience of being "a fatherless child", in addition to his having a birthmark on his cheek, was the making of Richards as a writer. "I learned at an early age to lie low, to watch, to gauge a mood, to know when it was time to speak," he wrote:

I also learned to listen, to eavesdrop, gathering what bits and pieces of information I could. I listened from corners, behind doors, on tramcars, to hushed voices drifting out of the vestry after chapel, to the gossip of neighbours talking in the street. I kept these phrases to me, hugging them in the secret place.

The acute observation of place and people to be found in his stories had begun even before he went to school.

His time at Pontypridd Boys' Grammar School, one of the best of its kind in the whole of Wales, was marked by rebelliousness and a bare minimum of academic endeavour. "I was 31st when I went into the school and I've kept it up," he told his grandmother, still putting a brave face on things. His fraught relationship with E.R. Thomas, known to us boys as Piggy, the martinet of a headmaster who served as the father Richards never had, is movingly described in the autobiography. One incident must suffice.

Frog-marched into the Assembly Hall to be shown on the Roll of Honour the newly painted name of his uncle, an RAF pilot who had been shot down over Le Havre, he met the teacher's sarcastic jibe "A family of heroes, and what are you?" with the defiant, quick-witted reply, "Alive!" It was a defining moment and thereafter a strange sort of bond grew between man and boy. From always being in Piggy's bad books, Richards became his Gold Flake Boy, a coveted status because it meant being able to nip out to the shop kept by his grandmother in the middle of the school day and thus choose the lessons he wanted to miss.

After three years at the Monmouthshire Training College for Teachers in Caerleon, at which he found a place not by virtue of a very ordinary School Certificate but a glowing reference from his old headmaster, Richards served for three years with the Royal Navy, latterly in the rank of Instructor Lieutenant, and so began a fascination with the sea that was to remain with him for the rest of his life. He wrote extensively about ships and sailors, notably in two novels about maritime Swansea, Ennal's Point (1977) and Barque Whisper (1979), edited The Penguin Book of Sea Stories (1977) and Against the Waves (1978), and contributed many scripts to the popular television series The Onedin Line. For his books about the lifeboat service, he was presented with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution Public Relations Award.

Returning to Wales from London, where he had been a probation officer for three years, he became desperately ill with tuberculosis. He was admitted to the sanatorium at Talgarth in Breconshire where most of his fellow patients were silicotic colliers, many in the last stages of the terrible disease brought on by breathing the dust-laden air of the mines. The two years he spent in hospital as "a witness once more of Homo sapiens with his trousers down" were a dreadful but enriching experience. Almost blind and left for long periods in a semi-coma as a result of his resistance to streptomycin, he was sustained by the courage, humour and comradeship of the older men in his ward who "kept an eye on him", fed him with bacon from their own plates, placed bets on horses for him, read to him and helped to nurse him back to health.

"More than anything," he wrote in an essay for the volume Artists in Wales in 1971,

I learned that we are not as different from each other as we would like to believe, and yet each of us is unique . . . In the last resort, our nationality, race or colour did not matter. We were up against it, all of us had complications of one kind of another, but we made our stand for as long as we could, and one or two of us survived. It was an experience I shall never regret, meat and drink to the writer, whose business it is to make sense of every experience, to shape it in the process, an eternal search for understanding and reasons, and I have been lucky ever since.

From 1957 to 1967 Richards taught English in Cardiff but was then able to become a full-time writer and settle in Mumbles; a seaside suburb of Swansea where his wife was a teacher. He earned his bread and butter by writing for television, including adaptations of Georges Simenon, W. Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells, and for theatres in Leatherhead, Coventry and Nottingham, though seldom in Wales; his stage plays were published under the title Plays for Players in 1975.

From time to time he took up fellowships at universities in Wales and Australia, and was awarded a Japanese Foundation Fellowship in 1984. But his greatest achievement was in writing the short stories in Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1976); his Selected Stories appeared in 1995. The most important of his novels are The Elephant You Gave Me (1963), The Rome Patch (1966), A Woman of Experience (1969) and Home to an Empty House (1974). He also edited two editions of The Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories which were much admired for their quality and range.

A connoisseur of rugby, Richards published A Touch of Glory (1980) on the occasion of the centenary of the Welsh Rugby Union, and in 1984 a memoir of Carwyn James, the rugby-player and coach, a very different kind of Welshman, Welsh-speaking and a staunch member of Plaid Cymru, with whom he had a rare and unexpected affinity. Carwyn: a personal memoir reveals his view of Wales, Welsh nationality and the role usually attributed in defining it to the Welsh language, and this in a country where four- fifths of the population are not Welsh-speakers. Welsh had played no part in Richards's upbringing and he tended to bristle when claims were made for it as a badge of Welsh identity, especially in the context of appointments to BBC Wales, an institution against which he invariably fulminated.

His own Welshness was intense and unequivocal, the basis for some of his best writing, but for him it had less to do with language than with the qualities he associated with the industrial, proletarian communities of South Wales: loyalty to family and workmates, warm-heartedness, neighbourliness and compassion, a sense of humour in the face of adversity and the absence of deference on grounds of social class. "I am Welsh," he wrote definitively in 1971, "and the rest is propaganda."

Meic Stephens