Letter from Wales

The elder of two boys born into a bookish family (both his parents were teachers), he grew fully aware of the world about him in the 1930s, when chronic unemployment had paralysed and impoverished the whole of industrial south Wales. Bare figures tell a story, but cannot convey the full impact of the human experience that lies behind them. The unemployment rate in Merthyr was over 25 percent; coal mining, iron and steel manufacturing in the immediate neighbourhood were devasted; ten thousand of the inhabitants left the town hoping to find a living elsewhere. As an exceedingly well-read teenager, Williams became a communist, and nothing he experienced subsequently changed his views, though towards the end this political conviction was yoked with Welsh nationalism. In 1943, he won an open scholarship that should have taken him to study history at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. Instead, with thousands of others, he found himself in the forces. When he died, in November 1995, he left incomplete an account of his army service written while he was undergoing treatment for cancer and eventually published in Fishers of Men (Gomer, 1996), which describes some of the action he was involved in towards the end of the war. Only a smidgen more than five feet tall, but a skilled marksman and sturdy enough to be equipped with a Bren gun, he was in one of the early waves of Allied forces to come ashore on ‘Gold Beach’, a little east of Arromanches, after D-Day, 6 June 1944, and in July 1945, among the earliest British troops to ...