It’s a maudlin melodrama stuffed with cod philosophising and embroidered with Welsh idiom – there’s nice mind – that reached the bookshops at just the right time and defined the South Wales Valleys culture perhaps forever. This is a Valley where people go around singing and writing poetry when they are not down the pit – in the case of the men (who were all Men) – or glowing contentedly as the Great Welsh Mam in the case of the women, either in the kitchen or sitting outside their terrace doors waiting for the Men to return from the pit. His pen-name was Richard Llewellyn of course and his only famous book, a coming-of-age tale set in a mining community in Victorian South Wales, is as chock-a- block with nonsense as Llewellyn’s claims about his background. Or was his name Richard Herbert Arthur Llewellyn Lloyd? And was he born and brought up a monoglot English speaker in Wood Green, London, whose only connection with St Davids were the childhood holidays he spent with his grandparents? The opening lines of How Green Was My Valley put first-language Welsh speaker Richard David Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd from St Davids on his way to becoming the author of the most famous English language novel set in Wales and a tax exile. HUW MORGAN is on his way: “I’m going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley.”
He died in Dublin.In the second of our Snapshot of a Nation mini-series, Steve Dubé examines the background and legacy of the 1939 novel How Green Was My Valley
His best-known book was How Green Was My Valley (1939), which won international acclaim and was made into a classic Hollywood film. Late in his life, he lived in Eilat, Israel. Following the war, he worked as a journalist, covering the Nuremberg Trials, and then as a screenwriter for MGM. During World War II, he rose to the rank of Captain in the Welsh Guards.
Before World War II, he spent periods working in hotels, wrote a play, worked as a coal miner and produced his best-known novel. Richard Llewellyn (1906 – 1983, E) was born of Welsh parents in Middlesex. He lived a nomadic life, travelling widely.
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