Idris Davies was a poet renowned for his evocative portrayals of life in the valleys of south Wales during the early 20th century.
Davies’s poetry is still celebrated today for its unflinching honesty which captured the changes and hardships in Rhymney and the surrounding valleys during the 1920s and the interwar period.
His work came to prominence after verses from his poem Gwalia Deserta (Wasteland of Wales) were first published in 1938 by TS Eliot. The poem reflects his experiences as a miner and his observations of the social and economic hardships faced by people in the valleys during the Great Depression and after the 1926 General Strike. In 1957, American folk singer Pete Seeger used part of the poem, the Bells of Rhymney, for a song which became world famous.
Idris Davies was born on 6th January 1905 in 16 Field Street, Rhymney to Evan and Elizabeth Davies. His father was a colliery engineman at the McLaren Colliery in nearby Abertysswg and Davies left school at 14 to follow his father into the pits, working first as a coal miner’s assistant at the Mardy Pit in Rhymney.
Davies had a second serious accident underground when he was 21 and lost a little finger. Like others in Rhymney and neighbouring mining towns and villages, he took part in the 1926 General Strike and found himself unemployed for four years, which profoundly influenced his literary work.
Davies used this time to complete his education at the local library, where he started writing poems. He decided to turn to teaching and after courses at Loughborough College and the University of Nottingham, he qualified as a teacher in 1932.
From then until after the Second World War, he taught at various schools in London as well as at schools in Wales and England evacuated from wartime London, becoming friends with Dylan Thomas during this time. However, he was nostalgic for Wales and, in 1947, with the help of a local councillor, he returned to the upper Rhymney Valley to teach at the junior school in Cwmsyfiog (New Tredegar).
Regarded today as one of the classics of twentieth-century Welsh poetry in English, The Angry Summer: A Poem of 1926 was written in just three months and brilliantly captures the tensions of the General Strike using the voices of ordinary people caught up in the struggle.
His first book Gwalia Deserta was published in 1938 after earlier work had appeared in the Western Mail and the Daily Herald as well as several left-wing political publications. The "Bells of Rhymney" verses, Davies' most widely known work, appear as Part XV of the book.
The poems for his second anthology, published in 1945, were chosen by T. S. Eliot who describing Davies' poems as "the best poetic document I know about a particular epoch in a particular place".
In one poem, I was born in Rhymney, Davies refers to his upbringing and his family’s Welsh language:
I lost my native language
For the one the Saxon spake
By going to school by order
For education’s sake.
Dylan Thomas read "Bells of Rhymney" as part of a St. David's Day radio broadcast, which led to its fame, but wrote to Davies to say that he did not feel the poem was particularly representative of Davies' work, as it was "not angry enough".
In total, Davies published four volumes of poetry, in both English and Welsh. But sadly, in April 1953, he died of cancer at the age of 48, too early to enjoy his international success. His final volume, Selected Poems, was published shortly before his death.
Even decades after his death, Idris Davies remains a significant figure in Welsh literature, with his works continuing to resonate and be commemorated in his hometown and far beyond. He is buried at the town’s cemetery.