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Through the voices of ordinary people caught up in the struggle, The Angry Summer graphically illustrates the plight of the miners and their families during the six-month-long miners strike of 1926 - the summer of soups and speeches. Idris Davies himself left school at the age of fourteen to become a miner and it was the strike of 1926 that forced him to look elsewhere for work. He is perhaps the most authentic socialist poet of the inter-war years to write in English, because he speaks out of the experience of his own working-class community. This volume presents for the first time a properly annotated edition of the poem, an introduction by Tony Conran explaining the biographical, historical and literary background, and is also illustrated with photographs, newspaper cuttings and eyewitness accounts.
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The Angry Summer, the Estate of Idris Davies Preface, Introduction and Notes, Tony Conran, 1993
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 6 Gwennyth Street, Cardiff CF2 4YD.
The right of Anthony Conran to be identified as author of the Preface, Introduction and Notes to this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-7083-1090-7 hardback 0-7083-1080-X paperback
Typeset by Alden Multimedia, Northampton Printed in England by the Cromwell Press, Melksham, Wiltshire
Page v
Contents
Preface
vii
A Note on Illustrative Material
xi
Acknowledgements
xi
Introduction
xiii
A Note on the Text
xxxiii
The Angry Summer
1
Notes
67
Reading List
73
Page vii
Preface
The root idea of this book goes back to a multi-media event in Bangor as long ago as 1973, produced by Lesley Bowen and myself. A group of students and others, who were interested in acting The Angry Summer as a dramatic poem, used to meet every week in my house. We read and mulled over it, sorted out the various voices in it, and thought which of the lyrics ought to be sung. This 'academic' processwhich is part of rehearsing any performancegave us all a powerful sense of the integrity and value of the poem, and the close-knit inter-relationship of its parts, particularly as a dramatic whole. It certainly felt more of a drama than Under Milk Wood, for example, with more sense of interpersonal conflict and resolution as well as considerably more social insight; it shares with Dylan Thomas's work an ambiguous position between play and poem so that the term 'play for voices' is probably not inappropriate for bothalthough they can, of course, both be staged. What seems prima facie a collection of lyrics is an unexpected form for drama; but one recalls, for instance, how Greek tragedy arose from choral lyrics called dithyrambs, and (in the Middle Ages) Adam de la Haille developed a kind of lyric drama, Robin and Marion from trouvre songs; and of course the later development of opera from the Italian madrigal. If the Welsh were ever to take drama seriously, this poem by Idris Davies is one of the places they could start.
But of course we weren't only interested in it as drama. The long struggle of the Welsh miners to maintain their communities, in the face of the British state's hostility and the savage vagaries of 'market forces', is a major part of our history. It is a struggle that is even now not quite over. Many of us who gathered every week to read the poem were from the Valleys, or at any rate south Wales, and one was an ex-miner. The poem spoke directly to themand
Page viii
to all of us in varying degreesof the web of aspiration and suffering out of which their generation had emerged.
We entrusted the music to a local folk group called Yggdrasil; and we decided to set the performance of the poem in a documentary context. I suppose the not-too-conscious models for our project were the radio ballads of Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl: 'Singing the Fishing', for example, where actual voices of working-class fishermen were collaged with songs and commentary. The radio ballad had been too hot for radio to handle in the fifties and Charles Parker had been dismissed. Even so, the type of documentary we had in mind was not common anywhere except on wireless and television.
Lesley and I enlisted the help of Jim Davies from Pontypool and we all descended on the Rhymney Valley, interviewing old miners, shopkeepers and teachers about what happened in 1926, the year of the General Strike. We met friends of Idris Davies, took photographs of mines, pit-ponies, chapels, what have you, and spent a whole day in Cardiff Library, reading and making slides of contemporary press reports. It was an exhausting and exhilarating few days, and we enjoyed it immensely. I had never been in a mining community before and the friendliness and humanity we found there has stayed clear in my memory ever since. I can well understand how writers from the Valleys can spend their lives trying to recreate them, hardly able to talk of anything outside that magical, exasperating and tragic world.
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