Dream On

by Dai Smith

  His was a Faustian impulse, to build in despite of the frailty of Humanity and the febrile vitality of the Valleys. He recognised both these tendencies in the pre-War fever for Syndicalism, or workers’ control, where all leadership, of owners or by union bosses, would be eschewed in favour of direct democracy and decision-making. Again made feasible in this place as in no other by the concentration here of power and people through coal.

  ‘Welsh syndicalism’ echoed the advance nature of coal capitalism, expressed here in the words of its foremost theorist, the miners’ leader, Noah Ablett: “where the tendency to place the whole industry into the hands of one firm is proceeding at a phenomenal rate, scarcely a month passes [in 1917], but that there is news of two large companies amalgamating, or steps taken to form a large combine.” So the answer for Ablett and his followers was to be “an industrial union – on a revolutionary basis for the abolition of capitalism”, since “we shall never attain freedom by looking backward. We must go on with the times.” But that was where D.A. Thomas already felt himself to be and he understood Ablett’s insight into the fearful plasticity of their world because he shared it. In their self-created landscape the spirit abroad was that of an absolute social being – Capitalist or Socialist – which haunted the mind.

  Ablett’s ideas would resound for a short time, then dwindle to survivalism and welfarism in the devastated industrial backwater of the 1920s. D.A. Thomas would not live to see this, and by the end of his own days in 1918 had come to personify the mining valleys as a cutting edge for the entire modern world. His vaulting ambition, only thwarted afterwards and only for those who came after, would require of his biographer the ironic perspective that Conrad focussed on Gould, the silver-mine owner of Costaguana in his 1904 masterpiece Nostromo, to bring the meaning of the life to any kind of remotely satisfactory analysis. A conclusion would remain perpetually in abeyance. He died before his realm crumbled. But it was never, for him, a mere industrial concern and therein lies his fascination for those of us who have indeed come after him.

  All of the missionary zeal that fired him – “The wise thing for democracy to do is to give every child in the land an equal opportunity for making the best use of its talents, so that where there are now hundreds of industrial organisers there may one day be thousands” – as he saw it, to create wealth to increase happiness was founded on the inheritance in coal he had received from his grandfather and father in the Mid Glamorgan hills. Did he think of this inheritance as such an “equal opportunity”? Talent as an industrial organiser was nonetheless certainly his. He turned the Cambrian Combine in mid-Rhondda into one of the largest integrated coal concerns in the world. Nor did he stop there: agencies in the sale of coal, companies to import pitwood from France, distributive organisations in shipowning, companies to establish coal depots, insurance, stocks and shares, and ever more collieries, all were engrossed in his maw. He operated in France, Spain, North Africa, and North America – and all on the basis of steam coal from the Valleys. How his world was to be perceived was also within his remit, for he had financial control of numerous journals and newspapers in Wales, and planned for an influential journal of opinion in London.

  In effect when he stepped aboard the Lusitania in 1915, ostensibly to further his North American interests but, I am convinced, to begin the secret negotiations for munitions with which Lloyd George would openly charge him later – he had risen above any diurnal politicking. He was, he knew, a colossus beyond all that, one centrally placed at the core point of his age. It was what Joseph Conrad had recognised in Victory, the novel he published that year:

  “There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as “black diamonds.” Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one’s waistcoat pocket – but it can’t! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel.”

  We know from his secretary’s account that in his luggage was indeed Joseph Conrad’s just published novel, and we can safely speculate on the wry smile with which he would have read Conrad’s Jevons-inspired encomium to coal. Accurate in all its particulars, other than that D.A. Thomas had, in fact, such a “concentration of coal” that he did carry coalmines just as if they were diamonds in his “waistcoat pocket.” If he and his entourage, his daughter Margaret, his Secretary and the maidservant, had perished on their return journey the story, remarkable enough for its Tycoon lineaments in the age of the Industrial Titan, would still hold interest. But there is, of course, more: the emergence in wartime of a dedicated Public Servant of enormous capability and, at the Ministry for Food, the boss of Sir William Beveridge, whose later imprint on Welfare Britain would be so immense. As a Minister D.A. Thomas was confronted officially for the first time – since he must surely have known the average rate in his own Rhondda of almost 200 deaths per thousand live births in the decade to 1910 – by the appalling nationwide statistics for infant mortality. He now dreamed, as his legacy, of a nationwide Department of Health, one whose creation he demanded immediately. What emotion had ignited this principled ambition? What lives crossed and ended and led out from here to the world he would never see? Why did Lloyd George exclaim that an “interest in the health of infants is rather an unexpected passion for Rhondda?”

  There were other such pages, complete in themselves but all terminating abruptly when the old man had plumbed the necessary, to him, depth and then shied away from any onerous, unnecessary to him, further tabulation. So many hares started and let go, as if he was content with the print of a hare’s foot as being more alive with the subject’s once-and-vanished vitality than with any hunted-down, stuffed and mounted variety. Some notes were stark, and others enigmatic, as if what secrets there were lay here, in revelations that were to be unpacked later:

  His daughter said he preferred women to men as house guests though his professional life was entirely in the world of men.

  His daughter said that every servant they had was devoted to him. He would have no male servants around him or even in the house. It was, she said, the parlourmaid who tended to his comfort and well-being, even serving as his valet.

  His daughter said he always took the best of what was put before him, irrespective of others, once ate twelve oranges at a go and went from a bottle of port a night to being a virtual teetotaller at the end.

  His daughter said he took regular sun baths and that on warm days at Llanwern he would warn all but a servant away from that part of the roof where he would sit naked beneath the rays of the sun he adored.

  His daughter said that when the Lusitania was going down she went to his State Room to find him but neither her father nor the ship’s regulation life belts were there. He, elsewhere, pushed a woman into a lifeboat and followed her.

  His daughter said she was washed overboard and, in the water for hours, was near death before rescue. Father and daughter were reunited on the Irish shore off which the great liner had been sunk by the German U-boat.

  His daughter said that as he was dying he had wished, though it was a rare precedent he invoked, that the Viscountcy he had been given in June 1918 be remaindered to her for life after his death. Because of his “great services to the State” the King had agreed to Lloyd George’s request.

  There was no one to replace him in her life. When his ashes were interred she had a choir sing “Now the Labourer’s Task is O’er” at the graveside, and when the music and the voices stopped, she had descended into his grave to say her own private farewell to her father. She kissed his urn and placed her mother’s bridal handkerchief upon it.

  The old man had scrawled in his own hand, in ink across this last typed page of notes – “You couldn’t make it u
p, could you. Just conceive it! All aboard the Lusitania?”

  * * * * * *

  It was late afternoon by the time I read, and re-read, everything. I had been hungry for nothing else through these hours. I put the overhead light on as rush-hour traffic began to back up alongside the city’s castle walls. I had saved the “Personal” folder to the last. It was the least of all the papers in bulk. I had already read the four letters inside, however, several times over. One more time, then. I fetched a cold bottle of Mexican beer from the room’s fridge, uncapped it and drank from the bottle without the benefit of a salt rim, a glass or a segment of lime. The letters were zest enough, and my blood pressure had every reason to avoid a saline solution. I had more problems than solutions. But I did have questions, and maybe as echoes, a few answers. The first letter was in black ink on headed paper. From Llanwern Park, and dated 16 December 1915.

  “My darling Gwennie,

  I send this with Blackmore to deliver to you by hand. He will bring me your reply if you will. Do not be afraid, for I will not abandon you. I know your time is near and when it has come you will return here, with the infant, and there will be no questioning of you, or of his presence, in my house.

  What you have given me is not forgotten either and my joy in that gift of love and ecstacy sustains me in my labours. These, as you know, will increasingly confine me to London and Whitehall but, when you are ready, we will find time to be together again, and, I hope, find happiness in our meetings, so unexpected and vital for me, again.

  Your David

  Or, as you call me in memory of my place of youth,

  Your Dai”

  The second letter was on lined paper. It was written in blue ink and in a more child-like hand. The date was the same. It was just marked as from “Cheltenham”. It read:

  “My Dai,

  For that is how I do always think of you now even if it is not the proper way to call you, and I will use David if you do prefer, though you do not, do you, as I know all too well. Well, I am near to the time now and they all take care of me here, with no questions or evil looks which some can give you. I long to see you again and to meet like you say and am so happy you came back safe from America this time. What a fright we had in May and I will never forget it nor the way you saved my life, or I could say now, can’t I, both of our lives. What I will do or say when I come back to Llanwern I worry, but I will be discreet and with your help pass it off, though I do think Miss Margaret, Lady Mackworth I should say, has her own thoughts which, what can I say, are true as you know my dear, and very, very naughty boy! Dai.

  Until we “meet”

  Your very own Gwennie

  X for a promise!”

  The third letter was dated 3 July 1958 and the address was in Piccadilly. It was more formal.

  “My dear Mr Maddox,

  You will wonder, perhaps, that I only write now to acknowledge your note, of the 24th of September, 1953. Please be assured no discourtesy was intended and I had my reasons for not replying then, which are, indeed, different now.

  I would be glad to see you if you care to come to the above address in the afternoon of the 3rd of July after two o’clock, when I will be pleased to explain to you what I can of the circumstances of my family’s connections to you and to which your earlier note, and its enclosures which I have kept safe to return to you, alluded.

  Yours sincerely,

  Margaret, Rhondda.”

  The final, and fourth, letter was not dated. It was from my old man to me. I’m not sure it explained what he thought he was explaining at the time of writing, probably the mid-1960s since he had not dated it, but it would have to serve me half a century later as a settlement and a legacy. It did.

  “Dear Billy,

  I’ve often toyed with the idea of writing you a letter when you’re too young – not quite ten yet – to understand it and yet when, with a life to come, I can speak more openly and fully to you here than, perhaps, when you are older and, believe me, face to face is often less than transparent.

  But then it seems so artificial and I would not wish to write like some latter-day on-high purveyor of advice. So this is not, wherever this finds you and whatever you will have done by this time of reading, any advice at all. We will, no doubt, exhaust that, wastefully I suspect, as you grow up and away from me. No, this is information. Of a sort. Information I include here with the notes and passages for a work I began and will not now finish.

  That I started at all is down to your mother. Shortly after we married in 1953 – amidst the ballyhoo of a Coronation year and the stupid bastards with their flag-bedecked street parties. Here, of all places, but I do go on, don’t I, so I’ll stop Here! – I showed the two love letters to her. Gwennie was my mother. I had had nothing to do with her and no contact with her until the letters came through the post in late 1952. They’d been sent to the address of my cousin Jimmy’s mother, her sister, long deceased, and so then passed onto me by him. It seems I had a half-brother and he wrote, at her “dying request” he said, from Birmingham to give me the correspondence. Nothing else. No message. No explanation. Frankly, I did nothing. Not even a reply.

  Your own mother’s curiosity was something else. She worked out Llanwern to be, possibly, the country house, ironically enough demolished in 1952, and “David” or “Dai” to be D.A. Thomas, the coalowner of ill repute, so far as I’m concerned, who became Lord Rhondda in 1915. Well, well, I hear you say. If true, the capitalist bastard was shagging my proletarian mam. Joke here, eh Billy? And, bigger joke yet, I was the bastard she was carrying, to be born on 28 December, Holy Innocents’ Day, 1915. Or not so wholly innocent, as it turned out.

  Margaret, his daughter, was still alive. I sent her a polite note, asking for information and hopefully a meeting. I’d copied the letters and – foolishly, maybe – sent her the originals. I heard nothing back. But, egged on by your mother, I did some research, became hooked and even after she died, leaving you bereft and me a mess, and both of us alone, I tinkered until I thought I might write something about him. You have the fragments in the suitcase. So you’ll see I got so far and trailed away. With no regrets, I must say. I’d seen what I needed to see.

  There’s just one more capstone. The letter inviting me to meet Margaret came after your mother had died. I hesitated to go and, truthfully, in the end did it because I could feel Mona, your lovely and wonderful mother, urging me to square the circle. Well, I guess I did and I didn’t.

  Oh, Lady Rhondda was pleasant enough. And very grand, her flat more intimidating, with knick-knacks and occasional tables and paintings, than any home I’d ever been in. Also there were photographs of him, and her, separately and together in chased-silver frames. I’d seen photos of him in the books. No resemblance there I could see. Can you?

  Anyway, she told me that my mother had been “rather a forward young woman.” “Pretty”, she’d grant, “but decidedly forward.” It was possible, “likely but regrettably” she said, that her father, under some strain and relaxed by the sun he sought, “took advantage” or “was possibly seduced” by the dark-haired seventeen-year-old from Pontypool who’d been in service with them for over a year. Margaret added that she thought it “most unlikely” that my mother, at that age and coming from where she came, was “altogether innocent in such things”.

  That much was conceded but no more. In her opinion my mother was as likely to be pregnant with the child of the chauffeur, Blackmore, or maybe someone from the village, as she was with the offspring of a man nearing sixty, one afflicted with rheumatic fever and a heart condition. As for his letter, it was a recognition of their tryst and of her condition, and of his generosity and nothing more. My mother did indeed return, with her son, to Llanwern, in the spring of 1916.

  By December that year D.A. Thomas was President of the Local Government Board and in Lloyd George’s cabinet, and absent, by and large, from Llanwern thereafter until his final ill health and lingering death in the summer of 1918. She said that
she believed relations between her father and the parlourmaid had ceased long before. Margaret, for so I will insist on calling my half-sister, said she “vaguely” remembered me and “vividly” recalled my being discovered in a high chair, “in an almighty mess”, the day after my mother absconded, at the age of twenty, without “so much as a by your leave” and only a note to the effect that her sister in Aberdare be contacted to come to fetch me. And where indeed I did live until life and strength and war conspired to take me away. But that’s another story, for another time.

  I could have argued with her. I did demur. I said the letters seemed proof enough. That I had only wanted to meet her. I was ready to leave, when she softly, very softly, said she was indeed sorry. Perhaps there was more to it than she had wanted to know or believe. She had found it so difficult when her father, stricken with angina, sat in the semi-wild garden at Llanwern, amongst the spring flowers with his gramophone playing his favourite tunes from musical shows, my mother sat at his feet or dancing in front of him, whilst I tottered across the lawn. On the morning he died, Margaret forbade my mother directly from going to his cremation and to the subsequent burial of his ashes, which she planned to place beneath the ancient yew tree in the churchyard. My mother did not wait for any change of heart. She left the house forever, and me of course, on 4th July – did she know it was Independence Day? Why not? He, who wished to be an American would surely have told her that – the day after he died. Margaret said – and these were her very last words as I stood to go – “I do not expect you to forgive me, David. I do not even expect you to understand. But I loved him. And him alone. And I wanted you, of all people, to know that before I, too, die.” You know me well enough, Billy, to know I neither wanted nor asked for nor received anything else. Besides she had shown no interest in my life, not Cassino or the pits or anything, not in Mona or in you. Why didn’t that surprise me, I wonder. So sod her, I thought. And all that the foul air around her brought with her. We had no need of it. Then or now. My half-sister died in Westminster Hospital just a few weeks after we had met for the first and only time.