Time and again, a page is turned and content pours from his early-teen mind which seems to link with his later life. Were these premonitions of what would follow? Or do these pages more likely give testimony to Richey’s authenticity, in showing that themes repeat throughout his life to the end?
One 1982 exercise book contained a list of words for Richey to look up in the dictionary. It’s remarkable how many later turned up in Manics lyrics – cauterise (from ‘Ifwhiteamerica …’), transitory (‘Removables’), opulent (Journal for Plague Lovers).
Half of one exercise book was dedicated to ‘Poetry & Novels of Personal Choice’, wherein Richey wrote about James Herbert’s The Spear, a horror novel set in London involving a neo-Nazi cult. Also, two books from Alan Sillitoe – The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. A list of recommended authors includes J.D. Salinger, Mikhail Sholokhov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Ernest Hemingway, John Wyndham, John Steinbeck, Dylan Thomas, William Golding and H.G. Wells.
A Richey composition, ‘The Rebel’, involved a geneticist, Dr Blake, who is bitter at the government withdrawing funding for new research. He is kidnapped by a mysterious man in black.
‘Good evening, Dr Blake. I am sorry to hear about your operations being cancelled. I think that I will be able to help you … a sparkling new hospital, all the latest technology, massive kennels for animals, nurses and a choice of the finest doctors available … all yours! Yours, Dr Blake!’
‘Yes, I’ll do whatever you want. I want to get revenge on society and the government,’ Dr Blake said angrily.
‘There is an important MP in the Blackthorn Hospital. He has a private ward and he is suffering from syphilis. He is Martin Foot, the Labour Party’s chief whip. Imagine the publicity … Dr Blake, leading genetic engineer, holds an MP hostage. After two or three days you could let him go and I would have a helicopter waiting for you. I could fly you to South America where you would be safe, rather like Ronnie Biggs,’ shouted the man.
Dr Blake carries out his mission, and enjoys reading the front-page headlines from his secret hideaway. The story ends with a daring rescue by the SAS, and the revelation that the ‘man in black’ was in fact the Labour Party’s previous chief whip, sacked and replaced by Foot. Themes firmly place Richey’s imagination in the early eighties but what shouts most loudly is the act of social transgression culminating in a plan to escape and live on in freedom abroad. And this, in Richey’s mind at the age of 14.
Another assignment saw Richey having to write the first chapter of his autobiography. His story plan read: ‘Listening to records – friends arrive – take me to woods – meet two teachers – conversation (blackmail) – sent for by headmaster – teacher tricked us – in big trouble – run away – get caught – taken home – on trial – convicted for blackmail – detention centre – get out – find job in newspaper – get sacked – regarded as martyr – become rich and famous.’
Again, those prescient themes. Richey’s tale begins, set in 1981, when he is ushered into the world of action and intrigue by a group of local boys, all with a musical accompaniment:
David Bowie was blasting out ‘Ziggy Stardust’ from the stereo when I noticed flashes of light through my bedroom window. Quickly I ran to the window and peered out into the gloom and smog of the night. Below, at the entrance to our house, stood John, Tich, Echo and Peter, my school friends. I dressed quickly and ran outside to meet them without telling my mother.
What follows must have sent a shiver through the staffroom at Oakdale Comprehensive. The boys discover their teacher and a school secretary having sex in a clearing in the woods, and attempt to blackmail them. As their plan falters, they face possible jail, and Richey considers his options:
That evening I thought about my future. There was no doubt in my mind that we could be sent to a Detention Centre. I thought through every possibility of tricking myself out of the situation and realised there were none. I decided to run away.
As we make our way down the page, Rachel points out to us a passage she found particularly chilling. In this short piece of fiction, a 13-year-old Richey describes escaping over the Severn Bridge, without leaving a note for his family.
That evening at two p.m. I left home without leaving a note and headed for the Severn Bridge. I thought that in Bristol I might be able to find a job. I set off, hopes high, and followed the M4 for about three hours. It was hell. I couldn’t see anything expect for car headlights bursting forth from the dark void that lay ahead. Gradually it became lighter and I saw the bridge in the distance.
‘The fact he always had the image of the Severn Bridge in his head at such a young age is quite something,’ says Rachel. ‘That even then, when things got tough, he saw crossing the Bridge as a means of escape.’
School reports describe Richey as a stable, intelligent pupil who excelled at history and art. He ranked among the top of the class for most subjects – but not, interestingly, for music, where he was placed eighteenth.
However, among the glowing comments was one from his English teacher, Mr Bartlett: ‘In his essay work, Richard needs to be careful not to let his sense of humour run away with him. He also needs to be more careful in the way he puts his work together – his choices of words and expressions are often inappropriate.’
It’s not hard to see how Richey’s English teacher may have found some of his work ‘inappropriate’. His story about finding his teachers fornicating in the woods hardly bothered to conceal the identities of the individuals he wrote about – half-heartedly turning his Maths teacher into a French teacher, and identifying another member of staff as being ‘as old as Stonehenge’. This cheeky humour and sense of provocation would become apparent throughout his time with the Manic Street Preachers.
Mr Bartlett might well also have taken offence at 14-year-old Richey’s response to a piece of English homework on the subject ‘Why I find it hard growing up’. Richey answered that it was because of the homework assigned to him by this very teacher. Asked to write ‘My Encounter with a Strange Animal’, he described coming face to face with another person: ‘Alas, a human being is an animal. Don’t believe? Check with the biology department.’
Nicky Wire recalled Richey’s sometimes provocative nature manifesting on a school coach trip to France. When the pupils took turns to put on tapes, Richey’s choice was Einstürzende Neubauten’s avant-garde post-industrial screeching and noise. It lasted ten minutes before a teacher ordered, ‘Let’s get this off!’
Rachel feels Oakdale Comprehensive had little positive impact in helping Richey to facilitate his dreams. She says the stultifying atmosphere sought to iron out individuality. ‘I never understood why Nick sang the praises of Oakdale Comprehensive,’ she says. ‘It was not a nurturing school in terms of talent, it’s written down in Richard’s school reports, telling him to give up his dreams of wanting to be a writer and to go and work in a bank instead.
‘He came in once for prize day and on that occasion you could wear what you wanted. He’d done his hair high like Ian McCulloch from Echo & the Bunnymen. He was called up to receive a prize from the footballer John Toshack, but prior to that, a teacher had approached Richard and said, “Don’t come back with your hair like that. You’re not welcome here looking like that!” And she wasn’t joking. I remember him telling me at the time that nobody inspired him there.’
In 1998, three years after Richey’s disappearance, childhood friend Jonathan Medcraft gave an interview to Melody Maker in which he spoke about Richey’s time in Oakdale Comprehensive. ‘I remember Richey’s gothic phase, when he was wearing eye-liner and Oxfam coats. Image-wise he was kind of androgynous even then, and there were early signs of anorexia. I mean, in Wales you don’t find that high cheekbones occur naturally – you need to starve yourself.
‘At one point, he befriended this boy whom nobody else would talk to and this boy was universally ignored. Richey got to be really good friends with him.’
The boy’
s name was Richard Fry, and he and Richey grew closer and spent time together outside of school, walking their dogs around Pen y Fan Pond and taking photos of themselves in the surrounding countryside. The photographs show two 16-year-old boys in various carefree poses, outside in the rugged outdoors and at one with nature. One could interpret this as Richey trying to emulate and re-capture the innocence of his fading childhood.
‘I was the youngest in the year, and Richard was one of the older ones,’ recalls Fry. ‘I only had one other friend in the whole school, so when Richard sat next to me, I was really surprised but mostly grateful.
‘My home life was difficult. I was adopted and shortly after my adoptive mother passed away, her partner re-married and I never found a place in that new family. I was a teenager who didn’t have any sense of who I was or where I came from, and I never felt wanted by people in any way. The other pupils in Oakdale picked up on the negative things about me, but Richard saw something that nobody else did, and we became really close friends.’
The two boys would spend their weekends taking the train to Cardiff, where Richey would buy vinyl from Spillers Records and spend hours browsing the city’s bookshops.
‘I wasn’t very much into music or as voracious a reader as he was,’ says Fry. ‘In fact my main memories are of him sitting outside on the grass in high school reading Marx, Lenin and books about the history of Russia, but we connected on a level beyond that. We had very similar senses of humour and we spent most of our time laughing. I remember our first joke was calling the Chemistry teacher Badger, because she was this big matronly woman with black and white hair, who was always baring her teeth and shouting.
‘Richard had quite a surreal sense of humour, quite abstract, he’d send me a single biscuit and teabag through the post and tell me to treat myself, but of course the biscuit was crushed to bits by the time it was delivered to my place. He’d be really daft sometimes too, typical teenage boy stuff like picking up my deodorant stick and licking it like an ice cream just to get a reaction. He’d like to get a rise out of people, he’d enjoy shocking people, and making them laugh.
‘He was a natural performer, and when he’d come over my stepmother would always comment on how camp he was. He’d talk about being a successful writer or musician and he knew I was a keen photographer, so he’d always tell me, “When I’m famous, you can come and take pictures of me next to my swimming pool in LA.”’
Towards the end of their time at Oakdale, Richey and Fry went to stay at Fry’s aunt’s house in Ebbw Vale for a weekend. For the first time his friend noticed anxiety in Richey’s behaviour. ‘We’d gone up to the mountains because Richard asked me if I’d take some photographs of him for posterity. He told me he wanted to document his life before he became famous and so people could see his origins. “I want to remember where I came from” is something he’d always say. I think at that age he was proud to be Welsh.
‘We had a really good time and headed back to my aunt’s cottage. As the place was so small, we had to share a bed. He seemed really nervous about it and when it came to bedtime, he left his jeans and jumpers on and put his pyjamas on over the top. We were sleeping in the room with the boiler and it was a really warm night, but rather than take a layer of clothing off, he went to lie on the floor halfway through the night and slept there. I thought at the time it may have been something to do with his skin. He had terrible acne on his face, and I imagined he was self-conscious and trying to hide the marks on his back.
‘This behaviour continued on to college. We took an A-level Geography trip to Hilston Park in Monmouthshire, and walked and surveyed the landscape. When everyone got back they were expected to shower before dinner. I was quite shy so I’d wait until last before going into the shared cubicle, but Richard would wait until the middle of the night and go down and shower alone.
‘At the time I didn’t think much of it, he was always unique in his own way, but as time went on I wondered about his problems, and his hang-ups and where they could have stemmed from. In one interview Richard said he identified with victims, and I’ve always had so many problems in my life. I spent a long time in my early twenties coming to terms with my sexuality, so I always wondered if he could relate to me because of something he’d experienced or was experiencing.’
Richey is not remembered for having any major disastrous moments or traumas during his time at Oakdale. Reports show an integrated pupil who became class monitor for his form in the first year, and would later attend computer club, soccer practice and cross country during lunch breaks. Most notably during his time there, he won a prestigious national art prize which was submitted through his art and design class.
Rachel’s one worrisome memory is that her brother would sometimes faint in school assemblies. ‘It happened two or three times, and we never got to the bottom of it. I’m not sure if there was an underlying illness, because by his twenties he was having problems with his thyroid, but at the time we were baffled.’
During his final school year, Richey was taught Economics by his own uncle, Sherry’s younger brother Robin Lorne Davies, who also taught History at the school. ‘My uncle never taught us History, but growing up Richard would sometimes say he’d like to be a History teacher, if he was asked,’ says Rachel. ‘But I don’t think that was his main passion, it was more of a safety net as he’d obviously been discouraged by teachers when he’d told them he wanted to be a writer.’
Richey gained ten O-levels in the summer of 1984, including A grades for Economics and History, and B’s for Art & Design, English Language, English Literature and Geography.
The year that Richey left Oakdale Comprehensive coincided with the end of an era for mining in Britain, signalling the death of South Wales’s identity as a place of class solidarity, miners and their unions, and socialist values.
People from towns like Blackwood had known for decades that the coal industry was in chronic decline. What had been by far the dominant industry, defining the society and political life of the Valleys, was being obliterated; and by now most locals had only ancestral links with mining. The Thatcher-led Conservative governments of the eighties sped up the decline process as the show-piece in an aggressive ideological conflict – dismantling the post-war consensus, privatising industries, reducing greatly the power of trade unions – and all accompanied by a very public hollowing out of the Labour Party. In 1983 Welsh MP Neil Kinnock would become Labour’s new leader. His constituency of Islwyn included Richey’s home town of Blackwood.
‘Everything Neil Kinnock and the Labour party stands for is everything that my grandfather would have spat at,’ Richey told the music press in 1992. ‘His desperate craving for power at any cost. Labour were told by a right-wing press to move towards the centre. But they should have gone more extreme.’
Early eighties Britain, rejecting the drabness and industrial strife of the seventies, went in hot pursuit of brashness, consumerism and individualist self-reliance. Working-class people were now encouraged to cultivate selfishness; greed was good; there was, claimed Thatcher, ‘no such thing as society’. All of which laid down something of an existential quandary to working-class towns across Britain. And, in truth, people in places like Blackwood were as susceptible to the shiny new epoch, to personal ambitions and material delights, as voters elsewhere.
Embracing Thatcherism in South Wales was, however, markedly different to doing so in south-east England. A whole identity was at stake. South Wales had been synonymous with mining, trade unions and Labourism. Suddenly, communities and families and friendships were tested to breaking point.
With the conflict dominating the headlines, and Britain’s future trajectory at stake, people were compelled to choose sides. For young people coming of age in a former mining community in the Valleys, it was a pressing, immediate issue, in Blackwood as much as anywhere. Such matters were certainly upfront in the minds of young music fans. The Smiths’ song ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’ was just one of many emphatic statem
ents marking the era in pop.
In such an atmosphere, any hint of ambivalence was pounced upon. Was there a pressure on Richey, the son of two business-owners, to make clear his political persuasion? Rachel says that one reason her brother favoured Church View was that it was seen to be more working class. ‘He didn’t like what he felt was the suburban bubble of St Tudor’s View. He preferred where we were before. That older, slower pace of life, where what you saw was what you got.’
Richey witnessed first-hand on the streets of Blackwood the year-long miners’ strike of 1984–5. If upcoming generations were to avoid being left on the scrapheap, education had to work for them like never before.
Chapter 3
Crosskeys
‘There’s an awful lot of white British kids that have never really gone hungry, always had a roof to live under, but at the same time are desperately unhappy. It’s not total poverty, just a poverty of ideas.’
Richey Edwards, 1993
In September 1984, the 16-year-old Richey Edwards enrolled at Crosskeys College. A seven-mile journey from Blackwood, the college had a student body mainly drawn from the local comprehensives. Rachel recalls Richey being optimistic about starting college, despite fretting about his severe acne. He would join his sister in applying homemade yoghurt facemasks and steaming his skin before his first term commenced.
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