Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  Richey was to study for A-levels in Economics, Geography and History. Five days a week, he would regularly make the trip from Blackwood to Crosskeys campus on the number 156 bus. It was at the bus station that he caught the eye of Mark Hambridge, two years his senior.

  Among Richey’s possessions that we examine are address books spanning the years from 1988 to 1995. As time went on, he filled them out less and less, and his 1995 address book – a special John Betjeman edition – contains only a very few names. In his final address book, under the heading ‘IMPORTANT DATES’, Richey also listed the birthdays of his nearest and dearest: his mother; his sister; his then girlfriend 19-year-old Jo from the East End of London, whom he met while touring with the band in the summer of 1991; and the name ‘Den’.

  We ask Rachel about Den, who has appeared in the address book consistently from 1988 to 1995. She says it is Richey’s close friend Mark Hambridge, who still lives in the Blackwood area.

  When we first contact Mark online, he is reluctant to talk without first making sure of Rachel’s involvement in the project. A few days later he suggests we meet at his local Weatherspoon’s on Blackwood High Street.

  On arriving, Mark produces photographs of himself and Richey as teenagers, together with letters from Richey during his time in college and university. He tells us about the first time he saw Richey at Blackwood bus station. ‘Richard was sat at the end of the bench alone and away from the more typical rugby boys. He had his head in a book and really stood out because he was wearing this dark trench coat with this big Echo & the Bunnymen quiff. He had a quiet grace about him, a magnetism that made you want to go and talk to him.’

  Mark and Richey were both cripplingly shy, and the two didn’t manage to speak until over a year later. Mark was walking home when he spotted Richey up a ladder in a pair of overalls. ‘I saw him painting the walls of his grandmother’s house. I decided to bite the bullet and made a comment about his hairstyle and then he came down the ladder and we started talking music. We quickly found out we were both obsessed by Morrissey and The Smiths.’

  In the eighties, Morrissey became a figurehead, and brought a new perspective on life in Britain for a particular kind of person not readily represented elsewhere. The introverted, bookish aesthetes of teenage suburbia suddenly had a voice speaking directly to their experience.

  ‘When you like bands like The Smiths and the Bunnymen, it’s for a reason,’ says Mark. ‘You hone in on the words, and the messages are there for you to decipher.

  ‘As we got closer, I remember Richard spoke about his life before reaching adolescence a lot. In all his letters to me, he’s talking about his innocence. We’d both talk at length about how much better it was when you’re young and oblivious. You grow up and there are so many factors ruining your life – jobs, money, relationships – and you’re constantly wishing it could go back to how it was.

  ‘I think he had such a lovely childhood, and there was no way you could carry that on into later life. Even an innocent thing like our friendship was picked apart when we got older because we’d spend so much time together. We got called gay or benders by the rugby lot because of the way we looked. We’d even be hanging around with girls and the boys would still call us gay. We could never reconcile that.’

  Richey would allude to these times in 1992: ‘The worst thing about the Thatcher years was that gender barriers were re-established. You had to either be laddish or Sharon-ish. The whole Happy Mondays thing was so sad. All the beer-swilling, lager lout, football fans were suddenly ultra-cool.’

  The miners’ strike, and the high point of Thatcherism, were the very public death of what American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson has diagnosed as socialism’s master-narrative, and its replacement by postmodernity, the cultivation of infinite more localised and personalised narratives. If Richey and the future Manic Street Preachers have a core meaning or explanation, then it is here in the excruciating crossover from one era to another, as their home community and the very identity of South Wales straddles an older sensibility and the future. And Richey arguably embodied that tension.

  Richey would likely never have enjoyed a traditional male role in heavy industry, let alone donned the miner’s helmet and worked underground; and for him, as for a generation of young working-class males growing up in the eighties, the new era posed something of a paradox. They might regret and mourn the defeat of the socialist narrative and the collapse of a viable working-class movement, but the new era was also, undeniably, a time of new opportunities, exciting possibilities. Particularly as regards gender roles and new masculinities.

  Traditional male roles, probably best embodied by the figure of the coalminer, were disappearing fast. So, while many young men embraced the prevailing lads’ ‘lager lout’ culture, it was a time that also presented new opportunities for previously marginalised identities to come to the fore – through a new tolerance of male femininity and non-macho maleness.

  ‘Richard had an androgyny about him,’ remembers Mark. ‘He was simultaneously one half male and one half female in the way he acted. You could talk to him about sports, girls and have a pint, but you could also talk about things boys in the area didn’t really talk to each other about – anxieties, insecurities and whatever was getting you down. I had hang-ups about being overweight and he had hang-ups about having bad skin. It was something I think we both found hard to talk to other people openly about at the time.’

  The two boys spent their time in their rooms at home, even dropping letters through each other’s doors describing what they termed their ‘bedroom culture’. Like many Smiths fans, they took great pride in bunkering down indoors, developing their intellectual and artistic palettes. They rarely ventured out, shunned pubbing and clubbing and pursued instead the lifestyle embodied by Morrissey – an introvert’s odyssey deep into books, films and music. They eschewed the adolescent stereotypes of the day in favour of Ken Kesey and William Burroughs, Rimbaud and Rumble Fish.

  ‘You can see how he contributed to the band’s early aesthetic from the letters he’d send me. Every inch would be decorated in these photographs that would make an amazing collage. Sometimes he’d go overboard, and the postman would have trouble reading the address. He’d encourage me to send him my poetry I was writing, so I’d sit inside a lot scribbling away, whilst he’d be doing the same down the road.’

  ‘I wish I never had to leave my bedroom, then you just have yourself. I’ve compromised over so many things since I’ve left my bedroom. I wish I could enter Dostoyevskian Underground and stay in my bedroom forever.’

  Richey, letter to Mark Hambridge, 1986

  ‘You just felt extremely lucky that he chose to spend his time with you because he was so nourishing in terms of all the information and knowledge he shared,’ says Mark. ‘He wasn’t pretentious about it. He seemed more interested in talking about your day and your problems than talking about himself.’

  In the 24 years since Richey’s disappearance his influence still looms large in the lives of those he knew in Blackwood. Adrian Wyatt met Richey at Crosskeys College in 1986. When we contact him online, he suggests we talk in the Edwards family home. When we arrive at the bungalow, Adrian and Rachel are reminiscing in the kitchen. A frequent visitor in the eighties, Adrian looks back on this time in his life with great fondness.

  ‘Richard and I both took A-level History, but he was better than me, better than the teacher in fact,’ says Adrian. ‘I can remember the first lesson we had together, and there was Richard looking like Ian McCulloch, and I was quite intimidated by him. But I sat down next to him and he asked what music I was into, and then he started picking apart every band I liked at the time. I was into The Jam in a big way, and he quoted some lyrics back to me and said, “What’s that about? What’s that even supposed to mean? That’s just rubbish!”

  ‘He was good-natured about it, though, not judgemental, he’d just point out things and try to change your mind. I admired how insightful he was, and
we became really good friends.’

  Richey, Mark and Adrian would spend time with two other boys they met at Crosskeys College – Stephen Gatehouse from Blackwood and Byron Harris from nearby Risca. They would occasionally drink in the Red Lion pub on Blackwood High Street, but Adrian admits it was a challenge to get Richey out of the house.

  ‘Stephen and Byron were into drinking and going out to the pubs,’ recalls Adrian. ‘A bit more laddish. For a long time, every Saturday night, Richard and I would just stay in and listen to records at mine when my parents were out. We’d lock ourselves indoors and be really comfortable doing it, but we acknowledged that at our age we should be out drinking and enjoying ourselves. We’d have this long-running joke where we’d go “Shall we go down the Red Lion?” … and then we’d look at each other and say “Nah … maybe next week?” I remember him even spending his eighteenth birthday inside, watching Coronation Street. But during college, on the rare occasions we both ventured out, it was the gang of five of us who hung around together.’

  The five boys would buy bottles of San Miguel at the Spar on Blackwood High Street before pub crawling until closing time. During these rare drinking sessions, Richey would get into heated debates about anything from the merits of The Smiths versus Echo & the Bunnymen to the politics of Northern Ireland.

  ‘He was out one night, and me and my cousin were there,’ remembers Mark’s ex-girlfriend Joanna Haywood. ‘Richard and her were arguing over the divide in Northern Ireland. She was shouting, so Richard calmly said, “If you don’t shut up … I’m going to pour this pint over my head.” She went on and on trying to pick a fight, until in the end he stood up and poured the pint over his head. I remember the whole pub just stared in total silence and amazement.’

  Richey’s adolescent political instincts were unfailingly radical. Rachel remembers him, at the age of 13, being captivated by IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands on the news. Richey would later say, in a 1994 interview, that what Sands did was ‘a better statement than anything else that was going on at the time, because it was against himself’.

  In 1981, a year after Sands died from his hunger strike, Richey wrote a short fictional story entitled ‘The Intruder’ in which the protagonist sets out to become a poet who would highlight political injustices. After ridicule from his parents, the writer flees his home and makes his way to the Marquee Club in London in the hopes of performing his poetry. When he arrives at the venue he meets the comedian and actor Craig Charles, who steals his poetry, and performs it as his own. Eaten up by rage and injustice, the writer sees no option but to martyr himself, and plunges a dagger deep into his own side. However, he wakes up in hospital, and is now extremely pleased to see that he has become a cause célèbre among the British media.

  In Blackwood, Richey’s peers viewed his passionate stance on current affairs as eccentric. ‘He would talk at length about everything – international affairs, local governmental issues, cultural politics – knowing the most tiny, minute details and most obscure theory,’ remembers Adrian. ‘I remember other students saying, “He just talks about politics all the time! What’s the point?!”’

  During his time in Crosskeys, Richey would excel in his studies of modern political history. He received A+ grades in topics as varied as the Irish Act of Union to Partition, the role of nations in the Treaty of Versailles and post-war foreign policy analysis.

  One essay on nineteenth-century parliament was graded a B+, much to Richey’s dismay. The examiner noted: ‘Richard – a very lengthy effort with far too much detail. Perhaps you should be more selective at times.’ This assessment was greeted by Richey scrawling his own, rather less considered retort on the paper: ‘FUCK OFF CUNT.’

  One afternoon, walking through the college corridors, Richey was suddenly asked to stand in front of the neighbouring class by the college’s History professor, Mr Copely. The teacher extolled him to the class as an example of a stellar student, telling the pupils, ‘Everybody should expect great things from Richard Edwards in the future.’

  ‘He never told us about this incident,’ says Rachel. ‘I only found out about it from a friend a few years ago. Apparently Richard was blushing and looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him up. But I think he really enjoyed his time in Crosskeys, and felt his work and critical thinking was more appreciated there than it was in Oakdale.’

  ‘He genuinely enjoyed all that academia entailed,’ recalls Adrian. ‘You could tell in political debates he’d sometimes hold back, not to show the full extent of his understanding or knowledge on the issue, because it may be a bit full-on or in-depth for some people. He’d like to play games and voice an opinion that wasn’t his own – because he liked nothing better than to get a reaction. He’d give me a nudge under the table.

  ‘I saw those nudges in his later lyrics. They were challenging, with so many undertones and a lot less obvious messages so that if you were similarly well educated you could pick up on them. It’s a bit like that mentality of “go off and do your own research”.

  ‘At college, he was very principled and very idealistic in wanting to open up other pupils’ eyes to a deeper understanding of how the world worked. Whilst a lot of students adopted their parent’s political point of view, or had none, he was unique because he had opinions outside of what you’d read in the papers or hear on TV just by watching Newsnight.’

  Richey was to reflect on his time in college in a 1988 letter to a girlfriend called Claire Forward:

  Take college. Most people hated me from day 1. Which is good. I said from day 1 that I’d get three A’s cos I knew I would. Copley told the class to read Norman Stone so I’d read Asa Briggs. Mr Bevan told the class to learn ‘weather’ so I learnt statistics. Mr Vaughn told us to learn ‘demand’ so I learnt ‘supply’. I hope you see. If people want to close their eyes and be blind that’s their problem. I don’t know if you saw me very often in my college days but if you did you would have seen I hardly spoke to anyone. That’s cos I hated them all. One boy (a friend – Rhydwin) said once that he hated everything I stood for, despised everything I said and sometimes felt like hitting me. Then he said he knew what I said was true and that’s why he sometimes hated me. Everyone longed to see me fail but the problem was that they knew immediately, from day 1 that I’d get three A’s. The teachers knew it as well. Look, in my year 2 people out of 25 passed Geography—I got an ‘A’. Someone else (Rhydwin) got a ‘C’, and the rest failed. Don’t you think it’s significant that the one person who befriended me did well??? They all thought I was a big headed arrogant bastard. Only Rhydwin could see it was all a fraud – he saw my shyness. He saw my vulnerability. I was gonna say ‘I hoped’ I would get three A’s but it would’ve been a fucking lie. I will not come down to some stupid level just to make them feel better. I told my Economics class to stay in one weekend to revise cos they were holding me back. They hated me but if they could have been bothered maybe they’ve been passed. Same in Geography – I told them all they were stupid but they believed they would pass from their notes. Everything in that exam I did myself. I even got information from a bus poster, and they kept learning the same stupid arguments. I just want people to think for themselves. They never do. On my last exam I wrote about inner city riots for a ‘Richard III’ essay and still got an ‘A’. It was totally irrelevant but if you think you can make anything apply. This girl and her friends asked to borrow my essays and I told them to fuck off. They just missed the point. You cannot learn from someone else’s arguments. Do it yourself. In Economics the teacher photocopied all my essays and gave them to the class. So in the exam I developed a completely new argument from my own essays. They all failed and I passed. Now if I’d written my original essay before it got circulated around the class I’d have still got an ‘A’. Do you see, the argument was not wrong, but the people who wrote it were. They missed the point, they learnt the work, but did not understand, did not breathe with its lungs, did not see with its eyes, did not feel its emotion. They knew
every material detail but they did not know its soul. It’s the same in music. They all know The Wedding Present words but they do not understand its soul. Just like economics, I have to find a new band and when the mammoths discover it they’ll kill it dead. Stone dead. Absolute killers. Do you know what it’s like to cherish beauty and then see so-called people come and crush it? It burns my skin.

  The letters show a passionate commitment to learning, and the importance the adolescent Richey was now beginning to place on the world of music. Throughout college Richey’s files and paperwork were adorned with lyrics from his favourite bands, cartoons of his favourite musicians and musings about the rock stars of yore.

  ‘I remember in our final year of High School we went to see [Visage singer and 1980s New Romantic pop star] Steve Strange together at a record fair in the old Oakdale Miners’ Institute,’ says Richard Fry. ‘We were meant to go to Cardiff afterwards, but Richard refused to leave because he wanted to meet Steve Strange.

  ‘He wanted to get his CDs signed and try to strike up a conversation with him. You could see that music really mattered to Richard. I kept telling him my dad was outside ready to give us a lift to the station but he kept fobbing me off, so in the end I left him to it, and went home in a huff.’

  As Richey’s time in college progressed, he would go to more and more gigs, seeing bands such as The Wedding Present and Wire, and travelling alone as far afield as Nottingham to see The Jesus and Mary Chain. He was at an infamous Smiths concert in Newport in 1986 when the gig was cut short after Morrissey was dragged into the overzealous crowd and treated for concussion at the A&E department of the Royal Gwent Hospital. However, one concert Richey didn’t attend was an early Manic Street Preachers headline gig in Blackwood’s Little Theatre on 4 October 1986.