promenade as a reminder of a town proud of its past and heritage. For decades the Miners’ Eisteddfod would celebrate, through song and poetry, the communities surrounding the threatened coal industries of the nearby valleys. For this they would use the Pavilion where they were always welcome, always part of the bubble. It was yet another event which would generate that buzz about town - audible just above the ever-present lapping of the sea shores. Perhaps one of the most rewarding moments of my own life as a Porthcawl resident though (apart
from when I get to do a reading somewhere more cosmopolitan and announce where I come from), was when the place appeared on the BBC’s Coast - the attempts of which to gentrify this humble town on the edge of the Bristol Channel made us all chuckle. As a presenter tried to embellish a story of escaped German prisoners of war, claiming it to be the significant event of Porthcawl’s hidden past, I took comfort in how little the rest of the world appeared to know of my town. Had they looked harder, they may have been able to investigate the wreck of the Santampa, visible only on the biggest tidal swings of the year - the same surges that send the surfers dashing east to chase the
Severn Bore. Perhaps the story of the Maid of Sker had eluded them - and of the ghost that still haunts the flatlands around Rest Bay (whom I saw personally late one night during my teens). Either way, being misunderstood or underestimated is something my town has always enjoyed. After all, for me it’ll always be that sense of standing out from the rest of the crowd that gives Porthcawl its place along this coast. Having humbly submitted ourselves to the sea and its mysterious whims centuries ago, my town has danced to a different drumbeat ever since I first knew it, and, as seasons change and building come and go, I take comfort in knowing that this one virtue will always be Porthcawl’s to keep.
and to show that they, too, have their message.” Writing about this early publication in The London Welshman in 1964, he said that he was on the staff of Dulwich College at the time, having been rejected for military service for medical reasons. He writes, “Patriotism was the temper of the time. This inspired me to show that men and women of Welsh blood had a distinctive English voice in verse, in addition to their age-old native heritage of poetry.” 1917 is a significant year. We could say that it was the year in which ‘Modern Poetry’ was born, with the publication of T.S.Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. We could also say that, with PrysJones’s anthology, it was the year when Welsh writing in English as a category was born. Prys-Jones included twenty-two poets, mostly unknown today. He included three poems of his own: ‘A
Song of the Welsh’; ‘A Ballad of Glyndwˆr’s Rising’ and ‘Madonna’. The second is included in Meic Stephens’s capacious anthology, Poetry 1900-2000, (Parthian, 2007). It has conviction and vigour: “My son, the winds are calling, and the mountains and the flood/ With a wail of deep oppression that wakes havoc in my blood./ And I have waited, waited long through the bitter years/ For this hour of freedom’s challenge and the flashing of the spears:”. The poem ‘Madonna’ signals the poet’s Christian faith. In 1948 Prys-Jones published a selection of his own verse under the title Green Places. Poems of Wales. Their subject-matter was taken from Welsh history and storytelling. The poem ‘Henry Morgan’s March on Panama’ is graphic and rhythmical: splendid for recitation during a junior school play featuring pirates: “Twelve hundred rattling skeletons/ Who sprang to life, and then/ Like a wild wave took
Profile
Prys-Jones PAT R I OT P O E T JOHN IDRIS JONES
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rthur Glyn Prys-Jones, born in Denbigh in 1888, left his mark on the Literature of
Wales. In 1917 he published an anthology of poetry: Welsh Poets. A Representative English Selection of Contemporary Writers. In his Introduction, Prys-Jones quoted, “..let each one of you learn to act in such a way that in him men shall respect and love his country.” He continued, “Mazzini epitomised the duty of the good patriot. It is in a modification of these words that the purpose and scope of this volume may be discovered. It is to give collective utterance to the Englishspeaking poets of Modern Wales
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