MEL AP IOR THOMAS (1952-2023)
With the death of Mel ap Ior Thomas in November Welsh domestic football has lost its great champion, historian, statistician and chronicler. From the formation of the Cymru Premier (then called the League of Wales) in 1992 he took on the responsibility of running the league’s results and stats service Soccerfile Wales, editing the league’s weekly newsletter, disseminating information to the Press Association and compiling the Welsh entry in UEFA’s European Football Yearbook. On top of this he set up the Welsh Football Data Archive website, a huge, long-term project researching and recording the completely neglected history of the game in Wales, wrote articles for World Soccer magazine, and was the author of History of the Cambrian Coast League (2009) and the African Football Handbook (1988) – the first book to cover African football – as well as joint author of the Welsh Football Almanac (1991). He is going to be almost impossible to replace.

He did an essential and crucial service for Wales, a service that all the regular sources of football coverage still simply refuse to do. From BBC Wales, ITV Wales, the Western Mail and Media Wales through to the London-based ‘British’ press and media there has effectively been a boycott of the Cymru Leagues since the establishing of the Welsh pyramid in 1992. Take the BBC, for instance, the biggest and most read supplier of football news in the UK. The top five tiers of the English pyramid, the top four tiers of the Scottish pyramid and the top tier of the Northern Irish pyramid are all covered in micro-detail whereas coverage of the Welsh pyramid is so minimal, derisory and insultingly inadequate it scarcely exists. Quite apart from this being a brazen breach of the BBC’s legally-binding charter that explicitly prohibits such discrimination and bias against one of the four ‘British’ nations, this has been hugely detrimental to the Cymru League’s struggle for visibility and support in Wales.

Almost singlehandedly Mel worked without reward to try to counteract this cruel and calculated anti-Wales policy. Now he has gone, the FAW must fill the void and pump some of its many millions into the domestic game – without which, as Mel knew so well, there would be no Welsh international team and no FAW. The FAW’s shoddy and hopeless official Cymru Leagues website must be comprehensively upgraded and enhanced to include all Mel’s painfully accrued statistical data, all the historic results and line-ups, all the individual club records, and all the records of players, appearances, goalscorers, attendances, managers and so on. This type of all-encompassing coverage has been grievously lacking ever since the superb welsh-premier.com website run by Andrew Lincoln suddenly ceased to exist five years ago, and now the death of Mel ap Ior Thomas has made it even more urgent that the FAW steps into the breach and does its job.

I knew him quite well dating back to the early League of Wales years when I wrote a regular column for Welsh Football magazine (another vital resource influenced by Mel in its early years and still going strong today thanks to Dave Collins in Cardiff). He was great company. We met up a few times to watch matches at Aberystwyth Town’s Park Avenue, about equidistant between me, then living in Pembrokeshire, and Mel in Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he was born, lived and worked until moving to Llandudno on his retirement. I well remember watching Aber’s Intertoto Cup match against Floriana of Malta with him on a hot midsummer Sunday afternoon in 1999 – how we roared when Kevin Morrison put them ahead with an early goal, and how we jigged on the packed railway side terraces when he scored a late penalty to get the Black & Greens a historic 2-2 draw! Happy days. Ffarwel fy nghymar. The fight goes on.

DAVE BURNS (1946-2023)
An intrinsic part of Cardiff feels missing following the death of folk musician, mandolin and guitar player and superb singer Dave Burns in December. Creative, talented, big-hearted, he embodied all that is best about this city and there was something elementally Cardiffian about his background and his life story across 77 years.

His roots were in the Irish diaspora of the 19th century. Fleeing the Great Famine, hundreds of Irish people were shipped to Cardiff as cheap labour and plonked in the jerry-built terraced streets of Newtown, Cardiff’s ‘Little Ireland’. From those beginnings Burns’ extended family made a profound impact on Cardiff society. Legendary boxer ‘Peerless’ Jim Driscoll (1880-1925), Newtown’s most famed resident, was a cousin of Dave Burns’ third cousin, Welsh rugby international Jim ‘Ocker’ Burns (1899-1971), who ran the Royal Oak pub in Broadway, a shrine to Driscoll, from 1947 to 1971. Ocker’s daughter and Dave’s second cousin, Kitty Flynn, nee Burns, (1930-2021), then ran the Oak until she retired in 2003 at which point the Cambrian pub in St Mary Street was renamed in honour of the best landlady in Cardiff (in 2015 it was again renamed, becoming the Cambrian Tap).

Growing up in Newtown south of the mainline railway (all demolished 1966), Dave Burns went to school at St Illtyd’s College in Courtenay Road, Splott, a Roman Catholic institution run by the fearsome De La Salle Brothers who would indelibly influence generations of Cardiff boys. The influence was hugely negative, because despite the College being named after the 5th century Welsh abbot Illtud who founded the earliest centre of learning in the British Isles at Llanilltud Fawr, the De La Salle’s hard-line version of Catholicism didn’t even recognise Wales as an entity and churned out pupils brainwashed to reject the very concept of Welshness, as per the Vatican’s 12th century decree (designed to crush the Celtic Church, and still in force today) that Wales is just a part of England. So it is to Dave Burns’ enormous credit that he had the intelligence, the curiosity and the courage to see through the propaganda and embrace Welsh identity.

Music was the vehicle that helped him achieve enlightenment and liberation. In 1966 he and Frank Hennessy, his pal from Rumney, won the talent competition ‘Spotlight on Youth’ organised by Cardiff Council. Then they teamed up with another friend Paul Powell (1946-2007) and formed The Hennessy’s folk group, named after front-man and lead singer Frank. The trio toured Ireland, developing as live performers and learning about the rich Celtic folk tradition. Back in Cardiff they increasingly developed their Welsh identity, introducing traditional Welsh-language folk songs into their act and beginning to compose their own contemporary folk songs in the Cardiff vernacular. Forging links with Breton, Cornish, Irish and Scottish musicians across the thriving Celtic Music scene, The Hennessy’s became a Welsh institution, gigging all over the country, ending the subservient and apologetic status of Welsh folk music and writing a number of folk classics that have become standards – songs such as Farewell to the Rhondda, Tiger Bay, The Old Carmarthen Oak, The Grangetown Whale and the immortal Cardiff Born.

In 1976 Dave Burns stretched himself further by founding the band Ar Log (‘For Hire’) after being encouraged by the annual Interceltique Festival in Lorient, Brittany, to fill the empty Welsh void that existed whereas other Celtic nations had hosts of groups playing indigenous traditional folk music. Keen Welsh-learner Dave got together with Dafydd Roberts (later to become head of record label Sain) and his brother Gwyndaf Roberts from Meirionnydd in the north-west plus Iolo Jones from Caerffili to form a ‘supergroup’ that would also go on to become a Welsh institution through many line-up changes to this day. Burns was only with Ar Log for a couple of years but he was a vital component of the band’s first album of many in 1978 (simply called Ar Log) and set the Ar Log templates of pan-Wales membership, of ignoring the English-imposed ‘North’/’South’ divide, of commitment to experimentation and originality, and of top-quality musicianship and songwriting. They are very much the Dubliners of Wales, with a magnificent back catalogue that among multiple treasures includes the first recording of the Dafydd Iwan anthem Yma o Hyd. Wales has much to thank Dave Burns for.

He went back to The Hennessy’s fold and the life he loved with Frank and Paul on the Welsh folk circuit. Through the years of great gigs, good times, TV appearances, collaborations with other musicians, support for striking miners and pan-Celtic adventures, Dave Burns polished his skills to become an outstanding vocalist as well as top-notch guitarist. The Hennessy’s didn’t make many albums, but when they did they were always compulsory listening. No self-respecting Cardiff home should, for instance, be without 1984’s Cardiff After Dark. Dave also released a pretty essential solo album of working-class anthems, Last Pit in The Rhondda, in 1986.

Time went by and Dave settled in Whitchurch with his wife and son, always a regular presence in Cardiff’s folk clubs. From 1984 Frank Hennessy began presenting Celtic Heartbeat* on Radio Wales, and he’s still doing it today: two hours of sheer pleasure every Sunday evening and easily the best programme on the entire station. As family life, other priorities and the ageing process took precedence appearances by The Hennessy’s became rare treats, particularly after banjo-maestro Paul’s death. In his last years Dave Burns suffered with ill health and now he has gone too, to join the legions of Cardiff dead where all of us will eventually belong. Here’s the thing though: it isn’t frightening, it isn’t bad, it somehow isn’t even sad…it’s exciting!

*This Sunday (January 14th) at 8pm Frank will present an unmissable special edition of Celtic Heartbeat on Radio Wales celebrating Dave’s life.

ANN CLWYD (1937-2023)
Ann Clwyd, who died in her Cardiff home last July, was for 35 years between 1984 and 2019 the redoubtable campaigning Labour MP for Cynon Valley. On the left of the Party, she fought the good fight on behalf of a multitude of causes, always founded on her bone-marrow socialism and characterised by her support for the underdog, for the NHS, for feminism and for universal human rights. But sadly, quite late in her career, all her previous good work was completely overshadowed by her inexplicable decision to become a gung-ho cheerleader for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Born Ann Clwyd Lewis in Denbigh, she was the daughter of Gwilym Lewis, a metallurgist, and his wife Elizabeth (nee Jones), a domestic science teacher. The couple were from Aberdyfi in Gwynedd and had relocated to Helygain (Halkyn) in Flintshire for work. Raised in a Welsh-speaking home, young Ann didn’t speak English until she went to primary school (her commitment to Welsh would never waver and she was a low-key but effective advocate of the Welsh language throughout her career – being instrumental in securing European funding for its support and taking the Westminster parliamentary ‘oath’ in Welsh as well as English, for instance). She studied English, Welsh and Religion at Bangor University but dropped out without graduating and moved into journalism. In the early 1960s she worked for TWW (a distant forerunner of ITV Wales) and BBC Wales and in 1963 met and married her life partner Owen Roberts (1939-2012) from Niwbwrch in Ynys Môn, a pioneer of Welsh-language television who became Head of News at TWW’s successor HTV and later Head of News & Current Affairs at BBC Wales. Known as Ann Clwyd Roberts for a while, she shortened her name when she shifted in 1964 to written journalism with The Guardian and then The Observer, where she built a reputation as a lucid, persuasive reporter.

Her political ambitions grew and, dropping her previous allegiance to Plaid Cymru, she joined Labour in 1968 and was soon the Welsh correspondent of the party’s newspaper Labour Weekly. But despite being clearly superior to her male rivals, she couldn’t persuade chauvinist, male-dominated local parties to select her as a candidate in winnable Westminster seats so it was as an MEP (for Mid & West Wales) that she made her breakthrough in the first European elections of 1979. She was an MEP for five years, entrenching her international perspective and honing her campaigning skills, before she won Cynon Valley in a byelection, so becoming the first woman to represent a seat in the south Wales mining valleys.

In her long stint as an MP she was never a bland Labour clone. She was a powerful voice in defence of Welsh miners, fighting for proper compensation for pneumoconiosis sufferers and joining the successful 1994 underground sit-in to keep Tower Colliery in Hirwaun open (the pit didn’t close until 2008), and was always prepared to oppose Party policies she disagreed with – being sacked from his front-bench by Neil Kinnock in 1988 for defying the whips on the issue of nuclear weapons, and from Tony Blair’s shadow foreign affairs team in 1995 for missing a Commons vote.

When Blair became Prime Minister in 1997 she was sidelined as an ‘Old Labour’ leftie until her vocal support for George ‘Dubya’ Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought her into favour. Shockingly, Clwyd allowed her admirable commitment to the Kurdish people’s struggle against oppression prevail over all other considerations in a tit-for-tat example of false equivalence that utterly tarnished her reputation. Lining up alongside the warmongers, the imperialists, the lawbreakers and the liars (there were no ‘weapons of mass destruction’; there was no Iraq connection to the 9/11 attacks; there was no UN mandate for the invasion) was a terrible mistake from which her hard-won reputation as a woman of principle never recovered. The invasion cost 250,000 lives, unspeakable human rights violations and immense environmental and cultural destruction, while turning Iraq into an even more oppressive theocracy of sectarian bigotry and perpetual chaos, nurturing the rise of Islamic State, destabilising the entire middle-east and setting the precedent for today’s horrors like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israel/Palestine conflict. As for the Kurdish people, what little autonomy they had under Saddam Hussein has been wiped out. Abandoned by the US and the UK, the Kurds have been crushed right across their ancestral lands in Turkey, Iran, Syria and Armenia as well as Iraq and the prospect of an independent Kurdistan is further away than ever. And as for Clwyd’s beloved Labour Party, Blair’s illegal war so repelled and alienated an entire generation of voters that the way was cleared for the 14 years and counting of disastrous Tory rule the people of the UK are suffering to this day. She was cynically used by Blair as a useful stooge to silence the left of the Party and in the years that followed never had the perception or humility to admit she had made a terrible mistake and that two wrongs do not add up to a right.

For these reasons any assessment of Ann Clwyd’s political life and many achievements can only conclude that it was a tragic failure. Her self-exculpating memoir Rebel With a Cause, published in 2017, contained no regrets and she carried on in Cynon Valley until standing down at last in 2019 (establishing a new record as the oldest woman ever to have been an MP). If there is a redeeming postscript it might be in her 49-year marriage to Owen Roberts. In 1974, following a car accident, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Only 35, his BBC career came to a halt and Clwyd devotedly supported him for the next 38 years. Right to the end, when he was receiving poor treatment in Cardiff’s Heath Hospital, she was by his side fighting fiercely for his dignity and his proper care. Let that be her memorial.

GLENYS KINNOCK (1944-2023)
Glenys Kinnock, who died in December, was a stalwart democratic socialist, humanist, trade unionist and feminist who with style, articulacy and good grace campaigned tirelessly throughout her life for a better world, particularly in the spheres of nuclear disarmament, international development, poverty, education and women’s rights.

She was born into the ardent leftwing working-class politics of Welsh-speaking chapel-goers from Ynys Môn, the second child of Cyril Parry a railway signalman and trade union activist and his wife Bet (nee Pritchard), who took in washing and worked in a cafe. Raised and schooled in Holyhead, she avidly soaked up politics while keeping her father company in his signal box where the very end of the railway line from London connected to the ferry to Ireland. A merchant seamen during WW2, Cyril Parry inculcated his daughter with her internationalist outlook along with an abiding commitment to the Labour Party. By the time she went to Cardiff University in 1962 to read Education & History she was already steeped in politics as a member of CND and the Anti-Apartheid movement as well as Labour. It was in the canteen in the University’s Main Building that she encountered a blustering, red-haired second year student called Neil recruiting for the Socialist Society. She joined. Random happenstance had intervened, and the trajectory of the rest of her life was set. Reader, in 1967 she married him.

Glenys worked as a teacher before family life (two children) and the ambitions of her husband took precedence. He was MP for Bedwellty (later Islwyn) from 1970 to 1995 and Labour leader from 1983 to 1992. She continually subsumed her own abilities and priorities to support his career – all to no avail. He was mercilessly pilloried by the Tory press despite his jettisoning of all the Party’s values and remodelling it in the Tory image as a pale pink, anti-socialist friend of big business. And despite his virulently anti-Welsh British nationalism and complete ignorance of Welsh history he was still damned by the Tories as a “Welsh windbag”, a formulation in which both words were delivered as insults. Deservedly, he never became Prime Minister and in 1995 he took up a lucrative sinecure with the European Commission, eventually filling his boots as a fat-cat Vice-President of the Commission. From there the former firebrand seamlessly moved to the House of Lords in 2005 as Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty.

Having hidden her light under a bushel to take up the thankless role of meek, compliant, groomed wifey, Glenys could at last begin to express herself as he left front-line politics. She was always far more intelligent, radical and principled than him, and had none of his sickening antipathy to the very idea of Wales. Now she no longer had to bite her lip and keep her opinions private out of loyalty to him and she entered a period of late blossoming. Between 1994 and 2009 she was a an MEP, winning three consecutive elections with huge majorities as a member for Wales. She had a big impact in Strasbourg, bringing her cleverness and passion to the chamber and forging a reputation as a genuine international stateswoman and an inspiring example of progressive feminism. She stood down from Europe after 15 years to join Gordon Brown’s government as Minister of State for first Europe and then Africa, which meant accepting a life peerage in her own right, as Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead. One of the first things she did was to persuade the EU to accept Welsh as an official language on an equal footing with other minority languages of Europe – an advance that must have choked in the craw of her avowedly monoglot hubby who couldn’t bring himself to utter a word of Welsh.

The Tory return to power in 2010, the 2016 Brexit vote and the rise of the far-right would have deeply upset Glenys Kinnock in her final years. Perhaps her 2017 Alzheimer’s diagnosis, leading to her retirement from the Lords in 2021, was ultimately a blessing in disguise in that it spared her the mounting horrors that those of us still cognisant must endure.