TOM DAVIES (1941-2024)
Journalist and author Tom Davies, who died last year after a slow decline with dementia, personified unorthodoxy and independent thinking as he followed his own path throughout an eventful, fulfilling life. Born in Pontypridd, he grew up in Cardiff where his father had relocated to work in the GKN steelworks. The hyper-active, brainy boy won a scholarship at Canton High School to study philosophy at Cardiff University, where he used the long summer holidays to take casual work as a seaman in the Merchant Navy, travelling across the oceans to Australia and South Africa, and then in the summer of 1962 he served as a volunteer social worker in New York’s tough Lower East Side. After graduating in 1963 he went into teaching, first in Indonesia and Malaysia with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) and then back in Cardiff. Restless Davies soon moved on to become a trainee journalist at the Western Mail. One of his earliest assignments was to report on the Aberfan disaster, but he was so shocked and distressed by what he saw he was unable to write a word about it – a sign of his growing anguish about the human condition that would become more and more important for him as he developed a very Welsh mystical spirituality. His writing talent saw him in demand as an always entertaining features writer for the Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times and Observer, allowing him to travel far and wide and stretch his journalism into serious subjects. Eventually he left journalism to become a ‘proper’ writer. He published 16 books over the years, showcasing his trademark offbeat humour, perceptiveness and commitment to the ancient notion of pilgrimage. His first, Merlyn the Magician and the Pacific Coast Highway (1982), underlined his enduring themes (bicycling, travel, Wales and the destructive cruelty of the modern world). Other particularly noteworthy works include Stained Glass Hours: A Modern Pilgrimage (1985), Wild Skies and Celtic Paths (1988), Visions of Caradoc (1999), Through Fields of Gold: A Pilgrimage from Berlin to Rome (2000), The Reporter’s Tale (2011) and Black Sunlight (2013). In 2001 he and his wife moved from Penarth to Bala in Eryri where they ran an art gallery. In 2014, in his last big adventure before illness took over, the couple spent a year exploring Australia in a camper van, described beautifully in his 2015 book Bush Revelations.

FIONA EVANS (1959-2024)
Wales has always kept a warm welcome for any newcomer who respects its land, history and society, who accepts and endorses its unique identity, and who doesn’t try to impose values from elsewhere like some colonising conqueror. If that happens, the person involved is integrated comfortably and will soon be able to proudly call themself Welsh. This process has happened countless times across the centuries, counteracting the equally common reverse process of people leaving Wales and ditching their Welshness. Such was the experience of ecologist and conservationist Fiona Evans (known as ‘Flo’ to all who knew her), who died last year. She was born in Essex, close to Epping Forest where her love of the natural world was incubated. After an adventurous gap year exploring France and North America, she studied ecology at Loughborough University and then took up freelance conservation work, which first brought her to Wales as a summer warden for the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) at the precious Dyfi nature reserve north of Aberystwyth. It was love at first sight, and before long Flo joined the NCC full-time as a regional officer for north Wales. She established the Dolgellau office of the NCC’s successor in Wales, the Countryside Council for Wales (CCW), before she was seconded to help plan the establishment of a new environmental body – Natural Resources Wales – following devolution. By then she had met and married her husband, a warden at the RSPB’s Ynys-hir nature reserve near Machynlleth. There they lived in a delightful cottage, working hard to enhance biodiversity and raising their sons, Hefin and Iolo – whose Welsh names illustrate how Flo had become an unequivocal Welshwoman. Flo was instrumental in the creation of several sites of special scientific interest and the conservation of fragile and threatened ecosystems before she retired in 2016. Her passion for nature continued after retirement at Furnace, a village close to the Dyfi estuary: rehabilitating disused bridleways, setting up the Dolau Dyfi project to protect and restore grasslands, and often acting as an expert witness in conservation prosecutions. Her premature death from heart failure is a great blow to the constant struggle to defend Wales from the crazed advocates of the never-ending ‘growth’ that has wiped out 25% of the ecosystems, wild life and biospheres of Wales in the last 30 years alone.

MARGARET JONES (1918-2024)
Margaret ‘Peggy’ Jones, who has died at the remarkable age of 105, never received any formal training as an artist, although she had drawn privately since her childhood in England, yet her natural talent saw her become a superb illustrator of a huge catalogue of books that retold the myths and legends of Wales and other Celtic countries. Working predominately in watercolour, her immaculately detailed and intricate illustrations came to epitomise the rich depths and wise allegories of Welsh folk tales. She had the rare ability to bring complex stories to life visually – all the more amazing given that she didn’t start her career until she was 60, having devoted her earlier life to her Welsh husband Basil Jones, a Presbyterian minister, and their six children as well as missionary work in India. In 1953 the family moved to Aberystwyth and it was there Peggy lived for the rest of her days while Basil worked as a lecturer at the University and as a minister around the chapels of mid-Wales. She became steeped in the sagas of Wales, using her spare time to actualise them with her sublime imagery, and her breakthrough came after a successful exhibition of her work at Aberystwyth Art Gallery prompted the Arts Council of Wales to commission her to illustrate a new version of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. Tales from the Mabinogion, co-written by Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016) and Kevin Crossley-Holland, was published in 1984 and Peggy never looked back. Her interpretations became the unmatched, definitive manifestations of these earliest prose stories in the history of Britain. She went on to create gorgeous posters, maps and calendars and among the more than 20 books she illustrated marvellously were: Culhwch ac Olwen (1988), adapted by Gwyn Jones; Welsh Folk Tales/Chwedlau Gwerin Cymru (1989) by Robin Gwyndaf; Tales from Celtic Countries (1999), collected by Rhiannon Ifans; Owain Glyndŵr: Prince of Wales (2000) by Rhiannon Ifans; children’s books Madog (2005) and Llywelyn ein Llyw Olaf (2009), both by Gwyn Thomas; and Nat (2004) and Nat and the Box of Gifts (2006), two inventive books for children inspired by Welsh folklore that she wrote herself. Peggy Jones was a vital component of Welsh life for over 40 years; her legacy will endure for as long as books still exist.

JOHN RHYS (1928-2023)
Although born in Hopkinstown near Pontypridd, John Rhys, who died aged 95 two years ago, was very much a Cardiffian, his parents having moved to Llandaff North shortly after he was born. His father was a teacher and the importance of education was in the Rhys family’s bone marrow. Bilingual John excelled at Cardiff High School for Boys before studying Welsh at University College and going on to obtain a MA in medieval Welsh poetry. He tried teaching but it wasn’t right for him, so for 13 years he worked as a schools officer with the National Savings Bank encouraging children to set up savings accounts before he found his true vocation in 1967 with the Welsh Office. He rose through the ranks to become its principal and, as secretary to the Bowen commission of enquiry into the total lack of bilingualism in Wales, he played a crucial part in ensuring that the commission recommended in 1972 that road signs in Wales should be in Welsh as well as English. He became secretary of the Welsh Language Council, further strengthened the expansion of bilingualism and implemented the first financial support for the language. Whitehall head-hunted him but he turned down promotion because it would have meant moving to London, then the location of the Welsh Office’s HQ. So in 1976 he instead became director of the University of Wales Press in Cardiff and remained with them until his retirement in 1990, protecting its important academic publications and finding new revenue streams in the face of the perpetual funding cuts UK governments always foist on Wales, while simultaneously acting as a key member of the Welsh Books Council. Few Welsh civil servants can match his record of dedicated service packed with tangible achievements that brought real advances and benefits to his country.

ADRIAN STREET (1940-2023)
Men cross-dressing as women (and women cross-dressing as men, for that matter) is a practice as old as the very concept of sex-specific clothes, occurring in ancient cultures across the world. Over the centuries the phenomena has had many variations, motivations and reactions, but in modern times transvestism has tended to become a branch of the entertainment industry, from Shakespearean theatre, pantomime dames, music hall comedians and drag acts through to mainstream TV staples like Danny La Rue and Edna Everage. There have always been a few men ready to push the envelope into new zones, tapping into gender-bending’s inbuilt transgression and challenging of norms, and one of the boldest of those pioneers was wrestler Adrian Street from the mountain-top Gwent town of Brynmawr, who died two years ago at the age of 82. In a wrestling career that began in 1957 when he was only 16 and continued until he was 73 at his last bout in Birmingham, Alabama, he took part in more than 12,000 fights, travelled all over the world, won countless championships, made it big particularly in the USA and became famous for his outrageous androgynous appearance, caked in make-up, hair bleached peroxide blonde, bedecked in feather boas and flamboyant glittering costumes and provocatively camping it up ‘playing the poof’ to antagonise audiences as an archetypal wrestling ‘heel’ that the booing crowds loved to hate. He was years ahead of ‘glam rock’ acts in the music business, where frontmen such as David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Boy George, Prince, Pete Burns, Steven Tyler and so on inspired countless copycats who would turn frocks and mascara into a tedious trope. From a long line of coalminers but, determined not to end up down the pits like his father, Street flipped the tradition of sooty faces, fatal accidents and lung disease on it’s head and, in so doing, was a precursor of Wales’ seismic shift away from heavy industry. One of his career highlights came in the 1970s when he had the great pleasure of beating the crap out of a certain Jimmy Savile, utilising none of wrestling’s usual sham violence against the man who all the wrestling community knew to be a paedophile even back then (oddly, it seems only the BBC and the Royal Family remained oblivious to the truth). Adrian dished out an unrestrained old-fashioned Welsh drop-kick the vile child abuser wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Going by the nickname ‘Exotic’, he had a long, close relationship with his manager, woman wrestler Linda Hawker (aka ‘Miss Linda’) and they married in 2005. He returned to his beloved Brynmawr from the USA in 2018.

OWEN JOHN THOMAS (1939-2024)
Owen John Thomas was a great Welshman, a great Cardiffian and a great human being. His death from dementia last year in a Care Home on Dumballs Road was merely the sad denouement to a life of extraordinary achievements. Peculiarly, my early years and his share many similarities. He began life in Albany Road, Roath, so did I. His father was a pharmacist, so was mine. His family lived above the pharmacy at number 110, mine lived above the pharmacy just seven doors away at number 96. Oh, and he was a lifelong Plaid Cymru supporter and advocate of Welsh independence – and so am I. That is where the similarities end, not only because there was a 20 year age-gap between us but also because my inconsequential scribblings can’t hold a candle to the major difference he made to Cardiff and Wales. His 1983 founding of Clwb Ifor Bach alone stands as a seismic and historic moment in Welsh history. Named after Ifor ap Meurig (c1130-c1169), who led the resistance to the Norman invaders in Morgannwg, the music venue Thomas started in a disused British Legion building in Womanby Street has become an essential Welsh institution it is quite impossible to imagine Cardiff being without. It is the best place to hear live music in the city, a rejection of commodified, commercialised, hyper-processed bilge, the epicentre of bilingualism in the Welsh capital, a ceaseless champion of excellence and diversity, and its relaxed, welcoming vibe effortlessly silences the old lies about Welshness being ‘parochial’ and ‘insular’. The fact that Clwb is now in its 42nd year, an unprecedented lifespan for a Cardiff venue, underlines the scale of Owen’s visionary foresight. He was always brave and principled: he left school at 16 to work in the Docks; he was a Plaid Cymru activist from his teens onwards; he returned to education and got an MA in the History of Welsh; he taught himself Welsh in his late 20s; he became a primary school teacher and headmaster; he played a key role in advancing Welsh-medium education in Cardiff; he changed Plaid policy so that Socialism was included in the party’s aims; he championed leasehold reform; he was an impressive Plaid member of the Assembly (now Senedd) from 1999 to 2007 who campaigned powerfully for the teaching of Welsh history, for Saint David’s Day to be a national holiday, for the creation of the Wales Millennium Centre, for cancer treatments denied to Wales and for the return of the Allied Steel & Wire stolen pension fund; and late in life he completed his brilliant book The Welsh Language in Cardiff: A History of Survival (2020), debunking the oft-repeated lie that Cardiff had been solely English-speaking since the Anglo-Norman conquest. Yes, Owen John Thomas was indeed a great man – and we need a lot more people of his calibre to come to the fore and fill the immense void now left by his absence.

CHRIS WILLIAMS (1963-2024)
The sudden death of Chris Williams from a heart attack last year has deprived Wales of one of its most distinguished historians and scholars. Born in Griffithstown, on the eastern edge of the coalfield in Gwent, he grew up first in Newport then in Swindon, where his middle-class parents moved when he was a child. Highly intelligent and hungry for knowledge, he studied modern history at Balliol College, Oxford, by which time his politics were firmly on the left and he strongly identified with the radical traditions of Wales. After Oxford he took a doctorate at Cardiff University then lectured at the Open University and Coleg Harlech before returning to Cardiff and rising through the ranks to become a senior lecturer in history. Stints at the University of Glamorgan and Swansea University broadened his Welsh perspectives and scope before he returned to Cardiff University again as head of the school of history, archaeology and religion. In 2017 he became head of Celtic Studies and social sciences at University College Cork, and it was while living in Ireland that he died far too young when only 61. During his impressive academic career he was also the editor and author of many outstanding works, most notably Democratic Rhondda (1996), Capitalism, Community and Conflict: the South Wales Coalfield 1898-1947 (1998), With Dust Still in His Throat: a BL Coombes Anthology (1999), The Labour Party in Wales 1900-2000 (2001), The Gwent County History, volumes four & five (2009 and 2011), Robert Owen and His Legacy (2011), and The Richard Burton Diaries (2012). All are strongly recommended to anyone interested in Wales.