JULIET ACE (1938-2025)
Llanelli-born playwright Juliet Ace, who died last year, was in her late 30s by the time she was ready to believe she could be a writer, having dabbled in teaching and acting after leaving Wales at age 18. She became a specialist in radio plays, a richly satisfying genre that today has more or less been abolished by the remorselessly dumbing-down BBC, and never looked back after her first broadcast play, Speak No Evil, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 1980. Prolifically imaginative and fiercely intelligent, bilingual Ace built a reputation for her vivid characterisations, convincing dialogue and probing explorations of a wide range of social themes. Many of her plays were autobiographical and described life growing up in Wales.
Settled in London with two children after divorcing her husband, she extended her skills to TV when she was among the first group of writers for the new BBC soap EastEnders in 1985. She loved the work, the new friendships, and the income that enabled her to buy a dilapidated house in Camden.
She wrote two films for S4C, Llygad y Ffynnon (1994) and Cameleon (1997), in addition to over 40 radio plays and many episodes of The Archers. Her final play for Radio 4, Moving the Goalposts (2020), told the story of her stage four spinal cancer – amazingly, she defied a 2013 prognosis of imminent death to survive for another 12 years and lived independently until the end of her life.
BILLY BOSTON (1934-2026)
By most reckonings, Billy Boston from Angelina Street in the Tiger Bay melting pot is the best known rugby league player of all time. Ignored by Cardiff RFC, without doubt due to out-and-out racism (the club had previously snubbed other black players such as Johnny Freeman and Colin Dixon), he briefly played rugby union for Neath and Pontypridd before Wigan lured him to the 13-man game in 1953. He didn’t want to go, but those were the days of shamateurism and young Billy was in no position to reject the professional game’s pay-packet. He cried after signing for Wigan as he knew his dreams of playing rugby union for Cardiff and Wales were over: at the time any player who played rugby league was banned from playing rugby union (a ban that remained in force until rugby union went professional in 1995).
Welsh rugby’s loss was Wigan’s gain: the winger’s strength, speed and hand-off brought him an astonishing 478 tries in 488 games during 15 seasons in the Cherry & White hoops, setting a club record that will almost certainly never be beaten. His final total of 571 tries in all competitions across his career, makes him the second-highest try scorer in rugby league history. After retirement he ran the Griffin pub close by Wigan’s Central Park ground, and his amiable, easy-going nature turned it into a rugby league shrine. A stand in Central Park was named after him and when Wigan’s rugby club and football club together moved to a new ground in 1999 (originally called the JJB Stadium, it is currently the Brick Community Stadium) a stand there was also given his name (Central Park was demolished and is now a Tesco supermarket and a car park).
Admired for his humility, dignity and easy-going personality as much as his rugby skills, Billy suffered from vascular dementia in later years but he still made the effort to come back to Cardiff one last time in 2023 for the unveiling of the ‘codebreakers’ statue in Cardiff Bay honouring him and fellow rugby league legends Gus Risman (1911-1994) and Clive Sullivan (1943-1985). He died in August just four days after his wife Joan was buried. They had been married for 70 years.
STUART BURROWS (1933-2025)
The smooth, luscious tones of operatic tenor Stuart Burrows, who died last year, made him a favourite of opera lovers around the world. He had a stellar career that began with his 1963 debut with the Welsh National Opera (WNO) in Nabucco and took him to all to all the great opera houses, from the New York Met, La Scala, Covent Garden, the Vienna State, Salzburg and San Francisco through to the Palais Garnier and La Monnaie. His particular speciality became the operas of Mozart (1756-1791), to such an extent that he became known as the ‘King of Mozart’. But his sensitivity and refined musicianship allowed him to excel in whatever he attempted.
A miner’s son from Cilfynydd near Pontypridd, he came from the same humble terraced street as another world-famous singer, bass-baritone Geraint Evans (1922-1992), as well as the Labour MP and Home Secretary Merlyn Rees (1920-2006) and rugby international Glyn Davies (1927-1976). In a Wales that really was ‘the land of song’ when Burrows was growing up, he learned the basics by serenading the street from an upstairs window as a boy soprano and came to wider attention when he won the tenor solo prize at the 1959 National Eisteddfod. For eight years (1978-86) he had his own hugely popular television show on the BBC, Stuart Burrows Sings, in which he sang Victorian ballads and folk songs from Wales as well as classical favourites. He never left his beloved Wales. As he got older he settled in Llandaf, was a regular adjudicator at Cardiff Singer of the World and was awarded thoroughly deserved honorary doctorates and fellowships from four Welsh universities.
ROBIN EVANS (1954-2026)
Musician Robin Evans, who died in June, was a founding member of the influential folk group Mynediad am Ddim (‘Free Entry’), formed by six students at Aberystwyth University to compete in an inter-college eisteddfod in Cardiff in 1974 – a time when the student population in Wales was still mainly Welsh, unlike today when students are procured from anywhere-but-Wales.
From Pencaenewydd near Pwllheli, Robin’s mellow singing was a key component of Mynediad’s three harmonising vocalists, and the band became a popular presence on the emerging Welsh music scene with their mix of humour, Celtic folk and original songs. Through nearly 50 years, changing line-ups and five albums, Evans remained an integral fixture, while also developing his career, first as a journalist for weekly newspaper Y Cymro and then as a TV producer at S4C where he helped launch two of the channel’s most successful series, hit teenage soap Rownd a Rownd and long-running football programme Sgorio.
To hear Robin singing with the band, the 1992 compilation album Mynediad am Ddim 1974-1992 and Hen, Hen Bryd from 2010 (both released by Sain) are strongly recommended.
PETER STEAD (1943-2026)
Tributes have been pouring in following the death in April of historian, writer and broadcaster Peter Stead. Swansea University, where he spent much of his career in the history department and founded the prestigious literary award the Dylan Thomas Prize, praised his “commitment and passion to the arts”. The BBC, where he was a regular broadcaster on political and cultural issues on both TV and radio, stated that “he brought curiosity, generosity and insight to everything he did”. Academic Aled Eirug declared that he “represented everything that was good about calm, reasoned, civilised discourse”. In a long obituary for the Learned Society of Wales, his old friend Dai Smith eulogised him for his “intellect and charismatic, gregarious and maverick personality” and his “gifts of eloquence, sharp wit and civic commitment”. And so on – the cultural gatekeepers, arbiters of conventional wisdom and pillars of respectable opinion were all agreed: Peter Stead was a Welsh paragon.
I beg to differ. Like so many Labour Party stalwarts of the British old left (e.g. Neil Kinnock, Alun Michael, Carwyn Jones, etc) Stead had a convenient blind spot when it came to Wales, backing national liberation struggles to the hilt so long as they took place at faraway places on faraway continents while telling Taffy not to get hung up on national actualisation but be patient and wait for the coming proletarian paradise when there will be no nation states. He thought he made a devastating point when he said that the Welsh working class had more in common with the English working class than with the Welsh ruling class – oblivious to the fact that the same could be said about the working class of every other nation on the planet – and he got into a terrible tangle when his Cymruphobia so outweighed his ‘leftwing’ principles that he ended up a keener advocate of the centralised British State than the far right. His insistence that Wales be divided into ‘South’ and ‘North’ (which he always capitalised even though no such places actually exist), plus his enthusiasm for any and every manifestation of Wales subsumed into England/Britain (e.g. Swansea City FC, Glamorgan CCC, the UK) alongside his distaste for any and every manifestation of an autonomous Wales show that he was actually just one more small ‘c’ conservative Unionist. He was no paragon, he was a collaborator.
BONNIE TYLER (1951-2026)
Born Gaynor Hopkins in Skewen near Neath, singer Bonnie Tyler (a stage name adopted in 1975 on the recommendation of her record company) was hugely successful in the 1970s and 1980s. After being discovered singing in Swansea clubs, she had her first minor hit in 1976 with Lost in France, composed by inhouse song writers at RCA Records. Shortly afterwards, her inimitable gravelly voice emerged after surgery to remove vocal-cord nodules, and with this powerful new instrument she proceeded to expertly deliver a string of memorable ballads.
It’s a Heartache was her last hit with RCA in 1977 before she signed with CBS/Columbia and really hit the big time teaming up with American songwriter Jim Steinman (1947-2021). Eccentric Steinman knew how to get the best out of her melodramatic, big-haired rock-chick image and Tyler went global with best-selling albums and emotional singles such as Total Eclipse of the Heart and Holding Out for a Hero that brought her fame in the USA and across Europe.
In the 1990s she branched out into multiple genres with different producers and songwriters and won a host of music industry awards as she cemented her reputation as one of the 20th century’s great female voices. Rolling in money, right to the end of her life she never let up and always sought to expand her repertoire. She and her property developer husband Robert Sullivan lived for most of the year in the Algarve in Portugal, but Bonnie was never going to sever her connection to Wales and she also had a home overlooking Swansea Bay at Mumbles. Much loved for her generous, down-to-earth nature, she died in Portugal in May and thousands lined the Mumbles streets to watch the procession of the coffin taking her home.