The Richard Burton Diaries Read Online Free PDF Page B

did possess. New baby Graham was sent to live a few miles away in Cwmafan with brother Tom and his wife Cassie. Two-year-old Richard moved further again: to Taibach, a district of Port Talbot, on the coast, and into the home of sister Cecilia (‘Cis’ or ‘Cissie’) and her husband Elfed James.
    Cis was twenty years older than her brother. She was old enough to be his mother, and in many respects embraced that role. She and Elfed had been married for only four months when Edith died, and they were living in a terraced house in Caradog Street, Taibach. Elfed James was, like so many others, a miner, working mainly at Goitre colliery, just to the north of Taibach. He and Cis had met at Gibeon Welsh Independent (Congregationalist) Chapel, where Elfed's father was a deacon. Elfed, it seems, though competent in Welsh, was happiest speaking English, and this was the language of the James household, as it was of much of Taibach and Port Talbot generally. A year aftertaking Richard in, Cis and Elfed's first child, Marian, was born, in November 1928. A second daughter, Rhianon, followed in December 1931.
    Although Richard would become most closely associated in the public mind with his birthplace of Pontrhydyfen, it is more accurate to see him as a product of Port Talbot, as this was where he lived from the age of two until he left South Wales altogether at the age of twenty-one.
    Port Talbot took its name both from docks that were opened in 1839 and from the Talbot family that had lived at the nineteenth-century Tudor-style home of Margam Castle, further to the south. It embraced the older village centre of Aberafan, and was home to tinplate works and (from 1907) steelworks. The docks served both industries, as well as the copper works of the Cwmafan area and the coal mines of the Afan valley. The Great Western Railway passed through the town on the South Wales Railway, providing easy connections to both Cardiff (30 miles to the east) and Swansea (12 miles to the west), while the Rhondda and Swansea Bay railway line brought coal from the upper Rhondda Fawr through the Rhondda Tunnel (the longest in Wales) down the Afan valley to the docks. New docks were opened in 1898. The main occupations for men were in the metal industries, mining and transport. Women comprised less than a sixth of the officially recorded labour force, and most were to be found in the personal service, commercial and financial sectors, although there were some jobs for women in the tinplate industry. The majority of women were fully occupied in the home.
    The 1921 census recorded Port Talbot's population as 40,005. That it grew to only 40,678 by 1931 indicates a certain amount of economic stagnation, although given that the population of the county of Glamorgan in which it stood declined in the same decade from 1,252,481 to 1,225,717, one might say that it fared better than settlements uniquely identified with the coal industry. Like many of the industrial towns of South Wales, it was characterized by left-wing politics. The Member of Parliament for Aberavon at the time of Richard's birth was Labour's J. Ramsay MacDonald, the former, and future, Prime Minister, while another scion of the town was George Thomas, who would become a long-serving Labour MP for the constituency of Cardiff West and, eventually, a famous Speaker of the House of Commons. Labour voting rested on strong traditions of trade unionism. William Abraham (‘Mabon’ to give him his bardic name), the leader of the South Wales miners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been born at Cwmafan, while Clive Jenkins, born in Port Talbot a few months later than his namesake Richard, would become a leading light of the Trades Union Congress in the 1970s.
    Neither the strength of such working-class credentials, nor the fact that Port Talbot society was increasingly dominated by the English language, inhibited the flourishing of Welsh national sentiment in the town. The National