Encyclopaedia

DAVIES, Idris (1905–53) Poet
I was born in Rhymney
To a miner and his wife –
On a January morning
I was pulled into this Life.

Leaving school at the age of 14, Idris Davies worked as a miner until the General Strike of 1926. He then obtained qualifications in Loughborough, Nottingham and London and taught at primary schools in England and subsequently in Llandysul and in Treherbert (Rhondda) before, in 1947, finding a post in his native valley. He published three volumes of verse: Gwalia Deserta (1938), The Angry Summer (1943) and Tonypandy and Other Poems (1945); a volume of his Selected Poems appeared shortly before his death, and his Complete Poems in 1994. Most of his poems deal with the mining valleys of south Wales during the interwar years, in particular the effects of economic depression, and from a socialist point of view. Despite moments of banality, his work has a passionate ring to it, a wry humour, a fierce pride in the virtues of the Welsh working-class, and moral indignation at the hardship they had to suffer. Some of his poems show the influence of A.E. Housman and John Ceiriog Hughes in their verse forms, and of the pulpit (Welsh was Davies’s mother tongue), while others have the quality of folk song; his best-known poem, ‘The Bells of Rhymney’, was set to music by the American folk-singer Pete Seeger and recorded by Joan Baez, The Byrds and many others. A memorial plaque on the wall of the house where he died describes him as ‘un o feibion anwylaf ac enwocaf Rhymni’ (‘one of Rhymney’s most cherished and most famous sons’).