Rhys Davies was a Welsh writer in English who lived most of his life in London, that Tir na nÓg in the east, the place of eternal youth and beauty to which in the mid-20th century many Welsh writers in English, adulterers and homosexuals ran. There were few chapels in London, but many bedsits. Also publishers. And guardsmen. Here Davies followed a career unique by Welsh standards, for he did not sell milk or teach. For 50 years he just wrote.
As Meic Stephens, in the first full-length biography of this remarkable son of a grocer in the industrial valleys, records with awe, Davies wrote over 100 short stories, 20 novels, three novellas, two topographical books (yes, about Wales), two plays and an autobiography in which, ‘obliquely’, for there had been rather too many guardsmen, he set down ‘the little he wanted the world to know about him’.
But the world soon may, for the President of the Immortals had not done with Rhys Davies. At least not in life. It was after he died in 1978 that his brother Lewis, a librarian, set aside money for a trust to the memory of this boy from Blaenclydach, a man who had lived out of a trunk, moving from rented rooms to those belonging to friends, never owning a house or a car or a telephone, and who ran home in the time-honoured Welsh way when the money gave out, which was often. The irony is that, had he lived, there would have been no need to run home.
What has taken people aback was just how much money there was in death. The first donation, from royalties and family bequests, was £100,000. Stephens, who knew Lewis Davies, is the trust’s first secretary, and he has done more than justice to his benefactor and to the black humour of Davies’s writing and that of his life.
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