Meic Stephens
Author who began as a youthful slogan-daubing activist and became a leading figure of Welsh letters
MEIC STEPHENS, who has died aged 79, was at the forefront of Welsh culture, as author, poet, editor and staunch champion of Plaid Cymru; yet he was not born into a Welsh-speaking family and spent many years mastering the language.
As a young student, Stephens was involved in demonstrations calling for greater recognition for Welsh culture, including the protest on Trefechan Bridge in February 1963 that almost brought Aberystwyth to a standstill. On another occasion, while a parliamentary candidate at Merthyr Tydfil in 1966, he was fined £12 after daubing “Lift the TV ban on Plaid Cymru” on the wall of Cyfarthfa Castle after the party was denied a broadcast.
He was particularly proud of “Cofia Tryweryn”, the graffiti protest against the drowning of a valley to provide Liverpool with water that he scrawled on a rock outside Llanrhystud and that was long to defy the onslaught of the elements. A Welsh learner at the time, he had failed to mutate “Tryweryn” to “Dryweryn”, and, as the strictest of grammarians himself, he never ceased ruefully to regret his youthful gaffe. His opposition to the formation of the reservoir, Llyn Celyn, did not, however, deter him from swimming there naked by moonlight with his landlady’s daughter.
As founder of Triskel Press in 1963 he was responsible for publishing Gerald Morgan’s The Dragon’s Tongue (1966), a study of the fortunes of the Welsh language in public life. But Poetry Wales, a quarterly magazine that continues today, was arguably his most influential youthful venture and received early backing from the (then) Welsh Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain. It paved the way for the appearance of Poetry Wales Press, subsequently Seren Books (the first significant English-language publishing house in Wales), and thus made possible the thriving bilingual publishing industry of contemporary Wales.
It was later, as Director of Literature (1967-90) of the newly formed Welsh Arts Council, that Stephens had his greatest influence, developing an imaginatively diverse programme of grants and of other initiatives that effectively brought a dynamic bicultural culture into being in modern Wales. Ever a rebel, he regarded this as making some “reparation for … the damage done to our country’s culture over the centuries”, and he proved to be as combative in his role as he was radically innovative.
Stephens was an impressive example of a maverick masquerading as establishment man. Over 6ft tall and burly of figure, he was imposing enough to persuade the Soviet apparatchiks he met on his occasional visits to the USSR that he was one of them. But he always managed to include a trip to emotionally unbuttoned Georgia in his programme, and in congenial company there he could unbend into subversive conviviality.
On one overnight train journey from Moscow to Kiev he entertained his travelling companions by singing many of the raucous, and occasionally bawdy, songs of the London music hall stage he had been taught by his Cockney grandfather. He had a remarkable memory for verse, and was fond of reciting some of the colourful squibs of his old Falstaffian friend, Harri Webb, of whose riotous and politically rebellious Merthyr commune he had been a member in his youth.
Michael Stephens was born on July 23 1938, one of two sons of Arthur, a turbinedriver at Upper Boat power station, and his wife Alma (née Symes). He was brought up in the village of Trefforest, near Pontypridd – he compared his upbringing to that of Alan Bennett in Leeds – and educated at Pontypridd Boys’ Grammar School. Summer holidays were spent working as a grave digger. In later life he loved to recall memories of another local boy made good, Tommy Woodward – later better known as Tom Jones.
Despite living in a predominantly English-speaking area, by the age of 17 Stephens “knew for certain I wasn’t English”, yet he “learnt more about Wales in the Scouts than in school”. He read French at the University of Aberystwyth and was a member of the Debates Union, where he was once ruled out of order for referring to the railings where female students bade good night to their boyfriends as “more sinned against than sinning”.
Moving to Bangor University for teacher training, he began educating fellow activists “on how to use a brush and pot of Dulux paint”, and soon slogans began appearing on walls championing the cause of the Welsh language and of independence for his country.
A lifelong Europhile, he became a French teacher at Ebbw Vale Grammar School in 1962, but was still far from fluent in Welsh. This was rectified to a large degree when he met Ruth Meredith while they were both helping on the 1964 election campaign in Merthyr Tydfil; they were married the following year.
He was involved in supporting such political publications as The Nationalist and Welsh Nation and was the Plaid candidate in Merthyr at the 1966 election, coming a distant third after failing to demolish Labour’s hegemony in the Valleys.
Although this marked the end of his political career, Stephens still promoted the cause. Among the titles he published through Triskel Press were a collection of patriotic ballads called Caneuon Rhyddid Cymru (Songs of Welsh Freedom) and Names for the Welsh, from which many of today’s Welsh population have had their names chosen by nationalist parents.
In autumn 1966 he became a journalist with the Western Mail in Cardiff, where one of his first assignments was covering the Aberfan disaster, in which 116 children and 28 adults died when a colliery spoil tip engulfed their school.
Of his more than 150 publications, his greatest achievement was probably editing the magisterial Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales/cydymaith i Lenyddiaeth Cymru. But he was also an inspired anthologist, a fine translator, a biographer, a novelist and a genuinely talented poet in both English and his Welsh – he several times came exasperatingly close to winning the prize of the Crown at the National Eisteddfod.
The body of diverse work he produced entitles him to be considered one of the foremost men of letters of his generation in Wales. And his range of friends and acquaintances was huge: from such surviving members of Dylan Thomas’s circle as the raffish Keidrych Rhys and Glyn Jones, through the Sixties generation of the poets Dannie Abse, John Ormond and Leslie Norris, to young writers such as Gillian Clarke, whose talents he spotted early and whom he supported.
Taking early retirement in 1990, Stephens set himself up as a freelance writer, editor and supply teacher. He took particular pride in his later post as Professor at the new University of Glamorgan because it was located in Trefforest. He took part in the successful referendum for a Welsh Assembly in 1997 and (thanks to his old friend Leslie Norris) became a visiting professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, although in the memoir he produced of his visit he confessed that he found the Mormon culture a disturbing contrast to that of South Wales.
He was an erudite philatelist and became a valuable writer of Welsh obituaries for The Independent and Daily Telegraph. On one occasion he entered his own, written under a pseudonym, into an obituary writing class at the National Eisteddfod.
His wife Ruth and their four children survive him.
Meic Stephens, born July 23 1938, died July 2 2018