[BITList] Red dragon

[John Feltham]

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Williams,  Gwyn Alfred  (1925-1995), historian, was born on 30 September 1925 at 11 Lower Row, Penywern, Dowlais, Merthyr Tudful, Glamorgan, the eldest of the three children of Thomas John Williams (1892-1971) and his wife, Gwladys Morgan (1896-1983), both of whom were teachers; the family later moved to Pant Road and in 1936 to 8 Morlais Street, Dowlais. Williams was educated at Dowlais central school, where his father was on the staff and later headmaster, and at Cyfarthfa Castle grammar school, the former home of the Crawshays, the ironmasters who had caused Merthyr Tudful to grow rapidly into one of the earliest industrial towns in Wales. The Williams family were Welsh-speaking and staunch members of Gwernllwyn Independent Chapel and the boy was brought up in a household, extended family, and neighbourhood which in many ways embodied the radical tradition of the Welsh working class which was to exercise him as a professional historian. Although his parents were not poor by local standards, the young man was deeply affected by the social deprivation that was a consequence of the mass unemployment which had afflicted south Wales during the inter-war years; in 1939, when he was fourteen, the male unemployment figure for Dowlais was still 73 per cent. In 1943 he won a scholarship to study history at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, but was prevented from taking it up immediately by military service. An admirer of Tito, he also spent a year in Yugoslavia, helping to build a road linking Zagreb and Belgrade, an experience which went to the making of his political views, which were always left-wing and for many years Marxist. Some of the more comical episodes from Williams's boyhood in Merthyr-particularly at the time of the civil war in Spain, when he and his friends became young communists, and from his active service in France and Germany which took him to the Normandy beaches, the liberation of Paris, and the ruins of Berlin-were described in his book Fishers of Men: Stories towards an Autobiography, published posthumously in 1996.

On his return to Aberystwyth in 1947, Williams studied history under Professor R. F. Treharne; he took a first-class honours degree in 1950 and, two years later, a master's degree for a study of the social nature of the patriciate in thirteenth-century London. By this time he had married on 9 September 1950 Maria Fernandez (b. 1925), whom he had known since childhood; she was the daughter of a Spanish steelworker who had settled in Dowlais; they had one son. Appointed lecturer in Welsh history at his old college in 1954, Williams soon earned a reputation as a highly entertaining speaker and his classes were attended not only by his own students but by many undergraduates from other departments attracted by his invective, his erudition, his irreverence, and his passionate concern for the Welsh working class in the context of a wider world. It was at Aberystwyth, certainly under the influence of David Williams and Richard Cobb, but also through the writings of E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart, that he discovered the array of research interests which were to occupy him as a social historian for the rest of his life; these included the French Revolution, political radicalism and dissent (particularly as manifested in the history of south Wales), the Arthurian myth, Jacobinism, the Spain of Francisco Goya, the settlement of North America, and, more specifically, the writings of Antonio Gramsci, which he discovered in 1959. His doctoral study, Medieval London: from Commune to Capital, regarded by many as his finest piece of scholarship, appeared in 1963, the year in which he was appointed reader in history at the University of York. The most important of his books written in York, where he was given a chair two years later, was Artisans and Sans-Culottes (1968), a study of popular movements in Britain and France during the 1790s.

His return to Wales in 1974 as professor of history at the University College of Cardiff was not the triumphant homecoming that Williams's many admirers had expected. The history of Wales did not enjoy much prestige as an academic subject at Cardiff and some of the new professor's staider colleagues were deeply suspicious of his left-wing views and unorthodoxies. He nevertheless set about raising the department's profile-not by administrative means, which he found irksome, but by throwing himself into research and publication, and by continuing to inspire his students. In 1975 he published a translation of Paolo Spriano's L'occupazione delle fabbriche, an account of the strikes and occupation of factories that threw Italy into turmoil in the 1920s, and Proletarian Order, a study of Gramsci's contribution to the factory council movement in Turin and the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy, and in the year following there appeared his Goya and the Impossible Revolution. The explicit Marxist message of these, and indeed all his books, was deplored by his more conservative colleagues, but it was his passionate belief that historians had a responsibility to explore the past in ways that could be used for the creation of a better future by people outside the cloisters of university life. He also believed that history should be entertaining as well as scholarly: some of his idiosyncratic footnotes are great fun to read.

Never one to show deference to the grey eminences of academic life, and revelling in controversy, Williams also held that 'too much of Welsh history has been written with the Welsh left out'. He now turned to a subject of which his own family had direct experience: his book The Merthyr Rising (1978) is still the definitive account of the events of June 1831, when, in the Welsh equivalent of the Peterloo massacre, workers took over the town and were eventually put down by armed force, after which one of their number, Richard Lewis (Dic Penderyn), was hanged for an offence he did not commit-the wounding of a soldier-thus becoming 'the first martyr of the Welsh working class'. This book was quickly followed by Madoc: the Making of a Myth (1979), a debunking of the tale of Madog ab Owain Gwynedd, the twelfth-century prince who was reputed to have sailed to America; The Search for Beulah Land (1980), which is about the Welsh in America during the last decades of the eighteenth century; and two collections of essays, The Welsh in their History (1982) and When was Wales? (1985), in both of which his provocative views of Welsh nationality and nationhood were subjected to a rigorous Marxist critique. With these books he earned a reputation as the pre-eminent historian of the Welsh working class-'the People's Remembrancer'-which he was to enjoy for the rest of his life.

The 1980s were filled with despair and crisis for Gwyn A. Williams. Appalled by the Welsh people's rejection of the Labour government's modest proposals for devolution in March 1979 ('the year of the plague'), and incensed by the subsequent advent of Thatcherism, he began to neglect his professional responsibilities and to fall out with his colleagues and even his erstwhile comrades. His intellectual turmoil was compounded by domestic problems: his wife, Maria, who had sustained him during an often turbulent lifestyle, left him; he began drinking more heavily than usual; and in 1983, falling victim to the effects of Conservative cutbacks, he took early retirement from what he had come to think of as his 'ridiculous job' at University College, Cardiff. From now on, as 'a redundant historian', he would turn his back on scholarly exegesis and speak directly to his own people.

He chose to do so by a resumption of active politics and as a writer for television. Although he had broken with Soviet communism on account of Stalin's hostility to Tito, Williams was still convinced that the left could be mobilized on Gramscian lines. He was a frequent contributor to Marxism Today and various militant journals in Wales, arguing in favour of a Welsh republic and addressing workshops devoted to the causes of trade unionism, feminism, and world peace. But after the Labour Party was again defeated at the general election of 1983 he joined Plaid Cymru, in whose ranks he soon won new converts to his Marxist point of view; these young people gathered around the magazine Radical Wales and the party's national left, in both of which he played a prominent role. In all his work the call to action was explicit and unequivocal: the capitalist, centralist, British state (and the English hegemony) had to be undone if the national community of Wales was to survive and prosper. He was never persuaded to stand as a parliamentary candidate on behalf of Plaid Cymru (he was an uneasy party member and could not have been happy in the Westminster parliament, anyway) but his oratory-despite a speech impediment, which he sometimes exploited for theatrical effect-made him one of the most inspiring speakers in the Welsh national movement. It was not until a trip to Donetsk in 1990, where he was taken down the notoriously dilapidated Gorki mine, that his disillusion with Soviet communism found expression: 'Good God!' he exclaimed in the television programme made about his visit, 'and this is supposed to be a workers' state!'

The rest of Williams's energies during the early 1980s went into the making of a history of Wales, The Dragon has Two Tongues, broadcast by HTV in thirteen episodes in 1985. The series took the form of a free-ranging argument between Gwyn A. Williams and a historian of the old school, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, in which it was generally thought that the trenchant analysis and impish wit of the wild-eyed, gesticulating, mercurial Marxist had scored more often than the cautious, even-handed, gentlemanly, whiggish approach of his sparring partner. Of small physical stature, with a shock of white hair and the Silurian features that seem so typical of the indigenous people of south-east Wales, Williams developed a quirky but compulsive television presence which had all the pugnacity of his writing, and used the medium unapologetically to put over what he thought the Welsh people needed to know about their own past. In his view the history of Wales, for all its communitarianism and zeal for social justice, was one of discontinuity, schism, rupture, and permanent emergency, and he exhorted his students and viewers to 'enjoy the contradictions'. This exuberant, warm-hearted, complex man was a master of brilliant improvisation, the devastating aside and memorable one-liner, and was not averse to the most outrageous hyperbole. He took risks, both on the printed page and on the television screen, which no academic scholar would have dared contemplate. His inimitable style made Gwyn Alf (as he was commonly known, to distinguish him from several other eminent Welshmen with similar names) a media celebrity, and for the independent television company Teliesyn he went on to write and present many more television programmes, some thirty in all, in both Welsh and English, which were broadcast by BBC2 and Channel 4; in them he examined the careers of such differing writers as Mary Shelley, Aleksandr Pushkin, Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg), and Saunders Lewis, arguing with them as if he were intimately involved in their lives and work. With the last-named, the greatest Welsh writer of the twentieth century and the founder of Plaid Cymru, he had a love-hate relationship: he could admire Lewis's European outlook while deploring the reactionary, right-wing strands in his thinking. More after his own heart were men such as Iolo Morganwg, the 'flinty Jacobin' and 'organic intellectual' who invented the Gorsedd of Bards of the Isle of Britain in 1792, and David Ivon Jones, the Welsh Unitarian who championed the cause of the black trade unions in South Africa, worshipped Lenin, and, at his death in 1924, was buried alongside other communist heroes in the Novodevichye monastery in Moscow.

Williams was attracted to men and women with enquiring minds whose ambitions were essentially revolutionary or at least subversive of established order and who, like himself, demonstrated in their lives Romain Rolland's motto: 'Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will'. His last book was Excalibur: the Search for Arthur (1994), a clear-eyed account of a subject which has confused so many lesser historians, and his last film, Gwyn Alf-a People's Remembrancer (1995), a moving autobiography of a man who chose the hard way to an understanding of his people's history. The esteem and affection in which he was held were confirmed at a celebration of his life and work held at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff on 6 February 1995, by which time he was seriously ill.

Williams, a chain-smoker, died of cancer on 16 November 1995 at Ty Dyffryn, in Dre-fach Felindre, Carmarthenshire, the home of (Gillian) Sian Howell Lloyd (b. 1938), the woman with whom he had lived since 1985. Six days later he was cremated at Parc Gwyn crematorium, Narberth, after a ceremony in which 'The Internationale' was sung together with a Welsh hymn, and his ashes were later interred in the garden at Ty Dyffryn.

Meic Stephens 

Sources  G. A. Williams, Fishers of men: stories towards an autobiography (1996) + G. H. Jenkins, The people's historian: Professor Gwyn A. Williams (1925-1995) (1996) + M. Stephens, The Independent (18 Nov 1995) + D. Smith, The Guardian (17 Nov 1995) + b. cert. + d. cert. + private information (2004)
Archives U. Wales, Swansea, research MSS | NL Wales, corresp. with Emyr Humphreys
Likenesses  photograph, 1992, Western Mail & Echo Ltd, Cardiff [see illus.] · photographs, priv. coll.
Wealth at death  under £145,000: probate, 1 Feb 1996, CGPLA Eng. & Wales