Richard Llewellyn(1906–1983)

Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd was born on 8 December 1906. He claimed across his life that he had been born at St David's in Pembrokeshire, but the post-1983 biographical research (substantially Mick Brown's 1986 *Telegraph* feature and the 2002 *DNB* entry by John Harris) established that the birth had been registered at Hendon in north London, where his father David Lloyd was working as a small hotelier at the Hendon Aerodrome residential block. The family had moved to Hendon in the 1900s from south Wales, where the father's family had been miners and tin-plate workers in the western coal-valley country between Llanelli and Pontypridd; the move out of Wales had been on the commercial-promotion prospects of the hotel-and-restaurant trade in growing suburban London. He was schooled at the St David's Welsh-language school the family had moved back to Cardiff for through his early teens (the parents had returned to Cardiff in 1916 on the economic collapse of the Hendon hotel business) and from fourteen at a small Italian Catholic boarding school in Rome that an uncle had arranged a scholarship for.

He came back to England at sixteen and took a kitchen-and-restaurant apprenticeship at the Claridge's Hotel in Mayfair from 1923 to 1926. He enlisted in the British Army in 1926 at twenty, served in the 9th Lancers in India and Hong Kong through to 1931 on the post-war garrison-rotation pattern, and on his return to England in 1931 was demobilised at twenty-five with the small army pension and the cumulative tea-and-restaurant trade and small Italian-Catholic-school education that ran across his early adult years. He took a reporter's job at the *Cinema News* trade weekly from 1932 to 1937, wrote three small produced stage plays of no senior commercial success across 1933 to 1938, and at thirty-two in 1938 took a typewriter to a rented cottage on the south coast at Eastbourne and wrote the manuscript of the novel that became his career.

*How Green Was My Valley* was published by Michael Joseph in London on 2 October 1939, two weeks after the British declaration of war on Germany. The novel, a six-hundred-page first-person retrospective narration by the surviving son Huw Morgan of a south Wales coal-valley family across the closing years of the nineteenth century, set out the foundational popular-fiction template of twentieth-century Welsh national identity: the small chapel-and-rugby-and-coal community life of the coal-valleys before the senior post-1900 industrial collapse; the Welsh-language family and parish-life detail; the collapse of the community across the strike-and-flood-and-emigration sequence of the 1900s and 1910s. The book sold five thousand copies in the first six weeks of British wartime publication, fifty thousand in the first year, two million across the wartime period (the book was on the standard senior wartime book-club list of the period in both the United Kingdom and the United States), and has sold seven million copies in continuous publication across the eighty-six years since.

The John Ford film adaptation, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox, was released on 28 October 1941. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 1942 ceremony, beating *Citizen Kane*, *The Maltese Falcon* and *Sergeant York* in one of the most-discussed Best Picture decisions in the history of the awards. Ford took the Best Director Oscar, Donald Crisp took Best Supporting Actor for the role of the father Gwilym Morgan, and the film took five Oscars in total. The senior film-historical post-war revisionist criticism (substantially Pauline Kael's 1971 *Citizen Kane* essay) has tended to attribute the *How Green Was My Valley* Best Picture decision to Hollywood industry politics around the anti-Hearst opposition to *Citizen Kane*'s commercial release rather than to the comparative quality of the two films; the *How Green Was My Valley* film has remained, on the popular-cinema reception, the film image of pre-war south Wales for the eight decades since.

The post-war career was the long quiet diminishment. He wrote three sequel novels carrying the Morgan family through to the present day (*Up, Into the Singing Mountain*, 1960; *Down Where the Moon Is Small*, 1966; *Green, Green My Valley Now*, 1975) and a body of further unrelated novels and short stories that did not approach the commercial or critical reach of the first book. He moved to Dublin in 1962, then to Tokyo, then to Switzerland through the 1970s on a tax-and-residence circuit. He married three times (Nona Theresa Sonsteby 1952-1966; Susan Heimann 1974-1981; the third marriage went unrecorded). He died of a heart attack at his Dublin hotel room at the Shelbourne on 30 November 1983, six months short of his seventy-seventh birthday. The post-1983 biographical research established that the author who had been read as the senior literary witness of pre-war Welsh coal-valley life had in fact spent his Welsh childhood in Cardiff suburbs and never worked the pits; the biographical exaggeration of the public-relations register has been part of how the *How Green Was My Valley* legacy has been re-evaluated in the modern Welsh-cultural-critical literature. The Llewellyn name in the Welsh-side catalogue is the patronymic of *ap Llywelyn* (son of Llywelyn, the Welsh kingly name carried by the medieval princes of Gwynedd), the foundational mid-Welsh surname of the Powys-borderland country; Richard Llewellyn carried the Hendon-Cardiff variant of it into the foundational popular-fiction image of twentieth-century Wales.