Newport School Of Education

This is a full-scale biography, furnished with an ample bibliography and references, of William Thomas ‘ Islwyn’ ( 1832-78), one of the most famous Welsh Victorian authors, celebrated for his doomed love affair in Swansea with Ann Bowen in 1852-3, which gave rise to one of the longest poems in Welsh, ‘ Y Storm’.He took ‘Islwyn’ (from his native parish of Mynyddislwyn) as a nom-de-plume when competing at the Abergavenny eisteddfod of 1853, where Lady Llanover persuaded him to adopt it permanently as his bardic name. Presumably this is what gave rise to the popularity of Islwyn as a name.

His father was a tramroad agent for the Llan-arth estate from about 1825 onwards – hence Islwyn was born in 1832 at Ty’r Agent – in the new little village of Ynysddu in the Sirhowy valley, his father having come from Ystradgynlais , his mother from a farm in the Mynyddislwyn area. The family’s home language appears to have been English, but they were very keen Calvinistic Methodists, and helped to found the local Babell chapel in 1827. Here Islwyn was baptized and here too is his memorial. Welsh was in this period the language of Methodist services and religious education, and Welsh was the language of his literary awakening as a boy.

Islwyn appears to have been a delicate or sickly child, but he was educated, like many of his family, to be a mining engineer or surveyor, taught first at home, then at Tredegar, and Stow Hill, Newport, and at Cowbridge – probably at the Eagle Academy, a fascinating building which has recently been restored by Cadw. He appears to have started to dabble in poetry while at Cowbridge. He was then sent to the academy of Dr Evan Davies at Swansea ( 1851-3).While there he fell in love with Ann Bowen, who suddenly died just before they were to become engaged. Overwhelmed by grief, he decided in 1854 to become a Welsh poet and a Calvinistic Methodist minister..He tried to resolve his psychological and spiritual crisis by endless poetic outpourings which he called ‘ Y Storm’, and even before this first ‘ Storm’ poem was completed, began yet another, related, set of verses also on the same tempestuous subject.

The crisis eventually passed, Islwyn was ordained as a minister at the famous ‘ Revival’ Association meetings at Llangeitho in 1859, and settled down at Ynysddu as a Methodist preacher, not a pastor of a church, but as an itinerant preacher all over Wales – at first this meant going on horseback, but later on meant travelling by the newfangled railway train. Islwyn visited Swansea again in 1863, fell in love again, this time with a relative by marriage of his first love, married her in 1864, and they settled down in Ynysddu. Islwyn’s health was never robust, and he tended to overtax his limited powers by endlessly competing in eisteddfodau, local and national, and by a busy amount of journalism. His health gave way badly in 1877 and he died late in 1878, just barely into middle age.

This book has an excellent account of Islwyn’s writings, including a powerful and sensitive analysis of the two versions of the poem ‘ Y Storm’, and also gives a picture of a Monmouthshire now largely forgotten, of a largely rural Sirhowy valley, little touched by Chartism or Scotch Cattle, where Islwyn was taught bardistry at Gelligroes Mill by John Jones ( Ivan Brydydd Gwent) and his son, the more famous Aneurin Fardd, and by William Jones ( Gwilym Ilid) the weaver and owner of mills at Machen and Caerphilly. Later in life he frequently took the train to Newport and spent many delightful hours smoking like a chimney in the company of Welsh poets and journalists who gathered in a kind of salon run by another John Jones ( Athan Fardd) who had married an artist, Miss Rogerson, at Newport and who had a photographic studio in Dock Street, Newport.We also have an excellent picture of Islwyn’s frenetic journalistic activities in the 1860s and 70s, writing for such papers as the Cardiff Times, and one of the most formidable journals for which he wrote - he was a keen political Radical - was Y Glorian, launched at Newport in 1867 by Thomas Williams, owner of.The Star of Gwent. Besides all this, there is a fascinating picture of the life of an itinerant preacher, carrying out all sorts of tasks for the Methodist Connexion –it is amazing to think of Islwyn going around Cardiganshire in 1871 to raise money to sustain the cause at Abertillery.

As can be seen from what has been said, this is a rich and fascinating biography, containing a great deal about aspects of life in western Monmouthshire in the early and mid-nineteenth century which are apt to be forgotten, partly because of the secularization of life in the twentieth century, and partly because of the anglicization of the later nineteenth. At the end of the book Gwyn Tegai Hughes notes the visit to Ynysddu in 1897 by the young Rhondda poet Ben Bowen: he sheds tears not only at the memorial to Islwyn at the Babell, but also because none of the children of the area by then could understand the words of their greatest poet.