Acorn Video has released a DVD containing the wonderful BBC adaptation of Richard Llewellyn's heartfelt, best-selling novel, How Green Was My Valley.
Starring Stanley Baker and Sian Phillips, How Green Was My Valley chronicles the fortunes of the close-knit Morgan family at the turn of the century. The Morgans experience both the best and the worst of times living in their South Wales coal mining town. Gwilym and Beth Morgan strive to achieve the best for their children in the midst of the hard bitten community and they are grateful for the help they receive the dedicated and thoughtful Reverend Gruffydd particularly with their youngest son Huw.
The series is a rich, moving portrait of family strength and integrity, originally broadcast on BBC2 in 1975. This double DVD is priced at just £19.99 for over five hours of classic drama and also contains special features including a biography of the writer, a picture gallery and cast filmographies.
Dramatised in 6 parts by Elaine Morgan. How Green Was My Valley, published in 1939, was the first novel by Richard Llewellyn. The previous 1960 television version, featured Islwyn Maelor Evans as Huw, Svlwen Morgan as Angharad, Rachel Thomas as Beth.
Thsi version was broadcast on BBC2 of a Monday evening with a subsequent repeat the following Saturday.
| Episode | Tx. Date | Time (Rpt) | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part 1 | 29.12.75 | 8.30pm (8.20pm) | Life is harsh but uncomplicated in the Rhondda Valleys. The Morgans ar a happy and unedited family but as the new century approaches the younger generation is restless. |
| Part 2 | 5.1.76 | 9.00pm (8.05pm) | Huw can walk again. Ifor and Bronwen are married. Ianto devotes himself to union work, but can still watch with interest as Owen's affection for Marged Evans begins to fade. |
| Part 3 | 12.1.76 | 9.00pm (8.00pm) | Huw's first day at school has left him bruised but undefeated. The mine-owner's son, Iestyn, is openly pursuing Angharad - but he has earned a blow from Ianto for his efforts. |
| Part 4 | 19.1.76 | 9.00pm (7.55pm) | Saddened by Marged's death and by the failure of the strike, Ianto and Owen have left for London. Their first letter home contains a cutting from The Times concerning Angharad and Iestyn. |
| Part 5 | 26.1.76 | 9.00pm (8.10pm) | Angharad has left the valley to marry Iestyn Evans. Ceiwen Lloyd has taken Huw for a moonlit stroll on the mountianside. Mr Lloyd, suspecting the worst, is looking for his daughter. |
| Part 6 | 2.2.76 | 9.00pm (8.00pm) | Angharad, Owen and Ianto have returned to the valley. The mine has closed. Unemployment is rife. Having found work with Ifor in a nearby colliery, Huw has witnessed his brother's death. |
..oO CAST Oo..
| Beth Morgan | Sian Phillips |
| Huw Morgan (as Child) | Huw Justin |
| Gwilym Morgan | Stanley Baker |
| Miner | Clive Roberts |
| Huw (as boy) | Rhys Powys |
| Rev Gruffydd | Gareth Thomas |
| Ifor Morgan | Norman Comer |
| Ianto Morgan | Keith Drinkel |
| Owen Morgan | Mike Gwilym |
| Angharad Morgan | Sue Jones-Davies |
| Mr Elias | Aubrey Richards |
| Mr Price | Eric Francis |
| Brownwen | Nerys Hughes |
| Cyfartha | John Clive |
| Dai Bando | Ray Smith |
| Marged | Victoria Plucknett |
| Mrs Evans | Elizabeth Stewart |
| Mr Evans | Dudley Jones |
| Meillyn Lewis | Maureen Williams |
..oO CREW Oo..
| Title Music | Osian Ellis |
| Lighting | Sam Barclay |
| Script Editor | Betty Willingale |
| Designer | Graham Oakley |
| Producer | Martin Lisemore |
| Director | Ronald Wilson |
The Radio Times originally billed it thus:
All the Christmases roll down the hill towards the Welsh-speaking sea, like a snowball growing white and bigger and rounder, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find; holly or robins or pudding, squabbles and carols and oranges and tin whistles, and the fire in the front room, and bang go the crackers, and holy, holy, holy, ring the bells... Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as we roasted chestnuts and the gaslight bubbled low. Ghosts with their heads under their arms trailed their chains and said' whoo' like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; wild beasts lurked in the cubby-hole under the stairs where the gas meter ticked.'
Christmas in Wales, the Christmases of Dylan Thomas's childhood... But there are other memories of other times in another Wales - a tight family circle in a Welsh valley deep in the Depression, the Wales of How Green Was My Valley for this Christmas.
As the mines declined in the 1890s, gloom settled over the Welsh village of How Green Was My Valley. Rigid social customs bit further into the passions and divisions caused by instability and strikes - customs recalled by the scriptwriter and actors in this new dramatisation. Here Ian McEwan looks back at the Wales of their early memories.
Years ago Hollywood made its own version of Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, a passionately emotional novel of life in a Welsh mining village during the 1890s, the domestic triumphs and catastrophes of the Morgan family. Predictably the film was a soap opera with miners singing in dense and joyous harmonies as they trudged to work at four am. The television version is likely to be more memorable: it has the added bonus of a virtually all-Welsh cast, as well as being able to draw on the personal experiences of the two principals and the scriptwriter. All three have known at first hand Welsh family life in the 20s and 30s-its rigid hierarchical structure, its odd mixture of strictness and warmth.
Stanley Baker's father was a miner, and he is fiercely proud of his home town, Ferndale. Sian Phillips was born in Bettws Mountain and grew up in rural Carmarthenshire. Elaine Morgan's father was a surface worker and lodge secretary for his union. The certain authenticity of Baker's and Phillips's performances will be matched by that of Elaine Morgan's spare, incisive scripts. She has made extensive use of a diary kept by her father-in-law from 1896. He also was a miner.
Both, Martin Lisemore, producer, and Ronald Wilson, director, told me independently that they regarded these as being among the best scripts they have had to work with. 'What I cannot be,' , says Gwilym Morgan to his mildly rebellious sons, 'is a father, because a father of the house is one whose word is obeyed, and mine is not.' Stanley Baker, who plays Morgan, recognises his own father in the part. 'He was a strong man, compassionate and very loving. But there could be no question of ever disobeying him. You wouldn't wait for him to tell you twice to do something.' 'Yea, the men had a very special position,' explains Elaine Morgan, 'because mining was the only work going, and it completely excluded the women. Their pride in the work, its shared danger, brought the men very close together. It was a very segregated world, in leisure as well as work.' ' Even now,' Sian Phillips confesses, 'when I return home to Wales I never go in the local pub. My husband Peter [O'Toole] goes alone. I wouldn't dream of going in there. And long after I had left home I never dared smoke in front of my grandmother. She thought it a disgraceful thing for a woman to do..."
With the women constantly servicing the needs of their menfolk it is hard at first to understand why Baker, Phillips and Morgan all insist separately that the Welsh mining community was, above all, a matriarchy. Elaine Morgan explains: ' The women were by no means downtrodden. Inside the home they had the power. It was their standards that upheld and determined personal relationships. They had a hard job keeping the community clean, sober, out of debt and sane. They were tough and strong-minded. How else could they keep their families together through long strikes?'
'At the end of the week,' Stanley Baker remembers, ' all the working men in the family hand over their wages to Mam. She gives them back a little for pocket-money, the rest she carefully budgets for the household.'
Llewellyn's novel covers the period of growing political consciousness in the mines, and the emergence of the first effective trade unions. Conditions in the mines were wretched, the hours long, the wages low. Stanley Baker's father lost a leg early in his working life and received a mere £80 compensation from the mine's bosses.
'Because of the strikes, people were hungry for knowledge,' says Baker. 'The political section of the Ferndale public library was always empty. I remember how exciting it was to listen to the men standing at street corners, talking for hours and hours . . . about government, about bosses, about what they were going to do. There was a feeling of revolution in the air.' Sian Phillips remembers education as 'something of an obsession in my family. I was often in bed ill, so I spent a lot of my childhood reading. Education was very much linked to political awareness.'
How has family life in Wales changed since their childhood?
'Different attitudes drift across imperceptibly,' says Sian Phillips. ' Roles are not so sharply divided now. There is more shared discussion, less subterfuge and manipulation on the part of the women. But I am brainwashed by my past. If Peter and I are both working, I'm still the one who prepares the meals'. 'I come from a family of long-lived women. The women in my family ran everything. They handled all the money, they made all the decisions, moral as well as practical . . . the women were acknowledged as the defenders of moral standards. It was not so much maternal as matriarchal. There was no great show of affection . . . but it was always there in the air.'
Elaine Morgan has a more emphatic sense of change. 'Women are finding jobs, and that is bound to change things fast. The insides of the miners' houses project a different life. Inside walls are knocked down, big picture windows are put in.' 'To keep their spirits up during the strikes, every village had a jazz band. They couldn't afford real instruments, mind. They had kazoos. I remember vividly one day in 1926, all the jazz bands came marching down the valley from each village and through the streets of Pontypridd. It was a really wonderful sound. Someone sat me up on top of a wall to watch ... a wall all covered with red ants.'
Stanley Baker thinks the continuity is more important. 'The men still hand over their wage packets to the women. It's not a passing fashion, it's an important ritual. No, the people haven't changed. Perhaps it is something physical to do with being confined in a valley. Family ties are very strong. They really mean something. People are as proud as they ever were of being Welsh. Feelings like that do not change easily.' 'I'll tell you how close people lived to death. We made a guy once for November 5th and carried it through Ferndale on an old bedstead, asking for pennies. We knocked at one house. A woman came to the door, took one look at the guy on the bed and fainted. We had to run and fetch the neighbour. You see, she thought it was her husband being brought back home dead from the pit'.