Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

The whole nation seemed to turn its thought towards that coal-pit. and every day made the suspense more painful. The rescue-party toiled manfully day and night; and when the last hope was almost given up [they] were found: and they were alive, though exhausted to the verge of death. Without air, without food, despair would have driven them mad were it not for the [hymn, Tn y dyfroedd mawr a'r tonnau'], which they sang over and over again with a feeling of terrible reality. Through the popular press this drama gripped the imagination not only of the Welsh people, but the wider British and American public. A reporter from the New York Times travelled all the way to Porth to cover the story, and it even gripped the imagination of Queen Victoria. A total of twenty-five Albert Medals were awarded to the rescuers, and 40,000 people congregated on Pontypridd Common to see Lord Aberdare give the colliers their medals on behalf of the Queen. (It is not without significance, perhaps, that Yn v dyfroedd mawr a r tonnau' was one of the Welsh hymns sung at Lord Aberdare's funeral in 1895.) As Professor Hywel Teifi Edwards has emphasised, the Tynewydd Disaster was an important milestone in the development (in a country still smarting from the assault on its religion, culture and morals by the notorious Blue Books of 1847) of the image of the brave, God-fearing, cultured Welsh collier3 part of a wider Nonconformist-Liberal construct of Wales as the land of song, the land of the white gloves, of revivals, of idyllic rural neighbourhoods, of virtuous maids and intelligent mothers,4 the land of 'y Werin' (that ideal of the responsible, diligent, democratic-minded common people, devoted to religion and culture, which Professor Prys Morgan has so eloquently discussed in a series of important articles). It is little wonder, then, that 'Yn y dyfroedd mawr a'r tonnau' became known from the time of the Tynewydd Disaster as 'The Miners Hymn'; and it is again not without significance that this was the hymn sung by Rachel Thomas (1905-95) that archetype of the Welsh 'mam', born at Allt-wen, Pontardawe in the film Proud Valley in 1940. However, its author was not a miner, but rather a tailor named Dafydd William. Biographical details are fairly few and far between There is uncertainty regarding both his date of birth and his place of birth.5 He was most probably born in the parish of Llanedi in 1721. If so that would make him a Carmarthenshire hymn-writer, since Llanedi is to the west of the river Llwchwr. If that were the case, he would join the