Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  Constructed in 1906 to house a mining family, 2 Penmaen Villas would gain a reputation when one of its original residents became known as the local hermit. Bethones John moved into the property as a young girl, with her parents and siblings, including her older sister Kezia. For Bethones it was not a happy home. Following the death of most of her family members over the years, she became notorious in the area as a recluse, a ‘shut in’. She shunned everybody, even her remaining relatives, and stayed in her childhood home, mostly alone, for more than eighty years. She was Richey and Rachel Edwards’s great-aunt Bessie.

  ‘Richard was obsessed by her story,’ remembers Rachel. ‘He was fascinated by the way she lived her life, and that she existed within our family. Growing up, he’d keep asking Mam and Dad to tell him Aunt Bessie’s story over and over again. Nobody ever saw her, and she was this big enigma to us and everyone else in the area. I do sometimes wonder about the significance of it all …’

  It was 1992 when Richey Edwards said, ‘We’re the sad victims of twentieth-century culture. The cinema in our town, which is the poorest and most boring town in the country, closed down when we were eight, so what do you do? You go out and get pissed and have fights, or you stay in and get on with your boredom. We were happier to go along with the boredom.’

  Twenty-five years on in Blackwood, we are given a guided tour by Mark Hambridge, Richey’s close friend from his adolescence, and the Manic Street Preachers’ driver in their early days. He walks us around Blackwood High Street, now as homogeneous as any in Britain with its takeaways, chain stores and Wetherspoon’s. And, finally, a new cinema, which opened in 2014.

  ‘Blackwood used to have an identity. Local businesses. A proud work force. Political movements. A sense of community,’ he says. ‘But that had nearly all died out by the time Richard and I were teenagers. Shops were boarded up, and industry was closed down. Unemployment, violence and defeatism were all around us. All that was left were betting shops and pubs.’

  The Blackwood in which Mark and Richey came of age was a microcosm reflecting new realities across South Wales. A distinct and fiercely autonomous region of the British Isles, once steeped in community values, political radicalism, social solidarity and its own unique popular culture – it had now been attacked and abandoned.

  South Wales had been the bedrock of socialism in Britain; the place where Karl Marx suggested interested parties should seek seeds of revolutionary change. His remarks reflected a time when Britain was witness to the rising Chartist movement for greater democracy, and the South Wales branch was particularly militant.

  On 4 November 1839, over ten thousand Chartists marched on the coastal town of Newport, overlooking the Severn Estuary. It was the last ever native armed insurrection against the British state. On the night before the conflict, revolutionaries gathered in the valleys north of Newport – and Blackwood was the epicentre.

  As the history books record, South Wales never did spark a violent revolution. Nonetheless, the nineteenth century saw the rise of the South Wales miners. Their organisation into a powerful trade union was another potentially revolutionary crisis for imperial Britain.

  Over a century later, the South Wales miners wielded their democratic power in industrial strikes that would topple a prime minister. In 1972, miners across Britain went on strike, with 135 pits closed across South Wales alone. Dock workers in nearby Newport and Cardiff refused to offload coal imports in a show of solidarity. The strikers’ victory resulted in miners enjoying the highest pay among the working class.

  However, their success was short-lived. Another strike, in 1974, resulted in a coal shortage for the nation’s power stations. The ensuing crisis prompted Prime Minister Edward Heath to call a snap General Election. Expecting the country to be behind him against industrial militancy, he was ousted from power.

  Such was the democratic potential of proletarian South Wales, it took the rise of Margaret Thatcher, who came to power in 1979, to tame the threat that the Valleys posed to imperialism, and to capitalism. Decades of deliberate de-industrialisation, coupled with the replacement of coal by oil, saw the long, slow depression that became South Wales’s beaten and prostrate future.

  This class war, the climax and death knell for industrial South Wales, was all that Richey Edwards and the young Manic Street Preachers had ever known. As teenagers in the mid-eighties, they were witness to the falling away of one kind of society, and the horrible birth of another.

  ‘Richey was right,’ says Mark. ‘When all the industry and everything left, there was nothing but frustration. People would go out and pick a fight. Defeated individuals who should have been a collective were left to take it out on each other.’

  He points down a boarded up alleyway. ‘There’s a common misconception about the Manic Street Preachers’ first single, “Suicide Alley”. It wasn’t a place to go and die by your own hand – it was about the fact that if you walked down there it’d be full of despairing, aimless people dispersing from the pubs, and you’d get your head kicked in. It’d be suicide to walk down that alley.’

  The economy and society of South Wales were once dominated by coal. The historic concentration around one industry meant a remarkable unity of experience, thought and feeling, and real social-political solidarity. This society, in which most of Richey Edwards’s recent ancestors lived, came with its own powerful narrative.

  The pre- and post-war Valleys were defined in the public imagination by clichéd images of male voice choirs, rugby union, radical politics and religious revival. These have been the predominant icons of modern Welshness, perpetually rolled out in cosy depictions of the recent Welsh past; an exportable view of Wales, seen famously in the John Ford film How Green Was My Valley (1941). The Welsh coalfield was a living narrative, steeped in idealism, struggle and illusion.

  The harsh realities impacting South Wales, and its people’s precarious position in the face of social upheaval, are written into the story of the Edwards family. For hundreds of years, Richey’s family, on both sides, lived in the cluster of towns and villages surrounding Blackwood. Richey’s grandmother, Kezia Edwards – with whom Richey and his family would later live during his formative years – was born in 1896, towards the end of the Victorian era. She was raised just outside Blackwood in the rural hamlet of Rhiw Syr Dafydd, and lived there with her seven siblings, her mother Rachel John, and her coalminer father, Thomas John.

  The young John family was deeply affected by a new era. The first decade of the twentieth century saw an increase in demand for Welsh coal from the expanding industrial economies of mainland Europe and North America. Among the many entrepreneurs, eager to increase their fortune in ‘black gold’, were the Tredegar Iron & Coal Company, composed of local wealthy industrialists.

  In 1906 that company executed its plan to exploit the rich seam of coal under the Sirhowy Valley, directly beneath where Kezia and the John family called home. Its mission was to create several new mines in the area – one of which was Oakdale Colliery. It gave its name to the new village and in turn, almost sixty years later, to Oakdale Comprehensive School. For the new village of Oakdale to be built, however, Rhiw Syr Dafydd and other areas of the Sirhowy Valley needed clearing. What had been a Welsh-speaking community would soon be inundated with English-speaking mineworkers and the ancient tongue and associated cultural memory all but eradicated within a few years. It was to be a pattern repeated across South Wales.

  The John family was moved from Rhiw Syr Dafydd to the newly built 2 Penmaen Villas in 1906. Kezia was ten years old at the time. Such huge upheaval inevitably had a profound and lasting impact. The effect upon the family is impossible to measure, and would doubtless have hit each individual differently depending on their sensitivities and propensity to soak up violent change. However, what we know from official records is that in 1907, one year after the upheaval of being moved from her home, Kezia’s mother, Rachel John, was dead at the age of 41. Her death certificate states that she died from ‘Chron
ic alcoholism: Heart failure.’

  Her passing left her husband with seven children to raise. Kezia was only 11 and it is highly likely that, being now the eldest female, she was tasked with caring for her younger siblings. But this wasn’t her only commitment to the family’s survival. In the 1911 census, now 15, she was listed as a ‘coal-miner/hewer’ in the nearby pit of Waterloo. Women and girls worked ‘surface’ jobs well into the twentieth century; however, it had been illegal for some decades for any females to work underground. Kezia’s role as ‘hewer’ involved the dangerous task of digging coal at the seam, during a period in history when mine owners were happy to flout the law for profit.

  ‘All developing economies abuse their young. When Britain was a developing economy we sent our children up chimneys and down coalmines and out into the street to steal.’

  Richey Edwards, Bangkok, 1994

  Three of Kezia’s brothers were packed off to fight in the First World War. The oldest brother, John Richard John, served as a lance-corporal with the 1st Battalion South Wales Borderers. From May 1916 he was stationed at the small coalmining village of Philosophe in Artois, northern France.

  Four months later, John and his battalion were digging a new trench on the front line, when his ‘D-company’ came under fire from German machine guns. Twenty-three-year-old Lance-Corporal John Richard John (13208) was among the fallen. Less than three months after that, his younger brother Private William Charles John (3137) of the Monmouthshire Regiment was killed by German shelling.

  In Oakdale, a memorial to those who died in the Great War of 1914–18 occupies the most prominent position in the village’s Central Avenue. The monument commemorates the 22 local young men who gave their lives, including J.R. John and W.C. John, Richey’s great-uncles. With Everlasting Honour We Keep Their Memories Green.

  The loss of the family’s two eldest brothers had a terrible impact on those back home in Blackwood.

  ‘My Great Aunt Bessie was never the same after her brothers died. I think that could have affected the way she came to be,’ says Rachel Edwards. ‘I heard she used to be sociable and outgoing. She was learning to be a seamstress and was engaged, but it all fell through and along with losing her brothers, she just shut down physically and mentally. She spent all of her time looking after her brother, David.’

  David John was the only brother to return from war. He was relieved from his duties and discharged due to poor health. ‘He came back from the war very paranoid, and was obviously mentally ill,’ Rachel explains. ‘He lived with Bessie and she cared for him, but he died long before her.

  ‘My parents used to tell Richard and me that if they ever saw Bessie, she’d still talk about David as though he were in the room, even though he’d been dead for decades. It was just the two of them for a while, and then just Bessie all alone in that house for a long time.’

  With Oakdale Comprehensive just across the road from 2 Penmaen Villas, every school day must have reminded the young Richey of his strange, reclusive and now very elderly great-aunt Bessie. Did he sit in his history class absorbing the facts of the First World War, knowing that Bessie was just across the road, still deeply traumatised and reliving the cataclysmic events that tore her family apart?

  Bessie passed away in late 1994, mere weeks before her great-nephew himself mysteriously vanished. Her death was close enough to the time of Richey’s disappearance to suggest that it may have affected him. Although they were not in contact, he was certainly conscious of her. ‘Nobody ever saw her, she was this big enigma, and when she died, I guess her life was up for scrutiny again,’ says Rachel.

  That one of Richey’s blood relatives found solace in seclusion and safety in isolation draws instant analogy with Richey’s own disappearance. Here was a precedent example of a recluse in his family, and somebody who clearly fascinated him.

  When the two John brothers were killed in France, Richey’s grandmother Kezia, who was slightly older than Bessie, had already started a family of her own. In 1914 she married Thomas Edwards, a coalminer from nearby Cwmcarn. Thomas’s father, Ivor Edwards, a deacon at the local chapel, bought Thomas and each of his siblings a house of their own. One was 12 Church View, Blackwood, where Thomas and Kezia set up home.

  Six children soon followed, of whom the youngest was Graham James Edwards, born in 1935. He was seven years younger than his closest sibling. ‘There was quite an age gap,’ says Rachel. ‘Being born later than the others, it definitely resulted in my father being closer to my nan.’

  Graham attended Pontllanfraith Junior School, but by his early teens he was working first as a baker and then, for a time, as a coalminer. He was later called up for compulsory National Service, and at 18 served with the Parachute Regiment in Egypt, prior to the Suez crisis.

  Considering the impact the First World War had on Kezia, with the deaths of her brothers, deep anxieties about seeing her youngest son deployed to the Middle East would have been all too understandable.

  ‘My dad never really spoke about his time in the Red Berets,’ recalls Rachel. ‘There’s a photo he had and he wrote underneath it, “Egypt – never again”, but we never knew why. He told Richard and me that the training was harder than average army training, and he did mention the paratroopers were made to do milling exercises – where you would stand for 60 seconds and take punches without blocking them.’

  During Graham’s time in military service, he lost his father, meaning Kezia was widowed. Returning home after his 18 months’ service, he moved back in with his mother. With his siblings now independent of the family home, Graham and Kezia’s bond grew even stronger.

  Following Graham’s time in the military, he trained to be a women’s hairdresser in Cardiff before starting his own business just outside Blackwood in nearby Crumlin. In the spring of 1961 he met his future wife, then called Sherry Davies, at a dance at Blackwood Miners’ Institute. An apprentice hairdresser at Sutherley’s Hair Fashions on Blackwood High Street, Sherry was still living at home with her parents and two brothers in Cefn Fforest.

  Sherry Kayron Davies was born on 24 May 1943. Her mother, Lily May Cole, had worked at Cefn Mably Hospital, a chest sanatorium near Caerphilly, before herself contracting tuberculosis. Following her recovery, Lily worked at an upmarket clothes shop on Blackwood High Street. Sherry’s father, Horace Davies, worked as a foreman carpenter for the local health authority.

  Both of Sherry’s brothers, Robin Lorne and Christopher Shane, taught at local secondary schools, before Shane embarked on a voyage to America in the early 1960s to gain his professorship at the University of Austin, Texas. His life story is another that fascinated the young Richey.

  ‘That was another story Richard used to like hearing,’ says Rachel. ‘He’d ask my parents to tell him Uncle Shane’s story a lot. About how he left Blackwood for America, and how he ended up living out there for the rest of his life.

  ‘But what he found most fascinating was that, when Shane first went out there, he didn’t visit home for five years. Of course, it was harder to make contact in those days, so essentially to the family he was living off the grid. He became another mysterious figure in the family for a while, until he started visiting us back home again.

  ‘Maybe Richard liked that story because it showed there was a means of escaping a place like Blackwood. Either way, it fascinated him that his uncle could go off the grid like that – and my dad always thought Richard would come back after five years, just like Uncle Shane did …’

  Sherry and Graham married on 28 August 1966. They set up home at 12 Church View with Kezia Edwards, and with Graham now owning two successful businesses – Graham’s Hair Fashions in Blackwood and another branch in nearby Crumlin – the future was looking bright.

  By the following spring, they were expecting their first child; it was to be a boy.

  Chapter 2

  A Fixed Ideal

  ‘A happy childhood … is the worst possible preparation for life.’

  Texan singer and
satirist Kinky Friedman

  – quoted in Richey’s archive, 1994

  Richard James Edwards, Graham and Sherry’s only son, was born at County Hospital, Pontypool, on 22 December 1967. His parents brought him back to his grandmother’s at 12 Church View, and photographs of the infant Richey show him wide eyed and responsive to the world around him.

  In November 1969, he was joined by a younger sister, Rachel. Also on Church View lived two sets of aunts, uncles and cousins. Graham’s brother Clifford, his wife and son Nick were a few doors down, and Graham’s sister Ceridwen, her husband and children Paul and Graham were at the end of the street.

  ‘The neighbourhood had a really old-fashioned village atmosphere, and everybody knew each other,’ remembers Rachel. ‘It’s a bit of a cliché to say it was that olden days mentality of leaving doors open and popping back and forth to one another’s houses, but there was a sense of community that’s hard to find these days.’

  Being near to extended family gave the young Richey a real sense of belonging. He would later reflect on that time in a 1994 interview. ‘I was ecstatically happy. People treated me very well, I lived with my nan and she was beautiful.’

  Richey and Rachel would spend their formative years with their grandmother, Kezia, an important and consistent figure in their lives. ‘Nan was always there when we’d get back from school,’ explains Rachel. ‘Mam and Dad would be at work until five or six, so she’d cook us egg and chips and look after us.’

  Richey was deeply influenced by Kezia, later describing her as ‘the wisest person I’ve ever met’.

  ‘She was certainly an unpretentious woman,’ remembers Rachel. ‘Very warm and down to earth. Both Richard and I were very close to her growing up. In a sense, it was like having a third parent around. She was very genuine, and things like that meant a lot to Richard. And all five of us lived in Church View very happily.’