Rhodri Morgan’s autobiography is as warm, touching, funny and wonderful to read as you could expect from a man with his charisma and love of life.

Today, we are starting a series of excerpts from the book, published by the University of Wales Press, with his account of joining Cardiff Labour and meeting his future wife Julie.

Following it some childhood memories – including the time his mother threatened to send him to Winchester public school

I had joined the Labour Party in December 1963. I climbed up the stairs of Number 36 Churchill Way in the centre of Cardiff, an address with a brass plate on the outside saying “Cardiff South & Penarth Labour Party”.

I had noticed that brass plate when visiting the WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) regional office in Charles Street, which ran parallel to Churchill Way.

The ground floor and first floor were solicitors’ offices overspilling from Number 34 and belonging to Leo Abse and Cohen – Abse was the Labour MP for Pontypool. I knocked the door and walked in.

The two persons inside were Paddy Kitson, the full-time agent for Jim Callaghan, and Jack (later Lord) Brooks.

Jack Brooks, Baron Brooks of Tremorfa, the new Chairman of the Cardiff Labour Party, pictured at home in Janet Street, Splott, Cardiff, Wales, 12th March 1968
Jack Brooks, Baron Brooks of Tremorfa, the new Chairman of the Cardiff Labour Party, pictured at home in Janet Street, Splott, Cardiff, Wales, 12th March 1968

I said I didn’t live in the constituency, but that I wanted to help Jim get re-elected whenever the general election was called. Jim was the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, but at the 1959 election his majority had been cut to less than a thousand by Michael Roberts, a local headteacher and later MP for Cardiff North from 1970-82.

Paddy gently explained that to join a particular Labour Party, like Cardiff South & Penarth, you actually had to live in that same constituency. I lived in Pontypridd from Monday to Friday, then in the family home in Bishopston outside Swansea at weekends, so I had a problem. I must have stayed there an hour. Jack Brooks mentioned that he and Paddy had been discussing CLR James, the West Indian cricket writer and historian of anti-slavery rebellion in the Caribbean. Luckily, I’d heard of CLR James.

This was the opposite of my interview to get admission to Oxford University five years earlier. This time, we were all on the same wavelength. We agreed that I would be given a membership card, but I would need to move into the Cardiff South & Penarth area to live as soon as possible.

Paddy also mentioned that he too was looking for a better flat. If I found a sizeable one, he would be interested in a joint move, along with his current flatmate, a Cardiff University student called Neil Kinnock.

Rhodri Morgan - Neil Kinnock, returned to old haunts, to be reminded of their student days in Cardiff
Rhodri Morgan - Neil Kinnock, returned to old haunts, to be reminded of their student days in Cardiff

I could meet Neil if I wanted to that evening in the Alexandra Hotel, a pub just across the road from Queen Street station, just a few hundred yards or so from the students’ union, where Neil apparently spent most of his time. After that, there was to be a Labour fundraiser at the Ocean Club in Tremorfa.

I went back up to Pontypridd in my mini-van to where I was living in digs. My address was the Welshest address of all time – it was Rhodri Morgan c/o Mr and Mrs Ivor Jones, Maes-y-dderwen, 1 Pant-y-Graigwen Road, Graigwen, Pontypridd, Glamorgan, Wales (that last bit was totally unnecessary really).

My American friends who received my letters with that address all thought I’d made it up just to impress them – no such place could possibly exist! I explained to Mrs Jones that I would probably be moving out in the New Year, and she was fine with that. I think she’d noticed that I was spending far more of my social time in Cardiff than in Pontypridd.

So back down to Cardiff in my mini-van, which was easy to park anywhere, and I went into the Alex. I saw Paddy Kitson in one corner with a flame-haired student, and a very nice-looking girl in a green dress.

Paddy introduced me to Julie Edwards and Neil Kinnock. Julie, he explained, was a postal vote canvasser – that was her holiday job, but in term-time she was studying English at King’s College London.

Rhodri and Julie Morgan
Rhodri and Julie Morgan

Postal vote canvassers were paid £5 a week. She’d done it through the summer holidays and was now getting a few extra weeks’ worth of princely £5 wages during the Christmas holidays. Postal votes were hard to come by in those days. Not only did you have to have some kind of mobility or illness problem to qualify, but a nurse or GP had to counter-sign the application. Still, maximising the number of postal votes, you could get signed up in safe Labour areas like the huge council estate in Llanrumney had already been spotted as being well worth the effort in seats such as Cardiff South & Penarth, which were classed as marginal.

Although I was chronically shy about asking girls if I could take them home, I did manage to summon up the courage to ask Julie. I think my fear was rejection really, but Julie didn’t reject me.

I owe a lot to having my mini-van in the Ocean Club car park – you couldn’t go wrong with a mini-van. The upshot of all this was that Julie and I hit it off, I couldn’t believe my good fortune really.

The following day, I went flat-hunting. In the Chris John estate agent’s window on The Hayes, there was an advert for a furnished flat in Cyncoed Road suitable for a share and £5 a week! I dashed back over to the Labour office to see if 40 Cyncoed Road was in Cardiff South.

Miraculously it was, albeit the last house in the constituency – everything north of it was in Cardiff North. We (me, Paddy and Neil, plus a fourth person, Wil Roberts from Chwilog in north Wales, by now sadly the late Wil Roberts of Blaenau Ffestiniog), signed all the forms, and leased the flat from January for one year.

The flat was pure gold. It was the ground floor of the old family home of the late Alun Emlyn-Jones, the Liberal candidate in the Barry constituency in 1950, who had then been prevailed upon to pull out in 1951 so that the Tory Raymond Gower could have a straight shot at Dorothy Rees, the sitting Labour MP.

Lloyd George had also stayed at 40 Cyncoed Road on innumerable occasions on visits to Cardiff.

One minor problem, at least for Neil, was the six-monthly health and safety inspection by his formidable mother. As I would always say of my own mother, “Once a schoolteacher, always a schoolteacher!”

You could safely say of Neil’s mother, “Once a district nurse, always a district nurse!” I can still hear that commanding voice ringing out from the bathroom, “Neil, these towels are filthy! Get them washed!”

Thank goodness my mother never came to visit. Everything had moved so quickly. I definitely felt I’d landed on my feet.

A VIP guest at Ninian Park as Jim Callaghan, later Prime Minister and Lord Callaghan of Cardiff watches the Bluebirds
A VIP guest at Ninian Park as Jim Callaghan, later Prime Minister and Lord Callaghan of Cardiff watches the Bluebirds

I’d been a member of the Oxford University Labour Club, but I cannot recall anyone mentioning that actually joining the Labour Party itself involved signing up to join in the place where you lived. That separate step entitled you to go to ward meetings. It was just never mentioned. Now, I could go to Roath Ward meetings.

Bizarrely, I reckon I was the only Labour MP who had been to a Democratic Party branch meeting in America (in Lewiston, Idaho) before I’d been to a Labour Party branch meeting in Britain!

Roath Ward was untypical, it has to be said – we had two members of the branch whose main occupation was composing opera libretti. If there had been a competition to see which branch of the Labour Party was the brainiest, it would have been a close run between Roath and some esoteric corner of Hampstead every year.

The librettists were busy composing operas, so I was elected to represent the ward on the monthly meeting of the Constituency General Management Committee. I was also made constituency Youth Officer (because I was younger than anyone else), which put me on the executive committee, the inner sanctum.

So I saw Jim Callaghan in action every month. He would get the train down from London on a Friday afternoon, and then attend the monthly constituency meeting in the evening. On Saturday mornings, he would hold a surgery, accompanied by his super-efficient secretary, Ruth Sharp (she had been in the secret service SIS throughout the war, and it was stamped all over her). Once you got past the SIS briskness, she was the embodiment of charm, but in a very SIS way.

Jim would then catch the train back to London on Saturday afternoon, as did most MPs in those days who visited their constituencies rather than lived in them. By now, of course, most Labour MPs live in the area they represent, and visit the House of Commons from Monday to Thursday.

Old Arcade pub in Cardiff
Old Arcade pub in Cardiff

We enjoyed our politics as much as possible. We took the meaning of “party” politics literally – every Saturday night, we would either have a proper party or at least take a “carry out” bag of flagons from the Alex in central Cardiff back to the flat, with the Old Arcade taking over as our home pub after the Alex closed down.

On one Friday night, we knew that Jim would unusually be staying down until the Sunday, and we boldly asked Jim, the Shadow Chancellor, if he’d like to come to a Saturday night party. To our surprise, he said he would, and when it became known that Jim was coming to our party, Ken Morgan came down from Swansea because he wanted to lobby Jim on the importance to Wales of the federal status of the University of Wales.

Despite the excellent dance music I’d brought back from America, Jim’s presence did inhibit everyone else, to the extent that he complained himself: “When’s this party going to liven up then?”

“As soon as you bugger off, Jim!” were the words of the unminced reply he got from Jack Brooks. That was what you would call a Splott putdown!

It was lucky that no thunderbolts descended on the flat after the Splott putdown, when you think that in that room were a future Prime Minister (Jim Callaghan), a future Labour Party leader (Neil Kinnock), a future First Minister of Wales (yours truly) and three future Labour peers and, respectively, Leader of South Glamorgan County Council, Vice-Chancellor of Aberystwyth, and an International Development Minister (Jack Brooks, Ken Morgan and Glenys Kinnock). After Jim left, the party did eventually liven up, but that putdown was a never-to-be-forgotten moment.

*********

Rhodri Morgan's childhood

I’d been issued with my ration book even before I had a name – my ration book said simply “Baby Morgan”. Once you’d entered the system as Baby Morgan, you were always Baby Morgan. Even when my mother and I went to buy my first pair of long trousers, the clothing coupons still said “Baby Morgan”.

I had seen a gang of Italian prisoners-of-war digging out the huge snow drifts in December 1944 on the A4119, the Llantrisant Road, which cut Radyr off from Cardiff. I’d seen Field Marshal von Rundstedt walking along the Bridgend bypass, interned in the Island Farm prisoner-of-war camp while awaiting trial at Nuremberg.

I have vague memories of D-Day and VE Day, and of the Labour landslide [in 1945]. I have very strong memories of the evacuees going home, of the VJ Day giant bonfire celebrations down at the village cricket field, and hearing dance music on some kind of rigged sound system and seeing husbands and wives dancing together.

Not my parents, though, because while my father had allegedly been an excellent mover on the dancefloor, my mother either couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Two other things denoted the end of the war within our family. One involved my father going down to Cardiff Market and buying examples of all the fruit that we hadn’t tasted during the war.

Cover of Rhodri Morgan's autobiography, Rhodri: A Political Life in Wales and Westminster, from University of Wales Press in Cardiff
Cover of Rhodri Morgan's autobiography, Rhodri: A Political Life in Wales and Westminster, from University of Wales Press in Cardiff

My brother might possibly have had some tastebud memories of exotic fruit, but not me. Bananas were wonderful. Pomegranates were unbelievably disappointing. Coconuts were somewhere in between.

The other thing he did was to buy a rugby ball. This coincided with my brother starting violin lessons next to Whitchurch Library and Park, also next to Velindre Hospital, where my grandmother was to receive her cancer treatment a few years hence.

While my brother went through the torture of his hour’s violin lesson with Miss Dorothy Morgan, quite a martinet of a teacher, my father and I repaired to the park.

Up and down and up and down we ran, passing the ball to each other. Occasionally my father would throw a dummy to me. I always bought it. That had been my father’s great gift as a centre three-quarter back in the 1920s, and it certainly fooled me every time.

What really struck me about my father on those occasions was the expression of childlike delight and relaxation on his face that I’d never seen before. If you think of that great cliché of post-war British prisoner-of-war films, where the fiendish German capturer says to the captured plucky Brit, ‘For you, Tommy, the war [pronounced “ze vor”] is over’, well, that’s how it was for my father.

That smile of happiness meant that for him the war was definitely over. That’s when I realised rugby touched a part of my father’s psyche that nothing else could. He might have been in his late thirties and a heavy smoker, but he was enjoying himself as much as in his Glais boyhood.

Rhodri Morgan entered Whitchurch Grammar School in 1950

Now he was teaching his son how to play rugby and tried (but ultimately failed) to teach him how to pick which pass was the dummy.

My father had a level of physical co-ordination that I could never match. I never saw him dancing the Charleston, but I do remember him killing a mouse with a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica! In my mind’s eye, I can still see him sat in a kitchen chair casually reading the Encyclopaedia. A cube of cheese had cunningly been placed six inches away from the skirting board where the mouse-hole had appeared. Out came the mouse, delighted at the ending of cheese rationing. In one movement, my father closed the Encyclopaedia and aimed it at the nibbling mouse, flattening it.

I fear that if my father ever dreamt I might one day play rugby for Wales, by giving me a good start with that rugby ball, I must have been a severe disappointment. I was far too skinny, far too slow off the mark, far too easily tackled in possession. I was simply a good rugby-watcher.

My father bought three season tickets for us – my brother and me and him – to watch Cardiff RFC play every other Saturday at the Cardiff Arms Park, where Wales played for the first season when rugby resumed after the war. That was after a break of seven seasons.

I lapped it up, but my brother did not. He would bring a sketch-pad along, and would spend the match sketching the crowd or details of the stanchions holding up the roof of the stand.

Because of the rugby starvation during the blank years of war, the crowds for the club games were huge. Cardiff had great pulling power for players from the Valleys, from Glamorgan and Gwent or further west. The centre pairing that Cardiff had in Bleddyn Williams and Jack Matthews was arguably the best centre pairing ever to have played the game in Wales or anywhere else. Haydn Tanner, the scrum-half, was again arguably the best in the world, and only Gareth Edwards can touch his achievements, despite Tanner, like the others of that era, having missed out on the best seven years of their careers.

Rhodri Morgan in Radyr boys' cricket team in 1953-4
Rhodri Morgan in Radyr boys' cricket team in 1953-4

There was plenty of spending power around as the late 1940s was an era of post-war reconstruction, where demand for coal and steel seemed limitless. There was no return to the 1930s and the Great Slump.

During the summer of 1948, my father and I occasionally went to the Glamorgan Cricket ground, backing on to the rugby stadium, and that was the miracle year in which Glamorgan finally won the County Championship, despite being known in some quarters as “Middlesex seconds”, so many Lord’s rejects did they have in the team!

What all these experiences were doing for me was building up a Welsh wall of inner self-confidence. I love RS Thomas’ poetry but I’ve never been able to recognise the picture of Gwalia Deserta, a nation in permanent decline, which inspires his poetry. Beautifully depressing wonderful verse.

I grew up in a parallel universe to RS. My Wales was doing okay and I was convinced that I was in the right place, the right city and the right country. Of course, there was a strong sense of Britishness as well. But if Britishness meant British Empire-ness, the Britain where half the world map was coloured red, then that was going down the pan quickly during my progress through grammar school. But I didn’t lament the empire’s passing.

Not everyone would have agreed with my view. We had a steady trickle at the grammar school of returnee children from the Empire, whose parents had had good jobs in India, Malaya and so on. When I was at the school dinner table in the Fifth Form, I heard a conversation between two of these returnee children, three years younger than me, which left me so gobsmacked that I didn’t even respond to it. One lad (ex-India) said to a girl (ex-Dutch East Indies): “We taught them all they know!”

Passport photo of Rhodri Morgan in 1965
Passport photo of Rhodri Morgan in 1965

Inwardly, I recoiled. I had read about white people in the colonies thinking these thoughts and uttering them in white-only company, but now I’d actually heard with my own ears two people spouting such drivel right in front of me! It wasn’t in a play or a Rudyard Kipling poem, but at our school dinner table.

The Suez adventure in October 1956 went nowhere, and did nothing except confirm that Britain was no longer a world power. That happened when I was in the Lower Sixth. The collapse of the Suez adventure was quite a heady cocktail for me in my formative years.

The Soviet Union was in the international doghouse over the brutal repression of the Hungarian Uprising, and now Anthony Eden had managed to upset the Americans and the Soviets at the same time by invading Egypt to try to take back the Suez Canal.

****

My mother went through a huge argument with herself over whether to return to teaching.

The Conservatives had abolished the rule barring married women from teaching. She’d been 20 years out of the classroom, but had kept up with the curriculum by marking A-level scripts for the Central Welsh Board, predecessor of the WJEC.

I don’t know how much she discussed the question with my father or how much use he was to her on it. But I do know that I once had the following bizarre conversation with her.

She cornered me playing table football in the front room. She said she was going to work her fingers to the bone. She was determined to go back to teaching and throw herself into it as never before. And the money she earned was to pay for me to go to Winchester – to send me away to a very posh albeit highly intellectual public school, not a hearty rugger and cold showers one.

My mother had actually gone to the trouble of getting the Winchester prospectus. It was the first I’d heard of me going away to school. Although I was always top of the class in Whitchurch, my parents, or at least my mother, may have thought I wasn’t being stretched enough. I was still reading comics rather than books (proper books). I certainly didn’t read any book that wasn’t written by Enid Blyton. I used to do my homework in 20 minutes and then I was out playing.

Rhodri Morgan and Tony Blair during a Britax Aircraft Interior Systems Ltd at Llantarnam Business Park, Cwmbran, in April 2000

She had a point, but I just ignored her really and carried on playing table football. I heard no more about it. I think my mother noticed how unimpressed I’d been by her offer to work her fingers to the bone to help me have a public-school education, with all that might mean for my accent. It was a maternal guilt trip that went horribly wrong.

The likeliest reason for her getting the Winchester College prospectus was that she was casting around for reasons for going back to teaching. Paying the fees to transform me from rough diamond to Oxbridge material was one way of persuading herself to take the plunge back into the classroom.

The only person who would definitely have been impressed would have been Tony Blair, who would probably have made me Foreign Secretary in 1997 – except that I would probably never have been selected as a Labour MP in the first place.

So I never went to Winchester, and she never went back to teaching.

© The Estate of Rhodri Morgan, 2017

From Rhodri: A Political Life in Wales and Westminster, Rhodri Morgan

HB ISBN: 9781786831477 • £24.99

University of Wales Press, 2017

www.uwp.co.uk