Newport & Gwent Literary Club
2022-2023 season
The lecture programme for 2022-2023 is in place and here is a summary:
Wed 28 September 2022
Not Just William…Richmal Crompton’s life as a writer
Kate Massey and Jane McVeigh
Wed 26 October 2022
The Reef: Dannie Abse and the Sea
Robert Minhinnick
30 November 2022
Where are all the Eisteddfod Chairs?
Aneirin Karadog
December: Xmas lunch
Wed 25 January 2023
Arthur Machen in the Yellow Nineties
Catherine Fisher
Wed 22 February 2023
The Golden Age of Crime Fiction
Alis Hawkins
Wed 29 March 2023
The Happiness of the World: PG Wodehouse’s Comedy Cavalcade
Paul Kent
Wed 26 April 2023
The Centenary of Radio Broadcasts from Cardiff
Dr Jamie Medhurst
Wed 31st May 2023
Writing History for Children
Steve Martin
To book places at the Club’s events, please contact Pat Wells-West on
01633 265660 by the Sunday before the event. To contact other Club officers, visit the Contacts page of this site. Non-members very welcome. Cost to non-members: £25 to include dinner. Advance booking essential.
Updating the programme is a work in progress and full details of each event will appear below shortly.
Full programme details:
Wednesday 28th September 2022
Not Just William: Richmal Crompton’s life as a writer
With Kate Massey, who is Richmal Crompton’s great niece, and Jane McVeigh who is Honorary research Fellow at the University of Roehampton …… Jane McVeigh also teaches for the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education and is presently writing Richmal Crompton, Author of \Just William: A Literary Life. She has read the whole of Richmal Crompton’s published work: forty novels, 38 Just William Collections and ten other short story collections and regards it as a treasure trove of work by an undervalued woman writer.
In October 1923, “William goes to the Pictures”, the opening story of the first William book, Just William (1922) was transmitted on BBC Radio as a children’s programme. His dad thinks William is mad and his mother just thinks that boys are funny things. When asked on radio in 1968 whether she would liked to have written something apart from William, Richmal Crompton said politely that she had also written thirty novels [she miscounted!].
The Richmal Crompton is a Wetherspoon’s pub in Bromley where she lived for twenty six years. In Bromley, that is, not in the pub.
https://www.justwilliamsociety.co.uk/
This lecture is supported by Literature Wales.
https://www.literaturewales.org/
The venue is the Holiday Inn, Coldra, Newport and events begin at 6.30pm.
Wednesday 26 October 2022
The Reef: Dannie Abse and the Sea
Robert Minhinnick discusses the life of Dannie Abse, friend, co-poet, mentor and inspiration.
Dannie Abse was born in Cardiff in 1923 the younger brother of MP and reformer Leo Abse and psychoanalyst Wilfred Abse. The Club is proud to have had Dannie as a guest on at least two occasions, most recently in 2010. His long career as one of Wales’s most distinguished writers began in 1949 with the publication of After Every Green Thing and in 2009 he published a volume of Collected Poetry. The same year he received the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award and was made CBE in 2012. In 2007 The Presence, a memoir of the year after his wife, Joan, died, won Wales Book of the Year. Dannie was a chessplayer, lifelong Cardiff City fan and Glamorgan cricket supporter. He remembered being taken to Cardiff General Station to see Cardiff City come home with the FA Cup in 1927.
Robert Minhinnick is a Welsh poet, essayist and translator; He has won two Forward Prizes for best individual poem and he has won Wales Book of the Year on three occasions…. in each of the three decades of its existence. He co-founded the charities Friends of the Earth Wales and Sustainable Wales. He was editor of the magazine Poetry Wales from 1997-2008.
This lecture is supported by Literature Wales.
https://www.literaturewales.org/
The venue is the Holiday Inn, Coldra, Newport and events begin at 6.30pm.
Wednesday 30th November 2022
Where are all the Eisteddfod chairs?
Aneirin Karadog talks about the great Welsh literary award ceremony: the Chairing of the Bard. A new bardic chair is designed and made for each Eisteddfod and awarded to the winning entrant in the awdl…. strict metre competition. It is possible for a Chair not to be awarded if the judges believe that no entry has reached the required standard. This happened most recently in 2013. A favourite guest of ours, Mererid Hopwood was the first female winner and she won the Crown at a later Eisteddfod. Tonight’s speaker, Aneirin Karadog, won the Chair at the Monmouthshire Esiteddfod in 2016. Chairs have been awarded since 1876 in the modern format but the earliest such ceremony is known to have taken place in 1176. So there are almost one hundred and fifty Chairs knocking around and many have gone missing over the years. Aneirin will trace some of the stories which will doubtless include the Black chair, so called after Hedd Wyn won the award posthumously after his death in World War One.
Aneirin Karadag was born in Llanwrst. He has a degree in French and Spanish from New College, Oxford. His mother is Breton and his father Welsh so he has those languages as well. He has worked for Tinopolis as a research and broadcaster on Wedi 7, Sam ar y Sgrin, and Heno. He has been Bardd Plant Cymru – the Welsh language children’s laureate. He has presented documentaries about zombies and about Dylan Thomas. He now works as a freelance writer and broadcaster and has completed doctoral research at Swansea University into the relationship between the poet, the medium and the audience. He won his very own Chair in 2016 having won the Urdd Chair in 2005.
This lecture is supported by Literature Wales.
https://www.literaturewales.org/
The venue is the Holiday Inn, Coldra, Newport and events begin at 6.30pm.
Wednesday 25th January 2023
Arthur Machen in the Yellow Nineties
Catherine Fisher focuses on The Great God Pan via “The Yellow Book” which was a quarterly literary periodical that was published in London from 1894 to 1897 and its name became associated with the decade. There was an aura of aestheticism and decadence about the magazine and artists like Beardsley, Singer Sargent and Sickert illustrated it and Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, Wells,Yeats, Henry James were contributors. Arthur Machen was there, too; The Great God Pan was published in the early 1890s and Stephen King has famously called it “maybe the best [horror story] in the English language”. It was widely denounced for its content and [therefore?] sold well.
Catherine Fisher wrote the introduction to The Hill of Dreams [Library of Wales] and The Tunnel in the Three Imposters Machen-inspired series of Wentwood Tales. She has won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, was the inaugural Young Persaon’s Laureate for Wales. She has won the Arts Council’s Tir-na-Nog prizes. Her internationally praised children’s novels have been translated into twenty lanaguages. So tonight we have two of the three most famous Newport writers.
This lecture is supported by Literature Wales.
https://www.literaturewales.org/
The venue is the Holiday Inn, Coldra, Newport and events begin at 6.30pm.
Wednesday 22nd February 2023
The Golden Age of Crime Fiction
Alis Hawkins will talk about crime fiction of the 1920s and 1930s and perhaps slide either side of those dates as well; Agatha Christie leaps to mind, of course, but other rooms in the house have Margery Allingham, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Matsh, Georgette Heyer, John Dickson Carr and Ronald Knox. But despite the Golden Age being back in the day, most of these writers were still working immediately postwar and later. Knox it was who codified some rules of the game [jokingly, largely, I would think]: no Chinaman, twins, spiritual intervention and no more than one secret room or passageway in a house.
Alis Hawkins grew up in Cardiganshire and read English at Oxford. Her mediaeval crime novels are based in a fictitious university city; but her Teifi Valley Coroner series is set the very real west Wales of the 1850s. Her research work is meticulous. For The Black and White she spent a weekend learning charcoal burning in the Forest of Dean. Alis Hawkins is equally fascinated by her predecessors in the crime fiction world and will take us through some of the big names of The Golden Age of Crime but, more interestingly perhaps, remind us of and introduce us to their distinguished contemporaries.
This lecture is supported by Literature Wales.
https://www.literaturewales.org/
The venue is the Holiday Inn, Coldra, Newport and events begin at 6.30pm.
Wednesday 29th March 2023
The Happiness of the World: PG Wodehouse’s Comedy Cavalcade
Paul Kent takes us through the full range of PG Wodehouse’s range of comic creations including, of course, Jeeves & Wooster: the delightful, complex relationship which threads its way through thirty five short stories and eleven novels. They first appeared in print in 1915 and continued to appear in Wodehouse’s work until his last completed novel, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen in 1974. PG Wodehouse (1881-1975) is a treasured humorist and published more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories and other writings between 1902 and 1974. He was interned by the Germans in Le Touquet, later released, and made some comic and apolitical radio broadcasts over German radio. The furore meant he never returned to England and he lived the rest of his life in the USA.
His quirky use of Edwardian slang, half remembered quotations and allusions and idiosyncratic literary techniques make him a unique writer. And Jeeves and Wooster, like Holmes and Watson, remain embedded as one of the great double-acts in British fiction.
Paul Kent is a long-serving member of the PG Wodehouse Society; he has been a BBC radio producer specialising in music and drama. Now semi-retired [ha!] he has written a remarkable three-volume study of Wodehouse’s writing style and the process between ideas and the page. Volume 1: This is Jolly Old Fame. Volume 2: Mid-Season Form. Volume 3: The Happiness of the World.
This lecture is supported by Literature Wales.
https://www.literaturewales.org/
The venue is the Holiday Inn, Coldra, Newport and events begin at 6.30pm.
Wednesday 26th April
The Centenary of Radio Broadcasts from Cardiff
Dr Jamie Medhurst
At first, radio stations were seen as useful for military and civil communication, with no intent of mass communication or entertainment. In 1922 the BBC was formed and public service broadcasting began in Wales the following year when the BBC Cardiff station [5WA] opened up in February. The Cardiff Station was at 19 Castle Street with its transmitter at the Castle Avenue Electricity Works. Listeners tuned in to hear the first broadcast at 5pm and at 9.30pm Welsh baritone Mostyn Thomas sang Dafydd y Garreg Wen. Nevertheless, John Reith thought the best programmes were made in London and the regions should imitate their style and content. Despite this, pressure within Wales ensured some of the output was in the Welsh language….. the BBC was accused of “achieving the complete Anglicisation of the intellectual life of the nation”. Plus ca change, as they say in Aberystwyth. Dr Jamie Medhurst will take us through the politics, culture, creativity and literature of radio.
Dr Jamie Medhurst is Professor of Media and Communication at Aberystwyth University. His book The Early Years of Television and the BBC (Edinburgh University Press, 1922) explores the relationship between the BBC and television from the mid-1920s through to World War 2. He is also editor-in-chief of Media History and is co-editor of “Broadcasting in the |UK and US in the 1950s: historical perspectives (2016). He is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on broadcasting and society in Wales in the 1970s… a book from University of Wales Press will follow in 2024.