Dai Smith – Birthday tributes

On the occasion of his 80th birthday, many of Dai Smith’s family, friends and colleagues gathered in Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre today to celebrate his myriad achievements as an historian, writer and broadcaster – We asked some of them to assess his wide-ranging contributions to Welsh life.

Angela V. John’s new biography Behind the Scenes: The Dramatic Lives of Philip Burton will be published in May.

What’s distinctive about Dai the academic historian? There’s the way he writes. Dai really relishes words, plays with language and produces sparkling prose. In short, he’s a WORD SMITH!

Dai calls himself a Rhondda writer. His imaginative and probing historical analysis is shaped by Place, People and Politics but he cannot be described as a local historian.

Although a central figure in Llafur (the Welsh People’s History Society) since its inception 55 years ago, and co-author with Hywel Francis in 1980 of the landmark study The Fed, even labour history cannot contain him.

Neither is he to be labelled a cultural historian essentially concerned with theory. Culture and Community come together for Dai. Unsurprisingly, his major biographical study is a homage to Raymond Williams, though even here Dai subverts the genre.

His books must be a nightmare for library classification but his challenges and collapsing of divisions ensure his distinctiveness and acclaim, keeping historians on their toes.

In addition to brilliant, wide-ranging books, Dai has inspired gifted students such as Chris Williams to publish highly original research.

And as founder editor of Parthian’s historical series Modern Wales, Dai’s legacy includes generously sharing his profound knowledge and many skills.

Nick Capaldi, Chief Executive, Arts Council of Wales (2008-2021)

Dai is a visionary who brought his unique blend of historical insight and passionate advocacy to his role as Chair of the Arts Council of Wales. A distinguished scholar of Raymond Williams, he believed fundamentally in Williams’ famous mantra “Culture is Ordinary, and that is where we must start.”

For Dai, this was indeed just the start. He believed that there should be nothing mysterious or exclusive about a whole society’s need to share and participate in cultural achievements.

In his time the Arts Council frequently faced the criticism that we leaned too much towards old fashioned conservatism on the one hand, and an impetuous embrace of ‘the new’ on the other. Dai would have none of this.

From his deep personal understanding of the arts he knew that it was creative artists who reflected, questioned and shaped the way that culture and society develop.

And for Dai, the contemporary, the living and the dangerously ephemeral was the primary driver of our vision at the Arts Council.

Above all, it was about quality – not something remote or limiting, but an authentic expression of life that could exist in many settings and appeal to the widest audience. It was a privilege to work with Dai – committed, charismatic and above all else, fun!

Tim Williams is Head of Cities (Group), Sydney, Australia

Dai Smith is a Welsh Wonder and that’s why we celebrate him and his life’s work on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

And what work it is! Always eloquent and rich in content, it is also an extraordinarily diverse body of work – the output of a big, combative mind in a man of modest stature, proof positive that indeed what matters is not the dog in the fight but the fight in the dog.

Dai is one of the best British historians of his era who has combined the highest academic standards with popular appeal, melding the language of the academy with the demotic of a man who takes no prisoners, all in a successful attempt to tell other historians across the UK and indeed globally about how the modern history of Wales is both idiosyncratic and yet expressive of the wider human story and to tell the Welsh important things about themselves they may not have known but needed to, Dai’s contribution does not stop there.

Gore Vidal once complained that a little of him dies when he hears of the successes of his friends and that’s sometimes how I feel when I contemplate the Stakhanovite productivity of my former teacher.

Historian yes, but a fine novelist also, a public speaker of the first water, a broadcaster of note, an administrator at the highest levels of Welsh public life and no – say it isn’t so – a published poet.

A maddening talent but a necessary one for the professions he has worked in and the people and a proletariat for whom he has actually been working for and in support of whom he has been harnessing his broad abilities and output across what has appeared to be many fronts and is actually the one battle.

And neither he nor they are over yet, not will his contribution cease: ‘And still he learns’ and so do we in part through him. Diolch o galon, gyfaill.

John Geraint is the author of The Great Welsh Auntie Novel and Up the Rhondda: A peculiar sort of hiraeth.

I grew up a decade after Dai Smith, but just yards away from his Tonypandy boyhood home – on the Penygraig side of the Mid Rhondda Athletic Field, where we both trespassed to play as nippers.

So when I was asked to chair today’s discussion, celebrating Dai’s 80th birthday, and featuring many of his illustrious colleagues, how could I say no?

Because it wasn’t just the history of ‘The Mid’ that Dai had brought to life for me – with its sporting glories of professional cycle racing, international rugby in both codes and top-flight soccer, as well as its role in hosting mass meetings of miners during the infamous Cambrian Combine Dispute which led to the Tonypandy Riots.

No, Dai’s work, his forensic research and his intellectual re-imagining of what ‘Tonypandy’ meant, gave me far more.

It confirmed on the basis of undeniable historical truth what instinct told me: that the part-ruined coal cosmopolis where I grew up was a place of true weight and significance, an American Wales where the vanguard of industrial Britain redefined itself as a community.

Where resolutions and analyses, dreams and schemes formulated and debated in the cafes of Dunraven Street counted for something, not just in British politics but on the world stage.

Where history was on our side. For that, as well as for years as friends and comrades at the BBC and the Arts Council, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the giant who’s just turned 80.

Rob Humphreys was Director of The Open University in Wales and subsequently appointed as Chair of the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales.

Understanding Dai Smith’s remarkable contribution to the intellectual and cultural life of Wales this past half century and more – as historian, documentary film-maker, leader and innovator in the arts, novelist – requires the same multidimensional approach that he himself deployed to capture the roller-coaster ‘American’ historical experience of industrial South Wales.

The Fed (co-authored with Hywel Francis), the placing of Aneurin Bevan in the ‘world’ of South Wales, the biography of Raymond Wiliams, the establishment and astonishing early work of National Theatre Wales – these and many more stand alone as major accomplishments.

But Dai’s manifold output was – is – built upon binding foundations: methodological rigour, the interrogation of literature as a ‘way of seeing’ a whole society, an assertion of the distinctiveness and vibrancy of the anglophone culture of Wales, and a focus on collective human capacity for creating institutions that drive progressive social change (without sparing truths about setbacks and defeats where they occurred).

The work is of Wales, speaks to Wales and unquestionably altered how we see and define Wales, but never entirely containable within a narrow national frame – and all the better for it.

There is a further and vital ingredient in this potent intellectual cocktail: Dai has been an intellectual who has put himself (sometimes fearlessly) in the public arena.

He has cajoled, argued with, provoked, and sometimes confronted establishments and his fellow citizens – in Wales and beyond. Debate and disagreement always welcomed – and who hasn’t disagreed with him? – but best have your evidence ready.

It is impossible to think of Dai Smith’s output without this public engagement and difficult to imagine contemporary Wales as it is without acknowledging his contribution.

He moulded and laid down a ‘live-rail’ that powers the brightest illumination of our past and in doing so simultaneously electrifies the present.

A very public intellectual, and an absolutely necessary voice.