David Rees Griffiths

David Rees Griffiths (November 6, 1882 – December 17, 1953), also known by his bardic name of Amanwy, was a Welsh poet, and an older brother of politician Jim Griffiths.

Griffiths was born in Betws, Carmarthenshire, where his father was a blacksmith. He was the fifth of ten children. He spent his working life as a coal miner, beginning work in 1894 at the age of eight, after a brief education at the local primary school.

His father's smithy remained a gathering point for local intellectuals and political activists. On January 28, 1908, David was badly injured in a colliery explosion, which killed one of his brothers.

In 1910, Griffiths won his first eisteddfod chair, going on to win a further fifty in local events. In the same year, his wife Margaret died of tuberculosis. Griffiths also had a career as a journalist, writing for the Amman Valley Chronicle and also for BBC Radio. In 1927, he travelled to South Africa along with his son Gwilym, who was suffering from the same disease (from which Gwilym eventually died in 1935). In 1928, Griffiths became caretaker at the local grammar school. In 1951 a film, David, was made, in which he played himself. The role of 'Dafydd Rhys as a young man' was played by Ieuan Davies, who later married the youngest of his two daughters Marged Mallt Davies (née Griffiths). The elder daughter was named Menna Ruth Griffiths, she later worked at the same Grammar school and died in 2013.

David (1951)

Director Paul Dickson, script Paul Dickson, phot Ronald Anscombe, music Grace Williams. Prod co World Wide. Dist Regent.

Cast: D.R. Griffiths (Dafydd Rhys). John Davies (Ifor Morgan) Sam Jones (Rev Mr Morgan) Rachel Thomas (Mrs Morgan) Mary Griffiths (Mary Rhys), Gwenyth Petty (Mary Rhys as a young woman) Ieuan Davies (Dafydd Rhys as a young man), Rev. Gomer Roberts (himself) Prysor Williams (north Walian at Eisteddfod) Ieuan Rhys Williams (south Walian at Eisteddfod), Wynford Jones (narrator).

38 mins. U cert.

David is not merely the finest of all short films from Wales and a consummate achievement by Cardiff-born director Paul Dickson. It also ranks, for my money, in the pantheon of finest movies from Welsh directors - alongside, for example Un Nos Ola Leuad/ One Full Moon (Endaf Emlyn), House of America (Marc Evans) and Above Us The Earth (Karl Francis).

The hero of Dickson’s deeply affecting thinly-veiled biopic, made for the 1951 Festival of Britain, is a working man, David Griffiths, known in the film as Dafydd Rhys, a school caretaker for decades and a former miner. DR’s later years in Ammanford at Amman Valley Grammar School would hardly seem to be the stuff of heroism but Dickson shows how this ordinary man has extraordinary virtues. He attains grandeur in bereavement and his innate dignity is seen here as an inspiration to the film’s narrator Ifor Morgan who recalls in adulthood his experiences as a school pupil under DR’s benign wing.

For the film's David is a friend to all at the grammar school, a stoic who for the most part masks his suffering and helps inculcate the correct traditional values into his school charges.

The actual David Griffiths – for the film is a thinly-veiled biopic - may never have achieved the fame of his brother, the miners’ leader and first Welsh secretary Jim Griffiths, but here represents a certain kind of honourable traditional Welsh proletarian. DR communicates a strong sense of his community’s worth and retains a fierce loyalty to the memory of his fellow pitmen.

David, impeccably structured and paced, shows or implies what a friend and bulwark DR has been over the years – and we see how his selfless help gave impetus at a vital time to the careers of both Jim Griffiths and a noted Welsh preacher Gomer Roberts.

The film’s most poignant section deals with the impact on DR of the death of his adored son, and the effect on Ifor (John Davies) and his fellow pupils of DR’s temporary estrangement from them as he retreats into himself and his memories.

Dickson handles the set pieces with highly effective restraint. A high angle shot from a balcony shows Dafydd reacting to news of his son’s serious illness, then left alone bracing himself, before resuming mopping the school hall floor with only the slightest pause. The body language in extremis allows us to gauge the depth of feeling.

This sense of loss is reinforced in a moment of great sadness when DR cleans outside windows of the school and Ifor, on the inside, seeking to re-establish the warmth between them, is effectively shut out as water from the cleaning cloth slides down the pane, blurring David’s impassive expression.

The small subtle touches give this film its stature. There’s a pleasing, almost throwaway moment when brother Jim, off to London and bound for miners' college, clasps the hand of a workmate on the platform and smears coaldust over his face as a gesture of comradeship as his train leaves.

This is almost eclipsed by the resonant images of Dafydd leaving the Eisteddfod after his poem, an elegy to his dead son, has contested the coveted Chair award.

David Griffiths may not have been an actor but here he conveys, impressively, the accumulated experience of a working man and the cadence of his voice, with its careful intonation and slight over-emphasis, lends weight to the sentiments. He suggests rare authority as DR effectively guides schoolboy Ifor through the landmarks of his past, his marriage, and his mining days, cut short by a serious mining accident juxtaposed here with skill with the almost simultaneous birth of his son. DR imbues Ifor with an appreciation of the weight of the town’s proletarian tradition and the importance of the chapel, and the acknowledgement of the emotional legacy left by previous generations who have sat in those very chapel pews.

David’s climax, meticulously prepared low key drama is all the more effective for its understatement. We can appreciate the discipline and control Dickson exercises, and sense the affinity he feels for his subject, a man whose legacy to his own. and the youthful generation he shelters and by implication empowers, runs deep.

Dickson, in presenting us with familiar iconography - the rugby union game, the pit, the chapel - always skilfully skirts cliché, thanks to the manifest integrity of the images and presentation. Barry composer Grace Williams’s sensitive score registers the right degree of significance and dignity. David is unquestionably a better film than the director’s by no means negligible British Film Academy winning film The Undefeated (1950), a study of paraplegics and their rehabilitation. It also prompts profound regret that Dickson after making various low budget features, drifted into sponsored and industrial documentaries and never again ventured a Welsh subject worthy of his mettle.

Works

• Ambell Gainc (1919)
• 0 Lwch y Lofa (ed.) (1924)
• Caneuon Amanwy (1956)

Sources

• Biography
• About the film, David