Poetry 1900-2000: Huw Menai

This is the second in the series of poets' lives taken from the profiles Meic Stephens gives us as a taster in Poetry 1900-2000. The anthology will be celebrated on 22 April at the London Welsh Centre: details here.

Born in 1888 in Caernarfon, Huw Menai left school at 12 to go to the mines in South Wales. He got employment in Merthyr Vale and became politically active, leading to him getting the sack. He became a weigher and was seen as a ‘companies man’. Often unemployed, Menai fathered eight children. Welsh-speaking, he wrote simple archaic poetry in English and was taken up by fashionable left-wing, middle class London circles. He was known as ’the poet of the South Wales Coalfield’.