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Photograph of the chairing of Dic Jones at Aberafan National Eisteddfod, 1966

Written by Bethan Ifan

2 December 2024

Who of poetic stock stands near
This giant amongst the great?

                                                        From Gerallt Lloyd Owen’s commemorative ode to Dic Jones (trans.)

What would be your reaction if you heard that someone once said of the Chief Bard Dic Jones that his work was unsatisfactory and that he could do much better?  Some eisteddfod adjudicator talking nonsense?  No – that was the opinion of his schoolteachers in his final school report in 1949, the closing comment from the Principal, T. Evans, being: ‘Can do much better than this.’

History has since consigned such observations to oblivion.  This year, 2024, that ‘giant amongst greats’, Dic Jones – or, to give him his bardic name, ‘Dic yr Hendre’ – would have been 90 years of age.  He was born Richard Lewis Jones on Pen-y-Graig farm near the north Ceredigion village of Tre’r-ddôl and brought up on Tan-yr-eglwys farm in the south of the county.  It would surely have come as scant surprise to his teachers at Cardigan County Secondary School when, aged 15, he left formal education to take up his work at Tan-yr-eglwys and the neighbouring farm of Yr Hendre, Blaenannerch.  He first came into contact with the world of poetry and poetic competition through the Urdd community in Aberporth and started to learn the craft of cynghanedd – the writing of strict-metre poetry – under the tutelage of the well-known local community poet Alun Cile (Alun Jeremiah Jones, 1897-1975), mastering the craft to such an extent that he went on to win five Urdd Eisteddfod Chairs.  He subsequently won the Chair at the National Eisteddfod in Aberafan in 1966 with his awdl (ode) ‘Y Cynhaeaf’ (‘The Harvest’).  In 2008, Dic Jones was proclaimed Archdruid of the Gorsedd of Bards, the first farmer to be awarded the honour.

A Welsh proverb claims that ‘all furrows seem long ere reaching their end’ – which proved something of an asset in Dic Jones’s case as it was primarily whilst at work on the farm that he would hone the crafted structure and fine-tuned harmonies of his poems: the rich soil bringing forth richer fruit.  In one of his last interviews, Dic Jones said that he was fortunate to have come into the world “almost at the end of the age of the horse and at the beginning of the age of the tractor, almost at the end of the tradition of the local community poet”.  He followed in the footsteps of those poets by composing poems and songs in celebration of local and family events – his son Brychan’s twenty-first birthday, silver wedding anniversary greetings to his wife Siân (a poem of thanks without “a trace of slushy sentimentality” (Idris Reynolds: Cofio Dic  (2016)), poems to note weddings, retirements and deaths, an Aberporth Urdd Community reunion, the Gomer Press centenary – as well as countless strict-metre and verse libre poems composed for eisteddfodau and other poetic contests from the early days of youth competitions to the final months of his life.

When Dic Jones died in August 2009 – the month which saw the Bala National Eisteddfod, an event which Dic was forced to forego in the face of his final illness – Wales lost one of the twentieth century’s most skilled and eloquent bards.  

A glimpse into the life and work of a man referred to by poet Ceri Wyn Jones as the ‘Hendre Blackbird’ - the scathing school report, the early achievements and the crowning glory of ‘Y Cynhaeaf’, the poetic greetings and the satirical verses, the harrowing elegies and Gerallt Lloyd Owen’s commemorative ode in its entirety, together with the myriad tributes following Dic Jones’s death – can be viewed in the Papurau Dic Jones / Dic Jones Papers archive at the National Library of Wales.

Category: Article