In the winter of 1991–1992, shortly after the untimely death of the actor Ray Smith, Herbert Williams was asked to produce a tribute article for theNew Welsh Review. Drawing on both his personal and professional relationship with the man, Herbert Williams commented: ‘Above all he loved words. “It’s great to have some good words to say,” he would remark.’¹

It was an astute comment, but Herbert Williams could so easily have been talking about himself. Words have always been important for him — saying them, reading them and, above all, writing them. Searching for the right words, the best...

When his brother Bobby died from tuberculosis in February 1948, Herbert Williams was just fifteen years old. Bobby’s death came as no surprise, as he had been suffering from the disease for some time and the spectre of the terrible wasting illness had hovered over the family for years. Herbert Williams has written:

Tuberculosis, which carried away so many young men and women in Wales in the first half of the twentieth century, was as much a part of my childhood as Hornby trains and senna pods. My brother Bobby died of it when twenty-five . . . and my...

Five months after leaving the sanatorium at Talgarth, Herbert Williams became a journalist. It was March 1951 and the job on theWelsh Gazettehad been found for him by Reg Kendall, an expatient at Talgarth and a reporter friend of his brother Vic. Herbert had spent the time since his discharge walking, usually on Aberystwyth promenade with Vic, and trying to build up his strength. He read and tried to write poetry or stories, driven on by the example and the image of Dylan Thomas, the ‘wondrous boy’ of post-war British literature. Gradually the desire to become a writer...

Herbert Williams’s first published poem appeared in theAnglo-Welsh Review, vol.12, no.29. It was entitled ‘Dandelion Days’ and while it clearly had enough about it to excite the interest of Roland Mathias, the poem was heavily influenced by the work of Dylan Thomas:

Once, when the sun spun high,

I parachuted seeds with my

Time-telling breath.

Too young was I to weigh

The worth of hours that kept at bay

Clock-watching death.⁴²

Phrases like ‘sun spun high’ and the use of hyphenated descriptions such as ‘Time-telling breath’ and ‘Clock-watching death’ owe their genesis to the lyrical power of Thomas’s poetry...

Desperate to get back to Wales, in the summer of 1972, Herbert Williams had applied for a job on theGood Morning Walesradio programme produced from the BBC Wales studios at Llandaf in Cardiff. He had almost no experience of radio work but his real motive was a return to Wales, not a change of career. Perhaps understandably, he was not offered the post but then, soon after he began working at theWestern Mail, someone from the BBC rang and told him another job on the same programme would soon be available. This time his application was successful...

The late 1990s and the early years of the twenty first century were undoubtedly ‘the years of the novel’ for Herbert Williams. Starting with A Severe Case of Dandruff in late 1999, he quickly followed it up withThe Woman in Back Rowin 2000 andPuntersin 2002.

He had always wanted and intended to write a novel, so it is hardly surprising that when he did finally get around to the project, Herbert Williams should exploit the most traumatic and powerful events in his life.A Severe Case of Dandruffis his crowning achievement as a writer. A...

Herbert Williams has long been conscious of ‘time’s winged chariot,’ the transitory nature of human existence having been hammered home to him from a young age. Intimations of his own mortality came much closer still following the death of his brother Vic. By the beginning of 2000 there were, apart from Herbert himself, only his brother Richard and his sisters Lilian and Kate left alive from R.D. and Minnie Williams’s brood of six children. Kate’s death in 2005 was a further heavy blow.

In the summer of 2007, Herbert Williams was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He had suspected that something...

One of the great regrets of HerbertWilliams’s long and productive creative life is that there has never been any real critical appraisal of his work. He has always regarded himself as an ‘also ran’, an outsider, and has become resigned to the fact that many critics and writers see his straightforward style as lacking in depth and, therefore, not worthy of detailed study or even acknowledgement. Allowing for the usual mild paranoia of most creative artists — although, admittedly, in his case it is backed up by the attachment issues of his youth, issues that have had a profound affect on...