Elaine Morgan Great Welsh Writers

Elaine Morgan is 92 years old, and is one of Wales's best-loved authors.

Born into a Rhondda mining family, she has been a top television writer,

feminist icon, scientific rebel

and an award-winning newspaper columnist.

There was a time when the writer was king and she was one of the stars.

If you saw that name on a script then you really wanted to do it.

I turned the first page

and from then on my life literally did change.

There was no going back.

I'd go along with that, too.

I imagine her sitting at a desk

and looking into the middle distance and conjuring up thoughts.

She is a lone operator.

Elaine Morgan is both sweet and sharp,

rather like a sugar-dusted acid drop.

Last year, Elaine published her latest book.

Knock 'Em Cold, Kid is her autobiography.

The engrossing tale of a unique life and body of work.

This programme tells the story of that life and that work

and looks at what inspired it.

She has that honour that people have bestowed upon her,

she's not just Elaine Morgan, she's "our Elaine".

Elaine Morgan was born in November 1920,

in Hopkinstown near Pontypridd.

She spent most of her long life only a stone's throw from her childhood home.

It was a place that shaped her life and her outlook on the world.

Tel-L- Kebir...

I am not quite sure what it means

but it was the name of a battle in Egypt,

but we called it Telly-keeper, it sounds like the keeper of a telly, which was kind of suitable.

I remember we lived all the time in the kitchen

because we could only afford to have a fire in one room,

and we went into the middle room for posh occasions.

There were hard times, compared to what most of the country had,

but if you hadn't seen most of the country you weren't aware of that, so it felt OK.

Elaine was an only child, and lived with no fewer than four adults.

Her mother, Olive, and father, Billy, and Billy's own parents.

In hard times, it was an unusual and very beneficial start in life.

Elaine was always, I think, from the beginning, exceptional.

Even amidst the relative poverty she had quite a cosseted upbringing.

Her father was a craftsman,

he drove the fan in the engine in the Great Western Colliery,

and even when he was unemployed at the end of the '20s

because their grandfather and grandmother lived with them,

there were two sets of dole coming into the house

and there was an allotment.

Elaine says she was never really aware of poverty.

My father was very popular because he could mend anything that got broken.

And he was careful not to charge more than people could afford.

So sometimes, it was just a packet of fags or something like that.

My mother was very intelligent, and she made all my clothes

so that I didn't look poor.

I felt quite posh.

Elaine shone at junior school,

and at the age of 11 she had her first breakthrough.

The Western Mail was to publish a story she had written

and pay her the handsome sum of one guinea.

This is chapter one of the story I wrote called Kitty In Blunderland.

"It was the end of the most wonderful day in Kitty's life,

"and she was lying on her back on top of a pile of sweets

"riding on Uncle Bob's hay cart. She had spent a whole week at the farm..."

I have a sense of this girl, Elaine Floyd,

in the streets observing things, looking at things.

Looking out at them.

The Elaine Floyd who reads books that even adults are not reading.

The little girl who will grow up to translate,

adapt other people's words.

In a way, it is almost as if she has always been an observer,

somebody who regards and then comes back to tell us.

Later in life, as a professional writer,

Elaine drew deep on her upbringing.

Adapting the novel How Green Was My Valley for television,

she knew first-hand

all about the hard knocks of a mining valleys' upbringing.

-Hello, Mum.

-What happened?

Nothing, I am a bit stiff, that's all.

That's it. How many were there?

-Five.

-I wish I could lay my hands on them. I'd have them flat if they were the size of a house!

You're lucky there's nothing broken. You willing to go back there tomorrow?

-Yes, Dada.

-Right. You going to hide from them or stand up to them?

It is the big ones he is in with, didn't you hear him telling you?

-You want your head read, talking to him like that.

-Stand up to them!

That's it.

And from tonight, you shall have a penny for every mark on your face,

sixpence for a nosebleed. And a shilling for a black eye.

Gwilym!

Ah, go on! He'll be running rings around them in a month or six weeks.

By the age of 18, Elaine Floyd was the star pupil at her secondary school,

and in October 1939 she was ready to take a huge step.

Away from the Valleys and into a very different world.

Elaine Morgan and I both went up to Oxford at the same time.

We were both reading English.

And she had the scholarship, which was called an exhibition.

So she was marked out, if you like, from the beginning,

as one of the clever ones.

We knew she came from a mining background,

she made no secret of it.

But we all got on extremely well.

It was a wonderful three years, even though it was wartime.

Elaine's Oxford career had started badly.

When she first visited her college for an interview

it was assumed that she had come for a job as a maid.

But once she was in her stride

the girl from Hopkinstown flourished.

I found it, to my relief, much easier than I had expected.

I thought most of it would be over my head, but most of it wasn't

over my head, I could understand what they were on about.

And I could understand what the books they give us

were on about quite well. I was good at words.

I found out if you had enough cheek it was OK.

Oxford also gave Elaine the chance to work on her creative writing.

Albeit, unofficially.

Elaine and I once... We were having a tutorial, Elaine was reading her essay,

"De-dum-de-dum-de-dum" quoting things,

and the tutor said, "Just a minute, Elaine."

And snatched her copy of Milton from her shelf,

"Tell me the reference for that."

"Oh, dear," said Elaine, "I'm afraid I don't have it."

"I will leave a note in your pigeonhole."

"Yes, we won't waste time now."

When we came out of the room at the end of the tutorial,

Elaine turned to me and she said,

"I am not quite sure what I'm going to do now, you see, I was making them up."

As ever, Elaine's experiences fed into her work.

Her first television series A Matter Of Degree,

was the story of a Valleys girl who goes to Oxford.

Four decades later, she returned to the theme in her BAFTA winning adaptation of Testament Of Youth.

-About the piano...

-Well?

-It is beautiful.

But I can't help thinking that the money you spent on that and my music lessons

would have been enough to pay for my fees in a University, Father!

We are back to that old tommyrot, are we?

Why is it tommyrot, why?

You got your head full of silly ideas from one or two dried up spinsters from St Monica's!

You will soon grow out of those ideas when you grow up

-and the right man comes along.

-When will you realise that I am grown-up?

I am 18, I am not a little girl. I am 18, I am a woman!

It was at Oxford that Elaine first showed a political side to her character.

The official university Labour club was dominated by Communists.

So Elaine helped to found the new Democratic Socialist Club.

And soon, she was chairing it.

Elaine Floyd enjoyed Oxford,

she was the president of the Social Democratic Club,

which was in a sense the Labour Club after Lloyd Jenkins

and Tony Crosland, future Cabinet ministers.

Elaine Floyd as a Cabinet minister in a future Labour government?

Not unimaginable.

Marriage and children and other things maybe changed that direction,

but Elaine's political instincts from the off were humane,

were central, were mainstream,

and I think above all else she would have been able to communicate that

to a greater British public.

Shirley Williams, Barbara Castle, Elaine Floyd. Go for it.

I was slow getting a political picture of the situation,

but once I did, I thought, well,

the people are going to change it to the Labour Party,

not the Communist Party.

Nobody is going to start a revolution here.

After graduating from Oxford, Elaine returned home to the South Wales Valleys.

It was here that she met the man who was to help shape the next chapter in her life.

He was very tall, and dark, and good at expressing himself.

And also, he was the first reasonable Communist I had ever met.

Morien Morgan was a local from Ynysybwl,

and had just come back from serving with the International Brigade in Spain.

Elaine met him at a political rally in Pontypridd.

A year later they were married.

And married life began not in the tightly-packed streets of Rhondda,

but in isolated, rural Radnorshire.

It was right up on the top of a mountain,

and it was miles away from any other house.

And Morian would go away on Monday and come back on Saturday.

And I was up there feeding chickens and milking the goat and so on.

But I did have tons of time to myself and I started writing little stories

about that kind of life and background.

And I started selling them, so then I thought, "I am on my way now."

Elaine's early work was published in newspapers and magazines.

But then, her agent asked if she might fancy turning her hand

to a new and rather unpopular medium.

It is true at that time

that some people thought television was beneath them,

perhaps rather common.

She was never pretentious like that, I think she saw an opportunity

and she saw what was required.

She was a writer, writers write.

Nothing airy-fairy about it, that is what you do.

You sit down and write and if the words don't work first time, you make them work the 100th time.

She was really on the wild frontier with a few other people.

So it was exciting. And I think that is what she enjoyed.

It was new, I suppose, and unknown and not many people saw it.

Not everybody in the country had a set.

It was live and there were mistakes and things went wrong,

there would be a few cameras in a few shots and it was just inevitable.

The pressure was colossal,

but it was attractive for young writers, it really was.

Soon, domestic production line was established.

Elaine wrote longhand,

and Morian would type it up, adding occasional critical notes.

Elaine's star rose rapidly as she wrote single dramas and series,

often dealing for the first time on television

with the lives of ordinary people, especially women.

Feeling more relaxed after your tea, are you?

She saw opportunities to write about real lives,

she knew how people lived in the town in Rhondda, Pontypridd and so on,

all of this experience, all of her feeling for women

and for other people, men included, comes through her own experience.

It is true.

What is the matter? Afraid to look?

I can never see why you don't do that sort of thing in the bathroom.

There's many wouldn't mind the chance, I'd bet. Why the bathroom?

I get it, wives preserve your mystery.

The secret of glamour is, never let Abbie know how it is done.

If you don't know how it's done after 10 years of marriage,

in a flat this size, you never will.

She is a wonderful plotter, she is a very good storyteller, for a start.

So nobody ever had to do any tweaking.

Not a word. Not a word.

You saw that name on a script, then you really wanted to do it.

The decades rolled by,

television became not just respectable but universal,

and Elaine Morgan was one of its star writers.

She penned some of the most successful series of their times,

How Green Was My Valley paired Sian Phillips with film star Stanley Baker,

in his final screen performance. It was a Welsh classic.

-Oh, Bron, he's beautiful, he is.

-There's another one half asleep by the look of it.

Three o'clock last night before we got him off.

Go on, he's exaggerating.

If he is going to be sleeping at the wrong time

you will have to go on nights like Owen.

The quality of the dialogue, she knew how to write,

especially about people from South Wales.

She knew exactly the tune, the melody, the way we talk.

And it required very little acting, actually.

Elaine had a flair for storytelling and realism.

But there was much more to her writing.

Often, she used popular drama

to tackle the issues closest to her heart and background.

Funeral expenses for the Duchess of Cambridge, £180.

Is her husband too poor to give her a decent burial?

Hardly, hardly.

Because the Exchequer has already handed over to him

something in the region of £3 million!

Mr Speaker, I have here a recent report

revealing how thousands of hard-working, thrifty men and women

are living lives of ceaseless toil in conditions of grinding squalor.

And from this morass of misery and despair

this discredited government simply averts its eyes.

While presiding over the wealthiest country in the world

it protests it cannot afford to do anything

to relieve the suffering of the poor.

Elaine Morgan was riding high,

she won two BAFTAs and a host of other awards.

Remarkably, she did it all from the South Wales valleys.

It is where she felt at home, a place, she said,

where people were valued for who they were,

not for property or status.

But then, her writing career took a very unexpected turn.

Beginning in a rather unlikely place.

It was the early 1970s and Elaine Morgan was paying her weekly visit

to Mountain Ash Public Library.

The book she picked up that day would change her life

and the lives of millions of women.

The Naked Ape was an international bestseller

and had made a TV star of its author.

It used human evolution

to explain present-day society and relationships.

But the housewife from Mountain Ash was having none of it.

The more I read of this genre,

the more I found that the fascination was being modified.

I felt, this is all nonsense.

These people are not thinking straight,

they are not thinking or writing about the human race,

only about the evolution of less than half of the human race.

Namely, adult males.

For Elaine, The Naked Ape wasn't objective science, it was a story,

written about men, for men.

Despite having no scientific training, she decided to take it on.

She pored over the literature and finally

came across the germ of an idea that seem to make much more sense.

She even gave it a name, the Aquatic Ape Theory.

To anybody studying human anatomy,

there are some very odd things about the human body.

One of them is, why do we have no body hair

when every other animal you can think of on land has hair?

Another is, why do we have layers of fat,

why do we run to fat directly underneath the skin?

The Aquatic Ape Theory

suggests that there was a stage in the evolution of early man

in which those ancestors were living close to lakes and water

and spent a lot of their time in water.

And that that is the reason why, amongst other things,

human beings don't have body hair

and are able to produce fat beneath their skin which keeps them warm.

Elaine began to set down her thoughts in a book.

It was a simple theory, but a radical one, and in Elaine's hands

it put early woman at the very heart of evolution.

In the age of women's lib, this was a call to arms.

The 52-year-old mother of three from the Valleys

was about to become a very unlikely feminist hero.

The Descent Of Woman was an evolutionary bombshell,

but it is also a seminal feminist work.

What Elaine so deftly does

is to take on the pomposity of the establishment,

of established truths about evolution

and the way that women and men behave,

and what explains the way they look

and the differences, so-called, between them.

And she punctures these myths with this blistering wit

which is just an absolute joy to read.

The Descent Of Woman raced to the top of the bestseller list, and not just in Britain.

Elaine toured America three times,

appearing on national television and radio.

And giving as good as she got in debates.

Who is the enemy?

The American woman does have difficulty pinpointing the enemy,

cos if she points her finger at me

I will bite it off and lick the tip, because I'm not her enemy.

I have never met an American woman,

including the American liberation women, who say,

"We are out to put men down."

'Elaine's work basically took the blinders off'

and it had a profound impact on millions of people around the world.

This was a book that was translated into over 25 languages,

and you read one page of this book

and it is no surprise why it had such an impact.

The scientific establishment was less enthusiastic, though.

And the Aquatic Ape Theory was shot down in flames by the experts.

Why do you think critics take such exception with your theories?

Obviously, all of the scientific establishment

will find it very inconvenient

if they have been wrong from the word go.

But Hopkinstown's finest was never one for giving up.

It is certainly the case that 56 years ago

there were stuffy scientists

who thought that seeking popularity amongst the great unwashed

was not something that was intellectually respectable,

grubbing around for cheap popularity.

So when someone comes along

who hasn't got ostensible scientific qualifications,

who hasn't been through the mill,

hasn't done the hard work, there is a resentment.

There she was, a writer, a playwright,

distinguished television playwright,

who was suddenly moving into this area.

It is a remarkable thing that Elaine,

once she got her teeth into it,

she simply couldn't let it go.

As Elaine passed retirement age

the Aquatic Ape Theory became her main passion.

She penned five more books about it

and spoke at conferences all over the world,

gradually moving the theory from the fringes into the mainstream.

I ask people sometimes and they say,

"Of course, I like the aquatic theory.

"Everybody likes the aquatic theory.

"Of course they don't believe it, but they like it."

I say, "Why do you think it is rubbish?"

They say, "Well, everybody I talk to says it's rubbish.

"They can't all be wrong, can they?"

The answer, loud and clear is yes, they can all be wrong.

History is strewn with occasions when they've all got it wrong.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

And you must never be afraid to rock the boat,

I go along with that, too. Thank you very much.

But there was one last chapter of her career waiting to be written,

and it brought her story full circle.

Her writing began winning competitions,

as she wrote in the Western Mail as a girl.

And then, when she was I think 83,

the Western Mail asked her to write a weekly column.

The column was called The Pensioner,

but she didn't really sound like a pensioner,

she sounded like a Valleys woman who had something to say

and wanted to say, and knew how to say it.

Over the next 10 years, Elaine would write every week

on topics from the global recession to her son's wedding.

From climate change to junk mail.

And, as ever, she liked to stir things up.

I thought that I was writing such common sense

that it would hit everybody in the eye,

but I got a lot of people who wrote back quite solidly saying,

"You are wrong about this

and you haven't read this and you haven't read this."

Which is very good for me, of course. Because then I have to think again.

In 2012, Elaine got her reward,

when she beat journalists from all over Britain to become

Regional Newspaper Columnist Of The Year at the age of 91.

It's quite clear that Elaine valued her skill with simplicity.

Getting to the nub of things.

And look at all those columns, week in, week out. No jargon.

No pointless slang, no words wasted.

Each one was crafted.

And for you, the reader, it was a gift.

Something charming, attractive, meaningful, every week,

at your table.

Elaine Morgan still lives in Mountain Ash,

overlooking the valley.

In the summer of 2012 she suffered a heavy stroke

but she continues to battle back.

There is every sign

that her extraordinary story is far from over.

From Wales's greatest living lady of letters

there might well be more to come.

If we look at the path of Elaine Morgan's life,

I'm sure of one thing.

That from the off there was a steely core to it.

She was energetic, she was ambitious,

and she did what she wanted to do.

She got an education in Pontypridd and in Oxford.

She did write, she became, in a sense,

that journalist that the little girl had said she wanted to become.

I think that's a tremendous achievement.

She is a great, great exemplar

actually of what Hopkinstown would have wanted her to be

all those years ago.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd