Ffeil = File 1/3 - Correspondence

Dannie Abse was born in 1923 in Cardiff, Glamorgan. He studied at the Welsh National School of Medicine, and at King's College and Westminster Hospital in London, qualifying as a doctor in 1943. He entered clinical practice, and was a specialist at the Central Medical Establishment chest clinic, 1954-1989. He is a prolific writer and poet. He is deeply interested by 1930s politics and the Spanish Civil War, which formed the background to his schooldays. His poetry is influenced by his Jewish heritage, Welsh nationality, and his life as a family man and a London suburban dweller. He has published seven volumes of poetry and seven plays. He was Senior Fellow of the Humanities at Princeton University (1973-1974), and president of the Poetry Society (1978-1992). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983, Fellow of the Welsh Academy of Letters in 1992 (President since 1995), Honorary Fellow at the University of Wales College of Medicine (1999), and awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Wales (1989) and the University of Glamorgan (1997). He was given a Cholmondeley Award (1985). Abse is married to the art historian Joan Mercer, and together they edited, Voices in the Gallery: Poems and Pictures (1986) and The Music Lover's Literary Companion (1988). They live in Glamorgan.

Lord Tonypandy (1909-1997) was born Thomas George Thomas in Port Talbot, Glamorgan, one of five children of Zacharia Thomas. He attended Tonypandy Secondary School and University College, Southampton. He returned to Cardiff in 1931, where he taught at Marlborough Road Elementary School for Boys and Roath Park School. He was drawn into politics through the National Union of Teachers. Medically unfit for war service, he became a Special Constable and was elected to the union's Executive Committee in 1942. Thomas had joined the Labour Party in 1925. He was nominated with Barbara Betts (later Castle) for the dual seat of Blackburn, but stood for Cardiff Central, which he won in the Labour landslide in 1945 and, following the boundary changes in 1950, was MP for Cardiff West until 1983. As a Welsh Nonconformist, he opposed Attlee's conscription policy, and spoke against pub and cinema openings on Sundays. He also campaigned on leasehold reform. The peak of his ministerial career came between 1968-1970 when he served as Secretary of State for Wales; his other political posts were Minister of Civil Aviation, 1951; Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, 1964-1966; Minister of State at the Welsh Office, 1966-1967, and at the Commonwealth Office, 1967-1968. He was Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, 1974-1976; and Speaker of the House of Commons, 1976-1983. He was the 133rd Speaker of the House of Commons, and the first to become known to a wider public through the broadcasting of Parliament on radio. In 1983, he was created Viscount Tonypandy of Rhondda. After he took his seat in the Upper House, he began to speak out against British integration with the European Union, at a time when his party was pro European Union. In 1996 he endorsed the anti-Europe campaign of Sir James Goldsmith and his Referendum Party. He was Chairman of the Bank of Wales, 1985-1991; President of the National Children's Home, 1990-1995; and Vice-President of the Macmillan Fund for Cancer Relief, 1991-1997. He was a diligent Methodist lay preacher throughout his life. He was a strong opponent of devolution and measures to alter the legal position of the Welsh language. He campaigned against Welsh devolution in the 1979 referendum. In 1997, with the banker Sir Julian Hodge, he was a prominent patron of the Welsh "Just Say No" campaign in the second referendum. It was his last campaign. He died aged 88 on 22nd September 1997.

Kyffin Williams, artist, was born in Llangefni, Anglesey, 9 May 1918. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and articled to the land agents, Yale and Hardcastle, Pwllheli, 1936-1939. He served with the Royal Welch Fusiliers from 1937 to 1941, but on failing an army medical examination because of his epilepsy he was advised to take up art by his doctor. Hence in 1941 he entered the Slade School of Fine Art, and from 1944 to 1973 was Senior Art Master at Highgate School in London. In 1968 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to record the Welsh community in Patagonia.

He was elected President of the Royal Cambrian Academy from 1969 to 1976 and again from 1992; an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1970, and a Royal Academician in 1974. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the University Colleges of Swansea (1989), Bangor (1991) and Aberystwyth (1992). In 1973 he was made an Honorary MA and in 1993 an Honorary Doctor of Letters of the University of Wales. Other honours bestowed on him were the OBE (1982), the Cymmrodorion Medal (1991), and a KBE (2000).

Exhibitions of his work have been held at the following London Galleries: Colnaghi's, the Leicester Galleries, Thackeray Gallery; also the Howard Roberts and Albany Galleries, Cardiff; Tegfryn Gallery, Menai Bridge; and other provincial venues.

His work is found in the collections of the Arts Council of Great Britain, National Museum of Wales, National Library of Wales, Welsh Arts Council, Royal Academy, Contemporary Art Society, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, art galleries of Newport, Swansea, Hereford, Coventry, the Chantrey Bequest and very many private collections. A major retrospective exhibition was staged at the National Museum of Wales in 1987.

Kyffin Williams's autobiography, Across the Straits, was published in 1973, and his second autobiographical volume, A Wider Sky, in 1991. Other works include Boyo Ballads (1995), Portraits (1996), The land and the sea (1998), Drawings (2001), Cutting images (2002), and Gwladfa Kyffin / Kyffin in Patagonia (2004). Since 1974 he lived and worked at Pwllfanogl on the edge of the Menai Straits below Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll, Anglesey. He died in September 2006.