Harri Webb

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Harri Webb (7 September 1920 – 31 December 1994) was an Anglo-Welsh poet, journalist and Welsh nationalist.

Harri Webb was born on 7 September 1920 at 45 Ty Coch Road on the outskirts of Swansea, but before he was two the family moved to Catherine Street, much nearer the city centre. Growing up in a working class environment, in 1938 he won a Local Education Authority scholarship, and went to Oxford to study languages, specialising in French, Spanish and Portuguese, a period of his life Webb makes virtually no references to in his writing. He graduated with a third class degree in 1941, the death of his mother two years earlier having affected his studies.

Webb then volunteered for the Royal Navy, in which he served, including periods in Algeria and Palestine, until being demobilised in Scotland in 1946. Following his return to Wales the following year his life was, outwardly at least, largely uneventful. After a period immediately following the war where he worked in a number of temporary jobs, including working for Keidrych Rhys in Carmarthen, and a brief period in Cheltenham, Webb moved to Merthyr Tydfil in 1954 to work as librarian in Dowlais and, in his own words, to fully absorb himself into the national experience.

Two years later he published Dic Penderyn and the Merthyr Rising of 1831, a pamphlet in which he somewhat imaginatively retells the story of the rebellion. ‘In defiance of any rational career structure’ he stayed at Dowlais for ten years, before becoming librarian in Mountain Ash in 1964. While in Merthyr Tydfil, Webb lived in Garth Newydd, an old house that had been given to the town during the Depression, and subsequently seemingly belonged to nobody; when Webb first moved in it was occupied by a group of pacifists. He lived in the house with Meic Stephens and others, and it became almost a nationalist commune.

In 1964 Webb began to work in Mountain Ash, the Cynon Valley previously having been the largest borough in Wales without a public library service. He took the job seriously, introducing innovations such as lending LPs, and buying books and periodicals to appeal to a female readership, activities that sometimes angered some sections of the public. His first collection, The Green Desert, was published in 1969. Webb carried on living in Garth Newydd and commuting to the next valley until 1972, when he moved to Cwmbach near Aberdare, before finally retiring in 1974, the year that A Crown For Branwen appeared. This was followed by Rampage and Revel in 1977, and finally Poems and Points in 1983, soon after which Webb virtually ceased to write poetry, suffering a serious stroke in 1985.

Webb remained in Cwmbach before moving into a nursing home in Swansea shortly before his death on New Year’s Eve 1994. His funeral was held on January 6, 1995 at St. Mary’s Church in Pennard, Gower, where Webb’s grave is to be found.

Webb's poetry is marked in its themes by his radical and uncompromising commitment to Welsh nationalist politics, coupled with a quasi-Christian sensibility. In form, his writing was often deliberately simple and comic, in order that it could reach a wide audience and so have the desired political effect.