T. E. Nicholas Llygad y Drws (1940), Canu’r Carchar (1942) and Prison Sonnets (1948)

Abstract

It is a fact of either low farce in the style of ‘Charley’s Aunt’ or high drama of a Kafkaesque nature that T. E. Nicholas, ordained minister, Welsh language poet, labour movement organiser and long-time communist, was imprisoned at the outset of World War II for having Nazi sympathies. While he and his son were held at HMP Swansea and HMP Brixton other prominent citizens, familiar with the real, rather than imagined, political sympathies of Nicholas, conducted an ultimately successful campaign to have them both released. The case against Nicholas was entirely trumped-up by local Conservative-leaning dignitaries and the local chief of police. It eventually transpired that the evidence against him consisted of little more than a set of miniature Nazi flags that he had acquired as a supplement to a recent issue of the Daily Express (Rees, 2010) or The Daily Telegraph (Thomas, G., 2004), the readers of which were supposed to use such flags to mark up a map showing the progress of the war against the Germans. One might reasonably ask, perhaps with tongue in cheek, what had possessed Nicholas to purchase either of these particular broadsheet newspapers. At that time the Daily Express was owned by the Liberal Unionist politician and businessman Lord Beaverbrook. The fact that Trotsky wrote for the paper for a short while, following his expulsion from the Soviet Union, would not have made it an attractive read for an avid a supporter of Stalin, like Nicholas.

Nid damwain ydyw’r gell: gwyddwn amdani Fel rhan o’m tâl am eithio dros y tlawd; O ingoedd dyn a gwlad y ceir dadeni A rhyddid o afaelion ofn a ffawd. (from ‘Y Gell’ in ‘Llygad y Drws’ p.121). [No accident this cell: I knew its portion As payment for my work the poor to cheer; New life must come from pain of man or nation, And freedom from the chains of fate and fear.] (from ‘The Prison Cell’, translated by Daniel Hughes in Prison Sonnets, 1948: 45).