One Town, Four Remarkable Stories by David E. Owen

Guest Post: One Town, Four Remarkable Stories

By David E. Owen

History has a habit of becoming simplified over time. A name becomes associated with a single achievement, a place with a particular event, and the life that existed around it can easily be forgotten.

For author David E. Owen, writing When the Stones Held and researching the remarkable life of Welsh stonemason William Edwards opened the door to a much bigger question. Growing up near Pontypridd, David had always known the stories of some of the area’s most famous figures — but how well did he really know the people behind them?

In this fascinating guest post, David returns to the history he grew up with and considers four extraordinary Welsh stories, the legends that have grown around them, and the real people waiting to be rediscovered beneath the familiar versions.

Over to you, David…

I grew up in Cilfynydd, just outside Pontypridd, surrounded by stories I thought I knew.

There was William Edwards, who built the famous bridge across the River Taff; then there was Dr William Price, the eccentric doctor who cremated his son and helped establish the legality of cremation in Britain. Evan and James James were the father and son who gave Wales its national anthem, and then there was Guto Nyth Brân, the almost impossibly fast runner whose exploits had become part history and part legend.

I knew all those stories, or I thought I did.

It was while writing When the Stones Held, my novel about William Edwards, that I began to realise how little I had known about him. I knew of his achievement: the bridge, and I knew that several attempts had failed before the great single-span bridge finally stood.

What I hadn't known was the life around those facts.

Once I began researching William properly, the familiar story became much richer. The man who had existed in my mind largely as the builder of a bridge became a young man accepting an extraordinary challenge without formal engineering training. He had a family and was a minister as well as a stonemason. He lived within a community that was itself changing. The bridge was an achievement, but there was an entire life behind it. And that made me look again at the other stories I had grown up knowing.

How much did I really know about them?

The doctor who cremated his son

Dr William Price is probably the most extraordinary of the three stories I would like to explore next.

Even describing him briefly sounds like the beginning of a novel. He was a doctor, political radical, Chartist and a self-proclaimed druid. He opposed many of the conventions of Victorian society and became one of the most recognisable figures in nineteenth-century Wales.

But the story most people know concerns the death of his infant son, Iesu Grist (Welsh for Jesus Christ).

Price attempted to cremate the child's body on a hillside at Llantrisant in 1884. Cremation was deeply shocking to Victorian society, and Price was arrested and prosecuted. The resulting court case established that cremation was not illegal provided it did not cause a public nuisance.

That is the story I knew.

But When the Stones Held taught me to ask different questions.

Who was William Price before that day? How did he become the man who was prepared to challenge society so publicly? What did the people around him think of him? Was he regarded as a visionary, an eccentric, an embarrassment, or all three depending upon whom you asked?

Most importantly for a novelist, what was it like to live alongside someone like him? Suddenly, "the doctor who introduced cremation" wasn't enough.

The father, the son and a song

The story of Evan James and his son James James is very different, but perhaps even more deeply embedded in Welsh life.

In 1856, in Pontypridd, James James composed a melody and his father Evan supplied the words. The song was Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, "Land of My Fathers".

Today it is almost impossible for me to separate that music from Wales itself. You hear it before an international rugby match, at national occasions and wherever Welsh people gather around the world. Again, I knew the headline, but what I knew far less about were the two men.

Who were Evan and James when they weren't "the men who wrote the national anthem"? What was their relationship like as father and son? What sort of Pontypridd did they inhabit? And what happens when something created by two ordinary people gradually ceases to belong only to them and becomes part of the identity of an entire nation?

There is also something attractive about the simplicity of its beginning. Two men in Pontypridd created a song. They could have had no certainty that people would still be standing to sing it more than a century and a half later.

That, to me, is where the novel might be hiding.

The man who could run

And then there is Guto Nyth Brân.

Guto belongs to an earlier Wales. He lived in the eighteenth century and became famous for his ability as a runner. Over time, genuine sporting achievement and folklore became thoroughly mixed together.

The stories are irresistible. He could supposedly run extraordinary distances at extraordinary speeds. Legends accumulated around him until separating the real man from the runner of Welsh folklore became difficult.

As a child, that hardly mattered. Guto Nyth Brân was simply the man who could run faster than anyone else.

As a novelist, it matters enormously.

The uncertainty is part of what attracts me to him now. Somewhere beneath the accumulated stories there was a real man named Griffith Morgan. He lived, worked, competed and acquired a reputation sufficiently remarkable for people still to be telling stories about him centuries later.

Finding that man beneath the legend may be the most difficult part.

It may also be the most interesting.

Four stories from one small part of Wales

These aren't four men who all sat together in a Pontypridd inn. Their lives span different generations, and Pontypridd itself changed almost beyond recognition between them.

Guto Nyth Brân and William Edwards belonged to the largely rural Wales of the eighteenth century. By the time of Dr Price and Evan and James James, industry had transformed the valleys. Coal, iron, canals and railways had brought population growth and enormous social change.

Yet geographically their stories sit remarkably close together, and that fascinates me now in a way it didn't when I was growing up there.

Perhaps familiarity was part of the reason. William Edwards' bridge was simply the Old Bridge (Yr Hen Bont). Guto was a name associated with a famous race. Price was the extraordinary doctor with the fox-skin headdress. Evan and James James wrote the anthem everyone already knew.

They had been reduced, in my mind at least, to the things that made them famous.

Writing When the Stones Held changed that. I began with a bridge and discovered a man. Now I find myself wondering what lies beneath the familiar versions of those other three stories.

I don't know what I’ll find. That is part of the attraction. Research may confirm some of the stories I grew up hearing and dismantle others. There will be gaps where fiction has to enter, just as there were with William Edwards, and there will almost certainly be moments when the person I discover is quite different from the one I expected.

But I know where I want to begin.

Not with the eccentric who cremated his son, but with William Price.

Not with the national anthem, but with Evan and James James.

Not with the impossible races, but with Griffith Morgan, the man who became Guto Nyth Brân.

When the Stones Held began with a landmark I had known for much of my life and a story I thought I understood. It turned out that I had only known the top layer. Now there are three more layers of Welsh history I would very much like to uncover.

Check out When the Stones Held by David E. Owen and discover the story behind the bridge—and the people David has imagined standing around it. Pick up your copy HERE.

David E. Owen

After decades spent teaching around the world—from the UK to the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East—I came to writing fiction later in life. I started with fantasy before finding my voice in fast-paced, real-world spy thrillers. My stories are grounded in current issues like corruption, gender bias, and power, but always emphasise pace, surprise, and character-driven tension.

I’ve visited over 80 countries, worked as a radio host in Abu Dhabi, directed Shakespeare for African audiences in the bush, and even survived a flash flood in Mali and an armed hold-up. I was arrested for drug-smuggling in Nigeria but was eventually released when I refused to pay off the police captain, and I was boat-wrecked alone on a desert island in the Arabian Sea (but no tree) and rescued through a police search. Now retired from teaching, I split my time between writing, photography, and trying to get fit (thanks to a stubborn rowing machine). My latest novel, Hate Machine, tackles misogyny and gender radicalisation — not typical thriller territory, but I like a challenge.

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