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Colin Edwards (1924-1994) was a radio journalist and documentary film maker. He was also an actor, author, university lecturer, Plaid Cymru activist and founder of the American CADW - the Committee to Aid the Defence of Wales. He was an acknowledged expert on middle eastern affairs, and was often called upon for advice by the United Nations and policy think-tanks. But Edwards was also interested in the arts, anthropology and science: his broadcasts included the Irish theatre, European witchcraft, Congo tribal customs, chemical pesticides, the Abominable Snowman and Vernon Watkins.

Edwards, father, Brinley, who worked in the meat trade, was a member of the Welsh Cob Society, a dog breeder, show judge, and an amateur historian. Doris Edwards, Colin's mother, won a scholarship to the Sorbonne, but did not take it up and went into teaching. She was a member of the Swansea Writers' Circle, now remembered as Doris Williams after her second marriage. As Doris Seys Pryce, she published poetry in the Welsh Review and many other periodicals.

Much of Colin Edwards' early life was spent at the Kingsbridge Inn, Gorseinon, a village just outside Swansea. After attending local schools, he went to the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and in 1942 joined the Fleet Air Arm. He flew as an observer on the Russian convoy route, was shot down over the Atlantic and later rescued. After the war, he studied at St Catherine's College, Oxford, but left within a year to take up journalism at the UN headquarters in New York.

In 1949, Edwards became a combat correspondent with the British army in Malaya, and then covered the wars in Burma, Indochina and Korea. Over the next thirty years, he broadcast radio documentaries from around the world, the majority on middle eastern affairs. He also produced commentaries on the wars in Biafra, northern Ireland and Vietnam. More than two hundred of Edwards' documentaries and in-depth interviews were made available for distribution to universities and schools by the University of California at Berkeley.

From the 1970s, Edwards virtually gave up radio reporting to concentrate on freelance lecturing and writing, including working with Moshe Menuhin (Yehudi's father) on his autobiography - The Menuhin Saga published by Sidgwick and Jackson in 1982, and translated into four languages.

Colin Edwards returned to Wales almost every year. In July 1958, he paid a visit to one of his Gorseinon cousins, Mrs Tilly Roberts (née Evans), who ran the Post Office in Kingsbridge. Tilly had been friendly with Dylan Thomas when they were teenagers and she knew Dylan's mother, Florence. She asked if Edwards could come and talk with her.

A few weeks later, he called on Florence, now living alone in the Boat House in Laugharne. During their conversation, they talked about Dylan as a boy and young man. They thought it important that someone should "bring out the Dylan known to his friends and relatives in Wales, the Dylan of the years of growing up and maturing; the 'real Dylan'...before what happened towards the end." Florence suggested that Edwards should do the interviewing.

He readily agreed and by 1968 he was able to write that "I have interviewed one hundred and twenty-two other relations, close friends and literary colleagues of Dylan during five extended visits home to Britain, three trips to Czechoslovakia and two to Italy." By the mid-seventies, he had pushed up the total of people interviewed to one hundred and fifty-one, adding France, Switzerland and Iran to the list of countries visited.

Edwards wrote an unpublished biography of Dylan based on his taped interviews. The first chapters, dealing with boyhood, grammar school and the Little Theatre, are in the National Library of Wales. He made three documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Company called The Real Dylan, Dylan as a Youth and My Son Dylan.

On his death, Edwards interviews were donated to the National Library of Wales. They have since been transcribed, and then edited and published.

Colin Edwards died on July 11 1994 in Oakland, California, where he and his wife, Mary, had lived for some thirty years. His ashes were brought to Wales, and interred in Oystermouth Cemetery, Swansea.

References

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Colin Edwards", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0