It was back in 2014 when I was researching archive for the film ‘Jack To A King’ that I had the surprise of my life. On the surface the idea behind the film appeared to be the story of the remarkable rise of Swansea City Football Club, from the depths of despair to the heights of the Premier League…but we wanted to do much more.
We had an amazing collection of characters who had come together to save the football team they loved. We wanted to tell that greater story by finding out who these people were and what made the citizens of Swansea come together to save their club.
We could always interview people, but we couldn’t have 90 mins of talking heads, we needed good pictures and films to bring their stories to life. The decades of the 80’s and 90’s had a lot of actual football archive. What we also wanted was the news archive of the people who now owned the club fighting each step of the way. We also wanted to tell the story of the city itself.
By the time we were making the film Swansea City were actually in the Premier League and were well and truly at home at the Liberty Stadium. We wanted to show how the stadium had transformed a barren industrial waste land into a symbol of renewal and revival. I remember finding some incredible archive filmed by a Canadian gentleman named Franklin Cardy. He had worked on the Lower Swansea Valley project in the 60’s and 70’s and had filmed as the army blew up old factories and kids planted trees.
Also on my list was a TV programme made by HTV Wales in the 1960’s. We wanted to show the importance of football to generations of kids in Swansea. I remembered that the investigative journalist John Morgan once brought the TV cameras to Brynhyfryd Junior School. The whole school had been brought onto the school yard to watch the football team play for the cameras. The programme was broadcast just the once, late one night in the politics slot. We had stayed up to watch it and I remember they did show the team but with no video recorders or streaming on demand all that I had was a blurry black and white memory.
The HTV archive is now housed at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. I sent the archivist a list of programmes and news items I wanted to see if possible. I also mentioned a programme presented by John Morgan for HTV Wales which included Brynhyfryd School sometime in the late 1960’s.
It was like going through a treasure trove, an Aladdin’s cave of wonderful delights. One of the greatest discoveries was the whole of the Swansea versus Hull match of 2003, the game that saved the club from dropping out of the league. We already had a scratchy old copy someone had of the highlights but in a box at the end of a corridor we found a dusty box of tapes with very little details written on them. I literally screamed for joy when I put the tape in the machine and there it all was, the full game unedited.
Maldwyn Pope talking to TV Presenter John Morgan 1968
One of the other tapes I played that day literally took my breath away and left me in tears. The Library Archivist said he thought he had found the John Morgan programme I had requested. The programme was called ‘The Welsh Revolution’ and started with contributions from politicians like Gwynfor Evans and talk of possible extremism as Wales prepared for the Investiture of Prince Charles.
John Morgan wanted to show how Wales had shaped him and that’s why he wanted to film his old school in Brynhyfryd. My memory hadn’t let me down. There they were my old school football team playing in the yard with the whole school cheering us on.
Then it happened. As John Morgan walked in the picture and his narration talked of how he had been a boy soprano a little kid in a blue jacket and shorts walks up to the reporter and asks him a question. Even though the programme was in black and white I say a blue jacket because I know that was the colour jacket the boy wore because…I was that boy!!!
I stopped for a moment, rewound the tape and looked gain. Then I started seeing other faces I knew. This was my world where everyone was young and excited, frozen in a moment of time.
These days you don’t have to travel to Aberystwyth to search the National Library of Wales ‘Watch and Listen’ Archive. This week I was delighted to host a special event at the South Wales Miner’s Library at that top floor of the wonderful Y Storfa in Oxford Street.
The event was part of the National Library’s ‘Your Library Tour’ which was also helping to promote ‘Clip Corner’. Whilst a lot of the Library’s Archive is available online, due to various rights issues, some of the archive is only available to view in special centres around Wales. One of these, ‘Clip Corners’ is now housed at the Miner’s Library in Swansea. You can search online anywhere to see what is in the archive and if it’s not available to view at home you can now go along to ‘Clip Corner’ Swansea and see it there.
Chatting to Roger Bell
The team at the National Library thought it would be appropriate to make this a special evening to honour Bonnie Tyler. The special guest was Roger Bell, the man who over 50 years ago by mistake walked into the wrong room in the old Townsman Club and heard a voice that would change his life and start the career of one of the most successful singers Wales has ever produced.
As well as sharing his own remarkable story we were able to show clips of Bonnie performing from the Library’s Archive. One of the clips was from a show called ‘Peter Karrie Behind the Mask’. It’s a terrific show where Bonnie sings ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ with a full orchestra before joining Peter and his other guest David Soul for a chat. After we played the clip Roger told us that he had been looking for that show for years but couldn’t find it. There it was in the Library’s Archive and its now available for all to see now if you pop along to clip corner.