The Old Red Lion and Dragon

In the 1970s, when Byron Rogers was appointed speechwriter to the Prince of Wales, the Daily Telegraph, where he was for many years a prolific contributor, report- ed the story in a one-sentence paragraph: ‘The Prince of Wales has appointed as speechwriter Mr Byron Rogers, a colourful Welshman.’ Nearly 40 years on, he still resents that announcement — ‘as though being a colourful Welshman was a job,’ he complains, ‘like a bus driver.’ To judge from Me: The Authorised Biography, though, the Telegraph’s subs had it right — being a colourful Welshman is Byron Rogers’ job, and he is extremely good at it.

He was born in monoglot Carmarthen- shire, an only child, ‘amongst people who heard a different drum’. When he was five the family moved four miles up the road to Carmarthen town, in the shadows of the English castle and unusually hideous chapels. His father was a master carpenter, and so far as he knows the only things his mother ever read were his articles in the newspapers, in case of what her neighbours might think: ‘How am I? What do you care? I haven’t been out for a week because of what you said about the town clerk!’

‘I come from the working class,’ he writes, ‘and received a middle-class education, so life, like a career in the Soviet Communist Party of the 1930s, was a series of dis- appearances.’ Soviet Communism enjoyed a great vogue in Wales — at ‘Little Moscow’, a remote village in the Valleys, boys were given such names as Stalin Watkins and Trotsky Evans — and is a ready source of analogy: he recalls the Methodists as ‘the Stalinists of Nonconformity’.

Of the purges attending Byron’s progress — he has always disliked the name (‘You there, the poet,’ gym-masters would sneer) — through 11-plus, O- and A-levels and university, the most traumatic was the primal one, the ‘disappearance’ of his parents.