The Social Significance of Sin

The fact that back when I was a student I had no real curiosity about anything outside the vapid, narrow and long vanished right-on punk rock catechism of the late seventies and early eighties has long furnished me with a warning against myself.

Did I ever during the three years I was in Swansea University take the local ferry to Cork, the Irish port that may well have been the the embarkation point of almost all my direct ancestors? No I bleedin' didn't, so it can be no surprise that I managed to live in the hall of residence Neuadd Lewis Jones with no idea of - and no interest in - who Lewis Jones may or may not have been.

Well now courtesy of Dai Smith and the Library of Wales I have learned a little.

Labour college student, imprisoned in 1926, Cambrian Colliery checkweighman, victimised union activist, leader of several hunger marches, remarkable orator, Communist councillor and proletarian novelist. He was even capable of holding an audience of over a thousand people for two and a half hours with his lecture ‘The Social Significance of Sin’.

It is however entirely likely that Lewis and I wouldn't have seen eye to eye.